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- [00:00]
Noah Efron
This is TLV1. This episode may contain explicit language. Welcome to the Promise Podcast brought to you on TLV1, the voice of the city that this week hosted over at the Tel Aviv Exposition Grounds, tucked between Hayer Kon park and the University in spacious Pavilion 1, the Samson International Smart Mobility Summit, which name obviously brings to mind the biblical Nazarite Samson described in the Book of Judges, who was possessed of spectacular strength, enabling him to slay a lion with his bare hands and vanquish a philistine army with the jawbone of a donkey. Suggesting, of course, the great power in our day of smart mobility. Though in a coincidence so astonishing as to suggest that maybe it's not a coincidence at all, but a sign of some sort of divine providence. The Samson International Smart Mobility Summit has long been supported in part by philanthropists Eric and Sheila Samson. Eric now of blessed memory. And there is also a Samsung Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuel and Smart Mobility. And pointing out the obvious, there is no Delilah Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels and Smart Mobility. But I digress. This week's Smart Mobility Summit brought together more than 3,000 people from more than 25 countries around the world who convened more than more than 1,000 meetings betwixt and between a packed slate of lectures in sessions called things like Autonomy Unplugged, From Hype to Highway and From Data to Decisions, AI at the Heart of Transportation and When Mobility Meets Reality, Cybersecurity on the Front Lines and Women in Mobility Creating Innovative Bridges. One of the most famous parts of the summit, of course, was the exhibition hall where hundreds of companies showed off stuff that they'd made that did stuff you would never believe. Like just take drones as for example, there were photography and cinematography drones, surveillance and monitoring drones, military reconnaissance drones, combat attack drones, delivery drones, medical drones, agricultural drones, mapping drones, inspection drones, search and rescue drones, firefighting drones, environment drones, weather drones, racing drones, swarm drones, passenger drones, underwater drones, decoy drones, cargo drones, communication relay drones, nano and microdrones, high altitude long endurance drones, tethered drones, indoor drones, drone light show systems, anti drone drones, and stealth drones. There were in fact even more. All of which was amazing. But the high point of the thing may still have been keynote speaker Elon Musk, who videoed in from Austin, Texas, where it was 2:30 in the morning. He was surprisingly chipper and he laid out his vision of things to come.
- [02:58]
Elon Musk
The world's going to have a lot of robots in the future, humanoid robots. You're seeing a lot of startups with humanoid Robots. And my prediction is that there will be far more robots, like intelligent robots in the world than there will be people. I think it will usher in an age of not universal basic income, but universal high income. Not that many people are aware of neuralink, which is creating a cybernetic interface to AI from your brain. And it has enabled people who have completely lost their brain body connection to speak again and to use their computer and their phone. And we believe it will enable people to walk again. And then later this year we expect to do our first implant for what we call blindsight, where even if somebody has lost both eyes or lost the optic nerve or perhaps has not even been able to seen, has never seen, even if they were blind at birth, it will give them initially limited vision, but I think over time very precise vision, perhaps superhuman vision. Those what you might call like sort of Jesus level sort of technologies. Ten years from now, probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self driving car. It'll be quite a niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car because the car will drive you. I think there will also be humanoid robots that are pretty much everywhere and I think it'll be pretty cool because who wouldn't want their own personal C3PO R2D2. But even better than that, and I
- [04:38]
Noah Efron
of course want a stout astromech droid and I obviously need a protocol droid to fulfill my protocol related needs which are substantial. And Elon Musk continued oddly, sometimes, like when he found himself wondering if we ought to want a future of love and peace.
- [04:54]
Elon Musk
I think we want a future with love. That seems like a no brainer. Peace is an interesting one because sometimes the price for complete peace may be too high because the complete peace may require too much suppression of the people. So perhaps there is peace to some degree, but not completely. Ideally, there's not like large scale war. Of course.
- [05:15]
Noah Efron
After that, Elon Musk went on for a good bit laying out his vision of our lives in the very near future, five years from now or 10. And the crowd loved it. But arguably nothing, Elon Musk said was received with more cheer and warmth than what he said about us here in Israel. My parents had a ceramic ashtray when we were growing up with a cartoon of a blowhard man who had cornered a woman at a cocktail party. And it said at the bottom, but enough about me, what do you think of my work? And we have a little of that ashtray in us, I think. And Elon Musk said, I'M a huge
- [05:46]
Elon Musk
admirer of the innovation coming out of Israel, honestly. I think objectively true that Israel punches far above its weight for population. I think probably number one, honestly, in the world in terms of my hat is off to Israel for just how much incredible innovation. I say innovation per capita. Israel must be number one by far in the world.
- [06:14]
Noah Efron
And arguably nothing captures the start uppity enthusiasm of this most startuppity of cities that we love so well. Tel Aviv, yaffo. Better than 3,000 people gathering to applaud the vision of the world's richest man, a man with three quarters of a trillion dollars, whose vision describes how the technologies being built by us will give us lives of bounty without handicaps and misfortune, without hardship and labor, lives flush with love and with just the right amount of conflict and war to somehow keep us all free. Now with us Today, speaking from TLV1's flagship satellite studio in Jerusalem, is a woman who does not need a whole lot of technology. No drones, no autonomous cars, not even a humanoid robot, not even a single stinking humanoid robot to lead a life filled with love and joy and meaning. This owing to her famous au so human joie de vivre and, well, humanity, obviously, that most flesh and blood, in all the best ways possible, woman could only be Linda Gradstein. Linda Gradstein has long covered Israel, first for NPR and most recently for the Voice of America of blessed memory. Linda is also a lecturer in journalism at NYU Tel Aviv and the Hebrew University, and not too long ago at NYU Abu Dhabi, Linda has won an Overseas Press Club Award and an Alfred I. Dupont Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. Linda, how you doing?
- [07:34]
Linda Gradstein
I'm doing fine. I was on a short trip to the States where I got pastrami and Trader Joe's and the Strand Bookstore, not in that order, but you know what? There's nothing like coming home. And I love the fact that people clap when you land in Israel, and I love the fact that rescue flights are bringing you back to. To the war. So I'm doing just fine.
- [07:56]
Noah Efron
Oh, that's wonderful. And we're so happy that you're back. And by the way, if you had $750 billion, don't you think the experience of going in the Strand Bookstore would be different? Or maybe it wouldn't be different. I don't know.
- [08:07]
Linda Gradstein
I don't know. So I might. First of all, I am physically incapable of walking into a bookstore and not buying something, so I have to be a little bit careful. Like a real dead tree book, you know, not the Kindle, but a book. And it's fun. It's just fun. And there's an energy about New York that's also a little bit like Tel Aviv.
- [08:27]
Noah Efron
So true. Now, as for me, my name is Noah Efron and I do not mean to boast, but a beloved former student who wrote his PhD about Israeli high tech workers in Silicon Valley. Brilliant Aviv Frankel is the guy's name. I remember that name. He's on maybe his third big startup. Aviv suggested a podcast he thought that I would like called Acquired about high tech companies. And I started with the episode about Google, which is divided into three parts that together add up to 11 hours and 52 minutes. And I love and when it was done, and I swear to you that this is God's truth, I had two thoughts. One, I wish there was more and B now that is how long a podcast episode should be. It really gives you the time to get into all the telling and all the beautiful details. And please believe me when I say I'm not boasting. God knows my parents brought me up better than that. But I do not know how anyone manages to force themselves to see the forest when each and every tree in the forest is just so damn interesting and worth talking about. Today we got two topics so deep and important that you may want to phone up your parents and angrily demand from them to know how they hid this knowledge from you while you were growing up. One of which topics we will discuss with Rabbi Joe Wolfson, whom I consider to be one of my rabbis and surely one of the people I admire most in the world, but whom I will introduce when he gets here for our second discussion. But first, we have this matter that we are following with alert interest and great concern as part of an occasional series we like to call the Promise Podcast ponders Pentecostal permutations and profusions in piety and practice, profound and profane. Exactly 100 years ago this week, reckoned by both the Hebrew and the Gregorian calendars, Yitzhak Michaeli, newly a member of Kibbutz Ein Harod with his wife Sarah and two sons, Oved and Shem. Later would come Yosef, Yaakov and Hanan, the then four of them just three years here from Russia, still newly the Soviet Union. Yitzhak Michaeli wrote this about the holiday of Shavuot in his new home, which description he later published in a book. He called me Tarmi Li from my rucksack quote the festival of the first fruits. And so here before us is the ceremony of bringing the first fruits as it is to be celebrated today at Ein Harod. From the early afternoon hours, great activity is already felt in the courtyard. Members decorate wagons with greenery and branches, fruits and flowers and farming tools. Each branch of the settlement tries to undo the others in the splendor of its wagon. The children too have wagons according to their groups, toddlers, kindergarteners and the grade school. This year, for the first time, the festival will be celebrated jointly with all the settlements of Gush Noris, the Harod Valley, who will come to us at Ein Harod in a procession of wagons. Everyone will assemble here and at one o' clock in the afternoon Ein Harod will line up at the head of the procession with its wagons, the bearers of the bikurim, the first fruits leading, followed by the farm workers and field crop divisions in the following order. First, a tractor and a plow, followed by a pair of animals pulling a disc harrow and a second pair pulling a drill seeder. After them come two pairs of animals with sheaves, another pair pulling a rake, another with a wagon loaded with sacks of grain. Behind it a wagon piled with loaves of bread, and finally the great threshing machine pulled by a tractor. Altogether, the field crop group includes seven pairs of beasts of burden and two tractors. After the field crop group comes the wagon with the tree planters with saplings. Behind it come the vegetable garden group, the tobacco group, the poultry yard, the apiary and the craft workshops. Each work group is represented by one wagon. Finally, at the end of Ein Harod's caravan of wagons, comes the children's wagon carrying the first fruit of their livestock, pulled by the donkey Moishke. Altogether, Ein Harod's procession includes 13 wagons belonging to workgroups, followed by seven wagons carrying members and children, for a total of 20 wagons. The procession of Ein Harod will travel to the railway station and meet there the processions from Geva and Ain Tivon. From there, everyone returns together to the Ain Harod quarry in a joint parade, with Geva leading, followed by Ein Tivon and Ain Harod bringing up the rear. At the quarry, they meet Tel Yosef and Beit Alpha, and together they circle around and descend in one great procession to the threshing floor of Ein Harod. On the way to the threshing floor near near the hill, they all pass beneath a decorated ceremonial gate, after which they arrange themselves before the stage. At the threshing floor, the excitement mounts as the afternoon hours pass. After a hurried meal, they begin organizing our procession on the road leading from the courtyard to the railway station. After about an hour of commotion and tremendous effort, the marshals finally succeed in placing each workgroup in its proper position, and the procession moves forward toward the station. Settlement after settlement takes its place, and the whole procession moves time back toward the quarry. What a profusion of colors. What joy and tumult. Neighing horses, the cries of wagon drivers, and the laughter of young women. Especially great is the joy when members from different settlements meet one another after long periods apart. And I am reminded of the market days in our little town back in Europe. The neighing horses, the peasants holiday clothes, and the riot of colors in the dresses and kerchiefs on the young gentile women. And above it all, the deafening accordions. Who could have imagined, who could have dreamed that only three years would separate the scenes of the market in Wycock from all that now appears before our eyes? Here, dozens of wagons laden with fruit and grain, gigantic Hungarian mares pulling them, tractors and threshing machines, and the young Jewish men and women driving them, singing and speaking in the Hebrew language. This is truly a revolution. Most of the young men wear white shirts, and the more fastidious gird, their waists, with tasseled belts on their legs, are riding breeches and leather boots befitting mounted guardsmen Khayil in Arabic. The young women wear black seraphim dresses or blue pioneer tunics. The children, wearing yellow shirts with embroidered collars, sit crowded together in the wagon like lambs. Their caretakers try to calm them and encourage them to sing holiday songs, and they also distribute drinks and sweets. And now the herald calls out, and the entire procession moves forward to its final destination, the threshing floor of Ein Charod. At the head of the procession, riding a red horse like a knight, is Yitzhak Hankin of the famous Guardians, one of the founders of the Hashomer organization. Behind the rider, young men and women in colorful dress march in formation, the women carrying jugs on their shoulders and wearing flower wreaths on their heads. The young men carry, on a pole, an enormous cluster of grapes. Slowly everyone gathers into place. The wagons are arranged in rows according to settlements, and the crowd, after alighting from the wagons, takes its place opposite the stage, each settlement in its designated spot. And then comes the sound of the trumpet announcing the ceremony of bringing the first fruit. The children's choir sings, accompanied by violins. Immediately after, delegations from the settlements ascend the stage, and suddenly someone announces the gifts of the first fruit and enumerates them. Two sacks of grain, six sheep, Jars of milk, honey cakes, and so forth. Then the herald proclaims that the bikurim, the redemption of the first fruit, is sacred to the Jewish national for the sake of the people and the homeland, renewing themselves in their ancient land. Now the herald announces once more, telling all in the name of the farm treasurer, that the redemption of the first fruits amounts to 300 liras of good weight. Behold, he says, we have merited the first fruits of our soul, consecrated for the land and for the people of Israel. With the conclusion of the program, all the settlements depart back to their homes, and the tumult gradually dies away. End quote. And it is important to know that Yitzhak Michaeli was born to traditional piety, coming of age in a town called Yaknivka, in what is today the Ukraine, the son of a shohet, a traditional slaughterer who grew up in a cheder, and when the time came, he became a teacher in a Talmud Torah, known for being learned. This was his background, though when he was drafted into the Tsar's army, he did not try to avoid induction, and he was a medic in World War I, taken prisoner by the Austrian army and spending three years in captivity, during which time he worked long days in the field, which he saw as preparation for life of growing crops in Palestine, and at night taking part in a study group on Tolstoy that he started among the prisoners. And when he was freed, he went back to Yakhnivka, where he met Sarah, and the two married with plans to move to Palestine, which they did finally in 1923, by which time Yitzhak Mikhaili was a different man than he was raised in the cheder to be, which goes some of the way to explaining what he wrote next about Shavuot in 1926, in Ein Harod quote, we have broken through. We have created the festival of Shavuot in a manner different from that in which our ancestors celebrated it in the exile. There we were forced into constriction and deprivation beneath the blows of fate and wandering, pushed into the four cubits enclosed by the walls of the synagogue and our family homes. Now we have returned to the fields and to the colorful throngs of people in exile. This was a household holiday, full of spiritual content, with songs and prayers and only symbolic remnants of the original harvest festival, the remains of the physical splendor that once existed. Is this not the meaning of the greenery on Shavuot, or the citrus fruit and palm branches, the lulaf and etrog and Sukkot and Just as today in agricultural labor, we drill wells and pierce rocks until we reach the pure groundwater below, laying broad pipes in order to channel this abundant fresh water. So too are we commanded to dig and delve into the source of our festivals and raise up from the depths of the Jewish people's past the purest groundwater of our ancient culture, in order once again to channel it through the conduits of meaning that became clogged during the long years of exile. Then we will quench our thirst for full and complete lives. And all these things are meant not merely in theory, but in actual practice. End quote. In those years, the years of the second aliyah, and then the third and the fourth, and I guess all the aliyot that came after, people like Yitrak Michaeli looked to celebrate Shavuot like all the other holidays. But Shavuot maybe most of all in York, new ways, the new sort of agricultural collectives, Kfutso, kibbutzim, moshavim, sought ways to bring back the idea that Shavuot was a holiday of the harvest, when first fruit were brought by pilgrims to the temple. Something like this happened, too, in the cities in Tel Aviv, beginning in the 1930s, each year on Shavuot, there was a parade leading to a big staging ground, all the children of the city in white clothes marching behind a banner bearing the name of their school, the strongest of them hoisting baskets of fruit on their shoulders. All this as men in straw hats and women in fine dresses looked on. The same sort of thing took shape in Haifa, which staged celebrations that the socialist daily Davar said elevate and purify, educating the youth and adding national civic content to the lives of Haifa's Jews. The noble spirit of agriculture and of work spreads the glory of labor and the vision of redeeming the land. End quote. And in the central Zionist archives, you can find spectacular photographs of cart after cart and float after float, rows of young people in flowing white dresses and white caftan shirts with baskets of fruits walking through the streets of Haifa almost from the start, though, as soon as the effort, as Yitrak Micheli put it, to pierce the rock of the old Yeshivish traditions and make something notionally ancient and certainly modern out of Shavuot seemed to have succeeded. There were from the very beginning, those who looked at what had been wrought of this holiday and felt that something was missing. The master of ceremonies at the Haifa Bikurim Festival in 1932, Menachem Usishkin, then the president of the Jewish National Fund, said From the dais quote. Do not forget one essential thing. This festival is not only a festival of nature, a festival of first fruits of the soil and of labor. It is also the day of the giving of the Torah. And on this day we became a people. One must not separate these two festivals on a single day. We were created as a nation and became a people working its own land by the sweat of its brow. Eleven years after that, the entire front page of the June 6, 1943 edition of the typed and mimeographed journal of Kibbutz Hulda Bakfutsa, the journal is called in the collective, was given over to an essay by a kibbutz member named Frida. I haven't yet puzzled out her full name, though I will. My plan now is to ask next time I see him, the mayor of Tel Aviv, Yaffo Ron Huldai, who was born on Kibbutz Hulda 14 months after Frida published her essay, who this Frida was. The essay was called the Festival of Weeks, the Festival of the giving of the Torah, and it went. Quote it is not to Shavuot as the festival of the first fruit that I wish this time to devote the following words, but rather to Shavuot as the festival of the giving of the Torah and of the profound feeling bound up with that name for the holiday. We are living in a period, one might say, in which the sacred and the mundane are intermingled. When we came here to live the life of a free people in its homeland, it was natural to celebrate Shavuot as the festival of the first fruit, and thus agricultural symbolism became attached to it. During this great period of building the land. Yet there exists an idea whose significance neither the spirit of man nor the spirit of the nation can forego amid the gray and petty routines of everyday life, the need to draw sustenance from the eternal values of human existence. In this transitional period for the the whole world, and especially for the people of Israel. In this era in which new foundations are being created, while nations rise and fall and ideas collapse in front of our eyes, where shall we turn, if not to the eternal wellsprings of our people, which preserved and sustained us through every condition of existence and every age of faith, the entire world today is engulfed in terrible darkness. From the abyss bursts forth, calling for foundations, for meaning, people mobilized out of a desire to defend existence itself. Amid the ruins, we seek to save what remains. Yet we shall not be rebuilt, nor shall we be able to offer the world anything if we are not rich in inner content and in the spirit of justice and integrity. Without such foundations, there can be no building of a new world. Only through the cultural and moral foundations of humanity can there emerge a peaceful and whole world. Not through rage, but through submission to a higher purpose. Not through force, but but through an inner heroism that sustains the people of Israel throughout the ages. Only from an inner world filled with substance and will, a world that grants dignity and worth to the human soul, can individual and collective alike survive. The forces that shattered human society arose also from the inner emptiness and spiritual hollowness that penetrates every sphere of life. These days, throughout the world, people seek external forms and formulas, ways to spare themselves from confronting this deeper task. But all these vanities of the age have been proven empty. The fundamental vision of Isaiah regarding the nations will yet add strength and direction to humanity. It will make clear to us and to all of mankind that only in the great struggle of freedom, justice and peace can humanity fulfill its destiny. Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah, is also the festival of the first fruit. It stands before us like a shining point within the darkness, illuminating humanity's path in a world where the fate of the world depends upon the spirit and deeds of human beings. And in these difficult and dangerous days, the question arises ever more sharply. How shall we find the inner strength for justice and righteousness, for human dignity and national dignity, for overcoming and for surviving? Only through the creation of an inner spiritual force that can serve as the ideal foundation for our existence as individuals and as people, shall we endure and secure our future. Signed Frida. Two and a half weeks before Frida wrote this essay about Shavuot, news had made its way to the Yishuv, to Jewish Palestine, that there had been an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and that it had been brutally, murderously suppressed. This news no doubt carried special weight in Hulda, as Hulda had been re established by Polish Jews who got their Zionism in the Gordonia Youth Movement. And the Gordonia Youth Movement was one of the five youth movements leading the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising alongside Hashomeratz' IR Dror, Hechalut and Akiva. This news was personal, and it was only in these days ahead of Shavuot 1943, that the scale of the tragedy in Europe began to be known and the scale of the need for justice and righteousness began to be felt. It was on the eve of this very Same Shavuot in 1943, though now in Jerusalem, that the great writer and future Nobel laureate Chai Agnon learned that the ghetto of the city he grew up in Buchac in Galicia, had been liquidated, destroyed outright a year later, in a one page story called the Sign, in a journal called Mosnaim Chai Agnon told of his experience on that Shavuot in 1943. 5703 by our reckoning, I did not deliver a eulogy for my city, nor did I call for weeping and mourning over the congregation of the Lord whom the enemy had destroyed. For the day on which the news arrived concerning the city and its slain was the eve of Shavuot, and it was after midday, and I set aside my mourning for the dead of my city because of the joy of the season and of the giving of the Torah. On the night of Shavuot I sat alone in the base midrash, reciting the Az Harot liturgical poems, or Piyutim Azarot are poems that were written by the greatest of the poets of medieval Spain, Rav Shlomo Ibn Gavirol, that are said traditionally on Shavuot eve. In some places anyway they go. For example, happy is the one who studies Torah, who meditates upon a day and night, who walks, walks in its statues, who keeps its commandments with love, for they are sweeter than honey, more precious than gold and fine jewels. They bring light to the eyes and joy to the upright heart, and so on. And Chai Agnon continues his story. I heard a voice and lifted my eyes. I saw a holy man of God standing above me. I trembled, was overwhelmed, and fell silent. Never in my life had I seen such a holy figure in human form. Nor had I ever seen a man possessed of such sanctity. He looked at me, his eyes filled with anger, like a king who has entered a province and found among all of his ministers and servants only a single insignificant slave. What are you doing? He asked me. It is the eve of Shavuot, I answered him, and I am reciting the as Harot. And during the seven weeks between Passover and the holiday, he said to me, surely you intended to do something that should have been done, and yet you did not do it. It I gathered all the strength of my soul. And I answered, I did what people do. I prayed, I read Torah, I studied the Tractate of Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers. Again he asked, and when did you recite Piytim in this place? I replied, it is not customary to study Putim. He laid his head upon his heart and fell silent. After a while he raised his holy eyes and asked, and where then do they study Piu? Team. I remembered my city, Buchac, and its forests and streams, and the Great synagogue there, and the old prayer book lying upon the reading desk in which all the PI team, composed by our rabbis, the poets of blessed memory, were written. I remembered the old cantor, may the Lord illuminate his light in the Garden of Eden, who knew the Piytim by heart and would recite them aloud while the pages of the prayer book were soaked in tears and the writing itself scarcely visible. I answered him and said, there are places where it is customary to study Piyutim. And so too in my city. And what is the name of your city? He asked me in a whisper. I answered him, Buchac. My eyes filled with cheers because of the calamities that had befallen my city, and I no longer knew whether it existed still at all. He nodded his head and said, and his voice sounded like rhyme, kissing rhyme. And then I knew that he was Rav Shlomo IBN Gavirol. May his memory be for a blessing whose Az Harot I had been reciting that very night on Shavuot. Rav Shlomo said, I shall make myself a sign, a mnemonic, so I will not forget the name of your city. I stood astonished. Could my city truly be so important in his eyes that he wished to. To make for it a sign? Again there was heard a sound like the sound of rhyme fastening itself to rhyme. And he said, blessed among the cities is the city of Butchac. And thus he continued composing and rhyming through all seven letters of my city's name in measured verse and faithful rhyme. My soul slipped away from me and I forgot the six lines of the poem of the city. And now to whom shall I turn? And who will tell them to me? Perhaps the old cantor, may God illuminate his glory in the Garden of Eden, who was expert in the pew team of our rabbis, the holy poets. But I am but dust beneath their feet, End quote. And I tell all this because, like Frida wrote in the Hulda journal of Then, we too now are living in a period, one might say, in which the sacred and the mundane are intermingled. And we have at hand so many resources. We have Agdon and we have Huldah, and we have Haifa, and we have Tel Aviv and we have Ein Harod and we have Warsaw, and we have Bukach, and we have the Kabbalists of Tzfat, and we have Shlomo IBN Virol, and we have all of this and so much more with us to bring to what Frida called the greatest struggle for freedom, justice and peace that is once again today ours. Today two discussions, the first being going going Gantz as lately two more of the closest allies and fellow travelers of former alternative Prime Minister and Defense Minister and before that, IDF chief of Staff Benny Gantz decided to quit his Blue and White Party, once the biggest party in the land, raising the question why has Gantz's radical principled cent so quickly lost so much support in the country as his party now finds itself on the wrong side of the minimum election threshold? This topic as as we record the Knesset votes in the first reading on a bill to dissolve itself and usher in new elections probably at the start of September, and we will be more and more looking at some of the deeper issues, absorbing voters as we start to get ready to go to the polls. This will be the first of them and our second discussion amends as we and the country prepare ourselves for the holiday of Shavuot. We will about a newish recension of the tradition or practice or ritual of studying all night on Shavuot what is called a Tikkun lel Shavuot, literally the reparation of the Eve of Shavuot. This newest recension being a jumble of music, poetry, literature, history, psychology, self help, alongside considerations of traditional Jewish texts, often from an unconventional angle. And we will wonder, what are these things? Why have they lately gained so much popularity? And are they an adaptation or rather a subversion of of the kind of tikkun lel Shavuot that our grandparents might have gone to? We will be joined for this discussion by Rav Jo Wolfson, a huge hero of mine and friend, as I said, a scholar, leader, activist, Mensch. Or a slam. That's an acronym that hasn't entirely entered common usage. Scholar leader, Activist, Mensch slam. But I feel it will now that Rob Jo Wolfson is at the height of his powers. And for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters, in our extra special special extra discussion, the link to which you can find in our show Notes on your podcast app or at patreon.com promisepodcast on the world Wide Web, we will talk about the aftermath of Noam Beton's rather astonishing second place finish in the Eurovision Song Contest, wondering how and why the great singer got the highest possible ranking, the coveted douce point or 12 points from six count EM6 Finland, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Azerbaijan and France. What did Noam Bataan's performance mean in Europe and what did it mean here? We will wonder idly, with no real way of knowing, of course. But who needs knowing when we got feelings in such abundance? Hopefully we will be able to persuade Rav Jo Wolfson to stay and join us for that discussion. You know, because you don't want to discuss pop music without getting the rabbinical perspective on the thing. But before we get to any of that, listen to. That's Me. That song is Che at Lo Kan by Mika Tal, though not that Mikatal. More music of these still really weird times. And now it is time for our first discussion. Linda My heart broke a little when Gilly Trooper announced the past week that he is ending his eight year partnership with Benny Gantz, the two men having earned reputations for dec and probity and a deep, deep, deep loyalty, one to the other. What, if anything, do we learn from some of Gantz's closest allies leaving despite not having a bad word to say about their erstwhile leader and friend?
- [37:18]
Linda Gradstein
Well, that's really a good question. And as you said today, as we record, the Knesset will vote on the first reading of a resolution to dissolve the government and go to new elections. If the resolution passes and then passes a second and a third reading, then elections will be at the start of September before the holidays. If it doesn't pass all three readings, then elections will be toward the end of October. Either way, we are now in election season, which opened two weeks ago when centre right former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid announced that they would run together with Naftali Bennett as their candidate for prime minister. Since then, the parties that run primaries, the Likud on the right and the Democrats Party on the left, have started to get organized, with almost every day bringing an announcement by another political hopeful that they are running for a on the list. All the parties have started to have meetings of loyalists that run into the night, and to interview campaign managers and website designers and social media experts trying to lock down the most promising personnel before a different party does. So it's a moment like dawn when everything seems bright and full of potential, yet somehow not yet clearly and fully defined. One of the most poignant things that has happened since Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid basically rang the opening bell of the 2026 elections is the respectfully quiet but still dramatic exit from Benny Gantz's Blue and White Party of some of the people who have long been associated with it. Benny Gantz, you may remember, was the IDF chief of staff, the country's 20th appointed by then defense minister Ehud Barak in 2011 and serving until 2015 when he was replaced by Gadi Eisenkot. There is a three year cooling off period after IDF generals retire before they can run for political Office. And from 2015 to 2018, Benny Gantz worked for a spyware company called the Fifth Dimension, so named presumably as an homage to the great American soul group whose song up, up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon was a number one hit in Australia and Canada, reaching number seven in the us. But unlike the soul group, the fortunes of Benny Gantz's spyware company went down, down and away. The concern closing in time for Benny Gantz to announce in 2018 the formation called Hosen l Israel the Israel Resilience Party by the time the elections approached, the Israel Resilience Party joined with Yair Lapid's center right Yeshatid Party and formed the Blue and White alliance, which won 33 seats in the 2019 elections to the Likuds, 32, giving Gantz a chance to form a government. But there was no majority to be formed. Without the Likud, the Ultra Orthodox parties and the Arab parties, all of which Gantz shunned or shunned Gantz. The country went to another election and Blue and white again won 33 seats, but this time the Likud won 36 seats. And after all sorts of machinations, in the end Benny Gantz joined an emergency coalition with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to the agreement signed, Blue and White and Likud were equal parties in the government, with the premiership rotating between Netanyahu and Gantz at the halfway point, and until then Gantz served as alternative Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. Also, Yair Lapid, who opposed the coalition with Netanyahu, pulled out of Blue and White. What's more, it did not take long for Prime Minister Netanyahu to make it obvious that he had no intention of letting the rotation agreement with Gantz play out. And then there were new elections and this time Benny Gantz's party got only eight seats. After a surprising set of developments, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid formed the government in a putative rotation and Benny Gantz joined remaining the Minister of Defense. That Knesset, which lasted a year and a half, is mostly remembered as the Knesset in which Professor Alon Tal served. After it fell, Benny Gantz formed an alliance with right wing former Likud Minister Gidon Saar's New Hope Party and with Gadi Eisenkot's newly formed Centrist National Unity Party and the joint Blue and White New Hope National Unity List 112 seats four days after October 7th on October 11th, Benny Gantz announced that he was joining an emergency government under Benjamin Netanyahu, serving along with Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer. Benny Gantz stayed in that emergency government for the first nine months of the war, withdrawing in June 2024. Since then, support for Benny Gantz in the polls has dropped steadily. What's more, many of his closest political comrades and chums have left blue and white. Last July, Gotti Eisenkot quit eventually to form his own party, Yashar or Straight or Honest. Matan Kahana, a lieutenant colonel, fighter pilot, friend and fellow traveler of Benny Gantz, left with Eisenkot. A few weeks later, Attorney Orit Farkash Hakohen, who was with Gantz since almost the beginning and who served as Minister of Strategic affairs, then Tourism, then Science, Technology and Space under him. She quit too. A few weeks ago Eitan Ginsburg, the very popular first out gay mayor of Ranana and lately the chairman of the Blue and White Party, announced that he was leaving. Then this past week, Khalil Troper announced that he was leaving Gantz's party too. Gilly Trupper, who is generally considered the second biggest mensch in Knesset politics after Professor Alon Tal, has been Benny Gantz's wingman, conciliari, trusted number two and factotum since the moment Benny Gantz decided to go into polit politics in the first place. He is famously loyal. He is famously mild. He is the last person you would have expected to leave Gantz in hopes of making it into the Knesset in a different party with a different party head. One reason why all these people left Gantz in blue and white is because the polls have for months now predicted that the party will not get enough votes to pass the minimum election threshold. But there is something deeper going on here too. 2 Benny Gantz has been the only leader of an opposition party to refuse to pledge not to enter into another coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu under any circumstances. In fact, Benny Gantz has said that if his forming a coalition with the Likud can keep the Ben Gvirish radical right out of the government, he will do so. He is also the only leader of an opposition party to refuse to pledge that he will not sit with an ultra orthodox party until they agree to their young people being drafted in high numbers members. Basically, Benny Gantz is the only politician now in the opposition who refuses to rule out in advance the parties that are now in the coalition, save for Itamar Ben Gvir's Jewish Power Party. In interviews, he has said that if it turns out to be possible to form a centrist government without Netanyahu, he will happily take part. But this is not how he expects matters to turn out. In the more stalemate ish scenario that he foresees, he is the one who will keep Ben GVIR out of the government. Government. In interviews and in private conversations that we've learned of, Benny Gantz has said that his message of moderation. I will cooperate with Netanyahu yet again in the service of keeping the radical nationalists out of the government is one shared by a majority of Israelis, and that it is bound to catch on. Until lately, I think that his closest political allies, Khalil Troper and Eitan Ginsburg, may have agreed with him. Both men, like all the others who have left the party, say they have great respect for Benny Gantz, and they seem to mean it. They say there needs to be a place for someone who believes that the most important thing right now is to create as broad a consensus as possible without the extremists on both sides. And this is what Benny Gan stands for. But they also say that right now this message is not getting across. They seem to imply that in 2026, a centrist who does not reject Prime Minister Netanyahu out of hand and decisively will not win enough votes to get into the Knesset, much less to make a difference. Noah, what do you think of this? When someone like Gilly Troper leaves Benny Gantz after so many years of such close partnership, is it a repudiation not of a man, but of a doctrine? And if so, what do we make of the seeming decline, maybe the death of this doctrine?
- [45:47]
Noah Efron
Yes, it is the repudiation not of a man, but of a doctrine. And it makes me very sad, I have to say, to see those two men part, because there was so much pleasure in seeing them together in all their joint Menschleschkeit. And there's something unnerving about seeing, as you put it, Benny Gantz's doctrine seemingly disproven, or at least losing its plausibility in the eyes of someone as committed and as smart as Khalid Trooper. I should say, over the last election, last bunch of elections, I have voted for Benny Gantz. And I haven't had to think too deeply about whether or not Benny Gantz best reflected my politics. Because always on his list was Professor Lon Tal, who you mentioned, who is a close friend of mine. And the privilege of being able to vote for him for the Knesset is too great to pass up in any instance. And I would vote for him as my friend in any possible universe. But beyond that, and maybe more importantly, I vote for him because I believe that the Knesset, with even a chance of Alon Tal in it, puts the course of Jewish history on a better track than it otherwise will be. It is a good way for me to spend my vote. But I haven't ever forced myself deeply to ask the question, what do I think of this gospel doctrine and what it is basically? I mean, you said it well. But what it is, the defining characteristic of Israeli politics at this moment is most of Israeli politics anyway, is that there is a fissure between two camps that here in Israel are called the Ralab or Raklo Bibi anything but Bibi camp. And the camp that is willing to to join a coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu. And the anything but Bibi camp includes many political parties that are really to the right of center at the moment, but who believe that Netanyahu has poor judgment, who believe that Netanyahu is self serving, who believes that Netanyahu has taken the nation in a poor direction, who believes that Netanyahu is responsible personally for October 7th and all that has followed it. And those people say, look just as a, as a matter of principle alongside a practical matter, we cannot form a government with that man, especially a government under that man who seems to symbolize corruption and poor judgment more than anything else. And Benny Gantz is, I think, literally the only prominent politician who says now that while he has well earned criticism of and enmity for Netanyahu, at a personal level, he believes that what is going to be necessary after the next election is for at least someone in the center camp to be willing to say they will form a government with Netanyahu. And he is willing to. He's the one who's willing to do that. Why is he willing to do that? Because he thinks that not doing it leads to disaster. It leads to election after election after election, or worse, it leads once again to the election of a government that goes from the pretty far right to the very far right and does things like passes death sentence laws and does things like annexes the west bank, which is right there on the horizon. And Benny Gantz believes that the only way to avo avoid that likely will be for people on the other side to say to Netanyahu, we will join a government with you if you do not include in that government the far right wing Zionist parties, which is to say Bengvir's party and Smotrich's party. We will join with you if you are willing to have a broadly secular, broadly liberal government without those right leaning or right wing, but without those people. And I think that it is impressive and responsible for Gantz to do that. And I've been talking too long. I'll just end by saying, having said all that and really seeing the logic and the value of what Benny Gantz is putting forth, I myself, who am I think one of the least anyone but Bibi people who calls themselves a leftist in the whole damn country and maybe the whole damn world. Even I have a hard time voting for someone who says who tells me in advance that he will join a government with Benjamin Netanyahu. Even I find it hard to do. I will do it probably, because probably that's the path that leads Professor Alontal back to the Knesset, if any path will will but and if I find it hard, then I understand why other people do. What do you think?
- [51:13]
Linda Gradstein
LINDA so I I disagree with you. I think that it is a repudiation of Benny Gantz as a person as well as his doctrine. I think that Israelis tend to vote on personality, in other words, the head of even though, you know, we have this parliamentary system and and I think that you look at the heads of the parties and you say you vote the same way that Americans vote in a presidential election, on personality, on sort of gut feelings. And I think that while we tend to right now, the polls show that Israelis have no respect for the government, but they still have a lot of respect for the army. And that's why we have so many former generals, including as we said, Gadi Eisenkot. But I think if you Benny Gantz and I think comes across as a loser, in other words, the fact that he joined the government once with Netanyahu, then they had this agreement for rotation, Netanyahu totally ignored that and then he joined it again and enabled that enabled Netanyahu to remain as prime minister. And I would put myself much more in the anyone but BB camp because I think that the fact is that everybody in the army and in other places has taken responsibility and he has still not taken responsibility, not expressed any regret for October Sev, for his for what happened on October 7th. And I think has done a lot of damage to Israel because of that. And I think that Gantz and by saying that he will not rule out and that he would sit with Netanyahu in the future, first of all, fool Me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me or whatever. I don't know if I got that right.
- [53:00]
Noah Efron
But he's not fooling you. He's saying it right out.
- [53:03]
Linda Gradstein
He's saying it right out. But how?
- [53:05]
Noah Efron
Who's starting this new Meloim party? Reservist Party? He's trying to fool you. He's saying, no, I'm not going to sit with Netanyahu, but we know he will.
- [53:13]
Linda Gradstein
So. But I think that in other words, to me, the fact that he's willing to sit with Netanyahu, I think that's what's causing these other people who, you know, I think who we do have a lot of respect for, to say no. He also just, you know, I've been to a few of his speeches and things like that. He's not a good public speaker, which should not be necessarily a requirement.
- [53:37]
Noah Efron
He's very tall, though.
- [53:38]
Linda Gradstein
He's very tall. He's very, very tall. And you feel like he has good intentions. But I wonder about, had he not agreed to go to join Netanyahu the second time, would the government have fallen and would we be in a different place than we are today? I mean, I think there were just so many people were tired of elections and they wanted a government that was stable. But on the other hand, I feel like, like by joining the Netanyahu government, whether he should have done it the first time or not, I don't know. But by joining it a second time I think was just a really big mistake. And I think that's what people are reacting against.
- [54:21]
Noah Efron
So let me ask you this one last thing. He puts forth that, look, if nobody who is now in the anyone but BB camp is willing to change that view, then the most likely scenario for the future is that we will have a government that looks like the government that we have today, which is to say the ultra orthodox, prominently Ben Vere and his far, far right party and the Likud under Netanyahu and Benjamin Netanyahu will be the prime minister. And that is the worst imaginable outcome of all the possible outcomes. That's the worst of Benny Gant's proposition. That this is is the truth. Do you think that that is not true, not likely, that things are not likely to unfold that way? Or are you saying that even if that is true, that is a better outcome than empowering Netanyahu by giving our vote to him indirectly by voting for
- [55:22]
Linda Gradstein
Benny Gantz, you mean? And then allowing that to happen? So, first of all, I don't think that that's a better outcome. And I do in some ways tend to agree. But I think that he's just, you know, I asked a few friends of mine about this, and what do they think of him and what do they think of his behavior? But I'm not sure that I agree that that's really the only outcome. Because what about a government of Bennett Lapid basically similar to the government that they had a year and a half ago. I would like to see the Arab parties take part in it. I mean, where you have really a government with everybody except the ultra orthodox and the extremists. And I think that that's the better scenario and that in some ways, if you vote for Benny Gantz, you're voting for the kind of government we have now. If you vote for Bennett and Lapid, you're voting for a possible different kind of government. So therefore, I wouldn't accept that. And I think that by, you know, what you said, you're sort of indirectly supporting Netanyahu if you vote for Benny Guns.
- [56:32]
Noah Efron
Okay, people, we will continue to talk about these deeper election issues as the weeks go by leading up to the election. Now listen to this. That song is Tihilim Vidmaut by Hadar Yafet. And now it is time for our second discussion, for which we will be joined and set your faces for stunned. And we are so delighted. We will be joined by Rabbi Joe Wolfson. If you have listened to the podcast for a while, you will have heard lots about Rav Joe Wolfson and the astonishing community that he and his partner Corinne Shmuel have built here in Tel Aviv. It is called called Jlictlv, which just a day OR 2 After October 7 began operating what I think was the most responsive and successful of all the Hamalim, the war rooms, the relief coordination hubs that rose after the war. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of messages a day passed through the group's WhatsApp list. Rav, Joe and Karine and the group found places for hundreds of people driven from their homes. They organized a team of grave diggers. They brought meals to thousands of people. They oversaw the importation of supplies for soldiers. They ensured that at every Shiva within 75 km there were people there to offer solace to mourners. They coordinated psychotherapists eager to give free services to traumatized victims. They helped renovate damaged buildings. They organized free childcare and free transportation. They adopted whole communities of evacuated from kibbutzim down south, making summer camps and taking care of their kids and washing their clothes. He and Corinne and his community did thousands of other things, small and huge, working tirelessly in what was the greatest display of kindness, charity and goodwill that I myself no have ever seen. It is of course reductive to introduce Rav Jo Wolfson in this way, as he's also a scholar of tremendous creativity and depth and a teacher of rare brilliance. I know as someone who has learned with him, and a man of vision and also of gentility and great warmth. On my list of the reasons I am flush with hope for our future, here he is right at the top of the list. So Rav Joe, welcome to the podcast.
- [60:25]
Rabbi Joe Wolfson
Thank you for having me.
- [60:27]
Noah Efron
I'm so happy that you're here and thank you for joining this discussion, which we are calling Amends. And here is why in recent years, maybe the last 10 or 20, a tradition has flourished around the country more in Tel Aviv than anywhere else, I think, but of the big flashy public Tikkun Lel Shavuot A Tikkun Lel Shavuot is a hundreds of years old ritual practice of staying up late the night of the holiday of Shavuot, traditionally all the way to the morning to study Torah. The name Tikkun Lel Shavuot literally means the reparation of the Eve of Shavuot and what what is being mended, or maybe more accurately amended for is the fact that according to a midrash in Chirashim Rabba, when the Holy One, blessed be he, came to give the Torah to Israel, the people of Israel slept through the night, because the sleep of the holiday is lovely and the night is short. And the Holy One, blessed be he, came and found them asleep, and he roused them with thunder, lightning and Ram's horns. And Moshe went and woke Israel and brought them to the court of the King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be he. End quote. In other words, the children of Israel slept in on the night the Torah was given at Sinai, and to make up for it we stay awake and study Torah on the Eve of Shavuot every year. The holiday commemorates, of course, the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The tradition of having a Tikkun probably started among the Kabbalists, and it became popular among the Kabbalists in Tzfat, especially in the 16th century, the time of Ravi Yitzchak Luria Haari, the inspiration for the Lurianic Kabbalah, and of Rav Yosef Caro, the author of the Shulchant, one of the greatest articles ever written in my book in the field of Jewish studies is one called Coffee Coffee Houses and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry by Professor Eli Horowitz of blessed memory. And he describes how in the 16th century the mystics would get tanked up on coffee and stay up all night, including on Shavuot, learning mystical texts, thinking mystical thoughts and arguing mystical arguments. This was all not long since coffee had become something that you could get in the Fertile Crescent just then in the 16th century. At first, a tikkun traditionally focused on a generally, you know, well defined corpus of texts. It really was about Torah. It focused on the opening and closing verses of each of the books of the Torah, certain passages in the Mishnah and some selections from the Zohar. Over time, different people in different places expanded the practice to include a whole range of mostly Yeshivish texts. They could be Musar texts, you know, the ethical literature. They could be Gemara or mystical texts. Lately, though, the Tikkun Lel Shavot, especially here in Tel Aviv, though, like I said, also in Jerusalem and a bit in Haifa, and very much in New York and no doubt in London, the Tikkun Lel Shavot has taken on a very different character. Go to the Tikkun at the big and influential Reform synagogue over near the Yarkon Beit Daniel and you will find a session called called Loving Life with a Broken Heart, which is a quote from the poet Mindfulness. At night in the park, Go to the big and important Reconstructionist synagogue over in Beit Shalom Aleichem near Icholov, and you will hear sessions called On Jewish Humor and Israeli Humor as a Perspective on life. Go to the Chemda Genuza community in Beit Dani over in Chunata Tikva, and you can hear the Ovadja Trio performing music for from Kurdistan and Morocco on traditional instruments with the Paitan or traditional singer of traditional prayer songs, Ilan Ariha. At the newish Conservative congregation on Plitehasfar street near where Miriam lives, you can hear a session called Tradition and Prayer Without Ruminations between the Book of Esther and the Book of Ruth at the big Tikkun of the Alma Secular Beit Midrash at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, you can see the great environmentalist kid show star Dalik Walenitz talk about quote, was, is and will be a Buddhist. Look at God. The capstone of the Tikkun at the museum is the rapper Jimbo jae performing from 2 to 3 in the morning. Over at the Conservative Shulki Latinai, you can see Tel Aviv University professor Ron Morgelin talking about people nation and state. At Binah, which calls itself the secular home of Israeli Judaism, you will find, among many, many other things, a yoga workshop called It Is Written on youn Body. And it goes on and on and on like this. There are hundreds of discussions and lectures, concerts, dance sessions stand up all around the city. And among them, I must add, there are many of these things, many of these discussions that would be a natural part of a traditional Tikkun. And I should also add, there are also dozens of traditional tikkun taking place mostly in Orthodox shuls around the city. And then there are those that are somehow culturally in between the big, flashy secular and egalitarian tikkuns and the traditional Orthodox ones, mixing sessions about traditional classical texts with sessions about, say, modern poetry and even politics, broadly defined. You can find half a dozen members of Knesset speaking in a Tikkun Lel chavot in Tel Aviv this year. Part of what is so exciting to me anyway, about this new development, these tikkuns all over the city, is the thrill of drinking new wine from old vessels. I think I'm still enough of a yeshiva Bacher that I still find it thrilling to have Wittgenstein be part of my conversation about Talmud, or to have the Buddha offer insight into, you know, my God. See, drinking this new wine because of the old vessels, you can feel like you're doing just what your grandparents maybe did and theirs maybe did back for a long, long time, maybe reaching back to those coffee guzzlers in Tzfat. And I love all of. And to be frank, I personally have spent a lot of my last month wheedling from the city the budget to help pay for a bunch of these events, though it ended up being just a few tens of thousands of shekels or, I don't know, 100,000 shekels, though next year it will hopefully be more. But here is my question to you people. I am also still enough of a yeshiva Bacher to wonder if what I am doing when I'm listening to a two in the morning rap concert at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, whether it's that is not just as much a subversion of this. On this night we study Torah spirit of the Tikkun as it is an honoring and an adaptation of that same spirit, because this is one of the things that Zionism famously does, coming as Mark Anthony to Caesar, not to praise Torah, but to bury it. And it does so with most of the things I love most about Israel, like Shavua Hasefer Book Week, which is about to start in a few weeks is this massive, massive book fair around the country in city squares. And publishers sell something like a third to half of all the books they sell in the entire year in that one week, which admittedly is a 10 day long week. And the news and the papers always say, ah, see, we are the people of the book, but the people of the book were the people of like the Torah, they're the people of sacred texts. And the people of Book Week are by what we're buying is cookbooks and graphic novels and translations of John Green's most recent book. And something like that is true also of Yom Kippur, my favorite Jewish holiday, save for Pride Day, because of all the people in their shuls, but mostly because of all the people outside in the streets without cars, praying with their bicycles and scooters. It is so moving to me, I tell myself, thinking about these two ways of worship happening side by side in these place the people on the inside and the people on the outside. It all just seems like worship to me. But did you notice what I did there with Pride Day? I always say this. Pride Day, really, I always say Pride Day is my favorite Jewish holiday of the year. It's the same sort of thing. So Joe, what do you make of Jimbo J rapping and Dali expounding the wisdom of the Buddha as our making amends for our forefathers having fallen asleep and then slept late at the foot of Mount Sinai? Is this praising Judaism? Is it burying Judaism? Or is it doing something altered, together, different?
- [68:47]
Rabbi Joe Wolfson
So when I was younger and more ideologically fierce and I was a card carrying member of B' Nayakiva UK and I had friends in secular Zionist youth movements and I had Haredi friends, I think I definitely would have seen this as part of the battle of ideas and I would have staked my claim. I'd have said that Yom Kippur is not about riding one's bike and playing volleyball at the intersection, and it's about pouring out one's heart to Hashem and undergoing a process of Cheshbon Nefesh, of self accounting. And Shavuot is not about Jimbo J and yoga and Buddhism. It's about receiving the Torah and the joy of study of Torah. But I think as I've grown older, I've maybe mellowed somewhat and changed my thoughts on it. And I remember one anecdote which seems to crystallize at first for me. My great Rosh Yeshiva Rav Moshe Lichtenstein of Harat Zion, who I have huge amounts of admiration, affection and gratitude for one of his things that he always emphasizes in one of his sort of main things he tries to teach is the importance of tefillah, of prayer, of the sanctity of it. And I have heard him quote multiple times a story of Amos Oz as he was writing his famous journalistic book in the Land of Israel, where Amos Oz, in the early 1980s, traveled around the country, meeting all sorts of different people and corners of Israeli society. And in one part of the book, Amos Oz spends Shabbat in Ofra, which is a deep part of the religious Zionist world world in Yehuda Shombron. And he's there for Shabbat. And his hosts say to him, look, we're going to shul. We're going to synagogue. And, you know, you're very welcome to come with us. And you don't need to, you know, to pray. You can. You can sit at the back and see what it's about. And Amos says, no, no, no, I don't go to shul. And they say, look, you know, it's actually like a really, you know, it's not a porter cabin. It's a really beautiful synagogue. And there's like these gorgeous, you know, stained glass windows. You know, perhaps you'd find it, you know, architecturally interesting. And Amos Oz replied, I'll say the Hebrew just because that's how I heard it. Yehudi Baalebet hakneset lit palel o lo ba bihlal. A Jew goes to synagogue to pray or he doesn't go at all. And my Rosh Yeshiva quoted Amos Oz with sort of great respect and reverence and thought that Amos Oz totally got it. And I just remember thinking, there's just something sort of like strange and bizarre about this, you know, great towering figure of secular Israel being quoted approvingly by Arosh Yeshiva for what shul is supposed to be about. It's only about prayer. But when that same figure is sort of using that as his reason to not want to have any reason to engage with. With synagogue or with tradition, and, you know, you ask Noah is the contemporary Tel Aviv Tikkunlil scene of Shavuot, not a way of praising Shavuot, but actually of burying it. And it seems actually to me that the worst way to bury it is to do what Ahmos Oz did and to say, it has absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with me. A Jew studies Torah on Shavuot or he doesn't do anything at all. And I think actually the position that I've come to really feel correct is that one of the greatest and most important developments that can happen is for a broader Israeli society to move away from Amosoz's type of position, which says Judaism is only for traditional Jews, and to find their own organic, interesting, varied ways to make it their own. Do I need to agree with each element of it as being authentic? Of course not. Nobody would say that. But that to me is a far healthier, lively, more vibrant, beautiful way of making it something which really is shared by all of Israel.
- [73:14]
Linda Gradstein
I kind of have mixed feelings about this. You know, one of my first memories of Israel is walking when I came, you know, and I spent a year studying at Pardes. And after studying a whole year, I went to a fairly traditional Tikkun Lel Shavuot. And then at, I don't know, about 4 in the morning, I walked to the Kotel. And not that I love davening at the Kotel so much, especially if you're a woman, but it was amazing in that there was. Were thousands of people coming from all directions on all the different paths, and you would pass all of these people. Yeah, it was quite. And it was quite amazing. And I think, you know, Joe, you can correct me, but I think it was the Maharal who said that anyone who studies Torah at night, a thread of, I don't know, chesed connects him. And I think that there's something about. About doing something at night when everybody is sleeping, and yet all of these people are staying awake. And I do see it really as a tikkun for sleeping. At the same time, I think at what point does one of my kids loves Jimbo Joe? Jimbo J. Yes. I think I'm showing my age here. To what degree, if you call something, if you say it's Shavuot, does that make it Shavuot? I'm just not sure. At the same time, I think it's kind of. You know, Noah, you talked a little bit earlier about the kibbutz and how the kibbutz celebrates Shavuot. And you and I both have a connection to Kibbutz Keturah. And not only do they do all this agricultural stuff, which is really nice, but they have a ceremony where the parents present the first babies born and the first fruits are the first babies. And it's incredibly meaningful that somehow Shavuot is an agricultural holiday. It's a holiday of renewal. It's a holiday of accepting the Torah. It's also a holiday of marriage between the Jewish people and God, whatever that means. So I think in some ways these are all, as Joe, you just said, sort of manifestations of different ways of looking at the Torah. And I would much rather have people going to see Jimbo Jay than sleeping at home.
- [75:41]
Noah Efron
Yeah, I am also ambivalent about this, but so strongly ambivalent because I love these things so much and I also believe in them in a really deep way. I think one way to describe the path of my, my life, among many ways that are equally true and equally false, is that I started out being heavily meat naged. I mean, I remember when I came to Israel just after college, just before I made aliyah and I saw Yeshaya Ulibowitz give a lecture and he, he said, look, if I had been commanded to read the phone book every three times a day instead of read the sidur and pray, if that had been what God told me to pray, just a meaningless list of names, I would do it. And it would mean exactly the same thing to me as reading from the Sidur. And at that time I was like, yeah, that was totally the way that I was raised. It was purely formalistic. It was allergic to spirit, to free floating spirit. And I think that the journey of my life and it took a huge leap when I had children. And everything about the way that I understood the world changed when I looked into my daughter's eyes and said, oh, now I understand what people are talking about when they're talking about God. It's just an empirical thing. It's like I actually am seeing God. And then all these changes came in tow. And I think that these tikkuns that they have in Tel Aviv that again, like this year I've been deeply, deeply, kind of involved in them, in fashioning them and funding them and, you know, and promoting them, whatever. I think that they're really Hasidic. They're like saying, yes, the people at Beit Daniil who at 11 o' clock at night are going to go out into the park across the street from their shul and sit by the river and meditate and be mindful. What is more traditionally Hasidic than doing that? And so I'm really drawn to these things, but I still some of my, I guess, fears about that kind of Hasidut, when it's not closely tethered to still, to texts, it still exists. Because when one of the things that excites you is breaking down traditional barriers, it's really easy to find yourself breaking down all barriers. And then it just becomes hard to really make sense of things. I do think that the very, very, very, very few moments of my life that have been like that have had real spiritual depth. I think that there is something similar between those moments and the lives that, you know, Buddhist monks live probably all the time. Like, I think I do recognize there's something universal about this, but still, I think that. That. I think that I will lose it if it's not. If it's not tethered to something that's really specific. And music is so moving to me personally. Like, I'm so. That's also part of my. My Hasidism is that the degree to which I just fell in, I. I found music, you know, affect moved my life and changed everything about the way I experience the world. That too, too. Like, there's something like, I don't. One of those few times when I had a real spiritual moment was on the roof of the building of Alma at three in the morning at a Tikkun, when Kobi Oz, who you know, this great musician, and he now is a big secular Talmud student as well, he went to the Eurovision and represented Israel with tpex, his band. And he told this story about getting these old tapes of his grandfather, the paitan, in Tunisia, and writing a song so that he could sing with his grandfather, because when his grandfather was alive, he had rejected all of that. And now this was this moment of tikkun, of fixing. And I cried and cried and cried on that rooftop. I can't imagine something. And he was playing a video. It was like the least yeshivish moment you could imagine and the most spiritually profound. I don't know. So, Rav Joe, what should I make of this?
- [80:34]
Rabbi Joe Wolfson
I mean, I feel much more. I like the irony that you've brought a rabbi onto the podcast for the first time, as far as I know, and I'm the one being sort of more openly enthusiastic about it than the two of you. Part of the reason why I feel bullish about it is I think that in a world where. Where there is only Amos Oz saying, Judaism is for the Orthodox and the traditional, and for the rest of us, we have nothing to do with it, then it's much harder to build any sort of bridge to cross that chasm. But in a world where you can arrive in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur and the whole city is silent, I say to all of my friends, wherever they are, especially if they're from overseas and spending a year in Israel, you. You have to be in Tel Aviv for Yom Kippur, not just for the gorgeous, beautiful Outdoor Teflot, which you alluded to earlier, Noah, but just to see what it means to have a major city just be completely quiet with no vehicles going through it whatsoever and no commerce. And that is able to happen because the city as a whole, in all of its diversity says, well, actually there is something called Yom Kippur, and people are going to do it in very different ways, but they're a part of it in a way in which sort of. And now I'm using Amos Oz now as a sort of a straw man said, that's not mine. And that doesn't speak to me. And yeah, I am also very skeptical of, you know, calling anything Judaism, putting a label on it just because without it being tethered to something which can be authentically said to be a part of the broad lifestream of Judaism. But the reason why I'm bullish is I think that it's much more likely that there's a sort of exchange and interchange and someone can go from a concert to a Talmud class on shovel, what night or can go from, from riding their bike on Yom Kippur to coming to hear the shofar blown at the end of Ni', Ila, the conclusion of Yom Kippur. If as a whole, as the city and as a country, we're saying we are doing Yom Kippur and we are doing Shavuot, and it's going to be done in very different ways from one another. But that then shares sort of sets a ground in which the can people can walk from one place to another place. And to me, that's really, really what separates part of my Zionism, I think, as much as my Judaism. It's what it means to try and create a majority culture, which we never could do in the diaspora, at least not the diaspora that I grew up in. And that's just pretty exciting.
- [83:20]
Linda Gradstein
I also think, you know, first of all, any holiday that tells you to eat cheesecake is already a good one in my book. And if you've been following, there's, you know, the supermarkets are just, you know, packed with cheese and recipes for cheesecakes and, you know, all kinds of things. But I also think, you know, one of the things it says in the Torah is that when it uses the singular form of the people camped at Mount Sinai and it says Neged Hahar, and I think it's Rashi who says that the people were united, that when they despite when whatever disagreements they had when they were receiving the Torah and that something special happened on Shavuot and this year at Shavuot, we're so divided about so many things that I kind of hope that maybe we can somehow recapture that spirit and that maybe all of these things you just described, Noah, are one way of doing that and that different people have a path to do that in different ways. Ways.
- [84:28]
Noah Efron
Now listen to this.
- [85:43]
Rabbi Joe Wolfson
Okay,
- [86:06]
Noah Efron
That song is Ella by Haze Ev who is or Matalon. More music for these strange times, all of which you can find in all the usual places. And now it is time for our Vada country segment. This is the part of the show in which each of us describes something that maybe surprised or amused, delighted or enchanted and sorceled, or possibly even fluged us as we wended our way through our world over the last while, we have prevailed upon Harav Joe to stay and what a country with us. So, Joe, what is your what a country country?
- [86:37]
Rabbi Joe Wolfson
So I'd like to share an encounter with my boxing trainer that happened this week on Bogoryov beach, where we train together each week. But before I get to that, some background. One of the best parts of my job is that I get to teach a lot of Torah. And because I'm not constrained by a school curriculum or anything like that, I can more or less tune in to teach what I'm interested in, whatever piques my interest. And one type of teaching that I love to do, rather on brand with promised podcast ideology, I might venture, is to find Torah that bears some connection to the city and neighbourhood that we live in. So for seven years prior to returning to Tel Aviv, I worked as rabbi at NYU New York University in downtown Manhattan, and became obsessed with anything that was written south of 14th street, of which there is a veritable treasure trove. And in the last few years back in Tel Aviv, I've begun my first explorations into uncovering some of the fascinating rabbis and teachers and preachers who have taught and written in this city ever since Rav Kuk landed in Yafo in 1905. And the reason why I do this is because I think that's actually quite a profound experience that takes place when you learn about the people and ideas that were inhabiting the very streets we walk on. The text in front of you is not just a beautiful text written anywhere, but it was written here in this place, on these streets. And that deepens my connection to the city around me. And it's something that I like to sort of share with the community that we try to build as a way of taking off the blinders, the blinkers, and deepening Our connection to the place. Anyway, my muse for the last few months has been a man named Rav Yosef Zev Lipovits. He was a leading light, the great Musar Yeshiva of Slobodka in Europe, where they preached the doctrine of Gadlut ha Adam, the greatness of mankind and of individual's worth. And Ravlipovits, after studying at Slobodka and then at the University of Berlin, moves to the young city of Tel Aviv with his wife Bela in 1924. And they're still a young couple. I think they're in their early 30s at that point. And he's not an ambitious public figure at all. He never holds any position of leadership. Instead, he teaches Talmud at yeshiva, called Yeshiva Tel Aviv, and he teaches Talmud in Hebrew, which I did not realise at the time was a major radical move. And then after a few years doing that, he and his wife open a little pension, a hotel restaurant on Lillenblum street, where for the next 30 years or more, so their front room becomes a kind of salon, a gathering place for all sorts of people. There are laborers who come every week, there are leading journalists and intellectuals of the day who stop in there, all of whom want to talk and discuss Torah as a prism to illuminate the events of their own day and to hear what Revlips Lepovits has to share. And I even found a letter in the archives arranging a meeting between two of the great, really famous Torah figures of the day, Rav Yechiel Omichal Tikacinsky of Jerusalem, who was meeting with the head of the Ponovic Yeshiva and Bnei Brak Rufkah Hahnemann. And the meeting would take place in the neutral territory of the Lipovitzes front room on Lillemblum street in Tel Aviv. Anyway, he's basically a forgotten figure today. He died in 1962, and the only work published in his lifetime was this gorgeous commentary on the story of Ruth Megillah Droot, which of course we read on Shavuot, which was called Nachalat Yosef. And after he died, his wife sold all of her possessions, down to her wedding ring, to be able to finance the publication of his other rights. And so, for the last few weeks, after having spent quite a while thinking about this, I've been teaching his work in the class that I give on Monday nights at the shul we partner with on Ben yehuda. It's number 126, if anybody ever wants to join. And there's been something so beautiful about taking a full room in an old Shul predating 1948 in television of folk mainly in their 20s and 30s, and bringing this great teacher of yesteryear back to life in the city that he moved to more than 100 years ago. And as part of my preparation for the classes, I decided to take a walk down Liliblum street to really get into his world and his mindset. And today, for those who don't know, it's sort of very near Rothschild and Allenby and there are lots of office buildings and gyms and a delicious looking French delicatessen. And I discovered a plaque on a building on the street that told me that the Haganah, the forerunner of the IDF, was headquartered at 41 Lilienblum street from 1939 to 1948. And I thought how cool that the front room intellectual religious salon of Lipovits was neighbors with Yossi Galili and Yitzhak Rabin and Ben Gurion, all planning the Yishuv's military strategy. Try as hard as I might, I could not locate the actual building of Revlipovic himself. And I thought, if only, if only I knew someone who worked at the Iriya, the Tel Aviv municipality, who might be able to locate the building and put a little plaque on it just like the one that is there for the Haganah. If only I knew such a person. But I digress. All of which brings me back to Boxing with Alex on the beach by Bogashov, which is what I try to do every Thursday morning to keep me from slipping into a stage state of morbid obesity and physical disintegration. And Alex teaches me boxing and keeps me in shape, or tries to, but most of the time he lives in the water. He teaches people how to swim, including the swimming marathon that is once a year going from the port in Yafur to the port at the north of Tel Aviv. And he teaches people how to surf, and he looks exactly how you would imagine a Tel Aviv surfing, swimming, boxing, fitness instructor to look. But he also, like our honorable podcast host, is a former Yeshiva Bocha. And so on occasion he likes to trade his fitness advice to me for some Tara idea that I can share with him. And so talking about our Shavuot plans and going in that direction, I of course began talking about Revlipovic and Lilimblum and his beautiful commentary on the book Book of Ruth. And then, as sometimes happens when our physical environment triggers certain thoughts, I saw the beautiful Mediterranean Sea only a few meters away from us, and it reminded me of a particular passage which I had not thought deeply about prior to that moment. In this commentary on Miquellat Root, where Revlipovitz at this point is remarking on the sort of quiet, calm, pastoral atmosphere of the story of Ruthven, though it's also a story about terrible things, about famine and bereavement. And Rovlipovitz pivots from this, from this sort of like imagery of quiet and noise to a reflection on the messianic age and what it will look like. And the metaphor that he wrote preaches for, based on verses in Isaiah, is that our unredeemed, pre messianic, full of violence and noise world is compared to a stormy sea with waves crashing violently against one another. That is the nature of our current world. But he continues and says that this actually isn't really the true nature of the the sea. The waves are just the external superficial surface layer, and the sea itself, created by God on one of the first days of creation, is actually calm and peaceful. And then drawing on another verse in Isaiah, Yeshayahu, he speaks of the future redeemed world as actually being like a calm, beautiful sea at peace. And I had already, through sort of living with this text and this personality for a while, sort of developed a real sense of him as someone who never sought the limelight, who did not aim to be famous, he just wanted to teach in his front room. And really a sense of him as an introvert. And there he is in the noise of 19, 30s, 40s, 50s Tel Aviv, neighbors with the Haganah HQ and you know, many years before anyone living in Tel Aviv will be deeply familiar with Pinui, Binui and Tamara and every other building around us being torn down and woken up again, and so much noise in it. And I thought, what a beautifully insightful metaphor that such an individual says. Our world, our pre redeemed world, is just one of noise, but the messianic vision is one of a sea calm at peace. And Alex, our boxing, surfing, fitness instructor, Frank friend, is also a bit of that persuasion. His Tikkunlel will be him hosting a few friends around his table and sharing some thoughts. And Alex, who spends so much time in the sea, just absolutely loved this passage and this vision and metaphor. And I just had this beautiful feeling of when Rovlipovic wrote that passage maybe 60 or 70 years ago. I am pretty sure that the sea he was thinking was not one in the environs of Slobodka, but rather was the Mediterranean Sea, only a few hundred meters from his home on Lillenblum. And how beautiful that More than a hundred years after he moved to Tel Aviv. Here is a surfing, swimming, boxing instructor finding a passage that he reflected on to be so deeply be meaningful for his own life.
- [97:34]
Noah Efron
Oh my. How beautiful. How crazy. Linda, what is your. What a country.
- [97:41]
Linda Gradstein
Well, I just came back from a brief visit to the United States, which is the land of Dunkin Donuts and other things. And I was taking an Amtrak from Stamford, Connecticut to Trenton, New Jersey to see my sister on Mother's Day. And Mother's Day is a very big deal in America. And I was sitting reading the Sunday New York Times very happily, and a very nicely dressed woman looked to be in her early to mid-70s, sat down next to me. We both nodded politely and I went back to my New York Times and she was scrolling through her phone and after about a half hour I kind of glanced over and saw that her, her Instagram feed was all in Hebrew. So as one does, I started a conversation with her and I asked her, you know, do you live here? She said, no, I live in Tel Aviv. And she said that she was visiting her two children, both of whom her only children, both of whom have moved to America. Her son is a doctor and moved to Philadelphia for his postdoc and basically never came back. And a medical doctor and, and is a well known neurologist. And her daughter, who is married and has two young children, had just moved a few months ago, had a job with Netflix and was living in Brooklyn. And I said to her, oh, that must be so hard that, you know, both of your children and your only grandchildren are living in America. And she said, no, I'm very happy. I don't want them growing up in Israel the way Israel is today. And she told me how to yes, Oi is right. How she was, she's a sort of left wing activist and has been involved in peace organizations. And she said, and I see Israel moving so far away from what I want it to be that I really would rather my kids and my grandchildren be in America. And if I was younger, I would also leave, but I'm too old and I have my life and my friends there. But I don't think, you know, Israel's not a place for young people today. And it made me realize that I don't want to leave Israel, that I would not want to live anyplace else with all of the difficulties that we're facing today and with all of the complexities that the decision that I made almost 40 years ago to come here and to build a life here was really the right decision. And I kind of believe that people cross your path or enter into your life. Everybody enters into who you cross paths with and have a conversation with. There's a reason for that person coming into your life at that moment. And for me, this woman came into my life. I don't even know her name. I don't think I ever asked her. Her name was to remind me of why I came to Israel and why I'm going to stay.
- [100:42]
Noah Efron
Yes, yes, stay. I had tickets to a show at the Beit Prudet Community center scheduled for a week and a half after the war with Iran started. And that date went by and I didn't think much of it. There were other things to think about until last week when I got a text message that the concert was back on on Thursday night. And Susan and I already had plans to go to that food festival thing, the Eat Festival over at Charles Kluwer Park. So we fig we'd make an evening of it and go to the show after the festival. The show was a concert by a young singer named Toar Gadassi, who interests me partly because her father, Yair Gadassi, means something to me. He is a wonderful singer himself. And I knew that the family had a story. They left Tel Aviv's Hatikvah neighborhood, the neighborhood that produced so many great singers. Ofra Haza, Ahuva, Azari, Zoa Argov, Dana International. And then maybe 25 years ago, the whole Gadassi family moved to El Ad, which is an ultra Orthodox town. Hem Hitchhas Ku, as we say here, they strengthened in their religion and Toar Gadassi. Toar means purity, by the way. She grew up among Haridim in an ultra Orthodox town, and I knew that she'd long ago left behind all the strict and unforgiving observance. But the traditions, they matter to her. When a reporter asked her who were the greatest influences on her life and I love this, she said, king David and the great 17th century Yemeni Pietist and Rabbi Shalom Shabazzi. Those are the two great influences on her life. Also Madonna and Toar Gadassi's first album just came out, so I was eager to see her. The main hall in Beit Burdet is pretty small, a couple of hundred seats if you include the balconies. And I. And after Toar Gadassi came out and said, yala, should we open the gates? And started singing her song Ptahli Shah or open a gate for me right away, Most everyone was immediately on their feet singing with her. Sam. And the words that Toar Gadassi wrote, go open a gate for me. I have come to you like a desert. My heart thirsts for you. And Susan leans over and says that she thinks that everyone in the hall, they every single person, they all seem to know Toaar Gadassi, and they all know this song that she's written to God, to whom, later in the show, she dedicated her. And behind Tor Gadassi on the stage is a man playing all sorts of woodwinds, of sorts that I'd never really seen before. And over the minutes of the show, we learn that he is Yonatan Beiser, her husband. And Susan leans over and says, I knew that he was in love with her before she even said that they were married, from the way that he looks at her when she sings. And Toar Gadassi says, There is that last psalm in the book of Psalms, which is the most beautiful psalm. And my Yonatan, he put it to music. He heard psalms sung in a Yemeni synagogue. Imagine an Ashkenazi man who marries a Yemeni woman, and imagine his culture shock. And it stuck with him that you can sing the psalms. And he went home and composed this beautiful composition, which we will now do together. Partway through through the show, three men come out on stage and sing through most of the rest of the show. One of the men is very religious, sidelocks and tzitzit hanging out. Another is kind of religious, and the third is not at all religious, you can tell. And after a time, Torah Gadassi introduces them as her three brothers, Nachman Gadassi, Yedidya Gadassi and Nathan Gadassi and Toar Gadassi. She says, I didn't have the privilege of having a sister, but my three brothers, they more than made it up to me. And the four Gadassis sing a song to their mother, who we see is sitting across the aisle from us with a kid, I think one of Toar Gadassi's own kids. And by the end of the show, everyone is standing and everyone is dancing and everyone is singing. Everyone seems to know every word of every song. And I have been to, I don't know, a thousand concerts in my life, maybe more. And this was the most intimate one that I had ever seen. With music and God and family and place, they all became one, and it was beautiful. And that brings us to the end of our show, thanks to Itay Schelem, our station manager, without whom there would be none of this. Thanks to Achibo Lim, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva. They gave us some music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you Linda. Thank you Natalie. Thank you Rav Joe. We'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity and support. It keeps the show going and the station going and it keeps us moved and grateful and enjoying your debt. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking your valuable time to listen. And we'd like to ask you to like us on Facebook and drop us a line. We are eventually going to answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this in the famous Quality Quantity dichotomy, the Promise podcast stands steadfastly on the side of quantity. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today, as we record May 20, we celebrate world B Day, so stipulated by the United nations in Resolution A72 211 World Bee Day, in which the body quote, decides to designate 20 May as World Bee Day and invites all member states to observe World B Day through education and activities aimed at raising awareness of the importance of bees and other pollinators. End quote the the date of the observance was chosen to correlate with the date in 1734 when the great Slovenian painter and apiarist or bee breeder Anton Janza was baptized. Janza went on to write some of the canonical 18th century texts on beekeeping, including Wollstander Lehrer van der Baenensucht, A Full Guide to Beekeeping, and he was appointed by Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa to be head of the Imperial Beekeeping Academy. The Antan Janza Memorial Apiary in the village of Branznica in Upper Carniola says intriguingly that many people consider Janza to be, quote unquote, one of the greatest Slovenian beekeepers, raising the obvious question, what other great Slovenian beekeepers offer Yanza competition? And the answer? The answer is Uraz Fundli, a near contemporary of janza. He was 15 years younger, who was a Catholic priest who thrived in Slovakia, though he came to be known as one of the greatest apiculturalists in Hungarian history, by the way, some years back, Hebrew University archaeologist Amichai Mazar discovered that in biblical times the settlement of Tel Rachov was a beekeeping powerhouse, importing bees from as far as modern day Turkey and making the land of Israel a land flowing with milk and and honey insofar as they already had milk, which I can only assume they did. And I know that this World Beekeeping Day is going to be the best day ever. What with contemplating the awesome fact, and this is true, that 1 in every 200 Slovenians is a beekeeper and answering the many, many bee quizzes on the Internet, you should look them up which ask questions like how many times does a bee beat his wings in a minute? Give up 11,400. Which is a lot. And I am spending the day remembering the great director of the Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille. And don't get me started about Johnny B. Goode. It is a day we have all been buzzing about for months. But then I know that at the end of today, just like a Slovenian bee colony, when the snap of winter comes, it will be gone, not to return for a whole nother year. Not so the Promise Podcast. We will be back for you next week and most every week, reminding you that you don't need bees to know that you have experience something, the sweetness of which is cloying too much, the sting of which is sharp and unpleasant too much, and the net effect of which is to leave you with hives. On this, the Promised podcast.