Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Rabbi David Wolpe: Atheism, The Simulation Hypothesis, & Judaism’s view of the Multiverse! (#078)

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

  A discussion with Rabbi Wolpe, Max Webb Senior Rabbi, Sinai Temple, Los Angeles. Subscribe to Sinai Temple’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmwpoCGsU7wIgcF0E6licEg Subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Find Rabbi Wolpe on Facebook: www.facebook.com/rabbiwolpe And on the web: https://sinaitemple.org Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguable from magic. My guest today is a gentleman that I've been following at a distance, stalking, if you will, for more than two years now, dying to get him on the show, and I thought this would be a great chance to do it. He's been on the podcast with my good friend Eric Weinstein, the Portal podcast. He runs a podcast, which is my weekly listening for Shabbat, which is a podcast production that he makes out of the same thing. Sinai Temple. First I want to introduce him. His name is Rabbi David J. Walpeg. He's the

Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, and he's not only America's rabbi, but he's the most influential rabbi in America. So says Newsweek magazine. And he's one of the most 50 most influential Jews in the world, according to the Jerusalem Post. What do they know? You know, they're really biased. I wouldn't buy there. They might be slightly biased. Sinai Temple, of course, is in the Westwood District of Los Angeles. It's the oldest and largest conservative congregation in the greater Los Angeles area. It's a real pleasure to have you here, Rabbi. Thank you so much for joining us on the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you, and I want to thank you at the outset for giving scientific confirmation to the Jewish Day to the universe there.

5781, you said. That's right. Since the Big Bang. That may ruffle a few feathers in the scientific community there. That's right. You came right out and said it. Well, I know that you are a fan of Robert Chastro's book, God and the astronomers. And maybe if we have time, we'll talk about that because, of course, it was a, you know, some Jews have played slight roles in the discovery of different aspects of the universe's age.

And I want to talk about that and kind of some of the special uniquely Jewish or perhaps specifically Jewish aspects. But before we get into that, I want to ask you, if you were abducted by, you know, aliens. And we're going to get it deep into aliens because I know I know I have to appeal to your science fiction loving side. But if you were to be abducted by aliens, they randomly come to Westwood, they pick a random person at large, happen to pick you. And they ask you, who are you? How do you answer that question? So this has happened, of course. No, I'm just kidding. So I mean, if they ask who I am, the interesting thing, of course, is that among we earthlings,

The answer to that question is generally, what do you do for a living? So I suppose I would say I'm a rabbi. But if I was deducted by aliens, I might say that, you know, I'm a human being, that I have a child, that I believe in certain things pretty strongly, and that I hope they have benevolent intentions towards my fellow earthlings. So it's very interesting that you describe yourself, of course, as a father. I think that's part of the root of the word rabbi. Is it not a derivative, at least in some sense, of the word of which means father?

Is that not correct? I guess Rob could be similar, and it also means teacher. And teachers and parents are very intertwined in the Jewish tradition. Absolutely. You're supposed to honor your teacher the way you honor your parent. And, yeah, I do. Also, I had a father who. was a rabbi as well, and to whom I was very close and thought very highly up, so I suppose

that role does have particular significance to me. But if you were asking me, how would I define myself professionally? I would define myself as a rabbi. I write, I teach. I'm someone who also has deep interests in philosophy, literature, other areas outside of specifically just Jewish text and teachings, but that's my foundation stone. Yeah, that's sort of what I was interested in kind of honing in on because you do so much. You've written books. You are obviously a rabbi that's your profession. You told me offline you went into it for the money, which is the same reason I became a professor at a state university, and especially a cosmologist at that.

But, you know, I think it's very interesting. And I once heard at Shul. once, at synagogue once. Someone asked me, you know, what are you? Or, you know, who are you? And I said, oh, I'm a cosmologist. And usually that's a conversation starter. It's like, nobody ever meets a Jew. And they find out, oh, you're Jewish.

And it's like, oh, you know, past the pickles. It's something interesting about being a Jew. There's something interesting. And it's not better or worse. It just is. There's something interesting about being a cosmologist. And the guy said, no, that's what you do. That's not who you are.

But I think with a rabbi, it is sort of who you are. I mean, you're the only guys who can get paid to work on Shabbas without violating laws of Malachah. So it's also true that it's not a role in the sense that someone doesn't say, oh, there's Joe, he's a friend of mine. By the way, he's also a lawyer. Yes. Instead, you are always the rabbi, and there are advantages and disadvantages to that.

But when someone sees me in the supermarket, that's the rabbi in the supermarket. Where they see me taking a walk early in the morning, that's the rabbi taking me. and it is astonishing how difficult it is for almost anyone to separate the role from the person. My father had a good friend who once started to tell him a dirty joke and stopped himself and said, oh, Rabbi, if you weren't here, could I tell you a joke? So that sense of the pervasive, now it's less true. now I think than it was, you know, 40 years ago or 50 years ago, but it is still deeply true. Do you ever wish that you couldn't, that you could be sort of free of that expectation?

You know, you hear a lot more dirty jokes. I should say your repertoire and your daily pulpit off the pulpit seminar, a shearing. I do love jokes. Really good. They're hilarious. And I do have some that I can't tell. But yeah, the answer is there are moments when I wish I could escape it, but by and large, I think that it's, I'm glad for what I have. And I want to talk to you about, you know, a lot of the times as a rabbi, my understanding is that you have to listen to a lot of what your congregation wants.

And there's the old adage, you know, two Jews, three opinions. Do you ever feel like you want to be asked questions? Do you ever feel like there's questions that you are just dying, that you wish somebody would ask you? I wonder whether there are specific questions that I haven't been asked that I would be desperate to be asked. I don't think so again. I think that I get generally a fairly broad range of questions,

But I have noticed that what has happened to the Jewish community in general and certainly to my community is that questions of Jewish learning, which used to be part of the staple of being a rabbi, are much less frequent than they are. That's for two reasons. one because the Jewish community is less interested in questions of Jewish learning. And the second is because, to be perfectly honest, a lot of the things that people ask me, they can Google. And find out the information as easily, maybe more reliably and more detailed than anything I could tell them. And so I tend to get questions more of judgment and of opinion and less of knowledge. that has changed that has changed yeah i've heard it said uh you know the most cited academic in history is a woman by the name of marilyn vo savant because she's published in parade magazine and it's always

like you know questions that are coming in are like what was the uh you know capital of phoenicia and like 13 bc or whatever and it's like easily things you could look up and similarly too with uh the new Times crossword puzzle, there used to be a tip line. You could call in for a tip line, and I used to run up my mom's credit card bill by doing that. But yeah, you're right, there are so many things. But when Judaism is a very legalistic, and it's not sort of consensus-based, it's more, I would say it's more authority-based. And I wonder, could you explain to me how you see conservative Judaism? People might be familiar with, you know, the majority of Jews are what we call reform Jews, correct?

Yeah, these days probably so. So generally, conservative Judaism, which was once the majority tradition in America, but now is not, conservative Judaism was an attempt to look at with modern historical tools at the tradition and assert that it changed historically and needed to change historically. and therefore, part of the Jewish legal system should be taking into account the different situations in which Jews found themselves. I think that that's used to use slogans like tradition and change, positive historical Judaism. What has happened in the 21st, 20th and 21st century is the discovery that as soon, and this is my own interpretation of it, as soon as you remove God said you have to do this.

You are in then the area of you should do it for the following reasons. And so conservative and by extension, reformed Jews spend their time saying, you should practice Judaism because, and we have lots of the causes. And many of them, I think, are very compelling and very beautiful. None of them is as compelling as because the creator of everything that exists told you to do it. So I do believe that for non-literalist Judaism, there is an ideological struggle, which is very, very hard to make.

Conservative Jews in theory, still keep kosher, still keep Shabbat, still observe the holidays, but it is an uphill struggle. And, you know, typically it's, you know, people will kind of rely on. rabbis almost to get their opinion on the existence of God and so forth. And I think that there's an awful lot of pressure it must feel like to be in that position, especially when there's aspects of loss and growth and connection and even the pressure of keeping the Jewish kind of culture and tradition alive. Yeah, go ahead. So these days there are two different kinds of pressure and they are different, but they're at least equal.

One is the pressure that you enunciated about how do you keep the Jewish tradition alive after all you're giving your life to it, and it's so hard. We were talking about the fact that we're doing services online so different from anything we've ever done and how difficult that is and how do you maintain it. The other pressure, which will not surprise any of your listeners, is the pressure for political statements, because the Jewish polity, like every other polity right now in America, is bitterly, unalterably and savagely even divided between the right and the left. And they are living in real alternative realities in which the concerns of the other do not impinge.

and if you are a rabbi as I am, and you have people on both sides of that divide, which I do, you cannot split the difference. And so there is a constant, be on my side, be on my side, that I get, you should see my email. My email is basically divided between this side is right and that side is right, and this, or more accurately and more commonly, that side is a jerk, the other side is a jerk.

And so it's become very, very difficult to navigate those political waters. And do you feel like that those political waters really are getting more and more turbulent in these particular times that we live in now? Oh, yeah. You were very outspoken this summer and took very courageous stands, you know, when it came to the Black Lives Matter movement. And I think that, but do you feel more pressure than ever? I want to be really clear.

Well, we did not take a stand on the Black Lives Matter movement. Just for this reason. What I did was I put a sign up on the synagogue that said, we stand with our African-American brothers and sisters against racism. Didn't talk about Black Lives Matter, specifically because Black Lives Matter right now, especially in the Jewish community, is extremely polar. because some of the leaders of Black Lives Matter have made anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic statements.

And yet, I thought that it was really important for Jews to make a statement about racial justice. And so that was a perfect example of how I wanted even our own black members, because we have black Jews in the synagogue, to know we care about this, we notice this, we want to stand up with you, but I also want to avoid the political turbulence that comes with any slogan. It wasn't easy. And some people really didn't like on both sides, but there you go. Yeah. And when you, when we think about, you know, part of the objective of many rabbis, I think it's admirable, is to increase the, the participation, both at the younger, you know, kind of population level. It's often said that, you know, Judaism is a dying religion. I mean,

that's been said, you know, more times than they said Mark Twain was dead, Alfred Elbelle was dead in the case that I've interested in. But, you know, I find a lot of times with the kids that I see at the Hillel here at UC San Diego, you know, they're kind of defined by, or they see Judaism, if they think about it at all, as kind of split between, well, the Israel-Palestine conflict or the Holocaust. And none of those aspects really appealed to me when I became what's called a Balta Shoeva, a returnee to Judaism after being a... an altar boy in the Catholic Church, as I describe in my book. We won't get into that now. But the point is, you know, coming back to be, to the religion of my birth, was not motivated by

guilt over the Holocaust or perhaps, you know, wanting to take sides politically and Zionistic reasons. How do you, you know, the kind of famous Hillel, you know, convinced me standing on one leg, not that God exists or whatever, but just why should a young person, why should an old person, And, you know, I came back to Judaism in age 30 and learned Hebrew, et cetera, was very difficult. But convince me on one leg, you know, what sort of your approach to positive Judaism rather than reactionary Judaism? Well, I wrote a book called Why Be Jewish? And in it, I say, it is the oldest continuous tradition in the world that teaches people how to grow their souls. And that's my principal opening gambit.

is if you want to learn how to grow your soul, and I believe that that's actually the reason why we exist in this world, is to do so. Judaism is here to teach you how to do it. And also, it allows you to join a people. You will never be alone in the world if you're part of this people. And it teaches you how to work in the world to make the world better. All those things I believe are true.

It is also true that although it isn't the case for you, for many Jews, the historical experience of the Jewish people, of which the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel are the great events of the last 500,000 years, those are very powerful in spurs of identity. I was, in fact, before COVID came upon us, I was supposed to lead March of the living this year, when you bring people to Auschwitz-Burkenau and march between them. And many, many, many young people have done that, and some of them go on to Israel, and they find it an extraordinarily powerful awakener of their own religious and spiritual attachment. So it's true that it's not true, it doesn't work for everyone, but for many it does.

And when I think about, yeah, and it's not to say that those aren't influential. I've had been lucky enough to have on my podcast, Rose Schindler, who with her husband, Max, both survived the Holocaust case, Auschwitz-Birkenau. And she's a tremendous force. I just talked to her for my birthday. She gave us a call. Happy birthday, by the way. Thank you, Rabbi. Thank you very much.

That's great? Yes, it is. It's another lap around the sun. And actually, maybe that will segue nicely into what I was going to ask next, which is, you know, we think about why is it so important that the Torah, as we're going to be reading not too long from now in the weekly cycles, that the beginning of the universe, why is that the foundational event along with the exodus from Egypt?

What makes those so foundational that the rabbis and their wisdom put those as the foundational things that we say on all holidays? Why do we remember, for example, the exodus from Egypt not only on Passover, but every Saturday, every Friday night? Right. So I think that it's beautiful and important the way you paired them,

because there is a philosophical problem about God, about transcendence and imminence. How could God be so far away and still so close? And without entering into the philosophy of it, you've just summarized the imagery of it, which is, here is God who created the universe, which makes God infinitely greater than everything that is, but this same God cared enough about the fate of these individuals in the tucked away in this corner of the cosmos to make sure that their suffering was ended. And so I think those are the reason. It's that there's the,

There is, as one Jewish philosopher, Yud al-Aid, you put it, there's the god of the philosophers and the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And both of them play a part in Judaism. So you were going to say. Yeah, you recently said, and that really brings up another thought in my mind, you recently said in your off-the-pulpit podcast, you recently said, you know, one of the most important mitzvahs is essentially the mitzvah of forgetting or the trait. I would say that maybe it's a character.

the meda of forgetfulness. Of course, the Torah, you know, implores the Jewish people to never forget what the people known as Amalake did. How do you square those two things? You know, on one hand, we're commanded. Another hand, we're remembering what happened that we were slaves in Egypt. And yet, how do we forgive, you know, I have wonderful friends that live in Germany, you know, for example. How do we reconcile those twin, you know, kind of the forces that are opposing? So first of all, I mean, those twin forces exist both in the command to Amalek. It says, wipe out their memory, don't forget, which is a way of saying, forget them. Don't forget to forget them, which guarantees memory.

But forgiveness and forgetting are not the same thing. The Adam Mitchnik, the Polish dissident, once said, I'm for amnesty, but not amnesia. And I think that the same thing is true here. Judaism doesn't ask you to forget the bad things that have been done. And also, I think, when you mention Germany, there are very, very, very few people in Germany still alive today who gave bad things to the Jews in the Second World War. And the children of evil people do not themselves bear the responsibility

for their parents' deeds. However, having said that, if you do forget, it's the unmastered past that controls you. It's not the things you remember. We learn that, you know, that certainly goes back to Freud, for that matter, goes back to Greek literature. It's when, in even Jewish literature, when you forget where you came from, who you are, then you're liable to go astray. when you remember, then you have a direction. So I think that that's, now there is, as you mentioned, they're strategic forgetting in some ways.

But I think that Judaism clearly does stand on the side of memory. And Zahor to remember is a commandment. So we have a question from, we've got a pretty good outsized audience now. So I'm going to take one from Fabian Mango. Fabian Mango. He says, for me, there's always been a clear different. between church, the Christian organization, and the actual religion, slash, in other words, his personal relationship with God.

Is there such a difference in Judaism? Not nearly as much, and I'll tell you why. This is a wonderful point. Fabian, I have occasion to make this point to both Christians and Jews. Judaism is not a religion. Christianity is a religion. because today, if you believe in Jesus, you're a Christian, if next week you decide, you know what, I don't believe any of that stuff, you're not a Christian anymore. Judaism works differently.

If tomorrow I say, all that rabbi stuff, Brian, I was wrong. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in Judaism. I'm still doing. Too bad. Because what Judaism is is a religious family. That is religion is at the heart of it, but it's familial. That's why you're born Jewish, and that's why you can not want to be part of the family.

You still are. The only way in Judaism that you leave is if you choose another family. That is Jews who converted to Christianity, even though, strictly speaking, that wasn't recognized by Jewish law, they were read out of the Jewish community. So when you said, I don't like the synagogue, it's perfectly, believe me, it's a long Jewish tradition to not like the synagogue, not like the revolution. There's an old, old, old Jewish joke about a guy who finds a Clean, Robert. Keep it clean. The Jew, right. He finds a Jew on a desert island.

And he has two synagogues. And he says, so you're alone here. What do you need to build two synagogues for? He goes, well, this one, I pray in, and that one I wouldn't set foot into. In other words, the idea like that you dislike a synagogue, that is an old idea. Yeah. But the establishment of the religion is not separate from the religion. religion. That is Judaism is a religion. And I want to say one more thing about is a religious

family and they're they're inextricably intertwined. I want to say one more thing. People say to me sometimes I'm spiritual but I'm not religious. And what that means to me is I want to feel things but I don't want to do things. I actually don't have a lot of respect for the spiritual but not religious idea. If you tell me you're spiritual but not religious, I want to know how much money do you give to charity, to Sadat Khan? Because religion is the enactment of what you feel. And that's why if you're religious, you've got to go to committee meetings and you have to go to prayer services and you have to deal with other people. And there's politics involved. Politics, by the way, almost always means I didn't get what I want. When someone tells me there's too

much politics in the synagogue, I know they didn't get what they want that someone else did. but I love the old story about the guy who comes to the rabbi and he says, you know, Rabbi, I'd go to your synagogue, but honestly, too many hypocrites there. And the rabbi thinks there are many. He goes, you know, you're right, but there's always room for one more. So we all have that same impulse. It's like, I want to be above it. I don't want to fight.

But the fight is where the things get done. Yeah. It's where the things get done. Yeah, that's saying, oh, go ahead, Robin. I was going to say that's why I actually have a less cynical view of politics. than most people do, because I know that it's not nearly as easy to get stuff done in a political world as people might think. Yeah.

You know? Politics is sort of the highest expression of, you know, the ultimate building blocks, at least, of humanity and how we actually enact and relate to one another. Actually, getting back to what you said, I think I had this conversation with Ben Shapiro on his Sunday special last year exactly at this time. And I said, you know, most people say they're agnostic. you know, a scientist, if they'll say that they're not atheist. And I always say, oh, yeah, well, which, you know, church do you not go to?

Because it's the same one as Richard Dawkins, the one that he doesn't go to. And, you know, the separation of active participation, I always say, you know, I don't know, rabbi if I believe in God, but I believe in religion. I believe that there is a value to religion. And I think, you know, I am an agnostic in that sense that I am constantly questioning, constantly searching. I think it was Ellie Lisell who said, you know, a gene. Jew cannot be, a Jew can be angry at God, but a Jew can't be without God.

How do you come down on that side of that state? I mean, I agree. I think that God is central to the Jewish tradition. And not believing in God, but actually wrestling with God. And I think that, right, I also think that what, how you think about God, I don't even want to say what God is, but how you think about God is much, much more various than most Jews or Christians for that matter, know or suspect. And the reason that's so is that they stopped their religious education when they were 13,

which is a tragedy because adult sophisticated thought about the realities of God is adult sophisticated thought, just like in any other field, like cosmology. Yeah, that's in fact, that's another thing I brought up with Ben on my conversation. I said, you know, Einstein didn't ask what happens. if I travel at the speed of light and look into a mirror until he was in his 20s. And it was good that he did. And he said, because he would have asked the smartest person he knew, his dad. And his dad would have said, oh, it's just happened.

You know, nobody knows. It'll never be a. And he would have accepted that as a seven-year-old or as a 13-year-old. And I was thinking of these great Jewish atheist Carl Sagan, whose wife I've had, a widow I've had on my show, and his daughter I've had on my show. And they're both, you know, devoutly secular people. But I ask them, as I'll ask you, at the end of this conversation in about 90 minutes. just kidding, and at the proper time as it comes to the end of the hour. But, you know, I asked what

was, what is your ethical will? And I'll ask you that, what would you put in this ethical will to Andrewian, who's Carl Sagan's widow? And she says to, you know, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. And I was like, ah, you're missing. You know, you're missing three words at the end with your God. And she's said, no, that's intentional. She views the wisdom of our tradition, not a superior, but she, and she obviously doesn't practice at all. But that there is value and that we give up. I said, you know, another thing I say frequently is, what if I gave up or what if I said at age 13,

or a 13-year-old comes to me and says, you know, Professor Keating, I know all there is about physics. Einstein was wrong. I'd say, get out of here, you little pisha. You know, as my grandpa, Bobby and Zady used to call me, right? So I'd say, yeah, forget about it. No one, maybe in math, you might be able to come up with something. But 13 years old, you need so much wisdom.

You need so much experience as an experimental physicist, especially. No 13-year-old can do it. And so I would discount it. And now, seemingly, I would also not take the advice of a 13-year-old young man, i.e. myself, when I decide, oh, this is all supernatural shenanigans. And I think it really does a disservice. I mean, that's my kind of one-leg conversion is that, you know, you're missing out on so much in our tradition.

And it doesn't even matter if you're Jewish or not. There's so much in there. And people are asking in the chat, aren't all these religions the same? Aren't all these, you know, the fact that Judaism and Christianity, et cetera, and Islam come from the Abrahamic tradition, isn't that sort of a proof of God or some commonality? What do you think about that? So here's the question. I mean, the way that I think of religions is that they are different languages to speak to the same ultimate reality.

And that's why some of my Jewish colleagues, do and will get upset when I say this. That's right. It is not my job to argue Judaism's superiority. It is my job to argue Judaism's excellence. And the reason I say that is I want to be intellectually honest. I never was a Muslim. I never was a Christian. I never was a Jane. I never was a Buddhist. So for me to say, listen, the Sikhs don't have it right. The Jews do. When I know 100,000, if that, about what it is to be a seat compared to what I know what it is to be a Jew, is it's absurd. So I try not to pronounce on the truth claims of other religions because I don't think that it's useful or important. What is useful and important is what your religion makes of you.

And there, I believe that Judaism has an extraordinarily strong claim in the world, that it has made a remarkable, devoted, capable, contributing people. Not perfect, obviously, but who is? And so I without understanding what God is or beginning to think I have the slightest glimpse, I do believe that in living a Jewish life, I am in some way living in conformity with the way that God would want me to live. On the portal podcast with Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend, you said something to the effect that you almost believe that belief in God is almost as generative as grammar is, according to my previous guest, Noam Chomsky. you know, grammar is sort of an intrinsic quantity that is expressed differently. As you said, religion is expressed differently. In what sense do you, did you mean that? And then I have a

follow-up question about that relating to prayer, which is my stumbling block. So first of all, I meant it in whatever way will separate me from Noam Tromsky. But that's a separate, That's a separate issue. But I would say the vastness of the possibility of conceptions of God, forget the vastness of God, which is infinitely vaster than anything I can imagine. I mean, this is what I said. I don't remember if I said this on Eric's podcast. I sometimes tell teenagers, when you were two years old,

you know what it is to be a 13-year-old? And they say, obviously, no. A two-year-old has no idea what it is to be a 13-year-old. And I say, well, God is greater in proportion to you than you are to a two-year-old. So when we say we had any idea. But how do you know, like you did say that on Eric's podcast. That's great thing. I mean, that's how I'm expressing Judaism's belief, just so that you understand that from the Jewish tradition,

you can't possibly really talk about God. And yet the idea of God is in fact so generative as you say. that it explodes into a million different paths of life, ways of understanding, traditions, and so on. And I believe, I will say this, I believe that every spiritual and religious tradition takes inspiration from and in some way intuits the same ultimate reality, that I will say. how they get there and what they do with that varies enormously enormously all the different expressions that could take one of my

commentators who goes I think this is the Hebrew name Rust in Peace says he understands or she understands the cultural aspect to religion just not why it's those of us that want evidence before believing are the ones who are thought to be strange I don't know it's just an honest position What's say you, Robyn? Okay, first of all, I don't think anybody calls you strange.

I mean, if they do, that's silly to say that an intellectual position is strange. What I would say is that you're making a category mistake, I believe. Category mistake is like saying brown is long. That is, you're applying the wrong category for something. Because you're applying the kind of proof that you use for a scientific proposition to something that is not a scientific proposition. It is rather an orientation of life. It is like saying,

I want proof that life is worth living before I open my eyes. In other words, it's a fundamental posture towards the universe. That's why I don't think of God as an entity that you either believe in or you don't believe in.

God is a lived reality in your life, and you can live in such a way as to bring that reality into your life or not. That's why I always found Like, what happened with the sense, when I had debates with Sam Harris, with Christopher Hitchens, or Richard Dawkins or so on, the debates that I thought, the part of the debates that I thought were fruitful and real were, is religion good for the world?

But the part of the debates that were really just, you know, can I be funnier than you, are, is God real? Because they were applying the wrong standard, I think, to the wrong question, which is, God is as real as my consciousness in moments when I feel God. And I don't want to say that I'm, I mean, I'm not one of those religiously gifted people that feels God at every moment. But when I do God is as real as my consciousness. And to ask me, is my consciousness real, is to ask a question that has no real purchase for me.

So if you're going to say, I won't believe in God until I get the evidence, then what I would say to you is, you're in. not even on the path that would lead you there anyway. So, of course, you won't get that evidence. Because if you work, you would see certain things as evidence like the existence of the world, or the reality of love, or the fact that two and two equals four, which is astonishing, or the fact that your mind can comprehend the fact that two and two equals four, on and on and on and on. because for most of us, just what one Jewish philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel called radical amazement is the beginning of belief.

You know, what do you make of these? There are many different kind of approaches to the question of proving God's existence. I feel those are all fruitless. And the proof to me is that many of them rely on, say, scientific. conciliants when the scientific method is predicated on an adversarial kind of striving for truth, which I want to get into if we have time, the commonality between what I call the Jewish method and the scientific method. Maybe if we have time, we'll get to that. But it's more important than I ask these questions first. And that's, you know, you hear things I've heard from,

from rabbis that I respect and love, you know, oh, the proof is that all the kosher animals are listed. you know, there's no, there's no hyper pigs or quantum, you know, whatever that are, you know, or there's only one animal. I mean, they're cute things or the Bible codes. That's another. I have very, very loving, deep relationship with rabbis and friends that believe deeply in the Bible codes and so forth. Well, they should read, they should read Jeff Teague writing about the Bible codes. First of all, the Bible codes are easily, easily, I think, disproven. It's not even hard to disprove them. and it requires so much intellectual, um, presidigitation, I'll put it that way,

to, uh, to maintain the Bible codes. It's very funny. You change spellings of things. Anyway, um, I don't,

no, I don't believe that, uh, that the creator of the universe left behind a, a New York Times crossword puzzle so that you would know that, that the creator of the universe really exists.

Which is also in Moby Dick, which is also in Moby, it makes right. It makes, it makes, it may, it may, It makes God so absurdly small that it's one of those cases of the necessity of bringing God down to the narrowness of my own mind.

Right. What's the opposite of Simpsum? What is the opposite of Simpsum is sort of the opposite? Hich is expansion. Expansion. Simpsum is contraction. Hitschtooth is expansion. Right.

Exactly. So I often find that the people want to have that. you know, oh, you're a cosmologist, you know, and can you give me, you know, some reasons to strengthen my faith? And I, you know, I always say, it's sort of interesting that we put so much stock in this, in both, you know, in scientists nowadays, we see that in the COVID crisis, of course. We see the debates that are taking place in university campuses about global warming and other things, not even debates, but just these heated discussions. And then I'll give a talk about the origin of the universe and someone will say, well, what do you think about global warming? And I'll say,

I hope when you have somebody speaking about climate change and somebody asks you, asked the speaker a question about the origin of the universe, that the speaker has enough legitimacy, you know, to say integrity to say, well, why don't you talk to a cosmologist? But I think it's a natural thing that people sort of idolize science and they've come to this role. And you're, of course, in the capital of idolatry right now in Los Angeles, California, where Hollywood rules. Do you think idolatry is intrinsic to the human, to human nature? I mean, it's so much in the Torah, in the Ten Commandments, it appears a couple times alone.

And the question, why is it there? Like, I don't want to bow down to a statue of ball anymore. No, you don't. Not anymore, you don't, but for a long time you did. Not you. No ball. No ball. The desire to worship is deep in human beings.

And I would say, look, I think you see it in the political sphere too. people feel deeply attached beyond so much so that when you approach somebody about the flaws of the political figure they love, they can't really hear it. Or they say, well, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Because we really do have a venerative capacity. We venerate things. And I would just also say the reason that idolatry, at least again, to recurrent, to recurrentive. to Heschel, since I mentioned him before, there's a beautiful phrase about idolatry. He says, look,

it's not about the fact that you carve this statue and you say, this statue is God and God gets insulted. They said, you know, God is big. God can take the insult. The problem, he says, is that there is a real image of that in this world. And it's in every human face. And when you point to other things and make them important instead of human beings, then you've done something wrong. And so if we took each other seriously as images of God, I think that we would act very differently towards one another. And if we understood that we all shared that, we wouldn't assume that there are certain people who are so far above the flaws that the devil, the rest of us, that we would worship

them. But it doesn't, we don't work that way. And I mean, so if it's part of something deep in the human psyche, is it safe to say that you have your own idols, Rabbi? I mean, was it a, was it a huge accomplishment when you became the Max Webb, you know, senior rabbi, for example? Is that something you were striving for that could be coming out? No. No, not that. Not that. In fact, I never bought a was going to be a synagogue rabbi. I wanted to be a professor and a writer. It was a somewhat circuitous route to become a synagogue rabbi.

And also, idolatry generally, at least in my experience, it's not about oneself. There are people whom I admire tremendously who it's hard for me to hear negative things about. And I'm not objective about them. So, yeah, that's absolutely true. and there are people whom I've met in my life that I came to them with, you know, with a sense of beyond normal admiration. And so I think that that impulse, and in fact, I'll tell you weirdly, I'll tell you the time that I most understood the impulse to worship a human being and idolatry. So I've had a couple of health crises. I've had lymphoma and chemotherapy, and I also had a brain tumor, and I had a couple

brain surgeries. And the first time I had a brain surgery, after I still didn't know whether it was going to be, you know, life-ending or not or malignant or anyway, the guy who, the doctor at UCLA, who had operated on me, came into my room not long after I recovered. consciousness. And I remember feeling at the moment I first saw him, this inexplicable uprush of worship. It's like this wasn't a person. And I also remember at the same time being astonished by it and thinking to myself, oh, this is the feeling that people have when they worship someone. And now later on, I saw him again, he returned to being a human being, but I will never forget that sense of this is a god in my room.

And I realized also at the time, and I have seen this certainly with rabbis and others, I realized also how distorting and dangerous that can be to the person to whom it is directed. Because they think of themselves. Go ahead. No, I just want to ask you, I mean, so there's a. statement I think in the Talmud. I mean, everything's in the Talmud. There's 2,700 pages there. But one of it's like, you know, halakha or Jewish law can become a form of idolatry. And I even think religion can be a form of idolatry. And the proof of that is all the things that aren't religions that are forms of religion. In other words, atheism, could be a form of religion, environmentalism. They all have wonderful aspects and truth seeking at some level.

But is it not possible that, you know, even Judaism, even Halakic Judaism, or even conservative orthodox reform could be a form of idolatry. Yes. You can make, you can worships anything beyond what it merits and deserves. No question about it. Yeah. And I want to ask you, when it comes down to, you know, as you said, people have this innate desire to worship. I want to talk about worship. I personally find it very hard. You know, I know you've never been asked, you know, to solve someone's problems in Judaism. But this isn't your synagogue's problem, right? So this is my problem. I can relate to. Judaism on an intellectual level. I love studying the Talmud. I love reading the Torah. I love

looking for connections and just like wonderful things that apply today. I mean, one great example is, you know, there's something called the shopkeeper law in Judaism, which states that you're not allowed to go into a physical store and ask the merchant for the price of something. When you know for sure you're not going to buy it. And why is that? What's wrong with that? You know, you're stealing the hopes of somebody. There's a sensitivity that you need to have to every human being and call the Homer, all the more so, to, you know, people that you love and people in your life, but you're not allowed to get people's hopes up. I love those kinds of things. I love thinking about those kinds of things. But my question to you is, what about prayer?

I mean, can you be a Jew? Obviously, you can't be a Jew and not, you know, have God in the sense that you're confronting God. Can you be a Jew who doesn't pray or cannot pray? You can. Of course, again, you can be a Jew who does almost anything. But I would say this. I like this. This is my favorite image of prayer, and it may help. So there was an 18th century rabbi, Leona Medina, an Italian rabbi. And when I read his image of prayer never left me.

He said, imagine that you're standing on the shore and you see a guy pulling his boat to the shore. if you were mistaken about mechanics in motion you might think he was pulling the shore to the boat and when people pray they make the same mistake they think what they're doing is pulling god closer to them i want this i will pray for it so god will do it the butler but in fact but in fact he says what you're doing when you pray is you're pulling yourself closer to god and if you rise from your prayer, now I'm riffing on what he said, if you rise from your prayer a better person, a more sensitive person, a more aware person, your prayer is answered. If what you want from your prayer is to move God, I mean, I remember again, to return to the same thing. When I was sick,

I remember thinking, is it really true that because some people are praying for me, that God's going to look down and say, okay, Wolpey has someone praying for him. I'm going to save him. But the guy in bed three, I have heard nothing. I heard nothing. Let him go. I don't believe God that works that way. I don't want a God that works that way. I don't want to God. I agree. But I do believe that the prayer strengthened me, made me feel less alone, all of that. I still could have died, but that prayer worked. Yeah. And I mean, I obviously feel like it might be the same way the piece of advice for myself that goes, you know, you have to take it seriously. And, and, and if you don't, it's like, I feel like the penalty for missing, for breaking Shabbas is you miss out on Shabbas.

Like, I don't work on Shabbas. Right. Email. I don't make phone calls. I don't tweet. I don't do any of that. Not because, you know, I know that God is going to punish me or whatever. Right. Because I know it's not good for me. It takes me out of this world in a good way to be with my friends, my wife, my kids, my family. And so I just think it's, it's, my, it's, my be the same. I might be missing this gene of prayer, but it might be to my detriment. And I wonder if there are any kinds of exercises or, I mean, do you meditate?

I've always wondered, do you meditate or what do you feel like the connection between meditation? Okay. I don't. I pray and I take long walks, although I generally, when I take walks, honestly, listen to books on tape. I listen to Victorian novels. I've listened to almost all of trallop. I listen

to Austin. I listen. That's a, and I find that very meditative, although other people may find it boring as out. So that's something you have in common with Nolm Chomsky? What? He does that too? He does not meditate, but he reads a lot of trallop. He reads a lot of trollope.

Maybe I should start meditating. But he says the nicest things about you, Rabbi. Yeah, right, sure he does. He did grow up as the child of a Hebrew teacher in Philadelphia, so we're not entirely, you know, we're not entirely distant in a certain way. but but uh but i but i do not understand the the virulence with which i with which i read his um his insistent distancing from his own people and his own tradition with a with an edge that is cruel and and and and biting and to me very painful uh but that's a separate yeah i this isn't

this isn't the nomchomsky hour right no that's right but it is illustrative i do think that there's you know when I was talking to him, I'm like, this guy, you put a Kippa on him, and he's, you know, he's like one of the rabbis of brought a slato of, you know, I mean, he has this wisdom and a vuncular character. And yeah, if you, if you steer away from the 99% of, you know, the stuff that you really just find a testable. But, you know, and I said, look, I don't agree with you. There are people that find a lot of what he said repulsive, but I'm just going to talk about what is interesting to my audience and what I'm personally interested in, because quite frankly, I don't care what he has to say other than, yes, it is true he could have a detrimental effect.

But I want to move away to a rapid fire series, because I know you have to go in a few minutes, Rabbi. Well, I want to tell you one quick thing, Shlomo Karl Bach once said, a rabbi of the 20th century, he said, you know, when I used to go around to campuses, and somebody would say to me, I'm a Catholic, I would know they were a Catholic.

And somebody would say to me, when a student would say to me, I'm a Protestant, I'd know they were a Protestant. When a student said to me, I'm a human being, I knew they were a Jew. The escape of Jews from their own tradition is a constant and painful reality, And Chomsky is a particularly noxious example.

Of course, again, I have to say that, you know, not in his defense, but I think it's to his detriment. He's missed out. I agree. On infinite wealth of interesting and delightful. Not only that, but I would have said nice things about him on your podcast. Well, how about this? We'll do a debate.

How about a rabbi won't be, Noam Chomsky debate? That would be, that would be ratings gold, rabbi. I want to finish up with a couple of rapid fire questions, and I do want to get to your book Making a Loss Matter, which is such a meaningful book to me personally. First rapid fire question, what would you be doing if you weren't a rabbi? I think I would be an English professor. Okay, not second base for the Dodgers. Okay, fine.

No, no, no. Limited by talent. Now, when I grew up, I grew up, I was born in Harrisburg. I was a Baltimore Orioles fan, actually. Ah, okay. But these days, Phillies, Eagles. Anyway, I don't, I limited by talent, I think what I would have done was become a writer and an English professor. Wow, that proof, you know what the proof is that being a professor is the best job in the known universe, rabbi?

It's that Neil Armstrong, after he landed on the moon, the very first human being to ever set foot on another world, he ended his career as a college professor at the university of, I think, Dayton. There you go. The bucket list. Have you ever heard of the bucket list? Sure. Yeah. So is that a Jewish concept?

Is the bucket list something that, you know, a good Jew, you know, I once heard it said, you know, like some Talmud was asking his rabbi at the Yeshiva, you know, rabbi, is it okay if I ride a motorcycle? And the rabbi was like, you know, hit him upside the head, you know, basically. It's not like riding a motorcycle is not a thing a Jew does. Well. Is a bucket list something a Jew can do? I actually rode a motorcycle in Thailand when I was on my sabbatical, so that's off my bucket list. But I will tell you this, this is the closest thing I know to a Jewish, version of the bucket list. Samson Rayfield-Hersch was a great 19th century Orthodox rabbi, founder of

modern orthodoxy. And late in his life, he told his students that he was going to go hiking in the Alps. And they said, Rabbi, you know, you're, yeah, I don't know, you're 80s, whatever, why you go hiking in the Alps? He goes, because I'm not going to be living that much longer. And I know after I die, I'm going to come before the reborn show, the master of the universe. In other words, I'm going to come before God. And God's going to say to me, so, did you see my Alps? So I like that as an idea that there are certain things in the world that you should experience if you have the chance to because it's a remarkable world. Is the multiverse and one incarnation of it, which is called the simulation hypothesis, which basically states that we're living in this immense digital

simulation that's promulgated by people deep in the future and simulating our existence, that compatible of Judaism? Again, it's an offshoot of the multiverse, which composes that there's an infinite number of other universes. Is that compatible? There's an early midrash that says that God created many worlds before he created this one. So I suppose you could fit that into Judaism. I'm always reminded when people talk about a multiverse, this is a simulation of Samuel Johnson and Berkeley. Bishop Barclay was an idealist. He said everything exists in the mind. And Samuel Johnson famously kicked Iraq and said, I refute him thus. All I can say is if this is a simulation, there is no evidence.

I mean, I'm hitting the wall. I don't believe that this is a creation of someone else's mind. If I'm wrong, I'll be wrong later. But this is one of those cases where I think it might be that common sense is common sense. That's right. Why would there be so many Kardashians if there was a simulator? There you go. UED, as the philosopher says.

That's right. That's right. But last couple of questions. What point in Jewish history would you most like to have been alive besides now? You can't say now because you're alive now, at least the assimilation hypothesis is not correct. In order, not because I think it would be a nice time to be alive, but in order to answer the questions that I would like to have answered. Since I wrote a brief biography of King David called David the Divided Heart in the Yale series

of Jewish lives. I'm tremendously fascinated by the character of David, and boy, I would love to go back and see him and see what his world was actually like. What is your 11th commandment?

It is what Henry James said was the most important thing in life. He said the three most important things in life are to be kind, to be kind, and to be kind. I think that is the, I think that is the critical. I don't always achieve it, but that's what matters. Yeah, that goes along with what my realtor once said, location, location, location. Last couple of questions, Rabbi, if you could get rid of a commandment, if you could get rid

of one of the, and he can't say adultery, Rabbi. I'm joking, I'm joking, Rabbi. If you could get rid of a commandment, you know, Moses in the 10, what is it, the great Mel Brooks movie or he comes down with 15 commandments. All right, exactly right. It gets rid of. Which one? Does that have to be one of the 10 or can it be one of the 613? It could be one of the 613.

Yeah, I know you, you know, the stepmother, you know, kind of the, uh, being attracted. No, I'm just kidding here with all these weird references. I'm trying to think, you know, I'm a vegetarian. So I would actually add to the commandments if I could. Oh, you would. Okay. Yeah, I would say, uh, I would say, uh, I would say either, either no meat or, or, or no factory farming no matter how you slaughter them. At least that. If you're going to eat meat,

at least know that the animals are not allowed to be treated cruelly while they are alive. And there's too much wiggle room in some of the kosher laws and some of the kosher. And some animals that are kosher are not kosher in terms of the suffering that they endure before they die. And the last thing I want to just touch on is your book. I almost picked up a copy of my book, but I'll pick up a copy of your book here. This is Making Lost Matter. Very beautiful paragraph at the end. You say, when we read a book, the pages diminish. We can look ahead and see how far we ought to go. In that sense, no book can reproduce life because we know the terminus. Life does not grant that knowledge. The story could end today or in 50 years, yet age is the visible

sign of dwindling pages, where once we had counted on unbounded future, now we begin to number the years. So the last question I want to ask you, Rabbi, is if you could take what one of my kids is working on called the never-dying pill, if you could take a pill that would allow you to live forever, would you want to take it? If I was the only one to take it, no. Why not? No. Because I don't think that I would, I think that at a certain point, it's like Tennyson's poem Tithonis. you know, me only cruel immortality consumes. I think if I consecutively lost everyone that I cared about and loved over and over and over again, the time would come when I would long for death.

Very powerful, Rabbi. Well, that's sort of more of a somber note that I wanted to end on. I was going to ask you a couple of questions about chess that we'll have to get to. Maybe we could do a part two and a part three with Noam Chomsky and then a part two. I'll take you out on Yom Kippur for a nice meal. Rabbi, thank you so much. You've been so gracious. You've been such a big influence in my life.

Thank you. Have a wonderful day. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. Shanata. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible,

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Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, director. Brian Heating, co-director. Patrick Coleman, associate director, produced by Stuart Volko.