Noam Weissman: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Barbara Sommer and Alan Fisher and Andrea and Larry Gill. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History or if you just want to say hey, be in touch at Noam@unpacked.media. I really love hearing from you each week. It’s awesome.
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There are moments in history that don’t just change what happens. They change who people are. October 7th was one of those moments. Not just because of the scale of the violence or the shock or the trauma, but because of what it did to something deeper, something harder to measure. The Israeli psyche. The way Israelis think about safety, about their neighbors, about power, about vulnerability, about the future. To be sure, for some, there was confirmation bias. Beliefs that their Palestinian neighbors were not actually interested in peace was confirmed to the extreme. But there were many, many people whose conception of potential peace with the Palestinians was shattered. They were always called naive by their naysayers, but now they started to believe it too.
And then, as if that wasn’t enough, came another layer, direct conflict with Iran, both in June 2025 and again today, in 2026. Missiles, escalation, a sense that the circle of threat is expanding, not shrinking.
So here’s the question I keep coming back to. What happens to a society that lives through this kind of sustained rupture. What impact does this have on children and young people living through sirens with lives on hold? Not just politically, not just militarily, but psychologically, morally, spiritually, as a human being.
Because whether I want to admit it or not, Israel has always been a country shaped by crisis. I don’t think there’s been a year since 1948 where things were simple and I don’t know, placid. Of course, the Israeli story is about so much more than conflict and ignoring the culture, the ideas, the civil society, the music, the sports, it’s reductive, of course.
And not but and wars, intifadas, terror, existential threats. They’re not new. They’re not new. But something about this moment today, 2026, feels different, heavier, more disorienting, maybe even more permanent. So how are Israelis changing? What beliefs have been broken? What new beliefs are taking their place? And maybe most importantly, what kind of society is being formed on the other side of all of this? What is the story of Israeli society? That’s why I wanted to have this conversation with the most preeminent Israeli philosopher alive today, Micha Goodman. Micha or Micah is someone whose work I have been deeply influenced by. His catch 1967 breathtaking, his The Wondering Jew, unbelievable, broader Jewish philosophy books on Moses and Maimonides. For me, these are my nightstand books and my airplane books together. I read and I reread them. Of course, I’ll make sure to link all of them in the show notes. But Goodman, he’s a special thinker. He’s a philosopher, someone who has spent years trying to understand not just what Israelis think, but how they think, the stories they tell themselves, the tensions they live with, the contradictions they carry. And I’ll say this upfront, as you might be able to tell, I view myself as somewhat of a student of his. Because Mika has this rare ability to zoom out, to take the chaos of the present moment and place it inside a much bigger intellectual and historical frame. Not to simplify it, not to simplify it, but to make sense of it.
And that’s what this conversation is about. How Israeli society absorbs trauma. How fear reshapes moral imagination. How a country like Israel, with its history, its ideals, its contradictions, adapts when reality shifts underneath it. And I want to be clear about something else, and I say this a lot on our show. This is not a debate. I’m not a debater. I’m not here to challenge Micha or to push back for the sake of it.
I do that sometimes, but really I do that to understand the ideas better. And I’m here to listen. I’m here to learn, because I think a lot of us, whether we live in Israel or not, are trying to understand something similar. What is happening to Israel right now? What does it mean for what and what does it mean for what Israel is becoming?
That’s the goal here. No hot takes, no predictions, maybe some, I don’t know, but something harder. And I think more important, trying to understand how history is reshaping a people in real time. Micha, thank you so much for being here.
Micah Goodman: I’m glad to be here, Noam.
Noam Weissman: Micha, I want to have a conversation with you. We’re in a moment right now in Israeli history, and we’re seeing just a remarkable story take place. I want you to situate me right now. I want to pause and I want to understand what you are understanding about not the day to day of the war with Iran, but I want to understand how you’re understanding Israeli society, in face of this moment, maybe historically take us to how we got here from an Israeli society perspective, and maybe how you think the countries surrounding Israel have misunderstood Israel all along.
Micah Goodman: Okay, this is very, very packed. There’s a lot to talk about here. But when you open the Hebrew Bible, you see all these ancient nations, the Jevosites, the Girgashites, the Hittites, the Ammonites, the Moabites. And almost all of them somehow disappeared. They don’t exist anymore. I assume, Noam, you never met a Jevosite, a proud, patriotic Jevosite, that wants to renew the ancient Jebusite language. You never met that kind of a, right?
But from all the ancient biblical groups, there’s only two that we could say that are still alive, standing and sovereign. And that’s the Persians and the people from Judea, the Jews. And now those ancient biblical nations are having the last round. So that’s one way to think about this.
But that’s the wrong way to think about this, because it’s not us against the Persians. It’s, if you go dive into the internal understanding of critical mass of Iranians, not all of them, but many of them, they do see themselves as the inheritors of the ancient Persian empire. But they feel that an radical Islamist group took over their country.
And in that sense, this war is not the war of the Jews against the Persians, it’s Israel, plus the Persians, and we’re both united against our shared common enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. So I think that would be the more, I think the more accurate way to capture this moment historically. But, the fact that Iranians are still inheriting their ancient ancient civilization is very beautiful. very powerful, but it’s also a very great Iranian weakness because for 1300 years, Iranians practiced this Zoroastrian religion. Now this is a very interesting religion. This is a religion that believed that there was not one God, but two gods.
One God is called Ahura Mazda. That’s the God of light and of harmony. And it’s the good God. And then the other side you have Angra Manu or sometimes she’s called Ahariman and is the God of evil and darkness and Druj, the chaos, disharmony. And these two gods went to war with each other in order to have, in order to fight, you have to have a battlefield. And guess what the battlefield was called? The world.
What you call the world is the battlefield between these two gods because in order for gods to have a fight,they can’t be an abstract, what they call Menog, that’s the ancient, it’s that not an abstract world of ideas. It has to have space and time. So Ahuramada creates this world to go to fight with Ahariman, with the bad god, and human beings are commanded to join the good god versus the bad god. Every good deed we do is a blow to the bad god and every good
The way we speak, the way we think reinforces the good over the evil. So think about it. If for 1,300 years, your mind is trained as a Zoroastrian, you become very, very binary in your thinking.
And Max Weber taught us something very interesting, that cultures have a tendency to be shaped by their ancient religions. Ancient religion shapes, creates mental habits, habits of mind and habits of thinking and habits of doing and those habits are still a part of you even when you stop believing in that religion. So Max Weber’s theory is that religions have a tendency to shape the culture and the personality and the character of societies, even after those societies don’t believe in those religions anymore. That’s the great insight of Max Weber.
That the spirit of capitalism, for example, says Max Weber, was formed by a theology that the Puritans believed in when they came to America. And hundreds of years after many Americans stopped believing in Calvinism, that theology is still shaping their mind and creating the spirit of capitalism.
If I use Max Weber’s model to understand Iranians, Iranians are trapped in binary thinking. They have a very hard time not to think in categories of either or. Thinking about how they’re thinking about the world now.
There’s America and Israel, this is a Satan. This is the absolute evil. This is how they’re thinking. And now they’re the alternative. They’re the, and the thing is that that this way of thinking is what blocked Iranians from creating some kind of a unity within their own identity. Because within Iran, you have Iranians that have a very cultural Iranian identity and Iranians have a very religious Shiite Iranian identity. And they’re playing the either or game. People that are culturally Iranian have an allergic reaction to Shiite religion. People that are Shiite in their religion think that being culturally Iranian and being inspired from ideas and books written before Muhammad is Jahaliya, is impure, and they can’t unite their culture. And as a result, Iran is divided into two groups and they’re in constant, constant civil war.
And that’s what we’re seeing now in Iran. So when, as an Israeli observing Iran, I’m asking, are we Iran? Are we trapped in binary thinking? Can we unite? Because in Israel, you have Israelis that see Israeliness as a cultural identity.
Noam Weissman: All right, so pause there. So, Mika, so you’re talking about Israeliness as a cultural identity. What I was going to imagine when you’re talking about the two different binaries of Iranian society, of, you know, the Persian versus the IRGC, let’s say.
Micah Goodman: I was thinking Irania, and Islamia. That’s how they understand it. Iran yacht is the culture and Islam yacht is a religious identity.
Noam Weissman: Yeah. Okay. Okay, great. And I was thinking Israel, you might say, well, there’s another binary, the binary of Jewish and democratic. Exactly. But is that binary, a real binary in Israel?
Micah Goodman: So there are many Israelis that think that either you’re Jewish or democratic, that we can’t be both. We have to be either or. So binary thinking, which is very possible that the origins of binary thinking is in the Zoroastrian, is Iranian thinking, is shaping the way that many Israelis are thinking. The kind of Israelis think that if you are a democracy, you can’t be Jewish, the country can’t be Jewish, or…these ways that say that if the country is Jewish, then it can’t really be a democracy. They’re playing the either or game and the idea that I’m sharing these days with Israelis that if we want to defeat Iran, we can’t be Iran. We have to be an alternative to Iran. The alternative to binary thinking is holistic thinking. It’s yin and yang. It’s a question. Can we be a Jewish democracy? Can we hold on to this tension?
Now, which takes me back to your question. If we look at these two and a half years that we’ve went through, ever since let’s say not October 7th, but October 8th, about what happened since October 8th with Hamas dramatically weakening, all the refugees, all the hostages coming home, Hezbollah being dramatically weakened.
Syria collapsing and now Iran degraded. And I think we could speak about that second. That’s not questionable, right? The massive success of the IDF. I think that is the, that’s not question.
Noam Weissman: the kinetic the kinetic war has been incredibly successful thus far for his last couple years yes
Micah Goodman: The narrative war we lost, the information war we lost, but the kinetic war, the ability to take an existential threat and neutralize it and turn things, turn the strategic equation upside around, that is something that’s very hard to deny. And I think the reason why Israel managed to do this, it’s because we’ve managed to hold on to this tension. Okay, I’ll try to explain this point.
This tension between being democracy and being Jewish. Yeah. But first let’s try to understand what does it mean to be democracy and Jewish simultaneously.
Noam Weissman: Yes, please.
Micha Goodman: When we say that Israel is a Jewish state, what do you mean? Now, Noam, you deal with Jewish history a lot. you know, in Jewish philosophy and Judaism could mean many things. So from all the variety of the meanings of Judaism, which one of them do we mean when we say it’s a Jewish state? It’s a Jewish democracy.
So here’s what we don’t mean. We don’t mean Judaism as a philosophy or as a belief system. The state of Israel doesn’t believe in anything. It’s not an entity that believes in God or believes in whatever. It’s not. Judaism could be interpreted as law, right? That’s how many philosophers thought, it’s law. No, but Judaism as, when we say Israel is a Jewish state, we don’t mean it’s a state that obeys the halacha, the law. That’s not what we mean.
Here’s where I think of what we mean. When we say, Judaism is a collective identity. Now, what is a collective identity? When you belong to a collective identity, so the story of the collective becomes your individual story. This is the alchemy of collectivism. This is the alchemy that turns history into biography, to quote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. When history is turned into a biography, you know that you belong to a collective, that the story of the collective is like, every person every Passover every Jew is supposed to see himself as if he or she just now escaped the Egyptians Experienced eggs is turning history into biography. Or history into memory and individual memory. Now, My mom is a convert to Judaism. She grew up a Roman Catholic from Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City. Wow, okay. Yeah, she’s one out of seven. Has six siblings. She’s one out of seven.
Noam Weissman: And then she converted to Judaism.
Micah Goodman: Yeah, she comes from a very frum family. I like to always to say that the Haredim in our family are Catholics from Oklahoma, very frum family. My great uncle, great uncle Jack was a personal advisor to John Paul II, the Pope. Wow. So we were, that’s my yichus, right? Yes.
Noam Weissman: That’s your pedigree.
Micah Goodman: That’s right. Like you have his way to say, I’m from the Vilna Gaon.
Noam Weissman: That’s great. That’s great. No one can compete with that Micha. No one.
Micah Goodman: No, it gets better, by the way. Because my mom’s grandfather was a Chickasaw Indian. We’re Native Americans.
Noam Weissman: Okay, this is getting, this is good. This is good. So you’re native American, a great grandfather’s, grand, grandfather, grandmother Catholic and your mother was Catholic converted to Judaism. And then maybe, okay. And her son becomes the leading Israeli philosopher of today. Jewish philosopher. you go. Natural Jewish story. I love it.
Micah Goodman: So yes, when my parents had their 50th anniversary, so my job was to tell their stories, I say there’s two wandering persecuted tribes. One, Chickasaw Indians in the Mississippi in the 15th century, and Ashkenazi Jews in the Rhine River around the same time. I told the story of these two persecuted wandering tribes, and then eventually they meet, they come to Israel, and here we are.
Noam Weissman: That’s so good. That’s so good. All right, so tell me about your mother.
Micah Goodman: So when I was a teenager, was to my mom. I was very aware of my Catholic background because as a teenager, I was a little bit embarrassed of it because I was, you know, a teenager.
Noam Weissman: A teenager in Israel, living in Israel. In Jerusalem.
Micah Goodman: Yeah. And, you know, I felt that. And so I remember my mom, I was very aware of the conversion. So I remember my mom speaking to her friends and she was speaking about how we were persecuted in the middle ages, and how we went through the pogroms and we went through the Spanish Inquisition. And as a kid that was very confusing so I asked my mom, but mommy, you say we were persecuted, but your ancestors weren’t really persecuted.
Noam Weissman: Maybe a little reverse, maybe they did some of the persecuting.
Micah Goodman: So I tell so she says to me, honey, we were persecuted. It took about 50 years. Maybe I’m exaggerating 30 years to understand what she said. When you, the best way to understand belonging to a collective is observing moment of conversion of transition. And when somebody moves from one team to another team changes what you belong to changes the nature of your belonging. And just like my mother now becoming a part of this club of the Jews.
What really, we think is dramatic because when you convert, you change your future. That’s true, but that’s not what’s dramatic. What’s dramatic is that you change your past. You see, belonging to a collective means that the story of the collective is your story. When we say that Israel is a Jewish democracy, Judaism doesn’t mean faith, it doesn’t mean belief, doesn’t mean law. It means that this story is a story that you belong to.
It’s not a law that you obey. It’s a story that you belong to. And that’s what we mean when we say Jewish. When we say democratic, here’s what we mean. We mean a liberal democracy. Now, liberalism and democracy are very separate ideas. They have two different, very separate biographies, democracy is an answer to the question, what is the only legitimate source of authority for the government?
Noam Weissman: The people.
Micah Goodman: The answer is the individuals. Every individual votes and that individual is the only legitimate source of the power of the government. that’s liberalism and it’s answer to a different question. Not what is the source of legitimacy for the power of the government.
But what are the limitations of the power of the governments? And what’s the answer of liberalism of John Locke, of John Stuart Mill? The liberties and the rights of the individual. So behind the idea of democracy and liberalism stand a deeper idea, individualism. And so if we unpack this philosophically correctly, when we say that Israel is a Jewish democracy, Jewish means collective. We belong to a collective. The story of the collective is our story. That’s collectivism.
When we say democracy, we mean human rights, we mean human liberties, we mean individualism. So if we unpack this correctly, a Jewish democracy means we’re a hybrid society that melts, that is very collectivist and very individualist simultaneously.
Noam Weissman: That is this so helpful to understanding Israeli society, keep going.
Micah Goodman: This is what’s hard to understand because most people, collectivist societies, like think about communism, fascism.
Noam Weissman: Give me examples of those famous collectivist societies. Countries.
Micah Goodman: The CCP, China. Right. Okay. the Islamic Republic of Iran. Right. So belonging to a collective means you have no individual rights. Belonging to a collective means you’re erasing your individualism. On the other hand, individualistic societies have a tendency to be very embarrassed of the sense of belonging to a collective. That’s not, you know, we’re speaking about individual rights, individual liberties, belonging to a collective always creates a connotation for liberal individuals as fascism or something. And it’s a hard, we always find hard marrying these opposites of individualism and collectivism and Noam, that is the project of Israel. A Jewish democracy means I belong to a collective, the collective is who I am, but democracy, I’m not erased. so that, I have my rights, I have.
That is the challenge that Israel is. And when Israelis say, can’t do democracy anymore, means we wanna be a classic collectivist society. And when Israelis say, we can’t do the Judaism anywhere, means we want to be a classic Western individualistic liberal society. And we don’t wanna be this not normal hybrid combination.
Which takes us to this war. If you ask, if we both kind of agreed that this war was, I mean, I don’t want to do ayin hara, but so far, kinetically, it was incredibly, incredibly successful. So you ask what happened here? So.
Noam Weissman: Well, Micha, A what happened here but B also what happened here that either Israeli society doesn’t understand about itself or that the other players in the region don’t understand about Israeli society.
Micah Goodman: Okay. So I think Yahya Sinwar when he attacks Israel on October 7th, he really believes Israel is about to collapse. He really believes that. And the reason why he believes that is because that was what the entire Jabhat al-Mukawamah, the entire Axis of resistance or a front of what they call the front of resistance believed. Their belief was that Israel is about to collapse. That’s what they thought. This was their understanding of Israel That’s a weak fragile society will hit it and it will collapse now we see like in 2015 Ali Khamenei says that Israel has maximum 24 years before it’s erased. When he said that, he believed that. Hassan Nasrallah in Binchbel in 2000, Binchbel is a town in the south of Lebanon, and Hassan Nasrallah goes to south of Lebanon in May 2000. This is after Israel
Noam Weissman: And Nasrallah was the head of Hezbollah.
Micah Goodman: was the leader of Hezbollah. And he makes a speech where he says that he says two things about Israel, that Israel has the strongest air force in the Middle East and has nuclear weapons, but it’s weaker than cobwebs. And this is the concept that they all had, that Israel is in the Shiite religion. You know how in Jewish religion we make a distinction between Pshat and Drash?
Noam Weissman: Yes, the simple meaning and the more layered meaning, let’s say.
Micah Goodman: Yeah. So every text has layers and there is deeper layers that you can see there are not transparent and you can’t. So also in Shiite tradition, you have that idea. You have Zahir, that’s the external transparent meaning of the sacred text. And you have Batin. Batin is the internal, the secret, the esoteric layer. But so, so Hassan Nasrallah is saying never let the external form of reality delude you.
There’s always more than meets the eye. Beyond the Zahir, there’s the Batin. And he looks at Israel and he says, Israel on the level of zahir, the pshat, Israel is the strongest force in the Middle East. But if you look deep down, it’s rotten from within. And the level of the Batin will just hit it and it will collapse. the entire Jabhat al-Mukawamah, the entire axis of resistance, really believed in the myth that Israel is very weak because what did they think? What was their understanding? And that is that Israel is a materialistic, Western, individualistic society. Now the problem with materialistic and abundant, rich, materialistic, individualistic liberal democracies of the West is that they are very high on capabilities. They have much better air force. They have better intelligence or high on capabilities, but they’re very low on will. Their will is very weak.
Noam Weissman: They’re soft.
Micah Goodman: They’re soft and their ability to pay a price to suffer, to sacrifice in a battle is very, very low.
Now Middle Eastern clans, Middle Eastern tribes is the opposite. They’re very low on capabilities. They don’t have F-35s. They don’t have like the best cyber and intelligence, but they have, they’re high on will.
And now, so here’s a question. When you have a clash in two societies and one is high in will and low in capability and the other is high in capability and low in will, who’s going to win? So the most important understanding of Islam, this is, one of the greatest philosophers of history of all times is a Muslim called Ibn Khaldun from the 14th century. And he said, will will always defeat capabilities. He called this Asabiyya.
Asabiyya. Think about a word that unites two concepts, unity and determination. That’s Asabiyah. And when a society has asabiyah, no, like,
Noam Weissman: I like Asabiyya. Asabiyya sounds great. I’m serious, the concept of like will over like, I would love to teach my children. It’s more about will than it’s, isn’t it? It’s not that I don’t. That’s Asabiyya, right? It’s, it’s, what, do you translate that? It’s not that you, it’s not that you can’t, that you don’t want to, you don’t want, like that’s what they say in the Israeli army. So that’s Asabiyya.
Micah Goodman: That’s Asabiyyah. Now think about the founding myth of Islam. In the 7th century, in this part of the world where I am, in Israel, there were two empires. There was the Byzantine Empire, which was actually the Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire in the East, and the Persian Empire in the West. And then in the desert, there was all these Arabs that one day became Muslim, were filled with Asabiyyah, come out of the desert, create not one but two armies, and defeat not one but two superpowers. The Byzantines and the Persians, that’s the founding myth. That’s will defeating capability. That’s Asabiyya. So uour founding myth is about the victory of will over capability. And by the way, think about Americans in Vietnam, the Viet Cong had will, Americans had capacity, who won? The French in Algiers, the Algerians had will, the French had capacity, who won? The Soviets in Afghanistan.
So asabiyah defeats F15s. That’s because you’re willing, because here’s the to think about it. Capacity is your ability to hit. Will is your ability to get hit and continue fighting. That’s asabiyah. What’s more important? Now, you know, this is the famous Rocky Balboa. It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you get hit.
The French killed a half a million Algerians and the Algerians continued fighting. The Algerians killed 20,000 French people and they packed their bags and left Algeria. That’s what it means when you’re high on Asabiyya, the advantage of Asabiyya. Okay, so this is all background to understand the culture, which is the lens that Sinwar, Khamenei, def Nasrallah, had when they were thinking about, when they were sure that Israel’s on the verge of destruction. And their idea was, okay, let’s go back on the level of Zahir, the external level, that’s capacity. have great, we have better weapons, but the level of will were very low on Asabiyya. Why is that? Because they thought they are collectivist societies and collectivism creates a sense of belonging, patriotism, unity creates Asabiyya.
And we are individualistic societies.
Now let’s think about individualism. The paradox of individualism is the following. If you ask why our Western societies are so wealthy and enjoy abundance, it’s because of individualism. Because individualism does two things. One, it creates innovation, right? If you think out of the box, out of your group, you’re not liberating.
Individualistic societies encourage people to think for themselves and to be, the heroes are those that are liberated from group thinking. So it creates innovation and ambition, because I have a dream and I’ll do it the way Frank Sinatra thinks it my way. And I will build my company and my heart.
Okay, so if you marry what individualism does, creates ambition and innovation, you marry that, that creates abundance. And abundance is what creates much better armies, wIth much better weapons.
So individualism is what creates high capabilities for Western countries, but the same individualism. It makes you weak on will. Right. Because if we’re all individuals to quote Monty Python, if we’re all individuals. So when things get tough, we’re all on our own. We’re not there for each other. There’s no Asabiyya. There’s no one for all and all for one, everyone for their own.
Sothe paradox of individualism, what individualism does to national security, to national strength, is that increases capability and it weakens will. Collectiveism does the same thing just upside down. In collective societies, you’re not gonna find a lot of ambition. People don’t create like startups, there’s less innovation, so there’s less abundance, so there’s less capability, but people are willing to die for the tribe and to take a bullet for everyone else.
Noam Weissman: Well, Joseph Trumpeldor, tov lamut b’yad artzeinu, it’s good to die for our land.
Micah Goodman: That’s right. now, if you are coming out, you’re saying, okay, Israel is a Western country, high of high on individualism, low on, so which means it’s low on a sub via. And in the end, just like, by the way, they all think the West is in decline. And by the way, I’m not sure they’re wrong, but the question is, is Israel Western?
What they got right is that Israel is Western. What they got wrong is that Israel is not only Western. Because Israel is Western, it is a liberal capitalist individualistic society that creates innovation and ambition to start a nation and high levels of capability. But Israel is also a collectivist Middle Eastern tribe. We are Middle Eastern Westerners. That’s what they have a hard time understanding.
Now let’s see how this is played out in this war. If you measure this war, if you see the capabilities that Israel has been demonstrating, so from the pagers to the intelligence about Hassan Nasrallah to the 12 day war, we’re seeing mind blowing capabilities, Right, absolutely. When it comes to intelligence, when it comes to accurate fire, mind blowing capabilities. And Israel’s defense tech is going to bloom after this war because everybody wants Israeli capabilities.
But then you saw something else in this war. We saw throughout Gaza and Lebanon, and right now, as we’re talking, our brothers are in Lebanon, we’re seeing the highest level of willingness to sacrifice. I was yesterday in Tel Aviv. And I realized, I’m in a war zone. Like these people in Tel Aviv, they’re up three times a night when there’s a siren, an average. And the guy was with, the crew and the team was describing how every night he has to go take his kids, his three year old, a three month baby, and then go across and knock on the door of their elderly neighbor to make sure that he woke up and then bring him down all the way down four levels to the bomb shelter, go back home, go to sleep just to wake up again a few more times at night and then you have a regular day and his voice have been, now he’s asking, you supporting this work? He yeah, I am.
Noam Weissman: You know that is something that I think Americans, where we don’t, I can’t speak for every American obviously, but when I hear these stories and the. And the ability to withstand or the ability or the willingness to lose a few hours of sleep at night. I sometimes I think like what Americans do we have this collectivist culture that you’re describing in Israel or do we not have it because, it sounds like we’re much more of an individual society. Iran’s more of a collectivist society. And it sounds like Israel is this hybrid, which therefore makes it incredibly hard to understand. IAnd perhaps Israel’s neighbors just never understood that.
Micah Goodman: This is what they don’t understand. And it seems like there is, this is an inside ad, the conversation with Peter Berkowitz from Stanford University. There seems like there is an historical zero sum game between capability and will. So science are high in capability and low in will, science are high in will and low in capability.
And this past war, Israel has managed to break that historic zero sum game. Be high in capability and high in will simultaneously. And I think the answer, how did Israel manage to do that? It was managed to do that because we are a collectivist individualist society. Collectivism is what increases your will. I belong to a story that’s bigger than myself. And individualism, I have a dream, I have an idea, I’ll do it my way.
Individualism is what creates abundance and capability and the best weapons. In Israel, being an Israel, think about what does it mean to be an Israeli? Now, obviously we’re making generalizations. But let’s say, okay, so I’m a hyper individualist. I have a dream, I’m gonna make it happen. I’m gonna create a startup. I’m living in Tel Aviv. I’ll do it. There is a term that Israelis use, ani lo ro’eh b’einayim, which means, it literally means, I don’t see in my eyes, but it kind of means like nothing it’s going to stop. Nothing will stop me. There’s no boundaries. I’ll do whatever it takes. I have a knife between my teeth. I’m going to go all in with my ambitions. And like Frank Sinatra said, then I’ll do it my way. And that’s what that’s the startup nation. And everyone that knows Israelis knows that they are way too individualistic.
David Ben-Gurion said once that the worst job in the world is to be a prime minister of Israelis because you’re the prime minister of 1 million prime ministers. That’s in the 50s, right, when we were a million. So like, try to tell an Israeli what to do, right? By the way, ask Moses how it felt to govern Jews for…
Noam Weissman: Right. Shimu na hamorim. Right. Listen, listen, you rebels. Exactly.
Micah Goodman: That’s right. never, Moses says, which means you’ve never listened to me not one time. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, it’s the ungovernable people. This is, so individualism is very natural for the story of, you know, for this Talmudic, everyone has their own opinion, tradition, nation, people. And that’s what creates the spirit of the startup nation, right?
And then that same person that’s now building a startup in Tel Aviv, October 7th happens. And without thinking twice, that person finds himself within two days in Khan Younis in Gaza, a part of the platoon. And now that person is in a very different emotional environment. And, and so let’s think about it. The emotional system of individualism is self fulfillment. That’s where the adrenaline comes from, self-actualization. But when you’re in a brigade in Lebanon, a whole different emotional system is activated. And that’s not of self fulfillment, but self-sacrifice. And how was easy for so many Israelis to move from self fulfillment to self-sacrifice? And then by the way, when Miluim was over, when their reserve was done, they go back to extreme hyper self-fulfillment. This is back to self-sacrifice.
So we’re not just talking about two ideas, we’re talking about two emotional systems moving backwards and forwards for both of them. So if I go back to your original original question, Noam, it’s very hard to marry Judaism, Jewish, to create the Jewish democracy. And because it’s hard, people want to give up. What’s hard for people to see is that it’s hard. creates tremendous amount of pain and conflict marrying these two, keeping these two things alive. But because Judaism is collectivism and democracy is actually individualism and they present two different ideas and two different emotional systems, when it’s possible for us to marry the two, it leads to a society that manages to break the historic zero sum game between will and capabilities. And if you ask how did Israel do it, it’s not Israel that did it, it’s Israeliness that did it.
Noam Weissman: It’s the hybrid. What is Israeliness? What can you define for me? What is Israeliness? In Hebrew you say Israeliyut. What is Israeliness? What does this word mean?
Micah Goodman: I think the essence of Israeliness is that, by the way, it’s not always so good. It’s actually usually not. It’s not, first of all. But Israel at its best is hybrid. Israel at its best is not binary. Israel at its best, it’s, now on a political, I mean, we see this as these are two ideas that have to be married. These are two emotional systems that have to be connected. And these are also two… a book that I wrote that only came out in Hebrew, it’s called The Eighth Day. And it’s not going to come out in English, it’s a little bit outdated, it will have to do a different version of it. But we did a very big poll, a very big, we tried to understand Israelis, trying to understand what is Israelism. And because in Israel, politically, Israelis many times buy the binary myth that Israel’s divided into two camps.
And there is the hamahani haliberani. There is the liberal camp and there is hamahani haliumi, the national camp. That’s like left first rate and hamahani hali berani. That’s democratic Israel. And the hamahani hali umi is Jewish Israel. And the hamahani hali berani is Israel of Tel Aviv. And the hamahani hali umi is Israel of Jerusalem. Right. So so easy. the way, our minds are wired to think in a binary way.
Noam Weissman: There’s something to Zoroastrianism.
Micah Goodman: Oh yeah, it does capture something in human nature. It does. Yeah. Natural selection reinforced that tendency to divide everything into two and this is good and this is bad.
Imagine you walking in the Savannah of Africa, three million, like one of your ancestors, three million years ago, and you hear like something in the bushes. And let’s say you have like this very holistic.
Noam Weissman: Nuance.
Micah Goodman: Well, there’s 70 options what that noise might be. Maybe it’s good. Maybe, maybe it’s good.
Noam Weissman: That’s why they’re only fifteen million Jews.
Micah Goodman: Exactly. Those genes were wiped away. Right. They didn’t make it here. But if you had a brain that made a mistake that says, there’s only two options and there’s not two options, either it’s a rabbit and that’s good because that’s calories for me, or it’s a lion and that’s bad because now I’m calories. If you divided the person with a brain that divided reality into two options, either it’s good or bad, either have to run, go to it or avoid it. Those are the genes that survived and were reinforced throughout natural selection. And those are the genes we all inherited. So there’s a lot of explanations why our mind is so, it’s so easy for us to be seduced by binary thinking. We have to overcome our nature in order to think holistically. It’s very easy to think. And by the way, what social media does, it activates that.
If we go like to Daniel Kahneman, Daniel, so Daniel Kahneman taught us that there’s two ways we think. We could think slowly and think quickly. Thinking quickly is what he calls system one. And we think slowly at system two. And when system one is activated, when you think quickly, you’re always binary. It’s good or bad. Right? And when, to think holistically, to understand that opposites, even though they’re in competition, they still complete each other and we need both to think holistically yin yang to think that way. You have to think slowly that system two. So what social media does, it activates system one. So the way I see it, we have biology weaponized by technology. We have the whole natural selection creating biologically a mind, which is very, very easy to seduce to think and it to be trapped in binary categories.
And social media, that’s exactly what it does. It feeds us that this is good. is usually, you know, who’s bad. Everything is clear. Nothing is ambivalent. Nothing is holistic. Nothing. So right now we’re in a world where we’re all binary thinkers.
Noam Weissman: So Micah. But if I understand Israel, this is really this is the hybrid of collectivism and individualism. It’s the hybrid of Jewish and democratic. And the project of Israel, the project of Israeli society is ultimately to fuse these two or to live with it, not as a thesis and an anti thesis that never get synthesis, but there is some sort of synthesis that takes place within the society itself, which is it which is a feature of the Jewish project, the Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. That’s the feature. That’s a feature of it. This is something that you’ve picked up on. This is a new thesis, I think, of Israeli society that I really think is so important to pick up on.
But I want to challenge you on a couple ideas with the binary and Israeli thinking. Within the first week of the 7th of October, your voice was such an important voice to me and to many others. And one of the things that you said was a bit of a binary. Here was the binary that you said. You said Israel has a choice right now. It could either be respected by its neighbors. Or it could be loved by the West, but it can’t have both, right now.
Micha Goodman: Yeah.
Noam Weissman: Two and a half years later, Is that the right framing? Have you changed your thinking at all on this topic? Because like you said, we started with this Israel, and historically, I talk about this all the time, has won, is winning the kinetic war. It always seems to win the kinetic war. But the mimetic war, the narrative war, the information war, the conversation war, and maybe even like, now I’m going a little deeper, maybe within Israeli society, is there something that’s even like corroding from within that’s leading to a society that is saying to itself, It’s us against the world.
This is where we are right now. And we’re going to have the death penalty against just the Palestinian terrorists. And we’re not going to look at, you know, Jewish terrorists from within. We’re going to, we’re going to protect and we’re going to defend and we’re going to be collectivists. And this is going to be who we are. And we’re going to wake up four times in the middle of the night. That’s what we need to do. Is this healthy?
Micah Goodman: Okay, so this is very loaded. Yeah. Let me try to unpack this.
Noam Weissman: Please be there for me right now.
Micah Goodman: So I’ll go back to my original thinking. This is, the whole war, I was asked by American friends and American family, don’t you see that Israel’s reputation is being ruined? That the way you’re being seen in the world is being destroyed. And I used to think, yeah, we’re Zionists, we don’t care about our reputation. Zionism in many ways is about a transformation in the character of the Jew. Where what they call the Galut Jew, the exiled Jew, is a person that’s pathetically only cares about what everybody else thinks about him or her. Creating a very pathetic, weak, surrendering personality.
And as Ze’ev Jabotinsky put it, we’re going to create a new psychological breed of Jews. And the way Ben-Gurion put it so it doesn’t matter what the Gentiles say, only matters what the Jews do. So creating the Jew that doesn’t care about what other people think about him, it’s like, throughout the war, in the beginning, I thought that maybe this is what’s happening.
American Jews like, I’m like, they’re very care about the reputation and we’re like, we just wanna win, we don’t care about reputation. But that’s wrong, that’s wrong. That was a wrong way of saying it. And if I go back to, I think my original instinct was actually, I understood something, what you’re quoting now. Because we did care about a reputation, but the thing is we have two reputations to think about. There was a reputation in the West and a reputation in the Middle East.
Now in the West we want to be seen as a country which is friendly and playing according to the rules and cares about everything the West cares about. But in the Middle East, what reputation do we want among the jihadi forces of the Middle East? We want a reputation of a unpredictable, a little bit crazy country that could do anything in any way. We wanted a very different, aggressive, we wanted a very different reputation. The problem is you can’t hold onto two reputations at the same time. because we can’t, so another way to put it, when it comes to the West, we want the West to love us, we want to be loved. When it comes to the Middle East, we want to be feared. And if you ask an Israeli, and I think almost any Israeli, I’ll ask you, which emotion would you choose, to be loved by your friends or feared by your enemies. Like what will enable you after October 7th to sleep at night, fear or love? Israelis chose fear.
The problem is that there’s zero sum gain between the two because everything that Israel had to do in order to restore fear eroded the love. Or to turn this into more professional language, not fear and love, to more the, we need to restore deterrence, so we have to sacrifice legitimacy.
And so I think the way to think about this war is the following is that let’s say this war is a car. Okay. And the destination is restoring deterrence, which we completely lost after October 7th. And that’s the destination. In order for us to live here, to survive here, we need people, we need the different jihadi forces in the Middle East to fear us, which is what they lost.
They lost this because they thought that we have no Asabiyya and then we lost it because of the disaster of October 7th. We feel like we all thought we don’t have an army anymore. So why not? We couldn’t protect ourselves. That’s how weak we were in October 8th. So we have to restore the deterrence. The thing is, if the deterrence if, restoring the deterrence is a destination, I’m thinking in Hebrew, the fuel tank, the fuel tank. That’s legitimacy. The legitimacy is your fuel. And here is the question that the whole war was about. Will we reach the destination before we run out of fuel? Right? Or they run out of fuel before we reach the destination, which means, are we going to lose all legitimacy before we restore deterrence? Or will we restore deterrence before we lost legitimacy?
And I think the first war, now let’s say we’re in a different war now, but that war ended when the hostages came home. I think it’s fair to say that we managed to restore deterrence on the last drop of legitimacy, but then you find yourself in a situation where on the one hand, we’re the strongest force in the Middle East. Everybody knows that we’re capable and that we are willing and we have Asabiyya and they don’t want to mess with us.
And on the other hand, we lost all our legitimacy and now we’re isolated. and that’s the victor. That’s how we won and we lost. We won the kinetic war. We lost the narrative war. This was a catch to begin with.
And the big question now, Noam, will this war with Iran, when it ends, create new opportunities? Because the new opportunities, if there will be normalization, now there could be some level of normalization with Lebanon. That’s on the table. What we’re seeing with Iran now, this is different conversation, but Iran might be, the moves of Iran by attacking Saudi, by attacking the Arab countries. It might create, I don’t think we’ll have normalization with Saudi Arabia, but I do think it will, I think we should think about normalization and using quantitative categories. Many will have more normalization, more economic cooperation, more, you know, maybe like IMAC and like maybe you could be involved in projects in Saudi Arabia.
And here’s a question, is it possible that Israel will itself in a situation where it’s becoming more and more legitimate in the Middle East. Because if it is, so we’re in a very weird world. Because I was growing up in a world where Israel is legitimate in the West and illegitimate in the Middle East. We might be going into a world that is upside down, where Israel is less and less legitimate in the West, but more religious in the Middle East, legitimate in the Middle East. But I believe, a growing process of legitimization for Israel in the Middle East will block the process of de-legitimization of Israel in the West. And this all depends on how do we, this all depends like what kind of politics will we have? What kind of policies will we have? Will we grab the post-war opportunities? I’m just saying we had to, we had to, we had to, the currency that we paid for the success was our legitimacy.
But now the question is, can we leverage the success in order to restore some of that legitimacy? Those are the big questions regarding the future.
Noam Weissman: I have a couple just last questions for youto help our audience just understand just broader questions. In the story of Israel, this is what I do, I teach the history of Israel, right? There have been moments where Israel’s viewed as the Goliath. There have been moments that Israel’s viewed as the David. David was probably 48 to 67, maybe to 73 to an extent. And then over time, it’s…it hasn’t fought a war against a sovereign country until Iran of 2025, 2026, between 73 to 2025, 26. Israel has basically not had an Arab Israeli conflict from a sovereign perspective, but more of a local Palestinian Israeli conflict.
And now something that you’ve said also, you said the last year, I believe that Israel doesn’t have an Arab-Israeli conflict. Doesn’t necessarily have a Palestinian Israeli conflict alone. It’s more of an Iranian-Israeli conflict.
Micha Goodman: Yeah.
Noam Weissman: Do you view Israel as David or Goliath right now? What’s the best framing for a regular person here in the US? I’m actually recording in Orlando, Florida right now. I mean Orlando. It’s a regular Orlando person who’s right next to me right now, a producer right next to me. What would you say to her? Is Israel David or Israel Goliath?
Micah Goodman: Well, Israel is a very small country. We’re only 10 million people. We literally don’t have enough soldiers in our army now. Have, we don’t have enough soldiers. We have to recycle the same soldiers again and again. People serving people leaving their homes, their families for 200 days. They’re 32. They didn’t sign up for this. They’re serving 300, 400 days.
It’s a very, very small country, very high on Asabiyya. That’s why they leave their homes for 300 days because these hyper individualists are also hyper collectivists. That’s the alchemy that enables this.
But…If you think about now, we have a war in Lebanon as we’re with the Hezbollah. We’re attacked by Yemen as we’re talking. We are isolated in Western civilization as we’re talking. And we have a war with a 90 million people country, Iran. So I think it is fair to say that we are David. It’s us versus many. It’s a few versus many. I think it is fair to say.
This moment, this very moment as we’re talking, I don’t think we’re David because now we’re fighting shoulder to shoulder with the United States of America. But until this moment and after this moment, this is a very temporary moment. Yes. It’s us versus, which is also, which is also very, very confusing because when it’s Israel worth the Palestinians were Goliath, they’re David. When it’s Israel verse Iran and its proxies were David, they’re Goliath.
So Israel is, again, another Israeli paradox. We are Goliath and David simultaneously, depends which context you measure us against.
Noam Weissman: Micha, you wrote Catch 67 which I think is one of the most important works and so many of my ideas come from catch 67 and So, you know just full transparency I quote it all the time I quote you all the time but something I’ve been wanting to ask you me for a long time So I’m so happy to have you on Unpacking Israeli History right now to ask this question after the 7th of October or even now, is there something you would change from Catch 67 in Catch 67? You talk about the catch of gaining three times, four times the territory in the six day war in 1967 and the moral cost that it has on Israeli society. You spoke about there that the Jewish state is not occupying a land. There is no occupation of land. There is no state that is, there is no land that is more Jewish than Judea and Samaria, but that it is occupying a people. And that is just a cold hard fact. There’s a military administration of those people in areas A, B and C. Well, or in area C specifically, and area A and B is much more complicated. Fine.
But now again, after the 7th of October, after the June, 2025, now when you look back at it now, is there anything from that book that you say, hmm, I don’t know if this is what I was imagining. Or is it like, it still like it doesn’t still hold in the in middle of 2026 exactly as you as you wrote?
Micah Goodman: It holds and it doesn’t hold. Let me try to explain this. It does hold in the sense that I think the book captures a catch, a serious catch. And the catch 22, which is a catch 67 is that if Israel over, I mean, Israelis do not want to control the lives of Palestinians. It’s something that you mentioned before, Ben Gvir and others. So I’m talking about like, I’m talking about more mainstream Israelis, not the Israelis which are extreme.
Noam Weissman: Ben Gvir and Smotrich don’t represent a lot of Israeli society at this point?
Micah Goodman: I think they represent the minority in Israeli society. It’s a dominant minority, but I think they represent the minority in Israeli society. Yeah, of course.
Noam Weissman: But not a fringe minority.
Micah Goodman: It used to be a fringe minority. I don’t think it’s a fringe minority anymore.
Noam Weissman: But when you were writing Catch 67 they were fringe and now they’re just minority.
Micah Goodman: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. I think maybe that’s when I was writing Catch 67, they were a fringe minority now they’re a minority. I think that’s true. Yes. But still, think Catch 67 captures the voice of center left, center center, center right, maybe even moderate, like something like a large group of Israelis that do not want to control the lives of Palestinians at the same time they don’t trust them and they don’t want to be threatened by Palestinians.
So if you don’t want to control them, you don’t want to be threatened by them, you’re in a catch. Because if you don’t want to control them, you have to leave the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. But if you don’t want to be threatened by them, you have to stay in West Bank, Judea and Samaria. So that’s the catch. That’s the catch. And if you over control them, that could be an existential threat to Israel. And if you leave these mountains, that will be a kinetic security threat to the existence of Israel. That’s the catch.
Now, which means this problem is not solvable, but we could escape the, but anything we do that on the one hand increases Palestine and self-governance, but on the other hand, the military still has full access throughout the area. That’s not full statehood, I think, that is optimizing what most Israelis want. We want to control them much less without being threatened by them more. That’s what most Israelis want, that is what we’re aiming for. We can’t end the conflict. I call it shrinking the size of the conflict, turning it from a conflict that could threaten the existence of Israel, it’s a conflict that threatens Israelis. It felt like there’s a, right now, like the conflict is a threat to Israel. Can we transform it into a conflict that threatens Israelis?
Like, I think Israelis will continue sadly dying because of the conflict. The question is, will Israel as a country die because of the conflict? Shrinking the conflict is turning from an existential threat to a threat like crime, car accidents, bad things that happen because of bad problems. And that’s, I think that’s like.
Noam Weissman: There are challenges in LA or challenges in Atlanta or Baltimore or New Orleans or New York or wherever.
Micah Goodman: That’s right. And anyone that thought maybe we could have like, like, like a Smotrich saying that there is a way that this conflict will not threaten Israelis anymore. If the Palestinians will somehow not be there anymore. Or peaceniks that say, there is a way that the conflict will not threaten Israelis anymore. The Palestinians will be all Nelson Mandela, peace and love and, we’ll have, okay. But these are two, these are like if I’m. if I’m sitting now in Nir Oz, okay?
Noam Weissman: One of those kibbutzim that were attacked.
Micah Goodman: Next to Gaza. I’m saying on the other side of the fence, there is close to 2 million Palestinians. And the utopian far-wing right is saying, one day there won’t be any Palestinians there. And so, not many Israelis, but people outside of Israel think, one day there won’t be any more hate there. They won’t hate you anymore. They’ll want to live with you, coexist with you. These are two, this is infantile thinking. Infantile, utopian thinking is an abstraction of infantile thinking.
What do children want? Mommy, make the problem go away. What is an adult supposed to tell his child? Honey, the problem’s not going away. And that doesn’t mean we’re ignoring it. That means we’re starting to really deal with it. But then those adults look at the government and say, make the problem go away. And either the hate will go away or the Palestinians will go away. Those are two ways of being a child, of saying the problem is going to disappear.
There I think here’s a fact, that the Palestinians are here to stay the Jews are here to stay and the hate is not going anywhere and I don’t think there’s a way to change that in the near and in the foreseeable future. And all that is more true. I’ll tell you what I got. So so we have to ask not it will always threaten Israelis. Can we make it that won’t threaten Israel? Can we make it that on the one hand we avoid a one-state catastrophe without going into a two-state catastrophe? Is that possible? In the foreseeable future, I think it is.
But here’s what I missed in my writing.
It’s very big. If you’ll read Catch 67, I barely speak about Gaza. In articles I written, I didn’t speak about Gaza. In my Hebrew podcast, we did 30 episodes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I didn’t speak about Gaza. I kind of thought that Gaza was not an existential threat. It was a threat to Israelis, not a threat to Israel. Why? Because demographically, we left Gaza. So those two million Palestinians cannot become Israeli civilians and create like a one state Israel doesn’t exist anymore catastrophe. So that threat’s not there.
And on the other hand, Gaza is topographically not like Judea and Samaria right over. So it’s not a security threat, not a demographic threat. It’s not a big deal in Gaza. I avoided Gaza.
Now here’s what’s embarrassing. What I didn’t understand is that Gaza is a part of an ecosystem and that Gaza could activate Lebanon, could activate Iran, could activate the Houthis, act as a Gaza is an existential threat. Gaza can’t be forgotten and can’t be ignored. And this is such a big, blind spot. And Noam, it’s also as somebody that tries to see himself as an intellectual, it’s also an embarrassing blind spot. Why? Because guess who also thought that Gaza was nothing? The entire Israeli intelligence and military and political establishment, which means, and this is very embarrassing. It means that my head was trapped in the way the system was thinking. If I was ignoring Gaza means I was breathing, inhaling subconsciously the concept, the way of thinking of the entire system. So, which is very embarrassing because I always thought I’m an original thinker. So that was my awakening of after October 7th was like, dude, you’re not…
Noam Weissman: You’re in the matrix.
Micah Goodman: Yeah, I’m in the matrix and I’m a group thinker and all. So that was for me. So these are like, so I do think Catch 67 is not wrong. And the other, but I was blind and cause what didn’t I see? Cast 67 gives you two categories. Either there’s a demographic threat or there’s a security threat. And since God is not in Gaza is not in both. So I have to think about Gaza, which means I fell in love with my own categories. Now.
When somebody believes their own shit too much, that’s when you start becoming blind. So for me, I’m sharing with you my own cheshbon nefesh, my own intellectual.
Noam Weissman: Intellectual accounting.
Micah Goodman: Intellectual like, well, like, okay, this is, so this is a, so this is for me, a real wake up. Like, so you never, when you’re in the matrix, you don’t know you’re in the matrix. All group thinkers think they’re not group thinkers. So questioning yourself much more than you did in the past, that for me, that for me is the most important lesson from October 7th.
Noam Weissman: This is my last question. This is the question that I’ve been wanting to ask you for years. It’s something that people challenged me on. And as someone that, you know, I said this in my intro, you’re somebody that I’ve just learned a tremendous amount from. And I view you as like, and this might be weird for you to hear, but like an intellectual and spiritual rebbe of mine, a real teacher of mine. And one of the challenges that people pose to me, so I’m going to pose it to you, is, Noam, Unpacking Israeli History, what you do in your teaching in Jewish philosophy and Israeli history is you show the good, the bad and the ugly. That you are, you know, that I try to be a nuanced thinker. I try to be a nuanced thinker. I try to show the textures. I try to see things from all the different sides in the kaleidoscope. That’s what I try to do. And the argument is, Noam, that’s really good. Good job that you do that. But come on, man, you cannot do that at scale. That cannot exist at scale.
And what you said earlier about the evolutionary instinct that we have, good, bad, lion or something else, like, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, like, it’s not, this evolutionary gene kind of gets muted over time. But something you said is we need more moderates with an immoderate amount of energy. See, I’m good at quoting you back to you without even looking at anything. So that, but that’s something that you’ve said, and it’s in my head a lot. Moderates with an immoderate amount of energy.
The way I view that is like we need to be scaling thinking that is not binary. We need to be able to have the fusion, the hybrid of Jewish and democratic, individual and collective.
Micha, is this something that is scalable? Or is this ultimately a gene that’s gonna be muted over time and not really mutating so much over time? Is it gonna be a gene that’s kind of like you have 10 million people living in Israel and the fringe or maybe the minority are gonna have a way to have nuanced thinking, but it can never really be at the center of the spoke. It’s always gonna need to be something that’s a little bit on the outside. What’s your take? Is nuance scalable or is it something that will always live on the fringes of society?
Micah Goodman: It won’t surprise you that I get the same question, right? Many, many times, time and time again. And so we’re both living with this challenge and I have the same anxiety that you have that maybe this is not scalable. And that’s a tragedy because if this is not scalable, this is not going to good places. But I want to locate, I think I know, like, what’s the location of the problem?
When people need to understand, the world is becoming more and more complicated, more complicated than ever. And while the world is becoming more complicated, the amount of free attention that we have is shrinking.
So that asymmetry where you need, where the world is much more complex, complexity is broadening and attention is shrinking. The only theories that become popular dominance are the theories that meet the following standards. They give you an illusion of certainty and with minimum amount of attention, you have the feeling that you understand a very complicated reality. And what kind of theories fit that standard? Conspiracy theories, politics of blame, all these problems are because of them, the smolanim, the Jews, okay?
So and that’s binary. That’s binary vision, binary. We’re right there, like binary. And this is very worrying. I see the politics of blame on the rise, binary thinking on the rise, holistic thinking going down. And besides, it’s not just about content, it’s about the structure, which means, I don’t think we could heal the way we think without healing our relationship with technology, without creating spaces where our mind is not bombarded by digital stimulation, where we could activate system two, slow thinking, holistic thinking. So I think the conversation needs to be shift from content, to quote Marshall McLuhan, from the message to the medium. The medium is the message.
The reason why the messages are popular today are binary conspiracy theories. It’s not, it’s because the medium is shaping them. Malcolm McClure got it right. The medium is not something neutral that you use to spread the message. The medium shapes the message.
Noam Weissman: So if we read more books, if we maybe listen to more long form podcasts, if we processed information more, if we spent more time with system two thinking than system one thinking.
Micah Goodman: Yes, yes, yes. Podcast is a great example of how the digital revolution is actually… I forgot his name.
Noam Weissman: Don’t worry, don’t worry. Someone important said this.
Micah Goodman: Okay, is that In the beginning of the middle of the 20th century, United States went through the fast food revolution. Everybody’s like, this is so amazing because that’s the Trinity, right? It’s cheap and it’s very tasty, right? And you save time. So time, money and tasty. What could go wrong with that?
Noam Weissman: Sounds good to me.
Micah Goodman: And then like 10 years later, boom, there’s a health crisis and, and diabetes and obesity. Like, yeah, you changed people’s diets, what they eat. And you have a health crisis. That’s obvious right now. We’re in, we’re in the equivalent. We’re in the equivalent of the fast food revolution. We’re in the fast information revolution. And it’s quick, right? Time is money. You get like, it’s tasty in a sense that always triggers a very powerful emotion and it’s for free. And in the beginning when Facebook and all this came out, we were like, this is good for democracy. This is all good. 10 years later, our democracy is in crisis. Binary thinking is on the rise. Slow thinking systems, holistic thinking is down. right now what our body suffered after the fast food revolution, remind yourself suffering after the fast information revolution. And just like fast food is junk food, fast information, conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlsonism, that’s junk information. 10 years after that, new movement was created called Slow Food Movement, which to live healthy, have to go through slow food, the real fanatics, they grow their own food. I’ll just leave you with this, that the equivalent of slow food is slow information. You slow information is? That’s what Jews are best at. The Talmud is slow information, enjoying the process, enjoying the conversation.
And drawing to this agreement, books is slow information, podcasts, you’re a podcast no one. This is the antidote to fast information. This is how it looks like. So this is the medium that could, it’s the medium that could heal the message and not the other way around.
Noam Weissman: Micha, please stay safe and please be well. again, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with the Unpacking Israeli History community. Take care. Thank you so much.
Micah Goodman: All right. All right. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye.
Noam Weissman: Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, do something nice. Leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify. Maybe five stars never hurts. It really does help other people find the show and I would personally appreciate it so much. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam at unpacked.media. This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Rob Para and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here. See you next week.