Brian Schwartzman: From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Speaker 2: (Singing). Jay Michaelson: It may seem really distant, like erotic mysticism. I don't think it's distant at all. If you look at the kinds of religion that are ascendant in the United States, also in Israel, also in many other countries, I mean, these are people who are having these powerful, mystical, spiritual experiences and then translating those directly into what I call you would think is very repressive and regressive politics. Speaker 2: (Singing). Brian Schwartzman: I'm your host Brian Schwartzman. Today I'm talking with Rabbi Jay Michaelson. We'll be discussing Jay's short story collection, The Secret That Is Not a Secret, which bridges the worlds of mysticism, heresy, faith, and desire. In our show notes, we'll put a link to the book and its independent publisher Ayin Press. We'll also get into some of Jay's journalism. Since October 7th, he's tackled the moral and legal dimensions of Hamas' attack the subsequent war fallout abroad, antisemitism debates on campus. He's done this in a heap of pieces for The Forward as well as Rolling Stone. In 2022, Jay published an Evolve essay titled The Allure of the Antinomian, or How Jacob Frank Seduced Me. That piece was adapted from his book of scholarship, The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth. And that book actually ended up winning the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship. If you'd like to stay up to date on the latest essays, videos, and podcasts from Evolve, sign up for the Evolve newsletter. We'll put a link in our show notes, and you can also find it easily at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. We know we don't always want an extra email in our inbox, but this carries resources each month that'll really make it worth it. And this Purim, note, we'll be offering an exclusive essay to anybody who has subscribed to our newsletter. So sign up today to get this exclusive content. All right, now let's get to our guest. Rabbi Jay Michaelson is the author of 10 books. He holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, a PhD in Jewish thought from Hebrew University, and a JD from Yale, a Juris doctorate. Jay is a journalist at Rolling Stone and CNN, a rabbi, a longtime LGBTQ activist and a teacher of Jewish and Buddhist meditation. One of the places he teaches is for the smartphone app, 10% Happier, which I've used and I can say has helped me begin to develop a meditation practice. So I recommend checking it out. A note, we recorded this conversation on January 4th. Jay Michaelson, hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Jay Michaelson: Thanks, Brian. It's good to be back. Brian Schwartzman: If we're on the air and get enough episodes to get a five timers club, I have a sense you'll be the first one there. Jay Michaelson: No, that's great. Me and Paul Simon. Brian Schwartzman: Right, right, right. Tom Hanks too. First off, congratulations on your first book of fiction. I know from personal experience, it's not easy to find a home for short fiction in general, a collection, and it sounds like you ended up in a really good ... Ended up in a really good publishing home. So congratulations. Jay Michaelson: Thanks. Yeah, this would never have happened if Ayin Press didn't exist. We can talk about it, but I had a kind of version of this collection for some time and it took the quirky, artsy, Jewy, mystically publishing house to come to me. I pitched it to them before they even launched, but they waited for me to win some awards before they accepted. Brian Schwartzman: Oh, and yes. And since we last spoke, congratulations on the National Jewish Book Award for your next most recent book. Jay Michaelson: Thank you. I think ours was one of the first conversations I did on that one, actually. So I attribute its success to our podcast. Brian Schwartzman: I'll take it. Thank you. That was a good conversation. We're going to talk about your fiction writing today and some of your more recent news writing, and I thought back to an Amos Oz quote. I remembered that thanks to Google, I was able to look up and he had said when he was older that, when I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me. But I've been doing this for 60 years now, but when I write a novel, I'm not in that business. So you've published nine books before this run, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of op-ed and other news articles. What can you do? What can you say in fiction that you can't in poetry, scholarship, memoir, op-ed? Is there something different about fiction that you can't do with anything else? Jay Michaelson: Definitely. I mean, I love that quote and thank you for not telling me it before until right now. Love just hearing it fresh. Yeah, Amos said it perfectly. There, in my nonfiction work and certainly in my journalism working, I'm primarily an opinion writer, so I do exactly what Amos, in fact, it's funny. I mean, I just had a piece published this morning in my newsletter about the sort of liberal Zionist, center left, something like that. And so it's just fine. I may have said the same things that I also said 50 years ago, but that's right. There's a directness, there's a normativity and there's an ownership of a point of view. I don't write something I don't believe, and that's great. That has its place. I do that a lot, and it's so liberating to not do that. To not, as he said, to not be in that business. The characters in this book are grappling with a set of similar issues, but each in their own weird way and dysfunctional way and sometimes functional way. I think one of the things that I noticed in the revision of the book was that I don't think a nonfiction book on Kabbalah that I want to write. I mean, I had the academic book on Jacob Frank, but it's not a big part of my actual contemplative practice anymore, and it was in the past, but I still find it endlessly fascinating and just totally absorbing. And so to enter into a dozen different worlds in which that Jewish mystical life is real for the characters who were in it and for the world in which the stories are placed, that's super fun. And it was a way for me to play with some of the just remarkably complicated, in a good way, symbolism and just ways of being that sort of mystical tradition incubates in a person. I don't want to be any of those characters, I don't think, although some of them have some nice interesting things happen to them, but I am endlessly fascinated by them. Brian Schwartzman: Interesting. And picking up on your last book about mysticism, and it also was about heresy, this book The Secret That Is Not A Secret, it's subtitled, I guess, 10 heretical tales. I mean, you have a bunch of Orthodox characters, some non-Orthodox characters, men, women, gay, straight. What makes these tales heretical? Jay Michaelson: I think one of the subjects that I was interested in the book is the pull between what we might call shamai and arts or heaven and earth or some dualistic conception of spirit and body or secret and non-secret. The Kabbalah, if nothing else is about lots of levels of reality and depths of secrets and relationships of different energies and potencies in reality. Those may all be make-believe, but there is that obsession within that, and it is, having lived in that way a little bit in my life many years ago, it is transporting. I mean, you live in different worlds at the same time. The way some of those conflicts get addressed or resolved in this book of fiction is certainly not normative. So there's often a rejection of that secret in favor of the secret that's not a secret, which might be that there is no secret. There are a number of the stories are queer liberation stories. Some are psychedelic in nature. Many of them end with characters committing to faith but destroying themselves in the process. So these are not the messages of what I would call normative Kabbalah, normative Judaism, but they play in that playground to hopefully startling results, or at least surprising ones. At least they were for me, as some of them came into being. I think it's that role that the liberation of imagination is so joyous, especially I know we'll talk a little bit about this, my sort of journalistic work in a bit. In this weird juxtaposition, which of course was not timed or intentional that I have this book, there is one story in the book that touches on political themes and analogizes the political, erotic and spiritual in the lives of its characters. But other than that, these are stories that are certainly not about the news. And yet the book came out two months after the war began in Israel and Palestine, and it's just been this kind of ... It's worked. It's a cliche to say it is what it is. I mean, it's just been this particularly strange journey, having this celebratory moment of mystical fiction at the same time as not just that the war's going on, but that I'm actively involved in writing a lot about it and trying to help some folks who are really struggling and trying to shed a little bit of light. So it's like I'm always pulled in multiple directions. That's just a fact of my life. But it has been an interestingly example of that in these last couple of months. Brian Schwartzman: I think you wrote to me in an email that part of this discussion you wanted to address the queer desire that's explored in the book, and there certainly is that, but I mean, not all the characters are queer in sort of the traditional sense. I was thinking a lot about your need, I guess this works as an author. I'm still really feeling for this national religious young teenager who seeks to find spirituality in the desert and bad things happen and runs out of water and stuff. But she wasn't queer in the traditional sense. She just wanted to find God in the desert. So I guess I was wondering what you meant when you talked about this book and its exploration of queer desire. Jay Michaelson: Sure. Yeah. I mean, for me, the opposite of gay may be straight, but the opposite of is just normal. And so there's no one in the book that I see as kind of happily going about some sort of normative emotional life. And so even with Yuni, who's exploring her heterosexuality as a teenage girl and exploring desire and what kind of desire she has for the different kinds of boys that are in her high school, does she desire the sort of cool kid? Does she desire the quiet scholar. These different pulls, to me that's already queered and just the ways in which she struggles against the boxes into which young women are often placed, or at least that she experiences them in her community, that you're either a good girl or bad girl, for example. So you either have a puritanical rejection of sexuality, at least in an unmarried life, or you get this reputation of being the bad girl. And that to me, or queerness is about seeing the misfit. For me at least, it's seeing the misfit between these boxes, whether they're about gender or sexuality or really any kind of identity. The misfit between those boxes and our realities, which never really fit in. I think, I mean everybody's to some extent, and that's what I find more interesting. Yeah, I did an account at one point and fewer than half, it was just about half, but a little less than half of the protagonists would be identified as L or G, as lesbian or gay. And the way the queerness to me also mysticism itself is very queer. It's maybe it's a sublimated eros toward the divine, which is a kind of love. Or maybe eros is a sublimated mysticism into the corporeal. Kabbalah itself, I have written a couple of nonfiction articles. In fact, I taught a seminar I think at RC about queerness and Kabbalah, and it gives with one hand, it takes with the other. So on the one hand, here's this fascinating polytheism where God has these 10 emanations, whatever that word means, and they're gendered in different ways, and all of the gender combinations are different, and some of them have multiple genders, and it's this enormously queer and liberating theology. But at the end of the day, it comes back to the normative, heteronormative and sex negative Jewish obsession and legal strictures. So it's like on the end, even the liberating queer parts of Kabbalah are still woven together into a very gender binaristic and heteronormative context. I remember an ex-partner of mine once was being interviewed for rabbinical school, and the very well-known person who was interviewing him, who I won't name, said, "Well, how do you reconcile being a gay person with all of this? You're interested in Kabbalah, but the Kabbalah is, if nothing, it's always about male and female." And that's true, and that's a limitation. It's that's the world in which it's operating. And yet within that limitation, within that problematic frame, there's still every person contains male, female and other. So it might be, I might have more female than male in me, and you might have more male than female, and that might change depending on context. So the great Jewish heroes are meant to be male and, quote unquote, dominant. I feel like air quoting everything I'm saying since we're only in audio relative to their followers. So think about King David for example, or Moses or Jacob or Abraham. So they're meant to be the kind of men, quote unquote, relative to earthly people, but they're meant to be, quote, again, I'm not buying into this exactly the woman, so to speak, for the divine, more the vessel, more the receiver. And that that's really interesting. So even within, I mean, I couldn't even get those sentences out without hesitation, right? Because the system in which it's working is so problematic. But within that problematic system, there's still this really interesting queering, for lack of a better word, of the way that gender is normally understood. So that's like what's alluring about Kabbalah and what's frustrating about it. So again, writing fiction, coming back to your earlier question, I get to play in the sandbox with the fun toys and see where those head in different directions. Brian Schwartzman: Remind me, who's the name of the character from the first story who gets obsessed and repulsed by her husband's beard? Jay Michaelson: Actually, it's funny, her name is Sara because she's a Chabad. And yet in my brain until we recorded the audiobook, I mean, I knew it was Sara, but I somehow wrote in my brain it was Sarah, but it's definitely Sara. And when we did the audiobook, I realized, oh, wait, her name's not Sarah at all. It was funny. Anyway, Sara. Brian Schwartzman: I think I'm thinking of Sara jumps most to mind, but this kind of seems true throughout the book. There's something going on where the desire for God or the divine is eroticized and erotic desire becomes mystical or somehow religious in nature and just, I don't know what is going on there. Jay Michaelson: That's how I experienced my religiosity in real life. So I think what I found, so the rough plot of that first story called The Beard, and these stories interlock, so characters appear, the teacher from The Beard shows up later in another story, a bunch of characters reappear. This character Sara, who's a [inaudible 00:19:06], she didn't grow up religious but became Chabad, has a full normative now Chabad lifestyle. She loves her husband except she can't stand his big bushy Chabad beard. And she goes to all kinds of lengths to try to reconcile herself to that reality and really struggles to do so. I won't do any ... Give away any spoilers. And there for me, I mean that push-pull, no matter how she spiritualizes or symbolizes the reality in front of her, there is an embodied reality that is inescapable that she struggles against. And it's also a gendered reality, right? This is the symbol of his masculinity that she simply cannot abide. And there's a whole discourse that that story refers to briefly analogizing the facial beard to pubic hair. And it sees this relationship between the beard and sexuality and some of her other desires, which again, I don't want to spoil by talking about, but the way that she works with some of her desires that were so kind of forbidden that I only wanted to allude to them in the story, she really does also love God. She loves her life as a Chabad [inaudible 00:20:28]. And I think there's certainly a trend or a mini trend of ex-Orthodox nonfiction and fiction that's become pretty popular lately. And a lot of it's beautiful. I actually just read Jericho Vincent's memoir of leaving a Yeshiva [inaudible 00:20:47] household, and Abby Stein, who grew up as a Hasidic young man and is transgender, and she wrote this incredible memoir of growing up trans, not knowing that trans was a thing, obviously in that insular Hasidic community. So there are these wonderful stories about ... But I also wanted not just the leaving, but the wanting to stay. And those two that I mentioned, Jericho and Abby's books both have that a little bit, Abby's more than Jericho's, but there ... I'm interested both in why people leave. You can see that, but a lot of people don't leave and why don't they? And it's not only coercive control and abusive situations, it's also this yearning that I remember experiencing when I considered living that kind of a life. Luckily for me, I think luckily, I didn't do that, but there wouldn't have been much of a space for me as a queer man in that space. But people do find ways to reconcile themselves to it because of that devotion, which itself I think is a kind of sublimated arrows or related to arrows. And I also, there's another mini trend, which I am very guilty of participating in or the cult specials on Netflix or Max or whatever where there is, I did write that book on Jacob Frank, so I'm just totally endlessly captivated by these kind of marginal religious messianic erotic movements. Frankism was kind of a cult, if we could speak anachronistically in the 18th century. But I constantly struggle with these pop culture versions because I don't think they ever really can convey what's so attractive about these cults, right? It's just easy to say, oh, well mind control or charisma or something like that. But I know people who've been in these kind of movements and new religious movements and they're pulled to it the same way that folks who go to a good Jewish congregation or synagogue or davening or study session are, just in a more extreme way. And that eros is, I think, just really interesting. And I would even say since I know it's also a pretty important force in politics, it may seem really distant, like queer erotic mysticism. I don't think it's distant at all. If you look at the kinds of religion that are ascendant in the United States, also in Israel, also in many other countries, they are not like rationalist bland Protestantism or mainstream big temple Judaism. They are precisely the ones that are more charismatic, that have more, I mean, if you go to a good charismatic Pentecostal or evangelical church service and you have some familiarity, let's say, with a Hasidic service or davening, something like that, it will look very similar. I mean, these are people who are having these powerful, mystical spiritual experiences and then translating those directly into what I call you would think is very repressive and regressive politics. So the way, and that operates in the lives of a couple of the characters as well, there is, I don't want to call it a danger even, it's just like that is part of what it is to have this profound religiosity is like it's easy for progressive reconstructionists to be like, yeah, we should all do contemplative practice and then we'll love each other more. Well, a lot of people do pretty intensive spiritual practice and have stronger boundaries between us and them and stronger in group affiliation and stronger ties to traditional religious strictures. And again, I wouldn't want to put that out in a nonfiction like, "Hey, try this and become a fundamentalist." But as a writer, and I do find it, that is where I find it really fascinating, and I love those stories. So I tried to tell 10 of them. Brian Schwartzman: I just read somewhere that the most recent biographer said, George Harrison associates said he became much harder to deal with after he dived into transcendental meditation. So I guess- Jay Michaelson: Well, I think he was fine on the TM time. I think it was when he got into, he was into Ishkan, the Krishna, Western Krishna movement, and I wouldn't want to call that a cult or something, but it certainly was a strongly tied religious movement with a charismatic leader at the top and had ... But we see it everywhere. So whether it's traditional right wing religion, look at what's happening in Israel right now where religiously motivated extremists are dictating Israeli policy. And that's I think an interesting, from a writer perspective interesting, as a political commentator may be tragic, an interesting consequence of this 21st century in which technology and globalization and other gigantic forces have really changed the way we interact with one another, it has not meant the end of religion. On the contrary, it's meant a kind of extremization, that's not a very scholarly sounding word, of the kinds of religiosity that seem to be thriving are precisely those which have the most spiritual juiciness in them. And that is also eros. Brian Schwartzman: And you alluded to this about the circumstances of your book coming out post October 7th. You've been working and thinking about this for years, and yet that's the context in which it comes out into the world and doesn't ... It's a very Jewish book with very Jewish characters who are mostly unhappy in some way. You're not going to come away from this feeling like everything is all better. And it also doesn't- Jay Michaelson: I did. Brian Schwartzman: You did? Well, you did. Jay Michaelson: Well. There's redemption. It's funny. Yeah, go ahead. I did sort of- Brian Schwartzman: No, I guess, and it also, it doesn't address the Jews collectively. This is really does what fiction does about individual characters. I guess I'm formulating a question on the fly, so why don't you say what you were going to say about redemption? That seemed like it was going somewhere. Jay Michaelson: Yeah. First I would say I found the work on this, and hopefully readers will find reading it to be a good vacation. It's like a reminder. I think certainly in October, November, there is just an inescapable reality of the predominance of, let's call it the peoplehood aspects of Jewishness. Our people were attacked and then our people attacked back in ways that really divided a lot of us and that were painful. And this is all Jewish nation stuff. Religion was maybe in the background, but the kinds of Jewish stuff that I love to do, which are in the book, this stuff tails to what you're saying. The nature parts and pagan parts and the spiritual parts and the psychedelic parts, those all took a backseat in our consciousness, at least it did in mine and in literally every Jewish person I know because there was a trauma that took place and we're nowhere near done processing it. And so for me, when I had to turn, we did have some changes. We had a big launch party that was going to happen in November, which we didn't do, but we are going to try to do one in a couple of them in February. This was like a reminder that, oh, right, right, right. I'm not denying the peoplehood sides, the [inaudible 00:28:47] side of my Jewishness, but that's not where most of my joy is, my Jewish joy. And I'm fine if that is where some people's Jeish joy, primary Jewish joy resides. But it's almost never been that for me. The primary Jewish joy I think is in the sort of quirky, artistic, mystical creativity of whether it's Jewish spirituality, Jewish art, literature, et cetera. It's those funky, formerly marginal Judiasms, but I'm not sure how marginal anymore. Certainly, again, if we think in a kind of reconstructionist context, those margins, thankfully the lunatics have taken over the asylum, although I'm not sure we're allowed to say that anymore, but whatever the metaphor is, what used to be on the margins I think is now more toward the center. That's where the Jewish joy was. So yeah, it was almost like it wasn't quite a vacation from the news, but it was a reminder that helped me kind of balance a little bit, what is this Jewish thing that I slash we are involved in? But yeah, thankfully it didn't, the book is not a political book, but I did want to just briefly ... I don't want too much change topics. There is in the earliest versions of this book, I mean these stories date back 20 years, and in some of the initial versions, there was a lot less redemption than there is now. There are a couple of stories where the characters don't find redemption and remain trapped or choose to remain trapped, or they're given a glimpse of what redemption or liberation might look like, but we're not sure that that's going to be more than a glimpse. And that shifted, and I think when I first wrote these in, I've totally rewrote it about, it's funny, it was like in 2003, 2013, 2023, were the three times where this was really the focus of my work, and I rewrote it in 2013 for my MFA thesis at Sarah Lawrence. And there too, it was still, it wasn't about so much of the redemption that I think is in there, but in some of the stories I'm thinking like the transfiguration for example, or the final story, which is set in the 19th century, there are pathways to wholeness, healing, enlightenment. They're just not the pathways that are set down in the tradition. And that goes back to that notion of heresy, that the heretic is one who chooses etymologically, who chooses their own path and finds their own path or is shown a different path. And that can often be pretty traumatic in its own way, but I found it to be liberatory. And I was interested in telling those stories here. Brian Schwartzman: Have you been moved by this conversation? Found a new perspective on the Evolve website? Deepen your Jewish practice with a resource from ritualwell.org. Has your life been impacted by a reconstructionist rabbi or community? If the answer's yes to any of these, consider making a gift to Reconstructing Judaism. We bring you this podcast and so much more. We partner with people and communities to envision the kind of Jewish spaces we all want to be part of, and then we set about to build them together. There's a donate link in our show notes, and you can also give at the Evolve homepage, find it and click support us. Thanks for considering, and now back to our interview. I could talk about literature all day and- Jay Michaelson: Let's just do that. Brian Schwartzman: I do. I feel incumbent upon me to ask, transitioning a little, since October 7th, you've written, I don't know, I counted 10. There may be more. Maybe I over counted pieces for The Forward and Rolling Stone, maybe others really delving into some of the most thorniest topics of ethical, moral related to the war, Israel's response related to what's happening in our own political culture. You've addressed Jewish law and war, the hostage deal, the morality of attacking a hospital. You've written a couple pieces about the antisemitism on campus and the college presidents. I guess I was wondering, especially since you said it had been quite some time since you devoted your energy to writing about Israel or Palestinians, what role did you see yourself fulfilling? Was there an animating principle? Was there just something that made you get up? Was it the fact that you've got all these different backgrounds, rabbinic, legal, journalistic? I guess I'll stop there. Jay Michaelson: Yeah, it was kind of that actually, yeah. I think when there's a crisis of this magnitude, it's natural for us to ask ourselves, well, what can I do? And we're all powerless to some degree, to really impact, to really help the people who most need helping, the people who are being bombed or the people who are grieving horrible losses a few months ago from three months ago. We can help in some ways. So when we think, well, how can I help? It was that kind of confluence. So I can kibbitz about defense strategy and military strategy, but I'm not an expert in that. But where I have spent a few decades at this point writing is it that kind of intersection of ethics and politics or spirituality and politics. So the first things that I wrote were just trying to reflect, embody, convey, honor, and maybe comfort some of the shock and grief and pain and sadness that we all felt that we, I think almost everyone in the Jewish or Jewish adjacent community felt. For me that was already accompanied by a dread of the death that was to come, because obviously we knew that there would be a terrible response and that some response was called for, and we knew what that would bring, and that has now unfolded. But in that initial period, it was just like, let's not pass over. We need a grieving process, which we're not going to be able to have because soon we're going to shift into this wartime. And then we did. And yeah, for me it's like where there can be something that I can offer that Thomas Friedman can't offer, it's going to be at that intersection. And so some of the pieces I've done that I've pushed back on the use of the word genocide to describe the war from a very legal point of view. So that's really me. I mean, that was almost me writing a law article. I did that at The Daily Beast for eight years. I was the Supreme Court columnist just writing straight legal analysis basically. And this felt a little bit like that. So sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's more the intersection. Today as we're recording today, of course it'll be in the past when this is out, but I just published a piece on liberal Zionists coming into their own after a period of not really having a political home. And so it's rare that the main news story is one where I've just done a lot of work in the past and I was very active in writing and in some activism around this many years ago, I really kind of burned out. And it is true even now. It's funny, I think there's a sense that our public discourse now is the worst it's ever been. I would say the hate mail I get now is about the same as the hate mail I got 15, 20 years ago. I was banned from college campuses just for being a J Street supporter, let alone BDS supporter or something like that. Even that was considered [inaudible 00:37:08]. So it's actually more eerily familiar than new. I mean, the technology is new in terms of it's easier for people to send these kinds of messages. And it is interesting that the pieces that have provoked the most response are not even the ones directly about the war, but about these ancillary issues like the scandal around the college presidents and they're awful badly handled testimony in front of Congress and the stuff around antisemitism on campus, it's like that actually in terms of what gets people who disagree seemingly the most angry, it's actually that stuff. But that's where hopefully there's an intersection between the different kinds of work that I do. And look, the Substack newsletter I started in September not knowing there was about to be a war, and it's called both. And the idea is that intersection both and in many ways, even this liberal Zionist thing is a both and kind of situation, like both supporting the concept of this Jewish state and opposing some of its actions and so forth. But that was the intention was to kind of, at this point in my career figuring out I'm not going to conquer the world journalistically. So it's just figuring out what a Jay Michaelson piece might be. There's that overtold story, is it Hasidic or Talmudic where it's like [inaudible 00:38:32] goes to heaven and he's asked, how come you weren't more [inaudible 00:38:36]? So that's sort of the animating principle. Brian Schwartzman: As we're talking today, the stepping down of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, is still among the top news stories. I imagine it won't be by the time this episode is released, but back in the fall before even the president of Penn had stepped down, you took I think, which was a counterintuitive or less than universally embraced stand in the Jewish press of defending, if not the president's handling of the situation, the general principle of, depends on the context. And I was really struck by what you wrote when you said, when we react emotionally instead of intelligently, we make mistakes. So I guess now that we've seen the president of Harvard step down and there's all kinds of recriminations on multiple sides, what you're taking away from events and where you see that story going. Jay Michaelson: Yeah. I mean, that is just what we were talking about on the last question where I see at least an intersection between something about our inner lives and our outer lives. And it is interesting, and in my most recent forward piece, I think, was it yesterday, the day before yesterday, about this particular issue, I took a look at the statement by Bill Ackman, who's a very wealthy Jewish donor to Harvard, and it was just so had he made that statement to me, I also just coincidentally, I just finished teaching a six-day meditation retreat. Had he been on that retreat and come out with that statement in an interview with me, the invitation would be like, well, wow, how are you feeling right now? What's the feeling tone around these? It was so angry and saying things which are just silly from an analytical point of view. Understandable from an emotional point of view, like I can empathize with the rage and with the grief and the frustration, but it's like, here's somebody who's been very successful, perhaps in part because of acting on emotion, which can obviously be an asset certainly in certain kinds of business, but just saying some stuff which really is hard to support, and this is a very powerful person who did help co-engineer this campaign that took down the president of Harvard. And it's seeing the ways in which the very real pain that so many American Jews are in, seeing the ways in which that pain gets channeled or used or weaponized. That's been pretty sobering, and I don't think that's going away, but again, that's always been true. There's always been a lot of American Jews are tied to Israel because we learned about it when we were three years old, or because we had parents or grandparents who are Holocaust survivors or we have a sense of our own fragility and precarity, or we had positive experiences in Israel. I mean, I remember when I went as a teenager was like, I didn't even realize it's just this. It was a bit of a coming out experience. I didn't realize how repressed I had been Jewishly closeting, various parts of Jewishness, but now I was 16 and I could go to McDonald's and eat burgers or whatever. And that's pretty trivial in a way. But in a way, these were these big openings, even the McDonald's thing, although back then it was only Burger King and even that. But then much more than that. There's also, it's jokingly called sexual Zionism where these teen tours go to Israel and all the kids have these great experiences and associate them with Israel. But also you go and you're a kid or a young adult or even just an adult and you see the tel for the first time or something like that, or you visit some biblical site. These are powerful spiritual emotional experiences. And then just like we were talking about before, that gets linked to politics and linked sounds too conscious. It just is politics. It just becomes politics. It animates why we care about a certain way, why we take sides. Some of it, of course, is direct relations. I have relatives in the army right now, so obviously that's a degree of direct connection that's just not as much, as I want to empathize with innocent Palestinians, I don't have that just family connection that's there in that sense. But so much of it is also I think this profound emotional spiritual connection that people have with this thing called Jewishness or that place called Israel. And you just see it in real time, how it leads to ... I mean, I just did a kind of, I don't know, center, right, something podcast yesterday with a hostess Jewish, and immediately the emotional level went up to 11 and he just could not ... Yeah, I mean, it was not a civil conversation in a lot of ways. Brian Schwartzman: Yikes. Just sticking with the campus for a minute, and I'll move on. I guess [inaudible 00:44:10] criticism we've heard, and I think it's not just from the right, is that somehow the conversation feels different around Jews, that when we're talking about Jews, it's the first amendment and free speech comes up, and it seems like with other groups maybe protecting the sense of safety was the paramount principle. Is there anything to that, I guess? Jay Michaelson: Well, yeah, I mean you phrased that a lot more carefully than my host yesterday did, just with your use of the word seems. So first, I'm also very familiar with pro-Palestine activists on college campuses who are having a very rough time of it as well. Brian Schwartzman: Sure, sure. Jay Michaelson: So I don't think it's nearly as one-sided as a lot of the Jewish perception is. And look, I think also it gets in the weeds very quickly. Clearly there's been an increase in antisemitism in many different contexts, not just university campuses, but everywhere. There's just news, yesterday it was like a deli that was set on fire in Toronto, I think. So it's real, it's not not real. So that is real. Then I think there's a tendency to turn to who we usually want to blame for stuff, and then that's happened a lot. So there's already this kind of anti-woke sentiment in the right and the center also. So again, yesterday, not to reference that too much, but it was a lot about that double standard, oh, well, you say anything that offends a person of color and you're in trouble, but now you can support genocide? None of the words in that sentence are true. A lot of the examples of cancellation are people who are either faculty members or who are invited to speak and who are being de-platformed, not canceled. And student speech actually has been more free. I'm sure there are a lot of, we could talk about microaggressions and things like that, but that doesn't lead to people being fired from their prestigious positions. Obviously in the Harvard case, the plagiarism stuff is also real, and so it's complicated, but still, the campaign that went against her was not about plagiarism. It was about Israel and Jewish stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's just a tangled situation where it's neither one nor the other. It's neither all fantasy, nor is it all reality. There is this perception, and there's also a kind of, what I've seen directly is a kind of learning of what we're supposed to feel like when we're being hurt, and so we can weaponize our victim status. We learn that from culture, not from reality. So that's coming, I mean cultures, but we learned that because we have this image of like, oh, here's how I'm supposed to respond if I am feeling unsafe as a minority. I'm supposed to do this and have this feeling, and sometimes that creates feelings. So that set of culturally constructed victimhood. And so I'm not saying it's not real. It is real. And I think it is also true that in some circles in the left, Jewishness is definitely not regarded as in any way like a minority status, which is ridiculous. And we've seen it, that's really painful. Where the relationship of Jews and whiteness is very complex. We have a kind of conditional whiteness where sometimes we're white, but if we're at a white supremacist rally, we're suddenly not white. But here there's been a sort of whitening of Israelis, which is of course preposterous, but also of Jews. But that also has been going on for a while. That was years ago that I remember some of the first ... Not many years ago, but I remember in early BLMs, let's say like 2020, there were ways to were from coming within the Jewish left sort of reaching out to be like, "Here's how we can support each other. Here's how we haven't stood up to support people of communities of color, and here's what we need to do better." And also let's also not lapse into antisemitism or antisemitic rhetoric, and here are some of the things to think about and know about. Here's the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. So that's also not just the last few months, it's just maybe reached a new level of intensity. Brian Schwartzman: Something you said there really, and I'm not even sure what really just brought back to mind to me. You're like, "Oh, this is how we're supposed to feel. This is how we're supposed to react." It's so hard to see even a sliver of the world, something close to how it actually is as opposed to through distorted perceptions. And my sense is maybe that's part of what you're trying to do with these op-eds is do your best to show the situation as it actually is in all its complexity. I mean, I think you are doing a service with the op-ed writing you're doing. Jay Michaelson: Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's funny, even the word complicated is complicated now. Brian Schwartzman: Yeah. Jay Michaelson: Right? I mean, I'm always for complexification, and yet the word complicated is often used by sort of pro-Israel apologists, I would say, to get away from a brute reality of a particular situation. So something horrible happens, a bomb is dropped on a school or something, and you'll get a response on the pro-Israel side where it's like, well, it's complicated. It is true, it is complicated. And also the fact that something is complicated doesn't take away the horror of a specific situation, even if the sort of causes that led to that are complicated. And even if there was military intelligence, and even if that school was being used as human shields by Hamas, and even that may all be true, it actually is complicated, but maybe complicated is the latest word I should write a piece on along with ceasefire and genocide and so many others. Complicated is complicated. We also do want to retain ... I'm still for complicated. That's just where it is, and I've never felt even ... I'm trying to think of an example where I think it's not complicated, so I'm going to Trump or MAGA or the movement or something like that, but even that's complicated. There is a lot of reality under some of that disenfranchisement. It's not just white resentment and white loss of privilege. It's also some pretty big macroeconomic trends. It's also a mental health crisis that's gone unaddressed, and the opioid crisis. It's complicated. So yeah, I would say, I think I said earlier in the November, October, November period, anyone who has the answer, that's the person not to believe. Brian Schwartzman: You are a teacher and practitioner of meditation. You've written about it. Has meditation helped you get through this period personally, or has it helped you see things with more clarity? Jay Michaelson: Yeah, I mean, I think what's worked and what hasn't. I've definitely sort of adjusted some of my meditation practice to this very difficult period. I had it pretty rough, and I think part of it was just the way I wanted to allow the grief process to unfold. I really just went to hell the second week of October and did a lot of bad things like doom scrolling and stuff like that kind of consciously that it just felt like the wisdom of Shiva. I think the Jewish Shiva practice is just that we need time after a loss to just go to pieces and there's a Buddhist book going to pieces without falling apart to really allow those very painful emotions to happen. And at the same time, it definitely, I then at some point had to stop doing that. I'm a dad and I've got a family. I have to show up and do stuff. And so it was a struggle. Meditation was definitely a valuable ally, I think, in many ways. It's definitely not a cure all, though. And the great misconception about meditation in general I think is like it's just about changing how you feel. So you're feeling sad or anxious, and no, you can relax and be chill. I mean, meditation can be used sometimes for that, but the real value is in seeing what we're feeling more clearly, even when it's really painful. Partly, look, I mean, it goes back to what we were saying before. If you can see how angry, I was just doing an email exchange one of the hate mail pieces I got through a Claudine Gay piece came from a columnist who also sits on the board of the US Holocaust Museum. So I don't answer trolls, but if it's somebody who's in the field, I'll reply. And it's funny, the first email he sent was a pretty normal, I'm running my own piece and I have some questions. And I could tell the questions were hostile, but then I responded in a not hostile way, but then his second email was just all just vituperation basically. And it doesn't really matter, he's not tanking a relationship with me, because we don't have a relationship. But I definitely was seeing how with meditation eyes on, I was seeing how the pain of October and November were bleeding in into other parts of my life, into my work life and into my family life. And so that's where the real wisdom shows up, not in changing necessarily how you're feeling, but in seeing how you're feeling. Brian Schwartzman: Yeah, I don't know if it was ... I remember telling my kids sometime in mid-October, hey, if I snap at you, daddy's pretty upset about something. And I don't know if that did anything, but I felt like I had to at least say that. Because it was rough, and yet you do, you have responsibilities, you have to fulfill them. Jay Michaelson: Yep. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me a little bit of COVID, especially if you think in Israel, where those responsibilities include people who are having to serve in the military, and then people are having to fill in for people who are serving in the military. And I just think of my friends and relatives there. There is no time for the unfurling of these emotions, or at least not as much. There's just not as much of that because it's so live and it's still happening. And obviously the people in Gaza as well, even more so, right, they're trying to survive, let alone just get on with life. They're just trying to live. And this is the life in the poly crisis where we get over one crisis, and then there's the other one, and then there's the other one, and we got over COVID, and now then it's like climate change and the horrible summer, and then we got through that. Then there's this war, and now we're into the 2024 election. And I don't know, it's a great time to be alive in a lot of ways. Our life expectancy is longer than ever before. There's a smaller percentage of people in the world who are in poverty now than ever before in human history. And science is great. And also this period of poly crisis is also, it's definitely unprecedented for those of us who are, let's say, under 70 years of age. Brian Schwartzman: I mean, other than the fact that we're going to celebrate a bat mitzvah in our family this year, I can't remember feeling less excited about a new year. Like, what's going to happen this year? Jay Michaelson: Yeah. No, it's a problem with the way these elections ... I think also, we've pretty much known what this election, American election was going to look like. We've known about it for a while now, but we've just dreaded it, and now it's freaking here. And there is some optimism that if Trump gets convicted in any of these trials, it will depress his poll numbers very significantly. That's what the polling suggests. So I don't want to say that nothing will save us, but it's still ... There's just a lot of dread. And look, there's also dread, mindful of what I see to be our audience. There's also, for folks who are more progressive, it's really dispiriting that for yet another year, it's kind of like a candidate that a lot of progressives are not feeling great about versus the threat of fascism. So hopefully we'll do the right thing, but it's just like that's not how you want to feel about an election. Like, okay, all right, fine. I'll save the country from fascism. It would be nice to have a little bit more optimism than that, but that's not on the menu. Brian Schwartzman: I mean, I was thinking about the ongoing war and the election, but yeah. Yes. Jay Michaelson: Oh, I was mostly on the election. The war is so 2023. Brian Schwartzman: Still? Jay Michaelson: No, I'm joking. Brian Schwartzman: I think I wanted to come back maybe to where we see if this helps us circle. There have definitely been times since sort of the invention of modern contemporary literature where Jewish writers have been at sort of the center of the Jewish conversation. I mean, particularly the early 20th century, but I think even you could say the 50s and 60s when everybody was discussing Philip Roth and Saul Bello and Bernard Malamud, maybe even to the dawn of our current century. Do you see now with all these roles for fiction and literature to play and all these bigger discussions we're having about what happens to Israel, what happens to the Jewish people, all that kind of stuff? Or is it at this point, do you see the role more as a vacation from all that? Or a focus on the individual? Jay Michaelson: Yeah, I mean, I'd love to answer that yes, we are entering back, reentering the age of the Jewish public intellectual, and that means me, but I don't think that's the case. I think for pretty good reasons, a lot of the more public literary intellectuals who are in the mainstream, not the Jewish space, but in the mainstream conversation, are folks with the kinds of voices that haven't been in that conversation for the last couple hundred years. Whether it's voices of color, whether it's immigrant voices, and this is a larger trend, and it's overdue, and I can fetch about my own timing in relation to that, but I don't know that Jewish writers have that centrality to literary culture, let alone to intellectual culture that a couple of generations ago we might have. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because of the voices that are being lifted up or lifting themselves up. So it's sort of also, it's a larger question of what are even the kinds of voices, the kinds of nonpolitical, narrowly political voices that are being lifted up, and everything could change. But if it's like the main TikTok influencers and things like that, I mean, that's not my lane either. I thought about it for a little while, but that's not really my lane either. And yeah, I don't know. I think part of me yearns for that sort of sense in which what you might call, I guess we could just call it elite literary and artistic culture had a certain degree of public prominence that it might not have now. But the reality is, I think that my own work would probably be marginal there anyway. It would be other Jewish writers who get it on that stage, not to be self-deprecating, but just to assess the landscape. And yet, this is the age we're in. I think my own Jewish literary output, I'm very aware, one of the founders of Iron Press called it Operation Bifurcation, called my life that. Where there's some public work that's hopefully public facing, but part of the joy of doing this book was like, this is definitely the book, it definitely feels like a book that only I could write. And I don't think it's arrogant to say that. It's just, it's a pretty quirky book that only I could write and that won't have that big of an audience for that reason probably. But that feels great. That just feels really good. It feels like I have had these stories floating around in my brain and laptop for a long time in different forms and different iterations, and to have it out just feels really good. And also, it's funny, I'm happy to talk like CNN here on this podcast, but I'm not so happy to talk about my book on CNN. It deals with parts of the human experience that are vital to me, but that don't fit well in what I would call a sort of mainstream conversation. And that's okay. That feels exciting. I don't necessarily want mainstream embrace of queer spiritual scenes in the mikvah and a [inaudible 01:02:41] stage and so on. Brian Schwartzman: Well, congratulations again on the book, for all your work in the public sphere, and I'm sure you've got something cooking for what's next, and we'll be talking in the future. Jay Michaelson: That sentence fills me with a little anxiety. Brian Schwartzman: Oh, sorry. Jay Michaelson: There's that mindfulness thing. What's next? I don't know. I have a couple of next book projects, that's the subtext for that. And it's like, which kind of kind of book do I want to do next? So anyway, I own that anxiety, not you. Brian Schwartzman: Thanks for coming back. It was good to talk to you again. Jay Michaelson: Really fun, Brian. Thank you. Brian Schwartzman: Thanks so much to Jay Michaelson. Reminder, his new book is The Secret That is Not a Secret: 10 Heretical Tales, and it's available from major booksellers and its publisher, Ayin Press. We'll be back next month with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Waus. Our theme song [inaudible 01:03:52] is by Rabbi Miriam Margoles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Brian Schwartzman, and I will see you next time. Speaker 2: (Singing).