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Interviews from a multicultural perspective that question the way we understand America
If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.
Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.
Welcome to Back in America. Today's episode is a little different. It will be entirely in French. On February 25th at the Alliance Française in New York, the French language media outlet French Morning hosted an evening with Delphine Orvilleur, one of France's very few female rabbis. She is the author of several bestsellers, including Vivre avec No More and her most recent book Commence en Vapas, written in the aftermath of October 7. The conversation was led by Emmanuel Saint-Martin, and I'm very grateful for Delphine for giving me the permission to publish this recording on the podcast. During her talk, Delphine covers a lot of ground. She speaks about what New York
meant to her formation as a rabbi, about the art of building bridges in a time when no one seems interested in bridge building, and about the violent backlash she faced after speaking out last May about the situation in Gaza, receiving death threats both from the far left and from the communitarian right. She reflects on what she calls the Angle More, the blind spot that trauma creates in all of us, and on how grief and fear have made it nearly impossible for people to truly listen to one another. She talks about the erosion of nuance, about social media and the flattening of language, about the Talmudic religion of disagreement, and about the friendship across religion and cultural lines, including with the Algerian writer Kamel Daboud. And she
answers a tough question from an audience members who tells her, plainly, you lost me. It is a rich, honest, at time deeply moving conversation, and I hope you stay with us until the end. Enjoy. Welcome back to New York. Just quickly, to get into the subject, what is New York to you?
I am very happy to be here with you, and I thank you for this invitation.
It's been a long time since I last came to New York, and I realized when I arrived that it's been more than seven years since I last came. I don't know why, and I have no valid excuse, there was a pandemic, in the meantime, a lot of things, but I haven't been here in a long time. New York has changed my life in many ways. It's not a low word. I came here in 2002, at a time when I was still looking for how I was going to connect all kinds of elements of the puzzle of my life. I had lived in the Middle East, a long time in France, but a lot of going back. I was still looking for a place in the Jewish studies where it could lead me, and New York has opened unimaginable doors for me. I am extremely indebted to this city, which has made everything
positive. Yesterday, I was taken aback by the emotion of arriving at the airport, riding a taxi, and I had the feeling that, I know that exactly 18 years would have passed since I left this city to come back and settle in France as a rabbi. I was taken aback by the moment I received the rabbinical ordination. It was 18 years ago, 18 by Jewish tradition. Some people say that maybe it's a key number, because it's written in Hebrew, chai, which means life. In fact, 18 years is a kind of sign of a period of life. So that's it, 18 years ago. And coming back here after 18 years, it's like closing in on certain things, because I come back here to present books, to meet all the people who
counted on Marko. And it's true that everything was possible because it was New York, and that I met here a thought, a very short thought, progressive, that I had sought in many other places in my life, but that only New York could offer. It put me on the way to the rabbi school. So you come back to a city, and even more so a country that has changed a lot. We'll talk about it later, but precisely on this idea of you as expatriates, how you lived in New York, how you lived in Israel, etc. You say in an excellent article that some of our viewers recently published on a French site for the French of New York, you say that it allowed you to travel between the worlds, to be a kind of
learner, to be a kind of passer-by like that.
And what is striking is that it is a knowledge, a capacity, so the impression that it is largely lost today, precisely, we will talk about it a lot. It's still a paradox because we are in a period, a period of history of the world's shrinking, with technology, with
that does not stop far from there, and despite everything, we have this impression that it is more and more complicated to take points of view that are those of one another, to travel like that between the worlds. For you first of all from a personal point of view, this experience, this experience of life, it taught you that. How did it feel in your way of seeing the world? Let's say I have the impression that the one I have become, particularly the rabbi I have become, owes a lot to the fact of having lived in several worlds and spoken several languages. It turns out that I lived part of my life in the Middle East, in Israel, in Lebanon for a few months, and then here in the United States. And I see today very well how the fact of having had to speak different languages,
travel constantly between universes, has a lot to do with what I have dedicated my Ramina to, namely an attempt to build bridges, bridges with others who do not necessarily speak the same language, the same religious sensitivity. I spent a lot of time, some years ago, to make inter-religious dialogue, something difficult to do, and more and more. And also intra-religious dialogue, which is sometimes even more difficult to do. Because it's difficult to get along with people who live in another neighborhood. It's not easy to get along with your neighbors, but to get along with people who live in your apartment, it's even more complicated. And so I spent a lot of time trying to build bridges between
universes. What I see, but it's not going to be a scoop for you, is that we are in a time where no one is interested in the construction of bridges. But in a way, it's not a scoop, because it has always been true in history. The periods of crisis, and particularly the times of war, whatever they are, wars, to be specific ideological wars, the first thing that is destroyed in these times is the choice of bridges or builders of bridges. Because no one is interested in operating a passage between worlds. We are in a time where walls and barriers are consolidated. And of course, it's complicated for people like me who are trying to build bridges, because we are in an obvious situation where
no one is really interested in that. And yet, precisely, it's the moment when you shouldn't give up. So I would say that it's particularly true, and I live in the Jewish community, or my community, where I've been exercising for years now. We are in a time where people, in a very objective way, not just objective, have reasons to want to build walls. That is, there is an obvious desire for protection, a trust that no longer exists, which is strongly rooted in the other, and precisely not because we are in a time where many people want to build walls. You absolutely have to cling to the possibility that there are windows. I don't know if there are architects in the room.
But we could build a house on walls. It's nice that we're talking about this room, which represents that. It's great, this room. There are walls and windows. And in fact, there is this subtle balance that is so difficult to find today. Because when you try to continue building bridges today, there are a lot of people who are eager to tell you that you are in the choice of being naked or even dangerous, or that you do not live in the real. And so it's complicated to continue to impose this vision today, which, however, seems to me, is vital. So I was going to talk about it a little later, but to bounce back directly on what I don't know why I switched to voicing earlier. I take a microphone,
I'm starting to voicing. Yeah, I followed, I told myself, it's super formal here in these rooms. So we'll see how we get along. So obviously, yes, it's okay. On the other hand, this book is just about how it goes wrong. And speaking of the need to build bridges, to take positions that are a bit like the positions of the line of Crete and which ultimately make us attack both sides. There was this book, but there was your stand in May last year, I believe, in France, which made a lot of noise, like a lot of things you wrote, which was a position, a Jewish word to say that what was going on in Gaza was not at all rare, etc. Obviously, that valued the accusations on both sides.
So that's it. And all that to say that there is this, when you say it's difficult to talk, people don't talk anymore, etc. What I always have the feeling that the question that comes is, is it true that or is it finally those who want to talk, just we don't hear them, we can't hear them. There is this sentence that we had read in the article, that we had in French Morning, which is radicalism is a loud mouth, that you told me when we did the interview. And suddenly, there is a kind of silent majority, perhaps, in any case, not in the sense that it is habitually used by radicals and populists of all kinds, but by people who simply, either because they are afraid to vote against their
camp, do not speak up, jump to censorship, etc. It's still a large part of what's going on. Absolutely. And the construction of the walls that we are witnessing is still reinforced by what people perceive as loyalty to their group or their camp. And someone who suddenly interrupts this wall and the solidity of this wall is immediately perceived, well, we are very quickly treated as traitors. In fact, that's the word that comes up most. You are immediately perceived as being in betrayal of your group. And indeed, today, sorry if I'm pushing open doors, we are fully in the metaphor of architecture. But it is developing, indeed, today, the feeling of many people who are in a
silent majority, who no longer dare to express themselves because they express so strongly radicals that it is difficult to counter because we are afraid to be perceived as not being loyal to a group. So I'm going to go back, I'll talk about the book later, but maybe say a word on what happened to me around last May, a moment I took the floor. So I don't know, I didn't expect the moment I took the floor on this subject, really, some found me naive. I didn't expect it at all to trigger such a hurricane of response. Maybe when I wrote this text, I was in jet lag and so I became aware of what I was going to trigger tonight. But it seems that at that
moment, I was coming back from Israel, where I spent a lot of time with the families of hostages who strongly encouraged me to speak, saying that the diaspora should speak of the hostages. And then at that moment, I'm not going to go into too many political details, there were multiple expressions by ministers of the Israeli government who were, but not only to me, unbearable. There were sentences that were pronounced, that the family could be a legitimate weapon of war, that there was no innocent at Gaza, a set of sentences like that. And I told myself that it was for me the moment when it was necessary to speak out of love for Israel, for this country that I
know well and in which I lived for a very long time and which is so, so dear to me. And I wrote a text that I thought I was, and continue to think, again in my naivety, very measured. I quoted a verse from the Bible that everyone knows, but knows badly, which is, you will love your neighbor like yourself. That's it, it's in the Bible. And it's even the heart of the Bible. If you take the Bible and you unfold the text, imagine, on one side and on the other side of the room, and you try to find what is the point, how do you call it in mathematics or geometry or architecture, the point of mediation. You will fall on the verse of the middle, of the book of the middle,
of the Pentateuch, the third book in the middle. It's you will love your neighbor like yourself. Except that the verse begins differently. And this verse says, you will be able to blame your neighbor and then you will love him like yourself. That is, love in the Bible is not unconditional. Love is conditioned by knowing how to address criticism to people we love. It's a piece of advice for everyone here, it could be a quick couple, in any relationship. Love is about being able to address complaints. And so I announced this verse saying that for me it was important to me to speak about the Ecclesiastical oracle. It triggered something, a sense of horror that the Americans call
this charming word of shitstorm. And strangely the French have no word for that, so I invented an expression that is an oracle. I lived an oracle whose particularity was that it was, whew, bilateral. Since I received simultaneously insults from the extreme left, charming, and insults from the right, or from the hard community right, but not just, we have the right to disagree, and I know that in this case there are people who are in disagreement with my position, and so much the better. In fact, there is nothing more human and there is nothing more playful than expressing disagreements and it's great. But there were threats of death, I received photos of myself in the cellars, really
completely terrible things, violence that I could not imagine. And since then, a phenomenon came to me that is linked to the question you asked me, which is a phenomenon that I experience every day that God does. So for months and months, there has not been a day where I do not experience this phenomenon. I walk down the street in Paris, or I am sitting at the terrace of a coffee, and I hear something in my ear, or I slip a little paper that they leave on the table on which the same thing is always written, or the same thing is always said to me, which is thank you for saying what you think, but you dare not say it. And this sentence makes me
sick, in fact it makes me crazy, because I know that people who say that want to give me support and I say thank you, but in fact this sentence comes to tell that we can no longer speak. And I know very well why we can no longer speak, that's what you said a moment ago. The level of trauma and pain is such that we can no longer speak because we want to keep a relationship with our loved ones. People tell me that if I speak, potentially, I lose relationships with people who are very dear to me because they are not able to hear, there is too much pain, there is too much trauma so that we can not speak. And that's where you're right, the problem is not that we can not speak,
the problem is that we can no longer listen, to listen to where the other is when he speaks. A few months after this shitstorm, when I think about it and I myself I self-criticize, because it's my job too not to simply blame others for what they did wrong or said wrong or misunderstood, but to ask myself what I would change today in the way I expressed myself a few months ago. In fact, I have to deliver a form of self-criticism and recognize that I did not perceive in the month of May last when I expressed myself that the place where I was at that moment was not exactly the place where part of my community was. That is to say that I was already able to
say and see things that they in pain could not say or see or hear. And it made me think a lot about a concept that is the subject of my next book. You are the first. By the way, I am interested in a concept that is called in French the dead angle. The dead angle. That is to say that in English it is called blind spot. You know when you drive, you must always know that there is a part of the scenery that you cannot see in the rearview mirror. And that's a blind spot for your vision. It's interesting that in French we call it a dead angle. It is dead to your vision. But I think that war and trauma and pain and everything we have lived in recent years have created for each one of us a
sacred dead angle. There is something that we do not see. We cannot see. We do not have the ability to see or speak about it. And as when we drive, I speak of it so much that I do not drive. I can't lose my brother who has laughed enough at me all these years. I have the license, but not a PV. Since I have never driven. And I am not a driver. I am a driver. I have the license, but not a PV. Since I have never driven. And when we drive, to fight the dead angle, we have two solutions. The first option is to turn around. Look really back where we come from. Second solution, change the wire and there you change the direction of the car.
This conflict for me was no longer in a dead angle, but for some of mine was still. It is very complicated to know how we speak to people who are quite legitimately and where they are in a state of pain and trauma. Not just in relation to what has just happened to us collectively. And I believe that what has happened to us, and I think there are many people who can testify to this in a very particular way, what has happened to us is to awaken past traumas. I do not count the number of people who come to see me in the synagogue, in conferences, or people I meet all over the world and who in fact in the conversation make the ghosts of the past generations come in. I speak to people and I understand quite quickly that we are not alone. There is not only them and me at the table typically,
but there are their grandparents. Traumatisms for some of the heritage of the SOA or for others of colonialism. For some, for example, I speak with people who are second or third generation of black feet who have arrived in France and I understand that when they talk to me from the Middle East, the ghost of Algeria is in the room or an expulsion or family pain. And in fact, it seems very important to me and that's what I do very often now in conversations I have with people, at some point I stop the conversation and I tell them, who is there with us in the room? It seems like it's getting closer to a kind of group therapy, but finally Rabin, a therapist, it's a bit like that. Freud, psychoanalysis is still a very Jewish thing, but I'm moving away.
In fact, when you stop the conversation and you try to identify the ghosts, it helps to become aware of the dead angles, to a little bit de-mine the field and to realize that through our mouths, there is not only us who speak. But precisely, if we extend that a little bit on the political field, for example, to talk about what is happening here, but not only here, about this rise in radicalism and the impossibility of talking about what we were talking about earlier, I think it's Sartre who said, think is to act, speak is to act, sorry. On the other hand, we have people, for example, like Trump, who are in the semantic bombardment, that is to say, who speak a lot to say little or in any case a lot of lies,
that's the principle of this rhetoric, finally. How, in the face of this, in the face of this semantic bombardment, we find a word, we manage to have a word that makes sense and finally to find the power of the word, which is finally what it is about with this silent majority. Because finally, there is a well-known metaphor of Vacaville, which was put in fashion by the Canadian Prime Minister in a powerful speech a few weeks ago, on the power of the powerless, which ultimately is the complicity of the silent people, which allows the authoritarian, the dictatorship to hold on and that from the moment we start talking,
telling the truth, things happen. How do we manage to find this power of speech in this moment, which is a bit of a time of liberation for this majority, finally? Yes, because the paradox that you point out well is that often people who speak and who speak loudly today, first of all, they use a very small number of words, that is to say that their lexical, lexical sound is reduced, as in all the moments when there is a totalitarian temptation, new languages are developed. There are many people who have written on this subject, but I advise you all to read, to reread, if you have already read Klemper, Victor Klemperer and the language of the Third Reich, a tool
whose analysis, how with the rise of totalitarianism in the last century, new words are developed, a very different use of language, and that's what we're witnessing all around us. So paradoxically, the words are bombarded, bombarded, bombarded, and they are getting richer and richer, they are becoming more and more explicit. It's not by chance that in recent years, too, power has been raised on social networks of expressive modalities in 140 signs or 280 signs. It's interesting because we have privileged on social networks totally explicit messages.
That is, a simple, simple idea must be thrown in very few words and it must give way to the implicit. A few years ago, I was very interested in the use of emoticons in the way people have started writing. It may be a little less popular now, but for a few years now, people have been sending you messages and they feel obliged to add lots of emoticons to the sentence they write to you, as to make the emotion of their expression much more explicit. For example, someone writes to you, I passed my exam, and then he puts one thumb, two thumbs, three thumbs, four thumbs, then he writes to you, my cat is dead, oh, oh, oh, and then you have the right to five little good men crying.
So we can say it's funny, it's funny, but it's not an anecdote, in fact, it's a way of making language very explicit. That is, we tell you, I tell you that since my cat is dead, it makes me very sad, I am happy. There is something that is actually the opposite of what exegesis should be. The principle of my profession, but not only of many people who practice this work of exegesis, is that the proof of exegesis is interpretation. It is that we accept that a text can be understood in one way, but in another, and that there are several ways to read it and several ways to understand it,
and that absolutely nothing is completely explicit. But in the society in which we live, and besides it's interesting that when we can't talk anymore, many people start talking all day with machines, and for the sake of real conversations with Chagipiti and others, we have a problem with the relationship between language, it's very clear, and therefore with truth. It builds in many people a discomfort in their relationship with words and various and varied reactions. For example, in the last few months, I will give you a very personal element of my life. The only thing that does me good, I realize when I'm really at the end, is to go swimming. I swim, and I don't swim in any way.
I am one of the most ridiculous swimming pool in Paris Centre. I swim uniquely, with a tuba. Why? Very often at the swimming pool, people ask me, is there fish? You see something. But I swim with a tuba for a very particular reason. It took me some time to understand why it does me good. It's that the tuba allows me, for an hour, not to get the water out of my head.
And so for an hour, I benefit from a total silence. I only hear my breathing, in fact, it's like a meditative practice. I don't lift my head to withdraw myself from the noise of the world. But I think it's linked to what many people feel as an urgency to rethink our relationship with words, our relationship with language. How can we do it? And I don't have an answer to that, but how can we do it to make, again, not just the language complex, but to reintegrate complexity into any human conversation?
That is, to accept that there is no explicit language in a human world, that the essence of human relations is that even if I am clear in the way I am talking to you now, Emmanuel, I must start from the principle that you cannot understand what I am telling you. And that the conversation between us is possible only because there is this distance that makes what I say to you is not what your ear hears, and you will never be able to completely translate what I am trying to say. That's what Americans say in an expression that I find extraordinary, which is the lost in translation. There is always something untranslatable in language, and in fact, that's what we should try to find.
That is, the consciousness that something escapes us. Because this consciousness simply reintroduces complexity in the world, and you noticed that this is exactly what many people today refuse in this obscene simplification of the destruction of the world. But isn't one of the problems precisely this praise of complexity, which is always the fruit of a certain intellectual elite, finally, by nature, is confronted by the fact that there is no market for this. There is no political market, in particular, there is no demand for complexity, or in any case, it is the impression that we have of it.
And so we find ourselves confronted to feed, finally, these populisms, these radicalisms, etc. that feed on the fact that the elite calls for complexity, while this world or this universe has simple solutions and easy-to-explain solutions. So we come out of this kind of possibility. But I think it's a good thing to think that it's the elite that invites complexity. I think it's often those who want to convince us of populist discourses, precisely in the own of all populist discourses, it's that they're anti-intellectual discourses, and that has always been the case in history.
We want to convince you that the elite is disconnected from the small people and feeds its own interests in a disinterest for the populace. And in fact, I think it's exactly the opposite. I think we have to break this pattern. I think that typically, if there is, for example, a reading that re-learns us the complexity of the world, in my opinion, it's poetry. Really, reading poetry is being in contact with the complexity of the world, because by definition, poetry is a relationship to words that is more than just saying.
In fact, poetry, as in some cases religious texts, are texts that don't want to say anything. They don't want to say anything. They can say. So all totalitaries say, here's what the text wants to say, the Koran wants to say this, the Gospels want to say that, the Torah wants to say that. But the Torah doesn't want to say anything. The proof is that, at the whim of it, you can show everything and its opposite. This is an exercise I often do when I talk about religious traditions or sacred literature. I tell people, if you want me to show you at the whim of it, that the Bible is misogynistic,
it's very easy. But if, at the whim of it, you want me to show you at the whim of it that the Bible is misogynistic, I can do it. If you want me to show you at the whim of it that the Bible invites to the love of the next, it's easy to do. But at the whim of it, I can also show you with other verses that it constantly invites to be wary of the next. I can show you that the Bible encourages the installation somewhere, or, on the contrary, I can show you that it tells you to be wary of all its dentities
and to prefer a kind of spiritual heresy. In fact, we can say everything and its opposite. So the question is never what the text means. Most of the time, it's what it can say. But much more interesting than that is what we're going to do with what we've said in the text. How is it that we are aware of the interpretations of all the texts of our lives that have been made in political vises? That is, there is only one particular political agenda. How the text has been instrumentalized and how can we break this instrumentalization to make it again breathing and therefore, by definition, complex?
It's like in a pregnant breast, we would say, of new senses, of what it could still say. But it's crazy how so few people today are interested in this quest, again, of subtle, complex, not yet said. And it's linked to everything we were saying earlier. So, trauma, fear, creates a reversal in simple senses, on the will that all the texts of our lives mean only one thing. It must reassure people that it cannot be read otherwise. And so I don't know how we rehabilitate that. But what is certain is that social networks and conversational modalities today absolutely do not help us.
There is also the feeling of a kind of dumbization, I don't know how to say it, it doesn't even exist in English, but the idea of the world's idiotization. The idea that it is the fools who have taken power that, to quote a great author, a great thinker, humorist François Morel, the world is a bar, the world is a bistro and it is the balls of bars that govern. There is still this idea there. And is it a problem of, is nothing new at all, is it a problem of perspective, or is there something? What is still new is, again, I come back to the relationship with social networks. For example, I have been marked in everything I have experienced in recent months, for example, the attacks on networks. It is very interesting that at one point, I came to the conclusion that I had to close the comments on what I was publishing,
because I met a lot of people who were telling me, what did you take in the mouth, in the comments of everything you published? And I was telling these people, well, I don't know, I didn't read the comments, but did you read what I published? And people were saying, no, no, no, I just read the comments, we took it out of our mouths. And in fact, there is still something weird in there. You are asking why the life of Mr. Vincent, the life of Mrs. Michu or Mr. Moulin, who I am talking about behind me, three followers, who may be my friends, I don't know, who comment obscenely on some of your publications, what is it that is exactly worth paying attention to? If it is not that we have turned in a moment where in fact we no longer want to debate, we want to fight.
In fact, the conversation is not there to really debate, but to fight. And the conversation, it is interesting when we study this word of conversation etymologically, the conversation, the one we are missing so much today, it is the same root, the conversation, as the word conversion. And what does that mean? It means that a real conversation is a moment that could convert us, not religiously, I mean, but convert us, that is to say, change our mind. The only reason we are talking about it is that potentially we are not exactly the same at the end of this dialogue as before, because something in us, thanks to this exchange, could change. That is the meaning of a conversation.
But today it is not at all what people aspire to, they do not aspire at all, and especially not on social networks, to potentially change their mind. They generally aspire to take a third of the way they go, like in a catch match, to put chaos on the mat. And so it is no longer at all the same at all. So obviously, it saddens me even more that I come from a culture, and in Jewish tradition, nothing is more central than the confrontation of ideas. If you open a book of Talmud, in fact it is simple, for those who have never read Talmud, we can summarize it in one sentence. Talmud is full of books of people who are arguing.
In fact, they agree on nothing. And they argue, and this is even more interesting in the way it is edited, is that these are people who have not lived in the same place and not in the same century, but they still manage to yell at a subject that will seem to you completely uninteresting. To know how much we will have to give to someone who has reversed your bull, who is working on a field. And on that, a rabbi from the first century will yell at a rabbi from the third century, who does not live in the same place and in the same century, but who finds a way to debate, despite everything. And I find that there is a conversational modality in it that we must be able to explore again today.
There is a Talmud text, if you allow me, which is very well known, maybe not sure if you know it, but I often come back to it at this time because it seems relevant to me for everyone, this text. There is a famous passage in Talmud where two very well-known schools are confronted. There is the school of a guy named Hilen, and the school of a guy named Shammai. And as his name suggests, he is Shammai. Hilen and Shammai agree on nothing, never. Their students constantly argue. And one day they discuss a point of the law, and Hilen's students say, we are right, Shammai's students say, no, we are right.
And finally, a heavenly voice intervenes, which ends the debate, and which says, It is said in the following way, the words of living God are with one and the other. Translation, it's a bit the Talmudic version of the phrase, how was it called, in the school of the fans, Jacques Martin who at the end of the day, everyone won. Well, it's a bit the Talmudic version of that. God says to one another, he has the Shammai right. So there we say to ourselves, but it's still annoying, who, the law must follow who, in these conditions. And the Talmud continues by saying, despite everything, the law will follow Hilen's house and the idea of Hilen's students. So there, we are even more disheveled, we say to ourselves, and if both are right, why would the law follow Hilen's house?
The answer to the Talmud, because unlike Shammai's house, the students of Hilen's house were able to give the opinion of the other school before explaining their point of view. And that's a real culture of debate and disagreement. We will not agree, and you will not necessarily convince me. But what the conversation will serve is that I will have enough respect and listening from your point of view, I will be able, before explaining mine, to validate the viability of yours. That is to say, here, I understand that my interlocutor thinks so, reads so, understands the world so, and I will then explain with respect and politeness what my point of view is.
So I don't know how we can teach this art of conversation. I wouldn't say that you have to teach Talmud in all schools. No, I wouldn't say that. But there is something in this philosophy of dialogue that is terribly missing for all of us. This is exactly the moment when we will see if people are there to debate or fight, if we have some catchers in the room. We have microphones, if you want to raise your hand. So do we have someone to pass the microphones?
I was saying, well, that's a good question, I'll do it. Who has a question? Is someone with a question, a remark, a desire to speak? Hello. To take up your metaphor of the dead angle, there may have been a way of seeing that vis-à-vis your Jewish-French community, who said that we were driving like a good father to the family, without worrying about the dead angle, which was the anti-Semitism,
and that a huge motorcycle came, which took the rear-view mirror and tore off the rear-view mirror. And now we are always systematically turning towards the dead angle. It's a bit like Job who gets an anvil on his head and says, what happened to me? And he starts asking a lot of questions. Do you consider that too? Can you understand that from the perspective of the community?
I think so, yes. As I was saying just now, I know very well the traumatism of mine, because it's mine. In reality, I don't think I can make the emphasis on what pain is, we're talking about anti-Semitism, which has generated throughout the world, in recent years, in the way we have been able to bring about an insurmountable and unbearable pain. But the question that is always asked, and it is asked of everyone,
and obviously not only of the Jews, is what we do with this pain? Does it simply involve us in a logic of suspicion that will strengthen our self-care and our tribalism and will perhaps make us feel empathetic towards others? Or is it that, on the contrary, we are going to do something about this pain? I don't know if I'm answering your question or not. I don't think so. I think a lot of people today are building politics
only on affection. And I don't think we can go very far like this, because your pain will always be countered by the pain of another. In fact, I no longer physically support this competition of victims and pain that we are witnessing. And it happened to me in a situation where, to give you an example, since we are talking about the
I understand how some in my community have been brought here, because I know where the pain takes us. But I think there comes a time when we have the duty, again, to do something, to ask ourselves the question of how can it make us grow without denying what happened to us, make our humanity grow? But it's interesting because these last few months, I realize that I suddenly understand the texts to which I have been completely hermetic these last few years.
I'll give you an example. Maybe some of you have read the newspaper Déti Il Soudh. If you have read this newspaper that came out a few decades ago, which is the story of a young Dutch Jew who was deported and who, in a newspaper, writes his daily life in Holland. When I read this book a few decades ago, to be completely honest, I did not understand it, but it was very moving. Déti Il Soudh shows in this book a kind of human elevation
that makes her never talk only about the pain of the Jews from Holland, who were deported around her, but she takes a kind of elevation to be able to express her perception of all the human pain she encounters around her, and I find this position of the humanist extremely high that I was not able to feel a few years ago. And where I feel that these last two years and this conflict, how painful it has changed me,
is that all of a sudden I feel incredibly connected to this, to all those who try to transcend the pain of their, the tribal pain. Once again, I understand very well, on the one hand and on the other, that the pain felt and the trauma that some people bring to the other person to bend over on the self-esteem. But I consider that I do not really have an excuse to do this. In the same way that I consider when I go to the Middle East, that I understand very well that many Israelis and Palestinians today
do not have the strength or the space to have empathy for the opposite camp. But I consider that when we live thousands of kilometers away, and that precisely our children are not those who are on the battlefield, in the military cemeteries or under the rubble of Gaza, well, if we are not able to take a different human and humanist elevation, then not only do we not move forward towards the solution, but in a sense we are part of the problem. Just one thing, I think there is a small downside to the French Jewish community,
which was very integrated, which is not only a pain, but also an incomprehension. I went to the book of Daniel Ivan, and how he translates the integration of French Jews, which came by surprise, and the surprise effect also contributed to this dismay. Jean-Paul Bagnier, a very specific person in France. In fact, it is true that it has been 25 years since this phenomenon developed, and since that time to take a considerable amount of pain, and now it also becomes a worldwide phenomenon.
This rise in antisemitism, I will say a word, and it is important to say a word here in New York, because when I lived here, I was at the Ravinek School, I often say this, but if at the time, at the beginning of the 2000s, where there was already an increasing antisemitism in France, if at the time I lived in New York, I had asked for a dollar, not more, a dollar, to each person who said this sentence, antisemitism would never happen here.
Well, today I would be super rich. You were talking about the fact that, here, the empathy you have for the other side. I was wondering if you feel lonely, or rather, do you find partners on the other side in France? How would you define the other side? Because there are many sides, it's like a room with many things. Obviously, everyone feels that everyone is so divided from everyone, and when we try to do this point, as you try to do,
do you meet partners who see the Palestinian perspective, but who manage to go beyond this human you were talking about, the humanist? Yes, I'm a humanist. Thank you. So, I was talking about the inter-religious dialogue that I have, undeniably, and it would be stupid to deny it, it has become very complicated in recent years. The inter-religious dialogue is very complicated to find interlocutors
because of radicality, radicalization. I meet, for example, in this Judeo-Muslim dialogue, which is so dear to my heart. In recent years, this dialogue is at the dead end. I have a hard time finding interlocutors, for example in France, in mosques, I don't find any. On the other hand, I have a lot of interlocutors on the side of intellectuals, Arabs and Muslims, Islamologists.
I wrote a book a few years ago with Rajid Benzine, on the Judeo-Muslim dialogue. I realize that I have strengthened my conversation in a very particular way with other Muslim intellectuals who have become, for me, pillars, I don't know if I would define them as Muslims, of Arab culture. There is a friend of mine who is very dear to me, and I often talk about him, who is my friend with Kamel Daoud,
who is really someone, for those who don't know him, he is an Algerian writer who won the Goncourt last year, who was for me an extremely strong supporter. And we still see each other very often because on our paths, our paths are jostling with many common points, in particular a certain habit, for him and for me, to have been treated as a traitor by others. It brings us closer, it's incredible.
But it's a conversation that I have very often with him. He was for me really a pillar after the 7th of October, he is one of the first people who called me, I also think of many other Amir Abou, I say Mouawad, many others who have really been there, I talk about it in the book, How are you, about the way their friendship supported me. But indeed it's something difficult,
because many people, when you maintain these relationships, there are many people who will come to you and say, What naivety, what mischief. I suddenly remember an episode that I lived a few months ago, at the time of the war between Israel and Iran and the bombings, the war between Israel and Iran a few months ago. At the time, my son was in Tel Aviv, and so I was in a very worried Jewish mode.
I remember one day I was walking down the street in Paris, and I listened to the news because I was following the Israeli radio, I was following the bombings, I was asking myself where my son was, which I geolocated frantically, I know what they say, and he doesn't answer my phone. And I was walking in Paris, very close to the hotel de Ville, and suddenly I feel a presence in front of me, someone who is standing there, and I say to myself,
I lift my head and I see a young woman, with tears in her eyes, who says to me, It's crazy that I meet you here, because I was about to collapse, and I interpret my meeting with you as a sign. I forget what this story is about. And then I tell myself, if it's true, she also has a son in Tel Aviv. And I tell her, you have a family in the region,
and she says to me, yes, my parents are in Tabriz under the Israeli bombs. And at that moment, I tell her, my son is in Tel Aviv. And there was a second where we both looked at each other, and it was like in a movie, it was Lelouch, we could have turned around. We fell into each other's arms, and we started crying for ten minutes, tight-knit against each other, and then we broke up, and I was in a different direction.
But it was almost like it was in the same place, it was like the scene of... Who took this picture? The kiss on the hotel in the city of Douano. It was like the photo of Douano, except that it was an Israeli Franco and an Iranian Franco who were falling into each other's arms. And these little moments saved us.
And I know that as a teacher, there are people who say, yes, but in fact, we need that to stay up, at a time when so many people, again, want to lock us up in... Politically, what happens to us is so disgusting. There are no other words, actually. We see how everything is put in place to make our hatred grow. We have a question over there. Go ahead.
Yes. Hello. A very interesting question. When you talked about comments and people who will tell you, oh no, I only read the comments without even realizing it. And I find myself a little bit in this description. I find a lot of friends who tell me, I spent a sleepless night because I watched the comments on this video,
while the video was a message that they liked, and it's the comments that will reach us. And I have the impression that as a Jewish community, we will watch the comments to get the temperature, to take the burden off society. And that's why what Miriam thinks in 59, and the hatred she can have, will seem to us to be symbolic of what we will feel in the country.
And we have this hyper-vigilance state that will make us always want to take the temperature on social networks and that we attach a lot of importance to it. Absolutely. Yes. So the question I'm asking myself is, if you have found keys in other communities, knowing that we also have this kind of intergenerational trauma,
how to live with this hyper-vigilance state? How to see all this, to have a little more resilience in today's world? You yourself have found some keys. No. You are right, it often translates, I believe, in the Jewish community, there is this hyper-vigilance that actually tells the intergenerational anxiety. That is, we want to know where society is in its level of hatred,
because we are aware that this level of hatred translates what could soon strike directly and personally on us. So again, it's a form of post-traumatic psychosis that we are many to know. In the insults that I received, it was more surprising to me, when these insults came from Jewish people, I didn't see many people get up
to prevent them from being accused in a way that tells how we have all, whatever our affiliations, our identities, our stories and our traumas, a level of tolerance to violence, which is terrible. What makes us not get up? For example, I was very surprised to see that people even close, where there were attacks that I could receive,
like many people on the networks, very violent attacks, and people who were basically people from my camp, moderate, instead of getting up against this violence that I was victims of, all they could tell me was, in your text, I wouldn't have said that exactly, you said maybe, I would have said eventually. In fact, there was once again a moderate word,
which was actually prevented, but which tells our fundamental radicalities, but also the way in which everyone talks about this concept of Doverton's window, Doverton's window is what are the audible or audible words in a society, so it's a window that can be enlarged or narrowed, depending on the times. Very clearly, today's political leaders, including Donald Trump, have a gigantic enlargement of Doverton's window
within many communities, so the Jewish community, I have the feeling that this Doverton window has shifted very strongly to the right. It gives rise to a situation where my position, once again, is perhaps naively that I had considered for a long time as being a slightly mediant or moderate position, perceived by some as being a left-wing radicality. But it's too white, you have to compose with this movement.
I realize that I completely forgot the question. So, as a good rabbit, I answer another question, but I no longer know exactly what your question was. Did I answer it? No, I didn't. Yes, it was the keys to living with this hyper-vigilance. Yes. So, I think that first you have to be aware,
I was talking about ghostly ghosts, of historical traumas that we inherited, I think you have to be aware of it all the time, and see where they took us in history. I'll give you a little parenthesis on that. I've been thinking about this lately in a context of threats on the Jewish community, which has been almost a constant in history, of the rise of anti-Semitism.
How did the Jews develop strategies for survival and protection? In Jewish history, several strategies have been developed in different times and in different places. A first strategy, and it's a good time to talk about it, because in a few days it's the Purim Jewish Festival, which is the party where we read the story of Megillah, the story of Queen Esther. In Esther's book, which we will read in a few days in synagogues,
we were told about a Jewish strategy modality against threat. And this strategy is the strategy that we call in good French the strategy of the Jew of Chur. In Esther's book, for those who know this story, she enters the royal palace, she becomes the king's favorite, and in fact she approaches the sphere of power in a very simple strategic fight that is to protect the Jews. And this strategy, when you think about it,
it worked in history. There were many historical moments when the Jews were forced to be close to the powerful or to power, because it was the only thing that would save them in a society. There is another strategy that was used post-traumatic by the Jews. This is what we could call, apparently I gave you a Bible course, now you may not have come for that, but this is what we could call the strategy of Jeremy.
Because in the Bible, Jeremy, the prophet Jeremy lives in exile and he tells the inhabitants of the exile, the Jewish inhabitants around him who are in exile, he tells them, you should build the city where you are and develop its wealth, because the more the minorities around you, the more important the progress will be in the society where you live, the more the minorities will be protected, the more you, the Jews, will be protected because the status of the other minorities will be on you. This is what was the model in the American Judaism.
The American Judaism invested a lot in what we call here a Hebrew man who is in charge of accenting the chikkun in the soul, that is, the desire to repair the world, to invest in the progressive values of a society as an extremely strong survival strategy. And we see today that all these Jewish strategies in history continue to be relevant but partially in failure. And in fact, many of us are asking ourselves the question
of what is our survival strategy today? In fact, it is related to the question that you are asking me. If there are so many people who are, by trauma, are overwhelmed by the question of the comments, of what we say about them, what sauce they will be eaten with or at the same level of hate, in fact all this tells the ghosts and the residues of our survival psychology strategies. How to survive?
We have time for one last question here. Is there a microphone? Right there. Good evening, Delphine. We met at the beginning of this conversation to tell you that until this October I was a big fan of you and you lost me. It's nice to be here tonight. You mentioned it, it's by participating in audiences a little bit,
where we hear different messages that we progress. You mentioned a very important point. We are at a time when we have to be careful with nuance and subtlety. And the moment you lost me, is when you started in your comments or positions, to sometimes talk about Juif, De Tsaal, Netanyahu. And if you take up your writings or comments from this time, you will understand that you have lost a number of fans, as I was.
But it is as a moral authority that I would like to ask you the following question, which I wrote in order not to be too long. Do you think that a state at war against a terrorist organization has a higher moral responsibility than that of its opponent? If so, how far? And if not, why demand it, especially from Israel? Thank you. We have a few hours.
I am deeply Zionist, deeply attached to Israel. I have a double nationality, and this country and this Zionist project particularly hold me dear. Israel is defined as a hope, a refuge, and as a center, perhaps wrongly, but a center of living Jewish identity today. So yes, I have a particular moral, ethical and religious expectation towards this country. Maybe sometimes I expect more from other countries,
and I will not stand for someone else to have this moral requirement towards Israel, that they would not have towards the country where they reside. I do not stand for people who teach Jews who should, by definition, in the image of their history, behave differently, more morally, but who do not have this requirement towards their own country or their own religious traditions. But I consider that yes, I, a Zionist Jew, a rabbi, and a Jew of Jewish tradition, have a problem with the way the Israeli government today
kidnaps Jewish tradition in a certain way to betray what I believe are the foundations of its state and the possibility of its survival. Today, when we talk about it, this morning, when I opened the newspapers, I discovered that this night in the Knesset, in the Israeli Parliament, a law was voted in the first reading that forbids women, like me, to pray at the wall of lamentation with a prayer mat in a section where men and women could pray together,
and that if this law is passed in the second or third reading, the fact of praying like I do, and like the millions of people in the world, is passable for seven years in prison. I have a problem with that, not in the absolute, but with the death of Israel. I have a problem with this, yes, in a certain way, this value kidnapping, which in my opinion constitutes a betrayal. And once again, it is because I have this deep love for this country, for its history, for Amnian, for our heritage,
because I believe that the policy of Israel must take into account what was 2000 years of diaspora, and what this diaspora has taught us, simply in terms of consciousness of altairity. Is that true? Yes. I expect Israel to have a slightly different relationship to the other. So, of course, some will say to me, it's easy for you, you're not at the head of the state, you don't do politics, you're just a rabbi. But precisely, I think that Israel, more than ever, needs Jewish moral voices, wherever they are, to rise.
The timing is perfect because it was the end of this interview. Thank you very much to you all for the quality of the listening. We debated more than we fought.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.