Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason; 104; Anne Provoost and David Grossman

In this edition of Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason, if your God is going to drown the world, if your God is going to bring a flood, then why don't you pick a different God? Anna provost talks about the dilemma of worshiping a God who plays favorites. Don't we see people like that around us? Don't we see people who are repeatedly would make the wrong choices, who at the very points in which they need to be salvaged, they will do the wrong step. David Grossman talks about the tragic end of a giant whose life is confiscated by God. That's in this edition of Faith and Reason.

Major funding is provided by the Herb Alpert Foundation and by our sole corporate funder, Mutual of America, designing customized, individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. Hello, I'm Bill Moyers. For thousands of years now, the stories of the Bible have invited a wide range of interpretation and analysis. There's a reason for it, summed up by Israel's David Grossman recently, when over a hundred writers from around the world came to New York to talk about faith and reason. Sometimes we can study one verse of the Bible for half a year and we do not consume it. You cannot consume it. It's endless. It's really an ocean. David Grossman was here to discuss his new novel about the biblical giant Samson. On the panel with him was Belgium's prize-winning writer of children's books on a provost.

You can tell me a story that really happened and could happen and it would be useful for me because maybe you would teach me how I can cope with grief. But what you're doing in a fairytale and what you're doing in mid is you're telling stories that can't even happen. What do I buy for that when I have a crisis? On a provost has written several provocative novels for young people, that treating such subjects as diverse as sexual abuse, guilt, penance and mercy, the seductive power of fascism, and in her latest, the story of Noah and the Ark during the great flood of Genesis. It's theme. What happens when the boat is full? On a provost, if you had been living when God told Noah to build an ark, to save a chosen few from a terrible impending flood, and you learn that your name was not on the passenger list that God intended to drown you, would you choose another God?

I certainly would. And that's really what the story that I wrote is about. It's about this whole question of, you know, what happens to you if that's your verdict, if that's your future, if that's what God is planning with you. It's hard to worship a God who plays favorites unless you are on the invitation list, right? Well, of course, we are talking here about an old Testament God, and I'm very interested in that God. How did you get interested? Well, I used to live in the United States for a while, and back then, already, I was collecting children's books because I, you know, deep down, I'm a mom, you know, before I had children, I have three children. Before I had children, I was already collecting their books, you know. And there's a wonderful book that I'm sure many people here in the United States will know or remember. It's a picture book by Peter Speer, and it only has pictures, but it's the story of Noah and Yark.

It's an old book. And what you see at some point is you see the animals embark, and then you'll see a bunch of animals sitting outside in one frame, and then in the next frame, in the next picture, you'll see they're all, you know, they all have wet feet. And in the next picture, you'll only see the trunk of the animal, of the elephant right above water level, and the nostrils of the giraffe. And in the next picture, all you see is water. And that was really, really confrontational to me, and that's really what made the twist in my head thinking, you know, let's look at this story from the other side, because it's such an interesting story. Well, your account looks at the story of Noah and the Ark from the flood up, from the victims, from the drowning people. The people not only are. From the people in the shadow. The people in the shadow of the Ark. The original story and the Old Testament looks at it from God's angle, and Noah's experience.

It is the old story of the, you know, it always depends if you're going to report on a battle. You can always tell it from the side of the winners and of the losers. I'm not saying that in my book, I change the winners and the losers, but I change a perspective. And it's always very useful, because even when we talk about history and terms of war and peace, what we say is completely colored by who turned out to be the winner. I mean, how we have spoken about the Germans, if the Germans had conquered us all, and we would have been much more oblivious, and our attitude would have been completely different. But of course, I will talk to people all the time who will say, this is my childhood story. You know, you're taking it away from me, because I always saw it as a very positive, gentle, optimistic story. And I never thought of the people who were left behind, and I don't want to think about them, because it's very confrontational.

But that, of course, is what, as an author, you want to do. Did you ever read the novel Schindler's List? I saw the movie. I saw the movie. I saw the movie. Do you know that the author, the fellow who wrote that, Thomas Kinley, he first called, he called his first draft Schindler's Ark, because he thought that Ark was such a great metaphor for what Schindler himself did in Nazi Germany, of saving 800, 900,000 Jews from doom. Yeah, but there again, you would have a very strong sense of saving the people who are innocent. Well, I think the story of Noah and the Ark is really saving the people who are good and thus condemning all the others. Which, to me, is a very different matter, and that's what, you know, what really interested me in this story. For me looking at that story, I don't necessarily think that this is a saving, because the flood is coming, the order, you know,

the idea of the flood is coming from that God. He is choosing. And that's, you know, he's not choosing because he wants to save the people for an evil that he doesn't have any power over. It's his evil, which is the flood. And that's a gold mine for an author. At first you think he's saving a good man from a calamity, then you realize he's saving Noah from a good God who is also a bad God. This God is one and the same, good and bad. Right. And this God is destroying his own creation. So you wonder, you know, why do you create something that will turn out to be this bad? And then you're going to punish them for it. Maybe there's something wrong in the making. Not only that, but he chooses Noah who we thought was a good man, but the moment the flood is over and Noah comes off of the ark,

gets drunk, abuses his grandson. Exactly. I mean, twice in a row God has messed up. Right. Doesn't say much for intelligent design, does he? See, I think that's the whole power of this story. Is that, you know, you think at first sight that this is a black and white story. And then it turns out that the good guy has a human character and is diverse and human and a psychological mess, you know. And that's where the storytellers come in and want to know more about this man. Because that's exactly what's happening in this story. Is that you don't get away with interpreting it as a good against the bad story. It's more complicated than that. What conclusion did you reach from your research about what God means when God says I will save the righteous? Who is righteous? What is righteousness? I'm suspicious towards any group of people saying that they were chosen.

Because throughout history, and I'm not only looking at the Jewish historic line, but every people at some point probably has said this. They've said this group of people is to chosen. Now what strikes me is that never ever in history do you have a group of people that says, oh, here's us. But that group there, these other people, they are chosen. So whenever you have a proclamation of being chosen, it's always a self-defining process. It's always the people who are chosen, who say they are chosen. They never say that about the other, they always say that about themselves. If you're going to do that as a group, if you're going to say I'm chosen, it loads you with a very heavy burden.

And the story, once the people are on the ship, is very much about the feeling of guilt that you get by saying we are superior. Did you write this story as a mother? A mother of three children because the children, I've often thought of the children who died in the Great Flood, that they were rather righteous or unrighteous. And yet they perish by the tens of thousands if you want to believe this story. They play an important role in the book where you know they're drowning and some of them, I'm describing them. They're wearing beautiful gowns because they were loved by their parents. And you know, no parent will ever think I have a bad child, it deserves to drown. It's an old question. Why must the innocent die? We've all heard the cry. Why did the bullet get my buddy and not me? Why was I the only one to walk away from the crash? Why did cancer take my brother? And not me. I mean, this is one of the oldest questions in the human experience.

I would even go for take this step further and I would think that this moment that you're describing in life which I call the fatal instant. The fatal? The fatal instant in life. The moment something radically changes. Where it changes forever and there's an element of irreversibility where you cannot go back in time. You know, it's the moments in life you experience where you say, I wish I could turn back time. I wish I could change the, what do you call it, the fingers of the clock? Or the hands of the clock? The hands of the fingers, I call it. It's alright. I think everybody at some point in his life experiences that. And of course, the most ultimate moment in your life that this happens to you is your own death. But then you're not going to contemplate about it anymore. But it happens before you're dead.

It happens when something happens to your children. It happens in all the examples that you give the cancer that's right to your brother. I would think that that's not only the crucial question in human life, but it's very much the definition of what literature is about. It's about how this comes about, how this happens to the character, whoever that is in the book, and then how this character copes with it. When I write books about gods or authors who may think they're the same, changing time and playing with time, that may be a very interesting exercise for my brain. But what will I do with that knowledge the day my fatal instant has arrived? What will I do with these stories if my child crosses the street and it dies in front of me? And I want to turn back the time and I can't. Because this whole philosophy or this whole thinking about literature as it helps us,

it makes it richer, it enforces us, it empowers us, it emancipates us for the big moments in life. Does it? What do I buy? The moment something really bad happens to me for these stories? I've given this a lot of thought because it seems so easy. It seems so easy for a writer to do what is impossible. You have so many situations, especially in children's movies, which I find pretty, worries me. A bunch of people will be standing around the person and this person is dead and they'll be mourning. And then suddenly you will hear a cuff. And then the eyes will open and it appears that the person wasn't dead. So what this filmmaker, the movie maker is doing is he's reversing time.

Somebody is dead and then the next second turned out to be a fake. He's alive, happy ending. Rainbow. Rainbow. We can do that in stories. But what do we buy for it? When in real life, we experience that nobody starts coughing. Nobody opens his eyes. People are really dead. And I also want to know what this does to our children. You know, watching these movies over and over again where people always nearly die. But they never do for real. But don't you think people are looking for infiction and in movies? What many people are looking for in religion? To slip free from time. To become like God. Time less. Doesn't that explain the hunger for God as well as the hunger to read, to escape? The body and time.

There's definitely a big parallel between those two. And definitely people are looking for the same things in religion as they are in literature. I'm pretty convinced of that. Then again, I think we have to be aware of that. I wouldn't dream of wanting to define my art as a way of escapism, a way of getting away of the reality that we really, you know, have to admit that we can't quite cope with. In that sense, I would think that religion or faith also has to reflect upon itself and wonder, you know, what is it we're looking for? We don't want religion to be a kind of escapism. We want it to be more than that, right? We wouldn't want to establish a whole philosophy around something that is really trying to get away from reality. But then my question would be, why do you have to move that outside of yourself? Move it inside of yourself.

And it will be there. You can find it there. It doesn't need to be there. You can find what? The mystic, the religious experience. The experience that I would call transcendence. The feeling that you can have in your fatal instant, you don't necessarily have it. But you can have it if you want. That your fatal moment in life, the moment that you feel everything is turning and twisting, does not necessarily have to be a bleak empty hole. But it also can give you that moment of power or insight that even though something terribly is happening to you at that moment, you can, and you will be able to do that maybe through literature or religion, you can feel related with all the other people in history and all the people in the future

that have come through the same thing as you did. And I think that's exactly what people are looking for in religion. This support, this feeling of, I'm carried by others who went through this. There are so many questions come to one when reading in the shadow of the art, but there was one question that holds me in particular. I mean, can you trust a God who doesn't get it right? That's one of the questions, of course, that Rihanna, she's the main character in the book, is asking. She says, well, if your God is going to drown the world, if your God is going to bring a flood, then why don't you pick a different God? So to me, that is the question I want to ask, why would you trust a God that at this moment doesn't come back to give us the right book? He's given the Jewish people a book, and he's given the Christians a book,

and he's giving the Muslims a book. And there's big similarities between his books, but there's also contradictions. I would think that he needs to come back and create clarity, and he shouldn't let us fight over who's right, he shouldn't make it clear. So my personal answer to your question should we trust? A God who doesn't get it right, you wouldn't. I wouldn't. I would think if this God isn't in me, because for me, if you ask me, does God exist, I will say, of course he does, he doesn't all these, in the heads of all these people who believe in him. There's a great essayist in Belgium who wrote a wonderful essay on the parallel between art, love, and faith, or religious faith, in a sense that she points out that the love that I feel for my man, you know, for my favorite, my beloved,

is there, it exists, nobody will doubt it, but nobody else sees it, because I'm the only one in love with him. To me, religion follows the same pattern in the sense that God is there, because he's there for the people that keep him in their heads, and they keep him as a sort of lantern to follow, to find the way. But for me personally, I feel he has to stay there, he has to stay in those heads, because if people are going to bring him outside their heads and say, well, I'm here and he's there, and that's what he's asking me to do, because it's in his box, or it, then the ethical responsibility that I should feel is there, it's no longer here. And that's risky, because I can push the ethical responsibility away from me.

If he's going to stay in here, I will know that he's me, he's in me, and I will always remain responsible. Is there no God in your head? I think there is, but you know, very often when I speak to people who believe in God, and I say what I believe, the relation is so close that I think we all believe. We only define it differently. What I believe in is the strength that it can come from an ethical conscience, and that we should all nourish and try to educate, and that we should try to have. And when I define that for myself, it's probably going to come very close to the definition that most people who believe in God have of their religion, of their religious beliefs. So we're very linked only I don't call it God, but it's the same concept.

I call it ethics. I think there's a genius in your creation of the young girl in your book, whom you have stowed away. One of Noah's sons stows her away on the ark, so she's the hidden ninth passenger, right? She's the hidden, what do you call this? The moral, she's the unconsciousness of these people. She's what's going to come back to take revenge, because it's chewing on them. They know that what they've done wasn't right. So she's like the bomb, ready to explode in their faces. And she's there on purpose, because she's, well, she's the mirror. She will hold it in front of them after and say, what on earth did you do by choosing yourself? Why didn't you give your space to a child who for sure is innocent, to lame?

Why didn't you push overboard these animals and move in people? That she's the, now I have the word, the consciousness of the whole bunch in that ship. As well as the conscience. Yes, the conscience, that's the word I was looking for. Well, both word. She makes them aware the consciousness, but she also delivers the imperative, right? Do we have a contradiction, and does it matter what we do? That's the ethical dimension you're talking about. What is the message of in the shadow of the ark? There's a 500 in every page. I can give you a couple. One of them definitely is that the story of people who go, who get space or get a spot, or get room on the boat is not over yet, that we still are fighting for a spot on top of everybody else. The pyramid is still there, and everybody is struggling to be above.

And that we're leaving out many people. That we should build a bigger ship that involves, that implies all. That we have messages of doom hanging over us, and that we're not reacting to them. That it is dangerous to tell each other that you're, or tell the others that you've been chosen. That there is the possibility to escape true solidarity. You can smuggle stories on board if you want. You can try. That is worth putting your honor or your life or other things at risk for making a big gesture. That some things are worth a lot. That's just a few of the messages. And I'm sure I could, for each message that I just conveyed, I could give you a completely contradictory one, because I can be very pessimistic as well.

So I think there's also messages there of the impossibility to educate us as a human kind, our stubbornness to learn, are always repeating ourselves and making the same mistakes from history, are not learning from history. That is in there also. In the shadow of the ark. Thank you very much on a provost. Thank you. Coming up next, David Grossman. If Noah is one of the first stories in the Bible, Samson is one of the longest. The Book of Judges tells of Jehovah leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to the promised land of Canaan, only to find it already inhabited by the Philistines, who worship idols and false gods. To draw them out, Jehovah raises up a giant of a man, Samson.

We know him from art as well as scripture. There's John Belonia's great study of Samson slaying the Philistine with the jawbone of an S. Rubens portrayal of him resting in the lap of his lover Delilah, and Van Dyke's moment of his capture after Delilah betrayed him to the Philistines, who tortured and blinded Samson. His final desperate act, pulling down the temple of the Philistines, became a classic, now rather can't be climaxing since it will be DeMille's film starring Harry Lamar as Delilah and Victor Matur as Samson. It's a big subject worthy of one of Israel's premier writers, David Grossman. He's produced over nine novels, several children's books, and some noted works of journalism, including the acclaimed Yellow Wind. His latest novel, Lions Honey, casts Samson as a lonely and bewildered man, destined and doomed to do God's will.

David Grossman, what attracted you living in Jerusalem today to that ancient story of Samson and Delilah? Well, it's a wonderful story to start with. You don't have to be an Israeli or a Jew to like it. Here you have such a gigantic character like Samson. It's a story about his desires and passions, the women he loved. It's a story about betrayal, about loneliness. For me, as an Israeli and as a Jew, I find a lot of the symptoms of our behavior today, as a society, as a state, coded in the character of the biblical Samson. Why do you think the story is in the Bible? I mean, some editor had to take this and put it into this sacred text. Why? Well, maybe for the one who wrote the Bible, Samson was a kind of a model to imitate, to admire. You have to think about the Jews at the time of this story when they were under the tyranny of the Philistines,

crushed by the cruelty of the Philistines, very weak, vulnerable. Think of Jews throughout history that they did not have army, weapon, ways to defend ourselves, having to obey all the time. And we have someone like Samson who can break all the rules, who can do whatever he wants, who cross borders without any hesitation, he creates his own reality. He is the master of his destiny, so he thinks. Yeah, he's strong, he's so masculine. Jews looked at themselves as the warm of Jacob, Tolatyakov. And to have someone like him, and of course, you know, I'll tell you that, many of the combating the most daring military units in our army since 1948 were called after Samson. The Foxes of Samson was one of the most famous military units in the world of 1948,

in the beginning of the last Intifada, a special very secretive and very daring unit that acted in the occupied territories against Palestinians, were called the Samsonites. And there are many examples of the uses of Samson, the image of Samson, because, you know, suddenly to be able to be Samson, for people like us, is very refreshing. It's very tempting. Give me a thumbnail sketch of Samson's story. Well, Samson was born to parents that lived in the border area between then Israel and the Philistines, in a very tough period for Israel under the tyranny of the Philistines. His mother was a barren woman. Stera. Yes, sterile. We don't even know her name. We only know that she was sterile, that probably she expected the child. One day, when she was on the field without her husband, a man of God, an angel appeared to her.

And he tells her, you know, you are a barren woman, but you are going to bear a child. And this child will save the sons of Israel from the Philistines, and he will be Nazirite to God. Nazirite to God means... He is not supposed to touch anything that is dead, anything of filth, he cannot drink wine, he cannot cut his hair with a razor. Now, the woman runs to her husband, and she tells him the wonderful news, and she quotes what the angel told her, but she does not quote it correctly. She says, he will be Nazirite to God from womb till his dying day. Now, the angel did not say till his dying day. And I wonder, why would a woman who expected the son for so many years, when she comes and delivered the wonderful news to her husband, she adds this horrible phrase in what made her say this horrible thing. And I believe that in the time when she ran from the field in which she met with the angel, the magic man of God, until she met her husband, some knowledge, some understanding, pierced her, and that is that the son she is having now in her womb is not only hers,

that in a way it was touched by another entity, by God, yes, and of course she adores God, but it means that her son will never be only hers, that it's made of other materials. But in so many ways, he was ordinary, that is, when he grows up as a young man, he falls in love with a filistine woman, right? But he doesn't know that this love was planted inside him as a pretext by God, that God wanted to quarrel with the filistines, that why he imposed on some of this love to the filistine woman. It means that his love, his last desires, are nationalized in a way, by God, are confiscated, by God, are manipulated, by God. What a tragedy, if you knew that your love life are not yours, but they are part of a big plan, a kind of a divine big plan, that there are manipulation, how would you feel? He's just a pawn in God's plan.

Yeah, exactly. He's a violent man. He's a very violent, violent and obtuse and cruel, I do not try to justify him, I just try to understand the mechanism of such a soul, and to show that despite the destruction that he has and that he performs, there are other elements. You know, it's very easy to say he's a bully, he's a machine of murder, kind of a superman, of a golem, but I want to show that there are other nuances in his behavior, and the most interesting thing is the clash between these nuances and the superficial surface that we know about something. How do you explain that he falls in love with Delilah? He goes to Gaza, and there he falls in love with this beautiful woman, Delilah. I mean, she's Philistine, right? Yeah, Delilah actually is the third woman he falls in love with, and they are all Philistines. It's a story that keeps recurring, but it's an old story, and the theme is Big Man, beautiful woman, bad deal.

Probably she was irresistible, that's why she was chosen, I guess, and the Philistines come to her, and they tell her tempt him and find what is his secret, what is the essence of his strength, and probably everyone involved in this little scene felt that she is irresistible, that she will do to him what previous women failed to do, that she will make him full of desire to give himself a way to her. Why did he tell her his secret? Because he loved her, in a strange way, she is the first woman that you really loved, when it came to other women in his life, the word love was never said explicitly. With her, it's the first time that we read Samsung loved a woman, and love means, I think, I believe, to give all the keys of your soul to a certain individual,

to hope that this individual will love you not only because of what you are, but sometimes in spite of what you are. Samsung desperately needs one soul to reveal himself in front of her. He says, I believe, in the Agent Heber, he talked about telling her from his heart of hearts. Three times, he was aware of her manipulation, three times she asks him, what is the essence, what is the secret of your strength, and he tells her all kinds of stories. He opens his eyes, and I am sure he saw the assassin sitting or standing there behind the curtain. It's so obvious, it's so obvious that she wanted to kill him, and yet he continues to tell her hints about his strength.

I believe, because he wanted to believe that next time he opens his eyes, he will see only the Laila without the assassin, without the foreign presence, without the hostility of the Philistines that is radiated into this room. He just wanted to be loved simply, maybe not as a hero, just as a human being. Maybe he just wanted one simple thing to be like any other person. What does he say that in the last desperate act of a violent life, when he's pulling down the temple, killing everyone in it, his enemies, the innocent himself, Samsung believes he's doing God's will. Well, probably he's right, according to the storyteller of the biblical story, and to the editor of this story who puts this story in the Bible, and by that legitimized it and gave it the authority of sanctity, he is doing what God wanted of him to do.

We know that almost everything that in the life of Samsung was meant by God, so it is told to us. It's a horrible deed, of course, but the main goal of Samsung, the reason for which he existed, and the reason for which he became part of this story, is to fight the Philistines and to liberate the sons of Israel from the tyranny. The tyranny of the Philistines, and by breaking the whole building on their heads and killing them and himself, he actually believes that he did what God wanted him to do. Sounds an awful lot like the suicide bombers of 9-11, if you read their diaries, they felt they were doing God's will as they dove those planes into those buildings.

Yes, and I mentioned in my book that actually he was the first suicide killer, Samsung, and I don't know about any other previous example for someone who uses his own body in order to destroy other people's life. And of course, there is something common to all people who are doing something like that. They are acting in a hermetic system of faith. A hermetic system? Yes, it's hermetic because it's very difficult to justify it in terms of other systems. And according to their system, they have full justification to do what they are doing for us, people like me, I assume, like yourself, who are out of this system, it looks horrible, it looks so cruel. But they can justify it, in justify it, according to their own terms. This is, I think, one of the most interesting questions. What was the need of us, of the Jews, to have such a hero, such a questionable, such a dubious hero for us?

When you think about the Jews throughout history, you do not necessarily think about someone like Samsung. In a way, he seems to us not very Jewish. On the other hand, I can tell you there are many Jewish qualities to him that I think are very important even to us today. Such a hero. His loneliness. The thing that I said before, that there is no one like him. And I think every people, every culture, are very special and unique. But I think there is something very, very unique about us, the Jewish people, about our faith, about our history, about the tragedies that we went through. And also, about the way we are regarded by other people's cultures and religions.

For years, Jews have been either idealized or, more often, demonized by other people's religions. Both idealization and demonization are the different forms, the different faces of the humanization. We were always regarded as a metaphor for something else, as a parable. There was always a lesson to be learned from our destiny and faith. I find this approach so destructive. And when a people is cornered in such a place, when other people's project on him, so much stereotypes and prejudices and faith and superstition and myths and legends, you know, in a way you find yourself trapped in this state of mind of a people. Maybe some of us even like this idea. You know, there is a lot of attraction in being a larger than life story. It makes you feel very unique. It can justify some of the horrible things you had to went through. But it's not healthy as a people.

Could this be why Samson was drawn to the Philistines? I mean, there are moments in reading your book when I think he just wants to go on the other side of the field and sit in their stands and watch the game from their side and then go out and have a drink with the boys and get this chosenness and this. Samson stuff. It's wonderful that you say, because sometimes I felt that, yes, he was not in his right place in our people. Yes, and he needed, you know, to rub his soul and flesh against other culture and culture that probably is more sensual than the culture he came from with all the restrictions that Jews suffered from by their own selves, yes, by the rules and the laws of the Torah. And I can understand a person like Samson enjoying terrifically, being among the Philistines, having fun with them, making love with them, fighting with them physically. Maybe this was something that he did not find in his own place in among the Israelites. There's a moment in your book when you write, he was weary.

Was he weary of being chosen? Was he weary of playing out this fate that had been determined for him in the womb by God? I believe he was. I believe it was too much for him to take that the divine grand plan was much bigger for him to shoulder, even him with his gigantic shoulders. He walks in this life without really understanding what is expected of him. And there is a moment after the Laila cuts his hair, and before she calls the Philistines to start to torture him. And he lies on her knees, and many painters drew and painted this wonderful, suddenly silencing in the hassle and puzzle of all his life, in all the noise that accompanied him, all the violence, all the thunderstorm of the life of Samson. Suddenly, a very peaceful moment, he lies on her knees or in her lap. He's exhausted, but there is an air of rest, an air of someone who, for the first time in his life, achieved some tranquility.

And well, maybe for him, being there on her lap in the heart of the ultimate betrayal on him, because in a moment, she's going to give him away. Every woman in his life betrays him. Did he have a compulsive need to be betrayed, is that why he went to the bed? I believe so, when you see which women he will choose, it will always be women that inevitably would betray him. They are doomed to betray him, and he wants them. Don't we see people like that around us? Don't we see people who are repeatedly would make the wrong choices, who at the very points in which they need to be salvaged, they will do the wrong step. It applies to individuals, it applies to societies, to countries. It seems to me that Samson is the archetype, he keeps compulsively repeating destructive behavior.

If they have no choice, don't you see people acting this way? When I look at my country, for example, or when I look at the Palestinians, at any crossroad, when we were given the chance, the miraculous chance sometimes, by history, to take the right turn, the turn towards peace, towards reconciliation, towards stopping killing and destruction, we chose always the way to violence and to escalate hatred between us. There are so many similarities to Samson in the way Israel behaves, and one of them is the way we treat power. Three years after the Holocaust, after the Shoah, we created a state, we created an army that became immediately a regional superpower, maybe international superpower. We are in a way like a mutation of power, from being the victims of the Shoah, from being these people who for 2000 years lived in exile, who had no power, no power, no weapon, no army, nothing like that.

It's a mutation of power, and I'm not sure that we really know how to deal with this enormous power. And I think someone who experiences our situation is almost doomed always to choose the more aggressive way, the more vigorous way, as a first choice. And you can trace such a behavior in the history of Israel throughout the years. Now, part of it is not our responsibility, our neighbors and enemies were very productive and effective in creating this problem as well. But I'm interested also in our side, what is in us that prevents us, even when we can, to come to a kind of a acceptable, to a kind of more political definition of ourselves within borders. If you have no borders, it is like you live in a house that the walls are all the time moving, a house with mobile walls.

You do not really know where you end and where the other starts. Is this why you were attracted to the story of Samson, trying to figure out who you are, what Israel is, what you do with power in a hostile world? Yeah, I mean, being in Israel is a full-time job. I mean, I wouldn't trade it for any other existence. I mean, I was born, Jew, I was born in Israel. I think it's a fascinating place to live. I lament the fact that we are deprived of exploring all the possibilities of living in such a state, such a combination of so many people who poured into Israel from 70 countries and bringing in all their psychosis. Their psychologies, mentalities, senses of humor, knowledge, manners, habits, all these, this could create such a wonderful place, an interesting place to live. At the same time, we don't get to explore it because we are all the time, we just survive, survive from one catastrophe to another.

You know, I always think about this paradox of us as a people that throughout our history, we survived to live our life. And now, we live to survive only. This is not enough. We can have so much more. We are so strong as a state. We are so Samsonite. Yes, allegedly, we have 200 aton bomb. And yet, we are so afraid, by the way, like Samson, whenever he confronts a real danger, he collapses. He starts, he cries to God like a child. Why? Because like us, we do not really believe that this power is ours. We did not really settle our relationship with this power. Because of that, we are doomed to use it excessively. Because we do not really create a code of behavior regarding our enormous power. Maybe if time comes, if we enjoy some years of stability and peace, if we start to trust our enemies and neighbors, if they will be trustworthy, it's also a question. Maybe then also our attitude towards this power would change.

Aren't the orthodox, aren't the literalists, those who read the story of Samson as literally the word of God? Aren't they driving the conversation in Israel today just like the Christian right and the fundamentalist here are driving our political discussion? Well, again, you touched upon a very basic problem of us as a state today that there is too much connection between religion and state for the last 60 years almost. Israel prioritized the political goals of religion than the political goals of the state. For example, everything that or many things from what had happened to us since the six days war, the 67 war that brought upon the occupation of the occupied territories is highly dominated by religious aspirations. And the religious institutions are so much involved now in politics in Israel today. It's so much dominant in our politics.

And it's dangerous because also on the other side, on the Palestinian side, we see the same phenomena. They are now ruled by not only religious people, which I can respect, but they are ruled by fundamentalists, by fanatics. When you see, for example, the mother of her Palestinian suicide bomber, and she rejoices the death of her son, and she wishes in front of television camera that all her other children will follow him and become martyr like he is, like he was. So then I stop understanding. I cannot really understand such values, if they are values at all. When I hear that this suicide bomber, like many others, he wrapped up with paper and rags his sexual organs to protect them. We will be able to use them with the 72 virgins when he reached heaven. I really cannot understand such a mixture of reason and faith.

I think that for the benefit of all of us, we should pay faith a lot of respect. We should be very afraid when faith mutates itself to fanaticism. Was the mother of that Palestinian suicide bomber any different in her imagination than the mother of Samson, whose child was born to die for his country? In a way or not, in a way you are right. Again, this is the nature of our area. For so many years, Israeli women, when they bore a child, when they bore a son, one of the first things that they used to say after the birth, here I gave birth to another soldier to our army and it was said with pride, you know, and I thought it's horrible. If you destined your child from womb almost, yes, to the army, which means to be killed in the end.

This is the danger that awaits individuals and peoples who are undertaking such a total mission or who are formulated themselves in such absolute terms, yes, of they know the will of God. They were chosen. I think that total beliefs, total behaviors, hermetic absolute terms in which one defined oneself are dangerous. They are lethal. And absolute truths destroy absolutely. Exactly. I mean, we sense it now in the Middle East, in the violence and in the fundamentalist approach of so many groups there which makes the achieving of peace almost impossible. At the end of Samson's story and at the end of your book, there's the apocalypse. Samson dies. The Philistines die. Who wins? No one wins. That the nature of such conflicts, that's the nature of violence. No one wins.

This is something that Israel is and many among the Palestinians started to understand now. It's a no-win situation. And the only thing that can be productive is this very painful compromise. David Grossman, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Thank you very much. Arthur Richard Rodriguez, you learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life. It is the general agreement that we will not talk about these things this way.

One of the most important statements you can make as a scientist is I don't know. One of the most important statements you should be prepared to make as a believer is I don't know. That's next time on Faith and Reason. This episode of Faith and Reason is available on DVD or VHS for 29.95, the complete seven-part series for 149.95. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen. The major funding is provided by the Herb Alpert Foundation and by our sole corporate funder, Mutual of America, designing customized, individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company.

You