The act of talking – dignified and informative conversation, where people connect on a serious level with one another – is essential to the Jewish experience. This goes back to the very creation of Adam; the Torah describes God as breathing a breath of life into Adam, after which he became a nefesh chaya – a living soul. Targum Onkelos famously translates that phrase as ruach memalela – a speaking spirit. Accordingly, the fact that man is able to converse is part of his very essence.
In a similar way, the Torah is composed of not only written words, but also the Torah Sheba’al Peh – the conversation that began with Moshe Rabbeinu and has continued through the ages until today. It’s not an understatement to suggest that conversation is part of the lifeblood of Judaism.
Nevertheless, it sometimes seems that the art of conversation, like so many other aspects of 21st century culture, is changing in ways both good and bad. For example, the explosion of the popularity of podcasts demonstrates that people still crave stimulating conversation – but on the other hand, the people listening in are not active participants and don’t add to the discussion. In many ways, it seems that deep conversations between people are overridden by the myriad distractions that keep us glued to our phones and less present when someone wants to have our full attention. In a lot of ways, conversation has, at times, become vacuous – with potentially devastating consequences for interpersonal relationships.
So this episode of the podcast will be a conversation about conversations, and I was honored to speak to Dr. Yosefa Fogel Wruble to discuss a wide variety of topics related to authentic dialogue. I really got a lot out of this conversation, and it was actually quite different from many other episodes of this podcast. We dealt with many issues, from the Rambam’s ideas about speech, what we learn from sitting shiva, and the changing nature of teaching Torah, to phone notifications and Spotify playlists and the Red Sox and why we each got into the world of podcasting. It was a lot of fun, it was very informative, and I think you’ll enjoy listening in as much as I enjoyed participating.
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Music: “Happy Rock” by bensound.com