We Jews | A Conversation Between Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch & Rabbi Shmully Hecht

On Sept 25th 2024 Shabtai NYC hosted a conversation between Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch and Rabbi Shmully Hecht. The event was hosted by Lina Tetelbaum and Matt Anderson at their home in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 

Lina is a Senior partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz. Matt is a Senior Managing Director at Blackstone. 

Carolyne Newman moderated the dialogue between the Rabbis. 

Rabbi Hirsch is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and a courageous voice in the Reform Movement consistently advocating for unapologetic support of Israel and Jewish Tradition.

Rabbi Hecht is the Senior Chabad Rabbi at Yale University and Co-founder of Shabtai, the global Jewish leadership Society based at Yale

Schottenstein Academy is proud to present this film in our effort to unite the Jewish People and inspire People to embrace G-d and his holy Torah. 

Introductions by Matt Anderson & Elina Tetelbaum

• We Jews | Introduction Transcript | Anderson Mansion

  Matt: Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming. Welcome to our home. My name is Matt. This is Lena. For those of you who don't know us. It's an honor to have our rabbi, Rabbi Hirsch, here with us today of Stephen Wise free Synagogue. It's very meaningful to us on a number of different levels. It's the synagogue where I converted and came to the Jewish faith. Well. There you go. You got one. Well, but not only one. Not only one. It is also where our children are being educated. So there's two more right there. They're in the. They're in the back. It's where Lena's parents, Anya and Yasha, are our members as well. And it's also very meaningful to them. As Soviet Jews, they found the type of community that they were denied in their home country as well. So it's also very meaningful on that level. And Anya actually has her oldest friend in the world from Tiblisi, Georgia with us today as well. Golda, who I.

  Lena: Fifty years of friendship.

  Matt: So I can tell you, we feel fortunate to have found a synagogue community that, through Rabbi Hirsch's leadership, embodies progressive values about justice and Tikkun Olam, but at the same time never sacrifices the moral clarity about Israel's central role for the Jewish people, and in Judaism, which is something I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about tonight. Possibly. So if you happen to be new to the Upper West Side and Shul shopping or even just Shul curious, perhaps, we can't recommend it enough. And, Isaiah. Yeah. He's membership coordinator. He's right there up front. So we'd also like to put in a plug for Rabbi Hirsch's podcast, In These Times, which is really wonderful. And also his sermons are also available as podcasts as well, which is wonderful for busy parents like us. Which is amazing. And we also want to thank Shmully and Toby and the rest of the Shabtai community here. You know, I think Shmully, as you all know, is a force of nature, I would say. To say the least. We met him a couple of months ago now or a few months ago. And now 80 people are in our home. So there you go.

  Matt: That's some indication of that.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We're just getting started.

  Matt: Yeah, he can be. He can be pretty.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I understand there are three bedrooms in the back.

  Matt: Yeah. There's four. There's a lot, a lot of room.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I saw two doors. There's an H and an I.

  Matt: Yeah, exactly. But no, in all seriousness, we're very excited for this discussion. And Lena and I are both very deep believers in open discourse and intellectual curiosity and free speech, which we know are core to Shabtai mission. And, you know, we're pleased to be able to make some small contribution to that through hosting this event. So, thank you.

  Lena: With one other announcement. We have, yes. For the, you know, for Jews who love free things, there are books written by Rabbi Hirsch. Multiple options. Please take one. You know, we will find pens if you would like autographs. We can't have you leaving here empty handed. That would be a Shonda.

  Matt: Please take 1 or 2.

  Lena: Thank you. It's incredibly energizing and powerful to have this group of people assembled just to be here to listen to two rabbis and a wonderful, beautiful, brilliant moderator discuss "Those Jews" a topic we will unpack tonight.

  Matt: Thank you.

We Jews: A Conversation Between Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch & Rabbi Shmully Hecht

• We Jews Transcript | Anderson Mansion

  Carolyne Newman: Thank you all so much for coming tonight. And thank you so much to our hosts, Lena and Matt, for your vibrance and for having us at your beautiful home. My name is Carolyne Newman. I'm a member of Shabtai, and I'm excited to be moderating tonight's conversation between Rabbi Shmully Hecht and Rabbi Ami Hirsch. Rabbi Hirsch currently serves as a senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, and has been recognized as one of the most influential rabbis in the United States. He has served as the executive Director of the Association of Reformed Zionists of America, advocating for pluralism and democracy in Israel. He is also the author of One People, Two Worlds, a Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi explore the issues that divide them. A critically acclaimed dialogue about the modern challenges of Jewish life. And The Lilac Tree, a rabbinical reflection of on love, courage, and Jewish history. Rabbi Shmully Hecht is the founder of Shabtai, where he fosters dialogue across diverse perspectives, blending spirituality, community, discourse, and dissent. Shabtai, sometimes also referred to as a Jewish leadership society, is the beating heart of free and open speech and is one of, if not the only, rare places globally that can host Cory Booker and Ted Cruz, Vivek Ramaswamy and Vanessa Avery, Simcha Rothman and Brett Stephens for positive, open dialogue all under one roof. Before I begin, I would like to thank my two speakers for joining me tonight. Please give it up for Rabbi Shmully and Rabbi Hirsch. For my first question, I wanted to turn to the name of this talk of "Those Jews." The name suggests division. Us and them, Jews like me and Jews that I am nothing alike. Shmully, as the figurehead of Yale's most diverse organization, can you please shed some light on why we're all here tonight?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Okay, I think I'm going to stand. I'm vertically challenged. So sitting is going to be, among other things. Sorry. Thank you. I always travel with my lawyer. Thanks, Igor. Okay. Louder. Okay. So, first of all, thank you. I want to thank God for giving us this wonderful opportunity.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You're not going to hear me any louder. Yeah. Thank God we're all here tonight. We should not take that for granted. There was a time things like this couldn't happen. Even in this country. So I want to thank God for giving us the opportunity for being here. I want to thank, on behalf of Toby, my wife, my partner, in everything I do. And on behalf of Shabtai, the organization that we serve and the members and the students and the alumni that have gathered here tonight. Thank our hosts. Poschin Bi'chvod Achsania  of course. Elena and Matt, for opening up your home tonight and for having us all here and meeting your mom and your dad and your two wonderful children- where's Matt? Oh, you're right here. Okay. I'm looking for you. And you're beautiful children. It's just an honor to be here and to meet real Moscow Jews. That's something very powerful today. From the old school who saw it all. And as your mom mentioned to me tonight, I can't believe it's happening in this country. It's something we should just think about. So thank you for having us. I want to thank Rabbi, Rabbi Hirsch I got it. She wanted me to say- she wanted me to say to Cha..Lena. I said, Elena. Okay. All right. Rabbi-.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The cultural difference. The Russians are not withdrawn.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. It's okay. I'm a Galitsianer, we go a little bit slower. So, a Galitsianer, yeah. And so I want to thank Rabbi Hirsch for being the first Rabbi ever to agree to actually sit down and have a conversation with me. That's very brave. So I appreciate it. I mean, I've tried for a long time. But I'm not that popular. So it's wonderful to have accepted the invitation on behalf of the organization and, of course, your constituents and your community and, of course, your staff and the people that work with you in the synagogue that are here tonight. So thank you. But most importantly, I want to thank everybody that came tonight. It's really wonderful to see I know so many of you and I don't know some of you. And it's just an honor for us, I think, I hope, just to see people come together on a weekday night and, some very accomplished people in the room. Everybody is accomplished in the room. So it's wonderful. It's very heartfelt. It's wonderful to see a just an apartment in the city, an intimate, packed apartment of people getting together, to get together, I got it though. And to get together to do this tonight and of course, to Carolyne Newman- oh they're shooting at us already. Those Jews.

  Speaker6: The security of the section is very good.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: There's a company installing bulletproof windows now for Jews in the Upper West Side. So, and of course, to Carolyne Newman who Toby and I were fortunate enough to have met when we were- when Carolyne was at Yale. And your parents are here tonight from Chicago. It's wonderful to see you again. And your sister, from Chicago. Carolyne, for agreeing to try to moderate one crazy rabbi, at least, we'll find out how crazy it's going to go. But it's really wonderful to see you so often in New York and to see the alums that are here and the friends and all the other people who have come together. What was your question? What are we doing here?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What are we doing here? I don't think I need to answer that question. I think we all know what we're doing here. We all know what we're doing. So I'd say I'm going to skip that one and let everybody stop, maybe for 10 seconds and ask themselves that question. That's a question for all of us. What are we doing here? I think it's the existential question, actually. What are we doing here? What are we doing here? And if we're not doing much, we should start getting active. Yeah. If we've done a lot, we need to do more.

  Speaker6: Yes.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And if we've done more, we need to do more because it's not over. The battle isn't over. And it's survival at this point. So I think the existential question is something that we should be asking ourselves, each and every one of us, very deeply, and hopefully resolving to being able to answer that as individuals and communally and collectively.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Can I respond to him before you? First of all-.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: You can stand.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: You are.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Yeah. I'm kind of vertically challenged, too. First of all.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The Yeshivah basketball team.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: It is. Listen, when I was a teenager, I actually thought I would be a professional basketball player because I was good. And then I stopped growing. And here I am. I settled on the Rabbinate. First of all, to Lena and Matt, thank you very much. It's good to see some long lost congregants and new congregants and I do have to say, this is quite an intimidating crowd because based on the description that Rabbi Hecht gave me, you know, my only hesitation was not dialoguing with you. It was like all these geniuses coming here is, you know, it's quite intimidating. But I can just respond to you. I know you have a series of questions, but I was thinking when you were talking, you know, they're basically three, they're more than three, but for me, there are three central conceptions that have either collapsed in the last year for us or have been seriously eroded. The first is our faith in Zionism itself, in that Zionism never, never promised to eliminate Jew hatred. Actually, it was their opponents. If you know a little bit about the history of Zionism who felt who were opposed to Zionism because they felt the solution to the Jewish problem was not in creating a Jewish state, but in full faith in the emancipation to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, because they believed that now, as we enter into the age of reason and the European Enlightenment, that since anti-Semitism is rooted fundamentally in unreason, it's irrational and unreasonable, that now that we have all the tools of science and evidence and reason, we can reason somebody out of their irrational, unreasonable position with respect to the Jews.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: But the Zionists, by the way, argued exactly the opposite. They agreed anti-Semitism was unreasonable. And they said, because it's unreasonable, you can never reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. And, you know, Herzl, who witnessed the Dreyfus trial and was completely disillusioned, had bought into the idea of the emancipation resolving the Jewish problem, was so dramatically disappointed, and if you read you read his writings, you can see the personal trauma that he underwent. And so they said something very optimistic and very pessimistic at one and the same time. And this was essentially Herzl's idea that was carried on afterwards, where he said, the only solution to the Jewish problem, after we tried everything else was to get out of the way. Okay. Because we tried everything, we tried conversion and we tried assimilating and we tried this and that and nothing worked. And we accepted the argument of the emancipation that this new era of civil rights and social justice. And Herzl is sitting in, in Paris, which is the very capital of egalitarianism and equality and liberty or fraternity.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Right. He becomes disillusioned and he says, this is not going to work. So Zionism is really rooted in a pessimistic perspective of the condition of the Jews. There's nothing else that we can do, even in the most advanced society in the history of the human race. And therefore we need to get out of the way. And for Herzl, initially, he didn't even care where it was. He just wanted to get out of the way. At the same time, he said, in 50 years we can do this, which was such an optimistic perspective on the Jewish condition for lots of reasons that we can't get into now. People thought he was a madman and they sincerely thought that this person needed to be institutionalized. So the Zionists, they never promised that Zionism would be the solution to anti-Semitism, but they did promise security for individual Jews and the Jewish people. They did promise that from now on, Jews would defend themselves by themselves. And the kind of pogroms that Jews escaped from in Europe would not happen in the Jewish state. And we can go into this in more detail. But that conception collapsed on October 7th. First, the state was nowhere to be seen for the entire day. And secondly, all of the catastrophes and the massacres and the hostages.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: They, if not shattered, they shook faith in the capacity of Zionism to secure Jewish life. And up until that point, you know, Israelis were very happy to retreat behind all this technology. Consider, you know, we're part of Western Europe. We don't really want it. We're living in the Middle East, but psychologically, we're in the West, and we're creating all kinds of agreements with so-called moderate states in the Persian Gulf and so on. That's number one. And our faith in Zionism was shaken because for us too, American Jews, we thought and assumed that Israel was secure enough that, you know, it could mess around with judicial reform for ten months. And we could spend a lot of our time criticizing Israel and not thinking about security. That's conception number one. Conception number two that collapsed was, we thought like, not completely like our predecessors in Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. But we too, thought that we had reached a phase in Jewish history in the United States of post anti-Semitism. Okay. It wasn't as if we didn't know about the existence of anti-Semitism, and we didn't forget the Pittsburgh massacre and Charlottesville. But we related to anti-Semitism, kind of like the way we relate to our own mortality. You know, we know it's there, but we convince ourselves that it's never going to affect us, you know, on a daily basis.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: And, what we see here now in the United States is an explosion of anti-Semitism, but not only physical attacks that are obvious, right? For most reasonable, normal people, they know that Charlottesville with tiki torches or Pittsburgh is beyond the pale. But we're also seeing that a lot. And we know this firsthand. We know how much money we're spending now on security versus five years ago. For example, you can't get into our synagogue without going through a magnetometer and so on and so forth. But intellectual anti-Semitism, too, not only in the nexus between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. There is a direct intellectual assault - and maybe you guys know this more than me - on the foundations of Judaism itself. And the third conception that I think collapsed or was shaken, and I say this as a liberal who basically, since I first began studying liberalism in university, I became a committed liberal in every way. I'm a Reform rabbi. Our synagogue is on the Upper West Side. So, so I say this as a liberal that our faith in liberalism and in Western values has been shaken in the last years as well. The capacity of our belief and our faith in the West's ability to distinguish between right and wrong, terror and self-defense, good and evil has been shaken.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: And for those of us in the Liberal camp, it has especially shaken us because the people and institutions and organizations with whom we partnered for decades, going all the way back to the civil rights movement disappointed us. Almost all of them, almost all of them. And I can give you detail after detail in a discussion if you're interested and we have time. But almost all of them either disappointed us or even betrayed us. And when we look at what's happening on campuses and at universities and schools, high schools, which I can share with you my own experience here in the city and even middle schools, even elementary schools, by the way, when we observe what's happening there and we see the drift from liberal values, the kind, at least, that I was raised on and that I firmly believe, to leftwards to something else. Call it progressive, you know, call it identity politics, whatever we call it, that drift that has dragged some of our Jews with them. Okay, has departed from classic liberal values, from the kind of liberal values that people in my generation were raised on and had completely bought into as part of the American experience. And that it's happening, the higher the reputation of the educational institution, the more it's happening.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: And we see this in New York City, in the private schools as well. Right. The higher the reputation, the more elite the educational institution, the more it seems that institution is swept up in a departure from liberalism into some other left ideology that in many respects, and I say this as a liberal, is offensive to liberalism and is not liberal, is illiberal. And that's always bad for Jews. That is always bad for Jews, because once we depart from the liberal value of judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, or by what group they're associated with, or some innate characteristic over which they had no control. Once we depart from judging people by the content of their character, Jews are always going to find ourselves on the wrong side of virtue. And so for us, it seems to me what has been revealed over the last year is that we have a tremendous amount of work to do. And it's real work. It's fighting back. Okay. On these three concepts, we need to restore faith in Zionism. We need to protect and defend ourselves in every way with this explosion of anti-Semitism, including intellectually, including the nexus between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. We have to explain why that while on a theoretical basis and a philosophical basis, we might, you know, have interesting discussions.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Does anti-Zionism, by definition, constitute anti-Semitism? But we have to realize in more cases than not, it descends into anti-Semitism. We have to wage intellectual war on that, or at least on the intellectual struggle. And we have to restore what liberalism really means and has meant in the United States. And I believe we're only at the very, very beginning of this process. And one final word we can't. We're still in the traumatic phase of October 7th and the aftermath. We haven't even begun to recover yet because, you know, in trauma. Post trauma is almost by definition, I think, I'm not in mental health. But it means once you know, you've gone to a different phase beyond the trauma and you can begin to recover. The Jewish people is still in immense trauma until the war is won and Israel prevails and the war now is on. It's not even on two fronts. It's on multiple fronts. Until Israeli refugees are returned home in the north and the south and, of course, until the hostages are returned dead or alive, we're still in the midst of trauma. So we're at the very beginning of a very long process. And I'm very happy that you asked me to come. And of course, I dialogue with anybody who's willing to dialogue with me, especially.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Crazy rabbi like me.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Especially non Reform Orthodox rabbis. One of the books out there is with a Charedi rabbi that I dialogue with. So because I feel another lesson of October 7th needs to be there's room, there's ample room. And it's a positive thing for Jews to debate with each other and argue with each other. That's part and parcel of our tradition from the very beginning. Okay, a Jew who doesn't want to debate and doesn't argue. There's something not really authentic about that. But and all of that is good. And we need to continue to do that. That's what our tradition is. But we also need to try and find the biggest possible common ground in the Jewish community now, because we have an emergency and we have to prioritize what we need to attend to first. And I believe that from my perspective, we need to unite around the common tasks ahead, which are going to be long lasting and very significant. And try and leave as much as we can to the side all these, you know, kind of petty disputes that prevent us from coming together in a group like this.

  Carolyne Newman: Thank you very much.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Carolyne, you got to speak up. Maybe you should stand and ask the question.

  Carolyne Newman: So in the context of uniting the Jews and in the context of a regression away from Western values and the idea of Zionism as a whole, I want to address a petition you, Rabbi Hirsch, received in December, demanding your support of an immediate ceasefire. In reflecting on the content of the petition, you say there was not a word of sympathy for the Israelis, nor a word of compassion for our own. So, you know, in the context of what I studied at Yale, which was cognitive science, one of the core truths of human psychology is in-group bias, and that is described as a tendency to favor one's own group and its members and characteristics in general. So given this petition, how do you explain the psychological anomaly of contempt for your own in-group rather than bias in favor of it?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Should I stand?

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because listen, this psychology is beyond my pay grade. So, I'll have to ask you, you know, to give your perspective on it. I can tell you this.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Mendel, can you hear us in the back? Yeah. Okay.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: First of all, that petition, it was in December of 23. Right. It was in December of 23. So that was a mere October/November two and a half months or so. And the fighting was still raging. People were in shock. And of course we were. And Israel was contending with all these forces that were one, characterizing what was happening as genocide, and two insisting on a ceasefire. And so in that context, we had 1,200 or so, mostly young people who were alumni of the Reform movement, either synagogues or Reform camps, or similar institutions who wrote a letter not to me- Who wrote a petition to the movement itself and accused us of betraying our own values that we ostensibly taught them when they were young. Values of Tikkun Olam. You mostly heard that concept, which is a concept that's rooted in Jewish concern for all humanity and reminds us of our task to work towards repair of society at large. And, you know, in very, very vicious language really, accused Israel of the most heinous crimes and accused us, the Reform Jewish leadership, of abandoning our values. And what was noticeable was even beyond the actual petition, you can find this online if you want to take a look at it, was they published the reasons why people- several hundred people answered why they decided to sign this petition. And that was what was especially noteworthy to me, because over and over and over, over and over and over again, presumably young people, many of the ages that are here and younger and, you know, Gen X, which I guess goes, Gen Z, which I guess goes to 27 and then into the 30s.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: They used language of the Progressive left, as if they themselves were not part of the Jewish people. So Judaism starts with all of our concern for the world. The very first words to the first Jew. Lech Lecha Me'artzecha Umi'moladetecha Umi'bait Avicha. To Abraham. Leave your fathers' home, your homeland, and go to a land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation. That's the beginning point of Judaism. Peoplehood, what we call today. Peoplehood. And Nivirchu Ve'cha Kol Mishpachot Ha'adama. All the nations of the earth will bless themselves through you. So right there in Judaism at the very beginning, we have this merger between what we call today, loosely, universalism and particularism. Concern for the world at large, which is kind of encapsulated, especially in our movement, by the phrase Tikkun Olam and what's called the basic Jewish value of Ahavat Yisroel, love for the Jewish people. And both need to exist simultaneously. That's part of the genius of Judaism, and that's part of our contribution to the world. Jewish universalism ripped from the moorings of Jewish particularism. Ahavat Yisroel, love for the Jewish people is not Jewish universalism, it's just universalism. It's Kantian, okay? And Jewish particularism that only cares about Jews or my Jews, or people in my neighborhood, or people who think like me- Divorced from our mandate and responsibility to repair the world at large is also truncated Judaism. It's something different.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: It's something less. And we need to try and keep the two in balance at all times. And when we lose the balance, which is what I detected here, just simply on the language. We're going back to the age of the anti Zionists of the 19th and 20th century, who felt that the age of Jews caring about fellow Jews, Jewish particularism, Jewish peoplehood, that that was not only a relic of the past, but it was actually an impediment to the manifestation of universal values. And I suspect that that's what's happening here. So for when it when it comes to our own movement, I took that very seriously because we can't lose the Reform movement. We can't lose the liberal Jews in this country. 90% of American Jews define themselves, at least define themselves as something other than Orthodox. Okay, so I believe in live and let live and I believe in dialogue and I believe in learning from each other and all of that, all of that. But most Jews have not, are not and will not be Orthodox. So we can't afford to lose the liberal movements. As the liberal movements go, so goes much of American Jewry. And, from that perspective, I feel a particular obligation internally, first of all, to do Cheshbon Nefesh, to do a kind of a soul searching, and to be, to stop this drift that leads us out of emphasizing Jewish particularism, Jewish peoplehood, and its most eloquent modern day expression, Zionism and the State of Israel, because that would devastate not only our movement, but American Jewry itself.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm going to attempt to answer that question even though it wasn't addressed to me. But before I do that, I want to tell you a story about two rabbis who were challenged to convert the . You know the story about that. Yeah. So there was a , who they were considering putting through the conversion process. And they came back to the people that were running this competition. And the Reform Rabbi came into the office first and they said, how'd it go? And so the Reform rabbi says, you know, I sat down and I talked about Abraham and Adam and Genesis and the Bible and the prophets and liberalism and Zionism and all these things. And he didn't buy it. The  was not converting. So there was the Orthodox rabbi- they call the Orthodox rabbi in from the lobby, Orthodox Rabbi comes in to the room. He has one hand. He's got one leg. He's bleeding his eyes out. He's hunched over, looks like he's dying. And they turn to the Rabbi and they said, what happened? He said, I probably shouldn't have started with circumcision. So.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm a very proud Orthodox rabbi. And if I leave here tonight with one leg and one hand, that's okay. Toby will- Toby, you might have to drive home tonight. But I think the notion that we are going to raise a generation of American Jews, and I'll speak about Jews first, by teaching them the virtues of Zionism, modern Zionism, whether it's late 19th century or 20th century Zionism or teaching them the values of liberalism is over. Those days are over. Right. That's my opinion. So I'm going to tell you what I think. My opinion is and most of what I say, I actually believe Rabbi Hirsch agrees with. And I can only say that, although tonight's the first time I'm meeting you, because I read your book, one of the two books that that's on the table. And as I emailed you, I think it's a book that will go down for those that read in the centuries of books, like the great disputes that happened in the Middle Ages and the great debates that have happened through Jewish history, you should read the book. So the book is the conversation between Rabbi Hirsch and a rabbi, an Orthodox rabbi from Lakewood. Is he still in Lakewood? Yeah. Yeah. And it's just a fantastic conversation that he has. So I think I'm going to say a few things that may sound a little bit alarming and perhaps controversial, but I think you agree.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And you can obviously interrupt me or try to interrupt me when you disagree, but I'll let you come back. So Zionism and liberalism are wonderful things. And a lot of Jews want to be liberals. And a lot of Jews believe in Zionism. Most Jews believe in Zionism. And according to your statistics, most Jews are liberals. According to the statistics and the political front, 75% of Jews vote for Democrats, right? Only 25% vote for Republicans. However, if there's one thing we learned from October 7th and the aftermath of October 7th is that we need to go back. We need to go back not decades and not centuries, but we need to go back millennia, to the verses you're quoting of Avraham Avinu and the covenant that G-d made with Avraham Avinu. And we need to actually start educating ourselves and our children about what it means to be Jewish. We need to learn Hebrew. We need to study Aramaic, languages that our people wrote the Talmud in. We need to read the prophets in our original languages that the original languages in which they were written. I'm sorry, we're not that close yet. By the time the night's over. That smells like vodka.

  Speaker6: I don't want him to get sick before the holidays. Nor do I want to get sick. I have a big week. Okay.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We need to go back- we need to go back to the original texts, traditions of Yiddishkeit. Everybody in this room that's Jewish has a grandparent that talks about Yiddishkeit, about Judaism, about what it meant to go to Shul and to Daven and to open up a Daf Yomi and to learn Ein Yakov. Your father is telling me tonight about Yechezekel Landau . How many people in this room know who Yechezkel Landau is. One of the great giants of Talmudic scholarship. And he's telling me that your mother, I believe. Your father's still here. I just met him tonight in the kitchen. My wife is a descendant of Yechezkel Landau. Now, Yechezekel Landau. It's like it sounds like Chinese, right? We know about Herzl. We know about liberals. We know about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. And we know everything and we know nothing. So I want to address the question. One other thing I should mention, which is if you ever go to a room and there's a Rabbi there, and he comes in and they ask him to speak and he tells you he didn't really prepare anything, he's lying. First of all, rabbis always go to events with two speeches. They go with the speech they're going to say if they're asked to speak, and then they go with another speech because if somebody else who speaks before them, takes their speech, they're going to have a backup speech. All right, so full disclosure, Carolyne emailed us what she was going to talk about tonight. In fact, she gave us some headlines, thank you, on what the question's going to be. So I printed something out and I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it quickly in Hebrew, because that's the language that was originally written in. A blend of Aramaic and Hebrew and then I'm going to translate it. And I think that there's no place in Jewish history after Avraham Avinu getting the covenant. Ve'nivrechu Be'cha Kol Mishpochos Haadama. First G-d says, Avraham you are a chosen people and we don't apologize. You went to Harvard, right? You don't apologize, right? You went to Yale? You don't, you're not Harvard.

  And Harvard.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Where are you? You're part of the Wachtell Lipton, Wachtell Lipton, and Harvad.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, double apology and Wachtell, Lipton. Davis Polk. No one's going to apologize tonight. So we're Jews. We're the Chosen People. And that's what Avraham, that's the gift God gave us and we have, we can argue about how we define what that means and what it means to be a chosen people, among other nations that God wants us to love and care for and to share with. This existential question is the question that you talked about. The universal versus the particular, the Zionist, the 19th century Europe. Right. Herzl's dilemma, can we assimilate? But we're German? You thought you were German. You weren't German. Look what the Germans did to the Jews. They put 6 million of us in pits and ovens. For hundreds of years, you lived and you- delusional. Delusional to think that you were German. I'm a sixth generation American. But I'm a Jew first, I'm a Jew first. I think everybody in this room who is Jewish knows- you don't know it by now after October 7th, you're naive. You're Jewish. If you don't believe that you're Jewish first, your next door neighbor is going to remind you don't worry. When you get on the bus in front of your face or behind your face, they're going to remind you. They're reminding our kids on campus today. People ask me how things are doing at Yale. How are things doing on the ground? They're fantastic. You can't hide today. You can't hide if you're a Jew today. Because you're being reminded when you walk out of your dorm room or in your dorm room that you're different. And now you've got to figure out what that means.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You got to figure out what that means. So what does it mean to be part of a people that are distinct? No different than Americans are distinct and no different than the West is distinct, or Islam is distinct, or Christianity is distinct, or Harvard is distinct. What does it mean? So the Mishnah says as follows. "Keitzad Me’aymin Es Ha’edim Al Dinei Nefashos?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Hayu Machnisin Oisan U-me’aymin Aleihen

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Shema Tomru Me’umad, U-mi’shmua, Ed Mipi Ed Umipi Adam Ne’eman Shama’nu.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: O Shema Ei Atem Yod’in Shesofeinu Livdok Eschem Bederishah Uvechakirah." The Talmud in Sanhedrin, it's a Mishnah in Tractate Sanhedrin. Sanhedrin deals with the laws of jurisprudence, of the courts, and the Mishnah says as follows. Take about a few minutes, but if you remember this, I think you're going to remember something that's very important. It's going to give us some ammunition to go out there. When witnesses come into a court on a capital punishment case, the judges have a responsibility to warn them of the consequences of their testimony. And how did they do that? They would bring them in and they would scare them. They would say to them, is your testimony maybe something you're assessing, maybe you're imagining, maybe you heard about it. Maybe you even heard about it from another witness who testified about this murder in another court case. Maybe you heard about this from a person who testified about it that was a reputable court. Maybe you heard about a prior conviction, a big controversy today, the sex scandals. How many people can you- how many cases, prior cases can you bring in, being overturned in the courts, etc.? "O Shema Ei Atem Yod’in Shesofeinu Livdok Eschem Bederishah Uvechakirah"

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Don't you know that for capital punishment, we're going to ask you tough questions and you should know that capital punishment, "Hayu Yode’in Shelo Ke’dinei Mamonos Dinei Nefashos" that we here we're dealing with in a court of capital punishment. The consequences of which means the death penalty for the defendant is not the same as a monetary case. Why? Because "Dinei Momonos Adam Noisen Momoin Umischaper Lo". If you lie and you say that the guy stole the money and he didn't steal it, we found out that you lied. All you need to do is pay the guy the money that you made him pay. Dinei Nefashos, but if you lie in a case of capital punishment in a Jewish court in the times of the temple, you should know that, "Domoi V'dam Zaroisov T'luim Bo Ad Sof Haolam." You should know that if this person goes to the gallows because of your testimony, his blood and the blood of his descendants are going to be on your shoulders. Ad Sof Haolam. until the end of the generations. And the commentaries explain why. When you pay a monetary, if you lie in a court about a monetary, about a monetary issue, about a financial issue, about a fiscal issue, about anything to do with money, and you have to pay back, we don't say, but what about the cost of funds? You know, in the marketplace we talk about cost of funds. I get 4% in the bank. I made the investment. Give me my cost of funds first than give me my return, etc..

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We don't do that. So in a monetary case, we don't deal with cost of funds. We don't think about what could the money have done if it would have been spent elsewhere? Okay, but if you put somebody up to the gallows and you lied about them in court, you should know that the generations, all the children that they could have given birth to that didn't come into the world because you killed this man, or you killed this woman in a court. All the lives, that not that were taken away, but the lives that were prevented from being born are on your shoulders. How do we know this says the Mishnah, "She'kein Matzinu Be-Kayin Sheharag Es Achiv", Kayin killed his brother! And what does, Shene'emar as it says in the Passuk Breishis in Genesis 4: "Demei Achicha Tzo’akim". What does God say to Kayin after he killed his brother? So we're talking about war. We're talking about war in the Middle East. Right? And we're talking about one nation killing another, and then we're talking about how do we deal with it? And Palestinian lives and Jewish lives. So let's listen to this Mishnah. "Shene’emar “Dmei Achicha Tzo’akim" what does Hashem say to Kayin? He says Dmei Achicha Tzo’akim," the bloods, plural of your brother are crying out. "Eino Omer Dam Achicha Ela Dmei Achicha" It doesn't say the blood of- He says to Kayin. Why did you kill Hevel? The Torah should have said the blood of Hevel is calling out. Why does it say "Dmei Achicha" the bloods of Hevel are calling out.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Who are the bloods of Hevel? Hevel's one person he was killed by his brother. What's this plural? Torah is very particular about the way it says things. So the Gemara says the Mishnah says, "Dmei Achicha Damo Ve-dam Zar’oisav". You should know that the reason is because his blood, you took his blood, and you took the blood of all the people that Hevel would have had as posterity for generations to go. And you're responsible for his death in an illegal, unjust case. "Dmei Achicha She'haya Damo Mushlach Dam Al Ha'etzim Ve'al Ha'avanim" There's another commentary. You talk about the argument. The other Mishnah- the other part of the Mishnah says, the other opinion in the Mishnah says that it says plural blood, because when Kayin killed Hevel. he didn't know how to kill. Nobody had killed anybody before Kayin killed Hevel. So how do you take a life? He wasn't sure which part of the body was going to take his brother's life, so he stabbed him all over the place. So it says Dmei the bloods, because the blood was scattered all over the place. Then the Mishnah says something else. Now I'm going to bore you. I'm going to read you a Mishnah, and you're going to sit here and you're going to sweat, and I'm going to sweat and you're going to say, where did the night go? And hopefully Carolyne's going to get to her questions. But if you don't know this Mishnah, you're not going to be able to answer the existential question you started the night off. So I'm going to keep going. And forgive me if it's the last time you come to a Shabtai event. There's another hundred people in the lobby waiting downstairs.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: "Lefichach Nivra Adam Yechidi" says the Mishnah, that's why when God created Adam and Eve, he created one Adam and one Eve. "Lelamdecha" to teach us. And now, here's the key. "Lelamdecha" Why did he teach one man and one woman? Not only did God make one man and one woman, but he made the woman from the man, so he made one human. And all of humanity comes because Chava was created from Adam. So that's what the Torah says. So why did he create one man from which Chava was created? "Lelamdecha" to teach, you "Shekol Hameabed Nefesh Achas Meyisroel" to teach you that if you take the life of one- of one what? Of one Jew. Who said Jew? Who said Jew? So you say it's Jew. Ah, you take the life. You say that because I read "Shekol Hameabed Nefesh Achas Meyisroel" You take the life of one Jew. Let's table that for a second. The Mishnah says here that if you take the life of one Jew, "Maale Olov Hakasuv Keilu Ibed Oilam Maleh" you should know that you took the whole generation. You destroyed a whole world. Because Adam is one person and he was the whole world. So one person represents all of humanity. So if you take the life of one person, one Jew, the Mishnah says, table that, that word is a key word. When we talk about universal and human rights, I call it Jewmanitarian rights.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: But let's talk about humanity. "Vechol Hamekayem Nefesh Achas Meyisroel Maale Olov Hakasuv Keilu Kiyeim Oilam Maleh".  If you take one life, you save the whole generation, the whole world, if you kill one person. And if you save one person, you've saved an entire world. That's the first reason why G-d made Adam and Chava on their own. This is what they're telling the witnesses in a case and a capital punishment case. The second reason why God created the human species one man from which Chava comes, and then the entire race, "Mipnei Shalom Habriyos". Carolyne, because we have to live among the nations, and we want to live "Shalom Habriyos" to live peacefully with all the other people in the world. We want to be liberals. The Tanna'im want to be liberals. They were living in Babylonia. They lived in Jerusalem, they lived in Israel, in the Middle East. We lived everywhere in the world. Can't get rid of Jews. We're everywhere. "Mipnei Shalom Habriyos" the second reason why God made Adam and Chava was "Mipnei Shalom Habriyos" so that we can live with the other nations of the world peacefully. "Shelo Yomar Adam Lchaveiro Abba Gadol Me'avicha". I don't have the right to walk into a Catholic church, or to a mosque, or to a college campus and tell another person, my father is greater than your father. Guess what, buddy. We got the same father. His name is Adam. It's simple.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We all come from the same place. That's the second reason. Third reason? "Veshelo Ye'hu Minin Omrim", so the Apikursim, the Minim, the heretics shouldn't be able to say "Harbeh Reshuyos Bashamayim" That there were many gods. If there would have been many Adam's and many Eve's created, they would have said each God made one man and one woman. No. God made one species, one human race in the image of God. One God. And then look how beautiful this Mishnah is "Lehagid Geduloso Shel Hakodosh Baruch Hu" to teach us the greatness of God. "Sheadam Toivea Kama Matbeios Bechoisem Echad Vekulan Doimin Zeh Lazeh". Because when a person makes a mold- when you make a mold in a factory for a watch, for a phone, for a suit. You make a mold, and everything that comes out of that mold looks exactly the same. "Umelech Malchei Hamlachim Hakadosh Baruch Hu Tovah Kol Adam Bechoismo Shel Adam Harishon V'ein Echad Meihen Doime Lechaveiro" . God made the mold of the human, and no two of us look alike. No two of us think alike. No two of us behave alike. So this is the genius why God made one to show you the greatness of God's creation. That from one e pluribus unum. From one came so many. "Lefichach Kol Echad v'echad Chayav Lomar". And the Mishnah says therefore, when a person wakes up in the morning, you need to say, every day, every one of us "Bishvili Nivra Haolam".

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The whole world was created for me. God made the entire universe for one person. Now I get up in the morning and I say that. And the guy on the bus I know is supposed to say it too. And we're both saying the truth. What kind of world are we living in that God made the world for each and every one of us. And this is the end of the Mishnah. "V'Shema Toimru Ma Lanu Ve'latzarah Hazois" After the witnesses hear this. What's the first thing they're going to do? I'm sorry, Carolyne, I'm almost there. They're going to turn. They're going to turn to themselves and say, do we want to testify? I mean, what- this Rabbi just gave me a whole story about one person and the whole universe I'm going to destroy for generations. Talk about stress and trauma. Guy's going to have a nervous breakdown. Going to go to three psychiatrists. I have no reason to testify in a court. Let me walk out of the courtroom. So the Mishna says he can't. You have to testify. We Jews are going to testify because the Torah says."V'halo Kvar Neemar V'hu Eid Oi Ra'ah Oi Yoda Vlo Yagid" It says that you don't have a choice. The Bible says that if you're a Jew, you have and you know something, you have to be vocal. You have to go out for civil rights.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You have to go out for human rights. You have to go out for women's rights. If you know something, you have to be the one who walks into the world court, the court of the world's opinion. And you have to say that I'm going to fight for every single person "Vshema Toimru Ma Lanu Lachov Bedomo Shel Zeh". But what if he is guilty and my testimony puts him on the gallows and he dies? And here's the clincher. You should know that it says in Mishli it says in Proverbs, "Ubabod Reshoim Rinah" and this is the end of the Mishnah. "Ubabod Reshoim Rinah" means that with the destruction of evil there is joy. With the destruction of evil, there is joy. If he's guilty, you know what? He belongs on the gallow. So I want to answer. Give me a few. Just two minutes to finish this thought. In this text of the Mishnah, we've learned everything about the value of human life. In this particular Mishnah it says that a person has to say that God created Adam alone because one who saves every Jew and one Jew is as if he saved an entire world. There are other versions of the same Mishnah quoted by Rashi in another place in the Talmud, where it doesn't say the word saving a Jew, it says saving a human.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I want you to know that. And the Rambam, Maimonidies, 700 years after the Talmud. When he writes the law, he says it relates to every single person. That it's not written, that the text doesn't read Yisroel. But if you save a life, you've saved a generation. If you kill, taking a life, you're taking a generation. When I read the Mishnah, I have my personal reading, which I want to share with you tonight. We've done such a good job at saving the whole world. We're liberals. We're humanitarians. For 200 years, we've lived wonderfully in this country. We're there for every single cause. The Mishnah is teaching us that if you don't understand the value of the Jew, which is your own, you can't save the whole world. If the life of your 4-year-old in that bedroom is not the most precious thing to you in the world, you're not a good mom. If the life of your spouse who you love is not more important to you, you're not a good spouse. And we have a saying at Yale, for God, for Country, for Yale. What's For God, for Country for Yale? Just say for God, for country. And who the hell says God for country? Yale's an international university. What kind of country? Just say for God.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: But Yale never took that off and never took it down. For God, for country, for Yale. Because if I believe in God, I believe in my country and I believe in Yale. And you know what? If we do a good job with our God and we do a good job in this country, and we do a good job at Yale, the whole world is going to be taken care of. Because what are we supposed to be teaching our students? We're supposed to be teaching our students how to save the whole world, but take care of your own first. So the Mishnah is telling us, Carolyne, in groups, out groups. Why are they paralyzed? Why are Reform kids who grew up in some Reform Temple, walking at the college campuses and fighting for Palestinians? Because that's what they were taught. To fight for everybody. They were never taught what it means to self preserve who you are. Because who are we? What does it mean to be Jewish? So we need to go back, I think, to the fundamental principles of what does it mean to be Jewish? And from there expand outwards. And then we'll be stronger and the stronger and the more proudly and the more assertive and the more vocal we are about being Jews, proud Jews, practicing Jews packing the synagogues. I don't care about Reform, conservative, Orthodox.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm a Lubavitcher. So those things are meaningless to me. I'm a Lubavitcher who grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, which was headquarters of the Nazi Party in the 1940s. My dad's a Rabbi in  a Sephardic synagogue and I went to a Hasidic school with Satmar teachers and modern orthodox kids. I mean, so for me and I got on a bus on the B41 in Brooklyn everyday, I was the only white kid on the bus. So labels are meaningless to me. And I know that you're the same because I read your book and you're here tonight. So we, the collective we, need to remember it's okay for the Mishnah to talk about when they're dealing with the capital punishment case for a Jew who's on trial for capital punishment, to tell the witnesses that you taking this one Jew's life or not, his life is a generational thing for generations. And that's the way we set our courts up. And then we can go into the international court and value, which is what the Mishnah continues to teach us, which is that when you say to your friend down the block who's not like you that I'm better than you, you should remember you're different than him or you're different than she. But we all go back to the same place. So I'm sorry for holding it up, but you can.

  Carolyne Newman: Shmully, I'm really glad you shared that story, because I think it's really helpful in contextualizing a lot of, you know, internal moral confusion that Jews have as we watch people who we feel like we know perish in this war. And I want to address, you know, Rabbi Hirsch's perspective that it seems like Jews in general are tending towards Reform and liberalism, but Shmully's insistence that we must be more conservative in order to survive. So I'm going to ask a question next that challenges both, which is a Harvard Harris Poll from December, shows that 67% of 18 to 24 year olds believe Jews as a class are oppressors. So how can young Jews maintain pride in their Jewish identity when they're surrounded by oppressor class rhetoric? And what is the path forward for the American Jewish identity given the type of rhetoric that we are surrounded by?

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Do you want- Whatever you're comfortable with. So I just want to reaffirm what Rabbi Hecht said which I fundamentally agree with in terms of principles and in answer to the specific question. We're not prepared to give up on our interaction with all kinds of people who are part of society and have overlapping goals for society as we do. So when our, it's by the way, it's not only people who came out of Reform institutions who are participating in liberation Seders, in liberated zones, it's lots of people, including, by the way, some people who came out of Orthodox institutions. I've seen them and I've met with them also. But I do think and I agree that there are two elements here of what we thought we were doing and what actually transpires when we see, if not the final result, then the result down the road. Number one. Everything Jewish starts with the covenant of the Jewish people. We are a people that also has a faith, but we're a civilization, in the words of Mordechai Kaplan. If we lose that grounding, that anchoring, and then we speak about universal concerns, which you believe in too and you spoke about. But if we lose that grounding then we end up with a result that we didn't intend. Okay. So when we- this is just personally and a lot of my colleagues, when we deal with hundreds of our kids, we want them to be sensitive to social justice.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: We want them to be, in a sense, warriors against discrimination, against racism of all types. We want them to care about poverty and so on and so on and so forth. Okay. What we did not intend is for them to be anti-Zionist. We wanted them to be Zionists. We wanted them to care about their fellow Jews. And I completely agree. And again, I'm not in mental health. And I'm assuming there are people here who have studied this and know much more about it. But I completely agree that it is not chauvinism to feel with all of our concern about repair of the world. It's not chauvinistic to have more intense feelings for your own family than for somebody else's family. In fact, I want to suggest again, I didn't study this. If you don't care more for your own kid than your neighbor's kid, then there's probably something damaged about you. You're emotionally damaged. It doesn't mean that you don't care about your neighbor's kid, nor does it mean you have no responsibility for your neighbor's kid. You do, but you feel the more intense emotions for your own. That is how the human being is constructed. And for those who don't feel that there's something off about them. Now, from a Jewish perspective, it's exactly that. It's love of family, of your own family that trains you, conditions you, and teaches you how to love other people's families, which is what you said.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: So that's number one. We've kind of- again, this is why I say I'm detecting a lot of trends that they believed in the 19th century and 20th century, okay. Where we can kind of surpass all of that. No, we haven't become different creatures. We, by the way, we are, we've advanced tremendously technologically since ancient times. But fundamentally we're the same, we have the same emotional makeup, which is why when we read ancient texts, our own and ancient myths, we can so identify with the heroes because we see ourselves in them. That's number one. And that if I were to look back and say, look at the result of some people who claim in the name of values that we taught them, that's why they're marching with BDS and they're, you know, they're turning their backs on not only on Israel but on the Jewish establishment, which is a target of substantial criticism that they have. It might if I look back and I say, well, what did we do wrong? You know, Kafka wrote about his father that while he thought he was transmitting Judaism, it was all dribbling away. Okay, so we can't while we think we're transmitting fundamental Jewish values about concern of the world, we can't let it all dribble away about the fundamental construct of Judaism. That's number one. Number two, to the extent that you referred to this as well. I also agree. We spoke about this on the street this morning.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Okay. So you all, or most of you, I'm prepared to say all of you graduate were accepted by among the most selective and elite institutions of higher learning. In order to be accepted in those institutions, you had to work hard before and you had to excel before. In other words, you had to take this learning seriously. So we have the offspring of among the most accomplished Americans and accomplished human beings, the most educated human beings in the entire history of the human race. From a Jewish perspective, there has never been a diaspora Jewish community in the whole history of Judaism as educated, as affluent, as influential as what's considered successful as the American Jewish community of the late 20th and early 21st century. And the reason for that is self-evident to us, especially to you. We work hard. We believe in education. We believe in knowledge. We believe in reason. We believe in evidence. We believe in science and so on and so on and so on. And we work hard and we strive to accomplish. We believe in books, okay? Learning, because we know that if you want to know math, you actually have to study math, right? I mean, we have parents here, right? You send your kids to school, and if they come back and you say, well, I don't want to take math. You tell them, okay, don't take math. Study something else. Study home economics. It's like that would be preposterous for us. We understand that. Self-evidently.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: If you want to know what's in a book, we understand you have to read books. If you want to be proficient in music, you have to practice and study with the best teachers, right? If you want to be, if you want to excel in athletics, you have to train. So we have the children of the most successful Jews in the history of the Jewish people, in terms of our embrace of in the broader culture and the value they place on us. And for some reason, these highly intelligent American Jews who themselves understand the urgency of study, they think they can transmit Jewish identity without studying Judaism. Right. So, like, how does that work? Like, if you want to know what Judaism is, you have to- somebody has to teach you Judaism and you can't. It's like- somebody has to make the priorities. Like you say, no, you're going to study math even if you don't like it, because math is important to you, at least basic math. I can't do that stuff anymore. But I used to, and I need it to pass. Right. And you want to know what's in. You want to know what the history of civilization is like. You have to study history. The same for Judaism. If you want to raise children with a strong Jewish identity, you need to prioritize Judaism. And so many of our families. Because maybe it, you know, there's some kind of connection between the standard that they've reached in American society, the level that they've reached in American society, that in some way influences them to emphasize with their kids math and science and history and so on, and not Judaism, even though I know, at least from the perspective of the people I see in our congregation, those are the people who affiliate, right? All the people who don't care about Judaism already.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: I don't- none of us see them. Okay. And I can I can guarantee you that. And we know this from empirical evidence that the vast majority of their children by the third generation won't be Jewish in their families. It's just that and you know this because, like, you're the most intelligent people in the country. So you know this, right? And you want your kids to be Jewish. Not talking about you personally, but, you know, our people. And still they prioritize other things. And it just it's not going to work. And subcontracting Jewish identity from the family to a synagogue for an hour or two a week, interspersed with soccer practice and so I'm not coming this week and on and on and on. Okay. It's also not going to work. So I believe that, you know, that- and that's why in the end, our children who come to Yale and come to the elite campuses and face people who know their story well, Palestinian advocates and some of them have come out of the Palestinian experience and others have studied it in depth. Our kids are like deer caught in the headlights because they don't even know their own story. Because they didn't study it. They don't know it. And you thought you were. And you wanted to create a Jewish identity, not you personally, in our children. But they didn't put the work in. Okay.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: If you want to be Jewish. Not only that, by the way, if you want to know Judaism, you have to study Judaism. You have to study it in books and teaching and on and on and on. If you want to be Jewish, live a Jewish lifestyle, then you actually have to live Judaism too. And you have to have a discipline, a discipline that starts in the home and extends to the Jewish community. Okay. And that's our. If you were to ask me one of the questions that you have there is what's our biggest challenge? That's the final question I know. So I'm going to just jump to the final question. That's our biggest challenge, not October 7th, not Israel, which is going to survive and prosper. This war is going to end. Our biggest challenge here in the United States is what we loosely call Jewish continuity. Okay. But it is the ability to transmit Judaism from generation to generation, which is how Judaism was transmitted and why you're Jewish. And we have this is my last comment on this issue. We have an almost an unprecedented I think we have an unprecedented situation in the vast majority of that part of American Jewry that is not Orthodox. Jewish tradition assumed- you remember the Passover Haggadah? You know what? Remember with the kid who doesn't know how to ask? So you remember what you're supposed to do with him? Teach him. Teach him.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: But what happens if the parents don't know enough Judaism to teach their kids. Jewish tradition never took that situation into account, because it was inconceivable that the parents wouldn't know enough Judaism to teach their kids, who don't know enough to ask. So we have an almost unprecedented situation. This is what we found in the former Soviet Union when we got there after 70 years of communism too. The younger generation couldn't learn Judaism from their parents because their parents didn't know anything. It was sucked out of them because through the Communist years. Okay. And we have some of that in our community as well. If your kids don't know how to don't know what to ask, and you don't know how to teach them, you need to start to study too.

  Carolyne Newman: Thank you. Shmully, I'll let you answer.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Well, do you want to ask another question?

  Carolyne Newman: Why don't I ask the last question? So just as a last question before I open it up to any of your questions, I want to address the opportunity for unity amongst Jewish people. And as Rabbi Hirsh alluded to, I'd love to hear what Shmully thinks the biggest challenge facing American Jews are in the years to come, and how we can unite to overcome them.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Excuse me. Look, they're going to the Hamptons and they're doing coke. I mean, we see it, right? They're having coke parties. Sorry. Yeah, some people are Davening too. Thank you. Yeah. Let's talk about the Coke Parties. The Davening is for, let the Rabbis talk about that. Let's talk about the Coke Parties. They're having orgies. Okay. They're- everybody's trying to, you know, get into the back yard with these ridiculous half naked, you know, quote unquote, successful billionaires and millionaires and art collectors and art dealers with fancy cars and fancy houses. Right. Everybody's kids are in therapy. Everybody 50%, 60%, 70% of our children are in therapy. Therapy. They're going to see psychiatrists at seven years old. They got drugs. Like 90 year olds. You know, the Bobbe has, like, ten sets of pills. Now the seven year old goes to school. They get the bags with their pills. Right. Like a lot of them. A lot of them. Right. There's yoga studios thank God in- every pizza shop today in Manhattan has a yoga studio on top. Right.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You got your psychiatrist. Your therapist. Rock and roll. Tiktok. This is the world we collectively are all living in. Okay. Stress. Working 80, 90 hours, 100 hours a week so that when you're 60, you can go on vacation. Right. 60. 65. Get your condo in Florida, and then you're going to be able to relax. 80% of Yale students, 70 or 80% of Yale students are stressed. They're stressed. I've got teenage kids. So, you know, I was a teenager. Toby was a teenager. We were all teenagers. We know what stress is, but it's a different type of stress today. Drive through Yale's campus. It's the same at Harvard. It's the same at Columbia. It's the same at NYU. It's a wonderful place. Great. We lived there. We love campus. We love the people. We see faces here tonight, Rachel and Carolyne and everybody in between. It's wonderful. Look at the faces of people at 8 o'clock in the morning walking to class. They look like they're coming back from like Vietnam. You can ask yourself, like, it's not like they have, like, bad sex because there's very little of that going on at Yale.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You know, they woke up in the morning, it was the wrong guy. It was a party. Forget even that. There aren't even. We barely have fraternities and sororities. So when we talk about today, Rabbi, when we talk today about almost like making Judaism relevant again. Right? That's what you're talking about. Why Judaism? If there ever was a time, if there ever was a time that you look at modernity and you look at the progress and you look at the great scientific advances which, thank God, we all celebrate, we love our phones and we love technology, and we do and we love The New Yorker. We love it, right? And we love our education, and we love chemistry because it's saving lives every day. And at the same time, the mental state of the universe has gone cuckoo. And you ask yourself, what happened? Is there a better time to ask ourselves? Maybe there is an answer to it. And look at people who actually live traditional lives or lives that are rooted in history. Lives that actually have meaning and purpose because they come into the world feeling like the link in a tradition in a meaningful story. They're part of something. That's existential, purposeful, deep, philosophically deep. There was never a better time. Never a better time.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So what do we have to do? We just have to roll out the scrolls. Literally roll out the scrolls, and people will eat it alive to read a Mishnah like that. The world's going to teach the Jews about human rights. What the hell are you talking about? Lauterpacht than Lemkin. And the 1940s. And the Nuremberg trials of putting the Nazis up for Auschwitz. What are you talking about? The Tannaim, the Amoraim, the Rishonim, the Achronim, the Neviyim. Moshe Rabeinu. We taught this to the world. We gave this to the world. We are human civilization. We, the Jews, the Bible, the Old Testament. We sit at Yale with the Deans of the divinity school and the theologians and the great scholars of the New Testament. They know. They know not to cross lines when you sit one on one and look them in the eye and face to face, We're not going to apologize to the world. We're not going to bow to the world. We're not afraid of the world. The hell with the UN. Biden comes and Biden goes. But let me finish. Biden comes and Biden goes. I don't know Kamala Harris, Donald Trump. It's all the same, frankly. It's all the same. We have to go back to- they're not exactly the same. Not exactly the same.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We have an obligation to go back to the things that have survived the ages, the truths that have survived the ages that we were blessed with, that God gave us as a people and as a civilization. And we have to share them with the world. And I want to finish on this note. You're the Rabbi of the Stephen Wise synagogue. Correct? How many of you know anything about Stephen Wise? Raise your hand. Besides the people that work at the synagogue, you know. You know about Stephen Wise. Stephen Wise went to Oregon. That was his first post as a Rabbi. He came back, I believe, in 1905, 1906, 1907 around then. And he went in to become the Rabbi of Temple Emmanuel, the Reform Temple in New York, the cathedral synagogue, I think they called it. Is that right? And he sat down with the board of directors, and the board of directors told him, the board of trustees. How many of you know this story? Raise your hand. Well, we're down to three. We don't even have a Minyan anymore. Look at you.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So we're down to three, three people. And the board of, you know the story. And the board of directors sat down with Stephen Wise, and they offered him the pulpit. Great. You did your training in Oregon; Toby is from  Seattle, the Pacific Northwest. That was nice. This is New York, baby. But here the trustees run the synagogue. So if you're ready to sign. And he was talking to the, you know, the titans of Wall Street. I don't have to go through the names. You know, this is like, you know, the Lehman's, the Schiff's, the big shots. They got walk in closets the size of this living room. You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, yeah, but we're happy. But they don't have this. But they don't have this. They don't have this. And you know what? The trustees, they said, the trustees told Stephen Wise that in this synagogue the trustees run the shul. So if you sign here, we'll give you the position. And Stephen Wise writes in his autobiography, and it's a great, great, great story. And he says that he was- not only did he leave the meeting and tell everybody to go to hell, he said, not only that, I'm starting my own synagogue, and it's going to be called the Free Synagogue and the Free Synagogue, the Rabbi is going to call the shots. Now, not that the Rabbi is always right, not that the Rabbi is going to be dogma, not that the Rabbi can't be argued with or challenged or critiqued, but the notion that the bankers on Wall Street are going to tell the people what the Bible says and what the Gemara says, and what the Mishnah says is ludicrous.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Talk about interest rates and talk about the housing market, and talk about the industry and shipping and insurance. I'm the Rabbi, so if you want me to be a Rabbi, let me be a Rabbi. Now, 1964 Mario Savio. Very important name to know. Yalies don't even know who Mario Savio was. 60 years to today, the Mishnah says Ben Shishim Le'zikna that 60 is age. Mario Savio, 1964, got up on the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley, the Berkeley Sit-In. And some of you know what I'm talking about. The Berkeley Sit-Ins that changed America. And Mario Savio was preceded by Michael Rossman. You can watch the clip on the internet. It's Mario Savio, and he got up on the steps of Sproul Hall. And by the way, I am going to finish. I promise. And he got up on the steps of Sproul Hall, and he critiqued President Kerr of Berkeley, who was a liberal, so-called liberal. But there was a big debate then about free speech on campus and about who was and about the sit ins were all about free speech, right? They were fighting Vietnam. They were fighting segregation. They were fighting black rights and civil rights Mario Savio. Michael Rossman. There was a whole gang. A lot of them Jewish who stood up to change America at a very, very challenging time. And he said. I almost quote it because I almost know it by heart.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: He said, there's a time when the machine becomes so odious and you become so disheartened with what you see, that you have to put your bodies upon the levers, upon the gears, upon the apparatus, and you have to let the people know who run the machine, that if we're not free, the machine is not going to run at all. And that's what Mario Savio. That speech changed America. I want to finish by saying that Mario Savio stuttered and stammered in high school. When you watch him speak, he's one of the greatest orators of America in American history. Changed the country. One of the great fighters on college campuses in his time that changed America civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. He started on campus and I tell this to students all the time. Why do people stutter or stammer? One of the reasons is because they're afraid. And if you take, they're afraid. So they go into shock mode. Whatever scares them or whatever traumatizes them, whatever they're afraid of. And if you take away that fear, all of a sudden, even somebody who's born with a deficiency of some sort which can be healed or fixed, all of a sudden when they calm down, they talk. I've seen students at Yale who stuttered, and now they just go off and go for an hour. They can talk. The Jews, I think, are a little bit afraid. So we kind of like, I don't know what to do about the Antisemites. Oh. How are you doing on campus? Oh, my God, how are you sleeping? You're afraid? What are you afraid of?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I want to go back to the first question you asked tonight. What are we doing here? You're the greatest revolutionary of your time. You're the greatest revolutionary of your time. You give me inspiration. Because when you get up in your Shul. For me, it's easy. I got a d and Yarmulke. I'm Shmully Hecht. I'm a Lubavitcher. Married to Toby. They know what they're gonna get when they come here. They know it's gonna be longer than planned. They know 36 people means 72 people. They know this. They know, they know. So we get away with a lot. We can get away, I don't know if you'll have us back. By the way, before I finish, I want to mention that today is the birthday of Matt's mom of blessed memory, 25 years, 25 years ago. What was her name?

  Matt: Cathy.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Cathy. I want to finish, Cathy. We should just have her in memory today. Very important. Your children should live to know her greatness. And the children should live to know the greatness of grandparents and their ancestors and who they were and what they were, and the commitment you made to become part of the Jewish community. We gotta stop stuttering and stammering. You're the greatest revolutionary. And why are we really here tonight is because when we met the first time, and you think you had been to  Shabtai on Crown Street, when it was Chai Society when you went to law school, okay. I'm usually after a couple of whiskies on Friday nights, so I don't remember everybody who came through the building. It's great. We're reconnecting tonight. I got a clip from Mendel Mochkin, who's in the back of the room. He's a quiet guy, but he's one of the smarter people in my life. And I thank God have been blessed with being surrounded by a lot of smart people. Sent me a clip of you speaking in your Shul, and you said things that most Reform Rabbis either can't or won't say to their constituents, which is what have we done wrong, right? Where did we go wrong? It's a brave thing to do. In the spirit of the Stephen Wise synagogue. You got up. You said it. You didn't get fired. I'm assuming they're still going to give you a pension and your health insurance, and you get dental over there?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm working on dental. I don't know. Eye glasses, the 80 dollars...  But you roll, you roll, and I said, wow, this is a man I could talk to. This is real and one of the few Rabbis I can actually feel like we could become really close friends. And let me tell you, you and I become close friends? We're going to rock. We're going to rock this country. So I said to you because you had told me the night before, you told me that you were Stephen Wise members. And I just put two and two together and that's the way we roll in New Haven. And I said, Carolyne, we're going to do this, and we'll do a talk with Rabbi Hirsch. And you said, yeah, and we did it. Why do I love you and why do I respect you? Because for you it's much more difficult. But you've got it. You got to take it. You got to notch it up like three notches up. You got to literally like, there has to be, like, outside the Reform temples in America, there has to be like Talmud 101, Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, Jewish song, like Hasidic melody, like Shabbos is going to be Shabbos. Like we're not going to drive, we're going to walk. We're going to walk to Shul, just to take a walk. People don't walk anymore. They don't walk.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Tell people you Uber, you come to shul, you go to shul. You think- it's like a Pizza Hut delivery. Walk to Shul. People are going to walk on Friday night for 20 minutes. They're going to think. They're going to have time to think because they're not going to be on the phone paying the Uber guy. And they're going to come to Shul and they're going to open up and all of a sudden the Rabbi is introducing some Hebrew into the Davening today. And we're going to start learning Gemarah, Talmud. And you know what? I studied Talmud with the dean of the Yale Law School. It blows his brain out because it's so unbelievably complex. He loves it. He loves it. And the students and you go back to the original text and you have it because you know it. I know you know it. I've read your book. I've watched you. You've got the goods. You believe it all. You believe everything I believe. We pretty much are just about living the same belief system for sure. I'm 99- I read your book, and everything you wrote in the book is true, which is why I havn't written my book yet. Because I got to say the truth and that's- I'm busy. I should be writing. But you, you wrote it, you believe it. You know it. You know the answers. Let me finish.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: I just wanted to. I just wanted to comment.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. You know, I'll let you comment when I'm done. You can't interrupt you. I'm interrupting you first. You have, you know, that it's about the Navi. And on that note, I'm going to pull out one more note about the Yonah, about the dove, about the dove. I want to tell you about the dove. I lost the sheet. Okay, now I have the sheet. The pigeon, the pigeon, the pigeon, the pigeon, Shir Hashirim, song of songs. Shlomo Hamelech. Listen to the sweet words of Shlomo Hamelech. You think you're going to read Kafka? Yeah, you'll get off a little on Kafka, and you'll read a little Shakespeare. Nothing comes to the Prophets of the Jews. The whole world knows besides the Jews. I mean, guys, let's wake up. "Ani Yesheina Velibi Er" Shlomo Hamelech says some say Chizkiyahu Hamelech wrote it, but Shlomo Hamelech is definitely the original author and maybe recorded by Chizkiya. In Shir Hashirim, "Ani Yesheina Velibi Er" I am asleep, but my heart is awake. And he's talking about the lover. The lover. This is the most romantic book. One of the most romantic books in Torah, Shir Hashirim, is about the lover and the abandoned. The abandonment of the relationship. It's God and the Jewish people. It's an allegorical narrative. "Ani Yesheina Velibi Er"  I am asleep, but my heart is awake. "Kol Dodi Doifek" - and then the knock of my beloved. I gave you a book today. It's called "Kol Dodi Doifek". I hear my lover knocking at the door. "Pischi Li Achoisi Raiosi" - open up my sister, my lover, "Yoinosi" my pigeon, my dove "Tamosi, Sheroishi Nimla Tal"

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I've been standing out a whole night. This is God knocking on our door. He's standing out a whole night. Drenched in dew. Because the dew has fallen already. And God is waiting at the door. Drenched in dew. Soaking. "Kivutzoisai Resisei Layla" My locks, my hair with the damp of night. He's knocking on the door. And Shir Hashirim. And if you read the rest of the chapter, what do the Jewish people do? She gets up, she realizes that she abandoned her lover. She abandoned her God. So she goes running out into the street chasing after God. That's what we need to do. We need to be woken up. But why the dove? Why the pigeon? By the way, it's the fourth time in Shir Hashirim in the book of Song of Songs that we bring, that God refers to the Jews as the dove and the pigeon. So I've been reading a lot about the history of warfare and one of the most fascinating stories of the history of warfare, because we're living in a time of war is the homing pigeon. We all know what the homing pigeon is. If you don't know what the homing pigeon is, you should. So who knows what a homing pigeon is? Raise your right hand. Okay. Some people don't know. Good. So I'll teach you something about pigeons. The pigeon- you put them in, you bring them up. He's born or she's born. By the way, pigeons are vegetarian. Just for the vegetarians here.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Talk about liberalism. We got to mention a little vegetarianism. Pigeons are vegetarians. Pigeons are monogamous, and pigeons' feathers fall off. They're very loose. So when the crow or the hawk comes to grab the pigeon, it's hard to grab because he grabs the feathers and the pigeon gets away. So the Jews, we've been chased. So this is one of the commentaries, one of the Meforshim the Malbim or the Radak or the Metzudas Dovid, these names should be something that goes through your head and talk about what's the, why does God refer, why do we refer to the Jew as the pigeon? Pigeon? First of all, monogamy is an important thing. Second of all, vegetarianism. Okay. Basically, you could argue. Commentaries actually explain what it means not to eat of your kind like other birds. It should be, they call it cannibalism. So let's just make the distinction. Not exactly carnivore or omnivores, but that's another discussion. And the third is that the feathers fall off. But the real reason that we're the pigeon is because what's the pigeon? In war, before we had beepers, you know, the Israelis, they have beepers now. Before the beepers, way before the beepers, the Jews had something else. Not just the Jews, but the world. There was a pigeon. The pigeon you put, you bring you, it's born. You open up the pigeon and the pigeon flies away. And then what does the pigeon do? The pigeon comes home. They started races in Europe. It goes back to ancient times.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Medieval times. But in modern times, there were races. 50 miles. Then the pigeon went 100 miles. And the pigeon flew across the British Channel during World War II and landed in Budapest and came back with all the British and stuff. "Achoisi, Raiyosi, Yonosi" Over and over and over again. Shlomo Hamelech says to the Jewish people. You're the dove. You're the pigeon. You can run. You can fly. You could go. You're coming home. By instinct, you're coming home. Nobody's shown you how to go home. Nobody directs the pigeon back. It's one of the greatest mysteries of the world. That you could send a pigeon a thousand miles. A thousand miles. They did this during the war. They carried messages back over empty lines. A thousand miles. People bet their fortunes on these pigeons and they go back. The Jew is referred to as a lot of things, a lot of things. But the Shlomo Hamelech says that God calls us the dove, the pigeon, the, I think it's pronounced kalam. Maybe there's some, orthino- what's the bird specialist orthnology? Ornithology. Thank you. Ornithology. The pigeon comes home because by instinct, it's part of their existence to go home. So my hope tonight Carolyne. And to Lena, and to Matt, and to Mom and Dad and to the children and all of our wonderful, lovely people in this room, but you had you at the helm because you're in New York.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm in a small college town, we call it. We're making a little noise, but it's still a small college town. You got to notch it up. You got to bring all the birds back. Back in place. Back in time. From a thousand miles. From a third generation, you spoke before about "Eino Yodea Lishol" by the Seder, the one that doesn't know how to ask. So "At Pisach Loi" you have to start to teach them. What did the parents do if the parents can't teach? You remind me, I told this to Ron Liebowitz at Brandeis. We're living in the post assimilation generation. Our parents already assimilated. So the kids today come on campus, Toby and I are seeing second generation. Shabtai is already a second generation organization. The students of the parents who started the organization are coming back to campus. Their post, their parents are already assimilated. So the post assimilated, so the parents can't even teach them. So whose responsibility is it? The responsibility is on us. With you at the helm, you have to now take it a thousand times louder, bigger, and put it out in the world and tell the world, go back to the entire leadership of the entire Reform movement. You were a tank commander, right? You know, I don't have to tell you what tank commanders do. Tank commanders take control of the desert. It's my desert. I'm going to set the formation right? And everybody after me, you were a tank commander Ami.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You can change the Jewish world. You, one person will and can change the Jewish world. You have 90% of Jews don't identify as Orthodox. Okay good so you have 90% of all Jewry in your hands, about 13 million people. And if you get up tomorrow and you tell the world, the Reform movement, that we're going through a full overhaul here, full blown overhaul. We're going back to"Alef, Beis, Gimmel, Daled." Then the revolution will start, and then people will come in next time, we'll have a Talmud Shiur. I'll hand out the papers and you'll be reading it to us. What the Gemara says about human rights and about civil rights, and we don't have to hear the world preaching and lecturing us, and we come in paralyzed because we don't have the basic ingredients. We, all of us collectively, we don't have basic ingredients. So we need to hustle up and open up the texts and learn the languages and learn to enjoy it. And it's going to solve all our other problems. It's going to solve all our other problems. We're looking for all the world's wonderful things, wonderful things thank God there's therapy, and thank God there's meds, and thank God there's yoga, and thank God there's gyms and all these wonderful things. But let me tell you, existentially, as a people and individually, the wholesomeness of Yiddishkeit, the wholesomeness of Judaism, embracing, of reading Shir Hashirim, "Yonasi Raiosi", poets, poetry.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I told Stephen Greenblatt, who's the greatest, greatest scholar of Shakespeare alive at Harvard, who knows who Stephen Greenblatt is? We had an event in Cambridge and I said to Stephen Greenblatt, you mastered Shakespeare. Did you learn Ein Yaakov have you opened the Gemara to read the stories of the Talmud? To make a long story short, he learns Ein Yakov every day today. The great Stephen Greenblatt. I'm sure some of you have read his books. If you haven't, you're ignorant. You should read Stephen Greenblatt's  books on Shakespeare. And he's reading Ein Yakov and he's reading the Gemara and he sends me emails with the commentary. Where's volume two? I finished volume one. Well, Stephen Greenblatt, after you master all the Shakespeare and you realize you haven't really found the answers, you go back to something a little bit, you know, the Classics. Let's go back to the Classics. I'll finish- on that note, I'll finish with one story. There was a great art dealer. By the way, if anybody wants to leave, you can leave. One more story. One more story. There was a great art gallery in New York. And he was a great art dealer in New York. He actually owned the building that was owned by the Iranian embassy that was abandoned, I guess, after the Shah, after the Khomeini came to power. What was his name, Toby? The art dealer. And he told me. I came to see him. I used to go visit him. He had gone to Yale. I thought you were going to remember.

  Speaker10: I know, Chicago.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, Richard Feigen, the Richard Feigen gallery. He sold paintings for $60 million. I used to go visit him. He's a Yale alum. He wrote books on art. I remember coming to him during one of the financial crises. We were talking '08 or '09, I think it was. And he said, Shmully, Shmully. Look, look, it's full. The gallery is full. Nobody's buying the old masters anymore. Nobody's buying the old masters anymore. And I said, Richard, I'm not in the art business. I don't know the difference between this painting and that painting. I don't know anything about the economy. Ah, maybe you know a little bit about the economy. I can tell you one thing. The old masters never die. The old Masters never die. And the old Masters will come back, Richard. The old Masters will come back. So we're going to start right here. And I took out a Mezuzua, a piece of parchment, from my pocket. That has the words Shema Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu Adonoi Echad The Jews put on, I saw you have a Mezuza on your door. And I took out a Mezuza and I said, Richard, we're going to put the old, old, old master on the door of the Richard Feigen Gallery in 69th Street, because the old masters never die.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Business, you'll come back, ah they'll buy modern art, they'll buy Jackson Pollock, they'll spend, they'll blow $80 million. Maybe it's a fad. 50 years, 100 years. They're always going to go back to the Old Masters. They'll go back to Simon and Garfunkel, they'll go back to the Beatles. They'll go back to the Old Masters, and they're going to go back to the Bible. You have it. It's in your hands. I'll assist. I'll do whatever I can do. And we have a big community of people. Full revival, full reversal. You got to go in. You got to turn the tables upside down like Stephen Wise did. He told Temple Emmanuel, go to hell. If you board of trustees think you're going to run the Shul- have a nice day. He started the first free synagogue, then the second and the East Side. I think there were six, by the time he got going, he passed away. You're running the Shul. Take the Jewish people by the nut  and let's go.

We Jews: Q&A

• We Jews | Q&A Transcript

  Kieran: Thank you. Hi, I'm Kieran, this is my first Shabtai and I just want to commend you guys and also everyone who came. I feel like this is exactly the kind of conversation that we need to be having at the local level, the national level, the international level. My question for the rabbis is how would you counsel American Jews and non-Jews alike who are horrified by the rise of anti-Semitism and committed to combating it and calling it out, and also horrified by the actions of the Israeli government and committed to expressing their opposition. How should they express themselves in the public conversation? Would your advice differ if you were talking to a Jew or a non-Jew? And I guess really, for those of us who feel the pressure and the temptation of zero sum thinking, you know, of blind tribalism, of dogma, but also think that, you know, by speaking freely and fully and without fear, while also listening deeply, openly, with curiosity to those we not only disagree with, but maybe whose views we find harmful. That's how we can form a higher synthesis that integrates love of Jews and love of humanity. That's how we can maybe move closer to the beloved community that MLK and the Zionist leaders who marched with them envisioned. How might we proceed?

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Well, I'll just, it's obviously a very complicated question. And I can't, I mean, it requires hours and hours and weeks and months, but let me just say this. Personally, I believe in free speech. I think people should and have a responsibility and even an obligation to speak out when they see what they consider to be a wrong. I don't consider anybody beyond criticism. As I mentioned before and the book that Shmully is talking about is just an entire book about argument, lobbing arguments back and forth and debate. So I believe all that. And I think on campus too. Students should have, of course, faculty, but students should have the right to free speech and criticize. And I also I have you know, it's less in vogue now. You know, when I was growing up, the liberal response to hate speech or bad speech, we said more good speech. Right. That that was the liberal response. So part of me still believes that. I don't consider criticism of Israel to be inherently, and by its nature, anti-Semitic. Jews are, frankly, Israel's harshest critics. We are our own harshest critic. Even if I think the criticism is unfair, I still uphold the right and even the responsibility to criticize. The question is, where does legitimate criticism, even if it's wrong and driven by some degree of malice, where does that criticism begin to express itself as anti-Semitism for us? And it's something that a lot of Jews don't.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: First of all, we don't necessarily agree, but a lot of younger Jews can't even detect it. So if you- I believe in dialogue too. So I would love to sit down with people who disagree with us, including activists from the Palestinian community, and I will countenance their argument. I'll listen to the narrative. The Palestinian national narrative. I will reflect on whether a ceasefire could have been implemented earlier. I will take into account their views, learned or not, on how they would have conducted the military campaign that would have reduced civilian casualties while still preserving Israel's security interests. I would listen to all of that. And chances are, I would disagree with a lot of it. But it's all legitimate. And no country is beyond criticism. But if you ask those protesters, if you listen to them carefully, they, generally speaking, okay. So you might be able to find exceptions, but generally speaking, they do not advocate coexistence. They talk about from the river to the sea. Whether you consider that anti-Semitic or not. They talk about one state. They talk about genocide. They talk about apartheid. They talk about colonialism. And that's where legitimate criticism stops. And frankly, that's where a productive dialogue stops. Okay. And where we seep into simple denial of our identity and what makes us Jewish. And that I'm not willing to debate, but it is in the Jewish interest.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: And it is important for us to explain to people, including people who are protesting, who might not even know what they're protesting about. You know, they don't know what river and what sea and all that stuff. It is in our interest, and I think it's also part of our responsibility to see if we can dialogue with them and try and educate them. But we are not going to debate suicide. Okay? That we're not, and we shouldn't. And so it's important for us to know where the line is drawn between legitimate, even if it's vile criticism, and illegitimate criticism. And I think that starts first and foremost with our own sense of clarity, where that begins. Right. And so and it's complicated. It becomes more complicated for us because we have a lot of members of the Jewish community who are, who themselves define themselves as anti-Zionist. By the way, just so you know, the numbers. They make a lot of noise, but it is important for us to  in mind what the surveys and the empirical data show, which is something like 15% to 20% at most, at most of American Jews are hostile to Israel or consider themselves non Zionist or anti-Zionist. Overwhelmingly, 80% to 85% of American Jews are not only supportive of Israel and pro-Israel. Many of them consider Israel to be an important component of their Jewish identity. That's what they tell us.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: And that includes the liberal movements. So whatever impression we give and whatever public spokesmen may convey, overwhelmingly, the majority of liberal Jews are what I said, pro-Israel and consider Israel to be part of our identity. That said, in that community, there is a growing percentage of American Jews who are supportive of Israel and consider Israel to be part of their Jewish identity, who are increasingly uncomfortable with the way this war is being prosecuted. Okay? And that's legitimate, too. In fact, that's a Jewish value to care about civilian innocent death, even if you believe, as I do, this war is a war of no choice, a just war and a war in some respects, an existential war. Even if you believe that, if you're Jewish and we're so overwhelmed with our own sadness that we have no space left in our hearts for the suffering of innocent people on the other side whose government started this war. Then, you know, we've become. We don't want to develop hearts of stone. Okay, so but we have to draw the line somewhere. I draw the line on anti-Zionism because it often seeps into anti-Semitism, and it usually is, by definition, anti-Semitism, although not always. And that would require us to, you know, sit down for five hours in a classroom and philosophize about that. Partial answer, not a, you know, not a complete answer.

  Speaker14: Hello. So I have a question about social media and the power that it has on Gen Z Jews and the sensation of also a kind of, I would call it the power of the mob, the power of plurality and the power of opinion. And I myself actually, I'm at Columbia University right now, experienced this myself, which is something where when it's so overwhelming, the voices surrounding you, telling you that this is a genocide or these are these really powerful, terrifying words. I also think now, after reflection, are used to scare Jews as well scare Jews into changing their opinion about a very serious situation, which is that we were under attack. We have to defend ourselves. But I'm seeing actually, because I also am a writer and was covering the protests. And what I saw was a lot of students who went to Shul, all these things, but because of the overpowering number of whether it was faculty or classmates pressuring them, pressuring them to the point of on social media, telling them, if I don't see you post against this, if I don't see you post online that this is a genocide, then you're complicit. And the way that that reverberated was to a point where students were asked to put on their photos in hallways, that there's a cork board and the MFA, a Palestinian flag or not.

  Speaker14: So it was becoming very and there was only one Jew I knew of who actually withstood that one. So I think the power of fear and the power of the mob does more than just make people concede to an opinion, it discombobulates them. It gaslights them. It scares them into thinking, wait, am I complicit? And especially in a moment of major grief when we've lost so many people and are attacked, that trauma with that discombobulation has done so much damage. So in addition to teaching children Judaism, how do we also help them resist that majority power, especially when we have kids going to universities. Kids whose greatest dream was to go to Yale or Columbia who've worked so hard. And suddenly they're being told that if they don't say this thing, you know, they can't even go to class, they can't study. How do we give them the strength to stay strong in their convictions and also not be confused?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I think, Carolyne, you have to answer the question. What did you do when you were at Yale? Why don't you get up and answer the question? You dealt with this in your sorority.

  Speaker15: Yeah she's mic'd.

  Carolyne Newman: I am mic'd. I think that's a really hard question because.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We don't give you simple questions Carolyne.

  Carolyne Newman: Well, I think that's uniquely hard because of the level of, you know, isolation that you experienced far exceeds anything I experienced while I was a student at Yale. And something I also will say, because I know you personally is that you are the most, you know, you are the most balanced and well-rounded and humanitarian and open minded woman. And especially as a writer, I know, you're, you know, you're very fair. So to hear that you felt isolated at Columbia is really surprising to me and honestly very scary. I just I think Shmully is referring to a similar conversation we had two years ago before, you know, before shit hit the fan, for lack of a better word. Where I basically professed to being a liberal Zionist in a way that felt like I was like coming out as something that would be, like, controversial and not, and something that I was like, remember feeling hesitant to do on camera, but that.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Where were you telling people that you were a liberal Zionist?

  Carolyne Newman: Well, I said it. I said it on camera at a Shabtai event in New York City. But I also said it at a Shabtai dinner in New Haven. In the context of the war that was in 2021, the 11 day war.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, but you had talked then. I remember you talking about a conversation you had in your sorority with your sisters, about Israel at one point, and about just dealing with different people, not understanding Israel when you were at Yale?

  Carolyne Newman: Yes. Well, yeah. So, I mean, I think that was just a matter of correcting people who were using terms and repeating language that they had seen on social media and just explaining why the language that they were parroting without context was incorrect. And so I feel like it was a very small step compared to what you're describing. But being able to, you know, think critically and assess every, you know, nugget of fact, you know, in a nutshell of how it's being said in the context by which it's being said. And to be able to, like, evaluate for yourself whether or not it's true or rings true is, you know, kind of how I personally.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Zack, do you want to add something? Get up. If it's Yes.

  Zach: I just wanted to say, I think I especially agree that it's really important that people are educated rather than parroting because, I think- so, for context, I'm in the art program at Yale and I think that that's particularly concentrated with people who are unwilling to debate and to have discussion. I specifically remember, like last semester, going up to some of the people who were protesting on the lawn and just asking to know more, and not a single person would agree to talk to me just because I wasn't like wearing a keffiyeh or, and I think that that is like the most opposite of Ivy League thing that you could do to just completely refuse discussion. And then the real discussion happens on social media and people like you said are parroting or reposting or retweeting. And I think it's really it's kind of mindless and, yeah, I think in the art program especially, I think, you know, with the department, for instance, like saying that, you know, this is our stance or our interpretation of Yale's free speech policy. Oh, and by the way, you can't, like, express support for Israel. I think that is the most unlike an Ivy League school you could possibly be. So from my perspective, I mean, it's completely what you described. I think it's kind of tranquilized a little bit this year, which is also ironic because people were saying that we won't rest until Yale divests. Yale still hasn't divested, and they are resting. But, I mean, it's still there.

  Speaker17: Can I make a point about this? I don't need the mic, I don't think. I think it's important, though, in this discussion. And I'm a product of one of these institutions that was very different in my day, of course. I think it's important to  in mind that Jews, Jewish academic leaders, Jewish donors, Jewish faculty members played an extraordinarily significant role in transforming these institutions into the cesspools of anti-Semitism that they have become. Okay, if you see the experience of Erwin Chemerinsky, who is, I think now the dean at Berkeley Law School, he was shocked. He was astonished to encounter anti-Semitism on a campus, whose hiring and whose admissions practices led to these consequences. So I think this is a very important thing for every Jew to consider. All right. This is not a happy story. We played an important role in making it happen.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.

  Speaker10: And I think the one thing I want to follow up on is my question is more about the younger ones, the Gen Z ones, the 18 year olds, 19 year olds, 20 year olds who are being told through the power of social media, if you don't post this, then you will be penalized. And you and I have something in common, we're both in arts programs in Ivy Leagues. In the pressure cooker of that, it's unbelievable how much pressure there is to denounce as quickly as possible.

  Zach: And I got the same thing where like, if you don't post this, then you're complicit. I think that that's ridiculous. What if you don't have Instagram?

  Speaker10: How do we protect these children from being controlled via social media?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Toby do you want to say something?

  Toby Hecht: Yeah. So I think we're going to close. I mean, is there a final question or, no? We're good. Final story.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Whose got us another story? Oh you want another one?

  Toby Hecht: No no no, no, I was just blown away by tonight. I was just blown away by tonight. Rabbi Hirsch, Carolyne, Shmully. This was amazing. I could feel the warmth of the room. I think we were. This was just a beautiful night on many levels. Being here together with all of you and talking about very important subjects in a sacred space of Lena and Matt's home, who were so, the Hachnosas Orchim, welcoming people into your home is like the essence of and the roots of Judaism. Famously, Abraham had four doors to his tent for every direction. And this was just totally symbolic in that sense. The ability for all of us to come together with possibly diverse opinions and different ways of expressing maybe our Judaism and coming together literally, Ke'ish Echad Be'leiv Achad, as one person with one heart. And this was just such a beautiful way for me personally to go into the Jewish New Year, which we start celebrating a week from tonight. And I cannot thank you, the panel, enough. Rabbi Hirsch, it was just- How soon can you come up to campus? That's what I want to know. This was just- I really have tears in my eyes, for the things- just the beautiful unity of tonight. And I want to thank all of you for coming. I think this was extraordinary. And let's, "Mechayil El Choyil," from strength to strength.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I don't want to leave. Thank you, Toby. I don't want to leave Amanda hanging because things- the fact that you asked the question twice is telling. And we know that at Columbia, things are probably worse than they are anywhere. And I agree with you, obviously, about not only what the Jews did, but how the extent to which Jews have built these institutions. I mean, the endowments and the names of.

  Speaker17: Close your checkbooks.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. But thank God most people in this room don't have very big checkbooks. So we're talking about, but another side of this. But I want to answer your question because I think it's and I know you agree, but I think it's very important to remember the Jewish people strength was never about numbers. We're a small nation. We're a small people. And frankly, most very successful things in the world are not about numbers. You work at a small boutique law firm, but there's only one and everybody knows- everybody knows that firm. Even at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School, and at Columbia and NYU, they know there's a coveted spot there. So numbers are wonderful. The Jewish people, our history was not only not about our size, but it was the opposite. We were small. The Torah tells us over and over and over again, "Ha'me'at Mikol Ha'amim" we're the smallest among the nations. God blessed Eisov, Yakovs brother, with much more land than he gave us, much more riches than he gave us, much more produce and agriculture and farming. Look at the Arab world, right. And he gave us a small piece of land. We're a small people. That was our blessing. That's A. Therefore watch the way the blacks went into the lunchrooms, the Woolworth's and the lunch counters in the 60s. The heroic ones who sat there, but they weren't letting black people into those restaurants, and they sat there nonviolent.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And there weren't a lot of them, but they stood there and they said, when they come, they're going to hit you. They're going to beat you. Don't hit back and let them carry you out. And they carried them out, and they carried them out. They carried them out. You know what eventually happened? Eventually the world changed because the truth is more powerful than a million lies. Tik Tok and Instagram and thousands of people who won't even have a conversation with Zack because they're intimidated by Zack, because they know Zack is smarter than them. Zack knows the answers. Zack is going to challenge them intellectually. You're at Yale. You can't stand up to a conversation, to a real discourse, so you're weak and all you can do is scream. When you walk up to them, I've done it over and over to these demonstrations with my Talis, on Shabbos, coming out of Shul. I always go with my Talis and I even put my Tefilin on and I walk into the demonstrations and I look them in the eye. They start to shake. Guys twice the size of me surrounded by 50 people. I go alone and you look them in the eye. They see the Jew. And what do I represent? You're not going to stand here and preach hate. You're not going to stand here and tell me that I don't have a place or the Jewish people don't have a right to a homeland, or that, God forbid, we kill children indiscriminately because the facts are the facts.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You can scream or you can write about a thousand times on the front page of the New York Times. It's not who we are. So we know who we are. We know what our values are. If we don't, we should study them and appreciate them and learn them and go to Shul. Whatever Shul, take a class and open a book. It's not about numbers. It's not about noise. Warren Buffett - Igor, you wanted a story. Don't listen. Don't listen to the noise. If you trade. If you trade. If you trade stocks on CNBC's news, you're going to blow up your account very quickly. Very quickly. Because the market fluctuates like this. Okay? Warren Buffett says, I know people are going to buy toothpaste for the next thousand years. I buy my toothpaste stocks when the market when everybody's throwing their toothpaste stocks down because the market had a bad day and there's blood in the streets, right? There's certain things, but people are going to still brush their teeth. So you have to connect yourself with anchors that are real and true and honest and long term back in history and future history. And you got to ignore the noise because the noise is just going to it's just like you say, it's going to drive you crazy, and you got to go to small groups and fortify yourself and solidify small groups that are not going to be afraid and are going to call it out for what it is. Some people you argue some people you can't argue.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You know, and those people, the Jews who got on the buses and went down to the south and they got- some of them got killed. But how many were there? The Freedom Riders? How many? What is it, we're talking about a hundred people. They changed the whole country. Look at any battle, any challenge, any great revolution. Even in the last 200 years, forget about the last thousand years. It happened- because a few, a small group of people. We're here tonight, the reality is, we're here tonight with the people that we're here with because I got one WhatsApp sent to me on a two minute clip of your film. And I bumped into the two of you at an event a few days later, and I put two and two together because God just put it in the right thing. So what does that mean? But you're going to go back tomorrow to your Shul. You have thousands. How many thousands? How many thousands of families are there? And then the Reform movement, right. I mean, you got half Manhattan, half Manhattan. You know, even if we cut it with the park right down the middle, you know, let them have a little peace. But the whole Reform movement, every one of us has an office. You run the biggest PR firm in the world, Renée Edelman. Yeah, anounce yourself, I mean, what is Renée Edelman's- Edelman for the biggest PR firm in the world. And Israel has a PR problem. I mean, how could that be?

  Speaker18: Get them back.

  Speaker10: When are you coming back?

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah,coming back. Renee. Renee. Renee. If you go into corporate.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Richard Edelman.

  Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Sit down with the board of directors of Edelman's and say we're going to take Israel on. Yeah. Everybody knows. What do they know? Israel has a PR problem. Who in the world can fix it if not the Edelman's? Yeah. So I'll tell you, so what, what are we going to do about it? About the TikTok problem. They do $1 billion a year in billing for people who spend money on TikTok. Oh, they'll figure it out, right? Her brother, he came to Yale to speak. He knows how to figure these things out. What does Israel have to do? You stay up with these Israeli government, and you figure out how to solve the PR problem. And if the New York Times doesn't want to do something about it, you tell your clients to stop buying ads in the New York Times. I love you all, everybody. Have a good night.

  Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: Thank you. Thank you very much.