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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 was all a tizzy the night before last when the Maccabi Tel Aviv football soccer team won the Israel State cup, beating Hapoel Bersheva 2 1. This was the 25th time that Maccabi Tel Aviv won the cup since the cup Competition started in 1922. Maccabi Tel Aviv started in 1906, 120 years ago, and the night before last was a sweet moment, the 25th cup in Maccabi's long and storied history. And I say this even though I am pretty much a Hapoel man because, well, you know, socialism, rooting generally for the workers, teams in the red shirts, you know, as Auguste Blanqui said in 1848, Red for the blood of the martyrs and all that. But still, it has to be said that for me, the greatest excitement in Tel Aviv fandom this week came probably not from the football pitch, but rather when the Maccabi Tel Aviv rugby team routed Hapoel Yisrael 50 to 17 to win the Israel Rugby Championship for the 15th time, nicely capping their miraculously perfect 130 series. This with their very Tel Avivishly diverse team that includes seven native Israelis, joined by players from Canada, the United States, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Georgia, Ukraine, Italy and France. As you'd expect, there are on the team a number of players who have spent hundreds of days in the reserves during the recent wars. One of these people, Tomer Danino, who moved here from the United States, having rescued in Gaza an abandoned dog named Bolt, who is now the mascot of the team. The Instagram account of the team posted a sacco video of the rugby squad going from scrum to the try line, which sounded like this Shut up. Now that's sportsman. And it is not just Maccabi that instantiates the city's winning ways in all matters. Rugby. The Tel Aviv Amazons, the women's rugby team. Two weeks ago they took the national championship at Wingate. And it was not all that long ago that the Tel Aviv IBEX team quote the first inclusive LGBTQ rugby team in the Middle east, end quote, that describes itself as, quote, a team of LGBTQ men and allies on a mission to grow personally, build community, play rugby and tackle homophobia in sports, end quote. They won the igr, or International Gay Rugby League Championship in Rome and arguably nothing captures the sports. If it's anything, it's gotta be everything. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness vibe of this city we love so well. Tel Avivo better than all three city rugby teams, your men's, your women's and your genderqueer men's being champions, the one more charming than the other being winning while being winning, being on the ball while being on the ball, bringing a classy touch to the touchline, bringing the hum to the scrum. With us Today, speaking from TLV1's flagship satellite studio in Jerusalem, is a woman who, and now I am speaking mostly metaphorically, is the person you would want in your scrum. Tough when you need, strong when that's what you need, always willing to push, push, push in the direction that the group needs to go. Shoulder to shoulder with Brio and Joy. Obviously, that 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 are you doing?
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I'm doing fine. It's beautiful weather here in the holy city, and I just came from my TRX class, so I'm ready for the rugby scrum.
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There you go. It's sports, sports, sports. Ain't nothing like sports. Now also with us in the newest in the worldwide network of TLV1 studios, this one in the lovely Northish hamlet of Zichron, Yaakov is a man so leonine in nature, noble, courageous, proud, vital, authoritative, charismatic, protective, strong, that his name is Judah Ari, which translates, of course, to lion lion. Judah being a lion whelp and Ari being a lion. Obviously, I am talking about Judah Ari Gross, or to take the matter one step further, but definitely not a step too far. Big lion Lion Judah Ari Gross, though you might want to call him Lieb or Lev or Lavi or Kfir or Ariel or Leo or Levan or Leonid or Asad or Aslan, as it's lions all the way down with the sky. Judah Ari Gross is managing editor of E. Jewish Philanthropy. Before that, Judah was a correspondent for the Times of Israel, reporting first on the military and then on Israel diaspora relations and on religion. He lately has been an inaugural Elson Fellow at the Jewish Federation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Judah, I'm so glad that you're here. And I ain't lying. I How you doing?
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I'm doing very well, thank you. How did you know that everywhere in my house is full of lions?
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Because.
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Because it's my namesake it's your double namesake indeed.
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And I have many questions about this, possibly for your parents, unless one of these names is added by you later in the thing.
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C
But no, no, this was gifted from my parents. And what's crazy is that I actually know another Judah Ari. There's a rabbi in New York named Judah Ari Kerbel, who is. He and I were actually together in the USY youth movement and we both went to the University of Maryland. Though he's a couple, I think he's a year or two younger than me. So it was definitely his parents copying mine somehow. But we're not alone. And I'm also aware of a pair of insurance brokers in, I believe, New Jersey who are brothers named Judah and Ari. Gross. So, you know, we're going over like gangbusters. We're all over the place.
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A
That is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Yes, I think that I have met a bear, dove also, but yes, I guess once you have an animal once, why not have the animal twice? Now, as for me, my name is Noah Ephron, and I do not mean to boast, but Susan left to visit her parents. She took a midnight flight and already by the next morning, literally the next morning, it's just on the midnight flight. The sink was filled with dirty dishes and the bunny cage looked like a hurricane had passed through it. And the matt was mewing to tell me something, but I could not figure out what it was. And the electricity tripped and I could not find which circuit breaker turned it back on. And somehow that 2 liter ball top glass jar that is always in the refrigerator door with cold water went missing. One minute it was there, I was drinking from it and then it was not there. The cold water went missing and where could it go? And I'm pretty sure that I saw two rats fighting on the kitchen floor. I don't know where the littler scrappier one even got that shiv. And please believe when I say that I am not bragging. God knows that my folks brought me up better than that. But I like to think that I present myself with a certain sense of competence and independence, able to survive hours at a time without Susan, with or without access to cold water. Though I admit that Susan has now been gone for just over two days as I speak, and I'm getting pretty thirsty. Where could that water bottle be? Today we got two topics so expansive that they lie, as you will see, at the far reaches, the very border of our collective consciousness here in isra. 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 promised podcast ponders the protean and peculiar pathways of batrachology, herpetology, ichthyology and zoology. A story of revival and survival in the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem. Between the orangutan environment and the penguin pool, there is a small aquarium where last week tadpoles hatched. They now swim this way and that, and it is a big deal. But I've gotten ahead of myself. On March 22, 1940, 29 year old Heinrich Mendelssohn traveled north from Tel Aviv with his friend Heinz Steinitz to the Hula swampland up north, as the two men often did, to observe wildlife. Six years earlier, with the rise of the Nazis, Heinrich Mendelssohn had come to Palestine, abandoning his medical degree in his last year and his zoology degree, both at Humboldt University in Berlin. This was at the time of the great burning of 20,000 degenerate books. the Oppernplatz near the university, Joseph Goebbels gave a speech against the dramatic backdrop of the flames. And it was the time of the firing of the 1/3 of the Humboldt faculty, who were Jews, and Heinrich Mendelssohn, who did not even learn he was Jewish until he was 7. And someone said something at school and they asked his mother who told his father who said, yes, we are Jews, but this is like a hereditary disease. There is not much that can be done about it and you must learn to live with it. In fact, Heinrich Mendelssohn was born of high Jewish lineage, fifth or sixth generation from the great rationalist philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. And his line included the composer Felix Mendelssohn. And his mother's family tree included Rav Moshe Iserlis the Rama, one of the greatest rabbis of the 16th century and indeed of all time. Once here, Heinrich Mendelssohn went back to school in Jerusalem to finish what he had started in Berlin at the Hebrew University under the supervision of Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer. We call him the father of life sciences. Here Heinrich Mendelssohn wrote a master's on various snails of Palestine and his doctorate on these, that and the other birds of Palestine. Heinz Steinitz grew up in Breslau, then that was in Germany, now it's in Poland. And he also studied medicine in Berlin. He was a year ahead of Heinrich Mendelssohn, so he already had in hand his MD when the Nazis came to power, making a medical residency in Germany an impossibility. And he also moved to Palestine with his wife Ruth, and also did his doctorate also under Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer at Hebrew University. His on citrus scale insects. And then he was on his way to a life and career not of entomology, like you might expect from these citrus scale insects, but rather in ichthyology, the study of fishes. And Heinrich Mendelssohn and Heinz Steinitz took to going to the field together, from the Negev in the south to Lebanon up to the north, and their trip to the hula swampland on March 22, 1940. Heinrich Mendelssohn memorialized it in his lab notebook in part like this. Inside a small wadi about 50 meters from the bank, there was much green algae, chiefly hydrodiction, and the water made a strong impression. There were many frogs and many tadpoles there. Near them, beneath the stones, there were two round snails. In a nearby small spring full of vegetation, there were frogs and two kinds of tadpoles. One, the larger, had a long black tail, while the smaller one had a larger golden fin and white stripes along its sides, like the stripes on a goldfish. In this place there were two hill stream loach fish, one very large and marked with neatly arranged dots along its breadth. There was also vegetation characteristic of the Hula region. At noon there were dragonflies whose wings shone northward above the eastern bank. There was also a snake of the genus Natrix. Besides the pond there were also small freshwater snails. There was a lizard with broad stripes and other smaller lizards in which the pattern was especially prominent. The temperature in the shade was 31 degrees centigrade. In the end, it was the tadpoles that most captured the attention of the two young scientists. They had never seen tadpoles quite like them before, and they took back with them to Jerusalem Samples and consulting the library, they realized that no one had seen tadpoles quite like them, which is how it came to pass that in the December 31, 1943 edition of the Journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists there appeared an article called A New Frog from Palestine by Heinrich Mendelssohn and Heinz Steinitz that started, quote, two specimens of a species of Discoglossus, apparently representing an undescribed form, were found in March 1940 on the east shore of Lake Hula, Palestine. Two tadpoles caught at the same locality must be referred to this new species. The article goes on to describe the new frog from Palestine, which Heinrich Mendelssohn and Heinz Steines called Discoglossis nigriventer, meaning the black bellied round tongue frog or in the all the more beautiful for being so literal. Hebrew translation Agol lashon shahor gahon Again, the black bellied round tongue. The frog, like you'd guess, had a rounded tongue and its belly is black with white spots. Informally, the frog came to be known as the Hula painted frog because its color scheme is complicated in a way that seems almost intentional. This was a frog perfect for a natural theologian who hopes to see God's handiwork displayed on the plants and animals all around us. The creature's back and head are okra radiating into rust and then dark olive gray to grayish black on its sides with a band of a lighter color. Maybe you'd call it beaver or fawn stretching down the middle of the back. After describing the two specimens that the researchers took back with them to the lab on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, the article ends abruptly with this quote. The second smaller specimen was swallowed by the larger while the two were kept alive in a terrarium. End quote. Though if I were the smaller specimen, I might have a bone to pick with the article's authors about how the two were kept alive in the terrarium until they weren't. I would add, though nobody likes a smart ass tadpole. This tendency of Discoglossus nigri venter to devour one another continued to play a part in the the story as it unfolded. In 1955, Heinrich Mendelssohn, by now the director of the Pedagogical Institute for Biology in Tel Aviv, which not long after that merged with the Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics and the Academic Institute of Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv to create together Tel Aviv University. Heinrich Mendelssohn captured at the Hula two more specimens of Discoglossis negriventer and put them in an aspirator jar and put the aspirator jar in his car. But when he got to his laboratory, he discovered that once again the larger of the two had eaten the smaller, leaving him without the pair of tadpoles that he wanted to raise for his research and which he hoped in the fullness of time to breed. The fact that there would be no Agol Lashon Chahor Gachon frogs to breed mattered very much, because by this time in 1953, 12 years after the publication of their article, it had become clear to both Heinrich Mendelssohn and Heinz Steinitz that the species they had discovered could be found only at what was left of the Hula lake and wetlands. Which lake and wetlands in 1953 were disappearing fast. Well, they were being destroyed fast. Starting in 1951, the government and the Jewish National Fund undertook one of the greatest engineering projects the young state of Israel had ever tried, draining the Hula in order both to reduce the population of mosquitoes that spawned in the wetlands, this to fight the spread of malaria, and also to increase the acreage of rich land that could be put into the hands of kibbutzim and moshavim eager for more fields and orchards. By 1957, a cinema newsreel could say, The Hula lake is no more. The project of draining the Hula is over. From the map of the land of Israel, the lake is erased. In fact, of the 6,000 hectares that had been the Hula Marshes, only 300 remained. Which is why, in 1953, Heinrich Mendelssohn had reason to think that his two Discoglossus negriventer specimens, one male and one female, might be the end of the their line, unless he could somehow breed them in a laboratory. Though that, in the event, was not to be. It was in response to the draining of the hula, an act that Heinrich Mendelssohn and Heinz Steinitz both thought barbaric, and which they fought with everything they had at their disposal, their science and their reputations and their love of wildlife. It was in response to this draining of the hula that Heinrich Mendelssohn, Heinsteinitz and a handful of people who saw the world like they did set up the Israel Society for the Protection of Nature. The Khevrala Haganateva, which survived after the Hula wetlands, did not, and decades later would lead a successful campaign to rewild the hula, bringing back in 1994500 more hectares. Which is anyway something. After Heinrich Mendelssohn found his last two specimens, decades passed and no painted Hula frogs were seen again. Finally, in 1988, the species was pronounced extinct. By then, Heinz Steinitz had been dead for 17 years. In 1994, a team of scientists did genetic analysis of archived lab specimens of the frogs and discovered that their genus was not, after all Discoglossus, but rather a genus called Latonia, meaning the daughter of Latona, the goddess Diana. A genus of frogs that, save for the painted hula frog, had gone entirely extinct in the early Pleistocenes roughly 3 million years before, meaning that an entire genus had been survived by just one species of frog that existed only in the marshes of the Hula. It was too pretty a thought, but people thought it anyway. Of the Agol Lashon Chahor Gachon, that we Jews, like the frogs, also had survived for a long time. And yet we were here in this tiny place until the frogs anyway, until they were gone. Heinrich Metelsen lived until 2002, long enough to learn that a scientist working for a Lebanese nature protection organization claimed to have found specimens of the now Latonia Negriventer in the Beka Valley, just east of Beirut. But two French British Lebanese expeditions in 2004 and 2005 failed to find any sign at all of the animals up there. The only place they had ever been known was the Hula Valley. And that is how matters stood until 2011, when a man named Jeroen Malka, who works for the Israel Nature and Parks Authority at the now rewilded Hula Reserve, saw a frog that he could swear was the painted Hula frog. And he caught it and he brought it to astonished experts who confirmed that it was in fact an Agol Lashon Shahor Gachon. Zoologists came in numbers, nosing around and determining that there were probably more than 100 painted hula frogs now living at the Hula Lake. And though the Agolashon Chahor Gachon remained as endangered as a species can be, it had not actually gone extinct. Well, it turns out that the frog could be still more endangered than it was. And soon it was more endangered than it had been when the intensive bombing in the north from Lebanon started. After October 7th, and especially starting in the fall of 2024, when the war between Hezbollah and Israel flared, Yoram Malka had the terrible realization that all it would take would be one Hezbollah missile to kill off every one of the Latonia Negriventer in the Hula reserve, driving them to extinction for a second time in 70 years. So he talked to some people and he some money, and he launched the project of capturing 20 of the frogs and moving them to the biblical zoo in Jerusalem, separating the frog population between two locations to improve their chances of survival. Problem was, Latonia negriventer still had never been successfully bred in captivity. So the hope became that the frogs would shelter in the biblical zoo in Jerusalem until quiet returned to the north, and then they would be taken home to the Hula, where they could breathe. In this, the Hula painted frogs were not that different from most human residents of the north who had left their home, planning to be back soon when quiet was restored, only to find that quiet in the north is hard to achieve. And what was supposed to be weeks sheltering down south turned into years. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, A conservation expert at the biblical zoo named Ariel Kedem raised and cared for the Agolashon Shahor Gahon frogs, trying everything he knew to do to prod them to reproduce. He separated them into pairs and he mixed up their food and he varied the temperature of their water, changing the times and intensities of their exposure to light and doing everything else that he could think of. Once or twice, frogs laid eggs, but these eggs produced no tadpoles. Until, that is, a couple of weeks ago, when all at once, and to Ariel Kedem's surprise, more than 300 tadpoles hatched in a single day. These were the first animals of the genus Leitonia to be born in captivity ever. Ariel Kedem does not know why it happened, what mix of variables made what had been impossible forever suddenly possible. Something had changed, something had happened. And whatever it was, Ariel Kedem says, it can surely be made to happen again. Meaning that at this moment, the future of the Agol Lashon Chahor Gachon is more filled with promise than it has been in decades, maybe millennia, maybe millions of years. And I say all this because it is a reminder at a moment when I need one anyway, that nothing about the future is ever really fully fixed. Even the things that seem the most fixed, death, extinction, even these things are not fixed in the way we imagined. Two men whose entire world was destroyed in Berlin, whose lives as they knew them and whose family lines faced sure extinction, found new lives here and they found one another. And they found a new frog from Palestine. A seemingly never ending war with Lebanon leaves a man who worried that brown mouthed black bellied frogs may go extinct for the second time in 70 years to take 20 creatures to shelter in an aquarium between an orangutan environment and a penguin pool. And there, for reasons we do not yet understand, they are fruitful and they multiply, maybe never to face extinction again. No one expected the story to lead where it did. But today there are in Jerusalem hundreds of Latonia nigra ventur swimming happily in a large aquarium. Because sometimes life rises. Today, two discussions, first but with a whimper, with apologies to T.S. eliot, as it seems even more likely that the only partially prosecuted. From the perspective of our Prime Minister, war with Iran will soon enter its next phase of months long negotiations between US President Trump's negotiators and Mujtaba Khomeini's that may produce results or may just lose the attention of our American President, basically trailing off into exactly what we do not know. And we will wonder whether this purgatorial path is to be preferred over the path to perdition we lately have been on. And I ask once again, who writes this shit? And our second discussion Status Woe as apropos the relatively short attention span of the American president as 230 days have passed since the ceasefire went into effect in Gaza and the last of the living hostages came home. And though the Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump was expected by now to have stripped Hamas of its weapons, installed the government of efficient technocrats, started rebuilding the cities and villages of Gaza and replacing the IDF with an international peacekeeping force, none of that has occurred, and none of it shows any sign of soon occurring. Instead, we have what we will wonder a status quo that leaves more than half of Gaza controlled by the IDF and the other half controlled by Hamas flush with guns and missiles and bombs while covered with rubble and devoid of schools, hospitals, universities and mosques. What do we make of this woeful status quo? 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 discuss what it means to us that the shekel is as valuable now as it has been anytime in the last 32 and a half years, since October 1993, the year that the movie Groundhog Day came out in. Which kind of makes you think if you got a dollar it will only get you 2 shekels and 84 agarot. A euro will get you 3 shekels and 30 and a pound will get you 3 shekels AND 81 if you got savings. In America they lost a fifth of their value over the last year and 5% of their value over just the last month. Of course we, Susan and I smartly took the precaution of using all of our savings to pay for our boys college. But not everyone is a financial genius like we are, so we will talk about what it means. And since we are on the topic of unreasonably generous Patreon people, Itay has asked me to mention that if you want to write us whether you're a Patreon person or not, the very best way to do it is to do it through the Patreon page. Facebook apparently has gotten unwieldy and unreliable, which if you've written to me and haven't heard back, that must be the reason and not the fact that I I am unreliable and duplicitous and a bastard. But for now, please listen to this. That song is Kiki Malinki and featuring Yuval Mendelssohn. New music of these unsettling times. And now it is time for our first discussion. So, Linda, the war with Iran began with a bang, but it's ending. Kind of weird, isn't it?
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Yeah, it certainly seems to be, you know. US President Donald Trump phoned up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past Shabbat to tell him that the United States was about to sign a letter of intent with Iran that would formally end the war and launch a 30 day period of negotiations about Iran's nuclear program and the more than 400 kg of enriched uranium that Iran holds. In return for signing the letter of intent, the President told the Prime Minister Iran would allow tankers and other ships to sail through the Straits of Hormuz, allowing oil markets to go back to their status quo ante what they were before the war. War. According to reports that may or may not be reliable, Prime Minister Netanyahu tried to dissuade President Trump from signing the letter. One US Official said that his hair was on fire, but President Trump would have none of it. Reuters ran an article with a nicely understated headline, Netanyahu Admits Difficulty influencing Trump decisions on Iran, sources say. Writing in the Atlantic, senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, Robert Kagan explains why Prime Minister Netanyahu was dismissed made by President Trump's news. The ceasefire with Iran, Kagan writes, is essentially an admission on the part of the Americans that their war with Israel on Iran has ended in full blown defeat. Among the issues to be discussed in the negotiation period, which has since Saturday expanded to 60 days, are a cancellation of long standing economic sanctions against Iran, a freeing of billions of dollars of now frozen Iranian assets, assets and the possibility of war reparations. President Trump has said that Iranian negotiators agreed in principle to give us their enriched uranium, a claim that Iranian sources forcefully deny. There have been no reports that Iran's ballistic missile stockpile or the factories they have churning out new ballistic missiles have come up in the negotiations. In Robert Kagan's analysis, President Trump, quote, seems to hope to slip away without Americans noticing, noticing the magnitude of the defeat the Iranians have handed them for us, though not noticing what President Trump seems to be willing to give up to the Iranians is not that much of an option. Part of the difference is that while Donald Trump lives more than 10,000 km from Tehran, out of the range of the missiles, Benjamin Netanyahu lives 1,500 kilometers from Tehran, well within their range. Another part of the difference is that there was never a backward running clock in central Tehran, counting down the days until the Islamic Republic of Iran lays waste to the United States. Until Israel took it out last summer, there was such a countdown clock for Israel, for Benjamin Netanyahu in particular. Another difference is that while the Iran war seems never popular in America and President Trump feels like he needs to have it over before congressional elections in the fall in Israel, having the war with Iran end without any obvious and decisive gain is bound to hurt the prime minister in his fall asset elections. It was just a few months ago that Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Danone, could say on Fox News that
- [34:17]
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there is no daylight between Israel and the US There is no daylight between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, and
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yet now there seems to be a vast vista of bright daylight between the two of them. Judah, what should we make of the agreement that the Americans and the Iranians seem to be close to some, which is essentially an agreement to do their best first to come to agree about what it is that they ought to try to agree about, and then after that, having agreed about what they hope to agree about, to do their best to agree about as many of those things as possible. Where does it leave us?
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C
So I want to make the bold and brave stance that I don't know, you know, I think there's, I can't accept that. Yeah, look, there's a lot of criticism of what seems to be emerging within Israel and also among, you know, more Iran hawks in the United States, that this is capitulation, that this is JCPOA, not like a worse version even than the 2015 Iran deal, the JCPOA, which Trump famously pulled out of in 2018 during his first term, primarily due to urging from Israel. And so there's a of lot of criticism that's flying that way that after all of this war and destruction in Iran, in the uae, in Israel and elsewhere in the region, there's not very much to show for it. And if anything, we're potentially sort of going back to what, what was and what was this all about? There's obviously a very strong, within Israel, there's obviously a very strong political aspect to it, that this is something that we're going to be seeing a lot in the, in the election. And the problem with it is the agreement itself is sort of a discrete issue and obviously the contents of it, which are still being worked out. And Trump sort of every day is indicating differently if it's going ahead. If it's not going ahead, it's about to happen. Whoa, not so fast. So I think it's unclear what this agreement is going to be, but I think part of the problem in thinking about it is we really don't. Don't know particularly well where Iran is in this because there's a total. Still an Internet blackout in the country. It's not very clear what capabilities they do have. They don't have where they're coming into these negotiations, what their standing is. Obviously, the regime is still in place, but what exactly does that mean? And so I think that makes it hard to really assess the situation. Are they actually coming from a place where of strength, or are they coming, you know, pretending to come from a place of strength while really being as weak as they've ever been? I think that's a really profound question that we don't know the answer to. Obviously, there's some very smart Iran thinkers out there who are saying that the regime is sticking around, that this was a wasted, destructive effort. And at the same time, we can't know if this was sort of the first domino falling and it's going to take a few months, a few, you know, a handful of years before, you know, the regime is toppled, or if, yeah, this was, you know, a total boondoggle, you know, an enormously destructive waste of money and resources that, you know, is just going to cost us dearly for years and years to come. And we have nothing to show for
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A
it in the worst possible scenario. It is much worse than having nothing to show for it. One possible outcome of this is that the Iranians learn the limits of America's real willingness to intervene and to force them to change and to relinquish their nuclear weapons program and to relinquish their ballistic missiles program, which, by the way, no one is speaking at about at all. And so while there will obviously need to be some months or years of rebuilding on Iran's part, it could well be that the Iran that we see at the end of this is a greater threat to Israel than the Iran that existed before that. And that is what we're concerned about. Donald Trump may have provided a kind of proof that American politics are such that. That America will not in the foreseeable future, ever really, truly to be able, be able to intervene in an effective way with what Iran is doing. And then that would be a real problem if, if this is the. The message that they end up learning. And obviously, I agree with you, Judah. You're. You're right. We don't know what the result is. And we, we don't know because we don't know what Iran is like now. And we certainly don't know what Iran will be like in six months or in six years. But, but if that ends up being the result, it will truly be somewhat disastrous. And I think that the people here who you hear most often criticizing it say that an operation like this, if you go in with a time limited or intensity limited view about the, what you're willing to do in order to complete this operation, as the Americans obviously did in retrospect, then you can't do it. Then all you can do essentially, is cause damage. You have to go in committed to continuing to fight this fight. I don't know exactly if that's right, but at the moment, there's something very, very unnerving about, about seeing Donald Trump saying that, you know, I've won, I've won, I've won, while very, very clearly signaling, you know, I've lost and I don't give a damn, and let's move on to the next thing. It's really, it's really unnerving. And in our, like, in my nightmares where I imagine a scenario where some, you know, Iran or some other consortium of Israel's enemies really manage to attack Israel in a way that threatens our existence, I have now an image of an American president raising their hands and shrugging their shoulders and saying, oh, well, that's a shame. And it's very unnerving to me. Linda, what do you think?
- [40:54]
B
Well, I think you touch on something really important, Noah, which is that Israel has no freedom of action in this whole thing, thing. It's all being decided by President Trump. And that's kind of scary as well, especially with, I don't believe anything he says. I mean, we won, we won, we won. No, we didn't. Yes, there's an agreement. No, there isn't an agreement. So the fact that Israel really can't do anything, and he actually came out and said, I told Israel to do X. And then the other question is, what happens with Lebanon? Lebanon, Israel has been intensifying the fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But if President Trump says to Israel stop in Lebanon, then they stop that too when Israeli soldiers are being killed every day in Lebanon. So the thing is that the Iranians, all they need to do to win is to survive, which the regime has apparently done. And Jude, I agree with you. We really don't know how much damage has been done. But in any case, they seem to already be, be rebuilding. And the nuclear issue, you know, President Trump has said a few times that, you know, Iran will not have nuclear weapons, won't make nuclear weapons, and there's some, you know, there'll be negotiations about what to do with the uranium. But I just don't have any confidence that he has the staying power to really see this thing through. And I think that he's kind of moved on. I agree with you, Noah, to whatever the next thing is. And I think it really is pretty scary.
- [42:23]
C
I would add two things that make it even scarier. One is, in addition to learning the lesson of the limits of the American willingness to go to war in Iran, Iran also sees the technical limitations of the American and Israeli military. And they can now, as they're rebuilding, they're not just rebuilding, they can be upgrading and digging, building their factories and enrichment sites even deeper, even under deeper and deeper mountains and under deeper and deeper rock, and making it even more impenetrable and making it that much more difficult for another conflict in the future. And the other part of it is that unlike with the first JCPOA that Israel and its allies in the United States and other sort of Iran hawks could rail against and really do every. There's a significant sort of body of evidence that one of the big causes of the distancing between American Jewry and Israel and America and Israel in general is connected to Netanyahu's speech in 2015 against the JCPOA in Congress and against Obama. And while it was easy in a certain sense for Israel to lobby and advocate against Obama, Israel and especially Benjamin Netanyahu have specifically cast our lot with Donald Trump. And that makes it much more difficult for them to really advocate and fight against what's happening if this is something that he's pursuing.
- [44:02]
A
So I'll see your two depressing things and raise you by one depressing thing, which is the, that increasingly we've all seen within America, an increasing number of people view this entire war, which they see as being a failure and having been a mistake from the beginning, as having been instigated by Israel, which in a kind of, maybe a sort of Machiavellian kind of way, Benjamin Netanyahu somehow persuaded President Trump to do. And in. And so Israel has become the tail that wags the dog. And Israel has become, you know, every one of those late 19th century caricatures of the, of the, the, you know, the fat Jew controlling world events. So that, that is another outcome of this war that, that you could imagine balancing against, say regime change in Iran or an Iran that has reliably agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons. But if we don't get any of those other things, then there's no balance. And this scale just goes like, oh my God, the price that we in Israel paid for this thing is really, really heavy. Huh? Our bunny, I don't know if I've told you, our bunny is so cute. It just, he is just adorable. Absolutely adorable. And every day he seems to get more adorable, which is just to say things balance out. There's karma in the world. Now listen, Sam. Shabbat. That song is Shaat Ratzon by Narquis and now it is time for our second discussion. So Judah, sort of strange how little we hear these days about Gaza. I don't imagine that no news is maybe good news there, is it?
- [47:33]
C
So, 230 days ago, as we record, on October 10th of last year, a ceasefire took effect in Gaza, ending the war that started on October 7, two years prior, at least for the time being. Three days after that, on October 13, the last of the living hostages were freed from Gaza and US President Donald Trump visited Israel for three and a half hours to address the Knesset before flying to Sharm El Sheikh to sign the ceasefire agreement that he had brought brokered. The agreement that he signed described a step by step process that would lead to Hamas giving up its weapons and to the reconstruction of Gaza and to the establishment of an interim government of technocrats, professionals with expertise in housing, health, education, transportation and all the other things that you need to create a working civil society. The step by step process was to be guided by a so called Board of Peace chaired by President Donald Trump himself. However, the Board of Peace has met only once, on February 19, 98 days ago, and the most concrete discussion that took place when it did may have been of the proposal by the President of Kazakhstan to administer a special President Trump Award to recognize the US President's outstanding peace building efforts and achievement. It was announced after the meeting that $7 billion had been pledged by 27 member states, the board of of which so far $23 million have been transferred to cover the operation of the board itself. And another 100 million have been allocated to rebuild a Gaza police force. That $123 million came from the UAE and Morocco. Doing the math, 98.2% of the money that was pledged has never arrived, at least not yet. And the war left Gaza ravaged and very much in need of very much more than $7 billion. The UN estimates that 123,464 buildings in Gaza have been destroyed since October 7 and 50,973 buildings have been damaged. Together, these 174,437 buildings account for 81% of all structures in Gaza. 76.6% of all houses were damaged or destroyed and of these just under 85% were wrecked beyond repair. The World Health organization says that 34 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza were damaged. 18 of them are not functional. 526 of 564 schools were damaged, of which 493 are at the moment unusable. 22 of the 38 universities were damaged so much that classes cannot be held in them. 835 of the 1230 mosques in Gaza Gaza are said to be completely destroyed. One can doubt and question these statistics. There's every reason to think that at least some of them may be exaggerated. But I don't think you can reasonably doubt that Gaza has been laid waste and that the project of rebuilding it is an enormous one and an expensive one. The original ceasefire agreement called for a withdrawal of IDF soldiers from most of Gaza, save for a relatively small buffer zone at the border. However, as of now, Israel controls more than half of Gaza, including a big buffer zone in the east and the north, a big restricted zone in the south near Rafah and two east west security corridors, the Philadelphia corridor in the south and the Netzerim corridor in the middle of Gaza. At the same time, not only has Hamas not disarmed, but there are signs that it is rearming itself in the 230 days since the ceasefire was declared. Experts estimate that Hamas today has hundreds of short and mid range rockets and factories to make more. It has attack and reconnaissance drone, a great many semi automatic and automatic rifles, grenades, explosives, rocket propelled grenades, anti tank missiles, mortars, mines, underwater mines and shoulder fired anti aircraft missiles. It is also said to still control many kilometers of underground tunnels, some reconstructed after the IDF withdrew and some that were never discovered by the IDF in the first place. Michael Milstein, an especially measured and phlegmatic Tel Aviv University expert on Gaza, told the New Yorker this week that in Gaza, quote, nothing has changed. Hamas is the prominent player and has total control of the Palestinian side of Gaza. And now we are stuck. There has been no progress on the second phase of the ceasefire which was supposed to be about disarmament and governance and the reconstruction process, but there has been nothing. Interestingly, we learned this week that the head of the of Israel's Shin Bet Internal Security Service, David Zini recently met in the United Arab Emirates with Mohamed dahlia, a crusty 64 year old Younis born Fatah man who was formerly one of the heads of the preventative services in Gaza before he ran afoul first of Yasser Arafat and then of Arafat's successor, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently in the 22nd year of his four year term. Abbas has long claimed that Declan murdered Yasser Arafat. Mohammad Dahlan was also apparently involved in a 2006American plan to unseat Hamas in Gaza after they consolidated power there, murdering or exiled Fatah leaders in the region. In 2011, Mohammed Dahlan moved to the UAE and in 2014 he was tried in abstention in a Palestinian courtroom in Ramallah for various crimes like defaming President Abbas and embezzlement. In 2016, Turkey put Dahlan on its, quote, most wanted terrorist lists for his ostensible involvement in a coup attempt in that country. On the other hand, the journal Foreign Policy reported that Mohammed Dahlia played an important part in the success of the Abraham accords. And former U.S. ambassador to Israel in Donald Trump's first term. David Friedman has said that Dahlan ought to replace Mahmoud Abbas, who is 90 years old, as head of the Palestinian Authority. Political analysts here hypothesized that the purpose of David Zini's visit was to vet Mohammad Dahlan for the job of Chief Administrator of Gaza, apparently sidestepping for a moment the authority of the border peace. All of which leads to some big questions. Linda, what's up with Gaza now? What can we expect or hope for for Gaza's future?
- [53:31]
B
It's a very difficult situation in Gaza this week. By the way, is Eid al Adha the Feast of the sacrifice? And I spoke to people in Gaza who say that there's really no feeling of celebration. I've mentioned before that I've been sort of helping someone who a source of mine in Gaza with some money during this whole time. And last week she wrote me and said, can you please help me buy food? And then I wrote her, I sent money and then wrote her back and said, tell me a little about your situation now. Are you still in a tent? Is there more food in Gaza these days? And here's her response. Hello, habibti, I'm sorry, I was busy with my mother at the hospital. Yes, I'm still in the tent. There's nowhere else for us to go. We'll be stuck in this awful tent for the rest of our life. Lives. Yes, there's some food in Gaza, but the prices are honestly very high. So I think there's this feeling of just real depression in Gaza that even though there's a ceasefire, they see, you know, constant Israeli attacks. Just in the last two days, something like 20 people have been killed in Gaza. Israel was targeting several, you know, senior Hamas people and attacked. Of those 20, several people, several were children. So there's sort of constant, they say, constant Israeli attacks on Gaza. The situation is not any better. Hamas does seem to be very firmly entrenched in Gaza. Israel has been helping these sort of anti Gaza militias. In fact, just this morning, apparently one of these militias was seen using a very large drone, apparently possibly provided by Israel. But these anti Hamas militias are, are certainly not pro Israel and they're themselves corrupt and whatever. So I think there's this feeling of just depression in Gaza that nothing has changed, but now the world doesn't care anymore and that they've kind of been forgotten. You have, you know, children, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza who have now been out of school for three years. A few schools have opened in tents in the refugee camps, but there are still most, most kids are not going to school. Now. That's criminal. And I think everything sort of seems to be frozen. The Board of Peace isn't doing anything. Hamas is not disarming. Israel, in fact, is taking more territory in Gaza. This week they took an additional 5%. So they now control 59% of Gaza, not 53%, which is what it was. And I think that Gaza, Gaza is just not a subject for most Israelis. They don't talk about Gaza, they don't think about Gaza. And so I think Palestinians are feeling that it's not just Israelis that the entire world has kind of forgotten about Gaza. So they're really just quite despondent.
- [56:24]
A
Yeah, there was this slogan of anti Israel, pro Palestinian protesters in the west from October 7th on, all eyes on Gaza. Which really, I think that a lot of times what they meant is, you know, all eyes on Israel. But now there is this terrible feeling that no eyes are on Gaza. Even again, the people who are organizing and protesting seem to be concerned mostly with diminishing Israel, however possible, and delegitimating Israel. And. And there does not seem to be the same kind of concern for the people of Gaza as there ever was. And I mean, I feel frustrated and mad about it in a number of directions. One of them is at the Americans, at Donald Trump. I had never realized until these past months what an important moral category attention is and that how much of a moral failing. It is to be incapable of training your attention on something for long enough to actually address real problems. And this is of course at the very heart of Trumpism is the flitting attention from one thing to another, another. And the fact that this board of peace exists, meaning that it is the address that you go to to try to move forward some kind of process of rebuilding Gaza and the fact that it is essentially non functioning is devastating because there's no, no one else is going to exactly move in to do this crucial job because there exists this body and this body is not acting and it's infuriating. Obviously. Obviously there is what to be infuriated at Hamas as always. That seems so. They seem so willing to foster suffering of Gazans in order to advance their own immediate political aims and I think their long term aims of drought driving the Jews out of Palestine entirely. But the anger that I feel most strongly is obviously against the Israelis. Now what do we say? We say the first step of this was supposed to be the disarming of Hamas and we will not move forward until Hamas is disarmed. We will not leave Gaza, we will not lend our hand to the reconstruction. But Hamas is not going to be disarmed. The Israelis have to, to have to admit that Hamas is not going to be disarmed and do what we can to move forward in this reconstruction. Obviously, because just from a point of view of humanity, it has to be done. But also from our own best interests, it needs to be done. This technocratic government, if that's going to be the next step, or a government under Dahlan or whatever it is, has to, has to be established and has to move forward. Massive amounts of, massive amounts of money have to pour in. Schools need to be rebuilt, hospitals need to be fixed, mosques need to be rebuilt, houses need to be rebuilt. It's this massive, massive thing of a scale that humanity has rarely seen and there isn't time to wait. But for us, it serves our interests to say, well, until Hamas doesn't, until no person from Hamas has a rifle in their closet or in their arms, we will do nothing. And that is simply terrible. Judah, what do you think?
- [60:42]
C
Yeah, I mean the first, yes, it's all tremendously depressed, depressing, just full stop, that's enough. And the problem is that in order to do all of the reconstruction, you do need to disarm Hamas. It's never going to be 100%, but that's part of it is that we were sold this bill of goods of nitzachon. Muchhlat of total victory. That was sort of the government's line, which was obviously not feasible. And even now you have Miri Regev in some interviews sort of scaling that back. Of course, we never meant, you know, total victory when we said total victory. But you need to have people that are going to take, that are going to disarm Hamas, like they're not going to give up their weapons by themselves. And Israel is profoundly uncomfortable with that concept. We really don't, you know, the Israeli public, I don't want to talk about necessarily the Israeli security agencies, which is a little bit different, but the Israeli public is very uncomfortable with the fact that the Palestinian Authority has guns in the West Bank. It makes us uncomfortable. And especially when there's terror attacks that are carried out by members of the Palestinian Authority security services, it's even more so, Aha. We shouldn't be giving them guns. And now you want to give them even more guns and even more weaponry in Gaza? Sort of no way. And it's entirely sort of politically unfeasible if you're on the left or the right to think about giving Palestinians guns. And yet if you want to get rid, why is Hamas not as strong in the west bank as it is in Gaza? People on the settler right will say because of the settlements, but also because there's a huge sort of, there's a massive internationally funded and trained institution of the Palestinian Authority security services that are fighting Hamas in ways that the Israeli military doesn't necessarily have to in the West Bank. And you would want to have something like that in Gaza. You want to have other guys with guns that are taking the guns away from Hamas that are going to be fighting them over their small arms. And that's something that's just sort of politically entirely untenable. Even though, you know, that is the sine qua non for Gaza reconstruction is getting rid of Hamas. But we're not going to do that. There's definitely no interest, political will for Israel to go in and fully be running Gaza in that way. And when we saw that it was happening a little bit more last summer, it was an absolute disaster and was terrible. And so we're just left with this awful limbo.
- [63:18]
A
So then Dahlan is kind of a solution, a putative solution to that problem. But it's a little bit of a smart ass solution. I mean, it's a smart ass solution,
- [63:28]
C
but it also like that starts, that's like the first step, but then the next step is, yeah, you gotta, then give the Klan weapons and power and the ability to use them to stop Hamas. And that's something that I don't think we're going to seriously see in Israel because the first time that's, you know, used against an Israeli target, Zo like that's it, you know, the, at the
- [63:51]
B
end of the story, or the Palestinian Authority, if not Dahlan, which is also
- [63:55]
C
is the Israeli government has been been vilifying the Palestine for good reasons. I mentioned Abbas being in the 22nd year of his four year term. The Palestinian Authority is not a great institution.
- [64:11]
B
The other thing is there was supposed to be an international peacekeeping force and that hasn't happened and there doesn't seem like it's going to happen. But when we talk about disarming Hamas, I think you have to make a distinction between, between, you know, weapons that could hit Israel and weapons that are, you know, smaller weapons. And I had seen some reports that Israel might be willing to allow Hamas to keep some of the smaller weapons. But in addition, apparently there's like miles and miles and miles of tunnels that Israel still hasn't blown up or gotten rid of. But you have this situation where it's just kind of static. And I think, I think the law of entropy is that things are always going to go one way or the other. And if they're not moving forward towards some kind of the beginning of reconstruction, which is going to take probably decades, we're talking about decades. And meanwhile people are just living in conditions that are simply not livable.
- [65:14]
A
Now listen to this. That song is Lo Bati by Shaya. You can find all the music you heard on the show this week in all the usual places. And now it is time for our Veda country segment. This is the part of the show in which each of us describes something that surprised or amused, enchanted or ensorceled, maybe even fluged us as we wended our way through our world over the last little while. Judah, what is your. What a country.
- [67:17]
C
I found myself on Tuesday morning walking from the Tel Aviv Universita train station to the Rabin station center in northern Tel Aviv for a conference that was being put on by the Ruderman Family Foundation. It was a conference on Israel America relations. And I was going sort of partially for work, but also because I'm a graduate of the Ruderman Program at Haifa University on American Jewish Studies. And I was walking from the train, it was about a 10 minute walk, walked down and made my way up. And as I did, I passed by a massive public art installation that is called Trees In Negative that was created by Menashe Kadishman, who's about the most Israeli artist that you can imagine. He's created a lot of the biggest sort of public artworks throughout the country. There's the, you know, perhaps the most famous is Upright, the steel structure in front of Habima Theater made up of three round circles that seemingly are suspended in air. But he's also sort of maybe most famous for his portraits of sheep, very colorful sheep that you can find in pretty much every art gallery in the state of Israel. But trees in Negative are sort of exactly what it sounds like. It's these massive steel structures, steel slaves, out of which is cut an outline of a tree. And it's actually very beautiful because it's also interspersed with actual olive trees. And I walked by it, and I've probably driven past it any number of times on Rokach Boulevard on my way coming from the north into Tel Aviv. But as I was walking this time, I was able to see a small plaque on the ground. And the plaque read trees and Negative. Menashe Kadishman, born Tel Aviv, 1932, 1975, Corton style deal gift of the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Allentown, Pennsylvania, usa. I know Allentown. I grew up in Philadelphia, and Allentown's not too far away. And for the past three and a bit years, I've been the managing editor of E. Jewish Philanthropy, which looks at the world of philanthropy. And when people ask me about the job, I like to say that it gives me a new lens on the world. And. And part of that lens and part of that new insight that I have is noticing plaques like that and seeing the names on the buildings when I also went into the Rabin center, and when I go to museums and hospitals and pretty much anywhere and on the names of, you know, Magen de Viradome ambulances as they drive by. And it started me down a path of, okay, who are Philip and Muriel Berman? And so I looked them up and Philip. Philip Berman was born in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, a little bit outside of Allentown, to Eastern European immigrant farmers. And he served in World War II in the South Pacific, and he learned about trucks. And when he came back, he started a trucking company specifically doing rentals. And apparently it went very well, and he made a small fortune that way. And in the 1970s, he was approached by the owners of Hess Brothers Department store to try to get him to purchase it from them, which he did. And he turned Hess Brothers Department Store into a major department store chain with, I think, More than a dozen, with more than a dozen stores throughout Pennsylvania. And then he went on to sell that to Crown American, which owned a whole bunch of other malls and department stores throughout the country. And he used his fortune in really amazing ways. He gave lots of money to Jewish causes, to Hadassah, to the American Jewish community, the American Jewish Committee, and also to Hebrew University, among many others. But sort of the main thing that he did was fund art. He eventually became the chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is very famous especially for the rocky steps. But he also gave a large amount of money to museums here in Israel, including to the Television Aviva Art Museum and to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And I love it. I love every part of it. And there's something that we. There's a term that's sort of very often used derisively called checkbook Zionism. You know, that you have all of these American Jews that they express their Zionism by writing checks, and we dismiss that. And one of the things that has really opened my eyes over the past three years in reporting on this is it's easy to write that off. But also, we wouldn't be here without this. Without that support, without that funding, we wouldn't have the most Israeli artist, Menashe Kadishman, making art that's going up in front of a building celebrating the most Israeli man, possibly Yitzhak Rabin, without the funding and without the support and without the genius that comes from Americans. And I went into. I got a little smirk as I looked, walked past this art exhibit and saw that it was donated by Americans. As I went into this conference about the American relationship with Israel and heard from the former head of the master's degree program that I did, Gorel Roee, talk about how Israel is the ultimate partnership between the Jews who live here and the Jews who you don't. And part of me thought, you know, I didn't even need to come to the conference. I could have just told you that from walking here.
- [72:49]
A
Cool. Linda, what is your word of country?
- [72:52]
B
Well, I spent Shavuot last week with 1700 of my closest friends at Club Hotel Eilat. And of those 1700, I think 1,800 of them were children. So there was a little bit of a Lord of the Flies situation going on. And, you know, there was some typical Israeli hotel behavior, like. Like the guy who took 20 lounge chairs for his entire Hamila. First of all, everybody seemed to be there in Hamula, you know, large groups of related people, you know, big families. And he took 20 lounge chairs and half of them never showed up. There were people smoking despite signs all over saying please only smoke in the smoking areas. And my, one of the banes of my existence has always been this whole issue of taking way more food than you could possibly eat from the hotel buffet. And then of course, it getting wasted. And I've actually thought about this quite a bit and a friend of mine said that the middle class Israelis who go to places like Club Hotel, which is not the fanciest place, are people who might have grown up not having very much. And so for them, this idea of shefa, of abundance, of being able to take more. I also noticed that there's a little bit of a difference, and I will cautiously say that this may be an Ashkenazi Sephardi difference. You know, when I go to a buffet, I take my plate and I take what I want and I put what I want on my plate and that's the end of it. And I think maybe Sephardim tend to bring big plates. They bring plates to the middle of the table and then everybody helps themselves from the those plates. It's much more of a communal kind of thing. So maybe. But despite all of this, there were three moments of grace that I'd like to briefly share with you. And two of them actually happened in shul. Now, when I go to a hotel for Shabbat or a holiday, I don't usually go to shul. It's svardi davening, which tends to go very long and I don't know, I can't always follow what's going on. And often shul ends just as breakfast is ending. So if I have to choose between shul and breakfast at a hotel, it's pretty clear what choice I'm going to make. But it was Shavuot and I wanted to hear the reading of the Ten Commandments. So I went to shul. And I'm very happy I did because there were two very special moments. First was when I came into shul. There was a decent women's section. You could actually see what was going on. And There were about 15 women, mostly looking pretty religious. And there was one young woman in jeans and a T shirt. And I don't know if she was connected to anyone or not, but at least four times during the Tefillah, different during the prayers, four different women came over to her and just very nicely showed her where the place was. And she was obviously somebody who was kind of new to this and without any judgment, without making a big deal about It. They just pointed out the place. So that was one thing. The second thing was when they opened the ark, the Aron Hakodesh, for the Torah reading. They're standing there and they're saying something, some prayer that I was unfamiliar with. And it went on for about 15 minutes. And finally, after about 10 minutes, I turned to one of the other women and I said, what are they saying? And she showed me in the Sidur that there is an actual Ketubah, a marriage contract between God and the Jewish people. That Shavuot, which we talked about last week was, is the holiday where God gave the Torah to Israel. And there's actually. You read Sephardim. Read this very beautiful, very long marriage contract between God and the Jewish people. And the third moment happened a little later at the pool. I was reading a very thick book. My book club is reading Chaim Grad's Sons and Daughters, which has just been translated. It's excellent, by the way. So I was sitting in the middle of this very loud Israeli hotel in a lot, trying to immerse myself in the world of 1930s Poland. And this man who was sitting near me with his family started playing music on his phone. And he turned to me. I didn't say a word to him, and he said, I see that you're trying to read. I put music on for the avira, for the atmosphere and for fun, but if it's disturbing you to read, just tell me and I'll turn it down. And I thought that if we could all behave this way, then Israel would be a better place.
- [77:41]
A
So Mein Linda is also about Shavuot. Shavuot was a week ago now, and I still feel it. Yaduta, the new consortium of all the communities and groups in the city where women and men have equal parts, or queer couples are equal parts, or where poetry and song sometimes take the place of traditional liturgy, you know, the sorts of communities. Yaduta put out a list of all the Tikuns, the most or all of the night study that is part of Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah, though not only the festival of the giving of the Torah. And there were 14 Tikuns, which is twice what there were just last year. And if last year, with my bike and some rain Red Bull, I could make it at least for a time, to all of them. This year, that was impossible. I got to eight of them, the first being Chavruta, an LGBTQ Orthodox group. And it started with a woman, a therapist, and a kabbalist talking about relationships and specifically how in when you think about me and you. God. God is found in the and in me and you. She cited a text from Abote, the Ethics of the Five Father that go shnayim shiyoshvin v' yesh b' nehem d' vre Torah shchina shruya b'. Nehem. Two people sitting and there are words of Torah between them. The Divine Presence rests among them. I would hear this passage three times over the course of that night in three different places, and here at the headquarters of Chavruta, it meant, when you take seriously someone you love, then together you're summoning God. God. That is what the woman said. In any case, the next time I heard the passage, Rachel Elior, a professor at Hebrew University of Jewish Philosophy Hasidut and Kabbalah, was talking at the big Reform chul across from the River Beit Daniel. And she said the very first time, the Shekhinah, the Divine presence, which is by tradition, by the way a female thing is ever mentioned anywhere, is after the destruction of the temple, when the big and fearsome God of the sacrifices and of the holy of holies, that God of the temple, is now homeless. And now in place of that God, there is the Shechina, who settles in with two people talking about things that matter. And this was the point, or a point anyway, of Rachel Elior's astonishing hour long stream of brilliance, without hesitation and without notes. This was because whenever something is destroyed, the rabbis responded not with despair, but with hope. Hope, which was of course a message that Rachel Elior was trying to leave for us at this moment. And after Rachel Eliyor was done, it was one in the morning, and Rav Gilad Kariv, the Rabbi MK from the Old Labor Party, who opened by saying that this was his third tikkun so far in that night, and he still had one more to go to after, and each one was different from the next he had really prepared. He gave a drash about another passage from Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, that goes, one who says what's mine is min mine and what's yours is yours. This is a normal trait. One who says what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine is an ignoramus. What's mine is yours and what's yours is yours. A Hasid what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine. A wicked person. And Rav Kariv came around to saying there is virtue in the normal one, in being a way that doesn't demand that you, you make sacrifices all the time. And he shows how the text and tradition, they're ambivalent about the Hasid, the ostensibly righteous one, what's mine is yours and what's yours is yours. And that they prefer the one who says, what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. The thing about Shavuot Night in Tel Aviv is that there are each of the things that you see and hear at Binah, which calls itself the home of Israeli Judaism. And at the the heart of it is the link between Jewish culture, heritage and tradition, and the values of democracy. That's how they define themselves. They had at the beginning an hour and a half of music by a group called Hamagal, the Circle, a great group who perform in a circle, and around them the 300 of us made a bigger circle, and we all sang and clapped in the grass. At Beit Fila Yisraeli, the evening was given over entirely to talking about youth, humor and satire and politics and our souls. So there are each of the things, every one of them memorable in its own way. And then there is all of the things, something cumulative, and the night time is part of it. You getting tired as the night goes on is part of it. It makes everything strange and fuzzy and somehow luminous. And at 2 in the morning, I was in the art museum where Alma was holding its tikkun, and there was a session called Two Conversations with God, the Poet of the Psalms and Zelda, the Poet, by a young poet herself named Shani Poker, who I knew from just one poem that I saw in the newspaper called Walking About Her Wife Leaving Her. And that poem goes, how do we go on walking when from every stone the soul of our wife turns towards us? How do we go on walking when every street lamp illuminates the flesh of her skin? How do we go on walking when the air itself is rounded like the curves of her body? How do we go on walking when our longing does not grow still? How do we go on walking with all that cannot be atoned for? And then the poem ends with this, which I could not get out of my head after I read it. And I said, still can't Atonement, that strange wonder of human nature. Will you come to us on the wings of memory or on the wings of forgetting? The wings of memory and the wings of forgetting. It's not just atonement. Will the world we are waiting for tired, busted? Will it come on the wings of memory, or will it come on the wings of forgetting? And the lecture that she gave was was in a not all that big room filled with more than 100 people. Every chair was occupied, so a bunch of us leaned against the walls until the docents came up and gently whispered into our ears one by one, please do not lean on the priceless art, which in the event was baroque, Dutch, Golden Age sorts of stuff. And Chani Poker read the poems of the Psalms and the poems of Zelda. And it was 2:30 in the morning and then it was 3 in the morning and people, it got strange and there were moments when you could swear that the paintings themselves were listening. And we were all there. And what was sure was the Shekhinah was there, clear as anything, summoned by Shani Poker and by the rest of us. And all of that was a week ago now and I still feel it. And that brings us to the end of our show, thanks to Itai Shalem, our station manager, without whom there would be none of of this, thanks to Achibo Lim, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva. They give us some music at the start and the end of our show. Thank you Linda. Thank you Natalie. Thank you Judah Ari Lieb, lion hearted. 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 in your debt. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking your valuable time to listen and ask you to like us still on Facebook and drop us a line@patreon.com, we're gonna answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this. If you are looking for the precise Linnaean classificatory binomial for the Promise podcast, it is Podcastus Nauseosis. Finish that any way you want. That's science, people. But before you do that, remember that today as we record on May 28, we celebrate international Talus Day Day. That's Thales T H A L E S the great Greek philosopher about whom you learn from the dedicated website thalesday.com that our ability to reason is rooted in the tradition of philosophy and science that began with the Greek thinker Thales of Miletus, who initiated a shift in thinking from myth to logic with his theory that everything originates from one water, and who, according to tradition, predicted a total solar eclipse that ended a war because everyone thought that the gods were angry. The tagline of thalesday.com by the way, is questioning reality. Since 585 B.C. end' May 28, 585 B.C. is of course the date upon which, as the Talos.com people write, according to tradition and according to the Greek historian Herodotus, Talus doped out that a solar eclipse was destined to happen, leading the Medis and the Lydians, who had been fighting for five long years to lay down their weapons and make peace. Thales science had flipped the superstition of his contemporaries, bringing peace to the land and I am pretty sure that I do not need to tell you that I love International Thales. I adore it because I love all the days dedicated to pre Socratic philosophers and because I agree with the great ethical philosopher of animal dignity and rights, Peter Singer Singer who said, quote, today more than ever when populists are appealing to our basest emotions with distorted pictures of reality, we need to celebrate the ideals of science and philosophy and protect the free exchange of ideas in a calm and civil fashion. I welcome Thales Day as an occasion for remembering the importance of these ideas. End quote Yowza. Still, maybe rather like rational discourse itself. Already. Already I can feel International Thales Day starting to fade, fade, fade. Not to return. At the very least 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 while measured rational discourse is one of the finest things that humans know to do, there will always remain a place for half baked thinking expressed in stuttering fragments of property speech. On this, the Promised podcast.