I have not finished the episode (I’ve had several sessions while doing dishes and the like) but I want to say to Elias and Pete what an amazing new podcast and enthralling first episode. I feel like I should be taking notes and studying! Thanks for this.
It’s an astounding, and humbling, degree of thought and work that you’ve put in here, Elias and Pete! It was a joy to hear your voices introducing a public intellectual figure and Jewish religious scholar about whom I was not particularly familiar at first, and to have my curiosity about him justifiably piqued. Here are some assorted thoughts and reactions that I had to your excellent inaugural episode of The Lost Prophets.
- I got into this a little bit on my initial Facebook post responding to the first twenty minutes of your podcast. But I find that I have to question or at least cast a certain, hopefully constructive and salutary, degree of doubt on the project of looking back to the intellectuals of the postwar era, in the service of confronting and addressing our (admittedly vast) present-day declining-hegemonic malaises.
If we find ourselves walking into the same set of cultural and ‘spiritual-political’ cul de sacs today, that we had been doing so in, say, the latter half of the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s, then what exactly is it that we are looking for, in these figures who are drawn out of that selfsame cultural and intellectual milieu? How can we be certain, in an endeavour such as this one, that we do not become ‘a dog that returns to his vomit’, and ‘a fool that repeats his folly’ (Proverbs 26:11)?
In certain instances, I believe you will justifiably and correctly argue, the figures you are highlighting here represent, and are wayfinders (an excellent term!) for, a cultural and spiritual-political road not taken. This seems particularly to be the case with figures like Wendell Berry, and especially Jane Jacobs. We have hard data to the effect that the design principles by which the modern American city was constructed, were largely directly contrary to those which Jacobs championed.
On the other hand, how can we be sure there is something worthwhile to retrieve from Paul Goodman, whose work served as a formative influence on the hedonic countercultural campus radicals and lifestyle-leftists of the 1960s who subsequently went on to become neoliberal yuppies in the 1980s? Or Arendt, whose cautions about the totalitarianisms of the European 1920s and 1930s have largely been read as an affirmation of the entire Western neoconservative Fukuyaman ‘end of history’ narrative, which in turn has taken its own totalitarian bent? Are there lessons not learned or roads not taken in either of their cases? Or in their cases, is the privatisation, commodification and intimidation into conformism that Elias astutely mentions, a feature rather than a bug?
I come from a position on figures like Goodman and Arendt that I’m hoping comes across as sceptical but well-meaning and persuadable. And I’m hoping your future podcasts can clarify yours, or at least complicate mine!
- Is the present moment actually to be considered a war of attrition among polarised opposites in the political sphere? Or is it more one of entrenched power cliques with certain common elite interests quibbling over small differences in the centre? Despite the efforts of Bernie Sanders (whose irrelevance nowadays serves almost as a case in point), ‘socialism’ is still a dirty four-letter word among Democrats, let alone Republicans.
- Your biographical treatment of Rabbi AJ Heschel intrigues me deeply.
You have a child of a vibrant and deeply traditional Hasidic milieu, the matrix which produced the entire Yiddish culture which is at once versant in Scriptural and Liturgical Hebrew as well as modern German, being forcibly uprooted from that culture and placed in an American context. That perspective alone, and the attendant cautions he provides to the Jewish community in America, is valuable and, I would hope, meaningful and relatable to immigrants to America from many different places—including the Middle East and the Islamic cultures of North and East Africa.
At the same time, this is a rabbi who has these takes on Scripture which are informed by a visceral and intimate familial relation with the original texts. His interpretations of them, which I’m kind of getting third hand through you two, are (to my own ear, attempting as I am to BECOME versant in Scriptural Hebrew) in equal parts enlightening, endearing and infuriating. All of those are good signs that the man knew his vocation and performed it excellently.
That quote of his that you share on God not being your uncle, but instead an earthquake, strikes me as deeply informed by Scripture and deeply in line with what the Nǝbī‘im were saying. The idea is that God, even though (and because!) He loves you, is willing to shake you out of your complacency for your own good—with ‘thunder and lightning’, as is usually necessary.
But his take on Šabbāṭ, for example, evokes strong linguistic connexions between the Levitical and Deuteronomical strictures and the Wisdom literature on the one hand… before, on the other, it flies off into a kind of Gibranian mysticism which completely baffles me. I’d have to do my own close studies on the relevant texts in the BHS and the LXX in order to figure out if he is saying something truly profound, or if he is indulging in a solipsistic, ephemeral flight of fancy. But provoking, or better to say disturbing, me to start such a study is a sure sign that he’s doing his job, at least from one perspective!
The other thing which disturbs me about him, though not in as salutary a way, is his justification of Israel’s conduct in the Six-Day War. Elias mentions that Heschel’s view on that question was in transition. I wish you both would have expanded on that a bit more and explored how that evolution occurred and what shape it eventually took.
You two are really doing an excellent job so far of convincing me that Heschel is someone I need to be reading and taking seriously.
- The discussion that Rabbi Held provides on the differences between Buber and Heschel, and how Heschel is less anthropocentric than Buber, is fascinating. But it seems to be almost a non-sequitur to veer the conversation back toward personalism, which is essentially a form of the Buberian anthropocentrism which Rabbi Held shows Heschel as trying to avoid: making a sort of symmetry between man and God that idolises man, and belittles God. My question is: how do we avoid this? How do we get more to where Heschel is, without constructing this philosophical idol around human dignity, which turns into human supremacy and mastery over the cosmos and ultimately over other men—which in turn is something that we’re trying to get away from?
Sorry if I’m not making this question clear, or if I’m positing it in too polemical a way. But it strikes me that Heschel is onto something here that, again, I’d like to explore further in depth. I really appreciate Rabbi Held coming back to that, and talking about Heschel’s foresight of the ecological critique and the Scriptural conviction that God is the sole landowner—we’re just His tenants, and replaceable tenants at that.
- How do we recover this sense of moral urgency? How do we regain the sense of alarm, of emergency, that animated Heschel and his intellectual peers?
We are currently, at this very moment, living in a time where Israel has dropped on Gaza, over three times the equivalent of the explosive force of the nuclear warhead that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Of course it’s in response to a grievous and unconscionable atrocity that was committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians. I hold no water for Hamas, any more than I hold water for WWII-era Japanese fascism or imperialism. But did the attack on Pearl Harbor justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I was raised on the idea (inherited from my Jewish grandmother as well as from my Methodist forebears on the other side of my family tree) that two wrongs don’t make a right. And also on the idea of proportionality: a slap in the face, though unpleasant and wrong, certainly does not provide a moral justification for murdering the slapper.
Rabbi Held holds what he calls ‘extreme left’, it seems, in contempt for supposedly denying to the Israeli state the right to self-determination and self-defence. But it seems that the ‘left’, more broadly (I very much so include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Maté père et fils, Max Blumenthal, Katie Halper and so forth in this characterisation), has the matter in its proper perspective. It’s outright ludicrous to me to posit that what the Israeli state and people are doing now to the Palestinian people, by Augustinian just-war standards, is either justifiable in terms of self-defence—or in any way constructive to its moral or spiritual, let alone political, self-determination!
So, I’ve wrestled a lot with what you’ve been saying here, and I’ve probably been doing so using very ‘hard’ language. But I hope that it comes off not as an attack, but as an appreciation in the same way that Held clearly appreciates Heschel. The ‘moment’ that you appeal to in the introduction has taken me for more than my share of the ride. And from what you’ve been talking about here, Heschel seems to have been wrestling with problems parallel to those I’ve been wrestling with. Thank you both so much for hosting this episode, and this interview. I’m clearly going to have to augment my reading list yet again!
Thanks for engaging so wonderfully here, Matt! And I promise we will address your points about Goodman, Arendt, and the destruction of Gaza. (We have a stunning interview coming with the late Marc H. Ellis.) More soon!
While I don’t share all of the views expressed in this episode, I am deeply grateful for courage, conviction, perspective, understanding, and open-mindedness exhibited in this episode. Rabbi Held is a voice we desperately need in our time as we seek true, deep solidarity and subsidiarity. I am so excited for the next episodes. Well done.
I have not finished the episode (I’ve had several sessions while doing dishes and the like) but I want to say to Elias and Pete what an amazing new podcast and enthralling first episode. I feel like I should be taking notes and studying! Thanks for this.
Thanks Santiago--you are exactly the kind of listener we love to have!
It’s an astounding, and humbling, degree of thought and work that you’ve put in here, Elias and Pete! It was a joy to hear your voices introducing a public intellectual figure and Jewish religious scholar about whom I was not particularly familiar at first, and to have my curiosity about him justifiably piqued. Here are some assorted thoughts and reactions that I had to your excellent inaugural episode of The Lost Prophets.
- I got into this a little bit on my initial Facebook post responding to the first twenty minutes of your podcast. But I find that I have to question or at least cast a certain, hopefully constructive and salutary, degree of doubt on the project of looking back to the intellectuals of the postwar era, in the service of confronting and addressing our (admittedly vast) present-day declining-hegemonic malaises.
If we find ourselves walking into the same set of cultural and ‘spiritual-political’ cul de sacs today, that we had been doing so in, say, the latter half of the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s, then what exactly is it that we are looking for, in these figures who are drawn out of that selfsame cultural and intellectual milieu? How can we be certain, in an endeavour such as this one, that we do not become ‘a dog that returns to his vomit’, and ‘a fool that repeats his folly’ (Proverbs 26:11)?
In certain instances, I believe you will justifiably and correctly argue, the figures you are highlighting here represent, and are wayfinders (an excellent term!) for, a cultural and spiritual-political road not taken. This seems particularly to be the case with figures like Wendell Berry, and especially Jane Jacobs. We have hard data to the effect that the design principles by which the modern American city was constructed, were largely directly contrary to those which Jacobs championed.
On the other hand, how can we be sure there is something worthwhile to retrieve from Paul Goodman, whose work served as a formative influence on the hedonic countercultural campus radicals and lifestyle-leftists of the 1960s who subsequently went on to become neoliberal yuppies in the 1980s? Or Arendt, whose cautions about the totalitarianisms of the European 1920s and 1930s have largely been read as an affirmation of the entire Western neoconservative Fukuyaman ‘end of history’ narrative, which in turn has taken its own totalitarian bent? Are there lessons not learned or roads not taken in either of their cases? Or in their cases, is the privatisation, commodification and intimidation into conformism that Elias astutely mentions, a feature rather than a bug?
I come from a position on figures like Goodman and Arendt that I’m hoping comes across as sceptical but well-meaning and persuadable. And I’m hoping your future podcasts can clarify yours, or at least complicate mine!
- Is the present moment actually to be considered a war of attrition among polarised opposites in the political sphere? Or is it more one of entrenched power cliques with certain common elite interests quibbling over small differences in the centre? Despite the efforts of Bernie Sanders (whose irrelevance nowadays serves almost as a case in point), ‘socialism’ is still a dirty four-letter word among Democrats, let alone Republicans.
- Your biographical treatment of Rabbi AJ Heschel intrigues me deeply.
You have a child of a vibrant and deeply traditional Hasidic milieu, the matrix which produced the entire Yiddish culture which is at once versant in Scriptural and Liturgical Hebrew as well as modern German, being forcibly uprooted from that culture and placed in an American context. That perspective alone, and the attendant cautions he provides to the Jewish community in America, is valuable and, I would hope, meaningful and relatable to immigrants to America from many different places—including the Middle East and the Islamic cultures of North and East Africa.
At the same time, this is a rabbi who has these takes on Scripture which are informed by a visceral and intimate familial relation with the original texts. His interpretations of them, which I’m kind of getting third hand through you two, are (to my own ear, attempting as I am to BECOME versant in Scriptural Hebrew) in equal parts enlightening, endearing and infuriating. All of those are good signs that the man knew his vocation and performed it excellently.
That quote of his that you share on God not being your uncle, but instead an earthquake, strikes me as deeply informed by Scripture and deeply in line with what the Nǝbī‘im were saying. The idea is that God, even though (and because!) He loves you, is willing to shake you out of your complacency for your own good—with ‘thunder and lightning’, as is usually necessary.
But his take on Šabbāṭ, for example, evokes strong linguistic connexions between the Levitical and Deuteronomical strictures and the Wisdom literature on the one hand… before, on the other, it flies off into a kind of Gibranian mysticism which completely baffles me. I’d have to do my own close studies on the relevant texts in the BHS and the LXX in order to figure out if he is saying something truly profound, or if he is indulging in a solipsistic, ephemeral flight of fancy. But provoking, or better to say disturbing, me to start such a study is a sure sign that he’s doing his job, at least from one perspective!
The other thing which disturbs me about him, though not in as salutary a way, is his justification of Israel’s conduct in the Six-Day War. Elias mentions that Heschel’s view on that question was in transition. I wish you both would have expanded on that a bit more and explored how that evolution occurred and what shape it eventually took.
You two are really doing an excellent job so far of convincing me that Heschel is someone I need to be reading and taking seriously.
- The discussion that Rabbi Held provides on the differences between Buber and Heschel, and how Heschel is less anthropocentric than Buber, is fascinating. But it seems to be almost a non-sequitur to veer the conversation back toward personalism, which is essentially a form of the Buberian anthropocentrism which Rabbi Held shows Heschel as trying to avoid: making a sort of symmetry between man and God that idolises man, and belittles God. My question is: how do we avoid this? How do we get more to where Heschel is, without constructing this philosophical idol around human dignity, which turns into human supremacy and mastery over the cosmos and ultimately over other men—which in turn is something that we’re trying to get away from?
Sorry if I’m not making this question clear, or if I’m positing it in too polemical a way. But it strikes me that Heschel is onto something here that, again, I’d like to explore further in depth. I really appreciate Rabbi Held coming back to that, and talking about Heschel’s foresight of the ecological critique and the Scriptural conviction that God is the sole landowner—we’re just His tenants, and replaceable tenants at that.
- How do we recover this sense of moral urgency? How do we regain the sense of alarm, of emergency, that animated Heschel and his intellectual peers?
We are currently, at this very moment, living in a time where Israel has dropped on Gaza, over three times the equivalent of the explosive force of the nuclear warhead that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Of course it’s in response to a grievous and unconscionable atrocity that was committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians. I hold no water for Hamas, any more than I hold water for WWII-era Japanese fascism or imperialism. But did the attack on Pearl Harbor justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I was raised on the idea (inherited from my Jewish grandmother as well as from my Methodist forebears on the other side of my family tree) that two wrongs don’t make a right. And also on the idea of proportionality: a slap in the face, though unpleasant and wrong, certainly does not provide a moral justification for murdering the slapper.
Rabbi Held holds what he calls ‘extreme left’, it seems, in contempt for supposedly denying to the Israeli state the right to self-determination and self-defence. But it seems that the ‘left’, more broadly (I very much so include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Maté père et fils, Max Blumenthal, Katie Halper and so forth in this characterisation), has the matter in its proper perspective. It’s outright ludicrous to me to posit that what the Israeli state and people are doing now to the Palestinian people, by Augustinian just-war standards, is either justifiable in terms of self-defence—or in any way constructive to its moral or spiritual, let alone political, self-determination!
So, I’ve wrestled a lot with what you’ve been saying here, and I’ve probably been doing so using very ‘hard’ language. But I hope that it comes off not as an attack, but as an appreciation in the same way that Held clearly appreciates Heschel. The ‘moment’ that you appeal to in the introduction has taken me for more than my share of the ride. And from what you’ve been talking about here, Heschel seems to have been wrestling with problems parallel to those I’ve been wrestling with. Thank you both so much for hosting this episode, and this interview. I’m clearly going to have to augment my reading list yet again!
Thanks for engaging so wonderfully here, Matt! And I promise we will address your points about Goodman, Arendt, and the destruction of Gaza. (We have a stunning interview coming with the late Marc H. Ellis.) More soon!
While I don’t share all of the views expressed in this episode, I am deeply grateful for courage, conviction, perspective, understanding, and open-mindedness exhibited in this episode. Rabbi Held is a voice we desperately need in our time as we seek true, deep solidarity and subsidiarity. I am so excited for the next episodes. Well done.
Thanks, Alex--you're exactly the kind of listener we're hoping for!