Welcome to the Times of Israel's What Matters Now, a weekly podcast delving into one issue
that affects Israel and the Jewish world right now.
I'm your host Amanda Borschell, Dan here in our Jerusalem studio with author Yossi Klein
Halavi.
Yossi, thank you so much for joining me today.
Always great to be with you Amanda.
It is such a pleasure and you know Yossi before you came in, I checked when was the last
time we spoke together and it's been a year.
Really?
I'm not sure.
How's that possible?
It's been a year since you left your person my home.
That's true.
Oh my gosh.
So now we're doing it in the studio so we're safe.
And we know where your bag is in the meantime.
That's true.
Okay.
Funny.
But Yossi unfortunately we're here to discuss something quite difficult and I've been
thinking about this turn towards Jewish extremism over the past, you know, definitely years.
But in the past several weeks we've been seeing this uptick and I thought, who is the right
person to speak about with this?
Who's written, you know, the book on this?
And Yossi of course in 1995 you came out with memoir of a Jewish extremist.
Now your case is 180 degrees different than what's going on right now here in Israel.
But one of the reasons why I asked you to come in is to kind of delve into the psyche
more than the facts on the ground right now.
So just Yossi just really broad strokes.
Let's remind our listeners of your story and what led you to write your memoir.
Yeah.
I think it's important to look at the differences between the extremist world that I grew
up in in Brooklyn in the late '60s, early '70s.
We're speaking specifically about Mayor Cajana on the Jewish Defense League, the JDL.
And the world of Jewish extremism which Cajana had such a decisive influence on here when
he moved to Israel in 1971.
Until today Yossi, wouldn't you agree?
Oh, more so.
More than ever.
There was just a piece in one of the Israeli papers actually, I think, today in Wainett
by Ben-Joy Amini, one of the leading columnists, saying that one of Netanyahu's greatest crimes
against the state of Israel was normalizing Cajanism within the liquid itself.
And so the poison of the extreme ideas that Cajana developed here and that we're largely
confined to the far right have now, thanks to this government, penetrated the mainstream
and it's going to take us a very long time to contain the damage and the fallout.
But you Yossi are yourself an example of getting out of this extremism and that's another
of the reasons why I want to call you here.
So let's talk about your story a little bit first of all.
Yeah, so before I speak about my own specific experience, just a few broad strokes about the
time in which I was growing up.
In the late 1960s, we experienced a convergence of influences, a really once in a generation
moment where you had these extraordinary events coming from abroad and impacting on American
jury.
So the first was the Sixth Day War.
The second was the rise of the refusenic movement in the Soviet Union, the Jewish response
in Russia to the Sixth Day War, which was young Jews reclaiming their Jewishness and
publicly challenging the Soviet regime to let them go to Israel.
And there had never been anything like that, never mind, in terms of Soviet jury.
But in the Soviet Union itself, there had never been a phenomenon like that of thousands
of people challenging the authority of the Soviet regime.
And that had a tremendous impact on my generation and that combined with the Sixth Day War.
We really experienced that as a direct challenge.
How is it that Jews, our age, teenagers in Israel, in the Soviet Union, were risking
their lives for the Jewish story.
And we were living in the most comfortable diaspora in history.
So there was a sense of frustration, a sense of shame.
And there were a few other very powerful influences, the second generation to the Holocaust was
just coming of age in the 1960s.
And my father was a survivor.
Most of my friends were children of survivors.
Most of the people who I was with in the JDL were children of survivors.
And so you really had this very strong influence coming from within our own experience.
And finally, it was the '60s.
And you know, it's hard to convey today what that means culturally.
But to grow up in an environment where violence is considered a part of the cultural expression
of young people.
The films we saw, Easy Rider, the films that Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, which
might have come a little later.
But this was really the atmosphere.
And you know, Abby Hoffman, who was one of the leaders of the youth culture in the '60s
and of course was Jewish, once debated Marikahana on WBAI, which was the left-wing radio station
in New York.
And he turns to Kahana and he says, "You know Rabbi, I agree with your methods, but not
your goals."
Now this flipped on its head the criticism that Kahana used to get from the Jewish establishment.
Well, of course we agree with your goals, and so Abby Hoffman would say, "I don't agree
with your goals," which of course was to protect the Jewish people.
But I love your methods, which was violence.
And so when you combine all of these influences, you get Marikahana and the JDO.
Now Kahana was very shrewd and he played on the '60s and the need for young Jews like
myself stranded in Brooklyn looking out at America.
And you know, this is the old Brooklyn, this is not today's Brooklyn.
And we felt that history was passing us by, whether it was Jewish history, which is
happening somewhere else, or America.
And Kahana said, "No, I'm going to bring all of that to Brooklyn," and he did.
And he offered my generation away of joining Jewish history, taking risks, going to jail,
standing up for Jewish causes, and at the same time participating in the American Funhouse
of the '60s.
And so that's the background.
And I was keenly attuned to all of these trends, I had been an activist in the Soviet
Jewry movement since I was 12.
I joined the student struggle for Soviet Jewry in 1965, about a year after it was founded.
I was kind of the mascot of the movement.
And then as the movement was developing, I was feeling increasingly frustrated, as were
many of my fellow triple SJ activists.
And we felt that Jews in the Soviet Union were taking so many risks, going to jail, trying
to hijack a plane to fly it to Israel.
And here we were still circling on the corner of E 67th and Lexington, with the Soviet embassy,
Soviet mission rather in New York.
And we wanted something more urgent, more desperate.
And Kahana comes along and says, "I'm going to take the Soviet Jewish issue off of the
obituary page," which is his way of saying, "We were back news, and I'm going to put it
on the front page."
And of course, he did that through violence.
And that spoke very deeply to me.
And so I gradually shifted my allegiance from the peaceful wing of the Soviet Jewry movement
to the JDO.
So many things of what you just laid out in your story and the surrounding background.
To me are almost one-to-one parallels with what's happening right now for the youth here
in Israel that are caught up in this extremist hilltop youth movement.
Let's talk about the Six Day War.
Well, here we had October 7th in. the miraculous conquering of Chesbalash,
I always say, and all the might of the Israeli army,
you talk about the Holocaust.
Well, they had disengagement.
And so they're the second generation
after disengagement.
- A little bit different.
- And they're a lot different,
but they had a foundational traumatic story
that they're building upon.
A lot different. - Right.
- La Javdeel.
- Yes, no, no, I think that's a great way to put it.
A foundational traumatic story.
- Right, and you're talking about the charisma of Mary Kahana,
well, they have God.
And for so many of these youth,
being part of this movement is part of a mitzvah
of settling the land.
And it's not just, you know, the charisma of one leader.
In fact, I don't think there is even one central leader
in all of this movement.
It's the charisma and the obligation
and the narrative and the romance of serving God.
Do you see these parallels as well?
- As you were speaking, one parallel really jumped out at me.
And that is the sense of betrayal
by Jewish authorities.
That we felt toward the American Jewish establishment
growing up in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah.
And our deep sense of betrayal came from
the sense that American Jewry had failed
not only to rescue the Jews in Europe, our families,
but hadn't even really tried.
And today, my judgment has softened considerably.
I think that we were too harsh.
The American Jewish community of the 1930s and 40s
was still an immigrant and post-immigrant community.
It did not have the institutions, the savvy
that we began to see develop in the American Jewish community
in my generation.
And they didn't feel secure in America.
They were coming out of one of the worst decades
in American Jewish history, which was the 1930s,
when millions of Americans belong
to openly anti-Semitic movements,
the America First Committee and others.
And so there was this deep sense of insecurity.
Now, I'm not totally absolving them,
but the indictment of apathy and indifference in betrayal
was cruel.
Here, the foundational trauma, as you put it,
of the withdrawal, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza,
is very directly involved with a sense of betrayal.
And from their point of view, I don't
share that I was a supporter of the withdrawal.
And I think we've talked about this.
We've argued about this in the past.
And I understand why they feel
that not just the leadership, but Ariel Sharon,
who built the settlements, abrooted them.
And Sharon gave it, Sharon took it away.
And there was this sense of the capriciousness
of Israeli leaders and how you can't trust even right-wing
nationalist secular Israeli leaders.
And so it deepened that sense of disconnect from the state
and what we're seeing here is really a revolt against the state.
Now, that was not at all true for our generation.
And it wasn't true for Mayor Kahana in America.
It became true for Kahana here.
Kahana is the theologian of the post-desionist religious
right, the science that the secular state no longer
has a worthy role in history and needs to be supplanted
by some magical messianic state, which, of course,
we can entrust to the far right, and everything
will be happy ever after.
But in America, in those years, Kahana was very different.
And I think it's worth exploring the ways in which
it was different. And also, when I look back,
the ways in which there was a continuity where the JDL
and the American Kahana was, in some sense, a preparation
for what we came to see here.
And the differences, though, were really stark.
Kahana spoke about Avatisrael, love of the Jewish people.
He venerated Israel, the Israeli government.
And don't forget, it was the labor party
that was in power in the Sixth Day War.
The labor party delivered Israel's greatest victory
in Jewish history.
And so, in the immediate aftermath of the Sixth Day War,
even America, Kahana couldn't be too oppositional
to the Israeli government, which, of course,
was completely different story today.
And Kahana was also, I'd said earlier
that he was ideological, and not theological.
I think that that's a crucial point to unpack.
Kahana was a nationalist, very right-wing in the late '60s.
Even though he borrowed the language of the new left,
as the left was called in those years,
and the Black Panther movement, he appropriated
the language of black militancy and applied it
to Jewish militancy.
Instead of black as beautiful, Jewish as beautiful,
we wore these buttons, Jewish as beautiful.
We wore buttons that said Jewish power, which was--
With the fist, and everything.
With the fist, which was directly appropriate.
The JDL emblem was a fist through a star of David.
And that was the black power symbol.
And Kahana was shameless about this.
And it really spoke to people like me, young Jews, who
were not necessarily too right-wing.
I mean, I grew up in on the right.
But what attracted me to the JDL was the militancy.
And Kahana was in pushing a strong right-wing ideology
in those years.
When he came to Israel, he not only moved farther and farther
right until he became the farthest right in Israel,
but his language and his conceptual framework
shifted from Zionism to apocalyptic theology.
And I worked for Kahana in his first Knesset campaign.
It was the summer of 1973.
And I had come to Israel to study on the one-year program
at Hebrew University.
And then the Omkipur War breaks out, et cetera.
But that summer, the country is preparing for elections.
Mayor Kahana had recently moved to Israel two years earlier.
I was part of the wild send-off at the airport in New York.
We danced around Kahana.
We ran wild through the airport.
And this is a tangent, but it's a good story.
In the international hall of departures,
in those years at Kennedy Airport,
you had the flags of all countries lining
this vast, what do we call it, atrium.
And so we ran around looking for the flags, any flag
that had a hammer and sickle on it.
And there were lots in those years.
And any flag that had a Muslim crescent,
we ripped off as a trophy of Mayor Kahana's
celebratory ascent to the land of Israel.
And you look back and you just say,
well, what were we thinking, but we weren't really thinking.
And so Kahana comes to Israel.
And it's still, in the first year or two,
more of a nationalist than a theologian.
And so I come to Israel.
And I naturally went to volunteer for his campaign.
We called him the Red, you know, Rabbi Kahana, the Red.
That was an affectionate-- a term of endearment, the teacher.
You know, a teacher who you love is your rep.
And Kahana was the rep.
And I did some work with newly arrived Russian immigrants.
I-I-I had had.
a lot of involvement with, as I said something about earlier with the Soviet
movement. So he put me to work on the Soviet jewellery campaign. And I began to
realize, listening to the rhetoric, reading the campaign material, that something
was shifting, the tone, the causes. It wasn't really interested anymore in
Soviet Jews, except to get their votes. His focus was shifting to saving the
state of Israel. And how would Marikahana an immigrant from New York who was in
the country for all of two years? How is he going to save the state of Israel?
By importing the JDL's tactics, because Israelis were two week, Israelis were
just like ghetto Jews. All they had was Saul. And we were going to show them
how Jews in Brooklyn did it. And so Kahana's followers would beat up Christian
missionaries. They broke up a meeting of the Israeli Communist Party. And I'm
watching all this and saying, that's what the savior of the Jewish people is
busy with. I mean, who cares about about, you know, 30 Christian missionaries in
the state of Israel, and a Communist Party that nobody pays attention to? But
then it started getting worse. He started talking about the problem of the
Arabs in Israel. And he meant the Arab citizens of Israel. And he started a
campaign offering them any, any Arab Israeli who would leave $10,000 to
resettle abroad. And I was getting more and more edgy. So this isn't what I
signed up for. And at some point that summer, I just walked out and never had any
contact with him again. I didn't tell him I was going, I, I just wanted
nothing to do with him. I was feeling more and more revulsion. And what
happened in my case happened almost across the board, among my friends. And he
lost almost all of his American followers in his transition from here, from
there to here. His American followers who followed him to here or in general, in
general. Do you think that you also may have aged out in a way? That happened
later. I wish I could say yes, and that it was a clean break. But I still remain
very much in extreme circles and was involved with illegal activities that
fortunately never went anywhere and had had no real concrete expression. But
could have been very dangerous. Most of all for me. And and so no, there wasn't
that clean break that in retrospect I wish there would have been. It's good
to see you break.
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And we're back. I'm Amanda Borsaldan here and I drew some studio with author Yossi
Klein Halavi. Yossi we were just talking about how you had a transitional break
from the Kahanist movement and I'm going to tell you a bit of a story. Okay? So
a couple weeks ago I picked up a hitchhiker in the West Bank and he just looked
like a little boy to me and you know I'm a mother so if I see a little boy
trying to hitchhiker, I'll probably pick him up. And then in case I picked him up
he had a payout down to his shoulders, a huge Yamaka and he looked like the
typical hilltop youth kind of sat there. That one sees on the television. So I
picked him up and me being well number one nozy and number two a journalist. I
began peppering him with questions. How old are you? 14. What are you doing out
here? I need a ride to the outpost. What are you doing at the outpost? I'm
helping with the sheep. Why are you helping with the sheep? Because it's a
mitzvah. We are settling the land. Did anyone ask you to come out here? Yeah,
the organization of outpost farmers, they put up a notice on what's up, come
out and help with the sheep and make sure that the bed-wing are driven out. Okay,
so who's running this farm? A man and his wife, a couple young kids and there's
me, there's another couple people around my age and we're just running it here.
Are you noticing any violence? I asked him. He said, "Only when the leftists come
out and try and protect the bed-wing." I kind of laughed inside about that. You're
not perpetrating any violence? No, of course not. What do your parents feel about
this? They 100% support it. The whole family is behind this. Where do you live?
I live in an settlement. Oh, and what kind of settlement? It's a religious
settlement. All of us support this and we're all volunteering this summer at
various places. And then the craziest thing happened. A couple days after I dropped
them off, I was sent a video in this little boy in my mind. He's 14. He's still a
little boy, was depicted and against him, meaning standing in front of him, was a
very irate professor from Tel Aviv who was so angry at this 14-year-old boy
that he began choking him. So I actually saw with my own eyes what he was talking
about in terms of the leftists against him. But during that conversation with
the 14-year-old, my mind opened to this idea that these people are not
following one leader as you were. They're not following it to my bengueer. His name
never came up, though he is, you know, a disciple descendant, whatever have come.
He's also the protector for these kids. Exactly. But his family, he himself, they're
out here because they feel like they're doing God's work. And that, I find,
potentially more troubling than somebody who's trying to do kahana's work or
eat in my bengueer's work. Yeah, look, we didn't have that convergence of
religion and nationalism in those years. The connection that I do see
between the radical sea of loge that kahana became. And I think it's worth
unpacking a little bit what that theology became. But the connection between the
American nationalist kahana and the apocalyptic Israeli kahana, I think we're
really two things. One is no limits. Any tactic is valid and whatever will
further your goal or whatever you perceive as furthering your goal is
legitimate. You know, and I used to joke that kahana's motto should be why
solve any problem peacefully when you can solve it violently. But really, that
was, I think that I think he was in love with violence. And the second thing was
a sense of being part of the elite, almost a kind of a secret society that's
privy to wisdom that no one else has. And the arrogance of that, not to some
extent, I think any tight political movement will have that. But we had it in a
very, very high degree. And the Holocaust intensified that. Everything was more
extreme in light of the Holocaust. Everything was black and white, but more so. And
so there was this sense of being part of a almost a secret society.
society. And you see that very much on the religious far right today. They, much more
than we, we understood history. They understand meta-history. They understand the cosmos.
They have the secret to God's will. And that's, you know, all. That's a different level.
But there is a link in the sensibility between these two experiences. And the major difference,
you know, when I think about myself and my friends as teenagers in New York and these
kids today is, nobody was protecting us. We didn't have an Israeli army. These kids,
these unbelievably ungrateful kids who throw rocks and curse soldiers, who are the reason
that they're, they're alive on those hilltops. And we felt that every, everyone and everything
was against us. Now, we exaggerated. We were living in America, you know. We were, we
were living in, in what was becoming more and more the safest and most successful
diaspora in Jewish history. But we did not feel that in Brooklyn and Queens and the Lowery
side. And, and, you know, the, the, the, what, what were you, domestically, called changing
neighborhoods in the 60s in New York where Jews were left behind when most of the other
Jews fled to the suburbs. You were the junkyard Jews, right?
Well, absolutely, absolutely. The Jews who were plumbers and, and work blue collar Jews.
And that's, and we were their kids and, and that's who joined. It was, it was either survivors
or blue collar American Jews. That was your basic American Jewish type that gravitated
to the JDO. And so we were, we were outsiders, not by choice. And not by temperament. Well,
yes, but not only, but by circumstance, we really were marginal. And we really were
getting beaten up in the streets. You know, there was, it, it, the, the, the, the, the feeling
of, of being not at home, which was so much at variance with the rest of the American
Jewish community, which, which was trying more and more to be, to be at home.
To assimilate. To assimilate. Yep. And we felt we're not, we didn't know where we were.
And so in some ways, we were kind of vicarious Israelis. That's how we, that's, that's
how I identified myself. I just can't wait till I'm old enough to just get out of here
and, and correct the mistake that my father made after the Holocaust by coming to American
instead of Israel. So, so the, I don't, I don't understand the bully mentality of these
kids. I don't understand the, how they can live in such radical dissonance between on
the one hand being protected by the state of Israel. On the other hand, despising the
state and regarding themselves as, as outlaws. I don't, don't you think you'll see that it
has to do with faith. Your transition out of caranism was because of logic. Things didn't
add up for you. But if you have faith, pure faith, you can't argue with faith. It's a good
point. It's a good point, Amanda. But I, I, you know, it wasn't only logic that that I
think led to the disillusionment of so many of us with the rep. But the, it was, it was
also experiences. And the way he betrayed his people who got into serious legal troubles
and didn't raise money for their legal, their legal defense and instead raised money for
his Knesset campaign. And the way he abandoned people. And so there, there was this, this
sense of, you know, my, my uncle, Matt Winter, who was a legendary figure in Jewish studies.
He was the founder of the Jewish Studies Department at NYU and, and really beloved uncle of mine.
He tried to talk sense into me. He said, don't you understand that he's using you stupid
kids? He's just using you for his own self aggrandizement. And I thought, yeah, yeah, you
know, Mr. No, at all. And, uh, and of course, Uncle Lady was right. And so, and so that comes,
that of course comes with, with experience. But the, um, it wasn't really until I moved
to Israel, 1982, that I began to understand the threat that Cahanaism meant for, for, for
Israel, which we are seeing coming to fruition to its poisonous fruition today. And I, I,
Cahana, more and more gravitated toward both an apocalyptic theology that, that saw history
in through a Holocaust lens. And that, and that what happened then was imminent. It was
going to happen to the state of Israel. And we're bringing it on ourselves by our, by our
iniquity. And, and developed a theology to go along with this apocalyptic vision, uh,
in which the only way that the Jews could save themselves was by proving that we trusted
only in God. And how would we do that? By undertaking the most extreme and provocative
actions, blowing up the dome of the rock, actions that would bring the whole world's wrath
on the Jewish state that would turn us into a pariah state. And if we did that, we would
show God that we only fear Him and not America. And God will then intervene and send the
Messiah. Now, that's, that's a crazy theology. It's crazy, but you're speaking. And I
feel like this is in so many ways playing out. Okay, they're not blowing up the dome of
the rock, but they're going up there and they're praying, you know, more and more steps towards
it. They are, but we are still for all of the pariah status that we're in. We are so far
from being the pariah state, even that we were in the 1970s. In the 1970s, there were
more countries, far more countries that had diplomatic relations with Yasser Arafat's
PLO than with the state of Israel. And today, go to, go stand at a, at an, at an arrivals
and departures board in Ben Gurion Airport. And I love doing that because that is the negation
of cajonist theology. You look and you see dozens and dozens of countries with which we had
no relations with. And now we're traveling. Now, who knows what's going to happen in
the future? Things are not looking great, but we are still very far from the apocalyptic
theology that Kahana not only believed was coming, but believed that it is our duty,
our religious duty to bring about. And we have to expel the Palestinians. We have to do
the worst actions that would deliberately provoke the world's pressure on Israel.
Do you see this playing out in this extremist Southern movement?
Oh, it's definitely part of it, definitely part of it. The other piece of this is, this
is central to cajonist theology, along with the apocalyptic messianic vision. And that
is that for Kahana, the essence of Judaism was vengeance. El Nikamot Hashem, God is the
God of vengeance. That was his favorite verse. And what he was saying is that, and he tied
it in to his apocalyptic theology, is that God, and this I just learned from reading at
a tremendous series by Toma Pericico on Jewish fundamentalism, I think it's on his sub-stack
highly recommended. And he pointed out a book by Kahana that I was not aware of that had
been published posthumously. Kahana was assassinated in 1991. This book came out in 1993, I believe.
And in it he offers the strangest Jewish theology I've ever seen. And Toma calls it pagan,
a combination of quasi fascist, not quasi, he didn't use that word fascist and pagan.
That God was diminished and weakened by the Holocaust. And it's the--
role of the Jewish people to give God back his vitality, his godliness, his
divinity by taking revenge on the nations. Do you think you can substitute
October 7th for Holocaust for these people? Yeah, definitely, definitely. But
before we get too carried away without Amanda, this is a phenomenon that's been
around for decades. And I stumbled upon it in the late 90s as a reporter in
those years I was working for the Jerusalem report. We have the same we had the
same boss. It was my boss that was David Horowitz. He is yours today. And the
best possible boss and journalist that you can absolutely have. And and so
David sent me out on a story and I'm and it's in in Judean Samaria in the West
Bank. And I come across this little one now we would call it an outpost of
hilltop youth. But there was no name for it then. And these guys, you know, with
the long payout and and long hair. And they're sitting around smoking hushish. And
and they were building a house. These kids, they were building a house on this
hill illegally, you know, and and and I sat with them. And I just listened to
them talk. And it was a combination of beautiful mystical Torah with the most
horrific violent racist tirades. And my son, Gabriel said to me afterwards, he
said, well, you know, they're a combination. Once we started to see what this
phenomenon was, he said, well, the hilltop youth are a combination of of hippies
and skinheads. Wow. And that's exactly exactly what they are. And there's
something so profound and romantic about the freedom, the expense. They're
living without fear. You know, the settlers are barricaded in there with in
behind their their guard their guard posts and their fences. And these kids just
rejected all of that. And and and these kids at this outpost, it became a very
famous outpost, my own one of the one of the first, they were riding bearback
like like Bedwin, living like Bedwin. Would their goats. Yeah, yeah. And it was so
appealing except that it was horrific. And I came back and I told David, he said,
well, you know, I said, I don't know what's going on there. But something is
happening out there that we should pay attention to. And so I wrote a story
about it. And and then of course, it became more and more of a movement. And
Netanyahu, as is his way, dismiss it as just a hundred marginal kids. But of
course, it's now as as you discovered with this with this 14 year old kid, it's
really a movement with protection from important figures in government. And
just this week, Israel cuts our our I don't know what I'm looking for an
adjective to describe the worst defense minister in this country's history by
far has decided in his wisdom to hand over responsibility for security in dealing
with these kids from the army to the police. And there's a very specific
reason for that. And that's because there is a hilltop youth in charge of the
police. Now Ben Vier may be 50 years old, but he is still a hilltop youth. He grew
up in those circles. Ben Vier is the meeting point between
communism and the hilltop youth. And he is of course the national security
minister. And he is God help us in charge of the police. And so he is going to
now police. The criminal is now going to to police the criminals. Well, we'll
see if he will be in the coalition that arises at the end of October. And that's
the future conversation we're going to have. I look forward to that one. Puzzle on that.
Can you taste the food when you read a cookbook? Welcome to identity crisis. I'm
your host, Yuhita Kurtzer. And I'm a dean assessment and we just made these
watermelon whiskey sauer's. Behind. Before sitting down with my guest, my friend
and the extraordinary cookbook author, Adina Susman. Adina and I met up at
Chooka Carmel, Tel Aviv's vibrant open-air market. Narrow walkways, stalls
filled with produce, spices, falafel stands, hidden coffee shops, people
gathering each other. We're going to get some treats for the house. These are my
people. People come to a coffee shop like they can't do this thing about
community. And that's funny because I sometimes refer to cookbooks as culinary
seedling. Are these local? Oh, yeah. Nothing here is imported. Everything is in seasonal and local. Three places people
shoot in Tel Aviv. My kitchen, but that's unfortunately not an option for everybody.
Yeah, it's not open to the public. Listen to the latest episode of identity crisis
wherever you get your podcasts.
But this one thing you said earlier when you were angry at how ungrateful these
kids are throwing rocks at the idea of those who are protecting them. And what
is semi-ironic in this whole situation is that many of these kids join the
idea of and then they are deployed to beat these soldiers who are meant to
quell or protect this situation. The situation is ethically from a
Zionist point of view, a catastrophe. And you know we were talking about
we're analyzing the historical similarities and differences and the trends. But the
heart of what we're seeing playing out the desecration of the name of the state
of Israel, the name of the Jewish people, the name of Judaism. These kids are
committing the worst sin in Judaism, which is Chilul Hashem, the desecration of
God's name. There is no greater sin. Yom Kippur does not atone for Chilul Hashem.
And what we're seeing playing out there in the end is not about these kids. It's
about Netanyahu and Ben Grier and Smotrich. It's about this government. And this
is a government of Chilul Hashem of historic proportions. The damage that
this government is doing to the Jewish people, not just to Israel, to choose
around the world, is something that we are going to have to to deal with for
for years to come. What's troubling to me, as I keep mentioning, is that there
is no centralized leadership for this hilltop youth movement. So it's really
difficult to quell something that doesn't have a head. It has sprites everywhere.
And do you see some way out? Look, you know, obviously we need a new government
that's going to take this as a major security threat to Israel. And the next
government I think is going to start dealing with this crisis on day two. Day
one is going to be setting up a commission of inquiry. And I think revoking
the, some of the laws this government has passed on the Kharati draft. But day
two is going to be dealing with this crisis. And it has to be dealt with
politically. It has to be dealt with security, terms of security. We're going to
need a new head for the Shabbat, the shinbet, because the current head, who
Netanyahu appointed, is sympathetic to these kids. And that's a catastrophe as
well. And so we first of all need a major clearing in the parts of the
security apparatus that deals with Jewish violence and with Jewish
terrorism. And then this needs to, the next level is educational. That has to
the, this has to, has to penetrate the entire religious school system. And it
has to come from the, from the education ministry and schools that don't
cooperate with this curriculum need to be penalized. This is a, a matter of
saving the next generation of religious Zionist youth. And when this kid
said to you, everyone, all my, all my friends supported, I'm, I'm sure we're
close to that. And, and that is a, that's an educational nightmare. And the
final level in which and the deepest level in which this phenomenon has
be confronted as spiritual. Because what we're seeing here is a tremendous longing on the part of
these kids for the experience of God. And you know, you kept talking about faith in God. I think
that what we're seeing here is something even deeper than that. It's a longing for a almost
tactile experience of the divine. And these kids are out there for mystical experiences.
And the tragedy, of course, is that violence and hatred is the ultimate blockage of the divine
experience. Nothing will block the divine presence more than hatred and rage. Those are the
emotions that you need to work on and that's the mystical path. In any religion, the path is
you work on yourself relentlessly. You continuously try to refine the course and vulgar parts of
of oneself. And so the real struggle is going to be to create expressions of Jewish mystical
experience in Israel that will be able to draw some of these kids. And there are kids,
there are kids in that world who I think can be some of our best spiritual seekers. But where do
they go? If you're a serious spiritual secret today in Judaism and you're not pulled to the
already world, you're not pulled to Bresla for, you know, where do you go? And so this is a crisis
for Israeli Judaism. The solution is going to have to come from a deep immersion
in our spiritual and our mystical sources and in the experiential side of Judaism, of the Jewish
relationship with God. And I believe that's coming. I believe it has to come. And if you look at the
the history of Judaism, after any great upheaval in Jewish life, there's invariably some
counter upheaval of a mystical upheaval. And the Hasidic movement that followed the Himalamitsky
massacres, the Kabbalah that came after the expulsion from Spain, there's a pattern in Jewish history.
It's not always positive. Shab-Tazfi, for example, the Bahanism. And what we're seeing now
is that first wave of intensely negative expression. But we are going to, and again, I believe
this is coming because I believe in the intrinsic wisdom of the Jewish people. And we are going to
see extraordinary proliferation's creativity of the Jewish search for God. And you know,
Raph Cook had a terrific essay called "Souls of Chaos." And he wrote it in response to the rise
of among young Jews in his generation of radical communists, the turn toward a rejection of
religion among the early social Zionists. And the souls of chaos were very pure and high souls
who didn't have proper a proper way of expressing their longing for God. And it ended up being
expressed in very destructive ways. And when I try to think of these kids in a more hopeful way,
I think of the souls of chaos. And I think that we need to treat them not only as criminals,
but certainly some of them as a potential ballet chuv penitence. And people who,
when they get turned, will have the capacity to bring light to the Jewish people.
We shouldn't here, but we're not going to, because I'm going to ask you one more question.
You see, you're 70 plus right now. I want you to go back into you see, who is, shall we say,
early 20s? Shall we? And everything you just said, if somebody had come up to you when you're
in your early 20s, like your uncle or somebody else from the outside, would you have been ready
to accept that? Of course not. Right. Of course not. But no one spoke to me in a language
that I could understand, that I could hear. I needed somebody to explain to me
why this was not good for the Jewish people. And these kids need someone to explain to them
why this is going to block the messianic era and why this is going to block their ability to
access God's presence. And that's a, that is a mystical language that not many people today speak.
And those who speak it aren't necessarily coming from the highest place. So yeah, look,
it's going to take time till we develop these. I mean, there aren't here and there. You know,
you can see there's somebody. There's, there's a little circle that's trying to do something.
There are, but nothing has really coalesced yet. And, and again, I think to really to,
to answer your question, it will require people who come out of that experience in part,
people who, who, who understand the language, the intensity, the appeal, and the, the,
the, really the power of that experience, because if you haven't been in, inside of an extremist
environment, you can't really understand it. And, and the arguments that come from the outside
just seem laughable. You know, you don't understand anything. We're part of the circle of initiates.
We have, you know, we have the hidden wisdom of the ages. So yeah, it's, it's, there's a lot of work
on lots of levels to do. And God willing, we'll, we'll start with the political and I'm work
from there. Okay. Do we continue it on the political front? And you're, see, I so appreciate you
coming by and delving into a bit of the psyche of the extremist. I think it's been, for me,
it's been enlightening as always to speak with you. Well, it's always great to talk with you,
Amanda. And thank you for the opportunity. I don't, you know, I, I don't go back there
to those years too often. And, and so, and I think with everything going on now,
I have to. So thanks. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Times of Israel's What Matters Now.
Please check out another installment next week. This episode was produced by Yitzhak Lede.
If you have any questions or comments about this or any other episode, please drop us an email
to
[email protected]. Until next time. Shalom.
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