Rabbi YY Jacobson Interviews Professor Alan Dershowitz | My Career, My Life, My Faith

the yeshiva.net hello hello alan good afternoon so welcome away from someone okay how are you looks like a beautiful library behind you good reminds you of usada's house rib label no my zada didn't have a lot of much of a library you know i grew up in a house without books interestingly enough um we talked a lot but where there were there aren't a lot of books my house has a lot of books but you compensated we compensated broken we didn't grow up with music books culture we grew up with a lot of talking a lot of arguments okay you did well with that we had we had a sitter a humish and that's it you know but your grandfather was one of the founders of tara vadas no he was uh both of my grandfathers were on the fed and on the first young israel the young israel of brooklyn and uh mike one of my grandfather's names was on a plaque with mr wolf i forget wolf from born in israel williamsburg bar park yeah i know in williamsburg i was born in williamsburg um i think 193 eu street it's now a base midrash yeah where do you where are you from i grew up in brooklyn but now here in rockland county muncie ah oh good good good good so where in brooklyn did you grow up crown heights montgomery street oh yeah so i went to i went to brooklyn town munich academy on bedford and president street oh wow between president greene bedford and franklin yeah for elementary no high school and yeshiva university too no i got denied admission i wasn't smart enough so i had to go to brooklyn college okay is that part of your rosebud yeah yeah yeah so uh what are we gonna talk about for how long you tell me uh uh i would love to talk about half an hour okay yeah whatever you'll give us we'll gracefully accept it's an honor and a privilege oh it's my it's my honor and privilege good and a few years ago we were talking about a jewish prisoner who was in dire conditions i came with mr uh barry's okay on him so i saw all the books in your house yeah yeah yeah so yeah i know i'm sure i i mean i i represent a lot of jewish prisoners free so um you know i don't know which one that was happening a friend of mine thank you i did i did i worked on his behalf and i did a lot of work for olive on a lot of cases i've helped about maybe 10 people now so we can talk about that we can talk whatever you want to talk about who is the audience the audience is really uh very diverse i mean mostly the jewish community um i would say religious secular more affiliated and some less affiliated very diverse good but more or less jewish brothers and sisters from the world over good best crime is the privilege of speaking to the honorable alan dershowitz and if you will look at his wikipedia page he's immediately identified as somebody who possesses many controversial views which makes him one of the fascinating and extraordinary jewish figures of our time and it's really an honor and a privilege to be here with you on a zoom today we say gam zumlatova with alan so my first my first question is if i may what would you consider when you reflect on your life a rich interesting extraordinary life really part and parcel of contemporary jewish history in american history great fighter for civil liberties great fighter on behalf of the underdog and for great moral virtue and justice in the united states and abroad what would you consider your greatest success what are you most proud of when you look back at your life that's a great question uh you talk about zun my grandmother would probably say i'm oysters i do it uh so often now uh but um i would say i would list the two things one on the micro one on the mac level to start on the macro level i think i helped change the tone of the debate regarding israel on college campuses i think that my book the case for bill and my appearances on 100 college campuses not only around the country but around the world oxford university cambridge university university of leiden you name it uh american universities virtually every american university i think i've helped change the nature of the debate on israel and help to create a more sympathetic attitude toward israel among open-minded people not people of the extreme left not people who are extreme in their views but i think that's the accomplishment i'd be most proud of on the macro large level on the micro level in an individual probably helping natan sharansky get out of the gulag uh i was his lawyer for almost eight years um and i never forget um when he crossed the ground the geineky bridge was a free man and a couple of days later when i met him and he threw his arms around me and he whispered just three words in my ear which were so important um you know blessed are those who freely imprisoned of course for every day growing up i said the bracha of you know materia and uh and uh to have participated in it and helped him get out of the gulag and then become a close friend of his and a supporter when he was in politics in israel those are two of my major professional accomplishments of course personally wonderful children grandchildren wife family um very supportive um that's everybody's most important accomplishment yes of course now if i may uh you'll grant me permission if you don't want to talk about it i understand what would you consider your greatest failure or your greatest regret it's a fair point uh my greatest regret was that i ever met a man named jeffrey epstein um i was introduced to him by the lady rothschild um people told me he was this wonderful philanthropist he had given 30 million dollars to harvard he had built the harvard hill building um and so i was willing to meet him and of course the result was that i was falsely accused by a woman i never met of having had sex with her fortunately um we were able to prove that she made up the whole story i never met her we found emails from her which she tried to hide in which she admits she never heard of me nonetheless notwithstanding all the overwhelming evidence that i never met this woman to its everlasting disgrace the 92nd street y this great center of jewish learning where i spoke for 25 years cancelled me and said i can no longer speak there they acknowledge that nothing wrong but they said they didn't want trouble i mean that's just old-fashioned mccarthyism so the 92nd street why behaved horribly miserably very unjewishly in the way they canceled me they wouldn't allow me to speak about israel at the 92nd street y even though thousands of people wanted to hear me speak they didn't allow me to speak because of a false charge of false accusation and um you know they they violate obviously the assyrian had wrote they took seriously the false witness the casting of false witness you know when jewish law if you make a false accusation you get the same penalty as the person would have gotten had you truthfully accuse them right jewish law very seriously false accusations we learned the lesson of yosef and potofar's wife and uh you know it's part of the ten commandments but the 92nd street why chose to ignore it how do you deal with that emotionally personally does that very hurtful or you say i don't get hurt i get angry um i get angry and i fight back and um and i am fighting back i've uh sued um the people who falsely accuse me i will win the lawsuit because the evidence is overwhelming but there will still be some people who if you are accused they think you must be guilty um i mean that's why i actually i wrote a book on the subject here it is it's called guilt by accusation where i take on the issue you know people said to me oh don't write the book it'll just make more people see the accusation i said i don't care about that i want to make sure everybody knows the accusation is totally false so in the book i have all the evidence tape recordings the emails everything that proves i never met the woman but i wish i had never met jeffrey epstein my life would have been a lot easier for the last six years wow how do you explain that just two mortgages after the holocaust so many jews loathe and despise israel i don't have to tell you what a man like professor norman finkelstein or chomsky have said about you have written about you and so many others how do you explain that after so many thousands of years of so much jewish suffering educated literary jews would be so uh self-hating towards the old jewish homeland that we have after dozens of muslim countries we have one little one little piece of land that used to be the size of dallas international airport yeah yeah no it's it's absolutely remarkable from all your years of experience what is it it's very hard to explain i mean jewish self-hate goes back generations of course we know that even during the holocaust the wacapos uh we know that during every period of jewish history there were jews who turned against jewish values and i think today to be an anti-zionist to single out israel for special program and criticism is the newest form of anti-semitism and we have to fight it and i do fight it and um i appear on college campuses and i'm booed and uh and sometimes they stop me from appearing uh by the way because of this false accusation i'm no longer invited on college campuses so this was not only an attack on me personally it was an attack on my ability to defend israel on college campuses even in jewish venues i no longer get invited to jewish book fairs uh to speak because maybe five or six people would protest so because five or six people would protest a thousand people are denied the opportunity to hear me and so i have to make my points known in my writings on my podcast and now for podcast that has over a hundred thousand subscribers it's called the dirsh show all that's missing is the wits their show wits and the wits is provided by the listeners and viewers you can get it every day on youtube on uh um uh all the other channels rumble and uh today i talked about israel on the show i talked about the international criminal courts a vicious attack on israel and look i'm 82 years old and i plan to spend the rest of my life as long as life is given to me by hashem uh defending israel and defending jewish values i see that as my main mission may you live to 120 and longer who is the next alan dershowitz in the jewish world who's your ear we need to train young people uh i have helped to do that i have a number of young proteges uh who are out there um and men and women both and i'm hoping that many more will follow and we'll become the advocates for israel because it's so important that we leave behind us people who can be better than we were and uh there are such people your great grandfather was repsharia the famous of kaya dershowitz saved from their triangle fire in greenwich village 1911. they said because he didn't come to work on shabbos that's my great grandfather right that was my great grandfather of course i never knew my great-grandfather turned off galicia and galicia in poland i was there yeah uh so was i um uh and i visited in the area uh where my grandparents came from uh the dershowitz family for years uh lived uh in that area of galicia and uh fortunately they were able to emigrate and then my grandfather helped save 29 members of our family from birno czechoslovakia on the eve of the uh holocaust and uh um and so you know we have a proud proud history that goes back a long long time uh the dershowitz they all worked hard they were laborers they were workers um they all obviously studied the gemara and uh and uh were jewishly educated and and care deeply about educating uh their their children uh and um uh you know it's uh i went back and i saw the little the little schneckel pilsnow where my great-grandparents uh um just south of tarnoff not too far from krakow and um and i found out about the fate of some of the dershowitz family two of them died in auschwitz a young boy 15 and his sister uh 16 their father escaped he was a part of the resistance so he was in the woods but they captured the two children brought them to auschwitz and and murdered them um and um so great grandfather was called the tsadic of williamsburg he was my grandfather was very and you went to orthodox schools yourself as a child and then you grow into i went to yeshiva and where i was abundant and then i i was turned down from flatbush yeshiva because my grades weren't good enough so i went to brooklyn mutical academy where my rabbi said to me afterward you know dershowitz you got a good mouth on you but you don't have a yiddish a cup so you should do something where you have to use your mouth but not your brain he said i have two suggestions one you could be a lawyer or two you could be a conservative rabbi there you don't have to think about that he was that he meant that as an insult i wasn't smart enough to be a rabbi so i had to become a lawyer um i was not a good student in yeshiva i learned a lot i still know how to you know how to learn um my bar mitzvah center with chef tim i can still lane it and there are two interesting parts of those three words number one why to do well why not just accept zedek be just you have to chase after it it never is accomplished it's always a race there's always going to be people who try to be unjust so you have to always stay ahead of the unjust people and then white said that said first of all we'll never agree about what said deck is we'll always have disagreements there'll be justice for the accused there'll be justice for the victim there are so many ways of achieving justice injustice is easy we understand we recognize injustice very easily but justice is not so easy to recognize i think also the cops kerabi said and i know your great grandfather was eruptions i think they cut everything you have to pursue justice in just ways okay no that's that's very important that is the procedural and substantive justice felix frankfurter the great supreme court justice said the history of liberty is a history of procedure a history of doing it in the right way doing it in a just way the ends do not justify the means under jewish law and we must always pursue justice justly i agree with that so you grew up in a very orthodox torah-oriented mitzvas oriented home and then you move on you become the youngest uh professor at harvard university i think in the history of harvard in the early 1960s what what motivates you to so to speak move on from within the orthodox world and how do you feel about those choices looking back today it's a very good and difficult question um i was always a very observant joe but i was not a theological jew and my home was not filled with theology i don't ever remember having a conversation with either of my parents or with my grandparents about believing in god about whether god wrote the torah for us judaism was the little you with the circle around it you made sure you didn't need a candy bar that didn't have a texture uh it was waiting six hours not five hours after meat um with my grandmother you couldn't even have fish after meat you had to have the fish before the meat uh you know every morning to say modani every night to say shemala amita i never broke a rule i i was the most rule observant person i still am the most rule-observant person in the world i just live by slightly different roles so for me my my judaism was orthopraxy i practiced my judaism i practiced my orthodoxy i didn't think much about theology i didn't think much about a god we argued about it as we as kids would do and then when i turned 28 i was strictly observant until i was or when i clerked on the supreme court i wouldn't work on chavez um when i was editor-in-chief of the law journal uh they made a joke of it and they had every seven page empty one year just to commemorate the fact that i didn't work on on shoppers and when my kids were old enough my i had my kids very young um one of my children was born when i was 21 and a half and the other one when i was 23. so i had my children very young and by the time i was 28 i was finding it hard to justify to my children uh strict orthodoxy because of the practice and so we're still very jewish i mean i go to an orthodox synagogue i go to park east i love rabbi schneier and i love cousin healthcare um i still am a stickler i love singing jewish melody i divined in the choir i was in the choir of moshe kristavitsky and beryl and so you know my my jewish heritage is very deep in me um and uh you know i i try my best not to work on on shabbos and jewish holidays i won't appear in court obviously on any of those days in fact i couldn't argue the pollard case because it was scheduled for second day of rosh hashanah and justice ginsburg of sacred memory wouldn't postpone it she said it was only the second day of rosh hashanah and that's not so important well for me it was important i celebrate two days of rosh hashanah wow so you know i'm a mixed picture when it comes to um to jewish tradition army in the morning huh you still say boy in the morning i do and uh but you know i had an ex i wonder what i wonder what your listeners will think of this experience i didn't decide that i was not necessarily a theological believer in everything it was decided for me so here's the story when my son was 10 years old he got very sick he had a malignant brain tumor and everybody thought he would die and i went from coast to coast getting him the best medical care and having surgery and having uh all kinds of radiation and thank god he's alive and well uh but for me the greatest day of my life was taking him to college i didn't think i'd ever so we flew to the university of colorado uh in boulder and then i was so happy i had a smile on my face i got on the airplane going home from denver airport the plane got up in the air and suddenly it started shaking and the pilot announced in a very shaking voice we have a very serious problem here the flaps are locked in the takeoff position we can't land if we land it will risk the plane flipping over et cetera we have to get rid of all the fuel we have to do this we have to do that and everybody around me people crying people were praying people were holding their rosary beads um i took out my notebook and i started to write a letter to my children and i wrote a letter to each of my then two children i put them in my sh in my uh electric shaving case the plastic case thinking it would survive even if i didn't and but i noticed something i noticed that i wasn't praying i noticed that i wasn't asking god to help me i didn't choose that it just was a fact of life that i was not religious in that way i could still observe and can still be part of the jewish culture but when the test occurred you know they say there are no atheists in the foxhole i'm not an atheist i absolutely am not an atheist i'm a skeptic i'm a doubter i don't know i don't know it would not surprise me uh if the jewish theology were completely correct the one thing i am convinced of is that the jewish god won't punish me for being a skeptic because being skeptical is too jewish um uh you know there's a wonderful story about a great hasidic rebbe uh who never said anything bad about anybody or anything that was his thing never say anything bad and so the hasidim to trick him on purim said rebbe say something good about being an atheist and they thought they would trick him and he said there's the time in everybody's life when they must be an atheist what yes when you see a poor person on the street begging for food don't ever say god will help him you must act there is no god that you're the only person in the world that can save them so you know sometimes i think that way sometimes i think the other way i am utterly uncertain about my views but i am i am certain that god would never punish me for having my doubts and thinking i think about god a lot um but you know i have my my skepticism i have my skepticism about evolution about science about everything i'm skeptical about the world that's the way i am and i think i learned it from the talmud the talmud is a very skeptical book it's the first book in history first religious book ever to preserve the dissenting opinions in every other religion they burned dissenters they hanged the centers they crucified the centers in judaism we honored that's beautiful which story in the tanakh in the torah inspires inspired you inspires you most or challenges that's easy how can anybody who's a lawyer and not be inspired by that here you have avraham he has barely met hashem i mean they just meet in the previous chapter they hardly know each other and hashem says shall i withhold from avraham what i am going to do to the sinners of saddam and he uses the word abraham uses the word you know the king james version misinterprets it as far be it from the no leela i mean if you're a mahal shabbos if you're uh you know it's such a strong word there is no english word full of of even translating it it's a desecration of you it's irreligious of you how dare you the judge of all the world shall himself not do justice i wish i had the husband to stand up to judges and say that i have felt it sometimes but i have never said it and so that story has inspired me from the day i read it at age 10. i remember talking back to my review when i was like 10 or 11 years old and the me and said how dare you talk back to me i said most talk back to god and of course he said he was moshe and you're not moshe you're allen i'm not motion i'm abraham i'm motion to talk back to god yeah he said take me from my book take take me don't write me in your book if you don't even know me foreign if you don't forgive the people yeah yeah i love those stories you know i wrote a book called the genesis of justice yes which is my first my amateurish mid-rush and there's a funny story about it so i was in israel writing the book i was in israel writing the book and i had a draft of it a rough draft and i wanted to show it to my uncle my uncle rob's doctor saharian darshaf changed his name from dershowitz darshaf when he moved to israel my father's only living youngest brother great man great man wonderful thomas kakum so i gave him the book to read and he came back to me and said avi my name was avi and my family avi it's a very good book it's a very smart book there's a little bit of api chorus here and there but it's a very smart book but i need you to change only one word in the book i said for you uncle zaki of course i'll change one word what word dircew it's on the cover i said that word i won't change uh but uh we had a good exchange about it and so i've written i've written two books about the the book of about bereshit i've wrote my book the genesis of justice which was translated at the hebrew uh bereshit and then i wrote a book called abraham the world's first but certainly not last jewish lawyer yes about jewish lawyers that too it's bad absolutely yeah his face story yeah using abraham as a model i do very much so and you know the great thing about jewish models no one's perfect no jewish hero is perfect you know it's not like jesus and muhammad according to christian tradition jesus is perfect 42 muslim tradition muhammad is perfect in jewish tradition avraham is not perfect moshe is not perfect certainly david malek is not perfect uh joshua is not perfect you know people say maybe there were one or two people in the bible more obscure than others uh bingham maybe he was perfect uh but we don't look for perfection we look for human beings who deal with life's crises and often in imperfect ways we look for accountability not perfection that's right yeah yeah because it's realistic we can have accountability but we can never have perfection when we create heroes and try to make them perfect we're always going to be disappointed whether it be abraham lincoln george washington thomas jefferson david ben-gurion theodore herzog zev jabatinsky none of them was perfect but boy were they heroes i'm just finishing a biography of jeb zev a jabez man what an amazing man um it's just unbelievable and herzl what an amazing man these are people speeches you have to listen to some of his yiddish speeches he was a brilliant you know i've only been able i've only been able to find one online if you have others send them to me because i'd love to hear him speak he spoke like 11 languages yes uh he was supposed to be he was reputed to be the greatest art of the first half of the 20th century barring time and um and the competition was pretty stiff i mean he went all around russia promoting zionism he created the first jewish army since the maccabees yeah um the legion the the zion mule corps amazing amazing man beggins inspiration his mentors teacher yeah and i i spent time with monochrome and we talked about javatensky and um people don't realize you know everybody knows the story of the about the altalena a lot of people don't know alta elena was japotinsky's name it was his literary pseudonym and so the boat was of course named after jabatinskiy the altalena and part of jewish history that was a great decision of begging not to allow civil war right well what wasn't so much bacon's decision as it was ben-gurion's they you know bacon was prepared to accept arms uh and uh brought in the alt elena and ben gurion fired on him i have a cousin who recently died uh he was an israeli ambassador he could not say the word ben-gurion without putting a curse word between the word ben and gurion because he was on the alta elena and a shell missed him just by inches and he said ben gurion tried to kill me he tried to kill being you know jews have always disagreed with each other the ergun and the haganah stern these were all they had a common cause a common end but uh some of them pursued sadek more justly and some of them pursued a little less justly wow who are some of the great one or a few jewish leaders or personalities in the last generation that have that inspire you or have inspired you well number one of course ellie wiesel who uh was a close close friend he sent me to russia when i was in my 30s he said to me alan i'm not asking you i'm telling you here is the ticket you go to russia you defend jews in russia he had just come back from russia he had written the jews of silence and he sent there as tis shaliah and i went and then i was in chile on many many other occasions i miss him every single day wow i once heard a speech of you about an interesting debate you had with the laboratory i think about justice it wasn't a debate it wasn't a debate that that would dishonor him i would never debate him he was such a wise man it was an exchange of views because khabar invited uh congressman helms to speak is that what happened no oh he that they they honored senator jesse helms at the time still expressed racist views and sometimes anti-semitic news and so i wrote a letter not criticizing but just raising the question why and he wrote me this brilliant response it's in the archives of the chabad our exchange in which said we don't honor for the past alone we honor for the future we try to impact and affect behavior and of course jesse helms became israel's strongest supporter on the foreign relations committee and became a great friend of israel and so the rebbe was right and i was wrong we also had discussions about the appropriate way of dealing with soviet jewry i was more in favor of open demonstrations economic pressure legislation he was more in favor of behind the scenes negotiations and we discussed that and we agreed that uh the two approaches could be compatible if they were done right you discussed that in person or the correspondence no personally personally i met the rebbe three times yeah with this first one up when i was 14 years old i met him for the first time um his secretary was a man named rabbi groener label broker right and when he first became the rebbe he had just i mean he was in his maybe late 30s or something i don't remember i can tell you the year it was the fall of 1951 um and my yeshiva was about a mile away from the chabad headquarters and my best friend in yeshiva was sv groener the nephew of rabbi groener so one day we went he invited us to have lunch with him we went to have lunch never anticipating meeting the rebbe we were sitting down and having lunch with rabbi groener sv groener and me and this man with this remarkable black beard and piercing eyes walks in uh doesn't introduce himself um and just turns to us and says so you're yeshiva buckets yes what are you learning and so we both said baba kama above him and see i forget which it was and he asked us a couple of questions he gave us a beginner and i have no idea whether i passed or not but i was tested by the laboratory when i was like 14 years old that was my first meeting with him my second meeting with him was when arthur goldberg was running for governor of new york and um arthur goldberg asked me to accompany him uh because i spoke a little yiddish and hebrew and uh to accompany him but to a meeting with the rebbe and so i sat in on the meeting between arthur goldberg and the rebbe and then the third time was in the 70s um when we when i had been in the soviet union and we had a meeting about soviet jewry and then we had the correspondence what what what are you what would be your summation of the laboratory in terms of his personality his his reach his perspective his wisdom his accomplishments i unbelievable isn't it there are no words to describe it um you know the jewish tradition says they're allah bubnics um um you know only a few in a generation he was not only allah nick he was above nick he was one of a handful of transformative figures in the 20th century along with ben gurion and herzl and jabatinsky and uh and he has to be in that category uh for a different reason chabad has become the most remarkable jewish organization uh currently on the planet uh i say on the planet the joke was when they send the rover to mars they people expected to see a chabad house there but uh every place i've gone in the world and i've been all over i was in every little city in the soviet union when i was defending russian jews i was in every shtetl there was always a chabad house when i went to uh indonesia there was a khabarov and i went to when i went to chiang mai there was a you know everywhere in the world and i helped to found the chabad at universities i was the first founding faculty advisor of chabad at harvard and khabar harvard was the first it then spread all over the world hershey zarki came to me and everybody laughed at him how could you have a hot at harvard people with beards and pay us yamaka at harvard and i said i'm on your side we're gonna do it just do two things for me i said two things one don't try to be smarter than the professors we have enough people appealing our brains we need people to appeal to our neshama to our heart to our lev so do that and then they marvelously and second i said try to have events where you don't have to separate men from women and so in the beginning the first years always had only events where holographically men and women could beat together but khabad became so popular that the students landed a minion demanded that they have quorum and passover and all that so now of course there has to be separation but it's minimal separation when you go to a shabbos dinner at khabad there are flower pots separating the men from the women and as soon and by the way women can have their own efforts to have some of the the prayers the odi and that and they they they figure out ways of increasing the role of women and then the minute uh the elena was done or whatever the kind of stuff they take the flowers away and and and and we're all together so um and the dinners at harvard are amazing last time i was at chabad i spoke to 500 people friday night including non-jew um my grandson who was not particularly uh religious came he wanted to he loves khabad he went to harvard and he loves hobart and a lot of his friends went so it attracts people from every background what do you feel about barry weiss quitting the new york times and what has become of the new york times do you agree with her i do agree with her i think the new york times uh has been taken over by young leftists who don't appreciate true diversity they want racial and gender diversity but they don't want ideological and religious diversity and barry did the right thing and she's created a terrific career for herself now she speaks all over the world she's become so important now that she doesn't respond to my emails or calls wow are you uncomfortable with the concept of chosen people as a civil libertarian no i just no i'm not at all um i understand it i don't understand it as privileged um um you know for for centuries jews kept saying i mean it's in fiddler on the roof god please stop choosing us why are you choosing us for all these terrible things yeah that are happening look every group thinks they're chosen uh you know it's it's it's pronounced in the jewish tradition but in every tradition the muslims think they're chosen uh christian people think they're chosen uh uh various protestant sects uh and protestant groups subgroups call themselves chosen everybody's entitled to think of themselves as chosen to do certain things we are chosen to be a light unto the nations we are chosen to try to lead by our example um our chosenness has caused us a lot of difficulty so i have no problem with the concept of the chosen people um if we are privileged we've earned our privilege um you know i remember at harvard people talking about me having white privilege white privilege are you kidding i grew up the first person in my family to go to college right um i grew up we didn't have toys we didn't have you know i couldn't go to college if we had to pay i went to a free college to brooklyn college i might have been able to afford achieving university tuition it wasn't very high in those days but they didn't want me so again brooklyn college but uh no i have no problem with the concept of chosen but i would hold up jewish literature from the torah to the most recent response against any any religious literature anywhere in the world in terms of humanitarian civil liberties progressive you name it by any criteria our religious tradition does very very well what was your most if i may what was your most spiritual moment that you can remember in your life or one of your most deep spiritual transcendent moments i think being at the birth of my children uh was very transcendent um uh seeing the death of parents um um interesting story about that my mother who lived till 95 and was very active and even when she couldn't remember things um she would always have conversations she would call me moisha picked because she couldn't remember my name and my brother but she could have conversations when when she was dying her kidneys were failing and the doctors all said take her off dialysis it'll just be painful and she won't be able to live and my brother and i said look uh doctors are one thing but my mother was very religious she wouldn't want us to make the decision based on the doctors alone she would want the decision to be made by her rabbi and so we consulted with her rabbi and the rabbi said absolutely keep her on dialysis she'll deal with the pain she wants an additional few months being alive seeing her children or grandchildren we did it she was on dialysis she lived the extra few months she had decent quality of life she was able to interact with her children and grandchildren so you know the rabbis can be right and the the doctors who we loved and who we respected just saw it in a more medical rather than in a more spiritual way so i've had a lot of spiritual moments um i don't tend to have spiritual moments in shul uh my spiritual moments tend to be outsider shawl uh but you know i when i go to schule i love to daven i love to say the words the words are very meaningful to me uh as a skeptic i challenge the words when i read them and i always think of alternative interpretations but uh you know i love jewish sources so we can't ignore this one what is your feeling not just as a lawyer not just as a teacher of law not just as a defender of law but also as a jew and as a lover of israel in terms of the whole trump presidency and the impeachment debate well yeah you have four or five hours i only have a few more minutes so i'll have to give you the short version um i have mixed feelings about donald trump um i think he's a very divisive person i don't like his language he's used i don't like his attitude toward women uh there are a lot of things about him personally i don't like that would be true by the way bill clinton too uh certainly true of barack obama and certainly true of lyndon johnson again we don't expect perfection um i disagree with a lot of trump's policies toward immigration we're a nation of immigrants we should be more welcoming of immigrants of all backgrounds i don't believe in his use of descriptions of certain countries is better than other countries so i have a lot of fundamental disagreement on the other hand when it came to israel i worked closely with him and his administration on israel i met him over israel the first time i met him he came over to me and he said you i have to talk to i hear you're a good friend of netanyahu i need to get messages to him and so he used me as a conduit to be being antonio and i think his approach to israel was exactly right what he did was he told the palestinians you have over the peace process israel will make peace with palestinians uh if they choose to and if it's in their interest but israel will make peace with and normalize with arab countries and other countries he did a marvelous job with the abraham accords with the movement to jerusalem of the embassy with the recognition of israel's sovereignty over the golan heights with his executive order saying that any university that tolerated anti-semitism or anti-zionism will lose federal funding again i consulted on that draft so i worked very closely with the trump administration well iran deal how do you feel about the iran deal well i think the air india was a disaster the original iran deal i wrote a book about it called the case against the iran deal i hope we don't go back in it as such um i think that maybe it would have been better to try to sit down and negotiate a better deal but i don't disapprove of him getting out of the deal um i think biden will get back in some form of the deal if the iranians are willing to make the deal stronger and longer and more extensive and and different than the original deal there are a few people up now for confirmation who were strongly supportive of the deal and i hope they don't get confirmed i'm going to be very tough toward the biden administration if they go back willy-nilly to the deal itself because i think the deal is a mistake look he should never have been impeached he did not commit impeachable offenses um having studied the torah i understand what language means i understand how important every word is when the constitution says treason bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors it means that it means crimes criminal type behavior it doesn't mean abuse of power it doesn't mean obstruction of congress it doesn't mean making a speech on january 6th it means criminal behavior and donald trump was never accused of criminal behavior and so he should not have been impeached i'd like to move on now and let's give the biden administration a chance let's have an open mind let's see if he can help unite the country let's be critical of him where criticism is deserved and let's praise him where praises deserve and i want to praise you for thanking for welcoming me on this talk i enjoyed very much your great questions your interesting questions and i hope that your viewers and listeners uh enjoyed my answers but at feel free to disagree with them no uh i think that's the role of a teacher to provoke people thank you and i hope i provoked some thinking we're jews if i could quote to you your teacher elie wiesel i once heard from him that we jews love debating each other we just give their debate sophisticated names we fight with the world and we call it sociology we fight with god we call it theology we fight with ourselves and we call it psychology one last brilliant i heard this but alan if you had 30 seconds to talk to the jewish world what's your message to the people of israel and to the jewish people get together get together focus on your commonality focus on the things we agree with we'll always disagree at the edges but agree that israel has the right not only to exist but to thrive that it is the right to be judged by a single standard make sure that we demand for ourselves what we have earned in melee if not for if we're not for ourselves who will be for us but if we're for ourselves alone what are we and in in if not now when so i think we have to stick together make sure that we always defend ourselves that we defend israel but also that we remain a light unto the world one last question hello one last question yes many people are asking is it in the constitutional power for government to mandate everyone to vaccinate i could have a whole show on that i i'll give you the short answer if vaccination prevents the spread of a deadly disease the government has the power to order it if it only prevents you from getting the disease then the government doesn't have the power to order it so it depends on the nature of the contagion the nature of the disease i think these vaccines can be made mandatory uh i don't think at this point in time we're there because right now we're trying to vaccinate people who want vaccinations but i think anybody everybody should want a vaccination and remember that in the torah it says that when people were afflicted with the communicable disease leprosy or uh other kinds of diseases they were forced to go outside the city it wasn't voluntary they were forced to go outside the city so that they wouldn't communicate it so i think that because and concepts of police power under our constitution are similar and under certain circumstances you can compel vaccinations or at least you can condition not me no no we've been voluntarily isolated but not quarantined wait some people will say that uh in a normal circumstance that the vaccination was the vaccine was proven to be good and so that's a fine but right now that people don't everyone agrees we don't know the full extent of the long-term effects can you mandate mandate well uh can you make somebody serve in the army uh the answer is yes you can make them serve in the army even though nobody has ever proved that the army is good for your health so there are certain things that can be compelled in our country and if the vaccine is effective in preventing the spread if it helps to get herd immunity and um and unless there is strong evidence of negative effects i think the government can generally compel it but that's a whole other show it would take hours to go through all the issues but i can tell you one thing and here i challenge any rabbi to disagree with me that under jewish law the quran the saving of lives under the way the torah describes how lepers and others were treated there is no prohibition in jewish law against taking the vaccine and those very small number of rabbis very small number who have said there is a jewish prohibition were wrong and the vast number of rabbis including the vast number of casita rabbis who have said it's permissible some have said it's compulsory under jewish law i think peacock nephesh is so important that saving lives not only of our own lives but of our neighbors lives our families lives our children's lives take precedence over almost everything uh else in life thank you so much for having me okay thank you please send me a copy of this link so i can send it on to other people okay awesome thank you be well sure bye youtube bye this class is brought to you by the yeshiva.net please help us continue the classes make even a small contribution at www.theyoshiva.net donate