← For Heaven's Sake
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- [00:04]
Daniil Hartman
You are listening to an Art Media podcast. October 7th is still enslaving us. Fear is still enslaving us. A culture of war is enslaving us. This Passover. I'm really going to try to connect to hope.
- [00:21]
Yossi Kleine Levi
I'm in a different place, Daniil. I feel the hope already. The story is so powerful. It's so overwhelming, and it's such a profound source of hope and spiritual energy, and we don't have the language for it. And so every seder is an opportunity to try to go just one layer deeper, both in terms of the language and, well, the way we tell the story. I feel that challenge, especially this year.
- [01:01]
Daniil Hartman
Hi, friends. This is Daniil Hartman and Yossi Kleine Levi from the Sholem Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, for heaven's sake, in collaboration with ARC Media. Today's March 31st, and our episode is entitled Passover in the shadow of War. There's a cloud. It's more than just a shadow, Yossi. I feel it. And Israeli society feels it. It's been a hard week.
- [01:30]
Yossi Kleine Levi
It's the least joyful week before Pesach that I ever remember. Here.
- [01:35]
Daniil Hartman
Wow.
- [01:36]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Wow.
- [01:37]
Daniil Hartman
And you remember. One of the ways that I go through life as an optimist is forgetting things. I define memory to be just. It's like, who wants to remember?
- [01:48]
Yossi Kleine Levi
I remember selectively. I remember things that are useful, that may come into the writing at some
- [01:53]
Daniil Hartman
point, at times, but it's. This has been a hard week. Besides, you know, the running back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to the shelter, to the shelters. And my son came to Israel for three weeks for Pesach, and he came with his three kids, and Iran welcomed him. As he was getting out of his taxi, taking the suitcases upstairs to his apartment. The first siren. So leaving your suitcases and just running up. And he's with his wife and three children.
- [02:27]
Yossi Kleine Levi
And the airport, we know is a target.
- [02:29]
Daniil Hartman
This was not in the airport. This is. He had got to Jerusalem already. They waited. They waited. I don't want to think that the whole world evolves, but they waited. Then I called him, and we're all making sure that he knows and he's good. And I said, so how are the kids? They're okay. There were seven sirens that day. By the third one, his kids were tasting pts. It was like, whoa, this was a hard week. It was the ritual of war, of the Iran war.
- [03:00]
Yossi Kleine Levi
That's a good phrase.
- [03:01]
Daniil Hartman
And there was another dimension to that ritual and which we spoke about the Last time. It's an anxiety about the end of the war. The war itself has its own anxiety, but there was anxiety about the end of the war, what is going to be achieved. And I think some of the anxiety is that we know that the most that we could achieve is to delay Iran's capacity to produce missiles and weapons. We could weaken them. But Israel doesn't have the capacity for significant or total game change. And our fantasy or our hope and aspiration of regime change, that's not going to happen with an air campaign. It might happen now in months. It's in the hands of the Iranian population.
- [03:46]
Yossi Kleine Levi
So it's interesting, Daniil, because we're going into Pesach, the holiday of liberation, however one wants to conceive of liberation. And we had these hopes that we were going to liberate Iran. Yeah.
- [03:59]
Daniil Hartman
Or liberate. I don't know if it was liberate. That was your language. Liberate ourselves from Iran, from.
- [04:04]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Right, right. Well, for me, it was really both. Yeah. And now we know we're not really going to do either, at least not
- [04:11]
Daniil Hartman
immediately, or we don't know what Iran.
- [04:13]
Yossi Kleine Levi
It's liberation deferred.
- [04:15]
Daniil Hartman
Liberation deferred. Most liberations are defer. And we know we're so much in the hands of the pressure that the United States could bring to bear on whether the 15 point condition of surrender really will be accepted or not. And those are things that are. It's very heavy because to what extent do we get the 460 kg of enriched uranium? Do they commit not to enrich again? It's all out there and we're just listening to each news item. It's just like, whoa. And it's not in your hands. So that's one part of.
- [04:47]
Yossi Kleine Levi
There's a feeling of things not holding together.
- [04:50]
Daniil Hartman
Yeah. And we're hoping still, but people are realizing that, as you said, the redemption is not at hand. And it's interesting. We started the war during Purim and it's Pesach, and it's very, very different. Purim was about the evil Haman who wants to destroy us and how our current reality is different than the Purim reality. And now the holidays coming into Pesach, which is supposed to be the holiday of liberation, the holiday of freedom, the holiday where Jewish peoplehood begins in many ways. So there is that. But the cloud and the shadow goes way beyond Iran. Lebanon is playing an increasingly heavy role as a shadow and as a cloud over our existence as we feel it. Today it was announced four more soldiers, beautiful young Men were killed just the day beforehand, three were killed, and it's Lebanon.
- [05:47]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Yeah, we're back in the loop.
- [05:49]
Daniil Hartman
We're back in the loop. You know, it was hutar le psum as the way the news starts the term and that it was allowed to be reported because you don't report deaths until the families are in informed.
- [06:03]
Yossi Kleine Levi
That's the most chilling phrase in Hebrew.
- [06:05]
Daniil Hartman
In Hebrew, hutar le pursum. It's allowed to report and it's used
- [06:09]
Yossi Kleine Levi
only, only then for that.
- [06:11]
Daniil Hartman
Only for that. It's a holy term. You know, the term hol is distinct, it's separate. This is its own category and that should be enough. That would be enough for anybody. But that's in many ways just half of our shadow. And that's hard enough to bear. But in the midst of war, one of the prior unwritten laws of Israeli society is that during war you don't do politics, you don't do petty politics, you don't do partisan politics. But this is not a six day or a 12 day war, you're in a three week war. This is a multi year war. And politics are continuing, especially as elections are six months away. And so I can't blame the government for engaging in politics. And there's things to be done. But this week the political discourse and legislative process just really hit new lows in my mind. And I don't want to activate your anti Netanyahu sentiments.
- [07:13]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Oh, it's not hard.
- [07:15]
Daniil Hartman
And I feel like, Yossi, you've infected me.
- [07:20]
Yossi Kleine Levi
I'm actually calmer about things now. It's like we've done a transformation, you
- [07:25]
Daniil Hartman
know, we're a married couple. It's like Kadine and I, when one is nervous about something, the other one's calm.
- [07:29]
Yossi Kleine Levi
With one of I hand it over to you, you hand it over to me.
- [07:33]
Daniil Hartman
The whole country was reeling when the budget was passed and it was discovered that there was this trick or, I don't know, trickery to pass through a additional measure. How would one say in Hebrew an amendment? It's not even an amendment, it's a correction. Normally it's a correction. Normally a budget is passed and while it's being passed, there are amendments to correct on the part of the opposition against certain parts of the budget. And so the budget is passed as a package with certain amendments. Here the government passed an amendment adding to its pre planned budget in a way that no one would know in advance. And the amendment in correction was to increase hundreds of millions of shekel to the Haredi parties for their educational system without any claim of where it's going to be allocated. What's going to be the budgetary process? Because a budget is not just coming up with numbers. It's not just saying, okay, you get this money, you get this money. No, we're going to do this amount for schools, for what? What are you going to do it, you're going to do for buildings, you're going to do it for what's the need that this budget is responding to? But this amendment had nothing. It was just, okay, we're going to give you money. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of shekel to further the possibility of Haredim not having to serve in the army in the midst of a war. Where this week also our chief of staff got up and said, the army's collapsing under the burden. And to have the chief of staff say this and this legislation at the
- [09:13]
Yossi Kleine Levi
same time, it took dissonance to a new level. This money was allocated over the billions of shekel that have already been transferred to Haredi institutions. No government by far has ever given more money to the Haredi institutions than this government during war. At a time when health is being cut, health services, there aren't enough shelters
- [09:41]
Daniil Hartman
in the north, businesses are collapsing in the north.
- [09:44]
Yossi Kleine Levi
And this is what the government was preoccupied with. And the opposition rightly called it acting like thieves in the night. This was at 2 in the morning,
- [09:53]
Daniil Hartman
they did their so and if by not putting it in the budget, it wasn't open to review, to conversation, to sunlight, what is it that you're spending money on? At the last moment, they did an amendment to their own budget, not the opposition trying to go against the. It's like literally just being punched. And you're in the midst of a war, a war where, like all of us know, people called up again and they're just being torn away from their families. And in the midst of all of this, this, I don't know, shadow a cloud, you need another word of what's going on?
- [10:29]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Well, this was a violation.
- [10:30]
Daniil Hartman
This is a violation. And if that wasn't enough, one of the hardest things was the legislation passed last night. And that's the legislation mandating the death penalty. And here I want to be it's not the death penalty for terrorists, it's a death penalty for west bank residents who kill Israeli citizens and in so doing act to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel exclusively. It's not for Jews. And this is in the background of a horrific week and also since the beginning of the war. And I want to Recommend that people read Jeremy Sharon and the Times of Israel. Such a thoughtful piece about. Since the beginning of the war, seven Palestinians have been killed. And under this umbrella of the war, a whole process of attacks against Palestinian residents of the west bank and what's known as the hilltop youth. What Netanyahu dismissedly speaks of as, oh, 50, 60, dysfunctional ADD or high school graduates. There's a plan. And there's even now emerging a serious debate within the settler movement against it, which is. I think we have to talk about this at greater length in a full podcast. But in the midst of all of that, Israel passes a mandatory death penalty with almost no judicial discretionary, no possibility of pardon. If there's a terrorist within 90 days and they have to be hanged, we'll talk about this. But as a Jew and following the Jewish tradition, I'm an anti death penalty person. In our tradition, we wipe out the death penalty. Our tradition is unequivocally against the death penalty. The biblical tradition is four, but the rabbinic tradition just removed it. But just the hanging, like how many? Who are we? And so we'll get into this, but like it's been a hard week.
- [12:31]
Yossi Kleine Levi
What a week.
- [12:31]
Daniil Hartman
And now we're a day away from
- [12:33]
Yossi Kleine Levi
supposed to be going into Pesach, into
- [12:36]
Daniil Hartman
our joyful holiday of our liberation. So, Yossi, start with what? Any one of the. There's which layer of the cloud and the shadow and it's with a heavy heart, my friends, where this is not a joyful time. There are some hopes maybe we'll get to at the end. But there's so many layers. Where do you want to start, Jesse?
- [12:55]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Start from my, my study, my apartment. I've mentioned this before. We've moved to a new apartment the other end of the city. We used to live in French Hill, North East Jerusalem. Now we live in southwest Jerusalem, near Mount Herzl for those who know the geography, near Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. But more importantly, for the story that I want to tell you, right across from the National Military Cemetery, Israel's Arlington. Yeah. And the last few days I'm sitting in my study and I'm hearing Kaddish on the loudspeaker coming from the next hill. Very clear. And I'm hearing the Hespedim, the eulogies. And it's very strange because this is intruding in my daily routine. Sitting at my desk, I'm, you know, what do you do? I try to write. I look at social media. Maybe I'll watch a movie. And there's a funeral of a young man. There's a destroyed family on the next hill. And, you know, I would say that it's a metaphor for Israeli life, but it wasn't a metaphor. It was literal. I'm sitting there trying to live my daily life, and this is going on. So finally I just had to stop whatever it was I was doing. And you just sit quietly, and I go into meditation and try to connect with the family and offer prayers. It was a very long funeral, and I have work to do. So what do you do? You go back to work while the funeral is happening. And there was nothing more jarringly Israeli than trying to go through my daily routine while literally a young man is being buried. And you're hearing these heartbreaking eulogies. And then the singing. Beautiful, unbearable singing, but also the old Israeli songs because they add them to the system. This is now part of many funerals of fallen soldiers. Families will invite a musician who the young man loved and ask him to sing.
- [15:21]
Daniil Hartman
And they all show up.
- [15:22]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Oh, they all show up. They all show up. That's their reserve duty. You know, they feel, you know, unofficial reserve duty. And so this is all going on, and then you just pick yourself up from the floor and, okay, what do I have to do now? Oh, right, right. I said I would help prepare dinner. And that's what you do. So that's just, you know, one little corner of daily life. And this week there were multiple funerals. And it goes through the day into the night. So that's something of what I'm carrying. And you look at the faces in the paper, and you look at these young, beautiful young men, as you put it earlier, and they really are. And you can't bear it. You can't look, and you can't not look.
- [16:17]
Daniil Hartman
Yeah. You know, this last week, I was in my research seminar. It's called Israeli Values. And the seminar is about trying to think with a phenomenal group of people across a wide spectrum of political positions. What is the central issue that we have to talk about in Israeli society? And how does the institute respond? And what curriculum should we produce? And how do we change what it is that we're teaching? And very often the seminar is, okay, what are we feeling this week? What are we feeling? Let's get a pulse of each other and let's talk to each other. And from there we learn. And it's research scholars and heads of educational departments working together to make sure that we're talking Jewishly and Jewish fast about what it is that our people are Feeling, and I'll just share with you two observations that were made there. One was by the person who is the most right wing. He lives in a settlement and he's the most right wing thinker in the group. Very, very supportive of military action in order to defend Israel. Very unequivocal about that. He serves his children serve. And he was talking, you know, my son's in Lebanon and his gut instinct is always, and this is an Israeli gut instinct to stand on the side of when an Israeli soldier's in danger, you stand on their side. You don't critique. You just what do you need in order to do what you need to do? Politics will come later. And he said, you know, my son went up and he went to the Golan Heights and then we just found out he's not in the Golan Heights. They moved him now and he's fighting in Lebanon. And he said, I support an attempt to protect the north and we have to make life possible again in the north. And if we have to capture territory, he says, but Lebanon, we're back. And he says, I don't know. He says, I'm afraid for my kid and I don't know if we know exactly what we're doing. And it's a different conversation than the fear people had on October 7th in Gaza. The war had multiple stages, which our audience knows about and we've talked about them. But there was a sense of clear mission that overcame the fear, there was purpose that overcame. It was, we have to erase the impact of October 7th. There's a little of that in Lebanon, but Lebanon has a heaviness, has a heaviness and a doubt. Listen, we're talking again about holding litany and creating buffer zones. And we know how hard that is, how many soldiers have died and what are we going to do? And we spoke about that again. So there was his statement, like for him, the shadow was in his soul. Yeah, it was a shadow in his soul.
- [19:21]
Yossi Kleine Levi
What I hear from people about Lebanon in particular, first statement is this time we have to finish it once and for all. Second statement is, how do you do it? It's not possible from the same people.
- [19:36]
Daniil Hartman
From the same people.
- [19:37]
Yossi Kleine Levi
This deep ambivalence where we know, and I feel the same way, we have to finish this. We can't keep going back every five years. On the other hand, what does it
- [19:49]
Daniil Hartman
mean to finish what is once and for all? You know, they made a joke of it in one of the great Israeli satires where Netanyahu was declaring that what we will have done in the 12 Day War is a victory for generations.
- [20:03]
Yossi Kleine Levi
12 Day War in Iran.
- [20:05]
Daniil Hartman
In Iran. Do we have another 12 day war? I don't know. We have three words, six day war 12. But thanks for it'll be Le Dorei Dorot for generations upon generations. And the comedian, they were saying, and now Netanyahu is getting up and what we're doing now is for. Because we found out that generation to generation is six months. So what do we. So now if we want something for three years, it has to be from generation, generation, generation, generation to generation. This notion of once and for all,
- [20:32]
Yossi Kleine Levi
it reminds me of Menachem Begin, the prime minister during the First Lebanon War in 1982, quoting the Bible, said, and the land rested for 40 years. And he said, and this is what this war is going to do. And I don't know if the land rested for 40 minutes.
- [20:51]
Daniil Hartman
For 40 minutes, yeah. So that's part of that people sense, as you said, we want it to end and we know that Hezbollah is this danger, but the connection between what we're doing and achieving that end, there's a heaviness. And one of the research fellows, a woman whose husband has also done maybe 400 days, she said, you know, since for the last two, three years, we're priding ourselves about how strong we are as a country, she says, but what does it mean that to live here you have to be so strong? She said, that's not healthy. Her shadow is, how much are we demanding? How much are we demanding? Is it too much? Is it. It's just too much to bear? Yeah.
- [21:35]
Yossi Kleine Levi
The answer is it is too much to bear, but we have no alternative and we bear it.
- [21:40]
Daniil Hartman
But what she was saying is I
- [21:42]
Yossi Kleine Levi
don't know if we have an alternative.
- [21:43]
Daniil Hartman
No, first of all, there aren't alternatives. You know, she's. But she was saying lots. There are alternatives.
- [21:48]
Yossi Kleine Levi
She was saying she doesn't know if she could bear it.
- [21:50]
Daniil Hartman
She was just observing that. What is this celebration of strength? What about, you know, we're normal human beings, we're not Sparta, we're not supposed to be Olympians. A real country is not supposed to demand of you to always be this mega Olympian with strength. And we know how many people, we know how many people are on the spectrums of PTSs and the shadow of the demand of ultimate strength. And even your immediate response to me, it's like it's the Zionist answer, it's the ideology. And she was saying, do me a favor a second. Could you leave your ideology aside and Just recognize the humanity.
- [22:33]
Yossi Kleine Levi
It's not ideology, its reality. Of course I recognize it. Everyone's exhausted and there are different layers of exhaustion depending on, you know, if you live in Tel Aviv or if you live in Kirchmon in the north. There are different layers of this. But what makes this period more difficult than any that we've ever had is simply that it's gone on longer than we've ever experienced. We always fought short wars. It was the long, since 1948. 1948 was a two year war. Since then, our wars, six days, three weeks. Yom Kippur was three weeks. That was a long war. This is two and a half years. Israeli society has never been tested in an uninterrupted way like we have been since October 7th. And that's why questions are being raised about how much more resilient can we be in a way that have never been raised before. And I share your frustration when I hear, certainly from the government that I have no patience at all when it comes from government ministers. But, you know, this celebration of Israeli resilience. Yes, yes, okay, I get it. But let's also be honest with ourselves. Many, many Israelis, more and more Israelis have moments, and maybe more than moments of saying, I just can't. You know, I just can't. But then, I mean, what is amazing about this country is that people do find the strength. So what I would suggest, Danielle, is a kind of a combination of what we're saying. We need to be realistic. We need to acknowledge that there are breaking points, but we also, I think, need to, yes, celebrate or at least acknowledge the fact that we haven't broken. We haven't broken.
- [24:22]
Daniil Hartman
I know that, Yusuf, but I'm so far from you at this point. I'd agree with everything you just said. All right, okay. It's like here it is. If I would be writing the poster of Zionism, I would be saying exactly what you said. But there was a humanity that this person and I remember in my life, I'm the strong one. My whole life, I'm the strong one. You call me, I'm there, so I know the weight. I remember this is one of the hardest moments in my life. When my tank was blown up in the first war in Lebanon and horrific things happened afterwards. And then when they finally brought the three of us who weren't injured, my driver was seriously injured. They brought the three of us a step behind the front battle, and then we had just got there, and then there was a tank where the loader had ptsd and so they turned to my loader and they said, come, we need you to go on that tank. And yet to look at his face, he shrunk. Like, don't ask this of me. Don't ask. And I saw him as tank commander. I was like his Abba. I was responsible for him. And I told him, I said that you don't have to go. And I said. I turned and said, I'll go, but I'm conditioned that I'll be the commander. And that commander was very happy. It turns out the whole tank was a little dysfunctional. And I went and, like, that's like, this is what Israeli society does, okay? So, like, you know, and so I'm so proud. Like, and then we go, and I'm telling you, but it's not healthy.
- [25:54]
Yossi Kleine Levi
And then you had to leave the country for 10 years because you. Because you couldn't continue. And you came back and you continued, and so everyone.
- [26:02]
Daniil Hartman
But it's like what she was saying. But you know what she was saying? What she was saying is, could we just stop for a few minutes celebrating our strength? She doesn't say, stop being strong.
- [26:14]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Absolutely.
- [26:15]
Daniil Hartman
She says, could we just stop the cause? You know, like, we're in this war mode and we're strong and look at us, we're going in and out of the shelters, and we have jokes and we have this, and we have concerts and weddings. And she says, what is the story that we're telling here? This is part of the shadow that Lebanon has brought back. And then after Lebanon, we're going to go back to Gaza. And then after Gaza, we're going to go back to the West Bank. So there is that dimension of the shadow. There's a heaviness to it. Let's turn to the death penalty legislation. Had it hit you, I would maybe just add just a moment of introduction and framing. If it's okay that this is a legislation that was drafted in such a way to make sure that it would not pass the Supreme Court override. It is clearly a discriminatory law. You can't have a law which gives the death penalty only for Palestinians. If you want to have a death penalty for terrorists, we can have one type of conversation. If you want to have a death penalty for anybody who's a terrorist, any Jew, Palestinian who kills for defying terrorism, various political, ideological, terrorizes people, whatever it is, it's not the same as murder. Politically motivated murder of some type. That's as close a definition as I'll give right now. But it's exclusive. Palestinians of the west bank, non citizens killing citizens of Israel, and no review, no appeal, hanging 90 days. It was set up in such a way that the Supreme Court is going to see it as a discriminatory law so that it will not be implemented. So here it is. Netanyahu and Ben Grave, they can all celebrate. But we're then going to set up the Supreme Court against a majority of Israelis who see this legislation as what side are you on? Do you love terrorists? So here it is. The Supreme Court is on the side of terrorists.
- [28:17]
Yossi Kleine Levi
You already hear what they're going to say on the right. They're going to start calling this a terrorist Supreme Court. You know, Bagat Shala, Nughbeh, the Nukba, the Hamas terrorists of October 7th. It's completely political and as you say, no intention of actually carrying it through. Meanwhile, it is a. I won't even call it a public relations disaster, because it's so much more serious than that. It's a hilul hashem. A hilul hashem is the most serious sin in Judaism. It is the desecration of God's name. And when that is done by the collective Jewish people, by the state of Israel, there is no greater sin than Yom Kippur does not atone for hillul hashem. And what the government did last night was a hillul hashem. It was desecrating God's name. It was desecrating the name of Israel and the Jewish people. And one of the worst things about it is that they didn't actually mean it. They know it's not going to happen. But. But we also know that when the Supreme Court knocks this down, it won't make headlines around the world. It will be acknowledged. It'll be some news item or not, or even not. And meanwhile, the impression is that the Jewish state now has a blatantly discriminatory law of death and that you can start imagining hangings from cranes in Tehran. Yeah.
- [29:49]
Daniil Hartman
Who hangs today? Who's hanging today? You know, and the security establishment, the army and the security establishment all advised against the law, stating that this is not going to enhance vehemently against it. This is not going to help us. This is not going to help us.
- [30:06]
Yossi Kleine Levi
The Shin Bet, the Mossad, the army.
- [30:09]
Daniil Hartman
But you know, Daniil, it just nothing
- [30:11]
Yossi Kleine Levi
matters anymore what has happened to the right. And we've talked about this. But in some ways, even worse than legitimizing Ben GVIR and his small far right party is bringing the spirit of Ben GVIR into the Likud, the Likud has been thoroughly corrupted. What we saw last night was an erasure, for all practical purposes of what was once a bright red boundary between the far right and the mainstream right. Menachem Begin would not recognize this Likud. He would disown it. And that's where we are.
- [30:54]
Daniil Hartman
It's like, you know, the price of October 7th, we keep on coming back to it. Yes, it's like there's no checks and balances even in Israeli society. You're not going to have masses of Israelis demonstrating against this law. You're going to have some of the centrist and leftist parties and the civil rights movements demonstrating against the discrimination. You'll have articles, some of them in Haaretz by, you know, Kremnitzer, very thoughtful
- [31:17]
Yossi Kleine Levi
legal scholar who nobody reads outside of
- [31:20]
Daniil Hartman
Haaretz, Haaretz, speaking about the death culture as the great victory of Hamas, you know, okay, like. And you can move the populace saying, yes, what are you, for the terrorists, like here? Okay, all those who, for the terrorists, please come to a demonstration after Shabbat so that you can now support the terrorists. Because this is the people who murder you. These are the ones. The argument against death penalty has so many features. One, whether it is effective at all, whether it has any deterrent in any way whatsoever. Most of the world at which we want to recognize doesn't recognize that. United States does. And it's an outlier in the Western world. But America can get away with anything. But you just, like here it is a small little country, 90 days hanging. It's like, what do we want to satiate? It's like we're getting into the eye for the eye and our tradition, you know the Bible, you read the Bible, you think the Jewish people are going to disappear because for every sin that you know, death, death, death, death. And then, you know, like, if you
- [32:18]
Yossi Kleine Levi
do this, there'll be none of us left.
- [32:20]
Daniil Hartman
None of us left. What did you do? Yet it's like, like you do. And it's not just for violent crimes. It's for various, you know, theological, you know, violation of the Shabbos, all the above. Death, death, death, death, death. Anybody who does this, kill them, kill them, kill them, kill them. The Bible, you know, well, what do you want from a 3,000 year old. That was a language 3,000 years ago. You want death? That's like giving someone a slap or eye for an eye. The rabbis. The Bible also says if you take out an eye, we're going to take out an eye. Great. Even if you mistakenly kill somebody, we're going to have to kill you too. There's the revenger. Listen, we have a tradition like every tradition that started 3,000 years ago and profoundly reflects the ethos of its time. And along comes the rabbinic tradition 12, 1500 years later, and says, what are you talking about? An eye for an eye, no damages. Pay them damages. And more significantly, the famous greatest rabbi, just about of the whole Talmud says, one rabbi says, on my court, a death penalty will only be issued maybe once in 70 years. And Rabbi Akiva says, never in my court, it will never be. Because the testimony, the idea that we as human beings should take a life, it's one thing when you do it to save a life, but this is just not what we do. So our tradition has lived this way and this new ethos, it's one thing to be warrior, to fight in self defense. It is this. What are we gonna, are we gonna have an audience? Like we're gonna hang them from where it's just, we're getting lost.
- [34:00]
Yossi Kleine Levi
But it's so interesting to think about Israeli society in the context of the different eras of Judaism and Jewish history. You know, we talk about Israel as the ingathering of the exiles with Jews coming from 100 diasporas. But Israel has also ingathered Jewish time. And so what we're experiencing now is Jewish history arguing with itself. You have the biblical period and you have the far right, who would fit in 3,000 years ago into the story that the Tanaka that the Bible tells. You have the haredim, the ultra Orthodox who are in the rabbinic era or Poland, actually. Well, in Poland in the 18th century, let's be generous and say the 19th century. Then you have the secular Israelis who are somewhere in the mid 20th century. You're still, you know, in the rational modernity period. And you see the different stages of Jewish time arguing with themselves. Which period of Jewish history most authentically represents who we are as a people? And that's what's playing out here Now. It's fascinating to observe, but when you're actually in the middle of it, it's wrenching and you just can't believe it. Where did that atavistic streak come from? But it was always in us. And maybe in the 2000 years of exile when we didn't have power, it was a receding gene, it was dormant. It was dormant, but it was always there. And sovereignty has brought out some of our most extraordinary qualities. The reawakening of Jewish heroism, of military heroism. How extraordinary a people that for 2000 years didn't know what a weapon was. And look what we're producing. We have one of the great armies in the world. And I for one, and I think you are too, am enormously proud of our kids. But there are other tendencies that we've carried in ourselves, archetypes that are very destructive. And you say, where did this come from? Suddenly we have the zealots again from the second Temple period. Suddenly we have the corrupt priests of the temple, you know, that's now in the rabbinic establishment. Suddenly we have King Herod. The corrupt monarchy is back. And so we have the most extraordinary archetypes being reborn under sovereignty and some of the most destructive.
- [36:33]
Daniil Hartman
So with this shadow, Yossi, with this story, and I love the notion that all the historical periods are all condensed. And it's part of what's so alienating because like you're not. You don't even know where did this even come from. It's just, it feels like it's from. And truly. And that's the sense when you feel like your Israel is being taken from you, it's because it's being taken to another period in which you don't.
- [36:57]
Yossi Kleine Levi
But it was always there in us. That's the thing.
- [36:59]
Daniil Hartman
But it's like it's just being removed. So how, in this environment, Yossi, how do we celebrate Pesach this year? How are you celebrating it? Can you.
- [37:08]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, how do Israelis celebrate? We bring our families, our in laws. We'll be celebrating with in laws this year for the first time. And there's something beautiful. We're going to be seeing the expansion of our Seder table. Look, you know, this Seder is going to be celebrated not only under the shadow of everything we've talked about until now, but we've been warned by the home front command to have certain restrictions. And we know the odds are there will be missiles during the Seder.
- [37:46]
Daniil Hartman
They know everything about us.
- [37:48]
Yossi Kleine Levi
They know it's Pesach. They know we're going to be gathering. And you know, if you want to ruin a Jew's day, hit them at the Seder. That's a time honored antisemitic tradition. And so how will we celebrate? First of all, I think that the Seder has its own momentum. We've done this under all kinds of circumstances, and I certainly mean in the historical perspective for thousands of years. But even in the Israeli context, you know, you and I remember during the second Intifada when a suicide bomber blew up a Seder in the Park Hotel in Etania, which then sent the Israeli army back into the territories, and you had a mass mobilization on Seder Night. So we have these layers of memory, of celebration and trauma. That helps. And I think that even if we don't make it explicit, we carry that into the Seder night and the Seder, you know, it's a very complicated story. It's a joyful story. It's a story of liberation. But it's a lot of stuff that the Haggadah is unpacking. And I think that this Seder, for me, the joy that I'm going to be feeling is beyond the gathering, is that we're still doing it. Joy is too strong a word here. But I will be feeling a certain gratification that the war with Iran, the showdown with Iran, has finally happened. Now, again, it's not going to be the definitive victory, but this is an essential stage in the story of the Jewish people, in how we deal with those who seek to do us harm, which is part of the Pesach Seder, too. It's not the side of the Seder that I have wanted to emphasize all these years. You know, we had years in our Seder where we didn't even say the part. Vihisha amda lavoteinu Velanu. There's a part in the Haggadah that talks about how in every generation, there rises those who seek to destroy us. And my daughter Maria, when she was a teenager, she said, we're just bringing this on ourselves. We're just, you know, we keep wallowing and said, okay, we're not going to say this part. And we stopped for a while. And then during the second intifada, the period of the suicide bombings, it quietly came back. And it's back. It's firmly back in our Seder this year. I think it's going to be strongly there. It's not a dominant theme, but it's a part of who we are as a people. We periodically confront evil and we go through it and we overcome. And that will be part of the story. How about you, Daniil?
- [40:47]
Daniil Hartman
I don't know.
- [40:49]
Yossi Kleine Levi
I know that you're in a different
- [40:50]
Daniil Hartman
wavelength on that, but I don't know. You know, Israel was supposed to change the way we celebrate Passover. Passover was the story of a redemption and a liberation that happened in the past. And then Israel was the Passover story happening in our lifetime. And so much of that is true. I give thanks for this country, and I give thanks for our ability to protect ourselves, and I give thanks for the successes of this country, the reality of Israel is far more of a happy ending than any liberation aspirations we could have ever had. Where did we go after we left Egypt? Into the desert. What was the liberation? It was like. What was it eating manna. You know, this was not a. It took like, many years. And the Jewish story, even after Exodus, was always checkered. And Israel was the culmination, in many ways, of the Egypt story. Israel is Pesach and its connection to Independence Day. It's the liberation of the Jewish people. And here it is, the liberation of the Jewish people in our homeland. And all of that is true.
- [41:58]
Yossi Kleine Levi
And you mean it. Liberation on different levels. There's also a psychological liberation, if I understand what you're talking about, that Israel was supposed to.
- [42:07]
Daniil Hartman
No, physically, no. Absolutely not even psych. It was real. It was the physical freedom of the Jewish people bringing us back to our homeland. The exodus from Egypt was an exodus from Egypt into sovereignty, but also the
- [42:22]
Yossi Kleine Levi
liberation from existential fears. That's what I heard when you were speaking.
- [42:27]
Daniil Hartman
No, that wasn't that at all. It was, in fact, the ending. This was Pesach, Israel. Independence Day is the new Pesach. And that's why it's just such a clear holiday here. And everybody. It's the most dominant holiday of the year here this year. I'm feeling the shadow a lot. I really am. I'm connecting to Passover, not as this holiday of freedom. It's called, you know, the holiday of our freedom. I think for most of Jewish history, Passover was not the holiday of freedom, but the holiday of an aspiration for freedom. Most Jews throughout our history celebrated Passover with the hope that a better day will come. And, you know, one of the highlights of the Seder is towards the end of when we sing a next year in Jerusalem, right? And in Israel, they had the rebuilt Jerusalem. And then what are you really hoping to rebuild? Was it the unified capital? Do you want the messianic era?
- [43:28]
Yossi Kleine Levi
That's what it meant.
- [43:30]
Daniil Hartman
That's what it meant. But it was really. It's Passover is what gave us the strength to be a people who hopes. It's not a people who celebrate our success. It could be. And I'm not begrudging anybody who celebrates our success, but it was a holiday which says liberation is possible. Not that liberation is a fact, but liberation is possible and has to be an integral part of human culture. That aspiration and I think our people aspired for this year. I need hope. I'm holding on. I'm holding on to the Hope and this shadow. There are so many shadows. There's so much lack of clarity. When will Iran end? What's going to happen in Lebanon? I so much don't trust this government. And every time I hear our minister of defense just proclaiming, we're going to capture, we're going to rule, we're going to this. And our minister of Finance, we're now the Litanis, the new border of Israel. And I'm watching and I'm seeing my fellow workers like you're calling me up again. I don't even know if I'm going to be home. They're telling me for the Seder and all of that, we have to be liberated from the pharaohs within our pharaohs. Part of, you know, you spoke about Israel brings out the best, but it could also surface some of the worst periods. There are ideologies which are enslaving us. There are people who are attacking us. And some of them are inside. We got the outside ones not covered. But we know what to do, or we're going to try to do whatever we can do do. October 7th is still enslaving us. Fear is still enslaving us. A culture of war is enslaving us. And this Passover, I'm really going to try to connect to hope, you know, in our Seder, maybe with this I'll conclude. And if you have any final remarks, the Passover story, when you tell it, you don't start with liberation. You start with Avadim Hayinu, the Farobe Mitzray. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. You tell the story. It's a story of slavery to freedom. And I'm going to try to have our people talk about what's enslaving us. And I want to look at the shadow. I don't want to whitewash it. And there's so many shadows, you'll see that I'm feeling in my soul right now. This is not the Israel that I want, and this is not the life that I want. And our work is to use the strength of Passover to give us the energy to fight for the Israel that we have to be. And it's going to be interesting because, you know, my story's not the same. I'm going to have to see whether I could get everybody to tell that story. This Pesach, Yossi, last words.
- [46:20]
Yossi Kleine Levi
I'm in a different place, Daniil. I'm in a place where I feel the hope already. You know, part of the problem of being a Jew and trying to explain that Jewish hope is that we're inundated with cliches. So much of Jewish hope, the language desperately needs renewal, so to say. Again, we've survived so many adversaries and 4,000 years, and you know, it's right.
- [46:53]
Daniil Hartman
The Haggadah is one big cliche.
- [46:54]
Yossi Kleine Levi
And so it's like we need a new language. It's a cliche to say this about a cliche, but cliches are cliches because they contain something very powerful. And the cliche of Jewish survival is that it's true. We need to renew the language. I feel this acutely as a writer. I feel the limitations of the language with which we speak about one of the most extraordinary stories in human history. And. And Pesach is the time. It's the beginning of that story. And it's a time when we feel the contiguity of 4,000 years. It's all laid out. And I feel the limitations of the language of the Haggadah. We do our best as a people. We've been mining this. The Haggadah is what is 1500 years old. We've done our best and we're going to give it another try. But the story is so powerful, it's so overwhelming, and it's such a profound source of hope and spiritual energy, and we don't have the language for it. That's what I'm feeling when I sit with the Haggadah. I say, we have to do justice to this. The story is so extraordinary and the language is increasingly thin. That's what I'm feeling. And so every Pesach is, you know, every seder is an opportunity to try to go just one little layer deeper, both in terms of the language and, well, the way we tell the story. I feel that challenge, especially. Especially this year.
- [48:32]
Daniil Hartman
Yes. I'd like to wish you personally, your family and all our people a happy Pesach. I don't know. I don't know if joyful. What does joyful mean this year, but.
- [48:43]
Yossi Kleine Levi
But we always say chak sameach. I know.
- [48:45]
Daniil Hartman
And that's like a ritual, but I don't know. Yeah, we'll say chag same. And to us and to our world, let's, you know, we need some hope. We need some liberation from our enemies outside, our enemies inside, from the stuff within ourselves.
- [49:00]
Yossi Kleine Levi
And that's what you mean by the enemy's inside, inside ourselves.
- [49:05]
Daniil Hartman
We gotta strive for better and hopefully. May I like to wish all of us, you know, in our tradition, this is the new year, the first new Year of the Jewish People was now was on the 15th of Nisan. It wasn't what's known as the New Year. So a good year, everyone. A good year, a healthy year and a better year. We should be well. And Yossi, thank you so much for everything.
- [49:27]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Thank you, Shalatova Shanah Tovah I think the Hartman Fellowship has impacted me as
- [49:34]
Daniil Hartman
a Jewish leader more than any other
- [49:35]
Yossi Kleine Levi
Jewish program that I've done because it sort of broadened my horizon on what exactly it means to be a Jewish teen.
- [49:41]
Hartman Teen Fellowship Representative
You know, you're at Hartman when people
- [49:42]
Daniil Hartman
are laughing and joking, but also the
- [49:44]
Hartman Teen Fellowship Representative
next second they're talking about some serious rabbinic text. The Hartman Teen Fellowship is an opportunity for teens who want more from Jewish learning, more depth, more connection, more ideas worth wrestling with.
- [49:54]
Daniil Hartman
You really get the opportunity to engage with your peers and run with content
- [49:59]
Hartman Teen Fellowship Representative
with Hartman's top faculty fellows. Dig into Jewish life, their relationship to Israel, and their own leadership development.
- [50:05]
Daniil Hartman
There's just so much that could be going on that you can be put into any conversation and you know there's
- [50:09]
Hartman Teen Fellowship Representative
a space for you. Apply now for Cohort 5 of the Hartman Teen Fellowship, open to current 9th through 11th graders at Shalomhartman.org teens. That's Shalomhartman.org teens if you want to
- [50:21]
Yossi Kleine Levi
be in a place where you can learn about different types of people, meet hundreds of new people from different areas, and experiences you never had before, there's no better place than being at the Hartman Teen Fellowship.
- [50:31]
Sholem Hartman Institute Announcer
Here are some other things that are happening at the Sholem Hartman Institute. The newest issue of Sources, the journal you turn to for informed conversations and thoughtful disagreement about the issues that matter to our Jewish communities, launches online this week. This issue, the Ever Learning People, asks how learning can shape belonging, responsibility, peoplehood, and Jewish life in a democratic world. Read, share and subscribe to our print edition at the link in the show notes subscribers can expect copies to hit their mailboxes in the coming weeks.
- [51:01]
Daniel Garrett Goodman
For Heaven's Sake is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute and ARC Media. It is produced by me, Daniel Garrett Goodman, with help from Miriam Jacobs, Adar Taylor Schechter and Aviva Katmanaur, 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 Samo. 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 video 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.