Otniel

They take their guns, and they drive down south, and they go to Kibbutz Be'eri.

And just so people understand for a moment – Otniel, where they came from in the West Bank, is really, I think if you Google the word settlement, good chance the picture of Otniel comes up, right? Those red tile roof homes surrounded by Palestinians, beautiful, kind of perched on a mountain.

So these are right-wing religious Israelis.

Beirut is a bastion of the left, right? And by the way, I was so interested in this.

Rabbi Yaakov Nguyen showed up to this conversation with a Quran.

He's a religious Zionist rabbi who teaches Torah in Otniel, in Judea and Samaria, AKA the West Bank.

He's buried students murdered by terrorists.

He has every reason to retreat into fear and hate, but he hasn't.

So tell me a little bit about who you are, where you're from, and what you do.

Okay.

So I've been a, a rabbi for 30 years at the, at Yeshiva in Otniel, in the Hebron Hills.

Um, but through a process of many years, I've got, I've seen part of the great calling of the Jewish people in our time, and my calling, is the issues of, what is the place of the Jewish people in the broader story of humanity? And part of that is how we engage other religions, and in particular, living in Israel, living with now, um, a settlement on the West Bank.