Podcast #42 Parashat Vayetse

Alisha and Shlomo discuss the recent development of hostages being freed in exchange for terrorists and a ceasefire. They question the importance of Pidyon Shvoim, the freeing of hostages, and its source in Jewish teachings. They also discuss the concept of exile and how it allows for personal growth and discovery. They reflect on Yaakov's desire to be someone else and the dangers of aspiring to be someone we're not. They conclude that while aspiration is natural, it's important to focus on personal development rather than comparing ourselves to others. Shalom Shlomo, Shalom Alisha, and Shalom to everyone who is listening. You'll probably listen to this on Thursday or Friday or maybe Shabbat, who knows. But today is Tuesday by us, it's the end of Tuesday, it's very dark outside. We were just informed that there's a development in, an agreement is being reached to hopefully free 53 of the hostages in return for some terrorists and maybe a ceasefire or something. Ten hostages a day for five days, women and children mainly, in return for a five day ceasefire, release of some 300 terrorists in our jails, also youths and women, and a lot of food and fuel and other things for Hamas. Alisha, question, the Rambam mentions Pidyon Shvoim, the freeing of hostages, the ransom of hostages, and claims that it's a very, very important mitzvah. What is the source of that when we know that we're really not supposed to compare big and little mitzvot, they're all big, but what is the source of Rambam's statement, which to this day is part of our Jewish psyche here in Israel? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, let's just mention that we're on Parashat Vayetze, and the story is that Yaakov is fleeing from the land, not yet the land of Israel, because he will be Israel, he's not even Israel yet, so the land is not Israel yet. The land of Canaan is fleeing to his kin up in Haran in Syria, and yet the Torah portion and reality seem to mesh together somehow. That's a good question. It's a beautiful value that we have, that Pidyon Shvoim is a crucial mitzvah, and we're commanded to do Pidyon Shvoim. There are some really interesting stories about in the time of the Romans, when the Romans conquered Judah, and they took a lot of slaves from Judah to Rome, and they sold them in a slave market, and since there was a huge Jewish population in Rome, and Jews were pretty affluent, Jews took it upon themselves to redeem Jewish slaves from the market. They redeemed them, and then they freed them, and what happened was the price of Jewish slaves became that much higher, and there was incentive to bring more slaves from Judah because it's really good business. So by having this amazing value, the price of the slaves actually just increased and made Pidyon Shvoim, the releasing of hostages, even harder, and that's the case here as well with Gilad Shalit. I'm so happy he was released. I was very much in favor of that deal, but nevertheless, I think we freed 1,100 or so? Yes, over 1,000. Over 1,000 terrorists in return for one soldier, which I'm very proud of, but it set the price. And some of those 1,000 came back to haunt us, Elisha, and did really bad things to us. On October 7th. So it brings up really a lot of amazing, amazing questions, and we know that Abraham, the minute he heard that his nephew Lot was taken hostage, only two weeks ago in the parasha, three weeks ago even, he put everything aside and he went out to fight the armies in order to free all the hostages. So that set the example on many levels. And the idea that every human being is an entire universe, is an entire world, that too, that's a very important Jewish value, and it's a unique Jewish value. So on the one hand, I think we're going to be having some serious debates here in Israel over this, but I think we can be really proud that we freed one Israeli soldier at a time for over 1,000 terrorists, is because we regard this one single soldier, he is the entire world, and worth any terrorist, even though they came to haunt us on October 7th. Exactly. So Elisha, reading this wonderful drashah that you wrote, you wrote this in 2019, that's four years ago, and you speak about Yaakov, and he goes into exile, and you say, I'm reading from the drashah, like Yaakov, we all go into exile sometimes. Elisha, I'm really happy you're in Israel, and I'd like us to stay here for a few thousand years, what do you mean, we all go into exile sometimes? Yeah, yeah, what a great question. Exile is a very important word in the Jewish psyche, and the word for exile is galut. Galut. In Yiddish, by the way, my grandmother always used to speak about golus, which is Yiddish for galut. The worst thing you could say to somebody, he should go into exile. Wow. Wow, wow. Yeah, that's really interesting, and here she was saying it while living in exile, or in a diaspora. So this whole notion of there being a homeland, and being, today we don't call it exile, today we call it diaspora, and we also know that you can be in the land of Israel and feel in exile existentially. So the word galut, the word galut means, it's a beautiful word, because it really, it means, it comes from the word legalot, to discover. We go into exile to discover. What is it we're supposed to discover? When we're always on our path, when we're always home, when everything is wonderful, when everything is perfect, we don't develop, we don't evolve. It's only when we're forced out of our comfort zones, out of our place, out of our home, we go out wondering, as the Jews are so good at doing, do we really get to develop and evolve? So exile is the ultimate punishment, yet it is, everybody is going to go into exile. Sometimes have to. If we don't go into exile, we never legalot. We never discover what home really is, who we truly are. We never discover the powers that we have within us. The hostages, when they return back from exile, they're in a way in exile too. We talked about trauma. What I wish for them is, and they're going to have to process the experience they went through, and hopefully with really good professionals, but they're going to be able to reflect back and say, Wow, we survived this. We have incredible powers we didn't know we have. We didn't know we had. I just finished a counseling session now, and the woman that I was talking to in counseling, she saw what an amazing progress she made over the years. She discovered that she's actually much stronger than she ever thought she was. Yes, she'll be able to handle almost any adversity, any challenge in the future. This is something she could not say only two years ago, three years ago, when every challenge scared her so much. Today she knows that she has what it takes. She has the resilience. She knows she has what it takes to overcome the challenges. Exile is a deep existential term in Jewish thought. One of my favorite poems, Elisha, is relevant. It's by T.S. Eliot. He says, paraphrasing, Let us travel the world and then return home to see it for the first time. Beautiful. That happens to me all the time after traveling a lot. You come back to Israel and you really, really appreciate it. You see it for the first time. Yes. Let's talk about Yaakov. Yaakov commits a sin, and because of that sin he is driven into exile. The sin is, and you define this, the sin is from the moment of his birth until the day of his death. Yaakov wished to be something or someone else. He was trying to be someone other than Yaakov. Elisha, I've been doing that my whole life. When I went to high school in Regina, Saskatchewan, I was a little skinny kid, pretty good student, and I could run pretty fast. I wanted to be on the football team because all the girls really liked football players. I didn't have a hope. I didn't have a prayer to make it onto the football team, and to this day, and I'm 81 years old, I still regret that I never made the Kostan football team. Elisha, this is part of human life, aspiration. I even wrote a book with aspiration in the title because that's what drives entrepreneurs. We aspire to things that we can't achieve or that are too hard or that are great, and sometimes we make it. Nobel Prize winners aspire, and sometimes they make it. What's the problem with trying to be something better than who we are? Yeah, yeah. Ah, what a great question, and you're right. That's what the Beresha was all about in 2019. The fact is that we all aspire, and that's how development happens. Evolution is actually driven by our desire to improve, to be better. The problem is, and Yaakov really represents that. Yaakov is a twin. He's a twin brother, and it's not a coincidence. It's so deep, this idea that he's a twin brother, and Yaakov continuously wants to be Esav. He wants to be Esav. He wants to be Yaakov, and what's interesting at the end, he never does become Esav. He becomes Yisrael, so he does develop. He does evolve. He does grow. It's going to be next week, or next week for us, 20 years for Yaakov. The question is, as we develop and aspire to be so much more, what are we looking at when we're seeking to develop? Are we looking at the Joneses, at our neighbor, and comparing ourselves to them and how wonderful they are? You compare yourself to the football. Thank God you never made it to the football team, because who knows? First of all, I wouldn't have probably known you, because I don't hang out with people who do football. I hang out with people who love books and love learning, so no offense to anyone who's into football. What is it that we're looking to become? Yes, we do need to go into exile. Maybe you would have gone into the world of football, and that would have been exile for you, because you would have wanted to be like Esav, so you went out to the football field to be a hunter, a football hunter, and only to discover at the age of 40, oh my God, what was I thinking? By the way, Elisa, random trivia. Many football players, they make a great deal of money, pros, but many, many of them suffer a terrible damage called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which means their brains get scrambled, and they die early deaths, and they have dementia. It's awful, and they wear helmets, but our brains are not meant for being smashed into the ground. It's a great tragedy, and the football league has not taken care of that at all. And look how, at the age of 16, we don't think about that kind of thing. We just think of, we want to be loved by the girls, just like the football players are admired by the girls. Glory. Glory, right, glory and love. We want what they're having, and it's natural. The minute we ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, our eyes were opened. The minute our eyes were opened, we started comparing, and we wanted what they had. We wanted to be like them, and it's totally natural, but it is exile. To aspire to be someone else is different than to aspire to be a better you, or a more evolved you, to become who you are meant to be. One of the exercises that I do, both with myself and with people that I counsel, is we look at the word Ratson, Will. What do we want? What do we want? We examine that. We kind of close our eyes, and we ask ourselves deep inside, what do we want? And we follow our body's lead. The body knows. The body knows if it feels right and time after time, if people go through a deep process of evaluating what they truly want, they will always discover that what they truly, truly want is not what the other person has, but if they do the work, and discover that there's a deep want within them, something that wants to come out, something that wants to develop, something that wants to evolve, that is authentically theirs, and it's not a sub. I agree, and this brings to mind, Yalitza, a philosopher that you and I both love, Nietzsche. And Nietzsche was terribly distorted and ruined by the Nazis. He had a concept, I read it, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in college, in high school, and loved the idea of the will to power, being a weak little kid, Jewish kid, beat up by the Ukrainians. And the Nazis distorted the whole idea of the will to power as military power, as dominance, the ubermensch. That's not at all what he had in mind. The will to power for Nietzsche is the power of ideas. And there's an evolution of ideas. Ideas evolve just like things in nature do. And that's where the real power is. Our power to have thoughts, think, become who we really are, look into ourselves. Nietzsche was a brilliant philosopher. It's a terrible shame what was done to him. Yes, yes. For many, many years, he was one of my favorite, favorite philosophers. Today, a little bit less so, but still kind of left with that romantic aspiration to be your own, your own highest potential and not give in to smallness, to belittling of who we are. Like the meek shall inherit the world. No, they won't. No, no they won't. Elisha, you and I have an ongoing discussion about evolution. And initially, I thought we differed somewhat. But I think I'm coming around to your idea. The idea of the concept of evolution the more I think about it. So let's discuss, and it's relevant. Because in your Drosha, you say that creation desires evolution and it's even godly. This mechanism is godly. But there are several kinds of evolution. So let's make order in this. And let me start with the evolution that I really love, which is natural selection, biological evolution. We'll go on to your concept in a moment. I must cite this example, Elisha. Elisha, we are on this earth because of biological evolution and in particular because of a bacteria, a microbe, Elisha. We are on this earth because of a bacteria. Here's the story very quickly. The earth is four and a half billion years old. Halfway through the life of the earth, two and a half billion years ago, this little blue bacteria that you can't see with your eye called a cyanobacteria. This is what the scientists know. The cyanobacteria figured out something. This was done by random mutation. It figured out that it could use the energy of the sun and use that energy of sunlight and take carbon dioxide and with its energy break that molecule of carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen and it spit out the oxygen into the atmosphere and it used the carbon to build itself and to make more cyanobacteria. This pollution of oxygen is what we breathe today. This is why we are alive. All the things on earth breathing oxygen because of this amazing evolutionary development of the cyanobacteria. I see God in that and I think you do as well although we may differ a bit on what evolution really is. This is an amazing, amazing planet and it's driven by evolution. Right. I think maybe where we differ and we'll discover that we don't truly differ but where we seem to differ is what drives evolution. We can all see there is evolution. It's a fact. It's a simple fact and things evolve. Human beings evolve. Even within one's own lifetime we evolve. So clearly there is evolution. You know, Rav Kook believed in evolution. The question is what drives evolution? So if it's the survival of the fittest it's a reasonable, obviously a reasonable theory that it so happens that a better conglomeration of genes has a better chance of surviving and therefore it's the survival of the fittest. Those who are the fittest to deal with reality have a better chance of surviving and they will pass on their genes to the next generation. The next generation will be that much stronger than the generation before them. And that makes perfect sense. The question is what drives that? Is it just the random selection, the random survival of genes that simply seem to fit better or is there any kind of wisdom involved in that? And once you're willing to go to the sphere of wisdom then it opens up a whole range of possibilities. For example, that being fittest, being the best suited organism means, what does that mean? That doesn't mean, oh, you simply were able to survive. Oh, good job, you survived. Or that which fits better is, for example, able to bring something more articulate into the world, something more complex to the world. This complexity, the fact that things become more and more complex and more complicated in a positive sense to me is a sign that there's wisdom at work here. There's a wise force pushing this whole process forward and if I add Rav Kook here and we're not doing this whole thing justice because obviously it's somewhat superficial but we bring Rav Kook. Rav Kook will claim that this wisdom is the wisdom of goodness. It's not just mere survival of the fittest. It's all aspiring for betterment, for goodness. And to fit means to be a better person. The better you are, not necessarily naïve, not necessarily gullible, but the better you are, the better are your chances for survival. And I think one of the good examples is the Jewish people. We're not strong. Most of us didn't make it to the football team. Most of us were like you. We ended up being at best. We were professors at the Technion. And yet I really do think we bring a certain goodness to the world which the world cannot do without. So here's where we agree. Let me try to put some order in this. So there is biological evolution. It works through random mutations and most of them fail. And some of them succeed and encourage reproduction and multiply like the cyanobacteria. Scientific evolution. Darwin. Okay. There's two other kinds of evolution. And these are the ones that you were mentioning. But before we go to two others, I just want to put a little bit of question mark on the word random. That's all. Okay. Go on. That's what I tried to say. Sure. That's Darwin. The other two kinds of evolution are crucial. Crucial for the Jewish people, for everybody. There is social evolution. That means we create different experiments in different kinds of societies. The kibbutz. Martin Buber said the kibbutz is an experiment that has not yet failed. It failed for a while. And boy, it's making a big comeback. Alicia, the kibbutz is coming back. Social evolution. An idea. Let's try it. Let's see if we can organize society this way. And it really works. There's cultural evolution. Culture is simply information and ideas. And we have different ideas, and they kind of get thrown up in the air. In academic life, that's what we do. We throw ideas up in the air and see what comes down, what lasts. So there's this constant struggle of ideas, social organization, all kinds of things. And some work and some don't. I understand what's going on now, Alicia, as an example of social evolution. We have the evolutionary idea, the cultural idea of Hamas, and all the terrible things that it brings and that it's done to us. And we have we Jews. Our value of life, our respect for human beings, for human decency. And we're engaged in a worldwide global clash between these two ideas, not just Israel and Hamas, but this is global because there are lots of others who support the Hamas values. And when you see it in this context, first of all, I'm highly optimistic because there's no question that our values are enduring and through the power of evolution, they will prevail. It will be bitter. It's a bitter, painful struggle. They will prevail. There's no question. There's no question about it. Western values will prevail. And we Israelis, we happen to be in the front of the battle, right in the front line. Many people in the West don't get it yet. But they will. Which is an interesting idea. Western values will prevail while we see the American academia totally falling for the Hamas ideology. They think they're being pro-Palestinian. They're not being pro-Palestinian because anyone who wants to be pro-Palestinian, then you could not possibly support Hamas if you really care about Palestinians. So it's kind of interesting that it's not even necessarily... I would say that the evolution that's happening right now is it's not that the Western values will prevail. It's the Western values that are now failing in this battle because they've reached a certain level in which they no longer serve as the survival of the fittest. It's stupidity in its most horrific form. And we know that that's going to eventually lose the battle because we are an ancient enough people to see how eventually every battle brings out a better version of who we were. When the first temple was destroyed, in the second temple we saw the sages. When the second temple was destroyed, after that we saw halakha and prayer. Prayer took over from sacrifices. We actually evolved to a higher plane. And I think right now we're going to be evolving as well and Western civilization is evolving too. For example, one of the things that's collapsing now is the idea that there is no truth, that truth is subjective, it's relative and we're now adding a value here. We're saying we believe truth to be what preserves life with a capital L. We really believe in like Lechaim, to life. What really enhances life? And if Western values were able to view ideologies that embrace death and rape, etc. as viable ideologies, as worthy ideologies, this is the collapse of Western values. So Western values is now undergoing an evolution and the survival of the fittest is going to be those values that are going to cherish life most. We're going to beat this war eventually because we believe in goodness, because we believe in life on the most sublime level. Absolutely. And this leads me back to the Parsha and the question. Yaakov is in a holy place. He realizes that God is here. God is in this place. And he says to himself, And Rabbi Sachs quotes a wonderful Hasidic Rabbi called Paneem Yafot, a commentary. And he explains to the Rabbi what is meant and what the sin of Yaakov is, what his real sin is, not just trying to be somebody else. The sin of Yaakov is ego. How do we know that? Anokhi, I, lo yadati, did not know. I is in there twice. His ego is in the way. When our own ego gets in the way of values, principles, being godly, creating blessings, when our ego gets in the way, when the two I's dominate, we don't need two I's. He could have just said lo yadati. Why anokhi lo yadati? I is there twice. And this to me is a problem because self-awareness is a strong healthy ego knowing who I am. That's a really important part of creating blessings in the world. But an overly strong ego, and I see this, I'm an economist. Capitalism is all about the ego and getting money. And the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, is an egomaniac. And an anti-Semite and doing great damage. Excessive ego is terrible, but so is a lack of ego. How do we find the right balance in this? And Yaakov eventually does, right? He does, but maybe temporarily not so much. Right, and that's what exile is all about. It brings us back to exile. Every time we kind of fall for one side of the equation, it's all about ego, about me, about I, and not about society, the welfare of society and God, etc. Then, oops, we've fallen into exile or we're soon going to be led into exile. And if it's only about God and society and we totally erase the individual, there's no me, there's no I, then once again we will go into some form of exile, some kind of existential exile. Another great Hasidic story, very famous. I'm sure many of the listeners know this story. A person should go around the world with two pockets. Two pockets is always a good thing. And in each pocket there should be a little note. And in one note it should say, B'SHVILIN IVRAH HA'OLAM The world was created for my own sake, for my own creation. The whole world was created for me. Great note to read. Boosts the ego. And in the other pocket there should be another note saying, ANUCHI EFIL VASAR I am simply the dust of the earth. And we need to have both. And it's really beautiful. If we're talking about balance, ego, you said the word yourself, a healthy ego is very important. Someone who doesn't have a healthy ego cannot be a good person, cannot serve society, cannot discover their great contribution to the world because if our ego is destroyed for whatever reason, we're just busy trying to reclaim our ego. And we're going to bring a lot of damage to the world. So a healthy ego is great, but when the ego is inflated, etc. And Rabbi Nachman said, The whole world is a very narrow bridge. We're walking on this really narrow bridge. We can easily fall to the side of an inflated ego or to the side of a lacking ego. And the main thing, as Rabbi Nachman said, is not to fear. And Yaakov, we're his descendants. We will go into exile. We will go into exile because we make mistakes, because we try to be what we're not, because we try to emulate other people. And it's okay. It's all okay. The idea is, though, to be able to do cheshbon nefesh, to do reckoning and say, I think I've gone a little bit too far to one side. Let's do tshuva. Let's return. Maybe we can end on an optimistic note, Elisha. This is from Rabbi Sachs. He was in a drashad not long before he died and spoke about the ability of the Jewish people to endure, to prevail and endure our resilience. And here's what he said. What is remarkable is not merely that this one tiny people survived tragedies that would have spelled the end of any other people, destruction of two temples, the Babylonian and Roman conquests, the expulsions, persecutions, pogroms of the Middle Ages, the rise of anti-Semitism in 19th century Europe and 20th century as well, 21st century, and the Holocaust. It is truly astonishing that after each cataclysm, Judaism renewed itself, scaling new heights of achievement. Evolution. This is Masorete Judaism. We evolve. We change. We try different things. The world changes. We adapt. We learn. We try things. We reject some ideas. We accept others. And we endure. We endure. And we will endure. Right. So, in other words, the survival of the fittest are those who fit best at advancing society to better places. And that's the motivating factor in evolution. And now we're back to Bergson and back to Cook, and we're all happy. I'm going to write that down. Thank you, Elisha. Thank you, Shlomo. Thank you so much. And your comments are always appreciated. And hopefully by the time you'll be listening to this podcast, a bunch of children, babies, mothers, and hopefully the elderly are going to be free once again, God willing. And the whole country will breathe this huge sigh of relief and it will be heard around the world. Yes, but we're not going to fully breathe until all 238 are released. Every single one. Amen. Leetot. Shabbat shalom.