podcast # 43 Vayishlach

The speaker discusses the importance of the week's Torah portion and the return of hostages from Gaza. They also mention the significance of the female aspect of God, El Shaddai, and the Zionist movement. They share a story of female tank fighters in the Israeli army and discuss the controversy surrounding women serving in combat units. The speaker praises the bravery of women in the current conflict and reflects on the creativity and innovation in their friend's drashahs, noting how they defamiliarize the Torah and help people see it with fresh eyes. Shalom Shlomo, Shalom Elisha, Shalom everyone, welcome back, it is a very important week on so many levels, first of all it is a great parasha, where we finally become Israel, but also on the current events level, the hostages, our people, are returning from Gaza, still small numbers, but every one and one of them is a world, is a whole cosmos that is coming back, so the kids and the mothers were all excited about it, and there is a part that is really distressed about the understanding, the realization that there are still about 180 or so hostages still remaining there, and it could be there for a long, long time, and that is a scary thought. And Elisha, for all of Israel, watching these incredible scenes of mothers and children being repatriated, coming back, there is something incredibly touching that brings tears to your eyes, I think for the whole country, and it is related to the parasha, because you mentioned this in your drashah, about El Shaddai, which I interpret in a sense as kind of a female aspect of God, and we will get into that later, but let me just mention Elisha, I think this is our 42nd podcast, that is 80% of the 54 parasha, and I don't know where the time has gone, but I get to spend this wonderful hour with you, and it is a great privilege. I feel the same way, and I am also shocked at how fast time passes. Amazing. So Elisha, your drashah, let me read this passage. So Yaakov gets a blessing from El Shaddai, there are many names of God, and you mentioned that El Shaddai gives him a blessing in two parts, and they always appear together, these two blessings. The first is, I quote, the blessing of the matriarchs, our mothers, the four mothers, the blessing of fertility and abundance and continuity, which we get from mothers, not just genetically, but socially and spiritually. The second blessing is the blessing of the patriarchs, the inheritance of the promised land, continuity, Jewish people existed for 2,000 years without a promised land, and the land, which we finally have, owing to the Zionists, and Elisha, I always feel tremendously blessed that I am alive to experience this rebirth of Israel and to be part of it. Yes, I feel the same way, and the Zionist movement is getting such a bad rap in the world, and so many, even Jews, are becoming embarrassed by the word Zionism. Which is such a great success of our enemies to have done such a disservice to the Zionist movement, i.e., the fact that Jews today feel embarrassed about being Zionist is a great achievement of the Arab world. Zionism is, in my opinion, the most successful liberation movement, human liberation movement in human history, and brought us back home, and indeed, I think this parasha is a Zionist parasha. It's really quite amazing, last week I saw a clip of rabbis, Jewish spiritual leaders who are against Israel and against Israel's policy in Gaza, and against Israel's attempt to bring back the hostages and protect ourselves. I'm not so sure what they're thinking, and I'm so deeply hurt by their actions, but they're doing, they're reading Torah, I think just across from either Capitol Hill or the White House, and they were whispering the part in the parasha last week about the promise of, that Jacob is promised this land, that he will inherit this land, and when they reach this part, they actually whisper, and I'm kind of, I find it so painful that Jews can be so ashamed of who they are, of what our inheritance is, what the message is. You can have really strong opinions, but being so ashamed, and specifically, I think it's ashamed of El Shaddai, the El Shaddai within us, we're kind of rejecting this amazing quality, amazing divine quality called El Shaddai that you're pointing out to, and they're ashamed of that quality, and I think that Zionism, the Zionist movement has brought El Shaddai back to our lives. Yes, it has Alicia, and I have a great example of that, because the root of El Shaddai is Shud, and Shud is the female breast, so I think I'm allowed to interpret Shaddai as the power that women convey to us, and this is an example, Alicia, and you couldn't make this up, this is from reality, if our Hazal, our sages, would hear this, they would be in disbelief. At 6.30 a.m. on October 7th, Alicia, a group of women were awakened. They were in Nitsana, which is on the Egyptian border south of Hazal. They were part of a unit called Karakal, Karakal is a mixed male-female light infantry unit, including armor, including tanks, and the young women who were awakened were tank fighters, and they got into their tanks and drove along Highway 232, which by the way is never done, tanks rip up the road, they realized the urgency, two tanks and an American Hummer. The Hummer is usually the vehicle that the commanders drive in, there were no commanders, there were just these women, and they drove the Hummer, even though I hadn't done it before, and finally reached the area of combat in the south, at the place we saw on television where the fence was smashed down by Hamas bulldozers, and Hamas were pouring into Israel, and they engaged in combat immediately, and closed that opening of the fence with the tank and put the tank there, and stopped the terrorists from getting through, and wiped out a very large number of them, without a commander and their own initiative, using the Hummer as well, that they had never used or driven in, and never practiced on its weapon, and as they said on television, Hagar, one of the fighters, in 10 minutes, we figured it out, and engaged in combat. The power of women, and as one of them said on television, Alicia, the terrorists, they didn't know there were women in the tank or men in the tank, it didn't make any difference, and I think we've, as one of the commanders said, the male commander, this whole issue about women being in the army, and the IDF, and combat roles, that issue is dead, I mean, they absolutely proved themselves. I have a grandson who's in a commando unit, and he's religious, and he's scornful of women in the army, he thinks there's no place for them, but I think I will manage to convince him about, El Shaddai, El Shaddai in a tank, fighting the terrorists and wiping them out. Wow, I'm just mesmerized by the story, and for those who are not that versed in Israeli political discourse, it's been a huge controversy in Israel in the last 10 years or so, to what extent women should be serving in combat units. Women have been serving in the Israeli army, obviously, since the beginning, but not necessarily in combat units, that's rather new, and unit after unit, they are, they've been allowed to join, and they're doing really, really well, but the argument continued, and as you said, until this war broke out. This war, on so many levels, it found women to be at the front line of this battle, both the military, and the military aspect, but also the civilian. When we hear the stories from the kibbutzim on that day, on October 7th, the incredible bravery stories, both men and women, but the stories of women's bravery are just remarkable, are absolutely unbelievable, and it just changes our whole idea of male-female combat roles. Absolutely. Elisha, I want to step back a moment from the drashah, and take kind of an overview of our discussions over the last 42 weeks. Elisha, my field of research is creativity and innovation, and I've written books and done studies and interviewed many people, and studied entrepreneurs, trying to crack the code of creativity, the ability to come up with world-changing ideas, and frankly, I still have no idea, but I have been thinking a lot, for almost a year, more than a year, ever since I've known you, about the secret of your drashah, because over the last 81 years, I've listened to a lot of rabbis' sermons, and frankly, most of them plow the same field again and again, because it's easy to do that, and they tell the same stories again and again, and you don't do that. I think I've cracked your secret, Elisha, and let me explain what I've discovered. I discovered the explanation in a very unusual place, on a set of web-based comics. A brilliant man named Nathan Pyle, he's a Christian, a cartoonist, and he does cartoons called Strange Planet, and he looks on the planet Earth and the way we behave as if he were an alien, looking at the strange people and the strange planet, and he gives new words for things, so a kiss is mouth-pushing, and leftovers, leftover food is used food, and I'm thinking to myself, Elisha, in your latest drashah, in English, you make the point that Adam was put to sleep by God, who then fashioned woman out of his rib, but he anesthetized Adam. Adam went to sleep, but you point out in your drashah, Elisha, it never says that Adam woke up, so in a sense, you note, we are all sleepwalkers. I am a sleepwalker, in the sense that we look at the Earth, we look at the beauty of the Earth, the trees, the rainbows, the birds, but we don't really see them, we don't really see them, and in your drashah, you do something that this cartoonist, Nathan Pyle, calls defamiliarize, that is, you look at the familiar, the everyday, the Bible, we've read that so many times, and you see things in there that we never saw before, and you point them out to us, and you do that repeatedly, and that is highly creative. In fact, it's one of the tools entrepreneurs use. They look at something existing, and they examine the assumptions, and then they look at it with fresh eyes, and think about different ways that it can be used, so Elisha, you defamiliarize the Torah in your drashah, and you do that every week, and more than that, you help us do that. You help us find fresh things in the Torah, especially adapted to the times, and we're in really difficult, stressful times, so, kol ha'kavot. Thank you. I'm honored, I'm honored, and, well, it's not something that I can say that I'm trying to do, it's just, I guess that's just the way my mind is wired, I guess, but I'll take the compliment, I'll take the compliment, and I guess it's not even a compliment, it's an observation, yeah, yeah, so. Elisha, did you always have that skill, or did you acquire it along the way, to see things differently, in new eyes? Well, here's the problem, Shoma, I cannot look at myself from the outside, I can only look at myself from, so I've known myself now for 60 years, and that's all I know, so for me, that's the way I am, but I do remember, I remember since childhood, since I remember myself thinking, I've been pondering, pondering, like, why are things the way they are, and I think the deeper question always is, what's the source of this, what's the core of this, let's go deeper, wait, let's go deeper, why is it the way it is, I understand it is the way it is, but what's the mechanism inside, what underlies it, what's going on here, and one of the tools to investigate is bodily sensations, when I can feel my body getting excited, that there's like a living feeling, an excited feeling in my body, I know I'm on to something, when I feel my body in a dull state of sleepiness, so to speak, because I'm not asleep, but weariness, I know that I'm just like, blah, blah, blah, there's no novelty here, and I'm kind of addicted, it's an addiction, it's an addiction for better, for worse, an addiction for this feeling of being alive, so it's really asking the question, what's alive here, what's living here, it's like we have a puppy, quite a big puppy, I have to say, but that's another conversation, and I'm seeing how the puppy smells its way around, explores and smells, I've also learned that if you really want to exhaust the dog, the puppy, it's not about taking him for a long run, it's allowing them to explore, because the brain uses a lot of energy, and when they sniff and explore, it exhausts them, and then they get such a good night's sleep, and so do we, so I guess I'm kind of like a dog, sniffing, looking for life, looking for signs of life, looking for living water underground, and it's an addiction, it's an addiction. Alicia, I absolutely understand, by the way, here's a piece of trivia, our brain, in its thinking process, uses 20% of our energy, 20% of the energy we consume is not running around or using our muscles, it's our brain that really needs that energy, it's very important, and by the way, when I'm tired, I'm also stupid, because the brain doesn't have energy, in terms of what you just explained, this feeling that you have of excitement, that's actually known in creativity research, a social psychologist of Czech origin, named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote a book called Flow, and he described what you said, when we have great ideas, when we're composing music, Mozart had this, you have this sense of flow, everything just flows, and there's an inner excitement, because these ideas are coming from dark places in your mind, way in the back, and when we see them, they're very exciting, it's a process that is, as you say, addictive, because doing the same thing again and again is really boring, it's notifying, doing new things, coming up with new ideas, that's exciting, so yes, you are in the great tradition of all the innovators who've changed the world with new ideas, even some of our rabbis, a few of them, and Alisha, I want to talk to you about this idea that you mentioned, which is also powerful, you say God does not like it when people diminish themselves, now we need to discuss this a little deeper, because all of Hasidism, really, and much of other deeply religious people, much of it is about diminishing our ego, we make ourselves like the dust of the earth, and this is a powerful tradition, and you point out, really, that in order to be a blessing to the world, we need to have an ego, we need to know who we are, we need to have a strong sense of self-worth, self-awareness, but not too much, the atheists who were Zionists, who came here and settled Israel, the first Aliyah, the second Aliyah, they knew exactly who they were, they weren't waiting for God to do it, the religious factions felt this was sacrilegious, because who are we to start a country, only God can do that for us when the Mashiach comes, so yes, Israel was built by people with a strong, strong feeling of self-worth and self-awareness, even though they didn't believe in God, they were instruments of God, sometimes God works in strange ways, with strange instruments, even people who don't believe in Him. Yes, yes, yes, there's so much to say about what you just pointed out, first of all, I'm going to say two things, the first thing is that God is a very, it's an unfortunate word, because I really believe strongly that we all believe in God, we all believe in God, even the atheists who think they don't believe in God, believe in God, the only problem is that God is such a loaded concept, it's like this, when you ask a person, do you believe in God, they immediately think of a magical deity sitting on a cloud somewhere, or even if it's more sophisticated than that, even just the idea of there being a supreme being, and they have a really hard time with that, and that's not what God is all about, God could be that as well, but every time, I would say that, you know, if we're talking about excitement, every time we're excited, that's God in action, every time there's flow, that's God in action, now even if one explains it through chemicals in the brain, and the blood flow in the body, and hormones, etc., that's only explaining the way it appears in the world, the result, the result is amazing electrical and chemical processes in the brain and the body, that's how it appears in the physical realm, but the magic that's going on there, it's just another, that's, you know, let's just call that God, God is the life force, God is the life that's behind everything, if you feel alive, you are with God, you know, one of the beautiful blessings in the literature is like, may the force be with you, so that's another way of relating to God, so that's one comment, so I don't believe there is such a thing as an atheist, I apologize, and my best, best friend, he insists that he's an atheist, I've stopped arguing with him, but I just know, I know him really well, he is not an atheist, only has such a misconception of what God is, and he's my best friend, and, you know, he doesn't need my podcast, we talk all the time, and I've, you know, I've failed in convincing him for all these years. The second comment is that Rav Kook, you know, the first chief rabbi of, before Israel, of Palestine, he was in love with those early pioneers, he arranged this great, very well-known mission of Haredi rabbis who went to visit the Kibbutzim and the Moshovot of the first and second Aliyah, he came to Zichron Yaakov, he went to the Kibbutzim up north, I'm sorry, in the lower Galilee, and he was mesmerized, he was mesmerized by them, and he knew, he also knew that they are renewing the Jewish spirit, he knew that they are angels in the service of God, they will awaken Judaism from its slumber, that Judaism had lost its spark, lost its vitality, lost its oomph, and they were, and they recaptured it, and he was so moved by them, there's a beautiful story that in, I think, the last night of their mission, they're on Kibbutz Merhavia, and they're invited by the pioneers to join their bonfire, they're having a bonfire at night, before that, Rav Kook appeared in their dining room, and they wouldn't even talk to him, they said, kind of, don't you try and convince us to return to orthodoxy, we've abandoned that, we don't believe in that, it's dead for us, and he said, I'm, you know, he tried to tell them, I'm not, I'm truly coming to learn from your spirit, they didn't quite believe him, but then at the bonfire later, they were sitting there singing, and they started dancing, you know, as the pioneers, you know, mythically did, and it is told of Rav Kook, and I think it's a true story, that he went over to the guard, who was on guard duty, and asked him to switch clothes, to change clothes, he gave him his rabbinic clothes, and he took from him the pioneer garb, and he went back to the dancing, and joined them in their dancing, and they didn't realize it was him that was dancing with them, so, yes indeed, Zionism is a religious movement in the best sense of the word, it's the renewing of El Shaddai, and they didn't know it, they didn't call it El Shaddai, and El Shaddai is just a name, it's a name, but the spirit was there, and you point this out in your Drosha Elisha, going back to Yaakov, and we are named after Yaakov, whose name was Israel, Yisrael, you point out that the people of Israel, and Yaakov, the father of this nation, needed a new way of thinking, one that was heroic, controversial, confrontational, and physical, in order to return to the homeland, and Yaakov returns to the homeland, and so have we, but only after we were worthy of the blessing of having a homeland, by a new way of thinking, we need to be brave, and creative, and innovative, and bold, and not be afraid, and I want to return to the concept of El Shaddai, as kind of a female aspect of God, I've been interested not only in creativity Elisha, but in leadership, and trying to study the history of the world, and look at how the world gets in trouble, and who gets us into trouble, and Elisha, it's so obvious, it's the men who get us into trouble, it's the Hamas men who massacred our babies, and burned our houses, and our children, and took people hostages, it's the men, because evolution seems to have given men this idea that we have to compete with other men, and kill, and pillage, and do these terrible things, and the continuity of society, the Jewish continuity Elisha, in the Torah itself, it's from our four mothers, from Sarah, from Rivka, from Rachel, and it's from the mothers that we get the continuity, why? Women are communicators, women are builders of society, and men, we are macho, we are competitors, women are fearful, and they do it anyway, men are fearful, and they would never admit to it, if only we had more female leaders, I think we would have a lot less trouble, and a lot fewer wars in the world. Yeah, that's really interesting, I think it's really interesting that we're kind of moving in two opposite trajectories, one is there's less and less of talk of this division between the feminine and the masculine, the more progressive agenda is, we're on a spectrum where we could be both, we could be both and, which is one trajectory, which is really interesting, kind of eliminating the opposites between male and female, and allowing people to really be both, to have both qualities, and maybe even let go of the terminology, even, in order to, you know, just allow it to be human, as opposed to male or female, that's one trajectory, another trajectory is what you talked about earlier, about women joining the combat units in Israel, which is a huge, has been a huge discourse here, and the discourse is really clear, it's not about humans, it's about women joining the fighting forces, in the name of that other trajectory, of kind of allowing the differences to fade, to disappear. So, if we try and merge those two things together, my humble opinion is that Zionism, El Shaddai, this parasha, the whole thing, what brings it all together is the return to our body. Now, when we return to our body, the body also needs a home, it's a homeland, the body needs to fight, Jews for 2000 years felt very much at home in the books, in the Beit Midrash, we were not concerned with the body, the body is something we just have to live with, and Jews never negated the body, unlike Christianity that tried to negate the body by being celibate, you know, etc., and abstaining from food and the like, and Jews never were celibate and never abstained from good food, thank God, I love good food, but nevertheless, we were not really, we did not feel at home inside our bodies, and I think the Zionist revolution is the making peace between spirit and body, allowing us to return back to the body, back to the physical, back to the earth, back to the homeland, back to agriculture, back to growing your own food, and your own, you know, it could be both, whether it's vegetarian or meat and chicken, etc., so El Shaddai here, I think, represents, we said, you said earlier, you know, quoting the Rasha from four years ago, that basically Zionism is the union between El Shaddai of continuity and fertility, and El Shaddai of the promise of the land, I think the common theme in both of them is the body, experiencing life inside the body, we were given a body at birth, our spirit was given a body at birth, and told, your school, university, your learning is going to be inside this body, this body is your tool, and Zionism brought the body back to the Jewish experience. Terrific, so I have an example of that, excuse me, so we have to feed the body, Elisha, and today in the world, we're doing this really badly, there are 2 billion people who are overweight, and over a billion people who are hungry, and if we could just redistribute the food, it would work well, we are wasteful, we eat meat, cows are a terrible way to produce food, because they eat 7 calories and produce 1 calorie in meat, and I'm part of a very small part of a wonderful project called Minhalat Kumah, which is to rebuild the Western Negev, we don't call it Otef Aza anymore, the Western Negev, and the idea is to build this on agrotech, technology that drives food production, and part of agrotech will be plant proteins, so human beings need protein, we need protein for our body, to sustain our body, and you get protein from meat, but that's wasteful, we can't afford that anymore, and you can get protein from plants, so the Western Negev, and Israel is a world leader in plant protein, we buy steaks made out of vegetable protein, soy, in the supermarket, and they are delicious, absolutely delicious, and Israel is a leader in that, especially scientists at the Technion, who created something called Aleph Farms, which cultures meat in a test tube, without the cow, and without the waste, so Zionism will feed the world in the proper way, and all of those anti-Semites, who criticize Israel, and Jews, and who hate Jews, they will eat those steaks as well, and we will feed them as well, and we will use our medical technology as well, and we Jews will be a blessing to the world, and we are a blessing to the world, and part of it, a large part of it, comes from our little country. Yes, yes, and it's really quite incredible that the part of the country that was hit most, and hurt most, the Western Negev, or what we used to call until recently, Otif Aza, all the settlements around Gaza, they were at the forefront of bringing those blessings to the world on many, many different levels. These kibbutzim were doing some pretty amazing, amazing things, and it's so significant, and it's so symbolic that Hamas went after those settlements that brought so much blessing to Gaza as well, to Gaza too, and you know, these are people who've been murdered, we've mentioned that before, people who were murdered there, and people who were kidnapped, were those who drove Palestinian kids from the Gaza checkpoint to Israeli hospitals for medical care, and then found themselves being massacred on October 7th, and I feel really, it's really important to talk about those Jews who are becoming so anti-Israel, many of them have always been anti-Israel, so there's just like more so, and I really believe that it is a form of, I'm going to say something very harsh, and I hope it will be received reasonably well, I think it's a form of an emotional disability, an emotional disease, being so ashamed of your powers, ashamed of your body, ashamed of your right to exist, I think that is a real mental and emotional disorder, for Jews to be anti-Zionist, and I don't mean it in a sense of you're not allowed to be anti-Zionist, I could think of a lot of really good reasons to be anti-Zionist, but not for the reasons that are mentioned here, for example, a good reason to be an anti-Zionist, if someone really wants to be an anti-Zionist, is the notion that Jews were meant to be dispersed in the world, if we're supposed to be a source of blessing, well let's spread Jews around the world to be a source of blessing, and not stick them together in a huge army camp in the Middle East, and there's validity to that, there is validity to that, but it's like saying the spirit is a blessing, so you know what, let's drop the body, let's drop the body and have the spirit roaming over the world, the only way a spirit can be a blessing in the world is through, is by having a body and doing goodness in the physical world, so Israel is, the state of Israel is the body, while Judaism is the spirit, and the two of them together can do good in the world, without the two together, we're just simply, we're simply not going to be a blessing to the world. Absolutely, Arthur Kessler was a Jewish author, once wrote that a country is the shadow thrown by a nation, and for 2,000 years we were a nation without a shadow, a nation needs a shadow, it needs a country. That's beautiful, I love that, because a shadow is a sign that there is light, and if there's no shadow, that means there's no light. Exactly, we need to end Elisha unfortunately, but I'd like to read the last sentence, last paragraph of Yad Vashem. On a personal level, El Shaddai lives on, and he's accessible whenever we feel ourselves diminished, frightened, or weary, which is now many of us, he is well worth knowing, he's not pleasant, and his methods are sometimes scary, boy that's certainly true, the price he exacts can be high, but he holds the key to fulfilling our aspirations and our dreams, absolutely. Thank you all for listening, feedback will always be welcomed, and we look forward to meeting here again in a week from now. Look forward, Shabbat Shalom everyone.