Hey there, and welcome back to Take One, the podcast that brings you just one private page of Talmud each day.

You don't have to be a very dedicated listener to this show to know that over here, we do the best we can to steer clear of politics.

This is a show about Talmud, not about breaking news or partisan acrimony in most days.

We happily study Gamara together with little or no interruptions from the swirling chaos of the outside world.

But the Talmud isn't a hypothetical book of theoretical esoteric knowledge.

It's a guide to human life and nothing human is ever foreign to it.

And sometimes it delivers deeply necessary and timely lessons about deeply controversial

and urgent questions we're having right here and right now in the real world. Today's page,

Zvachim 114, does exactly that. But before we get to it, I'd like to introduce

you to a 36-year-old activist named Sia Weaver, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America,

who is just appointed to be director of the New York City mayor's office to protect tenants.

It's a big government job in America's largest city, so it

behooves us to know the director's mind. Here she is, in her own words, explaining her thoughts

about property. Have a listen. I think the reality is that for centuries, we've really treated

property as an individualized good and not a collective

good.

And we are going to in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of

shared equity will require that we think about it differently.

And it will mean that families, especially white families,

but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship

to property than the one that we currently have.

We will leave aside for a minute the racialized overtones and the designs to deprive white

...