RadixJournal - March 30, 2026


The Jewish Prophetic Tradition Reframed

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Richard Silverstein Netanyahu Torah Jeremiah Scotsman
Keep Calm and Carry On A More Private Equity

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

151.17

Word count

811

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I speak with Rabbi Shimon Ben-Avigayil about the origins of the IronCalf cult and its impact on the Jewish religion, and why it is important to understand that there is a deep Jewish religious and cultural component to it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 what is the prophetic tradition in the Jewish religion, it's almost never, the prophetic
00:00:04.760 tradition is almost never calling for the preemptive genocide of Amalek. It's almost always, 0.99
00:00:11.100 at least in my namesake, Jeremiah, I believe it's almost always, look at our corruption,
00:00:16.480 look at our corruption, look at our corruption, look at our corruption. And so there is this
00:00:21.460 aspect, I think, of that there is a deep Jewish religious and definitely cultural layer to
00:00:29.960 even just the questions of zionism and israel and that that is why i call it the iron calf cult
00:00:36.980 they call everything iron right i've pointed out that we went from 1923 of jabotinsky publishing
00:00:45.200 the wall of iron which basically is the architecture for what the sort of israeli
00:00:51.640 foreign policy becomes over the next century what the likud party ultimately is trying to pursue
00:00:57.440 Then 2023, 100 years later, in response to the alleged sort of security breakdown of October 7th, you basically have Netanyahu's regime responding with swords of iron, which is this sort of genocidal response. 0.55
00:01:15.100 And as I was telling on the radio show that I do, Understanding Israel-Palestine Beyond the Walls, I just interviewed a Jewish-American journalist, Richard Silverstein, who has often been like the one who can transcend the Israeli censors.
00:01:30.400 That's one of the reasons why we don't really know.
00:01:32.440 That's why there's questions about Netanyahu being alive and these kinds of things or what's actually happening in Israel.
00:01:37.980 Because there's such hard military censorship there that it actually takes like an American Jew to get sources from Israel and get some of the information that's trying to be suppressed.
00:01:49.520 And these are the kinds of issues that I began talking with him about.
00:01:54.960 And so I made this point to him.
00:01:56.600 The reason why I call it the Iron Calf cult is that we could say, and Richard has tended to say Zionism is not Judaism.
00:02:05.900 it's at most it's a hijacking of Judaism of Jewish terms or something like that but I've 0.92
00:02:12.500 always said no there's a continuity layer here this is sure it's a partially a hijacking of it
00:02:18.280 but my point is this like the Jews who then tried to worship the golden calf when probably what the
00:02:25.700 apex of like actual the Jewish moral proposition to the world is which is like mosaic law the 0.87
00:02:33.160 Ten Commandments. Those are a very, I think those are a good proposal in terms of civilization and
00:02:40.740 ethics in many ways, that there were those who lost faith and they started worshiping an idol
00:02:48.260 and it was a golden calf. And you could say, oh, those aren't real Jews. And you get into the sort 0.92
00:02:53.700 of the no real Scotsman fallacy. No, those were real Jews. They were just wrong in a way. And so 1.00
00:02:59.680 These are also Jews and they're also wrong, but they're also the dominant, the major dominant 1.00
00:03:08.200 faction in the Jewish world globally. The Torah is a story of the conquest of the Holy Land
00:03:17.700 on some very basic level and other stories as well. Do you think that Judaism could exist in
00:03:26.600 this sort of suspension of next year in Jerusalem in the sense of we'll never, much like you're
00:03:36.020 waiting for the Messiah, like we'll never really do it. We'll never actualize the taking of the 0.82
00:03:42.440 Holy Land. Do you think it could exist in that way or it is on some basic level as you were
00:03:49.920 suggesting? Yeah, it's a hijacking of Judaism. I can grant that to some degree, but is it not 1.00
00:03:55.380 but a fulfillment and actualization of the Torah.
00:04:00.820 Yeah.
00:04:01.160 I mean, it's just, yeah.
00:04:02.780 At the very least, it's meant to be that.
00:04:05.860 Yeah.
00:04:06.180 And so there is this possibility of where there would be the actual resolution of this idol worship to some extent,
00:04:17.560 which is the idea that you actually have to manufacture.
00:04:21.380 If God doesn't show up for you, you have to manufacture.
00:04:24.560 but you have to it's an infantile theology it's that you have to manufacture the idol and the end
00:04:32.020 times and the taking of jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple and all of these things
00:04:37.260 also there's and this exists in all kinds of religious strains of thought is that you can get
00:04:44.240 way to every the problem is usually people getting too concrete with words that were either spoken
00:04:50.840 or written by men. And they are often an inspiration directly from God. But then you
00:04:59.240 then concretize it and the scripture itself becomes an idol of its own. And so there was
00:05:05.880 always, this was one thing that I did begin to understand when I was studying religion at
00:05:11.200 Williams College was this idea of that there's this sort of a God beyond the God that's talked
00:05:17.340 about. So the God that exists beyond Yahweh.