Rabbi Naomi Levy in conversation with Susan Cain, bestselling author of "Quiet"

welcome everyone it's such a joy to have susan kane with us today on yom kippur and as i've been sharing uh author yom kippur there's no question that there is disappointment about the fact that we can't be together as a community um but in a way what we can do is have deeper conversations on yom kippur conversations that maybe we wouldn't have had otherwise and it's really a joy to have susan kane with us today she has a very long bio that i'm just gonna abbreviate and you'll already be able to check out so much more about her but susan cain is an attorney she's had an esteemed career as a corporate lawyer and as a negotiations consultant and she decided to leave that world to pursue quite a work on introversion and that quieter work led to truly a ground a groundbreaking bestseller called quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking and that book really touched accord with so many people and it led to two incredible ted talks that have been viewed by millions and it led to her co-founding what i guess would call a movement called quiet revolution rethinking office settings rethinking educational settings um and and yet another incredible work called quiet power the secret strengths of introverts um and susan i just i want to welcome you to uh to this discussion on yom kippur about yom kippur and about going inward so thank you for coming thank you so much for having me naomi and i always feel like it's such a joy to get to speak to you um i think i've told you how much time i've spent with one of your books in particular um einstein and the rabbi and um they're just so many incredible truths and insights in your work and also ways in which like i read this sentence or that sentence and think oh that's a kindred spirit right there i understand exactly what what naomi is talking about and where she's coming from um so it's really uh fantastic to get to be able to talk today and um and of course we also have a connection beyond our respective books right yes we do and i do you know it's funny i i i feel like i know you we've spoken on the phone several times but this is the first time i've looked into your eyes but i definitely feel a connection and and we do have this unusual connection um i'm trying to decide how i should share it or you should share it to begin with um would you like me to talk about the letter you first sent me which is how we got to know each other okay why don't you show that and i'll i'll explain how i figured out who you were oh okay um okay so i don't know actually i'm looking to see i have the letter right here and i'm looking to see if there's a date there isn't so i don't know exactly when this was but sometime in the years of flurry following when i published quiet and at the same time i was my kids were really young so you know you know what a chaotic time of life that is um and i was getting all different reader mail and uh and then this letter shows up in my mailbox and uh i'm gonna read a little bit of it is that okay um yeah so this letter says dear susan my name is naomi levy and i'm a rabbi in los angeles i'm definitely an introvert and your book quiet was both a comfort and an inspiration to me then you say when i saw your ted talk i began shivering because your grandfather rabbi israel shore of blessed memory was my rabbi and my role model this is you speaking um and you're saying i grew up in borough park and our which is uh for those who don't know that's a section of brooklyn um and our whole extended family belonged to temple bethel which is where my grandfather was a rabbi and now it's you speaking again and you said and your grandfather was the gentlest kindest wisest man when i was in high school my father was murdered in a mugging and your grandfather buried my father i remember my mother asking him to deliver his eulogy in yiddish i didn't understand the words he spoke but even without words your grandfather's soul reached out to my own and then the letter goes on from there um this was actually when you were publishing your book i loved so much einstein and the rabbi and and so some of the letter talks about that um i actually forgot exactly what i wrote yeah i can tell you that i was very taken by you with you and i remember reading a piece in the new york times first about your approach and then um watching your ted talk and it's just from the beginning it sort of reverberated through me just this idea of you know what i so remember about summer camp and the duffel bag and um and as you were speaking you started to describe that your grandfather was an introvert and he was scholarly and the books that he had and i was like huh oh wow you know and then um you never spoke his name but just all the little pieces of what you had described it became clear to me that your grandfather of blessed memory was my rabbi rabbi all right wait no i'm actually having goosebumps are you saying you knew that just from my description with the talk like with i don't know someone telling you what what his name actually was when i watched the talk i knew you were speaking of rabbi shore wow and then i had to confirm it for sure for sure but i knew that i in my bones i knew that your grandfather was read by shore and i think that it's um such a beautiful coming full circle to speak with you on yom kippur because um yes rabbi shore buried he buried my grandfather he buried my grandmother he buried my father um but probably the the most powerful memories of your grandfather are beholding him on the pulpit on yom kippur um i can i can picture him i can picture his talit which was um which was silver he had i mean it was a white talit but all across here it was silver um and i always felt that the timber of his voice also was silver i can't explain that but there was like a silver quality to the pitch it was a much higher pitched voice than what you would expect to come out of him and on connie dre he always gave a sermon in yiddish and again i didn't understand what he was saying but i understood exactly what he was saying and he would cry that was a sermon where he he would go from speech to this um very very deep place yeah and he would cry and i didn't know what he was saying but i knew that i knew what he was saying so um it's it's to me just the sheriff it's just meant to be that we should be talking today you his granddaughter on yom kippur about yom kippur yeah um i uh feel that way too and it's um it's also incredibly meaningful for me to hear your memory because i never knew him in that context you know we didn't we lived about an hour's drive from each other so i didn't know him in through his role in his synagogue you know i knew him as the grandfather who would come to visit every week and we would go to visit him and he was a kind of magical and mythical figure in my life and i think for our entire family um but you know i didn't see him in the context you're describing um although none of it surprises me you know i i kind of knew him the same way that you're describing um and you're like i lived maybe two blocks from him right but the the man that i that i knew was a holy man and i uh clearly i didn't know his private life but i i could sense his the light in him and the yoke of what it meant to lead a community on on the high holy days what what the yoke of that was for him i could feel it yeah you know um it's funny because i remember um you know i when i was a little girl i would hear him talking with my mother about this thing and that thing and um i i don't i didn't know very much yiddish but i would understand phrases here and there and um very often they would be talking about someone in his congregation and i would hear the phrase which like for if you don't know that mean for those listening uh it means something like oh poor soul yes exactly yeah and you know and towards the end of his life when i would go to visit him at the hospital i would i that was actually when i got to know some of the members of his congregation because they would come to the hospital too and um and i saw how clearly it was some of the real poor souls of his congregation who were coming with a kind of like how how much he had meant to them and how much those particular people had been his focus um so it was like what i had heard about all my life just in his day-to-day conversation um and then there they were in his hospital room so i think an enormous reverence and a deep gratitude so yom kippur um this this very holy day and um in my childhood as i said we were like a tribe it was our family my mother's brother's family lived next door to us so their family my mother's other brother's family lived on top of us so they are family my grandparents lived on top of my uncle so my grandparents and all of us would go as a tribe to pray a temple bethel your grandfather shall and the rabbis say that that yom kippur um what we're supposed to be doing in hebrew is called kashbon hanefesh and i guess we can translate it as soul-searching as yes we gather together as community but the work the work of it is personal and it's about looking inward and i i just think that the the endeavor of yom kippur very much dovetails with what you have dedicated your life to so i'd love to hear more about soul searching and our avoidance of it yeah well um soul searching i don't know you know i think there are some people um for whom soul searching is kind of like where they live emotionally and mentally and um part of why i wrote the book that i did and and the book that i'm working on now which is kind of an extension in a different direction i can tell you about but um it was because i have i i was just noticing all my life that um the desire to be quiet the desire to turn inward the desire to search one's soul all these desires were somehow considered not right in our culture you know there's just this feeling of like you're supposed to be constantly engaged in action you should be outward focused you should be doing not thinking um you should be doing not feeling and um you know a day like yom kippur is a day where those cultural injunctions are lifted um and that's the thing you're supposed to do but there's the other 364 days a year and um and i think that for some people they really want on those 364 days to be freed to do more of that and for other people maybe they don't really want to go there but um but benefit when they do and and i just felt like we all of us desperately need more of that and need together to build a culture that has more space for that tell me about from your perspective what the healing is when we make space for that going inward for quiet for introspection yeah i mean it's just like you can't you can't really do anything really um without being able to spend time in solitude and that's true i mean it's true even for things like making outward fake um outward facing decisions that if you're only making your decisions let's say um when you're surrounded by other people we as human beings we're so we're so porous and we're designed to be that way because we are inherently social beings that what we end up doing is taking in other people's opinions we're kind of like buffeted by opinions by viewpoints by uh lenses looking at the world and we don't even know what our own are um and so i've seen this across different realms like i i've interviewed um military commanders general stanley mcchrystal and uh and the guy named charles krulak who's the commandant of the u.s marine corps um who told me that they both described themselves as introverts and they both told me that they they found that they couldn't make as effective decisions and have the courage of their convictions if they didn't go off by themselves to know what they truly believed um and then you you find the same thing when you talk to creative leaders um you know like philippe stark who's one of the great designers of our time says that he spends i think it's from may through september every year completely by himself and during that time he won't even pick up a magazine or socialize at all because he knows that if he wants access to his own creative vision the only way to do that is by going inside um because if you're around others you're picking up their creative vision and and you want that too right like you you want the interchange and you can't um you can't really advance anything or have great ideas if you don't also have access to what others think and and communicate with them what you think but you also need that time to figure out your personal true north and your vision so what we really need to be our most healthy is the kind of yin and yang between those two states there's nothing wrong with the outward state we need the outward state desperately it's just that we need the inward state desperately too and our culture tends to be quite lopsided where we have all outward and no inward and it seems as if um for quite some time uh particularly with millennials that it was getting more and more that way in other words um i can think of the young people i know and sort of the offices that they were working in were just this complete nobody has their own desk nobody has their own space everything is just a giant playground type of atmosphere and and with children as well this sense that the better classroom or the more effective classroom is this sort of open you know not kids sitting in rows like kids sitting in rows was the wrong you know it was the old world it was the wrong way and i love um sort of your take on it how um it just completely discounts the person who actually needs their own space and actually the rabbis say that each person has dalid ammo which actually eerily with this pandemic it means that each person has six feet in every direction that's theirs that's like sort of their private like they're entitled to that that's like their domain yes and what happens when we take that away when we take sort of it's like our divine domain away yeah i mean exactly and like i'll tell you so like when i first started researching quiet um i decided that i would spend time visiting classrooms in schools across the country and i wasn't really looking for anything in particular i was just sort of going um just to see what kids experiences excuse me i was going i was going just to see what kids experiences of life were and i was actually shocked because at that time um my kids were still really little so or maybe this was even before they were born so i hadn't been at that time inside a classroom in in decades and i was shocked by how much things had changed you know like i i remember growing up and um and spending quite a bit of time in the classroom inside the domain of my own mind right you know like doing a writing exercise or math or whatever but what i found is that in education like everything has moved towards group work and the primacy of group work and um and even in doing things like math and creative writing you know in some classrooms there would be little um signs up on the wall that would say things like you know they would divide the kids up into groups right and then they would say you can't ask a question of the teacher unless everyone in your group has that question um you know and the idea is like everything's supposed to get worked out through the group through the committee and and to me that's that's a kind of sacrilege because the you know the kind of talmudic um discourse between the teacher and the student there there's something incredibly important about that and um opening up the students questioning mind um you know the idea that that all questions have to pass through the pipeline of group dynamics before they can see the light of day i i think is disastrous to the human spirit and to thought so which isn't to say we don't have to learn to work within groups because we do it's just again you know the lopsidedness and as you say you know so this is an education and and as you say it's in our uh workplaces also where until the pandemic came everything has uh been moving towards the open office plan which um which there too like that was interesting when i was doing my research you know um in all the news articles about it and if you would talk to ceos about it they would all tout the incredible creative virtues of the open plan office where creative ideas could be exchanged freely but then you would actually talk to people on the ground and they would tell you i hate this and i can't think and i'm getting interrupted all the time and i feel like i'm on display and it's shutting down my mental process and it's shutting down my creativity um you know and years later the research started to to come out showing that what people were reporting on the ground was actually true um and real so yeah so all i'm really saying is we need to create a cultural space for solitude not not 100 of the time not 100 of our spaces but it has to be there um and i can yeah i can tell you that when i when i first became a rabbi of a congregation uh in my synagogue i and i i definitely am more introverted and extroverted um i had an office but people would sort of knock and walk in all the time where my door would be open and people were becoming and going and it was a preschool right you know sort of sharing the wall with me and um i thought there was something the matter with me because i just i couldn't i couldn't um i couldn't write my sermons i couldn't get anything done so it meant that i was a soul all day and then only later after having been there all day could i begin to think and i remember i thought that there was some you know you know i thought in my abb and i actually went for all this testing oh my gosh and um because i mean i've been through school been through college you know been through a medical school but this woman who tested me said you know i think you're the type of person who needs quiet to actually go inside and think and she said my advice to you is go home as many times as you need to during the day to get your inner work and come back so i when i was a young rabbi i was like 26 at the time i used to come back and forth you know maybe three or four times a day to sort of just get my the quiet that i needed to to do some deep prayer work or deep sermon writing and then come back to be out you know out there with people um but i i just think that what you have touched upon is it's a game changer for so many of us i was just going to ask do you think that um the people who know you through your work through your congregation um who are listening right now are they surprised to hear this or is it very plain to anyone who knows you well that you would feel this way i think that the people who know me best they will tell you no he's an introvert but i think that people who don't know me as well um probably many people assume i'm an extrovert because i'm a rabbi because i'm on the pulpit because i have a large flock um they assume that i'm extroverted and sometimes people are a little bit confused um because i'm sort of extroverted on the pulpit but maybe more introverted off the paul bed so maybe you know and it can be confusing some people might interpret it as a shyness occasionally somebody might interpret it as coldness yeah but it's neither of those things it's actually um i i have a strong interior life that that pulls me that that sort of that's sort of my base camp yeah yeah yeah yeah and we've talked about this that um there are a lot of people who are out in the public eye in one form or another like performers or journalists or whatever um who kind of you know tone it up when they're in the public but but then feel the way you do as soon as they come out of that public role and and sometimes with with tv anchor people or um you know actors you'll hear people say oh this person is so um aloof and phony because you know when the cameras are on they seem so warm and friendly and then as soon as the cameras are off they become very cold and i always think when i hear that i don't think that's coldness i think that for nine out of ten of those people they're just recharging and needing to come back into a different kind of space once the camera turns off so which is just one kind of version of ways in which we need to understand each other much more deeply than than we do when we only look at each other through our on versions yeah and and one of the things that we had talked about you and me was i it suddenly came out of my mouth and i haven't thought about it before but that somehow in leading people from the pulpit i think what what makes me more comfortable is i feel in some level that it's my soul connecting with their souls as opposed to my ego uh connecting with or reacting to their egos um that something much deeper is happening and when i do have a soul conversation with someone i'm very comfortable but i'm maybe not as comfortable um sort of making chatter or small talk yeah a little bit less comfortable but i'm very comfortable talking to you yeah and vice versa and you know i actually think also part of sorry i'm just adjusting this um i also think that part of what you're getting at is but part of the discomfort in any social interaction but especially one where you're on or you know on stage or something is that to some extent you're feeling like a sense of what i don't mean you one is feeling a sense of social judgment um but when you're in the mode of soul connection which i know is what you've really been able to cultivate with your congregation the question of judgment maybe it's never gone completely between humans but it's really like all the way over there i mean that's really the domain of ego and i i found because i you know i've talked about how i used to be really terrified of public speaking and now ironically i do it all the time i i'm constantly public speaking and the way one of the ways that i got over my fear was by making this profound mental shift between um from focusing on how is the audience gonna judge me and how was i coming across which is what i used to be obsessed with and that was very paralyzing um two a place of thinking okay what do i have to give the audience you know and what what might i have to share and is there one person sitting out there who might whose child might benefit or who might benefit themselves by by something i might say today and as long as i get through to one of those people then then it's all good and that's a really profound shift and when you talk about moving from ego to soul i think that the more we could all do that in all of our social interactions the better off everybody is and the calmer we start to feel you just said something that's so yom kippur because there's this um sort of this fantastical rabbinic question does god pray and the answer is yes god prays what's god's prayer may it be my will that i not judge my people from from the place of judgment or not not behold my people from the place of judgment but rather from the place of compassion and they say that sort of the divine moves from the from the throne of judgment to the throne of compassion and i've been thinking a lot about it um right now as most synagogues have gone virtual is that there's been a lot of this judgment around it are you going to be live are you going to be pre-recording are you going to be having a static camera are you going to have a big setup and i know all these questions and will there be a video montage on yisker or not you know all these questions and i basically just said to a colleague i said you know we're all gonna have to be just a lot more compassionate right now and we're not meant to be treating yom kippur as film critics we're just we're just doing our best and um i just i love what you just said about moving away from thinking from worrying about judgment and getting to the place that we all want to get to which was can i help someone yeah how how important is it for me to overcome whatever fear of judgment that that we each live with to get to the place that's more important which is who can i help who can i lift up who can i help see themselves or this world through a different lens that will actually free them from whatever obstacles are kind of holding them fixed in place and um i think that these days that we've been sheltering in place on on some level during this pandemic this horrific pandemic um probably those of us who are more introverted are having a somewhat assuming that we're healthy and able to pay the rent and have food on the table that it's it's a it's an easier shift for us than for those of us who are deeply extroverted yeah and um i i told you that there was a kind of mind i i told him that we were going to be having this conversation and he said to me rabbi i'm i'm just i'm a complete extrovert and during this time during the pandemic it's forced me to be quieter it's forced me to go inside and i know that sooner or later this pandemic is going to end and i'm just praying that what i've learned i won't forget because it's helping me yeah i mean i think it's amazing that that person has actually been able to get to that place because there also are a lot of people who are just emotion people especially who are more extroverted who are just plain emotionally struggling with the situation and and you can understand that also um i think though at the same time that we all of us are living in a culture that's so hyped up and so 24 7 on that it's not good for any of us extroverts included and that's why you know long before there was ever a pandemic we've seen this resurgence of yoga and meditation and practices like that and it's because we all have that need um extroverts too and in some ways extroverts the most because extroverts don't seek it out as naturally like an introvert doesn't have to go to yoga class to get to that space they're going to be finding a way to sequester themselves no matter what um and they don't need a pandemic to do it either though it can help out um but for extroverts they might really need to carve out that space just the way for introverts they will often need to kind of give themselves you know a little bit of a push to go and chat with colleagues or um chat with the cashier at the at the supermarket or whatever it is um you know these little interactions that actually lift us all up but introverts might not be inclined to do them so i think we all have these places where um giving ourselves that push and retaining the the um the knowledge that we get when we make the push and have and see how it benefits us yeah i think what you said was so important that that you pushed yourself to speak publicly and with time it became more and more natural to you so i think from both ends the question is just like this community of mine was saying is can i make a permanent change can it somehow continue to grow inside of me so that i feel like a more balanced person yeah and i think with all those changes they have to be structural or else we're not going to do them because nobody's going to go against their comfort zone that much of the time unless it's really like embedded into the structure of your life so you know like for your person who you're talking about i actually would suggest finding whatever it is whether it's building in you know every day at 10 a.m i meditate or whatever works for that person um it's gotta kind of become integrated into the daily fabric which is um one of the things that's interesting about yom kippur is we do this people don't realize that it's also actually a daily practice but it's in our daily prayers but we associate it i mean we don't actually do the fist but we say all the very similar words um but i i just was curious if you had thoughts about about the confessional or memories of it or associations with it yeah i do i'm always really struck by it every year um you know the different things that we confess to the the one that always stands out for me for some reason is um this year i was stiff-necked and i guess it stands out because i have a stubborn streak so i always think i i mean i think i remember the first time i came across it i thought oh yeah that's actually really not good it's not just like a neutral personality trait but it's really something that can get in the way um [Music] but i guess i i think about that in the following context too and i'll i'll tell you a story that will seem separate but then i'll come back to your question um so there was this article in that was published in the new york times i don't know maybe four or five months ago and and it was the and it became the most viral story for that weekend and it was a story of this woman who had lost her dog and she loved her dog and she went looking for the dog everywhere couldn't find it and she literally quit her job so she could keep looking and she was searching kind of i think it was the wilderness of montana looking all over for a dog and the community learned about it and all these people came forth with all this kindness um and we're giving her a place to stay and and helping her and and finally um one of the people who would come to help called this woman and said i i see a dog in my backyard and the dog is mangy and hungry and scared and won't come anywhere near me but i think it might be your dog i'm not sure and the woman comes over to the backyard and the dog has been like cowering in the woods um but the dog recognizes her and it is in fact her dog and the dog comes jumping into her arms and it's this beautiful reunion um and i read i read this story and i was sitting in a cafe at the time and i you call it shivering i call it goosebumps but same thing um you know when i got all teary and um and i thought to myself that that that act of this woman dropping everything to find her dog and all these people trying to help her was were these acts of pure love you know coming back to the the feeling of of longing and yearning which is what i think yom kippur is actually really about at least to me um that melody is like it's a melody of just the most intense yearning for another world another dimension that you can possibly imagine and um and it's actually this is an experience i've had every year at yom kippur i've had it other times also i'm actually even writing my whole next book really about this that that there's or i should say my next book is is um the impetus for it comes from the following thing that there's some music that you listen to it's all about it's sad music right um so you would think well it would just make you sad but but somehow you have a response to it of incredible uplift it's almost like a kind of ecstatic response to ostensibly a minor key bittersweet music like what you hear at this moment during the service and i for years like for decades i have been trying to figure out why would it be that this incredibly sad and yearning music makes me feel so uplifted and some other plane apart from daily experience and [Music] and i think what really happens is that there's in all of us um a kind of yearning for what i think of and call like the perfect and beautiful world and we have different ways of expressing that you know you could call it the garden of eden or like the sufis call it union with the beloved um you know dorothy in the wizard of oz oz calls it somewhere over the rainbow you know the world that why oh why can't i get to that world i think that that's what we're all really longing for at the end of the day is getting to that place one way or another um whether we express it um in you know the spiritual idiom of yom kippur or more secular idiom of the wizard of oz it doesn't really matter um and so i to me what that blessing expresses and what the whole day expresses in general is really about that you know and it's just this moment where we get that much closer to the perfect and beautiful world um so yeah i i always love to hear that that melody and you're a really good singer i don't know if you want to comment for us now or if that's putting you on the spot but it's very touching i'd be honored to i first have a question about what you just said sort of i just want to clarify for myself yeah there's two long games that i'm thinking of as you're speaking one is the longing for what was which is how i would characterize eden it's the longing for what was for this blissful moment like suckling at your mother's breast yeah you know it's something that happened you can't have it anymore you can't nurse your mommy anymore it's that idyllic perfect i i remember when i was nursing i thought there was something wrong with my son because he stopped pooping and i took he just stopped pooping i took him to the pediatrician and i said there's something wrong he must be impacted he must be constipated and he said no mama he said there's a moment in which the exact nourishment that your breasts are providing that your breast milk is providing is exactly the amount that his body needs and it's such a perfect balance that he doesn't that there's just no excrement so so i'm just i was thinking about that like oh the longing for like when i think of a a mournful song i'm thinking of belonging for that that we can't exactly have anymore and then there's the longing of somewhere over the rainbow which is i'm longing for the promised land you know i'm logging for the place that i haven't yet arrived at and i'm curious which one or or is it both i think they're exactly the same thing it's like so they're alive yeah because i i think we come into the world with that longing you know and whether it's because we've known it for a brief moment you know when we were in the womb or nursing or for more spiritual reasons it kind of doesn't matter um how you choose to look at it i i just think we come into the world knowing that this is so um that there's this place that we long for um and so yeah you can look backwards and see it you could look forwards and see it but it's well it's just so it's so powerful what you're saying because of two things one is the name of my community which is called nashuba which means we will return yeah yeah um and teshuba the same route which is what we're supposed to be doing on rosh hashanah yom kippur you know loosely translated poorly as repentance it actually means to return but the way that the only way i can think of what nashuba means or what to shuffle means is to return yeah to something new oh yeah yeah to return to some so we say in hebrew when we close the arc of the torah to you oh god and we will return restore or renew our days as they once were so it's this double pull towards this longing for the past that's connected to the future yeah that makes absolutely sense yeah thank you so i'm happy to to sing it to you there's sort of the melody that goes in between the verses i'll just see you a little bit so the traditional melody that i grew up on goes like this [Music] you prompt the car name so it kind of goes like this [Music] yeah exactly i don't know i think that really so it is it's it's mournful it's holy it's elevating and um in in the sort of the instructions of the blessing it basically says god god is saying to the koa name you place these words on my people and i myself will bless them yeah so it's sort of uh you know we're we're talking about past and future the beer catkin is about heaven and earth it's about dissolving the barriers in this direction yeah so i think it's um it's funny you say that because like i so i have the exact same um emotional and spiritual response to beethoven's ode to joy um and i'm always struck that you know it's called ode to joy because it's extremely joyful and it's also extremely full of longing and mourning you know they're all like wrapped up together and in fact he he wrote it when he was going deaf and it was performed for the first time in a concert hall and he was up on the stage not able to hear very well as it was happening and his back was turned to the audience and one of the orchestra members when when they had finished performing actually had to turn him around to face the audience so he could know that it was over and to be able to see the audience who were like standing up with tears streaming down their faces and applauding because he had carried them to this other place um and i don't know i guess like when you hear music like that and i know you know this because you you talked in your book about how music is kind of like um you know at this higher level above everything and um i'm going to say the following thing i don't mean it in a morbid way at all or even in a sad way um but just when you hear music like that you kind of know that it's okay that you and your beloveds are going to die one day because there's something that's being communicated about something timeless and you can actually feel that emotionally and and the longing that we experience on a day like yom kippur is about that timelessness or it's for that timelessness i know i i actually went when when you were saying that i just was thinking about music certainly be one of the most powerful languages of the soul oh yeah and um on the first day of rosh hashanah it was shabbat so you can't say the words you're not supposed to say the word the vabina volcano you don't say it on shabbat but i always say it meshuvah that doesn't mean we can't sing the melody and just sort of that feeling [Music] with what it does to us and i think that it does bridge that whole issue introvert extrovert you know because it's not it's no longer introvert extrovert it's just yeah god it's just one soul and if that's that's the way it transcends life and death it just transcends the barriers so i guess you led me to i think what would be a beautiful way for us to conclude is something that i do every shabbat which would be to bless to bless you and to bless all of us who are participating now with the beer cup name okay thank you that would be lovely thank you so i'm just telling everybody just pretend let's pretend my hands are on your head they're just always on your head everyone may god bless you and protect you may god's very light be upon you filling you with grace and may god's very presence be with you filling you with peace thank you thank you so much susan for this really beautiful deep conversation thank you so much naomi and thank you for writing me that letter all those years ago and by the way this is my grandfather oh my god a young man i didn't know him like that i just i remember with his white hair his silver hair his silver tallis his silver voice there's something about him that just just go right through you thank you thank you so much

Channel: Nashuva

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Id: FYD-bVn5_6M

Length: 53min 24sec (3204 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020