In this episode I talk with Arlene Goldbard about her new book that I think takes on a quiet but consequential democratic problem: how, in unstable times, the hunger for certainty can slide into surrender—of discernment, of agency, and responsibility.

Rather than offering answers or heroes, her book The Intercessor uses story to explore how people learn to stay in relationship, inquiry, and ethical choice without handing their power over to charismatic leaders, rigid belief systems, or the promise of spiritual or political shortcuts.

In this conversation, we explore three deeply relevant themes:

1. Intercession as a practice of discernment, and learning how to listen without disappearing yourself in the process.
2. How artists and cultural workers can function as bridges , helping communities resist the pull toward false certainty.
3. And repair as a practiced skill, not an abstract ideal, but rather personal, communal, and spiritual repair that only happens when people remain accountable to one another.

You’re right to call that out. No reason to shrink the ecosystem. Here it is restored—full cast, fuller descriptions, URLs embedded in the titles, and organized by the four categories you’ve been using.

Notable Mentions

People

1. Arlene Goldbard: Cultural critic, novelist, painter, and longtime leader in community-based arts. Author of The Intercessor and In the Camp of Angels of Freedom. Her work bridges spiritual inquiry, democratic practice, and cultural organizing.
2. Rabbi Arthur Waskow: Founder of The Shalom Center and a central prophetic voice in Jewish Renewal. A pioneer in linking Jewish spiritual practice with social justice, environmental activism, and interfaith organizing.
3. Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank: Influential Jewish Renewal teacher known for his mystical depth and pedagogical clarity. A formative guide for many Renewal leaders, including Goldbard.
4. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: Founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Brought Hasidic mysticism, experimentation, and interspiritual dialogue into contemporary Jewish life.
5. Paulo Freire: Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His concept of “conscientization” (critical consciousness) undergirds much community-based arts and democratic cultural practice.

Places

1. ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal: The national umbrella organization for Jewish Renewal communities, ordination programs, and spiritual leadership training.
2. The Shalom Center: A Jewish justice organization founded by Rabbi Arthur Waskow. Engages in interfaith social action rooted in prophetic Jewish tradition.
3. Sefaria: A free, open-access digital library of Jewish texts. Provides bilingual access to Torah, Talmud, Pirkei Avot, and other foundational sources referenced in the episode.

Events

1. October 7, 2023 Attacks and Israel–Gaza War (BBC Overview): Context for the rupture explored in the novel between Sarah and Yasmine—where love collides with ideology, family pressure, and geopolitical trauma.
2. 2024 U.S. Presidential Election (Federal Election Commission Overview): The political backdrop near the novel’s close, underscoring its themes of fear, agency, democratic rehearsal, and moral discernment.

Publications

1. The Intercessor: Arlene Goldbard’s novel-in-linked-stories exploring intercession as spiritual practice, discernment, ethical repair, and democratic rehearsal in troubled times.
2. In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: Goldbard’s earlier book of portraits and reflections on spiritual and justice-oriented teachers who shaped her moral imagination.
3. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire: Foundational text articulating internalized oppression and participatory liberation—key intellectual grounding for community-based cultural work.
4. Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim): Biblical love poetry invoked in the episode as an assignment in praise, eros, and relational repair—an ancient text that insists love sits at the center of existence.
5. Pirkei Avot 2:16 (Ethics of the Fathers): Source of the teaching quoted at the close: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” A succinct ethic of sustained democratic practice.
6. Overview of the Talmud (My Jewish Learning): Explains the dialogic, argumentative structure of Jewish learning—where disputation itself becomes a form of worship and discernment.

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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

Hey there.

You know, in moments of social, political, economic stress, people often lose their trust in their own judgment and values and start looking for someone else to tell them what's true. So how can a work of art help us in this critical struggle with agency, trust and belief age in these particularly troubling times?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activists, artists, and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Now, recently I've been spending time with activists and organizers to consider how best to respond to the violence, corruption, and turmoil poisoning our nation. Increasingly, our discussions have turned on matters of faith.

These exchanges have not been about particular religious creeds or roles or points of view, but rather how, in this time of social and political rupture, can we bring our moral imaginations to bear on the terrible questions we face. What is true? Who is trustful? How do we resist peacefully in the face of violence? How do we reconcile forgiveness and accountability?

How do we repair and heal the deepening wounds?

And much, much more.

In this episode of Artists Change, I talk with Arlene Goldbart about her new book that I think takes on this often hidden but consequential democratic problem. How in unstable times, the hunger for certainty can slide into surrender, surrender of discernment, of agency and responsibility.

First, intercession as a practice of discernment and learning how to listen without disappearing yourself in the process.

Also, how artists and cultural workers can function as bridges whose real work is helping communities resist the pull towards false certainty and finally, repair, repair as a lifelong practiced skill.

Part 1 renewal so the last time we talked, we were in the camp of Angels of Freedom. You were the camp counselor, and it was a wonderful visit. This is a very different conversation we're going to have.

We're here to talk about your new book, the Intercessor, and before I get into some specific questions, I'd love for you to give a short story of the genesis of this.

Yeah, the Intercessor is a novel, but it's made up of link stories, each of which is narrated by the main character of that particular Chapter and these people live in the East Bay in California, around Berkeley, and they are members of a community called Jewish Renewal. You know, in Jewish practice they have these categories. Orthodox, conservative, Reform renewal is like the fringe of all of them.

Basically, it's people who in the 60s believed that it was possible to renew the tradition for the benefit of the living in ways that freed people from things that they might have found oppressive, like the massive sexism of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians called the Old Testament, and find new ways to incorporate the body movement, mysticism, progressive politics, and so forth. So these people are all part of that.

How I came to write this book was a form follows function thing, because I was in the aftermath of the most recent presidential election.

I was having the kind of headache that I think a lot of people in my generation are having, which is like, shit, we work so hard for these little increments of progress that we've made. And this monster is coming into power and erasing and how can it be? The feeling of futility that I was experiencing was really powerful.

And so I decided to try a spiritual practice that I had been taught 20 years before by a wonderful teacher, Rabbi Ruth Gon Kagan, called Melitz Yoshir in Hebrew, but in English you would say intercession or intercessionary prayer. The idea, whether you think it's literally true or a metaphor, is that in higher realms there are powers with whom you can plead for repair somehow.

So very often people use this to help somebody who's sick, for example, or a person who lost their job or their love or something like that. You can do it for yourself.

And I decided I would do it for myself at that juncture in Magaworld to see if I could get any ideas about what I should be doing.

So the process which is described in the book basically involves the person who is the intercessor cleansing themselves through prayer, through chant, through meditation, and then pleading for something.

In this case, I was pleading for myself and listening hard and receiving some type of medicine, some type of assignment that helps the person for whom you're interceding.

So when you say medicine, what does that mean? How does that manifest in one's life?

That medicine could be praying. It could be doing like a psalm every day for 42 days or whatever. It could be something completely unrelated to scriptural stuff.

You know, that you need to dance every day, that you need to do something to help other people. The range of assignments is broad.

So what came up for you?

When I went to do this, I hadn't done intercession in a while. And I pulled out this file folder that I had from 20 years ago, and when I took the course to refresh my memory.

And in the file folder was a printout of a short story called the Intercessor that I have since worked into the first chapter of the book about Sharon Marks, the person who is the intercessor in the book. And I read the story and I thought, this isn't bad. I like this. This is interesting. I might want to go back here.

And when I did the process for myself, the assignment I got is, write seven more stories like this. And here we are.

And here we are. But it's interesting. It personifies the Jewish renewal, because your protagonist.

Well, what is she?

She's not holed up in some cave doing intercessions.

She's a private detective.

She's a seeker who tries to answer questions in various forms in various contexts. And to me, that lays the groundwork.

For, okay, I like to get to know this person. This is cool.

It's very inviting and.

And inviting about questions that are hard.

Part two, Truth as Fiction, as you mentioned, this is about people with questions looking for repair or healing. And that whole idea, spiritual repair, is at the center of each of those characters.

So, Arlene, you could have written a book about intercession, but instead you use these characters to introduce the practice, and it's fiction. How did you decide that it was going to be a fictional journey that you're going to take people on? And why is that a good thing for this?

Yeah.

Well, I had a lot of stories to tell around these subjects that were mostly based to a certain degree on things I had actually experienced in real life over the last 20 years or so. But I didn't want to do, like, a tell. All right. In some of the stories, people get in trouble.

I certainly didn't want to tell anybody's story that way. I didn't want to humiliate or embarrass anyone. I didn't want to be an accuser.

So I thought that the way that I could tell the essence of the learning that had come to me from those experiences was to make them stories which the character isn't someone that anybody would recognize. They're people might see similarities to certain public moments that they were aware of, but that wouldn't be everybody, by any means.

And they wouldn't ever think I was libeling anybody or anything like that.

Right.

So fiction it was.

I mean, a lot of people do that. A memoir by another name? Yes. I get it. It felt very personal to me.

You know, you can make up a character, but a Characters that come across as authentic are ones that are grounded in the real deal.

So Sharon, who is the intercessor, she comes from two worlds, as I said, the world of the everyday, earning a living and helping people as a private detective. But she also is in this mystical intercessor space.

And in my mind, a lot of artists I know feel like they're in a somewhat similar boat in that they're moving material around in a form that people call art, and they're trying to earn a living. But they're also touching some other things that are pretty darn powerful and hard even to talk about.

Is that something that sparked you, particularly in the tumultuous social, political, cultural space that we're in?

Well, when you said that you saw artists as intercessors, that was new for me. I hadn't really had that thought before. I do have, as you know, lots of experience of seeing artists standing between worlds.

Right.

I've often said that artists who do, the kind of community that you and I have mostly been involved in, I often call them bridge people because they make their work, they make their lives a bridge between people who are often silenced in the society or whose stories are not asked for, not heeded in the society, and those who ought to be listening. And when the work is successful, it often builds that bridge. So in that sense, yeah, I think a lot of artists are our intercessors.

I think the hard thing right now is, are the powers that be listening in this spiritual practice? We don't know. You know, I'm not a literalist when it comes to this.

I don't see a group of angels sitting on chairs in heaven and saying, yes, Arlene, we'll do what you say. I think for me, most spiritual practice is deep metaphor, and this is no exception. But the feeling is that you're listened to.

When you do the practice, you almost always get an assignment.

And mostly both for myself and the people that I've done this with over the years, the assignment turns out to be helpful, as it did for the characters in the book. There's something that's released by doing a certain practice every day for a certain number of days.

Writing something about a subject is something that several of my characters are assigned to do. And for some reason, that process brings something home to them they weren't able to see before.

And I think that's often true for people who are involved in participatory or co created arts work, that something is revealed.

You may be the artist, you may be working with a group of people, let's say right now, a group of furloughed federal workers who aren't getting their paychecks and are facing the future with some large scary question marks.

Then a typical community based project might be that people would use video or they would use visual arts imagery, or they would use collective writing for people to share their first person stories, tell their real truth.

But to take that material then and extract from it the essence and convey it back outward in a way that people who don't have contact with those individuals start to have an inkling of what their truth is and start to have a feeling of connection to it. So, yeah, I think that metaphor works pretty well.

So the other thing that's in here is this yearning, I guess, that we all have for guidance, some kind of horizon line or something, particularly these days.

And there's a passage that jumped out at me early on when Sharon is comforting her daughter, guiding her through kind of a tangle of love and ideology and belief.

And it really encompasses what you just talked about, you know, seeking something outside ourselves that, that can help steer ourselves down the road. Could you read that?

Yeah. So Sharon is the person that we talked about who's the private investigator and the intercessor. Sarah's not her daughter, but she's Sarah's guardian.

Sarah is the daughter of another character, Rabbi Jonathan Fox, who died of COVID And Sharon and her friend Nomi have been made the guardians of Sarah. Sarah's 18 at this point, and she's in love with another young woman called Yasmeen, who's Palestinian.

It's not really pushed from Sarah's side because the people who are guardians for Sarah are big peaceniks on Israel, Gaza, as am I. But it is pushed on Yasmine's side. She has a brother who's very militant and he forbids the two girls to be together. And Sarah's brokenhearted.

So Sharon intercedes for Sarah. I'll read that section now.

Okay, great.

Sharon strokes Sarah's hair. And this is being narrated by Reb Jonathan from the Next World. So the first person expressions are for him.

My girl has that beautiful soft, golden brown hair, just like her Mother's. With a sad half smile, she said, I'm so sorry, honey. You know I'm a big peacenik, too. Sarah nodded through her tears.

Like most people, sharon said, I have a lot of political opinions about places I don't live, places I have no power or influence. But I don't think our political opinions matter so much right now. Your problem is about love that got knocked off course by ideology and by family.

You can never underestimate that. Pulling tissues from a box on the couch to wipe her eyes, Sarah looked up. Thought I saw a glimmer of hope. Give me a little time, honey. Sharon asked.

Sarah, just sit right there and let me consult with the folks upstairs. She closed her eyes and took a few slow breaths. I slid into her consciousness for a little eavesdropping, not intending to interfere.

I didn't detect any alien energy. Okay, sharon said. I'm getting two things. One is about love. Like I said, I'm getting that. You should read Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs.

Have you ever read that? Some, sarah said. Do you remember the parts where the lovers praise each other? Sharon picked up a book from the end table and began reading out loud.

My beloved to me is a bag of myrrh lodged between my breasts. My beloved to me is a spray of henna blossoms from the vineyards of Engedi. Ah, you are fair, my darling. Ah, you are fair with your dove like eyes.

I'm blushing, said Sarah. She was. She looked about 8. I remembered sitting with her on that blue couch, reading out loud from Harry Potter, which she loved.

Her teddy, his name was Dove, Hebrew for bear, was always propped up next to her listening to. It was good to see her smile again. Okay, said Sharon, slightly businesslike. The first part of your assignment is to read the Song of Songs.

Then write your own poem to Yasmin. A song of praise, pure praise. She hesitated. Hold on a minute. I have to get the rest of the assignment.

Sharon closed her eyes again, sank back against the couch cushions. When she opened them, she said, 18 stanzas, one each day for 18 days.

You can think how you want to give them to Yasmeen, but I wouldn't advise texting. Maybe write them on cards and mail them, or take photos and send them, or even email. That's up to you.

But your aim is to make her feel your love as an outpouring, a flow and not a pressure. Okay?

Okay.

I would have loved to have had that kind of advice in those kind of moments, as the worst first moments and any kind of yeah, Compass is really helpful. And so Song of Songs. Could you say why that jumped up?

Song of Songs is a long love poem. Some English accounts of it call it the Song of Solomon.

It's a dialogue between two lovers, and the lovers are speaking also to people nearby where they live. And what it narrates is just sort of the pursuit of love.

You have these scenes where one lover is asking the other to come, and they're not there, and they're in despair. Other scenes where they're knocking at the door, other scenes when they're together.

The thing about it, it's an ancient, sacred text, and there was a huge dispute among the rabbis about whether it should be included in the canon, whether it should be made part of the Hebrew Bible, which has a lot of books to it, but is generally considered to be the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament, and then a number of prophetic and other writings that go with it. And there was a big debate that never got settled about it. But some Jewish communities read some of it, like every Friday night.

There's a sanitized version of it where people say, well, this isn't really an erotic poem. It's really an account of yearning for God or yearning for union with God.

But what it does, what it says to people today, it's still read a lot, is that love is at the center. You know, that the purpose of our existence is to love.

And it feels like one of the manifestations of the Jewish renewal practice is to say, what can we carry forward here in a way that's authentic and makes sense, rather than, as you say, the filters that sometimes turn them two dimensional. Part 3 serious listening so Jewish renewal is at the center of all of your characters.

And it was not so much about a religious practice as it was about a way of thinking about the world and being in it.

I just.

I thought, oh, this is such a wonderful window into an incredibly powerful spiritual practice. I don't know, am I reading something into this, or is that your intention?

No, that's my intention. I mean, speaking of love, I think you have to say that in a way, this book is my love letter to Jewish renewal.

Because it's the flavor of Judaism that I feel the most connected to and that I've been the most involved in.

I was on the board of the National Organization for Jewish Renewal, which is called Aleph, the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and then for a decade, president of the board of something called the Shalom center, which is rooted in Jewish renewal communities, but also engages in Interfaith social action of various kinds. And that was started by Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow, who just died recently, was a dear friend and colleague of mine.

So the idea, as I said, was that it was possible to renew the tradition for the benefit of, of the living there in every spiritual practice, a range of people who engage in it in different ways. There's fundamentalists in everything.

There's people who are rule bound and whose interest is primarily in, you know, following the rules to the letter as they understand them.

There are people who see their mission as recruiting other members of their spiritual alignment, whatever it is, or in the case of some people who are in the American government right now, making everybody obey it, whether they belong to it or not. So there's a lot of different things you can say about spiritual practice.

Jewish renewal really has a whiff of the 60s about it, although it's definitely very much alive and well today in that the teachers who started it were people who had come out of mostly Hasidic Judaism, which combines the mystical and the observant, and who were sent out in the 60s to recruit back to the fold, these little lost lambs who were, who had gone into yoga or, you know, other Eastern religions, various forms of meditation and so forth, and who found themselves thinking, well, I don't actually want to pull them back into the moment of the past.

I want to take what feels most resonant and most helpful from the past and what these people are learning about the fact that we live in a bigger world than any one particular religious lens might give us. And so they set about to be experimentalists and tried a lot of different things.

And the teachers, the people that moved me in my life, the people I've been connected to.

The COVID of this book has a portrait that I painted of Rabbi David Wolf Blank, who is someone from whom I really learned most about this, a wonderful teacher who died very young, more than 20, 20 years ago. And so the folks that are in it are still aligned with this sense of experimentalism. I mean, Judaism in general is not a dogmatic religion.

Our primary spiritual practice is an argument. Right?

Right.

If you look at a page of the Talmud, you see text in the middle and there's blocks all around it where different teachers are saying, I don't think so, or I look at this a different way. In the book, one of my characters is, quote, the idea that he loves Judaism because in Judaism, disputation is a form of worship.

And Bill, I'm argumentative too, so I really like that part of it. It's not really parallel to Orthodoxy or Conservative or Reformed Judaism in that it's not considered a denomination.

People can align themselves with this flavor, but they may be at many different levels of observance. Yeah.

So if I just move the camera out a little bit, I feel like we're at a point around the world where an awful lot of people are in a similar situation as those original Hadassah missionaries, where some people are really freaked out and want to pull the world back into the safe story, and.

There'S others who are saying, oh, wow, this is a new frontier. Let's go explore that and see what.

We can make of it. And those two forces are really alive. And I think it's unsettling to a lot of people, the pushing and pulling between those things.

We don't have an intercessor to help us sort it out.

I agree with that, Bill. I mean, I do think that we see this big division in our own country, sometimes in our families or people close to us, but in the big world as well.

I don't know if my way of looking at it is the only true way, but I see it as, on one side, people who are frightened and are looking for someone to submit to, to give their power away to and to provide the answers that they can align themselves with.

And on the other side, people who want to understand the world through a process of investigation and experimentation of their own, they don't want to give up their autonomy. A character in my book says, we were given these big brains to understand and heal the world. And that's what I think, too.

Yeah. Which is actually a very freeing and clarifying job description.

So you have all these different characters, and they are each coming to Sharon for a different reason, but they're all wrestling with identity, belonging, the repair that I mentioned before.

But this cast of characters, where do they come from?

I think I have an experience that's common to a lot of other writers, which is, you know, you lean back, you close your eyes, and someone starts talking through you, and you feel like you're channeling another person.

I mean, in my case, I wanted to be sure that every chapter embodied some kind of ethical or spiritual challenge that readers would encounter in their own lives, because the big project that they're all involved in is to build some sort of spiritual community to sustain themselves and to help other people in these times, which is a hard thing to do.

So one thing that we see when we look at in the big world is that people like the MAGA folks want to eliminate Everyone who disagrees with them, so that their community is based on a unanimity that's total and perfect and eternal, which will never happen, of course. But the point is, you can't only make community with people who completely agree with you on everything.

You have to actually include people who disagree with you, people you might dislike, but people who have to face the world and need help and need connection the same as you do. And that's a hard thing to do.

And I wanted to assert with the book that it's possible, but it's only possible if you can actually face these challenges as they arise and help each other to navigate and surmount them. So, you know, I said that mostly things were based on some kind of experience that I had myself or had observed in real life.

But when I thought about them, the character didn't pop up out of someone I'd actually known. The faces that appeared to me and the mannerisms and characteristics that appeared to me were different. And I just went with that.

And so, yes, they inhabit you, and it is sort of a love affair that you have with these characters. And yes, they argue. You struggle, you challenge, you argue back. It's an amazing thing.

So in the earlier book, in the Camp of Angels of Freedom, each one of those incredible people that you describe through both image and text, has been a guide in your life. And this book, the Intercessor, is about spiritual guidance that makes a difference in the everyday world.

This task was much more formalized throughout most of human history. I mean, there were people and places with ready answers. Not always the best advice, but they were there.

And so it feels like you're saying, hey, folks, humans actually don't do real well without this kind of thing.

That one way or another, we're going to have to come up with ways to ask the hard questions and places to feel safe in pondering the answers and the challenges those answers force us to face. Once again, am I reading into this in a way that is my own yearning?

Well, I mean, I think you're describing the reality that I've experienced, especially with my prior book, in the Camp of Angels of Freedom.

There, I painted and wrote about 11 different people, most of whom I'd never met, but whose work had a tremendous influence on shaping my own ways of thinking and feeling. And in each case, there was an aha moment that was triggered by my encounter with that person.

Now, you were kind enough to interview me when that book came out.

And I think we talked some about Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian educator whose ideas about internalization of the oppressor and conscientization that had so much impact on people who do community based arts, liberating education, all of those participatory and democratic practices. And as soon as I read that for the first time, I was like, oh yeah, this is true. And that truth never left me. It's embedded.

It's like in my part of my operating system that I carry around. It's one of the things that I think about a lot now, Bill, under these political pressures, in the political moment, is the operating system.

Because I see an awful lot of people who are the amygdala, you know, the reptile brain seems to be in charge. They want revenge as a primary directive. You know, they want to triumph over others in any way that they can.

Rather than the neocortex is four part of our brain that really enables us to think things over and make actual decisions instead of react emotionally. And I always feel like, oh God, if there was a way, I could only do it. That's how I would like my work to have an impact.

I would like it to have an impasse on inspiring people to learn discernment and practice discernment. So you asked about artists as intercessors.

Some of the questions that come up for the intercessors in the book are, when I'm listening for the voice, what voice am I hearing in this practice?

There's a concept that's very core to Jewish understanding, which is that human beings are impelled by two inclinations, the good inclination, the evil inclination, Yetzer, hatovietzer, hara, and that they're acting on all of us all the time. You have to know who you're listening to.

So for some of the characters who are getting involved in intercession in the book, there's an evil force somehow that's worming its way into their minds and they need the discernment to be able to say, no, that's not the voice I should be listening to. There's another voice here that's the voice of true guidance.

So I sometimes think, because I'm a 60th generation person too, that I don't know where I am on the continuum of wooness. How woo woo am I? I'm way more woo woo if I go to New York than most of the people I meet.

But I'm a lot less Woo woo than some of my folks in Northern California. Yeah. So I don't, like, pick up my pendulum and ask it what I should have for lunch. But I sure know a lot of people.

I know people, Bill, who I love and admire in every other way, who do that. And let's make that the extreme of woo woo. Somewhere there where I'm in the middle.

I don't know when I'm quieting my mind, preparing my heart to receive some kind of guidance, asking in all sincerity a question where I really want help and opening myself to listen.

I don't know if the voice that I'm hearing is coming from an immaterial higher place, someplace I can't touch or see or smell, or whether that guidance is within me.

And the practices I've done have enabled me to access the inner voice that has my best interests at heart, rather than the inner voice that's rolling around in there telling me I'm worthless in this way or that. So. And I don't think it can be known, and I don't think it matters.

No.

Really?

Yeah.

But there's so much energy and stress that is produced around the gap between the fear that if you don't know, there's something really wrong with you and other people who are basically saying, yeah, and we've got the absolute answer for you to figure that out.

Right.

And take this drug or do this. Buy my book. Part four, Take heed.

So I've got another quote here, and it starts with, it's been five years now, talking about Zach Levy, and ends with, take heed.

Yeah. Well, this is the protagonist and narrator of this chapter. Her name is Reb Ruby. She's a rabbi.

And she doesn't have a congregation, but she has, like, a retreat and study center that she started in her 40s and that she's a director of. And it's a place that a lot of people admire and respect and go to.

And she, in this chapter, has gotten into a big pickle because she had a teacher come to teach at her center, and that person was apt to exposed as a sexual abuser. And there was a big controversy in the Jewish renewal movement about whether to believe the charges that were made against him or not.

There was a period of time where people wanted to excuse him and say it was all in the past.

And because she became concerned about the energy that she saw coming off him when he came to teach at her place, she called some of the references that he had given her before she booked him. And when he heard that she called the references. He was furious at her, although it was a very ordinary, normal thing to do.

And it started a campaign against her. There's a Jewish expression, Hebrew expression, lashon hara. It means evil speech or evil tongue.

There's a lot of texts about gossip and a lot of prohibitions that you should avoid it at all costs. Possible is a saying. I like that. You can never put the feathers back in a pillow.

Yeah, but if you live in a body on planet Earth, it's pretty hard not to want to confide in your friends where that line is.

So what happens to Reb Rivi is this campaign against her escalates and escalates until she goes to a conference in another town and people say, oh, you're that Reb Rivi. You're the one who is attacking Zach Levy, who's a spirit.

This rabbi against whom the accusations were made, her funders, the people who are supporting the programs at her center, start to say, you know, we're hearing stuff about you. We don't think we can continue to fund you.

And all of this is in contradiction to who she really is, which is she's not trying to be a celebrity rabbi like this guy Zach Levy. But she was just trying to look out for the well being of. Of the people she knows.

So to shorten the story, I'll just say that a whole new round of accusations are made against him. These are verified. They are in the present time.

The women who are involved speak out against him, he disappears, and she eventually and slowly over a period of years, is able to repair her relationships.

So this is a very last paragraph of this story in which a gathering has been planned for everybody to apologize for believing the gossip about her and for everybody to make up and be aligned again. And I'm going to read the sentence before too, Bill. Yeah.

Okay.

I thanked everyone and said that for me, this had to be a learning moment for all of us. Then I gave my teaching. Her teaching is about what happened and what it all means. And then we all had cake.

It's been five years now, and I don't know what became of Zach Levy. He disappeared shortly after the lawsuits were filed.

There were outstanding rulings against him, damages levied, but as far as I know, never collected. You can't get accountability from a ghost. I have a hunch he'll turn up again, though. Another name, place, religion.

The longing for a loving guide who seems to recognize your unique specialness and promises to hold you in a lasting embrace that seems hardwired into a not Insignificant portion of the human race. I feel it myself sometimes when they say to be careful what you want. We'd best take heed.

Yeah. And that just smacked me right across the forehead. It's a complicated story. It's a simple warning, something.

I think we all probably have faced situations like that in smaller versions than the ones that we're having on the front lines, front pages of the newspaper. But take heed. Let me finish by just saying so.

Repair is an ongoing important activity in the world individually, but also in communities and countries and the globe. And right now we're in a. I guess you'd say a damaged state.

And one of the things that they're talking about as being damaged is this thing we call democracy. And I'm wondering how you see if any, a link between the journeys that your characters have taken in this and the current situation.

We're in our everyday lives.

Yeah, definitely, Bill. I mean, I think the link is pretty strong. When you say democracy, well, that's a kind of. That's a big, expansive word.

And one of the things about it is that it applies to small things like gathering with a few people to do a project together, and large things like a nation or the nations of the world, their relationships with each other.

I feel like one of the things that people are saying at the end of the book that they're trying to do in these stories is to rehearse for life in a democracy in these small groups in which they're engaged. And the book is situated in a specific cultural milieu. So while the people are different, one of them is half Kunawan and half Ashkenazi Jew.

You know, others are living in another world, in another realm, but the people are quite different.

And in the last chapter, everybody's getting together and talking about their hopes and fears for the future.

And I doubt that there's a group of people of any ethnicity, age, location or whatever in whom there were not people who are finding themselves in exactly the same situation a year ago. And I think we're going to be there for a few more years now.

Yeah, we certainly are.

And what you just said and what this book explores is something that's, I think, Common to almost every tribe of humans, which is that there are these searching, questioning paths. And the common ground of those paths is that it takes practice.

You're going to argue and push and pull and give and take, no matter what version of democracy you're talking about. That's what it is. It's a work project. It's not a bumper sticker.

Your book is about people who are practicing to be human and trying to find sense and meaning in the world. And they're struggling and they're having celebration and revelation and they're establishing relationships, and that's the healthy human journey.

But we need a place to do that. You know, I'm most concerned about young people who aren't practicing all this, you know, deciding what's next together in a way that works.

They don't even know what to practice, let alone have a place or a guide. But the good news is that you've made this book. And so I just thank you for it. It's like an inquiring minds democracy manual, sort of with charact.

And I appreciate it. I really do.

Well, I'm so delighted to hear you say that, Bill. I really appreciate that in my writing. I try to make my prose accessible. I tend to not be very abstract.

I'm pretty sure that anybody from, you know, let's say, 13 on would be able to read this book and feel that they could comprehend everything. And I'd love to see a few young people read it. So I think that's a good.

I know sometimes how hard it was.

For my friends going to Hebrew school, and boy, if this were a part.

Of that, they would have loved it.

Yeah.

Well, there you have, the animating impulse behind Jewish renewal. Let's have at least as much pleasure as the pain that life sends us. As you know, I'm a painter, too, and a couple years ago, I did a self portrait.

Many of my paintings have text on them of some kind, and I wanted to put some kind of short text on it that conveyed what I felt was the essence of my being. And I chose this saying from a text called Pure Kevot, which basically means the sayings of the elders.

It is not given you to complete the task, but neither may you desist from it.

Yes, there you go.

And there we are. That's our assignment, right?

Yeah.

You got it. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much.

It's made my day.

And the great thing is there's this thing called a book that maintains the interaction. I don't read a lot of books more than once, but I think that this is one of them. So thank you.

Oh, that's great. Well, people can go to an easy URL. That's the intercessor.info. the intercessor. All one word. And thank you so much for having me, Bill.

It's always so great to talk with you and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You take care.

All right. Bye.

Bye.

All right, before we close, here are three things that I've taken with me from this conversation. The first is that this idea of intercession isn't about surrendering, you know, your will, your agency.

It's just about listening deeply and learning discernment between fear driven voices and guidance that supports repair. Then there's this idea about artists functioning as intercessors.

Whether they name it or not, they often stand between worlds, translating life's experiences into shared meaning and helping communities I don't know, rehearse for democratic life. And democracy, well, that's kind of like a spiritual practice. It's something you just have to work at.

Built in small groups, imperfect conversations, disagreements held with care, and a willingness to stay the course. Artist Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes comes from the ever present spirit of UK 235.

So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word.