Susan Cain: A Daughter’s Bittersweet Longing for Her Mother

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin: Hi friends and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin and this month we’re continuing our exploration of intergenerational divergence. Thank you so much to our series sponsors, Danny and Sarala Turkel. We are so grateful for your friendship and support over all these years.

And of course, thank you to our anonymous episode sponsor, Moshe. We are so grateful for you. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18Forty.org where you can also find video articles, recommended readings and weekly emails.I think one of the most frequent conversations that I have with my mother is talking about the difficulties of being a parent to adult children. It happens to be I give my parents extraordinarily high marks for being parents to adult children, but it’s one of the most difficult and almost underappreciated tasks that someone could ever have because that transition from childhood to being an adult, one thing that doesn’t really transition is the role that your parents play in your eyes.

That when you’re a young kid, and the role and the figure and the symbol of your parents is so large, and then you grow up and perhaps become a parent yourself or begin your own family and you become more independent. So there’s a transition that you’ve made, but you also need to transition in a way your relationships and particularly your relationship to a parent where in those formative, transformative years, you’re kind of always a child in your parents’ eyes. And I’ve spoken so often within my own family and with others about how fraught and how difficult it can be to reimagine those relationships. And that question, which is a difficult question that I don’t know that I’m even articulating properly, how we mature and how our relationships mature, is really at the heart of intergenerational divergence.

It’s how we become adults in the eyes of our parents, which I think more deeply is the struggle of how we become adult and human in our own eyes. Something that I’m still grappling with, you know, I just turned 40 and you’re at that age where like you’re really an adult. And even once you step into that independence, your beginning still animate you. Your childhood still animates you and you can have triggers or nostalgia or moments where like that inner seven-year-old like descends out and reaches out and grabs you and either pulls you down or maybe elevates you, but you’re still in dialogue with that childhood.

And in many ways that’s emblematic of the experience of Pesach itself, of Passover, which is so to speak the childhood of the Jewish people. It is our beginning, it is the beginning that we all come back to or try to come back to and recreate. It is why children feature so prominently at the Seder, prodding them to ask the questions like Ma Nishtana, why is this night different? It is why so many of our holidays, even not Passover, we say are Zecher L’Yetzias Mitzrayim, are in remembrance of our redemption from Egypt. Because it’s that childhood that continues to animate us.

And there are few thinkers and writers who talk about this experience more eloquently than our guest today, a world renowned author Susan Cain, whose Ted talk has been seen by millions, who’s written books Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which really sparked a global conversation about the value of introspection and depth in a noisy world. And she followed this up with an absolutely stunning book called Bitter Sweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And when I read this book, which was really several years ago that I was introduced to this by our friend Yehuda Fogel, he read this book and immediately reached out to me and said, you have to read this book and we got to get Susan Cain on 18Forty. I mean, the way she writes and the ideas that she weaves together are so beautiful.

But what also makes this book so remarkable and what really animates so much of our conversation is that really the book is a reflection, is a rumination on her own relationship with her mother. Susan’s mother who is still with us, she should have a refuah shlema, a full recovery. She is quite elderly. As we discussed on the interview, has Alzheimer’s, but herself was an Orthodox Jewish woman, the daughter of a rabbi named Rabbi Israel Shorr.

If you’ll give me a moment just to say a little bit about her grandfather because he was a remarkable figure. When he passed away, he was given an obituary in the New York Times and I reached out to my friend Dovi Safier, who gave me even more information about him. He was really a remarkable person. He writes, Boro Park’s longest serving rav is undoubtedly Rabbi Israel Shorr who began his tenure of Boro Park rabbanus in a small shul in Fort Hamilton Parkway and later at congregation Beth Israel and went on to serve as the spiritual leader of congregation Beth El for an astounding 63 years.

Throughout these decades of leadership, his listeners were treated to a unique brand of oratory, a graduate of the most illustrious Yeshivas in Galicia. He learned a phenomenal English and would deliver shiurim and lectures in both Yiddish and English. He is fondly remembered for many in Boro Park for his brilliance and his many decades of leadership in the community. His grandfather was born in 1905 and he learned in the Pupa Yeshiva, which was a division of the Unsdorfer Yeshiva, arguably the most important influence of his youth was his learning under the renowned gaon Rav Meir Arik.

And in his smicha approbation, his rabbinic ordination, Rav Arik described this Rabbi Israel Shorr as very sharp, a baki, meaning he knew all of Torah literature. He was really an incredible person. So Susan Cain, this author who is, you know, known to the world, her book was selected for Oprah’s book club, is a granddaughter of this Rabbi Yisrael Shor. And really the opening to this book Bittersweet really mentions obliquely her own relationship, her fraught relationship with her mother, an Orthodox woman, and Susan herself did not continue in that path.

But the entire continuation of the book is kind of a reflection of sorts on that relationship and the feelings and that’s really what Bittersweet is about, which is about contending with those conflicting feelings of relationships that are unrequited, of connections that haven’t fully lived up to maybe our dreams that maybe weren’t realistic in the first place, that could make life itself feel like bitter sweet, that existence itself is an act of longing. This is what Susan Cain writes in this book. I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not as we tend to think just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a story tradition, as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential.

It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed, yet stubbornly beautiful world. What a sentence. I want to read that again. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed, yet stubbornly beautiful world.

Most of all, bitter sweetness shows us how to respond to pain by acknowledging it and attempting to turn it into art. The way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, dominion, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know or will know loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.

It is such a beautiful reflection and in many ways when you turn every page of this book, it will recall without saying it explicitly, a very deeply Jewish character because longing, I believe, is at the center of what Yiddishkeit and what Jewish life and Jewish faith is all about. It is a faith of longing. It is a faith of waiting. It is a faith that the way that we transcend the limitations of what we can experience in actuality is to still long for eternity where we transcend our own limitations through anticipation, through divine longing.

And exactly as she writes in this beautiful, beautiful work, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain. And for the Jewish people, whether it’s pain, suffering or exile, which is the source of all pain and suffering being separated from the divine, from our home, from our natural habitat, from that redemptive world, we turn it into art. We don’t just turn it into art, but we turn it into prayer, into the Pesach Seder, into Jewish tradition and Jewish life where the way that we sweeten our relationship to the judgments of history, to the persecution of history, to the suffering of history is we sanctify that suffering, we uplift it, we commemorate it, we relive it through our commandedness, through our tradition, through our faith.

And through that, the history that each of us carries becomes sweet. And I reached out to Susan Cain year after year asking her to come on, and she was so gracious and so sweet, but she politely declined year after year. It is not easy to talk about relationships that are so close to us. And obviously, we’re not looking for sensationalism, but even with the best of intentions, it’s hard to talk about these relationships and you can hear it in her voice, the care and the thoughtfulness.

And what moved me so is that I reached out to her, really thinking about the Jewish people after October 7th, thinking about how so many of us are contending with our collective childhood, namely our own Jewish identity. How we contend with our past, how we long for that wholeness of the future. And because I thought that her book so beautifully addresses this moment and how this moment, this mix, this integration of triumph and tragedy, of wholeness and brokenness that I think the Jewish people as a whole have been feeling collectively quite acutely over the last few years, which is why I am so moved and so grateful that Susan agreed to come on as a part of our series on intergenerational divergence. It is my greatest privilege and pleasure to introduce our guest, Susan Cain. Susan Cain, it is such a privilege and pleasure to have you here and your story is so remarkable.

I wanted to begin by asking you, what was the religious home you had growing up? 

Susan Cain: Yeah, so I grew up in a very mixed kind of household, you could say because, I mean it was a very Jewish household, extremely. My mother is the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Schorr, who served for I think it was 63 years in Congregation Beth El in Boro Park, Brooklyn. And so my mother was very observant and my grandfather was a huge presence in our household and a very huge and beloved presence. I mean, he didn’t live with us, but he came to visit at least once a week and we were always going to see him.

And my father was also like extremely Jewishly identified, but a very secular person and probably an atheist. Like it wasn’t even something he talked about exactly. It was just that was just the air he breathed and you just knew it. So there really were these two strands.

And I would say the two strands converged on a kind of mutual love of secular intellectual culture as well. You know, because my grandfather, the Orthodox rabbi, if you would go to his apartment, the apartment was filled with books in every single, there was a dining room that had been given over to a library full of books, and then every corner of every other room had piles of books in it. But the interesting thing was that like I remember spending so much time in that library of his in the dining room. And you know, one side of it was all Hebrew texts, and the other side of it was Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Milan Kundera and, you know, all the great literary figures and he had gone to get an English degree at Columbia.

So we had all these different strands kind of woven together in our household. 

David Bashevkin: You know, your father you said didn’t make it explicitly clear that he had a different religious disposition than your mother. But how did you notice like growing up as a young kid? How did you process or what did you notice that gave you the clues that your mother and father had different religious personalities? 

Susan Cain: Oh, I mean, it was so obvious because my mother was shomer Shabbos and we children were raised to be as well, and my father was not. You know, number one.

My father was a doctor, he was a medical school professor at NYU and he worked all the time and he would go to the hospital on Saturdays. And meanwhile, the rest of us were shomer Shabbos. And also, when it came to kashrus, we all kept kosher. My father completely observed kashrus at home, but not in restaurants.

So there was this kind of parallel ways of being going on at all times. 

David Bashevkin: Your book Bittersweet really tells the story of your relationship specifically to your mother and the hopes that you kind of had for building maybe a life independent without kind of the shadow of your mother’s expectations of how you were going to live. I’m curious, when was the first time as a young kid that you got an inclination that the life you were going to build was not the one that your mother envisioned? 

Susan Cain: Well, first of all, like before I even answer that question, the thing that you have to know, I think to in some ways like put the question in context is how intensely close I was with my mother. My mother was the most, she was like an incredibly, infinitely loving and present mother.

We were incredibly close. She was the most important person in my life. I mean, my father and grandfather and siblings as well and my grandmother, but my mother especially. She was just like this shining figure in my life.

When I look back to childhood, I think that I was always different from her in various ways that didn’t matter so much in a child. Like I wanted to be a writer from the time that I was four, and when I was a little kid, that was something that she very much celebrated. You know, because, you know, you’re a little kid writing little stories, so that’s really cute. None of that gave rise to conflict, right? I was pretty much an atheist from a pretty young age, I would say.

And that’s somewhat changed in recent years that we could talk about. But I had those inclinations always. But I don’t think that any of that really came to a head or caused conflict between us until I was 14 and wanting to start dating and also keeping diaries constantly that my mother later read through. But anyway, all this is to say that it was during adolescence, as I think it is probably for most people, that our conflicts first came to the surface.

David Bashevkin: Did you ever consider having an explicit conversation with her back then, just kind of surfacing the fact that you felt that you were going in a different direction, or was that a conversation that was too heavy to confront? 

Susan Cain: Yeah, it wasn’t that we didn’t talk about these things. We talked about them all the time. It was just that they were incredibly fraught and became ever more fraught as I grew older. I think because for my mother, it felt like not just a straight up different opinion or a difference in a point of view, but it felt like a psychological breakup between the two of us, which was something I didn’t want and didn’t have in mind, but I think she processed it that way.

David Bashevkin: In your story, Bittersweet, what’s so remarkable is you have a story with your mother where you hand her your diaries when she came to pick you up from college, not for her to read them, but she took possession of them to bring them home. And this story was originally in chapter four of your book, and you moved it to chapter one. And what I wanted to understand is that decision from an author of changing a chapter after publication is a very serious decision from an author. And I wanted to understand why this story is chapter one of your book Bitter Sweet.

Why is this the opening to understanding how longing and desire and hope is really what makes us whole?

Susan Cain: When I first wrote the book, it had always been chapter one, and before publication, I moved it to chapter four. And I think I did that for two reasons. One reason was that this book is not in any way a memoir. It’s an exploration of the state of bitter sweetness and of why it is that life is such a curious mixture of joy and sorrow and what that means.

I was concerned that it felt too self-indulgent or something like that to begin in a memoir that was about my story. So that was part of the reason. I think the other part was also that that story for me was the most intense foundational element really of my life. And so, you know, there’s always a curious thing as a writer, at least for some forms of writing.

I think you’re writing to express the deepest parts of being human, but there’s also an incredible feeling of exposure in doing that. So I think I kind of wanted to hide it in chapter four. And then when the paperback came out and I had a chance to turn things around, I decided, no, I’m going to put it back where it really belonged. 

David Bashevkin: The way that I as a reader approached this story was it sounded like you’re both concealing and revealing at the same time.

You really give a lot of detail to the story of you staying later in college and handing over your mother, your diaries to bring home. But then you don’t really give the reader that much detail about the aftermath of that story. You say that things changed ever since then. Why is it that this story had such an impact on you? There are a lot of, you could imagine a lot of adolescents and young women, you know, have fraught or difficult relationships with their mother.

You could imagine somebody reading a diary, which is, you know, a breach of confidentiality, but something that happens in a parent child relationship. Why do you think this story held so much weight over you for so long? 

Susan Cain: My relationship with my mother, especially when I was a child, I had perceived it and in many ways it really was as kind of perfect and unconditional love. And then lost that in adolescence and kind of lost it in a way thereafter. And also, I felt terribly guilty that my mother had lost it.

Really the hardest part in many ways about that break was that I felt I was causing my mother so much pain and I felt she couldn’t bear that pain and that I had been the one to cause it to her. And of course, you know, now I’m 57 years old and I look back and I see all the complexities of everything I’m saying and we don’t have to unpack it all psychologically, but I’m just telling you, that’s how it was for me. That’s how I had experienced it. I felt a tremendous crushing weight of responsibility and I also felt that I had lost the Garden of Eden, pure and simple.

So the rupture of that relationship, the way I see it now, but the way I experienced it then also, I might not have put it in these terms, but it was a replay of the loss of Eden. And that’s why in a way it belonged in chapter one of the book because I think what I’m really exploring in bitter sweet is the way in which all of human experience, there’s some way in which we are always glimpsing and partially experiencing Eden, kind of like right around the corner. Like it’s right over there. I can point to it.

It’s right there. And we get these momentary glimpses of it and those moments are some of the most beautiful things that happen to us. But then also the fact that we never fully realize it is one of the most sorrowful things that happen to us and we’re living with that tension all the time. And my relationship with my mother and our present day version of reconciliation felt to me like an expression of all of that.

David Bashevkin: After this story took place, did you make explicit attempts at reconciliation or did you kind of leave that divergence in the relationship, what you called a rupture? Did you leave it unspoken or did you make attempts early as you were entering adulthood to explicitly say, Mom, things have been different since that story, since you’ve read. How can we get back to that paradise, to that Eden of our relationship? So,

Susan Cain: no, we didn’t really have that kind of conversation. I didn’t think that the differences between us were fully reconcilable. And we still had a relationship.

It wasn’t like a dramatic situation of we’re never speaking to each other again or anything like that. We still celebrated holidays together, still talked on the phone, all the rest of it. I think it was partly a recognition that there is no such thing as a Garden of Eden relationship. And part of that was just needing to learn that.

And I think all children have to go through the pain of separation from their parents at adolescence. And my passage through that pain was just a particularly painful passage. So that was part of it. But the differences between us were always going to be there.

So I would describe it as more of a, I don’t know if I want to call it an uneasy peace, but something like that.

David Bashevkin: Apart that you mention is your mother’s own, you know, Jewish identity. She was the daughter of a rabbi and grew up in the home of somebody who was a prominent Jewish leader. Your grandfather, I believe, had an obituary in The New York Times.

He was a fairly prominent early American rabbi in the Orthodox community. And I could imagine how a mother who is so devout and committed to Judaism, the expectations of your own religious life are always going to be seen through the lens of your mother’s expectations. So I’m curious for you, how did you feel that this, we could call it a rupture or uneasy peace or divergence with your mother. How did that affect your own relationship with finding nourishment and spiritual value within your own Jewish identity, knowing that your mother, who’s the person who instill so much of that Jewish identity, if that relationship is uneasy.

How did that uneasiness translate into your own connection to your own Jewish identity? 

Susan Cain: I don’t know whether it did or not, honestly, because I feel like the path that I’ve taken, I think is one that I more or less would have taken regardless, which is to say, you know, I share my father’s kind of more atheist inclinations, but, you know, my father was also a person who, well as I say, he was Jewishly identified. And so am I. That’s never something that I wavered from. I’ve always thought of myself as culturally very Jewish.

But in terms of the spiritual dimension, you know, my father was somebody who was always listening to music and sharing music with me. And it was some of my earliest memories or listening, he gave me Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopin and he played the Emperor Concerto for me and we would just sit and listen to music together. And it was only later really when I was writing Bittersweet. I like I talk about this in the book.

Part of the reason I wanted to write this book was because sad music, minor key music in particular, has this profound effect on me. It’s an almost ecstatic effect. It feels like waves of love really when I hear it. And I was trying to figure out why that should be, you know, that a seemingly aversive experience like sadness would bring about such uplifting states of being.

And I came across an old Hasidic parable that talked about how there was a rabbi who had a man in his congregation who was very skeptical of the whole business. And then one day the rabbi plays for the man a song of longing or he hums it for him, something like that. And the man says, oh, now I understand what you’ve been talking about all along because now I understand that longing is God. And I read that parable and I was like, oh my gosh, I’m that man.

You know, that that’s exactly how I feel. And it’s a different language for speaking about the exact same state. And so that’s what I feel about it all. And I don’t know.

I mean, would I have had a somewhat different trajectory? Had I not had this difficult experience with my mother? Maybe, but I kind of don’t think so. I think it’s how I’m built. 

David Bashevkin: There’s something very Jewish about it. There’s a Jewish character to longing.

Yes. We long for redemption. We long to enter back into paradise. We long for some sort of redemptive experience.

Almost what the way Gershom Scholem describes it is we live a life in deferment where we are always looking towards the future. And I would love to hear in your own life, you have this childhood and you use this language, which to me is almost the inverse of longing. Longing is very future oriented, and your book begins with a quote about being homesick, which is almost a longing not for a future, but for a past. And I’m curious, are there specific moments in your life, in the calendar, in Jewish ritual that pull at your inner homesickness, that longing not for a future, but that longing for that past that you brought up with, that relationship with your mother? What are the times of the year, the points on the calendar that evoke that longing for your own past, for your own childhood? 

Susan Cain: Well, first of all, I would say to me longing is equally longing for the future and longing for the past.

Even in spiritual terms because if you think of longing as longing for the source or, you know, longing for the ultimate like uniting with the beloved of the soul, whatever words you want to use to describe it. I think that’s a longing for what we once had, and I think it’s a longing for what we hope to return to. So to me there’s no distinction between the past and the future in the way that I look at that. And during the high holiday season, I’ll sometimes listen to various recordings of Avinu Malkeinu.

I’m like, oh my gosh. But I listen to it throughout the year whenever I want to feel that way. So I don’t really reserve it for specific days. I just feel like that that’s a state that I enter regularly and it’s one of the best states.

JRR Tolkien has one of my all-time favorite quotes. He says, we all long for Eden and we are constantly glimpsing it. Our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human is still soaked with the sense of exile. 

AndI love that. I love that so much. 

David Bashevkin: Soaked with a sense of exile. Wow.

Susan Cain: Is still soaked with a sense of exile. You know, I think that’s an especially interesting quote for Jewish people and especially for Jewish kids because I know I felt this way and I see it now with younger generations that you grow up Jewish, you’re hearing so many stories of trouble, you know, trauma, disruption and you kind of feel like, oh, the adults are bathing in this. There’s too much of this and I want to be hearing more of just like the everyday happiness of what it means to be Jewish. And there’s something to that, but I also believe that there is a strength that comes from that sense of being soaked in exile.

And so Tolkin is talking about that, you know, not from a Jewish perspective, but he’s saying that’s us. That’s us humans at our gentlest and our most human is when we feel that sense of longing. And so I think that might be one of the mysterious sources of strength of Judaism that has kept us alive for all these centuries. 

David Bashevkin: You know, there are so many Torah ideas that your book called to mind for me.

One idea that really moved me. It struck me very naturally when I was reading the book, but there’s an insight that I want to share with you if you’ll allow me that the name of God, if you read the Torah disappears after Yosef, Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers. The name of God disappears. It’s not to be found anymore.

You can flip through from the moment he’s sold into slavery, it disappears. And the only time that the name of God reappears is in Yaakov, the brother’s father, when he gives a blessing to the lowest of the tribes known as the Shvatim, to Shevet Dan, the tribe of Dan, Dan. And the blessing is Lishuascha Kivisi Hashem, that you long for God. And the insight is essentially when you feel imprisoned, when you feel cut off from the rest, what is able to still allow you to conjure up that divinity, that sense of wholeness is longing itself.

Yes. That the only way that God’s name reappears after Joseph being put in prison is in that blessing of lishuascha for your redemption, kivisi Hashem, I continue to long for because it is longing that is able to manufacture, to conjure, so to speak, that redemptive connection. 

Susan Cain: Exactly. That’s exactly exactly it.

And I think that’s the mystery of why sad music produces in many people such feelings of love and ecstasy. I think that’s really what it is.

David Bashevkin: Inthe teachings of Chabad, there is an idea that longing allows you to connect to the infinity of the matter much more than the actual engagement. You know, when you speak to somebody one-on-ones, we fumble for our words, we try to say the right thing and you kind of walk away half the time it was a nice conversation, half the time it may have been disappointing.

But there’s something about longing for the relationship itself that is the language of eternity, is the language of infinity. It’s not constrained by our own capacity. It’s not constrained by the words that we’re able to find. 

Susan Cain: There’s an incredible poem by Rumi that speaks to this.

I literally have it taped up on my lamp. I’m pointing to it right now. Um, and it it’s a poem that actually kind of mirrors that Hasidic parable that we were talking about before, except in this case, it’s a man who is praying to God and then a skeptic comes along and says, why are you doing that? You never got an answer back, did you? And so the man says, huh, you know, like he’s got a point. And so he stops praying.

And then that night, he is visited in his dreams by the guide of souls, who tells him you shouldn’t have stopped praying. And he says, this longing you express is the return message, like the return message from God. This longing you express is the return message. The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup. 

David Bashevkin: Wow. That is deeply, deeply moving. I want to hear from you because longing is such an organic, it’s very hard to conjure or to ritualize.

Do you have a way to ritualize, to tap into the nourishment of longing? There is something very nourishing in your book. The very title calls to mind the Hasidic aphorism of the Kotzker. There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.

And your book is about how longing makes you whole and you literally use that word in the title. So you’re an adult woman who has built an incredible life of your own and has incredible accomplishments that for anybody who wanted to be a writer since you were four years old, it sounds like you have the life not of longing, but of realization, of success, of achievement. Where do you go when you want to experience longing? Is it possible to ritualize the notion of longing to tap into it voluntarily?

Susan Cain: Yeah, it’s funny. That’s something I think about because like I’m knocking on wood a thousand times, but I happen to be at this moment of life where, yeah, you know, I have my husband and my sons and everybody right now, thank God is healthy and I love my work.

So yes, I’m in this moment that you just described where everything feels more or less full, but I guess emphasis on the more or less because I don’t know how you can live in this world without, like what I just described is, you know, my personal household at this moment, but the world is full of tsuris. And even in my own household, there’s just an awareness that things could change at any moment, right? Guess what I’m saying is I don’t even feel the need to ritualize that state. I feel that all of life is embedded with the fact that every single thing is broken and every single thing is beautiful. So all you have to do is look around, take a walk outside and you see that at every moment.

I guess for me, if I really want to get into that state of longing, for me, the portal is music. That’s a reliable portal and I love Leonard Cohen. I dedicated the book to Leonard Cohen. I could listen to a Leonard Cohen song at any time and I will be at the height of that state.

I think it’s different for everybody. And some people will find it in services and some people will find it in walks in nature. But I think the thing is to be attuned to where your portals are for entering that state. Your personal portals and to make sure that they’re open.

David Bashevkin: The Jewish community collectively since October 7th, I think has been in a acute state of longing. 

Regardlessof where your background was, regardless of your level of observance, of commitment, regardless even of one’s relationship to the state of Israel. I think everyone was awoken collectively to our unchosen Jewish identity.

You can feel the downward pressure of our own identity. And people have been woken up to their own Jewish identity in a way that we haven’t seen in at least half a century, probably more. And that awakening can be very startling for a lot of people because it’s much easier to characterize ourselves based on our accomplishments, what we have done, what we have achieved, rather than the longing or the unchosen parts of ourselves. And I wanted to hear from you, when you think of other Jews who are confronting that aspect of their identity that has laid dormant for so long.

How does one go about reconciling their present life with a past identity that they maybe haven’t been paying all that much attention to? And now all of a sudden this part of themselves, this very essential part of themselves is now coming to the fore. What approach, what advice, what thoughts would you give collectively to this moment for the Jewish people who are being awoken to a very bittersweet longing in the aftermath of October 7th? 

Susan Cain: Yeah, I have a few thoughts coming to mind about that. I mean, the first one is right after October 7th happened, I remember thinking like, oh, did it even make sense to talk about bitter sweetness when it’s really just bitter? It felt that the grief and the fear and the sense of calamity was so enormous that it felt hard in a moment like that to see any of the sweetness of longing or the redemptive quality of it. And I wondered if it even made sense to speak of it.

I don’t feel that anymore, but I just want to acknowledge that there are moments in the course of our historical lives and in the course of our personal lives where it feels that way. And that’s real. But to answer, I think more specifically your question, in the aftermath of October 7th, I had actually thought of writing a book called The Jewish Soul because I’ve been asking that very question of like, I see in myself and in Jews of all stripes that I think each person kind of coming to terms with well, what does it mean to be Jewish? And why is that suddenly such an essential question? Why does it feel so urgent? And I think we all answer that question differently. Well, one thing I’ll say on the subject of longing we were talking about before that there is something uniquely Jewish about being in that state.

In some ways, it’s not uniquely Jewish, right? Because if you look at all religions, all cultures, they’re all imbued with a sense of longing for Eden or a metaphorical Eden. But there is something uniquely Jewish about the way that we do it. Just as there’s something uniquely Christian about the way a Christian person would experience longing and so on. You could say that about any group.

And so I think there’s an unexpected strength in the Jewish mode of longing. You can see it right there in the Israeli national anthem, which is actually something I thought about a lot as a kid. I love Hatikvah and I love it’s mournful and melancholy tones because I’m a person who loves sad music. But I thought it was kind of curious that that was chosen as a national anthem because usually national anthems are a lot more celebratory and martial.

David Bashevkin: There was a rabbi named Rav Shagar, which is actually an abbreviation of, I believe Shimon Gershon Rosenberg. And he was a major thought leader in Israel. He had like a little bit of a post-modern quality. And he has an entire essay on Hatikvah where he surfaces the question, why do we have a unique national anthem? You listen to the French national anthem, you listen to our, the United States national anthem.

It’s triumphant, it’s victorious. And Israel’s national anthem is mournful, it’s soulful, it’s longing. It is talking about a people who are constantly longing.

And until I read it from him, and I’m hearing it from you, you’re the only other person I’ve seen, and I assume you’re not coming from the writings of Rav Shagar which—

Susan Cain: No, and in fact, I would love to I have goosebumps. I would love to read this essay. 

David Bashevkin: I will send that to you. 

Absolutely. But he makes quite a bit of reminding people because he’s not the one who wrote Hatikvah, but reminding people the uniqueness of how it captures the character of the Jewish people deliberately because of that longing tone in our national anthem. 

Susan Cain: Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh, I really want to read this essay. And I think there’s such a sweetness that’s unlocked by that.

You know, that expression of Ahavat Yisrael, you kind of feel a flooding of that when you hear those kinds of tones. So I think that that’s one of our sources of strength that we shouldn’t be turning away from. I mean, it’s a history that none of us would have chosen, but it is our history and it is our present and it appears to be our future. So at least we can see the strength and the beauty that has come to us by virtue of that history.

David Bashevkin: You’ve mentioned so much about the imagery of Eden, of Paradise. And there is a Hasidic idea that I probably think about daily. In the story of Paradise, where someone named Yaakov Leiner, who was of the school of Izhbitz, and they have this remarkable idea that when Adam eats from the tree of knowledge, why did he do that? His wife Eve gives him something to eat. Why would he eat from it? He knew better than to eat from it.

And the way the Beis Yaakov explains it is that Adam saw Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and knew that she would get banished from Eden. And Adam said to himself, if my wife is not going to be here with me, then it is no longer a paradise. So he ate from the tree to join her in exile to say, I don’t want to be in paradise by myself. To be with you is paradise.

To connect to you is paradise. So he ate knowing he would be placed in exile because a paradise without his beloved is not really a paradise. And I wanted to understand from you, you have all of these incredible accomplishments, what people would call paradise. You know, any young writer’s dream is to publish a nationally beloved book, not just one, but multiple, to be on Oprah’s Book Club.

I mean, what writer doesn’t dream of that? Were you able to share these paradise experiences with your mother, your accomplishments with her? We talk about Yiddishe Nachas. Howyour accomplishments featured in that relationship? There obviously were things that changed and you weren’t living maybe the religious life that she had expected you to live. But I’m curious how that played out in the way that you shared and bonded over your accomplishments.

Susan Cain: Oh, yeah, no, she was completely proud and happy and excited and full of nachas about things like that for sure. And in fact, I mean, we haven’t talked about this, but you know, my mother has Alzheimer’s now. And the incredible thing about Alzheimer’s, that I’ve never seen people talk about, so maybe it doesn’t happen in all cases. I don’t know.

But I think it basically strips down a personality to its core elements. So even though at this point, my mother doesn’t, she can’t even fully grasp that I’m her daughter. She still knows that I’m like a special beloved person when she sees me. And her whole nature now is about expressing love and about expressing kind of fear of doing the wrong thing and fear of abandonment and those kinds of things.

Like all the psychological issues that had disrupted our love are still there, but it’s all in a very uncomplicated form. And that has been kind of the ultimate redemption and reconciliation because our relationship now can just come back to what it once was, which is just the pure expression of love, being together with none of the complications of everyday living or of I have this opinion and you have that opinion. None of that matters anymore. And so to your question about the accomplishments and the books and the nachas and that kind of thing.

Now, I don’t think she’d be able to do this, but one or two years ago even, as the Alzheimer’s was progressing, you know, I would say to her, you know, Mom, I wrote a book. And each time she was hearing it for the first time. She said, a book, you wrote a book? Who published it? She still remember would remember to ask that. And I would say Random House.

Random House, that’s it’s a big publisher. And then what she would always say is, did Grandpa know? Does Grandpa know this? Because her father, who was probably the one who made me want to become a writer in the first place. And I would say, no, you know, Grandpa didn’t know. Oh, he would have loved to know this.

So that pure relationship is still there. 

David Bashevkin: That’s incredibly special that you had that. And there is something very universal about your experience. You know, there are obviously a lot of details, but everyone has a relationship with their parent.

It’s so interesting the song that you said brings it back is Avinu Malkeinu, which is where we speak to God in the language of father and king. And that parental relationship that we’re all trying to reconcile, everyone has some disappointment or some longing or some kink in that relationship. None of us are the perfect avatar of our parents, of all of their hopes and dreams. We all come out with some, you know, cracks in the surface.

You know, like Leonard Cohen says, that’s how the light gets through. But I wanted to hear from you specifically within the Jewish community, it is too common that people spend their entire adult lives grappling with unrequited relationships with parents. What advice would you give for adults who are living lives and accomplishing, but there is still a part of their childhood that is unresolved? They still have a parent that is casting a shadow over their lives. And there is a difficulty because the parent who may have hurt them or sent the expectations for them, that parent doesn’t exist anymore.

That’s the parent of who you remember when you were a child, the same way that child doesn’t exist anymore. What advice would you give to people to live with this tension? Do you think it’s smarter to confront? Or is there a way that you have found that you can kind of live with the relationship almost without the reconciliation, but still find that beauty? What advice would you give to the Jewish community that I think almost without exception lives in some form or another with the tension of the expectations of previous generations? 

Susan Cain: Well, I mean, I don’t know if I can give all-purpose advice to every human with every type of relationship because relationships are all so different and some are truly abusive and so on. So like I’m a little bit leery about giving totally all-purpose advice. But I guess the one thing that I would say is that as you grow older, you do get the freedom or hopefully acquire the freedom to see your parent as truly just another human being, not as the parent who is the all looming figure of your childhood, but just as a human being who had trials and troubles of their own.

And I look at my mother now and I understand everything. I understand everything. Like every difficult thing between us, any trouble that she caused me, like I know where it came from and I know the pain that she was dealing with that caused her to sometimes take the wrong path in her parenting. It doesn’t make it different, but you can get to a point of just full understanding.

And you can also reach a point where your own trajectory no longer is and no longer should be defined by whatever troubles you had as a child. There comes a point where it’s your life to take into your own hands and to leave that in the past. Not to not look at it, not to not understand the way it has shaped you. You should certainly be carrying that with you, but to no longer be bound in it, to see it only as lessons, but not as a place that you still need to live or still should be living.

You know, and on a practical level, I really do recommend deep therapy for anybody who has had that type of childhood relationship because it’s very hard to get to those kinds of insights completely on your own. 

David Bashevkin: Do you have a specific memory or idea that you would attribute that gave you the capacity to be able to see your mother as fully human? I mean, it seems like such a basic realization, but it is something that even in my own life, it is not an easy step to be able to understand and fully see your parents as human beings. We deify them, we look up towards them. They serve as symbols in our lives, not just as people.

What do you attribute your own capacity or was there like an aha moment where you said, now I see my mother through a different lens. I am able to understand what she was carrying and I’m no longer looking at her in an evaluative way of, you know, judging you as a good parent, not good, but just as a person. What gave you that capacity? 

Susan Cain: I don’t know that I have an epiphany moment that I can point you towards. And I think these things probably for most people are more of a process than they are of an epiphany.

And maybe we shouldn’t have the expectation of suddenly being able to have that epiphany because like we’re stating the fact right now, right? That our parents are, they’re not the moons and suns of our lives. They’re just people who raised us. And that’s going to make sense to people listening who might be still enmeshed in these kinds of dynamics. That’s going to make sense intellectually, but there’s a difference between it making sense intellectually and actually living it.

So all I can really say is first have it make sense intellectually and then walk around your life with that knowledge and start applying that principle. And it takes time. But I guess I would just say live your life with that notion and and I really do recommend therapy for anybody who has difficult dynamics that they need to understand. You know, the psychologist Carl Jung talks about how we all get to the point in life where the question is no longer about your parents’ troubles or about the things they did to you or didn’t do for you or whatever.

It’s about who you are now and what are you going to do with that? And I suspect that that stage of life happens at around age 40, you know, the same time that you’re supposed to be able to study the Kabbalah after you’ve had two children and reached the age of 40, something like that. I think there’s something to that. I think that’s probably around the age where we get to that point or have the capacity to get to that point of seeing our parents as people who we can love and empathize with. 

David Bashevkin: It’s not easy to talk about our parents and I’m incredibly grateful for even after writing about it that you agreed to come on and speak about your relationship with your mother because there is something very universal about that reconciliation or the lack of reconciliation and finding comfort and connection even without that perfect gift wrapped dénouement where everything comes together.

But I wanted to kind of hear about the nourishing memories that you still hold from your mother. She’s at a much different stage in her life now, but I’m wondering where your mind goes back when you are looking for those longing memories, those sweet memories of your Jewish childhood. 

Susan Cain: I’m glad you asked that because I always wonder like if I’m talking about this, am I accurately conveying like exactly how loving a person my mother is? You know, she’s like such an extremely loving person who had these psychological things that, you know, gummed up the work sometimes. So when I remember childhood, like I immediately think of the Shabbos candles, which is probably a very universal kind of memory.

But what I remember is like she would light the Shabbos candles and then we would sit at the table after she and I and we would just sit and talk. Like she just loved to talk and she knew, you know, every single one of my friends and was endlessly interested in hearing about them and hearing whatever I was thinking about. And she would take me to go see my grandfather in Boro Park, which is not I suppose a specifically Jewish memory, except to me it was because his whole life was so suffused with that. So it kind of felt almost like a, you know, just the way when you go to a movie, you’re going through a portal into a different land.

And so those trips to Boro Park were like that for me. It was like going to this other very magical place that she and I would go to together and we would sit at his kitchen, it’s always the kitchen table. We would sit at his kitchen table and have Lipton tea and marble cake from the local bakery and just talk. 

David Bashevkin: There issomething very specialandprobably very universal about memories of our mothers lighting Shabbos candles.

I don’t know if your mother did that. My mother to this day, you know, sits in prayer with her eyes covered. 

Susan Cain: Oh yeah, yeah. 

David Bashevkin: And you know she’s praying for you when you watch her and there is something almost ineffable about watching your own parent pray for you.

You feel that connection, you feel the expectations, the longing. You know, longing and prayer obviously really go hand in hand in a lot of ways, but those memories of watching a parent pray for their children is something that I think it encapsulates the bitter sweet experience because you know if they’re praying, the presence is not perfect because there’s something to pray for. And at the same time, there’s something very sweet about watching a parent. It’s so instinctive, it’s so visceral the way that you watch a parent think about children.

Susan Cain: Oh, can I give you one more memory that I just thought of? So I don’t know if you’d call this an explicitly Jewish one, but you’ll see why I share it. So I went to Jewish sleep-away camp, like all the other Jewish kids. And it was my first summer at camp and the plumbing broke down. We were just living without plumbing for like a long period of time.

And I was nine years old and I remember thinking, this doesn’t seem quite right. I think this probably isn’t the right thing. But mom thinks it’s okay for me to be here and if mom thinks it’s okay, then I know I’m safe. That was what my mother was like.

I don’t know how to put it into words. You know, I just felt like she cared so much and was so much that protective shield between us kids and whatever the dangers were of the world that it gave that kind of layer of safety from which ultimately I needed to break through, I guess. But anyway, that’s what it was like. A deep feeling of security at that time.

David Bashevkin: Susan, it’s so sweet that you mentioned that my mother, who is significantly older than you, she has grandchildren of her own and like many Jewish grandmothers, they call her Safta, but they can’t always pronounce Safta. So a lot of the grandchildren began calling her instead of Safta, they call her Safety. 

Susan Cain: Oh, that’s hilarious. Wow. Wow. 

David Bashevkin: That word safe and finding safety there in our parents is something that sometimes it takes work and sometimes it comes very naturally, but the safety, that homeness that we feel for our parents is something that I think we spend the rest of our lives longing for and hoping for and reimagining that connection in our lives. So I’m just incredibly grateful for how your book, it’s deeply Jewish, it’s also for all of humanity, it’s deeply human more than anything else.

And I’m just so grateful as difficult as it is to come on and speak about that relationship with your mother and really transforming something that could be seen through some eyes as bitter to something that is quite sweet through the mechanism of longing. 

Susan Cain: Well, thank you so much. You’re an incredibly gifted interviewer and I really appreciate you having me and I appreciate the depth and the humanity of the way you ask your questions. 

David Bashevkin: I’m so grateful.

If you’ll allow me, I always end my interview with more rapid fire questions.

Susan Cain: Oh sure. 

David Bashevkin: The more emotionally fraught questions are behind us. My first question is, we love book recommendations.

Again, I recommended both of your books, but somebody who’s looking for a book that really explores this theme, bitter sweet. They’ve read your book and they’re looking for the books that helped inform your perspective. What would you recommend for someone who is looking, whether it’s reconciliation, whether it’s just, you know, sweetening their own memories. 

Susan Cain: I’m going to recommend a book called Einstein and the Rabbi.

It’s written by Rabbi Naomi Levy. The subtitle is Searching for the Soul. This is an incredible humane book. It’s full of incredible wisdom and storytelling.

And by the way, Rabbi Naomi Levy was, she actually grew up in my grandfather’s congregation

David Bashevkin: In Boro Park?

Susan Cain: In Boro Park. Yeah. 

David Bashevkin: Oh, that’s very, very sweet.

Susan Cain: Yeah, sothat’s an incredible connection, but I had never met her and or heard of her until she wrote this book.

David Bashevkin: That is beautiful and really a full circle story. My next question, you have academic degrees of your own from Princeton, from Harvard Law School. If somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to go back to school to get a PhD.

What do you think the subject and title of your dissertation would be?

Susan Cain: I don’t know about the title, but I would for sure study psychology and mythology. 

David Bashevkin: And mythology? 

Susan Cain: Yeah, Imean, one of the authors who has changed my life or shaped my life the most is Joseph Campbell, who was a guy who went and studied the mythologies of the world and kind of pulled from them everything that all humans have in common and the various stories and features of our psyches that shape our lives. And that’s at the end of the day what really drives me. I’m fascinated by that.

I feel like that holds the key to everything.

David Bashevkin: And you see it in your books, which is why as local and as personal as they are, they’re so universal because you tap into these conflicts and opportunities and ideas that I think we all share as humans. My final question, which might be my most human question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning? 

Susan Cain: Well, if I could do whatever I wanted, my schedule would probably be like go to sleep at midnight and wake up at 9:00 a.m. But I have children, so that doesn’t work out so well.

So I try to go to bed earlier and I sometimes fail. 

David Bashevkin: Susan Cain, I am so grateful for speaking with you today. 

Susan Cain: Thank you so much, David Bashevkin. This has truly been a treat for me.

David Bashevkin: Susan writes in her book, again, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Home isn’t a place. Home is where that longing is and you don’t feel good until you’re there, where longing can be the home itself. And I have to thank my friend Levi Marrow, who’s the one who shared with me that passage from Rav Shagar.

And he writes so beautifully about Rav Shagar, but Rav Shagar that I mentioned in the interview is the one who notes that Hatikvah seems to be unique among all the national anthems. He writes of course in Hebrew, but I could give you a rough translation. He writes, the excitement I feel when singing Hatikvah doesn’t come from some superficial thrill about our national anthem or about the melody. The tune is actually quite simple.

I don’t compare it to the anthems of other nations with their martialbeats like the French or the Egyptian anthems, which are full of strength and grandeur. This anthem describes the birth of a homeland from the viewpoint of exile, from the lens of longing. Hatikvah is not a national anthem that comes with a sense of arrival, but rather one that expresses yearning. And the power of that yearning is that it presents itself in a time of redemption, not exile within redemption, but redemption that is still accompanied by exile.

The unique pain and hope that is the anthem of the state of the Jews. And I think this ultimately is the hope and the conception, the unique longing of the Jewish people. It is why we are formed specifically by our descent and eventual redemption to Egypt. that the Jewish people are born through our persecution and exile in Egypt.

Because that story contains the seeds of both exile and redemption. Inside of Egypt, we are persecuted, we are enslaved by the Egyptians, but it’s that very process of confronting persecution that shapes and concretizes our immutable Jewish identity. It is the beginning and Chazal sources explain this Rav Moshe Feinstein writes this explicitly in a responsa that Jewish identity becomes immutable through the process of our redemption from Egypt, which is the first conversion, the collective conversion of the Jewish people. It is how our identity becomes immutable.

And because Jewish identity is immutable, because that persecution that we experience in Egypt was a cauldron that fashioned that immutable identity. That is what gives us the capacity to always be longing as a people. We can always long for redemption because we know that as low as we may sink, as distant as we may become from the divine idea, we always retain the capacity to return. We never lose our Jewish identity.

So we always have what to long for. We always have what to return to. We can never be completely lost. And that capacity, that foundational identity upon which all longing is born begins in the story of Egypt, in the Pesach story, in our redemption from Mitzrayim, through our slavery in Mitzrayim.

It is why the character of the Jewish people is always to long for more. It is why Rav Tzadok points out in Divrei Soferim, in I believe the 16th section, why the very founding of the Jewish people came at a point where anybody else would have lost hope. Anyone else would have fallen into despair. An elderly couple, Avraham and Sarah, to have a child, anybody else would have fully despared, would have never believed such a thing, would have totally despaired and lost all hope.

But we were born specifically under those circumstances as a reminder that our foundational character as a people is never to lose hope, to be able to use longing to actually create presence. That through our yearning, we can actually apprehend or glimpse at eternity where we are no longer constrained by our actualized capacity, but we reach beyond through our longing, through what we anticipate. It is why, and I write about this in my book Synagogue. It is why some scholars, I believe attribute the second paragraph of the prayer Aleinu, which is typically said at the end of morning services, Aleinu L’shabeiach.

That’s how the first paragraph begins. The second paragraph begins, Al kein nekaveh. Therefore we hope, therefore we long. And this is said every single day to conclude our prayers.

That second paragraph, and some scholars attribute who wrote this paragraph, they attribute it to a character that appears in the beginning of Sefer Yehoshua, the book of Joshua, in the seventh chapter, someone named Achan, just right when they’re about to enter into the land of Israel. And Achan is this character that the Talmud derives the very law that af al pi shechata Yisrael hu, which is the Talmudic phrase which means once a Jew, always a Jew. He was a big sinner. He was not a hero in the story.

And he’s the one who writes the second paragraph of Aleinu, Al kein nekaveh, which some scholars attribute to him or symbolically he is represented in this prayer, whatever that means. And they point out there’s an allusion to his name. If you take the first letters of those first three words, Al kein nekaveh, which again is Hebrew is that prayer, therefore Al kein nekaveh, we hope. If you take the first letters of those words, it spells Achan, the ayin of al, the chaf of kein, and the nun of nekaveh spells Achan.

And what I wrote is that apostasy is destructive, but it is also a reminder of our individual resilience. So long as our Jewish identity can never be eradicated, there is always cause to anticipate a future redemption. The apostate, aside from representing the worst of Jewish decisions, is also a reminder for the best of Jewish hope. If there did indeed exist a boundary from which we could never return, beyond that point any longing would be futile.

But the apostate reminds us that wherever we may find ourselves, there is also a way back. No matter how far we drift, there is always reason, however small, to anticipate a return. And I think it’s that notion of longing that is at the heart of the Jewish people. It’s that longing that I think really animates the very story of Pesach and how we retell the story of the Haggadah.

I mentioned this idea briefly in the interview, but it’s so fascinating the story that basically is the very catalyst for our descent into Egypt is the story of Yosef being sold by his brothers. And the Avodas Yisrael, Rav Yisroel of Kozhnitz, who was a great Chasidic thinker, points out, and this was cited many times by Rav Moshe Shapiro, he would quote it, I believe in the name of the Kozhnitzer, he would quote this many, many times, but it’s really remarkable because from the moment that Yosef is locked up, the Torah does not mention the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of God until the very end of the Torah when Yaakov is bringing all the brothers finally reunited together and to the lowliest of the tribes, Shevet Dan, the tribe of Dan, the Tetragrammaton finally reappears, the name of God finally reappears. And where does it reappear? In the verse Lishuascha Kivisi Hashem. For my salvation, for my redemption, I long for you.

And what I believe this idea is taking this idea of longing a step further where longing isn’t just a testament to our immutability and the immutable Jewish identity, but through longing, we are able to already apprehend redemption itself. Through longing, we are able to reveal that concealed name of God. Through longing itself allows us to grasp the divine, so to speak. And this is what we do at the Seder.

This is why we end L’shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim. We end with longing, next year in Jerusalem. There’s a fascinating article by Jonathan Sarna. He’s written about this in multiple places, but Jonathan Sarna, who recently retired from Brandeis, just a phenomenal scholar who has animated so much of my own thought and understanding of American Judaism, and he should have incredible success and continue to influence in our community.

What an incredible scholar. So he writes, he has a wonderful article called “The Transformation of Next Year in Jerusalem in the Post-war American Haggadah,” but he’s also written about it in the wonderful Haggadah that my dear friend Stu Halpern put out called The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggadah. And in there, he also writes about next year in Jerusalem. And he points out that before 1942, no American Haggadah would actually translate those words because it was seen as a potential fodder for antisemitism, that American Jewry was almost like, should we really be writing that? Isn’t that an affront to our American identity? And in all of the Haggadot until 1942, that remained untranslated.

And I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of why we even end on that note, why even if you are having a Seder in Jerusalem, you still say L’shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim, next year in Jerusalem. And I believe the reason why we end the Passover Seder on that note is because we realize that until the actualized redemption, the closest we will ever come to redemption itself, to salvation itself, short of that actualized redemption, is through longing for the redemption. Is that longing has the capacity to be redemptive in and of itself. And that longing, instead of being seen as a subversion of happiness and joy, but as I think Susan Cain’s book so beautifully articulates, that longing itself can create a relationship.

And through our longing both for our collective past, and of course, for our collective future, may we be able to taste and fully see that actualized redemption clearly present before our eyes. So thank you so much for listening and thank you again to our incredible series sponsors Danny and Sarala Turkel. We are so grateful for your friendship and support over all these years. And thank you, of course, to Moshe, so grateful for your support.

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