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This Jewish Inspiration Podcast is dedicated to learning, understanding and enhancing our relationship with Hashem by working on improving our G-d given soul traits and aspiring to reflect His holy name each and every day. The goal is for each listener to hear something inspirational with each episode that will enhance their life.
00:01 - Intro (Announcement)
From the Torch Studio in Houston, texas, featuring leaders and personalities from Jewish communities around the globe. This is the Sunday Special Edition of the Jewish Inspiration Podcast with Rabbi Ari Abole.
00:23 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
Welcome back, my dear friends, to the Jewish Inspiration Podcast, to the Sunday special. We have a fabulous guest with us today, all the way from Jerusalem, my dear friend Rabbi Ken Spiro Shalom Aleichem. Welcome, aleichem Shalom. Thanks for having me. It is an honor. We're looking forward to your lecture tonight and it really is exciting. So tell me, where did you grow up and how did?
00:45 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
you get to Israel. So I was born in Brooklyn but I grew up in New Rochelle, new York, in the suburbs. I was not raised in a religious home at all. We were raised Reform. You know, I always jokingly say my oldest son, all my kids, are born in Israel and raised religious and speak Hebrew as their first language, which is pretty cool. But my oldest son, you know, he asked me years ago, dad, what does it mean you weren't raised religious? What did you do Jewish stuff when you were little? And I say, on Passover we used to have ham and cheese on matzah. And he laughed and he said, dad, why did you bother with the matzah? I said it was Passover, we couldn't have bread. I really didn't know anything. My parents weren't Zionist. We never went to Israel. We had after school Hebrew school. I went to public school, nur-i-shal High School, vassar College. I studied Russian language and literature and Japanese. In college I wanted to do international business. Do you speak Russian? Do you speak Russian? Yes, of course, it's free Very beautiful.
01:41
How did you know Russian?
01:42 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
I was there many times.
01:45 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
Well done, very interesting. Okay, that was a russian interlude there. Um, yes, so when I graduated college because I studied seven years russian in high school and college I could read tolstoy's war and peace in the original russian, but I couldn't ask for directions on the street. Because you want to actually learn a language, you got to get some immersion and I wanted to use it for business. So I said I better, before going to grad school, I'm going to take a year off and go to Russia as a graduate student. And I went. It was a University of Moscow's teacher training school and since I was taking a year off, I said I'll take half a year in Russia and then add more time to kill. I'm going to go to Israel and go to kibbutz. Never been there. Do what you do in Israel Pick grapefruits, go to kibbutz, learn some Hebrew, get a suntan.
02:27
So when I went off to Russia, it was the Soviet Union and when it was the Soviet Union, it was basically legal for a Jew to be practiced, study or practice Judaism. The first thing I learned is, if you want to get a Jew to do something just like, tell them they can't Like. If the Congress would Judaism, every Jew would run off and start studying. So I spent like a half a year in Russia cutting almost all my classes that I didn't care about and hanging out with hundreds of young Russian Jews who were like risking their lives to be Jewish. And when I finished that experience I had some amazing experiences there.
02:55
The first Sukkot I ever really had was there, the first secret Shabbat I ever went to, with the guy's parents hiding in the bedroom because it was illegal. They had no kosher food. They made kiddush on a cup of water with six raisins floating in it and had cabbage and potatoes to eat because there was no meat, there was no bread, there was no nothing. It was kosher. And it basically dawned on me if these people are risking their lives to be Jewish and study, there must be something more to the Jewish thing.
03:21
So my roommate in college had been to Israel and gone to Eshatorah Yeshiva in the old city for a few weeks the year before and I bumped into him again when I came back from Russia and he said you know what? I'm going to take a semester off and go learn in Yeshiva. Why don't you come with me? So I said sure. So I canceled my kibbutz and I showed up in Israel in the winter of 1982 for what was supposed to be three months, which has now turned into eight months and 42 years. Wow, so yeah, Wow.
03:51 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
So I'm always fascinated. You know I don't consider myself lucky like you to, at an older age, be introduced to Judaism, but I always wonder what's the turning point? What did you hear that said oh my goodness, how did I miss this my whole life? What was it for you? And I know every person has their own unique thing, their unique, uh, inspiration, what, what did it for you that just blew your mind, is like I there's no turning back so it wasn't one moment I left out of detail when I was because I had a non-Jewish girlfriend in college for many years.
04:26 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
We were from the second week of college. We went on for three years my parents were not religious but they were from that generation that you have to marry Jewish. You have to marry Jewish. I'm going to sit Shiva. You don't marry Jewish. I thought sitting Shiva was like an Indian chief.
04:37
So they heard Dennis Prager speak in our reformed temple in New Rochelle when I was already a junior in college. I wasn't present for this event but apparently afterwards my mother goes up to Dennis Prager and says how can we get our son to marry someone Jewish? And he said to her send him to me. And at the time he and Joseph Talushkin they've co-written multiple books were running a kibbutz camp experience in Simi Valley north of LA called the Brandeis Camp Institute, bci. It was like a one-month kibbutz experience for 18 to 26-year-olds and my parents basically kind of forced and bribed me to go to this instead of hanging out in the summer and working. And he was the first person I ever met who could say anything intelligent about Judaism. And what really lit me up was the whole notion of ethical monotheism, where there is no God, everything is permissible, that there's no real right or wrong without an absolute standard. That really resonated with me in a big way. So after spending a month there I wasn't observant at all, although I did he said you got to take on something. So I decided my senior year of college I'm not going to milk and meat. So I made my roommates thank God, two of them were Jewish and one of them was not I said you can't cook with milk and meat. But that was it. But at least the door was opened.
05:46
And then when I came to Israel, I went to Eshet Torah, and the founder of Eshet Torah is Rabbi Noah Weinberg. And Rabbi Noah Weinberg is really one of the pioneers of the Balchuvah movement, one of the first people to realize you can actually turn Jews on to Judaism by showing them the beauty and the relevance of Jewish wisdom and our Jewish heritage. But he's also he was super idealistic about. You know, this is a war. It's not a physical war, it's a spiritual war. You know the world is a bit crazy. The Jewish people are supposed to bring sanity in the world. The Jewish people are disappearing. Intermarriage and assimilation is killing us off and we have and a bigger picture, because that's kind of reactive.
06:21
But what really sold me was kind of a continuation of the messaging that Dennis Prager had given me before, of the notion that we have a mission to be the God squad, to be the people whose job it is is to teach the world how to run the place better, to be the source of morality. And I was planning to go to business school and it dawned on me not that I really loved the idea of going to business school, I just liked the idea of making a lot of money but it dawned on me. Why would I want to go to business school when I could change the world, I could do something really positive for humanity, which meant giving up on a lot of things in terms of wealth and materialism. But I guess I never viewed myself as a super idealistic, meaning-oriented person. But I guess I must have been more so than I thought, because I just made the decision. How can I do anything else? It would be dishonest. That was in terms of the mission, but in terms of being observant, it was a process, because, having worked now I work in outreach myself for decades everyone is lit up by something else. What might be a proof or something inspirational for one person doesn't do it for the next.
07:22
For me, it was basically history and science, because I didn't want to be religious, I didn't want to keep Shabbat, I didn't want to keep kosher. My mother used to jokingly say I know, you're orthodox when you stop eating shrimp. So it wasn't like oh, this is so, and I'm not like a super spiritual kind of kumbaya. I love the spirituality of Shabbat. That was not I love Shabbat. That was not the thing that did it for me. For me, it was seeing how unbelievable Jewish history is and how supernatural it is. And also I love physics. I always loved physics and astronomy. And when I finally started learning that we really had all the science before science had the science and we couldn't possibly have known it by any normal way.
08:09
So I got to the point where did I still have questions?
08:10
Yeah, but beyond a reasonable doubt.
08:11
This is true, and it would be completely dishonest if I were to turn my back on what I knew to be true, to go back to doing something else.
08:16
So it was really a combination of the idealism and the notion of being involved in really the ultimate cause of being the people's job it is to really try and make the world the best place humanly possible and the realization that there is a God who gave Torah at Mount Sinai, because that's the real issue for a Jew, you have to, that's the only real issue that a lot of people believe in God. But what separates Jews from everyone else is the notion that there's a God who gave us a Torah at Mount Sinai and we have obligation to follow it. And once you get through that big stab, the rest is just, you know, it's kind of like the commentary afterwards. So it wasn't something that happened overnight, but I have to say I fell into it fairly quickly. Within a couple of months of arriving in Israel, I basically decided that this I have to learn more and this is I got it somehow. I got to be involved in this in some way.
09:02 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
Fascinating, fascinating. Can we inspire someone else? The next Can Spiro of the world, and there are so many beautiful people that I meet and many listeners to this podcast who are on that similar journey, who you know. Yeah, I know not to eat ham and cheese on my matzah and I know all of the you know, but really, for me to keep Shabbos is a million miles away. For me to keep kosherism, I mean, I'm married to someone who's not, maybe not even Jewish, someone who doesn't care about Judaism, someone who's not, whatever it may be. How do we like, what do you say to those people to help them make that transformation?
09:47 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
Yeah. So first of all, I have to say I had an advantage because I came in single. I meet a lot of people who become religious after they're married. With families, that's a much more difficult transition. A because you're bringing a whole family along with it. The implications are huge. If you make the journey on your own and you're married, it can cause a lot of problems. And also because you can't immerse yourself the way I could and I ended up learning four years full-time in yeshiva so I could really dive in headfirst. But even for someone like myself who could immerse myself much more, you know continuously and directly, without being distracted by anything else, be it job or family, it's always.
10:21
It's not like a person. I didn't wake up one morning and say I'm doing all of this. It's. You know that quote the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step A person has to. For me it was begins with the first step A person has to. For me it was. I'm going to start doing this first.
10:34
You know, kosher was not hard for me to do. Actually, especially when you're in Israel, if you're living somewhere in the middle of nowhere and there's no kosher food, it would have been a lot harder, but it was taking little steps. And also I'm the BF Skinner kind of guy that a person goes after their actions. You kind of guy that a person goes after their actions. You know it says in Hebrew that you go after what you start doing. They kind of fake it till you make it thing. So to start doing things and also, but to be growing intellectually at the same time. You know that you're growing in your understanding. But for me it's always when I'm dealing with people I say what do you relate to? What could be easy to do? What do you find meaningful that you can start doing? Because there's another expression that the rabbi said tefasta, marubalo, tefasta. If you grab everything, you end up with nothing. And once you take the little steps, it's kind of like slowly building the foundations that give you the ability to take on much, much more and before long you'll find yourself in a place that you feel really solid.
11:28
It doesn't mean your questions end. People always have questions, always have doubts. We're always growing, we're always learning. But that for me is the really big thing and I always tell people, by the way, because a lot of guys in Eshatorah and Yeshiva that I still teach in come and ask me I'm a little bit of an outlier there in terms of my worldview and things like that. So I get a lot of questions from guys about should I do the army, not do the army? I lot of questions from guys about should I do the army, not do the army? I said I always tell them.
11:53
You know you got to stay in yeshiva until you're fully cooked, and fully cooked means you have to have your worldview worked out and you have to have independence in your learning skills so you can make your own decisions, not have to run to someone else for an opinion on everything. But I think the most important lesson is that a person I always say you have to feel comfortable in your skin, which doesn't mean you're lazy and inertia is taken hold. It means that you're inside and you're outside have to match that you're not acting one way, to feel like you're going to be accepted by the society at large, but you don't feel you're holding there, because that's going to cause a dissonance within you that's going to cause problems later. So I always say slow and steady wins the race and just figure out what it is that lights you up.
12:30
What is it you like to learn, Because people like to learn different things. Like learning the Talmud doesn't necessarily do the same thing for one person as another. For me it didn't. By the way, I did other things first and taking on the things that you feel you can comfortable, step by step and increasing, and eventually you find your way there. I think that's the best way to do it, and it's a different formula for every person every person has to find their thing that, yeah, that makes them, uh, glow, exactly.
12:57 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
If there was one thing from your childhood that you could bring back, what would you want that to be now? Obviously, you grew up as a child one way and now living your life a totally different way, you know, with complete shabbat observance. Is there anything that you think of like? I wish we still had that in this generation today. Yeah, Definitely.
13:20 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
I think about this all the time because I was the crossover generation between no technology and technology. When I was in college, my social media was a notepad stuck on my door where I said gone to dinner, be back in an hour, had less screen, more live, more outdoors, more play, more left to the imagination and less left to what's being thrown at us constantly. There was kind of a simple naivete to existence that was much more pure and, I think, wholesome in a lot of ways. And, by the way, I say this all the time I say I'm so glad I grew up when I grew up, that I had to actually learn and remember things, not on my phone, that's why it's called a smartphone. I had to actually learn and remember things, not on my phone, that's why it's called a smartphone. It seems to know everything and I just know how to access it.
14:08 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
And then my father says he's so happy that he raised his children generation without cell phones, because he says it's impossible. How can you control an 18-year-old, a 14-year-old, 12-year-old you know who's busy with their phone all day? Yeah, it's unbelievable. As a parent, I know myself I've got a bunch of teenagers. It really is an unbelievable task, so I appreciate that a lot.
14:37 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
Yeah, so that's the purity that I really. I mean you get that a little bit. When you have Shabbat, thank God. Even if you grew up with social media and a religious family, there's one day where it all goes off, and Shabbat, thank God. You know, if you grew up with social media, as a religious family, you still there's one day where it all goes off, and anyone who keeps Shabbat knows that's the day when everyone sits and everyone talks and people play and all things they don't do the rest of the week Read, play games. We used to play games all the time. You know that kind of stuff. That was fun.
14:59 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
We'd run around outside and everyone is, I think, question. But because you mentioned it, and I know that several of your children, maybe all of your children, served in the IDF. My father served in the IDF for four years and there's today a big conversation about the yeshiva students going to the army and serving in the IDF. What are your feelings about that? Can you shed some light on this topic?
15:28 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
Wow, that's a heavy one. You know, I did the army myself, I did it older.
15:32 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
I asked, by the way, and they said just go home. If we need you, we'll call you.
15:36 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
But you know it's funny when I did the army and my friends weren't doing the army, it didn't bother me. When my kids did the army and my friends weren't doing the army, it didn't bother me. When my kids did the army and my friends' kids weren't doing the army, it bothered me a lot because then it became like why is your blood redder than mine? Why are my kids risking their lives and giving up these years of their lives? I'm a big believer, that you know.
15:58
My personal belief is that the wars Israel fights are a mitzvah. It's an obligatory war for Israel's survival. I'm not into drafting everyone who's sitting in yeshiva. No, army drafts everyone in the country anyway. But I think the notion that one population, by virtue of the community they're born, has an automatic exemption I find very troubling and it causes a lot of resentment and I think this is a burden that has to be. I don't want. I joined the army because I said I don't want anyone fighting and dying for me. If I'm not, it's like we're owning a restaurant and giving supervision up. I'm not going to eat in it. You know. If I'm going to, if I'm going to put my name on a place, I have to be willing to stand up for that. So I'm a big believer that something, some accommodation has to be reached where every community in israel is contributing, and I think this do you feel?
16:43 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
that maybe it's a bad rap because you have, like the nachal haridi, which is thousands and thousands of you know enlistees who are joining the idf, but I don't think they're getting enough credit that it's like the religious community is contributing. It's more seen as like that. Those are the outliers of the religious community.
17:01 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
But if you go, go to see Nahal, that's really the case. They are, they're not. I have lots of friends who sent their kids to Nahal Haredi. These are not the Haredi you know populations you see in Jerusalem. Those kids are not in the army. It's kind of self-defeating because if you look at the IDF, the Hesder, they're religious, nationalist kids, they have kids, they have very strong units. People say those units are weak, the Nahal Haredians because it is a lot of the kids who really didn't fit into the framework of learning.
17:29
And army is all about like just with kids. They're influenced by their environment much more than their parents past a certain age. The army experience is very much who you do the army with. So if you go into a Hezdo unit with a whole bunch of guys who are learning in yeshiva and very serious, the pressure, the spiritual peer pressure is great and the units are incredibly motivated and very, very serious. When you're kind of pasting together a unit of a lot of kids that really don't fit into one, think about it. If they would actually take some really serious Haredi kids who are serious you know we say Yirat Shemayim guys and make a unit with them or have a core of them. They would create the energy that would make some really amazingly good army units.
18:11
That would be not the places. People would be much more happy putting their kids in those units because you know the atmosphere there and the peer pressure there is very, very serious. And, trust me, when you get 15 minutes to learn and you're a battlefield, you're going to learn, you're going to make every minute of that count and I see that, and I just see that. This bothers me because the people who are paying in this war since October 7th the most is the religious nationals community, not just the inductees. But I've been to way too many funerals. I have friends whose kids have been killed. A lot of middle-aged people with families and children are dying and they're doing. You know, my son-in-law has done 380 days in Gaza.
18:43
He's 31 years old, he's a reservist, he's a major in Guantanamo and my son has been in three times 120 days in Gaza in this war and he's there two times before. So people's lives are on hold and we'd have to find some way of equitably doing this and something has to change. Hopefully it'll happen. Happen painlessly and easily, with everyone agreeing on some middle road because not everyone's peaceful way.
19:04 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
Yeah, no one's going to get exactly what you want, but hopefully we'll work out a compromise so, because we're short on time, I typically ask in this interview what are the greatest things that you appreciate and love and feel proud about in the jewish people and unfortunately there are some parts of the jewish people that we're not so proud of what, on both of those spectrum, the greatest and, unfortunately, the thing that bothers you the most? What would you say that is?
19:33 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
Well, the greatest thing about the Jewish people, in my opinion, is that they really are a family. You know it's actually it's a flip side. Anyone who spends time in Israel realizes that Israel is a kind of rough around the edges kind of place. Please excuse me, thank you people. How they drive things like that. You go to England, everyone's very polite, you step on a British person's foot, they apologize. In Israel, you know, not so much so, but it's kind of like, even if Jews it doesn't matter, matter religious, secular, ashkenazi, sephardi it's deeply ingrained in the Jewish person that we really are one family and you really do see this in Israel. So it may be that the external stuff isn't maybe so nice and smooth and polite, but the amount of caring that you see people when people are in need, it's insane. How many people will help you, even getting unsolicited advice. It's hysterical. And that's the fact that there is such a sense of community and we really are family. And sometimes we only see it when things are bad. We're always at our best when things are at their worst. That's all of Jewish history.
20:34
The other amazing thing is how amazing it is that we have held ourselves together. You know, jewish survival is a combination of, of course, the big guy upstairs running the show, but the tenacity of the Jewish people and their amazing ability to be so productive. Look at Israel, surrounded by all these failed states that are trying to destroy us, yet look at all the startup and the positive things that come out, and Israelis are rated as, I think, it's the fifth happiest country in the world. That is mind-blowing. But the negative side is, of course, that Jews are very. Our greatest strength is our drive and our think-outside-the-box radical thinking, but it makes people who are very hard to unify so you have a lot of infighting. That's unnecessary and very painful to watch, but also because we are so creative and so driven. When Jews go bad, they do big bad and unfortunately we have you know I'm not going to specific names stock market scandals and you know stuff going on that really Hounsley schemes.
21:30
Yeah, we don't. Jews are not mediocre about anything. We're extremists on all the things we do. The German author Goethe. He said every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is involved in some immediate pursuit of a goal.
21:47 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
It is the most perpetual people of the world, wow. They're always on the move, for better and for worse. So we don't do anything mediocre. So we're going to leave out the things that you don't think are so great about the Jewish people. The reason, the reason I feel it's important is because I, I, I, I want to be educated about the things to stay away from. You know, everyone has their thing. They're like oh, I hate this, that we're coined in such a way. So that's why I like to hear that. But just one more final thing, because I know we're in a rush. We have a presentation starting in 22 minutes. The…. If you can give the state of the nation, if you can share, if, imagine this microphone and this podcast was big enough that all 15, 20 million Jews that are alive today can hear the words that you're saying right now, what would you like them to know?
22:33 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
That's a great one, I think I would say. My friends, you know, we Jews we going back to what I mentioned before we Jews we have we're an unstoppable force of nature. No one believes there's only 15 million Jews in the world. The fact that we have 22% of all the Nobel prizes since 1901, which is 11,500% more than we should have shows how, what a force of nature the Jewish people are in history. Which is why, by the way, so many people who are so much more powerful than us are so threatened by us, because the power of Jewish people and Jewish ideas to transform the world is arguably the greatest power in the world, far more impactful than the greatest empires. So I think the real message that we need to take upon ourselves as Jews today is a recognition that we're very special people with a very unique mission. We're chosen for a very unique responsibility in this world that we will never. Special people with a very unique mission. We're chosen for a very unique responsibility in this world that we will never be allowed to escape, which is why the world has this crazy double standard for the Jewish people. It's the way we're getting the messaging from above that you, jewish people, and you, jewish state. We have to answer to a higher authority, and being Jewish may not be comfortable, but it's always meaningful. And we are in a unique position to be the people who have directly, directly or indirectly, through ideas, transformed the world. And now more than ever, with a world that is so split, so divided, so lacking in proper role models, the world needs those role models and that has to be us. If we don't do it, no one else will do it. The world is a different place because of the values we brought into the world values of peace and social justice and value of life and social responsibility. That all comes directly or indirectly from the Jewish people.
24:07
But to accomplish that we have to be. First of all, we have to make a major leap towards unity. We have to choose to focus on what unites us and not what disunites us, and to recognize the people who hate us, don't care what we believe. I always say in Auschwitz there weren't different lines. There wasn't Ashkenazi and Sephardi and Reform and Conservative and Orthodox.
24:27
The people who want us removed from the planet Earth all look at us as Jews. We have to learn to do that ourselves, which means we don't have to agree with each other. We have to respect each other. I always say that we can agree to disagree, but we have to love each other and that's a very big point. But we also have to be educated, because you can't represent the Jewish people to know what Jewish people represent.
24:48
And when you have educated Jews because Jews are hardware, that's an unstoppable force. With the software that is our wisdom and our Torah, that's a winning combination. And Jews who are educated, jews who are unified, jews who are focusing all of that transformative thinking and that drive on what our mission is, are an unstoppable force in human history. And, by the way, if we start fighting amongst ourselves and I've seen this as a historian it's almost as if God is saying my children, you want to kill each other, I'm going to send non-Jews to do it. And why does it take us being attacked, whether it's explosion of anti-Semitism, diaspora or the attempts of our neighbors in Israel to destroy us, to get us to stop fighting amongst ourselves? So unified, proactive Jews who are focused on what our mission has been since Abraham, which is to be the nation that's a light to nations and connects the world to God, is a winning formula.
25:33 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
Amazing. Thank you. How can people find you online?
25:36 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
I have a website which is kenspirocom, and I have lots of content you can listen, read and watch for free, and I do a podcast every week. It's called Remember what's Next. It's on Apple, spotify, google Anchor on current events in Jewish history.
25:53 - Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe (Interviewer)
Rabbi Ken Spiro, thank you so much. This was an honor and a privilege.
25:56 - Rabbi Ken Spiro (Interviewee)
Thanks for having me. Thank you.
25:58 - Intro (Announcement)
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