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about it, but we went to church on Sundays. When we kids resisted, we were bribed with donuts. I found Sunday school to be mainly confusing. I understood the concepts of God and Jesus, but I remember having a lot of questions about the Holy Ghost, this character whose back story the teachers never seemed to want to fill in. But I believed in God. I prayed every night. I prayed for a long list of everyone I hoped
God would protect. Really, everyone I knew. My family, my friends, relatives, the souls of pets who had died. I couldn't fall asleep until I prayed. Always the same prayer every night until I turned 15. When I was 15, something terrible happened to someone I loved. After that, I only prayed that this one person would be safe. A month later, the same terrible thing happened to them again. After that, I mostly stopped praying.
At first, I think I was pretty angry, but the anger went away. And then when it was gone, it just felt easier for me to live in a world where everything didn't happen for a reason. A world where when someone I knew got hurt, I didn't have to look for a lesson in it, or imagine it as part of a plan. I kept getting older. I didn't think about God very much. But a couple years ago, I had a funny experience. I was in the desert with a friend, and I had
this feeling I never had before. It lasted for about a minute. Just this sense, like, a physical sense, that the world might just be a shadow of a different world. A place that was more real, or more true. It lasted for about one full minute, and then it passed. I did not rush off to start a new religion, or join an old one. I took what had happened with a grain of salt, but I also didn't discard it. It just left me with new questions.
I know I'm not allowed to do a podcast called Is God Real, but I did want to try to understand what faith feels like to the people who have it. That question has really been sticking with me. I think we'll probably ask it a lot in the future to different people of different faiths. But recently, I found one person who would let me pester them about it. Do you want headphones or no headphones? I don't think any of these ones. I might do no headphones
too, sure. Is that okay with you? Yeah, I'm listening. Take a tell me what you had for breakfast today. For breakfast today, I had a smoked salmon of avocado toast. This is Vika Krieger. How do I describe this person? We met recently. He leads a progressive Jewish spiritual community in Berkeley called Hulkmat Halav. I really enjoyed talking to him. I got the sense I could ask him a bunch of invasive questions about his faith, that I
could ask him about God. I was a kid who'd never smoked weed. We wanted to know what weed was like, and that these questions would not offend him. I invited him to search engine headquarters to ask one of those no questions too big. My plan today, this sort of roadmap I'm imagining for his conversation, I want to talk about
your early life. I want to ask you about what your relationship to faith has been like, how it's changed, how you were dragged kicking and screaming into rabbi dum, rabbi dum, rabbi dum. Rabident. Rabident. I want to see if I can get a sense of how it feels to believe, as someone who doesn't particularly believe. I brought one of my favorite books on the topic, so that you can see the title. Like catching water and a net. It's a book
about how to describe God. Oh, really? Yeah, so it's like, this is the title. That's great. Okay, so we're doing something impossible. Okay, so can you just tell me about your life before you decide to become a rabbi, like even like as a kid, did you believe in God? Well, so I grew up in Los Angeles primarily, and I would say I definitely believed in a version of God as a kid for sure that sounds not too different from the version of God
that you described growing up, even though I grew up Jewish. And so I grew up Orthodox, which means like on the very observant and very traditional end of the Jewish spectrum. And my parents got married when they were very young, like 19 early 20s and divorced a year later. And I was born in that one year period. Oh, wow. And my mom stayed in L.A. and my dad moved out and eventually landed in Israel. And so my mom is what maybe you
would just call like regular Orthodox or like centrist Orthodox. And my dad is ultra-orthodox or you call like, hurray-dee or hecidic, like where they with the the had and the beard and the garb and all of that. And so like Williamsburg Orthodox. Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I mean, there's nuances, but you know, lost on people. What are the nuances? Well, I think there's like different, like the garb may look the same, but I think there's like different
theologies around it within those communities, but subtle. And so I grew up primarily in L.A. and when I was younger, I would go back and forth between that sort of L.A. Orthodox world and then the ultra-orthodox world with my dad. And so those were like the formative experiences of my childhood, particularly when it came to religion, but like my life was religion because I lived in this insular Orthodox community.
So you're in Los Angeles, but it's like a very strict upbringing, like a strict religious upbringing. Yeah, like, you know, only eat kosher food, which means that like you can only eat in restaurants that are like certified kosher. I don't think I knew a non-duish person until I went to college. Oh, wow. Like I, you know, kept strict Shabbat, which means for one day out of the week, no electricity, no money, no phones, no screens, no driving. So
like, you know, borderline omnis, I would say. And is it like, I want to say excuse my ignorance, but if I say that, I'm going to have to say so many times in this interview. So just as a blanket consideration, please excuse my ignorance. Like, you know, I said like Williamsburg Orthodox, like in Brooklyn where I live, it's sort of this thing that people always found remarkable when they move here that Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has a reputation as being
both like a hipster neighborhood, but also an expensive neighborhood. There's one portion of Williamsburg that is just like Orthodox Jewish. And when you are driving, all of a sudden you just like hit it. And it's like a lot of people in the same community living the same way. Was it like that in Los Angeles where you're in like a distinct community where everyone
sort of falling practices or is it more dispersed? I would say it's a little bit more dispersed, but there's a couple neighborhoods where you're like driving through Beverly Hills, your onro dayo drive, you're passing by Prada. And then you take a left turn on Topiko and then all of a sudden all the storefronts are in Hebrew. All the women are walking around with wigs and long skirts. So it's got that Williamsburg-esque vibe, but it's a little bit less in your face.
And I would say, and I would say this is probably pretty formative to who I am, is that people are like, oh my god, you grew up Orthodox. And I say, yeah, but I grew up LA Orthodox. And what does that mean? So I think there was like a little bit more permeability, right? Like in Williamsburg, you'd think like if a kid grew up in Williamsburg, it's like, oh, they've got this kind of like super austere Orthodox upbringing, but you got hipsters, you got clubs and coffee shops, you'd
think that some of that would permeate in. But in Williamsburg and other of these like ultra-orthodox neighborhoods in New York, the gates are pretty high. Like you don't really get much of that culture in, whereas where I grew up, like I definitely, you know, by the time I got to high school, I would go out to like punk shows on Hollywood Boulevard. I would go to raves out in like the deserts around LA.
I would go surfing on weekends with my friends. And so none of that would happen if I grew up in Williamsburg. And when you're experiencing punk shows and raves, particularly like, was that okay? Or was it like you're sort of like stepping out? You know, when it comes to Orthodox Judaism, maybe religion more broadly, there's sort of two pieces. There's like the letter of the law. Like what are you allowed to do? What do you not allowed to do? And then there's like the cultural
pieces of like what is culturally acceptable and culturally layered on top of it. And so there's nothing wrong with going to a punk show according to the laws of Orthodox Judaism. But it may be frowned upon from like a culturally conservative perspective. And I think in LA, you know, there's still a lot of that judginess, but there's a little bit more of an acceptance of, okay, like you can sort of play in both worlds. So like I would go to a punk show, but I'd always
keep my head covered. Probably didn't wear a Yamaha to a punk show, but like wear a baseball hat or a beanie or something like that. Or like I wouldn't eat anything there because the food there wasn't kosher. Or if I was out all night partying at a rave, like I would make sure to be back in time for sunrise so that I could pray the like morning prayers. And did you feel like you were moving between worlds to this thing? So cohesive to you. I think that I definitely had a little bit of
sense of subversion. Like, oh, look at me. I'm a badass. I'm like doing these things. But I also, I don't know, I can't quite put my finger on why, but I felt a sense of integration. I was just like, okay, like there's no paradox here between like doing this, you know, going to a rave and being an Orthodox Jew. And I kind of reveled in my ability to move between those worlds and not feel attention. I've realized a question I meant to ask you really was like, and you've answered it,
but was did you feel ashamed? And it sounds like you didn't feel ashamed. It felt like exciting or normal or correct. I mean, I think that I mean, I definitely was like a type A over a cheaper in high school. And I think that part of my ability to move between those worlds is like, I was like really hardcore on the Jewish front. Right. And so I was like super into everything. I was like in the top Talmud class, like studying the best freaking ancient,
aeromac, legal codes that, you know, you can imagine. I was like, valid of Victorian of my school and like all of that. And I was like bleached hair and baggy janko jeans and like, you know, as one does in the 90s. And like, I think there were people who system would overload at the contradictions and like would look at me and be like, I can't fit this guy in a box. And I was just kind of like, whatever, like I like doing all these things. And there's nothing mutually
exclusive. And I think there's something also interesting about like growing up Orthodox in that. I, you know, I learned fluent Hebrew from the time I was a kid. I learned aeromac. And I was studying the text, the Torah, the all the legal codes from a young age in a way that like, I had direct access to them. So like, I didn't need a gatekeeper. So like someone could be like,
you're not gonna do that. And I'll be like, show me where it says that in the text, right? Or I'm gonna open up the Talmud and like find the place where it talks about this and be like, well, doesn't say that in here, right? And so I think that for a lot of people who don't have that direct access, they need it mediated through a gatekeeper. And generally those gatekeepers have a culturally conservative agenda. And so like, oh, no, you're not allowed to do that. And I'm like, well,
it doesn't say it in there. So I'm gonna do it. Right. So there's kind of, there's this quote, I think is Audrey Lorde who said, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I'm gonna be really embarrassed if it's not Audrey. I think that's right. And like, I kind of was like, well, like, I guess maybe sometimes you can. Right? Like I had the tools. The master's gave me the tools to dismantle the house. And so, okay. So at this point, you're like, you're able to live
in different worlds. And the God that you're imagining is the sort of like, classic God, like God in the sky watching men on a throne in the sky, long beard, kind of wagging his finger at you, recording all of your good and bad deeds in a book and you're praying to this person just like you were sharing. And so, yeah, that was definitely the God that I believed in as a kid.
And what was your relationship like to that God? You know, it's funny because people assume that if you're orthodox or if you go up really religious, you have very close relationship with God. Yeah. And that was not my experience growing up because there was so many rules about what it meant to be an observant Jew, right? In terms of everything about what you eat, literally how you get out of bed, which shoe you put on first versus the right foot. And then it's the left foot. And there's
like all these things. Well, this is like, you know, the Jewish version of it. And now, as an adult, I can see how much of it is based in like post holocaust trauma, OCD. I remember always growing up being like, this feels like OCD. And now I'm just like, oh, yeah, that's like not a quiz. Like when people spend so much of their life having their agency taken away from them and like being abused and traumatized, the way they deal with that is by creating these incredibly
specific rituals for every aspect of your life. You've got to wake up and before you do anything, you have to wash your hands. And there's a certain way that you do it. Two scoops on the left, two scoops on the right. And then there's a prayer that you say before you do anything. And then which so sure to sleep do put on first, which pant leg do you put on first? And so like, and it's for every part of your day, like literally every step you're taking, you're thinking about, okay,
what's the Jewishly prescribed way of doing this? And it's almost like there's no room for God. And like, yes, in theory, you're doing all these things because you think that that's what God commanded you to do. And that's what's going to make God happy. But you almost forget about that because like you're just so focused on all the rules that you're keeping. And so my life was
deeply infused with Judaism. Like every moment of my day was infused with Judaism. But God was like weirdly absent, except for this like hovering background figure that's like keeping a tally of that I put the right foot off the bed when I woke up in the morning. And so when you said college is when you start to kind of split somewhat from the exact ritual someplace of your childhood. And you know, I think it was like a slow progression. Like I'd say to this day, I'm still quite
traditionally observant. And a lot of the rituals that I kept back then, I still keep today. For example, like I keep a pre-strict Shabbat from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Like I don't use my phone. I don't use the internet. I don't drive. I don't use electricity. I don't use money. So I do a lot of things from when I was growing up. But the intentionality behind it is much different. And like the relationship of that act to God is very different. And definitely going to
college was a big part of that. I mean, I grew up in this insular world. Then there's like sort of tradition in my community that after you go to high school, you go spend a gap year in Israel studying in the Ashiva Jewish study school institution seminary. And so I went to Israel for a year. And I just literally from like 730 in the morning to like 10 o'clock a night. I just studied Talmud all day long, which is like obscure Jewish air make legal codes. I can't imagine studying
anything that much. It was when I started drinking coffee for sure. But like, I mean, it does bog on my mind. I look back to being like, holy shit. How did I spend so many hours a day studying with these, you know, first century, second, third century rabbis were saying about your ox, gourd, my ox, and pove pays who what under what conditions I was like, it's like an 18 year old. And what were you getting out of like as 18 year old you like, what is happening in your mind
while you're doing that? I think part of it was like it was just what was done in my community. It is very intellectually stimulating. Right. This is like for the for the we all have those friends that like graduated college and were so excited to go to law school. Yeah. Because they wanted to study torts, you know, and they those big, but I don't even know what they're called,
but those like weird leather bound books that have like all the legal theories in them. Like, that's probably the closest parallel where you basically the Talmud is basically a transcription of esoteric debates and arguments between rabbis. And when a rabbi will put forward a position, another will argue it. And they're basically using the Torah as like a proof test. Like, well,
I think the Torah says this. It's like, no, I didn't interpret the Torah this way. And so there's something kind of intellectually satisfying about like deconstructing an argument, following a debate, and also doing it in ancient air make in a book that has no punctuation. And so like, there's something cool, almost about like decoding these texts. That makes sense. So it's like, it's very intellectually stimulating. And it's like the Netflix algorithm of experiences would be
like four fans of debate club and arguing. Absolutely. Yeah. Totally. Yes. That's exactly right. But I will say that for me, and I don't want to judge other people, but like for me, there was exactly zero spiritual fulfillment in that task. But like, this idea of like spiritual fulfillment, like that wasn't really part of my vocabulary growing up. I mean, it's probably not part of most teenagers vocabularies, but this idea that like religion would be like nourishing in some way,
that wasn't why we did it. Right. And so going to college, like leaving my world, all of a sudden being surrounded by like other kinds of Judaism, more like mystical versions of Judaism, more embodied forms of Judaism, I was just kind of like, huh. Okay. Like that is interesting to me. And like being able to pause and ask questions of like, why are we doing this? And who are we doing this for? And like, definitely the questioning started then and continued well into my twenties.
And so then what is that period of questioning? Like, yeah, I mean, college again was like this interesting time. I went to Yale, which was like a total mind fuck for me being this cloistered Orthodox Jewish boy who we went to only Orthodox Jewish schools, basically only new Orthodox Jewish people. I was on to a college campus where I was like, like, you know, and in my community, high brow secular reading was people magazine. People didn't have like the New Yorker. Oh,
hell no, I never heard of the New Yorker until I went to college. But that's so I mean, just to say, like whatever different transmissions reach different people and places and meet different things, but why people magazine? Stars just like us. That was my favorite part of people magazine. So I'm like the high brow families had newsweek. Okay. But yeah, it was just like not a very intellectual milieu. And so like anything that I learned was like books that I had read on my own.
And then I went to college and it was so embarrassing because there were so many words that I had never heard said out loud. And so like I'd only read them. And I'd be in seminars with kids who went to like Exeter and Tote and you know, all these like fancy preps schools. And I would like mispronounce words all the time and people would always laugh. But I always feel like just to defend people that mispronounce words, I'm always like, all that means is that you read a lot.
Totally. But I think there's like something about like growing up in a cultural milieu where like people talk, have intellectual conversations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I thought the word penicilla and penache were the same word. I can imagine that getting embarrassed at yell. Yeah. And so but you know, it was definitely like my intellectual horizons were like totally broadened. But like I still prayed three times a day. I still studied Talmud with a friend like two hours a
day. I still kept Shabbat and kosher. So like I had this sort of cultural mind blowing moment. But then I also like kind of kept doing my thing. Yeah. And it didn't again. It was like you were able, I'm so used to hearing stories where the a very familiar arc of a very familiar story for me is person grows up and cloistered intense religious community. And then you know, it's almost like every culture loves a conversion story into itself. And so like as a progressive
intellectual type, we love the story of like I was very religious. But then I read the New Yorker and I voluva. But your story the way you tell it is I was very religious. I found more experiences. I found more things to read and think about. But I was able to bring with me where I came from in a way that didn't feel painful or confusing. Yeah. And like maybe partially attributed to my upbringing in LA where there wasn't this like strict binary of like either you're this way or
you're this way. But it was the sense of like if these practices are meaningful, you can keep doing them and do other things that don't conflict with those practices. But have you ever heard of the concept called the second naivete? Yeah. It's this like French philosopher Paul Riker. He kind of like traces a version of that arc that you distraised. But it's got a slightly different twist to it, which is like the first naivete is like you grow up and you learn about the
God in the sky and you pray to this God to do good things for you. And then there's like a second phase, which is like it all comes crashing down and you have this realization or you learn like holy shit like all this is bullshit. Religion is constructed by all these people with nefarious agendas like screw this. Then he has this thing called the second naivete, which is like okay like yes, religion is invented by people like yes, there is like no old man in the sky. And there's
still value in a lot of this stuff, right? I'm going to like choose to believe a lot of this stuff in a way that like is more suited to a grown-up sensibility of like what exists and what doesn't exist. But I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like there's like a way that you can opt in to that world that sort of meets you post-crash. Right. Like a way to not become one of those like internet atheists that's like constantly being like oh the flying spaghetti monster
or whatever. Yeah. That can't imagine that the human desire for belief in something larger or a spiritual existence is anything but like a dumb trick played on dumb people by the people who manipulate them. That there might be something valuable or real about that impulse even if you don't sign on to whatever you grew up with. Totally. And like a lot of my 20s and 30s was about
like updating my conception of God. And then looking back on my life and the practices and the way I kind of live my life as an observant Jew and saying okay like which of these still resonate, which of these don't resonate and like what aligns with this conception and actually like a lot of
it does align. It's funny as you talk about the stuff one of the things that makes me realize is that in my existence as like you know the identity categories I belong to or don't belong to or like foot in between all have days where I don't know like in the last few years I feel like I spend not a lot of time but some of my time being like you know like progressive, liberal, like left, whatever. I'm like where do I put in here? Where don't I put in here? Like how much does it matter
to know where I fit in here? Like how much is the tribal question in verse and intellectual and verse of values one? You've had to do that sort of internal maneuvering with faith. Totally. Yeah. There's a famous rabbi who said like the people I socialize with I can't pray with and the people
I pray with I can't socialize with. Any relate to that. Yeah and I think that definitely relate to that and I think that that's like to the extent that I quote unquote left orthodoxy though I like to pretend that I haven't really left but to the extent that I've left it was actually more for like
social reasons and that like the people in those communities tended to be more socially conservative and that's politically conservative and just like not into the kind of stuff that I was into and tended not to be like particularly interested in the world particularly interesting things beyond their sort of parochial bubble that they lived in and then like I'd go hang out with like my cool friends who were like into other things I was into but they're just like oh religion like
that's weird like why are you keeping Shabbat? God. Yeah. And so I'd say that like that tension in my 20s is what kind of led me down into this spiritual leadership route because I was just like I mean there were still a long ways to go until I got there but it was a sense of like why don't fit in here I don't fit in there I guess I kind of got to create for myself what I want.
Coming up after the break before Zveka becomes ordained as a rabbi we chart how being both spiritual and unusual can lead someone to perhaps the strangest professional path I've ever heard a person describe that's after some ads. Search Engine is brought to you by LinkedIn. When you're hiring for your small business you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role that's why you have to check out
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guaranteed. I don't even know how to handle this in the context of an interview. One of the things I have to do is take complicated lives and simplify them in a way that is not untrue but is legible and you've had such an interesting life path that I'm not. Can you give me what is your quickest dirtiest pencil sketch of your professional life from college to rabbi? Yeah I'd say probably like the headline is ADHD. But okay the quickest dirtiest sketch is graduate college become a journalist
work in Newsweek in New York because I spoke Arabic they send me to the Middle East. I become their Middle East correspondent lived in Egypt and Lebanon for a couple years. Move to DC for the first time. Work at the New Republic for a couple years. Work at the Atlantic for a couple years. Work as a writer editor all sorts of different things. Work at a Middle East thing tank. Work at
the Defense Department. Work at the State Department. And then John Kerry who was a Secretary of State at the time was like hey like all this stuff is happening in Silicon Valley and like it's like really affecting policy and we don't have anyone whose job it is to like build relationships with Silicon Valley and I was running the Innovation Lab at the time at the State Department and they're like
speak up do you want to go be our ambassador to Silicon Valley and I was like yeah. Yeah so I moved to California and did that for a little while then Trump got elected and I was like fuck this working for Trump and so I taught it Stanford. I studied design as an undergrad so I went back and I taught design in the design school at Stanford and then I got hired by the World Economic Form like the Davos people to set up a like hub for them in the Bay Area focused on like ethical tech,
responsible tech. So I did that for a couple years and then Facebook hired me to be their first ever head of ethics director of responsible innovation. What was that one like? You know I it's definitely the job title that gets the most snickers. And when they reached out to me like when the recruiter first reached out to me he referred to the job as chief ethics officer at Facebook and I just
and I burst out laughing and I was like this sounds like an onion article. But you know eventually what what can I spend a lot of time like talking to like all the people who I'd be working with and I was like okay like this actually sounds like it's legit but I love the job. Yeah despite all the sort of snickers of you I didn't like they're like oh you did a really good job.
You know that's like yeah okay fair you know like I didn't totally transform the business model there and like zero out any harm that was being caused in the product but like I built like a 40 person team there and we reviewed hundreds of products before they were released actually like pretty early in the product development process and we were able to sort of figure out or like
anticipate like how might these products harm people. And like I found that engineers and the product managers to be quite like well-meaning in being like oh wow like we hadn't thought about this right it's not their job to think about or it's not their mindset to think about it like you
don't wake up every morning being like how is this thing that I'm working on going to harm people right yeah so like having a team that that is their job like it actually made it a lot easier and so like you again forgive me this is a question but like you're in a job that involves thinking through
ethics and morality the part of you that you would consult when you're trying to solve a problem there was it just like you yourself were you thinking about you know telemetric disputes about oxcoring in aeromagre for many centuries ago like how did your faith and your job doing moral
reasoning for a tech company were they involved with each other yeah I was just like walk into a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg like my Talmud and be like Mark it says it right here in the Talmud like you gotta change the new speed algorithm no I mean it's interesting because I think actually like I when they recruited me I'm just like first of all I just want to let you guys know that I'm not a very ethical person we're like that's okay even better but I'm not like a conceptual ethicist I have no
professional background in ethics right I don't come with like frameworks for like ethical reasoning and things like that but basically like the the first thing that I really tried to impart to people is like number one like it's generally not right versus wrong like generally it's not like you know
either we launch this product and it brings us lots of revenue and more clicks but it might cause a genocide in Myanmar you know like it's not like those types of trade-offs it's more like hey like we could do end-to-end encryption for all of our messaging which is great for privacy and
everybody's like really being the drum on privacy but that means we don't have access to any of the content in those messages and there might be proliferation of all you know human trafficking and child pornography and terrorist extremist groups so it's like that's a trade-off like
optimized for privacy or optimized for safety yeah and like being able to surface that and surfrain in a way where it's like what are we going to optimize for and so it wasn't really my job to tell people what the right answer was even though most people wanted me to tell them they're like
what should we do and I'm just like well like let's actually frame up what the trade-offs are and help you make an intentional decision about what you're going to prioritize but it's funny I mean that does sort of sound like I have not often sought spiritual guidance in my life
I'm not trying to say you were a spiritual leader at Facebook although that's like a great movie idea but more like you were doing what I've found people do which is like they rather than be like here's what you should do they'll say here's what you might consider well it's interesting because
of course I'd be like very careful like not to like bring religion into the room with you know like I'm not going to like proselytize people you know but like I think there was this sense that it was spiritual work and like people would often like jokingly call me like Facebook rabbi you know
they would just be like hey rabbi I need some advice you know on on this stuff and so and I do think there is like a link between how I practice now is a rabbi and how I practiced like the responsible innovation work I did at Facebook which is like even now like in a spiritual leadership
role people come to me all the time and they're like what should I do you know my husband's having dementia and I want to put him in a nursing home because I still want to live my life like what should I do and I'm like it's not my job actually to tell you what the right thing to do is it's like
I can help you frame up what values are at play here yeah I will walk beside you and give you some tools give you the confidence to trust your own moral compass but I'm not going to like loan you my moral compass yeah but people want that oh totally yeah like and especially engineers
just like dude like we got we got lines of code right yes or no what should we do do you ever just give them a straight yes or no no but I think maybe it's also just something that is a part of my constitution and that like I just grew up around so many rabbis who just constantly told people
what to do that I'm just like I'm not so I jam like I'm not I'm not here to tell people what to do okay so Facebook ethicist yeah then what happens so like I had these two I like praying with these people I like to socializing with these people but like I feel like there's nowhere where I can
like pray and be spiritual with the people who I actually like so I just like started like doing a lot of my own like pop up stuff you know like putting together like prayer services like in my living room in my backyard just kind of like experimenting and I'm like I grew up Orthodox I know
to do this shit you know like I just funny it's also you're taking the ethos of DIY scenes like punk and raves you're like we can just throw a show we don't really then totalization here and like a lot of it like because I also I spent a lot of my time in my 20s I took like a little detour
I never like left Judaism but like meditation and mindfulness became really important to me because as I mentioned I have very severe ADHD it's not just like my career is ADHD I have very severe ADHD and like the only and like medication did not work for me it gave me like horrendous
headaches and so the only thing that really worked for me was meditation and so I got like really into meditation in my 20s and like mindfulness was really important to me and like embodiment became really important for me I know this kind of like a fun story yeah it's kind of like a new
AG phrase I live in Berkeley so I don't like trust me yeah I got a translate like some of the the lexicon but like I don't know I'm guessing you can relate to this but like I spent a lot of time in my brain right a lot of time like thinking and mulling things over and like intellectually
is like the way that I engage with the world mostly and I just like at a certain point realize that like that wasn't really serving me and that like I needed not that I should stop doing that even as if that's even possible but I need to spend more time like in my body not just thinking
all the time but just experiencing and being and moving and so meditation was really helpful for that but I got really into dancing which had had always been part of my life starting with the like mosh pits in the punk scene and then moving into like electronic music all these embodiment things
started just being a really important part of like my spiritual practice but then I realized like hey I want to like fuse all this together like I've got the traditional parts of Judaism that still really speak to me the ritual the practices the liturgy and then I've got mindfulness
and meditation and I've got embodiment like how could we bring that all together and part of it was also this learning journey that actually Judaism has I mean and by the way so does Christianity in Islam like they have these ancient embodiment mindfulness traditions that have been sort of sanitized in a post enlightenment sort of rationalist Western European world for Judaism and Christianity in particular so I just kind of want to bring all these things together and so I was like oh like I'm
going to like do stuff like this you know and in my living room and like I think there are like a lot of people who like grow up more progressive and they're kind of wary to do sort of radical things in a religious space because they're like oh well that's not authentic and that's not real
or that's not okay and I'm just like dude I grew up in the Orthodox world I know the Emperor has no clothes like over there also right Orthodox Judaism is just as constructed as whatever we could construct as well and so I think there is this conception especially from people who grew up outside
the Orthodox world that Moses got the Torah's Mount Sinai and then like pass it down and like basically was living as an Orthodox Jew like Moses had those like side locks and a black cat and a beard you know and then like Judaism had been practiced like that all the way down to
Orthodox Jews today and anything more progressive was like a deviation but like I guarantee you if Moses came alive today watching an Orthodox in a God you'd be like what the fuck is this like what religion is this is not the religion I got at sign a few years ago Svika started
attending rabbinical school his time there coincided with a chapter of personal crisis in his life a divorce burnout he took a break from full-time work to focus on parenting his child and ultimately he'd end up in the job he has now leading services for a Jewish spiritual community in Berkeley
basically there was this community in Berkeley that was started 30 years ago it's called Chumat Haleb which means wisdom of the heart and it started as a Jewish meditation center okay and it was a bunch of what we call boojus Buddhist Jewish people yes okay which there's a size of
old population of boojus of Jews who were just like oh Judaism's like really not spiritual enough for me I'm gonna go to Eastern religion which was like even though like Judaism has like a pretty long lineage of meditation and mindfulness practice it's not it was never mainstream in Judaism
it's certainly not in modern history but there are practices that you can go back to and so there was this movement of folks who wanted to like reclaim mindfulness and meditation and contemplative practices and so they created this center but it's been around for about 30 years and it's slowly
evolved into like being more of like a traditional synagogue don't tell anyone where they have like prayer services and bar mitzvahs and weddings and like things like that so you ended up in a place where even though you didn't want to be a rabbi in a synagogue you're a spiritual leader who is
now graduated rabbinical school in a spiritual community that has synagogue like tendencies yeah yeah synagogue adjacent but you feel like you have a practice that fits with your own contradictions or things that maybe don't feel like contradictions anymore but perhaps once did
well yes and like what I promise myself when I when I went to a biblical school but even more so when I took on this job I promised myself that I would not have a rabbi persona that I would not have like my rabbi persona and my like friend persona or like private persona I know so many people
who are in spiritual leadership who live sort of these double lives yeah I was like I don't want to do that and I don't have the energy for that and like I don't think it's good for people like I don't think it's good for the people in the community and it's not good for me so I was just like
I'm just gonna be myself warts and all and like if anything like I would like to be a role model for people to be like hey look that guy who's up there on the stage like giving the sermon like look how flawed he is and he's up there on the stage like being a spiritual leader that means he's
like valuable and worthy as a person and so if he can be up there doing that like I can also be lovable because of all my flaws and all the ways in which I am fall short and I'm still working progress and have not figured things out at all but isn't it strange I mean look I'm on the side of
flawed people honestly uncertainty but even to me it's surprising that you know people often go to spiritual places for answers when people are showing up with questions and you're like the answer is I don't know it's not just that I don't know it's that like it is okay to have those
questions you don't actually need the answer to that question it is okay to be living in this place of uncertainty and confusion and not knowing and I want to like validate you for that and like that is actually I think often more powerful than giving people the answers you're saying that a
question can be as valuable as an answer yeah and like not knowing like I mean so much of my personal practice has been releasing the expectation of knowing and it's just like oh like you're confused that means you're right right like certain T's actually the wrong place to be and like listen
I'm exaggerating a little bit there is Jewish wisdom out there on a lot of questions and I do have access to a lot of that wisdom because of the like decades I spend studying all these ancient texts and so I do try to sprinkle in things from the texts but I will say like there is a lot of Jewish
wisdom about not knowing yeah and mystery and surrendering control I was reading your sermons I struck by a couple things I'm so excited to hear what you have to say because like generally I'm like preaching to the converted yeah so I'm so curious like because I don't write
them in my like people who are like wouldn't be kind of like a captive audience and so I'm so curious what comes out well the the first thing and I was like perhaps this is just my boundless narcissism but I was surprised reading some of what you've written because I thought oh so part of the job you're doing is less far away from the job that I try to do than I thought where it's like you're telling stories you're choosing stories that already exist you're trying to contextualize
the experiences people are having and give them something that might help them make meaning out of it like there was a sermon where you were talking about it was as simple as hey like everyone's going over the holidays people are going to have difficult conversations with family members
you were relating an experience you'd had where you'd like made comments that were like about Israel Palestine that were sympathetic Palestinians and you had like more hardcore like pro-Israel people who had said or full things to you and I thought like oh this is a kind of sense-making
and meaning-making that like I understand and that surprised me I mean that is like when people ask me what is the role of being a rabbi I'm not just saying this because you said it like the number one answer I say is meaning-making like it is helping people make meaning it's like helping
them as they're like navigating their lives with a certain level of unconsciousness it's like helping them pause and be like how do I make something that feels mundane feel meaningful and it can be through a teaching can be through a prayer experience it can be through rituals totally meaning-making
is my job but then there was another type of sermon and this is where I was like oh religion requires a level of familiarity with texts that I don't have where would just be about you know stories from past stories from scripture that's the part that I can never there was it always feels
impenetrable to me it always feels like a TV show that is on it's like 15,000 season and everybody's like oh season one this thing happened and everybody says it means this but I think it means this and like I understand the pleasures of textual analysis and I understand the pleasures
of looking at a story and trying to see it differently but that was a part where I thought like oh this is just a culture that's not my own yeah I mean it is interesting how much I take for granted people's familiarity with like just the general contours of the Torah or the Bible you know like just
the other day I was just like oh that's going to the story of like the binding of Isaac and someone's like what's that I'm like you don't know the story where like Abraham was commanded by God to like sacrifice his only child you know and they're like no I've never heard that story before I'm
like right I live in this like little bubble like of course the binding of Isaac but um what and do you okay the binding of Isaac which is a story that as you start to describe it I do know that story when you're making a decision your life or confronting something confusing or painful
that's happened or you like oh the binding of Isaac does it right I mean I think that I don't know if this is the question behind your question but it's the question that I'm hearing is why am I returning to the Torah as this like book of wisdom right yeah like and you know the traditional answer
to that question is the Torah was written by God right and so like if you want to you know and like a kind of the way it's often talked about in Jewish tradition is it's like it's like a blueprint for the world and like a sort of instruction manual for how to live your life and there are
parts of the Torah that are very much instructions like eat this don't eat this where this don't wear this so that that stuff's kind of clear if you believe in it but then there's like lots of stories like the binding of Isaac or like back to this story or whatever and it's like well what
what are why are those in there at the very least these are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation and they are like in the DNA of anyone who's in the world of western civilization and including Christianity and Islam so like first of all the fact that they have
been passed down like there's this kind of buzzword these days of like ancestral wisdom and it's just like yeah this book has been around for like a really long time so even if you don't believe God wrote it like there's something there you know so I think it's like worth exploring and then
even if you don't think that it's inherently valuable it has shaped our society that you can't disagree with and so like looking back at it with sort of a critical eye and being like what is here what is this text and like what wisdom can be mined from it like it feels like a worthwhile
endeavor yeah it's funny I had a moment in my life where things were more challenging than usual and it was the only time where I found that when I read or thought about stories from the Bible I grew up with as a kid I found myself more attracted to them and it wasn't
because I felt more faith or less faith I think it was the feeling of like people in the past lived lives that were harder to make meaning out of because death was everywhere and things were more senseless and the stories that those people had used to survive then might be more valuable
because I don't know making sense of modernity can feel hard but it's not hard like plague is hard you know what I mean totally totally yeah and I think that first of all I think that's an important context for like when that book was written right but I also think the core
tension right of being a quote unquote religious person is like the God that is portrayed in these religious texts is like not a very appealing God yeah right it's just kind of like you have a God who gets angry you have a God who gets jealous you have a God who feels like kind of petty actually
yeah in the Torah and you're just like how is this supposed to be the bedrock of a faith this is God that's actually such an unappealing character yeah going to see a play where like the main character is like really unappealing it's just like you know like it's kind of how I feel about
white lotus like I kind of hate that show I'm just like there's no appealing character in this whole show so like the Torah is kind of like white lotus in that way but it's also the text that you have to use right well the way that I navigate that is that the God of the Torah is not God
the God of the Torah is a character it's a God character that was like created by humans but it's not God and I would say that there's an inherent contradiction and I'll say in Judaism it may be true in other religions I'm just less than an expert in other religions that like Judaism has these
sort of two paradoxical sort of truths which is that like we have the God of the Torah that is very much a human like figure that has feelings and does things but then there's like it's very clear in the Jewish sort of tradition the Jewish law whatever that like you are not allowed to
personify God you are not allowed to anthropomorphize God like God is not a person God is not a being God is like not separate from us in any way and so it's this paradox of like wait okay like this resonates like I think for a lot of modern people this idea that God is not like a person or a
sentient being in any way it's like okay that can kind of square that with the world as I see it but then like what the fuck is like this very human like God of the Torah or the Bible or in the Quran or whatever right and the only way to really square that circle is like that is actually like a
God projection that is actually like a human creation of God that is not God right it's a God character right it's like we've made something in our image rather than something making us in its image right you know and like and it's like a useful jumping off point to to have a
conversation about God but it's not that is not God because you can't that God does not have human forms like how can you talk about God in that way coming up after one more short break we get to the question that brought us here today okay what does it actually feel like to leave
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how are you having a different experience than me. So I was joking with you before that this book that I love the word that that talks about the challenge of like explaining the experience of God and it's called catching water in a net yeah which is like it's so hard to talk about so
I'm going to try to talk about it I appreciate it and so the first thing I want to say is like I don't spend all day everyday thinking about God okay right and in the Jewish sort of spiritual tradition like that's okay there is this practice called debate kut which literally means like
cleaving or connecting and it's like we always want to be deepening our awareness and our connection to God but like that's something that you drop in and out of right probably the best analogy is like mindfulness right like yes you could be like a Buddha on a mountaintop somewhere and just be
fully mindful 24-7 but actually like for most people it's like I strive to have moments of mindfulness in my life and those moments kind of inform the rest of my life but I'm not just like sitting in lotus position all day right but sometimes you sometimes you are in this analogy there's times
where you do feel like you're getting a clear connection or a clue yeah and so so to answer this question I kind of have to tell you like what I think God is that's fine I'm gonna come out of the closet and tell you what I think God is you know so like in Jewish spiritual tradition God is like
I was gonna be so hard to say things that don't sound like completely woo and sort of out there so you have blanket permission that permission to be woo so yes so in Jewish tradition the the shortest way to sum it up is like God is oneness that like everything that ever was is and will be
the sum total of all of those things is God okay so it's like an emulation of self as part of it absolutely there's yeah and like the and this concept of de vay koud of cleaving is like when you feel totally subsumed in the oneness like that's the sort of goal right and like God is
an English word and a Christian word it's not a Jewish word and the word for God in the Jewish lineage is it's it's a four letter word that you can't pronounce it's it's something called the ineffable name and it's like some people clumsily pronounce it in English Yahweh I don't know
if you have that yeah yeah because it those are the it's it's the like four letters they're like all vowels and like you can't really pronounce them but like first of all there's something cool about having a name of God that you can't pronounce which like really gets at the fact that it's
this kind of like intangible mystery and not like a person yeah like a being but the but the word for God which I can't pronounce is actually an emalgamation of the Hebrew words for was is and will be haia hove yeah if you mush all those words together it'll create the word for God
so God is essentially like everything that is was and will be so when you ask me like how do I experience God how do I connect with God to me it's how can I plug into that awareness that everything is one that we are all connected not just like we all people but like everything
in existence is connected and not just like everything currently in existence but like everything that was in existence everything that is and everything that will be is like all that is connected if you either think of it as like there is a life force that flows through all those things or
just like all of those things mushed together or God and when you're describing that awareness is it an intellectual idea an emotional idea a physical feeling like at a peak experience of that awareness what is happening inside your mind or inside your heart yeah it's a great question
and like I remember asking this question to one of my spiritual teacher it's because she was like okay you're home we're up for this month is every day I want you to spend 10 minutes meditating on the oneness of existence sure and like when I heard the the assignment I was like okay and then
like I sat down on my first day I'm just like okay like what do I do like one okay everything is one everything is one everything is like of course like I went to that intellectual place so like what does that mean everything is one is that mean that we're like literally connected like glue like
is it something flows through all of us and so like there is like a way in which you can grab with that intellectually but for me one such sort of move past that intellectual piece of it there is a felt experience of it if we are all part of like one entity that is God we always all
belong and there is just this like beautiful sense of peace for me that just kind of like descends on my body when I'm feeling kind of on the outs or sort of you know not belonging this sense of like oh we're all part of this like we're all in this together all this sort of distinctions kind of
fall apart that's like one way in which I definitely like experience God is when I allow myself to relax into that awareness and it's towards the way you're describing it it's like a place you can go sometimes with stillness and contemplation yeah that's kind of how I experience it yeah
that's really beautiful I mean it's like I feel like people talk about one ness and unity and like trying to get away from the self and I understand those things but I guess I hadn't connected it to a feeling of belonging totally yeah and it's so core in the Jewish teachings
or at least in like the mystical spiritual teachings that like I've really gravitated towards and like it's funny because people ask me like where do you encounter God like most in the world and like I really thought about that and like honestly the place where like most encounter God
is on the dance floor really yeah and it was like kind of cheesy but like there's this moment when you're dancing and like I don't know my I particularly like electronic music I don't know if it's true and other genres of music where you're just like on the dance floor and you were just like feeling
the music like it is just like vibrating inside of you and then you just look around and everyone else is just feeling it right because you're all dancing to the same beat you might be dancing in different ways and some people are like more subtle and some people are bigger movements and
now but you're all dancing in the same beat and it's just like oh like I feel connected to everyone on this dance floor because we are all in it and we're all feeling it that's oneness so that's the place where I most most feel connected to God maybe the other place is like when I'm surfing
really yeah I generally go surf at sunrise and there's this moment where like the world is all dark and then like you kind of see like the beginning glimmers I'm on the west coast so some does not rise over the ocean but you just kind of see the like glimmers of the like morning light
kind of sparkling over the water and then like it's I actually don't feel connected to God when I catch a wave I feel when I'm just kind of like floating and you kind of like the waves kind of come and it almost feels kind of like the heartbeat of the earth and it's just like oh there's
just this kind of like steady presence connected to something bigger that I can just relax into so those are like maybe as I think about it like two places where I definitely feel God I'm always encountering studies suggesting that basically if you can believe in God in many ways
you're likely to be happier and I was like well that's great but like it's not the type of thing you could rationally persuade yourself into doing it's like what advice would you have for someone who doesn't believe in God like what are the things from your practice that you think a non-believer
can still benefit from I was talking to my friend Adina this week who's a spiritual leader here in Brooklyn and we were talking about this whole idea of like believers versus non-believers and we were saying how that doesn't feel like the right way to divide the world between like atheist
and believers or like people who believe in God and people who don't believe in God it's people who think about the nature of existence and people who don't you know a lot of people ask like do you believe in God my version of that question is I start with what do you believe in
you know in every spiritual tradition there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to define God and I think that in essence you can find a definition of God in some spiritual tradition that resonates with what you believe in in terms of the nature of existence but that means you have to
be like curious about like the nature of existence why are we here what's happening in the world beyond what can be explained by science you have to be interested in asking those questions it's funny I mean I know your bent is towards not being prescriptive but I do think like the advice I
would take from that or when I take from that is that perhaps more important than whether somebody has faith or doesn't have faith or what they have faith in I do think it's pretty important to wrestle with larger questions because I think if you don't you end up just being stuck with the
small ones like your life just kind of becomes am I happy today was I happy yesterday will I be happier tomorrow will I get this will I lose this and sometimes things go really well as they go really poorly but it's almost like there's larger questions about existence or refuge because they
give you a larger time scale of meaning than whatever's happening right now totally yeah I mean like people ask me like well like why do you believe in God and I'm like because I like to it nourishes me it gives my life meaning it gives me an impetus to sort of grapple with these questions right I
don't believe in God because I feel like I have to it actually brings meaning to my life yeah but I also like I do I don't want to just punt on your question because I can give a more specific answer of like what I recommend like I'm a big fan of prayer and you might be like wait what like if
someone doesn't believe in God the prescription you're going to give them is prayer and you know to me like I like to say you know there's that phrase like dance like nobody's watching or whatever so I like to say like pray like nobody's listening so like there's like two parts of it one is
just stating what you want like verbalizing and allowing those words to count out of your mouth actually has a positive impact people who verbalize what they want feel more of a sense of hope yeah and then like number two is like I really do find a lot of power on this idea of surrender yeah you
know just like oh like there's something I really want and like one solution is to just like work my ass off and like grasp and like really try and get that thing and then like there's another strategy which actually in this strategy are not mutually exclusive you can say like actually this
is like totally not within my control to get and I'm gonna like surrender my ability to make this thing happen and there is something perhaps counter intuitively really helpful for me at least to just like be like yeah I'm gonna just like put this out there and like surrender my that might
sort of exclusive control around making this happen and so like prayer to me like has those to components to it and that's like one genre of prayer which is like wanting things to happen there's also like a whole other genre of prayer which is around gratitude which I find really
powerful and like if you're you know that more traditional person you're like thanking God yeah for forgiving you these things but then if you don't think of God as like a person that gives and doesn't give things there's still a value in being like I'm so grateful for you know
for all the things that I have in my life and to get specific about it and to on a daily basis connect with gratitude so you know it can take on a different flavor depending on what your conception of God is but I think that anyone can benefit from a prayer practice there's not
what I expect you to say and I like it I also just like it's funny this year we've sort of been collecting advice from people and I would not have predicted at the beginning that where we'd be sort of a year in is like consider prayer and surrender world is so fucked that like the only thing
left to do is just surrender it's a piece of the equation it's not it's not the whole recipe but you know I think it's it's an important practice so you got thank you for talking me about this thanks so much for having me when I spoke to Zvika I was having a nice week the week after
was more challenging and I found this conversation playing back in my head during the tough week I had this feeling that I forgot I have sometimes which was a little jealous of people who are able to believe it's a funny kind of jealousy there are so many things you get to choose how to
behave who to spend your time with but if you choose to believe in something I'm not sure what you have really is belief or if it's belief it's not the kind of belief I'm jealous of but Zvika had told me the two things someone like me might take from someone like him or prayer and surrender
you could try saying what you hoped would happen or you could try letting go of your ability to control it sometimes I think for those of us who don't believe we make this mistake that if no one's in control we have to be maybe that's wrong this week I'm trying to surrender I'll let you know how it goes right search engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions Search Engine was created by me, PJ vote, and Shruthy Pinomini, and is produced by Gareth Graham and Noah John.
Back checking this week by Holly Patton. Theme original composition and mixing by Armin Bizarrean. Our executive producers are Jenna Weissberman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Borallo, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey. JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Downley, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Mora Curran, Joseph Fiena Francis, Quirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA.
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