Ep 25 | Rabbi Daniel Lapin | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 18 minutes
Words per Minute
150.23544
Summary
Where does anti-Semitism come from and where does it go from? What is anti-semitism and what does it mean and how does it rears its ugly head in times of crisis? What does it stand for and where is it going to go from here?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
what is anti-semitism what is anti-semitism yeah all right before i answer that
00:00:22.280
let me ask you what is racism racism is the belief that one race is inferior or superior
00:00:35.380
than another or all others so racism then is only a thought crime
00:00:43.400
uh yes it's it's a belief yes then i would say that um that i agree with you and that would be
00:00:53.960
anti-semitism as well that it is the belief that jews are inferior vandalizing synagogues is
00:01:03.220
just as illegal as van design vandalizing a commercial office space
00:01:08.420
um assaulting jews is just as as criminal as assaulting people of chinese heritage
00:01:16.300
but but where does where does it come from it rears its ugly head in the same way every single time
00:01:28.200
it's you have times of crisis i would say times of marxism and anti-semitism rises up
00:01:37.880
yes why um it it rises up because the um the the ultimate uh titanic cultural struggle
00:01:50.660
um in the world today is exactly the same as it was in russia in the beginning of the 20th century
00:01:58.960
or in france at the end of the 18th century or all the way back to to the nine verses
00:02:07.860
in chapter 11 of genesis the tower of babel um it's always a struggle between uh and loosely
00:02:17.380
paraphrased it's a struggle between um a divine uh godly vision for human society and a a human
00:02:28.000
structured vision for society and um and the jews have always been recognized uh by by great leaders
00:02:41.660
like winston churchill and uh and philosophers and scholars and they've also been recognized by uh anti-semitic
00:02:52.220
tyrants um as the official uh architects of that divine order of human uh social organization
00:03:03.520
so people who because there would be uh well let me ask you this way i can only really understand
00:03:15.100
the anti-semitism i mean there is racism in all races and it doesn't matter it's not white and black
00:03:22.700
it's it's all races all around the world there's you go someplace and you know black guys against the
00:03:29.180
white guy you go other places it's the you know red against the yellow whatever racism is the same but
00:03:35.340
anti-semitism kind of stands alone sure i can understand it if i believe in good versus evil
00:03:43.520
that's right but if i if i don't believe in good versus evil if i don't believe that there is
00:03:49.120
a a force for good and a force for bad that is that is playing a bigger game then anti-semitism is
00:03:56.180
utterly irrational makes no sense yeah that's right yeah now that doesn't mean that every time
00:04:03.200
violence against jews explodes it's always informed by some deep philosophical antipathy towards
00:04:12.320
civilized human living um it isn't it it spreads once once a fire is ignited there's no controlling it
00:04:20.280
and so people will find many different kinds of excuses i mean the fact is that um it is more fun
00:04:29.580
to light fires and break shop windows i mean that's just more fun than writing a book or staying up at
00:04:37.340
night uh tending a sick child or uh or trying to to to build a society so they're always going to be
00:04:45.800
people who are uh attracted towards riots breaking things um it is it's it's astounding to me
00:04:57.540
how many people say if you speak out against george soros you're an anti-semite i mean we're good
00:05:05.880
friends i have lots of jewish friends i don't hate them because they're jewish and i don't hate george
00:05:13.160
soros i actually feel really sorry for him i think he's a sad disgruntled man uh that is really lost in
00:05:19.380
his life and i despise the things that he does with his money but uh that doesn't make me an anti-semite
00:05:27.180
well if it did it would also make me a one uh i you know i find the things that he stands for to be
00:05:34.900
uh reprehensible and destructive so yes but it has nothing to do with the fact that he uh he may be a
00:05:42.660
uncircumcised american of jewish ancestry uh i i think something that people don't always uh fully
00:05:51.400
grasp um is that uh to speak of of the jewish community is meaningless because if we were to
00:06:03.900
gather together all approximately four million americans who are self-identified as jews and by
00:06:14.120
the way i'm not sure whether george soros would include himself in that i don't know but if one
00:06:19.140
did gather together four million american jews into one large place and began a symposium to analyze what
00:06:27.280
sort of things they all agreed on the only thing they'd all agree on is that hitler was a very bad man
00:06:33.260
right and there is no such thing as the american jewish community there literally is nothing else
00:06:39.700
they would all agree on or we would all agree on and the old joke is you put two rabbis in a room you
00:06:45.400
have three opinions that's right and and one of the stories i told in one of my books is the uh
00:06:50.980
the uh the the lone shipwrecked jewish sailor who was finally rescued and the coast guard arrived and
00:06:58.200
they were really quite astonished at what he'd built for himself on his remote island
00:07:01.980
and and he showed them around and this is where he planted his crops and this is where he made his
00:07:07.220
house and then they see two other structures and he what are those yeah well those are both synagogues
00:07:13.380
two synagogues he says yes so what do you need two synagogues he said well it's obvious that's the
00:07:19.580
one i worship at and that's the one i wouldn't be seen dead as so yeah the point is that um something
00:07:30.980
that i think that that many of my christian friends uh are surprised to hear is that just because
00:07:38.640
somebody is jewish doesn't mean that his worldview is shaped by jewish values just because someone is a
00:07:45.640
christian that's such a ridiculous statement if you're a christian that doesn't mean you share the
00:07:51.640
same views i mean i know that i don't understand i thought it did i thought that once people had
00:07:56.420
accepted jesus christ as their lord and savior right then they're fixed well no not fixed necessarily but
00:08:03.380
certainly let me put it this way i think it would be bizarre and very unusual to find somebody who says
00:08:12.180
i'm a christian atheist because yeah okay you're not born a christian you you accept christianity as
00:08:19.520
i understand i think there's a lot of christians that were raised christian and don't necessarily
00:08:25.900
separate themselves from christian uh you know the christian uh title but they're not really living it
00:08:32.140
or even know it yeah yeah probably but but certainly uh because there is this um somewhat confused
00:08:41.900
perspective on what makes a jew uh you you will find many people who will proudly proclaim themselves
00:08:49.900
to be jewish and proud of it and at the same time um you know do not believe in god regard the bible
00:08:57.220
as a collection of anachronistic myths and um and and they would claim to be you know just as jewish as
00:09:04.820
the next guy so it's a it's a little hard to to grasp because what does make a jew then what does
00:09:11.600
what makes a jew is a covenant with god and uh acceptance of of the torah as god's message to
00:09:19.020
mankind is that a universally accepted view of what makes a jew glenn glenn glenn you didn't ask
00:09:26.980
okay no all right we're here for the truth okay okay all right okay good good um let me go back to
00:09:36.220
george soros one one thing one thing that um people have said um uh about me with george soros and it
00:09:45.740
really bothers me deeply because this is not what i said and it's not what i believe but he had when he
00:09:52.980
was a child he was in um wherever he was um and the nazis were rounding people up and he went to
00:10:00.380
live with a christian and the story is as he tells it that um he was working with somebody uh you know
00:10:08.800
in the family that were i don't remember selling the homes of jews or something but i don't blame him
00:10:15.620
for that i don't know what i would have done i don't know what you would have done in that situation as a
00:10:20.420
kid and i don't condemn him for anything that happened and i don't think he did anything bad
00:10:26.960
in the war um however when you are 70 i think he was when he gave this interview and he said he never
00:10:36.800
went back and reflected on that time and never examined it and never had a problem with it
00:10:44.760
does that sound healthy to you you know i don't know the man at all and i i i've spent uh
00:10:53.300
let's say i've just been too busy living my life to delve into george soros so i haven't really uh
00:10:59.060
found out very much or discovered very much about him every now and then i come across organizations
00:11:04.220
that are heavily funded by him which for the most part from my perspective are organizations promoting
00:11:09.960
um a thoroughly destructive agenda yeah uh so i don't really know much about anything that
00:11:16.460
happened within his life so um the destructive agenda let's let's move to this much of the american
00:11:29.020
left they say that they are for the little guy uh they say they are for the oppressed um i mean
00:11:39.760
i don't think you could make a case that there is a more oppressed people than the jewish people
00:11:43.740
yet um you mean that uh we should have um more jews on the supreme court and and you feel no no no that
00:11:54.360
that perhaps three out of six ivy league university presidents being jewish doesn't really represent
00:12:00.580
our four percent of the population and maybe you know 30 uh jewish congressmen
00:12:07.600
you know perhaps we when we finally eliminate the scourge of american anti-seminism we'll be able to
00:12:14.420
take our true place right 150 jewish congressmen no but i'm saying that um they say therefore the people
00:12:24.300
who have been historically oppressed jewish people without a doubt have been historically
00:12:29.420
um targeted uh and oppressed um in in many cases however they don't stand with israel they don't stand
00:12:40.180
with the small little country correct in fact they stand with the real power in the middle east
00:12:45.900
which is radicalized islam and islamists wildly dangerous stands against everything they stay
00:12:54.420
they stand for you're for the oppressed what's happening here i think the people of gaza are
00:12:59.380
oppressed not by israel but by by the the hamas and hezbollah and and all of the uh people who have
00:13:07.460
been running that and convincing their people what is the connection how does someone say i am for
00:13:15.320
the oppressed i am for the rights of women oh and by the way um we're holding these people up who
00:13:23.500
believe in sharia law um the answer is i mean i know you're asking it rhetorically because i know
00:13:29.480
you've read saul alinsky's rules for radicals and he lays it out very clearly there i mean basically he
00:13:35.320
lists the lies you have to tell to persuade people to uh build up grievances until they're willing to act
00:13:42.020
in the streets i mean that's the job of an of a community organizer now who was that name of that
00:13:46.720
most famous community organizer who oh yes yes yes right but that's exactly what it's all about so um
00:13:54.240
uh what do they have in common how did they possibly come together and how do
00:13:59.840
do they look at each other and say okay we need you now and we'll eliminate you when once we get the
00:14:07.600
power i mean i don't understand that i could see that coming from islamists but how does the american
00:14:13.920
left even begin to get there against religion they're against controlling religion they're
00:14:22.100
they're primarily against a society that is built on um the western tradition because the western
00:14:30.840
tradition is based on the bible now you don't have to explore the architecture and art of of europe to
00:14:39.660
know the validity of of that statement uh it it is a simple reality uh the entire face of the
00:14:48.320
geopolitical face of europe was shaped by christianity in its two forms of protestantism and catholicism
00:14:55.880
um you know part of the reason that in the 17th century sweden invaded poland i mean why does sweden
00:15:04.760
have to invade poland you know if if you're going to want to expand your influence and uh and and gain
00:15:13.080
wealth and and you're sweden with one of the most powerful armies uh ever in the 17th century
00:15:18.440
um there are places you can invade right but what is it with poland well it was essentially a
00:15:25.460
religiously driven conflict sweden was one of the early fully protestant countries um poland was
00:15:34.680
proudly and and devoutly catholic and it was a religious war so many of the other wars were
00:15:40.980
in other words the point is that uh it's it's hard to escape the conclusion that um it's it's at its
00:15:49.780
root it's biblical certain biblical principles that shaped the society that we call western society
00:15:58.320
whether we find it in canada or australia or uh on the streets of today on the streets of hungary or
00:16:05.720
london or anywhere else um it's very very foundationally biblical that's what it is and
00:16:12.060
that's partially what lies at the heart of um the the seductive allure of socialism
00:16:18.580
is to get rid of that shatter western civilization it always has been and uh and you know we we chatted
00:16:27.960
a little earlier about the uh the bizarre alliance between aggressive islam and uh liberalism well
00:16:36.000
liberalism it's just a term we use it's not a term that lord acton would would recognize at all you
00:16:43.740
can think of it as liberalism or socialism or secular fundamentalism as i prefer to term it but but in all
00:16:50.820
these instances that's really what it's uh what it's all about it is trying to destroy um christian
00:16:59.280
based society and what islam and secular fundamentalism share is a you know and again
00:17:07.760
islam like any belief system has a very long memory and so september the 11th 1683 uh was echoed
00:17:17.940
in september the 11th 2001 it was an echo uh it was once again a a strike against the west what
00:17:28.020
happened the first september 11th uh what happened then was that um uh the the muslims were determined
00:17:35.240
to basically march all the way through europe they had tried marching through europe from the west
00:17:42.340
in the 8th century from spain that was finally uh stopped um by uh charles martel and um 732 and then
00:17:53.680
uh 1683 they are now at the gates of vienna uh as soon as they overrun vienna the rest of europe is
00:18:01.840
wide open and um and it's it's a war it's it's it literally is intended to wipe christianity off the
00:18:13.160
map of europe that's i mean you can read the contemporary ottoman writings of the time that's what
00:18:18.920
they're trying to do and uh the pope and christian leaders all around europe recognize this and they
00:18:25.700
beg and cajole and and persuade uh knights to um get on their horses and ride to vienna to try and save
00:18:35.120
things and sure enough it was september the 11th when uh king um sobieski of uh of poland was the first
00:18:43.000
to arrive with with sufficient force uh to drive off the ottomans and that was the the beginning of
00:18:49.520
the saving of of the west from from that particular and so that was the the last attempt that islam made
00:18:57.180
to wipe out the west but the the memory the institutional memory of of islam it doesn't go
00:19:04.040
away just because they you know they run some fine international airlines right the um thomas jefferson
00:19:12.040
uh it was very clear on this you know when we went and fought our first foreign war on the shores of
00:19:19.580
tripoli and he said that you have to understand what these people believe because they will not go away
00:19:27.000
they will they will come back and that's so important i mean think for a moment uh on this question of
00:19:33.500
what is really more important in terms of shaping behavior not only of you and me but also of the
00:19:41.180
societies in in which we live is it facts or is it beliefs and i think sort of reducing it to its
00:19:49.360
most elemental um if uh you know if you're traveling arguments sake you you're traveling uh with with a
00:19:58.820
load of diamonds and your ship gets wrecked and somehow or another everybody on board knew that you
00:20:07.340
you're a jeweler and you're traveling with a priceless package of diamonds in your in your money belt
00:20:13.160
the ship gets wrecked and you drag yourself up onto the beach of a lonely desert island
00:20:20.660
and you look around there's not a soul to be seen and you you're just thanking the lord for your
00:20:26.480
miraculous deliverance when you notice somebody else dragging himself up the beach and now there's two of
00:20:32.440
you are you going to be able to go to sleep that night because you need to know whether this guy's
00:20:44.500
view is that um if he acts while you're asleep when the coast guard arrives for the rescue they will find
00:20:52.300
not two survivors but one survivor and so at this point it really doesn't matter whether this man knows
00:21:00.920
differential calculus and and and the history of the early settlement of australia what really matters
00:21:07.240
is not what he knows it's what he believes and if this man has beliefs that are informed
00:21:15.660
unequivocally by the ten commandments then you can go to sleep that night and if you don't know that
00:21:23.380
then you dare not go to sleep at any point at all and it's this is true for everything else as well
00:21:31.280
uh beliefs are what shape the the the the the development of civilization the shape of society
00:21:39.040
uh the the news in tomorrow's headlines is going to be the result of uh of a set of beliefs not a set
00:21:46.240
of facts or knowledge so what do we what's concerning to me is the the facts are all being
00:21:56.180
lost we're just seemingly the left is just making things up as they go along and we're just giving
00:22:02.320
it a whirl um gender everything it's just all everything is up for craps now again you know wonder
00:22:09.380
why think about this why would it be talking of gender why would it be that if a a young girl has a
00:22:16.980
a serious eating disorder and she's wasting away and it's because she thinks that she's fat
00:22:24.320
what do we do we immediately bring in psychiatric help we try and help her adjust her perception of
00:22:34.720
herself dysmorphia in a sense right but if that same girl thinks she's a boy we're cool with that
00:22:42.860
everything's fine i i would suggest that the reason for that is because there is a monumental volume that
00:22:50.080
has shaped the history of the world and in that volume it says male and female he created them
00:22:57.600
and the response of the the left to that is anything in that book has to go whatever that book says
00:23:27.600
it's difficult to talk to you because i i agree with so much although i don't think that there
00:23:34.740
i don't think we're headed that direction i don't think the world is is headed in the direction of that
00:23:42.800
book um we are we are throwing everything out and the two things at the very at the very bottom of it
00:23:51.760
all and this is so concerning that there's an archetype there is there's jesus christ and there's moses
00:24:02.020
the lawgiver and the and the love thy neighbor lawgiver those two archetypes are being thrown out
00:24:12.080
and so we are not we're striving for something but we're not saying that's what we think a good man is
00:24:20.640
that's what we think a good leader is we we're just erasing these how do you survive in that
00:24:30.580
well in the short term of course you can survive when that man is called marks as much as you can
00:24:37.260
when he's jesus in the short term um the the seductive allure of socialism um considerably exceeds
00:24:46.940
that of judeo-christian faith apart from anything else um and and here's a question by the way i have
00:24:53.820
great fun asking people this i mean uh on on an airplane uh yesterday somebody sitting next to me
00:25:00.820
i mean i ask people this all the time and i love asking it of young people which is um where about in
00:25:07.360
the bible is it exactly i don't which book was it do you remember where does it say and thou shalt
00:25:13.200
follow thy heart faithfully at all times it is so unusual for me to find somebody who responds and
00:25:22.580
says you know lapin you're an idiot it's not there right there's no such thing in the bible
00:25:27.160
everybody's sure that it exists in the bible well it is so appealing what would you rather do
00:25:33.620
follow your heart or have some guy come along and tell you glenn that's not allowed what you want
00:25:39.340
to do isn't permitted it's immoral you're not allowed to do that there's no question which most
00:25:44.840
people would elect if they had the choice and so the uh the the the the problem that we see playing
00:25:53.220
out and to which you're alluding um is that uh young people are being raised with um with so little
00:26:01.500
information about that book this is possibly the first generation of english-speaking people in all of
00:26:09.220
history we've been speaking english for about 800 years roughly this is the first generation
00:26:15.540
of english-speaking people who do not know if leviticus is the name of a book or a man's after
00:26:24.100
shave lotion they literally don't know so in the face of that ignorance there is no question that the
00:26:33.980
default the default the default is socialism this is this is what makes it so difficult um if if i'm not
00:26:42.820
because it feels it feels good and it's natural look um if uh if i could be persuaded that human beings
00:26:55.460
are just another form of animal which in itself is a seductive you know at the national zoo in washington
00:27:03.720
dc in the primate enclosure they actually have that sequence of silhouette drawings i'm sure you've
00:27:10.060
seen uh with the uh the baboon crouching on all fours and the next picture has him up on twos and
00:27:16.700
seven or eight pictures later finally he looks like a man that narrative is so fundamental to the left and
00:27:24.020
so very appealing uh and and you don't look for for your children and my children it's hard for them to
00:27:31.740
go to school and and have to stand up for an opposing viewpoint because it's so simple and
00:27:41.280
straightforward and so natural that is the default that we are nothing but sophisticated animals once
00:27:48.280
you tell me that and if if i'm persuaded of that then yes um redistribution of wealth absolutely follows
00:27:55.940
inevitably in the same way that if i were a farmer and i noticed that one big cow had been taking away
00:28:02.940
hay and feed from all the other cows i'd go in every dime and redistribute the grass and the hay to make
00:28:10.080
sure all the cows get the same amount how is the it's the decent natural normal thing for anybody to do
00:28:17.220
but at the same time socialism is the furthest from natural because it it discounts it discounts
00:28:25.320
the human uh desire to succeed and to grow and to uh reach for things it it suppresses all of that it
00:28:36.860
makes it makes everything gray in life which is not a human a natural human experience is it
00:28:44.020
no i think you're exactly right and and they would probably say that uh uh you know that it's it's
00:28:51.100
been only imperfectly applied oh no it's never it's never been kind of applied correctly right and you
00:29:00.140
look at it you know when when did when did when did a biblical model get perfectly applied you know
00:29:06.420
when would you you know when would you like to go back to so essentially we're looking at two belief
00:29:12.220
systems neither of them can be proven in a laboratory neither of them can be proved with
00:29:18.200
historic reference and in both cases uh we're we're saying to people look here is a belief system
00:29:25.560
that leads human beings upwards to nobility and aspiration and peace and tranquility and prosperity
00:29:32.280
and here's another one that reduces human beings so we can't we can't you know prove each of the
00:29:39.700
theories they are both religious big bang and and you know creation um but we can see the results
00:29:48.580
of the societies that strive to achieve that the societies that have really taken on uh socialism
00:29:57.340
uh it doesn't it it ends horribly every time um the western judeo-christian values sometimes it
00:30:06.000
doesn't work out but most times and we can look it is because it's not a coincidence that once the
00:30:14.460
enlightenment happens in america is is given birth to that all of a sudden man just takes a 5 000 year
00:30:22.080
leap that's not a coincidence is it no it isn't but um but i think most of us uh are are looking at
00:30:33.560
today not last century not next century we're most of us looking at our interests today and today
00:30:41.700
i see homeless people out there and i think to myself that is terrible and i'm it is 20 it is 20
00:30:49.900
of the population of the globe without the united states is homeless 20 in america it is 0.1 percent
00:30:59.860
that should tell you something about it yes we have homeless but we have the best uh we have the
00:31:06.540
least homeless problem in the world right no question about it but um it's much more fun
00:31:16.580
to light fires and break windows and here we've got homeless people whose fault has got to be
00:31:22.820
somebody's fault and we know it's immoral to blame the victim right because the victim is never
00:31:29.000
complicit in his own misfortune which is absolutely untrue it's complete nonsense but um
00:31:36.020
i mean there are those who are innocent you know there are those who can't make it always always but
00:31:41.540
there is also a lot i mean i am responsible for almost every pain in my life because i misviewed it
00:31:48.220
yes misinterpreted it used it as an axe and of course that's true for each and every one of us
00:31:53.600
the the person who's caused you more harm in in your life has his picture on your driving license
00:31:58.980
that's right yeah no question about it but i mean i i think the uh the the the thing we're grappling
00:32:07.660
with is um as i see it is the uh the the seduction of a socialistic viewpoint um how thoroughly appealing
00:32:17.680
it is to say that um uh some antiquated old system shouldn't regulate my life it's my life i should
00:32:26.900
be able to do exactly as i please with my life that's a hard thing to argue against and that um men and
00:32:34.560
women should be exactly the same well yeah hard to argue with that uh and and part of it is also
00:32:41.460
the fact that a a socialistic vision can be depicted in very quick sound bites
00:32:47.520
and and here we are discussing you know over a period of time considerably longer than a sound
00:32:54.820
bite and at the end of it um i i would have been grateful for the conversation but we're unlikely to
00:33:02.400
have come up with a list of you know here are six sound bites everyone has to know about and then
00:33:07.380
they'll start thinking correctly you know you just said um you just said that you know men and women
00:33:15.120
uh it's it's it's it's hard not to think that men and women are alike and i think that is true on one
00:33:24.420
level we are we're both humans we both have certain inalienable rights but there are also gifts that each
00:33:32.080
of us get and i i want to go i i listen to one of your podcasts i love your podcasts thank you very
00:33:37.160
much i love doing it um and uh i listen to one of your podcasts and you were talking about fashion
00:33:42.200
yes and you were talking about because once you started talking about this i thought of
00:33:47.920
the outfits that are the communist workers outfit they're dressed exactly the same drab coveralls
00:33:56.400
right they're in coveralls and you specifically talked about that yes will you talk about that for
00:34:01.520
saying yeah absolutely um and again the the podcast which to which i um i'm grateful for you
00:34:09.380
because if it were not for you i i would never have i never would have even occurred to me to do a
00:34:14.520
podcast and um and and the truth is that uh through my podcast um here on the blaze um my reach
00:34:25.040
is way beyond anything even when i've been on very large radio stations so no it's been great um so
00:34:33.260
yeah look um what's so great about the podcast is that it's uh it's longer form uh when you're when
00:34:44.580
you're on television uh five seconds yeah i know is is long and moves quickly uh on a podcast
00:34:51.420
there there's an implicit understanding between me and the listener that uh we are going to accept
00:35:00.600
that structuring an argument and making a case is going to take a few minutes yeah which you know
00:35:07.620
which is wonderful and um and fundamental to to this whole this whole discussion is the question of
00:35:15.860
whether you believe that human beings are nine dollars worth of common chemicals or we are a
00:35:24.100
unique creature touched by the finger of god those are two incompatible views do you believe that
00:35:30.960
intelligent design for instance i don't i have no idea nowhere is anybody can convince me at least at
00:35:40.000
this point that they have any idea of how god creates so i'm not going to get into the creation
00:35:46.000
thing uh i don't know i have no no idea whatsoever how he does it is there the possibility that uh you
00:35:55.740
know we we came from monkeys i i don't think so but does it matter if if at one point the divine said
00:36:05.420
that is human yeah it's exactly exactly right let and let me exploit the podcast format to respond
00:36:14.520
to what you're saying but but you know let's imagine uh i wanted to tell somebody that i i spent this
00:36:22.460
morning with glenn beck so i'm going to say to somebody and i i might boast about that i'm going to
00:36:27.440
say you know what i spent this morning with glenn beck and person says glenn beck who's that i said glenn
00:36:33.420
back he's the guy who one time 30 years ago drove a car from tampa to miami
00:36:40.380
or am i going to say glenn beck is the man who built up a huge following based on fundamental truth
00:36:50.440
called the blaze right i'd address what i think is one of your your outstanding accomplishments not
00:36:56.980
something much more mundane well it's interesting is it not that um the ten commandments
00:37:03.180
um begin i'm the lord your god and it should continue who created heaven and earth
00:37:10.540
because that's a pretty significant achievement i'm the lord your god who built this universe
00:37:17.440
you're in right you know what it actually says i'm the lord your god who took you out of the land
00:37:21.740
of egypt yawn i mean really is that the best you can come up with why isn't that interesting it is
00:37:31.820
why it's fascinating not only that but the creation of the world takes up 34 verses in genesis but the
00:37:39.220
construction of a tabernacle which was used only in the desert and for a few hundred years later when
00:37:45.840
the jews came to shiloh with joshua um takes up nearly 200 verses may i take speculate well i i know
00:37:54.060
you're going to get it because you were alluding to it a few minutes ago go ahead yes yeah that it is
00:37:58.400
that the bible is not about god the bible is about man precisely it's so great being with you the bible
00:38:08.500
is not man's book about god if it was we'd talk about the creation of the universe it's god's book
00:38:15.120
about man and fundamental to that is this basic question of what are we are we nothing but a creature
00:38:27.180
on the continuum that starts with bacteria and moves up to to people or are we a completely different
00:38:37.580
creature as i say touched by the finger of god that's really what we have to ask ourselves
00:38:42.240
because everything flows out of that once once we decide that question and you can never know it
00:38:49.840
you have to it's like everything else in life when you get married to a woman there is no way you can
00:38:56.000
possibly know everything about her before you get married that is a step you take with faith
00:39:02.880
when in almost every major decision in life when you choose a career you have no idea
00:39:08.480
all the implications that that's going to have 30 years later and so similarly on on this decision
00:39:14.900
you also make a decision in your life you say look there's this there's two ways to live my life
00:39:22.020
i either have to live my life as if i am truly a purposeless collection of molecules of nitrogen and oxygen
00:39:30.320
and phosphorus and uh and carbon or i am something that god created and put here with a purpose
00:39:38.060
and the implications are absolutely huge and the kind of society first of all the kind of person i'm
00:39:45.380
going to try and make myself become the family i'm going to raise the society i'm going to be part of
00:39:49.760
all of this is shaped as i said earlier by a belief along these lines as opposed to any facts
00:39:56.260
let me let me switch gears um i i am greatly concerned about
00:40:04.900
really probably the next 10 to 12 years of human existence and i fall into the category of stephen hawking
00:40:12.980
and uh and elon musk um are you familiar with ai agi and asi in in the world of artificial intelligence
00:40:22.600
yes yes okay so we right now mit is doing something called the moral machine and they as soon as the
00:40:33.720
5g network is up the world changes reason why we don't have self-driving cars now is we have the
00:40:40.340
technology to do it what we don't have is a big enough fast enough pipeline uh and that's going
00:40:46.740
to require the 5g network once the 5g network is up your car becomes far more capable of doing almost
00:40:55.820
anything it will be able to not only know what's in the road in front of them but also know who is in
00:41:03.740
the road in front of them beside them behind them and it has to make a judgment call if there's going
00:41:10.720
to be an accident who do i kill yes and that has to be programmed in advance correct yes there's a
00:41:18.420
hierarchy of of life if you will we are now designing um all kinds of machines to kill uh we we have
00:41:27.980
drones still has the human kill switch but we are designing for agi technology to be able to go in
00:41:36.380
and we don't have to have a human driver ray kurzweil has said to me by 2030 glenn there will be no death
00:41:43.380
complete nonsense it's it's so amazing that people who are so smart can be so stupid
00:41:50.260
well he's he believes that there will be no death because i can download you well that doesn't that's
00:41:57.100
not that's not you that's not life but we can't even agree on when a child becomes a child in uterus
00:42:08.000
but we do know that two identical twins who are truly identical there is no difference in their dna
00:42:15.740
we do know they have different fingerprints yes we haven't the faintest idea of where that
00:42:21.520
information comes from right we also know that they have different souls obviously right and so
00:42:27.380
a lot of these statements and and and you know you you're you're alluding to smart people but um
00:42:33.400
well i'm here's what i'm here's what i'm i'm driving at yeah um we have these gigantic
00:42:41.760
uh philosophical questions and we are driving the opposite way when it comes to knowing
00:42:51.620
universal principles really standing by those universal principles how do we survive rabbi with
00:43:00.460
the kind of the kind of technology that is coming our way programmed mainly by people who do not
00:43:09.360
look at the book uh for any kind of advice sure in a society that will gobble this up um so so i mean
00:43:18.920
i think the important thing is is not to be overly alarmed uh as i've said before um being very intelligent
00:43:28.580
is very different from being wise and there are many people in fact our culture i think has specialized
00:43:36.020
in producing very smart people um the the whole elite university system the idea now that that
00:43:43.580
marriages are essentially for the most part in that group very smart people marrying very smart people
00:43:50.000
it's not the way it used to be um you know careful you're starting to sound like charles murray
00:43:55.780
you know not everything charles murray said was wrong i think everything he a lot of it as you well know
00:44:02.600
the the bell curve was vilified but um but it was not vilified with data and science it was vilified
00:44:09.060
with beliefs yes and hysteria and emotions and feelings but um uh the the idea that um for instance you
00:44:18.780
know one of the people you mentioned earlier uh has has gone on record saying that uh the problem is
00:44:24.500
going to be not enough work for people there's going to be too much leisure okay people have been saying
00:44:32.060
this since water power replaced hand sawing operations in the 17th century uh it's it doesn't reflect
00:44:43.920
a reality of the human being uh it reflects a reality that would be true provided the human being was
00:44:51.520
nothing but a materialistic outcome if we really are just bodies and no souls then some of these things
00:44:59.440
become concerns but we're not and secondly there's also a cycle but if we believe we are i mean we're
00:45:06.820
headed towards the belief that we are yeah but there isn't a we you see this is this has been a tension
00:45:12.800
that has been true in society for 2 000 years it goes back to jerusalem and athens uh the uh the
00:45:20.180
athenian worldview exemplified really very colorfully by the the entire literature of greek mythology for
00:45:27.800
instance um even has something to say about energy right where prometheus unhappy with the notion that
00:45:34.440
energy in the form of fire belongs only to zeus and the other gods steals it and zeus punishes him
00:45:41.080
with eternal torture in the judeo-christian vision adam and eve are at the gate to the garden of eden on
00:45:48.300
their way to eviction and adam wails to god and how am i going to manage this wild animals there how am i
00:45:54.860
going to eat and god says i've got this great gift for you it's a divine gift you're going to be the
00:45:59.740
only creature on the whole planet that uses this it's called fire these are two incomparable visions
00:46:06.120
the greek vision is obviously more prevalent because that's why people knock on the window of my v12
00:46:12.760
bmw and say how dare you use so much gasoline right why don't you knock on my room in the morning and
00:46:20.160
say how dare you have four cups of coffee right because the way the uh the these these philosophies
00:46:28.020
have evolved energy is either divine or only not meant for you know not meant for the use of human
00:46:35.160
beings the the we've always been uh jerusalem and athens and that's the same uh play here um so where
00:46:44.260
we don't you really don't have to worry that that this group of people who are materialistic in the
00:46:50.980
extreme and and scientific in the extreme um portend these these dismal outcomes the fact is that
00:47:00.400
technology technological progress rises and falls it doesn't flow at a steady rate and so even now
00:47:07.280
for instance uh there's quite a lot of material out there about how some of the the silicon valley
00:47:13.180
geniuses won't allow their children to use ipads and phones right all right that's an interesting
00:47:20.220
development it's it's something that my wife could have told them 15 years ago already the woman one of
00:47:28.760
the women who uh came up with instagram just this last couple of weeks said i'm out and i know i brought
00:47:36.400
it to market but this this is horrible right so so the notion that somehow we're in this dystopian
00:47:42.500
universe heading towards robotic control that kind of gloomy picture is a specialty of the left this
00:47:50.380
is why according to the left the world is always going to end either nuclear winter or acid rain or
00:47:57.980
global warming but whatever it is unless the united nations manages to impose a tax on all of humanity
00:48:04.880
and given the power to save us we are all doomed versus a religious vision that says we don't know the
00:48:11.080
details but on some glorious day of god's choosing everything is going to be great
00:48:15.460
who are we you know i used to read the bible it was so funny you still no no when i when i was younger i
00:48:35.080
would read the bible and i would and i would look at these civilizations and i'm like four pages ago
00:48:41.440
four pages ago you learned this lesson you know everything's a little compacted but i used to laugh
00:48:48.520
at how fast people forgot yes and destroyed themselves over and over again who are we now i don't laugh at
00:48:57.420
that because i read it and i'm like oh my gosh this is us yes who are we if you had to pick a
00:49:03.060
civilization or a group of people or a time period in the bible what are we living right now the united
00:49:09.420
states of america yeah or the world uh the i think those are two different can you give me two can you
00:49:16.460
give me the difference yes i i could certainly try to uh yeah in in the united states of america um we are
00:49:23.400
probably more like ancient israel than like anywhere else uh we have our prophets uh we have
00:49:30.280
a significant part of the population that believes in the bible believes that the bible is god's message
00:49:37.580
to mankind um but then you also have a very significant population that is um hostile to that
00:49:46.200
world view and uh this is a struggle that is as evident today here as it was in israel in the days
00:49:55.000
of jeremiah do you know of any other society that's gone through this besides israel only israel and
00:50:00.360
and and america and there are other similarities as well we're we're the only two nations ancient
00:50:05.400
israel and modern america are the only eight nations that are not um specifically land shaped in
00:50:12.300
other words uh it's very difficult to become a naturalized swiss citizen if you weren't born in
00:50:17.320
switzerland but you can join the people of israel and you can join the people of america by a philosophical
00:50:24.980
belief process i i adopt the founders of america as my fathers as well so i think that that is a
00:50:34.000
um that's a strong similarity we're also uh the the only two nations that fought a civil war early in
00:50:42.520
their histories over moral issues and both emerged stronger than they went into it um it's very very
00:50:50.960
unusual and um and it's strange too that our founders believed so did the pilgrims that they were
00:50:57.380
completing the journey of the exodus of of uh very much so you know as as you know i think you may even
00:51:03.740
have a picture of it is the uh the seal yes the idea of having the great seal with the israelites
00:51:09.320
crossing the the red sea so the these things were very much in the in the minds of the founders
00:51:14.880
without question and uh israel broke up and was destroyed yes yes you see that i don't necessarily
00:51:24.660
see that and and i'm not uh yeah i'm not i'm not really good on the prophecy stuff but um but i see it
00:51:32.200
there's a possibility um i i'm very much um of the view that um that a uh religious reawakening could
00:51:42.800
i don't see another way of doing this by the way either i don't think you can evangelize people to a
00:51:47.800
political viewpoint um i don't think the republican party if we can just get everybody to vote republican
00:51:54.940
oh everything will be fine i i don't think that's that's necessarily true um although i do know if we can
00:52:00.700
get everybody to vote for the democrats as they're currently constituted everything will be terrible
00:52:04.800
but um uh but no i i think it is a case of uh a spiritual and and religious reawakening is is what
00:52:14.460
i see happening where's the rest of the world the rest of the world is um is is kind of where it's
00:52:21.420
always been um in certain ways it's it's a laboratory of of the human experience and um and there is some
00:52:31.800
place on the planet that you can point to for the bringing to life of of whatever philosophy you're
00:52:39.420
inquisitive about either in the present time or or historically but um uh the the idea
00:52:47.800
in others i i don't have any mission to save the world i think people who do can be very dangerous
00:52:54.560
um i don't i don't see that at all i do see my dream is is um is for america and israel to be
00:53:06.020
models of societal structure that the rest of the world willingly and voluntarily imitates and emulates
00:53:13.880
and and i'm i'm seeing some interesting things i mean um uh the the the european union in my view
00:53:21.800
has been doomed from from day one day one uh it's um uh and you know we we see what's happening there
00:53:29.740
and uh and um uh it was it was dreamed up as as a means of uh preventing another world war that was the
00:53:40.420
concept it was dreamed up as a way of trying to emulate the united states we have the united states
00:53:46.260
of america we're gonna have the united states of europe but uh but you do have countries that are
00:53:51.880
routinely denounced as racist and vilified as regressive but you do have some countries that
00:53:59.460
are taking steps to fulfill the most basic function of any state which is self-preservation
00:54:06.240
and uh in poland is who would have dreamed that that that poland could be a functioning
00:54:12.400
democracy in in the early 21st century those those just on the uh western side of the former
00:54:23.200
soviet union they're some of the strongest i mean they're some of the strongest freedom loving people
00:54:30.660
yes um hungary hungary is very fascinating so i yeah i i don't think it's america and the world
00:54:39.020
uh i i don't really i i think there are many many different countries and regions in the world
00:54:45.380
as i as i mentioned in another conversation you and i had i'm absolutely intrigued with some of the
00:54:50.640
things happening in africa now i mean obviously there are huge problems uh one of the biggest problems
00:54:56.860
infecting africa is foreign aid uh which is is nearly always destructive um foreign aid has kept
00:55:04.960
alive the arab refugee problem in the middle east uh it is very very difficult to give people money
00:55:13.120
without causing more problems than you're trying to solve and um and our that's one of the hardest
00:55:19.100
that was one of the hardest lessons i've ever learned from actually a bishop of mine somebody came to me
00:55:24.260
and i knew they were struggling and having trouble and because my faith is a faith of
00:55:29.460
of structure and checks and balances and everything else this person called me and said hey
00:55:34.460
you know i really need your help financially blah blah blah and i said have you talked to the bishop
00:55:39.440
he said yeah but i i really wanted to talk to you i said okay i hung up the phone and i called
00:55:46.340
my bishop and my bishop said and i had the money to help him it wasn't asking for a big thing he said
00:55:50.220
glad i'm gonna ask you to do the hardest thing you've ever done please don't he said if you do
00:55:55.080
you will undo so much of what we're trying to do he said he's got to stand on his own two feet
00:56:01.520
and he said he can he just doesn't want to yeah and it's uh it's a lesson that i don't i bono learned
00:56:11.000
it yes bono has learned it bono is now looking at all of the aid that he's done for his whole life
00:56:16.600
and said none of it made a difference you got to teach a man how to fish right well they're very
00:56:22.720
interesting things happening in africa very very interesting and uh i think it's important not to
00:56:27.880
lump the continent as a whole but to look at different societies there so when you do look at
00:56:33.120
europe um and i remember being mocked at fox uh you know for many things caliphate was one of them
00:56:41.840
the other one was the hatreds of the 1930s are going to come back and here we are yes and i
00:56:47.480
remember i mean they mocked me for always talking about nazis but i was always talking about this
00:56:51.460
problem is coming back and um and now here it is there's a there's something weird and i think it's
00:56:58.900
happening here in the united states too and i'd love for your thoughts on this
00:57:03.880
there is there's a problem that the elite class if you will the ruling class and the media
00:57:13.440
they will they refuse to recognize and then there's the people on the streets that see it
00:57:21.520
and what they're seeing is my wages haven't moved um my life isn't necessarily getting better
00:57:30.260
um we're we're fighting these wars and i'm not really even sure what they're about in europe
00:57:37.380
we're now the eu oh wait a minute i like being swiss or i like being you know german and i like being
00:57:46.700
italian or yes and the swiss never joined the eu they wanted as soon as i said that they wanted to
00:57:52.200
keep their own their own for exactly what you're saying their own identity yeah and and and so they're
00:57:59.000
seeing this come apart they know it doesn't work they're being told that it works economically but
00:58:05.240
they know it doesn't then they're being forced to take on an absorb millions of people who do not
00:58:14.280
want to become german do not want to become french do not want to become uh you know members of the eu or
00:58:20.400
the uk and because the press and the ruling class will not deal with the simple problems of
00:58:30.880
look if you want to come here we want you here but you got to be english we have english law here
00:58:38.880
you know you want to come here you want to be german and it'll be great but you got to fit into society
00:58:44.220
um because they won't deal with that and other basics the only people who will are these
00:58:51.780
you know uber nationalists who are not necessarily trying to solve the problem the average person does
00:59:00.220
but the average person runs to them because they're the only one saying this is a problem yes
00:59:07.720
so it's happening here i think to some extent too it it could get really bad when you have this
00:59:16.960
denial of truth and this yearning to be i think free and yourself that's when bad guys come in and play
00:59:28.600
how do how do we do you see europe waking up to this the whole immigrant question is is a terrific
00:59:38.100
lens through which to look at the whole question it's a great lens to look at it because it's being
00:59:44.160
played out and has been played out since 1965 in the united states with the 1965 immigration reform act
00:59:51.600
whose natural and inevitable consequence is a caravan of migrants moving through
00:59:58.260
central america determined to storm the southern border this is a very straight easily definable
01:00:05.880
line that links the caravan to 1965's immigration reform act um that angela merkel in in germany
01:00:14.760
believed that importing a million males all right one of the reasons that uh that roanoke didn't work
01:00:23.440
and new england did work was that new england was families there was men and women husbands and wives
01:00:29.920
uh soldiers don't build a society men don't build a society alone neither do women of course but uh
01:00:36.320
uh yeah it's it's um the idea that importing a million young arab males was a good idea
01:00:46.180
but i never try i never like saying how stupid they are because they're not
01:00:54.180
it it's uh it's a mistake to think anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid even if i'm tempted
01:01:00.200
to think that sometimes but it's not true um according to their worldview what they're saying
01:01:06.780
and what they're doing is exactly right let me explain what i mean let's just take a second which is that
01:01:11.620
again a fundamental and categorical distinction between a secularized view of reality and a judeo-christian
01:01:24.020
bible-based view of reality is the whole question of scarcity versus abundance a secular viewpoint
01:01:32.200
always believes in scarcity there's not enough trees there's not enough oxygen there's not enough
01:01:40.700
oil paul earlick is still teaching your children at stanford university at you know 65 grand tuition
01:01:50.480
and this is the guy who predicted in a book in 1972 that by 2000 americans would be dying of starvation
01:01:58.500
because in his world view scarcity and shortage and doom is the absolute inevitable end
01:02:07.540
uh they also believe that um land and resources are scarce and so people they see people as consumers
01:02:17.320
of resources not creators and so the big fear and the big worry is too many people and so zero population
01:02:26.440
growth was a popular movement talking of our friend george soros and many others um now we look at the
01:02:33.180
the religious viewpoint the religious viewpoint is that we have a god whose um identifying characteristic
01:02:40.360
is abundance limitlessness and so this is a god who said be fruitful and multiply
01:02:46.400
really well he also um said in hebrew pru or avu that doesn't just mean it's not just a poetic way of saying
01:02:56.020
be fruitful and have sex or it's it's not like that it's have children and educate them that's what
01:03:02.380
the hebrew says very very different so it's not just putting out kids there it's putting out
01:03:08.360
human beings who are capable of being godlike in their ability to create right in that world view
01:03:15.860
there's not much in the way of shortage now think about an economic system you know very often people
01:03:21.300
say well i don't want any children and i say well okay that's great but your social security is going
01:03:27.880
to end up being paid by my children and they say i don't need social security i have investments
01:03:33.900
and i say my response is exactly the same because your investments absolutely depend on companies
01:03:41.060
continuing to sell their goods and services and the only way those companies are going to continue to
01:03:47.080
sell goods and services is if the population base expands so everybody understands that people may
01:03:54.120
not agree with me that god created a system this way but everybody agrees that you've got to have
01:03:59.740
a pyramid-shaped structure there's got to be more people in the next generation than in this
01:04:04.580
if not for the most basic and elemental reason which is that for a husband and wife to survive in their
01:04:11.280
old age they need more than one child that's sort of pretty basic now you can translate that into vast
01:04:18.740
economic terms and factories and economic systems the basic arithmetic doesn't change there need to be
01:04:25.140
more people in the next generation if this generation is going to survive and so on and so forth okay fine
01:04:30.960
they understand that and germany understood that as well their answer was immigrants anybody
01:04:37.780
because to them people are just materialistic one pair of arms and one pair of legs and one mouth
01:04:46.140
is the same as any other set of those same organs and people on my side of the device said are you crazy
01:04:53.640
you're bringing in not just arms and legs you're bringing in human beings who have beliefs
01:04:59.100
so you believe that this is i have never thought of it that way you believe this is just a way for them
01:05:07.360
to repopulate because the system i mean just mathematically the system is collapsing
01:05:14.520
they're aging out and there's no young people everybody knows that yes i don't think everybody
01:05:21.100
knows no no no no just everyone knows what you just said yes yes yes yeah but i've never heard
01:05:25.700
anybody aging out yes i've never heard anybody tie those two together yeah so bring in those immigrants
01:05:31.380
and um and since we're only bringing in it's like bringing in cows right they're just arms and legs
01:05:38.240
and and hands their economic cogs they'll be plugged with nothing to worry about and outside of the
01:05:44.600
divide says you're completely wrong you're bringing in complete human beings and those human beings have
01:05:50.060
their own beliefs and those beliefs are like fire in their minds and you have to know what those
01:05:57.660
beliefs are because if they're incompatible with yours you don't have the makings of a society you have
01:06:06.080
the makings of a huge civil war and again parts of paris you know many many other french cities today
01:06:13.480
parts of uh sweden malmo in sweden uh cologne in germany uh these these things play out to the point
01:06:20.760
where uh uh the sort of things we're talking about would make europeans yawn and say yeah tell us
01:06:25.920
something new we know about this already i was i was in copenhagen and i was doing um what's called a
01:06:32.000
stand-up for television where you stand up in a certain area and you you tell a story and they
01:06:37.320
recorded and uh i was doing this and i was so focused on what i was doing out of the corner of
01:06:43.440
my eye i see my security agent he's been moving closer and closer he's uncomfortable very uncomfortable
01:06:49.100
and he finally it just puts his hand up and when he did that i knew i've got to pay attention to him
01:06:55.940
um he put his hand up and he said we have to leave right now and we all left and uh there had been a
01:07:04.500
crowd of muslim men that had been gathering we come home nothing happened we come home month later
01:07:11.080
i see cbs or i'm sorry i see 60 minutes australia and they're doing a stand-up in exactly the same
01:07:18.960
place and their team is beaten they didn't leave and there's a riot that breaks out and they're
01:07:24.180
they're beating them yeah i mean it's it's uh europe knows europe knows i'm sorry the european
01:07:33.220
people know people know the european people know look everybody knows uh again just to reduce it to
01:07:39.360
its its silly simplicity but you know ordinary people know that if you are on alone on a dark
01:07:47.060
street very late at night in in parts of town that make you nervous and you see four figures approaching
01:07:53.540
you from the other end normal people are nervous by that but if they get closer and you see it's not
01:08:00.380
four guys but two men out with their wives it's two couples normal people say okay i was worried
01:08:10.540
there for a moment normal people know that if you bring in a million young males into germany
01:08:16.700
that's not good news it's a problem no regardless whatever their beliefs are but now if you bring in a
01:08:23.900
million young males whose beliefs are islamic now you have a real problem ordinary folks know that
01:08:30.220
but again if your secular worldview is dominant then these are just arms and legs these are
01:08:36.000
socioeconomic cogs just like any others ready to integrate and become part of the economy of your
01:08:41.720
country so you can continue living as comfortably as you do in your gated community
01:08:46.240
i know so some of some of my favorite people uh thinkers are jewish because they just i don't know
01:09:08.280
they think differently and i think it's and i could be wrong i think it's because
01:09:12.980
you answer questions with questions you know you question everything isn't israel isn't that
01:09:21.220
it doesn't it doesn't that translate to wrestle with god yeah okay yeah yeah so and and correct me
01:09:27.800
if i'm wrong but it's part of the culture to question and wrestle with things you know it might be
01:09:33.020
um in in my case uh i i've just really done my hardest to make sure that that my thinking and my
01:09:42.360
analysis is driven by ancient jewish wisdom is driven by biblical tradition rather than by jewish
01:09:48.680
cultural but there's okay so but there's difference and i think it is from i think it is from studying
01:09:54.100
the torah i think the questioning comes from studying the torah um uh but there is a difference
01:10:00.660
between people who read the bible every day and people who study torah there's a great deal of
01:10:08.700
difference in the way they think would you agree with that or not um i would say
01:10:15.820
you know like like all your questions that's thought-provoking but my immediate response
01:10:21.780
is that um i have much more in common with a bible believing christian than i have with a secularized
01:10:30.240
jew i agree with that i'm not talking about secularized you i'm talking about somebody who is
01:10:36.620
studying the torah we don't study the bible like jews study the torah right but that's not because
01:10:44.360
of any shortcoming in you that's simply because you don't have access to the hebrew original and the
01:10:52.580
hebrew is a densely packed encoded system of information uh this you know the example i like giving is that
01:11:00.680
i sometimes pull down from my shelf a german book published in germany uh of max planks analysis of
01:11:10.900
thermodynamics and i give it to somebody and i say so you know what do you think i does this view of
01:11:20.180
the physical universe make sense and he opens he says rabbi later i don't speak german i'm so sorry
01:11:26.460
i put it in the shelf and right next to it i've got an english translation which is a very fine
01:11:31.000
highly heralded i pull down the english translation i'm sorry here it is in english tell me what you
01:11:35.860
think and then he says well i now see my obstacle in understanding it wasn't just the language it was
01:11:44.340
i i don't have i don't know enough physics i don't know enough mathematics every page is filled
01:11:50.020
with equations i'm sorry it it didn't help to give it to me in english it's a lot like that as well
01:11:56.460
where um the english translation of the torah is uh i i i want to say it carries as much as one percent
01:12:05.240
of the meaning but i think that's an exaggeration it's a it's it's it's remarkable remarkable how much
01:12:12.640
christians have lost by i mean we got to get these two together it's very problematic you see i mean
01:12:18.600
just a quick example and there's so many of these i mean we i could do the rest of the day on this
01:12:23.740
but um at the beginning of genesis god put man in the garden of eden to work it that's that's what
01:12:30.320
chapter 2 verse 19 says um in exodus chapter 20 verse 7 seven days shalt i do all thy work
01:12:40.300
six days six days in six days you must do all thy work same word work right god said to moses go to
01:12:48.420
pharaoh and say to him let my people go so that they may worship me in the desert
01:12:52.760
chapter 24 of the book of uh joshua near the end joshua saying you know what i'm fed up with you
01:13:01.520
people you guys can do whatever you like as for me and my family we shall worship the lord
01:13:05.380
so i've just told you four verses two of them use the word work as in doing your work and two of them
01:13:12.060
use the word worship and what no devout good wonderful christian brother can do is realize
01:13:20.240
that in the hebrew original that's all one word all one word there is no distinction between work
01:13:25.980
and worship one of the ways you worship god is by doing your daily work now do you see what an
01:13:31.620
immense difference such so rich that makes to how i go to work on monday morning i'm not now going
01:13:38.120
to work to get a paycheck i'm going to work to take care of god's other children and this is part
01:13:43.580
of the way of worshiping it's kind of the theory of pray always yes you are praying everything you're
01:13:50.780
doing is a prayer exactly right so that would be an example of four verses that are completely
01:13:55.880
misunderstood the essence of it is that taking care of your customers is part of worshiping god that
01:14:04.160
god set up a system where that includes human economic interaction and in the same way that
01:14:10.860
you would be filled with love for me if i did something beautiful for your children
01:14:14.780
god loves it when we do things for one another because we're taking care of his children
01:14:19.580
so these these provide a hebraic perspective on life that simply can't be obtained from the english
01:14:27.240
translation one last that's why everyone needs a rabbi if you don't mind dropping that in no i love that
01:14:33.560
um one last question uh i'm having a difficult time my son is struggling with god
01:14:42.860
and i struggle with god i think we all struggle with god and he has you know he doesn't know him
01:14:50.180
for himself he hasn't worked for that relationship exactly yeah um i was lucky to i felt an early
01:14:59.440
connection okay uh he doesn't um and we were talking about the scriptures the other day why do i have
01:15:07.380
to read the scriptures and i said because even if you don't believe in god yeah it is the basis of
01:15:16.360
the western society and it's just if it was bob's book of really great tips the world would embrace it
01:15:25.140
you know it would be it would it would be this this this bob has been selling these books for
01:15:32.400
yeah you know hundreds and thousands of years and there is really some good stuff in here
01:15:37.140
you know um how do you how do you talk to somebody who doesn't who's who's just disconnected
01:15:46.600
from it disconnected from the language and sees the stories as old and how old is he 14
01:15:52.160
um i think the answer is you don't and all you do is work on your relationship with him
01:16:00.740
everything else will said that to somebody somebody said to me he said how's your
01:16:07.580
relationship i said we're really close we just we're really close and uh and uh i said he's
01:16:15.560
struggling with god and they said what are you what are you doing about that and i said
01:16:19.720
telling him it's okay yeah and they kind of looked at me like that that's crazy and i said
01:16:25.700
it has to be from him i can't give him my faith he he has to find it i have to demonstrate that god
01:16:34.620
lives i have to live yes a godly life but at some point he's going to have that crash is that
01:16:42.580
breaks my heart when i see uh fathers so fervent in their devotion to god that they're willing to
01:16:49.700
destroy their relationship with their sons right in an attempt a futile attempt to drive into them
01:16:55.640
an equivalent love of god it doesn't work it will it will push him away from god i think and from you
01:17:01.080
yeah more importantly from you rabbi it's always great to have you are we already through our time
01:17:10.420
we are my goodness time flies when we talk you come back will you just uh
01:17:16.200
make the case for socialism and capitalism and make it in a way that somebody who's 20
01:17:24.420
can really relate can you do that yeah you can do that in your sleep no no i can't sleep at all no
01:17:33.280
it's not it's it's it's a monumental question but but it's one that i've grappled with okay yeah thank
01:17:40.960
just a reminder i'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it