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Foreign.
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You are listening to an art media podcast. I think that's one of the beauties of Israel, is how beautiful life is and full of joy and meaning. And then there's this stop, and you remember that there's somebody who, for you can't really fully understand, just once you wiped off the face of the earth. That's a thought from the shelter. You know, like, all your denial systems are gone, all these myths of normalcy, and it's just we're in this crazy place.
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When you go back into the mindset of the shelter, time becomes malleable, right? You never know what time of day it is. You forget the day of the week, and it all seems surreal. Foreign.
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Hi, friends, this is Daniil Hartman and Yossi Kleiner Levi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, for heaven's sake, in collaboration with ARC Media. Today is Sunday, March 1st, but today is also the second day of our war with Iran. And in this special session, special edition, Yossi and I, we thought to talk to you not about the strategic directions of the war and not what has been achieved over the last 2440 hours or so, but we called it Thoughts from the Shelter. Because the strange thing about this reality now is that we're now in shelters again, over and over and over again, and it's really not a normal existence. And as you're sitting in the shelter, listening to news, calling family, making sure everybody's okay, you also have a lot of time to think, a lot of time just to think about your life, think about what you're going through. You know, you get these special sirens on your phone waking you up in the middle of the night, telling you that soon we're going to wake you up so that you have to go into. Into whatever it is you have. And is it a shelter? Is it a stairway? Is it a safe room? And you know, the first time you go, you then quickly you go to the bathroom because you don't know how long you're going to get stuck. And you set up yourself, what are the things that you need to be with you for as long as it'll be. And then you go and you go, I go with my wife Adina. You know, we have a luxury. Other people go with. They have children and babies. Some people have to walk a few minutes, actually run a few minutes. Our house is an old Arab house. We don't have the new safe rooms. So the best thing that we decided it's the closest is that we have an underground stairway, stairways, are fortified. And so they're generally considered very safe and ours underground. And we stay in the stairwell surrounded by tons of earth. But you sit on the steps. So you're sitting, you have a pillow, it's. And I'm sitting there over the last 24 hours, I was looking like, I'm looking at myself. And I brought cables so that I could recharge my phones and my tablets. And we have water, we have everything we needed. And it's like I, I had this sort of out of body experience. You'll see as I'm looking at myself, I'm saying, this is insane. This is not a normal way to live. This is just not a normal way to live. And you know, you sit there and you, you try to hear what's happening in the country and you hope that everybody's safe. And as we saw Today, when a 500 kilo missile hits directly even on a shelter today in Beit Shemesh, nine civilians were killed. Because none of our shelters or our safe rooms or all our myths of stability are going to survive a direct half ton bomb with high explosives. And so you do whatever you can and life shrinks because you're not supposed to really go outside. You shouldn't be further than just a couple of minutes from wherever it is that you could be relatively safe. And all these rituals are just bizarre, you know, okay, Adina, Daniil, wake up. What? Again? But like, someone's trying to kill us, like to be in the midst of being bombed, it's not a normal existence. And as we look back, this is happening over and over again. And part of our whole perspective on this war, an inner Israeli perspective, is the deep understanding that this can't go on. And our yearning for a solution, whether we can get one or not, is a separate issue. But the deep fantasy and hope aspiration for regime change, that this is not just a two year or a three year postponement is very, very deep. And you know, as you sit there and you look at your life and as strange as it is and bizarre, you do hope that maybe it will come to an end. That this will be the last time that we have to do this. Maybe, maybe Israeli society is strong, but they're also stressed because the shelter is a strange place to have as an integral part of your life. It's not the room you don't go into, it's not the multipurpose room, it's the room you go in to be safe. That experience alone is just not normal. And your rituals of how you think you're safe. What you do when you go in, when you go out. So we wanted to talk to you, like our thoughts. And so, Yossi, maybe after my initial thoughts, what are some of your thoughts from your shelter or. As I look at you, you look like you have something very nice going on there.
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Well, this is my workspace. We actually have the luxury of a fortified room inside the apartment. We moved, as you know, not long ago into a new apartment. And all new apartments must have a fortified room. And it's strange, but one of the measures of Israeli luxury is whether you have your own fortified room. And that's my wife Sara's workspace doubles as our safe room. The safe room is a very strange place. I'll give you an example where we have an air purifier, which is supposed to be against a chemical attack. And that's all well and good, except nobody ever explained to us how to use it. And we suddenly realized we're sitting in the safe room, we're looking at this big box, we don't know what to do with it. So, again, the safe room is a matter of relative safety, depending on. On what we're up against. But there's still, you know, I look at the reports. I. I was watching a report on TV of the underground train stations in Tel Aviv, and people who don't have shelters in their homes are camping out there. And fully one third of Israelis don't have proper shelters, and so they need to rush to public shelters. And sometimes, as you know, we could be awake in the middle of the night four or five times with alerts. And so many people are just camping out in the train stations. And it's a little bit like the London BLITZ in the 1940s, when you had thousands of people living in the underground, the tube, they call it. Right, right. And so it really does feel like a luxury to just move from one room to the next. But, you know, Daniil, what I've been thinking about is how this strange phase of Israeli life began, because this wasn't always an integral part of Israeli life in the same way. And it began during the first Gulf War, January, February 91. That was the war with Saddam Hussein, when he fired 39 Scuds into Israeli cities. And we weren't used to that. You know, there was always this illusion in Israel that there's the battlefront and the home front. And of course, you could get from the home front to the battlefront in a matter of minutes, but there was still this sense of psychological cushioning and that first Gulf War, it shattered the illusion of the relative safety of the home front, and the home front became the actual front. And then that intensified a decade later with the second intifada, when the war was being fought in our streets, on our buses, in our restaurants. And ever since then, we've been periodically rushing into the shelters. Think about what that first experience was like in the Gulf War. We all, Sara and I, we had little kids then, you probably did, too, and strapping them into gas masks, which was a nightmare. Our children felt like we were abusing them. And in a way we were, and it was completely unnecessary. But we were all in this state of panic. And you remember we put these plastic sheets on the windows against chemical attack.
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I was in the United States. That was during my post Cold War trip. But I remember helping my mother and father, seeing them set up a chemical safe room for my father. Like they couldn't change a light bulb. Yes, it was very chilling seeing them go in there.
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You know, Sara and I were still relatively new immigrants trying to get our bearing. And suddenly we have to figure out, you know, how do you seal the bottom of the doorway? And it was all, you know, the great Hebrew expression, keelu, as if kilu covers a great deal of ground with life in Israel. And that shelter was really key. And now we're in a state of the art shelter. So I guess that's some measure of progress. But there's really something very strange, as you were saying, Daniil, about the way we've absorbed this unbelievably abnormal aspect of life which is the shelter, and that every so often we find ourselves in a literal life and death situation where our survival depends on our access to a shelter. In some ways, this war is the culminating moment. That's what it feels to be like of this process that began 35 years ago. And interestingly, the first Gulf War ended 35 years ago yesterday. The beginning of, of this war. And so it's just very evocative. Suddenly I feel like we're in some ways in this time warp. And in general, Sara and I were just talking a little while ago about how when you go back into the mindset of the shelter, time becomes malleable. You never know what time of day it is. You forget the day of the week sometimes you're not sure. Oh, right, it's now March. It's March 1st. And it all seems surreal. And so there is something about reliving the different times. Our lives have been so connected to these shelters.
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You know, you're Comparing this to the Gulf War and to Saddam Hussein and Iraq connects deeply to one of the things that I was thinking about a lot about this strange time, because Saddam Hussein and Iran don't share a border with us. Like, why am I your enemy? Hamas and its murderous atrocities. I don't understand it because I can't. But I can understand a conflict with Palestinians. I can understand. I wish it didn't have to be. Part of me doesn't understand it because I really think that peace should be normal and people should compromise and let's just go on and what it might be. But as you're sitting there, I was like, what does it mean to live with somebody who wants to kill you for no reason? It's like out of nowhere.
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For no reason.
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Like, for what? Like, what is it that you know now, Saddam Hussein, what motivated him? He wasn't a deeply religious man. Was it some desire to be the leader of the Arab world?
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Maybe?
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And to be that leader, you needed a common enemy. And we were that common enemy with Iran. And, you know, as we just learned today, that we're able to kill Khomeini. This radical Shiite ideology, you know, Shi' ism used to be like the ultra orthodox. They were the great pacifists of the Muslim world. They weren't like the Sunnis. And it fit the fact that they were relatively powerless in the larger Islamic empire and universe that they were waiting. The Messiah is in God's hands, just like the ultra orthodox. Redemption is its gods, to bring back the Mahdi, and one day that time will come. And I remember learning Khomeini's speeches at the period of time when I was studying Islam and how deeply he was influenced by the Zionist movement, that if you have a messianic aspiration, why not help God a little bit? Why Your responsibility is to participate in this. And living in proximity to somebody for whom your destruction is part of their redemption, it's also. It was part of the strangest. It wasn't just the strange rituals. You know, sitting on a step and crooked and the whole scene. You know, I took a picture of Adina sitting. She actually goes a little further down, sits on, covering her head in a blanket. It's like. It was literally bizarre. But the most bizarre is to actually live with somebody for whom their redemption is your death. To actually have a normal life in the midst of that. So part of what happens when you're out of the shelter, we could forget our neighborhood. I think that's one of the beauties of Israel the success of Israel is how beautiful life is and full of joy and meaning and vitality. And then there's this stop. And you remember that there's somebody who, for you can't really fully understand. Just once you wiped off the face of the earth. That's not. Again, that's a thought from the shelter. You know, like, all your denial systems are gone. You know, all these myths of normalcy. And it's just we're in this crazy place. And as I was saying beforehand, this really has to end. Really has to end. It might not end, because who knows what regime change. I love the Trump speech and Netanyahu, the same person wrote their speeches that, you know, Iranian people. This is not regime change on our part, because we've already learned you can't do regime change. The only regime change could be internal, and I so hope it's right. But, like, we're sitting there. To live in the midst of this ideology and to be the brunt of it is maybe the strangest thing that forces itself upon you in the midst of the shelter.
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I really appreciate that. I think it's a terrific insight. And we tend to just accept that hatred is a given. And maybe that's because Jews have lived with one form or another of hatred for so long and that we've just internalized the seeming normalcy of being hated for no reason. But what you're saying actually connects to something I've been thinking a lot about over the last couple days, and of course, many Israelis have, too, which is the question of Amalek. Amalek is the biblical archetype of the genocidal enemy of the Jewish people, the biblical tribe that attacked the Israelites in the desert for no reason, tried to destroy them, denied them water. And so Amalek took on this mythic, monstrous role. And whoever it is, that was the new Amalek in a given era really became part of this. It's more than a historic chain. It really is a mythological chain of genocidal enemies. And Naftali Bennett had a tweet yesterday. He said, here we are about to celebrate the holiday of Purim, which is the holiday of Jewish victory over a descendant of the king of Amalek, who is Haman. Haman. And he says, and on the Shabbat, when we're reading a Persian, no less. And here we were on the Shabbat where we're reading the Torah portion about Amalek. Remember what Amalek did to you? With, of course, the message being, always remain alert to Genocidal threat to people who hate you for seemingly no reason. And he said, and here we are, our pilots have killed the modern day Amalek, which was Khamenei in this passion play. So, Daniil, I've been thinking a lot about Amalek and what does it mean to be at war with evil? And I think you've given a very good definition of evil, a very good definition of, of the mythic nature of Amalek, which is purposeless hatred, hatred that does nothing. You know, there's hatred which is, let's say, based on envy. There's hatred which is based on greed. I want what you have. But the hatred of Amalek was the hatred of a Khamenei who had nothing to gain by devoting his life and ultimately losing his life for trying to destroy the state of Israel. So that's one element of Amalek, the undeniable recurrence of pure evil, which is directed, for whatever reason, against the Jewish people. That's one element. But there's a second element about Amalek which Purim ironically raises, which is the question of how we ourselves are not immune from the poison of Amalek. And of course, one thinks about Baruch Goldstein, the doctor who in 1994 on Purim gunned down 29 Muslims in prayer in Hebron in the tomb of the patriarchs and matriarchs. And since then, that massacre has been an inseparable part of my Purim experience as a warning of the evil that can penetrate us. So that on the one hand, the Jewish people is always on the front line against evil. On the other hand, we have to be especially careful in the era of Jewish power to protect ourselves against the penetration of Amalek into our own camp, because we're not immune.
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You know, really interesting, this whole association of current events with historical inevitable process is so alive within Israeli society now via connection of this Tippurim. You know, and you see everybody, religious, secular, there's this larger arc of history in which we're just playing out this story that has almost been dictated to us beforehand. And the case of Baruch Goldstein is where we get infected by that story. But it also reminds us, beware of the stories you tell because, you know, you told the story that on the Sabbath before Purim, we are obligated to read this Torah portion which speaks about, remember, the evil of Amalek. But it says one other thing. It says, and you shall wipe them out. Wipe out their memory.
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I've tried to wipe that part out.
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Yeah, it's interesting, but, like, there's an interesting different Torah about that story. Are you supposed to wipe out Amalek, or are you supposed to wipe out the memory of Amalek? And do you have this commandment? And we all know that this language of Amalek was also the language that so many Israelis. It was our world of association on October 7, and very understandable it wasn't that we were interested in committing genocide. But, you know, okay, you want to South Africa use it, quote it in the International court. This is our language in which we spoke about not what we were going to do, but of our. This, as you said, this repetitive.
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And where they twisted. It was as if Israeli leaders were speaking about the Palestinian people as Amalek when they meant. Clearly they meant Hamas.
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Hamas or, you know, or at that day, you gotta give, you know, whatever anybody said between October 7th to October 10th, they get immunity. It's like, really, like, you know, you're allowed, right. But I never resonate personally, I hate this combination of historical narrative, theological repetitiveness, and giving meaning to each moment through this ongoing story because they always have so many parts to them. You know, Purim, it gives you this guarantee of success or as our tradition ultimately does, and changes the story. It's part of God's story of history. I hate being part of a theological historical narrative. I hate it.
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You're in the wrong people, Danil.
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I appreciate that. I hate it because we use God. The way we could manipulate history and God on our side always makes me very nervous. And actually, one of the things why I love Purim is I love Purim because it's the only holiday that we celebrate that God didn't redeem us.
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God doesn't even appear in the scroll of Esther that we read on Purim, God doesn't appear.
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And there's this phenomenal scholar at the institute, her name is Orita Avneri, who did a deep analysis of the Megillah up. And not only does God not appear, Judaism doesn't appear. Passover is there. There's no mention of the Jews living a Jewish anything. And Esther marries whom? The king of Persia. Like, the whole story is like almost a bracket on everything that we know about Judaism and God. And we are saved because two Jews, principally started with Mordechai and then Queen Esther, in his famous line to her, in which he said, she says, I can't go intervened to the king right now because it's dangerous. You want me to go tell the king to save the Jews, but the king will kill Me, because you're not allowed to come to the king on your own initiative. And Mordechai has this famous line in Hebrew, miyodea im le' et kazot higat amalchut. One of the great iconic lines of our traditional. Who knows if it wasn't for this moment that you became the queen. Like, it's your moment. And your responsibility as a Jew is to stand up. Everything that you have isn't for your own self. This is your moment, your hineni, I am here moment for the Jewish people. And it was remarkable. The chief of staff, this guy gets up, you know, the guy who Donald Trump said, you're out of central casting. And he truly is out of central casting. You just look at this guy. This is like the next ex chief of staff. It has to look like this. It's like there's something about him. And he's talking about the operation and he says the lesson of Purim, he says, is that we Jews take responsibility and save ourselves. He gave a reading which is actually an anti traditional but a very accurate reading of the story, because we weren't saved by God. We were saved by two Jews in power, using their power for the sake of the Jewish people. So he gave this Dvar Torah, this teaching of Purim, which was beautiful. But the big difference between Purim and now is in the story of Purim, it's true we were saved by Mordechai and Esther, but we were powerless. The only reason why we were saved is we happened to have had the most beautiful woman in the world, whose uncle was willing to send her to the king's harem. Crazy, because that's the story was we had to use whatever we can. Now we're a powerful people. This moment for me is the antithesis of Purim. The evil we're encountering is an old story, but it's also a different story. There is this. What did you call it? Purposeless hatred. It's just there. And it's. So whether it's like Purim, not like
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Purim, you know, Daniil, there is an alternative reading to the Miqilah, the story of Purim, a reading that makes place for God. In this story, according to the tradition, God is not absent from the Megillah, but hidden, right? And of course, the rabbinic word play on the name Esther Hester, which is hidden. And so God is hidden. The name of God doesn't appear in the Miquella, but what does appear in the Miquella is a series of coincidences. And that's where you can trace, if not the hand of God, then the finger of God moving very subtly through that story, through Jewish history, and through the Israeli story. And really, as a believing Jew, when I look at this moment and I don't know what to make of this, you know, I think that what we've seen in Israel with Israeli Judaism over the last decades is this crassness of people, rabbis who insist they know exactly what everything means at every step of the way, and they can interpret it, connect. So we have to avoid that pitfall. But I think that the religious sensibility is still permitted to raise the possibility of traces of God's presence without necessarily understanding what it means. I'll give you an example. Okay. The fact that this story is playing out in the week of Purim is strange. It's just strange. And I don't know what to make of it. And really, I hesitate to even raise it because there are so many rabbis who know exactly what to make of this. But I think that one does have the right, maybe even the responsibility as a religious Jew to say what's going on here? And does this have some kind of meaning? And we have moments like this throughout Israeli history. For example, Yom Kippur, 1973. That war initiated the longest process of self reflection, of national, collective self reflection that lasted for years. In fact, that lasted up until October 7th, and then October 7th replaced it with a new trauma. But every year, on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the country went through exactly what it's supposed to be going through on Yom Kippur, which is, how did this happen? What did we do wrong? And so there's this eerie resonance in Israeli history that's in some ways in sync with the traditional calendar. And again, I don't know what to make of that, but I have to note it.
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You're my favorite believer because you do it with no arrogance. You don't do it with any certainty. I have such an aversion to people who own God's calculations because it gives them license. If you own God's calculations, you are basically justifying everything that you do under with religious, theological categories. And you do it thoughtfully, without certainty, with reflection. And how could I not accept your admonition in saying, there's at least some room to ask? And so the sweetness and sensitivity, you know, moves me. I'm not with you, but I hear you.
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So, Danielle, that's the sweetest form of religious skepticism that I know, so that
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you know, I'll end with one thought. And then maybe you'll have last thoughts for today. There's an interesting word that also came up in the Chief of Staff's speech. He ended with a blessing to Israel and the army that we will be successful with the help of, in Hebrew, Tzur Yisrael, with the Rock of Israel. Right now, this word Rock of Israel. You're our historian, right? The word Rock of Israel is an unbelievably critical category in contemporary Israeli life. Because when the Declaration of Independence was being written, Ben Gurion knew that this had to be signed by as wide a spectrum of Israeli Jews as possible. And it couldn't be a secular Zionist document. He needed the religious parties, and the religious parties and the religious population of Israel said, we're only going to sign this document if God is here. That you recognize God's embracing of the new resurrection and rebirth of the Jewish people in their homeland. This is a religious moment. And Ben Gurion said, I can't call this a religious moment for us secularists. We are rebuilding Israel, not God. And so here it is. If you want God, the secularists won't come. And if you take God out of the document and remove any theological consequences and implications to the story, the religious aren't going to be in the story. So they found the. It was a great compromise. The compromise was, let's thank the Rock of Israel now. The Rock of Israel. What? Who is the Rock of Israel? What's the answer? Depends who you ask. For religious people. In Psalms, one of the terms for God is the Rock of Israel. So when you see the rock, you think it's God. For the secular Zionist, who's the Rock of Israel? The army. So here it is, the term. We can all say the term to bring it into our own shul or our own interpretive house of study and derive meaning from it. So he called up the Rock of Israel, and many ways you'll see he was making room for me and you. For those of you who see the theological dimension, I'm there, the great reservation. And this goes back to my thoughts from the shelter. I so much want this to be the end of this purposeless hatred in our neighborhood. And it's one of the last ones that are here. If this gets removed, you know, okay, then we have stole it. Don't worry, we still have Turkey. We still have people we got to worry about. It's far from over and Hezbollah is still around. But this is the great destabilizer, at least up till now. And as I'm sitting in the shelter. I so much want it to be over. But thoughts from the shelter also tell me that don't need that too much. While this shelter is strange, it might have to be part of your life. Not every year, maybe every three years. That Ar Tsur, the Rock of Israel's our army, and they're going to do the best they can. And the American army is, God bless them, is helping them, us. And really, I pray for the safety of everybody who's fighting this war, and we need everybody together. But whether this is God or it's just a rock, and we have to learn how to use the rock as well as we can, and there are no guarantees. And so some of that in this whole mess of the shelter came to me, and it didn't give me comfort. But sometimes my comfort comes from accepting the imperfection of the reality within which I live. Yossi, last thoughts.
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Jan, I'm trying to process this conversation and understand the different layers of life in the shelter. And so the first layer is the strangeness of it, the discomfort, the fear, the personal experience. Then there's the speculation that we all go through, well, what does this mean? And how long will this last? And where is this going? And how will this war play out? And then whether we want it or not, there's the intrusion of the metaphysical layer. And whether it means accepting it, rejecting it, or entertaining the possibility that it's in play, it's with us in the shelter. And I thought of another ambiguous term, Daniil, when you were talking about Rock of Israel, there's a similar term which I feel is playing out very strongly at this moment in Israeli consciousness, which is Netzach Yisrael, the eternity of Israel. Believers interpret the eternity of Israel the way that it's traditionally meant to be, which is God. God is the eternal one of the people of Israel. But the Zionists reinterpreted Netzach Yisra' el to mean the eternity of the Jewish people within history, the capacity of the Jewish people to survive any challenge. And so once again, here we are in the shelters. There are those who will look toward the eternal one of Israel, toward God. There will those who will take comfort and strength from the resilience of the Jewish people through history. But it really is one of those moments again where Mezach Yisrael is very much in play.
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Yossi, thank you. Without getting too theological, please join me in a prayer for safety. Now. Today, nine people were killed in Beit Shemesh last night. A foreign caregiver of an elderly woman who didn't want to leave her alone because they couldn't get to the shelter. She died. There's a lot of danger. There's a lot of risk and heroism. Tremendous amount of heroism and hard work. This war is never normal. This feels a little more abnormal. And let's pray for the safety of as many of us. We know it's not going to be easy, and we know there's many more prices that will be paid and more life that's going to be lost because this is not an easy one. But let's pray for as little harm and as little damage and as little suffering as could be. And maybe the messianic prayer that this doesn't have to become a normal part of our existence. Yossi, it's truly an honor and a privilege to always be with you. Thank you.
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Always a pleasure.
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Daniel
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A
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 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 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.