Perhaps you could say a few words about the difference between having digital solutions in a factory and becoming a digital enterprise.

It's very interesting during your question that you're distinguishing between individual use cases and the digital enterprise because there's a huge difference.

Because often you have challenges, you have problems in manufacturing.

So what you're trying to do, you're trying to come up with a solution.

One use case, one technology, one KPI.

I see there's a lot that...

This approach delivers value on a small scale.

Is that typical, or are there sometimes companies that underestimate what all of this entails?

Did you start to express any of these doubts? How were these initial cracks forming intellectually and emotionally?

Well, intellectually, and you mentioned something in the beginning.

So there's almost like this caveat about centering our experience, right? And what that really means.

And I do think that it's important in any system like this to understand what it is like to be on the inside of it.

Because if you don't understand it, if you can't walk in another person's shoes, then you're missing the point that it could be anyone because nobody chooses where they're born.

You could be born on any side of any fence.

So really understanding what it's like when you're inside these systems, because it's easy to say, how couldn't you see it? It's so obvious, right? So maybe that's a short disclaimer before diving into it.

Where are we in the process of Zionist collapse or maybe not in your mind?

So what was his outlook in training students and in general in studying Bible, let's call it Tanakh?

Well, the first thing you have to keep in mind is he was very focused on the p'shat.

I always say if you want to find a wonderful Devar Torah for your Shabbos table, go to Rav Hirsch.

Full disclosure, he was an ancestor of mine.

However, if you want to know exactly what the words mean, go to Shadal.

He will tell you.

He was very focused on the p'shat, the plainest understanding of what the words were.

So let's highlight some examples specifically from this new volume.

When did cracks first start to form for you that you noticed something was off about the water you were swimming in, so to speak?

I suppose there might be two answers to that question.

One is from a very young age.

I find that many people who are starting to go through the big cracking open always had some sort of sense from a young age that something wasn't right, whether it was with their form, their sect of the religion, whether it was Zionism, or just general attunement to... to the emotional reality that's happening.

So there was always a part of me that had a feeling that something wasn't quite right.

However, certainly in a young age, even if you start having these questions, there's a lot of trauma that's programmed around voicing these questions.

And you learn quickly that asking these kinds of questions is not safe.

Can you talk a bit about your time serving in the IDF and what that was like for you, how your mindset was evolving during that time?

I know you said it's a layered thing, but you know, maybe a first conversation you had with your parents, or was there a moment where you talked to your mom or your sisters about your changing beliefs?

Honestly, never.

And even though I could slowly start to challenge it, those were my early explorations of what it's like to try to communicate these ideas and realize that there's no space for them.

It's relationally very dangerous to broach these topics often.

And I think that my parents, and my dad in particular, he got a sense that I was, let's call it a black sheep, well before I started challenging it.

He could sense that I was, I think in many ways, breaking free, but it wasn't ever something that we could actually talk about because...

I had already internalized and understood what the consequences of speaking out would be.

so sweet.

And where did their people come from? Like, where did your grandparents come from?

Well, on both sides, there were a couple of generations that were living both in Canada and in Pennsylvania, and different family members had emigrated from Europe to the States and to Canada over the course of a couple of generations preceding the Holocaust.

And so while I have family that perished in the Holocaust, for the most part, our family roots were in North America well before that.

And Zionism, I think that my dad growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, back then there was still a little bit more of an overt form of antisemitism that people had experienced.

And from a very young age, I think there, there was this instilling of Jewish pride.

Where can we be? Where can we be free? Where can we be authentic? And at some point, I guess my father was born in the mid-1950s, there was already talk about Israel, people knew about Israel, and following 1967, the war in 1967, the state was really elevated to a messianic promise, and people really saw it as a messianic kind of vision.

So in 1967, Israel launched, obviously there's a broader context, but Israel launched a preemptive strike against its neighbors that culminated in the conquest of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

No frontal

How did you experience that, like, growing up in the West Bank? I mean, 'cause we talked about last time how you kind of made a break from the society and culture that you were in in a certain way, but like what happened be- [laughs] prior to that? Like how was that at the dinner table?

It's really interesting because this process of telling the truth is a very long process because very often we think things and we already have this inner clarity, but then to get to the point where you reckon with these truths publicly, there's this in between stage, and that's the real, the stage of the silence where the real suffering is happening, where you've had this internal shift but you are completely misaligned on the outside.

And so when it comes to genocide at the dinner table, that's the stage where people around you could start, could be saying really shocking things.

I recall a specific conversation where a close and immediate family member was laughing at the starvation in Gaza, and there was a news headline that said that a turtle had washed up on shore, and this immediate family member said, "I thought they're starving.

They can eat the turtle." And that's the, just really the kind of joke, the kind of comment that somebody can drop, and when you're in this in between stage, there's kind of this nodding along that you ha- okay, 'cause you can't really speak about it.

And that's where you're already caught in this trap and in this cycle.

Yes.

How do we break it spiritually? How do we break it materially? Because I think that very often whenever we get to a point where we're afraid that being in deeper alignment is gonna cost us, th- will cost us economically, that creates the very conditions for us to actually not be aligned in the right work to receive the things that we might be able to receive if we were honest.

Daniel, what's your, growing up, what was your perspective on, I don't know, the things, what's the other side of the story of what? I might

even be more far-reaching than what Fares is describing.

Growing up in the settlements, this kind of violence was largely invisible to me because the vast majority of settlers are not violent in the way that the media is depicting them.

And so what Fares is describing, I never realized that this was happening because there's a small group of people that are propped up certainly by the government and the military that perpetuate these incredibly violent crimes.

And I recently wrote about this, that this is in a way a sort of pressure valve to get people to look at this really extreme, horrible violence without recognizing that the even more extreme violence is the occupation itself, which is affecting millions of people.

And the depths of the brutality of the systemic occupation and subjugation and dehumanization of the Palestinians is so far greater than what people imagine.

And so within Israel, when we have this violent group of settlers that are committing these horrific crimes, most people, most Israelis will protest it.

What are the facts? And when did you discover maybe some pushbacks to the narrative you grew up with? And what was that journey like for you?