Ashamed to Admit
Are you ashamed to admit you're not across the big issues and events affecting Jews in Australia, Israel and around the Jewish world?
In this new podcast from online publication The Jewish Independent, Your Third Cousin Tami Sussman and TJI's Dashiel Lawrence tackle the week's 'Chewiest and Jewiest' topics.
Ashamed to Admit
Episode #35 Reclaiming Jewish indigeneity, with Ben M. Freeman
In his third book, The Jews: An Indigenous People, author and advocate Ben M Freeman argues that to fully embrace Jewish indigeneity and reject the non-Jewish world’s attempt to impose its thinking upon us, the Jewish people must re-examine the idea that Judaism is a religion. Tami and Dash have some follow-up questions, and in this episode of ATA, Ben M Freeman answers them.
Articles relevant to this episode:
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/the-pomegranate-proof-jews-as-an-indigenous-people
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/we-need-to-stop-thinking-of-judaism-as-a-religion
Subscribe to The Jewish Independent's bi-weekly newsletter: jewishindependent.com.au
Tami and Dash on Instagram: tami_sussman_writer_celebrant and dashiel_and_pascoe
X: TJI_au
YouTube: thejewishindependentAU
Facebook: TheJewishIndependentAU
Instagram: thejewishindependent
LinkedIn: the-jewish-independent
Are you interested in issues affecting Jews in Australia, the Middle East and the world at large, but struggling to keep up with the news cycle, Well, you have possibly come to the right place.
Speaker 2:I'm Dash Lawrence and, in this podcast series, your crazy third cousin, tammy Swissussman, and I call on experts and each other to address all of those ignorant questions that you've been too ashamed to ask.
Speaker 1:Join us as we have a good go at cutting through some seriously chewy and dewy topics.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Jewish Independent Podcast. Ashamed to Admit to the Jewish Independent.
Speaker 1:Podcast. A Shame to Admit Dash.
Speaker 2:Tammy, Tammy, Sussman hello.
Speaker 1:Tell everyone what you do at the Jewish Independent.
Speaker 2:I am the Executive Director. Why don't you tell the listeners what you do at the Jewish Independent Tammy?
Speaker 1:I freelance for the Jewish Independent. I write articles, I make this podcast. I constantly ask you to make me a full-time role. You haven't. I keep coming up with new potential job titles. Comedy Saar was one of them.
Speaker 2:Fashion.
Speaker 1:Correspondent. That was your latest. I also come to events hosted by TJI and make awkward small talk. I might just walk right up to someone who looks important and just say hey, do you like carbohydrates?
Speaker 2:You clear the table of the gluten-free celiac I do appetizers. I've seen you in action you poke people with your skewers I do love carbs.
Speaker 1:Do you love carbs dash?
Speaker 2:of course I'm a marathon runner. I need to be carb loading all the time he had to throw that in there couldn't possibly perform at my optimum unless I was carb loading.
Speaker 1:What's your favorite carb?
Speaker 2:Oh, I do love a good slice of sourdough bread.
Speaker 1:How do you feel about pasta?
Speaker 2:Love pasta. Had several bowls of pasta last night, in fact, delicious.
Speaker 1:What type of pasta did you have last night, Dash?
Speaker 2:I think it was spaghetti.
Speaker 1:I love spaghetti. Spaghetti is my favourite type of pasta.
Speaker 2:Look, it's probably our go-to in the house.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I've now concluded that you are a fan of spaghetti. Are you also a fan of frivolity?
Speaker 2:Oh well, I sit down and talk to you every week. So clearly I am. We're a sucker for punishment. Not sure which one, but a combination of both, probably.
Speaker 1:All right. So you're a fan of spaghetti and you love frivolity, so I think you would be a good candidate to be a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yep.
Speaker 1:Do you know what their religion is called?
Speaker 2:Do I know what their religion is called? Yeah, it's kind of like a sort of a mock religion. It's a parody. It's an attempt to poke fun at religions, isn't it? Well, it started that way. It's an attempt to poke fun at religions, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Well, it started that way. They refer to themselves as pastafarian.
Speaker 2:Ah, that's right. Yes, yes, very clever, and I do love a pun, so I'm a pastafarian for sure.
Speaker 1:She's looking at me like where is she going with this, when are you going with it? What I'm trying to do is make a link between pastor theory and religion and what constitutes a religion. That was one of my worst. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2:Let's have one more go at doing this. So, tammy, you're like an interesting case study in being Jewish, right, because you grew up in a Jewish milieu, you went to Jewish day school. You have had, and still have, a lot of Jewish friends. You identify very much as Jewish, but I don't hear you often talking a lot about God or about faith or about Judaism.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for guiding this conversation into the direction that it needed to go in.
Speaker 2:And this is a thing that I've recognised in a lot of my Jewish friends, a lot of people particularly of your generation, but I think it goes back centuries. There have always been Jews that maybe they appreciate and they celebrate certain religious rituals and festivals, but there's a whole other big part of what makes them Jewish that has nothing to do with faith and with religion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think I've even said on this podcast before that among my Jewish friends I am the most non-practicing Jew out of those people and yet I am the most Jew-y, like I'm constantly engaging in Jewish discussion and thought and writing, you know, kind of oozes out of my pores and yet I am the least observant in that context. So you've hit the nail on the head.
Speaker 2:And by some people's standards that makes you perhaps less Jewish because you don't keep a kosher household. You might be quote unquote a bad Jew when it comes to keeping Jewish religious law.
Speaker 1:No need to rub it in.
Speaker 2:I'm pointing out here a kind of a problem, which is how could you, someone who is, I consider and you also identify in this way a very Jewish person be? You know, if we just think about Jewish identity through the prism of religion, then I'm sorry to say, but there's not a whole lot that I can identify in you. But if we have a much more expansive notion of what it is to be Jewish, you're a 99.9% Jewish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. That is why I found today's conversation with Ben M Freeman so validating. I can't wait for our listeners to hear this whether you identify as a religious Jew or a cultural Jew, or a culinary Jew or just a comically affiliated Jew, you'll gain something from this conversation. Ate a Jew you'll gain something from this conversation I forgot to mention. If you're a Jewish convert, if you're Jew adjacent, if you love a Jew and not in a weird way like hey, I love me a Jew, but like you genuinely have someone in your life who is Jewish and you love them, you'll love today's conversation.
Speaker 2:Our guest today. Scottish Jewish educator, writer, thinker, ben M Freeman has been wrestling with some of these questions in recent years. Ben is the author of three books. His latest book is the Jews and Indigenous People and in this book Ben makes the provocative case that we need to stop thinking of Judaism as a religion, that the idea of Judaism as a world religion is actually a relatively new and externally imposed concept.
Speaker 1:Ben M Freeman is a Jewish and gay thought leader and educator. Born in Scotland, Ben is also an internationally renowned author and diversity, equity and inclusion specialist, focusing on Jewish identity and raising awareness of the Holocaust. He came to prominence during the Corbyn-Labour Jew hate crisis and quickly became one of his generation's leading voices against anti-Jewish racism.
Speaker 2:Ben is the founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement and the author of the Jewish Pride Manifesto Jewish Pride Rebuilding a People. His book the Jews and Indigenous People was published in February 2025.
Speaker 1:Here's Ben M Freeman.
Speaker 2:Ben, you're the first Scottish Jew that we've had on A Shame to Admit. To begin the conversation today. Tell us a little bit about the Scottish Jewish community that you grew up in, and I'm particularly interested in how it shaped your particular Jewish identity.
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, thank you for having me, and it's really not a surprise. I'm the first Scottish Jew to be unashamed to admit, because there's not that many of us. So when I grew up, there was about 5,000 Jews in the whole country, so there were 5 million people in Scotland, so 5,000 in the whole country, and we had a real sense that we were a minority because of that. But I will say that there was no value attributed to our minority status. We just were a minority, right, and we could look at other kids in the non-Jewish high schools we went to and we could look at the Pakistani kids or the Scottish kids or the Nigerian kids, and we were all just belonging to our distinct communities I mentioned.
Speaker 3:I went to a non-Jewish high school because there is one Jewish school in the whole country and it's an elementary school, a primary school. So I went there for nursery, kindergarten and then primary slash, elementary, and then, when it came time to go to high school, I had to go to a non-Jewish high school. But the community was small but mighty, incredibly strong, incredibly proud, incredibly Zionist, and there were many, many activities for young Jews and it really, to be honest, it was cool to be involved in the community. You know, my friends and I, my peers from my primary school, we would reunite at the Jewish youth movements and the Jewish communal events. So it really was kind of an amazing place to grow up, to be honest, and my oldest friends who I'm friends with still to this day are people I met in kindergarten or nursery. So it really was an amazing place and I do think that that understanding that we were a minority helped me understand that we have to work for our Jewishness.
Speaker 3:And I think you know I'm in Los Angeles right now and I travel a lot for my work to speak, and I think that is a really important lesson that we should never take our Jewishness for granted.
Speaker 3:We should always be active participants in it, and that was a real lesson that I learned. And also to speak up and to be proud and to own your own identity, particularly when you're aware of being a minority, and I also think that's important. We are a minority. There's like 15, 16 million Jews in the world and yes, there are some Jewish communities, like maybe New York, and they feel that they're the majority because the Jewish culture is very strong or because there's many, many Jews, but it's like they're still a minority and I can see when I speak in America, their eyes get really big when I say you guys are a minority, because they know it but they don't really internalize it and understand it. And I think it's really important and, again, we don't need to attribute value to it, it's just an understanding that we're a distinct pride and in your debut book, jewish Pride Rebuilding a People.
Speaker 1:You explore this notion of Jewish pride as an important response to anti-Semitism. Are you able to tell our listeners how you personally distinguish this approach from other frameworks for addressing discrimination?
Speaker 3:I want my work to always hit the bullseye right. You don't want to be speaking around an issue and I think even having the language of Jewish pride is quite different. It's quite different from saying we are empowered Jews. I even think it's different from saying we're Jewish and proud. We're creating a standalone movement and it was inspired by my experience with LGBTQ plus pride. Right, I'm also a proud gay man and I think that's the difference. You know, you can be gay and proud, but that's different from the gay pride movement. And again, that's what I'm trying to build, or have been trying to build a movement that will educate, inspire and empower Jews and listen.
Speaker 3:Of course, there's echoes of standing up for yourself, of knowing who you are. You know those are not distinct necessarily to the Jewish pride movement. I think that owning that language is important and actually, since October 7th, it is a response to Jew hatred. But I also think it's something more than just a response. It's a reclamation and I think that's also maybe sets it apart. It's about finding the Jewish joy, the Jewish beauty. It's about owning our own identity, not allowing ourselves to be defined by the world around us or by how they treat us, and I think that's the kind of interesting thing post-October 7th.
Speaker 3:You know, there are many Jews who have maybe come back to their Jewish identity or who feel it has grown in some way, and I think with that we have an opportunity entity, or who feel it has grown in some way and I think with that we have an opportunity.
Speaker 3:Out of the tragedy comes perhaps this opportunity and it's to turn that relationship rooted in, maybe, october 7th into something positive, into an understanding of what it means to be a Jew, into a Jewish understanding of what it means to be a Jew, into an understanding of Jewish civilization, jewish indigeneity, jewish pride. Because I think in the diaspora, because of Western universalism, there are Jews who get nervous about that, who get nervous about saying you know, I'm a distinct Jewish person, I'm different, my priority is the Jewish people, my land is Israel People. The world often tries to make us choose, so I think in response to that, there are always Jews who say no and this is just our version of it. But I was absolutely inspired by my experience with LGBTQ plus pride. I wouldn't have been able to write these books if I hadn't already gone through the journey to become a proud gay person.
Speaker 2:But also what was dissatisfactory about the frameworks that you were given in your earlier life, in your Jewish education, because you described a community that was small but mighty. So clearly there was a sense of pride within that Jewish community in Glasgow, I believe, which is where you were raised but clearly there was also a feeling for you that something wasn't quite right about the way that Jews inhabited their Jewishness publicly.
Speaker 3:I think that we do not have conversations about our identity enough. We do empower Jews I was brought up as a very proud Jew but I don't think there are the conversations that we see in other communities. An example of this is internalized anti-Jewishness right, the idea of internalized antisemitism, kind of commonly referred to as self-hate, although I don't really like that language. That was my second book and it was one of the first books in a century on the topic whereas the LGBTQ plus community, the black community, other communities have regular, ongoing conversations, because pride isn't just about happy, positive feelings. It's really an investigation into your identity and asking the question how do I feel about my Jewishness, how do I take up the space, how do I navigate the world? It's a dialogue, and it's a dialogue that we have as individuals and as a collective, and it's not always easy, because you have to be honest with yourself and ask challenging questions, and I was never encouraged to do that. I wasn't discouraged, of course, but that was just not the language. We were empowered, of course, we were educated, but I don't think it was the bullseye, I don't think that they named it, it was not a movement, it just was okay. We were just Jews. We were happy and proud of ourselves, but I wanted to try and build a movement that would empower us to go on this journey of self-discovery so we can move through the journey of pride. Because that's what I had to do as a gay person right, it wasn't just that you decide. Okay, I'm proud. Wonderful, I've read the book about Harvey Milk. I'm good to go. No, it was work and I had to undo huge amounts of programming that I had internalized from the world around me, and I still stand by the fact that we definitely have got better with regards to the conversation on Jewish identity, but we're still not there. I think there should be constantly an ongoing conversation about our experience as Jews in the world, and not just from a. How are we experiencing Jew hatred? Right, what is it like to be an Australian Jew or a British Jew? Because a lot of those conversations actually focus on the outside world. What is done to us? We should be having a dialogue about how these experiences impact us, how they impact us emotionally, psychologically, how experiences impact us. How they impact us emotionally, psychologically, how they make us feel a better Jewishness, how they make us feel that we're able or not to move through the world. So that's what pride is.
Speaker 3:It's not always comfortable or easy to be questioning yourself and say, well, how do I really feel about this? And I had to do that. And as an example, you know my brother was in the IDF for a decade. He's made Aliyah, my sister's made Aliyah. We were brought up, as I said, very Zionist.
Speaker 3:I was still saying to people while working for a Jewish organization I'm Jewish but or I'm Zionist but because what I was really trying to do was show my non-Jewish peers that I was saying this to that I was a good Jew inverted commas that I was a Jew but I wasn't so different and I had to engage with that, and that isn't always comfortable.
Speaker 3:But the thing I say when we go on this introspective journey as a collective and as individuals, is that we've done nothing wrong, even if we have, at times, not necessarily respected our Jewishness or treated it with, you know, with the respect that it's due. We're a minority navigating a world which is often very hostile and very difficult. It it's really an investigation into identity. And the last thing I will say is you know, in each of my books I interview individual Jews, because the books are about identity, and I want to see how these ideas interact with lived experience, because we're real people and that's the most important. How do we take people on this journey in a tangible way which educates, inspires and empowers them, makes them feel able to have this conversation, but do it without?
Speaker 2:shame and with empathy for themselves on reflection, as historians look at as the peak point of diversity, equity and inclusion, which is a space that you've worked in for a number of years as an educator and in some ways I regard and correct me if I'm wrong your thinking to have been framed around and influenced by that thinking. So I've got a follow-up question. But before I get to that question because this show is all about helping people remove their shame about the things that they don't know quick explainer for our audience on what DEI is. I know our American listeners are going to know all about it, but perhaps some of our Australian listeners aren't as familiar with DEI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's definitely some people in my circles who wouldn't know what that means.
Speaker 3:Diversity, equity and inclusion. It's always changing. Now it's DEIB diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging and it really is a program that exists in the corporate world and in the educational world to make spaces more welcoming to minority groups. And I will say I think that at its core, it's a good idea. I think what we've seen is it become manipulated by bad faith actors. It's been mishandled, and not always purposefully. I think that's important to say. It exploded, as you say, when this book was published in 2021. It was the peak of that post, george Floyd, and a lot of DEI programs were put in place after that. So it was a response.
Speaker 3:But that was dealing with one kind of experience, the black American experience. It wasn't necessarily able to take into account every other experience and you know we're seeing the Trump administration speak about it, we're seeing companies roll it back, and I understand why that is happening. But I also think it's a shame because I do think, at its core, our workplaces, our companies, our schools be welcoming, welcoming and inclusive for all groups. And as a member of two minority groups, you, I do experience things sometimes that you would maybe call microaggressions, which are not ill intended. It's just people maybe being slightly ignorant and those could be avoided if we had a space to talk about them.
Speaker 3:But again, it has to be a specific type of space, right? If you're talking about difficult things, even though I said before, the internal conversation has to be without shame. Type of space, right? If you're talking about difficult things, even though I said before, the internal conversation has to be without shame. Right, and without judgment, with empathy. That goes for conversations about other experiences. You cannot be starting from a place where you're accusing people or punishing people.
Speaker 2:It has to be about empowering people through education, and I don't always think that's happened with DEI which is a shame, you know, really seeing Jews and Israelis as the oppressor, as the powerful, as you know, somehow distinct from a and fair game and absolutely not also a minority, not also deserving of forms of equity.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I understand the criticism. I would rather say that DEI has been both a cause and a symptom. Right, I don't think we can say it's just the cause, because people have those ideas and then they were expressed in the DEI context, right, but it certainly has, as you say, I think, charged it. But I think that we're seeing it's a symptom of the left. We're seeing the more radical, more fringe ideas about Jews that exist on the left have entered the mainstream. And I actually would say that the root to a lot of what we're experiencing internationally is Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party. But he's also a cause and a symptom. He certainly emboldened people and he certainly propelled this issue forward, but, like DEI, the issues were already there. He was just the one to express it and in DEI, that context, those ideas about Jews and particularly whiteness, they were already there.
Speaker 1:It was just maybe brought into the mainstream in a slightly more overt way, find their own Jewish identity from within, rather than what's projected from the outside, from people who aren't Jewish. That really, really resonated with me. One of the reasons why we have you on the show today is because I read a piece on the Jewish independent, your piece. We need to stop thinking of Judaism as a religion, and in this piece, which is an excerpt from your new book, you suggest that to fully embrace Jewish indigeneity and to reject the non-Jewish world's attempt to impose its thinking upon us, the Jewish people need in fact, you say must re-examine how we define our Jewish identity. And you said there's no aspect of this process more vital than the notion of Judaism as a religion.
Speaker 3:It's a bit shocking to people, I know, because that is kind of the commonly held truth that we're a religion, both internally and externally. But I will say I feel like it's the hell I'm going to die on. I feel very passionately that we're not a religion. And I will say there's nuance here, because we have religion. Right, I'm not denying that we have religion, that is true.
Speaker 3:But when we start thinking about the framework, so the constructs of our identity, the notion that we are a religion comes from the Christian West. Where do we come from? We come from the Levant, we come from the Middle East, and those are different contexts. So in the Christian world or let's say the post-Christian world right, because a lot of this emerged following the Enlightenment or as a result of the Enlightenment what we see is religion being separated from other parts of life and society, literally the separation of church and state. That is what secularism was and that doesn't really exist in a Jewish context. I'm an atheist or agnostic Jew I've not really quite decided yet which, I guess, makes me agnostic. Anyway, god does not play a role in my Jewish identity at all. I don't think about God. My father passed away just over eight years ago, and I still say Kaddish for him on his Yart site, and if you read the translation of Kaddish, it's all about God, right? So we as Jews, even if we're atheist or agnostic, we're still interacting with the concept of a God, at the very least, which is very different.
Speaker 3:Because let's think about what we are. We began life as tribes, as a people, as kingdoms, as a civilization. And let's just pivot to our next door neighbors, the ancient Egyptians. I've seen the Prince of Egypt, that song that the two priests sing right. I actually can't remember it, but I know they talk about Ra. So there are Egyptian gods, but we would never describe ancient Egypt as a religion. We would describe them as a civilization, an ancient civilization, and as part of that there was religion. Similarly, with indigenous tribes all over the world, of course, in Australia, the Maoris in New Zealand, the Sami people in Scandinavia, indigenous people in North America, there is religion, there is a relationship with a deity or deities Though we have that, we're not ignoring it but we have to understand ourselves through our own lens.
Speaker 3:So let's speak about this commonly held, in my opinion, misperception or misconception. Let's first state that in the Torah there's no word for religion. What do we call ourselves? What's our rallying cry? Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel live, we're an, am we're a people. So that is that. That's that context.
Speaker 3:But at some point we did become a religion and in the book I was desperate to investigate and I found this amazing article called Dat from Law to Religion. Because what do we call the religious in modern Israel? We call them Dati, right, but the root, the shoresh of dati is dat, and dat originally meant law. It was actually first used in Megilat, esther, the scroll of Esther that we read at Purim, and it was in reference to law. And at some point dat went from law to religion.
Speaker 3:And the paper that I read that I think I quoted in the piece, because that was just an excerpt from the book and I certainly quote it in the book was this amazing piece and it basically argued that the transformation began. And this was a process. But the transformation began after the Reformation, when the Christians started to refer to all systems of belief as religio, whereas previously they'd only referred to Christianity or Catholicism as religio, and that started to influence Jewish thinking. When we think about influencing Jewish thinking, we have to think about the dynamic. What were we trying to do? It's okay for civilizations to evolve and to change and to grow. That's actually not an issue. The issue is that in that context in Europe at that time, we were a very persecuted minority. So often what we were trying to do is make ourselves like I did previously when I talked about make ourselves more palatable, make ourselves into good Jews, remake ourselves in their image so that we can fit into their dynamic. And this idea kind of went forward and I think the paper identified an Italian Jew who was the first person to speak about Jewish religion. Then there's other examples and then in the 19th century and I quote this in my book there's a British Jew who speaks about Jewish religion, but really, if you read it, what he's speaking about is Christianity, because it was a muddling of Jewish identity. And then, of course, we've seen this idea intensify. And it's really fascinating because in America after the war, after the Holocaust, there were three religions emerging Catholicism, protestantism and Judaism and they became like the three American religions. So what it did was give again Jews a conduit to be Jewish, but in a way which was palatable and acceptable in the non-Jewish framework.
Speaker 3:And if we reflect again on the simple fact, there's no word for religion in the Torah. You have to start investigating what we are. We have religion. We have God. The Torah says that it was written by God, that God promised us the land. Those are important beliefs and they are part of our indigenous experience. And again, cultural evolution is fine. The Pesach cider was not Jewish, it was Greek. The Torah just says tell your sons, eat matzah maror, we're done. There was a ceremony that the theater of the cider, that the Greeks were doing and we looked at that and thought that's cool, let's take it and make it Jewish. But that's very different from making us less Jewish. I'm using inverted commas because not everyone would agree with me, but I think that if you're changing your very construct to fit in with the wider world, that is making yourself less Jewish. It's certainly making yourself, in my opinion, less authentically Jewish.
Speaker 3:And listen, this conversation was scheduled because of the response to that article. I don't think any of us expected people to take to it so much and I'm thrilled that they have, because and also I saw debate and dialogue, which is wonderful. Because we're Jews, we're not going to all agree, that's fine, it's like in our blood, but I think at least having the conversation is important and not just accepting these like almost natural truths, which actually are not necessarily accurate. They're just things that we have said over and over again. One of the things I talk about a lot is the idea of interfaith. We're not a faith, and I've spoken about this on Twitter and people came for me.
Speaker 3:It was absolutely terrible and my point was that Judaism does not contain faith and people were like what about Emunah? I said yes, you've talked about Emunah, which is a different concept to faith. Why am I saying that? Because emunah is a Jewish concept and it's an ancient Hebrew word. Faith is an English word which has different roots and therefore a different context. Emunah is more about belief. Faith is a different thing altogether. Again, I'm not saying we don't have religion, we absolutely do.
Speaker 1:But it's very different to have religion as opposed to being a religion. I'm so glad you mentioned emunah, because emunah is rooted, you write, in a dynamic relationship with God, emphasizing trust, loyalty and a profound personal connection with the divine. Hence the Jewish propensity to wrestle with God. And you said it's about engaging in a lived relationship with God and thriving on ongoing dialogue and encounters where the individual actively participates in their covenant with the divine. So how does that differ to the Christian framework or concept of faith, which I think is a word I've never heard before? You wrote is it pistis?
Speaker 3:So I think what we see with our relationship with God is based on belief. It's an interactive relationship and we wrestle, we criticize, we critique. I mean that's kind of the Jewish, the essence of this relationship In the Christian world. That's not so much what it is. It's you have faith and your faith doesn't change. It's not dynamic, it's not evolving, it's not rooted in a relationship necessarily in that sense, and it's also not rooted in what we would refer to as evidence. Right, our belief can evolve when new ideas emerge, and I think the thing with Christianity and Islam is that they have creed. You know, these are the things you must believe if you're a Christian you have.
Speaker 3:My partner is not Jewish, he was raised Christian. So when I was writing this section, I was like I think I know the answer, but I'm just checking. You can't be a Christian if you don't believe in Jesus, right? And my partner was like no, of course not, whereas don't believe in Jesus, right? And my partner was like no, of course not, whereas we actually don't have anything like that. Yes, of course we can say, okay, jewish monotheism, we have the Shema. But because Judaism is a culture, the Jews are a people. You can be atheist. You can be secular. You can be an atheist Jew. You can't really be an atheist Christian. You can be culturally Christian or culturally Islamic, culturally Muslim, but that's not the same thing. You could be a practicing shul-going Jew and be atheist. In the Jewish context, in the Jewish world, we still acknowledge that there is the concept of a God right, I acknowledge it when I say the Shema, when I say Baruch Atadonai, when I say Kaddish. We're active participants in this culture if we as individuals and this is the thing about indigeneity, because it's not just about individuality, it's about a collective relationship. That's why converts, as I write in the book, are just as indigenous as someone who was born Jewish, because the Jews are indigenous and, by the way, non-indigenous people can join indigenous tribes in other parts of the world. They can have adoption or initiation. So we're not unique in that, but I think it's really important.
Speaker 3:You know even the notion of ruth, right, ruth is known as the first convert. She is very important. She's included in the canon. She's king david's uh, great-grandmother, I think, and I called up a rabbi to be like. So what did she do if she didn't convert? Because if we're not a religion, then there was no conversion and especially there wasn't organized religion at that time. And he said something very simple and I thought ah, that's it. He said she naturalized as a citizen. We're an am, a nation, a people. So when you know the converts are meant to be at Sinai with us, they're a part of our people, they become a part of the Am and again there is religion.
Speaker 3:But we have to be precise in the language we can't be utilizing. So here I'm looking at my book, this section, and a little bit later what you're talking about. So you read that section about the Jewish belief, right, pistis, which is the Greek. In contrast, pistis tends to focus more on believing in specific truths or doctrines, ie Jesus is the Son of God. You have to believe that On Emunah.
Speaker 3:And Pistis Buber states in the English translation of his work the faith of Judaism and the faith of Christendom are by nature different in kind. But the problem is when you're using the same word, especially because we're not in English. I mean you and I we're all speaking English here, but we're not actually an English speaking people, we're an Ibrit speaking people. That's why we have to learn Hebrew, because if we're going to be Talmudic scholars or literate, in our own experience. We have to be able to investigate it in our own language, because then there's specific meaning and specific ideas which come from it. And there's a quote here that I love and it's Hafok ba hafok ba, hafok ba dekulaba. Turn it over and over again for all as therein. And it's from Prekeh Avot and it's about the Jewish relationship. We're constantly investigating.
Speaker 3:It's no surprise that we're having this conversation right, because we, as Jews, we want to get to it, we want to bullseye it, we want to debate and dialogue, and that's what people do when they read the Talmud, right, they read it in Fevrutan, they read a certain amount, and you read it with someone else because you always want to be in discussion. That, turning over to me, is what Judaism is. It's this intellectual exploration and again I apologize to the listeners because you've got me excited and I'm yapping From like an indigeneity perspective to understand the Torah, the Tanakh, as law. We come from this unbelievably rich legal tradition, because that's what the Torah is. It's a legal code, right? Or the laws of the Torah are legal code, and so, in a sense, for all of us who engage in these conversations, we're just lawyers debating what does the word mean. What does the essence mean?
Speaker 1:My family would be so happy to hear that I'm a lawyer. Thank you for diagnosing me with lawyer. I'm so glad you brought up Ruth and her naturalization, because you might be surprised to learn that Dashiell Lawrence actually isn't Jewish, but his partner is Jewish and his kids are Jewish and he's executive director of the Jewish Independent. And what was your doctorate in, dash?
Speaker 2:My PhD I looked at the role of Israel and Zionism in Australian Jewish community life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you have not converted, but you have been naturalised.
Speaker 2:Not in the Ruth sense. Look, I am glad that you raised the question of converts, ben, because when you were talking about the notion of a tribe and an indigenous tribe, I can imagine that critics of your book and your thinking would say well, how do you treat converts then? Because they weren't indigenous to the land of Israel, they're not a part of the tribe. But you have given an explanation for that.
Speaker 3:So my mentor, who's the last interviewee in the book, is Dr Winston Pickett and he converted 50 years ago and he is the most Jewish Jew I've ever met. He's so Jewish. And I think the thing is there's a lot of misunderstanding about indigeneity and the role of genetics within indigeneity is very complicated and controversial. And I will say listen, there are Jewish genetics, they do exist. We don't need to be scared of them in a post-Holocaust world. But if you look at the United Nations criteria on indigeneity, genetics isn't mentioned once. It's all about culture, it's all about the traditions, it's about this continuous relationship with the land and other. You know, I was just in Calgary and I met a First Nations person from, I think, territory 6, it's called that part of Canada and he spoke about his indigenous tribe and says, yeah, we have initiation, you can adopt non-indigenous people in, and I think it's a really wonderful thing because, you know, my partner is South African and we're living in the UK to get him a British passport and he will become British. You know, he doesn't lose his South African-ness or whatever, but he becomes part of this new community and that is exactly the same way. And we do have membership criteria and the membership criteria is very clear you can be born Jewish or you can convert. So converts are absolutely a central and really the story of Ruth tells us they are central in Jewish texts and Jewish liturgy and it's not okay. So they're not connected genetically, but that's not what makes us indigenous, they're almost separate conversations the role of the existence of Jewish genetics and the role they play in indigeneity.
Speaker 3:And so the last thing I will say before I hand over to you Dash because I interrupted you was in the beginning of the book I talk about blood quantum, right, the idea of measuring indigenous blood, and that was a policy created by the American and Canadian governments, in essence to limit the number of people who are allowed an allotment, an allotment of land. It's not so dissimilar to the Nuremberg laws and structure. And there are some indigenous people, non-jewish indigenous people, who talk about blood quantum as genocide because they say, well, the further down you go, the more watered inverted commas your blood gets, the less indigenous you get. That's not how it works, even if you are a strong, proud member of the culture. And alternatively, you can have someone and we see this particularly in the US right, someone who's like I'm 10% native. It's like okay, what about your interactions with the culture? What about your learning? What about all of the work we have to do? That's why I spoke about in the beginning with my parents, the act of work of being Jewish.
Speaker 3:The last thing I'm going to say is my partner's not Jewish and he's not going to convert because he was raised Christian and, as I've said, believes in Jesus. He ticked that box, but I call him a Jew for Jesus because he's like Jewish in every other way. But I said to him, particularly after October 7th I said you've crossed over, you're not Jewish and that's fine, but you do exist in this, in our world, because he has developed through years and years I mean we've been together almost 10 years a relationship with me, obviously, the Jewish people and the land of Israel. So I do believe that you can be. You know we call them like non-Jewish Jews, right, like there are people and there are quite a few, but there are people who cross over and enter into the community, even if they don't formally convert or naturalize.
Speaker 1:Ben, the next festival that we have as Jews coming up is Pesach, if I'm not mistaken, and you mentioned the Passover, the Pesach Seder. Now, the Pesach story, the story of Exodus, is all about liberation, which also connects deeply to the Indigenous nature of Jewish identity, doesn't it? Because we are being liberated from Slavery in Egypt, yeah, and being promised to be delivered to.
Speaker 3:The land of Israel.
Speaker 1:I'm getting that from the Prince of. Egypt. Is this a yes?
Speaker 2:Mr Ben, I want to make sure that you actually have done all that reading. You said I know exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I find Pesach to be absolutely fascinating. First because it seems to be one of the festivals that Jews celebrate the most. And it's fascinating because Pesach is when we came together at Mount Sinai, is when we came together as a nation. That's when the Jewish people were born. Previously, you had Abraham, according to the Torah, Abraham coming from Ur, then you had Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then poor Joseph was shipped off with his Technicolor dream coat and we weren't a nation in that way. That's when we multiplied, that's when we became a nation. So Pesach is absolutely central because, you're right, when are we going to? Where are we walking to? For 40 years, it's the land of Israel. But, fascinatingly even, I think another layer of our indigeneity is the origins of Pesach as a festival. So I mentioned the Pesach Seder, but also Pesach.
Speaker 3:There is writing and not everyone agrees with this, but there is writing that Pesach was developed from two distinct holidays and holidays belonging or let's say, festivals belonging to specific groups shepherds and farmers. So shepherds had lambs. What is traditionally sacrificed at Pesach, the Paschal lamb. What do we eat? We eat a matzah, which is unleavened bread coming from wheat, and the other group is the farmers, and the farmers were farming wheat and the shepherds were shepherding lamb and I'm not a shepherd or a farmer, so I don't know the correct terminology but they each basically made sacrifices in order to kind of guarantee good harvests or good crops or good lambs, whatever. And then it developed and this is what I find so incredible the origins of our festivals, Because even Rosh Hashanah Rosh Hashanah began life as the agricultural new year. But yeah, they say that. So not only is Pesach this holiday which celebrates Jewish nationhood, and we literally say L'shanah B'Abe Yerushalayim. So it's absolutely extraordinary when you have anti-Zionist Jews celebrating Pesach and it's like what is it? Is it L'shanah B'Abe Prakav? No, of course that's insane. It's L'shanah B'Abe Yerushalayim next year in Jerusalem. But also its very essence, its origins, its roots the Shoresh come also from the land, because the wheat that grew from the land and the lambs. So it's absolutely extraordinary. And, as I say in the book, there's a lot of holidays probably most of our holidays, rather, come from the land in some way, and most Jews don't know that, but it doesn't matter, they're still being celebrated.
Speaker 3:Think about what we do at Sukkot Jews in Australia, Jews in Scotland. We shake the lulav and etrog. It's like we're shaking literal leaves from the land and fruit and fruit. I grew up in Scotland, as we discussed. Can you imagine anything more insane for Scottish people to pray for rain? It is unbelievably ridiculous because all it does is rain. But when we pray for rain, as we do in the Amida, we're not praying for rain in Scotland, we're praying for rain in Israel. Isn't that just incredible?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the view was always there, and I think that also what this idea does is it gives permission for people to claim this relationship not through the lens of religion, Because if you have religion and if you have this kind of hierarchy of, well, this is how you're Jewish, this is how you're not Jewish. It creates this feeling of alienation if you don't believe, if you don't do, Whereas actually what we need to say is every single person has a right to engage in their relationship with Jewishness, with Israel, how they see fit. You know, I always imagine Jewishness or Judaism as an enormous buffet table and we're all at this, very loud simcha, and we get up off our seats and we go and choose something from the table. And you, Dash, might choose shakshuka, Tammy, you might choose falafel, I might choose chopped liver, which I probably would and we're all choosing something different, but we're all going up, we're all interacting because, ultimately, it is our birthright, Because we also have to remember that as indigenous people and this is across the board indigenous people are the inheritors of great civilizations.
Speaker 3:We have inherited this and it doesn't belong to us. We inherit it for the moment. We're here to take care of it, to mend it before we pass it on. So we have to always ask what are we passing on? How are we interacting with it? How are we presenting it? And it's not about changing things, you know. It's not about trying to quote Professor Umbridge from Harry Potter. What does she say? Progress for progress sake. Right, she doesn't like that. But we're trying to go back to the essence. We're not saying we can't evolve. We're not saying the PESAC story can't evolve.
Speaker 3:And the last thing I'll say, to bring the little bit about Pesach whether you believe or not believe it doesn't matter, because we as an indigenous people, we as a distinct civilization, we're allowed to tell our own stories and tell our own myths. The Greeks do it, the Romans do it, every other people in the world create stories to explain their origins. And I actually think the Torah's perspective is rooted, at the very least, in historical memory, so it's like really historic recalling something that did happen. It doesn't mean it's all true, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be so. Even if you're in vertical commas again a secular Jew and you don't believe in God, you don't believe the Torah was written by God, it doesn't matter. These myths are our founding stories. They're supremely important and if you do believe in God, then wonderful, good for you, fantastic. But they're not mutually exclusive.
Speaker 1:A good way to sign off. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us on A Shame to Admit.
Speaker 3:My pleasure.
Speaker 1:That was Ben M Freeman. His book the Jews and Indigenous People is out now, and his other two books are also in all good bookstores.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to A Shame to Admit.
Speaker 1:With me Tammy Sussman and executive director of TJI, dr Dashiell Lawrence.
Speaker 2:This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King, with theme music by Donovan Jenks.
Speaker 1:If you like the podcast, then leave a positive review. It really does help other people find this show.
Speaker 2:You can tell us what you're ashamed to admit via the contact form on the Jewish Independent website or by emailing ashamed at the jewishindependentcomau.
Speaker 1:As always, thanks for your support. Go make yourself some some spaghetti. Look out for us next week ciao you.