YouSaid · the spoken record

Rabbi David Wolpe

lines on the record: 92
first: 2017-02-15
most recent: 2017-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's why in a beautiful essay, although slightly problematic many years ago, Trilling said that Lolita was the modern novel of love. The reason is he said all love require, all real love stories require an obstacle. And usually it was adultery or something like that. He says, but when all barriers have been leveled and the only obstacle left is an adult may not touch a child. It was part of Nabucco's genius to make that into a love story, which is to some extent what Lolita is, even though at the same time, of course, you feel revolted by the reality of what it's about. But that's a very extreme way of going back to what you said, which is that religious stories can still do that because there are rules in a ruleless society. Love stories have no erotic tension, no barrier, nothing to vold over.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated. That's why more people should watch it special because it tells you about the life of a very important segment of Israeli population, which are, Strugim means knitted, knitted kipote. That is modern orthodox, which is a very important sort of straddling population in modern Israel, and most American Jews don't know about it, and it will teach you.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, okay. It's overrated in the degree to which people think of it as a dream factory, as an ideal place in the world, as a cloud. As a cloud city, but it's underrated in two ways. First of all, in its tremendous natural beauty, which if you haven't been there really, it's tremendously beautiful. There are mountains in the middle of the city coming from Philadelphia. I didn't know what they were doing there. And it is much more interesting, deep, ramified, filled with all sorts of intellectual, cultural activity than people on the East would think and to dismiss a city of, I mean, look, one out of every ten people in America lives in California, to dismiss them all as fruits, nuts, and flakes is silly.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, obviously not. Since I've had, as you know, a whole series of debates with atheists, obviously there are people who don't. And I didn't myself for a long time. If you're asking, do I have to believe in God to be a Jew?”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not surprising that a countercultural tradition, which demands, as you said, knowledge and is reliant to a great extent on another language which Americans won't do unless I guess it's Chinese these days. So, I mean, the inability of Americans, for example, American Jews to learn Hebrew is a sort of intellectual scandal in one way because Judaism really does have a sacred language in another way, I suppose it's expected because that's what Americans are like. And so I'm not, it's not a shock, even though it's a great sadness. And I don't think that it is, the Jewish tendency is to say, well, Judaism has not been presented this way, or we haven't given it that twist, or the leaders haven't done this, but I think that that's a function of standing against a tide. And I don't know what would reverse that tide, but it's...”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's too nuanced a message. So the degree to which neighborhoods were coherent and unvarying and constant was the degree to which there was a great deal of inmarriage and communal raising of children and continuity of heritage, and that's still true in some Jewish communities and more true in Canada because there's less mobility. But in an age of mobility where people don't have extended families and where intermarriage rates are what you would expect from a tiny minority in a big majority where there's a lot of cultural sharing”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think I'm not sure about the statistics of that, and I've spoken up in Canada a few times, and it's not as though they are not plagued with many of the same problems, although maybe they're a little bit in this sense behind the assimilation rate of American Jews. But I think that the reason that American Jews leave Judaism is some of it is very clear. First of all, it's what Erwin Crystal used to say. He used to say, the complaint that the Jews made about the non-Jews used to be that they wanted to kill us, and now it's that they want to marry us. When you say to a child, I want you to go to the best schools, live in the best neighborhoods, work in the best firms, but don't fall in love.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a sense in which, I think, history, when they say history is the final judge, but the final judgement is never written because authors are being revived, they're being rediscovered, and the same thing is true with certain commentaries and books and ideas. So as long as they are available and accessible, and in this, the internet is an invaluable addition to the continuity of learning, somebody will be able in 500 years to rediscover a book that we may think is gone forever and suddenly it will live again.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I officially appear to be what you're describing is something that is a normal historical process. I mean, the commentary that we have is a small fraction of the commentaries that were written. There were always people diving into obscurity, right? And people who wrote and their books, like Hume said his book was still born from the press. There were always such people. And you never know what's going to survive. So I have no idea who from the 20th century, for example, will survive.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that Judaism has the same problem that any thick civilization has in a world in which, as you say, context is stripped away, and not only is context stripped away, but attention to any one thing is scanter and less than it used to be. So, for example, a lot of Jewish commentary is based on your recognizing the reference that I make. Who recognizes references anymore? Because people don't spend years studying books. And so the optimistic take on that is that the availability with ease of the vast libraries of Jewish learning at your fingertips will create a more conversant community. And in some ways, I think that has happened. negative is that Jewish culture will get thinner and thinner and Judaism, as you said, depends on a very deep and thick culture.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that training, which is given, we have homilettish classes, but the ability to communicate what words to use, what examples to use, how to train your voice so that people can understand you. How often have you been in front of speakers who you have to tell them 10 times, put the microphone closer, please? I can't hear you, right? That ability is woefully underrepresented, I think, in the rabbinic community, and it is very much to our detriment.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've given this a lot of thought. Let me just mention one area. When I speak to rabbinical students, I tell them all the time that the single most valuable commodity you have as a rabbi You can answer that yourself, and then I'll tell you what I think your voice. Most people are going to come in contact with you when you speak to them. Not all of them, but most. There'll be more people who come to your services than the number of people at whose bedside you will sit as they die. And yet most rabbis, most people don't know how to speak”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could you imagine what an adult is? Not only could you not imagine it, but you couldn't even imagine what it is that you couldn't imagine. You don't know what your gaps are when you're two or three. Now, God in the Jewish tradition, the distance between God and human beings is infinitely greater than the distance between a two-year-old and a 20-year-old. So as soon as we say God's immanence or God's transcendence, realize that we're caught in this net of metaphors about something we can't comprehend.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, you would see the hat go down the street. But God is intangible, like love, like justice. That is, God doesn't have a physical being, and that makes God transcendent and in some ways incredibly distant. And I think that that's important because what I always say to, especially to high schoolers when I talk about God, I begin the conversation about God with this. We're going to discuss what God is or what God isn't and so on. But I said, In the Jewish tradition, think about, let's say they're 15 or as adults. When you were two years old,”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this is a constant back and forth and argument Heschel was criticized for when he wrote about the Sabbath for calling it a cathedral in time, for not being terrestrial enough in some ways. And so he wrote a book about Israel called Echo of Eternity. Yeah, I mean, there are those who see God as unutterably far and those who see God as unbearably near, and the Talmud and Jewish tradition, and not only Jewish tradition, Christianity bridges that gap, obviously, with the personhood of God, Judaism does not. Judaism believes that both exist simultaneously. The rabbis say that God is as close as your mouth to your ear. In other words, God hears what you say as easily as you do, and yet there is no representation of God in this sanctuary. God is not invisible because that suggests that God has a body, but you can't see it. It's like if you put a hat on.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it did was, at least from the Balshem Tov, it sought, yes, to restore the sense of God's imminence in the world, the sense of joy in connecting to God and to other people. It expanded the expressions of religious ecstasy in dance and song and also very powerfully and importantly in religious stories, Hasidic stories, especially the stories of Rabbi Nachman of Bratlav, are the most famous example, but not the only example by far. Hasidic stories are an immeasurable contribution to the world treasury of spirit. So all those things absolutely are true.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, you asked me to critique it. You didn't ask me what was good about it. Now you're asking what was good about it. So what I would say, I don't want to call it the most profound branch of Judaism. I don't think that you could say, for example, that the Vilna Gaun, who represented the Meatnagdim, those who opposed Hasidism, certainly was not less profound than the Balshem Tov. What I would say is that Hasidism, which is a tradition that I deeply love and in some ways my greatest religious hero, was a very offbeat, strange Hasidic Rebbe called the Kutska Rebbe.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tikuno lum is a Kabbalistic term that is a term from Jewish mysticism in which you do meetzvote in the world to fix breaks in creation and in God. And that means that you're doing Tikun Olam when you wrapped fill in in the morning just as much as when you give sadakah when you give charity. When you keep kosher just as much as when you, you know, I don't know, when you're kind to animals, every meat's ba is Tikunola. Now, the idea that there are breaks in God that human beings can affect is a beautiful idea, but if you're a rationalist, it's a hard idea to absorb.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's correct, I would expect you that you would as a reasonable man, but I certainly don't believe it. So the second thing I would say that might give you pause about Hasidism is theurgy, which is, and this is a deep Kabbalistic belief, this is where I can go on a mini rant about Tikun alam. And I say this deliberately at six than I, Tikun Olam has nothing to do with saving the whales. It doesn't. Tikun Olam is actually not a synonym for social action, even though everybody uses it that way. Tukun Oam, please, by all means, let the record reflect that there were scattered applause.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I would say Heschel had a Hasidic background, but he became a modern scholar. So there are things in Hasidic philosophy that he would not subscribe to. And among other things, I mean, this is just among us, right? So look, there is going back to Yehuda Halevi and going through the Tanya and woven through Hasidism is the question of whether Jews have different souls from non-Jews in some essential way. That I don't think you'd be particularly comfortable with. Nor am I. It's what a great American rabbi who passed away not so long ago, Harold Chulweis used to call metaphysical racism.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just so extraordinarily beautiful that it's an illustration of what it talks about. That is, it is something that touches your soul as it talks about the necessity for your soul to be touched.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I was there were two thinkers who were most important to me in different ways, although it's hard to say partly because where I grew up, and I think one was Heschel, the other Buber. Heschel, the reason that Heschel is so important is less for the content of his thought, although sometimes that's powerful than the frequently breathtaking prose in which he put it. And it was the first time that I read somebody who Could move me with the poetry of his language, even though, as I expressed to you earlier, sometimes he's overflowery, sometimes he could have used a good editor. But there are some passages where, like in his little book, The Sabbath, which everybody who's interested in Judaism or in God or theology should read, where you think it's like...”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disagree. Because if you take out the entire burden of the Torah, I might agree, but I think there's a lot of other things that you could just as easily say the Torah is about. So I think that it's too sweeping a statement. It's defensible to say a large swath of the Torahs about this, but not the entire burden.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just couldn't because that's what, I mean, that was his pride, and it reminded me that there's this great, that I haven't read for years, and I'm sure I could find it, but there's a de Mompason story about a guy who's a circus performer, and what he does is he fires arrows into his wife's, into an apple on his wife's head, and that's their circus act. And he starts to hate his wife and he wants to kill her. He can't bring himself Do it wrong. He can't do it. And weirdly, when I read the Levy thing and I thought of the De Montpassant thing and I thought that in some ways that sense of I must be accurate all the time. That's what Levy is. It's like I can't get this wrong. And when you read that on Auschwitz and you know that the person that you're reading won't exaggerate or distort it makes it that much more painful.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Careful, detailed prose that is heartbreaking. But there's no, he doesn't appeal to your heart. Instead, he just tells you in a crystalline way what happened. And I'll give you one analogy that I've never actually written about or seen written about, and I thought of it years ago, and I hope that I'm remembering it right. There's one place, I think in survival in Auschwitz, where Primo Levi talks about a brick layer that the Nazis asked him to build a wall and he couldn't persuade himself to build it badly.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So primo levy is a problematic figure in some sad way because although it's not a universal consensus, most people believe he committed suicide. And Ellie Wiesel said that he died at Auschwitz 70 years later. The thing about levy that is so remarkable is that he's one of those rare, almost like checkoff. He's a scientific mind that is a brilliant literary writer. So when you read him on Auschwitz, you're reading very”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read everyone. I've read several of them, but I mean, some of them were produced by his students, and some of them are translations and so on. But even when you strip away all the accretions, he still was a phenomenally productive scholar. And in many ways changed the field of Talmud studies, even though traditional Talmudists didn't like to think that, in part because they didn't like to think that, and in part because he was a notoriously difficult character. And I will leave it at that. But what Newsner did was something very simple, which he learned from his beginning in Renaissance studies, which is when it says Rabbi so-and-so told Rabbi so-and-so this, he's”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and Nusner was a very interesting character in a lot of ways. I think the brief biography, and some of you may not know, Jacob Neusner was the most productive and prolific scholar. Of the 20th century. Notice I did not say Jewish scholar. I said scholar. He wrote, he is credited with almost a thousand books, maybe more.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second is that chronicles it's not just that chronicles is, when I said it was made boring, what I meant was not that it's a dry textbook as opposed to a bodice ripper of a romance novel, but that it takes the very humanness of David and tries to sanctify him in a way that I think is untrue to David's character. It's the first time, for example, that the character of the Satan appears as an incider. He incites David to do something bad so that way you don't have to blame David that he did it. And in that sense, I think the Chronicles is a sort of, it's a sanitizing of the real history of David, even though it may be a more interesting political, I don't know, more interesting, a different political lens.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a beautiful explanation. I would say two things about it. One is that if you're writing this story of David and you're writing the story of David as opposed to, say, a political analysis of David's kingship, then you want the story as its most dramatic, full of blood and fury and sex and betrayal and so on. And that's in Samuel”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're probably right. I could imagine him as a king. First of all, he was the son of the king, so he was the natural heir. And as we know, that often happens that the natural heir may not be the fitting king. And also, yeah, I thought that Jonathan was the kind of person that people would be drawn to. But I would certainly, I mean, I think that that's probably a worthy caveat. He probably would have gotten killed in the kingship in a way that David was too... Too strong a personality and too crafty an operator to allow himself to be killed.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you can rely on. So here's, I would say next to his hubris there's a self-effacement and next to his charisma there's also receptivity. And yeah, in the complex of his personality, you can understand why people might look at him sort of to draw very different political figure the way that at some point I think it was Seward said about Lincoln, which is he's the best among us.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apparently I think, according to the standards of the time, having several wives was normative, and they weren't sequential, they were simultaneous. So as my friend Joseph Talushkin says, polygamy does exist in the Bible, it's just never successful. So, David does have many wives and very strained and interesting and complex relationships with women. David has the most complicated and most described relationships with women of any character in the Hebrew Bible. Those qualities that can be negative in David are to some extent positive. One of the things that draws David out of the charge of simple narcissism is that he really listens. He pays attention, he pays attention to women over and over again. He listens to what they say and changes himself because of it. And that's not a characteristic of men in the ancient world or the modern one.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The acceptance of that, that is the acceptance of God's gifts at unequal levels, is the way interpersonally brothers succeed in not killing each other. And in terms of the establishment of a political order, I think there the idea, at least in Samuel, what starts to happen is that there is an understood division between the political order and the religious order. That is, Samuel is the high priest and the leader, and he gets very upset when they want to have a king because he says, why am I not good enough? The reason is because you need a political order that is different. You need separation effectively of synagogue and state to some degree.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beauty in some ways, let me first give you my sarmonic answer. The beauty of the book of Genesis is all through Genesis brothers are fighting, even though they don't kill each other in the end. And then the very last set of brothers, the reason that they fight is because generally in one way the younger is preferred over the older and there are questions of birthright and so on. And then towards the very last scene, there are two brothers at Friam and Menasha. Menash is the older, Ephraim is the younger. Jacob blesses as the grandfather. He blesses the younger with the better blessing. And Menasha doesn't protest. He's actually kind of the silent hero of the book. So I would say that there is a degree of acceptance that is taught and unequal distribution of goods, if I can transgress, until your field for a moment.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, brother's not killing each other is always a provisional statement. I say this with two of my brothers in the audience. And I think that it's fair to say that we have not killed each other yet.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Installing his son in the kingship, and his son succeeded in building the temple which became for a long time the center point of Jewish religion. And he established Jerusalem as the capital, which if he had only done that would have been an extraordinary achievement. So if you want to attribute that to the fact that David listened to God and that the Psalms are in fact an expression of David's soul, I don't have a problem with that. But if you want to be a pragmatist about it and just look at results, so I would say that's how you judge the success of a leader, then and now.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we know in general, or how do we know in a book of the Bible? Because those could be two different. So I would say that it's true of the problems with the Bible is that you can always say how did the person know that God was speaking to them? Since I can't, as Queen Elizabeth said, cut windows into people's souls, I have no idea if God spoke to David. That's something you have to either take on faith or not. What I do know is that David was successful in unifying the kingdom, subduing rebellion, leaving a legacy of a lasting legacy where people believed that he would lead to ultimately to the Messiah. And also”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's yes. The sin there, I mean, that's actually a very problematic sin where he's told you didn't kill enough people and you didn't slaughter the king when you were supposed to. But the idea is that the way the Talmud puts it is that somebody who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind. And the idea that your enemies have to be dispatched or at least effectively subdued was something that Saul didn't have the stomach for. And I would say in the ancient world, maybe that would make you an unsuccessful king.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better king because he never committed well, no, because it's not clear that Saul committed idolatry, it's clear, pretty clear that David didn't. I would say, and also”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You cannot underestimate the value of charisma in a political leader. And David had tremendous charisma. So when the women of Israel went out into the streets and said, Saul has killed thousands, but David has killed tens of thousands. That was already a signal that Saul was going to fail and fall. So I think that on those two just survival and charisma alone, you would have to say that David was a more successful leader.”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, thank you for inviting me to. This grilling dialogue I do believe that David was a better king than Saul. The first, look, the first test of a king in the ancient world is what David did that is remarkable, and that is he died in his bed. That's rare among ancient and medieval kings, as you know, and so survival in and of itself is a test of merit, even not speaking about in divine eyes, but just in human eyes. Some way, Saul seemed to have lost the confidence of the people. And while no contemporary analogies are intended in anything that I say,”
2017-02-15 · Conversations with Tyler · Rabbi David Wolpe on Leadership, Religion, and Identity (Live at Sixth & I) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source