Here is the Hanukkah edition of my series with Rabbi Joseph (The video recording cut out before the end so scroll down the post for the YouTube version, in which Rabbi Joseph lights the Menorah and prays three blessings).
Firstly, here is the story and video of testimony from released hostages that Rabbi Joseph references in our conversation.
Secondly, here is an excerpt from a piece Rabbi Joseph sent me, How to Live Like a Cynic:
Improvise your life: A Cynic, in the ancient sense, does not have fixed ideas about what their life will or should be like, and for this reason will be more prepared to adapt to circumstance.
Live shamelessly: The sense of shame or embarrassment that rule-breakers feel is the last and most intimate bind that produces and maintains us in a state of servility, enslaved to laws we might otherwise wish to question and rebel against. The Cynic confronts this situation by embracing humiliating experiences and so finds ways to overcome or become immune to those who would wish to shame them into submission.
Push against all boundaries: Not all rules, prohibitions or social conventions are explicitly stated. We live most of our lives according to a set of expectations and inhibitions that remain tacit or unstated, and which are for that reason hard to see, and even harder to challenge. A Cynic seeks to push against these boundaries to discover where they are and lay them open to challenge.
Act with courage; refuse to owe respect to the powerful. The Cynic remains
impassive or unaffected by people in positions of power, authority or influence. This helps the Cynic remain incorruptible and ensures they are prepared to offer up uncomfortable truths, even when the act of speaking out may place them in jeopardy.
Give up everything you can. Material possessions are treated with suspicion based on the idea that we are at risk of becoming enslaved to them, or at least, that we are at risk of becoming enslaved to all the activities (seeking promotion, sucking up to the boss, etc) that help secure wealth and prosperity and guarantee a comfortable life. By refusing the enticements of material culture, the Cynic is better able to escape its enlistments, its enforced servitudes.
Finally, below is the *unedited* transcript of our conversation.
Jason
Rabbi Joseph, welcome back to our Wednesday morning.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Thank you, Jason. And it's my hope today to do much more than I think we can accomplish in our easy going manner on our weekly podcast. There are people who've taken the time and effort to comment, to send you concerns about our conversation. And I'd like to begin there. And I need to go back and affirm. with as much clarity as possible. I participate in interfaith dialogue as an ongoing model of pluralism.
Jason
Okay.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
This is not late sixties kumbaya, we're all going to be happy. The pluralism I speak of is complex, messy, and requires people to juggle multiple truths at the same time. So I affirm in your presence and with gratitude for our conversation that you minister through the grace and blessing of the Christ Jesus as savior. I don't add the relativizing idiom for you.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I take the risk of saying that truth must be true.
In return, I ask for the risk of saying that God is the source and continual defining covenantal reality through my Jewish identity and the way Jewish life continues to observe and engage and destined.
Jason
Yeah, that's, I think that's important because I think at least for Christians. You know, we posit that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that's potentially historically falsifiable. And so, you know, at the very least, Christians should be open to entertaining the possibility that maybe they're wrong.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
And I'm not venturing there. I'm saying that on this day, on the 6th of December, 2023, I come back based on this risky, messy, complex proposition. Both of us as clergy, as thinkers, community leaders are attempting to hold
Jason
I know you're not.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
to equal truths simultaneously.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Analogically, I continue to affirm the dignity and destiny of the Palestinian people. I have, over the 50 years of my rabbinate, personally engaged in supporting that dignity and destiny. In the early 80s, when HIV AIDS was just beginning, I made sure that American educational materials were sent via then to rabbinic students that I helped. And I personally paid for that material to be translated into Arabic and made sure it was given to not yet existent AIDS activists in the Palestinian community. I did it for multiple years, knowing that I would not wait for the Israeli Ministry of Health to do.
I have mentored and engaged individually with Palestinian students, one of whom had been president of Students for a Free Palestine, but was harassed by those faculty leaders. When he needed help for his brother who lived in Bethlehem to receive care for cancer, I called several friends in Jerusale and he was later seen at Hadassah Hospital. He sat in my home in Minneapolis for Shabbat dinners and shared in Passover seders. I was invited to his wedding. I was unable to go, but friends who I introduced him to did go. So I am a lifelong Zionist who does not support the current Israeli government and has not. But as a lifelong Zionist, my identity begins with a commitment to a unique Jewish state.
There are some who would prefer no Jewish state. Some strange utopian bi-national, let us all live together. That might have been possible as Zionism was beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Martin Buber at one point opted for that. That is not true today, 75 years later. I share with those who believe in a two-state solution in which the dignity and destiny of the Palestinian people must be fortified.
Israeli policies and protocols that have made the occupation since 1967 horrific. I do not agree with nor do I justify. I have supported rabbis for human dignity, Truwah, another rabbinic organization, for a open progressive to state Israel. All of that.
For those who ask, why is your rabbi not empathetic about the destruction of what is occurring?
I don't know how to express more clearly that the devastation of Gaza is horrific. I don't know the words that will push aside issues of justification, proportionality. I don't have that vocabulary, Jason.
When we began our conversation, it began shortly after October 7th.
October 7th will become, and we are beginning to acknowledge it as, a moment in which Jewish life as we knew it has now been permanently changed.
I can't even explain what I just said, but I intuit that as a reality that will absolutely become a shared communal certainty.
Jason
And I want to emphasize this point, Joseph, because it's not the case that October 7th is an event in the past that will live in the memory of Jews and Israelis. It's that it's a threat that exists.
Today, so just two days ago, Ghazi Hamid said, we will repeat the October 7th massacre again and again until Israel is destroyed. We are a nation of martyrs and are proud of it. We'll sacrifice as many Palestinian lives as it takes.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
So then we are left with the following question.
Even with what I have stated and my behaviors of the past, how can I convince anybody that the destiny and dignity of Palestinians is part of my moral quotient? When a terrorist organization, not the Palestinian people, a uniquely justified, self-defined terrorist organization that committed a horrific massacre on October 7th, threatens to do it again until their stated purpose, the elimination of the State of Israel, is achieved.
So here we are, we're in a painful dark period.
And people want to be supportive while simultaneously looking at pictures, hearing reports, hearing part truths, manufactured truths, manipulated truths, and carefully say, I need to know if the rabbi cares about innocent Palestinians.
I do.
Do I care about innocent Palestinians to the exclusion of the survival of the Jewish state?
That's a question for which no good answer comes.
Jason
Well, and it's, I mean, that the burden of proof is on you as a Jew and a rabbi to prove that you care about innocent lives in Palestine. I mean, there's a, there's a foundational antisemitism that lingers behind even that expectation.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Well, you said it, I didn't. I don't, it never works when Jews play the quote victim card. Um, there are now significant reports of what hostages who have been freed are now telling the Israeli government. And they went and they demanded to see the prime minister and the work cabinet. And what they told them, we must all listen to must listen and then ask, I ask, is the concern for the innocent Palestinians equal? Not greater than, equal to the 150 yet remaining hostages. Because the hostages who have been freed are coming and saying, this is what happened to us. We need to get the rest out.
Jason
So just in case people haven't been following the news that closely, give us some examples of some of the hostages testimony.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Well, I want to add a category to that, and that is the assault on women and rape on October 7th, which was ignored, which was horrifically denied by silence by global feminism, until just this past week.
So.
Hostages saying, we never had enough water, guns were held to our hand, Hamas, inappropriately touched girls, which goes back to the unimaginable acts of rape and assault and murder, the bodies of which were found on October 7th and 8th.
There are still kidnapped hostages. So while the world is demanding a ceasefire, where is the equally loud, painful, enraged demand for surrender, giving back all the hostages, the elderly and ill men, and yes, then finally the IDF.
Men and women.
Can the last two days before the truce ended, negotiations were made in which Hamas demanded, we'll give you the three bodies and the father of the family destroyed and four other hostages give us all the women prisoners.
I'm trying to equate that with any reality of any family attempting to understand kidnap.
How do you negotiate with a vulgarity will give you dead bodies for live prisoners. All of the women.
Because Hamas knows that the remains, the bodies, are considered sacred by the nature of the Jewish community. So, can we listen to the hostages who've come back and said, they drugged us before we were freed. They drugged us in order that we would look, not afraid and not be aware.
They told us there was no more Israel. They would never give us any source of health care.
So there are still hostages, hostages taken for the calculated purpose of getting Israel to free Palestinian prisoners. Let's not get distracted by the protocols that put those Palestinians into Israeli prisons.
If we engage with terrorists, then all of us are vulnerable to kidnap any of us, not just Israelis, this becomes a critical leverage of human agony beyond description goes all the way back to the Bible and rabbinic period.
For seven weeks, the world did not reckon with the rape that was done on October 7th. Uh, the Americans lie. They manufacture things. Now the UN admits it.
Again, determined and calculated behavior by a group that defines itself still as eliminationist.
So when Israel offers a permanent ceasefire, what is it that we're offering? That this group will simply now with its partially destroyed infrastructure, but not all its top leadership removed, will, as the leader said this week, we will do it again.
Jason
No community, no nation would tolerate the ability of such a group to just hop a fence and come murder and kidnap and kill hundreds and thousands of people. The Palestinian and Israeli situation is unique, sure, but no place on earth would tolerate that.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
And among those who helped in the planning were Palestinians from Gaza who had been workers in the kibbutzim, accepted into the homes of many who were slaughtered.
So as yesterday, presidents of three of the most elite universities, not just in America, anywhere in the world, attempted to answer the question, does free speech on campus include the expression of seeking another group's elimination? And remember.
On the first time we talked, I suggested we begin by reviewing Hebrew-Israelite, Jew-Israeli. There are no more Hebrews, there are no more Israelites. They're in Scripture.
Jews and Israelis are not identical. Not all Jews are Israelis, and certainly not all Israelis are Jews. But why should Jews who go to a university be challenged with statements about, now, if you support Israel, now, you too should answer.
A student from MIT, doctoral student, a classmate in her group, threatening her by saying, the women who were killed at the music festival deserved it. They had no business being on stolen land.
No, I said threatened her. Yes, because a Jew at MIT has no way of responding to the random selection of Jews and non-Jews at a music festival in the south of Israel.
Will those three presidents ultimately find limits?
Does the school of social work at Columbia University that attempted to have a program about the counter offensive of liberation on October 7th. What does that?
Jason
Yeah, I saw that the Columbia said that their social work department didn't have anything to do with that, that students had used the name, an image without permission, but they were a little slow in clarifying that.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Right, but there you go.
So when I served on the faculty at St. Cloud State University, I am reminded of the then president who countered when I said they are having a protest outside using an Israeli flag, baiting me to go and get the flag. And he said, that's the marketplace of ideas, Professor Edelheit. Oh really?
Marketplace of ideas, I see. Tell me, what would you do if I got several of my students to dress in drag and have a pride flag? That's not funny. It's the marketplace of ideas. What if we dressed up in blackface? Stop it, he said.
Jason
That is a good, you know, you began talking about pluralism at the top. Um, these examples you're giving here, I do, I do think they show, um, the difference between, um, kind of a commitment to liberal democracy and the freedom of speech and a commitment to what, uh, the commandments demand of choosing Christians.
Um, because you, you may be, you may be free to do whatever you want in the marketplace of ideas, but the, the Torah does not allow you to, to treat like your neighbors in such a manner.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I'm trying to imagine post George Floyd, a group of whites deciding to protest Black Lives Matter in a way that the African American community experienced as a threat.
Could, and we saw this in Charlottesville, could those people marching with torches, that went all the way to court, a horrific example of terror in America, all that was missing were, quote, white sheets.
Are we saying that is permissible?
Or can we say, as we express pluralism, you know there are limits. Pluralism requires accepting multiple truths. But you and I agree, there's no such thing as a Messianic Jew.
There are limits.
Maybe what October 7th is about is understanding there are limits. This was intended. How does Israel defend itself from the ongoing presence of Hamas? Okay, let's open that conversation. I can't beat that conversation.
Jason
And the strategic and bitter irony is that October 7th baited Israel into a response that made it more difficult for Israel to make peace with its neighbors.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Correct. And that was intended. Hamas did not want a normalization. Saudi Arabia, anywhere else. We don't want Israel on the map. We want to destroy Israel. Part of that destruction is the world demanding that Israel stop hurting the innocent victims of Palestine.
Okay, what will you do with the terrorist organization embedded among the innocent Palestinians?
Jason
I think it shows just how most Americans do not pay attention to foreign affairs to begin with in global events. The US and its allies completely destroyed Mosul in order to free it from ISIS.
There doesn't seem to be an awareness that we did that. And there wasn't similar protests against the US government, the US military. You can debate the rightness or wrongness of those actions, but they're there in the past as an equivalent act. But Israel receives criticism that is unique to Israel.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
We fought a unique terrorist organization, ISIS. We fought that organization, al-Qaeda, that attacked the United States of America. Those were attacks by Islamic terrorist organizations. Our fight against them was not a fight against Islam or Muslims.
Israel is fighting Hamas. It is not a fight against Palestinians. Yes, I know Palestinians are dying
That is part of the complexity of the times in which we live. Want free speech? Great. Limits can't say anything to anybody anywhere.
I'm painfully confused about where interfaith dialogue will go in five years. I don't know what my younger colleagues will do with the necessity of these conversations.
Jason
And well, part of the difficulty I have had with interfaith and ecumenical organizations that I've been a part of through the churches I've served is that what really united the people who gathered with those organizations was a political ideology. And so they might have all been from different churches and denominations and religious groups but they were all united by a kind of center-left understanding of the world. And I'm sure there's center-right groups as well. And so I wonder if what will come in the future is just a deepening of that ideological sorting.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Yes, maybe. I don't know. I am.
I'm just tired right now of trying to find a ledge which is wide enough, long enough. So much has changed in the 50 years I've served. And I really had hoped and prayed that after 50 years I would see the appreciable growth of people giving each other a margin listening, waiting, learning.
And since October 7th, I am sadly horrified. Few had told me that an op-ed in the New York Times by a Jewish op-ed writer, Brett Stevens, would be solely about the assault on Israeli women and the silence of the world.
And that would come on the same day as multiple articles about the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn engaged in congressional hearings. If you told me that is what would occur the day before Hanukkah in 2023, I just, no, you're seeing something that won't happen.
But here it is.
And we continue to look with faith. I admit I'm doing it based on faith now, Jason. For a shared common moment, simply we have the same God. Can't we just be present to that truth?
Jason
You mentioned Hanukkah. You sent me a story that I was going to send you that it caught my eye because my son is a junior at William and Mary. And so there was, there's other examples of this story around the country, but, you know, the town of Williamsburg for their annual winter festival or whatever they call it, moved to remove the menorah lighting.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I'm sorry.
Jason
um, from their festivities this year. Um, and I just want you to think through that for us.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Part of me, an old part of me, would have said, yeah, I don't want the Hanukkah menorah out there with the Christmas tree. Doesn't belong. Bad comparison.
Another part of me says, you know, there are Jewish students on campus and we need to give them a part of their identity to share. Put it out there. Let them have this.
The post October 7th, 77 year old Rabbi is not surprised that Jews at a small private liberal arts college, historic. Excuse me.
Jason
Public.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Where John Stewart went, I believe.
You can't have a Hanukkah menorah because it makes a unique statement about a identity that is not merely religious. It's identity that transcends that university and links it to Israel.
And now if you put a menorah at a public university's winter festival, there will be people who see it as support for what Israel is doing in Gaza. How did we get there? Yes, it's just a menorah.
Does a Christmas tree link itself to all Christian nationalists? Does a Christmas tree link itself to every Catholic priest who ever abused?
Jason
The analogy I was going to use.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
What? What are we doing?
Jason
Well, and I thought about this. So the restaurant in Zahav in Philadelphia that was surrounded by, so I'm a big fan of that restaurant. And the blanket equating of Jews with Israel is the kind of just gross and general prejudice that is behind something like the Muslim ban that Donald Trump wanted. Um, that, you know, if you're one of these, you're, you're necessarily one of this group. Um, and therefore you're to be feared or loathed.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
And anyone and everyone coming from Central America is automatically a gun toting drug infested part of the cartel.
We've got to figure out how to take the time to be a bit more critical in our understanding of symbols and language. It's a menorah, a nine branch candelabra used for eight nights in the Jewish community. It isn't about the Israel Defense Forces, Bibi Netanyahu's government.
And if that's the only way you see that, then you're anti-Israel, not pro-Palestinian. You're anti-Israel is a direct anti-Semitism against me.
Jason
I wonder, you mentioned the complexity of war earlier. I wonder if, if one of the challenges that we're experiencing is, is that, um, war with all of its complexities just will not fit neatly into, um, the ideological camps that we choose for ourselves. Um.
We can't make our prior ideological commitments fit neatly into something like what's going on in Gaza.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
If we roll back the tape to not 9-11, but 9-12, 9-13, then President Bush misused the word crusade.
No, no, no
Life is far too complex today to assume that you can take the visual impact of disaster and equate that with an intentionality don't know how to disengage Hamas and at the same time not kill Palestinians.
That's what we all want. How do you do that? While listening to the freed hostages who also now want another truce, so more hostages will come out. And Israeli military who say, you won't get the negotiations you want until we hurt them more. Not a part of how I understand the world.
I have to listen because I don't understand. That's what I'm asking. Can we admit to each other when we don't understand?
Jason
And, and part of what you're commending isn't just listening. Um, it's, um, a healthy cynicism. You sent me this, this article that I love, uh, cause one of my favorite books is leaves from the notebook of a tamed cynic. Um, and so you sent me this piece, uh, called how to live like a cynic. And there are six, uh, points to that. Uh, one is improvise your life. Uh, two, live shamelessly, three, push against all boundaries, four, act with courage, refuse to owe respect to the powerful, five, give up everything you can. So five, not six. So talk a little bit about cynicism and how it can be a helpful antidote to wade through these things.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
I suppose I would frame it back into an idiom I use as a recurian, the hermeneutic of suspicion, that we look at tradition, we look at the past, and we neither immediately assume, because it is the tradition, we accept it, nor immediately discount it because it is the tradition. So the cynic, the skeptic, the person who reads with suspicion, who engages the values we want to keep, but we live in a world in which those values are 2000 years old, 500 years old, a day and a half.
I want to be in conversations with people who take the past seriously, but don't take the past as their catechism.
I want the past to be respected. And then let's negotiate about the perspective with which we engage the past.
Jason
Or even I would add, maybe we apply a hermeneutic of suspicion, not just to the tradition, but to our present. And the movements in politics we attach to ourselves too, in the moment.
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Always. That goes without saying.
Look, I think our current environment, and it will get darker and angrier and more divisive as we move closer to a presidential election, that environment is toxic. It truly is literally a toxic dump site. How do we talk about anything experience anything without first taking some kind of shower that removes what we just saw on X and I'm not on X or on whatever the other platforms are.
Maybe we need now, not what you just said, that we look at the contemporary with the same hermeneutic of suspicion. Maybe we need a new, just for now, hermeneutic of suspicion.
I want hope. When I send birthday greetings to anyone, I say health and hope.
Both of us understand the wish to strengthen our health.
And our mental health, our emotional health, is the source that sustains our hope.
I don't know how this is going to work right now. And I worry about it a great deal. For my adult children, for my grandchildren, how do you make sure at any given day, hope, hope and health?
Jason
Joseph, I didn't prep you for this, but liturgical Christians are in the season of Advent now. And the second Sunday of Advent, the lectionary normally presents us with John the Baptist, who importantly never becomes a disciple. He continues his Jewish ministry of calling people
Rabbi Prof. Joseph Edelheit
Some say that Elijah the prophet, one of two figures in the Hebrew Bible that doesn't die, Elijah the prophet is said by the rabbis to be the harbinger of the Messianic age. We will hear Elijah come in order to warn us that the end of days is now.
Jason
Well, Joseph, not to put on airs with the comparison, but in Elisha, God gives Elijah a friend and God has given me one in you. So thank you.
Light Two Menorahs on Hanukkah: One for Those Still in Darkness