From Spies to Zionists: What the Torah Teaches us about Courage Today

S3
E18
30mins

Noam and Mijal pause the punditry and explore how ancient biblical wisdom offers profound guidance for navigating the uncertainty, fear, and complexity of today’s Jewish moment. In this special, bonus episode, they dive into the weekly Torah portion of Shlach—the story of the scouts in the Book of Numbers to help think through the chaos facing Israel today.

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Noam: When I think of the story of Zionism, I think 3,300 years ago to the story of Numbers. Meaning, if you want to actually cultivate the Jewish land, cultivate the land of Israel, and you’re expecting everything to be so easy, so overt, so miraculous, that’s not what is going to happen.

Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews.

Mijal: I’m Mijal.

Noam: I’m Noam. And this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked by Jewish people, by non-Jewish people, about the Jewish story, about the Jewish people, about the Jewish state, often about Judaism. We absolutely do not have it all figured out, but we try. We try to learn together to wonder together.

Mijal: As we say every week, we really enjoy hearing and we really appreciate hearing from you too. Please send questions, suggestions, feedback and email us at wonderingjews@unpacked.media.

Noam: What I want to do with you today, Mijal, is I want to have a conversation about something that is not current events, but is on the current events. What I mean by that is, it’s like all of us right now, we’re in like punditry zone right now. These military experts, these geopolitical experts. And there’s a lot of that sort of information out there. But what I wanted to do with you, and you can hear it in my voice.

So wanted to pause, I wanted to think, I wanted to reflect with you, and I wanted to be able to turn to the wisdom that we have from the Hebrew Bible, from the Jewish story, that could help us think about this very moment today. How do we contextualize everything? Can Jewish wisdom help us think through such chaos, such difficulty, lack of clarity, uncertainty?

I want to have a conversation with you looking into the story of the Torah portion that we’re going to be reading this week, looking into the story of Numbers, the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible of Bamidbar, and for us to have a conversation on that. That work? That cool?

Mijal: 100% Noam, I feel like it’s become almost like a muscle that we have to turn to whatever Torah portion ⁓ Jews are reading in synagogue on Shabbat and the Sabbath. And I have found just a surprising amount of timeliness. Like there’s things here that like jump out and are really speaking to our moment. So as you mentioned, we are now reading the book of Numbers ⁓ and it’s an amazing book that really brings up so many questions.

Noam: Yeah, I love it. What I keep on thinking about and the story of numbers in general is this idea from, from the Netziv. The Netziv, that’s his acronym, his name is Naftali Tzvi Yehuda from Berlin and he wrote, he was the head of a yeshiva in Volozhin, the head of a Jewish academy, and he lived from 1816 to 1893. He spoke about this idea that the story of numbers, the story of Bamidbar, is totally different than the previous parts of the Torah.

He talks about how Bamidbar is this transition story. It’s a transition story, a transition from what he describes as overt miracles to something that’s more mundane, to something that’s more natural. He even describes, I’ll say it in English, he says, living in the wilderness, they experienced God’s glorious manner, marched to the right of Moses, meaning totally transcending nature, whereas in the land of Israel, their affairs accorded with nature, concealing the providence of God’s kingdom. May he be blessed.

Mijal: Wait, what does that mean?

Noam: So what he’s saying is that the Jewish people left a world in which they  had 10 plagues, which seemed to be quite miraculous. They split the sea, God split the sea in the story of the Bible, that seems to be quite miraculous. They were fed with certain things like manna, which was miraculous food. They were covered by this cloud, this cloud of glory, which comes across as miraculous. There’s miracle, miracle, miracle.

And then, Netziv says that the transition of the Jewish people from a people that was experiencing miracles to a people that had to operate in real time in a naturalistic sort of way as opposed to living with open miracle guidance is the story of Bamidbar.

Mijal: So it’s almost like in the last couple of books the Jews had left Egypt they had gotten the Torah at Sinai they had built the tabernacle and now they are walking on this journey towards the promised land. Which at first they think is going to be a short journey, it becomes longer. And you are saying that this entire narrative of being in the wilderness, of being in the desert, of moving forward, that a lot of it is also about an existential transformation from a nation that lives under open miracles to a nation that has to fight its own battles and make its own effort in order to become the nation it’s supposed to be.

Noam: That’s exactly right. And it reminds me of everything that Joe Schwartz said to us on the previous episode, when we were talking about the divine nature. You go from what happened with Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis to now the crazy stories about the beepers and then taking out the nuclear reactors in Iran. We were talking about the divine hand in that. And what Joe was saying to us is actually put aside the divine hand for a second. It’s actually also the human beings, the Jewish people taking matters into their own hands.

And the story, when I think of the story of Zionism, I think 3,300 years ago to the story of Numbers. Meaning, if you want to actually cultivate the Jewish land, cultivate the land of Israel, and you’re expecting everything to be so easy, so overt, so miraculous, that’s not what is going to happen, because that’s what they were used to. The Jewish people were used to these incredible miracles in the story of the Hebrew Bible. And now all of a sudden, if you’re gonna cultivate the land of Israel, it’s actually gonna be dependent on you making sure that ⁓ you’re making it happen. So that’s a story that’s in my mind very much right now.

Mijal: Right. It’s interesting. It reminds me now of my favorite, I think, commentary on the book of numbers. It’s not only in the book of numbers. It’s a book of numbers and Exodus. It’s a book written by Michael Walser called Exodus and Revolution. We can put the title on the show notes. It’s a brilliant book. And part of what it does, it’s almost the other side of the coin to what you’re saying.

Because what you describe right now is almost, ⁓ I heard you say it from a theological perspective, like God stops doing overt miracles and the people have to adjust. And Walzer applies this to politics. He basically argues that if you study, and he’s a philosopher, that if you study the book of Exodus and the book of Numbers, you are given a sense of a certain political philosophy that ends up shaping the West. And I don’t have the book right in front of me, but he has this amazing line in which he says that, the politics of the Exodus is a non-Messianic, of like non-revolutionary politics in which you understand there is always an Egypt, there is always a bad place, there’s always oppression and evil that you are escaping from or fighting against, in which you believe there is always a promised land, a better place, a better future, and in which you understand that you’re in the wilderness and that it’s going to take a really long time and really hard and you’re going to have to march through it together.

So by the way, for anyone interested, I write a weekly substack on the Parsha. And the one I wrote last week was applying this idea from Walzer and trying to talk about American Jews and what it means for me, what I’m taking from it this year, so much, Noam, is what it means to accept like uncertainty. Like say we have to be a people of wilderness that understand that the road is hard and is long. And maybe we thought we had achieved certain things, whether in America or in Israel.

But we haven’t, and that’s a function of the journey. That’s what it takes, and it’s really hard, but that’s the work that we have to do.

Noam: Okay,  you said there two different sides of the coin, Walzer and  Natsiv. I don’t know if people put them together in general, Walzer and Natsiv. But they’re two, yeah, and

Mijal: Why not? Learning Torah!

Noam: I like it, I like it, I like it. Let’s have Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, Berlin and Michael Walzer together. It’d be awesome to have them on the pod together. I don’t know, that’s not possible. But anyway, Mijal,  we’re gonna be reading the Torah portion of Shalach very soon. And I wanna know what your thoughts are as they relate to this moment. Like I need some guidance, I need some wisdom. I always like to look to the Torah portion to provide that. So what do you got for me?

Mijal: So as you mentioned, we are about to read the portion of shallach. It’s a very intense portion, actually, because this is the moment in which the journey of the Israelites changes irrevocably. Basically, until now, You have this people that are made up mostly of adults who experienced slavery and they left Egypt. They saw the glory of God at Sinai and they believe they are going to walk towards the promised land. And that’s almost the story that they were telling themselves. And an event happens in this week’s Torah portion that breaks down that narrative.As a result of that event, that entire generation of adults who experienced slavery as adults, they die in the wilderness and they do not go to the promised land. Only their children and grandchildren get to go.

So it’s almost like a breaking point. Like until now, they think they’re about to get in. After now, they’re going to be 40 years in the wilderness, right? Before they can go forward.

So what is this event? It’s the event of the spies or the scouts, meraglin in Hebrew. And again, a very quick plain reading of the text says that Moses decided to send spy scouts to go into the land of Canaan, which is the land of Israel, and to basically like, you know, he gave them certain instructions. It was 12 men from the tribes. They were supposed to be important men, like elites, and to go and investigate the land and it gives them a certain set of questions. They go for 40 days. They explore the land they come back and then it gets really really really intense very quickly Noam, And I want to read to you, if it’s okay, can I read to you some verses? So I am on chapter 13, book of Numbers, reading from the translation verse 26.

Noam: Yeah, yeah for sure.

Mijal: We’re told that as soon as they arrived, they came to Moses and Aaron and all the community of Israel at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran. So Noam, this is not like a memo to Moses. This is like a big show with the entire community watching. And they brought the report to them and to all the community and showed them the fruit of the land. Then they tell Moses, we came to the land you sent us to, and it is indeed flowing with milk and with honey. And this is its fruit.

Mosaics of Biblical events, Synagogue Or Torah in Acre, Israel (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

But the people who live in the land are fierce and the cities are fortified and very large indeed. That “but,” by the way, Fs, right, serves a very important purpose. Like they said, praise, like the sandwich thing when you praise somebody, but then you say, you’re awful. So I said, the land is flowing with milk and honey, but it’s the enemies that we have there. cannot even.

Noam: Yeah, it’s the power of the word “but.” It’s why everyone got rid of the word but and started saying and, the way everyone says when you say but, the previous part of the sentence is nullified. Everything before that is nullified.

Mijal: Exactly. And they say we even saw descendants of Anak there. Anak might be giants. And they mentioned in the Negev region you have Amalek who are enemies, Chittites, Jebusites, and Amorites, and Canaanites. And they’re basically saying, like, it’s terrible. One of the spies, Caleb, tries to silence them and he says, no, we can go. Don’t worry. We can do it. But then the rest of the spies, or at least 10 of the men, Joshua, you know, was part of the mission and he does not contradict.

He’s part of the Caleb kind of group that wants to go to Israel. But then the rest of the spies who don’t want to go, they say, we cannot go up against those people for they are stronger than us. And then they go down even more numb. They start actually speaking much worse. They say the land which we have journeyed through and scouted is a land that consumes its inhabitants. So they start off by saying, we can’t conquer it. It’s too hard. And then they say, and the land is really bad.

It consumes its inhabitants. The people we saw in it were tall and broad to man. We saw the Nephilim and listen to this phrase, Noam, they also say we looked to our own eyes like grasshoppers. And so we were in theirs. They’re saying we’re like tiny little grasshoppers in their eyes. And what happens to the community as a whole listens to this report. They do not listen to Caleb and to Joshua who joins Caleb.

And they start crying and we are told they cry, they rail and they say, if only we had died in Egypt, if only we had died in the wilderness, why is God bringing us far to this land only to fall by the sword, et cetera? Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt? And they literally want to rebel against Moses, appoint a different leader and go back to Egypt. 

Noam: I have a thousand thoughts on this, I just want to know, do you have disdain or empathy for the scouts and spies? Do you like, you, or something in between?

Mijal: I’ll say like this, Noam, I think that the book of numbers in general tries to seduce us to have contempt for the protagonist that we are reading about and to make us think like, we would never do that. You know, you’re like, what’s wrong with you? Or like, you’re so stupid. Or there’s commentators that say they were just trying to preserve their own power.

Noam: Yeah. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?

Mijal: They were leaders in the wilderness. They wouldn’t be able to be leaders in the land of Israel. So I think that’s a very obvious reaction that we might have. And I actually believe that Torah is asking us, instead of saying they are great or they are awful, first of all to understand. What is a thick reading to understand why this happened? And the main reason that we need to do this, Noam, is because the way that I learned Torah, Torah is that it’s supposed to give us wisdom for ourselves. If I just sit and criticize what they did, I will learn nothing about whatever human failure we still experience today. So I think we need to do like a thick and generous reading to understand why this happened. And before we talk about why it happened, I’m just to remind our audience, after this happens, God wants to destroy everybody. After Moses begs, God says, I won’t destroy you, but the adults will die in the wilderness and according to our sages this night becomes the precedent for all future calamities for the first temple being destroyed the second temple being destroyed and like it almost becomes like the genesis of exile and destruction so it’s like a pretty heavy episode that we have here.

Noam: Yep, yes it is. So I have, so what’s on my mind is that the story of Zionism is the ultimate remedy for this story because this is a story in which they, these scouts, the spies, would go to the land of Israel. They felt like they couldn’t accomplish what they were told to accomplish. It looked very difficult for them for all the reasons that you mentioned. And then they say, you know what, we can’t do it, we can’t do it.

The difference is the early Zionists saw marshland, they saw swampland, and they ran to it. They said, it’s ours. It’s not that it’s more beautiful than it, it’s ours. And we have to develop it. And specifically, I want to read to you something that I just saw right now. I don’t know if you saw it, Mijal, it’s so special. Yaakov Katz, who we had on the podcast earlier, he tweeted this, which I think is the exact opposite of the story of the Scouts. I want to read this to you, what he tweeted. He tweeted:

I was on a flight from London to Tel Aviv Thursday night, set to land at 3.30 a.m. just as the Iran attacks began. Minutes from landing, we were suddenly diverted to Cyprus. (That’s when we had the conversation with him.) For two days, I was stranded in Paphos, but everywhere I went, from the streets to the hotel to the Chabad house that opened its doors, within hours, I met Israelis who had one goal, get back home, not to safety to Israel. This afternoon, I finally did, on a tugboat. It’s insane. Nine of us squeezed onto a vessel captained by Eli, a veteran Israeli sailor, who didn’t ask questions, just took the wheel. Among us, a brother and sister who are farmers and grow flowers in the Aravah. They’d been in Holland on a sales trip. The brother insisted on returning to report for reserves. Another was a CEO from Carmel. His company has 100 employees in global orders. He’s now fighting to fulfill despite a country under fire. There was a woman, an energy worker, who left the Ivory Coast to come home, a high-tech investor who wanted to be back with his children and grandkids holed up at his house, and two young men fresh out of the army who cut short their trip in the Philippines, coming under physical attacks in Greece and elsewhere because they spoke Hebrew. And then there was the guy who organized the boat, a former Navy officer who runs a company that develops safety technology for ships. No one asked if it was safe. I love that line. No one asked if it was safe. But that’s not how Israelis think. We are people who run toward home, not away from it, toward our families, our communities, our nation, even in war. That’s the difference.

Mijal: That’s beautiful.

Noam: That’s what makes us who we are. And it’s a tweet that’s gone way viral. And again, I think of it, it’s the inverse of the story. It’s running to challenge, running to calamity because that’s where you belong, because that’s your home.

Mijal: Well, it’s interesting what you’re saying, Noam. You used the word remedy before, remedy. Zionism is a remedy for the scouts. I’m thinking of repair, you know, that there’s almost like this thing we’ve carried with us. And what’s interesting, Noam, and what you’re saying is that there’s almost like the literal and the metaphorical repair. The literal repair is like, you know, like just thinking about the land itself. So those who don’t want to go and then those who want to go no matter what. Metaphorical repair is Zionism which is about agency, right? It’s about running towards the difficulty and not away from it. Yeah, beautiful. I think I saw, I don’t want to say the wrong numbers, but I saw a tweet that said how many numbers of Israelis filled out requests to go back home within an hour of there being like a link in which you could fill out a form. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s like in the tens of thousands, which is just

Noam: Oh my gosh. Yeah, but it makes sense based on this. When you feel that magnetic pull of biet,   of home, you go to it. You go to it. That’s what it is.

Mijal: Yeah. But at the same time, Noam, think that, again, going back to your question around contempt, I still think that even as we might, like as a traditional reader of the Bible, when I read about the spies and the scouts, I read them from the point of view of the narrator of the Bible. What I mean to say is like, I think what they did was wrong, right? Like I wish they would have come back and given a good report and everybody would have gone to the land of Israel. ⁓ Having said that, I think it’s good for us to dig a little bit deeper into why they couldn’t do it. Because I think what you’re saying about this repair is something that I like you admire, but I am not sure we always have. So I think we need to almost like work on our muscles to be able to develop it.

But there is a commentary that I used to actually scoff at and that I’ve learned to really appreciate. I think I was like in 10th grade or 11th grade when we’re learning the book of numbers and I remember my teacher. I can actually picture her standing in front of the classroom and teaching us and then she said, oh, but there is this commentary that basically says, the scouts, the spies were so holy, they were so righteous, they were so invested in learning, right? That they studying Torah, they were in the wilderness when they had nothing else to do. They wanted to learn all day long. That they did not want to go to the land of Israel because they realized they would have to begin working, right? And they couldn’t go back to like this idealized, you know, learning all day long kind of situation.

Noam: learning, meaning studying Torah.

Mijal: So the reason I was frustrated when I learned this was twofold. Number one, it’s like… It felt to me like an anti-army, poor, sit down and learn all day kind of argument, but that’s for a different… 

Noam: Meaning it’s part of the ultra-orthodox contempt for going to the army for those who don’t go to the army in the Haredi world. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Mijal: Okay.

Yes. But the main reason that I was annoyed at this is that I felt as a 10th or 11th grader, I felt that my teacher was trying to to sanitize the text. She was trying to to take what these scouts did, which was really ugly. And she was trying to say again, OK, based on this on this ⁓ commentary, like, no, they were just secretly really righteous.

Noam: Right, it’s kind of like when someone’s in a job interview and you’re like, what’s your weakness? I work too hard. They were so religious, they couldn’t stop learning Torah. And that’s why they didn’t want to go to Canaan. Now everyone’s like, you understand everyone now. I got it, I got what you’re saying now. Okay.

Mijal: Right, right, right. But I will just say that I really feel much more drawn to this commentary lately. Because I think it expresses, and this might be little bit disjointed Noam, I’m working it out. I think it expresses something very human. I think, and it goes back to the way that we started with the Netziv, like the idea that you shared about like, you know, miracles versus working hard. Like, I think there is something very, very human in wanting to stay in a place where you just get to talk about ideas and you just get to imagine and you just get to talk. So in my mind, this year, when I was reading it this year, this is what came to me. Okay. I was thinking, wow, this reminds me of the distinction of, I think Ross Douthat is the one who, like in some of his books, he wrote this, but when we can talk about what it means to live life through virtual reality versus to like live life for real. And a virtual reality world or a world of social media or algorithms when you are, you know, warriors in front of a screen and a keyboard, that is in like such a different plane of when you are actually having to deal with the world, which is so much more complicated. And the reason that I love this, Noam, is because I think we need to hear this, right?

Noam: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mijal: Like we actually like I thought my teacher was sanitizing it but but but actually no this is such an important message I think to many of us especially thinking about what it means to live in America about about the seduction of virtual reality. 

Noam: Yes, it reminds me of this quote from Theodore Roosevelt who says, and who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who neither know victory nor defeat. That’s what this reminds me of.

Mijal: Wow.

Yes, yes. And I know for me, I mean, we had a different episode once, Noam, as to whether we should be moving to Israel or not. But I know for me, so much of this last few days has been both having kind of like my heart, prayers, energies in Israel and also a little bit feeling like, I’ll just say it in this way, like I’m really missing out, you know? Like I’m not there in the arena where this is being lived and where Israelis are just rising.  I think here in America, I’m telling myself, so I’m not being moralistic here, I’m just talking to me. I want to be reminded of the Scouts. I want to remember that there is this temptation we have to stay in virtual reality and to not engage in the really difficult, scary, complicated, risky work of working towards the promised land.

There’s so much here now that we can talk of. We can talk about the role of fear. We can talk about how they looked at their enemies and they saw giants, which reminds me of, you know, the whole conversation around like Iran, was it a paper tiger? You know what I mean?

Noam: What’s a paper tiger?

Mijal: The idea of a paper tiger is almost like this monster that you build up, but really it falls down very quickly. And also like the statements they make, they say, we were like grasshoppers in their eyes. They saw themselves as tiny. They had like low assessment of themselves.

And what happens when you see yourself as a giant? That might be the recipe to go towards the promised land. So much here. We could spend hours on this, but Noam, I know that like the book of numbers is a special place in your heart. Not that it’s your favorite because we don’t, I don’t know if you have a favorite, but do you want to share some like other small moments that have meant a lot to you that you’re thinking about right now?

Noam: I think this is a major one, I think it’s a major one, but just to kind of top this off, I’m thinking a lot about this idea from, it’s a few chapters later, which comes up when the Jewish people are gonna settle the land of Israel, and they actually start making their way there, and two and a half tribes, Reuven, Gad, and the half of Menashe, the two and a half tribes, they basically make the decision to stay on the other bank for different reasons, could be economic reasons, could be because they wanted to help fortify the Jewish people entering the land of Israel. I don’t know exactly what the reason, but there’s a line there and I might say it wrong in Hebrew, correct me if I’m wrong. I think it’s, ha’acheichem yachul ha’milchama ve’atem teshvupo, well your brothers go out to war and you’re gonna just be here, you’re gonna settle here. And it’s on my mind, it’s on my mind because like you said, we don’t want to moralize to people who are not living in Israel. You and I don’t live in Israel. I have family that lives in Israel, but I am a proud American, and it’s a big part of my identity that I am American. And I wanna make sure that no matter what, the Jewish people in Israel and Israeli people, even if they’re not Jewish, feel as though that I’m not being Yoshev Po, meaning that I’m not sitting idly here, passively here, that I’m not doing something that is just on the side, I’m not in the arena. I’m not in the arena, I know that about myself. I’m not in that Teddy Roosevelt arena right now.

But I wanna make sure that it’s felt that we care, that we really, really care. And I think that the Jewish people, wherever they are, and you don’t have to be Jewish, by the way, to be an ach, to be a brother. We just heard Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s not someone that you and I talk about very often or necessarily agree with so often. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t, I don’t know. He said, he referred to the Arab community in Israel as Ahim, as our brothers. 

Mijal: And think that’s a repair by the way that we have to keep working towards.

Noam: Yes, the cousins. That’s what some of my friends and I, call them our cousins. We call them our cousins. They’re our cousins. They’re our brothers. And so we have to make sure that people feel that, that there’s not gonna be passivity. There’s not gonna be us sitting idly on the side and just letting the stories of Yaakov Katz and these nine people go to Israel. It’s an insane story.

It’s amazing and it is either a repair or it’s a, what word did I use? You said repair, right?

Mijal: You said remedy.

Noam: Remedy, and it’s more than that. It’s feeling a kinship. It’s feeling this connection. It’s doing something. It’s staying so up to date on the stories. ⁓ And it’s contributing. It’s contributing to the one and only Jewish state and not to be passive no matter what. And so again, I think it’s the case that there are so many legitimate perspectives on so many different issues as it relates to the story of Israel. But when I just looked at the numbers today and I saw that 83% of Jewish Israelis were supportive of this fight against Iran, that is a heck of a high percentage. That is a heck of a high percentage.

Mijal: for a very costly war by the way.

Noam: A very costly war and people are hurt. They’re losing their homes. They’re dying. And for right now, right now, and I’m thinking about this, I’m trying to be meta about this, like there’s that line that I’ve cited so often that Talleyrand says, the diplomat who worked for Napoleon and he said, you know, treason’s a question of dates. Like right now, right now, within the first week of this story, with so many Israelis and so many Jewish people feeling like, my gosh, we are being taken care of,  this nuclear  monster, meaning the nuclear capabilities to attack us will not exist, and you could breathe a sigh of relief, that’s a moment that all of us should be saying, if we can, we are there with you, we feel this with you, we are happy for you, and we are there for you. And so that line, ha’acheichem yachul ha’milchamah v’atem teshu po, that, will your brothers go to war and you’re gonna sit idly here, that’s also very much so on my mind.

Mijal: That’s beautiful. Now, before we close out, I just want to say one PSA as a New Yorker. And this is not an endorsement, but I just want to encourage any of our listeners who live in New York City to,  you know, to go and vote because we spoke this episode about not being passive, about being in the arena, about shaping history. There is a pretty significant race going on that will determine who’s a Democratic candidate for New York City mayor. And I just want to encourage every single one of our listeners who’s eligible to vote. to go and vote is really important.

Noam: Okay, the New Yorker has spoken.

Wondering Jews is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Today’s episode was hosted by me, Noam Weissman, and by Mijal Bitton.

Our team includes Michael Weber, Jenny Falcon, Rivky Stern, and Alex Harris. It’s edited by Rob Perra.

Mijal: We’d love to hear what this conversation sparked for you. Please email us at wonderingjews@unpacked.media. Find us on social @wonderingjews. And if you appreciate the show, share it with your friends and write a review. See you next time.


Show notes

Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution

Here is a link to Mijal’s Substack: https://mijal.substack.com/

Yaakov Katz’s post on his journey back to Israel: https://x.com/yaakovkatz/status/1934571174060532198

Get in touch at our new email address: WonderingJews@unpacked.media and call us, 1-833-WON-Jews.

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