Ep 25 | Rabbi Daniel Lapin | The Glenn Beck Podcast

What is anti-Semitism?

What is anti-Semitism?

Yeah.

All right, before I answer that,

let me ask you, what is racism?

Racism is the belief that one race is inferior or superior than another or all others.

So racism then is only a thought crime?

Yes.

It's a belief.

Yes.

Then I would say that

I agree with you, and that would be anti-Semitism as well.

That it is the belief that

are inferior.

Vandalizing synagogues is just as illegal as

vandalizing a commercial office space.

Assaulting Jews is just as criminal as assaulting people of Chinese heritage.

But

where does it come from?

It rears its ugly head in the same way every single time.

It's you have times of crisis, I would say times of Marxism, and

anti-Semitism rises up.

Yes.

Why?

It rises up because

the ultimate

titanic cultural struggle in the world today is exactly the same as it was in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century or in France at the end of the 18th century or all the way back to

the nine verses in chapter 11 of Genesis, the Tower of Babel.

It's always a struggle between

and loosely paraphrased, it's a struggle between

a divine

godly vision for human society and a human structured vision for society.

And the Jews have always been recognized by

great leaders like Winston Churchill and

philosophers and scholars.

And they've also been recognized by anti-Semitic tyrants as the official architects of that divine order of human social organization.

So, people who, because there would be,

well, let me ask you this way.

I can

only really understand the anti-Semitism.

I mean, there is racism in all races, and it doesn't matter.

It's not white and black.

It's all races all around the world.

You go someplace and

black guys against the white guy.

You go go other places, it's the red against the yellow, whatever.

Racism is the same.

But anti-Semitism kind of stands alone.

And I can understand it if I believe in good versus evil.

That's right.

But if I don't believe in good versus evil, if I don't believe that there is

a force for good and a force for bad that is playing a bigger game.

Then anti-Semitism is utterly irrational.

It makes no sense.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Now, that doesn't mean that every time violence against Jews explodes, it's always informed by some deep philosophical antipathy towards civilized human living.

It isn't.

It spreads.

Once a fire is ignited, there's no controlling it.

And so people will find many different kinds of excuses.

I mean, the fact is that it is more fun to light fires and break shop windows.

I mean, that's just more fun than writing a book or staying up at night tending a sick child or

trying to

build a society.

So there are always going to be people who are attracted towards riots, breaking things.

It's astounding to me how many people say if you speak out against George Soros,

you're an anti-Semite.

I mean, we're good friends.

I have lots of Jewish friends.

I don't hate them because they're Jewish.

Uh and I don't hate George Soros.

I actually feel really sorry for him.

I think he's a sad, disgruntled man that is really lost in his life.

And I despise the things that he does with his money.

But that doesn't make me an anti-Semite.

Well, if it did, it would also make me one.

I find the things that he stands for to be

reprehensible and destructive.

So, yes, but it has nothing to do with the fact that

he may be a circumcised American of Jewish ancestry.

I think something that people don't always

fully grasp

is that

to speak of the Jewish community is meaningless.

Because if we were to gather together all

approximately four million Americans who are self-identified as Jews, and by the way, I'm not sure whether George Charles would include himself in that, I don't know.

But if one did gather together four million American Jews into one large place and

began a symposium to analyze what sort of things they all agreed on, the only thing they'd all agree on is that Hitler was a very bad man.

And there is no such thing as the American Jewish community.

There literally is nothing else they would all agree on, or we would all agree on.

And the old joke is you put two rabbis in a room, you have three opinions.

That's right.

And one of the stories I told in one of my books is

the lone shipwrecked Jewish sailor who was finally rescued and the Coast Guard arrived.

And they were really quite astonished at what he'd built for himself on his remote island.

And he showed them around.

And this is where he planted his crops, and this is where he made his house.

And then they see two other structures, and what are those?

He said, Well, those are both synagogues.

Two synagogues?

He says, Yes.

What do you need?

Two synagogues.

He said, Well, it's obvious that's the one I worship at, and that's the one I wouldn't be seen dead at.

So, yeah.

The point is that

something that I think that many of my Christian friends are surprised to hear is that just because somebody is Jewish doesn't mean that his worldview is shaped by Jewish values.

Just because someone is a Christian, that's such a ridiculous statement.

If you're a Christian, that doesn't mean you share the same views.

But that I don't understand.

I thought it did.

I thought that once people had accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

Right, then they're fixed.

Well, no, not fixed necessarily, but certainly, let me put it this way.

I think it would be bizarre and very unusual to find somebody who says, I'm a Christian atheist.

Because

you're not born a Christian.

You accept Christianity, as I understand it.

I think there's a lot of Christians that were raised Christian and don't necessarily separate themselves from Christian, you know, the Christian title, but they're not really living it or even know it.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably.

But certainly,

because

there is this

somewhat confused perspective on what makes a Jew,

you will find many people who will proudly proclaim themselves to be Jewish and proud of it, and at the same time,

you know, do not believe in God, regard the Bible as a collection of anachronistic myths,

and they would claim to be just as Jewish as the next guy.

So it's a little hard to grasp.

What does make a Jew, then?

What does

what makes a Jew is a covenant with God and acceptance of the Torah as God's message to mankind?

Is that a universally accepted view of what makes a Jew?

Glenn, Glen, Glenn.

You didn't ask.

Okay, no, I said.

All right, we're we're here for the truth.

Okay, okay, all right, okay, good.

Good.

Let me go back to George Soros.

One thing.

One thing that

people

have said

about me with George Soros, and it really bothers me deeply because this is not what I said and it's not what I believe.

But he had, when he was a child, he was in

wherever he was, and the Nazis were rounding people up, and he went to live with a Christian.

And the story is, as he tells it, that

he was working with somebody

in the family that were, I don't remember, selling the homes of Jews or something.

But I don't blame him for that.

I don't know what I would have done.

I don't know what you would have done in that situation as a kid.

And I don't condemn him for anything that happened.

And I don't think he did anything bad in the war.

However, when you are

70, I think he was when he gave this interview, and he said he never went back and reflected on that time

and never examined it and never had a problem with it.

Does that sound healthy to you?

You know, I don't know the man at all.

And I've spent,

let's say I've just been too busy living my life to delve into George Soros.

So I haven't really

found out very much or discovered very much about him.

Every now and then I come across organizations that are heavily funded by him, which, for the most part, from my perspective, are organizations promoting a thoroughly destructive agenda.

So I don't really know much about anything that happened within his life.

So

a destructive agenda.

Let's move to this.

Much of the American left left

they say that they are for the little guy

they say they are for the oppressed

I mean I don't think you could make a case that there is a more oppressed people than the Jewish people yet

you mean that

we should have

more Jews on the Supreme Court and and you feel

that that perhaps three out of six Ivy League university presidents being Jewish doesn't really represent our 4% of the population.

And maybe 30

Jewish congressmen.

Perhaps when we finally eliminate the scourge of American anti-Semitism, we'll be able to take our true place

at 150 Jewish congressmen.

No, but I'm saying that

they say therefore the people who have been historically oppressed, Jewish people, without a doubt, have been historically targeted and oppressed

in many cases.

However, they don't stand with Israel.

They don't stand with the small little country.

In fact, they stand with the real power in the Middle East, which is radicalized Islam and Islamists.

Wildly dangerous, stands against everything they say they stand for.

You're for the oppressed.

What's happening here?

I think the people of Gaza are oppressed, not by Israel, but by

the Hamas and Hezbollah and all of the

people who have been running that and convincing their people.

What is the connection?

How does someone say, I am for the oppressed, I am for the rights of women?

Oh, and by the way.

We're holding these people up who believe in Sharia law.

The answer is, I mean, I know you're asking it rhetorically because I know you've read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals,

and he lays it out very clearly there.

I mean, basically, he lists the lies you have to tell to persuade people to build up grievances until they're willing to act in the streets.

I mean, that's the job of a community organizer.

Now, who was that name of that most famous community organizer?

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Right.

But that's exactly what it's all about.

So

what do they have in common?

How did they possibly come together?

And how do

they look at each other and say, okay, we need you now and we'll eliminate you once we get the power?

I mean, I don't understand that.

I could see that coming from Islamists.

But how does the American left

even begin to get...

They're against religion.

They're against controlling religion.

They're primarily against a society that is built on

the Western tradition, because the Western tradition is based on the Bible.

Now, you don't have to explore the architecture and art of Europe to know the validity of that statement.

It is a simple reality.

The entire face of, the geopolitical face of Europe was shaped by Christianity in its two forms of Protestantism and Catholicism.

You know, part of the reason that in the 17th century Sweden invaded Poland.

I mean, why does Sweden have to invade Poland?

You know,

if you're going to want to expand your influence and

gain wealth, and you're Sweden with one of the most powerful armies ever in the 17th century,

there are places you can invade, right?

But what is it with Poland?

Well, it was essentially a religiously driven conflict.

Sweden was one of the early fully Protestant countries.

Poland was proudly and devoutly Catholic, and it was a religious war, so many of the other wars were.

In other words, the point is that

it's hard to escape the conclusion that

it's at its root it's

certain biblical principles that shaped the society that we call Western society.

Whether we find it in Canada or Australia or

on the streets of today, on the streets of Hungary or London or anywhere else,

it's very, very foundationally biblical.

That's what it is.

And that's partially what lies at the heart of

the seductive allure of socialism

is to get rid of that.

Shatter Western civilization.

It always has been.

And,

you know, we chatted a little earlier about the bizarre alliance between aggressive Islam and

liberalism.

Well, liberalism

is just a term we use.

It's not a term that Lord Acton would recognize at all.

You can think of it as liberalism or socialism or secular fundamentalism, as I prefer to term it.

But in all these instances, that's really

what it's all about.

It is trying to destroy

Christian-based society.

And what Islam and secular fundamentalism share is a,

you know, and again, Islam, like any belief system, has a very long memory.

And so September the 11th, 1683 was echoed in September the 11th, 2001.

It was an echo.

It was once again a strike against the West.

What happened the first September 11th?

What happened then was that

the Muslims were determined to basically march all the way through Europe.

They had tried marching through Europe from the West in the 8th century, from Spain.

That was finally stopped

by Charles Martel

in

732.

And then 1683, they are now at the gates of Vienna.

As soon as they overrun Vienna, the rest of Europe is wide open.

And

it's a war.

It literally is intended to wipe Christianity off the map of Europe.

I mean, you can read the contemporary Ottoman writings of the time.

That's what they're trying to do.

And

the Pope and Christian leaders all around Europe recognize this and they beg and cajole and persuade

knights

to

get on their horses and ride to Vienna to try and save things.

And sure enough, it was September the 11th when King Sobieski of Poland was the first to arrive with sufficient force to drive off the Ottomans.

And that was the beginning of the saving of the West from...

from that particular...

And so that was the last attempt that Islam made to wipe out the West.

But the memory, the institutional memory of Islam, it doesn't go away just because

they run some fine international airlines.

Thomas Jefferson

was very clear on this

when we went and fought our first foreign war on the shores of Tripoli, and he said,

You have to understand what these people believe because they will not go away.

They will come back.

And that's so important.

I mean, think for a moment on this question of what is really more important in terms of shaping behavior, not only of you and me, but also of the societies in which we live.

Is it facts or is it beliefs?

And I think sort of reducing it to its most elemental,

if

you know, if you're traveling, for argument's sake, you're traveling

with a load of diamonds

and your ship gets wrecked, and somehow or another everybody on board knew that you were a jeweler and you're traveling with a priceless package of diamonds in your money belt.

The ship gets wrecked and you drag yourself up onto the beach of a lonely desert island.

And you look around, there's not a soul to be seen.

And you're just thanking the Lord for your miraculous deliverance when you notice somebody else dragging himself up the beach.

And now there's two of you.

Are you going to be able to go to sleep that night?

Because

you need to know

whether this guy's view is that

if he acts while you're asleep, when the Coast Guard arrives for the rescue, they will find not two survivors, but one survivor.

And so at this point, it really doesn't matter whether this man knows differential calculus and the history of the early settlement of Australia.

What really matters is not what he knows, it's what he believes.

And if this man has beliefs that are informed

unequivocally by the Ten Commandments, then you can go to sleep that night.

And if you don't know that, then you dare not go to sleep at any point at all.

And

this is true for everything else as well.

Beliefs are what shape

the development of civilization, the shape of society.

The news in tomorrow's headlines is going to be the result of

a set of beliefs, not a set of facts or knowledge.

So what do we...

What's concerning to me is

the facts are all being lost.

We're just seemingly, the left is just making things up as they go along and we're just giving it a whirl.

Gender, everything is just all, everything is up for craps now.

Again, you know, wonder why, think about this.

Why would it be, talking of gender, why would it be that if a young girl has a serious eating disorder and she's wasting away, and it's because she thinks that she's fat,

what do we do?

We immediately bring in psychiatric help.

We try and help her adjust

her perception of herself.

Dysmorphia.

In a sense, right.

But if that same girl thinks she's a boy,

we're cool with that.

Everything's fine.

I would suggest that the reason for that is because there is a monumental volume that has shaped the history of the world.

And in that volume, it says, male and female, he created them.

And the response of the left to that is: anything in that book has to go.

Whatever that book says, we go the other way.

It's difficult to talk to you you because I agree with so much, although I don't think that there

I don't think we're headed that direction.

I don't think the world is

headed in the direction of that book.

We are throwing everything out.

And the two things

at the very bottom of it all,

and this is so concerning,

that

there's an archetype.

There's Jesus Christ and there's Moses, the lawgiver

and the love thy neighbor lawgiver.

Those two archetypes are being thrown out.

And so we are not...

We're striving for something, but we're not saying that's what we think a good man is.

That's what we think a good leader is.

We are just erasing these.

How do you survive in that?

Well, in the short term, of course, you can survive when that man is Karl Marx as much as you can when he's Jesus.

In the short term,

the seductive allure of socialism considerably exceeds that of Judeo-Christian faith.

Apart from anything else,

and here's a question, by the way, I have great fun asking people this.

I mean,

on an airplane yesterday, somebody sitting next to me, I mean, I ask people this all the time, and I love asking it of young people, which is,

whereabout in the Bible is it exactly, I don't, which book was it?

Do you remember?

Where does it say, and thou shalt follow thy heart faithfully at all times?

It is so unusual for me to find somebody who responds and says, you know, Lapin, you're an idiot.

It's not there.

There's no such thing in the Bible.

Everybody's sure that it exists in the Bible.

Well, it is so appealing.

What would you rather do?

Follow your heart or have some guy come along and tell you, Glenn, that's not allowed.

What you want to do isn't permitted.

It's immoral.

You're not allowed to do that.

There's no question which most people would elect if they had the choice.

And so

the problem that we see playing out and to which you're alluding

is that

young people are being raised with

so little information about that book.

This is possibly the first generation of English-speaking people in all of history.

We've been speaking English for about 800 years roughly.

This is the first generation of English-speaking people who do not know if Leviticus is the name of a book or a man's aftershave lotion.

They literally don't know.

So

in the face of that ignorance, there is no question that the default, the default is socialism.

This is what makes it so difficult.

If I'm not

because it feels good.

It feels good and it's natural.

Look,

if I could be persuaded that human beings are just another form of animal, which in itself is a seductive,

you know, at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., in the primate enclosure, they actually have that sequence of silhouette drawings I'm sure you've seen with the

baboon crouching on all fours, and the next picture has him up on twos, and seven or eight pictures later, finally he looks like a man.

That narrative is so fundamental to the left and so very appealing.

And you know, look, for your children and my my children, it's hard for them to go to school and have to stand up for an opposing viewpoint because it's so simple and straightforward and so natural.

That is the default, that we are nothing but sophisticated animals.

Once you tell me that, and if I'm persuaded of that, then yes,

redistribution of wealth absolutely follows, inevitably.

In the same way that if I were a farmer and I noticed that that one big cow had been taking away hay and feed from all the other cows, I'd go in every dime and redistribute the gross and the hay to make sure all the cows get the same amount.

It's the decent, natural, normal thing for anybody to do.

But at the same time, socialism is the furthest from natural because

it discounts

the human

desire to succeed and to grow and to reach for things.

It suppresses all of that.

It makes everything gray in life, which is not a human,

a natural human experience, is it?

No, I think you're exactly right.

And they would probably say that

it's been only imperfectly applied.

I know.

It's never been kind of applied correctly.

Right, and you look at it.

But, you know,

when did a biblical model get perfectly applied?

You know, when would you, you know, when would you like to go back to?

So essentially, we're looking at two belief systems.

Neither of them can be proven in a laboratory.

Neither of them can be proved with historic reference.

And in both cases,

we're saying to people, look, here is a belief system that leads human beings upwards to nobility and aspiration and peace and tranquility and prosperity.

And here's another one that reduces human beings.

So

we can't

prove each of the theories.

They are both religious, Big Bang and

creation.

But we can see the results of the societies that strive to achieve that.

The societies that have really taken on socialism,

it ends horribly every time.

The Western Judeo-Christian values.

Sometimes it doesn't work out, but most times, and we can look, it is because it's not a coincidence that once the Enlightenment happens and America is given birth to, that all of a sudden man just takes a 5,000-year leap.

That's not a coincidence, is it?

No, it isn't.

But I think most of us are looking at today, not last century, not next century.

We're most of us looking at our interests today.

And today,

I see homeless people out there.

And I think to myself, that is terrible.

And I'm educating.

It is 20% of the population of the globe without the United States is homeless.

20%.

In America, it is 0.1%.

That should tell you something about it.

Yes, we have homeless, but we have the best,

we have the least homeless problem in the world.

Right.

No question about it.

But

it's much more fun to light fires and break windows.

And here we've got homeless people whose fault has got to be somebody's fault.

And we know it's immoral to blame the victim, right?

Because the victim is never complicit in his own misfortune.

Which is absolutely untrue.

It's complete nonsense.

But

it's...

I mean, there are those who are innocent.

You know, there are those who can't make it.

Always.

Always.

But there is also a lot.

I mean, I am responsible for almost every pain in my life.

Because I misviewed it,

misinterpreted it, used it as an axe.

And of course, that's true for each and every one of us.

The person who's caused you more harm in your life has his picture on your driving license.

That's right.

No question about it.

But I think

the thing we're grappling with is,

as I see it, is

the seduction of a socialistic viewpoint.

How thoroughly appealing it is to say that

some

antiquated old system shouldn't regulate my life.

It's my life.

I should be able to do exactly as I please with my life.

That's a hard thing to argue against.

And that men and women should be exactly the same.

Well, yeah, hard to argue with that.

And part of it is also the fact that a socialistic vision can be depicted in very quick sound bites.

And here we are discussing, you know, over a period of time considerably longer than a sound bite.

And at the end of it,

I will have been grateful for the conversation, but we're unlikely to have come up with a list of, you know, here are six sound bites everyone has to know about, and then they'll start thinking correctly.

You know, you just said,

you just said that, you know, men and women,

it's hard not to think that men and women are alike.

And I think that is true on one level.

We are.

We're both humans.

We both have certain inalienable rights.

But there are also gifts that each of us get.

And I want to go, I listened to one of your podcasts.

I love your podcasts.

Thank you very much.

I love doing it.

And I listened to one of your podcasts, and you were talking about fashion.

Yes.

And you were talking about, because once you started talking about this, I thought of

the outfits that are the communist workers' outfit.

They're dressed exactly the same.

Drab coveralls.

Right.

They're in coveralls.

And you specifically talked about that.

Yes.

Will you talk about that for a second?

Yeah, absolutely.

And again, the podcast, to which

I'm grateful for you, because if it were not for you, I would never have,

it never would have even occurred to me to do a podcast.

And

the truth is that

through my podcast here on the Blaze,

my reach is way beyond anything, even when I've been on very large radio stations.

So it's been great.

So yeah, look,

what's so great about the podcast is that

it's longer form.

When you're on television, five seconds

is long and moves quickly.

On a podcast,

there's an implicit understanding between me and the listener that

we are going to accept that

structuring an argument and making a case is going to take a few minutes,

which is wonderful.

And

fundamental to

this whole discussion is the question of whether you believe that human beings are $9 worth of common chemicals

or we are a unique creature touched by the finger of God.

Those are two incompatible views.

Do you believe that

intelligent design, for instance, I don't, I have no idea, and nowhere is anybody can convince me, at least at this point, that they have any idea of how God creates.

So I'm not going to get into the creation thing.

I don't know.

I have no idea whatsoever how he does it.

Is there the possibility that

we came from monkeys?

I don't think so.

But does it matter if

at one point the divine said

that

is human?

Yeah, it's exactly, exactly right.

And let me exploit the podcast format to respond to what you're saying.

But let's imagine I wanted to tell somebody that I spent this morning with Glenn Beck.

So I'm going to say to somebody, and I might boast about that, I'm going to say, you know what?

I spent this morning with Glenn Beck and person says Glenn Beck who's that I said Glenn Beck he's the guy who one time 30 years ago drove a car from Tampa to Miami

or am I going to say Glenn Beck is the man who built up a huge following based on fundamental truth called the blaze right I'd address what I think is one of your your outstanding accomplishments not something much more mundane well it's interesting, is it not, that the Ten Commandments

begin, I'm the Lord your God, and it should continue, who created heaven and earth.

Because that's a pretty significant achievement.

I'm the Lord your God who built this universe you're in.

You know what it actually says?

I'm the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt.

Yawn.

I mean, really?

Is that the best you can come up with?

Why?

Isn't that interesting?

It is.

Why?

It's fascinating.

Not only that, but the creation of the world takes up 34 verses in Genesis.

But the construction of a tabernacle, which was used only in the desert and for a few hundred years later when the Jews came to Shiloh with Joshua, takes up nearly 200 verses.

May I take speculate?

Well, I know you're going to get it because you were alluding to it a few minutes ago.

Go ahead, yes.

Yeah, that it is, that the Bible is not about

God, the Bible is about man.

Precisely.

It's so great being with you.

The Bible is not man's book about God.

If it was, we'd talk about the creation of the universe.

It's God's book about man.

And fundamental to that is this basic question:

what are we?

Are we nothing but a creature on the continuum that starts with bacteria

and moves up to people?

Or are we a completely different creature, as I say, touched by the finger of God?

That's really what we have to ask ourselves.

Because everything flows out of that.

Once we decide that question, and you can never know it, you have to, it's like everything else in life.

When you get married to a woman, there is no way you can possibly know everything about her before you get married.

That is a step you take with faith.

When, in almost every major decision in life, when you choose a career, you have no idea all the implications that that's going to have 30 years later.

And so, similarly, on this decision, you also make a decision in your life.

You say, Look,

there's two ways to live my life.

I either have to live my life as if I am truly a purposeless collection of molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus and

carbon, or I am something that God created and put here with a purpose.

And the implications are absolutely huge.

And the kind of society, first of all, the kind of person I'm going to try and make myself become, the family I'm going to raise, the society I'm going to be part of, all of this is shaped, as I said earlier, by a belief along these lines as opposed to any facts.

Let me switch gears.

I am

greatly concerned about

really probably the next 10 to 12 years of human existence.

And I fall into the category of Stephen Hawking and

Elon Musk.

Are you familiar with AI, AGI, and ASI?

In the world of artificial intelligence.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

So

we right now, MIT is doing something called the Moral Machine.

And

as soon as the 5G network is up, the world changes.

The reason why we don't have self-driving cars now is we have the technology to do it.

What we don't have is a big enough, fast enough pipeline.

And that's going to require the 5G network.

Once the 5G network is up, your car becomes far more capable of doing almost anything.

It will be able to not only know what's in the road in front of them, but also know who is in the road in front of them, beside them, behind them.

And it has to make a judgment call if there's going to be an accident.

Who do I kill?

Yes, and that has to be programmed in advance.

Correct.

Yes.

There's a hierarchy of life, if you will.

We are now designing

all kinds of machines to kill.

We have drones, still has the human kill switch, but we are designing for AGI technology to be able to go in, and we don't have to have a human driver.

Ray Kurzweil has said to me, by 2030, Glenn, there will be no death.

Complete nonsense.

It's so amazing that people who are so smart can be so stupid.

Well, he believes that there will be no death because I can download you.

Well, that doesn't, that's not, that's not you.

That's not life.

But we can't even agree on

when a child becomes a child in uterus.

Yeah, but we do know that two identical twins

who are truly identical, there is no difference in their DNA.

We do know they have different fingerprints.

Yes.

But we haven't the faintest idea of where that information comes from.

We also know that they have different souls, obviously.

And so a lot of these statements,

you're alluding to smart people, but

here's what I'm driving at.

Yeah.

We have these gigantic

philosophical questions and we are driving the opposite way when it comes to knowing

universal principles, really standing by those universal principles.

How do we survive, Rabbi, with

the kind of technology that is coming our way, programmed mainly by people who do not look at the book for any kind of advice

in a society that will gobble this up?

So

I mean, I think the important thing is not to be overly alarmed.

As I've said before,

being very intelligent is very different from being wise.

And there are many people, in fact, our culture, I think, has specialized in producing very smart people.

The whole elite university system, the idea now that marriages are essentially, for the most part, in that group, very smart people marrying very smart people.

It's not the way it used to be.

Careful, you're starting to sound like Charles Murray.

Well, you know, not everything Charles Murray said was wrong.

I think everything he said.

There's a lot of it he said.

As you well know, the bell curve was vilified,

but it was not vilified with data and science.

It was vilified with beliefs and hysteria and emotions and feelings.

But

the idea that,

for instance, one of the people you mentioned earlier has gone on record saying that the problem is going to be not enough work for people.

There's going to be too much leisure.

People have been saying this since water power replaced hand-sawing operations in the 17th century.

It doesn't reflect a reality of the human being.

It reflects a reality that would be true provided the human being was nothing but a materialistic outcome.

If we really are just bodies and no souls, then some of these things become concerns.

But we're not.

And secondly, there's also a sense of...

But if we believe we are.

I mean, we're headed towards the belief that we are.

Yeah, but there isn't a we, you see.

This has been a tension that has been true in society for 2,000 years.

It goes back to Jerusalem and Athens.

The Athenian worldview, exemplified really very colorfully by the entire literature of Greek mythology, for instance,

even has something to say about energy, right?

Where Prometheus, unhappy with the notion that energy in the form of fire belongs only to Zeus and the other gods, steals it, and Zeus punishes him with eternal torture.

In the Judeo-Christian vision, Adam and Eve are at the gate to the Garden of Eden on their way to eviction.

And Adam wails to God, and how am I going to manage?

There's wild animals there.

How am I going to eat?

And God says, I've got this great gift for you.

It's a divine gift.

You're going to be the only creature on the whole planet that uses this it's called fire these are two incompatible visions the Greek vision is obviously more prevalent because that's why people knock on the window of my V12 BMW and say how dare you use so much gasoline

why don't you knock on my room in the morning and say how dare you have four cups of coffee

because

the way the uh the these these philosophies have evolved energy is either divine or only

not meant for the use of human beings.

We've always been Jerusalem and Athens, and that's the same play here.

You really don't have to worry that this group of people who are materialistic in the extreme and scientific in the extreme

portend these dismal outcomes.

The fact is that technology, technological progress rises and falls.

It doesn't flow at a steady rate.

And so even now, for instance, there's quite a lot of material out there about how some of the Silicon Valley geniuses won't allow their children to use iPads and phones.

All right.

That's an interesting development.

It's something that my wife could have told them 15 years ago already.

The woman, one of the women who came up with Instagram just this last couple of weeks, said, I'm out.

And I know I brought it to market, but this is horrible.

Right.

So the notion that somehow we're in this dystopian universe heading towards robotic control, that kind of gloomy picture is a specialty of the left.

This is why, according to the left, the world is always going to end.

Either nuclear winter or acid rain or global warming.

But whatever whatever it is, unless the United Nations manages to impose a tax on all of humanity and given the power to save us, we are all doomed.

Versus a religious vision that says we don't know the details, but on some glorious day of God's choosing, everything's going to be great.

Who are we?

You know, I used to read the Bible.

It was so funny.

No, no, no.

When I was younger, I would read the Bible and

I would look at these civilizations and I'm like, four pages ago, four pages ago, you learned this lesson.

You know, everything's a little compacted, but I used to laugh at how fast people forgot and destroyed themselves over and over again.

Who

are we?

Now I don't laugh at that because I read it and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is us.

Yes.

Who are we?

If you had to pick a civilization or a group of people or a time period in the Bible, what are we living right now?

The United States of America?

Yeah, or the world.

I think those are

two different.

Can you give me the difference?

Yes, I could certainly try to.

Yeah, in the United States of America,

we are probably more like ancient Israel than like anywhere else.

We have our prophets.

we have a significant part of the population that believes in the Bible, believes that the Bible is God's message to mankind.

But then you also have a very significant population that is hostile to that worldview.

And this is a struggle that is as evident today here as it was in Israel in the days of Jeremiah.

Do you know of any other society that's gone through this besides Israel?

Only Israel and

America.

And there are other similarities as well.

We're the only two nations, ancient Israel and modern America, are the only nations that are not specifically land-shaped.

In other words, it's very difficult to become a naturalized Swiss citizen if you weren't born in Switzerland.

But you can join the people of Israel and you can join the people of America by a philosophical belief process.

I adopt the founders of America as my fathers as well.

So I think that

that's a strong similarity.

We're also the only two nations that fought a civil war early in their histories over moral issues and both emerged stronger than they went into it.

It's very, very unusual.

And it's strange too that our founders believed, so did the pilgrims, that they were completing the journey of the Exodus of Israel.

Very much so.

As you know, I think you may even have a picture of it:

yes, the idea of having the Great Seal with the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

So

these things were very much in the minds of the founders, without question.

Israel broke up and was destroyed.

Yes.

Yes.

You see that?

I don't necessarily see that.

And

I'm not really good on the prophecy stuff, but

but I see it as a possibility

I I'm very much

of the view that

that a religious reawakening could I don't see another way of doing this by the way I don't either I don't think you can evangelize people to a political viewpoint

I don't think the Republican Party If we can just get everybody to vote Republican, oh, everything will be fine.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

Although I do know if we can get everybody to vote for the Democrats as they're currently constituted, everything will be terrible.

But no, I think it is a case of a spiritual and religious reawakening

is what I see happening.

Where's the rest of the world?

The rest of the world

is kind of where it's always been.

In certain ways, it's a laboratory of the human experience.

And there is some place on the planet that you can point to for the bringing to life of whatever philosophy you're inquisitive about, either in the present time or historically.

But

the idea,

in other words, I don't have any mission to save the world.

I think people who do can be very dangerous.

I don't see that at all.

I do see my dream

is for America and Israel to be models of societal structure that the rest of the world willingly and voluntarily imitates and emulates.

And I'm seeing some interesting things.

I mean,

the European Union, in my view, has been doomed from day one.

From day one.

And, you know, we see what's happening there, and and

it was it was dreamed up as a means of preventing another world war.

That was the the concept.

It was dreamed up as a way of trying to emulate the United States.

We have the United States of America, we're going to have the United States of Europe.

But you do have countries that are routinely denounced as racist and vilified as regressive,

but you do have some countries that are taking steps to fulfill the most basic function of any state, which is self-preservation.

And Poland is who would have dreamed that Poland could be a functioning democracy in the early 21st century.

Those

just

on the

Western side of the former Soviet Union, They're some of the strongest.

I mean, they're some of the strongest freedom-loving people.

Yes, I think.

I've seen it.

Hungary.

Hungary is very fascinating.

So, yeah, I don't think it's America and the world.

I don't really.

I think there are many, many different countries and regions in the world.

As I mentioned in another conversation you and I had, I'm absolutely intrigued with some of the things happening in Africa.

Now, I mean, obviously, there are huge problems.

One of the biggest problems infecting Africa is foreign aid,

which is nearly always destructive.

Foreign aid has kept alive the Arab refugee problem in the Middle East.

It is very, very difficult to give people money without causing more problems than you're trying to solve.

That was one of the hardest lessons I've ever learned from actually a bishop of mine.

Somebody came to me.

And I knew they were struggling and having trouble.

And because my faith is a faith of structure and checks and balances and everything else, this person called me and said, hey, you know, I really need your help financially, blah, blah, blah.

And I said, have you talked to the bishop?

He said, yeah, but I really wanted to talk to you.

And I said, okay.

I hung up the phone and I called my bishop.

And my bishop said, and I had the money to help him.

It wasn't asking for a big thing.

He said, Glenn, I'm going to ask you to do the hardest thing you've ever done.

Please don't.

He said, if you do, you will undo so much of what we're trying to do.

He said, he's got to stand on his own two feet.

And he said he can.

He just doesn't want to.

And

it's a lesson that I don't.

Bono learned it.

Yes.

Bono has learned it.

Bono is now looking at all of the aid that he's done for his whole life and said none of it made a difference.

You got to teach a man how to fish.

Right.

Well, there are very interesting things happening in Africa.

Very, very interesting.

And I think it's important not to lump the continent as a whole, but to look look at different societies there.

So when you do look at Europe,

and I remember being mocked at Fox

for many things.

Caliphate was one of them.

The other one was the hatreds of the 1930s are going to come back.

And here we are.

Yes.

And I remember, I mean, they mocked me for always talking about Nazis, but I was always talking about this problem is coming back.

And now here it is.

There's something weird, and I think it's happening here in the United States too.

And I'd love for your thoughts on this.

There's a problem that the elite class, if you will, the ruling class and the media,

they refuse to recognize.

And then there's the people on the streets that see it.

And what they're seeing is, My wages haven't moved.

My life isn't necessarily getting better.

We're fighting these wars, and I'm not really even sure what they're about.

In Europe, we're now the EU.

Wait a minute.

I like being Swiss, or I like being...

you know, German, and I like being Italian.

Yes.

And the Swiss never joined the EU.

As soon as I said that, they wanted to keep their own

identity.

And so they're seeing this come apart.

They know it doesn't work.

They're being told that it works economically, but they know it doesn't.

Then they're being forced to take on

and absorb millions of people who do not want to become German, do not want to become French, do not want to become

members of the EU or the UK.

And

because the press and the ruling class will not deal with the simple problems of,

look, if you want to come here, we want you here, but you got to be English.

We have English law here.

You know, you want to come here, you want to be German, and it'll be great, but you've got to fit into society.

Because they won't deal with that and other basics, the only people who will are these

uber nationalists who are not necessarily trying to solve the problem the average person does, but the average person runs to them because they're the only ones saying,

this is a problem.

So it's happening here, I think, to some extent, too.

It could get really bad when you have this

denial of truth and this yearning to be, I think, free and yourself.

That's when bad guys come into play.

How How do we

do you see Europe waking up to this?

The whole immigrant question is a terrific lens through which to look at the whole question.

It's a great lens to look at it because it's being played out and has been played out since 1965 in the United States with the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, whose natural and inevitable consequence is a caravan of migrants moving through Central America determined to storm the southern border.

This is a very straight, easily definable line that links the caravan to 1965's Immigration Reform Act.

That Angela Merkel in Germany believed that importing a million males.

One of the reasons that

Roanoke didn't work and New England did work was that New England was families.

It was men and women, husbands and wives.

Soldiers don't build a society.

Men don't build a society alone.

Neither do women, of course.

But

yeah, it's

the idea that importing a million young Arab males was a good idea.

But

I never

try, I never like saying how stupid they are because they're not.

It's a mistake to think anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid, even if I'm tempted to think that sometimes, but it's not true.

According to their worldview, what they're saying and what they're doing is exactly right.

Let me explain what I mean.

This will just take a second, which is that,

again,

a fundamental and categorical distinction between a secularized view of reality and a Judeo-Christian Bible-based view of reality is the whole question of scarcity versus abundance.

A secular viewpoint always believes in scarcity.

There's not enough trees, there's not enough oxygen, there's not enough

oil.

Paul Ehrlich is still teaching your children at Stanford University at 65 grand tuition.

And this is the guy who predicted in a book in 1972 that by 2000, Americans would be dying of starvation.

Because in his worldview, scarcity and shortage and doom is the absolute inevitable end.

They also believe that

land and resources are scarce.

And so people, they see people as consumers of resources, not creators.

And so the big fear and the big worry is too many people.

And so zero population growth is a popular movement, talking of our friend George Soros and many many others.

Now we look at the religious viewpoint.

The religious viewpoint is that we have a God whose

identifying characteristic is abundance, limitlessness.

And so this is a God who said, be fruitful and multiply.

Really?

Well, he also

said in Hebrew, pru revu, that doesn't just mean, it's not just a poetic way of saying be fruitful and have sex, or it's not like that.

It's have children and educate them.

That's what the Hebrew says.

Very, very different.

So it's not just putting out kids there.

It's putting out human beings who are capable of being godlike in their ability to create.

In that worldview, there's not much in the way of shortage.

Now, think about an economic system.

Very often people say, well, I don't want any children.

And I say, well, okay, that's great, but your social security is going to end up being paid by my children.

And they say, I don't need Social Security, I have investments.

And I say, my response is exactly the same, because your investments absolutely depend on companies continuing to sell their goods and services.

And the only way those companies are going to continue to sell goods and services is if the population base expands.

So everybody understands that people may not agree with me that God created a system this way, but everybody agrees that you've got to have a pyramid-shaped structure.

There's got to be more people in the next generation than in this, if not for the most basic and elemental reason, which is that for a husband and wife to survive in their old age, they need more than one child.

That's sort of pretty basic.

Now you can translate that into vast economic terms and factories and economic systems.

The basic arithmetic doesn't change.

There need to be more people in the next generation if this generation is going to survive and so on and so forth.

Okay, fine.

They understand that and Germany understood that as well.

Their answer was immigrants, anybody,

because to them people are just materialistic.

One pair of arms and one pair of legs and one mouth is the same as any other set of those same organs.

And people on my side of the device said, are you crazy?

You're bringing in not just arms and legs, you're bringing in human beings who have beliefs.

So you believe that this is, I have never thought of it that way.

You believe this is just a way for them to

repopulate because the system, I mean, just mathematically, the system is collapsing.

They're aging out and there's no young people.

Everybody knows that.

Yes.

I don't think everybody knows.

No, no, no, no, no.

Just everyone knows what you just said.

Yes, yes, yes.

But I've never heard anybody...

I've never heard anybody tie those two together.

Yeah, so bring in those immigrants.

And

since we're only bringing in, it's like bringing in cows, right?

They're just arms and legs and hands.

They're economic cogs.

They'll be plugged with nothing to worry about.

And our side of the divide says you're completely wrong.

You're bringing in complete human beings.

And those human beings have their own beliefs.

And those beliefs are like fire in their minds.

And you have to know what those beliefs are.

Because if they're incompatible with yours,

you don't have the makings of a society.

You have the makings of a huge civil war.

And again, parts of Paris, you know, many, many other French cities today, parts of Sweden, Malmo in Sweden, Cologne in Germany.

These things play out to the point where

the sort of things we're talking about would make Europeans yawn and say, Yeah, tell us something new.

We know about this already.

I was in Copenhagen and and i was doing um what's called a stand-up for television where you stand up in a certain area and you you tell a story and they record it and uh i was doing this and as i was so focused on what i was doing out of the corner of my eye i see my security agent he's been moving closer and closer he's uncomfortable very uncomfortable and he finally just puts his hand up and when he did that i knew I've got to pay attention to him.

He put his hand up and he said, we have to leave right now.

And we all left, and

there had been a crowd of Muslim men that had been gathering.

We come home, nothing happened.

We come home.

A month later, I see CBS, or I'm sorry, I see 60 Minutes Australia.

And they're doing a stand-up in exactly the same place.

And their team is beaten.

They didn't leave.

And there's a riot that breaks out and they're they're beating them.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, uh,

Europe knows.

Europe knows.

I'm sorry.

The European people know.

People know.

The European people know.

Look, everybody knows, again, just to reduce it to its silly simplicity, but

ordinary people know that if you are

alone on a dark street very late at night in parts of town that make you nervous, and you see four figures approaching you from the other end, normal people are nervous by that.

But if they get closer and you see it's not four guys, but two men out with their wives, it's two couples.

Normal people say, phew,

okay, I was worried there for a moment.

Normal people know that if you bring in a million young males into Germany, that's not good news.

It's a problem,

regardless of whatever their beliefs are.

But now if you bring in a million young males whose beliefs are Islamic, now you have a real problem.

Ordinary folks know that.

But again, if your secular worldview is dominant, then these are just arms and legs.

These are socioeconomic cogs, just like any others, ready to integrate and become part of the economy of your country.

So you can continue living as comfortably as you do in your gated community.

I know

some of my favorite people,

thinkers, are Jewish because they just, I don't know, they think differently.

And I think it's, and I could be wrong, I think it's because

you answer questions with questions.

You know, you question everything.

Isn't Israel, isn't that,

doesn't that translate to wrestle with God?

Yeah.

Okay.

So,

and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's part of the culture to question and wrestle with this.

You know, it might be.

In my case,

I've just really

done my hardest to make sure that my thinking and my analysis is driven by ancient Jewish wisdom, is driven by biblical tradition rather than by Jewish cultural.

Okay, so but there's difference, and I think it is from, I think it is from studying the Torah.

I think the questioning comes from studying the Torah.

But there is a difference between people who read the Bible every day and people who study Torah.

There's a great deal of difference in the way they think.

Would you agree with that or not?

I would say,

you know, like all your questions, that's thought-provoking.

But my immediate response is that

I have much more in common with a Bible-believing Christian than I have with a secularized Jew.

I agree with that.

I'm not talking about secularized Jew.

I'm talking about somebody who is studying the Torah.

We don't study the Bible like Jews study the Torah.

Right, but that's not because of any shortcoming in you.

That's simply because you don't have access to the Hebrew original.

And the Hebrew is a densely packed, encoded system of information.

You know, the example I like giving giving is that I sometimes pull down from my shelf a German book published in Germany of Max Planck's analysis of thermodynamics.

And I give it to somebody and I say, so, you know, what do you think?

Does this view of the physical universe make sense?

And he opens it, he says, Rabbi Lappe, I don't speak German.

I say, oh, I'm so sorry.

I put it in the shelf and right next to it, I've got an English translation, which is a very fine, highly heralded.

I pull down the English translation.

I'm sorry, here it is in English.

Tell me what you think.

And then he says, Well, I now see my obstacle in understanding it wasn't just the language.

It was

I don't know enough physics.

I don't know enough mathematics.

Every page is filled with equations.

I'm sorry.

It didn't help to give it to me in English.

It's a lot like that as well, where the English translation of the Torah is

I want to say it carries as much as 1% of the meaning, but I think that's an exaggeration.

It's remarkable, remarkable how much Christians have lost by.

I mean, we've got to get these two together.

It's very problematic, you see.

I mean, just a quick example, and there's so many of these.

I mean, I could do the rest of the day on this.

But

at the beginning of Genesis, God put man in the Garden of Eden to work it.

That's what chapter 2, verse 19 says.

In Exodus chapter 20, verse 7, seven days shalt thy do all thy work.

In six days you must do all thy work.

Same word, work.

God said to Moses, go to Pharaoh and say to him, let my people go so that they may worship me in the desert.

Chapter 24 of the book of Joshua, near the end, Joshua Joshua is saying, you know what, I'm fed up with you people.

You guys can do whatever you like.

As for me and my family, we shall worship the Lord.

So I've just told you four verses.

Two of them use the word work as in doing your work.

And two of them use the word worship.

And what no devout, good, wonderful Christian brother can do is realize that in the Hebrew original, that's all one word.

All one word.

There is no distinction between work and worship.

One of the ways you worship God is by doing your daily work.

Now, do you see what an immense difference?

Such

a difference that makes to how I go to work on Monday morning.

I'm not now going to work to get a paycheck.

I'm going to work to take care of God's other children, and this is part of the way of worshiping.

It's kind of the theory of

pray always.

Yes,

you are praying.

Everything you're doing is a prayer.

Exactly right.

So that would be an example of four verses that are completely misunderstood.

The essence of it is that taking care of your customers is part of worshiping God.

That God set up a system where that includes human-economic interaction.

And in the same way that you would be filled with love for me if I did something beautiful for your children, God loves it when we do things for one another because we're taking care of his children.

These provide a Hebraic perspective on life that simply can't be obtained from the English translation.

One last thing.

That's why everyone needs a rabbi.

If you don't mind me dropping that in, oh, I love that.

One last question.

I'm having a difficult time.

My son is struggling with God.

And I struggle with God.

I think we all struggle with God.

And he has, you know, he doesn't know him for himself.

He hasn't worked for that relationship.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I was lucky to, I felt an early connection.

He doesn't.

And we were talking about the scriptures the other day.

He said, why do I have to read the scriptures?

And I said,

because even if you don't believe in God,

it is the basis of the Western society.

And it's just, if it was Bob's book of really great tips, the world would embrace it.

You know, it would be, it would.

It would be,

this Bob has been selling these books for, you know, hundreds and thousands of years, and there is really some good stuff in here.

How do you talk to somebody who doesn't

who's just disconnected from it, disconnected from the language and sees the stories as old?

How old is he?

14.

I think the answer is you don't.

And all you do is work on your relationship with him.

Everything else will be.

I said that to somebody.

Somebody said to me,

he said, how's your relationship?

I said, we're really close.

We just, we're really close.

And

I said, he's struggling with God.

And they said, what are you doing about that?

And I said, telling him it's okay.

Yeah.

And they kind of looked at me like, that's crazy.

And I said, it has to be from him.

I can't give him my faith.

He has to find it.

I have to demonstrate that God lives.

I have to live a godly life.

But

at some point, he's going to have that crash.

It breaks my heart when I see fathers so fervent in their devotion to God that they're willing to destroy their relationship with their sons in an attempt, a futile attempt, to drive into them an equivalent love of God.

It will push him away from God, I think.

And from you.

Yeah.

More importantly, from you.

Rabbi, it's always great to have you.

Are we already through our time?

We are.

My goodness, time flies when we talk about it.

Will you come back?

Will you just

make the case for socialism and capitalism?

And make it in a way that somebody who's 20

can really relate.

Can you do that?

Yeah.

You can do that in your sleep.

No, no, I can't go to my sleep at all.

No, it's not.

It's a monumental question, but it's one that I've grappled with.

Okay.

Thank you.

Good to be with you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.