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Yossi Klein Halevi on Israel, War, and Moral Complexity

On this episode of RAW, I speak with Yossi Klein Halevi—author, historian, and public intellectual whose voice is vital in conversations about Israel, Jewish identity, and moral complexity in times of crisis.
Yossi was born in Brooklyn to a family of Holocaust survivors. His father, a Hungarian Jew, survived the war as a teenager by hiding for months in a frozen ditch in the forests of Transylvania—a story that shaped Yossi’s worldview and sense of Jewish responsibility.
He moved to Israel in 1982 and is now a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His acclaimed books include Like Dreamers, about the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem in 1967, and Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, a courageous effort to bridge one of today’s most painful divides.
We talk about the current war and what it reveals—about Israeli society, leadership, and the nation’s soul. We explore how the shadow of the Holocaust continues to shape Yossi’s view of the Jewish state, and the impossible tensions between survival and conscience.
We also touch on Yossi’s long-standing meditation practice, and how it helps him stay spiritually elevated and emotionally grounded through heartbreak and chaos.
This is a conversation about moral clarity and humility. About fear, grief, memory—and the quiet practices that help us stay human.

  • 0:19 Speaker 1 You saw the scenes of October 7th of thousands of civilians, Palestinian civilians, pouring across the border, participating in the massacre, celebrating and parading our hostages through the streets. I had these biblical images, you know, of Samson, a cage Samson being paraded through the streets of Gaza by the Philistines. 0:43 It was that primal, but it wasn't Samson, it was it was 18 year old girls. And so that experience was so primal that it was a natural response to say there are no innocence in Gaza. What we've seen in the last few weeks is the clearest refutation of that which was the outbreak of demonstrations against Hamas. 1:04 It's not for love of Israel. Let's put that aside. Let's put those illusions aside. But the courage that it takes to demonstrate against Hamas, even with Hamas severely diminished, is extraordinary. And I know that there are Palestinians who are not just willing to live in peace with us, but who accept the idea that we belong in this land. 1:37 Speaker 2 Welcome to RAW, a podcast where we confront the complexities of war from the inside out. I'm Manuk, A journalist, author, yoga teacher, and meditation practitioner. RAW, or War Spelled Backwards, symbolizes how many of us feel in the face of the Israel Gaza conflict, exposed, vulnerable, and seeking understanding. 2:01 Here, we don't just discuss the external battles, but dive deep into our internal struggles, examining how this violence has shaken our very core. Join me in conversations with philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders as we explore how to navigate these painful times with wisdom and resilience, finding guidance for our own paths through this raw, unfiltered world. 2:32 My guest today is Yossi Klein Halevi, author, historian and public intellectual whose voice is vital in conversations about Israel, Jewish identity, and moral complexity in times of crisis. 2:48 Yossi was born in Brooklyn to a family of Holocaust survivors. His father, a Hungarian Jew, survived the war as a teenager by hiding for months in a frozen ditch in the forests of Transylvania, a story that shaped Yossi's worldview and sense of Jewish responsibility. 3:07 He moved to Israel in 1982 and is now a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His acclaimed books include Like Dreamers and Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. We talk about the current war and what it reveals about Israeli society, leadership, and the nation's soul. 3:29 We explore how the shadow of the Holocaust continues to shape Yossi's view of the Jewish state and the impossible tensions between survival and conscience. We also touch on Yossi's long standing meditation practice and how it helps him stay spiritually elevated and emotionally grounded through heartbreak and chaos. 3:52 This is a conversation about moral clarity and humility, about fear, grief, memory, and the quiet practices that help us stay human. Here's my conversation with Yossi Klein Halevi Yossi, welcome. 4:10 It's such a pleasure to have you on Raw Well. 4:13 Speaker 1 It's great to be with you. 4:15 Speaker 2 How are you feeling today? 4:19 Speaker 1 Today specifically or today since October 7th? 4:24 Speaker 2 Like what's the general one to 10 hopefulness scale? 4:29 Speaker 1 I In the short term 0. Uh huh. In the middle term, 8 to 9. Oh wow. Yeah, that that makes me, by Israeli standards, raving. 4:42 Speaker 2 A Unicorn. 4:44 Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. But oh, definitely, definitely. And I say the mid term, not the long term because in Israel you never think in the long term. It's it's really day-to-day here. But at this point I am, I am in despair about where this government has taken us on every level, moral, political, strategic, in terms of our internal cohesion. 5:15 This government is sum total of the parts of Jewish history that were disasters. And we're, we're being forced to look at those aspects of ourselves, our collective persona, the ugliest side of the Jewish people. 5:33 That's, that's embodied in this government. So in terms of right now, you ask how I am right now, I, I, we say in Hebrew, Allah, Panim, which, which I, I, I love in English on the face, on your face. I think it really should. 5:48 Speaker 2 You've fallen flat on your face. 5:50 Speaker 1 I think it should be an English proverb, you know, how are you feeling? I'm, I'm on the face, you know, but in the, in the middle term, which is to say the next couple of years, I have a very deep confidence in our ability to begin slowly turning this around. 6:09 I think this government is going to leave lasting damage in its wake, and it will take us years to recover, if at all, from some of the moral and institutional failures and and corruption that the government has brought. 6:26 But a majority, a clear majority of Israelis don't like what they're seeing, want change and want healing. I, I think that in the end, that's going to be the decisive issue. You know, the great divide. 6:42 Are you for continuing this or are you for healing? And, and we have two models. You know, we have October 6th and we have October 8th. October 6th, we were tearing each other apart and October 8th, we instantly pivoted from the lowest place in our schism in in the history of the state to one of the peak moments of our unity. 7:07 And we've never done that before. We never made that pivot from from tearing ourselves apart to pulling together. You know, we've had moments of national unity in the past, but we weren't coming from that place that we were in on October 6th. 7:22 We weren't coming from the abyss. So that gives me tremendous hope. October 8th is really the model, but we have a government of October 6th, a government that's committed to tearing us apart and that feeds off of our schisms, that draws its power, that animates its base with hatred of their fellow Jew. 7:45 And we have, we've never seen anything like that in in the history of the state. So right now we are in an October 6th situation, but that's not where a majority of Israelis want to be. So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm an optimist. 8:02 Speaker 2 I like that you ended with. I'm an optimist after but an. 8:06 Speaker 1 Israeli, but an Israeli version of optimism. You know, the Israeli version is as bad as you think it's going to be in the in the coming months, it's probably going to be even worse. That's an Israeli optimist. After that, you know we're going to slowly start to heal. 8:24 Speaker 2 At some point, Eliyahu Hanavi will arrive. 8:28 Speaker 1 I think he's here already and, and that's what you see in the polls. You know, the polls consistently show strong majorities that don't want this. 8:38 Speaker 2 You just mentioned before this interview that you wrote an essay about meditation, that you've been meditating for 40 years. You have such an interesting kind of parallel world where on the one hand you're really deeply involved in thinking about Israeli identity, Jewish identity narratives, the Israeli Palestinian conflict. 8:58 And on the other hand, you have a meditation practice, which I see it as a kind of superpower where you can kind of sometimes take a step back and look at this whole great tragic comedy of humanity from slightly more distance. 9:17 As you talked also about the, about the very, very deep trauma of October 7th and how in some ways it's, it's been unparalleled since the since the Holocaust and how it pushed that survival button, which automatically pushes people into a very, very tribal place that doesn't really allow for us to see the other. 9:36 And yet you wrote this book letter to my Palestinian neighbor and you have this history of really thinking about the other side as well. I'm just wondering, like, have you really struggled internally as well? Or are you kind of solid on who you are and what you believe in? 9:51 Oh. 9:51 Speaker 1 Struggling all the time and the Palestinian issue is, is, is a good starting point for that struggle. October 7th sent us right back to our most primal and, and vulnerable place. 10:08 And, And I'm still there and I'm still struggling against it because I don't want to be there. I feel diminished by my inability to, to, to feel empathy for the other side. 10:24 And right now I'm frozen. I, I'm still frozen. It's, it's a year and a half later and I do feel my humanity is diminished and my, and my Jewishness is diminished, but it's really hard to have control over that, that primal place. 10:42 I think that there's this is something that that I've been, I've been trying to understand and you know, my, my, in a way, I guess my day job is trying to understand the Jewish psyche. And something became clear to me the other day, which is that we never fully emerged from the Shoah. 11:01 And, and of course people can't fully emerge from that experience. But it wasn't only the past. The Shoah didn't end in 1945. I The fact that we have been fighting for our right to exist since the creation of the state, since day one of the creation of Israel, is one of the greatest outrageous in Jewish history. 11:28 That the Shoah didn't end the Jewish struggle for the right to exist, It only changed. It shifted it from from the right of an individual Jew to exist, the right of the Jewish people as a collective to exist, to the right of the Jewish state to exist. 11:45 But the profoundly offensive question of what Europe used to call the Jewish question and today is called the Zionist question, which is do Jews have the right to exist in whatever form? And it never stopped. 12:01 Now I think that that the Jewish people were so overwhelmed with joy and gratitude in the early decades of the state. And I know that that's certainly how it played out in my family and and with the survivors that I that I knew growing up, there was this sense of vindication. 12:20 The state. State was the answer. And whether that's historically precise, whether anything could really be the answer to the show as a separate question, because Jews experienced it emotionally, viscerally, that the state was the answer and power was the answer to to total powerlessness. 12:41 And so we tended to downplay the fact that we were still struggling with the question of, of survival because we were, we won. And then, and then 1967 happens and the first time I visited Israel, I was 14, I was with my father. 12:59 That was the summer when the Jewish people believed that the Holocaust was really over. That's it. We, we won. And of course, we we're in the post October 7th reality now. 13:14 What I'm trying to say is that October 7th made explicit something that was there all along, but which we hadn't fully faced, which is that we're still struggling. Our right to exist is still under challenge. And so that I think is what we're, that's what we're responding to. 13:33 Speaker 2 I heard you talking also about your, your teenage sons. They assumed that Israel was secure and they, they had this kind of real strength, kind of psychological strength. And then October 7th happened. And I think for a lot of people, including myself, I realized that the Holocaust and the, and the messages that I'd heard from my grandparents and their their hiding and their families were, it was somehow almost imprinted in my DNA. 13:59 The, the kind of it awakened this just primal existential terror from which I, I didn't kind of come out for for several weeks and which is still there to some extent. And every comment I read online which delegitimizes the the, the feelings, the fear, the fear that we have, it kind of reawakens that a little bit. 14:21 I was wondering if. 14:23 Speaker 1 But you but but Anuk you, you really have an extra layer of of Holocaust trauma, having grown up in Europe and and I can't imagine what that would have been like. 14:38 It was hard enough growing up in Brooklyn with the Shihad, with with, with survivors to grow up in the middle of of where it happened. How do you how do you begin to dig your your way out of that? 14:53 That's a question to you. 14:55 Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a really good question. I I, I hadn't actually thought about that. You know, I think so much of it was just subconscious. There was no discussion about, you know, how is this affect? It was just this kind of kind of transparent abstract presence, which in a way was always there but never fully mentioned. 15:15 And I think, I think we all kind of pushed it deep into our subconscious, which of course it will always emerge at at time of, of yeah, of existential threat. 15:24 Speaker 1 Thanks for re traumatizing me. 15:30 Speaker 2 I heard your interview that you did about a year ago already with Ezra Klein from The New York Times. And I thought all the things you said were so compelling and nuanced and intricate and complex and balanced. And then I made the mistake which I, I just, I, I cannot help myself as some kind of like self flagellation of seeing the comments on the video and, and so much of it is just so misinterpreted. 15:58 Do these things affect you? Like someone said, well, you know, if you fear for your own security, why don't you just move to Nebraska? I mean, you're American, you come from there. And then they said, you know, yes, you have an indigenous claim from 2000 years ago, but the Palestinians have an indigenous claim from 2 generations ago. 16:15 You know, if you were. 16:17 Speaker 1 Now we have an indigenous claim, we have re indigenized ourselves. So where do you go with that Mister anti Zionist you know? 16:27 Speaker 2 I was just wondering where does your resilience come from? Because in this day and age and since October 7th, just talking about Israel and, and again, I really thought it was, it was, it was thoughtful. It was someone grappling with something so terrible and still trying to to kind of keep their humanity and explain their side in a balanced way. 16:47 And yet talking about Israel or, or, or Judaism or Zionism or the Israeli Palestinian conflict is so contentious. Do you ever dream of just, you know, just leaving Israel just like it's, it's too much, it's too hard. What that guy said is true. You could live in Nebraska and, and, and live safely and your kids could, does this affect you to the point where you ever think about that? 17:10 Or are you just so proudly, you know, Zionist and, and do you have a very strong backbone? Because I'd like to learn from from those kinds of backbones. 17:20 Speaker 1 I, I, I don't think that it's, it's primarily about pride. I'm, I'm very proud, of course, of the Jewish story and, and especially of the mid 20th century Jewish story of recovering from the lowest point in our history and reaching what I think is the peak point of Jewish history. 17:42 Even now, in terms of our power, our prestige, our ability to defend ourselves, our centrality on the world stage, we've never been so important in, in good ways and bad ways. I mean, obviously the, we're, the fact that we're under global assault is, is the dark side of that success. 18:02 But I, I, I think that, that our mid 20th century story of survival is the greatest Jewish success in 4000 years. And I never took that for granted. 18:18 I, I was always aware growing up that I was the first generation that was born immediately after the Shah and also that was born into the reality of a Jewish state and that the consciousness of being born after has defined my Jewish life, my identity. 18:41 So, so yes, there's, there's certainly pride there, but I, I maybe the deeper level is the sense of responsibility, of awe at living at a one of those very few pivotal moments in Jewish history when the Jewish story is being decided. 19:00 What is this story? It's being decided anew. And I I've always felt this sense of responsibility and burden and gratitude all all wrapped into one of being a citizen of the Jewish people at this moment, of being entrusted with the Jewish story at this moment. 19:20 And being a writer is an added burden and responsibility. The only story I've ever been interested in writing about from when I was a kid is the Jewish story, because that seemed to me the most extraordinary, the most powerful story. 19:37 And I've always tried to understand what it is. And I've always loved writing about individual Jews and about the collective Jewish psyche. So what what really keeps me bound to, to Israel is this sense of responsibility to the story. 19:55 And, and again, there, there are different for me personally, there are different layers of responsibility. And being a Jewish writer is one of the the main areas of responsibility, the main arenas in which this responsibility plays out. 20:11 Speaker 2 Do you ever think like if you were not Yossi, but J Smith in somewhere in the United States or the United Kingdom or wherever, looking at the news right now and, and, and seeing the kind of unfolding horror that has been happening in Gaza. 20:30 Do you feel like, you know, those, those comments that I, that I mentioned where people just really seem to just have an inability to understand the existential fear that has been awakened in, in Jews and Israelis and the perhaps at sometimes irrational or, or primal response? 20:49 Do you feel like you can understand what a lot of people are saying? 20:53 Speaker 1 Obviously, we're focused on all the details and nuances of the conflict that we're stuck in, but that's not true for most people. You know, how much did any of us really pay attention to Serbia, to Rwanda? 21:10 I still get the, the, the, the protagonists confused, but do I have opinions? Yeah. I kind of think the Serbians were genocidal, you know? Do I really know? No. Do I know which side, what the history of the conflict in Rwanda is? 21:29 I, I have no idea, but I have a kind of general sense that one side committed genocide against the other. If you enter this conflict, you know, on October, on October 7th, then OK, they, the, the Palestinians really behaved badly, but weren't they being occupied or something? 21:51 Wasn't there that going on? And, and then look at this Israeli government. They're such a nasty bunch. And, and who's that guy who says that they should throw out all the, all the Palestinians and don't, don't they have this politician who's an extreme right wing? 22:07 So it's very easy to, to put together a portrait of Israel. That's not the Israel we know and that's not the conflict we know. So there is that. But of course, there also is the phenomenon of people who've gone deeply into this conflict and still come out with that position, including some Jews, which for me is the most painful part of this whole the whole assault against us is really. 22:38 Speaker 2 The Yeah, just. 22:39 Speaker 1 Talking about Jewish enablers. 22:41 Speaker 2 Right. I think just because we mentioned Europe and the United States, I find that a lot of those Jews are are in the United States and that European Jews kind of more deeply understand, yes, the existential threat that they that they would be under it. 22:57 You know, it sounds far fetched and Orwellian to people who aren't Jewish. But but regardless of whether it's it's true or whatever happened or not, European Jews really deeply feel that that that fear that I think a lot of American Jews still don't feel. 23:12 Speaker 1 Oh, I think you're right. And you know, we, we tend to to talk about a, an Israeli diaspora crisis, but that's actually not true. There's an American, Jewish, Israeli crisis. The rest of the diaspora everywhere is more or less aligned with Israel because of the feelings of vulnerability, because of a more of a closeness to Holocaust survivors, Australian jewelry, for example, or Canadian jewelry. 23:44 It's it's heavily survivor families, to say nothing of course, of of Europe itself. 23:51 Speaker 2 I want to talk a little bit more about what you said about fearing for your own humanity. And I think, you know, we talked about that kind of post October 7th trauma, which I think we both understood, put the Jewish psyche in a place of survival. 24:07 And when you're in a place of survival, you cannot be thinking or empathizing with anyone other than than than your own immediate survival in that of your family. As the war has gone on, we're a year and a half into the war, a lot has changed. 24:24 Hamas has been greatly diminished and deterred. Hezbollah is, is diminished as well. Iran and I, I remember at the beginning of the war, you said the war was a war of, of survival because the Jewish people needed to feel that they could have that deterrence again, that we needed to rise up and, and show the world that and that would. 24:47 Speaker 1 Just especially, especially the Middle East. You know Israel can't survive in the long term in the Middle East without a credible deterrence posture. 24:56 Speaker 2 Right. A year and a half later, that deterrence you has has somewhat been been reinstated, right? Right. Do you feel more moral conflict, inner conflict about about, about the war? 25:14 Do do you think it should? It should end at this point. 25:18 Speaker 1 Well, the conflict that I feel is really over the hostages. And for the first, for the first phase of the war, like, like I, I think most Israelis, I intuitively prioritized the the need to destroy Hamas over the need to immediately rescue the hostages. 25:45 And it's not something that I necessarily said explicitly. It was more, it was more implicit. But I felt this overriding need for us to undo the disastrous perception of Jewish weakness that that was the result of October 7th and the turn around really happened with the beepers in in Lebanon. 26:12 And and yes, you're right, We have to look at look at Gaza, look at the the footage from Gaza. Much of Gaza looks like Berlin 1945. How much more will we be able to to inflict on Hamas? 26:30 So that's one, one question. And, and, and as a result of the partial restoration of Israeli deterrence, and I emphasize partial because the Houthis, I mean, whoever, whoever heard of the Houthis, the Houthis are lobbing missiles at Tel Aviv. 26:49 That doesn't strike me as, as, as a very impressive example of Israeli deterrence. You know, the Houthis aren't afraid of us. So have we really restored our deterrence? It's, it's an open question, but we've certainly proven that we have enough fight in US and that October 7th was an aberration. 27:13 So what shifted for me is in, in terms of policy is the, is the commitment to prioritize the hostages over bringing Hamas down. And, and something like 70% of Israelis, according to polls, are ready to end the war in exchange for bringing the hostages home. 27:35 Now that, of course, is not the position of of this government. And that has positioned me against the government on this issue, as well as all the other issues that I've been opposed to this government on. 28:13 Speaker 1 But you're really asking a different question. You're asking a question about the Palestinians. And so I asked myself the question, if Hamas wasn't holding our hostages, would I want to end the war because of Palestinian suffering? 28:31 Or would I believe we need to keep going until we destroy Hamas? And I don't know the answer to that. It's, it's a really important question. But the truth is it's so theoretical at this point because most of us in Israel want to end the war for a different reason. 28:49 But we are we do believe that the war should end. 28:53 Speaker 2 I really appreciate your your honesty about your own internal thinking and feelings. And so many of us would not have readily admitted that that at the beginning of the war, the kind of primal feeling was rage and going after Hamas at at, you know, at as the kind of first priority. 29:12 So thank you for sharing that also with the audience because I think it really legitimizes. 29:17 Speaker 1 I would just qualify that by saying, yes, certainly rage was a large part of our post October 7th response, but there was also a very strong rational strategic component which was objectively the need to to reestablish the credibility of Israeli power. 29:38 And that is an an existential need for Israel. Not immediately, You know, if we hadn't re established our deterrence, the country wouldn't have fallen apart, but it would have placed us on a downward historical trajectory. We would have been at the beginning, I think of the unraveling of Israeli power. 29:59 And so we had to, we had to do what we did. The question is, do we have to still keep doing what we had to do that and I don't know. I don't know. 30:09 Speaker 2 You lead the Muslim leadership initiative at the at the Hartman Institute. And I'm wondering if since October 7th, you've been able to, to keep your relationships with Muslim leaders alive or if that has just crumbled because I talked to other people who just, you know, their, their, their friendships just went radio silent in, in the best case scenario. 30:33 Speaker 1 Yeah, well, my, my, my primary Muslim friendships and connections have remained intact. And the, the program that we ran for almost a decade at Hartman, which brought young emerging Muslim American leaders, North American leaders to Jerusalem to, to the Hartman Institute to study Judaism, Zionism, the conflict was really extraordinary. 31:01 I think it was unprecedented in the Jewish world. Hartman is an educational institute. We don't do dialogue. It was not a dialogue program. We taught young emerging Muslim leaders about Judaism and Zionism. 31:17 And it was a year long program. They came for. I can't. 31:20 Speaker 2 Believe there were any of any of them. Had you know were wanted to come, I would not have even expected that such a program existed. 31:30 Speaker 1 This was the miracle of the program. We didn't initiate the program. Hartman didn't go out saying let's find Muslims to teach. We didn't think it was possible. A group of Muslims approached us. They knocked on our door, and our response was the only possible response that a Jewish educational institution can do. 31:50 You open the door, people are asking, teach us, let alone Muslims. And so and so we did and we graduated close to 170 people over over those 10 years, many of them who became in the course of this last decade front rank leaders, opinion shapers in the Muslim American community. 32:15 The bad news is that our relationship with many of them did not survive October 7th. Most were either silent because they were afraid of their position in the community or actively participated in the assault on Israel and the accusations of genocide and downplaying October 7th or or else. 32:46 Well, of course we condemn murder of civilians. Civilians should never be combatants. But look at the numbers on October 7th and look at the numbers in Gaza. So what? What has happened in the Muslim world, not only in North America but but throughout the Muslim world is is similar to the reaction of much of the Muslim world to the Holocaust. 33:11 There are the outright denialists, there are those who celebrate the Holocaust, and some of the denialists will say, well, it never happened and we're glad it happened and we're going to do it again. Those who justified October 7th, those who relativized it, well, yes, of course it's terrible, but look what Israel, what Israel's doing is so much worse. 33:36 So my approach to Muslim Jewish relations prior to October 7th was I have no preconditions. I will sit with any Muslim who's willing to sit with me. 33:52 And, and I've heard, I've heard it all. I've heard everything from Holocaust denial and minimalization. I've really heard it all. And my, and my position was, OK, we're at war. And if you're willing to listen to me, then I'll sit at the table and listen to you after October 7th. 34:13 I have much less tolerance for that. I won't sit with October 7th denialists or celebrants or or minimizers, justifiers. And, and so that's considerably narrowed the scope of my ability to, to find Muslim partners. 34:37 Again, my core Muslim partners are are with me and and that's not to say it's, it's easy because they're, they are severe critics of this war, but that doesn't make them Hamas apologists. 34:53 They are they are bitter critics of Hamas and I can easily live with Muslims who are Israel critics. I think that that's just going to be a given in Muslim Jewish interaction, provided that they are Hamas critics and not apologists and not minimizers. 35:12 So that has really left the playing field much smaller for Muslim Jewish relations than it was before October 7th. 35:22 Speaker 2 Knowing that the Jewish psyche as you do in the Israeli psyche, what would it take for for this current Israeli society to open up again to the idea that there are many Palestinians who might be willing to just forego this whole dream of like river to the sea and would be willing to have a 2 state solution and live in security and dignity alongside a Jewish state. 35:49 Even if there were such a Palestinian partner? Do you think today, post October 7th, and with the kind of propaganda of this government, that there are still many Israelis who would believe, who would have the empathy necessary to to look at the other side? 36:07 Speaker 1 You know, I understand the emotional reaction of Israelis after October 7th who said there are no innocent Palestinians, They're all Hamas as a as as as an emotional reaction. 36:23 You saw this? 36:23 Speaker 2 As a visceral. 36:24 Speaker 1 As a visceral reaction, you saw the scenes of October 7th of thousands of civilians, Palestinian civilians, pouring across the border, participating in the massacre, celebrating and parading our hostages through the streets. 36:40 You know, like I had these these biblical images, you know, of Samson, a cage Samson being being paraded in through the streets of Gaza by the Philistines. You know, it was that primal and and thousands of people celebrating and but it wasn't Samson. 36:59 It was, it was 18 year old girls. And so that experience was so primal that that it was a natural response to say there are no innocents in Gaza. Now, what we've seen in the last few weeks is the clearest refutation of that which was the outbreak of demonstrations against Hamas. 37:19 Now it's not for love of Israel. Let's let's, let's put that aside. Let's put those illusions aside. We're enemies. I I understand that. But the courage that it takes to demonstrate against Hamas, even with Hamas severely diminished, is extraordinary. 37:39 And I know that there are Palestinians who are not just willing to live in peace with us, but who accept the idea that we belong in this land. Now, of course, they're a minority. They've been fed the opposite line by their media and schools and mosques. 38:00 So it's really self defeating for us to write off entire populations. We're going to have to keep living with these people whether we want to or not. They're not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere now. 38:16 I think that a majority of Israelis understand that. And, and going back to your question, there was a poll that was taken a few weeks ago by Tel Aviv University, which really should have been headline news because it was such a stunning poll. 38:34 If Israel were to make peace with the Saudis and if they would be regional peace with the Arab Sunni world, would you accept a Palestinian state as part of that peace agreement? 38:50 60% said yes. Now I was stunned because I really thought that post October 7th, those numbers would be in the teens, and yet there it was. So I think that there's a common sense still among a majority of Israelis, which is a kind of a centrist instinct. 39:14 And I, I've always identified myself as an Israeli with, with the centre camp. And my understanding of the centre is that it's the camp of balance. It's the camp that tries to grapple with the terrible complexity of our problems, whether it's political, whether it's cultural. 39:34 Israel is faced with a series of of, of overwhelmingly complicated problems, and no one camp has all the answers. But each camp has a certain insight that we need. And so the center is the meeting point of the right and the left. 39:50 And as a centrist, I have a left wing side and I have a right wing side and my right wing side says that that we can't. We can't have a Palestinian state and October 7th just proves that in the most in in the most obvious way. 40:11 My left wing side says we can't continue the occupation. We can't live in one state with the people who did October 7th. We can't form one political entity with these people. Now of course, then you're if you're on the far right, your conclusion as well. 40:27 Then we expel them. But this is the 21st century, and if you expel several million people from your borders, you will not remain part of the club of successful nations. You will be a pariah state. And I don't want Israel to be a pariah state. 40:44 So. So what do I do with that? As a centrist, I recognize that that certainly for this foreseeable future there cannot be a Palestinian state. But I also recognize that in the long term, the occupation is untenable. 41:01 And So what do we do? That's that's the starting point. You need to look at reality without ideological blinders, and both the hard left and the hard right approach reality as a kind of a wish fulfillment exercise. 41:17 I impose what I want reality to be and what reality really is, and it keeps blowing up in our face. 41:25 Speaker 2 What do you do to to nourish your soul these days? What has kind of kept you afloat? 41:32 Speaker 1 There are the stock answers, which is, you know, I believe in the eternity of the Jewish people, which I do. And it does provide a measure of comfort, although the last few years have really strained that comfort to the breaking point. 41:50 And there's something that I've really been holding onto since the Netanyahu government came to power in 2022, even before October 7th, and that is that this government is forcing us to look at the dark side of our collective being. 42:08 Every people has a dark side, and you can't go through 4000 years of what the Jewish people went through without having strong residues of darkness. And this government is the coalescing of those subterranean dark forces. 42:26 And we have no choice but to face it. This government is rubbing our faces in our own failures, our own dark impulses, Whether it's hatred of the Guyan, that that term that really should not be part of the Jewish lexicon anymore, whether it's US against the whole world. 42:46 And sometimes it can feel that way. But objectively it is not true on any level. There is a sense of, of, of taking chosenness in an extreme direction. All of these factors I've coalesced in this government and, and what has paradoxically given me strength is saying, OK, we're at that moment in Jewish history where we have no choice but to go through this. 43:17 Do you know the Musser movement? And there's a wonderful, wonderful saying that I've carried with me for most of my life from one of the great teachers of of Musser, Joseph Yezel Horowitz of the Novardik school. He was the the rosheshiva of Novardak. 43:35 And he said of the following, he said in the Slobotka Musser yeshiva, they have a saying what you can't go through, rise above. In Novardak, we say what you can't go through, you must go through. 43:54 And so the Jewish people is at one of those must go through moments. And what makes this so painful, so unbearable, really, is that what we're going through is simultaneously an assault from without and from within. And that's what makes it so hard for so many of us to find solid ground. 44:14 But what I hold on to is saying, OK, we're finally at that point in the maturation of the Jewish people where we're being forced to face our weaknesses. I wish we weren't being forced to do so while at the same time we're fighting an existential war. 44:33 The existential war we're fighting is not just military, it's also a war for our legitimacy around the world. So in a way, we're fighting A3 front war. There's a military war against radical Islamism. There's a war for the legitimacy of the mid 20th century Jewish story of Holocaust to recovery, and that recovery happened because of Jewish power, and it's Jewish power that's under result. 45:02 And there is the internal struggle against those forces of dissipation that would turn us into the opposite of who so many of us believe we we are or should be as a people, as an ancient people, as a repository of one of the world's great stories. 45:24 So this is an extraordinary moment of truth for the Jewish people. And to walk away from this war as some Jews apparently are, I don't blame them, but but I this is the moment I believe that our generation was being prepared for. 45:47 This is it. This is, this is, you know, what's that awful American expression? This is Money time, right? So. 45:55 Speaker 2 So my last question relates to that and what you said about the, the, the Jewish people who are walking away from this war. And I've said on this podcast before, especially in the first year of this war, my husband and I had constant conversations. 46:11 I, I kept telling him, what about Portugal? What about Costa Rica? What about somewhere beautiful and green in the United States? And what about changing our name? And you know, I had these fantasies of walking away and ultimately I decided to stay. I decided that my kids would grow up here. 46:28 And yet I'm struggling like many people. It is a hard thing to do. It would be much easier for me to live in Portugal as some of my friends are doing. What I want to ask you is where, where does your strength come from? Is it from your father's survival story? Is it, do you think it's genetic? 46:44 Is it your temperament? Do you think it is innate? Or is it something that you know we can all rise to the fore and embody? 46:54 Speaker 1 Well, certainly I was privileged to be raised in a survivor family. I don't know if I would have used quite those words to define that experience while it was happening, but in retrospect, no question about it. 47:09 So, yeah, that's certainly a big part of it. But I have a very strong spiritual practice, meditation. I've been meditating for many years. It's a Jewish meditation practice. I've been part of a circle in Jerusalem of people who have gone deeply into the the Jewish meditation experience, which has been largely forgotten in modernity and I think needs to be resurrected. 47:40 And I've been nurtured by Eastern religion. Vedanta, the monotheistic foundation of Hinduism, has been a very, very strong experience for me over the years. And, and I've been privileged to have teachers along the way who took me in hand. 48:02 You can't really do it without teachers. Every spiritual tradition will tell you that. And, and it's true, you know, unless you've been reincarnated as some exalted soul, you're, you're going to, to be overwhelmed by the material world, especially in our time. 48:22 And so you need teachers, you need spiritual brothers and sisters, you need a group, you need spiritual friends to help strengthen you. And I've, I'm blessed with that. And I would not have been able personally to hold on to a deep, it's not just a deep faith in hope. 48:41 It's, I would say it's more, I don't want this to sound, to sound arrogant, but certainty. I just know that that this isn't the end of the story. And I think many Jews share that. I think many Jews just intuitively know. 49:00 So that's really what sustains me personally in a very practical way when I feel myself starting to fray, which happens a few times a day. And to keep from flying off the handle with every new bit of, of awful news, whether it's some new anti-Semitic outrage somewhere in the Jewish world or some new outrage by this government, whatever it is, this convergence of threat from without and within, It's having that strong spiritual practice, which also, by the way, gives me a great deal of hope for the future of Judaism. 49:42 Because if you look at at the history of Judaism, I don't just mean the Jewish people now, I mean of the religion itself. When, when we went through periods of intense upheaval, there was usually a strong spiritual response, not necessarily right away, sometimes a few generations later. 50:04 You know, look at the outbreak of Hasidism after the Kamalitsky massacres in, in, in Ukraine in 1648. It, it took a century or more for the Hasidic movement to begin to emerge. And the, the, the crisis of Sabatianism, so many examples of Jewish history, Kabbalah after the expulsion of Spain, Lurianic Kabbalah. 50:29 So, so there's a pattern in the history of Judaism of responding to crisis with deep spiritual movements. We are long past due for that response. And what happened in the Jewish people after the Holocaust was that all of that spiritual energy was really channelled by by the need to physically reconstruct, to physically rebuild the Jewish people, to build the Jewish state. 50:54 And it went into the practical reconstruction of the Jewish people. But there were tremendous spiritual energies that went into the practical rebuilding of the Jewish people. Those were still rebuilding, but the spiritual energies have been depleted. 51:13 They've been exhausted. And where do you go now? And I think the only place to go if you're asking yourself these questions is, is back to Judaism, back to the core of Jewish identity for thousands of years until the 19th century, which was the struggle of a people with God. 51:37 That's what the Jewish story is. And that story has either been sidelined by very powerful secular forces within the Jewish people or Co opted by fundamentalism. And we need, desperately need new sources of Jewish spiritual renewal. 51:58 And really, what makes me an optimist, a nuke, is that I believe that we are on the verge of the beginnings of a major new eruption in Jewish spirituality. 52:11 Speaker 2 I really appreciate what you said. And I think that's, you know, that's, that's one of the things that that drew me to, to make this podcast is I after October 7th, I think the magnitude of it was so biblical, so, so transcendentally horrible that a lot of us, including me, you know, secular Israeli living in Tel Aviv needed to find some kind of new spirituality. 52:37 And I had been studying Eastern meditation, but I needed it to come from from my own tribe. And so I think that you're right that probably a lot of people like me would be more receptive today to those kinds of ancient wisdom traditions that that come from from our own history. 52:57 So you've given me, you've given me hope as well. You'll see. 53:01 Speaker 1 You and your podcast are are a symptom of what's stirring. Listen to Israeli music today. So much of it is, is, is, is about God and the search for God, the disappointments, the God, are you really there? 53:19 The struggle with God. And this is new, you know, it's relatively new. It's less decade, but since October 7th it is really increased dramatically. And so there's now a desperation in Israeli society, which is also desperation is the ground for many things. 53:40 Politically it it can produce very bad results and is producing some very problematic results. But spiritually, desperation sometimes leads to to very rich results. And so Anouk, I'm really grateful to you. I'm grateful for for your podcast and for strengthening my hope you really have. 54:04 Speaker 2 Thank you, Yossi.

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