Daniel Gordis on America, Israel, and the Sources of Jewish Resilience

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2020

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The year 2020 has been one of real suffering. The Coronavirus has infected tens of millions the world over and has taken the lives of a quarter of a million Americans. It’s decimated the economy, shuttered businesses, brought low great cities, and immiserated millions who could not even attend funerals or weddings, visit the sick, or console the demoralized.

This podcast focuses on how to think Jewishly about suffering and about the sources of Jewish fortitude in the face of tragedy and challenge. In his October 2020 Mosaic essay, “How America’s Idealism Drained Its Jews of Their Resilience,” Shalem College’s Daniel Gordis examines recent experiences of Jewish suffering and how different Jewish communities responded to it. In doing so, he makes the case that Jewish tradition and Jewish nationalism endow the Jewish soul with the resources to persevere in the face of adversity. Liberal American Jewish communities, by contrast, have no such resources to draw upon. He joins Jonathan Silver to discuss his essay and more.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This has been a year of real suffering.
0:10.0	The coronavirus has infected women and men in every country on the planet.
0:14.0	It has taken the lives of a quarter of a million Americans.
0:17.0	It has decimated the economy, sh, shuttered entire business sectors, forever altered
0:22.1	the nature of work, brought low great cities, and immiserated millions of family members
0:27.6	who could not attend funerals or weddings, or welcome their sons home for military service,
0:33.3	or visit the sick, or console the demoralized. This week, we think Jewishly about suffering and resilience.
0:40.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast.
0:41.4	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
0:43.2	There are, of course, distinctions to be made between suffering at the hands of a virus
0:48.2	and suffering at the hands of a human adversary.
0:50.9	But for the purpose of today's discussion, I want to abstract away from that distinction,
0:55.7	and focus instead on the proposition that suffering from any source is a sad but inescapable
1:02.2	human experience.
1:04.1	Things will happen to each of us, and to the nations in which we live.
1:08.5	Something will happen to the just and the unjust alike. Someone will
1:12.6	contract a disease. An accident will maim or kill. An adversary will succeed. All of us, I'm sorry
1:19.0	to say, will taste from Job's cup. And when that happens, how will we react? Do we have the
1:24.7	inner strength and the confidence to withstand life's troubles? Do the Jewish
1:28.8	people have the inner strength to absorb suffering and build itself back again? My guest today
1:33.8	is Daniel Gordas of Shalem College, and the basis of our discussion is his October 2020 essay in
1:39.7	Mosaic, How America's Idealism Drained its Jews of Their Res their resilience. Daniel's essay begins with three
	...

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