"How Do We Move People to a Different Place?": Assessing the War While Dreaming Past It with Israeli Citizen Shawn Ruby

01/22/24 • 80 min

It was both challenging and illuminating to speak with my old friend Shawn Ruby, an Israeli citizen who is deeply rooted in his Zionist identity (having originated in Canada and raised his family and made his life in Israel, one child a high-ranking IDF officer), firmly anchored in an unwavering pursuit of moral clarity, and overall one of the most thoughtful people I know. We spoke an hour past the time the last group of hostages was supposed to be let out, in the midst of what he described as a great national anxiety, "everyone is sitting by their radios and tvs."

"There is enormous mourning. I find myself crying all the time. And it’s just been like that continuously."

"We were on the way to shul, when a neighbor came and told us something was going on down south, and it’s really bad...A good friend of ours lost his life that first day of fighting...this is a kid that we’ve known forever, we’re good friends with his partners. So that’s when it became very real."

"I was raised on Holocaust stories and pogrom stories, and it’s not like that anymore, we’re fighting back—and it’s good that we’re fighting back...But when you have power, you have responsibility—and we have responsibility also for the lives we’re taking now..."

"I am livid at my government for allowing Hamas to sit on our border for the past 15 years...I think the reason was to keep the Palestinians divided. That was immoral and wrong."

"What we’re doing is occupying the Palestinians for the past 50 years, and that is a moral stain on our country...and we were powerful enough to figure out how to solve it in some way. We were the more powerful party...We have to make people aware that as the more powerful party there are things we can do to move this thing along."

"How do we move people to a different place? It’s not that they don't think the occuparion is immoral—they do think the occupation is immoral. They just think the alternative is national suicide."

"I want to live with these people. I want Gaza to be successful. But not if they’re going to keep trying to kill me."

"I don’t think right now that the Israeli response is so disproportionate to what happened to us, and to what is needed to make sure it doesn’t happen again...cause it’s not revenge. But we’re interested to make sure it doesn’t happen again."

"There is enormous mourning. I find myself crying all the time. And it’s just been like that continuously."

"I am livid at my government for allowing Hamas to sit on our border for the past 15 years...I think the reason was to keep the Palestinians divided. That was immoral and wrong."

"I want to live with these people. I want Gaza to be successful. But not if they’re going to keep trying to kill me."

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undefined - "It’s Not a Time for Dialogue. It’s Just a Time for Checking Up on Each Other": The Tragedy of Victim-ism and Other Casualties of War with Coexistence Activist Rabbi Shaul Judelman

"It’s Not a Time for Dialogue. It’s Just a Time for Checking Up on Each Other": The Tragedy of Victim-ism and Other Casualties of War with Coexistence Activist Rabbi Shaul Judelman

"One of my Palestinian friends said, Everybody’s pro-Hamas right now. Cause they did something! On an internal level, hamas’ bid to take over leadership of the Palestinian struggle is very strong. On the other hand, I have another Palestinian friend saying, what do you mean — Hamas is a disaster for our people. It’s always been a disaster for our people. We’re all sitting around not working for a month now..."

Whenever anything happens in Israel, the person I want to hear from the most is Rabbi Shaul Judelman, Israeli resident of the West Bank town Tekoa, coexistence activist and co-founder/co-director of the non-profit Roots-Shorashim-Judur. That's why he is BAD RABBI's first 3rd-time guest, and why I'm so excited to stop typing right now and get this episode up so you can listen to it already. I basically just dumped out all of my current observations, anxieties, analyses, and critiques on the (metaphorical) table in front of Shaul and asked him to poke, prod, add, subtract, organize, and shed his own considerable light on it. We didn't agree about everything, but imo it would be silly not to take everything he sees and says very seriously.

Here are some salient excerpts from our conversation:

"Society is overflowing with purpose. Because it’s The Home. The Home has been shattered... So there’s this incredible sense of unity...The army failed us. The government is inept in many ways. In general we’ve been on a long slide of losing faith in our national institutions that are supposed to take care of us. But the Israeli society has just stepped up in the most emotive, amazing way, to take care of each other...

"[Prior to 10/7,] the reservists were threatening not to serve. The pilots were threatening not to fly. The leaders on both sides were just fanning all they vitriol. So it looked pretty bad. So when the attack came, I imagine Iran and hezbollah thought we were a society that was falling apart. But we were already enlisted. You had 300,000 people who were already enlisted to show up every Saturday night to fight for the Israeli they believed in. For the values they believe in. For the home they want to live in...By the next day [i.e. 10/8], the big protest movement had organized a control room and were evacuating people under fire from all the border towns, setting up places for people to go, already doing the food package in...it was a matter of sending out a WhatsApp on the channel. Because the network was there...the army at the end of the day turned to them for inspiration."

Why is Bibi still in office?

"The entire north of the country is worries about hiznollah commandos storming in through a tunnel...That day of reckoning is going to come. But the sense of right now, the most important thing to do is that our people in the south can’t go home until Hamas is out of power, until their ability to fight is done. Until that’s done, there’s a big swath of our country that is empty. And we owe it to those people who we’ve already failed to give them the security that they can live their lives within the established borders of the state of Israel."

"Imagine you’re a Palestinian committed to peace, and your Israeli partner says, 'I think we have to hit Gaza, we have to hit Hamas, I don’t see another way out.' The cost of that, whet it means on the Palestinian civilian life is tremendous and how can you possibly say that. But I think that most Israelis have come to that feeling."

"On the Israeli side, people were triggered by Palestinians saying, I don’t think any children were killed, Hamas only attacks military targets, your media is lying to you. And you have someone in our WhatsApp group who just buried her niece."

"For a lot of people, the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, who is the victim? & both sides have a pretty good case. But if you’re a Palestinian and you’ve been watching the world ignore you more and more, and looking at Occupation get worse, and Israel doing this, and the world's not paying attention, and all of a sudden the world is coming out and saying that the Israelis are the victim?...[And at the same time,] if you’re going to look at what happened on Oct 7, and you’re NOT able say that Israelis are the victim??...

"So right there is a very challenging moment.

"People hold onto their victimhood, because they’re some kind of weird thought in the world that whoever is the victim is right. And it’s really a very detrimental perspective on the world. Because it just leads people to claim victimhood."

Next Episode

undefined - "The Whole Book is Sort of a Meditation, a Prayer Designed to Protect the Person Who is Reading It": The Punk Rock Jewish Life of Author/Filmmaker Jeff Wengrofsky

"The Whole Book is Sort of a Meditation, a Prayer Designed to Protect the Person Who is Reading It": The Punk Rock Jewish Life of Author/Filmmaker Jeff Wengrofsky

"The whole book is sort of a meditation, of a prayer designed to protect the person who is reading it."

Jeff Wengrofsky, the most authentic punk-rock person I personally know, wrote a memoir, and you should buy it and read it. In some ways an unintentional pean to the Lower East Side, Jeff gets into what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider ("The sensation of feeling like an outsider is not a pleasant one, so I was looking to find some new form of community, and let go of whatever past I had") and why discovering punk was a world-opening revelation ("Punk rock was very theatrical, there was the opportunity to recreate oneself; it valorized the outsider...and all those things spoke to me"). He talks about the process of becoming a filmmaker, including a possible encounter with the ghost of a dead punk rocker in the Nola hotel room he died in, and the horror shorts film festival he's curated for the past 11 years in Brooklyn -- interspersed with reminiscinces of his time apprenticing to a Hasidic Kabbalist in the Lower East Side who'd been a beat poet in the '50s. He also gets into his own religious and spiritual journey with Judaism, including the humbling intellectual intricacy of Talmud study. "It absolutely blows me away to see that the parts can fit better in a counterintuitive way...and it makes me also a little humble about my own intuitions..."

"I like films that are surprising...I like to delight the audience by surprising them," he told me, and this in some ways is the headline for his artistic process more broadly -- the canvas of which is not just film, not just writing, not just music, but life itself.