podcast #12 Acharei Mot Kedoshim

The main ideas in this podcast episode are: - The importance of love in the Torah and how it is a foundational precept. - The command to love thy neighbor as thyself and the significance of the phrase "Ani Adonai" (I am God) that follows it. - The challenge of commanding love and the need for balance between self-love and love for others. - The role of listening and dialogue in fostering love and respect for others. - The story of the two wolves inside us and the importance of feeding the wolf of love. - The understanding that the wolf pack hierarchy is based on love, not aggression. - The idea that our ability to hear and understand messages of love has evolved. - The importance of taking responsibility for what we hear and using it as an opportunity for self-reflection and growth. Shalom, everyone. Welcome back to our podcast. I'm Elisha Wilson. I'm sitting here with Avatar Shlomo Meital, and we're discussing the Parashat Shevua. Again, we have two, just like last week. And again, by the time you get to hear this, we'll be past Yom Ha'atzmaut. We're recording this before Yom Ha'atzmaut, in fact, on the eve of Yom Hazikaron. So, you may feel that in the air as we're chatting and talking. So, Shlomo. Hi. Hi, Elisha. Shalom. Elisha, I think I'm beginning to figure out your secret, the secret of your creative brush up. The secret is to look in the dark corners. A very quick story, and then I'll explain and expose your secret. Okay. So, I recall there was a very wonderful editor of a Jewish newspaper in the southern United States, the North Carolina Israelite. And when he retired, he looked in his scrapbook and looked over back issues of this Jewish newspaper to see where the big stories were, where the important stories were. And Elisha, they weren't on the front page in the screaming headlines. They were on the back page. And that seems to be one of your methods, which is to find the dark corners in the Torah where we don't look enough. So, for Ve'ahavta le're'echa kamocha, you shall love your neighbor like yourself. And neighbor is a wrong translation. We'll discuss that. But it's immediately followed by words that I personally have not paid attention to, and they're absolutely crucial. Ani Adonai. And that changes everything. And you spotted that, you put your finger on that, and we can discuss that, why that changes everything about the so-called golden rule. Okay. So, first of all, I'm also really curious to hear about the secret that you're, you know, where we all have blind spots. So, we don't know, um, we need, we always need the other to, to kind of, um, give us an angle, um, to help us get to know ourselves better and, and vice versa. So, maybe we'll just, we should just say the two parashot this week are Achreimot and Kedushim. We're actually at the center of the Torah. Um, um, Kedushim especially is the middle, mamash, the middle of, of the Torah. And we're also named after that, Vahavta. We're called Vahavta from, coming from Vahavta le're'echa kamocha, love thy other, thy neighbor, thy friend, thy fellow human being, as you would love yourself, for I am God. And this is fascinating, Elisha, because suddenly in the book of Leviticus, which is about the sacrifices and the koanim, suddenly we find two, uh, precepts that are purely based on love. We are commanded to love. Um, and the question is what is this about? What does it mean? What do we do with this? And by the way, a question, a preliminary question, Elisha, how in the world can you command anybody to love? It's an emotion. Do we control, partly control our emotions, but we can command people to keep kashrut, to daven. Can we command people to love? Can we? Yeah. What a great question as usual. Um, so obviously I don't have the answer and, um, but we just finished a course. We've mentioned that already. We just finished a course, like a 10 week course on, on love, um, in Jewish, from Jewish sources. And, um, and I always choose topics that I, that I feel I need to explore that, uh, um, I have a lot of questions about and I want to explore. So best way to learn is to teach because you have to first yourself, you have to learn. Um, and I've come to some really deep conclusions about, about love. Um, and we talked about some of them actually, a few sessions ago, I can't remember which podcast it was, but, um, um, first of all, what I want to say is that, um, love your, it's kind of like a compass. Is that a compass? Compass, compass, spin. It shows us the direction. Um, we might not be there right now, but we're, but here's the direction they go. Deepen your love, deepen your capacity for love, deepen your ability to love, deepen your relationships. Um, there might not be very good right now. There might be, one may be good, another may be lacking. Um, but the, the, uh, the compass doesn't say, um, integrity on it. The compass doesn't even say, um, truth on it. It doesn't say, um, Jewish on it. It says love on it. And, um, and I'm, I'm, I want to take this really, really seriously. That's comment number one. Comment number two, which is a direct, um, continuation of taking it seriously, is I've come to realize that, um, um, one of the things we don't notice in our day-to-day lives is we see things. I see you sitting across from me. I see the computer. I don't see the oneness. I don't see, and, and I've come to see that love is, among other things, love is a connecting tissue. It's, um, love is, is that, is that which makes everything into one. There's no, no such thing in the universe as, as an individual particle. Every particle is in relationship. Um, and that relationship is love. And in a way, even a hateful relationship in a, in a warped way is also love, um, that we just don't see the love there. So, there's a lot more to say about that. Absolutely. So, Kedoshim has two commands, um, two love commands. And the first one is, love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. That's one. And the second is, um, the stranger living among you, the stranger, you must be, must be treated as your native-born. Love him as yourself. Right. Or you are strangers in Egypt. And Ani Adonai. Right. Both of them have Ani Adonai. Um, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs makes a beautiful point out of this. There are many rules in religion that are transactional. You do this, and the rains will come, and your crops will be beautiful, and, and your children will be healthy and brilliant. This is not a transactional command. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Um, love the stranger as thyself. He, this is what Jonathan Sachs says. Um, Judaism was the first civilization to put love at the heart of morality. Ani Adonai is a signpost, a stop sign. This is not a self-help book, guys. This isn't just popular psychology. This is ethics. This is what's right. It's right to do that. Ani Adonai. And, you know, we often think about Jews as the chosen people because we bring monotheism, one God, to the world. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think we bring love to the world. And, and a very quick story, and then I want your, your response on this. I have a, a friend from India. His name is, um, Denduluru Venkataraman Seshadri, and he's a Brahmin. He is a, a priestly Hindu and very religious. He rises at 4 a.m. every day, goes up to the top floor of his house. He has a, a shrine there, and he worships the Hindu gods. And, Elisha, there are more gods in the Hindu religion than you can count, and we have conversations about that. There is a God for every quality and every action, and he tells me it's all the same. It's one God. It's, it's all one God. So, I'm not sure that monotheism is our great contribution. Love at the heart of morality, loving other people, and those two commands are brilliant. Why? Love Re'echa. Re'echa basically is people you know, and maybe your wife, or your neighbor, and your friend, and then the stranger. So, love everybody. Love everybody. And you make this point in, in your book of Gershom, where you say that Re'echa is the ultimate other, everything that is not I. We are commanded as a moral principle by God, to love the world, everybody, period. Yeah, and let's be honest here. Let's be honest. We've lost that. We, you know, we, we may have been chosen for that. I, I, I, I would go along with what you said that, you know, if, if we can save ourselves, you know, the chosen people, which is a phrase that requires a lot of explaining, because otherwise it may sound very xenophobic, but an elitist, and I don't think that's what it was meant to be. But I think you're right. I love what you said about chosen to see the love that connects everything together, both your friend and the stranger. You are connected. How do we know? For I am God. We are connected in, in this oneness called, called God. And unfortunately, tragically, I think we Jews have suffered so much over the ages that we've just lost that. We've lost that, that, this message. One could say that maybe Christianity tried to take it over and claim it, you know, the religion of love. Islam, by the way, claims to be a religion of love as well. So, so it doesn't matter who says what. The source for both Christianity and Islam is, is the Torah at the end of the day. Judaism, the Torah. So yes, we're saying that love is the foundation of it all. And we know that it's a foundation, because right at the end of every sentence where it says love, it also says Ani Adonai, for I am God. Because I'm trying to say this is a foundational precept. So one of my questions to myself is, is how do we bring that back? How do we bring that back? And how do we, each in our own lives? And it connects with the other point you just made now about the many gods. It's beautiful that your Brahmin friend kind of said, yeah, I know they all have different names, all these gods have different names, but they're all one. They're all one. And I think, I love that. I love that. And in another course that we had here, we learned about all the different names of God in Judaism. We spent 30 sessions on the different names of God. And there are many names, you know, Elohim, Adonai, El, Shaddai, and many others, HaKadosh Baruch Hu, et cetera, et cetera. So each one of them is a different aspect of the one, one God. And every time I may be connected to another aspect, like when I'm in a warrior mode, I'm more connected to El Hamilchama, which is a lot more powerful. And when I am connected to the quality of mercy and grace, it's more Adonai. And so we do have that too. And what connects it all together is love. But because we human beings, we're moody people. We have moods. So we keep on, one moment we could be like really joyous, the next we could be irritated, and then we could be scared. So because of our limitations, each time we connect to another facet of God, and love connects it all. It does indeed. And there's another aspect I'd like to point out. You stress Ani Adonai, which makes this love a moral principle. But there's another word, which maybe we skip over. Kamocha, love thy neighbor as thyself. And we Jews, I think, have a triple whammy problem. We have the first problem of being a minority that has suffered like no other minority. And it's made us somewhat paranoid. And one can certainly understand that. We have another whammy, another problem, and that is the rise of selfish individualism in the world, which I think maybe the psychologists have helped dump on us, and for reasons, good reasons, because ve'ahavta le'erecha kamocha, love thy neighbor as thyself. If you hate yourself, you cannot love other people. It's impossible. And so psychologists heal us by helping us feel better about ourselves. But Elisha, maybe in doing so, we've gone overboard with self-love and self-respect. And that we need to find a balance between those two things, respecting and loving ourselves, and loving other people, and finding the right balance. Right, right. And the derasha that you're quoting from, I think one of the things I try to write there is, we can also read it instead of ve'ahavta le'erecha kamocha, love thy neighbor as you would love yourself, we could also read, love thy neighbor for he is like you. Ve'ahavta le'erecha kihu kamocha, because he's just like you. We're all the same. We're all, we all have the same angst, and we all have the same dreams and hopes and aspirations. We, you know, we do have different talents, and we have different professions, so we kind of act out the same core drives in very different ways. But at the core of it, we're all exactly, exactly the same. And that could be a reminder, you know, don't move away from individualism, saying, you know, okay, you are indeed an individual. But interestingly enough, the individual standing right next to you, he's just like you. He is just like you. And therefore, and therefore, open up to that other person. He has a lot to teach you. You have a lot to teach him, perhaps. And again, it brings back the notion of love, because we're all, we discussed this in the class this morning, we're now learning a course on how to allow the world to come. So just this morning, we discussed how it's the one breath of life that God breathes into everything, into every human being. And every human being that will ever be born out of another human being, shares that same original divine breath of life. Indeed, and Elisha, trying to translate this to principles that are pragmatic, what do I do with this? Where do I start in loving my neighbor and the stranger as well? So my wife Sharona, whom I mentioned a lot, a psychologist, has a wonderful project that's catching fire. And it's so simple. It's helping people to learn to dialogue with people and to listen to other people. And if I could, Elisha, on this principle, I would begin with that, with my fellow Israelis. Please learn to listen to other people, because listening is a sign of respect. And as you listen, you learn more about other people, and you come to understand them. And you may not love them, maybe that's a long way off, but you understand and respect them. And that seems to me to be a good start. Yeah, yeah. And maybe, actually, consider maybe adding a floor to this notion, this idea. Listening, it's respectful, and it's useful, because you may hear new things. And you may also, and you can really grow from just listening. And one needs to talk as well, by the way. I think it's important when we give our thoughts concrete words, it really helps us understand ourselves better. So it's important to talk, but really important to listen. But what if, when we're listening to another person, now this may be a bit far out, but what if when we're listening, I cannot hear something which I don't already somehow have within me. So if someone's talking to me, and I'm hearing something, I'm actually hearing something that is already in my own being, which is just echoed by someone else, and talked out loud by someone else. So in other words, when we say to a person, but I told you to do this and this and this, you did? I don't remember you saying that. And that is genuine. We really didn't hear them saying that. Because there was a part in us that wasn't even, we weren't even ready to hear that, whatever that was. But if we actually heard something, then it kind of tells us that we have that inside of us. So listening to someone else could actually be a way of hearing yourself out. So v'hafda lakha kamocha, love thyself as your fellow. Listen to your fellow, because your fellow is talking you to you. And the better you understand your fellow person, the better you can also understand yourself, and vice versa. Indeed, and I have a small story to back you up on that. I love stories, and I love your story. Well, I found this one in preparing for our podcast. And it actually comes from Native Americans. It comes from what we used to call American Indians. We call them Native Americans now, and the Canadians have a better term. They call the natives First Nation, which is a term of respect, and I like that a lot. So this is Native American story. A grandfather talks to his grandson, and the boy says, Grandpa, I have two wolves inside me. I have a wolf of peace and love and kindness. And the other is the wolf of fear and greed and hatred. Grandfather, which wolf will win? And the grandfather says, Whichever one you feed. So we all have these two wolves inside us, Alicia, and we have a choice. And it's awfully tempting to allow the aggressive wolf to win out, and we see that a lot, especially lately. But it's not inevitable, not inevitable. And I have a comment from a science podcast that I also listen to about wolves. I learn a lot from wolves. I love wolves. It's a main wolf thing. So it's kind of, I'm drawn to wolves. Oh, of course. So maybe you'll like this story. So Alicia, we had this concept of the alpha wolf, the wolf who leads the pack by being stronger and beating all his rivals and being aggressive and winning out both the male and the female alpha wolves, right? And this was in one of the first books written about wolves in 1970. And guess what? It's all a bunch of nonsense. There is no alpha wolf. A wolf pack, it turns out, is set up on love and not on aggression and combat. A male wolf finds an attractive young lady wolf and they have babies, and they start their pack. And the pack's hierarchy is based on genes and yichus inside the family. And some of the younger male wolves have to leave. You go off and they find their own young lady and start a pack. The pack is based on love, not based on these alpha wolf aggressions. That's been proven. I think that's interesting for the wolves inside us. Okay, that's really interesting. So basically we can say, so it depends which wolf you feed. And I would like to possibly expand that a little bit, to kind of say that if there's a wolf inside of us, no, I'll say it differently. I'll say it in a different way. We used to believe in alpha wolves, because that was the message that resonated with our internal evolution. Our evolution was such that we could only hear about alpha wolves. Looks like we've evolved. We've evolved and all of a sudden we can start putting aside the alpha nonsense, as you're saying, and open up to the option of love. And maybe we couldn't hear that message. Maybe it was spoken before. The wolves haven't changed. They're the same wolves. But we have changed. We've evolved. So we can now hear a new message that we couldn't hear before. So I think there's a takeaway from this, a little takeaway from this little segment in this podcast is, if someone is saying something to us which we really don't want to hear, we don't like it, it upsets us. If we can understand that right now, that's what we are able to hear. We're able to hear this criticism from someone. So we can turn inwardly, you know, there's the friend and there's yourself. There's that dialogue there between them and say, right now I am hearing criticism. That's what I'm able to hear. Who knows? Maybe the fellow person is not just trying to criticize me. Maybe he's talking about his own issues. I take it as criticism. And if I'm willing to take responsibility over what I'm hearing, meaning, I'm hearing you saying has nothing to do with what you're saying. It has anything to do with what I'm hearing. So I'm hearing what you're saying. Okay, you just gave me a gift. It felt uncomfortable in the body. It got me enraged. It got me upset and angry. But I'll, a priori, I will say, you gave me a gift here. Now I'm going to go back and think like, what is it here that what I could hear was criticism? And what's my own homework here? So this whole mirroring, we're actually talking here about the song of, we need the other person, the stranger, the friend, the enemy. We need everyone in our lives because they're all mirroring different parts in us. And without that, forget love. We can't love if it's only a friend. It's easy to love a friend and a partner. But we also have strangers, and we have enemies. And what are they to you? What gift are they bringing to you? That's a really important lesson I learned from what you just said. It's not enough to be a good listener. It's not just being a good listener. It's what you hear when you listen. And that's in our control, what you hear. And there are many ways of hearing things from good to bad. And we are in control. And we tend to hear things that anger us, which is a gut emotion, and far less things that broadcast compromise and love. And this raises a question, Alicia. And I'm asking you this as a rabbi, but also as a retired reserve officer in the Army, because you were an officer. We're a little country. We were born with very few chances to survive. Seventy-five years ago, we fought a bitter war, and initially we had very few weapons. The Army has a strategy and a culture and its own principle, in Hebrew, that is, wherever possible, to attack rather than defend, because that gives an advantage. Many people see Israel as an aggressive country for that reason, because we have had to survive against really long odds, and we still are fighting long odds, by being a very prickly, aggressive country, especially in our military, which is based on the principle of the aggressive wolf. And my question, Alicia, is, has this changed our soul as a people? Because we all serve in the Army. Almost all of us serve in the Army. We have four children. They all served. One of my sons served for eight years. Another, I think, 12. The Army really does change us. How do we deal with this, Alicia? We have a country now. We have the Torah. We have the moral principle of love thy neighbor. Our neighbors are not so pleasant. We live in a bad neighborhood, and we've had to do really difficult, aggressive things in order to survive. Has this changed us? I ask you as a retired officer. Yes, that's a tough question, and especially as we're speaking now, it's Erev Yom HaTikvot, Memorial Day, that's starting tonight and all day tomorrow. So first of all, I think it has changed us, and it changed us for the better as well. Meaning, if we came to the Diaspora as a petrified group, we saw in the Holocaust how in Jews were, you know, we Israelis were raised on a very problematic statement that Jews in the Diaspora were led like lambs to the slaughter. That's how we were raised. It took us a long time to understand that that's not very accurate at all, not only because there was also resistance, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but surviving every day was a form of resistance and bravery. But nevertheless, here in Israel, the ethos is indeed about the best defense is attack. And yes, that's changed us. We've become a very aggressive people, for better and for worse. Because I want to put a little spin on this whole thing. You brought a beautiful term in Hebrew, and you translated it the way it should be translated, but it's actually mistranslated. The term you just said is L'chto L'maga, to aspire for contact. It doesn't say aspire to fight. It says aspire for contact, for having a relationship, for contacting. Which is, you know, I never thought about it until you mentioned it right now. The ethos is, you're right, the idea is for a soldier, if you see someone approaching with a gun or a knife or something, don't run away, but rather approach and fight. But interestingly enough, semantically, it says don't run away, engage. Now, the engagement may sometimes be a hug, and it may sometimes be shooting and using force. But maybe if we can remember that we, Zionism was meant to heal our scared Jewish nature and bring us back to our daring human potential. And the Israeli military says always, always, always aspire to engage, aspire to contact. And maybe that could be the middle way here. And I just think on the most part, on the most part, the Israeli army has an amazing track record. And some who may be surprised to hear this, and if they're surprised to hear this, it's because they're ignorant about the Israeli military. The Israeli army is indeed one of the most humane militaries in the world. There's no good war. There's no lovely war. There's no cozy war. Wars are horrible. They're awful. I wish there were no wars. But considering what Israeli soldiers are facing here, the level of morality in the Israeli army is like no other in the world. Are there exceptions? Of course they are. Are they discussed and judged? Of course they are. But I think there's something deeply ingrained in us. And I pray we'll never lose that. And that's a concern. But I pray we'll never lose that. That HaKam L'Hogachash, HaKam L'Hogachash, who rises to kill you, then you have the permission to kill. But otherwise, seek to engage. And engage could be through, engage is a form of love. And Alisha, maybe we can close with this. We are putting an impossible burden on our 18-year-olds. American 18-year-olds go off to college and join fraternities and have drinking parties. And we send our 18-year-olds out with a gun, and they have a split second to decide when they engage, whether they engage peacefully or whether they have to use their weapon. A split second. And it's a matter of life and death. So yes, this is a burden. It comes with our being an independent country that has to defend itself and survive with a lot of people who don't like us. Yeah. And I just want to say one thing. As someone who's peace-oriented, politically speaking, I'm very much in the center. But peace is a value that I seek. Both on the personal level, on the national level. But I can say that my military service, I served five years in the army. And those five years, besides the reserve duty, those five years were the greatest life training that I've ever, ever received. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful for these amazing five years and everything I learned there and received from that. Mine the same. And I did reserve duty until in my 50s. And I loved it. I loved it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So we'll say goodbye. Happy Independence Day to Israel. And may we seek love, because that's where God is. God is in love. So that's a good place to find God and to bring more of God into our lives. Amen. Shalom. Shalom. Bye.