Decoding Truth and Faithfulness: A Dialogue with Rabbi Amy Bernstein

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

Hi, my name is Cynthia Marks. I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Dr. Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. Today we have the honor of talking with Rabbi Amy Bernstein. She is the senior rabbi of Kehillat Israel, in Los Angeles. In all, she is devoted more than 25 years to rabbinic service. Welcome, Amy. I'm going to call you Amy. Yes, please. So, hello and thank you for being here. How did you come to this fabulous service? What made you want to be a rabbi? What brought you here? Well, there's the long answer, which takes about three and a half hours.

And there's a short answer. The answer is, I knew I wanted to work with people. I knew I would wind up in a helping profession of some kind. I also came out of Northwestern University with a useless degree, a double major of cultural anthropology and English literature. So neither of which were helpful and thinking about a career. But maybe they led you to something that could become a career. Yeah. So it turns out as a rabbi, I am an expert in the Folkways and the literature of my tradition. Ah, So it took a while to figure out those loves and those passions, how they worked together to actually be a vocation.

But I came back to Judaism after I came out as a lesbian at 16. I had nothing to do with my traditional Jewish community anymore and it was coming back through Liberal Judaism that I was exposed to this idea that there was another approach to Judaism, another approach to Jewish learning, another approach to using our texts and the wisdom of our tradition to help people live better lives and hopefully contribute to a society that benefited from that as well. Then taking other skills and talents that I had naturally. But it was finally a career decision that this is what I wanted to do.

Was it hard to find that more liberal path? I was in a very traditional Jewish setting, so I grew up in a community Jewish day school, and then I went to an Orthodox Yeshiva high school. So I knew nothing about liberal Judaism other than it felt like church. It was all in English. Everyone stood up and sat down at the same time and like due to that in in more traditional Judaism. So I really didn't know much about it. It just felt really foreign to me. Reform Judaism was the only liberal Judaism I knew, and that felt very, very stiff and very foreign.

So it wasn't until I was a young adult and came back through the Reconstructionist movement, and by that time the reform movement had changed also. But when I started to learn more about Reconstructionist Judaism and its philosophy and its approach to Jewish tradition, I understood that it was very serious, meaning not frivolous and light. And you know something that didn't take the tradition seriously. It was about both taking traditions seriously and how the wisdom that's been passed down to us and the ways of looking at things, the time tested wisdom of the past generations and evolving that for our time and being open to new thinking and new thoughts and new philosophies, a new way of looking at things and accessing things and expressing timeless values and ethics.

But in new terms and realizing that it was the best of both, the best of contemporary thinking, as well as the deep, deep, deep wisdom of the past. And I really don't know that much. So I am layperson high. So what is that deep wisdom? I mean, you can't tell me all about it, but what separates that deep wisdom from anything else? So I think every tradition has its way of talking about eternal truths that are universal. So there's the universal values of compassion, equity, justice, forgiveness, patience, transformation, courage, loyalty. There are things that are universal.

What each tradition does is it takes the experience of its people, and it reads language about those values. It reads it a little bit differently. Of course, our base language is Hebrew. A lot of how we talk about things, for instance, the word shalom, people will say, What does that mean? And people will say, Peace. They're not wrong. They'll say it means hello, goodbye, because it's a greeting and something you say as you're leaving each other. They will say it's hello, goodbye and peace. Okay. Sort of, yes. But it comes from the root Shalom hole.

So when you say peace, well, that's a terrible translation. And actually, it's sort of peace. That's one flavor of shalom. But it comes from the root. Shalom to be whole. What if every child were raised in such a way that they were more whole? The state of that wholeness is what we mean by shalom. So when we say shalom, we know that feeling, that wholeness, and we're wanting that for the person we're saying it to. Correct. You're wishing that for the person you're speaking to. You're not just saying, hi. You're from the bottom of. Your heart. Kingdom, right?

Wholeness. And you're kind of asking about their wholeness. And in Hebrew, actually, when you say, how are you in Hebrew, you say Moslem. What's with your shalom? Wow. How's your shalom? I like that. You don't say, How are you? Like, that's a very English, you know, way of talking about Moslem. What's what's the state of your fellow? Well, that really speaks to Dr. Beal's work, which is mostly why we're having this podcast, right? He believed that children needed to be whole and that typically children are not whole, that they are a product of all these things that have happened to them, that have happened to their ancestors.

Some are fabulous, some are terrible, but that we basically have this imprint, this thing that is imprinted upon us, that leads us to live a life that is not wholly our own. We're leading a life based on the things that we understood, both consciously and unconsciously, to be important, to represent love, to be who we thought we were supposed to be, but not who we really, truly are. And he, of course, used the dream as his tool to get to the unconscious, where he believed that we would discover our true being, which is love. Is that true? Being is coming from the purest source of love.

Dr. Bail believed that that is where our spirituality is coming from and that glowing feeling of that pure love is spirit, whatever you want to call it in your world with your flock that you so happily take care of. How do you see those things presenting themselves So? Do you see people struggling to find love? Do they Do they know love? Are they looking to find it in their religion? What are what are people struggling with that you see in the real world? Well, we live we live in a really crazy time for the human nervous system and the human heart and the human brain.

Like it's a really, really challenging time. So we have access to all kinds of things that makes our lives so much better. But it's a really challenging time to be in touch with that inner life and to have real quality time with other people so that we tend relationships. People are with their devices, they are interacting in ways that we categorize as being a relationship, but as we know is not full presence, right? It's not reading the 90% of your communication that is nonverbal. Yeah, right. About reading someone's energy. When you're in a room together, relationships are suffering.

People are staying home more and watching television and using their devices to connect with the world and are not doing those things that used to be normative. I'm not saying the past is better, I'm just saying what has been normative for human beings since, you know, we came out of the trees and off the savanna is to be in community and to be in relationship. So if I walked from my house to the bus stop where I needed to get the bus to go to wherever I was going, I had to pass five people. I have a relationship with the corner person that I live near the corner grocer that I buy my vegetables from.

We have these normal ways of interacting at many different levels, so people got that little hit of love just from buying their cucumbers every day. And since we don't have that anymore, we have so many fewer opportunities to both express and receive that kind of attention, that beneficent attention from people that helps us grow that place of love and keeps our heart softer and more tender and more open and more ready to be compassionate, which is another, of course, expression of love is compassion and for ourselves and for other people. So this is what I'm seeing.

I'm seeing people really distracted. People are isolated. They think they're interacting, but they're really lonely. People are very, very lonely. And then once you get out of the phase of if people choose to marry and have children, once they're out of that phase, it's a it's a very interesting thing to watch people really struggle with now that they're not coming home to a family unit. And then if their spouse dies or people are very isolated and they're very lonely and they're very busy, and in our American society, we praise productivity above all else.

And so the busier you are, the more important you are or the busier you are, the better you're doing at doing what averages you're about. Yeah. Isn't it nice to make that phone call for some of us and say, you know, I've only got 10 minutes because I've got 17 appointments after this? Right. You sort of feel like you're very valuable. And so what that means is people are not communicating and people don't feel like they are anchored in relationship and in community. And that's one of the reasons I do what I do and I love what I do is because my whole life's work is about creating intentional community, a community of deep intention to be together.

You don't have to you don't have to love everybody. But we figure out how to get along and create something that holds our young ones and holds our elders and holds family units all infused with time tested ways of living in this world that make us better people and make society a better place. I see that, too, that people are very comfortable isolating themselves. And yes, they manage to be busy. I know our world's a tough place right now, but why is that somehow easier than coming out into the community? I mean, there's something so luscious about being with someone and letting your friend cry on your shoulder is such a sweet thing that you can comfort someone and the other way around.

Why is that gone by the wayside? Why is that no longer so precious? It's fascinating because we haven't prioritized it. That's number one. As a culture, we don't celebrate and honor friendships and relationships and community. That that is not sexy. That is that is not what's selling. So what's selling is consumption, materialism, individualism. So the celebration of the individual and all of those things work seriously against people putting as a priority, setting aside the time and the effort and what it will take to participate in community when people are on their devices, when people are watching television.

I love to watch television, I love my shows. But when people are mostly engaged that way, it's a distraction from what's happening below here. Sure, people are not taught the skills and they don't have the practice to access what's happening in their psycho emotional, spiritual selves. And so they don't have great skills or coping mechanisms for holding this stuff that's uncomfortable. And because we don't do it very much, stuff becomes way more uncomfortable, way faster. So the slightest irritation, you know, the slightest impatience, the slightest self judgment, the slightest whatever becomes almost intolerable.

And so people would rather do almost anything than face it and sit with it. And I think that, too, is a big part of Dr. Bill's work in that he really sees humanity just kind of settling into this comfort zone, even though most of us really know this is not the right place to be, it doesn't feel comfortable inside me in terms of satisfying myself. Let's just talk about that. I don't I don't know that I love myself, but I know I can live right here As long as nobody upsets that, you know, everything's okay. But I think we're meant to be here and support something that's way bigger than just.

Okay, I really want to help people figure out how to find that in themselves so that they can take that out into the community and not be so fearful of perhaps maybe people are more isolated because they're fearful of those engagements with other people. Somebody is going to ask me a question that is going to trigger me or these things that we're dealing with in the world are wars or famine are just so huge. Just can I just watch Mad Men again? Yeah, You know, whatever it is. Yeah. And add to that, I'm not sure it's one direction, right? I think community feeds our ability to be more present to ourselves because it's like, yeah, this is where life actually happens.

This is. This is where I feel connection, right? Doesn't have to be positive or negative. Like this is where I feel connected. This is where I feel part of something bigger than me. And that feeds our ability to then maybe be a little less distractible, right as we're as we're more present in community. And then, of course, we have to figure out how to get better at being with ourselves and what's under the surface in order to be willing to go out into the community. So I think it goes. Both ways, both. Ways. It feeds both ways, feed each other.

Because you could end up in a community that's not very healthy, but it could be your community and that's where you you feel honored. Well, that's. Why many communities that are completely unhealthy are doing. Well. Yes, one's. Focused on hate. One focused on conspiracy theories because people are starving for a place to belong. That's why my work is to try to provide a place where that's true, and it won't be to their detriment, nor to the detriment of the people that they will be in coming into contact with in the society that that they'll be building.

But that's something about. Is it? I'm afraid I'm going to get ask something if I go into conversation. The other thing people don't have a tolerance for anymore is being with people they don't know. They have 700 friends, most of them they don't really know. They're comfortable sharing what they want to put forward. Right. So what? They're ready to have consumed about their lives, they curated it and they put it out there. They're comfortable with that. But but we've lost the ability to go to a Rotary Club meeting, sit at a table with people you don't know, and introduce yourself and make conversation.

We've lost the commitment to that and we've lost opportunity for that. It's deteriorating That mid section of the people who used to be on the PTA and the people who volunteered for the library and the people who did Girl Scouts and the people who did Rotary and all of those things that used to be mid-level. It wasn't your family, was it your best friends? And it wasn't strangers. It was like this mid-level engagement. And as that has deteriorated, people have less tolerance for going into a synagogue or going somewhere and saying, I don't know somebody to sit with.

It's a very sad thing that I'm seeing. Do you think the loss of that partially is due to the fact that we're all in such ownership of our opinions and our view of the world, whatever that is, that we we don't want to be challenged by that. We don't want to face somebody who has a completely different idea than us because we don't know what to do with them. Somehow we've been told we're supposed to be angry if somebody has a different opinion than us, we're not supposed to support them. We could even hate them. Does that make us shallow on or less able to have community like this?

I mean, I think there are places where people feel safe that those topics are not going to come up. Right. It's like we're not going to get into a political conversation over Shabbat dinner. Right. Over family, Shabbat over a musical Shabbat. I don't think people are so worried about that in certain settings. I think in certain settings they're confident that won't happen. The challenges, they're. Yes, afraid of that in other settings about talking to people and getting into any serious kind of conversation. Because I might say something that shows my hand about who I am and how I vote because it's really political Now, that's that's what the real differences are, because we have become identified with our political party as our primary identity.

So once that's your primary identity, Democrat or Republican, and all the things that that means about who I am and all the assumptions that go with who the other person is, if they're in the other party that has now taken over all other identities. So it is actually a danger for people to feel like they're going to get into that conversation and then my identity is going to come out and now we're going to have a serious problem because of all the assumptions you have about me and all the ones I have about you. Yeah, So that is definitely a factor.

At the same time, people are desperate for conversations of meaning, so you have fear of sitting with the wrong people. Right? And that conversation and the danger of that on the one hand, on the other hand, people are desperate for conversations of meaning. They feel like they don't have conversations where it's about stuff that's not trivial. I know is, but we're all so careful. And our culture supports that. Our culture supports. Where did you vacation? How much money do you make? What car do you drive? Where do your children go to school? Where did you graduate from?

Like those are the our. Culture encourages conversation that is not about who are you? What do you dream about? What are you worried about? At three in the morning? What do you long for in your life? None of that comes up. So people want that. They want it. They're so hungry for it. And yet we're so afraid because we're so polarized. It's so obvious. I mean, you speak to Republican and Democrat. I mean, how many times in the course of a day do you hear someone say, you know, I just met Terry, and the person says, is she a Republican or a Democrat?

And that means you either do or don't get to have a relationship with her. That's right. It wasn't always like this. No, it wasn't, because our primary identity wasn't how we voted. We've become so polarized that now it's become our primary identity as Americans. Is it the people, the humanity that got us here, or is it the politicians that got us here? I think it's a lot of stuff that got us here. A lot of it is people are reading things that are fed to them by algorithms. We don't realize it, but we've lost a lot of choice about what we're exposed to.

And so our echo chambers have gotten smaller and smaller. I only hear people who agree with me and Facebook will feed me stuff. That is what I agree with and support already, and then it will send me stuff to get me as outraged as possible about the other side. Because the other side that's going to that's going to make me far more angry than someone on my side saying something that I might not agree with, you know, but the other side. And if we get angry enough, we interact with the app. And when we interact with the app, people who buy ads on the app get our attention, they get our eyes on the app, and that's what they pay for.

They're paying for our attention. So we have sold our attention. So once you do that, now you're not even in control of what you are reading. You're not in control about what you have emotional reactions to all day because it's being fed to you, right? That's on YouTube, that's on Facebook, that's on Instagram, it's on everything that's driven by these algorithms. And of course, it came out that that's true, that that's how they drive the algorithm is what is going to anger you the most. That's going to get a reaction from you, because that's what advertisers pay for.

Advertisers pay for is your attention. If that's where our attention is, it's little wonder that we are no longer open to wonder. We're not reading fiction that nourishes us. We're not reading poetry. We're not we're not exposing ourselves to lots of other stuff that would feed our common humanity, that would feed our compassion, that would feed our desire to understand somebody on the other side. We're marinating in what's going to make us really angry because it benefits advertisers. And as long as we're based in a consumerist society and as long as consumption is how is how we're driven and having more and more and the newest and the best and planned obsolescence.

So you need another one. And then you want the newest one. And as long as that's what's guiding our decision making and our attention, we're going to continue to be then influenced by all of this stuff that the advertisers want, which is for us to get more and more angry at each other. And it's so working. And it's working. Most of us are completely content in that arena. Are you as this fabulous guide to all these people? What is the way out of that? So I think part of it is about making a commitment to not give over our attention. So it's about putting the app down.

I stopped using Facebook for the most part. I have a professional page and my people at the office and will sometimes post to my personal page. Every now and then I post something about my daughter. But that's it. Because I realized how ugly and horrible and shallow and purposeful what they're beating me as. And you can't know anymore if it's a bot or a person like we know this. Yeah. So these comments that you see on your own feed, you don't even know if that's a person three times a week at least I get a friend request from a fake Facebook page, right?

I've started clicking on their photo and then looking through their phone and when there's two photos on there, guess what it's about. So part of it is making a commitment that I'm not living here anymore and my attention is too precious. Where we place our attention is what our life is mean. It's not a new concept, but recently that has started to sink in. I've read it several places now, several brilliant thinkers and philosophers that where we place our attention is our life. So it comes down to is that where we want to place our attention is in this garbage?

Like really some examples of a good place to do that. So when you put that down right on the drive over here, I was starting to get nervous. I was late, I was in traffic. It was taking way longer than I anticipated. This is people's precious time. Immediately I went to turn on Sirius XM and go to the news channel. I'll be distracted by what's happening. Like, tell me what's happening now. But of course, within 30 seconds I was worse, right? I was more angry, more frustrated. And I was like, okay, is this how you want to go into a conversation with someone who's making space for you?

Is that how you want to walk in there? Is this who you want to be? And so I turned it off and turned on a book on tape that I'm reading about a man who was writing about healing work around justice, and he's dying of Huntington's. He brought that work to his own situation, dying from Huntington's. And so his wisdom that he's done on his journey about living with this disease, that he knows he'll deteriorate and he will die from. And he's watched two generations before him die. I can listen to that. His wisdom, his deep lived wisdom about how he faces what he's dealing.

With, a super big challenge. A super, and able to do that with joy, able to do that with a real sense of commitment to making every moment of every day as much as he can. If we can place our attention just a little bit more on those kinds of things and start cutting back on the others, it's like when you begin a diet, it's really hard at first because we're so habitual in its habit to turn on the news. For me, it's habit and it's like if we can make a commitment to mindfulness, to dropping in, you know, and spending more time with ourselves and companion ing ourselves, then it means more time in silence.

So it means more time without any distractions and without anything. But where we choose to place our attention has got to start being more about nurturing who we want to be and growing our capacity to hold what's hard, lean into what's wonderful and what's growing and companion ourselves and each other. Because if not, life on this planet is doomed. people keep saying the planet, the planet's going to be fine, the planet will be fine. There just won't be human life on the planet, right? It won't sustain human life. Right. But that's what's going to happen as we we have to start shifting the ratio of how much attention we give to stuff that's really all about ad money.

And I think it's just another way for us to bury the things that are troubling. It's just we're just on the surface looking for things that satisfy us at this moment, you know, whether it's that new pair of shoes or a political opinion, all of these things are distract us. They take us away from trying to figure out who we really are, what is our best self, what do we really love? Do we know how to love if we get there, if we get to the place where we really know who we truly are and what we're here on this earth for? Why are we part of humanity?

Then we'll be able to stand up, I think, and say, No, I don't have to listen to this or I don't need to buy into it. I don't even want to buy into it. I don't want to pretend to want to buy into it. I think if we can all start just with ourselves, we can let that ripple out to others and then these communities become safer, sustainable, less dangerous. And when we were talking about community and how people get involved in those that are really not doing anything good, what attracts people to those communities? A sense of belonging. But you could belong to a community that does good things well.

It's not as easy. I think it takes more work to be legit. I think it takes more work to actually be in a community that's healthy and functioning. It's way easier if you don't already feel like you will be accepted when you come in the door. It's way easier to be in the crazy fringe stuff because they'll take anybody. Right? That's a good point. Yeah. Often people start reading first. They read, they join online groups first and everyone accepts them. Then sometimes they'll cross over into being in person. But to actually do stuff that's about being healthy and mature and responsible, where's the outrage?

You think about fringe communities and it's all about outrage or about evil or about sinfulness or about, you know, there's something that that activates and motivates that's much subtler when you're just trying to have healthy interactions and raise healthy kids and right. Have conversation and build something together. And there's no outrage. We are rage alcoholics and in our culture. And the other thing is that our brains are now being changed by our interaction with technology and our lack of interaction with other human beings. And when our brains change, then what our brain wants changes.

And so it's way more dangerous than I think anybody really gets. I just read in preparing for our study this week, I just read this terrifying fact that said the brain is terrible at dealing with lie after lie after lie after lie. If you get lied to or you suspect there's a lie your brain will deal with. Okay, wait, is that true? And we'll do everything to try to figure out what's real and what's true. Lie after lie after lie after lie, your brain shuts down. Your brain stops trying to figure out what's true. So then that means a lot of that stuff kind of gets by and lands somewhere.

And also you stop actively questioning everything you hear. So if our brain is terrible and it shuts down easily because we didn't used to lie to each other, because you didn't have sustainable relationships and a clan in a hunter gatherer society, somebody who lied all the time was out. So you weren't exposed to that. So it makes sense that our brains aren't prepared to live in relationship to a constant surge of lies. I see. Yeah. So all the disinformation that's out there that we get fed, that's the other real danger is that our brains are being impacted, our capacity to relate to, to search for, to be committed to truth has shattered.

Someone said when I was growing up, I'm 58, so when I was growing up, we all watched the same news show at night. And so you had the same set of facts and you had the same reality of what was happening in America and the world reflected on the TV, for better or worse, forget whether they were right or they were wrong, or even ad dollars were at work there and people have their own agendas for it. We all have the same reflection of reality that we then discussed, right? That was the mirror. We were all looking in one big mirror. Take a brick and throw it at that mirror.

Now we're seeing this much. Someone else is seeing this chart. Someone else is looking at this chart to see reality reflected. And then we wonder why we can't as a society hold some of the big challenges that we need to come together to address because everybody's got their shard of the mirror and that's all they're looking at. And they're holding on to that. And they're holding onto it because that's all they see. So it's changing our relationship to reality and to do community, to society, to our responsibility, to work together to solve the biggest challenges that we're facing.

I don't know why, but I have great hope in Gen-Z I have a lot of hope in Gen-Z When you see the young woman, Greta, talking about climate change and and being furious with adults who haven't taken it seriously and are handing our kids this disaster that they're going to have to try to figure out. They're angry. They are. Angry. What we've created is so much more present in the length of their lifetimes than ours. And here we've left them this giant burden. I mean, I can't tell you how many times my daughter has said, Thanks a lot, Mom. She's referring to all of us.

Yes. I think what you're talking about in terms of this media presentation and these shards of the mirror, it's not going to make our wars go away. It's not going to change us enough to stop that process. But maybe if we can get back to a place where, okay, we're all kind of getting the same amount of information from this source, and what you do with it outside of that becomes sort of who you are and what you want to represent. So we all start with the same thing, which is it gives us an opportunity to develop our own thoughts. We're not just buying into this little trinket and we're going to just hold on to that no matter what, and convince ourselves that our trinket is the way to go.

When we were listening to Walter Cronkite, we were just like, okay, thanks, Walter. And then you would go and talk with your friends and then. You read whichever newspaper you read and whichever commentator you read that does skew towards your values. And that's that's fine. Then you would have an opportunity at the PTA meeting to sit next to somebody that you care about who reads a different commentator. And you. And you would talk about it, right, Like you would, or you might argue and you might. Okay. But that's what it takes. It takes healthy, respectful debate to get to good ideas, to get to good solutions.

And to be able to learn from each and. To be able to learn from each other and to be able to hold some kind of middle ground that will be fruitful because we have big problems to solve. And I believe it's also about really encouraging one small step. We also are so, you know, we're so this is big scale of if you're not doing something huge, you're not making a difference. That's not true. It's going to take a bunch of small steps. And when we take a few small steps, we start to come out of this learned helplessness that it's all too big and there's nothing I can do.

So I'm just going to watch Mad Men again. I think a lot of us really feel like it's futile. There's I mean, you can't put my foot in the way my. Family makes so much fun of me for, like, washing plastic bags that you're doing. And I try I every time I reuse. And so my daughter laughs at me. But but I also know that her generation is committed to doing things differently. They understand the precipice that we're at, whether they can do it, I don't know. But it's the hope I have is that they seem to get it. And we need to raise more young people who get it, and we need to raise more young people who've been taken care of in the really important way so that they can reach their full potential and are healthy and whole enough to be able to contribute to the solutions.

Yes, given that these younger generations are so ingrained in social media, consider that the main form of human contact. How are those people able to really have true human contact when they sort of believe that that is true human contact? And I think we're we're at a place where my hope is, as they grow up and as they mature, they're going to find that it's always going to be there and it's going to be incorporated in their lives. That's just the reality. But I'm hoping that they will be wise enough to know that to address the world's problems, they can't just be in those devices that they have to attend a meeting about, you know, the local effort at Fill in the Blank.

I think they've seen the failure of us not doing that. And I think they get it that they're going to have to do something. We've left them with a huge task. And unfortunately, one of those tasks is making themselves healthy, first looking inward and seeing what can I do to better myself so that I know how to operate in my community, so that I know how to love humanity. Because I think we're all just like fishing, rowing that in there and seeing what catches. And none of it feels good, none of it is satisfying. And I really, really hope that these younger people can know what it really feels like to love.

Yeah, And part of pushing back against that imagery is for girls to feel like they're lovable without being the perfect model of beauty and the perfect model of what we think a figure should look like. Part of pushing back against all that stuff is also freeing them to love themselves and other people and young men who we tell, you know, you have to be the provider and you have to go out there and you have to be tough and you can't show emotion and you can't feel you have to be strong. And so we don't give boys and men the opportunity to explore their own sensitive responses to the world and cultivating a heart that's compassionate and soft and being able to to have relationships where they can say that, that they can say they love someone as much as I talk about how challenging it all is and we're moving in the wrong direction, I believe the arc of change is going in the right direction that I have the education I have that I am able to do a job that was a man's job and only a man's job.

And not that long ago. Yeah, that I could go to university, that I could then have a career, that I could go to graduate school, that I'm taken seriously by a 900 family community. That does speak to the arc. The hour, I believe, is moving in the right direction. We need to move it more quickly and we need to address the socioeconomic gap, the race gap, the real gender gap that no one wants to really own and talk about the pay gap. But we need to do a much better job. We need to move it quicker. But I do think the arc is going in the right direction.

But see, you say all of those things and I think to myself, yeah, another episode of Mad Men. So I mean, it's so easy to look at that and go, my God, I just it's just way too much. And as you say, the little bit that I can help is never it's just not even going to be noticed. I mean, how do we instill in people that they're important and that their little steps are not so little. So well, so this is this is where I go back to the wisdom of my traditions. Why was one human being created alone? The divine could have done a lot of different things.

And this is a mythology. I don't believe the creation story is literal. I believe it's myth. Myth which points out other truths. One of which is why one, why not create 27 and see what worked out from among them? And the rabbis teach it because it was so that we really got the message. We are all connected. We all go back to one or two too, you know, but also that God says if this person is gone, there is no humanity, there is no one, because every single human being is precious. Every single human being is a universe. Every single human being is a world.

That means we have to treat every single person we meet as being created in the image of the divine, as being a spark of the divine flame. And we have to treat them with respect and regard. And it doesn't matter. If you disagree, it doesn't matter if you don't like them. It doesn't matter if we take that seriously. Then every time I interact with somebody, I influence what their life looks like and what they pass on down the line. Every time I don't snap at somebody in the grocery store line, that person is not going to pass on. Then the anger and the volatility and the hurt and the whatever that I did to them.

So if I snap at the cashier because they're too slow and I'm having a bad day right there, they're going to pass that on to somebody else, Right? So if we start really taking that seriously, then our interactions are important and we can see that and we can that right. I've taught my daughter you always look at the nametag of whoever you're dealing with and you call them by their name. And when we arrive at the synagogue, you say hello to the security guards. When we arrive somewhere else, do you greet the person who's standing working at the door?

Because that matters. It matters when we treat each other like human beings. It matters when we treat each other as containers of holy potential that none of us can really ever understand about another human being. Our actions also have the same effect. They are ripples that become much bigger and broader and wider than we can ever know and ever imagine. I just became a mentor and a program for LGBTQ young people starting out because I am a success in my profession, apparently. And so, okay, so every person I mentor, every young person I sit with training for their bar mitzvah, and I can help them believe and trust in themselves, in their ability to access a vision of who they want to be as an adult.

That that is from what they've heard from all of their teachers and all of the things they've read that they're inspired by and all the people in history they're inspired by, we contribute every single time we are about that work and we have to tell each other that. I believe that people recognize those things and they feel something like when your daughter says something just even simply a greeting to the security guard and that security guard responds in kind. Do you feel like your daughter feels something from that? Do I believe it builds her respect muscle?

I don't have to know you to respect you. It builds that ability to talk to strangers. The practice builds a habit, a good habit of making sure we see who's at the margins. The janitor who takes care of the synagogue. Right. She knows to greet him by name because too often we treat people as their status, whether it's money, whether it's power whatever it is, which we react and relate to people out of our perception of their status or of their use to me. So this is Herschel's ideal rather than than an eye it relationship, and I vow relationship recognizes that I'm dealing with another human being that's.

Also precious, that's. Also precious and is a world unto themselves and can never be replaced. No human being like you. Exactly. You will ever exist again. It never has and it never will again. So we build the habit of seeing people as worthy of dignity and respect. That changes. I believe who we are and how we relate to the rest of the world, including how we relate to creatures. I'd prefer not to kill something if I can get it out of my house without killing it. We go either way. Either it's an aunt who cares book or it's an aunt. Is there a way for me to take a piece of paper and kind of help it along its way out of my kitchen?

Yeah. I believe that we influence our children and we influence, the people around us and we influence ourselves every time we make that choice. Do I respect this life or not? Do I respect this human being or not? And every time we say yes, we build our capacity for that. We build it as a good habit. And habits are important because our brains need habits. If our brains are to think about every single thing we do, we would not survive. We couldn't drive a car if our brains had to think about every single thing that goes into driving a car. Yes.

How many times do you end up at your destination. And you don't remember getting there? It's because you did it out of habit. So we talk about habits in general as bad, but I believe it is just as it is more important that we cultivate good habits. And good habits come from this understanding of your good place on earth. Who do you respect? How do you show respect? How do you feel about human life? What is truth? Are all those things in your mind or in your community representative of love? I mean, what is love to you? So I think too often our society, especially the Western industrialized world, treats love as a feeling.

It treats love as an emotion. And that's all it is in my tradition, the concept of provider of love is, first of all, it's a factor in why the universe is here. For us, the divine creates out of love. We create out of love and we teach out of love. Those are acts of love. It is not a feeling. It is a set of actions. There is an attitude, a way of approaching everything that we can do that is loving. It's not because we have an emotion and then act out of it. It's that we have a commitment to behaving in ways that make the opportunity for loving interaction to be more frequent and more often and deeper and more profound.

That's hard for me to wrap my brain around. So if it's not an emotion, where does the emotion come in when that thing that happens, either in reality or in a dream, or you just feel this sort of golden glow of absence but joy, you're with another human that you're having this fabulous interaction with, or what is that emotion? If it's not love, what would you title it sometimes? Joy Sometimes sadness. We have lots of emotions. We have lots of feelings. I'm not identified by any one of them. I am a combination right? Because it's my response to stimulation.

It's my response to the world. Emotion is is often in response to something you do X and I feel sad or I feel angry or I feel happy. But but me doing X is coming from one of those positions potentially. Well, maybe you're mad, maybe you're sad, maybe you're afraid. And so that drives your reaction. Maybe you're joyful. There's lots of different feelings, but underneath all of that, for me, there is spirit, that there is something else under all of my emotions that are because I'm a creature with the nervous system living in a universe. There is something that when I can get in touch with it, I know is all about goodness and purity and and love and compassion.

Our work is to act from that place, to be able to access that place, because then our acts will be loving acts, and our approach to things will be a loving approach to things. It's about healing our shame, our fear, our loneliness. We have to address healing those things constantly, and as you said, some of it from childhood, some of it from our own brokenness. It happened our own families, some of it the world, right? The world. What the world does to us. What the world tells some kids. What the world tells all kids of a certain color in certain places or a certain socioeconomic class.

Right? So there's a lot of damage that needs to be healed. And so if we're about doing that healing, then we can center more frequently and more aware and more mindful of what it is we're lining up our behavior behind. It's about cultivating love for myself and the ability to act lovingly, even if I don't feel it. I try to act lovingly towards my daughter, even when I don't feel it right now. But I would say because you truly, from the bottom of your heart, love her more than anybody else on earth, might that that's what's stopping you from saying you're moving out.

So let's go back to the cashier at Ralphs. I don't love the cashier at Ralphs. No, but you act from a loving place. But I try to act as if I did. If you loved that person, would you talk to them like that? If you really respected that person as a human being worthy of regard and respect and care and concern and love, would you snap at them when they're doing their best because you're late, because you're stressed out, because you didn't eat right? Because somebody yelled at you. Because somebody yelled at me 5 minutes ago. So that's what I'm saying.

It's it's cultivating the as if that is not always based in my emotion. I don't love her. I understand. That. But to be fair, on a broader level, I try very hard to remember that we need to love every human being. But that's right. Maybe we're actually talking about the same thing. Maybe I'm using the word love, or you use the word spirit, right? So I think from what I've heard you say about his work. That's what Bernard believed is that he would use the term love for all of the stuff that I might use, the term soul or spirit, that when we return to what is ultimate, when we return to what is our essence, he would say that's love.

And I would say that spirit. But I don't disagree that it's about that accessing. That is how I start to heal damage, right? Just by even being mindful of that. It's there that something's come up and then I get to touch that place with deep compassion and hold all of that with great compassion. Forgive myself, forgive who? You know, I need to forgive. Topic for another day. Exactly. I think we use that way too much. I think that you're unique in that ability to look at yourself and say, okay, well, that thing I did this morning, that doesn't sit right with me.

I don't feel good about that. Why did I go there? What's going on with me? What do I need to address about me? I think most of us just. Just slide right over that. Not enough time. It too much to try and figure that out. That means I have to confront something in me. And maybe it doesn't have to do with forgiveness at all. It's just like, okay, you did this thing and why and how can how can I not do that again? And not only how can I not do that, but what can I teach myself? So the thought of doing that never even enters my mind that I instead choose to come from this place that you've suggested where there's the checkout person and I can talk to them as if they're this fabulous human or get angry with them, snap at them.

What I want is other people to have that same ability that you you seem to just have naturally. Do you have. That? No, I don't. I'm a very impatient person by nature. But yet you look at yourself and say, okay, what do I need to work on? Because I have chosen to surround myself and and immerse myself in teachings and practices that are all about trying to be a better person. Right? That's that's my that's my job as a Jew is to try to be a better person and contribute to everyone else around me having a better experience. And then the world will be a better place.

And so that's our job every day is to figure out how to be better at that. But it takes practice and it takes practicing regularly. It takes I do mindfulness practice, I do a prayer practice. I and I don't believe in a supernatural God who controls things. I'm not praying to some being who's going to intervene. I open myself to draw on the forces in this world for transformation and compassion and patience and forgiveness and comfort and love. Where are those? Where are those forces? Where do they where are they coming from? I believe this is part of how the universe is put together.

Those things are a part of our experience and are available to us at all times. We have to do the work of accessing them, which is hard. Which is hard. So part of it is mindfulness practice. And for me, there's a there's a prayer practice that's about this too, is about we have to take some time to get to know where are we right now, what's happening with me right now? Where am I hurting? Where am I afraid? And when it comes up during the day, if you've done that work, you notice it, you're mindful of it. That's why it's called mindfulness practice, so that I'm mindful that I'm about to snap.

If we can increase the distance between the impulse to take somebody's head off and and actually doing it, if we can increase the space by half a second, we buy ourselves just enough time to say, is that really where you want to go? I don't always succeed even. Just to have that statement in your head. Is that really where you want to go? I mean, to be able to say that at so many different moments during the course of the day. Correct. So that's a practice that that means you practice. It means I also have a practice of singing with people. I go to services every Friday night.

I engage in preparing to our study every week so that I'm reading commentary, spiritual commentary on what our sacred scripture is talking about and how we apply that in our lives. So I'm reading the Masters and mistresses of of my wisdom, tradition and lots of other wisdom traditions. I read a lot of Buddhist teaching. I read a lot of take that on and Pema children. And so folks who are from the East and I'm rooted in that tradition. So but it's about it's about paying attention and it's about doing the work. I've also been in therapy, you know, thank God for therapy.

You know, it's that was one of the first stages was, wait, there's damage here. That's why I'm so angry and that's why I'm so reactive is wait and there's damage. Didn't think about. Didn't think about that. And so then. Then a good therapist starts to help you see where those places are that need your attention and need your loving attention and intention and the ways we need to start thinking differently than we tend to think about ourselves. Because often that's what we project on to other people. Yeah. And to be okay with damaged. Because there's no way in or out of this business without damage.

There's no way into a human experience and being raised in human society without damage. We'll contend with that our entire lives. I mean, we're always just a work in progress, let's say. I think to maybe this idea of that Bernard had, which I share of the unconscious might be the same thing that you're speaking about, where the universe is always offering us these resources that can show us how to be better humans at better individuals. And his feeling was that if we can access that and listen to that, that is going to give us the messages about how to be our best human right.

And the subconscious has a lot of dark stuff in it. It's about what am I accessing? What am I bringing forward from the deeper parts of who I am and and what am I cultivating? Because it's also about cultivation. It's about continuing. Do the practices that help soften us because it's not natural? No. And I think it's important to deal with these things that are deep and dark and disturbing because, again, they'll continue to contribute to who we are and how we behave in the world. Correct. And I do think that, as you said, that the some of these scary communities, let's say, are attracting people who have these dark issues that are much, much too difficult to want to look at or to even access.

And I think there are people who are so damaged that they are only really able to function and thrive in places that that are dark and dank. Maybe they never had a community. And I 100% agree. And I and I wish there was a way to get every single one of those people treatment that's appropriate for what they're addressing and what they're dealing with and what their demons. But we don't prioritize mental health. That's number one. Number two, we don't talk about it. It's so stigmatized. And I'm talking about depression. I'm you know, I'm talking about serious depression, those kinds of things that lead people to really dark places.

If we could have more honest conversations about mental illness and stop stigmatizing it, then I think a lot more people would get treatment. I do, too. And I also think that there are plenty of people who are interested in actual treatment, not just being given something from the pharmacy that sort of soothes them or makes them acceptable in society. That's not really healing anyone, right? And we don't help people access real modes of healing because we're terrible at them as a society. Modalities for healing are like what? But you can take a pill, you can get Viagra anywhere.

The things we prioritize, we have access to. And the pharmaceutical companies, of course, control so much of what drives research and what we're looking into. Are we looking at holistic methods of of really treating the whole person or are we looking at something that's going to make a company money which is managing symptoms? Disease is not being addressed, including diseases that are mental illness. Probably very low on the. List, very low on the list. There's so many people suffering. And the way we've designed society is it pushes them further and further into the corners and into isolated lives where whatever that is manifesting for them gets worse and is magnified because they're shown so little attention and affection and real care.

Right. And they're made to feel less of a human. Yes. And are treated like that. Yeah. It's hard to believe that today in 2024, that that is still a reality. So in your congregation, what are some of the good things you see happening to people or what do you see people starving to do? That's a positive thing. Seeing people come together and singing and leaning in to just a different way of being and behaving in the world like that. Like singing sacred liturgies, singing, sacred intention, singing, enjoy singing out of a sense of community and that we're here and wonder and that we get one day out of seven.

We need to shift our focus and be about something else and that their commitment to doing that and being there is so nourishing and people need it so much and they're really taking a lot from that. We've designed a more creative musical service that is drawing, you know, 100 people every time we do it every six weeks or so. And they're really loving it. I'm offering mindfulness practice. People are are hungry for ways and language wisdom from the tradition like that. In those mindfulness practice sessions, people are really missing cross-generational contact.

Most people live in nuclear family units, you know, So people the kids know other kids and they have some adults in their and adults know adults that they meet through their kids or sometimes at work or whatever else. And then our elder generation, they're often very lonely and because they don't have nuclear family living with them, because we no longer live like that in multigenerational families, that's starting to change. It is. It is starting to change. People are starting to build smaller houses on their like. They give their big house to the kids and they build a smaller house on the property.

So people are starting to get it that we've lost the incredible nourishment of cross-generational contact, as well as the ease and joy that we get from not being overwhelmed all the time because there's more people to share the load of all the things we have to do to adult in our time. Adulting is very hard and all consuming right now. The amount of things we have to keep up with and do it is I'm seeing relationships across generation. My daughter doesn't come to synagogue often When she comes in, she lights up when she sees Margot, who's 91. Right.

Because she's known her since she was six. And so she runs over to Margot to hug her. She knows Elaine, who's, you know, 87, and she runs to Elaine to hug her and she just lights up. And we don't have that. In the United States. In the United States, we do not have. And so so that's another thing I find in communities of intention is that we have really rich connection across generations and also opportunities to learn as adults, to be together and learn and have conversation that is not about what's on television or who won the big game or again, where did you vacation or what, you know, like whatever passes for conversation.

And so to really build a community where meaningful conversation is, again, part of people's expectation of what they will be doing routinely fills them with hope that there's something coming of meaning, builds their confidence right, and having those conversations and keeps our brains and hearts active in learning because lifelong learning we know is a key to mental health. We know it's a key to mental acuity. We know it's a key to higher levels of life. Satisfaction is when we keep learning and you keep being about wonder and keep being about something new.

That's really important too, is places where adults learning and engaging and that kind of growth and expansion. And you have this podcast and it's basically teaching people about the sort of monumental importance of your historical traditions and Judaism. It's using that really important historical wisdom and tradition to help us figure out what is that saying to us. How does that apply. How does that apply today? And what would it mean if we were really taking that seriously? What if we really took this seriously and like that? What then? What would that mean for us right now?

I'm sure you have a pretty great audience for that. Yeah. So we have over 300,000 downloads of the podcast. How do we access. That at our website? K lot Israel dot org. You can find a link to my it's my weekly Torah study and we have about eight countries that listen regularly. So for me it's really important to help with misunderstandings about how sacred scripture can be used without it being about being literal. There is not a lot of understanding about how you can take the Bible seriously, but not literally. So I think a lot of people who want some access to Jewish tradition and Jewish teaching but don't know how to get it and are looking particularly for a liberal approach, a non fundamentalist approach.

They find my podcast, they listen to a few and they're like, wait, what? It's not that I'm so great is that there's not a lot out there. That's number one in the liberal Jewish approach to Torah study, and even less it's accessible. But one of my congregants has committed to recording it and editing it and putting it up every single Friday. And that's it takes and there's not a lot of places that are willing to do that or have the expertise to do that or the commitment of someone to make sure it happens. And so because it does every week and I've been doing it now for about I think it's my eighth year because of that, there's this whole body of work now that people can access who really are looking for a way into Jewish knowledge and wisdom and spiritual encouragement and challenge and vocabulary, and a shift in the way that we look at things in the West, in our contemporary world, our industrialized world.

I think people they're like, like that's out there, that it's that it's serious and it's weighty and it's meaty. I've been studying this stuff my whole life, and yet I'm open to every single new thing I read. And it's often that I'll be reading an article. Then I start preparing to study and I'm like, my gosh, there it is. Exactly what they're talking about in this article is exactly right. It lines up so much more often than you would imagine, and it did this week when I talked about the brain not being able to do so. And one of the concepts we were studying was a relationship to Muna, to this concept of faith and faithfulness, to MT to truth, because it turns out in Hebrew they're from the same root.

So. Right. So I was like, is that true? Emmett and Muna are from the same root. They don't have the same letters, like, what's up with that? But I went to the dictionary, the biblical dictionary, and there it is. They're both from Amman, Oman, Amman This concept of support surety, both the word for faithfulness and truth, come out of that. So then in this article, I was like, now looking at, okay, what what is our relationship to truth? And really, if you think about it, that seems right. It seems logical. And so we don't believe things that are untrue.

Sure, we don't believe over some proof gap like I believe it, even though there's no evidence. Right. If we do do that now. But often it's that I experience something as true. And so I lend it my support, which is the root of the word for belief. And anyway, my point being that that article was right. It took me right into part of Tara's study and then talking about disinformation and talking about how many lies were being fed so often and maybe the collapse of the society all ability because societies made out of human brains, the collapse of our ability to really start discerning anymore what's true and then pushing back against what's not when we know it's a lie.

Right. And there's not enough pushback, Correct. There's not enough demand for the truth. No. And there's a lot of forgiveness. Of really spinning things in a way purposefully that is misleading. Yes, I think we have to end like I don't like that. But thank you so much for being here. It's fabulous. I've learned so much and I hope we could talk again. I would love that. It's an honor to be here. I wish you so much strength and good health and joy in your work and in carrying on your beloved's work. Thank you. So important to reorient ourselves in these days and times to reorient ourselves to a an attitude of love.

Whatever we can do. And thank you for doing what you're doing with this group of people that you're guiding. It truly is an honor. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. And we'll see you next time.