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Foreign.
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You are listening to an art media podcast. You know what I really need this time, Yossi? I need to stop analyzing our dysfunction. I need a break. But for us, we want to talk about not what's wrong. I need to have a conversation with you about what are we hoping for. I want to talk about like what. What are we looking for as the elections unfold and as the parties emerge?
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What I'm hoping for is, you know, just to be able to breathe again and to think about our politics in a non pathological way, that we actually have political leaders who care about the fate of the country and even place that first.
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This government embraced mediocrity embrace. I want a political discourse that speaks about excellence, that speaks about what we want to be. Hi friends. This is Daniil Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Sholem Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, for heaven's sake. In collaboration with ARC Media. And today is July 15th. Like last week, we chose again to concentrate on Israel's elections. But this week our theme is the change we hope for as Israelis. We are experiencing. I don't know if you want to call it a flood of. Some are calling it an onslaught, an onslaught of laws which are being rushed through the Knesset before the Knesset disbands this Friday. And now we officially have an election date, October 27th. So everybody could set their travel dates. We know when we have to be here. And one of the things that's happening now in Israel is that these laws that are passing that we're not going to analyze in great length. We spoke about them last week. But more than serving as laws aimed to change the nature of life in Israel, they are laws that are changing the tenor of life in Israel. Now, part of what the the current opposition parties are collecting is a list of all the laws that they're going overturn. So the fact that the government is passing these laws doesn't really make a difference and they know it.
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So why are they doing it?
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What these laws are doing? From the experience of the Israeli, this onslaught is just sort of shaping the. The public sphere of our country. They're coloring it with a certain color. It's a very strong pro Haredi community color telling the Haredi community, we're embracing you. These are laws which are fighting the deep state narrative that the Likud has spoken about, but really never got to because the ultra Orthodox parties weren't with them and they couldn't pass a single law. And so whether it's a deep state of finally achieving control over Broadcasting or over the Attorney General, they're just. It's declarative. They're using laws as a way to declare not even agendas, but what this country should be.
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But you know what, Daniil? I understand from their point of view why they're in a rush to pass laws controlling the media, controlling the public space, and that will play well to their base. But these bills exempting the Haredim from military service, extolling the study of Torah as a fundamental value in the state, when we don't have an equivalent law extolling military service as a fundamental value, these laws will only alienate even people within their own.
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I accept it.
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I just don't understand the medical logic. There is before a very tight election. I know that, God willing, they're going to lose.
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You're part of me, and you said this last week. We have stop trying to figure certain things out. And it could be that for the Haredim, they want this validation so that when they come to the next election, they don't lose a seat or two to Smotrich or Ben Gvir, who are increasingly making inroads in the Haredi community. I'm not sure why. You know what I really need this time, Yossi? I need to stop analyzing our dysfunction. I need a break. It's just this. I don't know if our audience needs one, but it's just. It's a.
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Let's do that.
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It's getting too. You'll see. It's almost too much for me now. I have to tell you. It's because if it was a law, I could deal with a law. If you want to talk to me about what should be the position of the Attorney General, I could have a conversation. I could have a serious conversation. But they all know that nothing's going to pass and every law is going to be now held up at the Supreme Court, which, by the way, is one of their agendas. Because as long as the Supreme Court continuously stops the laws of the government.
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Right.
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It just reinforces the fact that the great enemy of this country is the Supreme Court. Because if everything is the Supreme Court's fault, then it's not Netanyahu's fault, it's not my fault. So I'm sure they have a story.
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No, that's. I think that's a really important.
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They have a story. But for us, what I want to do today and what we wanted to do is we want to talk about not what's wrong. I need to have a conversation with you about what are we hoping for, because in this election, it's not parties and it's not just Bibi or just not Bibi, even though both you and I feel that Bibi is, and you know, that's our politics and we have a right to it. We're not claiming to represent all of Israel, but a large percentage of Israel feels that he's the problem. Large percentage of Israel feels he's the solution. But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about, like, what are we looking for as the elections unfold and as the parties emerge and all these new parties are going to come and they're going to compete and the old parties are going. We're going to see the polls and we're going to see an inkling here or there. One thing we see, we see that Netanyahu is regularly being weakened. Right now. The, the opposition is inching up. There's even some polls that have them winning. But, you know, we're, we're very far from there right now.
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But no, and this is important for our listeners to understand, no polls show
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Netanyahu winning and no poll shows him having a direction, even though he has a plan. And that is that if he emerges as the largest party, he remains in the interim government. And when you're in the interim government, then you put pressure on other parties. He's done this in the past, getting enough people to leave the other parties and promising he has a plan. He's a serious guy and there's nothing illegitimate about it. So the question of who will be the biggest party is the key question, because that's who gets the mandate to form the government and ultimately to be the interim government. But either way, now, let's leave all of that aside. You and I both come from the opposition side, the majority of non ultra Orthodox Jews or the majority of Zionists. In fact, we could actually say we're part of the majority. You know, we could put the. It's like I always win my group whenever I run a marathon, because Orthodox rabbis who made aliyah in 1971, you could always make a category in which you're a major. But this is actually a real category. If we look at the Zionist community in Israel, there is a very significant majority which want a change in government, which want a different direction. What is it that we want? And you see, the polls were strong. We're growing. And with a new party, as we discussed last week, the chances even increase. So today we're going to talk about what we want. And you suggested in our Prior conversation. Three categories that we divide our conversation into three and I'm going to follow you. The first is how do you understand what needs to be undone has to be fixed. The second is what do we restore? And the third are new visions. And so you'll see as we're entering election season and all the parties are going to be vying for your vote and my vote and the votes of the majority of the Zionist community. These three issues we hope will shape the conversation instead of just further viciousness. So let's do it step by step, Yossi. Undo damage. What do we need to undo?
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So you know, it's interesting, Daniil, because just in the little exchange we had before where, yes, we had agreed to talk about hope and a new agenda, and yet it was so instinctive for me to lapse back into the conversation, well, what are they doing here and why are they doing it and what's the nefarious plan? So maybe what I'm hoping for is to be freed from that, just to be able to breathe again and to think about our politics in a non pathological way, that we actually have political leaders who care about the fate of the country and even place that first. And it's been a while since we've had that.
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B
So I don't know if that falls under undo, restore or new vision.
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Yeah, it's just breathing, just breathing.
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Welcome to the world of the breathing. What do you want to undo, Yossi?
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We were talking about the Haredi laws, the laws about Ultra Orthodox exemption. And that's certainly the most obvious laws on the agenda to undo. And I believe that this government, the first week, maybe even the first day, will repeal those laws. But the change has to go deeper. What needs to be undone is the structure of the Haredi state within a state. And take this back more than 40 years, because the father of this impossible burden that we're carrying was actually Menachem Beginning. I think Menachem Begin has tremendous achievements to his historical legacy, but he is the one who granted mass exemptions to the ultra Orthodox as a starting point. In the past, it was always a question of negotiations. It wasn't taken for granted. Begin built this into the system so that several generations of ultra Orthodox have grown up in a system that for good reason, they take for granted we enabled it. And in that sense they're right when they say, what do you want from us? You made this possible. So the first step is going to be undoing the legal structure that allows mass exemption, but no less important, the financial structure and this is going to be extremely painful. Billions and billions of shekels have been poured into the Haredi state within a state in the last four years by this government to an unprecedented degree. And that's what we need to begin dismantling. And we are going to have, and we talked about this recently on a podcast, we're going to create a tremendous tragedy, tremendous human tragedy in the Haredi world. The poverty is going to be very steep. This is a community that, even with massive government subsidies, is always teetering on the verge of poverty. And to withdraw the subsidies, especially in one blow, which is what all the leaders of the opposition are talking about, from Bennett to Golan, every one of them says the first item on the agenda is no more money. Well, we have to do that before. This means you're going to have to go cold turkey.
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Why is there such a consensus on this? Anybody who, I would ask, what's the first thing you have to undo?
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It's this.
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It's this. Why is there such a consensus?
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I think everyone has different reasons. Something you said recently on a podcast was the deep sense of personal offense that so many Israelis who serve, whose children serve, feel in this time, and the resentment against the arrogance. You know, it's not just that the Haredi community exempts itself, but to dare to place themselves spiritually above those who sacrifice, who are risking their lives. One of the things I think about the Haredi community, and this is their undoing individually, you find extraordinary people at all levels of the Haredi community who are capable of examining their actions. And yet when they form a collective, there is no community more obtuse and arrogant. And so that's the first offense and arrogance.
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And they don't understand it.
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They can't, because they know that internally they're a community of tremendous values. And they're not as individuals, they are not arrogant, and they don't understand how they project. Partly it's defensiveness. And look, I grew up among Haredim, I know there's this sense of everybody hates us. They take that for granted. And so you fall back into a kind of a siege mentality. And you're always assuming that people hate you, and then at some point it becomes self fulfilling. But I also think, you know, there's something else here, and it's not just emotional, it's a very practical reason. We will not be able to economically carry a state within a state. Right now they're 14 or 15% of the population. What happens when they're 25%, 35% we can't do it anymore. This is the opportunity, this is the moment.
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October 7th was the catalyst for us be able to see it and the haredi community. There's a very famous Talmudic statement which goes as follows in Hebrew, tafasta merube' el ta fasta, tafastamu at tafasta. If you grab too much, try to grab too much, you're not going to get anything. If you grab something a more moderate amount, you'll at least have grabbed something. I think they. Especially with these legislations which aren't going to help them, because it's not an exemption from military service. It's an exemption, just to clarify for our audience, it's an exemption from arrest for not fulfilling your draft, which is basically selling. It's just a crazy law. People in this country, yes, it's a country of laws, and every law has punishments, but only haredim who break the law cannot be arrested by the police. It's. The Supreme Court's gonna look at it and laugh at it. It's like. But it's like that the fact you even wanted it, like, what do you want? Or that we should declare Torah study as a value of the country. You want to value Torah study, knock yourself out. But that you want me to value you. It was like a bridge too far. But I call it. It's the arrogance of chosenness. When you live in isolation and you have a narrative that you are the most important.
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A
You are the chosen of the chosen.
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You're the chosen of the chosen, and you're the secret of the survival in all these stories. And then you tell stories about your own heroism, the heroism and the difficulty and all that you have done in carrying the yoke of Torah. You're just. You're living in your own world. And so there is, you're right, Such a broad consensus that what we want, what we want to hear over the next three months. And here I'll shift to what I want to hear. We want to hear that that's undone. But you could hear it being undone as an act of vengeance, which I didn't hear from. Like, when I asked you.
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Not at all.
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It was.
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I'm. I feel. I feel trepidation, trepidation.
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It wasn't vengeance. It is a moment. And when you speak to certain people and you go beyond political alliances of who you're going to vote for, and you ask is, could we continue like this? This is because everybody knows, by the way, that even if you pass the most absolute equal draft legislation, it's going to take years till the army feels it. This war will be over. It's not going to resolve the reservists problem over the next two years.
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Right.
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It's just not going to, you know, the level of the level of infantry. Exactly. Because the level of training that we. That's right. Because the level of training that we need to replace our top infantry units is a year and a half. And if they're going to go into partial yeshiva study, it's going to take. This is going to take a long time, even if you have all the numbers. But it is a sense that this is a moment of reckoning for the future of the country. And so this shift goes to what I'm hoping for, what needs to be undone. What I'm yearning for so deeply is a political conversation that ceases to speak about total victory, not over Hamas, but over fellow Jews or fellow Israelis. This government has moved us back to a Hobbesian universe of the jungle of war of all against all. Hobbes posits that that's the state of nature. The state of nature is that you have a right, an inalienable right to pursue and to achieve and to take whatever you need in order to survive. And in the law of the jungle, we are all fighting to achieve what we need in order to exist. It's war of all against all. And the idea of civilization is that a society realizes that I don't want to live in a jungle. I don't want to fight all against all. I don't want to fight all the time. It's actually far more effective to accept a legal system in which we govern our behavior. We stop being able to take whatever we want because at the end, we achieve more through law sharing and equitable distribution than by fighting all the time. So I embrace law, whether I have a more noble notion, but even for pure utilitarian reasons, a war of all against all. This status of the jungle is a primitive vision both of human nature and of the state in which we need to function. But we need to be redeemed from that.
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I'm reminded of something our colleague and friend Tal Becker said, which is that the difference between nationalism and ultranationalism is nationalists aim to unite the country against an external enemy. A ultranationalists seek power by dividing their own people. You look for the internal enemy. That's what this government is.
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See, what I want to see in the campaign from various parties is I want to stop living in a jungle where everything that we're doing is just to Win. And it's not even to win for me. It's to put you down. It's to take. If you lose, I won't. I don't want to live in a jungle. I don't want to live with war of all against all. I have enough enemies on the outside that I have to know how to learn how to deal with. And even them. I don't think it's always a jungle. Sometimes there's other options. But particularly over the next three months, as we move into. As the parties dance before us, whether it's haredim, whether it's the Supreme Court, whether it's state and religion, whether it's. Let's just stop this notion that I'm just fighting you all the time. And this, this like there's no more fitting end to this government than this week. This assault of laws are just. It's. It's so beneath us. I want us. I want to bring an end to the aspiration of total victory, which is really the categories for the jungle. And I'm hoping that this campaign. Like, what do I want? I want at least that I want to stop the tenor of that conversation.
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You know what I would like this government to do? To set up a committee from across political spectrum.
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The one that's left or the new one?
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The only thing I want from this government is to leave is a letter of. The next one is to set up a committee to look at judicial reform. Sure. Let's really think. Why. Why has the court lost the.
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B
Well, see, it's in plans. I could calm you down.
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A
Really.
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It's already. It's already in the plans and it's a part of a constitution. They realize that we have to stop this fighting. We need to set up that if we're going to form a basic law, that that basic law should not be a simple majority. A basic law has to have meaning and that it can't be overturned.
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As someone who.
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What the court is allowed over, who
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believes passionately in the court. The fact that so many Israel Israelis don't believe we have to restore it is a real problem.
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B
Okay, so we're. I could on that. You should just know. It's already.
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A
This is inside information.
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B
It's out there. My friend. I'll give him a little commercial. And why not? Because he's a good guy. My friend Yadid Yistern is working on what he calls a limited constitution. And he has almost all of the parties. We gotta fix this. And we. We can't allow the rule of law to be a partisan issue in this country. And so that's one. So here your undo is the haredi, my undo to move us out of the state of the jungle. What needs to be restored?
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A
You know, in terms of what we need to restore, what comes to my mind most urgently is a sense of accountability, that that's what we've lost with this government, certainly personal responsibility on the part of the Prime Minister. Everyone is always responsible except for him. He is responsible for the successes. Everyone else is responsible for the failures. And that begins with a commission of inquiry into October 7 after the Yom Kippur war. Within weeks, the government established a commission of inquiry independent of the government, headed by the Supreme Court chief Justice, to investigate itself. And this was the case after the Sabre and Shatila massacre. When Menachem Begin, he wasn't thrilled about doing it, but eventually he had no choice because his own cabinet was pressuring him. And so there's a long history in this country of accountability. This is the first major crisis in Israel's history. Four years or three years into the crisis and not a sign of a commission of inquiry. It's so appall falling that you realize the rot that has set in into our public discourse, into our expectations of our leadership. And so what we need to restore, first of all, is a sense of accountability that begins with the commission of inquiry. And I believe that Avigdor Lieberman said, day one, we establish a commission of inquiry. And the commission of inquiry is not just the way Netanyahu sees us, as an act of revenge. It is really to understand the structure, both within the military and the political system that made us so vulnerable. The second condition of accountability that we need to restore is related to what we were talking about with the ultra orthodox, the principle of universal service. Everyone in this country needs to serve in one way or another. Now, I am certainly open to negotiating with the Haredim, a percentage of yeshiva students who will be exempt, and that will be their service, nowhere near this blanket wholesale exemption. And that conversation needs to include the Arab Israeli minority as well. Alternative civil service in your own communities. Now, there already are. This is one of the secrets of Israeli society, something that really should not be secret at all, which is that thousands of young people, Arab Israelis, do volunteer for civic service every year. And that's an extraordinary quiet achievement of Israeli society that needs to be formalized into law. That's part of the accountability of citizenship. And finally, this, I think, is the most. Well, together with the commission of inquiry, this is the most urgent issue on the agenda and that is that the accountability of those who commit violence in Judea and Samaria against their peaceful neighbors, and the fact that the great scandal, maybe the greatest moral scandal of this government, its greatest failure of accountability has been to allow the most violent elements of the settlement movement to indulge their worst instincts to burn and steal and destroy and occasionally kill without any accountability. And so under this, the rubric of accountability, this is what I feel we need to restore. How about you? Where. Where are you at?
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B
See, it's. It's interesting. You have very specific areas. For me, the essence of being a Jew is since our earliest moments, that we walked in the world. And what has defined us as a people for 3,000 is an aspiration for excellence, principally moral excellence. But not only we were too small to be mediocre. I think this government embraced mediocrity and protected it. It's a great insight through claims of fear and antisemitism. You know, Bennett runs and says, we're going to have a government that works. And I really appreciate him, but that's just. That doesn't get me out of bed as a Jewish. Doesn't get me out of bed as a Jew.
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Gets me out of bed as an Israeli.
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As an Israeli. Like, there's something I want. I want a political discourse that speaks about excellence, that speaks about what we want to be. And, you know, it's Value Nation. I wanna. I want us to have a conversation about.
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A
Did you just coin that term?
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B
No, I've been using it for a while. It's.
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I just thought I throw away it. A little historical moment.
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B
Yeah, I wish. I wish I was that original. But maybe it's. It's because it's not Value Nation versus Startup Nation, because Startup Nation had a lot of values in it. It's not an either or of it. I want us to start restoring a conversation about what we stand for, about our moral principles. This is a government who, since the beginning of the war has refused to ever talk about what our morality. I've been speaking for. I'm like a broken record on this, but I don't want to talk about the. We're talking about the future, you know,
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A
and I see how easy it is to forget.
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B
I know I became Yossi for a moment, but it's like, because it's all of us, it just gets us suffering. I want politicians who aren't frightened of restoring a moral conversation on anything, whether it's our internal moral responsibilities to fellow citizens, our moral responsibilities to each other, our moral responsibilities, responsibilities to Others just have that as part of the conversation. In fact, we need to return to our greatest strength. Our greatest strength as a people has always been our character. And we were never defined by the world around us. And I want parties and politicians who aren't frightened of that. I want to go back, you know, to, you know, like Kadesh Yemenu kiked, and restore, you know, this mythic. I don't know when that moment was, but I know we're very far from it now because whatever policies we have to implement, the policies that you want to change, they're all like, why would I want accountability if I don't accept the moral significance of admitting when you had a. When you made a mistake and the moral responsibility of trying to be better? Why would I try to adraft in a more equitable way if I don't have a moral commitment to treat all citizens equally here? You know, it's not an individual law. There needs to be a cultural shift of the way we approach our political discourse. And each one of the things that you're speaking about, Yossi, they're not economic, even though they're also economics.
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A
No, no, these are moral issues.
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B
These are moral issues. But that means we have to be willing to talk morally for three years. We have even judicial reform, with the exception of Levine, who I don't agree with, and some of the people from Kohelet who really did believe that. Who really did believe that their. The Supreme Court is creating a dictatorship. It was more about, I want to do whatever. I won the election, I want to do it how I want. We lost principles.
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A
It was about power.
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B
We lost principled moral conversation. I want that restored. And by the way, this goes back to your conversation. I'm wondering who has a better chance of doing that. Eisenhutter, Bennett?
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A
I was just going to say that I hear Eisencot speaking in a moral language and Bennett speaks more as a technocrat. And I appreciate that. You know, we really need. We may be his expertise. We need both. It's like, I feel Eisenhower also has the moral authority to do it. You know, as a bereaved father, he speaks from that place. And it's just all of this, I think he's going to. To. He. He may not go. He certainly will not go as far as you would like to hear him go. But I think that he's going to
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B
change the tenor and, you know, and as I was thinking about what I wanted, I understood what's been missing. It's not the detailed loss, when you put it all together. How could you get up in the morning and say I'm not going to be accountable? What type of moral universe or void are you living it? And the way you're like when I look at these years, it all makes sense. When you realize that you put everything in a category of survival, of either winning or survival. And your winning is what the country
- [31:25]
A
needs in order to survive, you're winning politically.
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B
Politically, exactly. And therefore anything that serves my needs, everything was enslaved to a lower back base Macedonian need instead of moving us to self actualization and to a larger vision. And so part of what I want to see over the next three months, you know, inshallah, with the government. But that's beyond our claim right now. Just these are, this is where I want us to go in a larger fashion.
- [31:58]
A
So it's interesting because I very much resonate with what you're saying, but that's only half the story for me. And maybe I'll take it a step back to where what you were referring to earlier about our origins and who we are, what our identity is. And we are a people that carries two very distinct identities. The first is what you're saying. We're a people that has defined itself, defined its identity by its moral passion. And think about it, the first Jew, Abraham, challenges God, says God, you're not living up to your own moral responsibilities. And so that's imprinted in us. And this government has tried to uproot one of the essential elements of our identity. The other, to my mind no less central identity that we're carrying is that we are history's most hated people, most hated and hunted people. We carry these two identities. This is the source of the political tensions within the Jewish people today. Choose which one, which one are you for? I'm hoping for a leadership that's going to be able to embrace both of those identities. Yes, we are a hunted people and we need to be really smart about our self protection and not naive. And at the same time being faithful to our core moral identity is essential to our being.
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B
It never was an either one was descriptive and we never let that descriptive reality define who we are.
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A
But let's move today we are. This is where this government helped widen, widen that gap.
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B
Bridge, let's go to what's your what, what visions? You know, we're not going to like pick one.
- [33:56]
A
So you know, to me on my vision, it's very much in line with what you were just, you were saying about a new mood. And on my way here to the studio, I was In a taxi and the driver is listening to a right wing radio station. And they were talking about the Defense Minister's request to undo the conviction of El or Azaria, a soldier who killed a bound Palestinian terrorist and was then sentenced to whatever it was.
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B
Two years for mass.
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A
And so now there's a move on the right to exonerate him officially. But that's not what caught my attention. It was the language that they were using about the other half of the country who they call Kaplanistim. Kaplanistim comes from Kaplan street in Tel Aviv where the democracy movement would gather for its demonstrations. So now the worst thing you can be, you know, it used to be Bolshevik, now it's Kaplanist. The hatred Daniil, that was coming out of this radio. And I'm sitting there, I'm a kaplanist. You're the enemy.
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B
You know, low profile. Tighten your seatbelt.
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A
And my hope for a new vision for this country is that we will not revert back to the way we were in the year leading up to October 7th when we were tearing each other apart. But the way we were on October 8 when we came together when the kaplanistim were being celebrated by right wing settler rabbis. You remember there was a delegation of the most right wing religious Zionist rabbis who went as a peace offering. It was such an extraordinary moment which very quickly passed. And so my vision, my dream for something new in this country is not that we heal our rift. We're not going to heal them. They're very deep rifts. We need to argue these issues. They're serious issues. Borders and the question of the balance between Jewish and democratic and the place of the Arab minority in a Jewish state. These are profound issues and you can't paper over them. But how do we argue them? And so that's my hope for the morning after here.
- [36:30]
B
That's a big dayenu, by the way. There's nobody who won't buy into that. You know what? My new vision that I'm hoping for this country is vision that we should just like I want to reclaim moral confidence. I want to reclaim vision, the ability to have a vision just to have them. Yeah, yeah, somebody give me anything. Just give me.
- [36:52]
A
Careful what you ask towards.
- [36:54]
B
Actually it's true because what happened is that Smochic and Benveer.
- [36:57]
A
Oh, actually they had a vision. They do. That's right.
- [37:00]
B
And their utopia is my dystopia. And there was a wonderful. I'll give a plug to our partners in ARC Media. There's a great podcast and conversation between Dan Sonor, that just came out today or yesterday with Rahm Emanuel. And Dan was challenging Rahm and they were going back and forth. And at one point Ram said, you know, we're now 78 years. In 22 years, what do you want? Turned to Dan, he said, do you. It's like, do you want the current status quo with Palestinians to be the same? Do you even think that's viable? So part of what I want is I want vision. I want politicians and I want to debate about a vision. I don't want to debate about only what we're going to get rid of. I don't only want an aspiration of unity, I want positions. I want a vision of where we want to lead this country. 22 years, give me five years. When my four year tenure is over, where do I want us to be? And we're so much after October 7th, like we're trying to plug holes all the time. We're just trying to get through the day. That's why Israelis love buffer zones. It's like, what's your plug? It doesn't matter. Just get me through the day. Some of them even want the draft of ultra orthodox. Lower my reserve duty. It's like, just help me get through the day. But we gotta move to vision. So what's my vision, my hope for vision? Vision. A conversation about vision. A conversation that will compete. We need this as an oxygen. And I believe we also need it for our strategic well being in a world that when it looks at you and says, if all you want is just to plug a hole, then plug your holes. You want to walk with me? Where do we want to go? You know, where do we want to. Where do we want to be? And so my vision is vision. So you'll see, it's great. We have, you know, we want to stop the hemorrhaging, we want to restore some things and we want to hope for some new, new directions. Last words for today?
- [39:13]
A
Yeah. You know, we talked about some necessary concrete changes that have to happen, but really we're talking about something intangible. And you know, your language is really the moral conversation. My language is more the spiritual conversation. But we're really talking about the same thing. We're talking about a transformation of consciousness, a transformation of tone, deeper than tone. We're better.
- [39:42]
B
We're better than what we've been these last four years. And we're meant to be better as a people. So as we enter and are in this stages, we're going to watch which parties emerge, which parties talk about it, what's the tone of that and which parties give us the better chance? We know who's not going to give us, but what type of coalition could emerge to give us a better side of what we're about?
- [40:07]
A
I needed this conversation too. You're not the only one who did.
- [40:11]
B
I hope our audience does as well. Yossi, a pleasure talking with you.
- [40:15]
A
Great to be with you. For Heaven's Sake is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute and ARC Media. It is produced by me, Daniel Goodman, with help from Miriam Jacobs, Adar Taylor Schechter and Aviva Katmanoor, and studio support from Go Live Media. Our episode was edited by Seth Stein, Natal Friedman is our executive producer and our music was composed by Yuval Sama. Past episodes can be found@arcmedia.org where you can explore more of Arc Media's podcasts. You can watch the video versions of our episodes on our YouTube channel. Follow the YouTube link in the Show Notes. Also, to receive updates on new episodes, please follow the link to arcmedia.org and subscribe to Arc Media's weekly newsletter. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute, visit our website@shalomhartman.org.