Show notes

00:00 Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Because I had to leave this thought of him as a monster. And I had to ask myself, what if he's not a monster? Why if he's someone like you and me?

00:12 Shaina Hammerman

That was award-winning author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen describing her attempts to empathize with the problematic characters she writes into her novels. Gundar-Goshen was the Taube Center for Jewish Studies visiting writer-in-residence and a lecturer for the psychology department. A practicing psychologist, we present her here in conversation with journalist, author, and media studies scholar, Gal Beckerman. Beckerman's most recent book, The Quiet Before, explores the history of social movements and imagines the struggles of the various characters who fought to bring justice into the world. Gundar-Goshen's most recent novel, The Wolf Hunt, imagines the alienation a mother can feel from her son as they engage with a world marred by racial divisions, gun violence, and nationalism. Together they ask, what is empathy and how might literature, whether in writing it or studying it, provide a pathway to empathy that real life cannot?

I'm Shaina Hammerman and this is Cite and Sound, the Stanford Jewish Studies podcast. Here we host conversations with scholars and artists as we explore Jewish scholarship, culture and history. On today's episode of Cite and Sound, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Gal Beckerman push against the limits of empathy in literature and in life. And now, the conversation.

01:26 Gundar-Goshen

Shalom everyone, and thank you for coming. And I will say that I feel like I pulled a trick.

Because when I read Gal's work, I felt I have to sit down with this person and to talk with him. And I didn't know how to get him to be in the same room with me because he's on the other side of this big country. And then we said, oh, we'll make it a public talk and then we can get him here for this discussion. So I can finally ask you all these questions and have also other people asking you questions.

02:00 Gal Beckerman

And I pulled a trick because every time I talk to Ayelet, she makes me speak to her in Hebrew. And my Hebrew is terrible. So I end up sounding like a fifth grader. And now she needs to speak with me in English.

02:12 Gundar-Goshen

No, not a fifth grader. Give yourself a little credit.

02:15 Beckerman

Let's say, no, I'm very, very pleased to be here. It's an honor to speak with a good friend.

02:24 Gundar-Goshen

So I think we're gonna go back and forth. We each have questions for one another. I'll shoot first. [Beckerman: Please.] Okay, because I'm the host. So my question, I wanna go back to Gal's latest article in The Atlantic, “Be Like Sisyphus.” And as an author, it's very interesting to me when somebody choose a myth, okay, a literary piece of work, the myth of Sisyphus, as a way to look at modern politics, okay? So you choose a literary myth in order to look at current days, at what's going on right now in America. I was curious about this choice, and I wanted to ask you, why do you think that this myth can tell us about real life, about what's going on right now.

03:08 Beckerman

Yeah. Well, I have to say that I borrowed that from Albert Camus. For those who don't know the myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus was a Greek king who had offended the gods in some way. And his punishment was that he had to roll a rock up a hill for all eternity, but never reach the top. Every time he would get close, the rock would roll back down. So to me and to Camus, this is the ultimate kind of existential parable of how meaningless life can be, right? This is the existential idea that if you're sort of aware of the pointlessness of life, it's a kind of torture, right? But Camus looks at the story of Sisyphus and sees something else. He says, within these bounds, within this task that he has every day to roll the rock up the hill, Camus has a little bit of freedom. He can decide whether to approach the task depressed or happy, whether to sort of throw himself into the everyday pushing the rock up the hill. And at the end of this essay called “The Myth of Sisyphus” that Camus wrote, he says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, which is a really shocking and kind of counterintuitive idea, right? Could you be happy being the person who has to roll a rock up a hill forever and ever and ever ever ever, knowing you're never gonna reach the top?

Why would this kind of tragic figure come to mind in the last few months? I don't know. Maybe somebody can tell me. I think that I wanted to re-examine this idea of how you find a sense of meaning and even hopefulness, even when you know that your situation ultimately might be one of impossibility. When you're living in a reality where you don't know that it's ever going to change, how do you comport yourself? How do you handle yourself? And Sisyphus is a...is a fantastic story to help tell that. And what you learn is that, you have to begin to think, as I started to do in this piece, what are those things that are going to make him feel like it's not pointless to keep rolling the rock up the hill? How is he going to think about what he's doing every day? And I think there are lessons that are sort of applicable to a reality in which we feel that so many of the big things that we want to change in our world sort of...feel stagnant and don't change. So that was the idea behind Sisyphus.

05:34 Gundar-Goshen

I'll ask because I think when you look at The Quiet Before, you do quite the same thing. That is, in The Quiet Before, Gal analyzes the origin of big social movements, but you focus on not at the moment when it explodes, which you usually do, right? But on the quiet before, on this moment where it seems like nothing is happening. But something is bubbling and then there's this moment when it erupts. So you cover many different big social movements, but you walk into it from the perspective of people. Each chapter, there's a different character, different time, different character, and you write from almost from the perspective of the character. What made you choose to discuss history, the big questions of life throughout the little people?

06:26 Beckerman

Because I like smallness. Like, I think that we experience reality, we live our lives through our individual experiences, through the way that we each view the world. And so when I look at history, you know, the big sort of movements and ideologies that stream through, that historians look at, that's all retrospect. Sort of in the moment, people are living their lives. It's, we're all, you know, Sisyphus not knowing if we're gonna reach the top of the hill. And so I...I wanted to do a book that would actually zoom in on those stories, try to understand before we knew that something like slavery would be abolished or that women would get the right to vote, what did it feel like to be in the center of those movements, to wake up every day and not know if you were going to achieve your goal? In fact, almost be certain that you weren't going to achieve your goal. So the only way to do that is to really tell stories and stories that aren’t retrospective. But stories that are in the moment, that capture reality as it's developing, which is what fiction writers do. So I'm going to turn on you because, and maybe this will bring it back to a question of sort of contemporary, our contemporary moment and how what we do is relevant to the bigger crazy trends of our world. But in that book, The Quiet Before, the reason that I wanted to delve into these small moments was because I was interested in something that I, I don't know if I called it or I borrowed it, but a notion of incubation, sort of how ideas develop, how ideas slowly bubble up, and the conditions that it takes for people to begin to think differently about, say, something like slavery or women's right to vote. And I was looking at different forms of communication that allow people to do that, that allow them to begin to question the status quo, question the reality that they know might be, could be different, might be different.

So I was curious if you think of literature in the same way, especially in a moment where so much feels sort of stuck about our world when it comes to the bigger things that we want to change or we dream about changing without talking about politics. I think a lot of people can say that on every side. So do you think about novels as in any way being a kind of a quiet before? As introducing the ideas that help people begin to think about political reality, social reality, cultural reality in slightly different ways?

09:01 Gundar-Goshen

I think it's interesting to look, if you look at the origin of storytelling. So if you go to the Bible, to the Hebrew Bible, and you look for the first act of storytelling in the Bible, the first time that somebody is coming to somebody else and says, listen, I got a story for you. Okay, remember the first act of storytelling in the Bible, which chapter it is, what's happening there? Breishit? I think creation is a hell of a story, but I think about the first time that one human being comes to another human being and says, listen, I got to tell you this story, this crazy story. I would usually think about it as the moment where, you know, King David, slept with Bathsheba and he sent Uriah her husband to die because he didn't want to, we had to find out that he was sleeping with his wife. And then God tells Nathan, the prophet, he tells him, you have to go to the king, to the most powerful person, and you have to condemn the king for what he did. And Nathan is intimidated because, you know, if you go to a king and you tell him that he did something wrong, usually you leave the room without your head with you. So he doesn't want to do it. And so he knows that if he will come to David and he will tell him right in his face the truth, you took somebody else's wife, you sent him to death, you're a terrible person, he knows that if he'll do it, he will get shot, killed. And so he tells David a story instead. [Beckerman: A lie.] It's not a lie, it's a story. He walks into the room and he tells him, I got a story to tell you. And he tells them the story, and kings love stories, right?

He tells them the story about another guy, a different guy, a completely other guy, a very rich guy that had a whole lot of sheeps. And then there was a poor guy that had just one sheep. And then the rich guy took the one sheep from the poor guy. If we put aside for a moment the fact that we're talking about women as sheeps here, okay? But Nathan is telling David the story. And David is sitting and listening to the story about sheeps. And he gets so upset while listening to the story about the rich guy who took everything from the poor guy, but at the end of this fictional story, he stands up and he says, “Mi ha’ish?” who can do such a thing? Damn this man. He's condemning the man that could do such a thing. And then I think perhaps this is the incubation, as he said, Nathan looks at him and he says, “Atah Ha’ish.” He says, you are this person. And I think this is such a powerful take of the Bible about the meaning of storytelling because the first time somebody is telling someone a story, what he's actually doing is using a lie or fiction to confront him with a truth that he's unable to face. If the truth was put right there, right in front, then David would kill him and not give it another thought. But when the truth was put into far, far away about somebody completely different, it's like a Trojan horse, right? You lower down your defenses, the story can go behind the walls. The king has the emotional reaction because he identifies with the one person he refused to identify with, which is the man he took his wife. So literature, I think right in the Bible was used as an instrument to create empathy to someone we refuse to have empathy to, to, as you say, to incubate, that is to make us wonder and stay with a guilt that we would usually just throw out and to reveal very uncomfortable truth through a lie. So I think you're right. So that's what you do. That's what Nathan did. He saved his life.

I think...when I write a story, I usually take a question that I'm haunted by. And my way of figuring this question out is through playing with this question in a like imaginary playground. In literature, you, you can test an idea in an imaginary playground. And if you fall down, nothing bad will happen. Well, in real life, if you would be facing these questions, then you have to pay...I think you can say authors sometimes write, what they never dare live. And you can experience things that you wouldn't dare to do in your ordinary life. [Beckerman: Right.] So maybe a bit of that.

13:52 Beckerman

But that makes me wonder, because I wanted to ask you about empathy. We have people who work with books and the worlds of writing. We have sort of almost a cliche idea at this point, I think, that sort of literature is an empathy machine, right? It's like you go in and you read a story about somebody who you don't know, and it makes you...connect with the rest of humanity. So I've been having trouble with empathy lately. Not my own empathy, but the idea that empathy is the way that we should understand people who aren't like us. And I think that there's a lot about our reality today that's making us realize that different people can observe the same reality and see something totally different. I mean, we live in a country right now where I think that's very much the case. And so empathy, me saying...Oh,I understand this other person because they're like me. I feel like there's a barrier. I feel like maybe they're not like me. Maybe there's a real different way that they understand the world. And so I wonder as a novelist, like, is there part of you that is, that maybe empathy is the end product, but you're coming into a story with a recognition of difference, real difference, difference of like...I could never be that person. I could never do what that person does. And then the novel is an attempt to understand and to begin to arrive at a recognition of the humanity of that character so that we can begin to also have that empathy. But I don't know. It strikes me that literature is more about exploring difference than about empathy. Does that ring a bell at all?

15:36 Gundar-Goshen

I think it does. You make me think about a conversation I had with Vered about Levinas and hospitality. The idea of hospitality as acknowledging the fundamental difference between us and somebody else and still being able to let him in. But let him in means realizing that he's not me, that we are completely different, but he's still invited, okay, for me, for us to try to communicate. I'm thinking...in my book...

16:06 Beckerman

I mean you have characters who do terrible things.

16:09 Gundar-Goshen

Yeah, they're not nice people.

16:11 Beckerman

Why are you interested in those people?

16:14 Gundar-Goshen

So the first novel I wrote, it's called One Night Markovitch and it's a true story. So I first heard about it as something that actually happened. There was a real case of Jewish men that were living in the British rule of Mandatory Palestine. And there was a group of Jewish men that sailed to Europe in order to have a fictive marriage with a group of Jewish women. This was the only way to get these women out of Nazi Europe. And once they got to the Mandatory Palestine, the Brits would let them go into the country if they were married to people with citizenship. Otherwise they couldn't enter. Okay? So this was the way of saving them from Nazi Europe. So there was this group of Jewish men that went... sailed all the way to Europe to marry these women, get them into Israel and then divorce them. There was one guy who refused. [Beckerman: Refused to divorce.] Refused to give the get. Refused to allow the Jewish divorce. So when I heard the story for the first time, I thought, I'm not going to say this word, but what a monster. Okay, like what monster can do such a thing? But then I asked, you know, it's like the psychologist in me sprang into action because then I thought, if he walked into my clinic, I just can't say, oh, you're a monster. You're a terrible person. Go away from here. Right? I have to try to understand him. I have to ask myself, what makes a man sail all the way to Europe to rescue a woman just to end up as her, as the one keeping her captive. Okay.

So this moment, the first reaction to this guy was as a woman, you know, hating him, condemning him, judging him. But the writer, the novel was, I was able to write it because I had to leave this thought of him as a monster. And I had to ask myself, what if he's not a monster? What if he's someone like you and me? Is there a part in you and me that is capable of doing such a thing? So this moment, when you try to...And I think this is empathy. It's the moment when you try to understand something rather than to automatically judge it. It's the moment in which instead of shouting “monster!” you're asking “monster?” Like it takes the exclamation mark and you tickle it to a question mark. Instead of saying, “this is a terrible person,” saying, “is this a terrible person?”

And I think, you know, also with the latest novel, The Wolf Hunt, it's based on an experience in which at first I felt completely estranged from, and trying to understand the situation led to the writing of the novel. But do you feel the same when you chose your characters? I don't know if I can call them characters for The Quiet Before. Did you think, wow, these people are so different from us because they lived in different times? Or did you think there is one characteristic which they all share, regardless of place and time, regardless of gender identities, national identities, which all dissidents share?

19:35 Beckerman

Well, I think they did share a desire for change, a desire to change a reality that everybody else is kind of comfortable in going along with. And I think that's true of dissidents. As a group, they're weird in this way, which is the rest of society can conform to a new norm. And they're the ones who are saying, “No, actually there are principles that we're losing. There are values that we're losing.” But they are different in the sense that, and this is maybe my own fascination that I'm exploring here, unless it has general interest, but their brains, I think, are different in interesting ways. And it has to do with the kind of communication that they use with each other, the sort of social environment, the cultural world that they lived in. So my book is looking at different forms, that book looked at different forms of communication. It started in the 17th century with letters and the way that communication was helpful in bringing about change. So it started with letters, it went all the way in the 90s to zines. People remember what zines are, it's kind of homemade magazines. And looked at different movements and the way a particular medium sort of helped bring about change. But the argument of the book is that something about the medium, something about the form of communication that they are using is actually shaping the movement itself and shaping their brains too. And I think we know this intuitively. I mean, think about how our brains are being shaped by the forms of communication that we're using, by the ways that we have less focus and less attention and are drawn towards shorter, more bombastic forms of speech. So in that sense, there is a feeling of difference, a feeling that

these are people who lived in another time. Yes, they wanted to make change in their time, but I can see them only so much.

And let's look at a contemporary example, because I've been thinking about this a lot, and I do wonder if it's, I'm curious to hear if you think this is where empathy, even as you understand it in a novel, sort of hits a wall. So take a Trump rally, right? So a Trump rally, somebody can–and I'm not gonna make political judgments on one side or the other–but somebody can view a Trump rally and see an exhibition of fear and rage and anger and something that is rallying people based on their basest instincts, right? And then there's other people who could see a Trump rally and see joy and see community and see a sense of patriotism and people coming together. Now, there is a wall, I feel, that separates people who see it one way or see it another way. I don't know if that wall is the wall that empathy hits against, but I'm curious, like, are there people who…can you write a character, will you reach a point where you say, I can't get into that person's head because they're seeing reality in fundamentally different ways than I would see reality? Does that…? [Gundar-Goshen: I think perhaps the…] I didn't know this is where we were gonna go.

22:42 Gundar-Goshen

I think perhaps the question is, do we even want to try to imagine? I mean, is the challenge that we're facing right now is that you want to be able to see the world through the eyes of the other, which is one of the popular definitions of empathy? Or is it that we're saying there are certain others that, no, thank you. I don't want to see the world from their perspective. Even trying to see the world from their perspective is for me an ethical failure.

So I see some of you nodding and I think it's interesting because each one of us is imagining the other that we are unwilling to read a novel from their perspective. I will give an example from my country, from Israel. I think a good example for somebody who does believe in the relationship between literature and empathy. Naftali Bennet. He’s a right-wing leader. He was the Israeli prime minister and before that he was the Minister of Education. And while he was the Minister of Education, he banned from school curriculums a novel that was presenting a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man. And there was a lot of debate over this in Israel. And I remember I talked with an editor-in-chief in one of the big publishing houses who is also a friend. And she said, she was ironic, she said, “I'm so happy that at least somebody truly believes in the power of literature”. Because look at us on the left, we don't believe in books as much as they trust them in the right. Naftali Bennet truly believes that if the kids in Israel will read this love story, this Romeo and Juliet love story, they will just run over the border. Those Jewish young girls will run over the border to want to make love to Palestinian men because of a novel in which a Palestinian man is not portrayed as the ultimate enemy. So he truly thought about it as something that can create change. And the mere invitation to think about the world from the perspective of this other for him was this is where he put the wall. And so I wonder if each one of us puts a different wall and we're saying the people on the other side of this wall were unwilling to even imagine the world from their perspective, because in itself it would be like taking an ethical stand. What is it that we're losing? And we're losing, in the case of America, half of the population. And that's the half you have to be able to discuss with if you ever want to change anything.

25:23 Beckerman

Now, you are on the other side of that wall for, and increasingly so, since October 7th, you and Israeli writers, there is a, you know, very big movement in the literary world with thousands of signatures by very important writers to say that they simply will not read Israeli writers. I don't know, I wonder about the sort of burden of representation that you feel if you get that phrase, you know, that you now more than ever an Israeli writer has to sort of... If somebody's willing to peek over the wall, they have to sort of display their humanity. And actually, this is something that Palestinian writers have written a lot about. There's a writer named Isabella Hamad, who's a British-Palestinian writer, who just wrote a book about this burden of representation, basically saying that Palestinian novels need to teach and enlighten. They need to show the world that we're worthy of humanity. And is this going to now be the burden of Israeli writers? And what is the cost? Because I think for me the cost, frankly, with a lot of Palestinian novels is that it becomes overwrought. It becomes trying too hard to say, look at us, look at us, look at us. And I wonder if that's a pressure that you feel as an Israeli writer.

26:54 Gundar-Goshen

I think about this sense of responsibility when you write. And I think sometimes I have two very different reactions to that. Because there's something in me saying, you don't have to feel responsible when you're writing literature. This is like a recipe for bad literature. Take everything you believe in and now try to advocate it in writing a novel as if writing a novel isn't hard enough. Now you have to put in, know, feminism, I'm totally pro, and like liberal ideas and the anti-occupation and all the things I believe in. But you really want to try to put the entire world into those 400 pages… and climate change…you won't be able to write one character because it's just a whole lot of petitions. And just as they say, when you write, you have to forget, or at least I think, you have to forget that your dad might be reading it, that your mom, when my mom was still alive, might be reading it. Because I will never be able to write a sex scene if I think about my parents. I will never be able to write about kids if I think that my own kids are reading it. I won't be able to write one word. So in a way, writing is about forgetting the world and doing what you're passionate about. At the same time, I'm thinking, yes, you do have a responsibility because also not writing about something is a moral choice, right? If you look at the Israeli author that never ever in any way talks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not even as a symbol, not even acknowledging that there is such a conflict, I would wonder. If you look at the whole…how do you say gif ha’avodah? [Beckerman: body of work.] Body of work. You see, that's a five-year-old, fifth grade. If you look at the whole body of work and you say, this person insisted on writing romantic comedies for 20 years, I love romantic comedies, but I will ask if this happened during a war. What does it stand for? What is the meaning? Sometimes the meaning is that, we insist that people are able to love and to have sex in even the most difficult situation.

29:05 Beckerman

Right, It's a way of asserting humanity to say, you know what, we're just going to tell stories about human people and not worry about whether or not we represent the conflict or whether that's part of, right? I mean, that is its own sort of stance.

29:19 Gundar-Goshen

It is. And sometimes I take, I mean, I always, when the books come out, in Europe, and I come and people always think of it as like the Israeli author. You know, the Israeli author is coming. And if you say anything, which is not about the conflict or is not about the Holocaust, then people feel like you're betraying, they didn't get their money. You have to talk about the Holocaust and you have to, and if you want to talk about love, then it feels almost…

29:42 Beckerman

Or they'll see a metaphor for, where you don't mean to put a metaphor...

29:46 Gundary-Goshen

Yeah, it's still about the Holocaust.

29:47 Beckerman

You're like the lovers who don't get along. Clearly that's about Oslo. But what would you lose personally if you stopped being read outside of Israel? Or in Hebrew. And the second part of that would be, is there role that you see for your work if it's offering solace and comfort and knowledge to your own people? Because that looks like where we're headed.

30:16 Gundar-Goshen

I'll answer with another author because it's easier. I'm thinking about my daughter after October 7th, the day she found out about the hostages. And it was a very difficult day for her because we didn't tell her at first because we didn't want her to be scared. And then she heard about it because kids hear things. And then she came and she started asking questions and she asked it gradually. She asked, “ma ze chatuf?” What is a hostage? And then we explained and she asked were there also kids taken? And then I said yes. And then she asked, kids my age? And then I was, she was eight and a half back then. I said, yes. And then she said, but the kids that were taken, she was processing, and then she said, but they're with their parents, right? And then I said, no, because I didn't want to lie. And like, some of them are not. And what she did immediately after this conversation..so I said, I'm here. And if you want to talk, I'm here and we can talk about it. And she didn't want to talk about it with her mom who's also a psychologist. She didn't want to talk about it. What she wanted to do, she went to her library and she pulled out Harry Potter. And she, the first one, which she already read like 10 times, and she started reading it right from the beginning. And this was what she was reading for the entire month, finishing it, starting it, finishing it, starting it. And at first I didn't realize what it was that she was doing. But then I thought, Harry Potter is a story about a boy who is left without his parents, and this is not the end of the story for him. This is the beginning of the story. Okay? This is not the final chapter. This is the beginning of a whole life. And I thought the first chapter is called “The Boy Who Lived,” the first chapter of Harry Potter. And I thought how she was eight and a half, she was far younger than me. But she knew something about the role of literature or the power of literature. And she *seeked the one novel that can transform this feeling from being completely helpless to being, you know, the protagonist and being ordered to survive a tragedy. And I think if I ask JK Rowling, do you think, what do you think your books are for? She, I'm not sure she knows that somewhere there is like an Israeli girl that found it to be her comfort in a chaotic world. And this is one of the things I like about literature, though. When you finish a novel, it's like throwing a bottle to the water, and it's there, and you don't know if anyone will pull it out or if it will just stay in the ocean, and you don't know which effect it will have on the person that will read it and what kind of effect. And the idea that because of the boycott, people will pull out a bottle from the ocean and say, ah, it's an Israeli author, I'll just throw it back into the ocean. And it's really sad. But I also think, you know, it's part of a big discussion of how can we make an end to this conflict. And the discussion is a super relevant one.

My turn. I want to ask, you said that you're a bit ambivalent, I would say, about empathy.

33:52 Beckerman

I mean, I think I am an empathetic person. I am ambivalent about how, about I think there are limits to empathy and that we might have to use other tools, which I'm thinking through in the moment to understand because that Trump rally example, you know, I don't know. You know, I think that we've gone through this long period now of a few, I don't know how long has it been since Trump came on the scene…eight years or so in which we've tried to say, there's an economic reason for this. There's a social reason for this. There's, you know, trying to interpret a reality that people on the other side, which I'll put myself on, don't understand, like a response that is impossible to understand, that response of, let's say, joy. Like, it's, I don't understand their joy, right? And so does it help me to say, I'm a human being, they're a human being, therefore I should be able to embody in some way the thing that brings them joy. Not embody, but leap into, imaginatively leap into what brings them joy. I mean, maybe if I was a novelist I could, but it seems to me that it presents a limit to empathy as a kind of a blunt tool. I feel like I need to reconstruct, you know, their social world in a much deeper way than just saying, oh, they're poor and angry or they're, you know, they're resentful at the left or whatever. I need to reconstruct their world to be able to fully understand that emotion of joy. It's something that otherwise I feel completely blocked off from and no amount of telling myself be empathetic, be empathetic, be empathetic helps me enter it. Does that make sense? But maybe if I was a novelist, it would be easier. I don't know.

35:56 Gundar-Goshen

I'm wondering if you find yourself analyzing stories because part of the most successful stories, if we look at history, are not stories which are used to create empathy. These are stories who are used to create exactly the opposite, to create rage, to motivate people into fascism, for instance. Do you think these stories are more powerful in a way or better constructed than the empathetic stories?

36:25 Beckerman

No, not necessarily. You're talking about novels, like literature itself, or about the stories that leaders tell their people?

36:33 Gundar-Goshen

You can say that Trump is a very good storyteller.

36:34 Beckerman

He's an excellent storyteller. But it's a pretty crude story from my perspective. I find that the stories that I would associate with stories that create empathy, are stories that look for complexity, that look for characters who are shaded in all kinds of different ways. I'm sure it's the type of literature that you like too. It doesn't tell a simple story about good and evil, which is what Trump does. Trump's storytelling is quite reductive. There's always a reason for the way things are, and the reason is this. I think in the storytelling that I appreciate, there's...6,000 different reasons and you have to sort of look at them from different angles to understand it. It's breaking open the simplicity and trying to find all the different facets of what makes us human, you know, which is not one thing.

37:27 Gundar-Goshen

And do you think perhaps that these stories are less appealing, not as bestsellers politically?

37:33 Beckerman

I think they're harder. They're harder for people to enter into, you know. I mean, I keep wanting to turn it around to you because you're the one who's writing stories. Is it hard to end a story that doesn't have a simple answer to it? Like it has an ambivalence or a nuance to the way that it… where it lands? Because I think it's probably harder for a reader to live with that, but it makes for a more complex and true to life story, I would think.

38:06 Gundar-Goshen

It's interesting that you're saying that because I had once a phone call from a reader in Israel because Israel is a small country. If somebody doesn't like the ending of the book, he can locate you like three minutes after that, he'll be on your phone. So I once got a phone call from a reader in Israel who finished the novel and was unsatisfied with the ending and he wanted to discuss it. I thought it was a bit weird, but also it was a great compliment, the fact that he cared enough to do it, but for me also the fact that the ending was not as tied together, like I'll give you an example with The Wolf Hunt was the latest one. I think what started the story remained for me a question because it's a story that started…I was taking my daughter when she was really young to the preschool for the first day and I was really scared when we entered the preschool that she will be bullied.

So I was scanning the other kids with my eyes and I was trying to see which one of the other kid is the potential bully. Okay, like where's the mean girl? Who's gonna do something to her? And then I realized that just like I was eyeing all the other kids, all the other parents were eyeing the other kids, including my daughter. And this was a very disturbing moment to think that while I'm afraid that the mean girl might be their girl, what if it's mine?

And this is a moment when it's not empathy, as you said, it's the difference, the idea of, because I wanted to say, nah, but I know my daughter. And then I started and said, what if you don't? Yeah, what if I don't? Did my mother know everything about me? Hell no. So I thought, what if I don't know really what she's capable of? What if I like to tell myself a story about who she is and there's a gap between who she is and the story and the narrative I create. And this was a very disturbing moment. And the book, like The Wolf Hunt is based on this moment, of this moment of feeling completely estranged. And when I ask myself, what would I rather her be? Would I rather her be a bully or would I rather her be a victim? For me, this is a question, as you said, that is not a very clear cut answer here. And I think if the answer is too much of a clear cut, then you're missing something. Then you're shoving something to the back that you don't really wanna face.

Gal, if you had to choose a Jewish text that is meaningful for you, that represents this moment for you, what would you choose?

40:40 Beckerman

Funny you should ask that because I happen to have one right here. This is a way that you end events, right? Okay. So the quote that came to mind that was meaningful to me is from Yehuda Amichai from a poem, it's a pretty well-known poem called “Tourists.” And it's the second part of the, there's kind of two parts to it. And the second part is a more prose, has a more prose feeling to it. It's something I think about all the time, because it's one of these that captures in a few sentences, you know, this question of, you know, how far empathy goes, how much empathy we need to have, how much we need to see the human. Anyways, this is the second part of the, it's much more beautiful in Hebrew, obviously.

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's tower.

I placed my two heavy baskets at my side.

A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker.

You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head, there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.

But he's moving, he's moving.

I said to myself, redemption will come only if their guide tells them, you see that arch from the Roman period?

It's not important.

But next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who bought fruit and vegetables for his family.

I get like choked up when I read this. I don't know why. And I love the idea of centering the human and sort of trying and the way that he does it here, which is to say all of that, it's all background. What matters is how people live their lives. It doesn't matter that you have an arch that's 2,000 years old, it matters that it's a man who's bringing food home to his family. I don't know, there's not much more to say about it, but it's something that I always found really meaningful.

42:41 Gundar-Goshen

This is such a beautiful motto for The Quiet Before, because you go back to the fruits and the vegetables again and again.

42:47 Beckerman

That's exactly right. And it's always the thing that interests me. So, Ayelet what about you? Do you happen to have something from the long history of Jewish literature that you'd like to share with us?

42:59 Gundar-Goshen

So it's actually very interesting because I also thought about Yehuda Amichai. And so what are the chances that two different people will get to the same poet when they think about a fundamental Jewish text? So it's a text by Yehuda Amichai. It's a poem by Yehuda Amichai, which I mean, for me, it's when I started learning psychology, I remember, Freud is really important, yes. But this line by this poet is for me the best way to think about psychotherapy, to think about the ability to empathy. So I almost didn't think about it as a piece of poetry as much as I thought about it as like what every therapist should write above their table. And I think in the last, since October 7th, it also became...again a political statement. I think it was written in part as a political statement and for me it became again not just a question about empathy in the clinic, but about empathy between nations and the other side of the wall and you said. So I will say it in Hebrew and Vered will help me or Maya will help me translate. So Yehuda Amichai says at the end of this poem, he says, גם האגרוף היה פעם יד פתוחה. How do you say that?

44:21 Beckerman

So even the fist was once an open hand...

44:24 Gundar-Goshen A clenched fist. So I'm thinking about this line. Like when you look at a clenched fist, what do you automatically do? You either clench your fist back, right? This is what we do. This is the fight or flight movement. We either clench back and we're ready to fight or we run away. And Yehuda Amichai is saying you have a third option, which is not...fighting back with your fist and it's not running away with fear and dehumanizing the other and saying, ah, he’s a monster. You have another option, which is encapsulated in the fist was once an open palm. And I think sometimes we need a poet to remind us that the fist was once an open palm. And this is such a politically charged thing to say right now about fists. And I think...Maybe it is a cliche, but I still feel that if you hold on to Yehuda Amichai strong enough, then you will be..as a psychologist, I will be able to meet things in the clinic and not go into a mental fight or flight. And as an Israeli, maybe I will be able to dare and think about something which is not just a fight or flight. So for me, this is a very important Jewish text.

45:44 Hammerman

Today's episode was produced by me, Shaina Hammerman, along with Iva Klemm and Nilofar Saraj. Sound designed by Romi Chicorean. Original music is by Jeremiah Lockwood. Cite and Sound is a production of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford.

46:04

Stanford University.