The Jewish Story: Heralds of Zion, part II: Moses Hess

making your way in the world today takes everything it got taking a break from all your worries it sure would help a lot and if you need a citation for that one well i'm just dating myself this is what i'm doing i'm taking a break cause i'm rob mike foyer and this is the jewish story apparel design part two moshe hess hi folks it's rob mike before you get going on this live series i want to invite you to put your money where your ears are and help make season four happen you can go right now to my website www.jewishstory.co and you'll see our button in the upper right hand corner there you can click on it become a patron and give a little bit of per podcast support or you can contact me at rob mike foyer gmail.com or find me at facebook at rob mike foyer and i'll happily share with you the details of how you can support in other ways if you want to hear that content which helps you understand past and present and gives you the inspiration for building the future put your money where your ears are right now and help me make season four happen as always i want to thank the paradise institute that's p-a-r-d-s.org that il for helping make this class happen okay here we are still life in a remote universe um yes and i agree with that request that was just made that everyone could just mute themselves so that uh the sound of my own voice is always the sweetest thing right um so so we're in the midst of this discussion of the roots of zionism and just to recall last week we focused on what i would call the religious roots of zionism but not just the religious roots of zionism but we laid out was a structure which is going to continue to follow us um as we go all the way through which is the two elements that i see as the foundational frames for zionism there's that problem-solving element and there's the visionary or messianic element and if you recall the problem-solving has much of its roots in the either modern conception of the jewish problem which we've spoken at length and it will return to us today about how emancipation in many ways posed that problem because the jews no longer fit into modern european society but it also has an older iteration where if zionism is a problem-solving movement then the fundamental problem is exile itself we saw that beautiful piece from the maharal which i hope you recall about how exile is an unnatural state and therefore it itself necessitates redemption and that idea of necessity is going to return to us as well today i want you to keep your eye on it so that's the sort of like problem solving piece that we're using as a frame the visionary or messianic what we saw last week is the classic messianic is built in in a very subtle way for secular zionism but in a very front-loaded way the visionary messianic element um has obvious life within religious zionism all the remembering that religious zionism will essentially remain a bit player until 1967 but it will have its impact on secular size and we'll see more of that today so that's kind of um quickly touching where we were last week what i want to talk about today is a fundamental tension which exists not only in zionism but all the torah and frankly is expressive of one of the fundamental elements of life itself which is the tension between claus and prot right there's tension in between the particular and the universal or the all embracing um because that tension you know the zohar says it's the tension that the soul comes into the world in order to reconcile and its attention which is always bound up with the redemptive instinct within um israel like the probably the most obvious expression of it in torah even though you can find it in many places is this strange notion that there's only one god who happens to also be the national god of israel right i mean you have this sense that right you say that i'm israeli is your god yeah but there's only one god right so he's everybody's god no he's our god wait can we try this again if there's only one god he's your god yeah but then he's everybody's god well yes but no you see my point is that built into the entire sort of framework of the torah is this tension between the particular and the universal and it's gonna have a specific expression here in our discussion in 19th century europe because 19th century european society itself is struggling between what i would call the parochial and the cosmopolitan instincts right and we're going to see that the um pro creo will find its strongest expression within nationalism although along with that will be a lot of the racial theories that we touched a little bit about with the polygenism of voltaire if you recall at the end of last semester right and the but that's going to really be embodied in our discussion today in nationalism that parochial sense that that um the unit of measure for history for culture for for even for the shaping of meaning is a national unit as opposed to the universalists which will say and universalism is funny right on one hand the unit of measure for for history meaning culture etc is all humanity that means that it's the individual plays a very important role as opposed to the nation so there's a lot of uh cross currents but essentially for our discussion we're going to see this tension between nationalism and the more cosmopolitan movements of socialism communism you know etc up until now we've at least touched on a few places where this tension comes up and i want to just get them on the board so we can appreciate our discussion today i didn't actually say it outright but our discussion today is going to be about uh moshe hess and the work which is considered sort of at least post-facto by many scholars as one of the earliest works of what we then call zionism it was a work called roman jerusalem it's going to take us a while to get there because i want to understand it when we do and has a rich life before it becomes one of the heralds of zionism as we call them so so in order to do that i want to put a couple of the pieces in the place because we haven't learned about this part of modernity as a whole we jumped into zionism there's a little bit of context um this tension between the particular and the universal for the hasidim who are a major force in european jewish life primarily eastern european but i want to get the full picture before we go any further they see the answer to the jewish question as sort of a national spiritual solidarity and a messianism this hope for redemption and therefore tend to belong to the more particularist element of the let's just call it of the jewish perspective right they're not looking for except in the sort of far far future for a universal redemption their vision is national it's a one body they say very familiar to us today because a lot of the language of the qasim has been absorbed into our common religious language um just let me know if the folks are still out there like wave or or make some noise or something it's just the the total silence is a little bit intimidating i have to admit um so along with the hasidim we also have the sort of more orthodox religious world which we haven't really discussed at all but for now what i'm going to do is lump oddly enough the orthodox and the reform movement together and we'll touch on the reform movement a little bit today in the sense that thank you shelley for the thumbs up in the in the sense that um that both the thing that orthodoxy and reform have in common at this stage of like say the 19th mid 19th century mid to late 19th century is that they're both oddly enough assimilationist movements in their own way and i know it might sound strange to call orthodoxy and assimilationist movement but in their own way both of them are looking to assimilate into the larger society by transforming the national life of the jews into the religion of judaism now it's not that such a thing is a foreign import but it is to a certain degree to make it the mosaic faith either the orthodox version of the reform version is an assimilationist move because then i can be a german of the orthodox persuasion or a german of the reform persuasion but notice it's an assimilationist move and therefore in many ways is a more universalist tendency that's why if you're familiar we're not going to discuss it now but just to put on the table things that people are familiar with if you're familiar with the tensions that exist within orthodoxy one of the most profound is is how do you reconcile between the particularism sees the jews as the chosen people that sees the torah as the sole source of truth fill in the blank of the where how you define the particular them of orthodoxy and yet it's um striking ability to function within a universalist society in in many ways the hereditary world has a much easier time working within the bounds of modern israel than the dhatilimi world which is attempting to reconcile and and synthesize and come up with some holistic vision creator world just wants to find its right place um so for our picture the hasidim are much more removed and still invested in this sort of uh national solid spiritual solidarity and the hope for redemption they also happen to be in eastern europe where emancipation has not quite made the inroads that it's made in western europe at this stage of our story then we have orthodoxy and reform which i'm going to call assimilationist movements because they're attempting to sort of like refocus jewish life as a religious life which can be french jews german jews american jews fill in the blank and then last but uh certainly not least we haven't discussed the scala the jewish enlightenment we're really going to touch on it directly next week but these are going to be the intellectuals who are struggling with the hasidim in eastern europe and also the orthodox in western europe and they're looking at this stage certainly in western europe to achieve emancipation and to assimilate into european society on a much more grand scale western europe they're the inheritors of emergence mendelson and we spent the last section of last semester speaking about in eastern europe we'll see that there they become the sort of fertile bed for secular zionism but we're not there yet okay so those are the pieces and we have to add to this tension between the particular and the universal and the roots of zionism a new profile and that profile is going to be uh what i'll call the radical jew may be familiar with people today um but the radical jew is an idealistic youth right who is going to strip the traditional garb and sort of expressions off of the messianic drive which gives life too much of religious existence and clothe it in the philosophical social economic theories of their day and this radical jew is probably best embodied for our story by moshe hess so before i get into moja has questions comments on that bit of an introduction which is hopefully helping to ground us where we are you can either do it verbally or you can write them into the chat i just want to pause for a second to make sure that people are with me so we're going to meet jewish nationalism for the first time really at the end of this class with some of the writings it has like i said um roman jerusalem and and we'll discuss it then my short answer for now is um on one hand jewish nationalism is like every other nationalism on the other hand because the roots of jewish particularism are bound up with a universalist perspective i mean who is the national pro-gen progenitor of the jewish people well abraham right and he becomes avraham right when he becomes abraham when god names him the father of many peoples you can't get a better expression of the tension i'm speaking about than that our national progenitor the ultimate particularism is a universalist figure and so therefore the thing that really differentiates between jewish nationalism and and others potentially is the universalism which is its mission and we're going to speak about that because that's why i introduced with this tension between the particular universal so stay tuned other questions comments people things you want to put out there you can do it in the chats as well as speaking out yeah well because radical is always defined in relationship to whatever the mainstream conservative standard format is so that's not an unfair association well i'm going to explain exactly what the radical jew is momentarily in the in the mid 19th century we're going to forge forward and again people have questions and comments you can throw them into the chat if i don't hear you okay so who was moshe hess moshe hess or moritz as he's really known in his younger years is born in 1812 in the city of bonn so he's born into germany remembering that germany at this point is part of the napoleonic empire because um from 1795 or so to 1814 napoleon's troops had conquered most of western and central europe and in doing so we didn't speak about him but i'm hoping that your general world history at least gives you some familiarity and in doing so they've thrown open the gates of the ghetto wherever they went good bad or otherwise that was part of what napoleon did he brought the ideals of the french revolution wherever he was and after centuries of cultural confinement right a personal freedom economic opportunity and of course the liberal ideals of the day became available to way more jews than moses mendelson ever could have imagined because we spoke about mendelssohn had these sort of very high flown ideas but they were extremely elitist just because practically speaking the conservative social structure would not emancipate the jews if you recall all the struggles of mendelssohn's day it took napoleon to destroy the social structure and rebuild it in his own image that would allow the jews real emancipation but the thing is is that of course napoleon is defeated in right and with his defeat comes what's known as the congress of vienna now the congress of vienna is a discussion under itself we're not going to go into it right now but just know two things first of all it was by and large a reactionary process napoleon's defeat 1815 leads to a restructuring of europe and what's known as the congress of vienna um and like i said it's its own discussion if you wanted to get into the depth of it but the two things that we need to know for our story are number one it was by and large a reactionary movement the four powers of europe that had defeated napoleon had an aspiration to turn back the clock to the monarchical religious conservative society that he had destroyed truth of the matter is they didn't really succeed but that that's not our issue right now our issue is that that was the goal that was number one and number two they created this concept of balance of power within europe that it was really out of the congress of vienna that there was a sort of um self-conscious commitment to the idea that the goal of european foreign policy on the behalf of all powers should be to prevent any one state or empire because they're really empires at this point of becoming too strong and that idea of balance of power will stick around from basically for the next 100 years until it of course blows up in their faces in world war one um so the those two pieces of those two pieces right now what really matters for us is this attempt to roll back the clock because for the jews when the rhineland in particular for our story where moshe has living is annexed to prussia king frederick william iii wants to revoke emancipation from the jews and in fact he does legally revoke emancipation from the jews so they had this progress on napoleon um and then rolling back i see someone made a comment like a fledgling eu the eu is actually a conscious attempt to create a new model rather than balance of power it's an actual union right and that's a discussion we could have at another time but here hass is born into a world in 1812 where his parents generation had tasted the economic freedom the personal liberties that came with the opening of the ghettos and then had it taken away and that provoked a crisis which for many people who couldn't bear the notion of sort of returning to a degraded state having really sampled the freedom of european society many of them chose baptism a lot of famous names this is when you know the children and grandchildren of of moses mendelssohn many of them converted as we spoke about at the end of last semester that was during this crisis if you're familiar with um heinrich hein the sort of famous poet who was part of the young germany movement very important poet in german history who was born a jew and famously said that the that baptism was the um price of entry into european culture right and so therefore took it um and a lesser known but quite important figure heinrich marks who was of course karl marx's father changed his name and converted on the very same day went from hashel to heinrich and from a judo christian on the very same day there were however of course knowing the jews meaning those are the people that jumped for the universalism they said that they they took that notion that in order to be part of the emancipated enlightened european society you have to check your particularist culture at the door and they went for it full on through baptism right there were others who however went in the opposite direction and said well the solution is to become more of a jew and that's actually what moshe hesse's family did it became much more fiercely attached to the religion and therefore he grew up in a home of deep religiosity nevertheless you know you can't shut the barn door after the cow got out um and and the ideals of the french enlightenment as well as the german enlightenment and the general culture of um modernity were already part of the almost like i said the air that he breathed um and like so many other idealistic young men um he was being moved by the waves of of mystic nationalism and romanticism that were swirling in germany in his day we'll speak a little bit more about that but what basically bottom line in a story which i'm sure many of us are familiar with his father wanted moshe to enter the family business and he said no way he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do but um his longing was to serve humanity that's a very important piece of his character from a young age in his writings and his own sort of like writings about himself he was moved by the desire to help the poor to liberate the oppressed right but above all not to make money he saw the whole way of life into which he'd been born which for his father was survival as a bourgeois egotism of the most disgusting type and that's uh a story which has returned to itself in many ways in the time in which we live so what did he do he wandered he left his home and basically starved i mean obviously he lived so he didn't completely starve but he wandered in poverty from england to holland to france he was in paris in the wake of the revolution of 1830 if people familiar with it when many of the sort of social advances that had been taken away after napoleon was defeated some of them were regained it was a very heady time picture him there in the cafes of paris drinking coffee discussing politics dreaming of global revolution and it was here in paris in the early 1830s that he finally or finally he first imbibed the radical social and economic ideas really many of which came with his fellow german immigrants there who put themselves in self-imposed exile in france the call of the day in this intellectual class that he joined was to fight capitalism in the form of abandoning individual enterprise and the ruthless competition that they claimed were destroying the body and soul of humanity and the dream that they longed to replace it with was a collective right this notion that a collective undertaking would release the energies of humanity in a planned and harmonious manner bringing universal prosperity justice happiness right this is the foundational environment for socialism in fact one of the earliest radical socialists was fond of declaring that the very possession of private property was the root of all evil and that justice and freedom would never be achieved without social and economic equality that depended on the complete abolition of inheritance and private property now you have to picture young hess who himself had sacrificed a life of at least economic comfort he didn't leave his home in order to escape his jewish confines he left his home because he wanted to escape the capitalist environment he's drinking up these ideas like wine right you have to add into this mix of the the socialist notion if you're going to pick out any phrase to remember just remember that phrase that the very possession of private property is the root of all evil add into this german idealism now it's not a class of philosophy and if it were we probably should better do justice to jewish philosophy than non-jewish nevertheless in order to understand the environment of formation really for zionism as a whole but certainly for moshe hess we have to understand a little bit of the german idealist movement um i went back and forth myself spent way more hours than perhaps i should have reading up on kant and and uh which was fun but but i'm going to hold back and just say a few things first of all the um the element that we want to trace out of kant's thought if you remember kant was a contemporary of moses mendelson so we're talking about the end of the 18th century and and kant really lies at the base of german idealism even though one could say that he's a precursor to it not going to get into all those debates about who belongs where in what philosophical school but the phrase i want you to pull out from constant is that the basis for morality is the autonomy of will right therefore in a political sense then everyone is an end unto themself and only notion of a right moral society is a political life which is organized around the idea of of um sort of serving as a base for autonomous will right sounds nice society oh i gotta see a question from you sorel yeah israel before i get to further too much further into uh into german idealism is the autonomy of the will of the will itself i'll get to that question about socialist and religious at the same time first of all he wasn't religious he abandoned his religion along with his his parental home let's talk about moshe has but i want to answer israel's question first and then we'll get back to moshe hass um the if you remember kant was the one who defined enlightenment as um as uh an escape from knowledge and escape from this state in which someone else's will is imposed upon you right and so therefore his idea of morality is the freedom of your own will well that sounds nice but then you have to create a society within which the individual can be free and that's the early enlightenment notions we saw er with mendelssohn's thought and khan's thought but that's only the beginnings of where german idealism will go because um we're going to see that that um the students of kant and even some of his contemporaries really struggle with this idea of the individual will as opposed to a collective national will and and and will often see actually real freedom as the embodiment of collective will and this is where the more romantic notions will start to replace the intellectual notions of the enlightenment and i don't want to go like i said too far into the philosophical distinctions also because my grasp of german idealism is not good enough to do anything other than really confuse you but the idea that a political collective can express will and not just serve as a platform everyone's individual freedom but rather actually can articulate a will which can only be expressed on the national scale is becoming it's going to become a very important part of european thought and in fact as a backbone of what's known as european romantic nationalism like abraham asked the question at the beginning of the class how is jewish nationalism different than other nationalisms and how it's the same one of the ways in which it will be very closely allied is the sense that there is such a thing as a national will and that the state or let's just say the collective because state is not necessarily the given at this stage of history the collective has the ability to express will on a level that the individual lacks so here's hess sitting in the cafes of paris absorbing on one hand these notions of the evils of private property to answer the question that uh that gold asks he is no longer religious he's abandoned the house of his father in every sense literally he's moved out religiously he's abandoned it and economically he's rejected any support from his father at this stage and in addition to these socialist notions he's also absorbing certain elements of german idealism the importance of the freedom of the will the question of what scale that will can find best expression on is it the individual is it some national units or is it some sort of universal sense that you know that they're after universal justice and freedom right into this of course in any discussion of german idealism we have to put heco and and here there's just a couple of things we have to understand about hegel in order to really appreciate where this story is going more than anything else you have to understand in hegel is a sense of inevitability right in his lectures in the philosophy of history hegel sort of paints a picture of an unfolding progression through time he sees it european that he is um from the greco-roman to the european and he sees it as a progress from the one person having the authority to rule over others to the idea that a class of people has the authority to rule over others and ultimately to the idea that no one has the natural authority to rule over anyone else therefore all men are free notice he is by the way saying men because he's still a product of his own society um this is not just a um philosophical well i should say just philosophical it's not just a a read of history it's an idealist's read of history meaning it's a cosmic assertion that that the world itself has what has been translated as a world spirit which is moving toward self-awareness and that self-awareness finds its expression in the world through people's rational knowledge right this is the um who was supporting us he was living hand-to-mouth he was working as a journalist in order to just even pay very barely his bills sitting in these cafes drinking wheat coffee and being very hungry right but absorbing the ideas and in particular this hegelian idea don't miss the importance that the world is inevitably moving toward freedom rational knowledge right and that this is a cosmic movement of the universe coming to awareness of itself in this sort of like almost mystic sense even though god is not being spoken about as a fierce sense of like god outside of the world but rather the world itself is coming to consciousness and because of that process there is also inevitability of the collision between social intellectual economic and political forces right this is if people are familiar with hegel was the one who first really formulated the social idea of the dialectic that you have a thesis an idea or a thing it which through opposition brings into the world its antithesis and the two clash and produce a new thesis that's that process of synthesis was that a question somebody was putting out there was that just background okay um the the i see a question out there i'm looking at the chat yeah i saw when does the collective will become the coercive will we're going to get to that in 1860s don't worry we're getting there um the but for now you're talking about i idealism right there they're not yet these young men in the cafes they're not yet empowered to act upon these ideas they're trying to conceptualize exactly what the world could be oh it's a great question i see from aviva she's sensing that there's a association between hegel and spinoza's no notion of god or nature and you're going to see momentarily that the first work that hess tries to write is a synthesis of some spinoza and hegelian thought along with his socialist notions so yeah there is this idea that that the world itself is evolving in our language right and that its evolution is expressed through the spread of rational knowledge which brings freedom to all humanity now you'll if you are paying attention you'll see that this is the base of all optimism within western secular culture but the very optimism of western secular culture is founded on this idea progress and progress is usually defined by the spread of knowledge and freedom and it won't be really until maybe the interwar period between world war and world war ii or for much of the world the sort of post-world war ii period in which that notion collapses economic prosperity will continue to be a standard of measure but even today if you look what's happening today with the collapse of i won't be over dramatic but let's say the contraction of world economy a lot of people's reaction to what's happening now is that the secular world has no longer any standard by which to measure progress certainly not freedom of the world because we have this retrograde motion in many places in the world toward a more authoritarian form of government knowledge with the post-modern problems has become itself problematic and now the sense of like endless abundance and sort of an unstoppable progression toward more consumption has proven to be let's just say less than stable but we're way ahead of ourselves for hess these notions of hegel add a very important piece to his socialism because if there's an inevitability in the collision between the four of what must be and what is right now nobody wants to be on the wrong side of history right the prophet process of growth is is perpetual struggle and in order to ex sort of uh to what's what i'm looking for express this world spirit right and and for our story i want you to sense the power of the secular messianism in hegelian thought what do i mean he used to be the jews i mean still today many say but for hess used to be he would say even though the messiah tarries nevertheless i shall wait but now he's absorbing this notion that you don't have to wait there's there's an inexorable progress of conflict between thesis and antithesis which is going to produce a higher synthesis and you can participate in the process of bring about a world not just which might be but which must be and of course is universal it's a world which is going to bring about a whole dawn of secular messianism and that secular messianism holds a very important place in in i wouldn't say all socialists and communists thought but in in in much of it so all over germany and the truth is all over europe at least western europe um intellectuals are deeply influenced by hegel students are seeking the sort of revelation of these ways of gods or the absolute spirit in history depending on what name you gave it schools of historiosity are popping up how do you read the story of the past as as what we would call romantic myth but a secular right um and they're praying that history will now do the work that they've given up on theology or even philosophical metaphysics to accomplish right and and and this sets the stage for a very important activism which is coming next because remember this is still german idealism hegel and his fellow philosophers are mostly embedded in the academy and they're writing works of philosophy and metaphysics what will happen of course who is the most famous in intellectual inheritor of hegel's dialectic karl marx and he of course is not an idealist he's a materialist which means he's all about the world that we actually live in not one conceptual world which lies above that or is in the progress of unfolding and we're going to see him appear in our story quite soon so um oh good i have a question for clarification i don't understand how secular messianism rose from the idea of progress well i would say that progress is secular messianism progress means we're going somewhere better inevitably and we don't need to believe that some redeemer is going to come according to some religious mythology and save us the world is inevitably moving toward it you understand barbara like like we don't have to wait for the messiah and the rebuilding of the temple and the return of the jews to zion and the in sacrifices we're gonna have food for everyone you know justice and uh and uh rational rational knowledge will you know will enlighten the whole world uh well they're not interested in the mashiach in a religious sense but but you know what happens when you get rid of messianism you lose hope well first of all you need to uncouple mexicanism in in in torah because messianism is certainly within western culture is this idea that there is a redemptive phase that humanity has not yet reached that life as it is now is not how it's meant to be and that there's a better phase which lays ahead hegel and the german idealists i would say are an interim stage between classic religiosity remember they come from a christian culture which is obviously a very messianic culture they're an interim stage right they're an interim stage between classic religious messianism and well i would say post-modern secularism where you're right people don't people just say well life is what it is or it's what it's or or it's what you can make it but there's no inevitability and that's why i wanted you to sense the attraction because uh because for people or jews like like uh moshe hess who is a jew was raised a jew in a religious home to live life without and and was was most captivated by the sort of um moral ideals of redemption so it is an easy fit to sort of strip away the husk as he saw it of religious particularism and to step into a universalist vision of the salvation of all humanity which is in hegel's terms the articulation of the world's soul you see how these things are resonant with a classic religious perspective of messianism but but they've you've lowered the bar of behavior you don't have to keep the mitzvoth anymore and and you've taken away the particularism which really bothered him because he saw the particularism as bound up with the sort of unsavory economic behavior of jews who were by and large very serious capitalists at this point and i see the comment here that perhaps marx was their messiah well you're about to see that that is the truth uh or i would say marx would have been eliahu so to speak if you're gonna if you're gonna do it because he was the harbinger they never saw their messiah but that's that's a discussion that lies ahead other questions or comments before we get back to the flow of hess's life at this point he's he's striving to leave his judaism behind we'll see that that's not gonna last pers talking to or who was marx talking to well we'll get we're going to get there in 1848 we're going to get there you guys are you guys are right on track your questions are showing hashem that we're that we're we're together other questions or comments before we we get back into the flow listen to this day the um progressive left sees the ideals of um at this point i could get into what their ideals are but they see their ideals as messianic ideals if you listen to the progressive left of the jewish world they have a messianic vision of of rights even sort of the idea of intersectionality has has deeply messianic overtones in in terms of its commitment to universal justice the sense of absolute human solidarity you know i'm not getting into how it actually plays out i'm just simply talking about it's um it's momentum and you know just to put one finger back down on on what uh barbara said is that i i think that it's very hard for societies to live without hope when you live in a world which is imperfect the hope that it could be better is a very important motivator for your ability to live day to day and more importantly for our story your ability to marshal people into collective action which is against their short-term interests remember these guys are starving and sacrificing their short-term interests in order to achieve a long-term ideal and and you have to have some hope and belief that the world can change if you're going to convince people to do this one of the great challenges of our leadership today one of the breakdowns of popular democracy today is that instead of of marshaling the ability to convince our societies to sacrifice their short-term interest in pursuit of long-term goals much of popular democracy is oriented toward catering to people's short-term interests it's been interesting that the coronavirus has forced many of the democracies to do the opposite like we have to convince people to stay on the lockdown because they want to keep their society alive and even though the economic cost is high that's a discussion that we could have in another time i see another question here from from uh aviva since marx's father oh we're going to talk we're going to talk about marx in his judaism you guys are you guys are dead on so can i all your questions are showing me that were that we're on the right track and maybe if we just keep going i'm going to answer most of them yes good ah that's funny because the time lag allows me to just say whatever i want okay um so so after a few years of this sort of abject poverty drinking week coffee sitting in the cafes in paris supporting himself as i said as a very part-time journalist young motion decides he's got to go home he he literally returns to cologne on foot right his family now lives in cologne and he has to make peace with his capitalist father and from his own account he was received you know the prodigal son returns home with open arms by both the uh religious and very small c conservative family that he came from his father was happy to make him a clerk in the family sugar refinery and of course you can imagine that that ended in complete disaster less than a year that moshe has was able to hold out as a participant in this capitalist system that he saw really as a vampire sucking the soul from humanity and within that year he scraped together whatever money he could enough to live for maybe a few months and once away walked away from his father's house this time for good he was not to go home and it was now and he's decided that he no longer wants to just um sit on the edges he wants to be part of the discourse the intellectual world in which he lives and he publishes a small and almost completely unknown work called the sacred history of mankind by a young disciple of spinoza now we're we're not going to go into it it's i haven't read it myself although i've read several secondary sources on it it's wacky stuff um but this the title kind of says it all um the the sacred history of mankind that's hegel this idea that um that there is a spirit which humanity embodies through time and which evolves is a classic alien thought and the fact that he called himself a young disciple of spinoza i think it was aviva who noted um there's 1937. i think it was a veto aviva who noted that um that this oh sorry 1837. i said 19. you're right 18th a very different year huh um so his central thesis is that in the beginning humanity lived in what he calls an undifferentiated unity of spirit and matter which are familiar if you're familiar with uh sort of german idealism that was one of its big challenges the relationship between spirit and matter and more importantly for our discussion in the condition of what he calls primitive communism which preceded the invention of property now you have to remember that we live in a world in which property isn't the concept it's a reality so it can be very difficult to wrap the head around the idea that actually private property isn't necessarily an intrinsic right it is a social construct the idea that i and leave aside the world the fact that we live in a world full of things the the primary historical question of property was what agricultural land the idea that i could put a fence around a piece of land and declare it mine happened at a certain stage in huge in human history and and uh the argument being made by the early socialists hass amongst them is that that was actually the great root of all evil right and therefore since humanity has drifted away from that state of primitive communism again where there was no property his assertion is the task of modern humanity is to create a rational harmony of matter and spirit remember originally it was a undifferentiated unity infantile but now we have the task of creating a rational harmony what he calls social humanity in which the evil institution of private property will at long last be abolished and for the purposes of our story this book published in 1837 right the sacred history of the sacred history of humanity by a young disciple of spinoza is incontrovertible proof that even at this early phase hess was a full-fledged socialist which by the way gives him a legitimate claim to be the one of the earliest if not the earliest german socialists right um now coupled with that socialism as we saw is a complete dismissal of his judaism and at this stage he has absorbed what i would call the worst elements of unconscious christian anti-semitism because in this work he says that the progress of sacred history includes the jews being superseded by christianity right he thinks and that's that hegelian notion that that each stage of history right has its purpose gives birth to its fruit and then is no longer right uh he's going by yeah as far as i know he's going by moshe house and someone asked whether he keeps his name but um but but this is this hegelian progression each thing serves his purpose in its time and then goes by the wayside and judaism should have gone by the wayside which means what he says to the jews of his day the people chosen by their god must disappear forever that out of its death might spring a new more precious life this is the relationship between particularism and universalism which he holds at this point which is particularism served its purpose and it must give way to universalism and at this point it's we're not going to go into it deeply now but it'll pop up several times the universalism is the same as homogenization right at this point in his thinking the way to achieve universalism is to make everyone equal and the same which means that the jews are intrinsically problematic because we're a clannish rather particular people now we're going to see other attitudes on that come from him before the end of the class but um this is where this leads us in our story is this commitment to the abolition of private property and a dismissal of judaism in fact the demand that judaism disappear in order to help humanity progress are two principles that he shares with a fellow jew or former jew at this point he's contemporary and his ultimate collaborator and that's karl marx right so i'm going to introduce marks and we're going to see that marks and hass actually had a very close and then very antagonistic relationship so marx is born only about six years after hess he's born in 1818 in trier in germany he wasn't religiously jewish but he was ethnically jewish what do i mean his history i mean his maternal grandfather was a dutch rabbi his father's line had been the rabbis of trier since 1723 his grandfather held that office last and then his father as i mentioned actually before marx is born right when jewish emancipation was removed in the rhineland like i mentioned the beginning class his father converts he changed his name from hashel sorry herschel to heinrich and he converts and joins the evangelical church of prussia which is the state religion of russia at that time um and really considers himself sort of an enlightened man of european culture abandons his judaism but you know it's not so easy you can stop being judaism jewish but it's hard to stop being a jew at this point in european history so marx does receive a significant dose of jewish ethnic culture as we'll call it so at the age of 17 marx is now it's october 1835 just two years before hess publishes his first work marx goes to university of bonn he's looking to study philosophy and literature his father wants him to be a lawyer um but once he gets the bond he gets involved with a group of radical thinkers who call themselves the young hegelians again i want you to appreciate this german idealism is the intellectual environment of the day that's in 1837 and now the young hegelians how old was marx and his father converted marx's father converts before he's born right before he born in fact remembering is born in 1818 and prussia is his uh emancipation has revoked i think it took a year so it was about 1816. um so so his father converted a year or two before marx was born um so the the young aliens this sort of um intellectual society that marx got involved in in 1837 same year that hess publishes the sacred history um are critical of hegel's metaphysical assumptions but they adopt his dialectic method of analysis of society this is an important move because it's a move toward materialism no longer for marx is the question in the field of play ideas he wants to directly analyze society so marx comes to cologne in 1841 and that's where he meets hess hess immediately falls under his spell as apparently did many people who met him right um he writes has to by the way wright said a letter that was recorded that was preserved he writes about marx to a friend he's the greatest perhaps the only true philosopher actually now alive dr marx that is the name of my idol is still a very young man and will strike the final death blow at medieval religion and politics he combines philosophical depth with the most biting wit imagine rousseau voltaire holbock lessing heinz not thrown together anyhow but fused into a single personality and you will have dr marks like you don't get any higher um any higher praise than that um are you guys having trouble hearing me i see the the comment about uh about the bandwidth yeah i i will work to solve this problem i tried to ether cable i'm not sure what else to do um so but what's interesting is that mark's his influence on other people is not a surprise what's interesting however is the fact that has had a profound impact on marx excuse me the the um the real place that will see this is actually in his socialism but before we do that there is um one question about marks that i do want to touch we get to the relationship between marx and hassan that that um is this sense that uh you know we said hask made a call for the chosen people to disappear in order to allow a new world to be born that's that cosmopolitan element within hess and also his idealist philosophy right because there shouldn't be a specific people anymore marked by distinct customs in a world of complete and undifferentiated human freedom marx however is not an idealist he's a materialist and therefore his analysis of the jews is a little bit more visceral and frankly more antagonistic marx writes in 1843 only a year or two after he gets to cologne and meets hess he writes a pamphlet known as on the jewish question it was specifically a response to uh to another german thinker bruno bauer's analysis of the attempts by prussian jews to regain their emancipation and it's significant in the history of marxist thought because it's one of his first articulations of the materialist concept of history he says that that this emancipation that the jews are trying to achieve on the political frame that that doesn't require the jews to assimilate why because political on isn't real freedom it's important to understand that about marx's thought is that in marx's mind the only significant realm of conflict and struggle is economic and political structures follow in their wake therefore the struggle for emancipation and the demand by the european that the jews assimilate culturally in order to get political emancipation says marx is a waste of everyone's time right real economic real emancipation is economic emancipation that's the only true liberation and in or in eyes of marx in an economically liberated world judaism must disappear because it he says he's called it the ultimate product of capitalism i got a quote from here what's the secular basis of judaism practical need self-interest what is the world religion of the jews huck string what is his worldly god money and that's why he says in the final analysis the emancipation of the jews is the emancipation of mankind from judaism and these are not the only what we would call anti-semitic words that marx has out there nonetheless marx's anti-semitism was one i mean it just begs the question of how much of this was his own struggle with his identity but i i can't psychoanalyze him from a distance um these words and these sentiments didn't prevent hess and many other the disaffected jews that were swirling through the cities of central and western europe at this point from being swept up by the power of his thought of that what eventually became known as dialectic materialism marxism and his personality so marx and hess will run on parallel tracks after their meeting in cologne in 1842 they'll run on parallel tracks for a couple of years they'll reunite in brussels in 1845 um at that point marx has already formed his friendship with friedrich engels and he's begun to develop the sort of framework of his economic theories that eventually of course are known as marxism and moshe hass has become one of the chief theoreticians of what's known as philosophical or true socialism it's the idealist stance on socialism opposed to the materialists now it's also important to note that um that hess is known as a man of a singular purity of character at this point he's sensitive to every form of injustice he's passionate in his devotion to his philosophical principles and apparently downright saintly in his everyday behavior so much so that um after his father dies as israel mentioned he marries a non-jewish prostitute in order quote to atone for the evil that society had done apparently he was happily married to the end of his days to her um but he his character was such that his friends and this is why i'm mentioning it actually nicknamed him the communist rabbi right they had a sense that his purity of character and idealism was what a jew ought to be so what's the point of putting hess and marx together well i'll tell you people scholars at least identify three primary influences marx's law there's hegel's dialectic there's english economics english scottish and then there's the utopian socialism which was based in france and germany and since it was hess that introduced marx to that utopian socialism we can say that he was a major contributor to marx's thought yeah israel and marcia you got a question there for the ark that we're we're painting here what's important to understand is that hess where he remained was an idealist and even though he will keep his association with marx all the way through the first international in the in the late 1860s i we're right now in 1847 right 1847 europe is reaching a boiling point what i mean that that the the liberal ideas of the french revolution that have been scattered like seeds all over europe by napoleon had been pushed back in 1815 with his defeat but we've seen the paris revolution of we're seeing the the sort of political struggles within the german states and with this sort of like social boiling point marx decides that the underground organizations and the sort of secret meetings that had characterized socialists and communists up to this point were no longer sufficient he needed to unite the working classes and so he found the communist league in and then at in the february of 1848 publishes of course the communist manifesto now the last bit of the manifesto is actually oriented toward attacking this pure socialism that he had really encountered through hess so much so that he called has a feeble echo of french socialism and communism with a slight philosophical flavor um nonetheless the fact that moshe has had a significant impact on karl marx is a is a is a point of interest in our history and brings us up to 1848 the year that the communist manifesto was published is also known in european history um as the spring of nations right the that spring the dam which was holding back all the liberal forces of europe basically burst right it's known like i said this as the spring of nations so the question of when did communism start officially the communist league is founded by karl marx in 1847. communism as an idea is quite a bit older but as an official movement founded by marx 1847 he publishes the communist manifesto in 1848 and in that same year only a few months after its publication um like i said the damn bursts on the liberal forces of europe it's the spring of nations it's called the people's spring springtime of the peoples of the year of revolution basically it's the most widespread revolutionary wave in european history and it's very hard to characterize because on one hand you have ardent nationalists people that are seeking the liberation of their national um unit their nation from the international empire austria hungary of you know etc like the they want self-determination you also have die-hard communists who are looking for world revolution and the sort of transformation and freedom of humanity but everybody is looking to overthrow the existent order that's the key that unites all these various movements 1848 is a mess in many ways historians characterize it as a failure but i want to understand just a few um points that occurred in this sort of battle against life as it was in europe and then we'll place hats in it um because 1848 is also a significant moment in the consolidation of the nation state it's not finished yet really world war one in many ways will be the last gas with the nation state although it's not completely done until world war ii and the formation of the united nations the word itself you know ought to ought to give you the indication of the end of colonialism but you know if we talked about 1648 if you remember the treaty of westphalia and and that very important shift within european political culture that you could have an identity of a citizen or a member of the nation which wasn't religious but was rather national it was no longer protestants and catholics you could have germans some were protestants some were catholic you had french some were huguenots some were catholics that was the beginning 1648 of the formation of the nation-state as the structure of european history the sort of next phase of that is in 1848 with this revolution of of uh this sort of 1848 or the spring of nations at this stage i don't think that uh um there there are definite differences between socialism and communism i don't mean to to deny that distinction this stage i think for our discussion what's important to note is more what unites them and what divides them right both of them are committed to an internationalist global transformation of humanity both of them are opposed to private property as a foundation for the social and economic order and and both of them at this point are revolutionary movements because they see the conservative socio-economic and political structures of their day as barriers which have to be destroyed in order to renew the world where are we right now you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna pull out of 1848 i'm going to give you thank you for for calling me the task there bob i'll give you the ark where we are because i want to get hess to his role is his transformation because really 1848 is his turning point why because 1848 was a failed revolution all these idealist notions of socialism or the more materialist marxist stance and even many of the nationalist attempts there's a revolutionary wave and then more or less a collapse and out of this collapse of all this idealism for hess comes a new conception a new conception and truth is the conception which he later says had occurred to him already back in 1840 you remember we spoke last week about the damascus blood libel and how there was an international outcry over the treatment of these these jews that were accused of the blood libel in damascus and the key is that was an international outcry because hess records in his journal how he reacted painfully to that incident only eight years before this failed revolution and for the first time he began to wonder whether the universalist solution that he was seeking for the liberation of all humanity would actually cure the problem of the jews as well so that idea that perhaps his universalism wouldn't help the jews started to bubble up in 1840 with the damascus blood libel and then when he sees the failure of these movements he judges to be a failure in 1848 he actually falls back on what had always been a bit of a difference between he and marx and and that was he began to condemn cosmopolitanism this idea that there were no nations there were not things that divide humanity as basically an unnatural suppression of the very real differences between nations and races he uses the language of race quite often although in very loose terms since genetics were not really part of the way he looked at things but rather it was a the think of the richness of humanity to borrow a later metaphor as a symphony and you don't want the violins playing the same line as the flutes playing the same line as the cello you know fill in the blank that it was the richness of individual nations and this natural what he calls differentiation of mankind into separate races or nations right that actually give humanity its full glory um and this was there were there were three elements that contributed to this number one his experience the question that arose for him with the damascus blood level like hey wait a minute maybe my universalism isn't going to help the jews number two the collapse of what people expected to be a revolution in europe in 1848 into basically the rise of a much more oppressive state and three he began to learn about um italian nationalism he was very much moved by mazzini and ultimately garibaldi if people are familiar with italian nationalism right but he saw nationalism and he started to say well if the italians can do this for themselves then how come the jews can't do it as well which is why the next big phase and what we need to spend the rest of the next you know sort of 20 minutes or so talking about the the next big phase of hess's life is centers around his great work which is known as rome and jerusalem or what he calls the last national question i want to lay out the roman jerusalem use it to sort of fit the pieces of his progress together and then we'll close it out with your permission i'm going to do that if people have questions they can write them down on the side the he says so rowan jerusalem he publishes it in 1862. it's called roman jerusalem because he's interested in italian nationalism this is the year that garibaldi tried to actually incorporate rome into this italian republic he's struggling to create and to keep in in in being for lack of a better word just to understand the nationalism which is dominating the world in 1862 it's not just garibaldi this is the same year that otto von bismarck gives his iron and blood speech if people are familiar with the history of german internationalism that was really bismarck is ultimately the one that will bring the german state into being and the blood iron and blood speech is like kind of the beginning of that also in america 1862 civil war has just gotten started you know america as a nation state as opposed to a collection of states is really coming into being nationalism is now seen to be the rising organizing principle for groups of people and and roman jerusalem is written in the form of 12 letters that are addressed to a woman in grief of the loss of a relative but it's basically one part description of the conditions of the jews in the west and a diagnosis of their problems and one part personal confession and that's what speaks to what you're asking chuck because because in it pes says he's basically living he's lived his life in a dream it was only in 1840 with that charge of ritual murder in damascus that he suddenly realized where the truth lay here's a quote for you it dawned on me for the first time in the midst of my socialist activities that i belong to my unfortunate despised and dispersed people right um and he basically says that he had stifled his cry of pain over his jewish existence because of the greater sufferings of the european proletariat which he thought he should devote his life to but here i am he says after 20 years of estrangement in the midst of my people i take part in its days of joy and sorrow and its memories and hope its spiritual struggles within its own house right and he goes on to say that that the eternal city jerusalem the birthplace of the belief in the divine unity of life and the future brotherhood of all men is now his guiding light notice jerusalem represents the particular jewish home but it also is the future of brotherhood of all men because he goes on to articulate a vision that that true internationalist thought begins with the nation state it's important today nationalism is seen as a conservative small c of course right conservative force which you know the liberal and cosmopolitan world claims is preventing the unification of the planet in hess's day nationalism was serving in many cases as a liberal force it was breaking up the multinational empires which were based in his opinion on oppression and was liberating people's right this is that will the wilsonian notion of self-determination so hess in jerusalem sorry in roman jerusalem identifies many of the fundamental problems that later zionists will see as well number one he says that the denial of nationality of particularism that underlays western jewry's attempts at emancipation does nothing except forfeit the respect of the other nations right that that the assimilation is not a solution it's critical right this is a notion which is going to become important for us as we move forward in the story of zionism he even goes so far as condemned the reform movement we haven't spoken about before moving because we jumped out of the flow of history to get to zionism but he condemns the reform movement amongst german jews which is its origin and calls it right an emptiness in jewish life with his willingness to break off bowers from the jewish tree with a shameful lack of pride its leaders tell the jews to conceal themselves amongst the other nations he says the modern liberal jew is to be despised with his fine words about humanity and enlightenment intended only to disguise his disloyalty to his brothers he's basically this is really answering your question chuck he's he's taking himself to task and the culture which produced him and he's pointing out that the idea of reforming judaism in order to join into european society is not only not going to work but it's a corruption which actually he's going to fight against he instead actually says that um the reform movement attempted to free the jewish people on foreign soil basically by watering judaism down and he says on the other hand khasi dude he sees as a genuine development of jewish religion and therefore that's where the future of the jews will come from it's an amazing thing for a secular socialist in western europe to identify the hasidim as the sort of real future of judaism he's got an incredible quote he says the rigid crust of orthodoxy that stunts the progress of eastern jewry and in this case he's a classic western jew who will see again and again in zionism they look to eastern jewry durian in eastern europe as this sort of much more natural organic expression of jewish life so he says the rigid crust of orthodoxy that stuns the progress of eastern jewry will be melted when the sparks of national feeling that smolder beneath it are kindled into the sacred fire which heralds the new spring and the resurrection of their nation into a new life right and he says even though he's rejected his religion that he would rather keep all the 613 mitzvot and have one day a new sanhedrin meeting in jerusalem until then the jews must preserve what they possess their authentic spiritual heritage unmodified right because he's he's gone 180 degrees on the religious question even though not in his personal life he doesn't actually adopt religious practice he's gone he's become to realize that the abandonment of of authentic historically authentic judaism right is actually counterproductive to what he sees as nationalism as the solution to the jewish problem by the way you can imagine this is not well received by the leadership of the or the reform movement within germany right we're again there's only so much we can do in the discussion of zionism i think you have to remember on a deeper level he's still a um a philosophical idealist and he believes that um the that there's a there's a essential spirit which drives the national collective and he sees as as expressive of that jewish spirit whereas the reform movement all these simulationist instincts are actually abandoning the genuine jewish spirit and attempting to imitate what they are not so gold had a question what was his turning point so so hass identifies himself the turning point as the damascus blood libel and a realization that that even the liberal progressive elements of europe assume that a blood libel could be true we spoke about that last week but also the collapse of all the hopes of the 1848 revolution right which forced him to reevaluate this sort of idea that cosmopolitanism that there's going to be a universal human revolution and say that no the real solution is internationalism meaning you have to have nations before you can have internationalism right and he says history he breaks with marx he doesn't he rejects mark's notion that the history of all society is that of class struggle and he actually says history is dominated by the struggle not only of classes but races and nations as well he is the first person to see a national solution to the jewish problem or at least to put it into writing and all fairness we don't know we're the first person to see it he does point out by the way that it's a diseased form of nationalism that seeks to dominate others right but nevertheless jews like other people need a normal national life in order to relate to the world and he says over and over again in the book without soil a man sinks to the status of parasite feeding on others right the the only way that have national life is to have soil and that that soil is unquestionably to him in the land of israel what he calls palestine he goes through in many places how the how basically jews are made patriots by their very religion he talks about his grandfather weeping as he reads you know uh the book of jeremiah he talks about how that that uh that when his grandfather showed him owls and dates that came from eric israel how his face would shine how jews would strive to get dirt from the land of israel to be put under their head when they were buried but he says very clearly that that this type of this type of jewish nationalism which is a bit of an anachronism but i think it's a fair statement isn't going to come from the assimilated jews of of western europe it will come from the hasidim of eastern europe who even though seem like they are less advanced and progressive they are more authentic to the spirit the natural spirit of the jews right so roman jerusalem is it's a big work and there's more in it but for our purposes you need to understand that it had no impact in its day published in 1862 to basically complete silence except for the heads of the reform movement who vehemently attack it for a very brief period until they realize nobody's paying attention anyway right so so i'll make a conclusion in a couple of minutes but um i questions or comments things people want to clarify before i wrap this up in the last five minutes but notice that's again expressive of the con of the the tension which i began with which between the universal and the particular hess remains a socialist to his dying day his vision is a universalist vision but he understands the mechanism as jewish national rebirth and that it's only jewish national rebirth which will allow the jews to achieve their actual vision which is universal redemption because in in this i guess with your guy's permission maybe well here's a couple of other questions um i would say he didn't reconcile i see this comment from gold he didn't reconcile his judaism with his socialism because i think of judaism as a religion and he he remained secular in his behavior he he he i would say he recognized his jewish nationalism with his socialism he and really what he did was he recognized he reconciled the particular and the universal and then i want to explain um as a um as a conclusion here i got about five minutes left so with your permission we'll wrap it up and i appreciate people's patience by the way i know this has not been from a technical standpoint the easiest class to follow um i am recording it though so i will put it up so if people want to hear it again um well no you the jewish nationalism is not a form of judaism in the sense that i'm making a distinction that judaism is a religious life and jewish nationalism is uh is far larger than that but this is part of the larger question that we're getting to so i'll i'll answer that in my conclusion here so okay so we have um moshe hess who basically goes through this process of having come from the orthodox particularist very small c conservative tradition moving into the stance of radical jew who tries to strip away his particularism in pursuit as he says of the liberation of the the masses suffering masses of europe right and ultimately he does chuva literally in returning to himself on some level and reclaiming his particular identity it's important though to appreciate the fact that his vision is universalist but it's not cosmopolitan and that's the key of understanding what he adds to our discussion is that his way of reconciling the particular universal was to say that the mission of the jewish people is universal but its success depends upon its particular embodiment as a nation in its land right in general his philosophy moves from international socialism to a view that true internationalism needs nations right because internationally was a movement to harmonize nations not to abolish them and so therefore his vision of a nation state for the jews which was a keystone for bringing a socialist society into being is going to have a deep influence going forward on what's known ultimately as labor zionism as we'll speak about it and um there's two notes i want to end on number one this is a critical insight which he consciously or unconsciously came to about the torah in general is that the torah offers a um a different form of universalism for humanity most of the universalisms of the 19th and 20th century were homogenizing forces everybody should be the same and that's how we'll have equality that it's the differences which lend themselves to inequality and injustice hess's vision was much more on the in the the vision of the torah which is no no particularism is a reality and you don't get rid of it universalism is a harmonization of the pieces into a whole not a homogenization and therefore he ultimately puts forward the national solution to the jewish people as a keystone to the universal vision of redemption that's one piece i want you to have clear and you'll see that contributes a lot to this day zionism is a is a visionary force and and certain elements within certainly the the left literal parts of zionism still speak about a universal redemptive secular redemptive revision the other piece i'll just note because it relates to the whole history of zionism is that some of the predictions that hess makes about life in jewish german life um are actually downright frightening because he says again and again that the germans are anti-jewish on a racial basis right um he says what the germans hate is not so much the jewish religion or jewish names as jewish noses this is the point at which racial theory is beginning to make real inroads and of course in a final chilling passage it's not the final but it's a chilling passage he says that liberal jews of germany one day suffer a cataclysm the extent of which they cannot begin to conceive this is the other piece that hess i think contributes to the development of zionism is not just the recognition that there has to be some reconciliation between jewish life and the universal values that both enlighten europe and he believes the torah preach socialism for him but there also has to be recognition that the situation of the jewish people within europe and particularly within western europe is highly unstable and the assimilationist approach attempt to just be accepted is actually making it worse and not better all right that's a lot today but it's 12 45 and i think i'll let you guys digest um once again to the extent that i'm responsible i apologize for the technical challenges here um and i would ask everyone i will put up the recording of this as soon as i can and it will go up and it'll be out there people can be in touch with me by email if they've got questions or comments i want to thank a few folks before i sign off i want to thank the folks that give their hard-earned money for making this show happen keeping it free and widely available i want to invite you to join them go to www.jewish find that button in the upper right hand corner and click on through the little bit of per podcast support put your money where your ears are people and help make season four happen or send me an email rob mikefoyer gmail.com or personal message on facebook and i'll happily share with you the details of how you can support in any other way i want to thank part ace institute pards.org