Rabbi Mordecai Finley has dedicated his life to teaching the mystical truths of the Kabbalah - one of the great maps to the interaction between the human psyche and the mind of God. This is one of my top ten favorite podcasts I have ever recorded, not just because of Rabbi Finley’s spiritual expertise, but also because he has lived the full and vibrant life of a man. A man who served as a marine, earned a jiujitsu black belt, and has dedicated his life to service for the good of all.

AUBREY: Rabbi Finley.
RABBI: Hey man, great to meet you.
AUBREY: It's great to meet you too.
RABBI: Yeah, I'm really excited.
AUBREY: I'm really looking forward to this. So I wanted to start this by expressing as I was earlier that I am by genetics, 87% Ashkenazi Jew and by family tradition, one side of my family was practicing and the other gave up the practice. But what I found as I went into Judaism is it was beautiful for bringing the family together. It was beautiful to have common rituals that kind of everybody got together and was doing the same thing. And there was this very warm family spirit. But as I've gone on my spiritual path, I've realized that I was missing the essence of deep spirituality and it felt like the husk that was missing the corn of God in a lot of the practices. So I just kind of left the practice entirely. And recently, partly from reading Steve Pressfield's books and being like, aha, there's something really interesting here. And then going a little bit deeper, I've started to see as with most things, there's a deep mystical pathway, a bridge to the divine if you follow it. So what I'm really excited to talk to you about is to really go deeper into that bridge that Judaism can provide and see where it ultimately leads when you have that discerning eye that has felt the heart of God and can find the way through this path.
RABBI: All right. So how many days do we have here?
AUBREY: Let’s go, however long it takes.
RABBI: All right, well the most important thing I think in studying a tradition is to be able to understand poetry, metaphors, myths, and symbols. And once you begin to understand the metaphoric, mythic, symbolic nature of consciousness, then you look at the tradition and you see the tradition is mediating between consciousness and the soul. So I'll give you a little example. So you've seen the phylacteries, the tefillin, that an orthodox puts on their arm?
AUBREY: No.
RABBI: Oh, okay. So I'll start with something less arcane. And let's just think of Shabbat. The Sabbath.
AUBREY: Yep.
RABBI: So, when you look at the Ten Commandments, by the way, in the Jewish enumeration, the first commandment is, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. That's the first commandment. So how could that be a commandment? So part of what God is saying is, I'm operating on the idea of human liberty, and you're my test case. I went into Egypt, so the world will know for all times that slavery is a moral offense against God. And people say, well, God hardened Pharaoh's heart. I said, it's not about that. It's about the God of the universe who humbled the king of Egypt and brought out slave people. And God said, I love the slave people. I don't love the pyramids. I don't love the emperors. I love these slaves. And I'm going to turn these slaves into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. So the first thing God says is, let's get something straight here. I'm the Lord you God who rescued you from Egypt. You need to know that that was I that went in there. So when I think of that, I think of the power of the idea of liberty. The power of the idea of human freedom. So over and over again, when you see through the world, what's been the most transformative power? Maybe not God, God's will, but a godly idea that people have died for, formed countries around, gone into other places and guaranteed the freedom of other people. So the first commandment, which I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of Egypt out of the house of bondage. So that's the starting place. And then God says and no other gods before me, don't play around with this. I'm claiming you. And when you talk about me, don't do it in a vain way. Do not take my name in vain. And then God says, honor the Sabbath. So God says, we have to have a regular meeting time. You're going to devote a day of the week where we're going to commune with each other. Now, the Bible basically says, don't do labor, toil. But it's not very specific on exactly what you do on the Sabbath day. That's where the rabbis of the Talmudic period filled in, but just think for a moment that I say to people, keep the Sabbath for one hour, keep it for 30 minutes, but one day a week devote yourself to whatever one understands God to be, however God speaks to you. So that you devote some of that day to that and the nice thing is we do it as a community. Because they're ruling 24 hour Sabbath observance. So no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing, I know we're somewhere across the globe at that moment. Somebody else is doing something like what I'm doing. So when you think of a Sabbath, not as, Oh my God, I can't watch, I'm a reformed rabbi. So I don't have that many restrictions. So I'm more on the positive side. So we light candles and we do a Sabbath dinner and study Torah and we just make sure that one day of the week we elevate things a little bit. So start there. What does it mean to have time devoted to God? And what does it mean to live life on an elevated level with your community?
AUBREY: It's so much about intention. I mean, there's ways to connect to God in so many different ways. It could be the Zen way of a tea ceremony where you're connecting in that present moment and seeing as you whisk that Masha connecting to the plants that actually made the leaves and the sun that shown down in the water that rain them and then how that interacts with your divine being and just being truly present in that that's an act of worship. That is a way, one pathway to do it. But it is very much about finding the intention there.
RABBI: Well, that's the exact word in Hebrew. The word is kavanah K A V A N A H. So kavanah means intentionality. So there's an argument in the Talmud, whether all commandments, the fulfilling of commandments require kavanah, like kol mitzvot tzvichot kavanah. Some say, no, you just do it and you get points for obedience. There's a whole other side that says, if you don't fill the observance with Kavanah, it's empty. It's almost an affront to the divine. So the tradition that guides me the most, the Hasidic tradition, that is really the emphasis. If you're going to do something, do it with full intentionality. So that's what I say to people. I say, it doesn't matter what level your observance is. As long as what you do, you fill it with intentionality.
AUBREY: And there's another interesting thing that's there because in some ways you can say God is everything, God is all things. There is no thing other than God, God loves all things, but that only works in one specific understanding of dimensionality. Like we have to translate that all the way down to the 3D. And in the 3D there are things that are far more in divine accord, like the principles of liberty, like the principles of freedom. And so there needs to be a translation of like, what are the principles that we can actually live by? Because it's not really helpful to say all is God and God loves everything. Well, okay, great. That's good to know. But punching somebody is not as nice as hugging them clearly, the divine is far more in the process of hugging than striking for no reason or whatever, because ultimately to do that, you're in the delusion that somebody is truly separate from you or not as real or deserving of this. So it's very difficult to be in the presence of the divine and doing one of these things like enslaving somebody, manipulating them or hurting them in some way. So there's this important translation from this kind of unicity consciousness down to, all right, what are some ways in which some guidelines that we can understand how to live our life in divine accord.
RABBI: Very well put. So you might say there are levels of consciousness and every level of consciousness is tuning into a different level of reality. One level consciousness is the conscious, that all is God and our souls are connected to the soul of the universe. That is one level of consciousness. But then the further down you go, you realize, well, there are evil people and there are destructive tendencies in every human being. So they don't deny each other. It’s where you're tuning in. So one part of my day, I might tune into the fullness of the divine presence. Another part of my day, I might be tuned into the reality of human evil. Another part of my day, I might be tuned into the destructiveness of my own nature. And they're all real. They're not, they're not mutually exclusive. So when people say, well, which level of consciousness? I said, well, which level of consciousness is required right now? So if right now what's required is helping somebody overcome their destructive inner forces, that's the reality I'm living in when I'm working with myself. It's another kind of reality I'm living in. So you have to tune your consciousness to what the present requires of you.
AUBREY: I think a lot of times this creates what seems like a paradox, but it's only a paradox because you're speaking about different levels of consciousness. And those different levels of consciousness have different understandings that actually make sense. So there can be something that's inherently paradoxical, like saying God isn't in the pyramids and God doesn't love the Pharaohs and these things. Well, okay. Yes, on this level of consciousness, absolutely true because they're out of divine accord. They are not in the essence and presence of the divine as they're doing these things. However, on another level, of course they are. So it creates this interesting paradox that actually dissolves when you start to separate them by, okay, just which level of consciousness are we talking about, which takes a little bit of precision in your understanding.
RABBI: Precisely. And so I've had friends who are more into the God is all And the interesting thing is they were very dogmatic about it, and I would say, “Hey man, let's like, let's loosen up here.” I understand that God is all, but there's also evil and pyramids are beautiful and they were built by slaves. So both are true. They're beautiful. And slaves built them. So let's figure out what we're talking about. Are we talking about the beauty of geometric forms? I'm all over that. You study Pythagoras and the beauty of sacred geometry. I can talk about that. And then we'll talk about human subjugation. It's just two different conversations and they don't exclude each other. So oftentimes when I'm talking to somebody, I say, which level of consciousness are we on? Because we don't need to argue about which level of consciousness is the right one. Cause I think they're all tapped into some level of reality. So I just want to, what are we talking about? Let's talk about that and not say, well, my level is better than your level.
AUBREY: Yeah. That you create this kind of hierarchy of, Oh, well in this level, this is better, but it's not actually helpful to create any hierarchy. Actually, the moment you're creating a hierarchy, you're actually putting yourself in a lower level of consciousness anyways. Like they're almost self defeating in that.
RABBI: At the moment, when you're struggling with yourself, that's at the top of the hierarchy, because if a person is struggling with themselves, they would say, but God made me. So obviously God wants me this way. I said at one level of consciousness, that's true, but I am not letting you off the hook because you're not going to do that fallback position when it's convenient. If you want to say God made me, then let's have that conversation. Right now, you are acting out of accord with divine nature and that's the problem we're talking about. So I think at the moment, if you're an authentic person working on an authentic problem, that's at the top of the hierarchy right now, and then you might switch. And so what you don't do is say, as you're saying, the only thing we should be talking about is all is God. I said, maybe not. Depending on what problem we're trying to solve.
AUBREY: When you go into the Kabbalah, and I'll allow you to explain it, but it seems like from what I've heard you talk about it and the little bit that I know, which I know very little about, it seems like it starts to become a translation of how to translate these ideas and philosophies and understandings into practice, in some way, a pragmatic approach, if you can actually understand what all of these different things are talking about.
RABBI: It can be. To be honest a book like the Zohar, which is the founding document of the Kabbalah, it's almost impenetrable for a non expert. It is esoteric. It is mystical. It is not practical. I mean, it is a map to the mind of God for the initiated. What happened in the 1700 is the Hasidic tradition tried to translate the mysteries of the Kabbalah into a practical spiritual psychology. So I mean, I know Kabbalah, I can teach the Zohar, but my main interest is making it applicable to the spiritual psychology of human beings. So a little bit about the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah came into being in the late 1100s, early 1200s in the South of France and in Spain. And it rests on ancient traditions that probably go back to the Greeks, to the Egyptians, to the Sumerians, which basically sees reality as having higher and lower dimensions. So if you go to Plato, for example. He has the idea of the ideal forms. So there's an ideal form of justice. A metaphysical idea that we human beings can barely articulate, but we have a sense when something's not right. Something's not fair. And someone says, well, define right, define fair. Good luck with that. I mean, it's just not fully defined, but we know what we're talking about. And then from Plato's perspective, it emanates into human consciousness. Now Plato wasn't the first person to think about this, nor his teacher Socrates. And we actually don't know who the first person is, we don't have written records that go back that far. That the divine emanates metaphysical truths into human consciousness. So that's the core idea. And you'll find that idea more or less an organizing idea of Western civilization.
AUBREY: And another problem is eventually you end up with words, which is an emblemization, a condensation of an idea that can never carry the truth of the idea. And then the words become the codex by which we actually form thoughts. So it's almost impossible, but the point that you're using a word, you're really in a challenging spot. Because you almost have to transcend the words to even get anywhere close to what the actual idea is.
RABBI: There's a Hasidic practice called Hidbonenut, which means the Hebrew word lahavin means to understand and lihidbonen means to take understanding and apply it within. And there's a practice called meditation on holy words. And the idea that every word, it's like an opening to a cave, and inside the cave there are worlds and souls and angels. And you enter from the surface to the word into this inexhaustible, stunning majesty of the interior of consciousness, and it doesn't end. But then you come out and you're at the surface of the word. So exactly as you're saying, words mediate between consciousness and the soul. So therefore, one of the worst things we can do is like the literalization of words. Words stand for, have metaphysical dimensions, have soul dimensions. So this is a Hasidic practice that I stumbled into on my own and then I actually found out it's been a Hasidic practice for a couple of hundred years. This is one of the things that got me really interested in Hasidism. So exactly as you're saying, this goes back to our earlier thought that when you look at traditions and so forth, you have to see the inner covenant, the inner intention. Well, it's the same thing with language and words. So the Kabbalah is very aware of that. So the Kabbalah has a system of these 10 emanations and so people want to know what the labels are. And I say, they're just labels. The meaning of it is not in the label. The meaning of it is when you sink yourself deeply into it and you immerse yourself in it and then you find the interconnections between the 10, you have to go in with a certain kind of consciousness. Then you come out. And then, again, whatever your tradition is, reform, orthodox, conservative, secular, whatever it is. But bring some of that insight into whatever you're doing.
AUBREY: Let's talk about these emanations and let's see if we can dive a little deeper. Explore some of these caves.
RABBI: Okay. All right. Well the top three, I'll just give you the normative order even though different systems name them differently because remember they came into being organically in the south of France north of Spain. They weren't issued as dogma. People figured them out. So there's what I would call the majority opinion on the labels. And I differ with other Rabbis. So I'm in one school about how to label them. So I just want to make you aware and make your audience aware. The differences are not huge, but they're there. So the first three are the most mystical. Okay. So the first one is the label is crown Keter crown, but the nickname of it is in soak, which is the infinite. Another name of it is Makhshava, which is the divine mind. So that really is the center of mystical experience. I only teach that to people at a more advanced level. The next one is called Chokhmah, which means wisdom, but as a concept it means the generative point like in a geometry analogy, how a point has no substance until it becomes a line? So the point out of which everything flows, so you go from the infinite to the singular point of the origin of consciousness. That's number two. Number three is called Bina, literally meaning understanding, but in Kabbalah, they call it the Khori which means once the point generates reality. So those top three, Keter, Chokhmah, Bina crown wisdom discernment, what they really mean is infinity, generative point, construction of reality. So you have to understand, not the label, but when you look at Kabbalah, how the Kabbalah understands what's behind the label. So the top three are really at the mystical level. The bottom seven are the more spiritual, psychological. That's what I spend most of my time teaching, is the lower seven Sefirot, because they directly apply to human spiritual psychology.
AUBREY: Well, let's play around with these first three. And in the first place, so it seems like there's a corollary between what Many people would call the crown chakra, which is your connection to the divine and also potentially what comes to mind to me is, Atman and Brahman, the idea that there's the universal God, and then there's the Godhead within the Atman, which is still the Brahman, Atman is Brahman, like this idea that this is our access point to the infinite, but it's still infinite. We're not a drop in the ocean where the ocean is a drop. This kind of idea from Rumi that we have is this access which is very difficult to understand because it's fractal.
RABBI: It’s beyond understanding. That's why when people ask me, what do I mean by the aim? And then an unbearably luminous obsidian density, infinite in expansion. And they say, I don't understand what you just said. I say, it's not supposed to be understandable. It's the deepest darkness.
AUBREY: You asked for words.
RABBI: You asked for words. I gave you some words.
AUBREY: Do you like them? Here you go. You want to make your own? Go for it.
RABBI: There you go. People say, well, it makes my brain hurt. I said, exactly. So anything to break the confines of language. Then you're projected into mystical consciousness, and then when you come back, it's as if your consciousness says, what just happened? So all you have are metaphors. All you have are oxymorons. So that's why mystics use metaphors and oxymorons to break the confines of consciousness. So that's when I say the ain't so, people say, oh, infinite. I said, don't think of infinite extension. Everybody thinks like, when they say infinite, they think ongoing. I say, think of infinite density. Think of infinite brilliance, think of infinite darkness, think of infinite everything. And then go there. And then when you come back, tell me what it was like using the best metaphors you can come up with. So that's in a way, when I try to teach the Ain Soph, you’re a natural. I mean, I'm really impressed. I just arrived in this room and I'm sitting here with a mystic. So it's–
AUBREY: I've had a lot of help.
RABBI: Yeah. Well, that's good because it's authentic. I mean, I can tell you've mastered the consciousness and mastered the terminology. But see, I deal with beginners, I used to teach at a rabbinical school and people become rabbis for all kinds of reasons. So they'd come to my mysticism class, my Kabbalah class and some said, I have no idea what you're talking about. So I gotta slow it down, and kind of appeal. Have you ever had that moment when you pull up in the driveway and just before you get out of your car and it's night and the stars. And you're there and the home and the family and your life and your past, your present, your future. And yet this moment where reality shudders through you and you say, what just happened? What just happened? And then I say, so capture that moment. Live inside that moment. Everybody has one of those, but they don't know how to name it. So they just forget about it. So teaching this to a beginner is not easy. And that's why I more or less reserve the upper three Sefirot for people who have some background in how to manage mystical consciousness.
AUBREY: Well, my path has taken me through the plant medicine path and working with some of the great masters who've carried this tradition lineages from ancient Chavin to the jungles of Peru to different places. And what's happened is, there's the language and the concept, and then there's the somatic experience of the thing when the full evaporation happens. And all of a sudden you've been using the word God for your whole life. And then you feel God. And then you say, Oh, God, and then you understand it. It becomes a gnosis rather than a knowing with the K and then you've really felt what it's like, and that's been exceptionally helpful. And what it's allowed is for the exploration of these different maps and for me to be able to apply meaning like, Oh, I know that, I've felt that thing. And I've been there and I understand what that is from a sensation in myself, a knowing that comes from within. That's been really helpful.
RABBI: That’s beautifully put. So that's how I described the Kabbalah. I said, it's a map that maps out human consciousness and the divine and the experience of the divine. And the worth of a map is how well it helps you negotiate the terrain. So the Kabbalah is not better or worse than any other map. The question is pragmatically, does it lead you where you want to go? So for me, it's an extremely good map. I've studied a lot of traditions. I mean, I have a doctorate in religion, social ethics. I mean, it was more on moral philosophy on one hand and symbolic nature of consciousness on the other. But I've studied other religions. And what I realized, every religion has a map. And so, I'm born into the Jewish tradition and I wanted to know my tradition. I'll tell you how I came to know Kabbalah. Okay, so I'm an undergraduate in religion. I'm an older undergraduate, so I spent three years in the military and a year on the kibbutz. So the professor, who's an expert in Eastern mysticism, says to me, look, I have to give a lecture on the Kabbalah, and I really don't get it. So I'll give you an A in the course. If you read this book on the Kabbalah and you give the lecture. So I read this book called Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and I'm reading through one chapter after the other after I get to the Kabbalah, I'm transfixed. Then I get to the chapter on the Lurianic Kabbalah, I'm in. Then I get to the chapter on Hasidism, I'm done. And I had a conversion experience preparing for that class and I said, wow, I think I'm a Hasidic Lurianic Kabbalist and I never went back. I mean, I'm reading an academic book, getting ready to give a lecture and it just unfolded, it didn't fold. The words connect me to the vine in the most unimaginable way. So, why do I believe in Hasidic Lurianic Kabbalah? Because it worked, because it got me there.
AUBREY: It's almost like there's this Eminent like this vibration that comes through and it found resonance where all of the molecules. Even though your mind doesn't have molecules, the molecules of your mind and soul started vibrating and made a clear tone. Like a clear note.
RABBI: Yeah, that's well put. So however consciousness comes from the brain to the mind. I shuddered–
AUBREY: Yeah.
RABBI: When I read the book. And so when I assigned the book, I didn't even assign it anymore because most students find it too dense. I found it gripping. It was like reading a thriller. So yeah, I shuddered. I absolutely shuddered with the book in my hand. And when truth comes off the page and grabs you by the lapels and looks you in the eye. So it's like, Oh, okay. So that was my first deep experience of the Kabbalah was reading major trends in Jewish mysticism by Gershom Shalom, who published it in 1941. Somebody said to Gershom Shalom, do you believe in this stuff? He goes, no, I'm not, I don't believe in it. I'm just a scholar.
AUBREY: But he was tapped in.
RABBI: He was tapped in far more than he would admit.
AUBREY: Yeah. Going to the second emanation. What comes to mind for me is that, in that moment of separation, we become a perspective in the mind of God. Like we're just a locus of perspective and we fill in the perspective with all kinds of things. But it's like the declaration point of perspective is like it was–
RABBI: Well, the perspective would more be the third one where reality is constructed. So the second Chokmah is the moment. When you identify with a generative point, there's no extension yet. There's no human thought yet. It's just the moment when you realize you're a generative point between the infinite and the human. And so Chokmah, it translates as wisdom, but it's a label for something that we wouldn't call wisdom. It's a mystical center point of mystical consciousness. Now wisdom is found in the lower seven Sefirot, meaning wisdom as far as how to think well and solve problems and understand the human condition. So Chokmah is very confusing to people because you slip right through it.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's very difficult. I guess in my own practices, really, it seems to me that there was a decision point where God was the void and God said yes, it doesn't say anything, but there was like, just like a, yes. And in this, yes, it became the active principle. It went from the Yin principle to the Yang principle. And the yes was the source point of emanation, which became articulation.
RABBI: So you’re going to love this tradition. So it says in the 10 commandments for the people to say to Moses. Don't let God talk to us anymore. We're going to die. You get it and bring it to us. So the Talmud says, well, how much did God say to the people before they said, stop? So some people say God only spoke the first commandment. They said, stop. So of course the next one says, God only said the first word, which is Anokhi, and then one said, God only said the first letter, which is the silent Aleph. So all God said was–
AUBREY: Yep. And when God says that.
RABBI: Yeah. When God says silence, the olive, which is unpronounceable, then the extension of the S yeah, right. Would be Bina.
AUBREY: Already moving in.
RABBI: It's already moving into this construction of reality. So that's why the Keter, Ein Sof, is the beyond infinite, and then Chokmah is the point that mediates between infinite consciousness and human consciousness.
AUBREY: Yeah. And then the third emanation, you arrive at perspective.
RABBI: Yeah, you arrive at the construction of consciousness, and it comes down to language. I mean, when the Hasidic masters get to Binah. They say when you study the interior of holy words, that's where you're heading. You're heading into the interior of language. You're with language, but you're in the interior of language. So many Hasidic practices take you into Binah. interior language, which then kicks you into Chokmah, the generative point of consciousness, which then takes you into Ein So, the infinite of the divine mind. So programmatically, it's from the infinite to the generative point to the quarry of language, but experientially it goes a little bit the other way. You go into the quarry of the language of Binah into the generative point of Chokmah and then ascend into the Insul.
AUBREY: Right. So it's almost like retracing the steps back up the mountain from what came down the mountain.
RABBI: It's a Hasidic practice, I will teach it to advanced students and I just actually did a whole, from October till March, I taught the classic Hasidic text on this practice. We got six pages into 138 pages.
AUBREY: Yeah. I bet.
RABBI: It was deep, man.
AUBREY: And I'm sure even for you, you go in every time you go in, there's always another level. My spiritual mentor, one of them Don Howard Lawler, who spent 50 years bringing the Chavin practice of serving Chuma, which is a plant medicine, that's a very hard opening. And several thousand years old practice and he spent his time and that was always the thing he said. It's like, no matter how far you've gone, there's always another layer. There's always a place where you can go even, even deeper. It's infinite.
RABBI: Absolutely. So when I was teaching this text, I had extraordinary experiences. First it's during COVID. So it's on zoom, but then actually our faces are closer to each other than in a classroom. And then we'd read a line, the Hebrew, and I had an English translation, and they'd say, explain it again. And I'd have to go into the deepest parts of myself to try to convey it. And I mean, it works. When you go into the depth of a mystical text where the author's been there. And then they're trying to lead you into the quarry, into the generative point, into the infinite mind of God. Well, I can't teach it if I'm not doing it, like, almost like real time. I can't teach it academically. I have to teach it in reality. So it became, sometimes it was unbearable to teach the class. It was like, you know what I'm talking about?
AUBREY: Yeah, for sure.
RABBI: So yeah, that's the realist. I mean, again, in the map of the Kabbalah, the upper three Sefirot, Binah, I'm going backwards now, Binah, Chokmah and Sov, that's where mystical consciousness is.
AUBREY: Beautiful. All right. Well, let's break it down to some more of the pragmatic wisdom that's carried in.
RABBI: So the first two of the lower seven are called Chesed, which means loving kindness. And then its mate is Gevurah, they're right across from each other. If you look up Sefirot, in a search engine and you put images, you'll find the classic 10 emanation diagram of the Kabbalah. So you see the upper three, then right under them, you'll see Chesed, which means loving kindness and Gevurah, which literally means strength. However, as concepts, you might say loving kindness begins in as it were, force, how you relate to the world. So the way that I teach chesed is that there are lower levels of chesed and higher levels of chesed. So a lower level of chesed would be, for example, love as manipulation. Love as trying to extract reciprocity, love as pure formalism. And then when you go, what I call, it's a vertical metaphor. You can say either the deeper, the higher, then you go into love as absorbing the presence of another human being. Love as service, Martin Buber would call it the I thou moment, the Ishtun du, the deep moment. So, when I teach chesed, we have to go on either, again, either layers of depth or a vertical metaphor
AUBREY: The language becomes difficult at that point because there is an argument to be made that at the point that you're doing something for manipulation, doing something for validation, doing something for the ends not the means of loving is it actually love or kindness at that point or is it–
RABBI: That’s the problem because people will say sometimes when I'm like a real beginner what I realized is person A's version of love is now that I love you, here's what you must do. And that becomes clear super quick. And then I say, well, think about love as service, not what they're supposed to do for you. People say, shouldn't my wife do this? Shouldn't my husband do that? I said, I don't know. Let's not talk about them, let's talk about you. What should you be doing? And this idea of, it's not about demands, it's not about entitlements, it's a whole other thing going on. So they come in, they say, I love my family, why don't they do this for me? And so there's a restructuring of consciousness. So I'm thinking, chesed. I got to move them from the lower to the higher or from the surface to the depth, however, whatever metaphor you want to use.
AUBREY: I guess it's valuable in that way to keep it under the same label because that's the label that people are using anyways. So they saying like, I love you, but there's levels to that and there's levels to the meaning of that and by allowing it to remain and saying that's not really love–
RABBI: Or it's not the higher level.
AUBREY: Yeah. So it allows them to kind of explore that with and really understand and redefine the same thing for themselves.
RABBI: That's exactly right. And that's the benefit of using these emanations that we can stay in the language game of chesed. And so when they say, I love this, I love that. We'll stay right in there. And then my job is to bring myself, first of all, I mean, all this begins in self psychology. And if I do that well, then I can bring it to somebody else and what it means to take it to a deeper level or a higher level. But then it's sister, it's right across, it's called Gevurah, which literally means strength, but conceptually at a higher level means rationality, good judgment, good boundary setting. And at the lower level it's rigidness, hatred, prejudice. But if you look at, they all use the word judgment. There's good judgment and there's judgmentalism. There's good boundary setting and then there's rigidity. So again, we stay in the conceptual world of Gevurah so that we can discuss all the levels of it. So yeah, you got it exactly right. The efficiency of the Sefirot is you get to stay within one conceptual framework as you move through them.
AUBREY: When describing it, using the label strength, when really it seems like it's more like judgment, but it's just the translation, but–
RABBI: Yeah. So in some systems it's called Dean, which is an Eric word that actually means judgment. But almost universally, if you looked it up, you would see Gevurah, which means strength. But remember, it's just a label. When people say, well, why is it called strength? I said, it's just a label. Why is a chaise lounge called a chaise lounge? I don't know. Like, I know what I do with it.
AUBREY: A credenza? I don't know. I just don't know what a credenza is.
RABBI: I don't know what a credenza is, but I think if someone says that's my credenza, I'm not going to say what? Right? So it's just a label. I don't get hung up on the label. Like, let's go into the interior. So how do you study the interior? Well, you study text, you study the Zohar, you study the Hasidic literature, and you see how it's used. I mean, the great Austrian British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I mean, he said consciousness works with concepts. Consciousness works with our building reality with language and we don't, we shouldn't just look at language as if it names something, but it helps us organize consciousness. So I remind people, don't get hung up on the label. So the interior of Gevurah is judgment going from good judgment, rationality, good boundary setting. And by the way, for many really loving people, their worst quality is bad judgment. Isn't that crazy? Like there are such loving people. And they almost always get things wrong.
AUBREY: I mean, there's that classic saying, the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions.
RABBI: Exactly.
AUBREY: Which is just bad judgment. They're just saying, I really want to help, but I'm actually not helping at all.
RABBI: Exactly. They don't know that they're enabling. Okay, so it's fascinating. For some people, they gotta get from lower chesed to higher chesed. Other people, it's not that they're hateful and prejudiced. For example, sometimes when I think of Gevuruddin, strength, judgment, I'll call it judgment for now, there's two sides to lower judgment. One is bad judgment, and one is judgmentalism. And judgmentalism is the source of evil. And you think about it. Judgmentalism is, I'm judging you to be wrong. I'm judging you to be bad. I'm judging you to be subhuman. I'm judging you to be not worthy of human life. So–
AUBREY: Which then becomes the justification for all sorts of heinous acts. And it's very rare that a human can escape some kind of justification. I mean, we think of the worst of us that have ever, and I say us, capital U, the worst of all humans of all time. Even Hitler had his rationality.
RABBI: That's exactly right.
AUBREY: He was the worst of us.
RABBI: That is exactly right. So how do you know when a person is hiding where they don't let other people talk? Because what's the first thing Hitler did? He shut down the free press. Took over the school system. So they say, well, how do I know when I'm thinking, well, when I'm not thinking. Well, I said, do you invite dissent? Do you invite an interlocutor and say, please challenge me, make me honest. So this very Talmudic idea is open discourse. Like I'm going to make a point, you respond and the truth will come out of honest, respectful dialogue. So the truth is discovered between people. It's not a stable thing. So when people say, how do I know? I said, well, there's a wisdom tradition of people who have struggled with these issues and they finally come out with a statement. For example, like the book of Proverbs in the Bible. So some of the book Proverbs I like and some I don't like. But then I come across one that really sinks in. And I said, well, it's naming something true. Then I run it by somebody. I said, "What do you think about this? And then we talk about it because maybe I'm not understanding it.” Maybe it sounds like the good word and it's not the good word. So at the higher levels of really getting into rationality, rationality always means testing your ideas with reality and with other people. And the first clue that someone is not acting in higher Gevurah, is they don’t let other people talk.
AUBREY: This is one of the challenges that I see with the world right now is that there's so much censorship happening and so much shutting down of ideas and someone expresses someone. And if that idea is unpopular, people don't say, well, let me understand what you mean by this or saying, you cancel, cancel, block, censor. It's like, whoa, whoa, let's all hear each other out, let's open this conversation and say, these words are clumsy little things, let's see what the intention was and let's try to understand.
RABBI: I completely agree with you and so sometimes when I say let's not cancel the person. They said, "Do you agree with them?” I said, “no, I don't agree with them, but I like to hear them make their point.” So I can maybe debate them and there's something in there they're trying to get out oftentimes.
AUBREY: Sure.
RABBI: There's something in there–
AUBREY: And they may not even be aware of it. And by opening the dialogue and hearing them and listening and say, I hear you.
And here's my thoughts. You have the opportunity to change them.
RABBI: One of my favorite examples of this is when I would say this to people, How can you even talk to these people? I said there's like a black guy in Georgia or somewhere and he would meet Klansmen and he would say meet with me.
And he would dialogue with them and eventually they give him their hood. They're clan hoods. Okay?
AUBREY: Powerful.
RABBI: Right? So somebody said, “how can you talk with them?” He says, “how many hoods do you have in your closet?” So it turns out–
AUBREY: That's the gangsterous thing to say.
RABBI: Isn't it?
AUBREY: That's the gangsterous thing to say.
RABBI: So he has a closet filled with clan hoods, because once they come around, he says, give me your hood. And she said, how many hoods do you have in your closet? Isn't that great?
AUBREY: Yeah.
RABBI: So I read that and I thought, man, that nailed it. So when people say to me, how can you talk to these people? I said, somebody has to talk to them.
AUBREY: Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's such a powerful thing. And in the occasions where someone said something incredibly hateful to me online and every once in a while I'll sense something and I'll just have a feeling like a lot of times I don't engage, but every once in a while I'll just dive in and I'll engage with it. There's been really powerful moments where I got the metaphorical hood of that hatred. And it was really like, Hey man, and eventually it'll be like, Hey man, I'm sorry about that. I just really had a hard time and I was projecting a lot of this stuff and it's really potent when that happens, and it's very rewarding. And sometimes it doesn't go anywhere that way. They're very entrenched in their ideas and that's okay too, but maybe that effort of showing them kindness in that way, which is part of the other emanation, just, okay, I'm going to give you some loving kindness here and see if that changes. It's your choice. You can hold onto these hateful ideas if you like, or you could revise them.
RABBI: Well, you've intuitively grasped why Chesed and Gevurah are connected.
AUBREY: Yeah.
RABBI: Because sometimes the way to lead a person to higher rationality and judgment. It's through chesed, it's through loving kindness. And sometimes you bring a person to higher levels of love, it's through rationality. Like an enabler, but I'm doing it from love. I said, let's talk rationally about what the consequences of the way you show your love are. So have a rational discussion about what you're doing and what happened next. And then the person says, I'm not helping. Am I right? There's a better way to love. And one way to love is not being an enabler. So it's interesting that Chesed and Gevurah, loving kindness and good judgment, are actually in a constant dance with each other. Yeah. And so I always teach them as a pair.
AUBREY: It's also interesting to think that, a lot of these concepts, I think we can sometimes feel like, oh man, humans just figured this out. Like we just figured this thing out, and no, this was written in the 1100s, 1200s and they put them next to each other for a reason, there was deep wisdom that was carried in a lot of these maps that when you actually start to think, Oh yeah, all of these new books that are coming out and these new ideas, they're not new ideas, they've been talked about for many years, sometimes thousands of years.
RABBI: Exactly. So the Kabbalah is rooted in a Jewish form of Neo Platonism and Gnosticism. I mean, the most efficient definition of Kabbalah is the intersection between Jewish Neo Platonism and Jewish Gnosticism. So if you know those words, then you really get what the Kabbalah is trying to do. It's trying to deal with the emanatory nature of consciousness and the fact of evil at the same time. And Platonism and Gnosticism don't go well together, because one believes evil is the absence of the good. And the other one believes evil is real. And so the Kabbalah says, well, they're both true. So let's work with that. So that goes all the way back into the ancient world of Platonism and Gnosticism. That we're part of our heritage from the Greeks and also in the Bible. I mean, they're operating in two different places, in the Mediterranean and coming to very similar graphs of reality. I have a feeling that what we call the Middle Eastern civilization and the Mediterranean civilization, they were in touch with each other in ways that we just don't know because we don't have written records. But then you go back, for example, the book of Proverbs. Sometimes I'll see a new book and I just say well, that's actually an entire commentary on one line of Proverbs. There's, again, I don't like every proverb but the ones I do like, I mean, one of my favorite ones is Proverbs chapter 20 verse 27 where it says the light of God is the human soul and seeking out the inner chambers of the human heart. Proverbs 20-27.
AUBREY: I think I need a minute.
RABBI: Yeah. Right?
AUBREY: After hearing that, say that one more time.
RABBI: Ner Adonai Nishmat Adam. The light of God is the human soul. Chofesh kol chadre vaten. Seeking out. Cheder means a chamber or a room. Vaten means belly, but it also means the inner life. The light of God is the human soul. Seeking out the hidden chambers of the human being or the human heart or something. So that's one of my meditations.
AUBREY: You can feel that, I could feel that one working. I won't say the second person. I can feel that one working when I hear it. It's like. Oh, wow.
RABBI: Okay. So that's what I chant, when my interior chant, for example, when my wife and daughters light Shabbat candles, I'm saying the light of God is the human soul. So I'm adding intentionality to the lighting of Shabbat candles. And so I take that as a moment, my kids are grown up now, but still, I have four children. I think of every one of them, I think of their interior nature and I think of the light of God. And my wife's a cross for me and I think, wow, she bears the light of God. We're like sojourners on this path together. So it's not just my wife, it's another light of God in my life. So just saying the light of God is the human soul when you light Sabbath candles. It changes the ritual from, okay, I'm observing the Sabbath, to it just orients consciousness. And I try to have that last for the whole 24 hours of Shabbat. And so that is actually my motif for Shabbat. 24 hours of Shabbat, the light of God is the human soul. So it's always the light on, in the back of consciousness as I hope I can live that. But one of my favorite Hasidic teachers says that one seventh of every week should be Shabbat and one seventh of every day should be Shabbat. One seventh of every hour should be Shabbat and one seventh of every second should be Shabbat. Isn't that?
AUBREY: Yeah.
RABBI: Isn't that great? Yeah.
AUBREY: That's great. Cause then it's always there. The light is always on.
RABBI: Yeah. One seventh of every second.
AUBREY: The light is always on. So this is speaking to what I was talking about earlier, the way that my family practiced, it was absent of this and perhaps I couldn't quite grasp it the way I'm grasping it now. Because when the student is ready, the teaching appears, there's these sayings that this happened. But ultimately if there was someone who could really embody it as you do and express it, I would have felt something. And then the candles that were lit would have meant something different. And these things could have been an invitation. And maybe I don't take the invitation. Maybe I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I want to go see my friends and I don't take the invitation, but at least the invitation would have been there. And the invitation is to a party that's deep.
RABBI: That's really great. One thing we said to our kids, they were growing up, you can go out on Friday night. You go to a football game, go to a party, but we're lighting Shabbat candles. I say, now we light Shabbat candles, go your way. And so that anchored them through life. Both our daughters served in the Israeli army. So one thing we gave them was a portable little candlestick, but they're really just like little plates that fold together. And we said, wherever you are on a Friday, pull out a couple of what they call tea–
AUBREY: Tealight candles,
RABBI: Tealight candles. And just always remember you have a soul. So that has anchored our marriage, our raising of our children. I mean, if there's one metaphor that we've taken throughout our lives is that the light of God is the human soul. So when you're a parent, there's a light of God in your home. So I don't fault your family because this wisdom was almost unavailable in American Judaism. It was all about ethics and keep the tradition and don't marry outside the faith. And there's all this soup, I'm not saying those things aren't important, but there's something so much more deep and it wasn't taught. So I had to discover it myself. I mean, I'm fond of the rabbis that were the rabbis at my synagogue when I grew up. And by the way, when I do kids' bar and bat mitzvahs in the Hebrew school, I can't get through to them. But I just want them to know that the rabbi meant it. I had a rabbi who meant it. I had a rabbi that my parents thought was a real thing. A man of spirit. And sometimes I have a kid come back to me 10-15, my first pulpit was in 1982 in Irvine, a monthly pulpit. Okay. So my first bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, that I officiated out was 40 years ago. So this kid is now 54 , and I've had people reach out to me in their forties and fifties and say. Rabbi Finley, can I talk to you? I had a moment and you were my Bar Mitzvah Rabbi, and now I get you.
AUBREY: Yeah, they're finally ready.
RABBI: They realized, wow, I kind of remember you. And so I see myself as planting seeds. Either I will water that seed into a plan or somebody else will but when you look at yourself back at that age, I don't know if anybody could have said anything to you, but look what you've become. I mean, you took a path into the depths of human consciousness as an act of will. No one made you do this. You chose this life. It's really admirable.
AUBREY: Yeah. I mean, once you get started, I think that's the key thing. Like you feel something. And my pathway was through a vision quest. And I was a traditional shaman who took me on a vision quest and then that vision quest ingested Psilocybin mushrooms on this vision quest out with the coyotes howling and the rain swirling. And it was this wild night. And I was absolutely, completely, agnostic leaning towards I don't really believe anything. I wouldn't say atheists cause that's a faith in and of itself, but staunchly agnostic and leaning towards atheists. And then I felt my body evaporate and I felt what I could only describe as my soul. That was the only word that was available to me. And I was like, Oh dear.
RABBI: How old were you when this happened?
AUBREY: I was 18. I was like, Oh dear, this changes everything. Now, I have to rethink my whole mental construct. And I was just like, I had to give it to the fire to be renewed. And I've once since that moment, I could never look away.
RABBI: See, I had a spiritual teacher in high school, who inducted me into a fellowship of conscious, it's called the Gurdjieff School of Thought. But he used it, he peeled away levels of consciousness in discussion. So I had a similar experience, under the able, almost surgical hand of an experienced spiritual teacher, it was not in the curriculum. He was not supposed to be doing this with his students, right? But anyway, his method was, I was in his science class and he would give the talk and then he'd say something kind of strange and look right at me. I remember one time when we were talking about spontaneous generation, people didn't know where germs and bacteria came from, so they just thought, well, they just happen. So he says, so the idea behind spontaneous generation is there are realities that we cannot see. And then he'd go on with the talk and he kept doing this. So I came after school one day, I just like–
AUBREY: He’s looking behind, like, what is going on here?
RABBI: So I came after school one day, I said, “I have this feeling, sometimes you're talking to me.” He says, “I was waiting for you to notice.” He says, “yeah, I think you can get this. Do you want to meet with me?” So I was in 11th grade, we scheduled every Wednesday afternoon in S 109, science building 109. And I met with him mostly every week for almost two years and he was my spiritual mentor and I had a similar experience to you, except drugs never had that kind of effect. In fact, he said I had to stop. You got to stop with the pot and all that. It's just getting in your way. And so he actually made me unusually sober when I was in 12th grade. He said, “okay, that's it.” That's like, no, no more of that. Cause your mind is, I want you to be a hundred percent present.
AUBREY: Yeah. It's very interesting. Intentionality has so much to it because he brought the intention of the divine through this and through using language and through his presence, his presence was kind of this light that allowed you to see things. And it was the same with all of my teachers, right? It was never like I just took something in my house and had a–
RABBI: Oh, very good. So yes, I never had a mentorship.
AUBREY: And with me, it was always very much that it was someone with a deep lineage that went a long time back to a tradition that had been alive and they carried this kind of the same thing though. They carried the presence, offered the presence and the intentionality through the medicine and then were there with the medicine and with me and with to bring that. And that's always where the most powerful experiences have come from because it's just like this becomes just another avenue and another–
RABBI: That's a very well put. I mean, I really never thought about that in the ‘70s, like the revolution was over and we just got the drugs. But there was no wisdom with the drugs. It was just a bunch of teenagers getting high. And then I had to stop. But my teacher in high school, Jack Bishop, one thing I did to clean myself up was go in the Marines. And then I found a spiritual teacher in the Marine Corps. It was like, out of nowhere, just all of a sudden I had a spiritual teacher.
AUBREY: And you'll have to tell this story. I heard a little bit on your amazing podcast with Rich Roll, but it's worth telling because it's so crazy to think that first of all, you found one in science class. And then second of all, you found another spiritual teacher in the Marine Corps. And it's very interesting.
RABBI: When he revealed himself to me, I thought, wow, they're hunting me. I can't get away.
AUBREY: I'm being stalked.
RABBI: I can't get away from these people. So this was a Sergeant, Robert Throneberry, a Vietnam vet, tough, he was an intelligence guy. He interrogated the Viet Cong kind of guy. I mean he did crazy stuff all the time. I think one story I told about the ghost platoon, is that the one you remember? Yeah. So the ghost platoon was I should say that in any platoon back in those days, we had about 80 guys, 20% were called Percy's, which is guys who joined the Marines on a spiritual search. And there's a lot of them, more than you could possibly imagine. And then the others are called the Johnny's, which is the guys who I don't want to work at the warehouse anymore. And the judge said it's either jail or the Marines. So they're the Percy's and the Johnny's now we're all good Marines. A Percy was just as tough as a Johnny, but the Percy's were on a spiritual search. So he noticed me. Anyway, so just to get to that story. So we're outside the chow hall and we're all at attention. They're backed up. So we're just standing he says, “oh you think just because there's a back of the chow hall you get to stand here and do nothing.” He says, “we're gonna do the rifle the order,” called the order of arms, when your rifle throwing situation the next, he said I drilled in a platoon to death and their ghosts are right here and there's ghost rifles on the deck. So everybody pick up your rifle. So we all pick up our ghost rifles. So then he kind of looks at me and says “does everybody have the right rifle?” As I got the cue, I said, “sir, this private does not have the correct rifle, sir.” So he says, “who in the hell has private Finley's rifle.” So one of the other person, he's like, got it. Oh, game time. He says, “sure. This private has Private Finley's rifle.” “Why don't you just give that rifle to private Finley?” And so the other guys were like, “what's happening here? What is going on?” So one of the most remarkable things he did was when we were in the infantry school. So this is right after Vietnam. So we were like staging ambushes and the thing with an ambush is absolute, complete quiet, you don't sneeze, you don't breathe because otherwise everybody gets killed. So here we are practicing an ambush and a guy starts to scream. So he finds it, it turns out that he was terrified of snakes and it doesn't matter if you're terrified of snakes, a snake can just crawl right over your head. It doesn't matter. You're in an ambush. Okay. So we're all lined up and he somehow gets a hold of a snake. And he calls Private out, Private Johnson, and he has Private Johnson hold the snake, by two hands, and he's like in his ear, when I give you the word, when I give you the word, he's like getting all hyped up, he says, bite it. And Private Johnson bit the snake in half. Whoa. And then he said, now rub the blood on all the other Marines. And I thought, wow, this is like some primal stuff, man. So he walked up and down the platoon and just like we all got a little bit of blood wiped on our face.
AUBREY: And that was Private Johnson, was the one who was terrified. He was the one who screamed.
RABBI: He became a Private Snake Catcher. And so then for some reason he needed another snake catcher. Okay. So I don't remember how it happened because I knew that he was a Private Snake Catcher, but then he yelled out private snake catcher. And for some reason Johnson was there. I really don't remember why. And if you don't run up to the duty office, we all do pushups until somebody shows up. Like he would say, Private swordsman, like whoever knows something. So he says private snake catcher. We're all looking at each other and we know he's going to come out and say, get on your knuckles. I go, what the hell? So I just pounded the door, “sir, private snake catcher reporting as ordered, sir.” And so he has a snake in a can. He says, “I need you to charm the snake and tell the snake to quit biting the privates of platoon 3077.” I said, “sir, can the private go get his snake charming gear?” So I go back to my footlocker. My parents sent me my prayer shawl. Okay. So I came back. I sit on the floor with crisscrossed legs. I put the prayer shawl over my head. I began chanting the Friday night service to the snake. And the snake comes out of the, it's like a coffee can and looks right at me. He goes, “okay, tell the snake.” I said, “snake, go tell all your snake friends to stop biting the privates from platoon 3077.” He says, “okay, dismissed.” I know, huh? So it was like he was off the chain. And we got to play along. So that was my bootcamp experience.
AUBREY: It's so interesting to see where things are hiding in different places where you wouldn't expect and it took, also there's probably a lot of people who had the same commander as you, or same sergeant as you, who didn't get it.
RABBI: They just thought he was weird.
AUBREY: They just thought he was weird. They didn't get it.
RABBI: And harsh. He may be like an orderly. One last bootcamp story. So I got a little too familiar. I said, “sir, how long did it take the sergeant to get from private to sergeant?” He looks at me and says, “are you implying that I was ever a despicable private like you?” I said, “sir, the private apologizes, sir.” So he choked me out, rear naked choke, passed right out. When you pass out, you're still aware of reality, but you're unconscious. It's the weirdest thing. So he yells out, two privates come forward to retrieve private Finley's body. So a couple guys dragged me out, put me under my rack. And like. I'm saying wake up, wake up. So I finally wake up, it's like resurrection from the dead. I just get up and clean my rifle or something. But this is the stuff he would do. So there were a lot of guys that were terrified of him. I was just so impressed.
AUBREY: Yeah.

RABBI: Like he used the fact that he had 80 captives to just play with our minds. Because he said, I mean, one time he said, “War will play with your mind.”
AUBREY: Sure.
RABBI: “I'll play with your mind here because when you get into war, like the war I was in, you better be ready.” So for him, it was all about physical conditioning, good Marine Corps skills. And breaking through the limitations of consciousness for those people who could get it.
AUBREY: I mean, I can see why you and Steve Pressfield have a lot of conversations. It must be really interesting because you hear all of the stories of Sparta and you hear the stories of how they would hone the mind very much as much as the body. Like this is such a mental process. And of course everything that happens with the elite operators, the special forces, all of this. Yes, of course. The bodies involved. But it's really the mind.
RABBI: There's body skills and there's like next level thinking. And how do you break a person to the next level thinking? You have to in a way deconstruct their reality so they can get into the next level of thinking. So I understood what he was doing. I understood that he was basically disassembling our reality for those of us who could track him. And I was awestruck by the brilliance of this guy. He must've been all of 25 at the time, I think about, I was 18, he’s probably 25, 26 years old. Decorated Vietnam vet.
AUBREY: Did you ever look him up in your later life?
RABBI: I tried, when the internet came. And I went looking around and I finally found a guy around the right age, name. Like when email came into being, I sent him an email, he said, “sorry, I'm not your sergeant.” It could have been him. Because on the last day of bootcamp, he came up to me and said to me “Private Finley, I was a PFC at the time but so you're still called a private.” He said, “do not come looking me up because if I have to send you to your death, I will. So we can't be friends.” Those were his last words to me.
AUBREY: Yeah. Interesting. Well, you've had two powerful mentors. At least two. And I can say the same. I think that's the thing. If you're really paying attention, the mentors are around and the mentors are looking for someone who's paying attention. That's the thing. It's like everybody's like, how do you find a mentor? Be the mentee. Like be the mentee looking and you'll find it and they'll find you.
RABBI: And it's not what you think it is. They're around and there has to be a matchup. I've met spiritual geniuses in the strangest places. When I worked on the kibbutz in Israel, I volunteered to work in the citrus fields. We get up super early in the morning and there's this one guy, he's like, I could just tell he's like a deep guy and I finally, my Hebrew got good enough and I just wanted to know like who are you? And he said, “I walk on the black earth and I just know.” That was it, that was our full relationship. But you know what? I detected him and he detected me enough to know he's going to tell me something. So I think you're right. And the thing is, once you start looking, there are people who are operating at a different level. All kinds of places and you gotta trust in a way that knowledge. I mean, that's an interesting theme that we've developed here is the importance of teachers and the importance of allowing yourself to be a mentee.
AUBREY: Yeah, no doubt. All right. Let's carry on with the journey. The different emanations. So we've gotten–
RABBI: Chesed and Gevurah. Okay. So then the next one is in a way the intermediary between those and it has two names. Some call it Emet, which means truth. Some call it Ferre, which means beauty. So Chesed and Gevurah resolved into truth and beauty. So that is just so, I mean, I forget which poet said at the end of Ode on a Grecian Urn, beauty is truth and truth is beauty. And he finishes somewhere. So this idea that somehow these are inherently connected concepts that beauty communicates a truth and truth communicates a beauty. So just the words as labels of inner realities. So then when I teach this, part of it is teaching the idea of truth. Well, first of all, your words correspond to reality and then the truth of the human condition. And the truth of the depth of human consciousness and the truth of the divine and the truth of the moral law. So there are so many levels and people get hung up on the empirical level. Truth is there's no mystical reality. There's no metaphysics. Truth only means that words correspond to reality and it's much more, man. It's like, it's the minute you start peeling away a concept like truth and then go to beauty. So people say to me, isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? Where in the eye, like the cornea. I said, “it's a metaphor, what are you trying to say?” Okay. So they, “Oh yeah, you're right. It's a metaphor. Never really thought about that. So isn't beauty subjective?” I said, “nobody talks that way.” When I see a beautiful painting, I say, “I don't know if the painting's beautiful, but I'm going to have any experience of beauty.” You say the painting is beautiful. That's just the way we talk. So when we say beauty, we're saying it as if there's a quality that inheres in something. And I'm not going to torture the English language enough to say, beauty doesn't inhere in things outside of me. So I don't buy into subjectivism. So they say, well what makes something beautiful? I don't know. Except that I didn't make it beautiful. Somebody else made it beautiful. All I did was perceive it. So once you realize that truth and beauty, and this is a very big argument in today as you can imagine, it's a huge thing today, isn't all truth subjective? My answer is no. Truth is like beauty, it inheres. And we perceive it. And then people say, right. Well, I heard that all truth is subjective. I said, you'll excuse me, but you heard wrong. I don't know. You want to do the long route or the short route because if your claim is that all truth is subjective and all beauty is subjective, I'm not going to try to argue it out of it. That's like, okay. But if you want to understand truth as a metaphysical reality. And beauty as a metaphysical reality, there's a way to get there.
AUBREY: In my own journeys, I've really kind of felt as if God, love, truth were synonyms in an interesting way. And that there was all of those different concepts really worked together in the same way. Love is always true. God is always true. Truth is, it's all kind of a different way to describe the same thing.
RABBI: The way I phrase it is, and this is totally Kabbalah because remember Chesed is love, Gevurah is justice, judgment, and Tiferet is truth and beauty. So I say love, justice, truth, and beauty are the garments of God. And so what does God look like? I said, look at God's garments. Love, justice, truth, and beauty. Then I extend by saying the good, which is how they all operate and then the holy. So I've refined it since I was a younger man. I would say love, just, truth and beauty are the garments of God and they are garments of the philosophic good that to which we human beings ought to aspire. The experience of it is the holy and then behind that is the divine mind.
AUBREY: And beauty is interesting because it inspires a sense of awe and a sense of wonder. Wow. Like that's the response. When you see something, a beautiful painting, wow, beautiful sunset. Wow. And that is the only natural response to looking at God.
RABBI: Precisely. So beauty is an awesome experience. And sometimes when you read something profoundly true, for example, you'd be watching a movie and they cut it exactly right. And you say, there was more truth in that scene just now than I reflect in any philosophic book I read. I mean, I really love cinema and I just love it when the casting director and the writer and the set designer and they all conspired to create a moment where this pulsing with truth and beauty, and you can see the metaphysical reality coming through the screen is overwhelming. So was that truth or beauty? It's the same thing.
AUBREY: I interviewed Matthew McConaughey and did you see the movie Interstellar?
RABBI: Yes.
AUBREY: So, the scene where they've just gone to that planet and he's lost 40 years and he has all the recordings of his daughter growing up and his son growing up and he's just lost all of this time and he's sitting in the chair trying to just reconcile with the fact that he's just lost whatever it was, 30, 40 years. And he was talking about that moment. That was one of those powerful moments I've ever seen in film. And it's very simple. It's just a closeup of him going through this experience, but it was true. And when he talked about it, he talked about how he got into that. And he just passed a note and he knew that he was just going to deliver that scene. And it was just going to be one time. And he said, because anything after the first time would have been acting like the first, this time was true. Everything else, I would have been acting.
RABBI: Wow, that’s incredible.
AUBREY: When he said that, I was like, fuck, that's right.
RABBI: That's exactly right.
AUBREY: That's exactly right. This was true. When you did that, that wasn't acting. You were really there.
RABBI: I love him now. He was in True Detective, right? So did you watch the series?
AUBREY: No. Was he in True Detective?
RABBI: Yeah. With Woody Harrelson. So Woody Harrelson plays the drunk cop who's burnt out. And Matthew McConaughey, you don't know if he's a mystic or if he's psychotic, we don't fully know, but toward the end there's this one scene where he's right between mysticism and psychosis and then they show us the world that he sees. And you start to doubt, well, what is psychosis other than a break with mundane reality? And it was, I mean, I watched it in awe of him. Everything. So I remember that moment more than interstellar because sometimes I'll watch the series to earn that moment.
AUBREY: Yeah. I got to see it. I got to watch it.
RABBI: Yeah. True Detective, and another favorite of mine is the TV series Fargo. The movie was great, but the TV series?
AUBREY: I saw a little bit of that. Yeah
RABBI: Yeah. So the first three seasons of the TV series, every single one of them had those achingly true and beautiful moments. So I think perhaps our greatest art form right now really is television where they can actually develop something, through 8-10 episodes. I'm really a fan of great, deep edgy television.
AUBREY: I think the art reflects what the culture really loves the most. I mean, there was a time when sculpture was what culture loved the most. And there was some amazing, you look at a Bernini or you look at a Canova and you're like, Oh, wow, this is unbelievable. When you see the Daphne and Apollo and you see the way that the hands press into the flesh, even though it's made of marble. I remember staring at that one and Rata Persephone, the rape of Persephone, I'm looking at these like, Oh my. Goodness.
RABBI: It's as if they're compressing all of reality into something physical and the reality is, did you ever read Rilke's poem The Headless Torso of Apollo?
AUBREY: No.
RABBI: Okay. So when the Muslims invaded Greece, they didn't like images, they cut the heads off of the statues. So down there there's a statue, it's called the Headless Torso of Apollo because the head's gone. So he's looking at the torso and then trying to imagine the head. And he leads you on this path of what it means to experience something and then experience the absence of something. And it's just an awesome, maybe, 10, 12 lines. And then there's skip a space and it says, you must change your life. I mean, you will shudder when you read because of your appreciation of sculpture. You read the headless horse of Apollo. So you're right. There was a time when sculpture for me, it's mostly poetry. And in scripture and. And now I'm just in awe of what cinema can do. So I feel just a beneficiary of living at a time when there's so much beauty in the fine arts. And beauty in music, and beauty in the written word and beauty in cinema.
AUBREY: And we still have access to different times when someone could spend four years on a sculpture or a couple of years on a painting and not worrying about whether they had to sell it because they had a patron and just a whole different world that we get to still appreciate that beauty if we're willing to go there.
RABBI: Churches. I just read a book called beauty. It's called beauty. A very short introduction. So he goes into the debates. And so I looked up everything he mentioned and I went into photographs of churches that I'd never seen before, but they're hidden all over Europe. Astounding works of art. And the fact that he introduced it to me, says, look how the column resolves into a robe, which resolves into an octagon, which turns into an art. So no one ever taught me how to look at architecture as poetry. So I'm looking at this stuff and saying, wow, man, this is just, this poetic urge is in which the presence of the divine is compressed and flowing through.
AUBREY: It's such a shame that this understanding of beauty and the essence of beauty being divine was not translated through all of the religious dogma. Different forms of art were suppressed. Different forms of dance were suppressed. Different forms of song were suppressed. Even the act of lovemaking, which is an incredible gateway into the divine, if you're doing it with the right intention. And all of these things were cast aside as, Oh no, these are bad, well, if they're beautiful, they're a doorway to God, they're a portal to God. If they really are beautiful and the intention is there. And that, if that would have permeated through everything, I mean, the whole world would be a different place.
RABBI: Yeah. I wonder, the couple of times I have been in Europe, I've gone into cathedrals. And they're overwhelming and they found a way around it because the sculptures, for example, of the I think it's called a sarcophagus, when they have an image of the person inside, I mean, the images of the women that were buried there, I mean, it was like for a dead woman, you guys are pushing the boundaries here. So you would go under the cathedral into the mausoleum. And you'd have these images of all the royalty that were buried down there. I mean, it was stunningly beautiful. And then you look at the same cultures that create the most poetic and architectural beauty can become savage. At the instance of a demagogue or something. So I wish that beauty made people immune.
AUBREY: Yeah.
RABBI: But you know what? I think there's no replacement for hard work on consciousness. There's no shortcut. If you want to be a just person, you gotta work on truth, beauty, and love. You want to be a loving person, you gotta work on justice, truth, and beauty. For me, those four, you gotta stay hard at work on love, justice, truth, and beauty because they all entail each other.
AUBREY: Yeah. I mean, it actually goes back, you can even talk about the pyramids again, right? Beautiful. And actually, if you go talk about the mystical purpose of the inner chambers in this acoustically resonant void where people could connect to the mystery of all of the divine. All right. Well, yeah. Beautiful. Made by slaves.
RABBI: Exactly.
AUBREY: It's like you got caught, you got some of it, but nonetheless, how many died? This is built in death and blood.
RABBI: And so here we have the kind of ironic, tragic view of the tragic compressing of the human condition. And so, when I think of my work as a spiritual teacher drill down into a Rabbi, who’s shifting into wisdom for everybody. For me, it's one Marine at a time, one cadet, one person at a time
AUBREY: And maybe one hood at a time.
RABBI: Well. But my students aren't as bad as that. I want them to see the mystery. Just like there's a soul in your home. It's not the spouse you're arguing with. There's a soul trying to get out. And are you ushering that soul out? Are you obscuring that light?
AUBREY: It's beautiful.
RABBI: Yeah, thank you.
AUBREY: Beautiful. Let's continue on the journey.
RABBI: All right, man. You want to do some more Kabbalah?
AUBREY: More Kabbalah, yeah, let's go all the way to the end here.
RABBI: All right. So you have Chesed and Gevurah concentrated into Tiferet Emev. Okay, so it's a triangle. The next triangle is called Netzach which literally means victory, but the interior is prophecy. So, prophecy means some people speak words that convey the presence of God. Some do and some don't. So the idea is there are people that when they talk, when they speak, and you attend to it, you can feel God's presence coming through. So it's the reality that there are spiritually gifted among us. So the word is Netzach, which means victory. But the interior is a prophecy. So you might say divine force is pushed out through language. So notice Chesed is a force. Gevurah is a container. They resolve into Teferet Emet, goes to Netzach, which is both force and form. The force and form of language. Right across from Netzach is the one called–
AUBREY: Sounds like almost even embodied language, like the language as it comes through a vessel. The words can be empty or the words can be full.
RABBI: So Martin Luther King's speech. Somebody else could have read it. We wouldn't remember it.
AUBREY: Exactly.
RABBI: I mean, I was a kid when I saw that on television. It changed the country. It was the moment that changed the country. That moment changed our country. I mean that was a prophetic moment where everybody watching it, just about everybody watching it, changed their mind. So such a prophecy. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Anyway, so, exactly. It's the words with the power of something behind it. So notice, if Chesed and Gevurah are a force of love, the form of good judgment. Mediated through Tiferet Emet, truth and beauty, then that goes into prophecy. Isn't it beautiful? The way the system works? So right across from Netzach is called Hod which is another word for beauty, but here it has more of a sense of architectural beauty. So you have the prophet and the priest. So the priest is in the cathedral. The priest is in the temple. So you have the power of the word and the power of the form of beauty. Think of architecture. And so sometimes I counsel myself because I'm much more of a word person, but then I look at the space in which I live. And my constant challenge is to make the space in which I inhabit look like a work of art. And I tend to have a messy desk and books strewn about and I say, no, my space has to reflect the beauty that I've experienced. That's my challenge. So whenever I give my talk on Netzach and Hod, prophecy and architecture. That's usually my talk to myself. And a lot of people resonate to it. A lot of people say, yeah, I kind of bulldozed through life and one thing after the other and I never stop and build a cathedral. I never stop and turn this into a work of art. So that's a very deep teaching for me. Those two resolved, it was called the Yesod, which means foundation. In the Kabbalah, it actually refers to sexuality. But I like to lift it above. Sexuality, and I try to think of how all of these become present in the human personality. Including sexuality because you can take erotic sexuality and just understand the greek idea of eros, which is human bonding. So it becomes personality object relations, how our interior connects to the world including sex? So when I teach Yesod, it's now down to how does this shape your personality? The next one is the goal, because the next one is the brokenness of God. It all gets broken, all this beauty, it gets broken and we gotta put it back together. So the last one is called Malkuth. And again, it's very complex. There are so many ways to teach it, but ultimately it means the sovereignty of God. But the interior of it is the broken sovereignty of God. So sometimes when I teach the Spirit, I go the other way out. I say, let's start with our brokenness. Now under your brokenness. What's the truth of your personality trying to get through? So everybody has a personality, everybody has a version of the divine. Okay, now we’ll go up into the architecture then over the prophecy.
AUBREY: What about sexuality? Cause it seems like that really actually is deeply connected to our brokenness. In many cases, what I've seen in–
RABBI: Well, all of them have a version of brokenness. So that's when it goes from brokenness into Yesod, people's sexuality can be purely gratification oriented. It can run into troubles because of glitches in the human brain. But let's say–
AUBREY: And conditioned shame, conditioned judgment, conditioned performative, conditioned ideas that this is the essence of who I am, my sexuality, how I perform is how I am as a man or whether I'm attracted. There's a lot that can get really squirrely there in that emanation.
RABBI: So interesting. I'm just a heterosexual male and I love my wife. I've never really thought, I mean, I assume, well, I don't really care about somebody's gender identity. Do you love somebody? Are you kind to each other? Is it expressing your sexuality? That's all I need to know. Like I'm really not interested in anything else, so I'm kind of a simpleton in this stuff, but when it does come down to it, I mean, if I'm really getting into the intimate life of another person, we will talk about how sexual energy gets communicated. Some people are very shut down. Some people are way too present and that's something they need to work on. But for me it's part of personality. So Freud said it all was rooted in sexuality. I think some of it is rooted in sexuality. I agree. Because I'm more of a youngie than a Freudian. I see the gods operating within us and trying to manifest in our different personalities. So when I think of Yesod, I go more on the path of Carl Young than Freud. And that's been forever. So it never really occurred to me that there's a different way to think about it because, when a person says, well, I have this trauma from my childhood, which is why I do this. And I say, maybe the god of war is living in you, maybe you're a warrior, maybe you weren't traumatized, maybe, this one guy says, I'm always angry when I'm closing a deal. I say, you sound like a man on a hunt. Every tribe needs a hunter. So, there's no problem with wanting to close a deal. Are you fair? Are you honest? You keep your contracts? Okay, so you're after deals. Like the hunter from which you are descended, thank God that guy was in the tribe. That did not give up until he closed the deal and brought some meat back. So anytime a person says, Oh, I'm this, I try to go to the tribe and ask myself, who is that person in the tribe? Like the anxious person, I said, we're putting you on the hill to keep an eye out for the animals. Right?
AUBREY: Like the scout.
RABBI: Exactly. You want an anxious person up there. When a person says, I have anxiety, and it's because of, I said, who knows, maybe anxiety was the most important thing in the tribe from which you descended, that somebody would not fall asleep on guard duty.
AUBREY: And lifting that judgment from all of these things actually allows it the freedom to breathe and potentially the freedom to alchemize and they say, Oh, okay. Because when you judge something, you actually strengthen it.
RABBI: You strengthen it. Going back to Pressfield, the nature of his, it becomes a force of resistance to enlightenment. And this goes back to the idea of the brokenness that whenever a person says, Oh, this is bad about me. I said, you've discovered your life's work. So when you look at the syphilitic system and some people. More gravitate to one than the other and they say, “wow I really don't love well.” And I say that's the brokenness that God gave you so now your job is to repair yourself. Repair the vessel of God that you are, this is the Lurianic Kabbalah where we are each given brokenness so that we can repair ourselves, repair each other and repair God. So this is the idea of the divine brokenness. So, I mean, I remember when I thought that when I had issues of why am I like this and this is not good. And I thought to myself, it's just my brokenness. It's just my life's work. Don't get super serious about it. I got work to do. Like when I get up in the morning, I got my work to do and I got my real work to do.
AUBREY: And a big problem comes when you start comparing yourself to somebody else, not appreciating that they have their own brokenness and they have their own life work and your work is just different than theirs. And again, it goes to that value hierarchy that we always try to create. Well, theirs is better than mine. Well, no, it's not. It's just–
RABBI: When you’re really tied to your work, there's no envy. There's no comparing. You're so busy with your work. You don't even have time to start comparing yourself to your neighbor and coveting what your neighbor has. I mean, the focus on spiritual work is one of the healthiest things that people can do is, the main thing I want to do is refine my spirit and work with my character and repair these broken Sefirot in my system and be as present as I can to the people around me and be a channel of love, justice, truth, and beauty, the good and the holy. And that's enough. That's enough to keep you occupied
AUBREY: For sure, for many lifetimes,
RABBI: For many lifetimes. That's exactly right.
AUBREY: When you talk about the foundation as the emanation, obviously there's the place that you're in. So, you create a home, it's a house or it's a home and there's certain elements that make it a home where somebody comes in, and one of the things, my home is, is filled with different artifacts and art and different things that I've collected through all my journeys. And we have some nice furniture and different things, but people walk in and they go, Oh, wow. They feel something in there. And I feel something in there and that's what I've tried to cultivate. That's really clear. Is there also a point where your foundation is your physical body, like this temple?
RABBI: Very much so.
AUBREY: And so your jujitsu practice, your jujitsu black belt, I don't think we've talked about that yet today, but that practice or your physical health. And I mean, because this ultimately becomes our ultimate temple. So how you take care of yourself.
RABBI: Exactly. So I mean, there are great Jewish Medieval theologians that start with the health of your body. And then through that, the health of your emotions and the health of your character. So they see them all as connected. This is nothing new. It goes back to the medievals and it goes back to the Greeks. I mean, people really understood that the foundation is the way you treat your body. So my connection to jiu jitsu is a way to embody myself because I spend so much time in an ethereal metaphysical world. So the idea of being physically connected to other people through sparring. Like, there's nothing metaphoric about sparring, there's nothing as real as a tap.
AUBREY: For sure.
RABBI: It’s real. And so I love the fact that I do something so physical where there's no ambiguity. I mean, there's skill and there's grace and there's art, but somebody taps or somebody doesn't or it's a tie. And just the satisfaction of I'm a good practitioner. My game gets better. I have elevated. That's the job of higher belts is to elevate the games of the lower belts. That's our singular job. There have been guys that have been brown belts too long and they didn't understand because their skill is greater than many of the black belts. And we can't tell them. It's because you're not committed to the game of people that are of a lower rank. When you get that, you get your black belt. And so the–
AUBREY: Cause that's the higher principle of service. That's the higher principle of love.
RABBI: We're in service to the discipline. That's exactly right.
AUBREY: Rather than just trying to smash everybody to prove how good you are.
RABBI: That's the black belt who taps to a white belt, they're working at a very high level.
AUBREY: Yeah.
RABBI: You earned it. You get it.
AUBREY: Yeah. It's also a shame too that I think a lot, a big challenge has been that people have created a value hierarchy where spirit is more important than body. And so you get these asceticisms and renunciate paths where they just let the body go to waste. So it's all about the spirit. Well, the body is the physical manifestation of spirit. And so when you create this hierarchy and say, Oh, God's up there and not down here in this lowly little body.
RABBI: Yeah, that has been one of the problems of the idea that the body is bad. The spirit is connected to God and the urges of the body are somehow evil. That dichotomy, that's been very bad. That really messed people up. I mean, I've counseled a few young men who grew up in very devout religious homes and they're very ashamed of their physical urges. And part of my job is to say, Oh, wait a second here, like it's not the fact that you have these, what do you do with it? Like it's beautiful if you make it beautiful, but because they feel the urge and someone told it's bad and it's shameful and you should only get married as a way to subdue your urges and those kinds of teachings I think are really somewhat disfiguring for the human beings. You're really interested in Yesod. I really like it because I kind of pass through that and you're really making me stick to it. I like it. Because you grasp the foundation and you're bringing it out to so many different aspects. So, I mean, this is like, is your entry to the sefirot. I feel it. That's your way into all of them. How do they all translate into a foundation? I mean, this is the brilliance of the system, infinite gender to the point of consciousness, the quarry of language, love, justice, truth, beauty. Prophecy, architecture, Yesod, brokenness of God, it's an infinite system to sharpen our minds and spirits. You come down, you go up, you come down, you go up, it's infinite. So I really thank you for having me take the time and lead you through it because.
AUBREY: I thank you. I mean, as you said, I've never encountered a map that was as interesting and deep as this. And this is something where a little bit of work, and I've actually seen it.
RABBI: You've seen the map, right?
AUBREY: I've seen the map and it has its own geometry and it's laid out and there's little nodes and then there's lines that connect the nodes and there's this whole process. But without this understanding, without my time spent here, I'm like, Oh, what is this? I don't know what this is.
RABBI: You've really done a good job in eliciting it. Because I don't think I've ever done this in my life. I sat down and gave the whole system.
AUBREY: Well, excellent.
RABBI: Yeah. No, really. I'm like, I said, wow, you really want to go the whole way. All right. So, the main thing is the labels are not the interior. And what you've done is you've drawn out the interior of each label. I can see that you're getting the deeper interconnections between them and what a lifelong study of this could produce.
AUBREY: Well, I feel like I actually just got goosebumps, but I'm excited to just this entry into this path and also my own roots and there's something there, there's a reason why. I don’t know if there is a reason but for whatever reason, if there is a reason, I was put in this Jewish lineage body and the Jewish tradition family. And now something else is coming to me where it's like, all right. This is now, and all the work that I've done and all the journeys that I've gone on, it seems like just a beautiful opportunity and invitation. Let's say an invitation.
RABBI: Well, the last words that my high school teacher said to me. I came back from overseas and I tracked him down. I went to his, kind of a hovel, where he was like illuminating it with his brilliance and he would teach me, he says, you know what Finley, he said my roots are Danish. He said, you really got to go back to your people. There's stuff in the Jewish tradition that you don't know that you have to go find. He said like, we're done. And it was a blessing. Go forth to Abraham, go forth to the land that I will show you. And so he kind of said, Hey man, like we had a beginning, a middle and an end and we love each other and now go find your way. And back in your traditions and I was 21 and within two years I was teaching Kabbalah.
AUBREY: In a lot of the different traditions that I've been involved in, ancestors are a big part, whether it's a Native American culture, whether it's a Peruvian culture, or these different cultures that I've been aware of, you talk about the honoring of the ancestors. And for me, that's always been something that's difficult because well, all right. I had family that passed on to me, but I don't think of them like ancestors. There's a certain reverence that I've never really been able to feel. I'll do it. I'll honor the ancestors, but it's been more like the husk.
RABBI: It’s so interesting that you say that. I don't think we Americans have a sense of ancestry. We have to really try to create that because my father was not born Jewish. He converted right before my bar mitzvah. And the last 10-15 years of my life I've tapped into my Celtic ancestry. And so I've studied books on Celtic spirituality and I don't want to leave it behind. My father's father was Irish and my father's mother was German. So there's a German Protestant background. So I'm deeply embedded in the Jewish tradition and I know I have ancestors that were Talmud scholars and Kabbalah scholars. But there's another group. And I don't know if this knowledge is passed on genetically, but they're my ancestors. So I'm gonna take it seriously. I went to people from a thousand years ago and said, wow, so our wisdom is still pulsating into the world because of our descendants. It's a big thing that we channel our ancestors.
AUBREY: Yeah. Well, my grandmother would be very happy that I'm sitting here right now with you. And just thank you so much for this conversation.
RABBI: It’s really been truly delightful and I did not know what to expect. I looked you up and. You are not your image, you are so much more. I want everybody to know right here.
AUBREY: Thank you.
RABBI: This is really special. Really thank you so much.
AUBREY: And I feel very much in my heart that this is just the start of a very warm friendship.
RABBI: Outstanding. I'm up for it, man.
AUBREY: All right.
RABBI: All right. Very good.
AUBREY: Thank you everybody. Much love. Bye bye.