On Being a Jew Today

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Tonight is the first night of Passover when Jews around the world will gather with loved ones for a ceremonial meal and a retelling of and discussion around the exodus story of God freeing people known as the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt and leading them to the promised land, Canaan, more or less what later came to be known as Israel and Palestine.

Passover this year comes obviously at a fraught time for many Jewish Americans, Jewish families just a half year out from October 7th, the deadliest day for attacks on Jews since the Holocaust, with many hostages from that day, don't forget, still being held, and also with intergenerational and other family conflict, or at least disagreement likely to arrive around the Passover table about the war in Gaza and even fundamentally, how to think about their relationship to that ancient promised land in modern times. As if that's not enough, Passover also comes with anti-Semitism on the rise, leaving many Jews less secure in their place in society and in their physical safety, even in this country.

Just over this past weekend, as you've heard reported, to take the big example in the news today, Jewish students at Columbia University disagreed with each other over how much danger an ongoing pro-Palestinian protest puts them in. The headline on this in The New York Times today reads, "As protests continue at Columbia, some Jewish students feel targeted." The article then starts by saying, "After reports of harassment by demonstrators, some Jewish students said they felt unsafe. Others rejected that view," the article says, "while condemning anti-Semitism."

Other news organizations also note that one prominent Rabbi affiliated with Columbia advised Jewish students to go home for the rest of the semester for their safety. To this moment, and to these conversations comes an ambitious new book from Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman called To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.

This was in the works for years and largely written before October 7th, but it does take the changed world of today very much into account, as Noah does explicitly in related articles, too, in the last few weeks, such as a Washington Post op-ed called How October 7th is Forcing Jews to Reckon with Israel, and a Time Magazine essay that he wrote called The New Anti-Semitism. Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard, where he is also founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz program on Jewish and Israeli law. He is the author of numerous previous books, including The Broken Constitution, Divided by God, and The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State.

Noah, thank you for joining us. A happy Passover to you and yours in advance, and welcome back to WNYC.

Noah Feldman: Thank you, Brian. It's always a pleasure to be with you, even if today's circumstances are a little more challenging than we might have hoped for.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed. Why had you been writing a book that asks how to be a Jew today before October 7th?

Noah Feldman: The title To Be a Jew Today implies the other possibility, which is to not be a Jew today. To be implies the possibility of not to be. I was really thinking about it intensely over the last few years as my kids got to the age where they were going to be applying to college and heading off to college. It was very striking to me how different the environment was going to be for them on campus around being Jewish than it was for me 30-some years ago. That's really what got me thinking about this. I really wanted to think about how Jewish identity, Jewish experience, and Jewish practice have changed, and I wanted to think about the affirmative case for why someone should be a Jew if they choose to be.

I wanted that affirmative case to go beyond, well, there are people who hate us, and so therefore we have no choice but to be Jewish because at least for me, it's not a good reason to be anything of identity simply that someone hates you. You have to deal with that. That's part of reality if you adopt that identity, but I don't think that's a good reason to go out and identify and be a Jew in the fullest sense, and so I wanted to explore the reasons that people have for being Jewish that are positive and affirmative.

Brian Lehrer: How much did the events over the last six and a half months cause you to revise the book or change any of your basic premises?

Noah Feldman: I didn't change any of the central argument, which, to say it in just a nutshell, is that the best way to think about Jews today is as a very large, loving, and somewhat dysfunctional family. I can say more about what consequences that has. That central argument remained the same. What I had to do was edit to bring home two points; one, how much intergenerational trauma affects Jewish experience really for all Jews.

That is to say, when we see the events of October 7th, or the Israeli response in the Gaza war, or even events like we were just speaking about-- You were just speaking about in your news report that are happening on some university campuses, it's very hard for Jews to experience these things just as the events themselves. They're experienced through the lens of the Holocaust, the lens of pogroms, and the lens of many, many centuries of Jewish oppression. That's a perspective that needs to be really very much taken into account and understanding how people are feeling and what's going on.

Brian Lehrer: Right. By the way-

Noah Feldman: The other element that was just--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Noah Feldman: No, I was just going to say, the other element that I really needed to emphasize was that people have very different kinds of perspectives on being Jewish and on Israel, but it's pretty hard for them to avoid engaging with Israel one way or the other, whether it's positive or it's negative. It's very hard for most Jews just to say, "Well, I'm just not going to focus on the Israel issue at all."

Brian Lehrer: About campus, and I don't want this segment to become entirely about what's going on at Columbia, or for that matter, entirely about Israel, because your book is about a number of big ideas, including Jews' relationship with Israel today. I want to acknowledge a couple of texts that we got because in the newscast, in our conversation with the reporter, I mentioned that there had been reporting that some of the actual expressions of explicit anti-Semitism that had been reported were taking place outside the campus, not inside the campus. A number of people have written to say that videos show that some of those were actually on the campus over the weekend as well.

Just acknowledging that a number of people are writing in to say that. Listeners, what we're going to do on the phones is invite you to preview what might happen at your Seder tonight, because a lot of what Noah writes about has to do with different views with respect to Israel breaking out at the family level, including in his own family. Listeners, if you want to call in and anticipate, and even maybe rehearse a little bit for what your role might be at your Seder tonight, what are you anticipating at your first post-October 7th Passover Seder, especially if you expect multiple divergent points of view about the Gaza war and about how members of your family think about Israel and generally relate to Israel generally?

212-433-WNYC. Are you going to have new experiences of anti-Semitism to share? You can describe some of those as well if you have been subject to that, and how are you relating to the current moment-- I should say, how are you relating the current moment to the Passover story in your own mind, or to the title of Noah Feldman's book, How To Be a Jew Today? 212-433-WNYC. Feel free to call in and anticipate and maybe rehearse for talking and maybe also, hopefully, for listening to others during the Passover family gathering to come for you. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

Yes, we'll get to Israel, but like I said, I don't want this, and I know you don't want this to only be about Israel or Hamas or the war on Gaza or Colombia because your book is also about the relationship to God and to identity. You name the names of major Jewish denominations or rough categories these days, reform, conservative, modern Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, reconstructionist, humanist, humanist Jews, those who don't believe in God, but still value being Jewish. What would you say in 2024 are some underlying commonalities, Noah, if you identify any, that make people from any of those groups feel Jewish?

Noah Feldman: I think the essence of what it is to be a Jew today across all of those very varied worldviews is a sense of struggling together as a Jewish family with God. Whether you believe in God or not, with what God wants from you, with respect to the right way to live. Again, that could just be a spiritual impulse or a moral impulse as well. With how to live in a community with other people and with how to live as Jews. I think that struggle idea, that collective struggle that also includes familial love, derives from the basic idea that family is where we usually get our very first experiences of love, our archetypal experiences of love. Family is also where we usually get our archetypal experiences of struggle. They go together. The love of God for Israel in the Bible, and the love that Jews have for each other, and the love that Jews are commanded to have for God and for the stranger, to my mind, are all versions of that love struggle. Of course, the details differ from movement to movement, but I think everyone who thinks of himself or herself as a Jew is having some version of that experience of love and struggle.

Brian Lehrer: If you can do this in short form, how do you deal with people's relationship with God, which is a big part of your book? Does it even matter as opposed to earthly ethics and behavior and community? I know some Jewish humanists, which means Jewish atheists, and they don't believe in God, but they feel very, very Jewish.

Noah Feldman: First of all, want to say that it's perfectly legitimate to have a Jewish experience that denies God, but even denying God is to be in a relationship with the God whose existence you deny. That's still a relationship. I would, in fact, argue that it's a relationship of struggle. If you're so sure that God doesn't exist, as opposed to being, let's say, an agnostic, then you're engaged. You're engaged in a serious way.

For Jews who do believe, they can believe in many different ways. Some believe in a very literal, personal God who intervenes in human affairs and in the affairs of the world. Others have a much more spiritual or even philosophical, rational idea a God who creates the world and sets up some big principles and lets the world do its own thing. All of those perspectives have real support within different aspects of the Jewish tradition.

The reason I think it's worth just mentioning God is that all too often when Jews talk about who they are, they just think about the groups they belong to and don't ask themselves, "Why do I belong to this group? What do I actually believe?" It's almost as if people tense up when you bring up the topic of God. I would like to make a modest contribution to people changing that, because if you're going to make an identity central to your life, if you're going to have holidays and perform rituals and shape your life in some meaningful way, it'd be good to know why you're doing it, and that why should go beyond just, well, we've always done it, because there's lots of things from the past that we shouldn't do anymore if we don't think they're good. There are lots of things that we should do because we do think that they're inherently valuable.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe this is even where we enter with Israel because you describe the early Zionists as actually trying to make a Jewish state not about religion, but religion moving back in overtime to a central position. Can you talk about that evolution as you see it?

Noah Feldman: Yes. The early Zionists were almost all secular and radically secular. What they wanted to do was basically replace Judaism as a religion and as an ethnicity with Israeli-ness as a nation-state. Their theory was that that would solve all the problems that the Jews had experienced both internally and externally because then Jews would just be like Italians or Irish or Koreans, I suppose. Anyone else whose identity was strictly national, then they might have a religion attached, but for the most part, they were defined by their ethnicity.

That didn't work out exactly in that way. They did create a state, and they did create a national identity of Israeli-ness, there isn't a national identity of being Israeli with its own culture and language and so forth, but it turns out some Israelis are not Jews, and many, many Jews, well over half the Jews in the world, are clearly not Israeli. The Jews aren't a single nation. Instead, what happened is that gradually and slowly, from a beginning where lots of Jews were not very invested in Israel, whether they were reformed Jews or ultra-Orthodox Jews for different reasons. They were very un-invested in Israel.

Over time, more and more Jews have come to see their identity, including Jews outside of Israel, as bound up in the Nationalist project that is Israel and Zionism. That's all well and good, provided that for you as a Jew, your conception of Israel fits your conception of your religion. It doesn't work as well if, let's say, you have a progressive view of your Judaism. You believe that Judaism is social justice, the repairing of the world, the prophetic vision of clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry. Then you look at Israel and you don't see a match between your social justice values, which for you are Jewish, and what the state of Israel is doing.

Then it can create a genuine conflict where one might feel that one needs to criticize Israel rather than identifying with Israel in order to express one's Jewishness fully. Of course, the same is true on the other side, too. There are people who see Israel as fundamentally definitional of their Jewishness, so what it is to be Jewish for them just is to be in support of Israel.

Brian Lehrer: Noah Feldman with us, Harvard law professor, if you're just joining us. His new book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People, as we have this conversation on the morning before the first Passover Seder night. To set up the conversation that you're going to help lead with some callers anticipating maybe some difficult conversations tonight in people's homes, here's a text message we got last night while you were on with Matt Katz on Notes from America. I didn't hear your segment on Notes from America, but I did see a couple of these texts that have come in that setup, I think, what we're going to hear today, too.

Listener wrote, "I'm in the midst of reconfiguring our Haggadah, that's the Passover storybook for people who don't know, to be more sensitive to all the different views that will be attending tomorrow night. I'm really concerned things will fall apart, either erupting in arguments or a lot of niceties and no real discussion at all at a time when we need it. My college-age son won't talk with me about the conflict, and I feel concerned that I won't be able to hold the space in peace," wrote one listener. You're hearing a lot of that? Are you even feeling it yourself?

Noah Feldman: Definitely hearing a lot of it from my friends, and I feel a little bit of it myself for sure. Holding space is the perfect phrase to describe what a good Seder should do. I have a tip for how to try to do it with the caveat that, tonight is still ahead of us and it may or may not work for me and my family. I think it's really helpful to begin by reminding everybody we're here today, everyone who's at the table, whether they're biological family or not, it doesn't really matter, because Jewishness is not only a biological family, but they're all at the table as family, just by virtue of being at the Seder.

As family, we sometimes disagree with each other, even disagree a lot. Anyone who ever has been part of a family knows that just because you're in a family with somebody doesn't mean you're not mad at them some of the time or maybe all of the time, but you're still family. You respect that each of you is there and each of you is coming there from a place of connection to the family, and one hopes from a place of love. I think if you start with that, it opens the door to having respectful, thoughtful disagreements.

The one thing I would add is the Seder is from its birth a place of argument and disagreement. It's a place where the rabbis set you up in the story to not just tell the tale of the Exodus from Egypt, but to argue about what it means and to disagree about what it means, and to stay up all night if necessary, disagreeing about it. The more you disagree, the better that is. That's what the Seder should be, and it's fine to disagree at the Seder. It's actually good to disagree at the Seder, as long as you do so within a framework of remembering that you care about each other, you love each other, and at the end of it, you're still going to be family.

Brian Lehrer: Some of your book is personal about your own discussions with your own adult or college-age children. Want to tell your own story a little?

Noah Feldman: Sure. I do try to be personal in the book. I grew up in a modern Orthodox house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and our Seders were very, very late-going and always very, very intense, usually less about politics than about other aspects of Jewishness. Still, I remember it very often reading the story of the four sons and thinking, "Man, I'm definitely the bad son here." I think other people at the table sometimes thought so, too. Then at various times, my brothers got to play that role as well. In my own life, with my own family, with my own kids, I'm acutely aware that for them, choosing to be Jewish is a choice. They could do it or they could not do it. I try to show them what's good about Judaism, and it's still hard.

They both came with me on trips to Israel at various times. My son, in particular, saw the barrier, the wall, separating Israel and Palestine. With both of my kids, we also went into the Palestinian areas. It made a very, very big impression. I think it got him thinking very deeply about the problems with the current situation between Israel and Palestinians. That's very much a live issue in our family and in our discussions, unquestionably.

Brian Lehrer: Before we take a break and then start folding the callers in, I want you to be able to touch on your Time magazine article, the new anti-Semitism. For one thing, you write that the old anti-Semitism, whether from medieval Christian crusaders or 20th-century Nazis was willing to proclaim itself, while today, no one wants to be seen as anti-Semitic. What changed?

Noah Feldman: There is a really big change. Okay, somewhere at the far right periphery and maybe the far left periphery, and maybe there are some people who would say, "We just hate the Jews." Occasionally one does hear that including chanted on the streets, but I think that's the periphery. I think the great majority of people today want to say, "Well, I'm not anti-Semitic, but I am anti-Zionist," or "I am very, very critical of Israel."

Here's where it gets subtle, and this is what I tried to say in the article, it's totally legitimate to criticize Israel, and you can do so without being an anti-Semite. You can have the most searing critiques of Israel without that turning you into an anti-Semite. It's also true that at the periphery of the argument that Israel is fundamentally an unjust state, one could easily veer into anti-Semitism.

For example, by depicting all Jews in general, or all Israelis as inherently oppressors, or Israel as a white supremacist society, forgetting that Israel is a country founded by people who are themselves deeply traumatized by the experience of victimhood and trying to shift the game so that instead of Jews being seen as oppressed people who may or may not be getting it right today, one thinks of all Jews as inherently powerful and inherently oppressors.

That starts to become reminiscent of the bad old anti-Semitism where the anti-Semite would look at an oppressed Jew in the corner and say, "You see that guy? That guy really controls the world." That's the kind of the bad old anti-Semitism. I think that there's a, a real danger and risk of that, and I think sometimes that's happening in some of the protests that we're seeing now. Not always, but sometimes it is happening that at the periphery of criticism of Israel, one can veer into a very worrisome and serious anti-Semitism.

Brian Lehrer: Controversially, I imagine, you certainly acknowledge the persistence of anti-Semitism on the far right as you label it, as you label it. You write that the most pernicious creative current in contemporary anti-Semitic thought is on the left. What is that current as you see it, and do you think you've been seeing that at Columbia this weekend if you've been paying attention to that story?

Noah Feldman: The current is the idea that all Jews, no matter where they are, are automatically oppressors. That the status of being Jewish is a status of oppressing others, and that in consequence, the narrative of Israel should be read through the narrative of Jewish oppression of other people. I think that's the form of anti-Semitism that can emerge from criticisms of Israel that otherwise on their substance could be perfectly legitimate.

Brian Lehrer: For example, one thing I read in one press report, and I think we know from our listeners' reactions and from other things, you can't trust any press report 100% on these high-conflict situations, but one press report I saw had somebody yelling at somebody who appeared to be a Jewish student calling that student a colonizer.

Noah Feldman: I think that's pretty close to the heartland of what I'm describing. There's a Jewish student walking through campus, not presumably in Israel, although maybe supporting Israel. To call that person a colonizer is to imply that just because that person is Jewish or has identified as Jewish, that they're engaged in an act of wrongful oppression. That's different than taking the view in a measured conversation that the best way to understand Israel is to understand it through the lens of settler colonialism.

Now, I happen to not agree with that point of view, but I don't think that that point of view is inherently an anti-Semitic one, but it can, as you have given that example, cross into anti-Semitism. Another thing, and look, I'm not on the Columbia campus, I'm on a different campus, but I was watching, like a lot of people, the videos on Twitter, and again, even those need to be always taken with a grain of salt, but I could hear some protestors chanting or yelling at Jews, "Go back to Poland."

That to me is another instance of flat and nasty and repugnant anti-Semitism, because these are just Jews walking down the street in New York, and had their ancestors been in Poland at the time of the Second World War, they would have been murdered by the Nazis when they invaded Poland. To say go back to Poland, it's the opposite of the acknowledgment of the humanity of the person that you're talking to. It is as anti-Semitic as you can be.

Brian Lehrer: Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, my guest, his new book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. Listeners, we'll start to fold in your phone calls on what you're anticipating at your first post-October 7th Passover Seder, especially if you expect multiple divergent points of view about the Gaza War or about how to think of Israel generally, and that's becoming difficult for your family, rehearse what you might say, rehearse listening to others. 212-433 WNYC, and we'll do that right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, his new book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. Listeners, we're inviting you to call in and say what you anticipate at your Seder tonight, agreement, disagreement, anything that feels different in the post-October 7th world new instances of anti-Semitism in ways you hadn't experienced before the last six months, or anything relevant that you anticipate talking about at Seder tonight. Rebecca in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Rebecca. Thank you for calling in.

Rebecca: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to say that I think there's a lot of talk about the intergenerational disagreement over Israel. That's certainly true in my family, but I think our disagreement used to be wider before October 7th and before we witnessed how extreme the anti-Zionist movement is over the last several months. I think even though I'm in my 30s, my parents are in their 60s, I think even though we still disagree on specifics of the war and some other things that were more aligned than we realized on--

Brian Lehrer: This period has actually brought you more together on your multi-generational family's relationship to Israel. Am I hearing you correctly?

Rebecca: Yes, definitely.

Brian Lehrer: Rebecca, thank you very much. Alison in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alison.

Alison: Oh, hi. Hi Brian. I love your show. I love what you do. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Alison: I told the screener, that I-- Just for background, just your basic New York reformed Jew, nothing too heavy on religion, but I definitely identify as a New York Jew. I have two children, and my 26-year-old daughter is very on this pro-Palestinian wave. While I'm totally open to having differences of opinions, it can get very unpleasant and aggressive from what I've seen, so much so that she didn't want to spend Thanksgiving with me. It started then.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give an example of over what-- how does it express in your family's case?

Alison: She's just saying as a lot of the pro-Palestinians or protesters are saying that the Israelis are oppressors, she's saying that they're committing genocide. This is what she posts on her social media and what she says to me. I have a hard time-- I want to be intellectual about it. I was never the Jew who said I always have a home in Israel. I have never been to Israel, quite frankly, never wanted to go because of the violence, but I do feel that they have a right to defend themselves and that Hamas or terrorists, but it's a very--

Like I said, she's reading The Hundred Years' War by Khalidi. I don't know if I'm saying the right-- I want to know, is this a good book to read? Is it objective? Again, I want to take the emotion out of it as much as possible and talk history. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Alison, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much. Professor Feldman, we got a couple of examples there. You write that many families may experience, at their Passover tables tonight, a split between those who you describe as Gen X progressive Jews, and Gen Z progressive Jews. I know that's somewhat of a generalization, and it's not only a divide by age, but hearing those couple of calls, one family more brought together in their relationship to the state of Israel, the other extremely divided that maybe more represents that model. How would you begin to describe the Gen X and Gen Z dynamic when it's among family members that all describe themselves as progressive?

Noah Feldman: Alison's account is very, very characteristic. Alison, you're not alone there. As Alison self-described New York reformed Jew without a very close connection to Israel, statistically, we can guess that Alison is a progressive person and is a Democrat and also that she taught her daughter a Jewishness that's infused with the values of social justice.

To me, what is very possibly happening, and I hope that if Alison's listening, she'll try this out with her daughter, especially on Passover, is by saying, "Look, you are sharing my belief that to be Jewish is to care about the other, to love the other, to care about oppression. Maybe we have a disagreement in practice about what the right way is to balance that desire with the right of anybody, including Israel, to defend themselves against violent attack." That's a legit disagreement on practical matters, but it's not a disagreement on what it is to be Jewish or what Jewish values should be within that family.

The other thing I just wanted to mention about that is Alison mentioned Professor Rashid Khalidi's most recent book. I know Professor Khalidi very well. I know his work very well. I don't always agree with him on practical politics, but he's a respected and rightly respected scholar who has combined both serious academic scholarship and some personal writing about his own family's history in the course of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I would hope that Alison would read the book too and get a sense of that perspective and that that would be an opening for the two of them to talk about it.

Brian Lehrer: Zeke in Boston, you're on WNYC with Noah Feldman. Hello, Zeke.

Zeke: Hey Brian. How are you? Thanks for the segment. Thanks for your show.

Brian Lehrer: You are welcome. Keep going.

Zeke: Oh, yes. I love Passover. It's my favorite Jewish holiday. This year, I won't be attending for the first time in my life the family Seder. It's not out of protest. I'm not trying to send a message to my family or anyone else really. It was a personal decision for me. I couldn't stand the thought of sitting down and having what eventually becomes a celebratory feast while Gazas were starving.

I guess I would just say on top of that, it feels like hypocrisy to me to be reciting the story of the Exodus, which is all about the oppression of a people by a more powerful people. I feel that this year, the oppressors are, you could say, the Israelis, but unfortunately, they are Jews. It just doesn't sit right with me. I didn't feel that I could personally do it.

Brian Lehrer: Zeke, thank you very much. Different point of view in relationship to what's going to happen tonight, I think, from Lisa in Levittown. Lisa, thank you very much for calling You're on WNYC.

Lisa: Hi, Brian. Can you hear me okay?

Brian Lehrer: Just fine, thank you.

Lisa: Great. Great to call in. I'm feeling that it's a very difficult time for Jews right now with the exploding anti-Semitism in this country and also the events in Israel. I'm so deeply appreciative of discussions like the one you're having with Professor Feldman. I think we really need it. I'm progressive New York Jewish person skewing more towards social justice than I would say towards the religiosity. I feel that it's very important right now for Jews not to be afraid and to speak to one another and to reflect on our Judaism in this way.

To answer your question about what we're going to do tonight is to leave empty chairs at the table to remember those Jews who are currently captive in Gaza and for the Jews in Israel who may be living in fear. If this is a celebration about liberation and being released, then I think that's really what is rising to our thoughts at this time.

Brian Lehrer: What if somebody at your table were to raise the thought that the previous caller just raised, that how can we have what is ultimately a celebration when 30,000 plus people have been killed in Gaza, in addition to, obviously, the suffering of the hostages, and starvation is going on in Gaza as a side effect of the war too. What would you say to that person if there is such a person at your table?

Lisa: Great question. These are such complex and complicated times. I think tikkun olam, we're in this world to try and unite, try to hold space for both the bad and good we see around us. I think we have to also be willing to see the good and to do what we can personally and globally to try and bring people together. It's the most complicated times I'm a boomer and I just can't remember times that have been this complex.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa, thank you very much for your call, and thanks to all of you who called with a variety of perspectives on what Seder or non-participation in Seder is going to be like for you tonight. Noah, in our last minute or so, you can reflect on that last set of calls but also, she mentioned the concept of tikkun olam, which I know you frame some of your writing around as pertains to multiple generations of Jews who consider themselves progressive. Maybe you want to reflect on that in our last minute or so and anything else you want to say?

Noah Feldman: Sure. Tikkun olam, which literally means to repair the world, is an idea that is at the core of Jewish social justice. It's also a mystical idea. It's also the idea that the world is fundamentally broken and that humans have a role to play in bringing the world and including the world and God back to its proper state. I think when Zeke called us, I'm glad that he did that, maybe that's Zeke's Seder, and that was very, very Jewish response on his part. Similarly for Lisa, thinking about the pain at the Seder of Jews who are still Israelis who are still kidnapped and are hostages in Gaza.

There's sadness intermixed with joy, and there's struggle intermixed with love. To me, that's what Passover is about, because that's what archetypally being a Jew is going to be about. The Passover story isn't all smiles. It acknowledges the pain of the Israelites enslaved. It acknowledges also the suffering of people who are harmed in the process of the liberation of the Israelites, including the Egyptians, for whom God also shows compassion. That's the complexity of it, and I hope, for people who are having Passover this evening, that they're able to appreciate their familial love and connection in the midst of that complexity.

Brian Lehrer: Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor, is now the author of To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and talking to callers. Happy Passover to you and your family, Noah.

Noah Feldman: Thank you, and to you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, to all of you who celebrate.

 

 

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