Shavuot asks - what's the point of it all? - with Rachel Goldberg-Polin

You are listening to an art media podcast.

John actually said to me a few days ago, he said, when we all came together at Mount Sinai after coming through an arduous, difficult, traumatic experience of slavery, very different people, and yet we all stood together and said, I don't really like him.

I don't like his opinion on this.

I don't like what she's wearing.

Too bad.

We have a holy purpose here.

We have a chance.

Let's grab it, people.

Grab it.

With the mission of being something better.

And that is what this holiday is about.

It's 3:30 p.m.

on Sunday, May 25th in New York City.

It's 10.30 p.m.

on Sunday, May 25th in Israel as Israelis wind down their day and their evening.

Today is also 597 days since Hamas launched its war against Israel.

That's 597 days that there are still 58 hostages being held in Gaza.

This war, this coming week, will officially become Israel's longest war, surpassing the 598 days of Israel's War of Independence.

Before we get to today's conversation, one housekeeping note.

On Tuesday, June 4th, in a couple weeks, I will be doing a live podcast at the Manhattan JCC with Brett McGurk, who is the top White House official for the Middle East in the Israel-Hamas War in the Biden administration.

I also served with Brett in the George W.

Bush administration, and Brett has served in the Obama administration and the first Trump administration.

To register for the event, please go to the link in the show notes.

I think it promises to be an illuminating conversation.

Now onto today's conversation.

In one week, Jews in Israel and around the world will be celebrating the holiday of Shavuot, the literal translation of which, Shavuot, to English is weeks.

But not all Jews will be celebrating.

In fact, I would submit that most non-Orthodox Jews in the diaspora don't even know much about the holiday.

One can understand why.

First, it's short.

It's only two days.

And it doesn't have a memorable hook.

I know that sounds glib and superficial, but ask most non-Orthodox Jews the first words that come to mind about other Jewish holidays, and you'll get a quick response: Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, apples and honey, Yom Kippur, the fast, Hanukkah, lighting the menorah, and, in the diaspora, holiday gifts, Purim, Haman, Gregors, and kids in costumes, Simchatorah, dancing in the streets with the Torah, Pesach, the Seder, Freedom, Matzah, Sukkot, the Sukkah, and Shavuot, What's that?

And when I bring it up, I usually do actually get blank stares.

And yet, it is one of the most important of the holidays in the Jewish year, in the Jewish calendar.

It's actually among my favorites.

So I wanted a crash course for the Call-Me Back community and also some inspiration and meaning for this year's Shavuot.

And the last holiday episode we did, Pesach, actually, we got a lot of feedback that provided ways for many of our listeners to navigate the Seder during this otherwise very difficult time.

And I think we needed more of that for this holiday.

And this holiday being a logical follow-up to Pesach made sense for all the obvious reasons.

So I asked Rachel Goldberg-Poland to return to Call Me Back for a conversation, as I said, after she helped us through Pesach.

So I am welcoming back my, I won't even say it.

I won't say my friend.

I won't say my longtime friend.

Best friend.

Best friend?

Very best friend.

I will say, Rachel, you've made me so self-conscious, as you've pointed out to me, that not only am I uncomfortable characterizing our relationship when I'm on with you, but now when I have other guests on, I freeze when I introduce them.

I know.

I feel very bad about that.

I'm sorry.

You could go back to introducing everyone as your longtime friend.

You've picked up on it.

You told me you like you felt badly for Nadav because he was just like introduced on a podcast recently.

It's just like, he sounded like he was like a mere acquaintance.

No, you said, and so I'm welcoming back Nadav.

And I thought, Nadav is like a longtime guest and friend of yours, but okay, here's Nadav.

So I'm sorry, forgive me.

When we do the episode about Yom Kippur and what the essence of Yom Kippur is all about and how there's an element of self-accountability, we could talk about that.

And I will ask your forgiveness.

That's fair.

That's fair.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I'll get that voice out of my head, your voice, every time I introduce someone between now and then.

Hopefully that'll work.

Okay, Rachel, I wanted to talk about Shovuot, but before we get into our crash course on Shovuot, you said something to me, not directly.

We had an amusing set of voice memo exchanges over the last few days before Shabbat on WhatsApp as we were plotting this discussion.

And I think one thing that you established, and I, you know, I agree with, we're not doing this for fun.

We're not just doing this because you are the terrific teacher that you are.

But you said something to me about if you're going to have these conversations,

they have a purpose.

I just want you to explain the purpose of them before we get into this specific chag,

what these conversations mean to you to do something religious or spiritual or intellectual in merit of something or someone.

There is a long-standing Jewish tradition that when we fulfill certain mitzvots, certain obligations, that sometimes we are doing them in the merit of something else happening.

And it's very important to me that we learn together, you and I learn together now, or whoever participates in learning through this episode, that we are doing it in the merit of the 58 remaining hostages coming home.

And that is the purpose of me being open to participating in this particular episode.

I think we are all trying all different ways of how do we get movement in this stuck place.

And one of the ways that we can do that is through fulfilling the mitzvah of learning Jewish texts together and Jewish topics together.

Okay.

And you mentioned something to me about that you guys did like a week of, I forget what it was, like community work or something that was also, when you guys were frustrated that there was no progress being made, you just encouraged people to go out and you can describe it better than I could, but it was similar to the spirit of this.

It was last summer.

in 2024.

John and I had been running all over the world, speaking to everyone, doing everything we possibly could do.

And at some point, we were sitting with the team in our office, and John closed his computer and said, enough is enough.

We're stopping and flooding the world with goodness.

We've done everything that we can possibly do.

Let's flood the world with goodness.

And for a week, we encouraged people all over the world, and we had hundreds of thousands of people participate with us.

And we did all sorts of traditional mitzvot

and non-traditional good deeds just to make more goodness in the world.

And we had a place where people were sharing what they were doing.

So you had religious people, not just religious Jewish people.

We had people from all different religions saying what they were doing.

We had a woman in Venezuela who was saying the rosary every morning for the hostages to come home and for the soldiers to be safe and for the suffering in the region to stop.

And we had one woman who said she and her son, a non-Jewish woman, had baked brownies for all of the firehouses in her small town in Maine.

We had a woman who said she had fostered a baby rabbit that needed to be bottle-fed every few hours.

And to see all of these things that seemed so disparate, but that were all things that helped make the world better.

We organized volunteers to go to food pantries and pack.

We had John took 50 volunteers to a forest near our home and did a humongous cleaning of the forest, of all the litter.

It was just flooding the world with goodness.

All of this is just saying when you get to a point where you feel helpless, there's always something you can do to add more light to this world that has so much darkness and brokenness.

So one of the things that you and I are doing right now is we're learning in the merit of the pain and the agony that so many in our battered region are going through to end.

Okay, so let's start learning.

That's beautiful.

Flood the zone with mitzvot.

I love that.

Okay, let's talk about Shavuot.

I mean what I say when I say that most people I know, really, most Jews I know don't really know much about this chag.

My younger son was bar mitzvah in June of 2022, right before Shavuot.

You know, in the U.S., in the diaspora, you typically have like a party or some kind of function, like the Saturday night after the bar mitzvah that morning, where a lot of people do.

And we didn't because that weekend was Shavuot and we couldn't have a party on in the middle of the Chag.

So we actually did something in reverse.

So everyone was perplexed at the party.

Like, why are we having this bar mitzvah party two nights before the bar mitzvah?

When Campbell and I were like opening up the evening and welcoming everyone, we said, well, it's because of Shova Wood.

We couldn't have a party on Saturday night.

And I will tell you, Rachel, that like most people did not know what we were talking about.

We actually had Angela Buchdahl, Rabbi Buchdahl, come up, who was there at the party, to come up and actually do an explainer, a very brief explainer, about what the holiday was.

So assuming that this is very remedial, let's just start with the origin story of Chevuot.

Like, when did you start celebrating it and why?

Okay, I'd even like to just go a little bit to what you were saying in the introduction, that I often think if you were playing Family Feud and they said 100 Jewish and non-Jewish people surveyed, top five answers on the board.

Here's the question.

Name a Jewish holiday.

And as you said, you could name five Jewish holidays.

Chevuot would not be one of them.

And I always feel a little bit bad for Shavuot because Shavuot is one of the three pilgrimage holidays.

We are told in the Torah, the first time that we hear about this holiday of Shavuot is in the book of Exodus, which is the second book of the five books of Moses.

And it is listed with two other holidays when talking about the three times a year that Jewish people, when they're living in the land of Israel, are going to come for the annual summit, the annual convention.

And by the way, in Hebrew, they're called shalosh regalim, which means like the feet holidays, because you use your feet.

You schlep up to Jerusalem from wherever you're living.

And those three holidays are Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot.

So they're three equally important pilgrimage holidays.

And as you said, the other two have a lot of bling.

They have both Sukkot and Passover are seven days in Israel.

You have Sukkot, where you get to build a clubhouse, decorate it.

You could sleep in there.

You get a lulav, you get an etrog.

If you don't know what those things are, maybe we'll talk about it before Sukkot in the fall.

For Passover, as you said, and as we discussed the last time that we spoke together, you have a Seder, you have all these symbolic foods of matzah, maror, charoset.

You clean your house, you sell your unleavened belongings.

And then you have this holiday, Shavuot.

And it doesn't have any defining, exciting bling that we are initially aware of in the Torah.

I have to ask you to use the line you used with me offline, that it's the Sabrina of the.

Well, because here's, okay, and I do not want backlash people.

Let me tell you something.

I'm old.

I grew up in the 70s.

This is just the way it was.

I'm bereaved.

Okay.

Don't throw shade at me.

I grew up during a time when Charlie's Angels was a very exciting show on TV that my mother didn't allow me to watch.

Really?

No.

I used to watch it.

My mother was like a TV sensor for me.

She was very protective of what I was able to watch.

She had her own reasons.

She didn't have me watch that.

But luckily, she and my dad, when I was in third grade, they went out of town for some sort of conference in Phoenix.

And I stayed with Myra Rosenberg, who thank God, her family allowed her and her sister to watch Charlie's Angels.

So I did see an episode, and then I was privy to what was happening on the playground, which is we would play Charlie's Angels on the playground, and there were three different Charlie's Angels.

I mean, I thought, here are these brilliant women who are detectives, and they're solving very difficult crimes.

And there was the blonde, sassy angel, and there was the sultry brunette angel.

Again, do not write to me, people.

Don't worry.

All the complaints come to me in a line.

Right, it's Dan's fault.

And then there was the smart angel, Sabrina.

But the way that it would work on the playground is that people would call that they got to be one of the other two angels first.

And I always felt as I started to understand Chavuotte, that Chavuot was kind of the Sabrina of the three pilgrimage festivals because she doesn't get the credit that she should.

Sabrina was very smart.

She was just as capable as the other two angels, and she had all the same qualities.

So Shavuot is the Sabrina of the pilgrimage festivals.

By the way, for some reason, this holiday gets more pop culture references, I've realized.

than almost any other because I heard another rabbi refer to it as the Rodney Dangerfield of the Jewish holidays.

It gets no respect.

So that's also aging us.

But okay, so it is of the three holidays, it's the Sabrina.

It's the one that people are least interested in, focused on.

It's got the least pizzazz, the least bling, as you said.

And what's crazy about it is that it is actually commemorating the single most

important event in Jewish history, which is it is the date on the Jewish calendar upon which the Torah was given through Moses at Mount Sinai, according to our tradition.

So, and that brings us together and really defines us as a people.

So it's craziness that it doesn't really get the kavod, the respect that it should.

But, you know, we'll talk about why that is, because the truth is that originally in both Exodus and Leviticus, the second and third books of the Torah,

we get a description of what is life going to be like for the Jewish people when they come, right?

We went through the desert.

We talked about that in the Passover episode: that the people wander through the desert, we get to the Promised Land.

What is life going to look like?

What life is going to look like in the Promised Land is being the Jewish people originally was going to be defined by living in Israel, having life kind of revolve around the temple that's going to be in Jerusalem, and it's going to be a life infused with the framework that's presented in the Torah.

So we have this issue that up until 586 BCE, that is what happened.

And the problem is that when the Babylonians conquer the land of Israel in 586 BCE and the Jewish people are exiled out of the land, most of them, not all of them, but the vast majority, and the temple is destroyed.

We then return and we build a second temple.

And we are living until the year 70 of the common era back in Israel, practicing the way that the Torah had sort of defined how are we going to practice this enterprise of Judaism.

And then the Romans come and they conquer the land.

And again,

we are exiled, mostly destroyed.

The temple is destroyed.

And so now we have this question, how are we going to celebrate this holiday that is defined by living in the land of Israel and bringing crops once a year, seven weeks after Passover?

You're supposed to count the weeks.

The Torah tells us, count the weeks from the second day of Passover when the seventh week is complete.

So that's 49 days, seven times seven.

The next day is the holiday of weeks, as you said, the holiday of Shavuot.

How do we now practice that if we have neither the land of Israel, and so we don't have the crops, and we don't have the

And so, Dan, I feel like you'll really appreciate this as the writer of Startup Nation, because I am fairly certain that this is the first time in Jewish history that we have the pivot of the reinvention of how do you

change and redefine and reinvigorate a holiday that was in danger and jeopardy of maybe losing its value or its seeming value or seeming importance.

And that's when the rabbis in the Mishnaic times, which is, you know, the Mishnaic times were around 10 of the common era till about 200, 220, they are the ones who say, let's start focusing on what actually happened on this date in the Jewish calendar.

Well, the Torah was given.

So let's focus on that.

Getting back to this jump from Pesach to Shavuot, I just want to establish.

So Pesach is, again, we had a whole conversation about it last time we spoke on the podcast, but let's just, for purposes of this conversation, it's the freedom.

The Jews are freed from slavery.

They're not given a purpose.

They're not given a Torah.

They're just given freedom.

And then Shavuot is, you've now gotten out of Egypt, you've gotten out of slavery, and now the Jews are being given something.

Can you just describe that distinction?

Before we get to these different phases that you just described, these different stages, just that distinction between the freedom and then the being given the Torah.

Like, why does that matter?

Well, I think that when we were freed, that's step one.

But freedom without a framework to live within ends up being empty and even without meaning.

And the freedom was for something.

The freedom wasn't just for freedom's sake.

Meaning, you know, you have kids.

When you say to your kids, any of us say to our kids, okay, okay, it's free time, you don't mean you could tear down the drapes and coat the dog in crazy glue.

There are still parameters within freedom.

And the idea was that we were freed in order to become a people living within a framework that would bring meaning and value and purpose and growth to our lives.

Yeah, it's like Isaiah Berlin wrote that famous essay, like negative freedom versus positive freedom, right?

Negative freedom is like the absence of constraints.

You are free of being entrapped.

That's one could argue, Pesach.

But positive freedom is like freedom to do something, freedom to have a purpose,

freedom to live a life with meaning.

And one could argue, if all you have in Berlin's terminology is negative freedom, that's almost like there's like a high at the beginning.

I'm free, but it's actually misery.

Agreed.

That is what our tradition believes.

And I actually

think that somehow the Jewish people had the wisdom to understand at Mount Sinai when they were given the Torah.

Let's back up for a second.

The Jewish people had been enslaved for hundreds of years.

They're taken out.

And just 49 days later, someone shows up and says, I've got this way of life for you.

It has 613

regulations.

And you can't browse it first.

This is not Barnes ⁇ Noble.

Take it or leave it.

And the question in the Talmud is, what is it that we're really celebrating on Shavuot?

Are we celebrating that God gave us the Torah or that the Jewish people received the Torah?

And the overwhelming rabbinic literature says we're celebrating that the Jewish people had this inner strength and knowledge and understanding to take it.

Even after having been exactly what you're talking about in this box of lacking freedom and now saying we're going to actually adopt this whole very

regulated way of infusing this seeming freedom with something.

And it really is considered by the rabbis in rabbinic literature to be this

greatest moment in Jewish history.

So what are the main rituals of Shavuot?

Like when people say, what's Shavuot?

What do you do on Shavuot?

How do you respond?

So So there are a few different traditions on Shavuot.

First of all, you can go to synagogue and there are special prayers that we say on all three of those pilgrimage holidays.

There is a tradition of eating dairy foods because the idea was we didn't have the laws of Kashrut until they were revealed.

You know, there's a big question of what exactly was revealed on Shavuot.

We know the Ten Commandments were given on Shavuot and part, if not the entire Torah, part of the Torah.

But we didn't have laws of kashrut.

So there's sort of this wink of, okay, if we don't know how to properly prepare animals for eating those people who eat animals, so then we would only eat dairy foods.

So then there's become this huge, exciting Shavuot tradition of eating cheesecake.

Which gets a little out of control.

It does.

By the way, for people I might add, at least among the Ashkenazi of us, that have high rates of lactose intolerance, it's a little perplexing that this is the theme of at least the culinary theme of the holiday.

Yeah, there is something funny about that.

Although Hirsch really loved cheesecake, and we have a friend, Noah, who used to make him an Oreo cheesecake that he just could never get enough of.

And there's also this tradition called Tikku Leil Shavuot, which is that people stay up all night and learn Torah until the morning, any kind of Torah.

Some people learn pieces of the Mishnah and pieces of the Talmud and pieces of the Torah.

And the idea for that stems from

this story that when Moses comes down after having been up on Mount Sinai to say, okay, people, here I'm going to reveal to you and God's going to reveal to you this incredible way of life that, you know, you've been enslaved for so long and now you can be a people.

And he gets down there and nobody's awake, that the entire Jewish people, according to tradition, and there are many Midrashim rabbinic tales about this, that there's silence and then you hear snoring.

And it's sort of like we picture that oftentimes God's relationship with the Jewish people is described as it's a bride and groom relationship.

So you can imagine, you know, the bride showing up at this gorgeous chippah, this gorgeous wedding with the dress and all the preparation.

And she gets to the chippah and there's nobody there.

And then she hears snoring and the groom is like asleep under the chippah, like under the platform.

And it's really insulting and it's annoying.

And so we as a people try to rectify this and fix it.

That's why the word tikkun, a lot of people are familiar with the words, you know, tikkun olam, fixing the world, repairing the world.

So we do a tikkun leil shavuot, a repairing of the night of shavuot, and to rectify the oversleeping on the morning that we were getting the Torah.

Instead, we stay up all night and we learn the Torah.

And so that is a really fun and exciting ritual that people do in different communities.

You know, depending on where you live, there can be hundreds of classes.

Certainly in Jerusalem, there are hundreds and hundreds of classes available.

And you see people walking all over all night long and people wear white because it's a wedding.

I didn't even know that was the reason.

So it's tradition that people wear white on Shavuot.

So it's very gorgeous at around four in the morning.

You see thousands of people dressed in white walking up to the western wall, to the wailing wall in the old city, so that as dawn cracks and the sun rises and prayers start to be said, people are thronged at the western wall in white, ready to receive the Torah.

I just want to stay on that because Shavuot in Jerusalem is, as you're describing it, particularly special.

The image of the Jerusalemites roaming the streets all night, learning together.

When you say studying Torah, I think when people hear that, they have this image of Jews like sitting in a yeshiva, literally studying Torah Tammud.

But it's not exactly like that.

There's all these all-night options of different kinds of learning about a whole range of subjects, most or all of which are Jewish-related, but it's not exactly Torah study necessarily.

The idea is to be engaged in some kind of intellectual communal, you know, group exercise all night.

And there's like a lot of variety in Jerusalem.

Yes.

And it's all within the framework of let's stay up all night together and learn.

And you might be learning a topic that doesn't speak to me, and I might be learning something that doesn't float your boat, but we're all doing it together at the same time.

And I think it's really powerful and beautiful.

And especially now when, I mean, I'm constantly talking about the need for unity and not that everybody has to be the same you can be unified and different but be unified and i think that this is a great example of that what we do on the night of shavuot rachel there's been this like it's almost like a rebranding if you will of shavuot seems to be at least in israel because during the first decades of the state's existence there was this i think a lot of the emphasis was on the agricultural aspect being highlighted especially in the kibbutzim and the very prominent role that kibbutzim played in Israeli society.

Can you just talk a little bit about that, about the theme of agriculture?

Again, I still think it's prominent.

It's just it's not as prominent as it once was, at least in how it's celebrated in Israel or honored.

Well, the kibbutzim feel very connected to this holiday, and even the non-religious kibbutzim feel connected to this holiday because it is a land holiday.

It's a crop holiday.

But I do understand

that as we as a society, as a nation, have grown less connected to that aspect,

that we still sing the songs.

There's a song about, you know, our baskets are on our shoulders and we're heading up to Jerusalem.

That, you know, my kids, when they were little, they would sing that in their kindergartens.

There's still very much the fumes of that.

But I do think that really

that pivot that I talked about earlier, I think

the reinfusing of this holiday as, and even in the liturgy, this is called Zmanmatan Toratenu, the time of the giving of the Torah.

And by the way, something very important that I didn't mention is that perhaps even the most remarkable tradition that we have on this holiday is that we read the book of Ruth.

We have five different Nigilot scrolls that are read throughout the year on different holidays.

We have, obviously, the scroll of Esther that's read on Purim.

We have the scroll of lamentations that's read on Tisha Ba'av, the ninth of Av.

We have the scroll of Ecclesiastes that's read on Sukkot.

And we have the scroll of the Song of Songs, which is read on Pesach.

But we have this scroll of the Book of Ruth that is read

on Shavuot.

And there are three different main reasons that that happens.

First of all, the story of Ruth, which, you know, I'll do it like a little reader's digest version.

Do it.

There's a woman named Naomi, and her husband's name is Eli Melech, and they live in Bethlehem in Israel.

And there is a famine in the land of Israel at the beginning of the book, and they go to live in Moab, which is modern-day Jordan, to deal with waiting out the famine.

They have two sons.

The sons marry two nice Moabite women.

One is named Ruth and one is named Orpah.

And time passes.

Elimelech dies and both sons die.

And so Naomi loses her husband and both of her sons.

And she decides she is going to go back to her home, to Bethlehem.

And her two daughters-in-law, who love her very much, both say, we're coming with you.

And she discourages them.

And they say, no, we want to come with you.

And she says, you're both from good good families.

You're both still young.

You both could get remarried.

You both could have children.

Go.

Go back to your people.

You didn't inherit any of the stress or Michigas.

Exactly.

Right.

We're getting there.

And Orpa says, okay.

And she cries and she hugs her mother-in-law, Naomi, and she says goodbye to her and she leaves.

And then Naomi turns to Ruth and says, okay, sweetheart, go.

I love you.

Go.

And this is when Ruth makes history and says the famous lines of, where you go, I go, where you live, I will live, your people will be my people, your God will be my God.

And she becomes this archetype of the quintessential righteous convert to Judaism.

I think it is such a gorgeous moment, this relationship between these two women.

Obviously, I feel this kindred relationship now to Naomi,

who, I mean, my gosh, this woman lost her husband and both her children.

She's not that old.

And then she has this incredible young woman who says, I'm not leaving you.

And what I think is really remarkable about Ruth's proclamation is when she says, your people will be my people.

Because it's one thing to say, I love you.

You're great.

I'm going where you're going.

I'll live where you're living.

And I even, you know, I've hung out with you enough to see the value in the way that you, your relationship with God, that this philosophy or this belief system, it speaks to me, but your people will be my people.

That is crazy hard.

When you grow up being whoever you are, how do you take on the fate of another people?

It's one thing to take on the faith of another people, but the fate.

And so I always love that part of the book of Ruth when I really think about it.

And when I think of my friends who have converted, I just, I'm in awe.

And what should be known is that we also read the book of Ruth on Shavuot because King David was born and died on the date of Shavuot.

And

he is supposedly, according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah.

And what does that mean?

We can have another episode about that.

But the Messiah is going to be descended from the Davidic line.

And King David was the the great-grandson of Ruth.

And so it's very important,

I think, the statement to say King David came from Ruth, the Messiah will be a descendant from the line from Ruth, is showing how much we as the Jewish people value someone who truly takes on becoming Jewish.

We disregard where the past, the past is the past.

You are who you are now.

And I think it's a really emphatic statement about what our relationship, the Jewish people's relationship, should be to converts.

And the last thing I'll say is that the story of Ruth, it goes on to unwind with Ruth taking part in the harvest that happens when they go back to Bethlehem.

And that is happening at the time of year when Shabbuot is happening.

So there are many different reasons that we read the book of Ruth.

You know, Rachel, I have two reactions to what you're saying.

One is I'm always struck by the fact that Judaism, as far as it's perceived, and I think as far as most Jews think about it, is not a religion that leads with conversion.

We're not a proselytizing people.

So on the one hand, here you are, this beautiful story that's so central to our story and certainly central to this holiday.

And yet this is like most people don't think of Judaism as one that is truly welcoming to converts.

On the other hand, I think about my own experience, my wife wife's Campbell's conversion, and she posted something, I can't remember if it was on Twitter or Facebook, sometime after October 7th, in which our son wanted to go out on the upper west side of Manhattan one evening, like early evening.

We were flying out late that night for Pesach to Israel, but early that evening, he wanted to go out with his friends.

And there was some big...

anti-Israel protest, like massive, one of these things where they had like hundreds of cops out and we got all these warnings, people shouldn't be out and about.

It's dangerous.

And later that night, we were flying the all-night flight to Israel.

And Campbell posted on social media.

She says, I live in New York City.

I'm paraphrasing here, but something along the lines, I live in New York City.

I am flying with my two sons right now.

Keep in mind, this is Pesach of 2024.

So it's the first Pesach.

It's actually when I got together with you guys.

It was on that trip.

And she said, I'm flying to Israel right now.

And I feel better and safer about my two sons flying to Israel right now in the middle of this crazy war than I do about them roaming around the upper west side of Manhattan.

She didn't grow up with any of this.

She chose to get into this, and that that was her instinct.

Her instinct is, take me to this country at war.

I, through the lens and through the being of my two sons, will feel safer, that she herself will feel safer and she will feel safer for her children.

When in fact, it doesn't make sense at all because you could argue there's no way they're safer.

Like, even with the craziness in the upper west side of Manhattan, it's not safer.

Actually, Actually, like empirically, it's not safer.

Like you can actually argue that it's not safer.

And yet she posted this thing and it went viral because it was so paradoxical to so many people, except to Jews, by the way.

Most Jews didn't find it paradoxical.

And here's this woman who was raised, grew up as a Catholic in Louisiana and Mississippi, and articulated that sentiment that so viscerally resonated with so many Jews.

It's, it's what you're describing.

First of all, you said it wasn't surprising to most Jews because she's Jewish and that's how she felt because she is Ruth.

Yeah.

And she's been with my mother, who's a survivor of the Holocaust, who was a hidden child, saved by righteous Gentile in the Holocaust.

She and her mother were on the run.

When she was six months pregnant with her first son, she and I went to Auschwitz with my mother, which is where her father was killed.

We went to Kushitz, her hometown, to her home.

We got into the home that she was taken out of as a little girl, chased out of by the Nazis in 1944.

She did all that.

She did all that again the summer of 2023 with three generations of our family, now with our boys, born and older.

And it was now her story.

It is.

It's her story.

And that's what's so gorgeous about when someone really takes on being the people.

And it's colossal.

And I don't know that everyone appreciates what that means to change your identity, not to change your philosophy or your religious affiliation, but to change your identity.

It's the hugest, most beautiful thing that someone does when they choose to become Jewish.

And my hat is always off to people who decide to do that.

Yeah, it's taking on an identity and it's taking on a history.

It's basically saying this is now my history.

Yes.

Yes.

And wrap me up.

Wrap me up in this.

By the way, another thing that Elon, I don't know if you can weave this in, but something that Dan and I were talking about also in the book of Ruth that happens is when Ruth and Naomi go back to Bethlehem together is that, of course, people haven't seen Naomi in many years and they're excited to see her and they're running out and saying, Naomi, oh my gosh, you're back.

And they didn't have email and they didn't have the Pony Express.

They didn't know what had really happened to Naomi.

And she says to them, don't call me Naomi.

Call me now Mara, which means bitter.

She says, My life has become bitter.

I've had terrible things happen to me, and I'm not the same person that you knew.

And there's something about that that speaks to me because I very much feel that I'm not who I was before October 7th.

I'm not who I was before

Hirsch was buried.

And

I also have, in some ways, changed my name

because I, for almost 30 years, when John and I got married, I stayed Rachel Goldberg.

And my children were given the cumbersome name of Goldberg-Poland.

And since October 7th, I

have very much become Rachel Goldberg-Poland.

And I have taken on that name to have the same name as my children, to have the same name as Hirsch.

And it's another way that I feel connected to the story of Ruth and the book of Ruth that we read on Shabuot.

The idea that we were mobile and survived and thrived, to your point, not just that we flourished while we were sort of on the run in these different places.

The Torah then becomes a metaphor for what I think we talked about in our last conversation, which is the why, is that the Torah can become a metaphor for purpose.

And you can be wandering and you can be on the run and you can be being battered and you can still make it.

And in some cases, actually flourish if you have the purpose.

Yeah.

And I think that's partly what, you know, what this holiday honors and recognizes.

And so if the Torah is this metaphor for no matter where we are in the world, having purpose, or as we talked about, the why, how should we think about that in 2025 as we begin to celebrate Shevuot in this moment, in this time, in this crazy context we the Jewish people are living through?

Well, I think there are two things that come to mind.

The first is,

just going back for a moment to Ruth being the ideal convert, on Shavuot, the entire Jewish people really were converting to Judaism.

When we all stood together at Mount Sinai, we were all saying, we'll do this together.

And John actually said to me a few days ago, he said, when we all came together at Mount Sinai, after coming through an arduous, difficult, traumatic experience of slavery, we all decided we're going to stand together and we're going to take this together and we're going to figure this out together.

And we were a diverse group.

Well, that was his point.

Something like 70 languages or something.

He said, can you imagine everybody's coming out of all these years of slavery, all these years of abuse, very different people.

Plus, they said there were some riffraff that just said, yay, they're leaving.

We're out of here with them.

Who knows who they were?

And yet we all stood together and said, I don't really like him.

I don't like his opinion on this.

I don't like what she's wearing.

Too bad.

Let's all get together.

We have a holy purpose here.

We have a chance of something that can transcend anything else around us.

Let's grab it, people.

Grab it.

And he said, that's what we should be thinking about now, is that we have this chance.

We've come through a horrific period.

We are still in that horrific period.

We are suffering.

You know, sitting here, the dissonance of being able to talk with you and enjoy thinking about our tradition and what we've been blessed with, this framework, while I know that there are 58 families in complete and utter sickening agony at this very moment, and that we have hostages who are alive right this very second, who are suffering in ways that there are no words to articulate.

It's so difficult.

And yet we have to figure out how do we come together, stop with this poison and negativity and hatred and acrimony and brokenness toward each other.

How do we come together to take something and infuse our lives with the why, with the purpose, with the how, with the meaning, and with the mission of being something better.

And that is what this holiday is about.

So, Rachel, if you don't mind sharing, what are your plans for Chevrolet?

So it's very difficult.

Last year was impossible.

And this year,

sadly, I mean, we've been asked to participate, to teach or participate in different ways in a lot of the various learning opportunities going on around Jerusalem.

And for me, it's just not the right time.

And so we will go to synagogue because we are still saying Kaddish for Hirsch.

So we go religiously.

And it's really difficult for me, but it is very important to me to say Kaddish with my community.

And so I'll be doing that.

And I don't think I'll be staying up all night.

John will probably go somewhere to learn.

It's just very difficult for me right now, still.

And we do have plans with very good friends for lunch, small lunch, with cheesecake.

So there's that.

Oreo cheesecake.

Yeah, maybe.

Before we go, there would be Jews listening to this conversation from all over the world, inside Israel and mostly outside of Israel.

What is your message to them, your prayer for them for this holiday?

Like if they were saying, you gave us some direction for Pesach, what is your direction for Shavuot?

You helped us get through and navigate the Seder during this impossible time.

What's your plan for us,

if you will, for Shavuot, given what the holiday represents?

Well, I think that Shavuot has become this emphatic statement of the viability and centrality of a Jewish way of life, even when things are dark and challenging.

And I would actually say if people could, just as we started this segment, say at some point during those 24 hours, technically 25 hours of Shabuot that we have in Israel, again, outside of Israel, it's two days, so you have longer to do this.

Take on learning something new in the merit of the 58 hostages coming home and our soldiers staying safe and coming home in peace and swiftly, and that all the people in our battered region find solace.

And when you're taking on learning something, it literally could be one line of anything new for you.

And I don't want to propose that it has to be from a Jewish text because sometimes, I mean, that is our tradition, but sometimes it gives meaning to a new perspective on something we thought we already understood.

I think a lot of people know that on Hirsch's Nightstand Still is the book that he was halfway through,

which was The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.

And I often thought, well, he has to come back because he has to read the other half.

And then what I realized is he had already accomplished that.

And that's why he didn't need to read the other half.

But I think that he found meaning in a lot of different traditions.

And I think there's value in that as well.

So I would say that if people can take that nugget of learn something, push yourself in the merit of these people finding relief and these families finding relief.

It is time.

We're all so agonized about this.

And if we are putting out flooding the world with light of learning in this time of darkness, I think it does something.

I don't know how the universe works, but I think it does something.

All right, Rachel, thank you.

I won't say chag semayach

because we agreed last time that we don't, we won't say that, but what do we say?

Have a meaningful

yeah, a chag of meaning, a chag of purpose, a holiday of growth, a holiday of light.

And as you said to me just before this Shabbat, you said things can turn around quickly.

We've seen it, we've seen it.

We know that things can happen in the blink of an eye.

Now or the now.

It's time.

Right.

So in that spirit as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's our show for today.

Before we wrap up, one housekeeping note.

On June 4th, I'll be hosting a live Call-Me Back episode at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center.

My guest will be Brett McGurk, who was the top Middle East policy official in the Biden administration and was on the front lines in dealing with the post-October 7th Middle Middle East on behalf of the administration.

So Brett and I will be in conversation.

If you'd like to attend the event, please follow the link in the show notes where you can purchase tickets.

I think it'll be an illuminating conversation.

As for this episode today, if you found it valuable, please share it with others who might appreciate it.

Time and again, we've found that our listeners are the ones driving the growth of the Call Me Back community.

So thank you.

To offer comments, suggestions, sign up for updates, or explore past episodes, please visit our website, archmedia.org.

That's arkmedia.org, where you can deepen your understanding of the topics we cover.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar.

Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marianne Galis Burgos.

Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.