What is Your Why?

In the debut episode of 'Finding Our Why’, co-hosts Courtney Winter-Peters and Ittay Flescher introduce a new podcast from The Jewish Independent that shifts the conversation from communal survival and safety to the enduring joy and meaning of Jewish life. 

Broadcasting from the Gold Coast and Jerusalem, the co-hosts open up about their personal journeys; how growing up in the heart of the Melbourne Jewish community shaped their early understanding of Judaism, and how living on opposite sides of the world has challenged them to consciously choose what being Jewish means to them today. 

The episode sets the stage for a series of honest conversations full of questions about beliefs, traditions, and values that continue to shape Jewish identity in a changing world. 

Feedback on this episode is welcome at findingourwhy@thejewishindependent.com.au

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Finding Our Why, a new podcast for the Jewish Independent.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

My name is Courtney Winter Peters, and I'll be joining you on this journey and this discussion from my new home in the Gold Coast, Queensland. For those listening internationally and don't know the Gold Coast, think of it as Miami type vibes, a little bit holiday outside the Jewish community. It's not Melbourne, it's not Sydney, it's in sunny Queensland.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

And my name is Itai Flesher, and I'll be joining you from a small mountain in the Middle East called Jerusalem, which is where I've been living for the last eight years.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

You're calling in from a little bit more of a familiar location.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Yeah, I think more of our listeners may have heard of Jerusalem and the Gold Coast. This is sometimes called the city of Gold, but it has no beach. So it could do with a beach, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

The beach makes it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

So I think it's important just to say why we're having this conversation. So lately, and I speak for my experience in Australia in particular, any conversation around Judaism has felt really heavy and really loaded. And it feels like anytime I speak to friends within the community and also friends from outside the community, we're constantly justifying our existence. It's coming from a real focus on safety. There's a lot of discussion around anti-Semitism, security, and politics. And I think those conversations are really important. But I think what's missing is we've stopped talking about the beauty of our religion, the connection to culture and history and language. And I think that's something that's been lost along the way.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

I would agree with you. And I think, look, all those topics are really important about fighting anti-Semitism, about security, about politics. And in fact, the Jewish Independent has podcasts on all of those topics as well. But this one's a little bit different because rather than sort of sharing our thoughts on those pressing issues of the day, we're going to ask what is, I think, a bigger question, which is why does all of this matter? Why is it important to wake up in the morning and have all of these struggles and arguments? What are we actually fighting for? And through this podcast, I hope both you and I, and you, all of our listeners, will help find an answer to the question, which is a four-word question, which is very simple, which is simply, what is my why?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

And I think it's just important to note when we started talking about the idea for this, we discussed whether or not we'd invite experts or rabbis on to share their opinion and what their why is. But what we settled on is this is a conversation between us, between friends, between people navigating this space. We're not here to tell anyone what Judaism should look like to them or how they should practice, but just really creating a space for people to share their thoughts and reflect on what it is that keeps us going and that keeps us thriving and passionate about our history. So the podcast is really about one question: why? Why do we choose Jewish life and what does that look like today?

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Sounds like a fascinating conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

I'm looking forward to it. It's very much going to be a therapy session for me outside the Jewish community a little bit at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

For me too. I feel like we're recording therapy, but that's uh that's what all good podcasts do these days.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Thanks for being my friendly free therapist. I think it's a good place to kind of throw over to you and you can share your story and what brings you here today. You were a teacher in Australia for 15 years, then you packed up your life and you moved to that mountain you mentioned in the Judean Desert. You're a journalist, you're an author, you're a peace educator with Seeds of Peace. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what brings you here today.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Thank you. So throughout my whole life, always been, I guess, a little bit different from people around me. And I often think about why things are the way they are. Remember, even as a child, I'd often just sit in the car with my dad and just ask him, like, why are the road rules the way they are? What why do we, why does school look the way it is? Why is it so many hours a day? Like, I just wanted to understand how things work. And and back then, I'm gonna show my age because there was no internet. I used this thing called an encyclopedia for our younger listeners. It's sort of like Wikipedia, but a book. And it was like 30 volumes, and people used to come door to door and sell them. And I remember as a child, I used to sit and read the encyclopedia because I wanted to understand how electricity works and how life is formed and you know what's going on in Yugoslavia, which, you know, that entry is a bit out of date these days. And yeah, I've just always had this curiosity, and then various decisions happened in my life that led me to be a teacher. I was a teacher in in Australia. I taught at the Adas Israel School, which is a Haredi or ultra-Orthodox school in Melbourne. I taught English and IT there, which is two very difficult subjects to teach at Adidas. And then I moved to Bialik and then King David and then uh Mount Scopus. And through all of those 15 years that I taught high school from year seven to 12, teaching Jewish studies, Holocaust education, religion, and society, I read thousands of essays and I had thousands of conversations with teenagers who were trying to work out what their purpose is in life and how they make meaning of both being a teenager, being a Jew, being a boy, being a girl, transitioning all those things that might happen in the life of a teenager. And as you help people answer those questions, you ask them for yourselves. And then eventually in 2018, my wife Carmen and I, who was also a teacher at Scopus, we decided that we needed to sort of keep asking this question in a new place. And we both had long service leave in in 2018. And so we decided to move to Jerusalem initially for two years just to sort of try it out and have an adventure with our kids and see what it would be like. And long story short, because I've written a whole book about this, I won't go into it now, but we uh we decided to stay here because we found meaning in Jerusalem and that's where we are today.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Beautiful, beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

So, Courtney, your story is a bit similar to my story in that you also went to the same school that I did. We were both Scopus graduates, and you ended up in a very different place. Tell me how you got to be where you are today.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

It's really interesting listening to your story and when you say that you were a little bit different and all the deep thinking that you did. Even though we were growing up in the same place and very engaged in similar places, I think my journey was more. I took my experience and my Jewish identity for granted. Looking back now, and when I think about it in hindsight, I know that all my decisions have been, there has been a question around identity and belonging and meaning, and perhaps an unconscious search for it. I wasn't aware of it at the time, and it's something I'm coming to now. So all four of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. So being Jewish never really felt like a question to me. It wasn't a choice, it was a responsibility. Their experiences shaped my identity. All the books I read growing up were about the Holocaust. So I think my why became closely tied to survival. They survived so that we might thrive. That was very much my philosophy. I grew up in what I'd call a very quintessential Melbourne Jewish life. I lived in Corfield, and again, for those that don't know Melbourne Jewish life, Corfield is the hub, the center, the everything.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Did you call it the ghetto or the bagel belt?

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Uh, a little bit of both. But that sums it up completely. It was the everything. I went to a Jewish day school, I went to a Jewish youth movement, I even went to shul every week on Shabbat until I turned Bat Mitzvah and stopped going because I couldn't sit with my dad. My family had a kosher home. We didn't drive on Yomtov. I think I was seen by my friends as being very religious because it just wasn't the norm at like for scopus students, that was my cohort, but I would call myself traditional. So Judaism wasn't anything separate from my life, it was just woven woven through everything. And then work, as you mentioned. So after traveling for a year after school, and I didn't go to Israel at the time because it was there was an interfada, it was too dangerous. I went traveling, I volunteered in Kenya, I went to London, I did a I did some different things. When I came back and I graduated as a lawyer, I started in private practice, I spent time in planning and environment, and then I moved into the community legal sector. And I think that move was certainly inspired by my grandparents and their journey, by that recognition and understanding of they survived so that we might thrive and we were thriving. So what can we do for others? In those organizations, I was often the only Jewish person. So I would really like to speak up about my Judaism a lot. I was always leaving on time to get to dinner on a Friday night. I just was loud and proud. I was I was very clearly Jewish. On the side, I was always volunteering at Jewish organizations. I was, I think I was always just trying to find my way of connecting to community and how could I give back and what would that look like? Then I was offered the role of CEO at Stand Up. Stand Up is a Melbourne and Sydney-based Jewish not-for-profit focused on mutual allyship and mobilizing the Jewish community to support others, with a focus on partnering with First Nations and refugee communities. And for me, it was this perfect alignment of Jewish values and social justice.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

It was a dream job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Dream job. I thought I had like found my path. And it's really interesting because I think that work expanded my way of thinking in a really profound way. From spending time with other communities, I became really aware about how insular my experience had been and how deeply protected I was by community. And I say that in a positive way. Like we really rally around each other. We really got this incredible community. So by 2025, after being at stand-up for almost four years, I was exhausted. I'd spent years immersed in conversations around identity and social cohesion and racism and anti-Semitism and belonging. Even pre-October 7, you know, there was this lack of separation between me and the work. When your values are so tied in, it becomes everything you talk about. So I reached a point where I just needed a break. Not from Judaism, but from the, you know, just from work, from life. So we took the kids out of school and we went traveling, we did a half lap of Australia for four months. I wouldn't say it's an unusual thing in Australia to do. It's a bit of a rite of passage, but maybe unique in the Jewish community to live in a tent for four months.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

And just for those of our international licenors, Australia is a very big country. So when you say do a lap of Australia, we're talking about several thousand kilometres you covered, I imagine.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

We drove 15,000 kilometres in four months. Yeah. You you could drive a day. You could drive four or five hundred kilometers in a day and barely see anyone.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

When you were on the road and you're driving for hours and hours and not seeing anyone except, you know, kangaroos, what's going through your mind? Are you listening to a podcast? Or are you just like letting the wind flow in your hair? Like, what was that experience like?

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Honestly, what was going through my mind a lot, particularly at the beginning, was how am I going to keep the kids happy? When are we going to feed them? What if we break down? And we did break down, I should say, we did break down, but that was okay. But it was also a switch off. We did Shabbat together, but it was just a switch off and a real presence with family. What mattered was our day-to-day. And it wasn't thinking beyond that. We weren't thinking about where we were going to be next week. We were just thinking about what we needed to do that day, which is a real gift.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

It's so true. I mean, I feel like in my life, so much of my life is planning, like making appointments, making emails, making medical appointments, planning an event I'm organizing or speaking at or whatever. And I feel like half my life is admin, you know, and then doing your taxes and all of that. And yeah, so just that ability to just be on the road and just be thinking about now rather than the future must have been a huge gift.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Huge gift. And I think about it a lot. You know, we just did what worked for us. We didn't have to do things for others. We didn't have calendars. I think at one point I kind of started making notes of roughly where we wanted to be on a certain date. But we would wake up in the morning and just decide what worked for us. You know, I've got I was traveling with my husband and three kids. Like, what did we want to do that day? Which was a real shift from being a leader of a Jewish communal organization where you feel everything is for others. And it was a pleasure, but everything was for others and everything was seen and noticed by others. At the end of that trip, we weren't ready to go back to Melbourne. I think we were really enjoying being out of our comfort zone. And I think I particularly wanted a little bit more quiet to just that time to just reflect a little bit more on what we wanted our lives to look like. So, you know, I wasn't quite ready to jump straight back into organized community life. But honestly, that's also been the hardest part and the biggest this push-pull for me. This like it's really nice being away from all of communal life, but it's also really hard. You know, Gold Coast is a very different Jewish community. There's not easy access to a shul. I think we're 25 minutes from the closest shul. If you want to get kosher food, you've got to arrange with the shul. They're open twice a week, or you can order it from Melbourne and it will be here maybe within a few weeks. There's not a Jewish day school, it's really different. So to be sitting down now with you, what I've realized is that the why is becoming a really big part of my life at the moment. How I think, how I reflect what I want our house to look like and what I want Judaism to look like in our life.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

I totally resonate with that. And even though, you know, I ended up in Jerusalem, I actually considered when I had long service leave moving to Byron Bay. For those that don't know, it's a place you go into in Australia to lose your virginity, smoke marijuana, and try surfing. But anyway, I think is that still what happens in Byron Bay? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Uh I think so. I think it's a bit fancier. And now, like Chris Hemsworth lives there and Matt Damon visits.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Okay. So buy expensive meals as well. So anyway, yeah, I thought of moving to Byron Bay and then uh or Mullum Bimbi or you know, somewhere like that, but I ended up in a place that's not similar to that at all in Jerusalem. But yeah, I I totally resonate with the idea of doing a stressful job and then finding something new to do. And definitely it makes you ask that why question a lot. I'll share just a Melbourne story that I sort of think about a lot when I think of the question of why. So Yom Kippur is a day that I think for many Melbourne, Sydney, Gold Coast Jews, is the one day you go to synagogue. And it's a day that you often get dressed up, and whether you believe in God or not, or believe in Jewish rituals or prayer, or all those things. It's a day that everyone takes very seriously. And myself growing up in Mount Scopus, and I was also the head of an Orthodox uh Jewish youth movement called Hinaini, which greatly influenced my life. So Yom Kippur for me was like the grand final. It's the biggest event in the Jewish calendar. Ironically, it would often fall on or near Grand Final Day for those that follow Australian rules football.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Um as a Sakilda supporter, it's the Ah right. The only grand final they've ever won was on Yom Kippur.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

So that's a sign. Okay, so we need to get them into another one. That will take a while. Yeah, so I used to on Yom Kippur, are you still really because I actually speak Hebrew? I don't just read the Siddur as a random collection of words. I actually understand what every word means. And for those that that do understand Hebrew, you'll you'll know that when you do the prayers on Yom Kippur, 90% of what you're saying is adjectives about how wonderful God is. And it's beautiful poetry and it's said in a very creative and emotive way, but that's essentially the gist of the prayer. It's praising God's greatness and then obviously humbling yourself before this great power and asking for forgiveness for the misdeeds that you may have done in the past year. And then various things happened in my life, and I stopped believing in God. I don't stop believing in Judaism, but I think that the belief of, you know, as Nick Cave talks about, I used to believe in an interventionist God, but I stopped believing that God intervenes in the world. And so prayer became really difficult for me. But I still wanted Yom Kippur. I still wanted that feeling of song in there. But I just couldn't go to a synagogue and say all those adjectives about how wonderful this thing was that I didn't know I really believed in. So I started a new habit, which I started from probably the age of 25 till 35, which is I went to shul every year on Yom Kippur to Shri Racharasha. And instead of reading the Mahzor, I read a book by Viktor Frankel called Man's Search for Meaning. And it's a book about a Holocaust survivor. It was actually written in 1945. The whole book was written in nine days after he survived the Holocaust, which is mind-blowing to write a book in nine days in 1945. And it's got two parts. The first part is a testimony of how he survived and what he went through in the concentration camps. And the second half is about logotherapy. It's a kind of a therapy that he developed about how to answer life's big questions. But before I I sort of jump into what I've learned from reading that book for 10 years on Yom Kippur, I want to ask you what's your memories from Yom Kippur growing up and sitting in synagogue in Melbourne.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Very similar to you, very much.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Similar to you, I also, after going to Xil Kildeshul and Corfield Schul, and obviously Shira that I was very involved with, I also started going to Kolano and also connected a lot more. I didn't feel like I needed to read a book at Kolano because it's much shorter and it's more singing, and sometimes I was even playing guitar there. And so I I connected more to that song, but I I felt that at Koleno I wasn't really asking myself hard questions. I was like enjoying the experience, but I wasn't in suffering, I wasn't bored. There's something really beautiful about I don't mean to diss Orthodox Judaism here, but I think a lot of Orthodox Jewish practices are very boring. But I actually think that's a really good thing because there's something about there's long periods of silences in Orthodox Phila that you don't have in a colleague, and there's long periods of blessings or like Torah reading or repetition of something that you said 10 minutes ago. And in that act of being bored, you think. And I often feel like as a person that's very addicted to my phone, I don't have many moments in my life where I think. And so there was something about being in an Orthodox school, which I even when I was going to Colleen, I would still sort of go to a core field to Kildeshira, you know, something on the other parts of the day when it wasn't on, because I I feel like it's good to have moments when you just have time to think, which brings me back to what I was doing and I was thinking or reading, which was this book Man Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. So without and I'm taking a long way from being a psychologist, but from what I understand, there's three dominant schools in psychology about what causes suffering or neurosis in the world. And the first is Sigmund Freund, and he said that suffering or neurosis is caused by unconscious desires, and if you can become aware of your unconscious desires, you can treat that. And then there was Adler who said that neurosis is caused by increased feelings of inferiority. And finally there's Viktor Frankel who said that neurosis or suffering is caused by a failure to find meaning. And he bases his sort of philosophy on the world on Frederick Nietzsche, who said he who has a why to live can bear almost anyhow. And uh in his book, there's a there's many, many stories about how when he was in concentration camps, he sort of became the camp psychologist, which is you know not a position that anyone appointed him to be. But a lot of people wanted to know, you know, why should I wake up in the morning when all I see is death and suffering and hunger and pain and slave labor around me like Why should I do anything? And he would help people find meaning. And then that later on, he would treat, you know, clients for the rest of his life when he lived in the US. And uh there's a story he tells there, which I found very moving, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this as well, Courtney. About he's treating his friend who's a doctor, and his doctor is in great pain because his wife has died two years ago, and he just he can't he can't get up in the morning because he's just so deep in grief at the loss of his wife. And Victor Frankel says to him, What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first and your wife would have had to survive you? And then the doctor immediately responds to the scenario and says, Oh, for her, this would have been terrible, how she would have suffered. And then Frankel offers the doctor a new lens to view his grief, and he says, You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering, to be sure at the price that now you have to mourn her. And then upon hearing this, the doctor said, No more. And he silently shook Frankel's hand and calmly walked out of the office. So Frankel then considers this doctor cured. Well, not cured necessarily, but you know, not in suffering anymore. And then Frankel concludes the story with this insight, and he says, In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as a meaning of a sacrifice. So what he's saying there is, and I guess what I take from this is everyone in life endures suffering, loss, pain. We lose loved ones from war, from terrorism, from cancer, from illness, from traffic accidents. There's so many ways to experience suffering, financial loss, grief, like all these things that happen in life. And the question of how that's going to affect you is whether you can find meaning in that suffering. And in this case, this doctor found meaning from the fact that instead of his wife having to mourn him, which he would have thought would be unbearable, he was mourning his wife, but he found meaning in that. Now it's a pretty dark story, but that's how Frankel was betreating people in the camps and later on in his life.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

It's a really powerful story, and it brings up it brings up a few things for me. I think the first thing that it makes me think about is all the rituals and customs we do have in Judaism to guide us through these things, right? And especially around you you said something about suffering ending. Like he thought he was cured and his suffering had ended. And I just like suffering, it doesn't end, and Judaism doesn't ask us to make it end. There's the, you know, someone dies, the funeral happens quickly, but then there's Shiva and Shloshim, and yeah. And you know, every year we revisit that, right? Every year there's you light a candle and you say Yizko. And I think having these things around grief and suffering really guide us and really make us sit in it to reflect, right? We can't just move on, we have to learn from it, we have to carry it with us. But then there's this other side of me, this feeling of, you know, of course in Judaism we come back to suffering. You know, everything seems to come back to trauma, and my journey certainly has. My journey is and my identity is so formed by the trauma of those before us. And I just wonder do we over-associate Jewish meaning and our why with pain and survival?

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Look, you know, when we were making the Google Doc for this podcast, we actually called episode two oi versus joy, which specifically deals with that question. And so I'm sure in episode two I'll I'll answer it a bit more. But I guess just for episode one, I just want to sit with that suffering. Yeah. Um, because I live in a country that there's constantly war and violence and loss, and so many people here have PTSD. It's not even PTSD because it's not proposed to anything, it's just a consequence of the way life is here, is incredibly stressful and there's grief and sudden loss happens all the time, as it happens to our Palestinian neighbours as well. And so we we in Jerusalem are constantly living life to the fullest, knowing that life can end at any moment. And so I think that shapes why when I think of meaning, I always think of what's the antidote to suffering and loss and grief. But yes, I would much rather have a a Judaism that's based on joy rather than oy. But I think that's where I am, and I think I think a story also that I've been carrying a lot over the past two and a half years since October 7th is the story of Rachel Goldberg-Poland, who my wife at Pradesh worked with her before October 7th. Pardess is a is a Jewish learning institute there where Rachel was like a counsellor helping students on this Gap Year programme, and her son Hirsch was stolen from the Nova Party on the morning of October 7th. And I would imagine many of our listeners are familiar with his story, but Hirsch lived a very, you know, in the same neighborhood as I did, in the same sort of Anglo community as I did. He supported the same football team that I do, and he had a great curiosity for life and travel and understanding the world. And so I think more than any other hostage that was taken on that day, I think I connected to his story maybe a lot more than many others. And and also in my neighborhood specifically, you can't walk more than 200 metres with saying a Hirsch sticker, a Hirsch poster, a Hirsch banner, because so many people in this neighborhood knew him and Hapoel Jerusalem, the football team that that he goes to with its iconic uh red and black colours. And in Australia was an Essenden supporter, so you know it's even the same colours. And I think something that I've been thinking about a lot is on the two-year anniversary of October 7th, Rachel Goldberg Poland came and spoke at my daughter's school, Boya, and they invited the parents to come and hear her speak. And so she told the story of what the last two years have been like, especially after Hirsch was murdered uh with a beautiful six. And most of the talk was about finding meaning. And at the end of the talk, she gave out stickers to all the students, and the sticker is a picture of Hirsch, and I've got it on my fridge, and he's sitting wearing sort of like a cool black t-shirt, like he's just come back from a holiday, and it's just got four words, and it's just what is your why? And uh she gave the sticker to the kids because she wanted all of the kids to just try and spend time thinking about this gift of life. What do you want to do with that? And it's a question I think about more and more because I used to think I have a simple answer to that. You know, I work in a peace-building organization, I facilitate dialogue, I I teach about how Israelis and Palestinians can share this land together. And so if people would ask me, what's my why? I'd say my why is to help bring peace. But that's not working very well. I don't know when exactly this podcast is going to be released, but I imagine that when it does come out, there probably will not be peace in the Middle East. And that doesn't mean I think my work is a waste of time, but it does make me ask questions of that I devote so much time to try and build peace and build understanding between Israelis and Palestinians and also between Jews of different political opinions. And I try and do that in my writing and in my speaking, but I have moments of success and I also have a lot of moments of failures, and that's why this why question keeps coming up for me.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Yeah, I think we need I need to just take a moment for Rachel and everything she says and does as a mother, as a human, just watching her journey, and you know, I haven't met her, but you know, you just feel like you can feel her every word, and seeing how many people are just resonating with her, and that you can come through that and still feel so closely connected to your religion and your history and your culture, and that is what is giving her strength. You know, sometimes there's this bit of this like like survivor guilt, right? This, oh, I'm so lucky to make these decisions that I can to live in the Gold Coast and do all these things so so freely and without the weight of the world on me. So I think for me, when I talk about my why, it's a whole new question for me. And it's really interesting being outside of the Jewish community and really having to find to find what that looks like. And listening to you talk and reflecting on my own story, I think if I had to name one idea that has shaped me, it would probably be a really simple one, le Dorvador. So, you know, we say every every Pesach, we say Mechol Dorvador, so from every generation to generation, it's this responsibility to carry stories forward. And I hear that in the way Rachel's sharing Herschel's story and keeping his memory alive, but it's that responsibility that to remember to bear witness that's shaped the work I do. You know, my grandparents' survival taught me that stories matter and that silence, you know, silence can erase, but storytelling can rebuild. So for me, that's kind of where my why comes back to at the moment, and being away from community is forcing me to be much more intentional. You know, I have to really think about what I believe, what I want to carry forward and why my kids are not getting Jewish education from a school right now. So it has to come from me and our home. As I said, there's not automatic access to Jewish life and culture here on the Gold Coast. So now Judaism is an active choice, and I think what an honor, what a joy for me to be able to go through this journey and really find the parts that I love and spark joy. So it's something I have to choose consciously every day. But um, you know, this podcast and this conversation couldn't have come at a better time to be able to explore that and give space to people who are hopefully listening that are going through this as well. We, you know, we're constantly being reminded about the bad and the hard and the scary stuff about our religion, but what's going to ground us?

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Yeah. So it sounds like we're both having the same midlife crisis.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

We've been calling it a midlife awakening in our house. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

I like that, a midlife awakening. So with that, hopefully we've wet your appetite a little bit for what this podcast is about. So as we conclude episode one, can you tell us a little bit, Corney, about what can we expect in the upcoming episodes?

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Upcoming episodes will be more conversations between the two of us, just exploring. Topics will include, as Itai said, oi versus joy, why learn Jewish, why practice Judaism, why eat Jewish, why argue Jewish, why love Jewish, why love a Jewish homeland, why arts, and then what's your why?

SPEAKER_01 33:32

So we're very much looking forward to you joining us on the journey ahead. And we'd like to really thank Donnie Janks, who created the intro music for this podcast, and our wonderful editor, Nick King. And especially a big thank you to the Jewish Independent, our editor Deborah Stone, and all the team that have had faith in us to give birth to this new podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback on the episode. We've created a dedicated email address, which is finding our why at the Jewishindependent.com.au, and you can email us questions, thoughts, comments, anything you'd like us to talk about, and we'd love to hear from you. And the last person I want to thank is Courtney. I know this was sometimes not an easy thing to do together, and I really wanted to thank you for your courage and bravery in sharing and coming along with this journey with me on my midlife awakening.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

Maybe we should call it midlife awakening. But thank you, and I'm really looking forward to having this conversation and for bringing thought and care and all your knowledge. Let's do it.