They say the most important thing in this life is life itself. They’re right. Now try to understand it.
We live in a world of contradictions, some so painful that the human mind can’t make sense of them. How can people attack us, rape us and murder us, continue to do so, and then have the world turn against us? How can Jewish students and professors be shut out of American campuses? How can extreme antisemitism spread across Europe, Israel be booed at Eurovision, and people from communities that have themselves faced oppression, including the LGBTQ and African American communities, turn against us?
The paradoxes within us may be even harder to recognize. Someone says, “I’m alone. No one supports me.” The feeling is real, but it is also a belief. In the spiritual framework Tal and I explore in this episode, that belief becomes a lens, shaping what reality reflects back to us. This reflection is not about what is fair. The sea isn’t blue; its clear water reflects the sky.
The Hebrew Bible offers two images for this idea. When Moses asks who he should say sent him, God answers, “I Am That I Am” (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh): one state of being facing another. King David gives us the image of reflection: “The Lord is your shade at your right hand.” A shadow follows our every movement. In the same way, we believe that what we bring into the world returns to us: our thoughts, especially our feelings, our words and our actions. Call it manifestation, “like attracts like,” or karma. Here, karma is not punishment. It is movement and consequence, a wheel, a mirror. As I put it, Creation “has no choice” but to reflect back what we project.
That is the paradox of Creation. If I believe I have no support, I will keep seeing a world that confirms that belief. If I believe I am lucky and everything works out for me, that is the support I will receive. Yet I also believe that our very existence is evidence of divine providence (hashgacha pratit). We are supported simply because we are here. Our freedom lies in what we choose to believe and where we direct our attention.
When reality refuses to add up
The episode begins with the emotional whiplash of a week that seemed to move from heaviness and grief, when even the sky appeared to cry with us, into a different kind of sunlight. That week brought us back to the central question: what do we do when reality holds truths our minds cannot reconcile?
We talk about the response to October 7 and the bewilderment of seeing people at leading universities, including Columbia, chant in support of Hamas. Columbia is supposed to represent academic enlightenment and to educate future leaders, presidents and CEOs, yet I see it wrapped in ignorance and lies. At one point I say, “We are living through a Holocaust now,” while much of the world is either silent or taking the other side. Even people who identify with communities that Hamas would persecute are described as supporting it, calling Israelis “Nazis” and casting them as the oppressors. The contradiction feels endless.
I also draw on examples from health and daily life. I point to Japan, which I describe as having exceptionally high smoking rates without lung cancer, and to France, where people consume alcohol, cheese and fat without the heart problems that conventional Western health advice would lead us to expect. My point is that even what we treat as axioms can appear to have exceptions. We cannot expect the human mind to grasp every law at work in reality.
That limitation is part of being here. In my spiritual view, Earth is a demanding place for strong souls. We live within the limits of the body, of time and place, of motion and of our five senses. I even imagine communities on other planets coming to learn from souls who manage to rise beyond those limits. We should not underestimate the power of consciousness. I believe it is shaped by our whole system of beliefs, from everyday assumptions to our deepest convictions about existence.
Five anchors for what we cannot explain
In the episode, this way of seeing the world comes together in five anchors. They do not offer a complete explanation of Creation. They offer a way to face what we cannot explain.
- What exists, exists. Begin by acknowledging reality. As Tal jokes, it is like the hummus stain on the mirror: arguing with it does not make it disappear. Resisting the existence of something can give it more force. A degree of detachment lets us see what is there without feeding it.
- Time and motion are also illusions. The past has already happened and cannot be revisited. The future has not arrived. All we actually have is this moment, then another present moment, and another. Again and again, life is here and now.
- Everything comes from one Source. “There is none other than Him.” In this view, the same Creator takes form in plants, faces, opinions and ideas. Those many forms do not erase the unity beneath them.
- What you give is what you receive. Thoughts, words and actions have consequences. Karma is not a sentence handed down as punishment; it is action moving around a wheel, like a hamster repeating the same circuit. Be careful about judging someone as weak because of their past behavior. In this framework, that judgment can draw the same weakness toward you.
- Everything moves and everything changes. Even what looks still is in motion. The events of life are not under our control, and much of the time we will not understand them. What can change is our point of view, our attitude and the opinions we have treated as fixed.
These anchors lead to one demanding task: learning how we create. I call focus the essential tool, then laugh and turn the phrase into “hocus focus.” In this framework, the universe has no inherent limits. The limits we experience often rest on childhood beliefs that no longer serve us. To step out of the karmic wheel, we have to loosen our grip on old thoughts, worldviews and opinions. This is what I mean by learning to work with, and even manipulate, energy. It means learning to create.
What are you sending into the world?
Love is the clearest example. In this framework, whatever you chase keeps moving away from you. When you are desperately searching for the love of your life, what are you actually expressing? The search repeats, “I don’t have it.” What you send out is the experience of absence.
The alternative is not to give up on love. It is to stop chasing it and become the love you hope to meet. Love yourself. Embody the kind of energy the other person is looking for. Trust that you have what you need, that you are supported, and that what belongs in your life can arrive at the right time.
This is difficult precisely because it asks us to find calm in a reality that feels anything but calm. When we complain that everything is terrible, we send out the very experience we want to escape. The conversation briefly turns to the saying, “Do you want to suffer a little or a lot?” Tal and I explain that it refers to avoiding a small pain, refusing to surrender to the truth and postponing a decision until the suffering grows. My point here is different: what state of being are we echoing? If I want love, am I being love? If I live in fear, am I multiplying fear?
One state of being meets another. The water in a pool seems to have a color only because it reflects the sky. I believe reality works much the same way.
This is where I insist on a personal relationship with God. “Beautiful souls, the Creator isn’t Haredi (ultra-Orthodox),” I say. “He doesn’t walk around in a suit, kippah and hat.” Outward signs are not the point. For me, the Holy One, blessed be He, is love and sweetness, and the Creator loves every person simply because they exist. Talk to Him personally, even in the middle of a party. I talk to the Creator while sitting with a drink.
Guard the doorway of your thoughts
Creation begins in thought. We lock our doors to keep burglars out and put screens on our windows to keep out mosquitoes and other insects. Why, then, do we leave the mind wide open to anything that passes by?
A memory from five years ago suddenly surfaces, bringing anger or sadness with it. When a harmful thought arrives, throw it out. Do not leave it there. If it stays long enough, it begins to take over. It draws in more thoughts like itself until we sink into gloom. I compare the spread to fire racing through a field of thorns and invoke the verse about the altar: “A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar; it shall not go out.” The altar becomes an image of the mind and of the care we must take with the fire burning there.
Guard your thoughts as fiercely as you guard your home, your possessions and your surroundings. Notice what enters. A thought that lingers will seep into feeling, and that feeling will eventually shape action. That is why the quality of our thoughts matters.
“This too is for the good”
“This too is for the good” (gam zu letovah) is easy to repeat and difficult to live. I understand it to mean that even what looks bad is also good, because in the end there is always salvation. Living that belief asks us to hold several truths at once and consider what happened from the premise that everything is for the good.
“Be wholehearted with your God,” I say. At this stage of my life, I am less concerned with which God another person has chosen. If you have chosen God, be wholehearted. Practice inner discernment, but begin with a good thought and the possibility that this, too, may be for the good.
I bring that faith back to the antisemitism we discuss at the beginning of the episode. When the phrase “Torah shall go forth from Zion” comes to me, I imagine one possible answer to universities closing their gates to Jews: Israel should invest its money and capital in building an international university capable of surpassing the world’s universities and bringing brilliant Jewish minds here. Perhaps the gates are closing so that people will come home. Seen from above and through faith, even this painful moment might hold the beginning of something good.
I often feel like Hansel and Gretel, following a trail of crumbs home. I look back across my life for signs left along the way and trust them to lead me where I need to go. For more than 20 years, one song has been that trail of crumbs.
The song that kept returning
While studying for my bachelor’s degree in education, I did not have the money to pay tuition. Then the minister of education, who was religious, announced that students preparing to teach Bible and Judaism could receive a 90% scholarship. I chose that path. I did not understand why at the time. Today, I understand it much better.
Near the end of my degree, a lecturer asked the class to memorize Psalm 121, “A Song of Ascents” (Shir HaMaalot). This was before the band Sheva released the version that would later become well known. The assignment seemed ridiculous to me. I was as outspoken then as I am now, and I said so. My lecturer quietly replied, “You will learn it by heart.”
On the day of the test, my lecturer told me that she had finally received an answer to the question of why memorizing the psalm mattered. That morning, on her way to the university, a former student had called out to her. He was now a combat soldier. She had also required his high school class to learn “Shir HaMaalot” by heart.
“You saved my life,” he told her. He had spent 12 hours in a life-or-death situation during combat. The psalm was the one thing that held him together. He repeated it, led the other soldiers in reciting it, and no one was hurt. Then I stood before my lecturer and recited the same psalm from memory.
Later, I traveled to India. I was sitting in a deeply spiritual place, wondering where the journey should take me next, when I suddenly heard “Shir HaMaalot” coming from the next room, now set to music. A group of Israelis told me it was Sheva’s new song. They could not understand how I already knew every word.
In India, I met a dear friend who remains in my life today. We rode roughly 4,000 kilometers on his Enfield, traveling across India and up to Nepal. I sang to keep him alert and make the ride more interesting. Again and again, between other songs, I sang “Shir HaMaalot” until he knew it too. When he asked why he had to learn it by heart, I did not have an answer yet.
Three months after I returned to Israel, my father died. His funeral shook me deeply. I had been out the night before and, as I say without embarrassment, had partied until about four in the morning. At my father’s grave, I was exhausted, overwhelmed and barely able to stay on my feet. Then I heard the rabbi reciting “Shir HaMaalot.” The song had found me again.
A month later, I learned that the friend I had taught the psalm to in India had been arrested in Japan. He spent seven years in prison there. Our letters helped me understand why it had mattered for him to know the psalm by heart.
About a year later came another turning point, this time a joyful one: my wedding. I chose Sheva’s “Shir HaMaalot” for my entrance. It had accompanied me through the lowest and highest moments of my life.
The period when we recorded this episode, full of grief and joy, uncertainty and clarity, felt to me like a time when all of us needed to hold on to some kind of faith. I do not demand that anyone share my beliefs. I simply invite listeners to hear how the song begins in quiet, connection and sadness, then rises higher and higher in energy. As I put it, it “works miracles inside your body.”
For me, this is the song. It carries King David’s image, “The Lord is your shade at your right hand,” and it has found me at the critical turns in my life. I believe it will continue to do so.
The episode closes with Psalm 121, “A Song of Ascents”:
I lift up my eyes to the mountains.
From where will my help come?
My help is from the Lord,
Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip.
Behold, He does not slumber,
and He does not sleep, the Guardian of Israel.
The Lord is your guardian,
the Lord is your shade
at your right hand.
By day
the sun will not strike you, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will guard you
from all evil;
He will guard your soul.
The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
from now on.
In this week of sadness and joy, may we all hear good news.