Lawrence Rudnick's guest appearances

Lawrence Rudnick

Garage Logic

Temple Talks

Yotam Ottolenghi

David Harris

Marcia Zimmerman

Jason Klein

Rabbi Joseph Edelheit

Howard Mortman

DeWayne Davis

Elijah McDavid

Michelle Horovitz

Rabbi Sim Glaser

Rabbi Zimmerman

Deborah Waxman

OwlTail

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below.  Dr. Rudnick Should there be limits on what we should do or study? Are there questions we should not investigate or ask? What are you going to say when I tell you I know why this is true? Let’s say science could tell you, from an evolutionary standpoint, why there is yetzer hara (evil inclination) and yetzer hatov (good inclination). Is that going to diminish it for you? Rabbi Glaser I read the Yuval Harari books, Sapiens &amp; Homo Deus. As I was reading them I thought, wow this guy is really pulling apart the universe into its component parts. He wants to explain scientific rationalizations for everything. When I finished it, I was both incensed and really mobilized. I was jazzed up. When I read it I thought, huh, yeah you do think that…but you’re wrong! There was something inside me that was arguing with his very practical consideration of everything. So my answer to your question would be, no, we should not stop analyzing. There should not be limits. Keep doing it! But always have one eye on the people that have faith in certain aspects that might be unanalyzable. I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s good when scientists and theologians sit down together. In fact, it might be the only solution for the planet’s problems because if we look at what’s being done environmentally to this world, and we look at it only from a scientific standpoint, I’m not sure that’s going to suffice. Dr. Rudnick Right, in fact we know it’s not. We know, for example, with all the misinformation that we’re experiencing now, that just giving people more facts is not the answer. We need to understand something about them as human beings and where they’re coming from. Science can help with some of that, but cultural and religious understandings need to come into play as well to understand where people are. Rabbi Glaser That answers your question, doesn’t it? Don’t limit what can be studied, but also don’t put all your marbles in that basket.  Dr. Rudnick I come into a similar conflict all the time. I go to services and read the liturgy, and we say things like “who causes the sun to rise in the morning and the moon at night.” First of all, it’s factually incorrect because the moon is up during the day as well, not just during the night. And we know why the sun rises and sets. Then there’s other things like, “who can count the stars?” Well, I can. Rabbi Glaser You can and you have! Dr. Rudnick So I have to just sort of relax, because the language means other things. And we have to simultaneously be people and be these analytic creatures that are trying to understand in this other way. **************** Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below.  Dr. Rudnick Should there be limits on what we should do or study? Are there questions we should not investigate or ask? What are you going to say when I tell you I know why this is true? Let’s say science could tell you, from an evolutionary standpoint, why there is yetzer hara (evil inclination) and yetzer hatov (good inclination). Is that going to diminish it for you? Rabbi Glaser I read the Yuval Harari books, Sapiens &amp; Homo Deus. As I was reading them I thought, wow this guy is really pulling apart the universe into its component parts. He wants to explain scientific rationalizations for everything. When I finished it, I was both incensed and really mobilized. I was jazzed up. When I read it I thought, huh, yeah you do think that…but you’re wrong! There was something inside me that was arguing with his very practical consideration of everything. So my answer to your question would be, no, we should not stop analyzing. There should not be limits. Keep doing it! But always have one eye on the people that have faith in certain aspects that might be unanalyzable. I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s good when scientists and theologians sit down together. In fact, it might be the only solution for the planet’s problems because if we look at what’s being done environmentally to this world, and we look at it only from a scientific standpoint, I’m not sure that’s going to suffice. Dr. Rudnick Right, in fact we know it’s not. We know, for example, with all the misinformation that we’re experiencing now, that just giving people more facts is not the answer. We need to understand something about them as human beings and where they’re coming from. Science can help with some of that, but cultural and religious understandings need to come into play as well to understand where people are. Rabbi Glaser That answers your question, doesn’t it? Don’t limit what can be studied, but also don’t put all your marbles in that basket. Dr. Rudnick I come into a similar conflict all the time. I go to services and read the liturgy, and we say things like “who causes the sun to rise in the morning and the moon at night.” First of all, it’s factually incorrect because the moon is up during the day as well, not just during the night. And we know why the sun rises and sets. Then there’s other things like, “who can count the stars?” Well, I can. Rabbi Glaser You can and you have! Dr. Rudnick So I have to just sort of relax, because the language means other things. And we have to simultaneously be people and be these analytic creatures that are trying to understand in this other way. **************** Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at <a href="http://TempleIsrael.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TempleIsrael.com</a>.

#12: Scientific and Religious Awe (Dr. Lawrence Rudnick & Rabbi Sim Glaser)

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below.  Rabbi Glaser When you were just talking about different kinds of sound that we can’t understand, or can’t hear but others animals can, that always piques an interest in me. It is similar with colors right, infrared and so on. And you know as I’ve studied Kabbalah the last fifteen years, it seems that the mystics, the Kabbalists, seem to be interested in dimensions other than those which are perceived. Third, and fourth, and even fifth dimensions of what they call reality. And these Kabbalists are interested—maybe like people looking for extraterrestrials or otherworldly creatures or forces—in knowing if there’s something beyond what we experience in this physical world. And that’s where they start moving into the realm of the divine. They philosophize about a greater being, and I say greater only in the sense of a being that isn’t entirely manifest in our day-to-day life. They say that’s our problem, not the problem of the divine. It’s our inability to seek. Dr. Rudnick Astronomers are extremely sensitive to these limitations because in almost every kind of parameter that you could think of, we know that we are limited. We talked about being limited in terms of sound, that if the pitch is to high or too low we can’t detect it. And then you brought up light, where if the frequency is too high its ultraviolet or x-ray or gamma rays, and if it’s too low we call it infrared, or radio, or millimeter waves. So what we do is we recognize that there are things way beyond our senses and we build instruments to detect them. If things are too fast we can’t detect them. If they’re too slow, we can’t see them changing. We are extremely sensitive to these limitations, but one big limitation really is the things we can’t even conceive of: the unknown unknowns. The questions that we don’t even know to ask. And we do talk about dimensions we can’t directly interact with. That’s sort of an ongoing quest for us—to go beyond the physical limitations that we have, but also to go beyond the conceptual limitations that we have. We try to ask is there more. Rabbi Glaser I think there’s an interesting Kabbalistic analog in that when you look at the Sephirotic system. The sephirot emanate from the divine and become increasingly understandable, or knowable, or conceivable by humanity. So by the time they get down to our human world, these things are garbed in ways that human beings can understand it. Like the idea of compassion is nothing, unless someone is being compassionate. And there’s no way you could identify compassion outside of a person being compassionate. When you talk about prisms of light, some people talk about God—or whatever you want to call the Source of all being—as being an infinite and unseeable light, but like a prism, that non-visible light is broken into elements that are in fact perceivable by human beings. Similarly, God’s infinite power cannot be conceived by human beings because it is too powerful and too all-encompassing. But broken down into component parts that exist within the human structure and huma life, we start seeing. We get hints as to what that divine energy might be. ****************Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.

An edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Glaser When you were just talking about different kinds of sound that we can’t understand, or can’t hear but others animals can, that always piques an interest in me. It is similar with colors right, infrared and so on. And you know as I’ve studied Kabbalah the last fifteen years, it seems that the mystics, the Kabbalists, seem to be interested in dimensions other than those which are perceived. Third, and fourth, and even fifth dimensions of what they call reality. And these Kabbalists are interested—maybe like people looking for extraterrestrials or otherworldly creatures or forces—in knowing if there’s something beyond what we experience in this physical world. And that’s where they start moving into the realm of the divine. They philosophize about a greater being, and I say greater only in the sense of a being that isn’t entirely manifest in our day-to-day life. They say that’s our problem, not the problem of the divine. It’s our inability to seek. Dr. Rudnick Astronomers are extremely sensitive to these limitations because in almost every kind of parameter that you could think of, we know that we are limited. We talked about being limited in terms of sound, that if the pitch is to high or too low we can’t detect it. And then you brought up light, where if the frequency is too high its ultraviolet or x-ray or gamma rays, and if it’s too low we call it infrared, or radio, or millimeter waves. So what we do is we recognize that there are things way beyond our senses and we build instruments to detect them. If things are too fast we can’t detect them. If they’re too slow, we can’t see them changing. We are extremely sensitive to these limitations, but one big limitation really is the things we can’t even conceive of: the unknown unknowns. The questions that we don’t even know to ask. And we do talk about dimensions we can’t directly interact with. That’s sort of an ongoing quest for us—to go beyond the physical limitations that we have, but also to go beyond the conceptual limitations that we have. We try to ask is there more. Rabbi Glaser I think there’s an interesting Kabbalistic analog in that when you look at the Sephirotic system. The sephirot emanate from the divine and become increasingly understandable, or knowable, or conceivable by humanity. So by the time they get down to our human world, these things are garbed in ways that human beings can understand it. Like the idea of compassion is nothing, unless someone is being compassionate. And there’s no way you could identify compassion outside of a person being compassionate. When you talk about prisms of light, some people talk about God—or whatever you want to call the Source of all being—as being an infinite and unseeable light, but like a prism, that non-visible light is broken into elements that are in fact perceivable by human beings. Similarly, God’s infinite power cannot be conceived by human beings because it is too powerful and too all-encompassing. But broken down into component parts that exist within the human structure and huma life, we start seeing. We get hints as to what that divine energy might be. **************** Welcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at <a href="http://TempleIsrael.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">TempleIsrael.com</a>.

#3: A Rabbi and A Physicist... (Dr. Lawrence Rudnick & Rabbi Sim Glaser)