"Not A Jungle": Recent Episodes
Tzvi Kilov
Tzvi Kilov aims at an uncompromising synthesis of this wacky world and our mad times with the infinite, ancient, and still-radical Torah.
tzvi.substack.com
When a wild-eyed Spiritualist, back from his ayahuasca or DMT trip, tells us, to quote the Ancient One, that we are looking at reality through a keyhole, we are unimpressed. Our keyhole, this narrow, pragmatic, mundane vantage point, is what lets us plumb and heat the buildings, grow more food than the world can eat, and prevent hippies from dying of exposure on their shroom trips. It even lets us synthesize DMT and create a global distribution system for exciting south american herbals. Whatever they see is thus arguably an extension of our know-how, and ought not uproot it.
Such arguments are often used to counter religious flights of fancy as well; however, as we have mentioned before, such critiques fall oddly upon Judaism. Judaism is not a spiritual religion; its overriding goal isn’t spiritual attainment or perfection. On the contrary, the soul has far greater spiritual sensitivity before it is born, so spiritual achievement can hardly be the purpose for which we are born. This is, in turn, an expression of Jewish epistemics, how we know what we know. For if we demote the spiritual experience by putting its true flourishing in a different world, how can we claim to know the truth in this world? Jewish epistemics are thus not spiritual. They are rather Sinaitic. The event at Sinai that founds all Jewish truth involved externality, objectivity, and public record as much as it involved spirituality, vision, and prophecy.
The hard-nosed philosophers actually make a pretty good point. The spiritual in this world always occurs together with the physical, always uses it as a medium. The physical is a necessary condition of physical events, a necessary component of all spiritual experience in this world. For something to exist or occur in this world, it must possess a material aspect. Of course, there are very good arguments for spirit being the prerequisite of matter as well: no plumbing has ever been so physical as to escape the spiritual. Despite prevailing societal biases, objects and events don’t exist without a spiritual component either. Perhaps all existence is spiritual, and existence in this world is also physical. Of course, proofs from other worlds must themselves be conceived in this world using our physical brains. But then, arguably it is only perception by a spiritual mind that renders the physical brain a coherent object. And on and on.
Judaism, for its part, does not escape the fight, but at least offers an argument for why we ought not to escape it. G-d very much cares about plumbing and about spirituality, which is why He created both. The human being, extraordinarily, exists in both worlds. Reconciling them properly is part of our mission, and demands regrounding our understanding in a selfhood that bridges spirit and matter. The very fact that we understand both plumbing and prophecy is mysterious indeed.
"Not A Jungle" is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
There is no ritual to join the secret society of fools, no official membership list or organizing committee or fundraising arm—yet one day I woke up and knew with certainty I was a member, as certainly as fools know they are not members of other societies.
Most people who have any interest in art or culture or religion are only in it for making conversation and positioning themselves. It’s only the few fools in the audience that can relate to the artists’ foolishness. It happens through subterfuge, in code.
Our secret society is not a secret because we have shadowy meetings or an esoteric handshake but because meetings are inherently impossible and any standardized language would tear the group apart.
And yet, despite having no bylaws and no fixed principles, no gatherings and no leader, the society of fools is pervasive. We are within and among you, at all your meetings and gatherings, watching, with a secret fire burning in our hearts. The society of fools takes things personally.
The society of fools does not need revolutions or violence, riots or protests, plans or schemes. The society of fools rebels inwardly, if not entirely alone then united only by the underground wires and the hidden back ways. Its presence on the world stage is an absence.
Even as I speak these words, I am not exposing the society, because for those who are not members, the words will invariably be misunderstood, while those who are fools already know. The society of fools works always and everywhere against the pretensions of externality, pragmatism, and accomplishment, yet its agenda is ineffable. There is no goal so practical, no words so clear, no logic so cold, that we do not challenge it in the inmost private souls that are our meetinghouses.
The society of fools is full of those who once tried to justify themselves rationally. They did not join because they failed, but because they succeeded, and the success tasted like dust and ash. They realized winning was losing, and losing was to win.
This, then, is the war and uniting purpose of the disparate, silent, unshareable society—to lose, and lose again. To set the inner fire like a fool against the iron fortress and numberless black troops of the world, a match to a comet, and burn.
Everywhere, in your churches and forums, bowling alleys and group chats, the fools are set upon by an endless parade of superficialities and pragmatisms, plans and essences, hierarchies and forms, and everywhere the fools in silence hold the line. They weave their refusals between the words of their acquiescence; they intimate rebellion in their obedience. They cannot be stamped out because they echo as noiselessness in the chambers of the oppressor’s heart.
We cannot be found in the phone book or locked down to an ideology. We have members everywhere and nowhere, and you cannot torture it out of them, because they themselves do not always know, but their ignorance of their own nature will not stop them when called upon.
“The Society of Fools” is not our real name. It is a translation into your language, as all words must be. Who else would live for a cause that cannot rally?
Our plans span centuries and are not plans, our survival is guaranteed and is disgusted to be called survival, our messages leak out like the face of Providence within the mechanism of the world, and deep, deep down, we all believe that the society was founded by G-d.
"Not A Jungle" is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
I have been taught that if one Jew sincerely wanted Moshiach to come, he would have come already. This is already a striking teaching in theory; imagine the shock upon figuring out why I, particularly, don’t really want Moshiach to come.
Ten years ago, I wrote that exile colors even our highest dreams of redemption. Even aware of this issue, I’ve only recently come to see how deeply my perception of Moshiach has been tainted by exile, how totally the limitations of today’s Judaism have embittered that future sweetness.
You see, when I’ve been imagining Moshiach, it’s as Judaism with nowhere left to hide. I had absorbed a picture of Moshiach as an extension of present religious life. Moshiach would be like yeshiva, like a farbrengen, like being with the Rebbe, only universal, intensified, and permanent. Every Jewish community imagines something similar. The ideal world will resemble its own world, once the compromises and dissenters have been removed. Moshiach is the moment when the community expands to fill the universe. All that is left to the individual is the degree and quality of their agreement with the Divine Truth and its community on earth.
There is another version, ostensibly more spiritual and perhaps even worse. In that version, my body, animal soul, peculiarities, questions, memories, and human interiority will cease to matter. Some pure G-dly soul, some inner vitality and identity who, unlike yours truly, cares only about G-d, will inherit redemption in my place. The consummate insiders, the pious and the saintly, will remain themselves when the Third Temple stands. But what will be left of me?
But the Messianic era will not be purely spiritual, and in fact, with the resurrection of the dead, the entire focus is on souls in bodies, bodies that are not souls. It’s G-d finally acquiring a dwelling in the lowest world, the world that remains lowest.
The Beis HaMikdash remains so difficult to imagine honestly. We post luminous pictures of it as though it were an especially beautiful synagogue and the disclosure of G-d we’ll find there will be so similar to our favorite farbrengen or mishmar or kumzitz. But the Temple is full of blood and fire, the odor of flesh and incense, smoke, knives, entrails, crushing moving crowds. It is not spirituality liberated from matter, and we won’t be either.
This finite, biological being I, for the most part, call myself, is going nowhere. It will remain itself and yet be entirely different, in the same way the ark in the holy of holies takes up space without measure. This is the ultimate signature of G-d, in our reckoning. Moshiach is not one group of insiders intensified or generalized but the outsider remaining who they are while ceasing to be alienated and the insider remaining who they are while ceasing to require outsiders.
No one’s present Judaism is universally triumphing. Every Jew will be there in their stubborn Jewish body with their secret Jewish soul. If every Jew belongs to redemption, then redemption cannot simply ratify the categories by which our communities decide who is central or peripheral, tolerable or expendable. The Jewish G-d does not become revealed by swallowing the world, assimilating the space between our bodies into one abstract whole. The Jewish G-d lives in that space too, and the unequal perspectives that set Hillel and Shammai against each other, that allowed the Will of G-d to speak in the language of the Rif, Rosh, and Ran, shall one day sing of Him equally. The “Knower of Secrets” shall be known by all even as the secrets remain secrets.
Perhaps this is part of what we mourn on Tisha B’Av. Not only that the Temple is gone, but that our imagination has become too exilic to desire its return. We can imagine an escape from suffering. We can imagine our own community enlarged. We can imagine becoming someone else. We cannot imagine being wholly ourselves, wholly united with every Jew, and wholly transparent to G-d.
We imagine Moshiach as a great impersonal state of affairs imposed upon us, the private possession of whichever person or group is most right, into which we will assimilate. Perhaps if we knew what a person was, who we really are, we could understand how G-d will wipe away every tear without wiping away our faces.
To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber!
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
A bargain was struck in New York harbor: the Jews traded the unique Jewish experience for the right to be treated the same as everyone else. The Jews would not say, anymore, that there was anything difficult about their lives to set them apart from the rest of humanity, while in turn, they would be subjected to no experience by external forces that would uniquely alienate them (“An antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary.”)
I bring this up not to praise, nor even to blame, but, indeed, to bury. It didn’t work out. We continue, more and more now, to receive unique experiences. For example, when was the last time (if ever) that Ukrainians or Russians in the US were required to denounce their European homes to socially exist in America? Do Han Chinese have to defend themselves against claims of genocide or political repression? Who else can claim to be Vice President Vance’s absolute favorite?
Many Jews seek to get rid of these resoundingly Jewish experiences and return to the status quo ante. I would like to propose an alternative: take back the right to claim the unique Jewish experience that is already being imposed upon us. With one comes all; if the Jew is an entity who knows things that can be known only by dint of being a Jew, why couldn’t it include our ongoing and historical relationship with G-d—Jewishness as a way of being chosen to be different by the Creator of all being? The world’s inability to explain its obsession with us itself testifies that we aren’t generic. May as well accept it.
We could end the long practice of reading the Torah with the assumptions that the “human mind” or “history” are genera and the Jewish mind and Jewish history merely species. We tend, when the world tells us repeatedly that we’re different, to lick our wounds and seek out all the ways we’re definitely, for sure, the same. This has led to Jewish politics that sound Southern Baptist, Jewish history that seeks to file the holocaust as an example of genocide, and Jewish religion yearning for universal natural law. “If we accept we are different, we will become the very insular, arrogant tribe they accuse us of being” is yet another refusal to admit that the Jews are different, that this may be a dilemma for other groups but isn’t for us. It is more comforting, for many Jews, to play the villain that fits into the world’s narrative than to say, “You have no idea what a Jew is at all.”
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Multiple times now we have discussed how:
-
The world tries to build the inside from the outside, deduce the interior from the exterior;
-
Many falsely reason that from knowing the body we certainly know the soul, that from knowing brain, we must know mind, that there’s nothing else to soul and mind than body and brain in the first place;
-
In a way, the entire notion of interiority is ruled out a priori by the materialist worldview.
However, there is an idea from the sciences that to me seems deeply concerned with interiority.
Without trapdoor functions, which enable public key cryptography, the internet as we know it would be largely unworkable. They are a key mathematical principle underlying your ability to send secure messages between, say, your web browser and your bank without allowing anyone in between, even your internet provider, to read the messages. These trapdoor functions rely on the fact that multiplying prime numbers together is far easier than factoring numbers into their constituent primes. Hence, they are “trapdoors”—they “open” only one way. In other words, there is a practical computational asymmetry in mathematics that allows us to construct secure digital barriers of a sort, encryption that your phone can easily “unlock” if you have the key but that a supercomputer would struggle to break without one.
The trapdoor function could be thought of as a weaker, more perspectival, computational version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which establishes that physics is directional and thus has time. Computational asymmetry implies that mathematics for situated knowers—and is there another kind?—can have perspective. We are able to securely purchase goods online largely because composite numbers contain their factors but do not disclose them equally to every standpoint.
One of the concerns about the emerging technology of quantum computing is that quantum computers may be exceptionally good at this kind of factoring and thus render much of our current-day trapdoor-function-based encryption ineffective. (This is one reason why trapdoor functions are weaker than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which no computer will violate any time soon.) However, asymmetry and “situatedness” may have the last laugh. Quantum technologies may also enable secure, widespread use of the “one-time pad,” an encryption technique that if executed properly is mathematically unbreakable without holding the keys. The relevant technique is called quantum key distribution, which is based on yet another intersection of physics with perspective, the fact that at the quantum level there is no observation without participation. All knowers are situated, and their situatedness can be harnessed to strengthen encryption.
What’s more, the one-time pad is mathematically unbreakable because the encrypted message is equally consistent with every possible cleartextof the same length. This is a different way of saying that technically, messages encrypted by a one-time pad contain no information about the original message. The meaning lives entirely in its relation with the key; in effect, the message has no determinable outside, only an inside.
So even in our coming sci-fi future, there will be numbers that are accessible to those on the “inside” and denied to those on the “outside.” A single string of ones and zeros can be eternal gibberish to an eavesdropper and a prayer to the one who wrote it; the history of the number, or, in other words, the other knowledge of the one who wrote it, makes a difference.
This all sounds suspiciously similar to certain Chassidic metaphors for the Divine act of Creation. In the Torah, being derives from G-d’s speech. A teacher contracts his vast personal understanding into a dense metaphor that the student can only grasp superficially, from the outside, but that from the teacher’s perspective transparently contains all the depth of his intellect. If the trapdoor function firmly distinguishes informational inside from outside, and the one-time pad eliminates the outside entirely, then Chassidus questions whether the entire distinction between inside and outside is itself one of the effects of createdness. What if “outside” is not where G-d is absent, but merely that disclosure of G-d which is unrecognizable without the key?
The secret to G-d’s closeness is not another being beyond the object or an encounter beyond all we have encountered, but the relationship of createdness that makes this object and all encounters Divine. We should be looking to understand the teacher and how He spoke, not sulking because we don’t hold the keys. Genesis is genuinely epistemically superior to mere inspection from within the creation. The outside is not as outside as it first appears, given G-d. Even science doesn’t entirely concede a view from nowhere. Reality has an inside. So let’s delve.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
I would never sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. What’s more, I have come to appreciate the Star Spangled Banner more after visiting Fort McHenry and learning the story of the Battle of Baltimore. Nevertheless, the Battle Hymn should be the national anthem of the United States, and on a Jewish basis.
The purely secular arguments for it are good. It is a better song, musically, than the Star-Spangled Banner, and easier to sing, having arisen from the Union Soldier song “John Brown’s Body” which in turn came from American folk hymns. The Civil War marked America’s second founding and the triumph of the Union’s cause, the living vindication of the founding’s deepest ideals.
The Jewish argument is that America is a better country when it is aware of G-d, and the Battle Hymn ties the religion of America into what we’ve previously described as the country’s liberal, inherently philosemitic apophatic structure. “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free” is, in one line, better than any other, the true moral vision of the United States. The lyric grounds “all men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” in the particular Christian worldview from which the Declaration arose and from which it cannot be severed and live. It does not, however, suffice with that Christian root, but transforms it into the metaphorical impetus to “make men free,” a mission other than making men holy, a mission that “making men holy” was insufficient to accomplish. This one line of the Battle Hymn of the Republic precisely embodies, then, the blend of “explicit emptiness, implicit fullness” that characterizes the most successful modern projects of humankind. It almost certainly accomplishes this feat contrary to the intention of Julia Ward Howe who wrote it.
The Battle Hymn, then, is Christian, not Jewish, but it is precisely the type of Christianity implicit in the Constitution, the type that lends the First Amendment its negative-space sanctity. The spiritual energies of Christian civilization are directed in the Battle Hymn not toward an affirmative totalizing vision (of the type, in Christendom, that has always rejected the Jew and still does) but toward a subtle, open-to-paradox, American vision full of explicit emptiness.
The Battle Hymn is a militant song about bringing the terrible swift sword to the Confederacy, freedom avenging itself of its own perversion, the grapes of wrath trampled out on the “freedom to enslave”. The Confederacy was explicit emptiness with no holiness commitment, explicit emptiness with no implicit fullness to guide it. The Battle Hymn cannot guarantee that the apophatic notion of freedom will prevail. However, the Hymn at least juxtaposes Christian holiness with the American commitment to making men free. It is the closest we come, in our culture, to capturing the paradox that makes freedom worth fighting for, for freedom requires commitment (i.e., lack of freedom) to fight for. This paradox is why the Jews have been allowed, to America’s eternal moral credit, to live freely in America, and it is what the Jew, therefore, ought to advocate as the country’s ethos. It is a juxtaposition that at present threatens more and more to spin apart, with half of American society rejecting its founding implicit Christian commitment and the other half rejecting the explicit extension of that commitment to make something new, this great Republic.
Because it is spinning apart, few now have the perspective to appreciate this poetry: A Jew being unable to sing the Hymn not because it is anti-Jewish or because the Jew hates America, but because the Jew’s love of America need not depend on overt commitment to he who “died to make men holy,” is the genius of America. A deeply Christian commitment to fight for the right of those committed to freedom even if they are not committed to Christianity is the kind of paradox that would have pleased the founders. His truth is marching on.
"Not A Jungle" is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Rabbis are often asked about the obsessive detail demanded by Mitzvah observance, about whether G-d really cares whether the string of an eruv touched the top or merely near the top of a pole. They answer, quite correctly, that G-d is obsessed with us to a degree it can be difficult to comprehend, that we are not in a mild platonic relationship but a Song of Songs life wrecker, and the Jew must get as into G-d as He is into us. He cares? He’s infatuated.
This can only be part of the story, though. The goal of Torah and Mitzvos, the purpose of the world’s creation, is the “home in the lowest,” and this means G-d’s deepest infatuation will one day be fully and naturally on display here. When we are at home with the people we love, the people with whom we’re infatuated, infatuation becomes the organic, natural tenor of life, as well.
"Not A Jungle" is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
We may think, superficially, that this domesticity is a form of forgetting, of ardor cooled by familiarity and long years. We see this is false through memory:
Pick any dinner with close friends or especially with family. It could be a holy Shabbos dinner, but maybe these are too special for test conditions. A better example would be totally mundane, as mundane as anything can be. Nothing particularly interesting occurs; you are simply present in each other’s lives for a short time. There may even be some friction, as presence in others’ lives almost necessitates. You talk about this and that, the weather, the food, your day at work, a Torah idea you learned. You clear the unremarkable table and return to your unremarkable affairs. But at some point in the future, you may no longer be together with these people, may no longer be able to have boring dinner, and from that vantage, the mundanity, the domesticity, can ache fiercer than any extraordinary occurrence. These people facing us and woven into our lives are simply irreplaceable. No experience without them can reach this stupid, small dinner at which nothing important happens. Imagine if we lived our lives forward, rather than backward, if we could know how precious this is without losing it, if we realized that everything rich and infinite that could ever be was present to us now just by living in this moment we might wish to fast-forward.
One day, Torah and Mitzvos will be like that. They will lose none of the infatuation, of G-d’s deep desire to be with us in every detail of our lives, but crucially, that wild abandon will also be the condition of “mundane” reality. Life will be mundane and domestic and shall be lived infinitely richly, intimately, and unbound precisely there.
But this changes the whole tenor of living a G-dly life even now. We must “settle in” with that Divine obsession with detail. Jewish mundanity is extreme and Jewish extremes are mundane. That Eruv string is G-d teaching us how to make mundanity bite, the calendar dreadful, dinner supermassive. It’s all already irreplaceable. The messiah will live right here.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Readers,
This newsletter is not dead, and work has not ceased on upcoming posts. In fact, the thing about Mount Sinai, the one that was next according to that incredibly optimistic schedule I published near the beginning of 2023 (this series of posts was meant to be finished by Shavuot last year), is at around the 3500-word mark. I will complete it soon, and then the next one, and then the next one. The adrift year, the annus horribilis 2023, feels like it’s finally receding, and I am tinkering on beautiful things to fill the future.
We are now in the month of Adar, the Jewish month of joy. To that end, I wish to share one of this newsletter's current inspirations. It is a wonderful short essay by Robert Louis Stevenson called “The Lantern-Bearers.” It, like all my recent writing, is about how “no man lives in the external truth.” It contends that “to miss the joy is to miss all.” And in case you don’t want to read it yourself, I’ve read it for you.
Love,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode ten of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode nine of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode eight of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode seven of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode six of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode five of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode four of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Episode three of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Here it is, episode two of “Repentance w/Tzvi”.
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d in the Jewish fashion
Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Yours,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
It’s been forever. But I had an idea!
Idea: "Repentance with Tzvi", one minute per day Elul vlog (until September 18) on the joys and subtleties of returning to G-d on the Jewish fashion
So here it is. Listen in audio form like the regular podcast, or check out the video below. Feel free to share, subscribe, and, most importantly, enjoy.
Wishing you a good month,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
I write to you from the cold of winter, which surely parallels the cold detachment of worldly intellect. True, the mind is powerful enough to know that it cannot know everything, but in general, when not acting as a vessel for faith, the rational intellect is a teribly dangerous tool, able to find multiplicity in any unity, ego in any humility, separation in any togetherness.
Trying to fill the emptiness of human existence with the rational intellect is like trying to fix cracked ceramic with an axe. Our emptiness comes from our apartness from the infinite, the true Fullness of Being. It is the mind that led the very first idolators to sanctify this apartness, and it is by understanding the limits of the mind that we can and must mend it.
Stay warm out there,
Tzvi
P.S. Apologies for the lower audio quality in this one; it was recorded without the aid of my usual equipment.
P.P.S. If you enjoy this podcast, dear listener, please subscribe and share with others who’d enjoy it.
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listener,
Has the whole world gone mad?
Let me start over: The whole world is mad, as the Jews have often suspected. But has the illness grown so severe that the Jews themselves have started accepting it?
Left and right, Jews bequeath Jewish identity upon gentiles and deny it to their brothers and sisters. I don’t like it one bit. Not just because the reasons are pathetic, obvious, bald attempts at squaring an ancient and noble tribe with young and faddish tribes. Even worse than declaring Jews to be non-Jews (or vice versa) for bad reasons is declaring it for any reason.
Chassidus, as usual, diagnosed the problem long before its basest manifestations had a chance to arise. The Alter Rebbe teaches us at the very beginning of the holy Tanya: A Jew is a Jew by virtue of the inscrutable and sacred nature of the Divine, and not by virtue of any earthly allegiance or cause. When you muck about with Jewish identity, it’s His borders you cross. The very cognizance of this fact is G-d whispering our own names in our ears, that we may shake off the slumber of exile and become whom He has made us to be.
Stirred, not shaken,
Tzvi
P.S. As always, if you enjoy this podcast, please like, share, and subscribe!
P.P.S. We have bumper music now! Let me know what you think.
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listeners,
It’s been a while! First, I was on vacation. And then, I wasn’t. But that’s neither here nor there. Just like the purpose of our universe’s creation.
We’re not here to pick a side, nor to pretend that the sides are not separate, but rather to unite them. This is one of the central themes of the central Chassidic holiday, Yud Tes Kislev, that we celebrate this week. The infinite and the finite, faith and intellect, are to be brought together. This is the reason G-d said “Let there be light,” the reason we are here on earth.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and share!
L’chaim,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listeners,
It’s hard to zero in on what the soul is, despite being a soul. So much of our lives are spent pulling away from ourselves, investing our energies in things patently external to us, and, usually, in the aspects of those things external to them.
Before we get into deep forms of worship in which we negate our own being, perhaps we can start simply, as Abraham did, thinking about the being underlying all being. This will set up a solid center position, from which we can tic-tac-toe across and down to the end of Abraham’s story as a perfect suprarational vessel for G-dliness.
XOXO,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listeners,
I hope the Fall finds you well! I myself have spiritually scraped my knee, which reminded me of something I wrote a few years ago that I decided to record for you. The Chassidic Masters teach that unity is a most fundamental principle in fixing this universe and represents the ultimate goal, the messianic truth underlying all reality. It is worth dwelling then, for an occasional moment, on the apartness G-d has placed into our world, on the separation we have within us the ability to overcome.
I like to think it was just such questions that brought the first Chassidim to the Baal Shem Tov’s door…
Good Shabbos,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dear Listeners,
For the third episode of this little enterprise, I present to you something truly different — a discussion on the nature of different-ness. This is an episode I recorded freestyle, as it were, with a little preparation but no notes or rigid structure. It’s longer than if I was reading an essay. As always, I yearn for your comments. Is this better than when I simply read pre-written material?
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and share.
Be holy, and until next time,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Dearest listener,
We have here another episode connected with the holiday of Sukkos. The connection this time is less explicit. It doesn’t talk about the Lulav or the Sukkah or even the book of Koheles. No, this episode is connected with Sukkos because for some reason this time of year I always feel like writing an essay on a teaching of the holy Baal Shem Tov. Something about the fresh fall air, the dew on the schach in the morning, the sun through the trees…it makes me think about the founder of Chassidus as a small child, wandering the backwoods of the Ukraine and Poland, fearing nothing but G-d alone.
That is really one of the two themes of the BeShT’s teachings: Love every Jew as yourself, and fear nothing but G-d. The latter underlies today’s recording, which seeks to show how, with a grounding in meaning, Chassidus can help us elevate even the meaningless, and we struggle to see it because our grounding is in meaninglessness. The former, I hope you feel in my sincerest wishes to you for a joyous and sincere Shmini Atzeres and Simchas Torah.
Please don’t forget to forward this to all your friends and perhaps even your enemies who you still like deep down. It’s free to sign up, and new types of content, all sorts of things you’ve never heard before, are just over the horizon.
All the best to you and yours,
Tzvi
P.S. Did you know signed copies of my book are available through my website? It’s true!
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe
Since I published the book, people have been asking for audio. “When will you turn your classes into a podcast?” “I don’t read, but I do listen.” “Your essays should publish in audio form for my commute.”
Ladies and gentlemen, your prayers are answered.
I am opening here on Substack a space for audio recordings on my usual topics: Judaism, the world, &c. Some of these recordings will be audio version of essays I have already written and that appear in my book. Others will be entirely new material, scripted and unscripted.
As time goes on, I have many ideas for new types of recurring content I would like to try. All of them will be accessible, as many of you have requested, through podcast apps such as iTunes, Stitcher, &c.
If you enjoy what you hear here, please sign up for future releases and share this with others.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know — I would like to build this into something you really enjoy and benefit from.
Our inaugural episode here is a recording of an essay I wrote a few years back called “On the Mysteries of King Solomon and Koheles”. It’s appropriate for the holiday of Sukkos that starts tonight. The text can be found on my website and, in slightly improved form, in my book.
Wishing you and yours a wonderful, joyous festival of booths,
Tzvi
Get full access to "Not A Jungle" at tzvi.substack.com/subscribe