God Cannot Be Expressed, Only Addressed

Lex Fridman opens by introducing Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, someone he has admired for years for the kindness of his heart, the strength of his character, and the friends he keeps, including people who disagree with him and still love him, among them the late Christopher Hitchens. He says he will keep having conversations about religion, about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and others, looking to understand and celebrate the culture, tradition, and beauty of the people who practice them. He will not shy away from difficult topics; he will talk about hate and love, war and peace.

The conversation was recorded more than three weeks before it aired, and Fridman asks for a few minutes on the war in Ukraine. He had considered a long solo episode, tried several times, and found it too personal for now. He has been talking to refugees, friends, and loved ones in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, and also in Britain, Germany, Canada, India, China, and the United States, some of them crying, angry, confused, or scared. He was born in the Soviet Union, with Ukrainian and Russian roots, and today and until the day he dies he is an American, proud of all of that. He condemns Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and he also condemns many military interventions by the superpowers, including by the United States, which after World War II has intervened in over forty nations, with studies finding it culpable for an unfathomable number of civilian deaths.

What he wants from the podcast is to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature, because he believes each of us is capable of good and evil, and conversation is one of the best ways to understand how a mind and a circumstance lead someone down one path or the other. That means talking not only to the most inspiring people in the world but also to the most controversial. Being in the same room with wildly different people, he says, will make it easy for media and the internet to pick clips and call him a shill; he cannot defend the point except to say he is a shill for no one. He quotes Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”: if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, walk with kings nor lose the common touch, if all men count with you but none too much. That last line is what he tries to live by: all human beings count with him the same.

He apologizes for times he spoke about Putin and Zelensky without the seriousness the topic deserves, and says he is disappointed, even ashamed, of his frequent ineloquence on these subjects. When he is joking it should be clear, and hopefully actually funny; when he is serious he should speak with care and rigor. He likes humor, especially dark humor, likes being silly and not taking himself too seriously, and will occasionally dress in strange outfits to celebrate the absurdity of life. He does not have to agree with someone to laugh with them, and he thinks humor just might save this little chaotic civilization.

Asked who God is according to Judaism, Wolpe says a tradition thousands of years old, spanning lands, languages, and thinkers, does not give a single answer even to simple questions, and certainly not to large ones. Judaism introduced the monotheistic idea to the world, but that does not mean it is one idea. Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, would say God is omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable: you cannot say what God is, only what God is not, because you have to emphasize God’s unknowability. A modern philosopher like Abraham Joshua Heschel says God is a God of pathos, which would probably make Maimonides shiver. In the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions, and Jewish thought lives in a tremendous tension between transcendence and immanence: God is exquisitely close, as close in the Talmud’s words as your mouth is to your ear, and at the same time unfathomably distant.

Wolpe takes refuge in a phrase from Martin Buber: “God cannot be expressed. God can only be addressed.” You can speak to God and feel a sense of God, but you cannot begin to comprehend or know God. The early Jewish philosopher Yosef Kaspi put it more sharply: to know God, he would have to be God. Visualizing God, giving God a gender, picturing an old man in the sky, is almost inevitable, Wolpe says, but ultimately you try to transcend it. The story of the golden calf, just read in synagogue, is about people who had come from Egypt and found it impossible not to have a visualization, then met the idea that God cannot be visualized, which stretches and maybe breaks the bounds of human comprehension.

The salvation, he says, is that you do not have to have a comprehension of God; you have to have a relationship to God, and those are not the same. You have relationships with people who are mysteries to you, and you are a mystery to yourself; you can live with and love someone for fifty years and they can still say something that surprises you. When a child first says “I,” we call that individuation, but what it really means is the knowledge that you are cut off from other minds. With God the relationship can be more intimate, because you can believe you are known by God even though you cannot know God. The caveat is Hitchens’s line that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because the surveillance continues after death: being known is frightening if your image of God is unloving.

Wolpe and Hitchens debated often and were friends. He did not agree with many of Hitchens’s views, but he found him a remarkable person, full of good lines. One lesson was that you cannot win a debate with Hitchens, in part because of the British baritone and the ready wit: you cannot triumph over laughter, and if the quip is better, you win, even when the quip is not an argument. Once they argued about free will and Hitchens said, “I choose to believe in it,” and everybody laughed. On a three-hour limousine ride from Los Angeles to San Diego, Hitchens said they just could not talk about religion, so they talked about literature and Hitchens gave a long lecture about Scotch.

Wolpe wrote obituaries for him and began one with the historian Keith Thomas: there are two ways of achieving immortality, by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering, and by that standard Hitchens did both. He went to danger zones, knew the best bars from Kuala Lumpur to Beirut to Los Angeles, and could drink all night, write a two-thousand-word essay on the poetry of Yeats, and go to sleep. Before a debate in Boston, Hitchens asked him to have a drink; Wolpe refused to drink before debating him, and Hitchens said to just have a beer, “it’s water.” What Hitchens changed his mind about, unrelated to Scotch, was the claim that religion makes people better: not automatically wrong, but a much more complicated argument than Wolpe had wished it to be.

Of the atheists he has debated, he thinks of each differently. Sam Harris, he says, is in some deep way a religious personality, oriented toward meditation and an appreciation of Buddhism, even if Harris would call it a purely material spirituality. Hitchens was not a closet believer at all; Wolpe almost feels he was less a passionate arguer against religion than someone extremely upset by the forms religion took in the world, and then, once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun inventing new arguments that he got carried away by his own eloquence. Calling a book after the claim that religion poisons everything was, Wolpe thinks, deliberately provocative, so Hitchens could defend a proposition that is obviously indefensible. What sums him up is tremendous joie de vivre: he loved life in all its manifestations, and arguing against something someone else believed was one of his greatest joys.

Harris believes religion is intellectually indefensible, deep in his soul, and gets angry at the idea that a proposition should go unchallenged if it offends his sense of logic. After hearing Wolpe’s podcast with Eric Weinstein, Harris said he learned things about what Wolpe thinks that he never learned in their own conversations, because he could never let unfounded assertions pass, and Fridman just let them go. Both Hitchens and Harris, Wolpe says, could separate their contempt for religion from the person sitting in front of them. Weinstein, like Jordan Peterson, is often uncomfortable saying whether he believes in God, yet lives as if he would like a religious life; Wolpe thinks Weinstein believes in God and does not, oscillating like a quantum system, Schrödinger’s God. Judaism is a religious family, not only a religion: you are born Jewish, so you can drop the beliefs tomorrow and still be Jewish, though Wolpe thinks it is very hard to sustain a demanding tradition over generations without some sense that its source is beyond ourselves.

Fridman had recently seen a photograph of Elie Wiesel in the camp at liberation, and it hit him harder than pictures of people whose words he had never felt, because here was a normal body, a face he knew, and then the thought of all the others who looked exactly like him and did not make it out. Wolpe has seen the picture too, and what disturbs him is the same: he has seen a thousand people like this, and he knows this one and what he became. Pictures of liberation, they agree, are almost never celebratory. Asked how such things could be committed, Wolpe says the Holocaust is multicausal; one piece is the special nature of antisemitism, and another is that human beings are fundamentally split, mostly good except under certain pressures.

His first explanation for hatred is a playground: when a new kid arrives, the others do not offer to share toys; they ask who the stranger is and go get him, because otherness is built in and we are tribal by nature. As a boy playing chess tournaments, poorly and not for long, he still felt the whole world divide into people who could play chess and people who could not. Jews were always the identifiable other: Frenchmen and Jews, Russians and Jews, Germans and Jews. America’s great blessing, he says, is that there is no identifiable other quite that way, though Fridman notes that Americans still try, slicing immigrant against native, tribe upon tribe; Wolpe grants it and says that when you are on thin ice, your safety is in your speed.

Antisemitism has a peculiar quality unlike other hatreds he knows: Jews are both superhuman and subhuman, vermin to the Nazis and yet in control of the world. The English scholar Hyam Maccoby said the reason is the myth that Jews killed God, killed Jesus, and to kill a god you have to be superhumanly evil; you cannot just be bad. Ordinary othering says they are subhuman and here to steal resources, like the playground; to be both is a more poisonous construction. Wolpe agrees one hundred percent with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that the capacity for evil runs through every human heart; he has known religious leaders whom people thought were above the human, and they were emphatically not, some using their position to do horrible things.

Fridman says the toughest part is that good and evil are not always clear, and that some part of Stalin legitimately thought he was doing good, which should make anyone building technology ask whether they actually are. Wolpe’s worry about AI goes back to God: knowing we hear only some frequencies and see only some colors, how can we be confident creating minds in some ways far more intelligent than we are and steering them as we think best? That looks to him like hubris that might turn destructive. Fridman grants that any plan with hubris in it ends badly at scale, and still finds beauty in approaching the work with humility, a four-legged robot standing behind Wolpe like a small act of breathing life into the world. Wolpe feels how remarkable that is, which is exactly why humility is hard, and he tells the joke from his first debate with Stephen Jay Gould: a scientist, ready to make a person from dirt, is told by God to get his own dirt.

Fridman brings up Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, and Wolpe’s line that religion is not our enemy: before the Western faiths captured the heart of the world there was cruelty and carnage, and in the twentieth century, when religion ceased to be a force in international politics, the scale of slaughter went far beyond anything human beings had known. Wolpe thinks Nietzsche was largely right, not as a statement about God but about God’s presence in the world; God is not a force in a lot of Western society. He worries about nihilism without a clear counter: the idea that we are here for a purpose, that our lives are inherently meaningful, that there is a God who wishes us to be better. The optimism that things will just get better and better is what one philosopher called cut-flower ethics: we are still living off morals religion gave us, now separated from the soil that gave birth to them, and he sees them wilting. The Greeks looked back to a golden age; it was the Jews who said no, the golden age is in the future, the Messiah, and that idea that we are moving toward something better is, he really believes, something humanity can do if it does not destroy itself.

He is excited about technology he will not live to see, and that excitement is a kind of religious excitement, because there is a reason to preserve the whole thing. He knows it sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but he thinks God is cheering us on; we are here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul. The atrocities of the twentieth century, he says, have to do with a religion that does not make ethical demands for the other: Stalin and Hitler both had religions, in a sense, that made no ethical demand for the stranger. Thirty-six times the Torah talks about the stranger, trying to educate people away from their natural distrust of the other, which is a lot of work; tribal passion without a universal ethic is trouble.

The Jewish tribe is very strong, Fridman notes, and tradition itself propagates the tribe. Wolpe says it is both: the Torah does not start with Jews, it starts with Adam and Eve, a way of saying this will be a story about a people, but prior to a people there are people; he is a human being before he is a Jew. The Muslim New Year starts with Muhammad’s journey, the Christian New Year with Jesus’s birth; the Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world, a particularist tradition making a universal statement that all humanity are children of God, in the image of God. On sabbatical he went to Dharamshala with his brother, a bioethicist at Emory, where the Dalai Lama had taught for years, and the first thing the Dalai Lama said, pointing at him, was, “What’s this about the chosen people anyway?” Wolpe said Jews believe they were chosen for a certain mission, which does not mean other people were not chosen for other things; the Dalai Lama burst out laughing and said they also think they are chosen.

No tribe is better; from a Jewish perspective you are chosen for a thing, and that does not make you better. Historically, he says honestly, the “better” crept in when Jews were small and persecuted, a kind of psychic revenge against persecutors. The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who did not know much about Islam, used to say Judaism is the sun and Christianity the rays: Judaism introduced the idea of God and Christianity brought it to the world. Different people have different missions, and chosenness, in this telling, is a job description, not a ranking.

The greatest difference among the three, Wolpe says, is that Islam and Judaism are more similar in a lot of ways than Judaism and Christianity, because Christianity in its core is not a religion of law. It grew up in the Roman Empire, so law was taken care of; Jesus did not have to create civil law. Moses and Muhammad created religions in the desert, where there was no law, so you have to create a religion of law or you have anarchy. That is why there was never a separation of church and state in Islam or Judaism; that was a gift Christianity gave the world, and it could do it because of “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” All three share what Wolpe thinks is the single most important statement in human history: every human being is in the image of God, which, if you really believe it, is transformative, and “love thy neighbor as thyself” comes straight from Leviticus, from the Torah.

He often does interfaith conversation with Christians and Muslims, and one thing he learns is that the personalities you think unique to your own community exist in all sorts of communities; religious communities in particular draw interesting personalities. Clergy share pressures, and the role is strange because you never escape it: you are not someone’s lawyer at the supermarket, but you are their rabbi at the supermarket. People come to you for the deepest questions, and when they are suffering they look to you for answers. Every privilege has a cost; the reason you get the role is that you get to be there at crucial moments, to marry people, give eulogies, come to the hospital, which he calls inexpressible.

He has a joke with people he knows: Saturday night on the couch, he does not want to get up and go to a wedding; he wants to watch Netflix like everybody else. When he is actually doing the wedding, he always loves it. People in calmer conversations want theories, including a theory of why God allows evil, but when someone is suffering they go for presence and comfort, not answers; an answer does not make them unsuffer. They want to know they are not alone, to be heard, to feel things in silence together.

Marriage, he says, is first of all to teach you how to care for someone unlike you, which could be anyone you marry, and to create a home and a family. Couples tell him they do not need to be married because it will not change how they think about themselves; he says that may be true, but it will change how everyone else looks at you, and because of that it changes you. It is one thing to say this is my partner and another to say this is my husband, which means a real commitment. He worries less about a simple dissolution of marriage than about a diminishment of the idea of commitment, the way free agency, starting with Curt Flood, let players move, which is better for players and still changed what it meant to root for a team. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, asked about sampling religions for what is beautiful, said you are treating religion like a nomad, and nomads eat and move on, while farmers stay and make things grow; the relationships you farm grow things that fly-by-night relationships cannot.

The Torah is the five books of Moses, written in Hebrew. Like most modern, non-Orthodox, non-literalist rabbis, Wolpe will tell you it is a product of human beings, inspired by God, and clearly a human product. Modern biblical scholarship, if you know Hebrew well enough, shows levels of language, the way someone writing like Shakespeare today is not writing the English we speak; the Bible was written over hundreds and hundreds of years. He likes the Hebrew idea that the Torah is from heaven and not from Sinai: origin beyond us, with things in it that are human. That view is also the ground of one of the huge controversies in his congregation, when he started to officiate at same-sex marriages.

Some people tried to argue that the Torah does not forbid them; whether it does or not, he says, we understand things about gender and sexuality that were not understood in the ancient world. His argument is that you criticize the Torah by the Torah: it gives you the understanding you use to evaluate its own claims, and Judaism has always done that, because there are things in the Torah that the rabbis changed, altered, grew, expanded, diminished. That is what it is to be part of a living tradition. In *Why Faith Matters* he quotes Walt Whitman: for there to be great books there must be great readers; for a book to remain powerful through generations it cannot have a single meaning, and scripture, like great poetry, cannot be paraphrased without losing the totality of its meaning. He writes a weekly Torah column for the *Jerusalem Post* and still wonders what there is left to say, then opens books and finds he is entering a conversation thousands of years old; if any diet worked, there would be one book, and you would be done.

His congregation is politically split and split by origin: many Persian Jews from Iran, Israelis, some from Mexico, many who grew up in Los Angeles. Increasingly he was uncomfortable with people, primarily men, who came to his office and said this is the only kind of person I can love; unlike intermarriage, where you could find a Jew, there was no substitute. When it finally happened it was on the front page of the *New York Times* and the *Los Angeles Times*. He told his daughter, then ten or eleven, that people might say bad things about her dad because he was going to start doing same-sex marriages; she looked at him quizzically and said, “What took you so long?” Her face was as if he had announced he would start marrying blond-haired people to brown-haired people.

Looking back, he did one thing right and one thing wrong. He waited until, in the communities that objected, enough parents had kids who had come out, so he could refer later parents to them; once he announced it, as he thought would happen, a bunch of kids came out. What he did wrong was that the classes were not enough, and not enough people were prepared; part of the explosion was shock. He went to feeling, not scholarship: honor for God’s creations, and how painful it is not to be able to tell the world, even your parents, who you are, sexuality being core, not trivial. After it died down he told his daughter Churchill’s line that it is exhilarating to be shot at without result; the problem is that when you are in the battle, you do not know.

He was not cancelled in the sense of losing his job or his home, but he hurt people he cared about, which is hard when you went into the work to bring people together. The sermon he had just given was about Moses coming down the mountain, seeing the golden calf, and breaking the tablets: if he had sat with it a little while, he probably would not have broken them. The instant reaction is always anger, and in our age that reaction gets put on social media forever. Once you have said it, it becomes harder to back down; keep quiet a day or two and you can still retreat, but after “this is terrible what you did,” an apology is harder, and a lot of the antagonism is not so much refusing to give ground to opponents as refusing to break with the people behind you.

The recent fire was the Super Bowl, posted while Los Angeles County still required schoolchildren to wear masks, a rule his school followed and many parents hated. Frank Luntz gave him a ticket; among seventy thousand people he maybe saw two masks, and without thinking, which was foolish, he posted a picture of himself unmasked. Many people were glad he was having a good time; a lot were livid, and not one wrote a private note, only public labels: hypocrite, clown, idiot, disgrace. He left them up, deleting only the vile ones, because he did not want to pretend it had not happened, and he felt worse about hurting people close to him, including parents whose kids now asked why the rabbi did not have to wear a mask.

He did not answer on social media, knowing he could not formulate it in a tweet. He waited for a fifteen-minute sermon and published the text, which he never does, because he usually speaks from notes or from none. He wanted two points: that he really felt terrible about the contradiction between how he acted and how they wanted him to act, and that some people, he suspects, just do not like a rabbi at the Super Bowl, as if he is supposed to be doing rabbi stuff. The second point was that we have to express anger and disappointment better than this, in part because screaming does not get the result you want.

The most painful moment was a letter from a Christian pastor who said he had always admired the Jews so much and could not believe they could be so cruel, especially to a rabbi; Wolpe did not want his congregation perceived that way, though many of the comments were not from his congregation. The Torah does not say what happened to the broken tablets; the rabbis say they were carried in the ark together with the second, intact set. We all have brokenness, communities and individuals, especially now, and we have to give each other space to be mistaken and broken and hurt. When you show empathy and kindness on the internet, you will actually feel better a week from now; you will feel much worse after a negative statement of principle. After the sermon a man came up and said he had four words; Wolpe thought, oh no, and the man said, “You changed my mind.”

The Hebrew Bible is a stepped canon: the five books of the Torah; then history and the prophets, Samuel, Kings, Judges, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel; then the writings, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Esther, Daniel, Ecclesiastes. In Hebrew it is the Tanakh, Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim, and that is the Hebrew Bible; sometimes the whole is loosely called Torah, but Torah generally means the five books. Jews do not recognize the New Testament as a sacred book, only as the book of another religion. Wolpe sometimes tells Christians that Jesus has as much religious significance to Judaism as Muhammad has to Christianity: Jesus, though Jewish, became the founder of another religion. Jesus said many beautiful things and some Wolpe does not like, including leaving father and mother to follow him, which he does not like as a religious model.

The Quran, which he knows less well than the New Testament and far less than the Hebrew Bible, retells many of the same Abrahamic stories differently. Jews will say Muhammad heard those stories from Jews, and midrashim, rabbinic interpretations, and wrote them down; Muslims will say the Jews got it wrong and Muhammad came to correct the record. Christians accept the Hebrew Bible as sacred scripture. What is common is monotheism, more complicated in Christianity because of the Trinity, though as Christianity developed it presents itself as a monotheistic faith.

The role of the exact word differs. None of the books of the New Testament were written by people who met Jesus in person, and sometimes even the original language is uncertain. In the Hebrew Bible the tradition is that Hebrew is *lashon ha-kodesh*, sacred language, the language God spoke to Moses, so the exact words are infinitely interpretable; traditionally Moses wrote them at God’s dictation. What makes Judaism and Christianity different, Wolpe says, is that Christianity has an ideal life and Judaism has an ideal book. Christian holidays are events in the life of God, birth, death, resurrection; Jewish holidays are events in the life of the people, liberation from slavery, or in the people’s relationship to God, like Yom Kippur, because in Judaism God does not have a biography: God is eternal and never came to earth.

Twenty-one years earlier at Passover he said the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all. He believes the story has a historical kernel, and Richard Elliott Friedman may be right that it was the Levites who left, but he does not believe ten plagues, a split sea, and six hundred thousand men, about two million people who would stretch from Israel to Egypt. The point of the sermon was that the historicity of the Exodus is not the basis of Jewish faith: a myth may not have happened and is always happening. Speaking to Iranian congregants, he said they had lived the truth of the Exodus, escaping a regime that wanted to destroy them; the question is whether God delivers, in ancient times and now. Science can add facts and even change the feel of studying Talmud on an iPhone, but you can live a life by Torah and you cannot live a life by biology.

Stepping back toward Sam Harris and a materialist picture of mind, Fridman asks how Wolpe explains consciousness and free will. Wolpe returns to the Hitchens debate, where he thinks neither Hitchens nor the moderator understood him, in part because Hitchens was focused on humor. If we are entirely biological creatures, if we did not choose our genetics and did not choose our environment, then there is no space for free choice; he kept asking where it comes in and did not get an answer, because he does not think there is one. A thoroughgoing materialist can have randomness, but randomness is not free will. He thinks you need a spiritual, non-material belief in order to get free will, and that is why he believes in it.

The feeling of having a choice could be an illusion, like other tricks of perception, and he understands that; actual free will he does not see how you get if you are a materialist. He thinks Sam Harris would agree: without a God and without a soul, free will is a logical impossibility. Harris goes further: it is not just that free will is an illusion, the illusion of free will is an illusion; we do not even experience anything like it, we are like the current in the river. For Judaism, Wolpe thinks the “I” is fundamental: you are the custodian of your soul, and even if modern society overemphasizes individuality, the human being in the Torah is created singly, in the image of God, a deep truth whether or not there was a literal Adam and Eve in a garden.

Consciousness is, for him, a real thing; he rather likes the panpsychist view that there is an element of consciousness in everything, constitutive of reality, though he is not wedded to it, and he thinks it exists in different degrees in all sentient creatures. Anyone with a pet knows they have some kind of consciousness. What perplexes him is the denial of the reality of consciousness from people fully aware that they are conscious, including in a delightful conversation with Daniel Dennett in which he made no headway. Humility, as you get older, has been in his experience not more answers but a bigger puzzle.

Fridman asks about robots that exhibit the capacity to suffer, and Wolpe distinguishes exhibiting suffering from exhibiting behaviors that evoke a sense of suffering, as a doll can make a sad face. Fridman presses the threshold: memory of shared experience, speech, a relationship, the embarrassment of losing to a chess computer that does not think you are an idiot. Wolpe has more and more trouble imagining turning off, deleting the memory of, a system he has been through things with, even a toaster, and he still thinks we have a long way to go before the objective part of the brain, not just the emotive part, believes the machine has consciousness. Fridman wonders whether we will one day look back and see that we formed another tribe, and that scripture all along had room for a deep connection with non-biological minds. Wolpe resists it tremendously, and as a student of history he knows instinctive resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about.

Fridman tends to believe suffering is fundamental to being human and tied to consciousness: under anesthetic you do not suffer, and there is also non-physical suffering, pain you have caused, pain people you care about have felt. Wolpe thinks it is equally true of joy. Why is there suffering if there is a God who cares? If everything were a primitive robot there would be no suffering and also no growth, and growth implies choices. The Holocaust, he has said, presents the exact same theological question as somebody shot on the streets of Los Angeles: God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people, on an unimaginable scale, but the same question, and you cannot give everyone free will except the Nazis.

When you are actually faced with suffering, these explanations are obscene; telling a person in pain that the rabbi said God gave people free will is just awful. The second piece is natural suffering, children born with disease, earthquakes, volcanoes. Suffering has to be random, because if only good things happened to good people, everybody would be good, and it would have no moral content. The only way goodness has moral content is knowing you can live a really good life and have terrible things happen anyway, which means Wolpe has been incredibly lucky: he does not have a good life because he was good, he has a good life because he was lucky, and that implies a tremendous responsibility to those who were not, to study history, tell their stories, and suffer better.

He does not fear mortality. In high school his father encouraged him to read Ernest Becker’s *The Denial of Death*, which convinced him that much of society is a way of not encountering our physicality, because the body is what dies and decays. Religion, for Wolpe, is in part a confrontation with that fact and a claim that something about you is eternal, though he does not know what. Every picture of the afterlife is foolish, including Mark Twain’s green fields and harp music, which you would not sit through for five minutes while alive. He loves the parable of twins in a womb, one believing in a life outside: when the believer is born, the brother mourns a death while everyone outside celebrates a birth, and this world was a surprise, so why should the next world not be?

In high school he was a pretty ardent atheist, in thrall to Bertrand Russell, for his money the best atheist pound-for-pound, a witty and lucid writer. He has a theory about why adolescent boys like Mr. Spock and Sherlock Holmes: puberty makes the body so uncomfortable that you like the idea you are just a brain, a thinking machine, and Russell was perfect. His father, a rabbi, wisely bought him Russell’s books, a way of saying he was not afraid of him; at camp another rabbi found him reading Russell, spoiling for a fight, and said he would rather David grow out of him than grow into him. When Wolpe read about Russell’s life, the rationality had not shielded him from multiple marriages, infidelities, family silences, a remarkable life and not a happy one, and he began to think people of faith might see something deeper. Coming to faith was not a logical decision but an opening of the heart; Rabbi Nachman of Breslov called himself a moon man, faith waxing and waning, and Wolpe is the same, with more faith in his feeling moments.

The most beautiful part of Judaism, he says, is that even though it is filled with humor and wit, it takes life and the soul seriously: this matters, we matter, what we do matters, an unbelievably powerful message in a world where young people feel they do not. He wants to say to every young woman under thirty on TikTok that she does not matter because she is beautiful; she matters because she has a soul. To every young man who thinks that if he makes enough money his life will be fine, the same: you matter because you are in the image of God. The deepest meaning of Judaism is not political; we put politics on top of everything, but it is on a soul level, not a voting level. Hitchens, it turns out, actually was Jewish; he discovered in his thirties that his mother was Jewish, wrote a beautiful essay about it, and in *Hitch-22* you learn that his mother ran away with a minister or priest and they died in what seemed a suicide pact, a story Wolpe read too late to ask whether it had anything to do with the hostility toward religion.

The week after the Dallas synagogue hostage incident, his synagogue ran active-shooter training, a reminder that synagogue security matters and that antisemitism is an evergreen issue he had once hoped would fade. On Israel and Palestine he is a very strong supporter of Israel and also feels for the plight of the Palestinians, a clash of legitimate narratives that cannot be split exactly. He does not believe Israel is unwilling to make peace, having made peace with Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab nations, and he thinks that if Palestinians accept a Jewish state as legitimately here, the two peoples together could do remarkable things. A piece of the way out is what made the Abraham Accords happen: economics overriding ideology. After watching Magnus Carlsen in Dubai he compared the city to a polished Las Vegas without gambling, until a friend told him to imagine arriving from Yemen or Riyadh, where it looks like a miracle of what people can build once they drop ideological shackles.

Advice for the young, in high school or college, thinking about a life they can be proud of: life is longer than you think, even though he understands the impulse to be in a rush, and you will have many unfoldings, more even than people of his generation did, different aspects showing possibilities you cannot imagine yet. Second, as old-fashioned as it sounds, read books, not just social media, things that give a broader context than today or yesterday or the day before. Third, develop your own internal metric of what matters and what is good, because you will be exposed to more voices than any generation in history, called influencers, telling you what you should think and believe, and you need a private space to say that looks great, but that is not me. He grew up with three television channels, evenings of board games and reading, football in the street, a bike in the morning and home at night, and a religious tradition with bigger metrics; it is still hard for him, and harder for kids without that space.

His favorite novel is *Middlemarch*, by Mary Ann Evans writing as George Eliot, which Virginia Woolf called the only English novel written for grown-ups; you feel the pressure of her intellect in the sentences. He also loves Saul Bellow’s *Herzog*, Viktor Frankl’s *Man’s Search for Meaning*, and Heschel’s short book *The Sabbath*. What he takes from Frankl is that if you believe something matters you have enormous resilience, and meaning is the great antidote to a nihilistic life; Hugo Gryn, who grew up in Auschwitz, told of his father using the margarine ration as Hanukkah oil, because you can live three weeks without food, three days without water, and not three minutes without hope. The meaning of life, Wolpe believes, is to grow in soul, returning it more burnished, nicks and all, and you do that mainly by learning how to love, the monotheistic insight being that God cares how you treat each other. Fridman leaves listeners with Wolpe’s line: “The only whole heart is a broken one, because it lets the light in.”