Zoe Fertik & Nissim Black on Religious & Secular Jews Coming Together | The Deal (Highlight)

[Music] so so israel's goal and its purpose is also is always framed as being a land for jews right it's always this is the land of the jews but there's so many different uh disagreements there's a lot of mock locus you talk about the torah and the fila there's a lot of big issues going on here primarily you see this between the orthodox the haradi community and the secular community um what do you think that we need in order for it to be a better relationship between between these groups and do you believe there's a solution yeah so i'm actually pretty optimistic i will say i might be in the minority because i'm feeling some optimism about the divisions in jewish in our jewish world and the reason why i'm feeling optimistic is like is as follows i i grew up really zionist and i israel is in my bones and i feel like it was there from from the moment that i entered this world israel was in my bones and one of the things that i have learned to appreciate so much about israel i knew i felt it i knew i had this connection and now that i've learned more about israel and spent more time in israel i have a deeper appreciation and one of the reasons is because even from the very beginning of israel there were debates about what israel should be right there were people who believed in sort of like what i'll call the herzl camp that israel was a place for jews which meant it was a place where we could be safe and avoid anti-semitism and have sovereignty and self-defense and then there were those who i'll call the akhada am school is another one of these early zionist thinkers and he was more of the opinion that the purpose of zionism was not to be a hub for jews but for israel to be a hub for judaism it should be a place where judaism was getting put back into its homeland so that judaism could flourish in its natural soil right and that mission of acharam got seriously interrupted because of the holocaust we lost so many jews that the herzl vision of what israel needed to be won out we needed to preserve our bodies because how can we preserve our ideas and our lives and our culture and until how could we preserve anything if we weren't preserving ourselves but now it's been 70 years since the holocaust and one of the reasons why we have so much division in jewish life is because thank god we have enough jews again for there to be a variety of different iterations of what jewish life looks like and i actually think where this beautiful moment in jewish history where we're finally at a critical mass again after post-holocaust that we can have every little iteration of what jewish life should look like and every group has their own idea of what's most important and everything and there's enough people for each of those groups to exist and so i actually think we're at a turning point where the divisions we're seeing now is actually a good sign and some of the boundaries are going to start melting away and i i'm hoping that this is a journey towards a sort of boundary-less jewish life where we can be more unified in all of the ways that we practice in all the ways we believe [Music]