Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1805: The Importance of Spiritual Health With Rabbi David Wolpe

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Rabbi David Wolpe about the importance of spiritual health in these challenging times. A little background on Rabbi David Wolpe. (2:11) Is religion still important in modern times? (3:25) Why all good impulses need good institutions and organizations to keep them going. (4:58) Is a spiritual practice essential for health? (7:30) When has his faith been tested the most? (9:59) The two key reasons why people suffer. (11:30) Why evolution is a mixed bag. (14:36) The dangers of moral altruism. (17:58) The consequences of easy access to pornography. (21:15) Why more knowledge isn't necessarily solving things. (25:39) What concerns him the most in the social landscape? (28:16) How we have forgotten to forgive. (30:05) What is the most popular book he has written, and why? (33:22) When did he decide to become a Rabbi? (34:16) His thoughts on the problems in higher education. (35:30) Why is it popular to be anti-Israel? (37:36) Does science need religion? (39:40) Why what someone writes on the page isn’t necessarily the life that they lead. (42:51) Are we made to worship? (46:13) Why we have to coexist in this world. (48:23) The overall impact of the pandemic on the church or synagogue. (51:15) How does he counsel couples through marital problems? (56:33) What has his interest right now? (57:50) His advice for a better life. (59:12) Keep searching for meaning! (1:00:49) Related Links/Products Mentioned May Promotion: MAPS Starter Bundle and MAPS Spilt 50% off! **Promo code MAYSPECIAL at checkout** Visit Legion Athletics for the exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Code MINDPUMP at checkout** Why Faith Matters – Book by Rabbi David J. Wolpe Bishop And A Rabbi Discuss Religion | Rabbi Wolpe & Bishop Barron | SPIRITUALITY | Rubin Report The health benefits of strong relationships Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking Teen Porn Addiction: Statistics and Advice for Parents Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update Opinion | A Yom Kippur Response to Cancel Culture Making Loss Matter : Creating Meaning in Difficult Times – Book by Rabbi David J. Wolpe Sam Harris And Rabbi David Wolpe Does God Exist? Is There an Afterlife? - Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, David Wolpe, Bradley Artson Shavit Autobiography - Book by Bertrand Russell Dr. Nicholas Christakis on the Coronavirus Pandemic Man's Search for Meaning – Book by Viktor E. Frankl Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned David Wolpe (@davidjwolpe)  Instagram David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe)  Twitter Bishop Robert Barron (@bishopbarron)  Instagram Sam Harris (@samharrisorg)  Instagram Arthur Brooks (@arthurcbrooks)  Instagram Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis)  Twitter

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. All right, you guys know that we are all about health. The big part of health is spiritual health, which is why today we interviewed Rabbi David Wolpy. He's the Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, also an author, one of his books is called Why Faith Matters.

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All right, David. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. I see you. You know, I found you because we had Bishop Barron on the show a couple of times, became great friends with him, and then I saw a podcast with you and the bishop talking about religion and spirituality. And I was so impressed with, obviously I'm a big fan of Bishop Baron, but you communicated so well as well.

So that's why I wanted to have you on the show. And some of our audience may not be familiar with you. If you wouldn't mind giving just a kind of quick background as to who you are and what you do. Sure. I'm the Rabbi of Sunnett Temple in Westwood, in Los Angeles. I write books. I speak, I teach at various places, and like Bishop Baron, I also have a flock. That is, I do weddings and funerals and counseling and preaching and all the sorts of things that clerked you do and Over the years, I've also done a lot of well-publicized debates with

noted atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and a bunch of others and And every now and then I get to be on a good podcast Today, actually, you know, I want to be on a good podcast. Excellent. Excellent. I want to start out by an interesting statistic. In 1971, only about 4% of Americans identified as not religious. And today it's almost a quarter of Americans. I think the last number I saw was something like 21 or 23%. So it's a fast growing segment of our population is

Religion still important is this still something that's important for us in modern times and what's the value if it is? Well, I think that it is really important and I think that there are a variety of reasons why people don't identify as Religious anymore, but the most important reason why they don't and they should is not about belief, it's about community. When people, for example, say I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious, my first question to them is how much do you get to charity? How much do you take care of the person who lives next door? Because what religion do is it organizes spirituality at its best to take care of people. Other than sports events and concerts, where else do people gather together for the same purpose? Where in society do people sing together?

Where if you know, if you have a death in the family, do you know, that people will come over and bring you food and keep you company and so on. Those are the kinds of things religion does really well. And as society gets more and more separate, and people become more and more individual and less communal, I think they need that part of religion even more. Now I know someone watching right now says, well, that's just a part of being a good person. And you know, that's just natural in humans to work together and take care of each other. Is it something that's natural or is it something that we need to kind of work with and organize? I think it's kind of both human beings are mixed they're partly good and partly not good but they do need institutions and organizations to help them realize whatever it is.

I mean, you can be a good athlete, but if you're not on a team, it's not gonna be the same. And teams require organizations and coaches and equipment and all those things. And the same thing is true here. So you can hear that someone you know how to, how to loss in their family. You might give them a call,

but if you're not part of an organized group, you're unlikely to come over night after night, bring them food, have your kids make sure that they take care of their kids. All good impulses need some kind of organization and an institutional basis to keep them going. I mean, we have a family in our congregation who for two years,

because they had a really devastating loss. People once or twice a week would bring them dinner. I don't think you get that outside of a pretty close religious community. Yeah, that's actually a pretty good point. Well, I'm surprised you didn't use that opportunity to share the statistics out or the study about, comparing it to smoking cigarettes

and having community and how long people... Well, that's a good point. That's a good point. I read a study. I think it was a Harvard study if I'm not mistaken that showed that having poor relationships was as bad for your health as smoking something like 12 cigarettes a day. We're obviously a health and fitness podcast. And it just kind of highlights.

So I want to get to that. I want to get to the health and fitness part for a second, because maybe unsurprisingly, religious people tend to be healthier. Yes, true. They tend to take fewer drugs, alcohol, other things. They vote more, they give more, not only to religious causes, but to non-religious causes.

And I think a lot of that, some of it is believed, but a lot of it is community. I mean, look, you know, I mean, you guys know better than anyone. You exercise harder if you're in a gym than you do by yourself because there's something about other people being around that motivates you and the same thing is true with goodness. Is a spiritual practice essential for health aside from I know the community aspects are

very important but what about the practice itself? I think it does a lot for your health and for your peace of mind. And we live as you know in an age of a lot of anxiety. I mean, I see many, many teenagers who are really anxious, a lot of them on antidepressants, which is, wasn't true when I was growing up. And I think part of it is, first of all, that we don't let them outside. And I think that was like a real problem in growing up. Like when I grew up, everybody played outside all the time. You left in the morning, your parents were never worried about you, you came home at night.

I think that's part of it, is the normal, healthy, like physical body in the world thing. And then also just having this, I have a moment of quiet when I'm not actually looking at my phone and I'm not on a screen and I'm thinking about what really matters in life. I think that's, yeah, it's good for your health. How does it help with, I guess, helping you with or people with very challenging issues?

Sometimes things will happen where you feel like there's just no answer, it's just terrible. Is this something that can bring or you've found that brings people, I guess, either comfort or some meaning behind maybe the subject? Those are exactly the two things, comfort and meaning. It was beautifully put. First of all, it's comfortable because you're not alone. And one of the worst things about going through a difficult time is the feeling that you're alone. And you can feel you're not alone both because of God's presence, if you believe in God, but even if you don't because of the presence of community around you. I've been, I've had cancer a couple times, I've had a couple of neurosurgery's. I always knew that I had, first of all, I had my own faith, but I also had a community of people around me that I could call one. And in addition to comfort, which is really important, it gives you a lot of strength and resources and ways to go. And so I do think that all of this is part of, you know, when you say healthy body, healthy mind, if you expand mind to mean spirit, that's really the triumvirate that matters.

I mean, you have to feel balanced in your life. You have to feel like it's not just that your physical being is strong, but that you are emotionally and spiritually strong. Speaking of faith, Rabbi, what do you think is the most your faith has ever been tested? I mean, what do you think is the most your faith has ever been tested? Wow. So I know this is going to sound strange. And I don't think most people would say this. My faith wasn't tested by illness or my mother had a devastating stroke when she was 53. That didn't test my faith. And the reason that that's so is let me just take this into a direction for a second is I will often have people

come into my office and say things like you know I got sick, why me or my parent has to weigh, why me. But here's what they almost never say. I was born into the richest country in the history of the world and I've never gone hungry. Why me? Or I had two parents that loved me. Why me? And so you can have your faith tested by just the fact that you're so incredibly lucky. I mean, I look at Ukraine right now where people are suffering and I think, why me? Why am I so lucky as to live

in a peaceful country? The thing that tests my faith is not so much what happens to me. It's the deep unfairness of the world when I consider that other people are suffering and I've been so fortunate, or that I could have been born in a relocation camp in the Sudan and not had the opportunities I had. That's to me the hardest, I have reasons, but even so, that's the hardest thing, it's when I see other people's suffering that it tests my faith. How is that reconciled? Like, why is it so unfair?

And that's a big, that's one of the main, I guess, questions that's posed to religion is, well, if God is real and if he's good, why is there so much bad? So here's the best I can do. And I say this without suggesting that it is an answer because one of the things that I understand is that I don't understand. I always tell our high school kids, like if you think, think of when you were two years old,

could a two year old understand a 15 year old? No, not only could they not understand, they couldn't even understand what they don't understand. So the distance between me and God is much greater than God in a two year. So I don't begin to pretend that I understand God's ways, but this is the best I can do. There are two reasons why people suffer. One is what other people do to them. The people in Ukraine are suffering because of what Russians are doing. And free will, the ability to choose is essential to what makes us human. That's why we're not robots

and we're not dollars. And the ability to choose only matters if you get to choose bad things as well as good things. So one reason why we suffer is because we have souls and we have choice. And sometimes we make bad choices for ourselves and for others. But there's also suffering that you don't choose. Like nobody chooses to get a disease. And here's the second part of it. Let's say we lived in a world where only bad people got sick and good people always did well.

Every time you steal, you get sick. So nobody would ever steal. But why wouldn't they steal? They wouldn't steal not because they care about goodness. They wouldn't steal because they don't want to get sick. The only way to be good, to really be good, is to be good without knowing the consequences. As soon as you know the consequence, as soon as you know if I'm good, I'm going to live a wonderful life, then you've taken away the chance of being good. Then it's like an investment. It's not

goodness. So the world has to be random in some way, because unless it's random, there is no real goodness. So I know that I can lead the best life and still tragically die young, have people around me who suffer, but I will know that I'm living a good life because I care about being good. And I think that that's the essence of what it means to be good is doing it for its own sake. Not doing it because you know that some gift story in the sky is doing it for its own sake. Not doing it because you know that some gift story in the sky is going to give you a reward. Yeah, I've heard someone say it's like, someone who doesn't rob a bank

because they're afraid of going to jail is just a coward. Not necessarily a good person. Exactly, exactly right. So if you don't commit, if you don't steal, because you think God's going to get you, then you're a coward, you're not a good person. But if you don't steal because you think God's going to get you, then then you're a coward. You're not a good person. But if you don't steal because you think that's not why you were put on this earth, that's not

what God wants of you, that's not what you should do. That's goodness. Now speaking of good and bad, okay, I've heard this argument many times and there's philosophies around this argument that that it's objective, that morality is not necessarily this fixed thing that it's objective that morality is Not necessarily this fixed thing. It's not objective. What you may think is good and bad. I may think is bad and good What do you have to say about this? so my My sort of summary answer to that would be that there are things that are good and bad. They're not always easy to know. I don't think, I mean, I have no respect for a philosophy that says, you know, it was okay to murder Jews in gas chambers in 1940 and Nazi Germany, but it's not okay today.

There are certain things that are objective moral criteria. You shouldn't have killed innocent people. You shouldn't murder innocent people. I really believe that almost nobody in their hearts thinks that that's a relative as opposed to an absolute value. But it can be really hard to figure out what the values are. I have a brother who is the director of the ethics center at Emory University and he teaches ethics and he says in his presentations all the time that ethical questions are almost never questions between right and wrong. There are almost always questions between right and right. So for example, do you pull the plug on someone who has no quality of life. So on the one hand, there is the right of, you shouldn't have to live a life that has

no quality. On the other hand, there's the right of, you shouldn't determine for someone else whether they live or die. And so most of the questions we ask ourselves are really grappling with the things that we know to be right, but we have to balance them in certain ways to go for the more right as opposed to the less. Now, what do you say to people who say, well, that's just, you know, evolution, right? It's instinct.

Like, of course, we're not going to, we've learned not to hurt each other because that's how we get along. And we've learned not to, you know, take someone's spouse and not to see. I'll say yes. I would say to them, although I understand the argument, when someone says that people are just naturally good, or they've evolved to be good, I always say to them, why don't you go visit a playground? What happens when a new kid comes onto the playground?

Do the other kids go, oh, look, a new child, let us share our toys today. Not at all. Pumpkin. They get the new kid, right? In fact, you have to teach people to be good. Some of our instincts are good. Absolutely. No question about it. But some of it really is anti instinct. You know, you have to, you have to force yourself not to get out of the car and go hit that guy who just cut you off in traffic. Because you know that it's not the right thing to do, even though your instinct tells

you to do it. So evolution is a mixed bag. You know, we've evolved for some good reasons and some bad reasons. And I think that an overlay of ethics is really important. Yeah, I've seen, I've actually seen it at work. I've seen someone jump into a lake to save someone else and put their own life at risk. And the person that they were saving, they had didn't even know who that person was. And instinctually you would not jump in.

That doesn't sound logical at all, but something told them to do that. What are some of the dangers of moral relativism, though, in terms of if we're constantly kind of wane each situation like that and we don't really follow ancient wisdom and we're just kind of coming up with our own new rules like where do you see any kind of problems arising from that? Well so I would say two things and these are all by the way I just want to I should stop for a minute and say these are fantastic questions and deep ones and really important ones. And I appreciate it. You're asking them.

The first thing is, there's something that called Chesterton's Fence Rule. It's a great, it was GK Chesterton, it was a Roman Catholic novelist and a writer. And he said, if you're walking in a field and you come across a fence and you say, there's no reason for a fence to be here. You're not allowed to tear it down because you can't tear a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up. And what we do too often is we knock things down without really understanding why they were there in the first place and then it's too late.

is we knock things down without really understanding why they were there in the first place and then it's too late. So I think for example, like the question of why were there traditional sexual ethics? And what did they protect and what did they afflict and how carefully do we have to change them in order to understand both of those things is really important and you can't just say sex is a purely physical function you can do whatever you want whenever you want and it doesn't really matter because once you do that then you'll discover it was a chesterton sex that there were reasons why people took sex so seriously in interpersonal relationships

and there are consequences and feelings and hurts and wounds that really matter. And if you make everything relative, then what you basically say is, I can do whatever I want as long as I think it's okay. And that's first of all a recipe for anarchy, but also it's a recipe for wounding one another. And we are very self-justifying animals. We can always find good reasons to do what we want to do anyway. And if you don't think that there's a moral code that's bigger than your own idea, what you will end up doing

is justifying what you want, whether you think you should or not, because you can always find a good reason to do it. And I mean, I could give a lot of examples, but I really do think that the example of the way people treat each other sexually, especially because I see this in our high school students, is a really powerful one. And they don't realize both men and women and all genders in between that they wield a really powerful weapon in sexuality. And unless they have some guardrails and some guidance, it is so easy to wound other people.

It's one of the reasons, you know, like high school is probably the most difficult time of life. Speaking of that, what about pornography? You know, I mean, I grew up in the 90s, 80s and 90s, and it wasn't very accessible in those days. It was magazines. And if you found one, you know, you were the luckiest kid in school or whatever was, that's how rare it was. Well, today it's so accessible. And I read statistics. I have two kids, both teenagers. And the last, the last statistic I read was that the, the, the average age

of the first time being exposed to internet pornography's 12th, which is quite alarming. Do you see this as a big problem in society? And if it is, what do you what are the consequences of this extreme easy access to all this novelty in pornography? So I see it as a problem especially because the pornography that you saw as a kid was different from the pornography that your kids see. So there was, I mean, you look at an old playboy, it's almost sweet compared to pornography. You know, I mean, the pornography today is very violent, very brutal, often involves either people who are genuinely underaged or

made to look underaged. And the real, the danger as you implied in your question is, first of all, desensitization. That's first of all, how can you, in the world, find something that is the same as this systematic fantasy that is curated to appeal to a 13 to 14-year-old mainly boys. Let's face it, fantasies and second, this sort of brutalization that can't possibly be out. And it certainly doesn't cultivate attitudes towards women that are going to be good for them in the long term or good for relationships in the long term.

So I really, I mean, I don't know exactly what to do about. I think in an internet age, I'm not sure that censorship could be successful even if you tried. But either is a serious social problem and it along with, I mean, we've gotten, it's part of a syndrome of which fentanyl is another part, for example, drugs and the potency of drugs or another part, is that we've gotten better at everything. We've gotten better, and we've gotten better at what the Jewish tradition is called, the Yates or Haram, evil inclination.

We've gotten better at appealing it back to that too. We've gotten better at what every it is that will give you a dopamine hit. All of those things, so even though there are many, many, many blessings to technology. And I certainly, I think, remember when I was a kid, we thought, when we grow up, we're going to fly around with jet packs. Now that didn't happen, but the one thing that nobody, but nobody ever said to us is, no, one day you're going to hold all of human knowledge in your pocket.

And so there are incredible blessings to technology, but the dangers are real and the dangers generally are the dangers of the worst in us. Yeah. You know, I read some know, this kind of access to pornography is kind of relatively new. And I read some studies showing how it remodels the brain in similar ways to drugs, because of the, the dopamine and the down regulation of receptors the spike in young men with erectile dysfunction, which was never an issue before. So it's from a physical health standpoint,

which is what we, you know, that's our expertise. It's actually, it looks pretty bad. It looks like drug abuse. So it's very, it's very, And there is a weird, there's a weird decline in the amount of sex younger people having, which again makes sense if you say, why should I engage with another human being

with all the messiness and difficulty? And so when I can go home and soon put on virtual reality glasses and have almost the same experience with having another person. Yeah, it's great. You know, speaking of the internet and the information and access to it, you know, when I was younger, I used to make the argument that if everybody had access to all the knowledge in the world, we would solve all the problems. That's it right there That's the problem. We just all need we need all the knowledge and then We got it and now you have

groups with millions of people that believe the earth is flat, right? So Yeah, and this is when I realized that there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom Would you mind explaining the difference between the two and why more knowledge isn't necessarily the solving things? Yeah wisdom is what I think and knowledge is what you think. I mean that's not it's it's really hard. It's not as you know it's not easy because one of the things that you discover early on is if you talk to somebody who holds impossible beliefs like the earth is flat, that they have a thousand arguments, you can't out-argument them. You go into it thinking, oh, I'll just pretend with the argument. I mean, look, the sun goes down.

It doesn't work that way. Because fallacies can sometimes be defended as logically, as true isms. And so I think that a part of it is you have to have a holistic approach to a human being. Somebody who is a generalist, but somebody generalist, is raised with educated people around them and loving people around them and who's nurtured and who gets to read books as well as look at videos. They're going to have essentially a sound view of the way the world works, especially if they're

exposed to more than their own community, which is another really important thing. And by being exposed to your own community, more than your own community, I don't mean that you watch a YouTube video about something that you disagree with. I mean that you meet other people that you know, America's great advantage and disadvantage is how isolated we are from the rest of the world. I mean, the reason America has been so successful, there are lots of reasons, but the main reason can be expressed in four words,

Canada, Mexico, Ocean, Ocean. But if you grow up in Europe and you have other cultures around to other languages around you, the Middle East, other cultures, and other languages, so you around you in the least other cultures and other languages. So you ought to cultivate better the art of being able to listen and know other people with other ways. But even so, there are no guarantees. Rabbi, when you look at the social landscape right now, is there something or a single thing that you are most concerned about or you think is the most dangerous to our society? In the social landscape, I think probably the most dangerous single thing that I see at

the moment is the way in which our relating to each other is moderated by tools that make us less tolerant and open and understanding. By which I mean, you get tremendous, both from social media and from media in general, you got a tremendous negativity bias. I mean, it used to be, the local news would show an accident. But now, anything bad that happens becomes the dominant news everywhere in the country. Everyone has to comment on it. One, you know, movie star, slapstick immediate, and that becomes the dominant narrative of the entire country for three days. I don't think that's a healthy way to be. And also the canceling, the social media

attacks, the inability to tolerate people who say things that are even slightly offensive to you, that's all bad. I mean, I grew up assuming people would say bad things about religion or bad things about me or bad, and part of being a person was being able to engage them, to listen to them, to say why they're wrong, but not to say you should lose your job in social standing and knowing should ever speak to you. So there's a sort of built-in extremism to the social world that is tearing our nation apart.

Yeah, why do you think forgiveness is just not something people really discuss anymore? Yeah. I actually wrote for the New York Times some a little while back. I wrote about how we sort of have forgotten to forgive. And here's the main problem with, I think, with forgiving. Yes, people are angry and yes, people have been hurt. And some things, by the way, don't deserve complete forgiveness. You know, I'm not ready to say, we should all forgive Harvey Weinstein, for example.

But the biggest problem with forgiveness is if you hurt me, I'm better than you. Because you hurt me, I'm better than you. Because you hurt me. And if I forgive you, if I really forgive you, then I have to give up my moral superiority. I can't feel better than you anymore. If I still feel better than you, I haven't forgiven you. And everybody these days, it's like a constant competition to be the more righteous person. I'm more righteous than you because you support this candidate and we all know this candidate

only wants to destroy the country. And believe me, as you know, I'm in a profession where there's a lot of self-righteousness. It's not like the clergy have never been self-righteous. So I say this like with full authority, you have to be able to give up your sense of moral superiority to everyone around you to be able to forgive them and to hope that they forgive you because you know we all have an inside cheering section that tells us how good we are. Like that person did it because they're lousy. I did it because I was having a bad day. But we need forgiveness too because we hurt others inadvertently and sometimes by intention and

by callousness and by indifference. And there's no human being on this earth that doesn't be constant for you. Yeah, I think part of the problem is the anonymity that the internet provides. You know, when you're in real life Yeah, sometimes you have to pay the consequences either socially or whatever or physically or physically like if you tell someone they're you know You know jerk or so I think that's part of it But the irony is this and I we've talked about this on our show before I'd love your opinion on this Social media is been around now for a little while, but I feel like at some point so many people's comments

and opinions and statements have been recorded that nobody's gonna be safe. And you're already starting to see this, like somebody will do a tweet and everybody attacks them and one celebrity will attack them and then people will be like, wait a minute, four years ago you said the same thing and then they'll attack that person.

So I'm hoping that it comes full circle to where everybody's gonna go. I better not say anything, because I've said a lot of stuff on social media myself. So I'm hoping that it comes full circle to where everybody's gonna go. I better not say anything because you know I'm on I've said a lot of stuff on on on social media myself. Yeah, yeah, I totally I worry about this with kids especially because you know, you say a lot of stupid things when you're a kid Even even the smartest kids have a lot of stupid things and now it's all frozen forever And and that's certainly that was my experience.

All the stupid stuff that someone has to get is only remembered by the people I said it to. But it's not on the internet. Thank God. Yeah. And, and, and it's a problem. Yeah, I think God didn't have, didn't have phone cameras when I was a kid. Yeah.

So, I'm, I'm looking at all the books behind you to make me wonder that I'm thinking about your books that you've written right now, which is the most popular and why do you think it is? The most popular one was one that I wrote called Making Lost Matter, Creating Meaning in Difficult Times, and it was about the different kinds of losses we face in our lives, loss of home, loss of friends, loss from death, loss of dreams, all those kind of things. And I think it's the most popular because everybody's life is still a good loss of different kinds. I mean, I remember the first day I realized, you know, in my early 20s, I was never going to be a major league baseball player.

And the truth was, I was never going to be a majorly baseball player. And the truth was, I was never gonna be a majorly favorite. But, but, it comes this day when all of a sudden, you go, I can't even dream about it anymore, because it's gone. And so, we all have those kinds of losses. How did you decide to become a rabbi? What did that look like for you? Well, the deeper stories that my father was about.

So, I came to it honestly, but really, I always wanted to be a writer and a rabbi, not my father, another rabbi said to me, what do you want to write about? And I said, I don't know, I just always wanted to write. And he said, so long to go and study for a year of rabbinical school, maybe you'll get your subject. And I wasn't doing anything, I just graduated college. I said, okay, I'll go while study for a year. And I went and I loved it. And the main reason was I just come from college where people didn't live what they taught. Like you went to a great class in literature, but the guy didn't live middle March. He taught middle March in college and then he went off

and lived however he lived. And then I came to a medical school and I met several really extraordinary people who were teaching the life that they lived. And I thought I want to teach what I live as opposed to which by the way you guys did which is a really great gift that you don't teach something detached from yourself. You teach how you live and you teach other people. This is a really good way to live for me. And I think you'll find it that way too. It's a very satisfying way to live. It is. Speaking of colleges, there's a lot of talk about the universities, either in docker-nating kids or kids are coming out and they're too sensitive or they're coming out with crazy ideas or they're pumping out a bunch of, you know, socialists or Marxists or whatever, you know, whatever it is.

What are your thoughts on the higher education? Is this happening in your opinion? So yeah, there's a lot of problems on college campuses. I actually, I just announced, I have another year at the synagogue and then I'm going off for a visit to be a visiting fellow at Harvard for a year. And I don't know what I'll meet there.

I really don't know what it will be like to teach there. And part of it is that there is, there's a culture on campus, some of which we spoke about, like the cancel culture and the culture of you can't say anything against the orthodoxy. And also from my own point of view, Israel on college campuses is often derided in ways that I think are at least ignorant and at worst reflective of some hatreds. And so we have work to do, but I really believe in universities. I think that their factories have tremendous ideas and innovation and have that throughout

American history. And so I'm hopeful that over time, the universities can change course. I really do think that America is starting to see the excesses of the past several years and talk about it more. And after all, I'm basically by nature, I am a hopeful person. I hope so. When you go to Harvard, make sure you say hi to Arthur Brooks, a good friend of ours. Actually, I'm supposed to do a panel with Arthur Brooks.

If you've ever met him. Have you met him? I have not, but we're going to do a panel together. Oneorgs. No, it's a great day. If you've ever met him, have you met him? I have not, but we're gonna do a panel together. One of my favorite people in the world, you'll absolutely love him. Yeah, I mean, from what he writes, I'm a big fan. Oh, he's an incredible great man. So, where do you think the roots of this,

like, anti-Israel sentiment started? Because it is very interesting. If you actually dive in and learn about the whole situation, it doesn't seem the way that it seems to be presented in popular, meaning in social media. It's almost like it's cool to say Israel is oppressive or it's cool to be anti-dense. Where'd that start?

I think part of it is an anti-Western bias in general. People think that the West is colonialist and Israel is this outpost. They never look at a map and see how tiny Israel is compared to all the nations around it. I think that part of it, some of it is rooted in anti-Semitism. There's no question in my mind about that. It's got to be a reason why Israel is uniquely demonized in the world when other countries behave horribly. If you look at Syria, Syria, China, they are not demonized the way Israel is. And then I also really do believe that there is a difficult, you know, in the Middle East, there are lots of people who have claims to that really, they feel deeply

about and strongly about. And it is not easy to have this one non-Muslim civilization drop-dead among people who really on some level don't feel they should ever be there. And so Israel has numerous times tried to make peace and also by the way has made mistakes along the way without question and done things that they ought not to have done. I don't think that Israel is perfectly righteous in this, but on a deeper level, I really do believe that what other country has given

back a territory like the Sinai, which they did with Egypt. They made peace with Egypt. They made peace with Jordan. The people who want to make peace with Israel end up with peace. Yeah, it's very interesting. So I want to kind of take a turn here and talk about the comparison or should I say the, I guess they seem to be pitted against each other. And that's science and religion. You often hear this. Yes. Science and religion are totally different and they oppose each other.

And if you're believing science and you can't possibly be religious and vice versa. And I remember somebody, I had this argument, I used to be an atheist and I had somebody present this to me and say, well, you know, if you look at some of the worst scientific studies ever done, they were done by people who weren't religious and because they didn't have anything moral to tell them, not to do something. And so that was one of the best arguments I heard,

but do you think science needs religion? I think that society needs religion. I think science weirdly presumes religion by which I mean science assumes that there are natural laws in the universe. So it assumes that there's an order and that there's some kind of coherent creation. It just doesn't call it a creation. But if you think about it, science assumes that that's true. That the law of gravity, what is the law of gravity? It's a law of observation, right? You drop something ten times, you assume it'll fall the eleventh time. But to make it into a law assumes that somehow there is some kind of

ordering intelligence behind things, although some of my atheist friends would not agree with that. How was speaking of atheist friends, how was the conversation with Sam Harris? We've had a couple of conversations. The people confined on YouTube. One was just the first debate, and then we had with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, another rabbi and I talked about whether or not there's an afterlife.

That was a good one, but I get along very well with Sam. I've seen each other in social situations too. And I also got along very well with Hickins. I don't assume that because somebody disagrees with my beliefs, they're not good or kind people. They're religious people who aren't kind and non-religious people who are, I think, on the whole, religion is better for the world, but I try to judge individuals as individuals. Where does the fork in the road seem to be? Because with an intelligent guy like Sam and yourself, I'm sure there's a lot of things you actually agree on. And then where does

the divide happen? I actually don't think it's intellectual. I really think it's whether you have an emotional willingness to let go into your heart. Because I know, I used to teach religious philosophy and I would put up the ontological proof and the teleological proof and the cosmic, I never had somebody go, oh, now I'm going to do it. But expose them to religious people who are strong and kind and good. And you have a much better chance of people saying, you know, so it is possible.

It's not true that all religious people are weak or all religious people are needy. And once you have that emotional openness, I think that it's possible because for me at least faith is a relationship and you can't have a relationship if you're not open. Yeah. I'd love your opinion on this. When I was really staunch atheist, I was constantly learning about religion. It feels like I was searching and I find that people who are very atheist tend to do that.

They tend to want to know more versus people who tend to be indifferent. You know, that's so funny. I was exactly the same way. I was really, I was like a staunch atheist in high school. Oh, wow. Yep. And your dad was around by it. That must have been great.

You know what was great about it? That was fun dinners, huh? I'll tell you what was great about it. So here's what was great was I read, I used to read Bertrand Russell. It was like for my money, he was the best, the best of the atheist. And, and one day my dad came home and he said, I got you a new book. I said, book. And he handed it to me and it was a book of Bertrand Russell's.

And it was his way of saying, I'm not afraid of this guy. Oh, wow. That's cool. That's really cool. It was very cool. It was very cool. And it went a long way for me understanding that you could read anything but you had to come to your own conclusions. And what helped me along the way was then I read Bertrand Russell's biography. And if you read Russell, he seems like the most logical person like ever he was a great philosopher and his like His arguments build one on another on another and his prose is clean and clear and funny and smart and then he read his life and his life was Hey mess

Just a mess like multiple marriages adulteries, affairs, didn't just kids didn't speak to him, he didn't speak to, I mean, just a mess. And you realized that what someone is on the page or the arguments they make, that's not necessarily the life that they lead. And faith is about the way you live your life. It's not just about the way you make your arguments. So do you remember the pivotal moment when you made the switch?

I think at what, I don't think that there was a specific moment. I think it was when I started to meet people in the world that I moved into sort of at the end of college and after that were religious and weren't my father because I was not my father was an exception. Okay, my father because I was not my father was an exception. Okay, my father's great, but all those other religious people, I never, I never occurred to me to wonder why I thought that, but I did.

But then I started to meet other people who were strong. I think it was the strength thing because when I was a teenager, I just assumed, we're obviously religious people, we're weak and strong people, we're people who used only their intellect and I'll give you the example, Mr. Spock, Sherlock Holmes, right, those are the kinds of people, Bertrand Russell, they were all brain and no emotion. I have this theory by the way about boys and puberty that that's why like, intellectual and client boys and puberty,

they're scared at the fact that their body takes over. And so they like these models of people who are really just brains and not bodies, like Mr. Spock, like Sherlock Holmes, like just reasoning machine, kinds of people. But then you get older and you realize that a person is an integrated whole. And I think that that sort of softens and opens you.

Yeah, are we made to worship? Emerson said that, actually. He said, a man bears belief as a tree bears apples. So yeah, I think we are. And I was just discussing the other day actually with an actress. And she's related to a very, very, very, she herself is like, she's starting out, but she's related to a guy who was a very famous actor. And she was talking about, I was talking about with her, like how to handle the ego of acting. And we were saying that like people who become incredibly successful actors, why are they sometimes drawn to culture,

crazy beliefs, or things like that. And I think the answer is because we know inside ourselves how inadequate we are. And when the whole world praises us, we can't stand it. There's something like out of kilter, something not right about that. And so if you worship, it helps restore the balance. It helps you understand again that you are unique, but you're not, you're not the most important thing in the world. And that's really

important. There was a rabbi simple bonham who said, you should carry two pieces of paper in your pocket. One should say, for me, the world was created. And the other should say, I'm Dustin Ashes, because they're both true. Yeah, I've heard people explain that whether you think you worship something or not, your actions show you worship. So, if it's not God, it's something else, right? Yes, I, you know, that's, I'll go back again, even though I mentioned him before, and he wasn't a Jewish sage, but he said it. So it's a good one. He'd like Chesterton said,

when a man stops believing in something, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in everything. Yeah, I didn't. Um, what was his he learned under Sigmund Freud, I believe and he he predicted the rise Oh, there's the beef he predicted the rise of communism as a result of the decline of of Religion it was probably young there you go young it was Carl Young. Yeah, he predicted that so you know It's interesting is I'm noticing more It was Carl. He predicted that. So you know what's interesting is I'm noticing more religious leaders from different belief systems, you know,

like Catholics and Jews and even people from his up working together. Is this because actually I'll ask you, what do you think, what do you think's happening right now? Because in the past, I guess it's, we're led to believe that it was always there was against each other. And I guess in some cases they might have, but why does it look like we're all working together now? And even atheist, you know, I noticed like lots of atheists are working together with religious leaders.

First of all, I want to say honestly, like as a Jew, you have to say what has happened to Christianity and the Christian attitude towards Jews over the past 50 years has been astonishing and like my ancestors wouldn't believe it. Yeah. Because some of the greatest allies that the Jewish people have in the world are religious Christians. And that's a beautiful thing. You mentioned Bishop Aaron at the beginning of the podcast. I mean, it's just a beautiful thing to be able to work with other. And increasingly, I think there are Muslims who also, along with Christians and Jews, we want to combat fanaticism of all kinds, of all kinds. It doesn't matter which side it's on, whether it's secular fanaticism or religious fanaticism, because we really

do understand that we have to coexist in this world. There was a time in the middle ages, I think, when every side thought, we're going to win. We're just going to win, and it's only going to be us, and everybody's going to believe like me, and we just have to kill enough people and argue enough and move away. And we know now that the world doesn't work that way. And so the increased acceptance of, I really believe what I believe, but it's okay that you believe what you believe. What one rabbi Jonathan Sachs called the dignity of difference is increasingly, I think, the way the world is moving has to move if we're going to survive.

Why do you think totalitarian regimes tend to reject religion? If you look at historically, it's almost like people come into power, they've got complete power, and they almost always attack organized religion. Why is that? Because it's an alternate center of power. Because people say, look, the dictator, maybe the dictator's not God. It doesn't like that. because people say, look, the dictator maybe, the dictator's not God. The dictator doesn't like that.

And that's why, like, in part of the arguments on about atheism, when people talk about how terrible religion is for the world, say, look, when a religion is expelled from the world, you get communism, you get Nazism, you know, you get much, much, much worse worlds if you say there's nothing greater than political power because power becomes the God. And that's, you know, we're not wise enough to be that great.

Now coming out of this global pandemic, you know, our industry, fitness industry was affected quite substantially with the gyms, like people not being able to go. But we're seeing this major resurgence of people wanting to go to gyms and we're seeing them fill up again. Are you noticing this as well in the synagogue and in churches? Absolutely. Okay. People are starting to come back to synagogue, people are starting to come back to gyms, and they're doing it, I think, in some ways, for the same impulse. One is social, and they're doing it, I think, in some ways, for the same impulse. One is social, and just want to see other people and be with other people. And the other is, it's almost like, you know, you've been in a straight jacket and you

want to open your wings, you know, and begin to feel yourself in the world again. I heard the other day, I heard Nicholas Christakis, Professor Yale, and he studies pandemics through history. I think he was the one that said this and instruct me it's really smart. He said, you know, when a tsunami hits, people try to run away or to, you know, find a boat or to whatever, he says,

but then what happens is the tsunami receives and you see all the damage. He said, right now, COVID is receiving like the tsunami. And we're going to see all the emotional damage, the economic damage. He said, we're just going to start seeing it now. And so you're going to have all these societal reactions that haven't happened yet because whether people know it or not, even if they had an easy pandemic, so to speak, like they were taking care of and they had food and vital reactions that haven't happened yet because whether people know it or not, even if they had an easy pandemic, so to speak, like they were taking care of and they had food and so on.

The psychological burden of the past couple of years is only going to start becoming evident now that the tsunami has receded. And so I think that this is the healthier part of it, but there's a lot of woundedness out there, both physical and spiritual, and it's going to take a long time. Yeah, we have kids, Rabbi, so we see it with our kids more than anything. To them, a couple of years is such a big chunk of time, versus for me, which I'm a lot older. Speaking of what happened during the pandemic and the lockdowns, obviously, we come from the fitness space, and we come from the fitness space

and we were very upset when they shut Jim's down. We thought that was so silly because that's where people improve their health. That's great ways to build your immune system and all that stuff. And we talked about spiritual health earlier. How did you guys feel about the laws and rules that said, hey, you can't meet up in the synagogue?

Were you like, wait a minute, that's not a great idea or were you more? There wasn't. Yeah, I mean, this was so hard. We have a school and a synagogue and, and we're in California. So there were all sorts of state rules and addition to federal rules. I think that the, the first thing I would say is nobody knew what was right. So I have a certain amount of forgiveness for people who just now we know they got all sorts of things wrong, but like this was unprecedented and nobody quite knew what was right.

On the other hand, I don't think that we did what you suggest, which is what we should have done. And that is air on the side of allowing people to be together as much as possible. And I still think that we're making some mistakes in that respect. But yeah, it's like, I don't think we took psychological and social health seriously enough. Because we really need each other. People locked in their homes.

It's just not good. And especially once the vaccines came out, I think that we should have opened up faster and better than we did. But as I said, you know, I'm not a public health official. I don't know all the factors to consider. And I also recognize that everybody, as somebody says, I heard somebody say, you know, last week I was a public health official.

The week before that I was an expert on Afghanistan. Today I'm an expert on. So I think there's a mean flow through our armchair expert. Now I'm an expert on inflation in the economic. expert now. I'm an expert on inflation. Exactly. Now I saw firsthand I have two my mom's parents, my grandparents still alive, late 80s, my grandfather's 90, and we all totally isolated from them and they're health declines so fast and such a short period of time and it wasn't for any of the reason that they weren't around their grandkids and their kids and it was incredible to see,

it was very sad to see but it was very apparent. I live in my daughter was in her early 20s, now she's in her 20s, 25 but she was 22 or 23 when the pandemic started and it was really but she was 22 or 23 when the pandemic started and it was really, you know, in your 20s, you should be able to have another 20-year-olds. Right. Yeah, it was hard. But by the way, on school kids and older people were the worst, like really the worst, because when you're developing, you need to also the mask them. When you're developing, you need to see people's faces. I know. I know. It's unbelievable. My daughter won't even take it off, even though she can.

She feels either embarrassed or whatever. She's like, it makes it really breaks my heart. Do you counsel couples, married couples as well? Yep. What do you see come up most in today's couples in terms of challenges? And how do you counsel them through, I guess, through religion or spiritual?

So, right. So, you'd be amazed maybe you wouldn't, how much of it is about money. Money is a huge, and but as I always tell couples, money is never just about money. Money's too symbolic, you know, just like sex. Money, sex, they're never just about the act.

They're just never just about the money. It's always symbolic of other things. But I think that it's really about understanding roles in the time when roles are so confusing. And also, honestly, you know, again, the internet is a great thing. I see a lot of people are meeting each other online. I do a lot of probably most of my marriages now are people who bet on dating apps. But dating apps also are, yes, this person is attractive,

but I just want you to know that they're an infinite number of other people that you could look at just by moving your finger, even after you get married, those people are still online and you can look at all of them. And that's very tough. Right. Right. Is there anything you are currently studying or writing about right now? Curious what's interest, what's got your interest right now? So, but I first of all, when I want to study over the next couple of years is culture and religion, exactly this. Not politics and religion, but culture and religion. Exactly the things that you've been talking about,

which is why I've been saying that there's such wonderful questions, so happy to have this discussion. And the other thing that I've been thinking about is, what does it mean to transition institutions and people in a time when everything is changing? Like work is changing, you know, we're facing a coming crash of all sorts of jobs and society is transforming. And all of these, these are what we, almost like the world is in a liminal state, liminal state or what sociologists call the transition, like from being a kid to a teenager, from a teenager to a adult, from single to married,

from married to having kids, all those in-between states. And it feels to me like we're in an in-between state right now. And how do you shape a future that is solid when the ground seems to be shifting under everyone's feet? Yeah, that's a really good one. All right, any advice for... Well, two, I got two's questions. You were start with the first one. If somebody's listening right now and they're not religious, but they see that there may be some value in some of the wisdom that comes from religion. What advice can you give them to help them have a better life? So I would say, first of all, if you see, if there is in your area a community of people you like,

you can join a church in a mosque. I mean, there are also other organizations, but really, it's the main thing that you're looking for when you go to a house of worship generally is a community. And in an age where we don't have very many ways of getting community, you ought to think about it because you can be an important part of the community even with lots and lots of doubts because I think that doubt is part of faith anyway. That's one thing that I would say. And then the second thing that I would say is that a think of it as an emotional practice, emotional-sp spiritual practice, which can be meditated,

it can be physical, something that you do every day that helps center and ground you, is really important. And remember, yes, it is a pain in the neck sometimes to do, but what that is valuable in the world isn't sometimes a pain in the neck. Everything that matters takes effort. Absolutely. Okay. Now the second question, somebody's listening and they're feeling, you know, the pull. They're feeling like, oh man, I feel God pulling at me, for example. I don't know though. What are the next steps for them? though what do I what are the next steps for them? Find a teacher find a community, read a book that might speak to you about that, there are endless possibilities. And really it's about

my one book that I always recommend to everybody is a book by Victor Franco called Man's Search for Meaning. This is a guy who was in a concentration camp and discovered that the key fact in life, the people who survived are people who in one way or another found meaning. And it's a beautiful book and it's a short book. And what I would say is, which you are searching for in your life is the meaning. And there are ways to find it, keep searching. And lastly, the searching is part of the meaning. The searching, the journey, right? It's not about the destination. It really is about the journey because it's just like, you know, I have all these books

behind me because I always have this idea, I'm gonna read this book and it's gonna be it But no book is it no person is it no idea is it it's about the journey Excellent, I know we're leading into I'm you know, I'm Catholic and I know we're leading into Easter But is this also a a holy time for Jews as well? Yes Friday night is Passover Okay, which is a holiday of liberation, freedom. But I just wanna say, people usually quote them passed over, let my people go. But that's not actually the full Bible phrase.

The full Bible phrase is, let my people go that they may serve me. In other words, you're liberated to do something as well as from something. We all want that. We want liberation from and liberation too. Excellent. Excellent. I don't know if it's appropriate to say happy Passover. I don't know if you guys say absolutely. I have to. Absolutely. I have to.

Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming on the show. And then when you see Arthur, tell them the guys from my plums. Absolutely will. Absolutely great work. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy

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