Russ Roberts: preference

Transcript context

…Or the Hebrew Bible more broadly. No, no, no. I’m not sure I heard you correctly. It’s interesting sitting in a synagogue here on Saturday morning, which I used to do in America. The biggest difference isn’t the Torah reading, it’s a blessing for the state of Israel, which gets recited every Saturday morning. In a Jewish synagogue in America there’s also a prayer for the soldiers of the IDF, the Israel Defense Force. It’s much more visceral here. People pay attention. You feel like you’re actually saying something that matters and that means something. As for the Torah, I think the biggest thing that I felt actually wasn’t in services or reading the Bible; it’s exploring different parts of the country I hadn’t ever been to before. When we first got here early on, we went up north to the Golan Heights, which Israel didn’t have access to until the 1967 war — it’s still controversial in some quarters, of course. It’s really a stunningly beautiful part of the country, and you can walk a town called Gamala. Gamala was a Jewish town in Roman times that the Romans destroyed, a little bit like Masada. They’ve uncovered the mosaic floor of a synagogue. There’s some houses; the floors and rooms and house walls of partial houses are still visible, and it’s a very wild part of the country. There’s big ravines and outcrops, and then in the distance you can see the sea of Galilee, the Kinneret in Hebrew. It just felt different that there’s a Jewish presence in that outpost in the middle of nowhere that’s 2,000 years old. I feel part of something that — obviously, intellectually, I felt it before I moved here. But moving here and feeling that and being there and standing on that — having that town to ourselves, my wife and I, we hiked to the top. It’s a little tiny space, hard to believe that a few thousands of people live there, but it’s a crazy, crazy archeological experience to be part of that, and other things like it. That’s what to me is more special. The holiest part of Israel, most people would say, would be the Temple Mount — a Jew would say is the Temple Mount and the Kotel — the wall, the supporting wall of the Temple Mount that the Jews pray at every day now. We have access to it since 1967. Jews have been praying there for thousands of years. It’s very moving to be there. I’m about an 18- or 20-minute walk from there, and I’ve been there once since I’ve been here. In the past, I’d come here every trip. I had to make sure I got to the Kotel and the old city, and I’m surprised how little I’ve been there. The workaday, suburban — not suburban — urban streets of Jerusalem feel special in a way that doesn’t require that past hovering over it. It’s just nice to be here. Now, there’s a great books emphasis at Shalem, if I understand correctly. If you had a bit more time than you probably have and wanted to choose one or two great books — Hebrew Bible aside, of course — to make sense of your time and experience in Israel, what would you pick and why?…

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