Across the West, battles rage over whether liberalism and liberal values (liberal in the sense of John Locke, not liberal in the sense of “left wing”) will continue to shape society and government. In the United States, Canada, the UK, France and Germany, to say nothing of Scandinavia, the tectonic plates are crashing and grinding, and in each, the shockwaves are being felt in numerous ways.
In Israel, the same battles rage, but with a twist. Is liberalism really Jewish? Or is it a Christian idea that has somehow insinuated itself into the heart of what should be a more authentically Jewish state?
Until October 7th put the judicial reform project to (temporary) rest, the battles over individual rights, the independence of the judiciary, the freedom of the press were the main source of discussion when one mentioned Israel.
The issue of liberalism or something-else hasn’t gone away in Israel—it’s just gone a bit quiet until the war is over, until there’s a judicial crisis or until there are elections. But even while seemingly dormant, the intellectual clashes continue. As Tomer Persico explains in our conversation today—and in his new book which he describes for us—people like Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir and others are basically making a claim about the very essence of Jewish views of society and government. They suggest, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, that liberalism is a fundamentally Christian implant onto a Jewish society and it’s time to revert to more authentically Jewish values.
Nothing could be further from the truth, argues Persico. And in today’s conversation about his book, one of a series of new Israeli books on liberalism, freedom and individual rights that Persico edits, he explains what is at stake and argues for a reading of Judaism which places liberal values front and center.
Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Chief Editor of the ‘Challenges of Democracy’ book series for the Rubinstein Center at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Persico was the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies for three years and has taught for eight years in Tel Aviv University. His fields of expertise include the liberal order, Jewish modern identity, Contemporary Spirituality and Jewish fundamentalism.
His first book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition (Hebrew) was published by Tel Aviv University Press in 2016, and his second book, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea was published by Yedioth in 2021, and will soon be published by NYU Press in 2025. His third book, Liberalism: its Roots, Values and Crises (Hebrew) was published by Dvir in 2024.
Tomer also has his own blog in English, which you can find in this link.
Tomer Persico’s book In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea in is available on Amazon
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
Over the past two years of war, of tragedy in virtually every direction that one can possibly look, what's happened to Israelis, what's happening and not happening with the hostages, what's happening on the Gaza side of the border, and everywhere one turns. It's easy to forget that Israel is a country and a society that has much more going on than politics and war. But the truth of the matter is that what makes Israel an extraordinary place, and what makes Israel, one of the things, at least, that makes Israel such a wonderful place to live, is the intellectual foment, the energy here in the academy and far beyond the walls of the academy, that make this really as a society of ideas. There are lots of different pockets of ideas here. There are people in the sciences, and there's people in tech, and there's people in the humanities, and so on and so forth. Then there's a group of people, among many, many other talented groups, who I think try to bridge the world of Jewish religious thinking, Jewish traditional classical thinking, with the cutting-edge ideas in the West. To my mind, one of the people who has always been outstanding at this, and who whenever I see him in a paper or a magazine, wherever I immediately read, is Tomer Persico.Officially, Tomer Persiko is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a senior research scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle East Studies. He's the author of several books, including the Jewish meditative tradition in Hebrew, and liberalism: Its Roots, Values, and Crisis, which is in Hebrew. We're going to talk today about a new book of his that's come out from NYU Press, an expanded version, a significantly extended version, actually, of the book that I just mentioned in English called In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea. I'm not going to do justice to all of Tomer's impact on the intellectual class in Israel, but he's really quite widely recognized as a person of enormous intelligence, profound thinking, a person who cares deeply about the liberal tradition and the way in which it's finding and not finding at the same time, a home in a contemporary Israeli political and intellectual discourse. Tomer and I saw each other not that long ago, actually, at a conference at Tel Aviv University at the Rabin Center, which was celebrating a new book about the. What was it called? The Retreat of Democracy?Yeah. About populism and extremism and how they feed off each other.And one of the authors of that book is Yaniv Roznai, who's actually been on the podcast before speaking about judicial reform. And I saw Yaniv at the conference, of course, and he readily agreed to come back on and talk to us about his new book. But that whole series is being edited by Tomer Persico. So he's got his fingers in a lot of pies and always with a great quality. And given the fact that in the Western world, everywhere one turns, certainly in the United States and in Israel, but far beyond, one can see in Europe and South America as well, some of the central ideas that have shaped Western civilization, and certainly, Western democracies for several generations now are very much under attack. This felt like a really important moment to have Tomer talk to us, first of all, about the ideas themselves. And then we'll talk about Israel in light of what's changing, and how it's changing in Israel, how it's not changing in Israel, how optimistic he might be that we can keep that going in Israel and so forth. So Tomer on a very, very, very hot, and I don't know if it's called it cloudy, but it looks like there's huge fires outside of Jerusalem, but I don't think there are. You can look like you can cut the air. The air is gray. I don't know what it is, but in any event, it's gross. I'm glad that we're inside in an air-conditioned office. Thank you so much for taking the time.Daniel, thank you for your very, very kind words. Thank you for having me.It's really, really a delight. Tell us a little bit about this really extraordinary book, which focuses on five themes: Selfhood, Freedom, Conscious, Equality, and Meaning. But really, through those five concepts, you do a history of the West. It's an intellectual history of the West. There's a lot of people. I said to my wife last night, there's a lot of young people that are coming out of the army now. I think this is a terrible thing, but she doesn't think so, who are unbelievably talented. The army taught them how to code in the most cutting-edge ways. They come out, they come from families where it was obvious you're going to college. This is not a question. All of a sudden, they can earn more in the marketplace than they're going to be able to justify not doing. So they skip college. They go right into the world of tech. Then I was saying to my wife just the other day, we were talking about this, Well, how are these kids going to get an education? And of course, the truth of the matter is that the world is a very different place than it was when I went to college. Even when you went to college. There are ways for autodidacts to learn a lot that they didn't used to have, there are AI and the Internet. But I would say, even though I'm very much encouraging people to go to college still, if one wanted to do one or two books that really trace some of the critical ideas that have shaped Western civilization, this would be one of the many books that I would point to that I think has done a really amazing job. So tell us about the idea of the book, where it came from, and why you wrote it, and what it says.I mean, as you said, it's an intellectual and cultural history of the West through the prism of the idea that all humans were created in the image of God. When I started researching this, I was actually surprised that no such book had been written because you think, This is such a fundamental idea. It's chapter one in Genesis. Obviously, somebody is going to write how this influenced Western tradition, Jewish tradition, Christian tradition, Christendom, whatever, Europe, something. But no such book has been written. Okay, I picked up the glove and really tried show how this is a seminal idea in the development of the West, in the development of selfhood, of conscience, of liberty, as you just read, of equality. This begins with Antiquity, in which the image of God really comes to establish an individuality that was not there in other cultures. Think of yourself as an organ of a wider network, your tribe, your clan, your ethnic group. The image of God makes every individual not only equal to every other individual because everyone was created in the image of God, we are fundamentally essentially equal, but it makes people significant. It makes individual life meaningful.Every person is a whole world onto itself, the Mishna says. Not only equality, that is such much an important contribution, which really establishes a individuality that is translated immediately to laws in the Bible. If you compare biblical laws to Mesopotamian laws, Babylonian or a Syrian, and Acadian, et cetera, you can see clear differences. I'll give one example. In all of Mesopotamia, and indeed in the Hellenistic world, you could first of all, trade life for money. If somebody kills somebody, you can pay in order for them not to be punished by death on the one side. On the other side, People would be punished for the sins of others. If I would kill a son of a certain party of families, of a patriarch, of a head of a household, my son would be killed. No, my son didn't do anything. He's not connected to the deed in any way. But he would be killed because he's the equivalent of measure for measure. He's the equivalent of the place that the other patriarch's son holds in the scheme of the family.Well, eye for eye, leg for leg. Yeah, but a son for a son. Our tradition explained that differently.Exactly. We You have the Bible, you have Genesis saying, you have the Deuteronomy saying, sons will not be punished for the sins of their fathers. Fathers will not be punished for the sins of their sons. Each will be punished for their own sin. This is a straight-off contradiction of Hammurabi laws, of Assyrian laws. The Bible is arguing with them. The prophets are saying, Father ate unripe fruits, and the tease of the sun will be hardened. No, no, of course not. The Bible places each individual as a world unto themselves as significant, and so the law changes. And what I show in the book is that when this idea gets picked up by Christianity, that becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, that becomes a universal religion, and indeed today the most widespread and biggest religion in the world, when this idea gets picked up, it, of course, changes. It, of course, mutates in different directions, but at the end, it influences the laws that we today legislate, just as the biblical laws were influenced. It produces, not in a deterministic way, but it produces the liberal order which today we hold so dear. I mean, not in a deterministic way is saying, it's not that if you plant the idea of the image of God 3,000 years ago in some culture, 3,000 years later, you'll get the liberal order. It's not so simple. Obviously, there are a lot of other conditions that come into play, material conditions, cultural conditions. But even if it's not a sufficient condition, it is perhaps a necessary condition for the liberal order. And indeed, no other culture which does not have the idea of all people created in the image of God, produced rights discourse, respect for of the individual above, democracy, et cetera. And in that way, by the way, my book is also another book in that infamous genre of books trying to answer the question, why the West? Why has the West, why has European culture and then American culture been so successful and basically dictated the hegemonic culture of the world?Would you say has the West or did the West?What do you mean?Is this idea in decline? It's a separate question, obviously. It's not what the book is most fundamentally about, but I think people can't help but asking, where we're witnessing a world. First of all, you can't help but think, of course, slavery in America blossomed in a highly Christian environment. They were people of faith, and they absolutely believe that. You could look at Israel today. The people that say, go wipe out Huwara and go wipe out Gaza, are people who wear kippot and would I'll tell you, at least, I absolutely believe that all people are created in God's image. How can I not believe that? It says it in the Book of Genesis. So when you say there's no deterministic way, you're obviously right, because Christianity produce slavery and right wing Judaism is producing all sorts of horrible things. Let's go 30,000 feet above that, just before we come back to the argument of the book, is the West still going to be the West, or are we looking back at something that was and it's still close enough that we can describe it?Look, we're in a crisis. There's no doubt about it. We're in a crisis of the liberal order. I would say we're in the second crisis of the liberal order. The first one was 100 years ago with fascism and communism coming up. As explicit rivals of the liberal order, Mussolini and Lenin would say, liberalism is bourgeois nonsense, is egocentric, is a Christian, American, whatever idea, and we are against it. And we know what happened in the first crisis of the liberal order. Many, many Awful things. But liberalism prevailed. I think we're in the second crisis of the liberal order. I think the enemies of the liberal order right now are weaker than they were, are less coalesced, less sophisticated. They're less complex. We tend to forget how alluring and how complex were the ideologies of fascism and communism. These were serious frameworks of thought that people wrote books about, that people argued about.That attracted a lot of Jews, both in the United States and in Palestine and early Israel. And so today we don't have that. We have populism. We have, Identarian politics on the left. But we certainly are in a crisis. I'm not pessimistic. I'm optimistic about the liberal order.That was my basic point.I think the liberal order has withstood greater tests. And even the very fact that we live in a liberal order it's the conclusion of accumulated effort by so many activists and thinkers, most of them we have not even heard about. Many of them paid with their lives to forward what they thought was the dignity and autonomy and sacredness of each individual. And they succeeded against forces much greater than today, against a church that could burn you at a stake, against absolutist monarchy that could send you to the Bastille, et cetera. We did it once. I think we'll do it again. I think the West will remain essentially with this liberal character. Now, having said that, again, As you said, it's easy also to take from the Jewish tradition and from the Christian tradition, certainly from other traditions, other voices. We have other voices in our traditions. We have violent voices, we have racist voices, we have ethnocentric voices. We have all these. I think we can debate this. We can talk about this more, but I think the choice is ours. The choice in the end is ours. I choose to go with Chapter 1 in Genesis, the beginning of humanity, the beginning of personhood, which is that all people were created in the image of God.Okay, we'll come back and talk about the present time in a little bit because I want to ask you how a country that prides itself on its liberal ethos. Again, we just want to make sure that everybody understands liberal does not mean left wing. I think people get it. I just want to make it very, very clear. But I want to come back to that and talk about how a country that prides itself on having been founded very much in the liberal tradition. Even Ben Gurion, who violated it left and right and up and down, and day and night, believed in it very, very much. I want to talk about eventually how a country that was so deeply rooted in this liberal tradition has produced a religious edifice, which on one hand is deeply derivative of the book that you're talking about here, i.e. Genesis and the Tanakh and so forth, which takes this idea of everybody being created God's image seriously, and yet has produced, I think, a fundamentally illiberal way of life. If you had to ask yourself, tell yourself, a person who's coming from a yeshiva. You don't tell them which one. They're coming from five years learning in a yeshiva. Are they likely to be more likely to be leaning towards the ideas that are based in this book, which come from Genesis, or more likely to be ethnonationalists. It wouldn't be a bad bet to say that they're more likely to be ethnonationalists. I want to hear you think a little bit about with us later, because to me, this is what keeps me up at night, literally. How did this country produce that? But let's not get there yet. I want to talk about the book more, and I want you to explain more about the ideas that are in the book. So you take this idea that everybody's created in God's image as the central idea of the liberal West. You say that this idea basically produced the Western order as we know it.First, individualism, equality, I mean, liberty as personal autonomy. It's a specific interpretation of liberty. There are other ways to understand liberty. Meaning it even produces atheism and secularism at the end of the road. Because when you concentrate on the person, on the individual, and on individual autonomy, and when you locate great sources of sacredness and then also authority and also meaning within yourself. The image of God is within me. Maybe it's my reason, maybe it's my conscience, perhaps it's my soul. When you do that, the person learns to rely more and more on themselves and to treat themselves as indeed a source of authority, a source of meaning. That can take you to secularism because you say, I mean, why do I need the church to tell me how to interpret the Gospels? I can read and use my God-given reason or God-given conscience to interpret the gospel, the Holy scriptures, however I think. That's what Luther did.I may not need the Gospels. I may not need the Gospels at all.Then next step is, why do I need the Gospels at all? Why do I need Jesus? Why do I need Moses? I can be my own conduit to God, or what do I need God for? I can be my own God, my own person, my own authority.My own moral compass.Perhaps it's even in my human dignity to reject these fables and myths that I feel contaminate or dilute my reason or my dignity if I adopt them. I'm my own person. Then you get 20th century existentialism like Camus, who will say, Sisyphus is placed in front of a world that is an empty, barren, devoid of meaning, wasteland. But his dignity depends on him saying, yes, and I'm not going to fault. Yes, this is the truth. I'm not going to let myself be carried away with fantasies or fables that will comfort me, of course, but of course, will suppress my free thinking, will injure my dignity. But for me to remain my own man, a dignified human being, I have to reject all these as nonsense.So there is a way, tell me if I'm wrong, is there's a way, is there not, in which the liberal order undermines the liberal order in the following sense. The liberal order is derived from taking a biblical idea, as you show in your book, very, very seriously. We are all created in God's image. It's not a bumper sticker, and it's not an aphorism, and it's not something to sing about at a summer campfire, whatever. It's a serious fundamental philosophical idea. And you're saying that this idea that everybody is created in God's image, which then has implications for autonomy and individualism and for freedom and so forth, which is the basis of the liberal order. But then if I take this autonomy idea seriously, then I don't really need, at the end of the day, the church or the synagogue or the community or the Bible. And I can actually then come up with my own senses of whatever. One could argue, I guess, that the liberal order destroys the very sense of community that the liberal order needed in order to be created and to thrive. It has the seeds of its own burial buried inside it. Is that a fair assessment?I think that's true. I think the liberal order on its own will, at the end, self-destruct. I mean, it undercuts its own sense of community. As you said, it undercuts its own founding myth because at first you say, of course, all people are sacred because of the image of God, we must respect, et cetera. Rights discourse hinges on the image of God, as I show in the book. But then you cease to believe in God, and of course, you reject also the image of God because humanity is simply in a naturalistic, materialistic world. I would say yes, and I would say that it even comes further back than that from Christianity. Even Christianity, in a way, undercuts itself. Because the minute you place the crooks of religion inside the individual, with the individual and in the individual, you allow for this to progress or to develop into Lutheranism, Protestantism at first, then Unitarianism, Deism, and at last, Secularism. Because Luther would say, I don't need a Catholic church. I don't need the Pope. I don't I need the councils. I only need myself. I will translate the Bible from Latin to German so every layman can read and decide for themselves how they want to believe.Now, of course, Luther was a very religious person, very, very religious, indeed, extremely religious. But he opened the door, and this is a Christian door. This is an individualistic Christian door. Let's go back. It even begins with Paul. Paul says, You don't need the laws, you don't need the Torah, you don't need the ethnic specific group of the Jewish, the children of Israel. You are your own person. Of course, we have a church, we have a body of believers, but you are redeemed yourself by Christ if you believe. If you have some inner transformation, some inner metamorphosis. Paul uses the word metamorphosis twice in his letters. It's something that changes inside you. Then you're a free man. You're liberated and you're redeemed. Luther will take it one step further, you don't need the church. It's not only that you don't need the laws of the Torah, you don't need the authority of someone to interpret God's message. Then you'll get Unitarians who say, God gave us reason as the image of God, by the way, and taught us to think for ourselves. If we think for ourselves, we understand that the Trinity is actually a subversion of monotheism. What are we doing here? We don't need that. We're going to create the Unitarian Church which only believes in God. Jesus was a wise spiritual teacher. He's fantastic, but he's not the son of God. That's just right. It's not a person inside the Godhead. You got Deism. Please remember, perhaps our listeners don't know, Deism was the religious fashion of the late 18th century.It of the founders of the American Republic.Most of the people who are signed that the signatures are on the Declaration of Independence were deists. What do deists believe? There is a God. He is good. He wants us to be good. He gave us reason and the ability to think and make a choice between good and mad, so we will lead our lives in a moral way. That's it. Some of them also believe in an afterlife, some don't.Some of them had slaves, but okay.Of course, but that means also that through the image of God, which is reason, we now have rejected not only the Torah and its laws, not only the church and its authority, also Jesus, also Miracles, the virgin birth, the Trinity, of course, et cetera. We have remained with the bare minimum of rational, what they call natural religion. Natural because everybody can think and come to that conclusion. It's a universal natural religion. It's really just the minutest step from secularism. Because the next step will say, What do we need this God for also? If I use my reason, I also can come to the conclusion that there is no God. And we're atheists. So this streak of individualism that begins, it begins in the Bible, but then Paul takes it and carries it on. Then Luther accentuates it, and then 17, 18th century thought, even more underlines it, comes at the end or one of its venues, vectors, is at the end, secularism.Now, let me ask you a question. I don't think it's in the book, the book begs us to ask this question, right? So if you're going to argue that seeds of the erosion of the liberal order are in the very liberal order itself, which was created by this idea of everybody's been created, everybody has been created in God's image. And it leads us from, let's say, the church to Luther, to greater individualism to eventually, as you said, Unitarianism. And I was reminded as you were speaking, by the way, when my kids were living in Boston for a number of years, they went to this minyian called the Cambridge minyian, which met in the social hall of a Unitarian church. And so we had little grandchildren then. They were very little babies and whatever. My job, of course, was to hold the grandchildren and walk around the halls so my children could be in shul. I would look at the bulletin boards of this Unitarian Church. They had a soup kitchen, of course, because it was appropriate and everything. They had lots of different things on the bulletin boards, which by the end of the years, I knew these bulletin boards very, very well. I kept thinking to myself with a chuckle, there's actually nothing on this bulletin board that I can't subscribe to. As a Jew here, wearing a talit, wearing a kippa, holding a grandchild. There's literally nothing. Because as you said, even Jesus is put in terms of a great, wise teacher, whatever. Okay. Exactly. And then, of course, it takes us to deism and then eventually to secularism. Now, here's my question about to what extent are we witnessing what we're witnessing in the West? Let's take the worst examples of anti-free-thinking in the Western campuses, and the opposition to all sorts of things, including things that you and I care about very deeply and are living our lives for. To what extent is this radical anti-free-thinking movement on Western campuses, let's just say, like Columbia and Harvard, itself a result of the seeds of hyper-individualism that were planted in the liberal order itself? Did liberalism bring this on itself?Let me say, I'm a liberal. I'm for the liberal order. I know you are, you wrote a whole book called In God's Image.Yeah, and I'm a religious person, so I'm also for that. My book just shows some avenues and main avenues that idea took and developed through. But to answer your question, I think what we have in today's campuses is actually a reaction to that individualism because identitarian politics want to accentuate specific identities. People see themselves as part of groups, LGBTs or blacks or Jews or whatever. I think it's actually one of the reactions to the hyper individualistic scene that we have come to at the beginning of the 21st century, as is populism. Populism also will say, we are actually a group, and we don't want these elites or cosmopolitan or immigrants to dilute our group identity and our group. I think both are reactions to this. Again, if we go to the campuses, what they forget, what these people on the identitarian left forget is the basic principles of liberalism, of rights discourse, because if they silence people, they infringe on their right of speech. If they treat another person, let's say, an Israeli, as automatically liable for whatever their group does or their country does, again, it's not very liberal not to treat a person as an autonomous individual. I think there has been a crisis and a dilution of liberal principles there. But if I can, I also want to relate to comments that you interject here in place, which comments by the line of the founder of the US held slaves. And yes, these are all fantastic values, but we know that they are not realized, etc. What my book tries to answer, among other things, is why even would any person think that people, that all humans are equal to each other? Why would any person think that you must respect certain dimensions or depth within your other, within a person you don't know but have just met? You have to, by moral injunction, respect certain dimensions of that person rights. Why? I mean, the default position for humanity, I think, is to think we are the superior group. I am a superior person. The hierarchy starts with me on top. My group deserves everything. Your group deserves nothing. We can take whatever we want from you without thinking about it. That's the different position. Different position is people are violent, people are egocentric, etc. In order for people to even entertain the idea that actually all all humans are created equal, are fundamentally equal, it takes an enormous revolutionary idea and progressive development of a certain culture for that idea to take hold.Again, look at biblical times. If you compare biblical, Old Hebrew, ancient Hebrew society to other societies, the laws are different. Let's say laws concerning slavery. Did they abolish slavery? No. But did they legislate laws that were extremely progressive for that era concerning human beings that are enslaved? Yes. To stay on the topic of slavery, the first countries that abolished slavery were Christian countries. The first people talking for evolution were people who were driven by religious ideas like William Wilberforce, etc. Saying, No, people were created in the image of God. We actually cannot buy and sell the image of God. We actually cannot enslave human beings. Now, of course, there were at that same time Christians and even Jews, unfortunately, that says, No, the Bible actually legitimizes slavery, and it's okay. Yes, you've got those voices, but you've got, that's the default position, again, and you've got these voices saying, No, we actually need to abolish slavery because it's an affront to God-given image of God, et Et cetera. That's the special thing. That's the unique thing that this idea gives to society, in this case, Jewish, that Christian society, that makes it different. Indeed, the first time slavery, which was a universal social institution, the first time it gets abolished is in Europe.And so what you're saying is that although many people probably instinctively think of the Bible as a very traditional book, right? I mean, it's the bedrock of Western civilization, Judaism, Christianity, and so forth. It's actually a revolutionary book in its own way, right? I mean, it's a revolt against the world that had come before. I think you point that out in certain parts of the book, in the early parts of the book, if I'm correct. Of course. I'm doing it correctly, right? So just say something a little bit more about this, that there's something fundamentally revolutionary or rebellious in this idea that is in itself the bedrock of Western civilization.Of course, first of all, the Bible itself, things of itself as revolutionary, as standing opposed, right? Abraham, he's on the other side of everyone else. There's something else there. Of course, there's monotheism versus polytheism. There's a God you cannot see versus God's you, you can, et cetera. There's all sorts of revolutions there. Prophets are speaking up to King's, truth to power, et cetera. But this idea also, of course, is one of the things that the Bible uses to confront and to argue with the hegemonic cultures of the era, Babylonia, Assyria, Rome. Rome before Christianity would glorify heroes. Who were the heroes? They were brave in battle. They would cut their opponents heads off and arms off and whatnot. The torture was something that people lauded and enjoyed the Colosseum, et cetera. Here comes Christian tradition built on Jewish base and says, no, actually, the hero, the warrior, the killer is not the hero. The hero is the sufferer. The hero is someone who will be kind, who will be tolerant, who will be willing to endure pain for their own truth. This is the true hero, and this is the martyr. A new conception of what it is and of what it is to be a good human being, an upright person. And again, of course, a revolution in the way people thought. And that whole Roman Empire changes its character slowly but surely. Again, it turns into medieval Europe, turns into modern Europe, et cetera. By the way, you've got the rise and fall of the, sorry, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in which Gibbon actually says, this was the beginning of the decline of Rome, Christianity, because when they were pagan, they were brave and they were heroes and they sanctified the life and virility, et cetera. But when they turned into Christians, and this is also Nietzsche, they became weak and pathetic. But that change had come, and our modern world is built on those foundations.Look, that's the central idea of this book. And I think that at a time like this, when we're so concerned, no matter where we are in the political spectrum, no matter who we are religiously or not religiously, just as human beings, we're watching the West under great threat, of all different sorts, United States, in Israel, Europe, it doesn't make any difference. I think it's very, at least to me, very soothing to remind ourselves what the world that we love and care about is built out of. And I think that for many people, the intellectual challenge that you take, or the intellectual journey, I guess, is even better, that you take us on in this book is a really important reminder of what it was that is the bedrock of this world that we're so desperate to try to preserve and hold on to, even if we understand it's going to change, and even if we understand, as you put it, it's under a second major wave of threat, we have a deep-seated sense of what it is we're trying to preserve. I think your book helps us give much more meat and substance to an understanding of what it is that we're trying to preserve. What was the idea? Where did it come from? How did it manifest itself? And how did the West emerge out of that? I can't recommend it enough.Thank you.Now, I want to ask you something a little bit different, which is beyond the contours of the argument of the book itself, but I think is very much on the minds of people who listen to these exchanges, these interviews of leading Israeli intellectuals. I want to ask you something about religion, moderate religion, moderate religion and liberalism in Israel. You and I are, I don't know exactly what all your views on everything. It doesn't make any difference. We're pretty much cut from similar parts of the spectrum. We're cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways. We're both religious, we're both observant, we're both liberals. We care deeply about the religious traditions from which we come and the secular liberal order. We care about all of those things. And I think both of us are living in a period of tremendous sense of dislocation, perhaps disappointment, I would say even deep existential pain about the following. I want to ask, just to reflect on this. Now we'll switch the conversation a little bit to Israel, specifically.This is, in many ways, the first genuinely religious government that Israel has ever had. Menachem Begin sort of occasionally wear a kippah, but his government wasn't fundamentally a religious government. Of course. Bibi Netanyahu basically doesn't wear a kippa. He got a certain ceremonial moments, which is totally his right. I couldn't care less. But his government is fundamentally a religious government, and not only, by the way, because of the people who are in it, but because of the ethos of the discourse in this government. We don't have to go into all the ways that's playing out. But this is the first religious government that Israel has ever had, and it is, at the same time, one of the least liberal rights, observing freedom, actualizing governments that we've ever had. I'm leaving Palestinians, Gazans, et cetera, completely out of this picture for the moment. You're raising teenagers in this country now who you would like, I think, to grow up in a world in which the Jewishness of the state reflected the very best of the Western world that you want them to believe in. You want this to be a country which enables your kids who are now teenagers to grow up and to feel that there is a natural association and alliance between the very, very best of the Western liberal order and the very, very best of the Jewish traditional world.That's not what they're getting from their leaders. And my question to you is, can we turn this ship? Does Israel have the capacity to produce a religious enterprise which is fundamentally liberal at its core? Or is the Jewishness of this country always going to be in tension with the fundamental liberal ethos that you describe in God's image?Okay. The short answer is yes. At least I certainly hope so. One of the reasons I wrote this book was to tell my fellow Israelis, fellow Jewish Israelis, listen, what fundamentalists like Smotrich and Ben Gvir will tell you is something foreign, is something Christian, is something that infiltrates Judaism and we need to reject it is actually the very roots of your own tradition. This idea that people are equal, that they have rights. This is chapter one in Genesis. So don't reject it, adopt it, and build on it. So that's, first of all, what I was, among other things, trying to do. Just to say, there's no doubt we're in a tragedy now. I think Judaism in Israel right now is expressing its ugliest, most slowly, most despicable parts. Our tradition has, we said before, has these racist parts, has these ethnocentric parts. Netanyahu's government right now is not It's not only a religious government, it's a religious fundamentalist government. Look at his partners. His partners are not Hely Troper, Matan Kahana, or Micha Goodman, or us. Religious liberal. His partners are either fundamentalist religious Zionists, and not all religious Zionists, of course, are fundamentalists. These are Smotrich, Ben Gvir, or fundamentalist Haredis, with Litzmann and Golknopf and these people. These Haredi Both of these groups, as fundamentalists, see modernity as a threat, see the liberal order as a threat.Threat to what? What is the threat to them?It's a threat to their tradition and their identity. By the way, we said before, yes, liberalism, in a way, undercuts tradition, undercuts community. That's true. So they identify something true, but the remedy that they give to it is, of course, disastrous. Because they think for Haredi, if they close themselves up in closed communities and not expose their children to anything other than their own education, that will save their identity, that will save their tradition. Smotrich and Ben Gvir are even worse because they think we need to change the whole country, not our own community, but actually our own country in the image of our own fundamentalist ideas and reject liberalism, democracy, women's rights, feminism, gay rights, reject all those in order for us not only to keep our own tradition and communities authentic in their eyes, but actually to redeem the Jewish people and to create a Kingdom of priests and a Holy Nation. That's the problem with this government. You asked before, what happened to Judaism in Israel that produced these unfortunate avatars of Judaism. Look, the easy answer is orthodoxy. In Israel, we don't have reform, we don't have conservative Judaism, which are, of course, a lot more liberal, even in the United States. But that's an easy and actually wrong answer because we know there are liberal Orthodox people. Even in Israel, but you can The chief rabbi of Britain was Jonathan Zacks, who was not only a liberal, but a liberal thinker.We're having this conversation in South Jerusalem, and South Jerusalem is dotted with what we call liberal or even egalitarian Orthodox community. Exactly. It's possible.I'll just say it's not that. I think what happened here in Israel is the unification or the melding together of Orthodox Judaism and nationalism. What happened is that the state, as we know with Cookist theology, religious Zionist Coockist theology, became sacred for many religious Zionists. Now, again, you can have that view in mind.That's mostly a post-73 phenomenon.Exactly, right. It bases itself on the '67 miracle, quote, unquote.Like Gush Emunim.The settler movement, et cetera, sanctifying land, sanctifying sovereignty, sanctifying the very state. I think that was the beginning of mutation for orthodoxy in Israel that led it to this day. Because again, if you say '73, look before '73, you had religious Zionists, members of parliament and members of government like Yosef Burg, like Moshe Haim Shapira, which were to the left of the labor movement. They were humanists. They were Liberals. There were nothing like what we see today right now in government. So it's certainly possible, and I think most religious Zionists today have no problem with liberalism and democracy and want to live in a liberal and democratic state. We've got, at this time, out of an unfortunate, tragic political constellation in Netanyahu's own personal needs, we've got the worst coalition of religious fundamentalists, and indeed, zealots, that we have ever had.But here's the educational/political/philosophical question that I want you answer or try to answer. Can we create in this country a world in which the state is not worshiped but revered, in which still there's a generation of people when, God forbid, there's another October 7th, simply rush to tanks, go across the border, beg El Al to give them seats on planes so they can come back and come to war. I don't know that comes from a sanctification of the state, but it comes from a deep belief in the importance of the state. Can we create a world in which people care deeply, deeply, deeply about the state, but don't reduce Jewish religiosity to ethnonationalism? Can we create that? Because we don't really have the seeds of it now in any meaningful educational setting.Wait, wait. I think we can create it, and I think that's our challenge.Okay, and how do we do it?I mean, in Israel is poised at a unique position that actually caters to that and can lead to that. Israel, even today, has the best fertility rates in the West. I mean, one of the best in the world, certainly of first-world countries. Israel sees itself as a very tight-knit community, as a extended family. There's no lack of patriotism and solidarity, and and mutual trust, et cetera. As it is, Israel is such a society that is actually unique in the West in the amount of connection between individuals. What happens again at this time is that this was taken over by a government that I think represents a minority of Israelis. I think the majority has a good chance of doing exactly what you said, of creating a society that is both I mean, it's both very patriotic but also very liberal. As I said before, liberalism by itself is not enough. Yes, we need the nation as a story that binds us together. We need tradition, again, as a story that binds us together. We need communities. We need a lot of other sources of meaning and identity that complement the liberal order and allow us to express ourselves, to find meaning in our lives. Here in Israel, we have that. We have abundance of that. I do hope that when this government is out of office, we will start the Tikun, the process of repair.You believe that there are enough powerful educational and religious institutions, educational religious institutions, that can inculcate this idea of a liberal Jewish order, that there's enough religious leaders who care about this? You don't feel like you're a lone wolf crying out in the night?I mean, first of all, we're sitting in one of these educational places.We're sitting at Shalem CollegeBut your other question about religious figures, that's a problem. I think most rabbis today out of, I mean, Haredi rabbis care only about their own community, et cetera. But most religious Zion rabbis have attached themselves and invest our very much invested in the settlement project. I mean, the next argument we're going to have in the next government is the Palestinians and the Palestinian state. We've got another country recognizing the Palestinian state every day. That's going to be the argument, and they are heavily invested in the settlement project. It's going to be tough. But maybe this crisis will be a moment of rebirth. We know that there are countries and there are nations that use a crisis as a moment of rebirth and as a moment of return to their original and authentic DNA values. The US is, of course, a great example. The Civil War was a moment in which the US had to reckon with its promises of equality between all people, of rights, of liberty. It was an unbelievable trauma. It was the most lethal war in American history till today, including World War II. That's what we're talking about. But it gave the US a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln said. It made the US true to its inherent self, to its real self. I can only hope that Israel will also, out of this crisis, be born again true to its authentic self.And to remind ourselves what that authentic self is and the roots that that authentic self has in the Western tradition, there's an opportunity now to read a book by a religious Israeli committed to Western liberalism in God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea by Tomer Persico, Tomer Mazal Tov, on the appearance of the book.Thank you.Thank you again for taking the time to come in and have the conversation. Thank you for inviting me. I hope many of our listeners are edified by their encounter with the book, and I look forward to our next conversation and down the road to a conversation when we have an opportunity to describe how it was that Israel actually did turn the corner and come back to those very roots that you describe.I hope for that so much. Thank you.
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