Thank you so much for having me.

It's interesting, I was raised in what I would like to say, a cognitive dissonance experiment, in that my parents were relatively secular Jews, not religiously inclined almost at all, but they were scholars of Jewish studies. That's what they did for a living. Jewish culture and Jewish learning, a robust Jewish culture was part of the atmosphere that I breathed in at home. Because my parents were so serious about Jewish culture, they sent me to a very traditional Jewish day school. So in school, I was being exposed to a very traditional religious perspective, an orthodox Jewish religious perspective, and at home being exposed to a very secular perspective. And the soup that came out of that is my present life, which is an attempt to take on board all of the things that I learned from my secular parents about philosophy, about academic approaches to religion, about things like that, but also to take this seriously as a path for worshipping and serving God. It's kind of that bringing together that has been at the core of my life, I would say.

Yeah. I would say I sometimes joke to my wife that on a good day, my parents created a background for me where I could feel at home in absolutely any Jewish environment anywhere. And on a bad day, they made it such that I can't fully feel at home anywhere. But, I guess I have found that not feeling fully at home is very productive. The institute that I co-founded and helped run, Hadar, is kind of post-denominational, right? It sorts of refuses the boxes of Jewish life. Are you Orthodox? Are you conservative? Are you reformed? I'm just not that interested in that question. I know there are many people for whom denominations in their religions are very important, and I deeply respect that. But that never resonated for me, and I think it's enabled us as an institution to speak to an incredibly broad swath of the Jewish world, or increasingly in my own work in the Christian world as well.

Meaning the rabbinate or specifically Judaism?

Yeah. I think that becoming a rabbi for me was a very natural outgrowth of where I found my interests constantly returning. You know, I got to college and part of me thought I had a very traditional background. I want to do anything but Jewish learning. And then I realized very quickly, no, I want to acquire more lenses for thinking about the Jewish tradition. I want a more scholarly approach to philosophy than I got in high school or something like that.

This is maybe an interesting story for your viewers and listeners. As a Jew, whose parents were European refugees, my parents never said a bad word about Christianity, I have to say. But yet I, on some level, almost by osmosis, internalized their fear and anxiety about Christian anti-Semitism and Christianity became a kind of bogeyman in my mind. I was very nervous around it, and I can't say that I can explain this, but literally on my first day of college, I thought to myself, I have to understand this better. And I went and enrolled in a class in Christian theology, and that became one of my great loves in life. It's not my tradition, but I've spent years and years of my life in conversation with it, and that's obviously very much in evidence in my writing. So, you know, it's sort of like when you find that the thing you're most passionate about over and over again over the course of years is actually a path that's available to you, what an immense privilege that is. And I was very lucky, I would say. I started sharing with friends my reflections about theology and about Jewish texts and about things like that. I found it kind of mystified me. People were sort of interested in what I was saying. People would say, "Oh, keep talking." And I found that so surprising. Why would you want to hear about my private reflections? I guess I realized that I had been given this gift of being able to talk about spiritual questions in a way that opened up those questions for other people. It felt just like a very natural outgrowth of all of that to spend my life pursuing the questions that mattered to me and pursuing the questions that mattered to me that when I talked about also seemed to matter to other people.

I see that in a very theological language, I would say that that's grace. I didn't do anything to earn the ability to talk about religion in a way that people found compelling. It just sort of happened. I hope it doesn't sound grandiose because I don't mean it that way at all, over time, it came to feel not only like a privilege, but also a like responsibility that if I could help open up worlds for people, so that was what maybe God wanted for me.

Yeah, it's funny, I'm going to ruin this quote, I'm sure, because I haven't thought about it in decades. But as you're talking, I'm thinking of a comment made by the Christian novelist Frederick Buechner. He was also a minister. He says something like, "Vocation is the place where the heart's deep hunger meets the world's deep yearning."

I may have just butchered that but it is something like that. That is just such a powerful image, the point at which your heart is drawn and what part of the world actually needs is a sweet spot. That is a total privilege because not all of us get that. We take that for granted at all. I don't think it's something I earned. It's a gift that I was given. As I write about in my book, I think gifts come with responsibilities. The gifts of God are meant to flow through us and not just to us. You don't just grab the things that you've been given. You try to share them and put them out into the world.

Yeah. I think I would answer that in 2 ways. One is that in a very simple way, I would say that we created Hadar because we wanted to build the institution that many of us had wanted to study in, but never found, meaning, I had always been longing for a place that we can combine deep religious passion and commitment with real intellectual worldliness, refusal to be afraid of difficult questions, whether philosophical questions or just painful, difficult life questions. I guess I would say, I had been in environments that were deeply religious, and I found them often intellectually thwarting. And then I'd been in environments that were wildly, intellectually open, but I found them spiritually kind of sterile. And I wanted to see, could we find a way to combine really intense spiritual power with a kind of steadfast commitment to intellectual and human openness? That's really what Hadar emerged from.

I would just add that, as I alluded to earlier, it felt to me in my own life that the denominational boxes just didn't fit to speak very internal Jewish conversation for a minute. The gender equality that was central to the conservative movement and the religious passion and commitment to observance that was part of the Orthodox world. I could not accept and I still can't accept that one has to choose between those two things. If I didn't see it in the world, I thought I would try to create it. We talk about leadership lessons, for whatever it's worth, I remember thinking to myself when we were starting Hadar, there's all kinds of reasons why this might not work, but when I'm holding my grandchildren on my lap, I want to be able to say to them, there was something that the world needed, and I tried to make it. There was a hole and I tried to fill it. If I had to say, but I failed, okay, but I could at least say to them, I saw this need and I went about trying in my own small way to fill it.

I've been very blessed in that Hadar has thrived and is a constantly growing and evolving institution. But it really was about instead of going through life feeling bitter that you never found the place to study that you wanted to, build it. And that's what we tried to do.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think there were a couple of things. One is that at the beginning at least, we had to contend with people who were stewards of already existing institutions and movements, who found what we were doing threatening at best, and subversive and hurtful at worst, and it took a lot of time and conversation of saying to people, I want your institutions to thrive too. I want to grow the pie. I'm not trying to break in and take away from what you do. I'm actually hoping that maybe us creating what we create will also help you grow. It was a very steep uphill climb at times. There were a lot of people rooting for us to fail. I don't know how else to put it. And I think we didn't always do the best job at the beginning of really hearing the anxiety under that and instead just heard the hostility. I think that's just a helpful thing to do in general, which is when someone is approaching your work with hostility to at least take a minute and ask what is at stake for them, that it makes it so hard for them to see it the way you might see it. That took some maturation on our part. I'm proud to say, now that rabbis and leaders from across the Jewish denominational spectrum regularly spend time at Hadar, study at Hadar, or use our resources. I think we have crossed that hurdle, but it was quite a hurdle at the beginning. There's a kind of sweet spot of acknowledging the anxiety that others are feeling and also not letting that deter you from work you know is important. I think we've emerged from that, as I say. But it was a difficult piece.

I think also, just to be honest, you never want to become the kind of person who doesn't have any self-doubt, but you have to become the kind of person who refuses to be defined by their self-doubt. So, we had moments where it's like, "What are we doing? I mean, you know, here I am running an institution. I'm 32 years old. Who am I? I'm a child. What am I doing?" I was 35 when we started. And, to sort of say no, I have an intuition here that this matters. And it's important. Ideally someone older than I would be doing this, but right now the kind of the vista, that person is not on the horizon. So my colleagues and I were going to do this, and we've done it. There's a lot of work to do.

I still think of us as a startup 18 years later and a very large budget and offices in many cities. I still think of us as a startup. I don't want to lose that energy. But, there were challenges.

If I could I'll just share a quick kind of a biblical commentary that has always really touched me because it speaks to this. Just to be clear, I'm not comparing us to Moses. I'm just trying to understand a spiritual teaching here. When God summons Moses, to liberate the people from Egypt. Moses famously says, "I can't even talk. Why are you asking me?" And then there's a moment where God says, "This is the sign that I have sent you." And interpreters have always struggled with what is the thing that God is referring to? And one obscure modern commentary says, I love this so much. He says, the fact that Moses' first reaction was, I don't know that I can do this. That's the sign. That says, I want someone who's not saying, "Oh, I can change the world." Because that person is likely to be arrogant, not attentive, not aware of their limits, but the fact that Moses ends up going despite first saying, "Hey, this is big and I'm small." That moment is a sign. That's the kind of person God wants. A person who is ultimately not defeated by self-doubt, but is aware and open to the reality of self-doubt.

I think there's a very important and sometimes elusive sweet spot there.

Interesting question. I suspect it's different for different people. I don't know how to say this in a way that will not sound sort of self-aggrandizing on Hadar's part. I think that people saw that we were, in fact, doing something that was unique and that was mattering to a lot of people, and they just sort of shifted from, we want these guys to fail to, "Oh, how can we tap into this energy also?" I remember it was a very powerful moment. The president of one of America's major Jewish seminaries, who started out, I would say not hostile, but very suspicious of us. And finally, after several years of this cold war kind of relationship, he decided, I give him enormous credit to come to a high holiday service that we were running. At the end of the service, he came up to me and I would say mildly, begrudgingly said, this is in fact very powerful.

I was very moved. I was just like, first of all thank you so much for being here. Thank you for the generosity of spirit for saying that. And I think that is sort of emblematic of a little of what happened. I also think people began to take us at our word when we said, "We don't want you to fail, we want us to succeed. We even believe that if we succeed, you know you'll succeed better also." I love that.

Here's just a tiny example. This summer, a reform rabbi from Northern California came with 12 of his congregants who were most interested in the spiritual path and in Jewish living. They all came together to a summer seminar that we ran for adults. And he left with 12 people who were now energized at building Jewish learning at his reform synagogue. Hadar is not reform. It's never going to be reform. But here was a way in which we could kind of synergistically build something together. He figured out, I think, that there was a resource that we were 100% sincere in wanting to offer.

I've had a very moving few days, I have to say, where rabbis have been sending me the sermons that they've written in which they quoted my new book. The thing that's most striking to me about it that has been, it's almost reduced me to tears a couple times, they're all so different from each other. It's orthodox rabbis, reform rabbis, very spiritual types, and more sober intellectual types, and I just love it. I'm so touched by it. So I think it's that. I think they simply saw that we were producing something and they discovered that we were sincere about growing the pie, to make many flowers bloom whatever cliché we want to invoke here. And that was real, and remains real.

I think I might say a version of what you said in this way, which is that we wanted to find a way to really stand for a particular vision of Jewish life, while also at the same time and without apology, being an institution that belongs to the entirety of the world without kind of claiming, "Oh, everyone has to do it like we do." I love the fact that we're not reform, but reform educators use our resources all the time. We don't see ourselves as conservative or orthodox but use those resources. That's kind of what we wanted.

And to your point, we also learn from them. What you said a minute ago reminded me of how Maimonides has this wonderful formulation that a person should always hear the truth from wherever it comes. I'm not Christian, obviously. I learn from Christians all the time. I'm not Buddhist, but Thich Nhat Hanh has had a massive influence on my life and honestly has affected the way I see everything Jewish. It's not just I'm standing on a mountain preaching down to all of you, and you take what you want. I'm also learning from you. You say things that really matter to me, and I take on board and then have to struggle with and integrate, so there's a kind of genuine openness to others and their experiences. I often say that the world would be a better place if our first impulse, instead of arguing about religion, was learning about one another's religion. If you tell me, I have found God through Christ, or I have learned to kind of endure suffering through the fourfold path or whatever might be. My first reaction is, "Really? Tell me about that." As opposed to feeling the need to say, "Oh, let me tell you the truth." Because that doesn't resonate for me. Just on a human level, I don't find it interesting. I'd much rather learn.

By the way, I feel the same way about conversations between theists and non-theists. When someone says to me, I experience the world in purely materialistic terms. First of all, honestly, I find that so surprising every time that my real inclination is wow, tell me about that. That sounds really interesting because it's not how I see the world. Tell me about your experience. Obviously there are times we're going to disagree about things and we have to kind of draw a line. If someone tells me my spiritual path involves murdering people, I'm not going to say, "Oh, tell me about that." But, you know, that first impulse is to say, "Oh, maybe I could learn something here. Tell me."

I would just add as a footnote, I know this is implicit in what you said, but not just mind expanding but also heart expanding. It's just you develop the ability to just embrace more, to sit with other people's experiences, to feel like "Oh, I don't need to be anxious about the fact that you experience the world differently." For me, my first impulse is that there might be something here that I can learn, and honestly, we can model not killing each other over theological disagreements, but actually we can both live in together and maybe even living lovingly together.

Thank you for the question. Let me start by saying, when I say that Judaism is about love, I don't mean to say that it's not also about other things, right? Love and justice are good examples. What's interesting to me is for example, just take a very concrete example so it doesn't sound abstract, when people say Judaism is about law rather than love, one of the things I've tried to sort of point out is that very formulation sounds very Lutheran to me, where you have the notion where there's a kind of difference between gospel on the one hand and law on the other. In Judaism, law is a manifestation of divine love. God loves us so much that God wants to give us a path with which to walk through life. There's again false dichotomies. Judaism is not about love as opposed to law. It's actually about law because it's fundamentally about love. And law manifests that love. Similarly, I try to show a passion for justice. It can be actually animated by a really deep sense of love. Judaism is most certainly a religion of deeds, but it's a religion of the deed and the heart. It's a religion of the integration of who I am on the inside and what I express on the outside. The whole idea, I think, is to overcome that dichotomy.

Something that I found very helpful and this might sound kind of obscure, but I think it's really interesting, was I discovered in the course of researching this book that historians of the emotions have argued that this notion that's almost a truism in modern Western culture that emotions are just inward, that that idea really begins with the romantics that actually in ancient cultures, people thought much more fluidly about the internal and the external. So that if you said to a biblical writer, is love an emotion or is it an action? I'm not sure they would have understood that question. They would have said, "Well, of course it's both of those things." In an ideal moment of humanity, I genuinely feel love for you and I act lovingly towards you. That's the ideal.

Now, if I'm not feeling lovingly towards you, I'm still obligated to act lovingly towards you because you need to be loved or very concretely, let's say you're hungry. We don't wait till I've achieved full virtue until you get breakfast, right? I have to give you breakfast whether I'm virtuous or I'm not. But the ideal is a full integration of the inner and the outer. And I think what I had seen so often in my life was how much a kind of caricature of Judaism that stemmed mainly not exclusively, but mainly from traditional Christian anti-Jewish polemics, how much that had been internalized, how deeply it had been internalized by so many Jews? And I wanted to reframe the Jewish tradition. Stop saying it's about deeds rather than inwardness. It's about both. Stop saying it's about law rather than love. That's a distinction that makes no sense Jewishly. Stop saying, etc. etc.

Let's sort of reframe this in a way that feels truer to the Jewish tradition. When I started out, I had 3 levels here. When I started out, my main project was to write for Jews because I felt Jews across the denominational spectrum had frequently internalized the traditional Christian idea that Judaism isn't about love. And I want to say, guys just open your eyes to what's in front of you in the prayer book, in the Bible, in the rabbinic tradition, it's everywhere, right? Then I also realized as I started writing, Wait a Minute. I'm also writing this for Christians, because I've met many Christians who know that the way that Judaism has been portrayed in Christian contexts is offensive at worst and obsolete at best, and they don't know what to say instead. So I wrote the book also for Christians who were open to the possibility of thinking about Judaism, of encountering Judaism in more authentically Jewish terms, less kind just bulldozed by traditional Christian bias and then sort of more almost dreamily, I thought, I hope that people who are just interested in love and in visions of the good life might read this book and say, wait a minute, you know what? Judaism is one of the religious traditions of the world that has a lot to teach me about what it means to be a loving person, which is one of the reasons I have to say why I was so moved by your invitation. Because I thought, "Oh, this is exactly what I had been hoping for, this is someone who is not Jewish and not Christian," who actually thinks, "Oh, Judaism is about love. Tell me about that. Maybe there's some conversation that we could have."

So I hope that answers your question or begins to.

I'd be glad to. By the way, I also would say, in an interesting way, this question flows directly from your last one, because grace is another category that many Jews have stopped talking about because they've been convinced that it belongs to Christianity. I never tire of saying to Jewish audiences, you can't just give the foundational building blocks of your own tradition away to someone else. What are you going to be left with? Grace is really fundamental. I'll give you the most dramatic example.

So let me take a minute and start there with what you just said, which is I think that that is true, that there was a moment in the American Jewish experience. I suspect it was in the wake of World War II. But I've not researched this. I'm not sure I'm right about that, where American Jews who were very anxious about assimilation and who did not have rich Jewish educations, began, I suspect, unconsciously, but I don't know, to define their Judaism as whatever they imagine Christianity was not, which led to Jews saying things like Judaism has no notion of the afterlife, which if you know anything about Jewish sources, it's just so bizarre that it begs an interpretation like, "How could you say this when it's patently false and believe it?" I think it's because of this kind of anxiety about defining ourselves over against. What I'm trying to do is, as you say, to sort of invite Jews to consider that those terms are fundamental and at the heart of the Jewish tradition. And more than that, also to invite Christians to be reminded that Jesus got this from somewhere. I say this a lot to Christian audiences. Jesus was obsessed with love. What I would like to invite you to consider is that maybe that's because he was a good Jew, right? He was raised in an environment that taught him love. After all, when he's asked what the great commandment is, and he talks about love of God and love of neighbor, he's quoting the Hebrew Bible, he's quoting Leviticus and Deuteronomy. He's speaking a good Jew.

Another way of saying this is and I think this really goes directly to some of the work that's important to you as well, something doesn't have to be exclusively Christian for it to be authentically Christian. Something doesn't have to be exclusively Jewish, for it to be authentically Jewish. Something doesn't have to be exclusively Buddhist for it to be authentically Buddhist. I sometimes say kiddingly with people, if you think that only one religion gets every truth, who gets monotheism? Is that a Muslim idea? Do they get that? Or is there something else? Of course not. That's ridiculous. So don't give in to that temptation and actually understand that, like some of the core truths of the world are available in multiple traditions, sometimes because they've influenced each other, as in the case of Judaism and Christianity, sometimes because maybe there's different paths to accessing. Maybe God has even revealed something in multiple ways.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot to talk about in what you just said. One of the things that I think about a lot and maybe this will take us a field so we can pull back from it. But, how can we allow religious traditions? How can we honor their desire to make robust claims for themselves without making claims that thereby exclude and demean everyone else? If a Christian wants to say to me that Jesus was a unique revelation of God in the world, I want them to be able to say that. What I don't want them to be able to say is everything he said. He said sui generis. And Judaism was an abyss into which he brought light. I don't want them to be able to say that.

I've been saying this to a lot of Christian audiences, and it's been really interesting to have this conversation, because I'm a big believer that interfaith involves talking about real things, even difficult things. It's not just people of different communities getting together to be polite to each other. It's talking about hard stuff. And I said, look, as a lifelong student of Christianity, I would say one of the biggest struggles Christianity has had is making space for the possibility that some of the things that most cherishes about itself may also be present elsewhere. Some of the things about Christianity that are most powerful to you may have been said by Radhakrishnan too. You have to deal with that. They may have been said by Moses before you. You have to deal with that. And that's true about all religions. Judaism is a little bit unique in monotheism, in that it never claimed that everyone had to be Jewish to have a relationship with God. So its version of this is different. I don't mean that it's better, but it's different.

So now, let me back up to the question that you started for a minute about love, grace and generosity.

So, I often start with the notion of creation by grace because I think it's actually more accessible to people or most widely accessible, which Maimonides emphasizes that in a way, a religious awareness begins with the sense of, "Wait a minute, here's a world and here's life. And I didn't do anything to earn either of those things." No one can earn the gift of it. Anyone who says they earn the gift of their own life is delusional. They're not just wrong, they're delusional. There's no such thing, right? You didn't earn being born. You didn't earn coming out of your mother's womb. It just happened and you didn't make the world.

By the way, it's sort of fascinating because the prophet Ezekiel, who's considered the arch villain, the most immoral, anti-God figure in the biblical imagination, describes Pharaoh as saying, I created myself. There's something really interesting there about someone who is so deluded as to think they don't owe anybody anything, will end up being a monster. There is something actually so humbling about an awareness of grace. To use my language here, my life is a gift. The world is a gift. My life in this world is a gift within a gift. I didn't do anything to earn any of it. And I don't mean that, by the way, in some naive, Pollyannaish way. I, myself have been through almost unimaginable suffering in my life. I'm not saying that in some naive way, "Oh, it's all flowers." I don't mean that at all, but the very fact of consciousness is grace. I didn't earn it.

The thing that I found most kind of fascinating, as I started to research different ways that Jews talk about this, is that unawareness of grace, leads to gratitude. I'm so grateful for this. And this is that next step that became so important to me in my own thinking and writing, that part of what it means to be grateful is to want other people to have the same gifts that I do.

There's a wonderful line, a British philosopher, I don't think he was Christian, Jewish, or anything. He is just a good old British philosopher and he says at one point, "What distinguishes being glad from being grateful is that when I'm grateful, I want others to have it too." If you do something for me and I'm like, "Oh that's delightful," that's gladness. But if you do something for me and I say, "Oh that's delightful. You know, there's a lot of people who don't have that. How can I help them have it?" That's gratitude.

I talk about how I think in Judaism, there's two versions of this. I'll call it the descriptive version and the prescriptive version. The descriptive version is in an ideal world in which everything is flourishing healthily, when someone does something for me, does an act of kindness for me that naturally manifests in my doing an act of kindness for someone else. It's a kind of the flow of divine grace, if you will. But there's also a prescriptive version, which is if something does get in the way and you're tempted to hoard and not share, then you're obligated to. Obligation is what I would call the fallback option, right? The ideal is an open heart that says, what do you mean? I mean, I was hungry and someone gave me lunch. Now you're hungry. Are you hungry? Can I feed you or can I offer you food? But if I'm not so moved, that's where the law comes in and says, wait a minute, you know, you're obligated to that person who's hungry, even if you're in a terrible mood and feeling angry and entitled, there's an obligation there. So it's sort of like the merger of the prescriptive and the descriptive.

The image that I love comes from a 16th century Jewish thinker who talks about how the flow of divine gifts is like a river, and the task is one is not allowed to become a dam. You can't become the wall that stops the flow. That's what I mean when I say the gifts of God flow through you and not just to you. It's to keep them going. I was alone, and someone welcomed me into their home. There's a kid who has no parents, should I welcome them into my home? That kind of thing, the gifts keep flowing.

Thank you Hitendra. I like that formulation. Grace is not meant to make us passive. I think that's a really helpful way of saying it. I might even go one step further and say, the grace by which we are loved by God is meant to empower us. We are loved by God and that love comes with expectations. The way that I like to say this is, at least as I understand it, in Jewish theology, God's love comes with expectations, but without conditions. God doesn't say, do this or I'll stop loving you. God says, I love you. Here's what I really expect. I expect a life of justice. I expect a life of holiness. And it seems to me at least, I don't know if everyone would agree with this, I'm not really sure. But I think that kind of lying at the heart of the biblical idea of covenant is the idea that God takes us seriously as agents. God doesn't want to build a redeemed world all by God's self. God wants people to be participants in making the world a place that God would want to live in.

I think that's a helpful and important way of thinking. It can often get thwarted. Sometimes people who are theists end up kind of articulating a kind of quietist position. Quietist meaning, "Oh, God is the actor in the world. I'm just supposed to sit quietly, sit on my hands and wait for God." I don't think that that's the core of what the biblical tradition is saying at all. I'm supposed to be a partner with God. That's an image from the rabbinic tradition. Partners of the blessed Holy One. That's our mission in the world, to be partners of God.

Yeah. I mean it's interesting. That brings me back to the first book I wrote, which you alluded to in the introduction. Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence. There's an extended discussion there comparing Heschel and Thomas Merton, a Jew and a Christian, on true and false selves, and about how much of the spiritual life is about shedding the false self that the true self can emerge. And one of the things Heschel says, and it's a little blurry now because it's been quite a number of years. But he says something like, "Our pursuit of self-actualization is totally self-defeating, because the self is actualized in transcending itself, in transcending the ego." The title "The Call of Transcendence" is really in part an allusion to the call of transcendence, meaning God, but also the call to self-transcendence by which he means decentering the ego, realizing that my ego is not the center of the world. That's an aspiration, I think, that you find different expressions in all kinds of different religious traditions.

The way that I think about this, and you can tell me if this is sounds simple minded to you, but it is really how I think about it, the fact that you and I experienced the world through our own mind foments the illusion that, "Wait a minute, my mind is the center of the universe after all. I experience everything through it. It's the center of my universe, isn't it?" And almost every religious tradition I've ever encountered, every meditative practice is sort of about in part realizing, "No. That's just the way you happen to see it, the way you happen to experience it at the most surface level. But that's not some deep truth. That's just the reality of your embodiedness." I always start with this as an ethical level, right? My perception of the world is no more the center of the universe than yours is. Even that totally relativizes myself, right? Oh, Hitendra sees the world this way. You see the world that way. Neither one of you has privileged access. Neither one of you is the center of the universe. Neither of you is seeing from God's eyes, right? And then at a deeper level, the realization that, sometimes I think Jews are a little bit ambivalent about whether to say ego is an illusion, but there is a way in which I come to realize, "Wait a minute, this is not some ultimate truth." By the way, this is something I gesture towards in my book a few times, I would like to go back and talk about this more at some point, the aspiration to begin to see the world as it were, through God's eyes rather than my own, so that when I see you and I think, "Oh, there's a guy who gets on my nerves," there's a part of me that says, try that again. There's a guy that God loves. Try that again. The fact that that person gets on your nerves is not some deep truth about the universe. That's just your experience. How does God see? And I think there's something actually really beautiful about that.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, a great 20th century rabbinic figure, I hope I'm remembering this right, talks about trying to make our own eye the way we see according to the supernal eye, the eyes from above. Which is an eye of love and compassion he says.

Yeah, I think that is such a difficult question, because you open your heart and feel like it gets crushed, right? At a certain point, you're just tempted to just physically cover your chest so that nothing else can get in there. I might say two things about this, neither of which I think is adequate, just to be clear. But, one is I have been thinking a lot recently about a book by a British literary critic Terry Eagleton, which is called "Hope Without Optimism," in which he makes the claim that I think a lot of people find paradoxical, which is why I find it helpful actually, which is that he thinks hope is the opposite of optimism, because optimism kind of doesn't acknowledge the depth of what's gone wrong, whereas hope, for it to be real, has to begin with a clear eyed vision of the sheer amount and depth of brokenness in the world. I forget if this is him talking or me. It has kind of become assimilated in my mind, so I don't want to attribute it to him if he doesn't say, but what makes hoping different from wishing is being committed to contributing somehow to making it better. I wish wars would stop. That's lovely. I'm committed too, and what are the ways in which I'm implicated in that? I say this because, when people say I'm not optimistic, I think what Eagleton taught me to sort of say is, "Okay, that's reasonable. It's a totally reasonable thing. There's no obligation to be optimistic." There's maybe an obligation to cultivate hope and again that involves agency. I said commitment, but you used the word agency. And that's right. I think.

The other thing I would say, and again I don't pretend that this is adequate, but this is something I think I once heard Elie Wiesel say, "When you feel overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of human suffering around the world, pick a corner and get busy." Because if you think you're responsible for all of it, you will basically drown. Is there a homeless shelter in your neighborhood? Is there an organization in Sri Lanka that is providing mosquito nets? I think that's something that I was just recently reading about. I hope I didn't just misarticulate that. So, pick your corner. Not because the rest of the world doesn't matter, but because it'll be so easy to become overpowered. Ideally, I guess, we come to care for more and more corners of the world. That's where I start.

The reason I say this is, I'll just be really honest about this. The reason I described both of these as inadequate is, they are not going to solve the horrors that we read about in our daily newspaper. They just might make the world a little kinder, a little gentler, a little bit more filled with sweetness. There might be a few more children who aren't hungry. We can fill in the various blanks of things that are important to us, but I think it's really really hard. I have younger kids than I should for my age. I had to start having kids late. I just want to, in a way, reaffirm what you said a minute ago. I'm constantly struck by raising kids in America, that they are growing up without any of the dreams of America that I grew up with. I was taught, and this might have been the privilege of an upper middle class white kid from New York, it might have been that. So I want to sort of acknowledge that. But I always thought, America, we're getting better morally. There are some really horrible stains on our legacy like slavery and racism, but we're working at it. I don't think my kids have that. And it's a little heartrending for me to watch. They have to work harder for hope than I did.

Yeah, that's interesting. I hope there's some truth to that. I actually need to sit with that a little bit, is that my experience of my children and their friends? I'm not sure. I guess it also depends what we're talking about, because maybe this is always true, but I sense a big gap in talking to 25 year olds versus talking to 15 year olds. I find in an interesting way, the 15 year olds that I interact with now feel humbler to me than many of the 25 year olds, more open to the sense that the world's problems are really complicated, and I can't just shout slogans to solve them. I think, one of the things I talk about briefly in the book is with all the importance of protesting injustice, we have to find ways to protest injustice in ways that don't lose the complexity of the world, such that we end up just shouting slogans and reproducing other, the oppressed becomes the oppressor kind of thing, right? I think this is a really interesting question for education. How do you raise kids who are passionate about fighting for a more just world and committed to listening to other people at the same time? I don't think that's an easy thing at all.

It's a beautiful question. Thank you for asking. I might start by saying something about this book that I just published, and then I'll talk more broadly. My real dream for this book without any illusions of grandiosity is that it might help more Jews and more human beings believe that we were each created with love for the purpose of love, and that we would strive in our own lives to materialize that. More broadly, I would like to see the Jewish community, although it's not limited to the Jewish community, I always say my dream is that someone sees a synagogue or a Jewish school and says, "Oh, that's a Jewish institution. That must be a bastion of kindness." People there must be so kind because they have the Torah. They must be so kind. One of my dreams is really just to keep sharing this vision of what Judaism is and even more fundamentally, what human life can be. The reality is, it is a strange thing to end with this. But, as someone who lives with chronic illness, I'm always aware that I don't know to what extent I should be dreaming of continuing to paint on a broad scale or painting on some smaller scale. There are book projects that I have that I hope, again, will kind of grow out of the one that I've just produced. But ultimately, how can we make some small contribution? How can I make some small contribution to making this world a more loving and just place? I don't know what else besides that really matters.

I'll give you a very traditional Jewish response to this, which is to center visiting the sick and comforting the mourners. When you know someone who's grieving and you can't decide, should I reach out one more time or not reach out one more time. When you know someone who's sick and you're not sure, just ask if you can be of service in some way. The Jewish tradition comes back again and again to those kinds of two behaviors as just being present with other people as they suffer. I think an awful lot can grow out of just a fundamental commitment to being there with each other, to being there for each other. Very few of us will, at the end of our lives, regret having visited our friend in the hospital, having made an extra phone call, just like the simple elemental humanity of you're hurting and I'm here. That's a very powerful place to begin, I think.

Thank you so much.