Wolpe, David

rabbi, Sinai Temple in Los Angeles; author of Why Faith Matters

David Wolpe: Judaism

Lex Fridman Podcast · Mar 16, 2022

• David Wolpe
• Judaism and monotheism
• Torah as divinely inspired but human-authored
• Exodus historicity debate
• Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris friendships
• free will and materialism
• machine consciousness and moral status
• Israel-Palestine as competing narratives
• same-sex marriage controversy in his congregation
• Ernest Becker and mortality

Core ideas

Wolpe frames Judaism as a tradition without a single fixed answer to what or who God is, citing tension between transcendence (God as unknowable, per Maimonides) and immanence (God as intimately close, "as close as your mouth is to your ear," per the Talmud). He argues, via Martin Buber, that God "cannot be expressed, only addressed" — meaning a relationship with God doesn't require comprehending God, since human relationships with other people are also, in his account, fundamentally opaque and mysterious. He distinguishes his own view of the Torah — a human product, composed over centuries by multiple identifiable strata of Hebrew, but "inspired by God" and possessing origins "from heaven" without being literally dictated word-for-word "from Sinai" — from a literalist reading, arguing this view lets later interpreters (including, in his account, his own congregation's debate over recognizing same-sex marriage) evaluate and extend scripture's own stated ethical principles rather than being bound to readings shaped by ancient assumptions about gender and sexuality unavailable to the text's original authors.

He recounts a specific, professionally costly episode in his own life: adopting same-sex marriage as rabbi of a politically and culturally diverse Los Angeles congregation, a decision he says provoked a major public backlash (reaching the front pages of the New York Times and LA Times) but which he stands by, framing his reasoning around the concept of kavod (honor/respect for God's creations) rather than a purely scholarly argument. He describes, in the same reflective vein, a separate controversy — being photographed unmasked at the Super Bowl during a period when his congregation's school mandated masking — as a moment of genuine misjudgment that taught him about the disproportionate, tribal, and often irreversible intensity of public backlash on social media, contrasting it with the private, face-to-face repair (citing a parable about Moses breaking, then preserving, the shattered stone tablets) that he argues real communities need to heal from conflict.

On the historicity of the Bible, Wolpe reiterates a controversial position from decades earlier — that the Exodus narrative, as literally described (ten plagues, a parted sea, roughly two million people fleeing Egypt), likely did not happen as written, though he believes it may reflect a smaller historical kernel — while arguing this is largely beside the point, since he treats scripture's value as centered on enduring "truth" (a story that is "always happening," illustrated by his account of Iranian-Jewish congregants who lived their own exodus from a regime that "wanted to destroy them") rather than strict historical "fact." He extends this distinction to explain differences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: unlike Christianity (which, in his account, developed within an existing Roman legal order and could therefore focus on an "ideal life" rather than an ideal legal code) and Islam (which he says shares much narrative material with Judaism, differing on questions of origin and correction), Judaism is, in his framing, a "religious family" one is born into rather than a creed one must actively affirm, and centers on an "ideal book" continually reinterpreted by successive generations of scholars rather than a fixed set of resolved doctrines.

Wolpe discusses his personal friendship and public debates with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, describing both as motivated less by cool intellectual analysis than by genuine anger at what they saw as religion's real-world harms, while crediting Hitchens especially with a distinct rhetorical brilliance that Wolpe says is difficult to counter in live debate regardless of argument quality. On free will, Wolpe argues that a fully materialist view of the mind (one that denies any non-physical, spiritual component to human beings) logically cannot accommodate free will as distinct from mere randomness, and states his own belief in free will depends on rejecting pure materialism. He extends a similarly speculative, explicitly uncertain stance to machine consciousness, arguing that if artificial systems ever accumulate long-term shared memories and relational history with humans comparable to those found in close human relationships, humans may increasingly (and, in his telling, legitimately) begin to treat them as morally significant regardless of their substrate — while stressing repeatedly that he does not know where, if anywhere, such a threshold lies.

On suffering and evil, Wolpe argues that a coherent theology of free will requires that people be permitted to choose evil as well as good — framing the theological question raised by the Holocaust as continuous with, not categorically different from, the question raised by any individual act of violence — and separately argues that undeserved natural suffering (disease, disaster) must be effectively random, since a world where only "bad" people suffered misfortune would strip moral choice of its meaning. Discussing Israel-Palestine, he describes himself as a strong supporter of Israel who also feels sympathy for the Palestinian situation, characterizes the conflict as a clash between two legitimate, competing historical narratives rather than a simple moral binary, and expresses cautious optimism that economic incentives (citing the Abraham Accords and a personal anecdote about visiting Dubai) could eventually do more to produce lasting peace than ideological or religious argument. He closes with reflections on mortality (informed by Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death), describing his own religious journey from an adolescent embrace of Bertrand Russell's atheism toward faith, and offers concluding advice to young people to read widely, resist algorithmically amplified social pressure, and cultivate an internal sense of meaning and value independent of external validation — stating his belief that the purpose of life is for the soul to "grow," principally through learning to love others.

Excerpts