Next Stop: Interview with author Benjamin Resnick

Join Rabbi Lizzi for an intimate conversation with Rabbi Benjamin Resnick on his provocative and timely novel, "Next Stop."

In her review of Next Stop for the Jewish Book Council, Megan Peck Shub asks, “What would happen if, say, Israel collapsed into a black hole, triggering a global cataclysm that magnetically beckoned every Jewish person in the world? And what if the resulting antisemitic backlash triggered their destruction wholesale? Such a story might feel eerie, complicated, and uncomfortable. It might even seem hysterical. And yet it might also be familiar, as if its events, in one form or another, have already happened — or are happening right now.”

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Transcript

Transcript

You great. I'm really excited for those of you who are able to stick around. Fabulous for those of you who are not but want to hear this conversation. This will be posted on our podcast feed later. I'm so excited that we get this time with you. So many of you know rabbi, Ben, Benjamin Resnick, but Ben, as it sounds like, you go by when talking about, when

I'm a writer, I go by Ben or Benjamin. When I'm a rabbi, I also go by Ben or Benjamin. But sometimes people, I'm sure you get this too, Lizzi. I mean, I tell people, call me Ben, and people will not do it. They will they, they will not do it. So

I think, in my case, I think people get a kick out of putting the words rabbi and Lizzi together in the same sentence, because it's almost so absurd, like that, like the nickname, you know, I don't know, but yeah, I find that people, yeah, mostly just anyway. By Lizzi, yeah, anyway. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna just cop to say I have not finished the book yet, but I'm enjoying it very much. And we had this date on the calendar and and I told Ben that I thought it was likely that many people in the community also would not have read it yet, but that this conversation might catalyze the desire to and so Ben, you know, do some some reading, and we're going to talk about some of the motivations for him to write about some of the themes that come up. But just to say, Ben and I grew up in the same community, in Hyde Park and went to the same you went to the lab school just a year or two behind me, yeah, oh

yeah. Oh yeah, kindergarten, oh my.

So we should we share a lot by way of background and upbringing, in the trappings of where we were raised, and so it'll be interesting to see, you know, to what extent that comes into the conversation. But now he's the rabbi at Pelham Jewish Center in New York. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary the the New York Ziegler School of rabbinic studies, you know, which is where I went to school that was, he's laughing because, like JTS is over 100 years old and storied and has been in New York and, you know, a flagship School of the conservative movement for for that time. And the school that I went to Ziegler is about, I don't know, 25 years old. And then the book is called next stop. I'm holding it up here. And so we're just gonna, we're gonna have a conversation about the book. We're gonna Ben's gonna share and read some pieces from it, and we'll and we'll take it from there. All of you are also welcome. If you have a question, you can send it to me or put it in the chat, and we'll, we'll get to those later as well. So Ben, do you want to? Do you want to take it away and sort of and start to introduce the book?

Yeah. So the book is follows, so the best way to think of it, so, so the book The the precipitating event in the book that happens about 15 years before the main action in the book opens is a unexplained black hole opens up and swallows the State of Israel. And in the years that follow, similar anomalous events begin to occur, causing damage, smaller amounts of damage, but significant damage all around the world and these mysterious events, which are unexplained throughout much of the book give rise to a variety of different theories, some of which are anti semitic. And the main action of the book follows a young, blended Jewish family as they navigate a violent, anti semitic hysteria in an unnamed American city and and then, you know, and an increasingly kind of menacing environment, and it's a story about the choices they make as Jews and very specifically as parents, as they try to navigate that and and and stay safe and stay together as a family. So that's kind of, that's kind of what the book is about. And I think Lizzi if you want, I often at these I, you know, I read a very short section, and then then you and I can talk, and then we can have any kind of questions that

would be great, that would be great, right?

Um, so the section that I'm going to read is one of my favorite sections of the book. And Lizzi, if you want to ask me to read other sections later, that's that's fine, too, but the context of this is the first time, so that the two main characters in the book are Ethan and Ella. And Ella's young son, Michael and they, in the opening of the book. They, they meet at a, at a, they they work in a you know, we work space basically together for different companies, and they meet and they begin a relationship. And the section that I'm going to read is about the first time that they Ethan goes back with Ella to her apartment

and and, yeah, so, and this is sort of after they've had sex for the first time. Basically,

as they lay in bed, their bodies close together, but not touching, Ella remembered the image of the first event as it flashed across the screen. The photographer who captured the image from an Israeli helicopter died that day when the blades of the helicopter sputtered and stalled, but not before she managed to send an image out, the first and last of its kind, and the photograph that made Ella want to be a photographer, the blinding absence in the center, the green of the palms and olive trees on the left side of the frame, the old man standing near the rim of the anomaly never identified even as the photograph made its way around the world, we need to figure out what to do. Her father said, when they were all together that afternoon, his voice was measured, and his hands, she recalled, were perfectly motionless. His palms pressed into their dining room table. Miriam, we should buy gold. But her mother was not listening. She was pacing around the kitchen, looking down at her phone, refreshing news websites, dialing and redialing her brother, Aaron, who lived in Keith, her aunt and uncle who lived in Modine, her movements took on a frenzied, staccato quality, and Ella watched from the couch in the living room as her mother cycled through revolutions like a broken wind up Toy. Her breathing would become labored, and she would calm herself at intervals, closing her eyes and resting her weight against the refrigerator. Then her eyes would snap open again, shining with panic like the eyes of an animal cornered. Eventually, Ella's father went over to her and wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her as she sank down onto the floor, where they stayed for quite some time. They were quiet. All was quiet. Then Ethan's hand, the edge of his little finger against hers, restored her to the present, and as she closed her eyes, he whispered something he did not quite hear. She did not quite hear. Ella dreamt of a man walking with a torch across a dark field. He was wearing a thick overcoat, a wool cap, a scarf like a gash red and wild in the wind, Far in the distance, the lights of a small town far behind the line of trees and in between, nothing in between the man walking, she thought through his eyes, she was with the man, and she was within the man, but she was not the man. She was far ahead, well beyond the lights. What did he know? She wondered, apart from the cold. What did he know? She wondered, apart from walking somewhere, the moon hidden by clouds somewhere, an owl hunting mice and rabbits, far from high above, she saw the man walk 5000 miles on air. It was the light of his torch and the gentle pressure of his feet that created the earth beneath him, the set the self, same patch of brown that carried him on to lights and chimneys and always the wolves and always the bears and always the Cossacks and always the dogs. But his father said, Go. So he went from Vilna to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Chicago, and from Chicago onward to a place promised but unseen to a woman named Zisa but Winick, one of Ella's four great grandmothers, the only one whose name she knew, Ethan went out into the living room and Ella slept opposite. The couch was a floor to ceiling bookshelf made of white particle board SAT. Lagging with many more books than most people kept in the city at home, the majority were old photography books nudes and street photography and war photography. Some of them were print reprints of books from over a century ago, and some of them, he suspected originals. He ran his fingers along their spines delicately and with great desire, as if he were once again touching her body. Then he walked over to the window and looked out across the city somewhere, perhaps two miles south, he saw a cloud of black smoke rising between two buildings. He could not see the source, but he could imagine it, and when he did, he could almost feel his teeth rattle, and he remembered last winter when a bomb exploded at a bike series sharing station. About 30 seconds after he rode off, he felt heat on his calves, but he kept riding, not looking back until he was a block away, at which point he stopped breathless and realized that he was bleeding. The street behind him was mangled and dusky with smoke. There was yelling and the blare of a siren, and his body shook. There were pieces of people on the ground, but now, looking out at the smoke from his vantage point in Ella's apartment, he was His breathing was steady. A person could get used to a great many things. He thought. Reaching up above the window, he picked a few more jasmine flowers, which he said in a glass of water, and placed on the nightstand alongside Ella. He kissed her on the forehead. She shifted, but did not open her eyes. He noticed again how small she was, and he remembered the feeling of her breasts against his chest, and once more, he felt a torsion of desire. He looked down at her delicately painted nails, and he recalled how she turned over the packet of jerky, her eyes squinting slightly, and how she became adjusted to the and how she adjusted the wings of her paper airplane. He did not wake her. Instead, he quietly gathered up his jacket and his shoulder bag and went downstairs on his way to the subway, he passed the bench where they had seen the Jewish drug the Jews struggle with his apples. He saw no sign of what had happened. The vendor and his tormentors seemed like ghosts from another age. He thought again of sleeping Ella, of her jasmine flowers and old books and young son. It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and the sun was high in the sky, and as he descended into the station an express stop crowned with a great dome of glass, he felt very light and very Free.

So let me ask you, you sent me some, you know, other interviews that you've done, but the first question I want to ask you actually is not in the same question as the first question that some of the other interviews you've done have asked you, but it picks up kind of on where you began reading. But something that is pervasive throughout the book, which is, we sense that we are in a city, but it is an unnamed city. We sense that we are in a time very similar to the time in which we live, but a little bit in the future. But it's not clear how far like they refer back to the pandemic. They refer to times when dangers have happened out in the world. You know, things that we we too, could imagine, you know, like a bomb going off at a, you know, at a public bike station, you know, like second intifada type stuff, but things that happen all over the world that we are familiar with. What led you to be ambiguous about both the city and the time, like, what were you trying to invite us into thinking about by by not being specific about those things?

Yeah, that's a great question. I it was very important to me at the outset to create sort of a somewhat dreamlike and almost mythological kind of landscape for a couple of reasons. I think the main one, and I think this is, and this is a whole big conversation, but I think it's but, and a worthwhile one to have, but I'll, but I'll say that an aspect I think of Jewish storytelling, or at least a lot of Jewish storytelling, is a certain amount of withholding. One of the there's a really interesting book by mid 20th century English professor and philologist named Eric Auerbach, called mimesis representing reality in Western literature. And Eric Auerbach was a Austrian, Jewish philologist and literary theorist who mostly made his career in America. And in this book called mimesis, he which is very long and worthwhile reading, but also sort of Tomic. But he develops this idea that there are sort of two modes of Western storytelling. One is the Greek mode, which he associates like with Homer and the Odyssey. And one is the the Israelite, or Jewish mode, which he associates with the Tanakh. And he says a lot of things about that in the book. But one of his claims, and his example for this is the story of the binding of Isaac, which is, you know, I think, unquestionably, one of the great literary works of all time, and it unfolds over like 20 verses. You know, it's extremely sparse and extremely spare and extremely mysterious, and there's a lot that's left unsaid and we don't know where it is, or even really when it is. And his claim is that part of the power of that kind of writing is that it really demands interpretation. It demands it sort of offers itself to the imagination of the reader. And, you know, makes people get together for book clubs and talks and, you know, Harvard and talk about it, right? Yeah,

that's That's right, like, the more the more ambiguous it is, the the less you can kind of distract or deflect from the invitation to to really sink your teeth into it by saying, well, it's not talking about right now. It was obviously talking about back then, in that time and place. And, you know, because they say it, and it's like, the actually, the less explicit that it is, the more about you it could be,

right, right? I think that that's true. And I think that, listen, I also, I was thinking about this the other day, someone else asked me a version of this question the other day, I think, and I think it's partially, maybe because of my job, and also, I'm a Jew, you know, like, I think I have a higher tolerance than average, probably for sort of ambiguity and unanswered questions in in stuff that I read, and I, you know, I don't want books to be I don't like to be cryptic for the sake of being cryptic. But for me, sort of the mysterious aspect of the book was sort of an important for those kinds of reasons. It was also important. This is a, this is, this is more mundane, but, but true. One of my own preoccupations as a writer is like getting things right. So if I was setting something, let's say like like like, in, like, in Chicago and Wrigleyville, I would be very concerned and bogged down by, like, oh, but, like, I said that was a Thai restaurant, but it's actually not a Thai restaurant. Now. It's like a store and like, Oh, I I said there were four stories on the building, and actually there's five and and people don't mostly care about that, but, like, oh, but,

like, all of your Chicago readers would care about that, and then they pick it out, and if you get that detail wrong, then they wouldn't trust you on the rest of the book. So that's

right about that, right? I worry about that and, and the truth is, like, like, fiction is made up, so like, most readers don't, but like, so that's another reason why for me, at least working in a speculative kind of genre. It made sense to me to situated in sort of a nowhere place, although I'll also say that most readers, at least New York readers, identify where I live now identified as New York, which is fine, too.

So one of the one of the themes, correct me, if I, if I say anything that's incorrect. But one of the themes is sort of like this, this event, the first, the precipitating event, the black hole swallowing the State of Israel, and then similar events happening around the world, cause conspiracy theorists and you know, sort of like the contagion of people to imagine that it's not just Jews being the victim of this, these events, but actually causing them, being, yeah, you know, being responsible for them, and that coming out in all kinds of different ways, and affecting the Jewish community in ways that, in ways that struck me as, like, the thing that Jews in our day and age kind of fear, you know, it's like. We know what the Holocaust looks like. We know what, you know, European anti semitism looked like. But sort of, God, what? What might anti semitism, sort of institutionalized, or, you know, running rampant and state sponsored, look like in, you know, now or in the future? And so I wondered, I wonder, what for you like, where did some of those ideas come from? Um, you know, to what extent, yeah, to what extent is that anything you have personal experience with, and, like, how did you, you know, how did you kind of come up with some of these different both, like, quite realistic and, you know, plausible situations. And you can feel free to, you know, either read to us or tell us about some of some of the things that happen to Jews in this book. How did you come up with those? And you know, what for you felt like a stretch, you know, like, this is real fiction. And what for you, you know, sort of felt like, like, this is happening already, you know, like, whether or not people see it,

right? I mean, one thing I'll say, and this doesn't really answer the question, but I think sometimes people wonder, I mean, the book was written in its entirety well before October 7. It was edited for publication. It was accepted for publication and edited for vocation after October 7, but there were no major changes at all as a result of October 7. I mean, the book, all of the themes were basically in place before that.

It's a great question. I answer it, and I've been asked it before. I answer it in what, in different ways, in different times, based on sort of how I'm feeling and how my thinking continues to evolve. About it, my basic view of anti semitism, and I think this is one of the arguments of the book, to the extent that the book has an argument, is that anti semitism is like a monster that lives in all of our closets, And we schlep it around with us, wherever we go. And sometimes monsters hibernate and they go to sleep, and then sometimes monsters wake up. And when monsters wake up, they wake up hungry, and they eat people. And I think that that is one way of understanding Jewish experience historically, I don't think it's the only way of I don't think that's the only thing about Jewish experience historically. I think there's a lot more about Jewish experience, wonderful things about Jewish experience, but I do think that that has been a structural aspect of Jewish experience for millennia, and you know, we're getting on towards Pesach, and we're many of us probably on this call are going to be at sadrim. And if you're at a Seder like mine, which is every Seder, also like every Seder I've ever been to, we're going to sing in a really cheerful, jaunty tune, the hisha AMDA lavo denou, this is what has been promised to our ancestors and to us, shalom, shalodelnu, that not only one will come to destroy us, elishebel, dorbadorum, demaena, la palutenu, rather in every generation, they will come to destroy us. Bucha, Leno, me Adam and God will save us from their hand, which, however you understand that theologically, means that well, but we're still going to be here to re experience that and to be saved again. And that's an extremely disquieting line, and it's, it's extremely disquieting by the way, that, like the most kid centered event of the year, which is the Seder, and the whole point of the Seder is to brainwash our kids with this story about how, part of which is we get saved, but part of which is really terrifying, things happen to us and will happen again. And, you know, I think that that's been true in Jewish history. I think that's, you know, I don't know if talga is prophetic, but I think that that's been true and And so somehow, on some level, the whole book is sort of a footnote to that, to that, to that statement, and that aspect of Jewish experience, historically and so. So I think so, that's what and so and we live. And I think as Jews, we all live with that on one left in one way or another. I think you know, for you, and I don't know about you, Lizzi I never experienced anti semitism ever as a child at lab school. I will say two things about that. One, and this was very, very eye opening for me. My first job at my first rabbinic job, was at a small synagogue in northern Massachusetts, small town sort of up near Maine, basically. And there I learned very quickly, and I was surprised that every single one of my Hebrew school students. Students, every single one reported that they had experienced some level of anti semitism in their school experience. It wasn't like American History X, it wasn't like people were, you know, beating them up and whatever, but all of them experienced things like comments about them being cheap, or people threw pennies at them on the bus. All of them normal, and they weren't, they weren't deeply, I don't think, disturbed or upset by this, but it was an aspect of their lives that I did not experience growing up. So I think, you know, growing up in a city, you know, I think in a big, you know, Jewish center like Chicago or New York, I think there's a certain amount of myopia that, at least, that I had about sort of the experience of Jews in other places in America. I'll also say that since October 7, I have personally experienced anti semitism in ways that are totally shocking to me. Like, totally, totally shocking to me, like, I, you know, like specific, like explicit comments directed to me from strangers, like sitting on a plane, for instance, like, which is what, which is like, okay, like I did not, ends new. It feels to me new and, and, and, so, yeah, so, so I wanted to tell a story about those things. I guess

there were two different places. I mean, again, I haven't finished the book, but the parts that I've read, there are, like, many there, there are many places that I feel like describe dynamics that are familiar, you know. So, for example, I'm gonna read, let's see the guy on the island. This actually,

yeah, the guy on the island. Okay, so, so the

is it? Do you want to read it? Or shall I I'm on page 22 you're

on page 22 Where do you want me to read? I can read, if you want.

Shortly after the Jew hole opened. Is that? What is that? Is the idea that, like, that was the first place in the book that I that the black hole was referred to as the Jew hole, and I figured that was like, what the world is calling it, sort of like how the Affordable Care Act became Obamacare, and the two things became synonymous, like, that's just what people are calling it. It's the Jew hole. Yeah. So I considered

call, I considered calling the book Jew holes. Oh, my God. Wise. Then I wisely, I wisely, decided that that was not that wouldn't work. I mean,

you might have gotten, like, a whole separate audience of people who have weird Jewish sexual fetishes, but like that could have, you know, that's No, that's no, yeah.

Okay, so Okay, so read from there, yeah

till the end, yeah. And then there's yes. Great, sure,

yeah. So this is about a guy who, yeah, he's sort of a weird guy who lives alone on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Shortly after the Jew hole opened, a blight struck the pine forest that lined the island's Eastern Shore. It was a foreign disease which had no business on a remote island in the Northwest, and the man, along with his neighbors, tried to clear away and burn the infected trees, but the disease continued to spread westward across the sparse grass. In the months that followed, he wrote letters to foresters and local newspapers. The Blight was a distortion he wrote similar to the distortions around the anomaly that he heard about on the news and its presence in such a distance place only proved that its effects were spreading and needed to be contained by whatever means necessary. He sent letters with more. He sent his letters with mournful resignation. He knew that in response, there would be scientific expeditions and government agents and press junkets, and they would descend on the island and destroy it as they destroyed everything. But it turned out that he found very little traction. No one cared that the Blight jumped easily from pine trees to moss to grass. No one cared about the family of dead seals he found on the rocky beach near his property, and no one cared that before long, it would swallow the house, the island, the surrounding waters just to dark as darkness had swallowed all those Jews. This confused the man and then made it made him angry. There were no Jews on the island, of course, and the man knew that, and that this was because Jews disdain such things, the rhythms of the land, the power of the ocean, the Jews sought to control and then destroy these things. And in a fever of inspiration, he realized that the whole would expand again because it was hungry, it would consume the Jews, or would consume the world. And the man loved the world as the birds fished, the man posted the video about his theories, then he made another and another. After that, adding them to the still seething potion of astounded newscasts, breathless posts, puzzled scientific articles, pamphlets of spiritualists and the doomsayers, presidential addresses pleading for calm, scattered reports that the Israelis had had advanced warning that they had known something more, and it stood to reason that they shared their knowledge with Jews everywhere, even though Jews everywhere appeared to know nothing. And was that not convenient? The first day, his videos got 34 views. The next day, 5000 the day after that, 5 million. The theories of the man from the island made a great deal of sense to a great many people, because many of them had thought those very same things ever since the anomaly opened, but they had not found a way to put their thoughts into words. This was his gift. He alchemized ghosts and demons and brought them concretely into the world. Soon enough, the videos were everywhere. They were as coherent as anything else. In those days, the man remained on his island, 7000 miles away from where Jerusalem had been.

I think I wanted you to read that, because it feels so familiar, like the spread of attractive misinformation that explains, you know, phenomenon that are happening that sort of feel like, wow, this is crazy. This is insane. This shouldn't be happening. There must be an explanation. And you know, Jews have been the convenient explanation for many. You know, for many, whether you know the black plague, 911 you know, there was a whole thing about, oh, well, convenient. The Jews stayed home that day. They didn't stay home that day. Plenty of people died that you were you and were you in New York that day,

I was not. I was in Chicago. I was, I was a I was, I was a freshman at lab school. Okay, so, right, not a freshman. I'm sorry, not a freshman. I was, I was, I was a junior at

La rabbi. I'm a little older than you still, right? So I had friends who were in New York that day who obviously did not know about it, and and, you know, it was just like this sort of shocking, like, what on earth, like, like, you know, it almost feels like surreal, you know, for Jewish people, but so tell me about, first of all, like, how deep down the rabbit hole of online anti semitism, you know, and anti semitic theories and, you know, chat groups and comments did you have to go in order to get a good sense of, like, how does this actually happen, and what does this look like? So that you could portray it in the book, you know, or, or was this kind of

not, not very, not very deep, not very deep. I did not, I did not. I didn't feel like I needed to do that much research about that. It just sort of seemed, intrinsically, that I had a sense of how those things would go. I mean, you know, and again, I mean, like, in the aftermath of the fires in LA, there were, there were people blaming the Israelis or the Israel or the America, yeah. I mean, bizarre. I mean, it doesn't I mean, like, or blaming America's involvement with Israel and support of Israel on the fires in LA. I mean, you know, people can have opinions about both of those things, but the idea that those things are linked IS, IS, IS HARDCORE antiSemitism, in my view,

LinkedIn in a causal way, in like, a direct causal way, yeah,

I mean, I mean, I don't know. I mean yes, in a direct causal way, but the idea, I mean the idea, but the idea that like America was unable, that like Californian firefighters were unable to fight fires effectively because like American resources were diverted to supporting Israel is like a bizarre and wild claim and has no basis in reality, as far as I in my opinion. I mean, I, you know, but that was something that was articulated, I mean, and seemed to me surreal, so not totally surprising, but like, but like, you know, unsettling. Do

you want to describe other ways that sort of show shows up in the book, other, you know, sort of effects. So it's so there's like the online, you know, kind of the online spread, the viral spread of blaming, and so then what's like, the course of events? What do you mean? The story of the book is kind of, what then happens, oh, as, like in the actual world, yeah, you know, I like as as a result of these sort of, like fantastical theories that you know, as people are encountering them, well, you know what? The. Just as convincing as anything else. But then, like, what are the concrete things that actually do happen?

So the basic idea that the guy on the island sort of presents to the world is that, and one of the themes in the book is, is that sort of the whole sort of open up in different places around where there are large populations of Jews, for the most part, and Jews feel sort of simultaneously frightened of but also drawn towards these sort of dark centers of gravity. And the concern is that the holes are either are going to expand until they swallow all the juice or until they swallow the whole world and so, um, that idea, you know, manifests in different ways in different countries, but you know, but frequently, you know, manifests itself as increasingly sort of menacing state supported restrictions on Jewish movements. And you know, there are rumors about Jews being forced down into the holes, and it's unclear to what extent that's going on or where that's going on. And and, and all of the and, and Ethan and Ella are sort of witnessing all of this, are experiencing all of this unfold in a particular place. But they are also one of my favorite scenes in the book is just this scene where they're basically just Doom scrolling through and like and like and like, you know, obsessively refreshing their their news feeds, and sort of see trying to piece together what's going on in the world, which seems increasingly turbid and hard to sort of get a handle on, which I think is also very true, or also something that we all kind of experience. So, yeah, so that's sort of how it how it unfolds.

I want to read, because we're I want to, I want to move in the direction of closing. First of all, if there's anybody who's here in you know, who's who's still here with us, who has a question or wants to ask something? Yeah, feel free to drop a note in the chat. But in some of the in some of the reviews, this book has been called either prophetic or timeless, you know or you know. But basically, I mean prophetic is a word that has come up like more than once in describing this. And I'm wondering, what for you? You think this is warning or prophesying? You know, I mean, because usually prophecies are a warning. You know, if we don't do this, change this, then the following will happen. That's what you know. Most of the prophets are in our tradition, and unfortunately, most, yeah, are basically ignored because people don't like the prophecies. They demand that something change. They demand that we change and and so here we are. Did you Yeah? Did you write this with that intention?

Yes, I mean prophecy. I'm not claiming the mantle of prophecy, but I mean prophets. I mean I don't know what depends on what your theology of prophecy is. I don't, I don't, I'm not. I don't hear visions. But I think a prophet is someone who experiences the world and sort of refracts what they experience through whatever is going on inside for them, and then tries to say something about the world. And, you know, there were many, there were 1000s of Prophets. You know, Isaiah is the one who hit on something, I guess, that captured people's imagination, and he lasts for us. Not that I think I captured anything like that. I'm not, certainly not claiming that at all, but, but, you know, I think we're trying, you know, all writers are trying to sort of say something about the world that that seems important and relevant to them. I mean, for me, one of the central themes in the book, is the theme of Jewish precarity. I mean, the Jewish being in the world has, has historically been, and I think remains, in some ways, fundamentally precarious. I think that that's true. And I think that's true in America. I think that for a long I think that, I think that for a very long time, very long and sort of not in Jewish terms. But, but for for a pretty long time, I think part of the American Jewish experience has been built around the idea that the fundamental laws of Jewish gravity, as described in the Haggadah right, which is that our being is precarious and and, and it's not only one that came to destroy and so and so on so forth, but But part of the American Jewish idea has been that those laws don't apply to us, and that America is, in some late ways, fundamentally different from the places where we have lived before. That's part of the American idea, I think, more broadly as well. I think that that's part of how Americans, not just Jewish Americans, but Americans, see ourselves as sort of, in some ways, fundamentally discontiguous with the past and creating something new. That's why the Pilgrims talked about like America as the new Zion, right, that we're right. And I think that Jews, as Jews, we continue, we continue to inhabit that reality at our own peril. I mean, I, I don't think, you know, America today is like Germany in 1936 I don't think that if I thought that, and I guess if I had the foresight to know that, I wouldn't be here. I have kids, and I have, you know, a family, and I would go somewhere else, probably the Israel, if I thought that. But I think it's at least worth considering that our existence here remains precarious. And because I think that's true, and, and, and I, to the extent that the book is a is a warning, or to the extent that I wrote the book for Jewish readers, which I did to a large extent, I think that's one of the warnings in the book that that our situation remains precarious, not only precarious, but but also, but, but precarious. And that's part of and that we should think about that, and that it's worth thinking about that. Um,

I, uh, I'm interested in that. Yeah, no, so it's so temi. Temi wants to know about your writing process, which I actually think is that might be, that might be a nice place to close because, and I will segue from actually, where you just were, to this question about writing, which might not seem, might not seem like they're, you know, On the same continuum. However, the whole, the whole notion of, you know, precarity, uncertainty, you know, sort of like living, living at the whims of the governments that we, you know, don't, don't run. But are, you know, living under throughout history and basically being safe if they like us and not safe if they don't like us? You know, I feel like that sort of consciousness travels with Jews throughout, throughout history, for the past. Well, I mean, like, we're coming up on Purim, right? Like, that's right, we're fine in shoeshine, until all of a sudden there's a government minister who doesn't like the Jews, and and then all of a sudden, we're not fine. And so that's that is a theme that runs throughout and and I think one of the challenges there is the question of whether there's anything we can personally do about that, you know. So if you drive here in Chicago, I don't know about, I don't know what, what you got going on in Pelham, but, like, we've got the big pink signs, you know, like, fighting anti semitism is fighting for America, you know. Or the from Federation, like strike out hate, you know, like strike. You know, there's word anti semitism with a strike through it like it may be, if we put billboards up, we will remind people that hating Jews is not a solution for the problems of the nation. Um, but I think, you know, it's, it's kind of a challenge. You know, on the one hand, we as Jews don't want to say that we are responsible for anti semitism or racism that comes our way, but at the same time, we want to do something. We want to we don't just want to sit here and take it. We just, you know, and and I will say, like, as a rabbi, I imagine you find this too. I am much less interested in shouting from the rooftops about the existence of anti semitism, and I am more interested in cultivating Jewish community that teaches Jewish people to be proud, to be knowledgeable, to be literate, and also takes that into places where non Jews will encounter us being proud and knowledgeable and literate and not scary and not planning the you know. Overthrow of the government or black holes or whatever, but actually just being normal people, you know, being being ourselves in the same way that any other you know, sub genre of Americans or French people or German people are, you know, being themselves and hoping that that exposure, that positive exposure, actually dissipates some of those stereotypes and conspiracies nonetheless, like, that's, you know, that's, it's, it's a gamble. We don't really know the effect of that, you know, larger. And I think it really does help to have some kind of daily or weekly, or whatever kind of practice it is that helps us reclaim a sense of agency. Yeah, whatever is going on in the world. And so I actually that's, that's where timmy's question. I'll just read it out loud, for people who are not seeing the chat, would love to hear about your writing practice. What was the process of writing the book? Life like, both emotionally and practically. Like, are you a plot sir, or a pantser? You'll have to explain those words to me, because I don't know

what those mean. I know I got it all right. Ben's

got it. Can't wait to read, you can't wait to read the book. So, yeah. So how am I writing, you know, kind of a response to, yeah,

yeah. I mean, I'll just say, you know, I'll just editorialize and say, just quickly, then I will answer the question. I mean, I'm not so optimistic, personally, based on my read of history, about the idea that Jews presenting themselves as sort of normal, acculturated, nice people, is going to diffuse sort of anti semitic Animus. I don't think we have, I don't think there's a strong record of that, track record of that working. Perhaps it will work one day, and perhaps it can work here in America. But I would not personally want to put all my eggs in that basket which relates to, I'll ask answer question about the process of writing in a second, but in terms of sort of the emotionally, the activity of of storytelling, um, it was, it was really, really, really important to me to tell a Book, to to tell a story from a pretty ardent and uncompromising Jewish perspective, and something that was sort of deeply rooted in Jewish consciousness there, like, there's an there's a line of untranslated, untransliberated, unvocalized Hebrew in the text. I mean, it's just one line, but, but there. But, like, which, which, like, like I was and I was and I was not that interested, and am not that interested in, sort of building bridges between sort of the broader world and the world of the story. And I don't in when I read other things. I don't tend to like that either, like I tend to like to be plunged into a world and, and I'm I either swim in it or, or I sink in it and, and that's okay. And I, you know, the the the late great Toni Morrison, who, you know, is a giant of 20th century literature and brilliant used to say for most of her career that she wrote primarily for the black community. I mean, she was pleased if anyone read her books, but she was, of course, but she was but, but she was writing something that was, that was indigenous to a very, very specific way of being in the world. And I think that that's really wise and important. And I think I think deeply rooted fiction, deeply culturally rooted fiction, is hugely important, especially in a world there's not like an original statement that's atomized and polarized and there's echo chambers. And I think fiction has sort of a unique comparative advantage, because it's so intimate in sort of inviting people in to looking at the world in a radically different way. And and, you know, to the extent that someone you know might pick up next stop, and you know, like, let's say a non, you know, an imaginary non Jewish reader, might pick up next stop with certain notions about Jewish experience and Jewish being, and they come away changed by it, or they come away with some kind of new insight about, you know, that way of being in the world. I think that's wonderful, just as you know, you know, one of my favorite writers anywhere is a guy named Mohsen kamid who wrote an amazing book called Exit West. And he's a like a Pakistani British writer. And he wrote this book, Exit West, which is set in a which which inspired next. Up in some ways, and is set in a sort of an unnamed Islamic city, and it exposes me to a way of being in the world that's different from my day to day life. And I think that that's really urgently important and and I think as a response, that is a way in which I think we can respond to prejudice of all kinds, and to insist that difference matters, and to exist on the dignity of difference and the importance of sort of a vast and varied marketplace of cultural perspectives. I think is really important. I think fiction is really uniquely positioned to do that. My writing process, that's sort of the emotional that's one of the things that I think is really important about writing in general. My process, I write 500 when I'm working on a project, which is almost all the time. I write 500 words a day, every day before I go to sleep, except for Shabbat. And I pretty much always do that. And have done that ever since I've been writing seriously, which is for about 20 years now.

And for context, 500 words is like two solid paragraphs. Yeah, three solid something

like that, two or three solid paragraphs. It's

not a lot, but it is consistent.

It's not a lot. Most writers that I know can't write much more than that, writing fiction, at least, I find you hit a wall, basically like once you once you hit about, at least, for me, once I hit about 1000 words. I'm completely fried and I can't, I can't, I can't do much more. I don't think most writers, if you write 500 words a day, every day, you have a draft of a, you know, an 80,000 word novel, which is standard length in about seven, eight months, something like that, which is pretty typical. I don't know that many writers who write novels faster than that, and then I work from I'm not a pantser. Is someone who writes by the seat of their pants. A plot sir, is someone who plots things out and outlines, I don't work from detailed outlines, but I tend to be more successful when, when I start writing a book, I have a pretty clear sense of the plot in my head, so I and I make notes to myself throughout so I'm not plotting out every single beat, but I have a very I'm most successful when I have a very clear sense of where I'm going. El doctoro talked about how writing a novel was like traveling down a dark a dark road and you can only see what's in front of your headlights, but somehow you're going to get to where you're going. I actually don't great. He was a great writer. That's not how I work. I tend to know more about where I'm going from the outset,

Kathy. Kathy is asking if, if your book has been, you know, subject to some of the the different like independent bookstores you know that have books written either by Jews or Zionists or Israelis, has that affected?

No, yeah, so I'll say that I don't know for sure. It's hard to know for sure. I mean, part of the part of the answer to this question, which I think Jewish writers get a lot lately, is that the situation is pretty turbid, like, it's hot, like, like, it's hard to know. So that bookstore, you know, over there, or whatever, did they not stock the book because of anti semitism, or did they not stock the book because they thought it wasn't or did, you know, I don't know. It's hard. How would I know that, right, right? Unless I happen to know the owner and knew like, what they said over coffee to their book person about, like, why they're buying this or not buying that. So it's hard to really, really know, um, like, on the one hand, there's a lot of anxiety among the in the Jewish Book World about anti semitism in the literary world. I think some of that is real. And a lot of people I know and trust in the Jewish literary world, in the publishing world, think that that's real. I think it's also true that a lot of Jewish stories are still coming out, like next op included. So I think again, like whenever I'm asked about that, I say, one, I don't really work in publishing, and two, I think the situation is turbid. I think what would be extremely disconcerting, and that would be, this is extremely disconcerting. There have been, there was an article in The New York Times, an op ed in the New York Times about six months ago. So which quoted an anonymous but prominent literary agent who said that to write, you know, robustly Jewish fiction takes real courage these days, because you know, it's not, you know you might, it might not be saleable, or you were to antiSemitism and so forth. And if that's true, like, if Jewish writers read that and think, Oh, I'm not going to tell Jewish stories, that would be extremely that is extremely concerning, like, whether or not the market continues to support publishing Jewish stories, which it seems to because, like, Jewish stories are being published and they sell and so on and so forth. If there's a perception among Jewish writers that writing Jewish stories is not going to be feasible for them economically and artistically, that's a problem, because I think it's really, really important, you know, to Toni Morrison's point. I think it's really, really important, you know, for writers to write about specific, you know, culture from specific kind of cultural places. I mean, writers can write about whatever they want, but I but I think that, like, I mean, that's a whole other thing. I have lots of thoughts about that, but I think, I think writers should, usually, should it's, I'm gonna Okay, I'm gonna be normative. I think writers should usually root things in cultures and perspectives that are indigenous to themselves, right? Like, I think that that's, I think that that's, I think you should write what you know. I think that's, I think that's, I think that's a fancy way of saying. I think you should write what you know. And I think that like so I think that would be a problem. Have I been personally affected? So I there was a bookstore I was speaking at up in Providence, and they emailed me like, a few days before saying, Oh, we're canceling this because we don't have enough people that night to set up chairs, to which I thought, well, book talks, you know, there's like, if you get 10 people, you're doing pretty well. And if the store is open, I think probably whoever's there could set up 10 chairs, or I could come two minutes early and set up 10 chairs. I mean, what was that about? I don't know. I have my suspicions, but I don't know, and it's impossible for me to really know. So,

yeah, it is really interesting, sort of like, you know, which communities, sub communities, like a bookstore, or larger community, like, you know, television shows, or, you know, the decision to publish things in big magazines or newspapers or whatever, like, when people are making those decisions, who is deciding what is timely, you know, like, who is deciding what is totally right, what is appropriate and, and the feeling is, I mean, as there were people discussing, you know, sort of publicly, certainly in the Jewish community, whether the movie that just won Best Documentary like no other land, you know, I feel like one thing that I saw in, you know, among some like Jewish commentary, was like, well, it was, you know, it wasn't the right time for this movie. And I'm like, I'm hearing this, and I'm like, I'm pretty sure Palestinians feel like any time is the right time to talk about their experience, you know, and, and what you're saying is true also, like, it's always the right time to talk about our own experience, if that's what we know. And then you know the sort of bigger question of the the appetite or the interest of the wider world. It's like it that's actually, it's a thornier conversation, and it's interesting to hear, like your personal experience. You do actually, you have an experience of a bookstore that canceled the talk with you. Now, did they tell you that it was because they were getting shamed or online bullied by people saying, we don't want that Rabbi that? No, they didn't say that. So you don't really know. But it does feel a little bit better. It feels a little

bit weird. I mean, it wasn't like that, yeah, shattered tablets in Brooklyn, which, which is a big thing, but it's hard to know. I'll also say, and you know, if anyone like so in in a month, at the end of a march, I'm going out to LA for the AWP Conference, which is the largest American writers and writing programs con conference, one of the largest sort of trade conferences of writers in the country. And I'm going to speak on the Jewish Book Council panel that was explicitly all of which were all of the Jewish Book Council panels were, you know, self consciously put together in order to. Of a voice place that is otherwise the fear is somewhat hostile. I mean, I mean, the AWP conference was very hostile towards Jews and dionists last year and and so that, like that stuff is real, like that stuff is real and it's uncomfortable, and so it's important that we go and, and, of course, to the credit of the AWB, they welcome the JVC to put together house, right? So that's good, right? So, so we'll see. But like that stuff, that stuff is real. And, I mean, I think it's, it's both, you know, I think, I think sometimes, you know, there's Jews in America. You know, it's important not to be alarmist about things, but it's also important to, you know, talk about things that are happening alone,

to be honest about what you're seeing and experiencing and not minimize that either. I think this is where we have to stop. Thank you so much for sharing your writing process. What was interesting to you that gave rise to this dystopian, prophetic work of fiction that really is. It's like a wild ride to read, and I hope for everybody watching, listening, and who listens later, they will pick up the book. It's called next stop by Benjamin Resnick, and you can get it like anywhere books are sold

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Lizzi, thank you everyone. This is a real pleasure. Bye. Have a great day. Great day. Everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai