S4E3 When the Stories We Tell Ourselves Stop Working (w/ Tom Haviv) (re-release)

So I think there are different levels of my interpretation of it, which may not be all the meaningful interpretations, but I think the stanza that you read, the first stanza of that poem, you know, I have enough distance from writing it now that I'm reading it and kind of droshing it, you know, anew in some ways.

Right, right, right.

And I think my feeling was I wanted to look at this irony like a sneaking suspicion that what I understood as the normal path of cultural transmission especially in the Jewish context, which was retelling stories like the Haggadah, like Passover, etc., like the Torah, was actually creating an attenuated experience with those same stories.

So something about like, you know, Pavlovian, it's probably not the right metaphor anymore, repetition has indeed made and shaped and defined Jewish peoplehood.

Yet somehow I was receiving the repetition and it was starting to fray.

And I was thinking also about what was an impulse in me as an activist at the time.

So when you say...

So the idea of a repetition of the story is that this story is really dear to us and we have to make sure that it sits with our next generation as it sits with us.

But you are saying that in the retelling over time, it frays, the image begins to blur and distort.

And is that inevitable with every story? Is that built into stories?

I do think so.

And I think that there is a kind

of...

Yeah, there's another line in the book that's coming to mind that I wrote in a section called A Flag of No Nation that are kind of like performance prompts for a flag, some sort of metaphysical flag.

And the phrase is the durational hum of passing eras.

And I think that there is something about the... paternalistic approach of some, some way of thinking about Judaism that believes that if you just repeat with certainty, you know, maybe any, any religion, it will be so.

And I'm an anti-authoritarian kind of, I'm not, you know, I got kicked out of Hebrew school for the, before I, you know, got a bar mitzvah.

I already, I had that impulse.

So And I had a deep relationship from Judaism from the beginning.

And I love the storytelling in Passover.

So when I was receiving the mythos of my grandparents and honoring it and loving it, and it was repeating in my own mind, and it was being repeated in some form in the news, and the meaning wasn't stable, it immediately called into larger questions the larger mythos of my Jewish identity and my Israeli American identity.

And I think it remains to be the case and it remains to be, remains in my mind to be an underlying commitment and assumption about how culture works and what I and press as a Jewish publishing house should be doing and should be taken as a fact, which is that everything changes and that change is a fundamental principle, even for traditional cultures.

Right.

It's not just that that particular story is breaking, although that might be an important thing to talk about.

You're saying stories break automatically just because narratives themselves are unstable inherently.