Bryan Schwartzman: From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. [singing] Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Currently, the best way to get mental health is to get arrested. The largest mental health facilities are prisons. That's insane. [singing] Bryan Schwartzman: I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and our guest today is Rabbi Aryeh Cohen. We'll be discussing his essay, "What Happens When Everything Is Broken? Grappling With #DefundthePolice". The essay argues that the entire American model of policing is broken, and that a new one is needed. Rabbi Cohen seeks to add historical context and a new perspective on the conversation on policing, racism and violence by bringing in the Talmud and other Jewish sources. As a reminder, the essays discussed in the show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, which is evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. The essays aren't required reading for this show, but we always recommend checking them out. Bryan Schwartzman: A little note that we spoke with Rabbi Cohen on Friday, November 6th, right after Election Day when the outcome was still somewhat in doubt. And now we know that Vice-President Biden has been declared the winner, and it seems like democracy is going to hold. The elections of have gone off. We saw great celebrations here in Philadelphia. We know not the entire country is celebrating, but certainly the results of the election and the political situation is certainly very pertinent to what we're discussing here in terms of police reform, policing. I mean, we discuss what the election results nationally might mean for police reform and more broadly local ballot initiatives. And he gives us a pretty good rundown of what's happening and what this could mean for Los Angeles and Southern California where he's really based. Bryan Schwartzman: We spend a little bit of time on the Talmudic sources and how that informs his thinking, but we really get into the policies of police reform and why he thinks, and many think police, modeling isn't working and what needs to change. We get at some of his ideas about what a working model could be. And we also talk about some of his personal experience, not as a police officer, but as a soldier in the Israeli army, and how that's impacted his understanding of guns, of violence. He certainly brings a strong perspective to this topic. So it felt like a really interesting conversation. Let's get to it. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen. Bryan Schwartzman: Rabbi Cohen is a serious scholar, professor of rabbinic studies at the American Jewish university in Los Angeles. He's also a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and Rabbi-in-Residence at Bend the Arc: Jewish Action in Southern California which means he's a committed, experienced activist. His latest book is Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism. And: a fellow podcaster! Cohen has a weekly Talmud podcast called Daf Shvu'i/Weekly Daf. He says, give me 40 minutes or so, and I'll give you a Daf or so. So we recommend to check it out and delve into the Talmud with Rabbi Cohen as your learned and accessible guide. With that in mind, let's get to it, so much to discuss. Rabbi Cohen, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here at this time. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Thank you. It's really great to be here. Bryan Schwartzman: Before I start at the beginning, I figured I'd start at the present. We're talking Friday after election day, where it looks like Vice President Joe Biden will carry the Electoral College. It seems like on the one hand, we're going to get into the topic of police reform and the defund the police movement. I mean, it seems like nationally, it would be hard to take the election results as sort of a ringing endorsement for systematic reform in those policies. But as we've seen there've been a bunch of ballot measures passed in half a dozen cities and states around the country. I think more than that, certainly a couple of key things in your home city of Los Angeles. So we'll talk about, as an advocate, how do you come away from Election Day feeling in terms of police reform, knowing that we still don't know the final results. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Yeah. Thanks for that. There's really mixed results all around the country. I mean, Florida, which went for Trump again with a larger chunk of the Latino vote, which is made basically of Cubano votes and some Venezuelan, but they also passed a higher minimum wage and they also legalized marijuana. So the legalizing marijuana could have been on a nonpartisan basis. In California, I think that California, a number of conflicting trends on the progressive side in general, but in terms of police reform, in terms of carceral reform or moving towards abolition and pushing back mass incarceration, there is a solid trend. And there's also really interesting things happening in terms of the political process, not the electoral process, but wider than that, politics in its largest sense. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: In Los Angeles, one of the biggest wins is that Jackie Lacey has been the DA. This was going to be her third term, was voted out of office by George Gascn who is often called the father of the progressive district attorney movement. A year ago nobody knew he existed. He was supported by totally grassroots movements. And a major part of that was Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has been demonstrating outside of Jackie Lacey's office for over three years now. And at first, what they wanted, their demand, was that Jackie Lacey charge police officers in officer-involved shootings. She's never charged a police officer until very recently. And after she refused that and refused to meet with Black Lives Matter, they changed their demand to Jackie Lacey must go. And Jackie Lacey went. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And they are not a ... What's fascinating about it is that it wasn't "Vote for George Gascn". I mean, even though that's the logical result. We know there are two people on the ballot and you say, "Jackie Lacey must go. And yes, we want you to vote" You're going to vote for George Gascn. But they refused to do what the political consultant, what veteran politicians would say they had to do. You have to get involved in the system, you have to run a candidate, you have to support a party. They didn't do any of that. They created a mass movement, probably the large ... there are those who say that Black Lives Matter is a largest mass movement for social justice in the history of the country, if not larger. And that's what they did. They created every week, they created a movement out of grief and anger. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So they met on Wednesday afternoon. And as you can imagine, it was celebratory, but it was still the center of their gatherings. Every Wednesday is a combination of politics and a shiva. It's the families of those who have been killed by the police who speak, and they're given space to say whatever they want. They're not given talking points. They don't speak off the ... it's not a rehearsal. It's just grief. It's like hearing somebody speak in a shiva. It's powerful. I've been going there off and on for three years. And it used to be 35, 40 people standing on the steps of the Hall of Justice, or as they call,it the Hall of Injustice. And now it's in the street because it's hundreds of people, and they built this movement. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And that movement brought in its way a progressive DA being elected, seemingly very convincingly. It also brought in its wake a legislative side to defunding the police. The county measure was passed called Measure J which sets aside 10% of the city budget, which cannot be ... there's no leakage. It's siloed. And that money is for what we would broadly call Social Services. Employment, drug rehabilitation, social workers. And that money cannot go to the Sheriff's Department. And so this movement, the whole demand of defund the police was to take that amazingly large chunk of money, which is 50%, maybe more, and take it away from the police department and move it into the communities that are impacted to fund things like education and small businesses and social services. Bryan Schwartzman: So lots to get into there. And now I think I want to just take a step back and frame the conversation. Your essay for Evolve and your book, Justice in the City. I think one of the central premises is that, we as a society, as Jews, can look to the Talmud and other Jewish sources to inform current policy debates about policing and other matters. So I guess I wanted to get your perspective on that. Who is this for? Is this so Jews can better understand these debates in terms that resonate with our tradition? Is it that we think the Talmud and its ancient wisdom has something to offer the larger society that scholars can interpret? What's the purpose of consulting the Talmud to better understand police reform and other pressing policy debates? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Great question. So there are a bunch of different reasons that I look to the Talmud. One is that, that's where I live. I love Talmud. I teach Talmud. So there's a conceptual world that rises when I think about different issues. They are a number of different ways to understand the question. If the question is, studying the textual tradition, is that the only way to arrive at just solutions to problems? Obviously not. That's a ridiculous thing to say. So I would say a number of things. In certain instances, the Talmud has an insight into current debates, which our contemporary culture does not get at because the Talmud starts from different points. Not only is it a different ... it's not a capitalist society, and it's not a socialist society. It's an agrarian society, which is kind of mixed in terms of what the economy was. It's also an imperial society, but at the same time, what's more important is that it's a society that's based on obligation more than rights. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And how does that change things? So I'd say that in a number of ways. Not so much around policing. Policing is its own thing. And it talks about policing and about incarceration. We'll get there in a minute, but for example, around homelessness or around poverty relief, the Talmud talks in terms of what the obligation of a city is to those who are impoverished. Our society talks in terms of rights. Now, what right does a poor person have? Is there a right to shelter? Now, some people will make the claim that these are two sides of the same coin. And I would strongly disagree with that, and with the following example. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: If I'm homeless and I have a right to shelter, there has to be somebody from whom I can derive that right. But if we start from the point of the right, it's not clear who has to give me shelter. So I have to sue the city. I have to sue the state. I have to sue the federal government to find out who is it that is going to fulfill that right? If on the other hand, we talk from the point of view of obligation, the city has an obligation to make sure that everybody has shelter. Then as soon as the person comes and says, "I don't have shelter", we know who has to supply the shelter. Same thing with poverty relief, the same thing with all kinds of other things. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So a system which is based on obligation, it's much clearer what the relationship between the marginalized and the society in general is. And I think that that's helpful in enlightening these conversations. Of course, our system isn't going to change into an obligation-based system rather than a rights-based system because of centuries of law and practice. But the discourse clarifies what's going on to a large degree. Bryan Schwartzman: You spent a lot of time in the Evolve essay talking about the Talmudic concept of shotrim. And I'm no great Talmud scholar, but I'd never heard the term before this essay. So what is it? Why is it important for the debate we're having now? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So it's interesting because it's unimportant, right. So shoter is both the modern Hebrew word for policeman, and it's also a biblical word, right? And so sometimes people will make the mistaken assumption, this is kind of in your original question, "Oh, look, the Bible says shoter. That must be talking about our police force." Now, what's interesting is the way that the halachic tradition has understood the concept of a shoter, which is why oftentimes in the essay I don't translate it because it's not simply policemen. It seems to be as the halachic literature evolves, a person who carries out certain types of rulings of the court, right? And now the interesting thing is that, when Maimonides codified this, he says very little about these shotrim. The Maimonides code has pages and pages, chapters and chapters about the court system. But he has two places where he talks a little bit about the shotrim, let's call them police officers. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So what do we do with that? So the contemporary legal, halachic tradition, it doesn't say a lot about it, but those who do, and especially Haim David Halevi, and he's the person who I quote most extensively in the article, has a fascinating take on it. And he says that the shoter is not just a police officer. The shoter is kind of a roving court. So the shoter is somebody who has to have a really deep understanding of the law, because he is the frontline of carrying out the law and making legal interpretation. For me, this is like a light bulb that went off. Because obviously everybody says, "Well, the police are the enforcement arm of the law." But they're more than that. They're an interpretive arm. They are a moral and legal interpretive arm of the law. And so every interaction has to be based on an understanding of justice and an understanding of law. And that is obviously not happening. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: The second thing is that we come here to a situation where obviously Jewish law has no traditional categories to understand contemporary policing. And that's because contemporary policing is contemporary. It's only the past number of centuries that we've had police officers who were supposed to solve crimes. Bryan Schwartzman: You see, what was fascinating to me, and I don't know if I'd ever thought about it this way, but you point out that, until a couple of centuries ago, and certainly in the time of the Talmud, most of what we consider crime is really in the area of torts, a person versus a person. And it was sort of a matter of interpersonal adjudication, how theft of a sheep or an ox or something would be resolved. And you point to it as a revolution that the state gets involved and in effect takes over adjudication, punishment of a crime. And I guess what I was curious about was, were you pointing that out as a critique? Were you saying we went down the wrong road as a global society by getting the state in the crime and punishment business? And did that somehow lead us to where we are with mass incarceration and the injustices we're seeing or was that just more of a fact you were pointing out? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: It wasn't a critique. I'm not sure I think we got to a place that ... so what happened is that the king got involved. So all crimes became crimes against the king. And that's how we got police officers. That's how we started the contemporary notion [that] a police force is supposed to solve crimes because the crimes against the king, and they weren't crimes just against subjects. But it's not necessarily a critique of that. I mean, I think because I ... we don't live in an agrarian society. We don't live in ... I don't know what would happen if we lived in a society where we actually sued each other for damages rather than have a police force come in. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: But what is important about that, is the shift enabled the creation of a police force, which was supposed to solve crimes, as opposed to ... like there are some countries where it's different. Like, for example, in Spain, it's the prosecutor who is also the investigative arm, right? As opposed to the United States where investigation and prosecution are two different things. An investigator is supposed to be neutral. So what does happen is that, we are able to get to the point where there's a choice about what crimes are investigated, where resources are put, what is considered a crime that's important or not. The police department decides how to direct its resources. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And what we have is a situation nowadays, over many years, where there are certain communities that are over-policed and under-protected, and other communities where you barely see police, but if there's a crime it's solved like that [snaps fingers]. I was thinking about this when I was at the BLM gathering on Wednesday afternoon. One of the women whose brother had been shot by the police, which she was , and her rage bubbled over, and she said, "Where are you when they break into our houses? Where are you when there is theft? You're nowhere." Right? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And so that's part of this issue of what crimes do you solve? There's cops all over South LA and all over East LA, but they're not solving crimes. And they're not stopping murders. Crime has gone down, but they're not solving crime. So there is the question of the forensic investigatory apparatus of the system is not being placed at the service of those communities who really need it. At the same time what they're doing is they're acting as, to put it in a very crass way, as an occupying force, which is actually rooted in the history of policing in the United States, where policing in the United States started in slave patrols. And in Los Angeles, it was both slave patrols and also patrols to round up native Americans to sell them to farmers as cheap labor. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: A lot of times in the Jewish community ... I was on a webinar with a bunch of people about defunding the police and a Rabbi of a very well-established Reform temple in a wealthy neighborhood said, "We're very happy that we're in a 90-second response zone." Meaning if there's an incident at the synagogue, there'll be police presence in 90 seconds. So we have to ask the question, who's being protected and who isn't being protected? Bryan Schwartzman: Time out here. We hope you're finding this a powerful interview. Do you want others to experience this kind of conversation? Please take a moment to give us a five star rating or leave a review. Positive ratings and reviews really help other people find out about this show. All right. Now, back to Rabbi Aryeh Cohen. Bryan Schwartzman: So you argue that, or you state that the evidence strongly shows that policing doesn't work. And certainly looking at some of the horrific incidents we've seen this summer, it's hard to argue it does, but "doesn't work", to me doesn't sound very scientific, like doesn't work compared to what? Like, do we control and have no police and compare what society looks with no police? How do you understand "doesn't work"? How do we measure that so we could, I guess, think about what could work? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Okay. So there's an article from the Washington Post from January 2019 about homicide. And if anything, if you look at any ... and all of us watch the police shows on TV, the procedurals. So it's always- Bryan Schwartzman: They always figure it out. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: It's always a homicide. 50 minutes later, it's figured out and somebody is caught. It doesn't make a difference what, but using public records request the Washington Post detailed information about up to a decade of homicides, and they map nearly 55,000 homicides in major American cities. And this is what they say: over the past decade, they found that across the country, there are areas where murder is common, but arrests are rare. Homicide arrest rates vary widely when examined by the race of the victim. An arrest was made in 63% of the killings of white victims compared with 48% of killings of Latino victims and 46% of the killings of black victims. Almost all of the low-arrest zones are home primarily to low-income black residents. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So when you take that as a whole, that's what we call systemic problems, systemic racism. And the question of what crimes are solved and where, so the problem where they had in New York, the issue of stop-and-frisk where, when they stopped stop-and-frisk , crime went down. There's always questions of causality, but when they used stop-and-frisk crime didn't go down. So the whole purpose of stop-and-frisk didn't work. So what happens? The people who are being stopped and frisked, the black and Latino men who are being stopped and frisked, aren't idiots. They know that they're the ones that are being stopped and frisked, and not white people the same age as them. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So the relationship with the police force is a relationship towards an occupying force. And it's not that they don't want to be protected. There's a wonderful though really disturbing book called Ghettoside by Jill Leovey. She was an LA Times reporter, years of deep reporting in Los Angeles. And the point of the book is that, solving murders doesn't rise to the top of the priorities of the police department, because it takes a long time and a lot of resources, and you can get better headlines and better splash if you go after just street dealers, or if you go after ... you do things like broken taillights, and then try to get somebody on an old warrant or whatever. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Now, what happens is, aside from the fact that this causes a relationship with the police force which is tense and violent; but if we think about what the functions of a police force should be, and then what they are actually carrying out, we realize that most of the things that cops are doing are not things that you need cops for. Right? When you have a traffic accident, you have two policemen showed up armed. Why? Two cars smashed into each other. Maybe somebody's pissed off. Cops should be trained in how to deescalate a situation without shooting anybody. Bryan Schwartzman: Yeah. So let's get into it. Let's talk about, either what you envision or what advocates you work with envision when we talk about defund the police. I think even these many months after the term's come into widespread use, I think there's still a lot of confusion and some apprehension over it. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Right. I totally agree. Let's talk a little bit about it. I think it's important to get into the details. What do cops do? Right. So I think we could agree on the following things that don't need armed officers. Writing traffic tickets, going to traffic accidents, doing wellness calls at people's houses, doing foot patrols. Now, foot patrols, some people might say, "Well, maybe there will be violence in the foot patrol." So what is the purpose of police on patrol? To make sure that things are okay, that everybody is safe. And so if, let's say, and people will disagree with me even on this, let's say there are situations, and there will be hard situations where force is called for it. That shouldn't be the first line. There should be a small core of people who are armed and trained in that to be able to do that. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: But here's the thing. If you have somebody who has a mental breakdown in a shopping mall, something that happened here very recently, and they have a knife: if you have two armed police officers, their training tells them that any danger to them or possible danger to them, they pull their guns and they shoot. If they didn't have guns, they would need to be trained like police officers in London are, that there are other ways to deescalate a situation aside from killing somebody. And the person with a knife, yes, might be a danger, might not be a danger in that moment, but in the long run, the real problem is access to mental health. What we want in that situation, what everybody wants in that situation is for this person to go to a hospital, to get mental health care. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Whereas currently, and this is what defund the police is all about, whereas currently the best way to get mental health [care] is to get arrested. The largest mental health facilities are prisons. That's insane, especially since prisons cause trauma. You can't cure somebody of the trauma that leads them to be violent in a place which causes trauma. So there we have a situation where we're going exactly the wrong way. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Now, even if you take situations of domestic violence, which can often be problematic, if you send in armed police, there's a good chance that somebody is going to get killed. If you send an unarmed police, but have the guys with the guns downstairs, around the block, in case, then the cop knocking on the door is going to be trained in ways of talking down the violent, usually man, with the knife, trying to get him out that door where everybody is safe, then dealing with him. So it's not that arms are never called for, but we also have to remember, we can't forget this and this drives me crazy, that people talk about this in a vacuum also there are 300 million arms in private hands. Bryan Schwartzman: Right. I was going to say, in England, the police officers don't have the same fear that there are all those guns out in society. I mean, it could be a chicken and egg debate a little. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: It could be. But instead of getting into that vicious cycle of, well, everybody has an AR-15. So first of all, not everybody has an AR-15, right? It's a smaller and smaller group of people who have more and more weapons. But besides that, we have to attack both of these problems. Both of these things are problematic, right? So we can't say, Oh, well, you can't take away the police's guns because private people have guns. Oh, we can't take away private people's guns because they have to arm themselves against the police. Right. That's an insane ... that gets us where we get to, where people go into fast food restaurants with AR-15's, because they're worried that they're going to be attacked by a Big Mac. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: So in the current situation, there will be for the foreseeable future need for a small group of people who are well-armed, but those people should only be able to ... And this is where I got this idea from the notion of triage in hospitals, right? Two people come into the hospital, the doctor is fatigued from making these decisions. There has to be a group of people. So these are situations that have to be made on the spot because you have two people, who you're giving the [inaudible]. Those are the types of decisions which should be made by the same type of an ethics committee when, in the very small minority of situations, there's a call for using deadly force. Nobody should shoot a gun without that running through that kind of an ethics committee, in the very small situations. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Now, the other thing that happens is just recently, the Sheriff's Department shot a guy who was riding his bicycle the wrong way on the street. That was what initiated the interaction. And then he refused to stop. What did he do? He was riding his bicycle. And so the reason that these things escalate to that point is the sheriffs have guns, because the police have guns. If you put people into situations, and there are numerous situations, mental health situations, inequality of life situations, all these kinds of things, where once you introduce a gun into the interaction, somebody is going to get killed. Because there are other ways. I'm a very prominent, not prominent, I'm a very fierce advocate of nonviolence. And I know that there are ways to stand up against violence, counter protestors, or against the police, where nobody gets hurt. The police should know that also. The police should know that also. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And I think that that's our basic problem when we say defund the police. We're saying, look at the number of people that have been killed by police. A lot of those people, a majority of those people were either mental health issues or in a situation which escalated because of the police. A lot of the violence over the summer in Los Angeles was initiated because instead of letting a group march down this street, the police decided, no, they have to march down this other street. And so they initiated violence. They stopped, they pushed people back. All these things are connected. And I think that actually the larger point, which I don't know if maybe I'm overstepping my bounds here, the larger point is we live in a society where force is the answer. We look at our foreign policy, the Defense Department takes a majority of the national budget, and the army is building houses and building roads and everything, and any problem, we send the army to do it, which is insane. It's because we trust the gun. Bryan Schwartzman: Okay. Well, we have another couple of seconds of your time. If you'd like to support these groundbreaking conversations on the podcast, on the website, in Evolve's web conversations, you can support us. You can make a contribution at reconstructingjudaism.org/evolve-donate. There's also a donate link in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening and now with no further ado, Rabbi Aryeh Cohen. Bryan Schwartzman: So speaking of the gun, I mean, since October 27th, 2018 a great many more synagogues and Jewish institutions have turned to armed guards. I mean, one could argue pretty reasonably based on the potential threat, we're also in society still concerned about mass shooters and terrorism. So what do you say to people who are concerned? Who's going to protect my synagogue? Who's going to protect us against potential terror attack if we de-arm the police and take away some of their resources? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Great question. I don't necessarily have a great answer to it. So most of the according to studies, when you have a mass shooting, most of the people who get killed, they're killed in the first 90 seconds. And then either the gunman runs away, the gunman shoots themselves, somebody shoots the gunman. In most cases, the job of a security guard is to be the first person killed in those situations, because security guards are outgunned. The question is, what is the cost benefit? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: It would be wonderful if we could be a risk-free society and nobody ever gets killed, but what brought the shooter to the Etz Hayyim synagogue in Pittsburgh? What brought them there was a rhetoric of racist, xenophobic violence, and that's what he wrote. He attacked them because they were a HIAS shul. They were bringing immigrants, and then they fit into this anti-Semitic mythology that Jews are bringing in brown people to replace white people. That's what brought him specifically to that synagogue. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Now, if there had been an armed guard there, would the armed guard have been able to shoot him first before he was shot? I don't know. None of us know. The same way in Poway, the synagogue here in San Diego where there was an armed shooter. But there also in Poway, the rabbi who wasn't armed chased the guy away. Not the rabbi, another congregant chased the shooter out without ... in Christchurch, in New Zealand where there was an awful massacre in a mosque, what finally chased the gunman away was somebody picked up the credit card machine and threw it at the guy's head. It wasn't an armed guard. So the question is, what is the cost benefit of having armed guards in these situations, as opposed to other kinds of security? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: While I was working on this project to try to convince shuls not to become armed fortresses. And I spoke to one rabbi, and this rabbi spoke to a former Secret Service agent who was a member of their congregation. And the Secret Service agent said, "Do you want me to do a security audit of the congregation?" And the rabbi kind of hesitantly said, yes, worrying that the Secret Service agent would come back and say, "Well, you have to put a tank in the lobby, and have a machine gun nest next to the rabbi's seat on the pulpit." But rather than that, the Secret Service agent said, "What you need is to have ushers who know where the doors are, who know where the exits are, and who can tell people where to go in the case of an incident." Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And there are a lot of things we could do, because if you had ... and this happens to be a synagogue which doesn't look like an armed fortress. It has armed guards, but they're in civilian clothes, not many of them. Well, in those synagogues that have electronically controlled gates and fences, and security guards in camo and carrying weapons on their hips, there are kids who are walking into that synagogue. I'm not saying that adults don't learn this lesson the same way, but kids who are going to the day school, the kids are going to services on Saturday: we're teaching. That's a teaching moment. We're teaching those kids that the outside world is scary, and the only security is inside this building. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: What that teaches them is that, no, we shouldn't try to come together with other communities in order that we each guarantee each other's safety. We shouldn't look outside of our synagogue and try to draw other people in or come together in various different types of partnerships with other people. What we have to do is be inside our synagogue behind walls. In a security briefing, which was put on by the Federation in Los Angeles, the guy who was head of security talked about hardening targets. And he explained it in the following way. He said, "To harden your target means you want a gunman to not go into your synagogue, but to go into the synagogue down the block because your synagogue is harder." And I was thinking, "I don't want a gunman to go to any synagogue." To say that we are not responsible for every community in the city is saying that we are not being responsible Jews, right? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: We want to create a city. We have to look at the root causes of issues to create a city where no synagogue has to be a fortress, and that's a whole bunch of issues. You can't start at the shooting and say, "This would have worked out better." Because none of us know. You have to zoom out and say, "What brought to this shooting? What brought us to this shooting?" If you respond, when you're on the street, you're in an action, what everybody tells you is if something happens, the first thing you have to do is breathe. Because if you react from that initial surge of energy, your heart is beating faster, your fight or flight reflex is going, you're going to make the wrong decision. Bryan Schwartzman: Thinking fast and slow. Right? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Exactly. So we have to, at that moment, we have to grieve. We have to grieve. But then when we pull out the focus, we have to say, "What brought us to this moment really?" Right? And we have to address those issues. And those issues are not addressed by more guns and more guards. Those issues are addressed by social problems, by getting rid of guns in private hands, by not having a president who legitimates xenophobic and racist and pseudo-fascist or near-fascist mythologies of this country. Bryan Schwartzman: Wow. So much to think about and digest. And I know we're running out of time, and I wanted to make sure I asked this. In your personal biography, I mean, you served in the Israeli defense forces a number of years ago, you were in the first Lebanon War in the early 80s, presumably you had to fire a weapon in combat. How has that experience shaped your approach to or your thinking on policing and firearms? Because it feels like it must. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Yeah. Once upon a time when, yes, this is all true what you're saying. And there was a time in the debate around gun control back after Sandy Hook, when the pro-gun folks, I don't know why anybody would want to identify themselves as pro-gun, but the pro-gun folks would say, "Oh, what do you know about guns?" And so I wrote a blog post in which, in the middle saying, "Even though I think this is completely irrelevant to the situation at hand, I've fired weapons from a M9 Beretta to a tank cannon." I was intimately familiar with guns. The truth is, if you're just shooting a gun, it's fun. It's like target shooting. But to have a gun define you is a whole other thing, and to ignore the context of armaments totally. So the '82 war in Lebanon actually was very important in my own biography, in my understanding. When I got down from Lebanon, which many of my friends were killed in that war. Bryan Schwartzman: I'm sorry. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And many of my friends had to kill in that war, my initial reaction, which at first I thought, was just, I can't believe how superficial this is, how shallow this is. But I said, my initial reaction really was, I can't believe people have been doing this for thousands of years and still think this is the way to solve problems. Right? But the truth is that after now 40 years later, almost, I think that's the right reaction. It can't be, because even if you look at that war, nothing was solved. Nothing was solved. Hundreds of people were killed. Hundreds of people were killed, and millions of dollars were poured into that, and nothing was solved. Things are not solved by war. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: One of my favorite philosophers is Emmanuel Levinas who in his philosophical way says, the ontology of war and the ontology of peace are completely different. What he means by that is that, war does not lead to peace. Pax Romana is not a peace. It was violent suppression of any opposition, which when that violenct suppression weakened at all, there would be another war. In the 20th century, World War I led inexorably to World War II, right? The way to get to peace is not through war, it's by denying war. And this is what I learned personally, and this was what my takeaway from the Lebanon War was. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: And that was the beginning of a very long journey away from certain types of right-wing politics. My ability to examine kind of long-held truisms about guns and violence, and the army, and the role of the army, and purity of arms, other kinds of notions. And that ability to stand back and actually rethink things has been an important tool the rest of my life. And that's where I got ... I mean, I was always liberal on other things aside from Israel growing up. But the ability to say, you know what, 10 years ago, I would've thought that no, we need a police force. We need this police force. We need a carceral system. We need to lock people up, to where I'm willing to say, wait a second! Is that a fact or is that a truism? Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Because I'm just thinking of the kind of apocalyptic situation where, okay, let's just open up the prisons and let everybody out and they're all going to kill each other, rather than saying, we have so much money in this system, a system where there's 70% recidivism, so a system that's failed. If 70% of cars failed, we wouldn't buy cars. And so it's a system that is obviously failing and so much money is put in it, and there are other ways to do this, that it behooves us, if we really want to create a more perfect union, to rethink these things. If we really want to create the kingdom of God on earth, if we want to create a place of justice, it behooves us to say that there are no more sacred cows that we can't slaughter or that we can't question their premises. Bryan Schwartzman: Rabbi Aryeh Cohen. This was such a fascinating conversation. I feel like so much to discuss, but that seems like a hopeful place to end. And I'm all for hope these days. I really appreciate your coming on the show, and I hope we have the chance to do this again. And hopefully some progress will have been made by the next time we interact. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: As my grandmother would say, "From your lips to God's ears." Bryan Schwartzman: Thank you. And Shabbat shalom. Rabbi Aryeh Cohen: Shabbat shalom. Bryan Schwartzman: Thanks so much for listening to the conversation with Rabbi Aryeh Cohen about his essay, "What Happens When Everything Is Broken? Grappling With #Defundthepolice". So what did you think of today's episode? I want to hear from you. Evolve is about two-way conversations, and that includes you. Send us your questions, comments, feedback. You can reach me directly at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. We'll be back next month with a brand new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu,was written by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. And I will see you next time. [singing]