Command F: What Art Refuses to Let Disappear

Jenna Arnold: Command F lives between the world we are building and the wisdom we have inherited. We hold AI's astonishing power in one hand and 5,000 years of Jewish thought, ritual, and argument in the other, asking how to navigate what is coming without surrendering what is sacred. I'm Jenna Arnold, and together with some of today's most compelling thinkers, we explore the ancient questions resurfacing inside our most modern technologies. As AI changes how we create, remember, relate, and understand ourselves, we ask whether the questions beneath this revolution have been with us all along. When people cannot control power, they often turn to narrative. And when language alone is insufficient, they make something. Jewish life has repeatedly survived through stories, images, languages, arguments that carried identity across borders and generations. Molly Crabapple begins by showing us how art became a tool of memory, resistance, and cultural survival. Stephanie Lepp asks whether storytelling can do something equally urgent in the present. Not only does preserve people from erasure, but restore complexity to those we have reduced to enemies or symbols. And James Gortzman takes us into the building of the Temple of the Moon at Burning Man, where hundreds of people pour their labor, grief, intention, and love into a sacred work designed to disappear. Together, these conversations move us from art as a record of who we were to storytelling as a way of finding one another again. To creation as a human practice whose meaning is carried not only by what remains, but by what making asks of us. We are honored to welcome Molly Crabappel, a visual artist, journalist, historian, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Molly's work lives at the intersection of art, memory, politics, resistance, and human dignity. In her book, She explores a Jewish movement that understood newspapers, poetry, illustration, theater, language, and cultural production, not as decoration, but as tools of survival. Welcome, Molly. Hey Jenna, how you doing? Molly, thank you for being here to help us explore art as resistance, art as remembrance, and whether creativity itself may be one of the last deeply human acts. Thank you so much for having me. One thing that struck me reading your work is that Jewish history is so often the story of people surviving without traditional forms of power. And yet Jews produced extraordinary amounts of art, literature, humor, music, storytelling. Do you think creativity became a form of a homeland in itself for Jews throughout time? I mean, I think that when certain avenues are foreclosed from you. People's intellect, people's energies, they go into other things. And I think that Jewish stuff is based on being the people of the book, right? It's this like incredibly textual tradition, for better and for worse. And in researching the Bund, did you realize that cultural production? And when I say cultural production, like creating our stories, creating art, creating music was so much part of who we are, who we were, and was it that part that you Felt the most connected to you before you really opened Pandora's box? Well, I came to the boon because of my great-grandfather, Samuel Rothbard, who was a post-impressionist painter. And it might seem like a little odd to be that into your great-grandparents, but I was obsessed with Sam. And the reason was because he taught my mom how to paint, and my mom taught me how to paint. And I grew up surrounded by paintings, sculptures, photographs, his violin that he made out of wooden Venetian blinds. And one painting that I really loved and I started my book with this is a picture he did from memory of a young girl, a young woman in his hometown, Volkavisk. And she's wearing the long skirts and her hair is in the updo and she's throwing a rock through a window. And next to her is her boyfriend throwing more rocks. And it was titled Itga the Bundist. And this Painting became my doorway to this project, the last that consumed my life for the last seven years of researching the Jewish Boond, which was a secular, socialist, and defiantly anti-Zionist Jewish revolutionary group out of the Tsarist Empire. And there were so many things I loved about it. Of course, I loved their amazing songs, their newspapers, ⁓ their literature, but I also loved that they were street fighters. I loved that. They were socialists who believed in human solidarity. And I love that they were people who defiantly fought for their right to stay in countries where the power structures might have been incredibly racist against them, but where they insisted instead with their full chests, this is our homeland, and they would fight for it. I'd love your thoughts about like what came through your bone marrow as you were writing this. How did that impact you as a Jewish woman who might be losing sleep? Or maybe you're sleeping really well about what's happening in the state of the world. You know, the idea that there was ever one single way, one single story of what being Jewish meant at any time in history, that is a lie. That's a homogenization that's being ⁓ foisted upon us. It it doesn't exist, never did. And I think there were a few things that really stuck out to me when I was writing the history of these Jewish radicals, of the Jewish labor bund, and of other Jewish radicals, anarchists, communists. It's the ⁓ what bookish nerds we are. Absolute, absolute bookworms. There was something I read that there was a survey that was done of Jewish sweatshop worker teenagers in the Lower East Side at the ⁓ dawn of the 20th century. And they asked them, like, what do you want to do in your free time? Do you like to go to the boxing match? Do you like to go dancing? Do you like to go to the synagogue? Like, do you want to go on dates? Like what do you want to do? And And they're like, Read Lectures, lectures, they wanted to go to lectures. And so that's one thing. The second thing is just the constancy of dispute and the constancy of contestation. I mean, when I think about like what a Jewish tradition is, arguing, arguing and being able to kind of keep together while still massively disputing and debating. And then also this tendency to try and change the world, to try to make the world better, to to look at how the world is and refuse to be content with it. Refuse to be content with like your little plot, your little garden, and instead try something radically new. I think that is the Jewish story in the 20th century. Like I look ⁓ Yuri Slezkin's amazing book, The Jewish Century. He sort of divides societies into two different types. And obviously, like all divisions like that are a little bit spurious, but you know, I'll follow Yuri for this. There's the Apollonian societies, which he associates ⁓ with landbound societies that are based on like farming, you know, with stable governments. And then he talks about Mercurian societies, which are the societies of people who are not bound by the land, who travel and move, and ⁓ whose traditions are based in things that are portable, like texts and books and stories. And he talks about like overseas Chinese communities, he talks about the Roma people, he talks about overseas Lebanese communities and Armenians, but also and especially he talks about the Jews. And I definitely thought a lot about Sletskin's amazing book while I was, you know, researching my own family story and while I was researching these crazy migratory, deeply ethical, deeply nerdy troublemakers who were traveling around the world on forged passports, making new philosophies of life. Have you come across examples where the Jewish diaspora anywhere in the world have done a particularly unique? well documented core of their community effort toward preserving art or music. It's not so much visual art usually, though ⁓ you know, there are like amazing ⁓ Jewish forms of art. I I know more about Eastern European because that's my own background, but like I don't know, like paper cuts for instance. Have you ever seen like an Eastern European Jewish paper cuts? They're beautiful. It's a piece of paper and a scissors. It's ultimate poor people thing. And they made worlds out of these. They're so beautiful. A lot of times, because Jews didn't have a state, they didn't necessarily have the architectural expression historically that ⁓ you know, Christians, Muslims, Hindus had because they didn't have the the means to create those buildings. But there is a type of ⁓ Jewish building from Eastern Europe that I think is so beautiful. And these were called wooden synagogues. And these synagogues were all over places like Poland, Lithuania, and they were made out of wood and they look kind of a little bit humble from the outside, but inside they were painted like heaven. They were hallucinogenic. They were so beautiful. And most of these synagogues, the vast majority, were burned by the Nazis during World War II. But there was a recreation of one of them that I saw at Pauline Museum in Warsaw. And it was like standing beneath heaven. It looks like the experience of meeting God through psychedelics. So beautiful. And I'm like, why don't we build things that look like this anymore? So these were very nomadic communities, and it's fascinating, even a relief in some ways, to see how they continue to tell their story privately and publicly and shape their identity through art as like a way to absolutely refuse their disappearance, no matter what was happening geographically or politically. And it's such a clear connection today that Jewish identity. is constantly evolving and still not absent from this other through line, a fear and threat of our potential disappearance. But Molly, I remain so confident in us because of our ability to be in motion, to create that art or to build community. Like this is all in our bone marrow too, and ultimately what will continue to protect us, which reminds me of the section in your book where you write about the zealots. Can you tell us why their story is so key to understanding who we are? So about a hundred and some odd years after Christ was born, there was a rebellion against the Roman Empire by a Jewish sect that was called the Zealots. And there's a reason that the word Zealot in the contemporary English language derives from these people's name. And they launch a doomed uprising against the Roman Empire. Which quickly devolves into a bloody civil war between different factions of Zealots and Sakari, and includes many murders of Jews that don't think like them. And Jerusalem is placed under siege by the Roman general Vespasian. And rich men in Jerusalem, they got together and they made ⁓ food stores strong enough to last 21 years. But the Zealots destroyed the food stores because they wanted there to be this apocalyptic battle with the Romans. Now there was a rabbi whose name was Jonathan Benzekai, though they didn't call him a rabbi at that point. I guess you would have called him a priest. And he looked at this uprising and he was like, This is the stupidest thing in the world, and this is doomed, and we're all gonna die. And the Romans they don't want to destroy the city, but they will. And he asks the zealots to surrender to Vespasian, but the Zealots refuse. And so Rabbi Benzekai surrenders himself. Vespasian. Vespasian asks him what he wants, and he says, I want you to preserve the wise men in the city of Yavneh, and I want you to let me in peace teach. And Vespasian says yes. And then he goes in and he destroys Jerusalem and he destroys the second temple. He burns it to the ground. And the zealots all die. But Rabbi Ben Zakai is living in Yavne with his school. Now, up until that point All of Jewishness was based on the temple and the sacrifices of animals in the temple, almost like ancient Greek religion, you know, it's very typical of ancient religions. And these students of Ben Zekai were they were broken. They were like, what do we do? Like, how do we worship God if we can't make sacrifices? And Ben Zekai says, God doesn't need your sacrifices of animals. The real offering you give him is loving kindness. And the temple is in your heart. And that is the basis of 2,000 years of the Jewish wisdom tradition. That the idea of the temple was in your heart and that your sacrifices were studying and loving kindness. I love that story to segue into this. Judaism places enormous emphasis on remembering and the Hebrew word zakor, Z A C H O R. Do you think Jewish art or architecture or even like the idea of the temple and the wailing wall? Functions because it carries the burden of memory. I found growing up in like a relatively reformed Jewish family that there was always like, we have to remember. Yeah. It feels burdenful. Judaism places enormous emphasis on the interpretation, commentary layered on commentary. And you tweeted out earlier in the conversation that our job Is to debate, to sit in the sacred end, to be uncomfortable, to try to figure out, to navigate the esoteric together. Do you think that art could function in a similar way? I mean, that's something that Aristotle said, right, in Poetics, where he says that one of the purposes of theater is catharsis. It's to take these ⁓ emotions, these drives that people have that. Are both intrinsically part of being human, but also incredibly destructive. The drive to kill your enemy, for instance, you know, like violence, sex and death drives that are both so human, but so ⁓ destructive. Aristotle saw theater as a way to experience and purge them in a space that was safe. And I think that it's the same with trauma and it's the same with memory. I mean, artistic expression can be schlack that just re-inscribes the trauma. Or it can be a way to work through it and to purge it. And I mean, with my book, like about a third of it is, even though I did not intend it to be a book about the Holocaust, about a third of it is about the Holocaust and especially about the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Revolts. And I wrote that part while the genocide in Gaza was taking place and while I was seeing this state that uses the Holocaust as its perverse justification carry out a genocide of its own. It broke me in all sorts of ways to sort of forensically reconstruct the genocide of my own people while this other genocide was being carried out by Israel. But what I really tried to do with this book was I tried to write about it, looking at it like unflinchingly, but also that's giving people their full human dignity and their full richness and complexity and, you know, silliness and ridiculousness too, right? Because these were humans. Like I was trying to use my artistic skills as a writer combined with the facts of history to at least like look unflinchingly at it. It strikes me that we have this contemporary world of artists today. There was a Rothko that just sold for $183 million earlier this week. And I'm not one to necessarily say what art does tell stories and what art doesn't. But it does strike me that that art today is Highly manipulated for its extraction, its capitalistic purposes. And what I just witnessed you do, Molly, is something that I would say you might have only been able to do because you have an art craft in the palm of your hands and you have that like geeky desire to understand that the nexus of those two things is part of our ancient knowing that. Bearing witness that inheriting the responsibility of watching the stories that are really about loving kindness is Jewish responsibility that exists generation to generation. Yeah, I mean, I it's funny when I think about contemporary art, right? Like the stuff like the Rothco, that's obviously just being used as a speculative divide object, like the same way. That people would buy stock or buy gold or buy ⁓ you know, pig futures or whatever. That's what they're doing when they buy that art. But that art has always been only the smallest fragment of the type of art that's produced. You know, I think about the people in my neighborhood that are doing, you know, these Puerto Rican Dominican mural spray paint murals of people who died in my neighborhood, of people who passed. And to me, that is art that sings more than any growth co does. And that Is something that's made for the people. It's not just made as a speculative object for the rich. And I don't think that everyone's an artist or that everyone has to be, but I feel like creativity is our human birthright. And creativity, you know, is what happens when that like spark of the divine meets the constraints of the physical world. One of the ancient principles that is at the core of this episode, a Hebrew word, Lishmah, is this idea of doing art. For art's sake. And I love when I see sculptors create products that will disintegrate in a certain amount of hours, or when Tibetan monks create mandalas only to be destroyed, that the idea of creating and then bearing witness to the art and then ultimately bearing witness to its disappearance is part of the human exercise. that in a very extractive capitalistic culture where it's like you only do something for the benefit of some sort of outcome to me feels so critical to how I'm framing my identity and why I'm showing up. And I didn't realize that was part of some of the ancient whispers and myths that I feel like I'm picking up today. Well all human labor is built on sand, right? I mean, it's part of the tragedy of human life. Just like how We as humans are mortal beings and we will die and everyone we love will die. Like that's part of what it is to be human. In the same way the works of humans collapse. They collapse because of war, because of climate change, because the seas rise, because a fire breaks out. I mean, I think about my my friend Marv Zuckerman, he's 94 years old and he as a scholar and his home in the Palisades ⁓ burnt during the fire. And in that home were archives that were smuggled out of Europe, you know. Things that are totally irreplaceable that went up in ash. And I think one of the most profound acts of love is to preserve the labors of our ancestors. And that's the only sort of immortality we have. Even with that, we create everything knowing that eventually, you know, the the sun will eat the earth. Judaism is obsessed with archives, books, commentary, memory names, stories. Did you feel while writing this book that you were participating in a specifically Jewish act of remembrance? Or was that the art? Or was that dare I say the activist or woman? I mean, it's all of it. One of the things that I think about w is this type of book that was compiled after World War II. There's called Yitzkar books. You're talking about, you know, zakar memory, that word yitzkar comes from that. And these were collective histories that were written of every single, like Godforsaken, small town in Eastern Europe. ⁓ the one about Volkovisk, where my great grandfather is from, is over a thousand pages. Ten thousand people lived in this town. That means 10 people per page, you know, of this book. Think about that. And they're amazing because they have all these portraits of characters of the buildings. ⁓ they're gossipy, they're shit talking. Like sometimes one person will write a chapter and then the next person will be like, that's not how it went. Like And these were crucial to me. I mean, these were acts of memory that were written by Holocaust survivors and by the families of Holocaust survivors. And one of the things that I learned was that ⁓ Palestinians also compiled similar memory books after the Nakba. They're actually stored at Columbia University. To remember all of these villages, this act of remembrance, it's both Jewish but also not specific to Jewishness. And I think it's very much an act that comes with being exiled. And perhaps we've just had more experience of exile than most. It seems like art is the evidence that a soul refuses to be reduced to. Ashes in a way, as the world continues to be more extractive and rooted in capitalism. I'm eager to create in these conversations an offering to the world that isn't rooted in our headlines right now. I think so much of the Western left is the Jewish tradition, right? Like there is no Western left without us, without Marx and LaSalle and Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman. And the hundreds of thousands of people who fought and died to create the better and more beautiful world. And I think these traditions are so strongly rooted, but they're also sometimes stripped of the fact that these were not just rebels, but the Jewish rebels. And we can offer Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Well, Molly Crababel, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for Doing the work that you did. I remember when I first met you, you said that you had spent how many years? Seven years in the in the crazy archives trying to unearth the parts of our story that we can all be, not just Jewish folks, but that we can all be so proud of this commitment to equality. And I know that it took somebody like you, an artist, who would have known that it was the art that was the catalyst. But I feel indebted to you on behalf of generations whom we'll never meet. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was it was the honor of my life to get to do this act of love and try to uncover our ancestors. Thank you so much, Jenna. Bye, Molly. After talking with Molly about art as remembrance, resistance, and survival, we wanted to turn to another question. Once stories preserve us, can they also reconnect us? Technology doesn't just shape what we consume, it shapes how we see one another. Algorithms reward outrage, flatten nuance, and often incentivize performance over understanding. And boy, do we have so many examples in our own individual lives. And yet, storytelling still remains one of the few tools powerful enough to interrupt that cycle. Stephanie Lepp is a producer, filmmaker, and founder of Synthesis Media, a nonprofit storytelling studio devoted to expanding hearts and minds through deeply human conversation. Her work explores political identity, polarization, empathy, and what it actually takes to move people beyond tribalism and toward genuine understanding. Today we're talking with Stephanie about storytelling as bridge building, whether art can create not just common ground, but higher ground and what happens to human connection in an AI era increasingly optimized for division, speed, and certainty. Stephanie Lepp, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Jenna. It's great to be here. So why should we even bother talking to each other? Why should we even bother talking to each other? Because being alive is a miracle and we're a social species and connection feels good and is healthy for us. There's an assumption that truth is not always immediate or singular. In a previous episode, we talked about digitizing all of the ancient texts, specifically a lot of the dialogues. Do you think we're losing our capacity? For moral and spiritual depth because technology increasingly rewards instant conclusions instead of sustained contemplation. I mean, I think that the algorithms are moving us in that direction of less depth, less capacity to hold uncertainty and more shallowness. However, I also see that coexisting with the rise of long form podcasts. I mean, here's is an example of this. Somehow, you know, while we've been, you know, moving towards sound bites, this medium is popular and growing, right? So I don't necessarily think that losing depth and nuance is entirely the whole picture of what's happening. Are you familiar with the concept of the perception gap? That we often think that people who think differently from us are more extreme than they actually are. Like if you ask people who identify as pro-choice, like do you think that pro-life people XYZ like really wouldn't have abortion under zero circumstances? Never in the case of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of a mother, and they would think that people who are pro-life are more extreme than they actually are, and vice versa. So on some level, we are maybe oftentimes fighting with mirages. Like it looks like we're actually more extreme and disagreeing and less nuanced than we actually are. So As an artist, as a producer, as a theatrical creator, how are you unpacking the stories we're telling about each other? So artists have their periods, right? The blue period, the red period. I happen to be in the period of integrating different perspectives into a bigger picture of reality. That's kind of the theme that my two most recent productions are: One Faces of X, which is a series of short videos that integrate. Different perspectives on complex social issues. And I use the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It's the same person playing the different sides of a debate. And then again comes the same person in a different outfit who attempts to articulate some kind of integrated perspective. So that's one project. And then the other one that is most active right now is the anti-debate, which is a new format for debate where participants build on each other's insights so that greater complexity can emerge. It's it's like it's it's an answer to the question like, what would a debate look like if we assumed not that one person was right and the other was wrong, but that they were each holding different parts of the same bigger picture. Just going back to your last question, are we all just losing the capacity for this? For me, a quintessential place I do this is in parenting. It's like I love the shit out of you and go the fuck to sleep. A hundred percent really. And like the fact that those different perspectives coexist. inside of us is part of what grows our hearts and our minds as parents. It can be a little harder to port it into, you know, culture war issues, but that's a part of what I'm helping us do. We are gonna take a listen to a clip of Stephanie producing a conversation of a single actor who is talking about AI and the pros and cons to it and the threats and the brilliance and the fear and the joy. Jay, please roll the clip. Artificial intelligence is the greatest force multiplier we have ever known. I think you mean the most destructive force ever known. Cancer, poverty, climate change, AI solves it all. Every day we delay is another day of preventable suffering. Time to let it rip. More like time to pull the plug. We're racing to build mines vastly more capable than ours, with zero guarantee they will care about us. Our greater intelligence has not fared well for other species. Come on. Artificial superintelligence is decades, if not centuries away. AI today is just sophisticated pattern matching with a marketing budget. We got plenty of time. Time is precisely what we don't have. Well, you're all debating hypotheticals. China is building AI for social control. If we slow down, authoritarian AI wins. So remember, it's one actress playing all of these perspectives. Let's skip ahead of it. AI is harming real people right now. Gig workers are getting replaced by algorithms. Facial recognition is turning minority neighborhoods into digital police states. How did you start to develop the different perspectives without marrying yourself to one angle? It's a series. So we've done capitalism, abortion, gender, race, free speech, and AI. You know, yeah, just keeping it light. And the series has been used in classrooms where teachers have their students watch the series and then write a script for an issue that they are wrestling with. And on the website there's instructions for how to actually write a script for this. And I find to be a very fun challenge, especially if it is an issue that you are wrestling with. And AI is the only one that it's many different perspectives before the synthesis. The other ones are are much simpler because it's just a Thesis and antithesis. So you want to listen to and ideally interview people who are coming from those perspectives. So you feel like you can really grok them. The synthesis obviously is the hardest part. How do you actually integrate different perspectives into some kind of more comprehensive view? That is the hardest and in my opinion the funnest part. This episode, but also this show is trying to model the synthesis view. And while it feels novel today, that is also part of the ancient technology that is offered to us through Jewish text, which is look at the different perspectives unless a little bit about the concrete answer. Do you think people today are willing to go through the artistic exercise of exploring another angle of the prism? So where I come at it from, do you or do you not want to understand this issue you care so much about? Okay. So that's really a thought. Do you want to understand it? If so, then it behooves you. To get as much of a three-dimensional view as possible. Synthesis can be weaponized, right? There there are some perspectives we don't integrate. I'm not doing an anti-debate on slavery, right? There are some in you know perspectives we don't integrate because they're morally reprehensible or just not worth engaging with. We're also not just like meeting in some meaningless middle. I wrestle with that answer a little bit. Because I do think so many of the subjects that you're proposing and will consider abortion or will consider AI, those that there is such a moral clarity. Like I really deeply believe that, which goes back to your point around the perception gap. But I do believe people who are anti-abortion are anti-women's freedom and not just like body sovereignty. I think it's that dramatic. Or if we're talking about like anti-racism versus like anti-wokism. To me, it's like I I don't have a ton of time for conversations like this. I did over the past decade. I don't today. And so I wonder if the art that you're offering in the world is the exercise of multiple perspectives and less about the outcome of where people land maybe. I think it's both, but I guess on the on the abortion question, abortion under all circumstances and abortion under no circumstances are inherently unintegratable because both of those perspectives do not play well with any other perspective except their own. So if we leave those off the table and integrate what's left, we'll actually come up with something that like a majority of people can get behind and that's very reasonable. So I think this is actually kind of about reframing the debate to people who want to reduce unwanted pregnancies and the need for legal abortion versus people who want to restore traditional gender roles or treat abortion as just another form of birth control. Right. You're taking everyone on the middle and like putting them on one side and then taking both extremes and putting them on the other side. Does that make sense? It does because it seems like you're centering the debate the exercise of the debate itself or the role of curiosity and as a parent, that to me feels like the most important thing I can teach my kids. And so I do see the art and the medium that you're creating as like a curiosity muscle. I think even if we all learn to build and flex those muscles, I think inevitably each of our different perspectives is partial at the end of the day. We will still land in somewhat different places, but I think it bodes very well for us if we at least are building that muscle of seeking, deliberately attempt seeking different perspectives, if not also deliberately attempting to incorporate them, include them in our view. What led you to creating art around this subject? I can I can tell you a personal story. I was a freshman in college and I joined the Redwood action team at Stanford, great acronym RATS, for a city council meeting in Mendocino to protest the logging of the Northern California Redwoods. And at the time, an activist named Julia Butterfly Hill was living in one of those redwoods. Yes. Yes. We called her from the protest to her tree, like on speakerphone. And she gave us this TEP talk and it was like very exciting. But I noticed the people that we were protesting against, right? The loggers and their families were mostly migrant workers. I just remember thinking to myself, like, I don't want to be on the opposite side from those people. Like I wanna be on the side of the trees and the people. Right. I didn't know anything about sustainable development at the time, but I knew enough to know like the way these lines are drawn just does not make sense to me. And so that has been an inquiry of mine of like, how do I redraw the lines to get more of us? on the same side of this. Because the way that this binary is being painted just does not make sense to me. Or it feels like a lose-lose proposition. I used to call myself a promiscuous pragmatic pluralist as my like political affiliation. Maybe we all are. Maybe we all are. Because that becomes again my theory and my North Star that I think we like all want the trees to be saved and we want the migrant workers safe and they have joy. And I sit in the political position that I believe that that is all possible. And we are up against systems created by egos today and over the past centuries that want to control. But it's really interesting coming into this series with the objective of how do we build a bigger tent for people to explore themselves and the world through Ancient Jewish technologies like storytelling, debate, being curious. And I'm scared because I feel like we are at a moment where it's so you're with us or you're against us. And I see this on the left as much as I see it on the right. And it requires centering the artists or you as a communications expert or you as like an intellect. But I don't know if I have the musculature to do what you did in that A AI piece and identify seven, eight perspectives on AI. One because I saw a piece of myself in every single one of them. Yeah, that's part of the power of having the same person play every because we we do have all of these inside of us. I'm also kind of speaking directly into a genre that exists like on the socials of people having conversations with themselves. I imagine that many, if not all, wisdom traditions do have, you know, a practice of productive disagreement. But I just happen to have inherited Judaism and I know it well. And it's deep in our history, in our practice, even in the early rabbinic periods, famous debate schools. So these debate schools. Beit Shemai and Beit Hillel, these were the two debate houses. And they would debate vigorously to, you know, interpret the Talmud. And then they would break bread together, right? Because their like vigorous competition was ultimately a collaboration to wrestle with Jewish law. And they would record the losing opinion first. And I just think of like, what if our Supreme Court did that? Like, why did they do that? Do you think? I think because they understand that even though Ben Hill is often the majority opinion, that doesn't mean that the minority opinion is not a critical partial truth. But I wonder if it's something a little bit more sacred than that. Like it is our job to protect the losing argument or dissent or whatever it might be. I if I think about Supreme Court rulings, I find myself gravitating actually the most to the dissent. Like I want to know how they navigated all of that to get to where they are. But keep telling us more about this is all fascinating and ⁓ I could go on forever. I mean the Talmud itself, which is the central text of rabbinic Judaism, is literally based on rabbinic disagreements. All it is is rabbinic disagreements back and forth over the course of two centuries. I don't know it well enough. But it does have a format that is similar to the Greek thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It has the initial statement, there's a challenge or an objection, and then there's some kind of attempt at a resolution. The quintessential example in Judaism is Hivruta, right? So in Judaism, we are literally commanded to study the Talmud in pairs because it is by virtue of having different perspectives that we sharpen each other's intellect. Like you cannot study it alone. You must study it in pairs. So as part of developing the anti debate, I did a whole deep dive into what I'm now calling Jewish debate wisdom. So how did that inspire the faces of X, if at all? ⁓ it's funny. I I feel like what I have been discovering over the course of the last couple of years is is how Jewish I actually am. It's like promiscuous, pragmatic. Pluralism is so Jewish, actually. I wasn't explicitly drawing from let's say Havrutham when I created Faces of X, but clearly it's deep in here. Do you think there was like something bubbling up as part of like your ancestry that you didn't know? You did know how how fluent, literate were you in wisdom cultures and Some of these practices before you transitioned into creating this medium. I'm a Mexican Jew. My first language is Spanish, but there's a bunch of words I grew up speaking that like I didn't know if they were Spanish or Yiddish. It's kind of like been in the water. I've been swimming in, integrating different perspectives, different cultures. So it's been more implicit than explicit, the explicit kind of seeing how this shows up in Jewish. culture and Jewish practice and Jewish mysticism. I mean Jewish mysticism are the story of Ein Sof, one of our creation myths, is a story of just separation and reintegration. So it didn't become explicit until more recently, which has been such a sweet discovery for me. Do you mind telling us about the creation story? So the replace God with whatever you consider to be just the divine oneness that we are all ultimately part of. But when God wanted to create something other than God's self, in order for God to have a relationship with that entity, God removed God's self and made space in the universe. And God filled vessels with light as part of this creation process. And the story goes that the vessels were not strong enough to contain the light. I'm telling kind of an abbreviated version, but the vessels shattered and the pieces went everywhere. And the pieces became us and our world. And so sometimes it looks like our world is broken until someone comes along and sees that those pieces actually fit together and put the pieces back together so that the vessels can contain the light again. And so our job, I mean the job of tikunolam, the spiritual job that we have according to this myth, is to like see the broken shards, recognize that they fit together and put them back together. Do you mind clarifying what tikunolam means? And does that story give you hope? Tikunalan literally translates, I think, as to heal the world, healing the world. And does that story give me hope? I mean it I generally feel ⁓ hopeful because I can see that human consciousness has evolved over time. That story, it's it's less that I find hope in it and more that I just it's like one of these examples of like. ⁓ how sweet that the work that I'm up to right now in this theme of integrating different perspectives kind of like maps onto the tradition that I inherited just so kind of cleanly. Judaism takes speech very seriously. God literally spoke reality into existence. Right. We think of speech as an act of creation. ⁓ abracadabra is Aramaic for I speak and I create, something like that. like speech makers, journalists and storytellers and forecasters, we are co-creating reality. It's like we gotta take responsibility for the reality that we conjure. Do you ever get intimidated by the role that you're playing? No, I mean I have my practices, let's say, like seeking and attempting to integrate different perspectives. I can't know everything. I have to stay tethered The reality that is always gonna be infinitely more complex than my capacity to understand it. And as long as I maintain that humility, I think that will keep me aligned to the right North Star. That seems like it's a harder exercise to do than not, though. It's harder in the sense that I can't ever think I figured it out. You know, so many wisdom traditions have the same, like the the sayable Tao is not the eternal Tao. In Judaism, it's no false idols. It's like never think that this thing that you decided you understood is the everything. It is harder than having your idol that then is your everything because then you don't have to think anymore. Then you can just be, you know, fundamentalist. Which is what AI is a little bit off It can be dangerous in that way where we optimize for something and then we're drowning in paperclips. If you're familiar with the paperclip maximizer, it's like if you tell the AI, make as many paperclips as possible. And at first it's like, ⁓ great. And then all of a sudden, like the entire earth is converted to paperclips because it turned paperclips into the idol, let's say. And so you like destroy everything at the expense of the thing that you decided was the idol. There's a beautiful Einstein quote. It's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things. There is one whole we call universe. And our task is to develop our capacity to perceive it. So let's not drown in paperclips, swim in the universe. I love that. Well, if you are an artist who is doing yes, the ancient work of reminding us that there is so much more to it all. And ⁓ that there is something really safe about understanding and looking at and exploring and being curious about other people's perspective and just the act of being curious, the act of learning more, the act of expanding is taken alum. It is part of healing the world. So thank you for role modeling that and producing what you produce. Thank you, Jenna. Such a pleasure and thank you for asking such thoughtful questions. This has been Very lovely. This has expanded me too. ⁓ Good. Thank you, Jenna. We now welcome James Gortzman, an architect, builder, technology entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Moonlight Collective. After more than two decades working at the intersection of creativity and technology, including helping build the infrastructure behind large-scale online games, James turned increasingly toward physical communal art. He is leading the creation of the Temple of the Moon for Burning Man. After months of design and construction, temple will stand briefly in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, asking us what it means to devote extraordinary care to something that was never intended to remain. Welcome, James. Before we talk about what disappears and the importance of that, I want to begin with where you are in the process of bringing the Temple of the Moon into existence. When do you leave for the desert? What is happening between now and then? And why do you continue to feel so drawn? Toward pouring this much of yourself into something you already know will disappear. Yeah, so we're in the home stretch. We'll be out there for almost three and a half weeks before Gernamette opens. ⁓ I think we have like four or five build days left in our shop here in Oakland where we're pre-assembling as many parts as possible. And we've been working in that shop now since March. So it's been many, many months of work. Every weekend and many of the weekdays, we've been in there from 10 to 4 with up to 100 people at times, all coming together in this community to build this temple. And I would say spirits are pretty high. It's really fun to see all the pieces come together. You know, we have a flatbed truck going out today with ⁓ another set of pieces. And I think this makes truck number 10 or 11 we've already shipped out. So yeah, you asked the question like why are we putting this much effort into something that's gonna burn? It's funny because to me it's almost like the question doesn't even compute. It's like it has to burn, you know, and and not just because obviously this is what we signed up for, but in my mind, one of the things that makes a temple so magical and so special is that it does have this power. to take whatever people need to let go of. It can take on people's grief, it can take on people's memories. It's whatever people have to let go. They can bring to the temple, leave it in the temple, and then ultimately it gets taken from them and transported. So it's almost like this is the juice that gives it the power to do what it has to do. You know, if we could just go to like Costco and buy a temple and set it up in you know a weekend, it just wouldn't have the same power as knowing that, you know, hundreds of people have been working for months and months Putting so much labor into this thing. And the kind of granddaddy of all the temples is this guy named David Best, who built the first eleven temples from 2001 until 2011. And you know, I had a chance to talk with him about wanting to create something sacred. And he was like, Look, what makes this temple sacred is not the design, it's not the architecture, it's the intention and the love that the community brings to it while you're building it. And I really believe that. For those of you who might not be well versed in what Burning Man is, it started out as a small group of individuals who would build a piece of art known as the man. It was this like plywood two by four structure of the man that started out being burnt on the beaches in San Francisco. And then they moved it to a place outside of Reno, known as Black Rock City, when Burning Man inhabits the space. And then over many decades, real imagineers with real understanding of engineering capacity started building even bigger monuments. And one of them is this place known as the temple, where people go to mourn themselves, mourn a moment, mourn an experience. And I can't emphasize enough how the temple was, in my one experience, the most profound and desperate experience that I had and witnessed. I was so moved. By the wedding dresses that people were hanging in the temple. And I think the wedding dresses were in reference to people who might have gotten divorced or relationships that had been severed that past year. James is constructing the temple. It's worth checking out this temporary world that's created in a very extreme environment that's still. Create space for spectacular art that is open for interpretation on an individual level constantly. Didn't I miss anything, James? I mean, I think I think the most important thing to note with the Burning Man BlackRock City is that it is a temporary city. I mean, it really is a city. That's a post office, it has a radio station, and it's a city that basically is a firmware, right? So it's built, it's there for a week and then it goes away again. You know, a handful of volunteers can't make a city work of 80,000 people. It only works because everyone who's showing up. Bought into this premise and understands the principles and plays their role. So there is a Jewish idea called lishmah, doing something for its own sake. Not because the act is purposeless, but because its deepest purpose is not entirely outside of the act itself. We learn because learning changes the learner, and we create because creating changes the person doing the creating. There is also the idea of Kavanaugh, the intention, attention, and presence that we bring to an act. A machine might be able to reproduce the form of something, but it cannot automatically reproduce the lived intention behind its making. So in conversation with Molly Crab Apple, she said that sometimes we can spend too much time trying to define what art is or what it is for. And eventually we simply have to just pick up the pen and do it. Does Lishmah creating for the sake of creating describe any part of your relationship with the temple of the moon? I mean, I think, you know, yes, you have to build a great temple, but ultimately people are going to get out of it what they need to get out of it. And while we want to create this beautiful, amazing spiritual uplifting space, ⁓ ultimately I've really come to realize that the process of building it in some ways matters more than the end result. And so, you know, when we get together every weekend with our volunteers, we take anyone who wants to help build a temple, shows up. A lot of times people are dealing with something pretty profound that they need to let go of and they feel called to help build the temple. You know, we run tool schools every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. for people who've never picked up a power tool before. And by the end of the summer, we have people now doing these like very complicated compound miter saws and some pretty advanced power tools who had never picked up power tools before they started this process. You know, and so there's this openness to an inclusivity that we really try to bring to the temple build process that by definition means we're not cherry picking the absolute best builders we can find with the most technical skills, we're open to an entire community saying, hey, come build a temple with us. So what does burning versus just deconstructing it into a pile of wood and reusing the lever? Like what does it teach you about letting go of the expectation that a work of art must remain in order to matter? There's something obviously cleansing about fire. And I think, you know, what's really interesting is is the burn ends with two fires, right? The last Saturday night of the of Burning Man, the man burns. And then the following night, Sunday night, the temple burns. And the temple burn is actually the very last act of Burning Man. And there couldn't be more different experiences. And there's music and there's drumming and fire dancers and cheering and screaming. And then Temple Burn, by comparison, it burns in complete silence. Like it goosebumps now. I'm thinking about it because what happens is, you know, we form a perimeter. There's no music, there's no art cars blasting, there's no fire performers, you know, everyone gathers in quiet. And then at the right time, the temple goes up to flames and it burns for often a couple of hours, you know, until it collapses. And during that time, it's complete silence. People are sitting there and thinking all the things that they have put in the temple that are now wiped with flames and hopefully escaping this earth and going to wherever they need to go to. We have a chat group that all the temple builders are on. We talk about logistics primarily. Just this morning, one of the people called out ⁓ a comment on a Reddit forum that they had just found yesterday where this mother was saying that her eleven month old son had passed away and she was saying, Will someone please put his name in the temple for us so that we can't be there? And, you know, my whole community was like, of course, and reaching out and saying, We'll do this for you. And I think the fact that she was reaching out to essentially group strangers on a Reddit forum and saying, Hey, well someone please do this for me shows the power of of the temple. And that we don't have a lot of opportunities in today's society to really grieve publicly and openly. And in fact, it's actually interesting. One of the reasons I'm so taken actually by kind of the Jewish grieving rituals is at least as an acknowledgement that these are not rituals meant to be done alone. This is meant to be done, you know, in community. And you know, I think the notion of sitting Shiva and the notion of the Jewish prayer of of of grieving, these are meant to be done in a community. I really appreciated what you said at the beginning about the original architects creating the temple and that it was As Kavanaugh says, this ancient technology, this ancient theory, that it is about intention, that it could be a cardboard box. And later in this season, we are talking about grief and the Jewish technology around how we grieve and why we have to grieve and what that looks like with grief bots and how we might be shortchanging this practice, this algorithm that has been designed that has helped humans heal after a loss. And I was so taken aback. By the temple, specifically again, going back to these wedding dresses. The wedding dress symbolizes to me like the most narrow destination for where women are headed. It feels like the man burn on Saturday night is the like, fuck you, anger to the world. And then Sunday, the temple effort is a desperation to come home. desperation to come back to our humanity. Yeah. And David Bastu that built the first temple, he had now gone on and he builds temples wherever he feels called to build temples and and and burn them. You know, I know he did want to decide up a school shooting. ⁓ he he's has almost made this his calling now to go to communities that are grieving something and help them build and ultimately have this sort of catharsis of burning a structure. And I think this is a technology that that you know we need. You also come from the world of technology and video game development, where systems are often designed around reaching an objective, completing a task, or arriving at an answer. And you've spent two decades in the gaming industry, including building gaming studios, and you've lived at the intersection of creativity, technology, systems, and commercial production for much of your career. But a game's destination is often only an invitation into the actual experience of playing. The goal creates a structure for attention, experimentation, et cetera. And it seems like I never would have made the connection between video gaming playing for the act of playing. It seems like in that context, is the finished object sometimes simply the invitation into the deeper human experience of making? I got into games because I was always fascinated by both computers and theater. There's something about building these fantasy spaces that get inhabited and transformed that I found magical. And I also love computers. And so community video games were the intersection of almost like computers and theaters, a chance to create these immersive and arctic spaces with an eye toward play, but the amount of effort that goes into creating the settings and the spaces and the soundtracks and the landscapes. And these are beautiful, fully realized spaces. And so to me, it was just like a virtual state set for creating spaces for people to go play in. And I got a lot of joy out of being in the game industry for so long. But at some point in the last probably five or six years, maybe it was actually the pandemic, I really started being kind of just done with screens, you know. And I still play games myself occasionally, but really I realized I spent so much time creating exclusively virtual experiences that I now wanted to get my hands dirty and I wanted to start building physical art and physical spaces. And so I'm now in and building physical stuff. And I think that is an important antidote to the current time and place where we're at right now, where so much is virtual. And and the temple is the ultimate community ⁓ experience. The series is about like, okay, now what do we do with AI as people who probably really don't understand our ancient technologies to begin with? But having looked at your website, I wonder, like, are some of those mock-ups AI? Where's the line that you're playing with as an artist, an architect, an engineer, recognizing that it's ultimately gonna be people's hands and the screwdrivers that's creating the thing? How are you wrapping your head around AI? Yeah, yeah, we we've actually been pretty ⁓ I don't know if we've drawn a pretty hard line, but we've been pretty ⁓ pretty good about not using AI very much this year. Starting from the early producers very excited. I think we use AI around the edges, but I when I think about the main through line, the core concept was created by a team member of ours, Alana Perry, who's a Disney Imagineer in her day job. And she basically did the initial sketches and initial concepts. We have an architect at Annie Lock Shears based in Sweden. She's the one who took those initial concepts and sort of turned them into the ultimate structure that we're building. You know, I've been and others have been doing a lot of actual kind of construction drawings by hand. You know, we use AI more around the edges of things like take a second look at this piece of writing I'm about to put out in the world and see if I missed anything. But AI has not changed or affected any of the core structures. It was important for me that there be a completely hands-on touch from start to finish on this thing. How will you feel when a future architect uses AI to design the temple? Will that contradict the intention of that temporary space out on the playa? I think as long as a community of people come together and put in tens of thousands of hours building it, ultimately, I think that's what really matters the most. I think the day that someone pushes a button and the temple builds itself, that's the day when I think it really will. There has to be a lot of blood, sweat, and tears go into this thing. The design is less important than the building of it. So perhaps art for art's sake does not mean art without meaning. It means that the meaning cannot always be measured by what remains, what sells, what's owned, or how quickly it was produced. And AI may be able to imitate the evidence that making actually occurred. But it cannot make the human experience of making something unnecessary. So, James, my final question for you. When the temple of the moon is gone, where will the art have gone? The birth of the temple. Let me talk about how this temple came to be in the first place. I have ⁓ one of my dearest friends in the world, and she had lost her partner pancreatic cancer last fall. And I had been sitting with her during his illness and then subsequent passing and and really holding space for her as she was grieving. And I remember it was one of the hardest things I've ever done just because I'm so action oriented and always moving and trying to do things and just make being productive. And so just sitting and holding space with her while she was grieving, not to try to fix it, not to do anything about it, but just to sit with and witness and be present and just give her someone who could be there with her was a challenge for me. You know, and in the middle of this grieving process, I I had been reflecting on sort of what was next for myself. I was at my own kind of crossroads in terms of like, do I stay in tech or do I go into becoming more of a full-time artist? And during that, I did some work and had this kind of realization's epiphany that I couldn't fix her grief, but I could build a temple where she would be grieving. I basically suddenly realized that I really felt called to build this temple because of this experience with my friend. And in that, it was interesting because in that same experience, I remember having a vivid image of what the temple is going to be. I literally had this vision of the temple kind of like fully done. And it just has had this sense of almost inevitability to it from the beginning. It's a long-winded way of answering your question, which is where does it go when it burns? It was here already before it got built. It's here now. It'll still be here after it burns. Word is witnessing this narrow temporal slice of it. James, thank you for reminding us that disappearance is not the same thing as meaninglessness and that something does not have to last forever in order to change us forever. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a beautiful build, a meaningful bird, and a safe journey into the desert. This episode began with art as a form of survival, moved through storytelling as a form of relationship, and ended with a creation as an act of attention, labor, and then release. Molly showed us that creative work can preserve memory when institutions, governments, and dominant histories refuse to. Stephanie showed us that stories can interrupt certainty and return humanity to people we have flattened. And James showed us that a work of art does not have to endure as an object in order to endure in the people who made it, witnessed it, grieved inside it, and ultimately let it go. AI can reproduce an image, imitate a voice, generate a narrative, or perhaps even propose a design. It cannot automatically reproduce the lived intention, communal labor, moral risk, and human transformation that made the work necessary. The challenge is not merely to keep producing things that look like art, it is to protect the attention, ache, embodiment, responsibility, and human need to make something visible, even when we know it will disappear. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Command F. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. You can find a summary of this episode along with all the links and resources we discussed at the landovand.live. Follow The Landavand on Sumpstack and YouTube and join our live community on Twitch. There's so much more to come. The ideas and opinions shared on this podcast belong solely to the host and guests. They reflect our thinking at the time of recording and may evolve as we continue to listen, learn, and encounter new information. They do not necessarily represent the views of any sponsor, partner, or affiliated organization. Command F is produced by the Land of Ande in partnership with Common Era. This series would not exist without DZ Callman, whose questions helped inspire its inception, and whose voice has been essential to its intellectual and moral foundation. Our deepest thanks to Rabbi Joanna Schiller, Chief Research and Development Officer at Common Era, and Mikhail Humble, Christina Gilliutin for their partnership, trust, and support in bringing this work to life. Special thanks to our production team, senior creator producer and story editor Maureen Marshea, senior livestream producer Janice Matsko, and producer and editor Sarah Jacobson.