We Are What We Believe

Why do nations act the way they do? Why do some societies endure hardship while others collapse? Why do people continue to sacrifice, fight, build, and hope in ways that seem irrational to outsiders?

In this episode, Robert argues that human beings (and the cultures they create) cannot be understood through material interests alone. As he puts it, we are what we believe. Our deepest convictions about God, history, freedom, suffering, and man's purpose shape everything we do.

Drawing on examples from America, Israel, Russia, and Iran, he explores a simple but often forgotten truth: to understand the world, we must learn to see both the visible and invisible forces that move it.

Subscribe to Hebraica on Substack and join the conversation at hebraica.substack.com.

Transcript

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Yeah, I started uh Hebraica after a decade, more than a decade, working on issues uh related to Israel in the Near East. And I started it because I felt that the conversations that we are having on those topics are just too shallow. Hebraica is really just an attempt to place those conversations back in the context of the world that produced them. But I I I'm getting questions from people, and I'd like to address uh two of them here in this episode. The first one is uh some version of, well, sure, Hebraica seems like a like a nice project, but uh it's basically a spiritual or devotional or intellectual project. It doesn't strike me as very practical or or useful in the real world. The second question is how did you, me, someone who's spent all these years working in the real world, someone trained in law, someone who's spent all this time dealing with political matters and national security matters, how did you come to talking about Galileo and and the Psalms? What's what's the connection? So these are good questions. Uh and if you stay tuned, I I want to give you an answer. Uh welcome back to Hebraica. If you're enjoying these conversations, uh please, if you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast, uh, rate the show, review the show, really helps with visibility. And uh please share it with someone who will appreciate it. Newsflash, we also now have a Hebraica Substack, Hebraica.substack.com, and uh would be grateful if you subscribe to that as well. So I've given one reason why why I started this project, but but let me give another. The first one is that we need a deeper conversation about Israel and the region, this discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which, as far as I can tell, lives in a galaxy far, far away from all the other galaxies. Uh, a galaxy where the long history of Jews and Christians and Muslims really doesn't apply. And in this galaxy, everything is just a question of borders and settlements and refugees. And that that discourse is just very unsatisfying. But there is a second reason that I started Hebraica, and this reason actually may be more important. In all the work I've done, all the issues I've dealt with, the places I've traveled, people I've met, there's one lesson I've learned that gets stronger and stronger in my mind with every year. And that is that we are what we believe. Let me give you an example rather than try to define that to help you understand what I'm trying to say. Take me. I believe, as a matter of faith, that a first-century Jewish rabbi rose from the dead, ascended up into heaven, and will one day return to earth to judge the nations. I can't test that in a laboratory. I can't put it on a spreadsheet. And even when I say it out loud, it sounds, I know in the eye, the ears of many people, it just sounds absurd. And yet that belief shapes every aspect of how I see the world. It just does. Now, I'm not interested in getting in the the actual details of that statement. I'm only bringing it up to point out uh two things. One, uh, I'm biased, and you should sub consume Hebraic content uh with that bias in mind. I'm not I'm not neutral. But number two, nobody is neutral. You're not neutral. Everyone within the sound of my voice has some metaphysical commitment that shapes every aspect of how they live in the world. Some belief about the big picture and what it's all about. And this is a way in which a guy like Mike Huckabee and a girl like uh Greta Thunberg are actually very much cut from the same cloth. Now, on one hand, this idea that we are what we believe is not very profound, because for the most part, I think most of us understand that, at least intuitively. But on the other hand, what seems like a common sense observation is when it comes to the analysis, the professional uh analysis of political and international affairs, is largely ignored or abandoned. In the name of realism, many people, even those who are believers, interpret what's happening in the world based solely on material factors: money, guns, natural resources, oil, rare earth minerals. Now, let me say, as a Christian realist myself, I would attest that there is no other starting point for understanding the world today or any day than power. I know some Christians who, in the name of Christianity, reject any any interest in power and even reject power as, by definition, sinful. And these Christians completely subsume uh material reality, material interests beneath moral goods, beneath values. But values and interests are both tangled up in this world. And if we're being honest, moral systems are only possible when they are upheld, protected, enforced, defended by the power of the sword. I mean, try setting up a quiet villa in uh the Congo with no fences and no security, and uh you might be surprised at how quickly that whole thing collapses. Humans can't be human in the high sense of the term. We can't create societies that reflect deeper values unless humans themselves, human bodies, have enough food and water to survive and are safe from whatever is out there, be it beast or or man, that wants to kill them. Power is the central dynamic of international politics. But power alone is not enough to explain the world. There are no values without interests, but interests by themselves are insufficient to fully explain human behavior. It was first Moses and then Jesus who said, Lo al halekem levad do ych yeha dam. Man does not live by bread alone. And this is the one place, I think, where the Hebraic lens becomes extremely useful, extremely practical for interpreting world affairs. And if I'm going to drill a level deeper, I would say that there is a maxim, an implicit maxim, embedded in the biblical tradition. And it's that every man, every individual, indeed every culture, has a God. Human beings, for profound reasons that we don't fully grasp, are designed, or if we put it in historical terms, are prone to worship. It's it's a core idea in any Hebraic interpretation of history, be it Jewish or Christian. Now, when I say God, I mean God in the widest possible sense. God with a small g. A God can be a personal being as as it is in the biblical tradition, a being with a name, as it is in the traditions of other nations, the Moabites or the Ammonites, uh the Canaanites, also the Greeks and the Romans. Everyone, every culture put these beings, these divine beings, at the heart of what they believed about the universe. But a culture's god could also be a force or or a principle. It could be one's ancestors, could be uh uh meteorological uh phenomenon. It could be reason, human reason, it could be man himself, could be uh wealth, mammon, uh and of course it can be material power. A culture's god is its big truth, it's its highest standard, the ultimate thing before which its people bow and uh against which they they measure everything. You can tell a lot about a culture by its God, by what it worships, because the big truth is the thing at the center of the culture's view of the universe. It's the ultimate source of meaning for the people of that culture. Meaning defines identity. And of course, identity shapes behavior, so that no culture can rise above its idea of God. And what goes for cultures is also true for individuals, especially in our day, individuals who belong to a given culture may not necessarily buy into or believe in the old God and may have embraced other gods or created their own. So that you have cultures, maybe the bulk of which are still remembering the old God, and then a smattering of people within the culture, legitimate members of the culture, but who nevertheless, at least psychologically, are breaking away because they've embraced these other big truths. Over the years, I've sometimes been asked why I interpret the Near East or international affairs in the in the quirky way that I do. And uh this is this is the answer. It's because I see the world through this lens. I'm convinced that geopolitics and domestic politics, for that matter, uh are shaped, first of all, by power, by my material force, by interests. And I'm troubled when I meet these Christians who dismiss power, supposedly because Jesus didn't care about such things. I think it's actually the opposite of that. I think Jesus told us, yes, to be harmless as doves, but he also told us to be wise as serpents, harmless in the wielding of power, but I think also deeply aware of how power works and how it's actively shaping the world around us. We're not told to ignore power, to dismiss questions of national security, to shrug off the best way of uh waging war. We are told to avoid the use of power for sinful ends, and then that's different. So I think a lot about power. It's it's a core element of a lot of my work. But I also know that power alone is not enough. And I talked about that last week in my analysis of Benjamin Netanyahu's statement about Jesus and Genghis Khan. Global affairs are as much about power, however, as they are about belief, about the way that human beings and the human societies make decisions based on what they believe to be true, about what they worship, even when they don't know that they're worshiping. From belief come all of these other intangibles, things like honor, prestige, dignity, memory, a sense of national destiny. And these intangible things, these invisible things, are just as vital to nations and societies and cultures as the visible things like trade and defense tech and rare earths and all of that. The Hebraic tradition, unlike some other intellectual traditions, gets this. It gets this dual lens. It understands to finish Moses' original quote, Ki lo al halechem levaddo ychihie haadam, ki al kolmozza fi hashem ychihadam. Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live. And if it's not the Lord of the Bible, it is some Lord. And that is an essential element of this dual lens, this lens that sees both interests and values, both power and belief. And that lens allows us to understand the full picture of what's happening in the world around us. So let's just list off a few examples. You cannot understand Israel if you don't understand what its founders and what modern Israeli Jews believe about the world. And furthermore, if you don't zoom in one more layer to understand how different Israelis prioritize different gods, different big truths, which for them are the central organizing principle of politics and security and international diplomacy. If you don't understand those things, then there is no possible way that you can understand the behavior of Israeli leaders or the policy of the Israeli military. These things, though invisible, are essential to understanding this country and the people who live there. I mean, let's let's zoom out. You cannot possibly, in my view, understand events in the Islamic world, whether inside that world as a whole or between Muslim-majority societies or within Muslim majority societies, until you start examining the ways in which religious belief and competing beliefs, completing narratives of Islamic faith and destiny are affecting the calculus of Muslim actors, Muslim leaders in real time. It's not to say that every decision that a Muslim leader or a Jewish leader or any leader make are completely about these intangible factors. It's to say that minus an understanding of those intangible factors, you are missing a massive piece of how that leader views and engages the world. Would it have behooved us, the United States, to consider in this latest war on Iran, that the Shiite revisionists who are running this republic, this Islamic republic, embrace a very distinctive theology, a Shiite theology of what you might think of as supreme martyrdom and that defeat for such Shiites, that losing in a material sense actually might fuel the followers of Hussein and Ali rather than demoralize them. I think, yes, it would have behooved us to factor in the ways in which the beliefs of the people who lead that regime, and not an insignificant number of Iranians living throughout the country, actually affect the way it responded to the American-Israeli War. Zooming out further, would it would it behoove us, all of us, to listen carefully to President Vladimir Putin as he explains to Tucker Carlson in this now infamous interview that he did, I believe, last year, his rationale behind the invasion of Ukraine. Many analysts in the West were puzzled, just dumbfounded by the risks that Putin took in invading Ukraine and then and then escalated and saying it's it's just foolish on paper. What is he thinking? And yet Putin himself is explaining to us clearly what he believes about Russia and Ukraine, about Russia's orthodox Christian heritage, about its history, uh, the greater Rus, which ruled these lands, um, and obviated the whole idea of Ukraine, about Russia's destiny. Now, people mocked that interview and mocked Putin and dismissed all of his rhetoric as just uh a cynical cover for for his raw ambition. And uh look, there's it's part of it's true. I think few people understand the rules of power better than Vladimir Putin. But but even for Putin, power is not the end of the story. There are things in Putin's head, things in his heart, even, things that also live in the hearts of many Russians that profoundly affect his decision making. Alas, we we don't take him at his word. But I could talk just as easily about Turks and Kurds, about Europeans and Americans, about Americans and Chinese, liberals, progressives, nationalists, Marxists, Islamists, all of us are engaging the world from within some narrative structure, some overarching story that we tell ourselves about what it all means and where it's headed. Every conflict, every issue, every actor needs to be analyzed in terms of both hard power and soft power, in terms of both strategy and identity. We are more than the sum of our appetites. Our decisions, whether individual or collective, flow from our sense of the plot. So, contrary maybe to a popular view, a Hebraic approach to the world isn't just spiritual. It is spiritual, but it is equally material. It is grounded in an awareness of the world's duality and the God who stands above it, the God who transcends it. And that lens isn't just useful abroad in looking at international affairs, it also applies right here at home. In a moment when the traditional American story has begun to unravel and the old God has become less interesting for American citizens, understanding the different gods of the people who live in this country, the different big truths, is really the first step to understanding where we are today, understanding and interpreting these data points that are just flowing endlessly across our feeds. Whether abroad or at home, until you zoom out and see both dimensions, you see power and belief, you just won't be able to grasp what's going on. And that makes wise decision making extremely difficult. And of course, it's the same with individuals. Told you earlier, I'm I'm not just a pile of molecules. I believe things, invisible things, impossible things even. But those things are in many ways more essential to who I am than my decisions about clothing and shelter. Unfortunately, many people who are making big decisions about diplomacy and defense and the future of the world see the world as a big clash of billiard balls just bouncing around. The Hebraic corrective is to acknowledge the pool table, that is, international relations, but then zoom out one more layer to consider these flesh and blood humans who are playing the game. People ask me why any of this is useful. I think it's extremely useful. It is admittedly harder to reduce to a neat formula, but it's essential to good judgment in all matters, and especially in the practical matters of society and state. We are what we believe, and to ignore the stories that we tell about ourselves or that others tell about themselves, even when they sound absurd, is to fundamentally misunderstand where everything is heading. Again, I want to thank everybody for listening. Ask you to subscribe at Hebraica.substack.com. Of course, subscribe and uh rate review, share this podcast as well. I'd be most thankful. Um very uh glad to be getting more and more comments. This project works best when uh it's done in dialogue. So please drop me a line, Robert at robertwnicelson.com. Until next time, Hamon Brachot, many, many blessings to you and yours.