Hey folks, I'm out today for Passover, but we want to give you a little bit of a taste of something amazing that we do here at Daily Wire. It's a show I do called The Search in which I sit down with some of the most interesting people across the globe. And honestly, these folks are from all sides of the political spectrum. And we just sit at a restaurant or a coffee shop and we just chat about life. I had the opportunity to sit down with Russell Brand, who's one of the most fascinating people in public life right now. It's, I think, a really riveting conversation. Here's what that sounds like. So again, I think that goes to the fundamental human good, meaning that if the, if the, you know, the idea of epistemic humility, that you should, you should, epistemological humility, that you should, you should be, you know, humble in how you approach issues, and maybe you could be wrong.

Yeah.

I totally agree. And that, that I think, is an issue, as I say, sometimes of morality, but very often

of pragmatism. You just don't know. You don't know. You don't know.

Yeah. But at the same time, I mean, there are limits to that. So, for example, you wouldn't say, you know, a person who is holding a slave. Well, no problem.

I mean, he's living how he wants to live.

There are certain fundamental values that overrun your, the sort of cultural, the sort of global libertarianism. And yet, that is an example of a value that contemporaneously to the construction of these ideologies was literally accepted as ordinary. So the, I mean, not to get into the biblical analysis of slavery, but one of the, I think, most honest ways to read the Bible is as a document that was given to a particular set of people at a particular time, meaning that you have to look at what it's attempting to transform. Meaning if you look at the slavery and the society surrounding, it's a much more liberalized version of slavery that's in the Bible, and therefore a step toward the abolition of slavery, which is exactly how it's been read by every abolitionist preacher in the 19th century. It's been read by... What do you mean, Israelites Egypt stuff? Well, I mean, yes, I mean that, and also, even the scriptural, you know, injunctions with regard to you own a slave. slave. do you keep the slave? The slave, do you, like, for example, and not to get too specifically biblical, but there's a, there's a whole section in the Bible where it talks about you are, your master's servant, and seven years go up. At the end of seven years, you are automatically freed, right? You can't have a term longer in seven years in the Bible.

And you are given a choice.

Do you want to stay with your master or do you want to leave?

And so the Bible says that if you want to stay, then we take an all and we put it through your ear and we give you essentially an ear piercing. Okay, so it's a punishment. The idea is that you should have gone free. There's something wrong with you if you decide to stay in bondage.

That's as opposed to the Code of Hamarabi, and the Code of Hamarabi is the opposite.

If a slave attempts to escape, then his return to the master, then the master puts the all through his ear to demonstrate that he owns the slave. So in the Bible, it becomes a flip scenario where it's trying to encourage freedom. And again, it's speaking to a culture in which slavery is commonplace. And so the most honest way to read the Bible is to look at it as both an eternal guarantee in particular areas where it's speaking to basic human nature,

and also as a transformative to the customs of a time, because any document that you give is transformative to the customs of time.

I can't speak the language of astrophysics to people living in 1500 BC. So that I think is a... So it has to be simultaneously allegorical while taking into account that it had...

The practicality. Contemporary application. And also you have to apply human reason to it in the

sense that what you're looking at very often is issues of human nature versus inerrant human

nature, right? Human nature just exists. So for example, do not murder is an all-time rule, right? That's not a transformative rule where murder is really common, so we're trying to minimize that. It's like, no, human beings want to murder, you're not allowed to murder. That's an all-time rule, as opposed to certain rules that are obviously an attempt to curb the worst practices of the time, maybe in pursuit of something better down the road. And so that's hard. I mean, it takes human reason to apply to it. And this is why Judaism has, you know, an entire corpus of laws and regulations that are deterministic on this. You know, I think that the thing that, you know, as a partisan of Judaism, the thing that I say that Judaism brings to the table, and I think that Judaism and Christianity come at it from opposite sides. And I'll make the case for Judaism, obviously. No way. Yeah, exactly. I'm leaving. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. I didn't come here for Judaism. Is that what Judaism is really about. And you mentioned the commandments. And you kind of said, you know, there's the commands and there's making God real in your everyday life. That's what the commandments are supposed to do.

So what Judaism says is that you are a human being with the capacity for great good and the capacity for great evil, right? You have literally the Yater Harah and the Atteratob. You have a desire for good, you have desire for evil, and these two things are battling in you literally at all times. And what your job is to do is regardless of what you believe, you do the thing.

The thing that is in front of you is the thing that you do. So we have this arcane set of rules, and this arcane set of rules is made to reify the presence of God in your life. And even if you don't recognize that's what it's doing, by you doing these things over and over, you're cultivating virtue through action. So it's like you reach God by doing the thing, whereas I think that Christianity almost comes at it backwards.

And through ceremony.

Right, exactly. you're cultivating virtue through action. So it's like you reach God by doing the thing, whereas I think that Christianity almost comes out backwards. And through ceremony, through your behavior? Through rituals, through all these things. And Christianity comes in... Can you do that speaking Hebrew chanting? I mean, yes, but it wouldn't be entertaining to anybody. You can't do it. You do that as part of your life. Could you reckon you could have been a rabbi?

I mean, there was a time when I was interested in being a rabbi, right, coming out of high school.

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