Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Israeli Resilience, Pre- & Post-10/07 - with Liel Leibovitz

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

This is a crossover episode with Liel Leibovitz in which we jointly release a conversation on the Call Me Back podcast feed and the Tablet Magazine's Unorthodox podcast feed. Liel Leibovitz, who was born and raised in Israel, is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox. He also hosts the daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of "Zionism: The Tablet Guide" and he's uthor of the new book, "How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book." Tablet Magazine -- Tabletmag.org Unorthodox Podcast -- https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/unorthodox "How Talmud Can Change Your Life" -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-the-talmud-can-change-your-life-liel-leibovitz/1142948866?ean=9781324020820

It is 10 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8th here in New York City. It is 5 a.m. in Israel on Thursday, November 9th as Israelis are getting ready to start their day. We're doing something a little different today. I recently had a long conversation with my friend Liel Leibovitz. For those of you who recognize his name, he is the editor-at-large at Tablet magazine, which is a very important journal of Jewish life, Jewish ideas, Israel, the Middle East, issues in popular culture today. I highly recommend Tablet if you're not a regular subscriber and reader of Tablet's

work. But Leo's the editor-at-large at Tablet, and he's host of their weekly culture podcast called Unorthodox, which is part of my podcasting diet, and the daily Talmud podcast called Take One. And he is the editor of Zionism, the tablet guide. And he is also author of the recently released book called How the Talmud Can Change Your Life. Surprisingly modern advice from a very old book. Leo is one of the most thoughtful people I know. He is a character in our new book, The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World. He actually appears a couple of times in our chapter on Israeli storytelling and the role of Israeli storytelling

and the Israeli television industry has a lot of really important insights that we bantered over lunch and then wound up weaving a lot of it into the book. And Liel and I agree on a lot, we disagree on a lot during the whole judicial reform protests of 2023, which seem like ancient history now. We argued a lot, and we come back and revisit some of those disagreements about what we learned about the various people and players involved during the 2023 protests, and what he and I think of those players now, post-October 7th. We talk a lot about our new book, The Genius of Israel, and we talk a lot about Israeli resilience and what we're seeing right now in Israeli society,

which is a big focus of mine and Saul's book, but is also just a focus of mine generally right now, just watching what's playing out in Israel, which I think is an underreported story about the vibrancy of Israeli society, which will be as important to explain how Israel will bounce back as the military story is. Now, Liel and I recorded this conversation as a crossover episode. That is to say, it will appear at the Tablet podcast on their feed, and it will also appear on the Call Me Back feed. My hope is after listening to the podcast, you'll think Leo's an interesting guy, and the Unorthodox podcast is well worth your time, and that you'll start adding the Unorthodox podcast

to your mix of podcasting downloads in your weekly routine. Leo Leibovitz and me on Israeli resilience, pre and post October 7th. This is Call Me Back. Dan Sienor, welcome to your own podcast and to ours, the great unorthodox Call Me Back crossover. Thank you, Leo. And I'm actually very excited that while this podcast will appear on both of our feeds,

we get to record it in person, which is a real rarity these days, and at the global headquarters. At the global headquarters of the Zionist Jewish conspiracy. I want to share with our listeners that we are both stuck in traffic this morning and we are both a little bit late. And when you got here, you said your first instinct upon seeing traffic is it's the pogrom. There is some kind of anti-Israel something going on. I wish I could say that was a joke and it wasn't.

I was heading north on 6th Avenue and I was making a right on 28th and all of a sudden a fight broke out basically on 28th. All I see is people yelling and screaming and holding up traffic and I'm thinking it's a pogrom. It's like, this is what's going on 28th. All I see is people yelling and screaming and holding up traffic. And I'm thinking, it's a pogrom. It's like, this is what's going on. Someone's trying to take down a poster of a hostage child and someone else is standing in the way.

Immediately, with not a hint of like humor, I really thought that's what was going on. You went zero to Kishnev in 2.3 seconds. You were right there. I was right there, which is a reflection of this insane, truly insane moment. And in the midst of this insane moment, you are publishing this book that it strikes me as a book that is even eerily more relevant, more prescient, more urgent now than it is. I want to read the title for the benefit of everyone. It's called The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation

in a Turbulent World. And it makes the argument, which I want to talk about at great length, because I think it's, I think honesty is the most important thing we can talk about right now, because it really gets to the point of Israel being against all odds

and against anything that any rational prediction might deliver is actually doing very well. And more importantly, poised to do even better, not just to follow up on your earlier blockbuster as startup nation with all these unicorns and all these, as Israelis love to say, the exits, those big sales to American companies, but also because it's a society that actually has a whole host of components that are vital, not just for survival, but really for a nation to thrive. So let me ask you the first and wildly unfair question. What is the genius of Israel and why will it be okay?

We didn't start writing this book expecting to go down the path that ultimately became this book. When we would talk to entrepreneurs who were very successful in Israel today, some of these entrepreneurs take these massive risks. When I would ask them why they took those risks, among the items they would list, which they didn't list when we first wrote Startup Nation, was a sense that the country has their back. There's a sense that the country is their back. There's a sense that the country is a community, a community that argues a lot, but it's a country that is a community,

and the community has your back. So we started to explore that theme more. That's when we stumbled upon what we call this like mountain, this invisible mountain. And so let me just rattle it off because I think some of the data, because I think it's important. The U.S., the West, most affluent Western democracies are headed in a real bad direction as it relates to their societies. These countries are experiencing a demographic collapse. Populations are shrinking. They're aging and shrinking. That's the worst combination. The most innovative economies are in countries that have young and growing populations. So the fact that they're

country after country after country where people are having fewer and fewer children. So the replacement rate's 2.1. So to keep your population growing, each woman has to have at least 2.1 children. And if you're below the replacement rate, it's just a mathematical fact of life. Your population is going to shrink. Most of the world is below 2.1. The U.S. is below 2.1 and Israel is over three. It's about 3.1, but we'll get to Israel in a moment. So there's this demographic crash. The world has never experienced this, by the way. And then you add to this deaths of despair. Even the living seem to be checking out. Killing themselves.

Right. Yeah. So in the U.S., and it's not just the US now, it's the UK and it's other parts of Western Europe and Canada, there's this new phenomenon of deaths of despair, which are deaths as a result of substance abuse, alcohol, drugs, opioids, and suicide. A lot of very healthy working age Americans are dying in disproportionate numbers as a

result of this. So I won't ask you to sort of analyze and theorize as for why so much of the Western world, despite unprecedented technological advances, despite unprecedented convenience and quality of life and really flourishing, economically speaking, is headed in such a grim direction. But I will ask you to start talking about what is working in Israel, because I think it's the same. It's a different answer to the same question. So you start contrasting this data with Israel. So I mentioned the replacement rate. So Israel is well above the replacement rate. Israelis are having lots of children.

Does anyone who's ever ventured into a restaurant in Tel Aviv knows there will be kids? There will be kids. There's no such thing as date night in Israel. It's just kind of understood that kids are part of every part of your life in a way. And my favorite scene is Conan O'Brien, who did this wonderful, you know,

he used to do these series where he'd go travel to different countries. He went to Israel and he goes to the Waze headquarters in Tel Aviv and he sees all these kids all over the place and he says he says what is this are you guys running like a child labor operation here like call the authorities you know this is our director of product but he understands the technology better than us so right he's got real intuition so first Israel's way above anywhere else in the world on being above the replacement

rate to the extent that it is. B, this is partly why Israel's population is young and growing, which is key to a dynamic, energetic, optimistic, self-confident economy and society. And so when I tell this to people, their immediate reaction, their go-to place is, ah, the Haredim. It's the ultra-Orthodox. That's why Israel has so many babies. It's because the Haredim are producing all these babies and they're going to take over the country. And then their next is they're going to take over the country. And then I point out, it's true the Haredim are having lots of children.

That doesn't make Israel exceptional. What makes Israel exceptional on this score is that secular Israelis are also having lots of children. As you write in the book, four kids has become the new status symbol in the four or five. Yeah. How you know you've made it? Everyone from this one woman who's a very successful tech entrepreneur, fintech, she has five children and she's working a full-time job. Lior Raz is a close friend and he features prominently in the book. Known to fans the world over as the lead in Fauda. So Lior is in his mid-40s. He is a very successful actor.

He's got the big deal with Netflix. He's in productions all over the world. And he has four children, four young children, as I always remind him, from the same wife. Four children from the same wife. Four children from the same wife. And I say to him, Lior, do you have any peers in Hollywood who has four little children? And he says he actually can't think of any.

Are there any of your peers in Hollywood who have that many children and served in the military and are embracing and patriotic about their country and love of country? And you start to add these things up. So the secular Israelis have lots of kids. Now there's this iron law of demography

that a wealthy or wealth-creating country typically correlates with declining fertility rates. And there's a number of reasons for it, but that is basically as countries become more economically productive, they just become less reproductive. Israel is the only outlier in the world, where its GDP per capita has been growing, growing, growing, growing, and people are having more and more children.

Now, this is an amazing point from which to begin the kind of exploration that you undertake in the book, because, I mean, it's obvious that having children, especially many children, is the ultimate act of faith in the future, of a person saying, I trust that things here are good and are only getting better, hence I am bringing more life into this world. And a sort of independent dispassion observer might look at Israel and say, I'm sorry, but none of the conditions here objectively appear to apply because you're a

small country with very finite real estate, as anyone trying to buy an apartment in Israel knows. Now we have war, which sadly last couple of weeks we have seen ever more clearly. We have internal societal divisions, which the last couple of months, sadly, we have seen ever more clearly. We seem to have a very unstable society here, and yet it thrives. I know there are many reasons for why they're depicted beautifully in the book, but let's start with your favorite. Why are Israelis so happy? Israel now ranks the fourth happiest nation in the world, according to the study that they released in 2023. And if you look at the other countries on the list, it's Denmark and Iceland

and Sweden, and it's not countries living with Hamas on the south, Hezbollah on the north, and Iran breathing down its throat. And so what I think people misunderstand by happiness is what it's really about is life satisfaction and feeling that you have purpose and the life you're leading has purpose. And I'm just pulling up the book here because there's one quote that I stumbled upon and then I wound up interviewing him for the book, which is Sebastian Junger, who's the war correspondent, very well known, written a bunch of great books. He wrote, and I'm quoting here, humans don't mind hardship.

In fact, they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. And I think that's the answer to your question. If Startup Nation was the title of our first book, I do think of Israel as necessary nation. People feel necessary.

They feel that they have a point, that their country has a point, that they're part of a country that has a purpose. So what do I mean by that? Mika Goodman, who you know, who is a close friend, public intellectual in Israel, serious scholar. We interviewed him quite a bit for the book. And when we presented him with the data, Mika said, you know, a startup nation, you guys were basically saying Israel's doing better than it should, given all its other circumstances.

What you guys are showing me now, it's not just that Israel's doing better than it should. It's that Israel's moving in an entirely different direction. The whole world is moving in this one direction. Israel's moving in the other. He said, you know, Israel is a small country with a big story. There are plenty of small countries in the world. They're fine. What is their mission? What's Denmark's mission? You know, it's nothing against Denmark or Sweden. Better herring. Improving quality of life, standard of living, good healthcare. These are perfectly nice goals for a government and for a society.

But it's not a big story, right? Israel's story is a really big story. And everything going on in Israel at any given- I mean, they don't really spend that much debating the finer points of tax reform or agricultural subsidies. They're dealing, who is a Jew? What should the borders be? How to deal with existential security threats at any given moment. How to balance Judaism, democracy. Those are big ideas. Of biblical proportions that

have implications for the past 2,000 years and for the next 2,000 years. And then he says, when you have a small country with a big story, it means that everyone in the country can touch it. We titled that chapter Touching History, that you have a role in shaping this because it's within reach because it's a small place with a big story. And that gives people this sense of purpose and I think makes them feel necessary. And when people feel necessary, they're inherently happier. That's a big factor, not the only factor, but that's a big factor. So look, this conversation up until now has been probably the most cheerful conversation two Jews have ever had in the history of Jewish

conversations. I wish to change that now. One thing that I was wondering as I was reading this book, the sort of great big unmentioned, which is mentioned here and there, but I feel not wrestled with, is the idea of faith. Because Israelis are also, while not all of them define themselves as religious, an overwhelming majority do define themselves as some variation on the word traditional. An overwhelming majority do anchor their lives in, for lack of a better term, Jewish time, be it kind of slowing down Shabbat. And you do write about Shabbat in the book at length, but more as a kind of opportunity to get together with your family. Could it be that faith is sort of the secret

engine that is moving this great big machine along? The chapter about Shabbat is my favorite chapter in the book. We titled it Thanksgiving Every Week. I love, by the way, the Noah Tishbe quote in the beginning. It's like, it's a small enough country, you are expected to come home if not for every Shabbat and every other Shabbat, and if not, like, watch out. And if you only come for every other Shabbat, that's because you have to go to your spouse's parents for Shabbat.

There's no like, hey, I'm doing something else that night. You better have a good excuse. You know, over 70% of Israelis do some version of Shabbat. Being together with family, two, three, sometimes more generations together every Friday night. I just want to spend a moment on this because it's important. I ask Americans all the time, tell me a ritual you participate in with your family that you know most of the country is also doing the same thing at the same time. Tell me a ritual you participate in with your family that you know most of the country is also doing the same thing at the same time. Not with you, but sort of with you and that they're

experiencing the same experience you're having. Only Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the only one they can come up with. Maybe Halloween. Well, no. I say Thanksgiving and then I say, give me one more and they say the Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Not for Jets fans. Exactly. Hey, hey, that may change. But yes. So they say the Super Bowl. And then that's it. And I'm kind of floored by that. We in the United States have lost a sense of shared rituals,

not only in our own family's ritual and our own community's ritual, but a sense that you're experiencing with the country. And that's what I say when it keeps the country from spinning apart. I do think Shabbat is a big reason. There are other holidays. There are other events that we talked about in the book that do this.

But Shabbat is extremely important. So secular Israelis still lead a pretty spiritual life. If you ask someone, okay, do you consider yourself religious? No. Okay. Who do you spend most of your time with? Jews What language do you speak?

Hebrew Where do you live? The Jewish state on biblical land And what calendar drives most of your schedule? The Hebrew calendar So before you even actually make the conscious decision About whether or not you're religious or observant You are leading a faith-based life

What is a faith-based life. What is a faith-based life? Mika Goodman, he said something like, communities don't create rituals, rituals create community. So what is the Jewish calendar? It's a series of rituals. And what do rituals do? They bring you together with family and community a lot. And what does all the data show? The data shows that if you're with your community and your family a lot, you tend to be a happier person. Laurie Santos, who's this happiness guru, she's at Yale University. She's got this podcast called The Happiness Lab. She had this line that I was struck by. She said something like, the data shows religious people tend to be happier. And then she qualified it and said, whether they're believers or not.

And that's what I was struck by because her point was, you don't have to believe in all this stuff. You don't have to get into existential questions. Do I or don't I believe in God? Just live this life. Live this life and you will be happier. Okay. So here's one really difficult question. The book's tremendous. It is certainly a great insight into not just why Israel will be okay, which is something that's incredibly difficult for most of us to kind of feel right now as it is fighting for its very survival, but also sort of its real innate greatness. So I want to ask an even more unfair question. How can we, for lack of a better term, Israelize our own lives here?

I'm not talking nationally, policy-wise. I'm talking- You mean Jews? American Jews who read this book and say, okay, well, I want to learn from this. I want to take this and implement this in my own life, in my own family, my own community. I want two principles, three principles

that I could start doing to imbue some of this genius of Israel and improve my own life. Mostly the way I get asked the question is in the context of the fight. Like, how do we fight back? How do we deal with this anti-Semitism? It's the absolute wrong prism. Right, exactly.

If you're asking that question like this, you've already lost a fight. So there, you've answered it. I try to give two responses. I say the first is I hope since October 7th, you've realized, to paraphrase that movie, they're just not into us. Right, they're just not into us. They're just not into us. You know, they may tolerate us, some of them.

Some of them may like us. But generally speaking, if you're not sure, they're probably just not that into you. So friends of mine who are pulling all their donations from these elite colleges, you know, I say to them, I said, so you walk around these campuses, I won't name them, but we all know what they are, the top, you know, Ivy League schools, you walk around the campuses and every lecture hall and student gym and dorm building, each one after the other is named after some prominent Jewish philanthropist, which means Jews were giving gobs of money to these institutions. Now you would think in return for that, at best, they probably had some influence on the place, but at a minimum, those places would not become hostile to Jews. So, if there's one

takeaway here is you could do all this stuff to try to win these people over and think that you're appreciated, and they're just not that into you. And your children would still be forced to hide in the attic of the library as the mob is outside is outside with pitch yeah yeah as a friend of mine sent me the other day he's got a kid at cornell said my kid who takes hebrew is a hebrew class at cornell was just sent a message from the teacher saying for hebrew class this week we're meeting at quote-unquote a secret location we will send you location so jews in 2023 having to study hebrew in a secret location. If like, I mean, so I say in response, the one thing American Jews have agency over, the one thing they can control

is whether or not they choose to lead a Jewish life. It has nothing to do with fighting with administrations of universities and sending in statistics to the Anti-Defamation League. And, you know, you can lead a Jewish life. So the chapter on Shabbat resonate, and you can lead a Jewish life. So the chapter on Shabbat resonates. I care a lot about it, the Thanksgiving every week,

in part because I know it well. I mean, I've seen it firsthand in my family that's in Israel. I have two sisters in Israel. My mother lives in Israel. My mother and one of my sisters, because they live around the corner from one another in Jerusalem, and my sister's kids, no matter what they were doing in the world, whether they're in the army, every Friday night, three generations are together. We've tried to replicate a version of that in our own home.

We chose to send our children to a Jewish day school. I mean, I can go on and on and on. These are things you can choose to do. And I guarantee you to come back to Laurie Santos, you don't have to be a believer. That's what I say to American Jews. If we have the data that shows what makes people happier and feel like they're leaving with purpose, it's there. I think Israel, it's there in extremis. It's set up for you in extremis for the reasons we lay out in the book. But you can create parts of it through Jewish living in the diaspora. Yeah, and it's not going to be easy. And it's not going to be cheap.

And it's not going to be comfortable. And you're going to make a lot of sacrifices. You are, but Zionism was never intended to make us comfortable or safe. It was intended to make us free. And that's what we see in Israel. Dan, thank you so much. Can I ask you a question before we? Absolutely. We barely talked about the massacre and the war. You and I talked a lot about before October 7th. You and I talked a lot about the judicial reform debates and what they meant for Israeli society. And you were quite critical of those participating in the protests or organizing the protests. And I had some criticism of them, but nowhere near how you felt. What we've seen since October 7th is, I think, something extraordinary, ranging from all this debate about the Haredim being a source of the problem,

according to the secular Israelis in the judicial reform debate. And here, the IDF is reporting that they're inundated with requests from Haredim to enlist. Now, when I say this to my secular friends, oh, well, yeah, but the base number is low, so the numbers aren't that big. You're missing the point. It's still unbelievable. You're missing the point.

Exactly. I tell them they're missing the point. And even if they can enlist, they want to do other things. They want to help. Four weeks ago, Yom Kippur, there was this big brawl in the streets of Tel Aviv about whether or not there can be a mechitza. The Orthodox wanted a mechitza for public space,

the dividing line between men and women. And everyone was yelling and screaming about, about whether or not there can be a mechitza. The Orthodox wanted a mechitza for public space, the dividing line between men and women. And everyone was yelling and screaming about, oh, this is so terrible. Jews yelling with Jews on Yom Kippur. Orthodox yelling, arguing with secular. And this is just emblematic of how the country was coming apart between the hedonists of Tel Aviv and the Haredim of B'nai Brak.

It looks very different now. In Tel Aviv, these restaurants, these hyper-traf restaurants are all kosherizing themselves right now so that they're able to prepare meals for soldiers because many of the soldiers keep kosher. And there are so many examples. I guess my question is, A, are you surprised?

And B, as much as you were critical of what the anti-judicial reform protesters were doing at the peak of the reforms are you less cynical about them i'll start with the easy question am i surprised no uh because just before this unthinkable tragedy occurred we um concluded reading one of the greatest works of literature the Jewish people had given the world, the book of Deuteronomy, Sefer Tverim, which is Moses' last speech to the Israelites in which he says quite explicitly, you guys, you're really good when things are bad. When things are good, you tend to fall apart. Watch out. Don't let this happen. I am not at all surprised by the incredible response in Israeli society,

but that doesn't mean that I am not moved literally, physically to tears three, four times a day by reading these super small stories. It's fantastic. And it's a great, great indication of something that I'm hearing a lot from Israelis these days in a manner of kind of heartbreaking, but I think very true criticism of how the leadership has been functioning or more accurately not functioning, said our politicians don't deserve a people as great as this. I think it's completely true. But now I want to get to the second part of your question where I grow a little bit more

dark. Because again, I feel we've had way too much hope and optimism here. Too much light. There's no rabbinical permission for so much cheerfulness in any setting like this. Look, I have said from pretty much the beginning that I don't think that the judicial reform protests have really been about the judicial reform at all. In fact, most people who I met who are committed marchers in Compline Street every Saturday night really could not tell you the first or second thing

about what it is that the bill actually said. It was very much about the future of Israel. It was very much about what kind of people we are and what our reason for being here is and how we want life to be. I am terrified, absolutely terrified that the day after what I am certain, because I have faith, would be an astonishing victory. The arguments would begin anew, but they would begin on a very existential frame because there will be some Israelis who look at what happened on October 7

and say, well, this is proof that we can't live on our sword. We have to be much more mindful of the Palestinian national aspirations. We have to collaborate within the region. We have to listen to the Americans who came to our aid. We really have to make a lot of concessions, even if they're very painful. And there are going to be a lot of Israelis who say, guys, this is proof that PLO and Hamas are not different. This is proof that the Palestinians are simply biding their time until they could kill us all. This is proof that the nations of the world may come to our defense or may not, but even if they do, they will not change the policies like the Iran deal that contributed so much to getting us there. This is an invitation for us to grow stronger, to grow tougher, and to execute,

if not vengeance, then at the very least, a public policy that is, shall we say, much more Middle Eastern than anything Israel had attempted before. Now, how do you have a conversation like that? Because a conversation like that isn't about security arrangements. It's not about, well, you know, maybe we could turn Ramallah into a little independent emirate controlled by the tribe

because it's all, you know, these hamulos, these family-based tribes. Those conversations I'm not worried about. We're smart. We could get through those. It's really about why are you here? And I think I told you the story, and it remains with me as probably the seminal story of this conversation. Some years back, I was at a lovely conference in Oxford organized by an American Jewish philanthropic organization.

They brought Israelis and American Jews together, and I was sort sort of liminal figure on both sides. And one of the participants, who is a religious sort of right-wing famous journalist in Israel, said something and he said, oh, you know, in Bet HaMikdash, the temple. And another participant who is also Israeli, who is a prominent journalist on the more sort of liberal end of things said, why are you talking about the temple? What does the temple have to do with anything? And the man who said this looked at her and said, what does the temple have to do with anything? It has to do with everything. It's what we pray for three times a day. It's the only reason we're here. I still fear that there is a substantial portion of Israelis for whom life, as they've known it, and this is where the being a very young country also

comes in, has been mostly lived in the world, by which I mean to say most living young Israelis have not experienced a war, let alone an actual war of survival. Most living Israelis have not had to live with anything resembling real anti-Semitism. Most Israelis would define success as being normal, as being part of the rest of the world. This idea, guys, no, you can't. They actually don't, as you just said a moment ago, they don't like us. They are seeking to destroy us.

And furthermore, our historical mission has always been to stand apart and do our thing. And it's a very distinct thing. And the thing isn't cool. It's not the exit from the startup, although we do need this desperately to survive. It's not the sale to Netflix. It's the doubling down on Jewish life. I am terrified, absolutely terrified that a very bitter argument would start pretty much the day after the victory. I don't think it would be an argument about personnel anymore, I think. And at this point, even though I've been sympathetic to him throughout most of his career, I hope BB goes home at the end of this.

Sometimes I wonder why he hasn't already. He can't. I mean, he can't midway, don't you think? I mean, I don't see how- I don't know. I mean, I would like to think that he can't, but then I see him tweeting, getting in Twitter wars with- At 1 a.m. At 1 a.m. with the security forces being like, you never told me that there was an attack coming. Don't you have a war? So I think we're going to have really, really difficult conversations. The thing that gives me a glimmer of hope, but it really is a glimmer, is that I think we're going to have really really difficult conversations the thing that gives me a glimmer of hope but it really is a glimmer

is that I think this tragedy has been a real necessary reminder that our fundamental foundational arguments are never going to go away but I think it's been a reminder that we should have them at a very different register

not at the register of like oh those people I hope that like, oh, those people. I hope that there's no more those people. We may still come to blows, hopefully only metaphorically speaking, over really important foundational questions in the future of this country. But I don't think it'll be as acrimonious

as anything we've seen, or at least I hope it will not be as acrimonious as anything we've seen in the last couple of months. And the fact that you're seeing now, like the example I give of the Haredi, the Orthodox Jews who are enlisting or trying to enlist or do something, and hyper-secular Israelis that are trying to accommodate more observant Jews during this time of crisis, doesn't that also, it doesn't remove the barriers. The barriers are still, the dividing lines will still be there after the war, but I feel like it softens them a little bit.

I really hope so. Look, you and I have spoken about the Haredis a lot. Most of my family are Gerhasids, so it's a community I know very intimately. I feel that this is a deeply maligned sector of people who kind of live in perpetual fear of their brothers and sisters because they feel that they are being targeted, wrongly targeted for their life choices. And they feel that the only real solution that would satisfy secular Israelis is Haredi simply stop being Haredi. Yes, if they shaved their beards and served in the army and, you know, didn't care so much about their beards and served in the army and, you know, didn't care so much about their own rituals and communities, everything will be okay. But at that

point, they will no longer be themselves. I think there is a world in which those great big demonstrations of solidarity on behalf of that community really inspire and soothe and heal. But there's also a world in which Israelis emerge and say, okay, look, this is an indication of why, or this tragedy of October 7th is an indication of why military service is so important. The people who saved the country at this juncture were us. And we could tell a lot of stories of very brave Israelis,

including, and I have to say this, this organization, Achim Laneshik, right? Which is an organization of Israeli officers and army veterans, really one of the leaders of the anti-judicial reform protests, was unbelievable in every single way, from running to the front line with guns, like personal handguns, and fighting on October 7th, to really taking all this organizational infrastructure and doing incredible things.

The morning of October 7th, about 20 of them met. Some of the biggest players in the Brothers in Arms, some of the biggest players in the tech community got together and said at 10 a.m. October 7th, okay, what do we, we got to, and within hours they had a few hundred people and a few hours after that, they had thousands of people from this community. And they literally just reached out to the MOD, the Ministry of Defense and said, let's lock arms. How can we help? We have all this infrastructure. Let's get to work. It's overnight from being at war with the government to... It's amazing. The thing that I really fear is that after the shooting's over, they'll turn and said, okay, well, we've just

proven that we are central here. Everyone else take a back seat, which is a natural response. And I pray that it doesn't happen. And honestly, I'm a little bit optimistic that it won't be. Here's another thing that is making me optimistic. I am wildly optimistic. In fact, kind of amazed at the response of Israeli Arabs to this. We now have polling that something like 83% of them are standing really firmly with Israel, that there is very little tolerance, let alone

enthusiasm for any of the Hamas propaganda. You see entire villages up in the Galilee coming together and manufacturing something like 30 or 50,000 meals for the soldiers. Today, someone sent me a photo, one of my friends who's deployed, sent me a photo of a column of tanks on which, because the soldiers were Druze, they flew the Druze flag and the Israeli flag on the tanks, which was incredible to watch. Again, that doesn't go away. You see Lucia Rosh? Uh-huh. She's a prominent Arab-Israeli anchor.

And she, soon after October 7th, just on her broadcast, she's viewed as very critical of the Israeli government. And she just basically said, and she did it in Hebrew, Arabic, and English and said, I stand with Israel. That is amazing. Here's the greatest thing. And because I really want to kind of plug into the optimism. Here's the greatest thing that would happen. I'll start with one anecdote and kind of extrapolate from there. Before on October 6th, the absolute worst job you could do in the army, documented, was a lookout, which is a person who sits in a base right on the border

and looks at a screen. Because this is the surveillance. It's literally the eyes and ears of Israel. And it means that you're looking at a screen for five hours straight, every shift. And you can't look, I mean, you can't look i mean you can't get distracted you can't like listen to music as you're doing this you have to sit there and look it is a mentally and physically crushing job and it's like 24 7 it got so bad that in march

only in march the idf had to arrest and imprison i think about two dozen young women who said, I don't want to serve in this horrible position. This is the community of people, of the soldiers hit on October 7th. It's a community of people probably hit the hardest. 13 of them lost their lives right away because again, they were on the frontline base. So you would think that when the new round of recruits came about, and this just happened last week or this week, actually, you would think that when the new round of recruits came about, and this just happened last week, or this week, actually, you would think that a majority of people who got assigned to this role said, oh, absolutely not. Because not only was it shitty before, but now it's also deadly. There is an unprecedented number of volunteers of young women to be locates, which tells you everything you need to know about Amisra. I did not know that. That is amazing.

I think that we're going to see the same thing in every sector of Israeli life and society, including politics. I think that all of a sudden you'll see a lot of young people saying, okay, well, up until a month ago, yes, my trajectory was my firm, my company, my family, my industry, I'm just a good life. I think a lot more people are going to rise up and rise up to a life of service, which is pretty much the only thing that gives me tremendous hope at this time.

This conversation has been an extraordinary accomplishment because I've extracted from you some rays of optimism. I know. It's not what I do naturally. I will say before we go, just your point about that many of these protesters hadn't actually read the, didn't know the details of what they're debating. I just, this is one story, a friend of mine who's an Air Force pilot.

I won't say his name, but he told me that he was flying. There's this WhatsApp group of all these Air air force pilots that current pilots and retired pilots and they were having this heated debate during the judicial reform protests and there was all this i'm not going to show up to reserves and i'm not that you know and this friend of mine i won't say let's just call him it's sick i'm giving him a pseudonym he said in the whatsapp group have any of you actually read this bill like what tell me exactly you guys have such strong views you're threatening not to serve or not to do your reserve training because based on something you haven't even read and it got very heated how you know how dare you say that and sometime later during this period pre-october 7th he's flying from new york city to tel aviv

and he gets on the ll flight and one of the pilots recognizes him because he too also is in the air force and they served together. By the way, that's the definition of shchuna. Yeah, exactly. So even the pilot and the other pilot, they're just together in the cockpit. It's one big neighbor. So this guy's a passenger. It's sick.

He's a passenger. So the LL pilot says, oh, come up to the cockpit. You'll sit with us. Now, it's sick points out to me because I had just taken my Ambien. I was ready to go to sleep. But I figured, okay, I can muscle through another 20 or 30 minutes you know i'll sit up in the cockpit during takeoff and then i'll so he goes up to the cockpit and he's got the headset on and he's with the one pilot and he's with the co-pilot maybe a third

and they're sitting there and the co-pilot says to it's sick how dare you wrote what you wrote in the whatsapp group okay and and then and what do you want to hear on an 11 hour flight? Right. And you've just taken your Ambien. I'll have the chicken. Yeah. And they're about to take off. And he starts,

while the guy's taking off, he's chewing them out for the nerve and dah, dah, dah, dah. Okay. So apparently, and I don't know enough about commercial aviation,

but when you're, there's, there was a flight, I love flight from JFK and there was an LL flight from Newark and it's sick was on the one from JFK. And when there's, when they take off around the same time that the two cockpits are supposed to communicate. So they're communicating, and the pilot in the JFK flight says to the pilot in the Newark flight,

by the way, guess what? We have Itzik here in the cockpit with us if you want to say hi. Itzik! And then the guy from the other plane starts yelling at him. How dare you? You wrote that WhatsApp, him. How dare you? He's got that, you wrote that WhatsApp message? How dare you? So the two cockpits are yelling with each other about Itzik's WhatsApp message.

Itzik, by this point, is half asleep. He just wants to get on the flatbed and be done with it. And the whole thing, if you had to sum up Israel in one, it's that. And yet, I'm willing to bet none of them had actually read the thing. Right, right, right. Which is fine because again,

we're having... It's about bigger things than just what was in the language. It's about what this country is. Is it a democracy in Jewish garb or is it a Jewish state

or a state of the Jews? Right. And I think that's a really big distinction. We're going to see a lot of it but we're going to see it hopefully done in a very different way. Liel, thanks for this conversation.

Dan, what a pleasure. It's good. We should do it more often. Hallelujah. Thank you.