TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Faith, Family, and the Fight for Truth
Date: 12/26/24 Length: 00:59:48
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show where I your rabbi, reveal how the world really works. First of all, I apologize for the poor audio quality last week. I think you could, you could tell that I was on an unusual trip and I had to cope with what there was, or missed the opportunity entirely of sharing any time together with you. So today we're going to make most of our show a conversation that Susan and I have with Tara Henley. She is a very fresh minded Canadian journalist, and she writes, and she has a site, and we we thoroughly recommend we get it. We get a great deal of benefit out of her show. And we listen to her, and we read her. We are always fascinated in how things look from across our northern border. Our relationship with Canada is so extraordinary, two neighboring countries, both from the same mother country and and the relationship is so fascinating. World War Two comes along, and both countries find themselves at war with Germany. This it's very, very unusual in the world today. It's, you know, it's not as if there's a formal written Alliance. It's not as if they are treaties. And I don't put a lot of stock in treaties and agreements and Accords, because in the final analysis, countries Act, or should act in their own interests. And yes, England found itself at war because of a pact they made with Poland. However, Winston Churchill knew that that war was absolutely inevitable, and that if they didn't fight it over Poland, they would end up fighting it over London or Glasgow or Edinburgh. The determination of the German war machine under Adolf Hitler was bound to come into conflict with what was left of the British Empire, and Churchill knew that. But ordinarily, pieces of paper, they don't really do a whole lot. An exception to that, have you ever heard people say about marriage? You know, we're living together. We've been together for eight years. We don't believe in marriage. It it's just a piece of paper, but it's a whole lot more than that, really. It's a piece of paper which is actually a contract. It's a statement to the entire community that you are committed to this permanent relationship. That is why, in many, many traditions, the wedding ceremony actually has the words till death, as do part. It is a permanent relationship. And the reality is that, as I've explained before in previous shows, the act of physical intimacy between a man and a woman is, in fact, actually a marriage. And what I mean by that is that deep down, both of them, the man and the woman, at the moment of connection, feel a permanence to the relationship and and that is why it is so deeply distressing, particularly to young women, to endure the hook up culture, to essentially have this man to whom she was attached in the most primal and powerful way possible, vanish from her life the next day, and it obviously causes tremendous damage. And we're looking at that reality now, if you want to try and understand. And American culture, and you want to understand how different men and women are, how the 2024 November presidential election showed so clearly differences between the way that single women vote and the way single men vote. A lot of that is explainable by the fact that large numbers of women in America, very large numbers, large proportions, are women who have been betrayed by a man they've had a relationship with a man that that ended, and very often ended before they were ready for it to end or wanted it to end. And there isn't such a thing as a casual physical relationship. There just isn't. And so when a physical relationship comes to a casual end, don't for one moment, think that it leaves the woman undamaged. Am I saying specifically, the woman very, very damaged? In that context, I should mention that we have a series of resources that we think of as the Lasting Love Package. Some of them are audio, some of them are video, some of them are written. But at any rate, take a look at it on the website, because it's going on sale very soon after you hear these words, and so if you yourself are in a romantic relationship, or somebody close to you is about to then the lasting love package is filled with information that is absolutely crucial, that is very often and filled with aha moments where you hear it or seen Oh yeah, that that makes sense, and which you won't get anywhere else at All. It's also the the last few days of the Tower of Power program available, and again, for a clear understanding of the seductive power of socialism, then I would recommend you do take a good look at that package as well. All of this at Rabbi Daniel lapin.com and then finally, you know, as you know, I have a small number of coaching clients. My coaching is based on the Torah system of the five F's, and it helps people work on developing their financial abilities, bearing in mind the impact of family, Faith, friendships and fitness on these financial aspects and I only have the time to work with three clients at a time, but we are working together with our friend Jim cochrarum on making a Coaching program available, particularly for those who are interested in becoming accredited in this area of coaching. So if you'd like to read more about that, take a note of this website, because you won't see it advertised anywhere else yet. But if you'd like an advance look at it, go to wehappywarriors.com/5f coaching. The five F's are, of course, as you know, family, finance, faith, friendships and fitness. And so if you go to we happywarriors.com and you go, slash five, the number 5f coaching, you will be in on the page where you'll be able to find out more about what it is that we have made available to you. So please enjoy our conversation with Tara Henley. She's a most unusual journalist, and we find her to be very, very enlightening. So we'll be talking to her now and then, right after that, I'll be back with you to say farewell.
Susan Lapin 9:52
Can you tell us a little bit about that book and what, what led to the writing of that book?
Tara Henley 9:57
For sure? Happy to and rabbi and Susan. It's just so nice to be with you today.
Daniel Lapin 10:02
Thank you, Tara.
Tara Henley 10:04
In terms of the book I wrote, it when I was having a crisis in my life. I had turned 40, and I was single and childless, and had been working very, very hard at my career, and one day in the newsroom, I started having very intense chest pains. And I was used to really pushing physically and mentally and in all of those ways, and my body just would not allow me to push anymore. And so I had to take time off from the newsroom, and I was living in Vancouver on the west coast at that point, and put my life back together one bit at a time, and the way that I started to do that was by hiking in the forest with with girlfriends and talking, and I did a lot of reading and reflection and research, and I just started to look at the ways in which our modern world is just really not serving us, and the sort of the loneliness and the workaholism and all of the things that I was experiencing firsthand, what it really meant for us collectively. And basically the conclusion of the book is that this is really not meant to be done alone. And I started to really change the way that I approach life, change my values, change the way that I structured my life and really put family and community first. And it was, it was revelatory
Susan Lapin 11:26
that what I find interesting about that is so you wrote the book in 2020 but then you started a podcast lean out with Tara Henley, which is still functioning today, but that wasn't until 2022 and when you started that, I'd have to say, if I had to say what your two passions were at that point, I would say that you had a passion for free speech, for making sure that different and opposing points of view are presented, rather than just one point of view. And secondly, freedom of the press. So, I mean, there were definitely discussions you had Monica Guzman, who I've spoken about and written about, and I enjoy, but on about people talking to each other. But you were also passionately. You had been, I believe, for many, many years, with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And you didn't just take off from there. You actually left it with a with an explanation of why it was no longer serving the Canadian people. And just from our perspective, I think the majority of our happy warriors are American, but we actually have people around the world, and our second largest concentration is Canada. So I'm really it's one of the things I'm excited about, is being able to bring a little Canadian, you know, when we go to British Columbia, as we do very often, I think we say, Okay, throw a u into certain words, like flavor and color and and get used to driving with kilometers instead of miles. But it's really the same. But it's not really the same. The city, United States and Canada are two very different countries. I should say also, we've really watched the the style, the socio political style in British Columbia, changed over the decades we've been going and it's become a slightly more a vicious and bureaucratic place than it used to be when we originally thought, What was so wonderful with our kids that they could literally run Free Range, as the popular phrase would have it, and little by little, that started diminishing over the years, as we could see socialism percolating its way down from the top. Well, yeah. Well,
Tara Henley 13:31
go ahead, yeah. I'm not sure that socialism is the best way to characterize it, because I think it's more of an incoherent political philosophy than that is the collection of views of the elites here. And some of them are leftist, but some of them really aren't. And so it's, it's more of an incoherent political philosophy, I think, but I think you're very much right on and observing that it has changed our culture dramatically. And I think that the point we are adding Canadian history right now is that the vast majority of the public does not share this collection of views that the elites share, and so we're in some pretty major trouble in this country right now, because we're having quite huge tensions over these things
Susan Lapin 14:16
you wrote about that you you said that the social contract in one of your in one of your articles, you said the social contract has been broken. There used to be a feeling that you, if you did things right, you worked hard, you followed the law, you would be able to, when you grew up, get a place to live and have a family and live in a faith area. And that that social contract has been broken. Well, that certainly happened in America. I think that's one of the things that led to both Trump elections. People were saying, it's been broken in what way is it different? And going back to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the news is different. What can you talk a little to how the news functions differently in the United States and Canada? Yeah,
Tara Henley 14:56
so I haven't worked a lot in Canada, but I can tell you my or. Sorry, have worked a lot in the United States. Worked a lot in Canada, I think that, but I can give you general observations. But going back to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, I was a current affairs radio producer there, so after I spent those months off work, I went back to the newsroom, and I moved back to Toronto, which is where I was when the pandemic hit. And it was an extraordinary time in the media. We were doing the same story every day. I mean, when 911 happened, I think the longest that anyone had covered a story was that was something like two weeks day after day, and then COVID. And I can't remember what the count was, but I think we did it something like 300 days in a row that was Whoa, that was incidented. And I'm a current affairs journalist, and so I take the news of the day and try to help put it into context for readers or listeners or viewers. And this involves finding people to analyze what's going on, finding people who can give unique insights, sometimes speaking to the public about their abuse. And typically, I did two stories a day, every day the CBC. And during the pandemic, it was all COVID all the time, and we were all working remotely, except for the host and the director, which is a role I sometimes played. I bounced journals a lot in the newsroom, and the combination of a bunch of things happening all at once led to a very stultifying environment in the newsroom. And first of all, we were isolated. All of us were working at home. We were many of us living alone. A lot of us were very frightened. And second of all, we were doing this story that most of us were not science journalists. We were somewhat out of our depth, and we were listening daily to a lot of human suffering. So those early days of the pandemic, I would get off the phone and I would have to just cry because it hearing. I mean, you know, from dealing with people who are going through immense pain, it can be quite tense. I think just to set the stage there, that there was a lot going on. But also there was this moment in the Canadian media where our media had, up until that point, begun collapsing, because the advertising model was not working anymore, the engagement model, business model, didn't fly, and the subscriber model had yet to become workable, and I think we're still experimenting with that. So you had this financial precarity, which meant that organizations were very precarious, but so were individuals. All of us, you know, I was either on contract or just working shift to shift. You didn't have very much stability in your life, and your organizations didn't feel stable either. And so there was this real uncertainty and instability kind of underlying everything, and that bred a lot of timidness and a lot of risk aversion and a lot of grouping we had already been and all this is my opinion. Other people have different opinions. We had been very left leaning already, and I come from the progressive left myself. I have been quite critical of it, because I have experienced a lot of the end game of of some of that thinking, and it has not worked well for me in my own life. But I come from that world, and we had been quite far to the left already, but I felt that there was much more of an effort to have viewpoint diversity, to acknowledge the range of different perspectives, and also to understand that debate was good, and that none of these models matters were settled. Kind of really, really changed in 2020 and I just How did you feel that
Daniel Lapin 18:36
in the news, from your experience, you've got a certain status and prestige already, after years with the Broadcasting Corporation, was there some, was there some new messaging that you became aware of or sensitive to? I
Tara Henley 18:52
would say I didn't have a lot of status. Actually, I was very much rank and file. I had a lot of experience, but I did not have a lot of status, just to be very transparent, but I had worked on a lot of shows, and I I'm a very agreeable person in terms of interpersonal relationships, but I'm a very disagreeable person in story meetings. I argue a lot, and that almost overnight, became a huge liability, whereas it had been encouraged before, and there was both top down and bottom up things happening. Gosh,
Susan Lapin 19:25
do you know if you're making I'm sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you're making me think of universities where universities used to be places where you were encouraged to debate and to and all of a sudden, no, you here's the party law. You say it or you get in trouble. So it's
Tara Henley 19:40
the same thing. The way that it functions in the newsroom is very, very subtle. Sometimes it's as subtle as you pitch a certain story angle and you've pitched it three times in a row in three different settings, and it never flies. And so sometimes it's that subtle. Sometimes it's silence in the story meeting. Sometimes it's the story gets through, but you. Know, there's many different stages, and each stage takes out one of the challenge questions in the interview. And it's not, I don't think it's nefarious. I think it's the people all in the newsroom all hold a similar viewpoint. They all think about the world from the same viewpoint. So
Daniel Lapin 20:16
was there any day you remember when you suddenly said to yourself, hello, I'm actually not. Things have changed. I'm not being able to do stories the way I used to.
Susan Lapin 20:28
It was never an aha moment. Aha moment. Yeah, right. It
Tara Henley 20:32
was quite gradual. I really love the CBC, and I really want for it to survive, and so I spent a lot of time arguing behind the scenes, and there's a lot of different views on this. I mean, if you talk to staunch leftist in the country, they feel that the viewpoint is very establishment and very centrist. If you talk to people on the right, they find it very left, like this. It's a public institution with a with a lot going on. But I think, think it was a good year and a half of arguing in every day, until I really realized that I just couldn't do the job the way that I wanted it to do, and I knew that I was going to need to go independent. And it's really interesting. A lot of people will say to me, how many of the stories that you do you couldn't do on a CBC, and especially in the first two years, it was almost all of them. Like, wow, almost all of them. The climate has changed in the last year or so, I think. But in the beginning, it was almost all of them, and it was a process too for me, of learning to speak freely. Certainly, I had spoken freely in editorial meetings, but in the public I had been quite measured. And it's quite an adjustment to then just what you think. You know, it takes a while to to build that muscle, I think, but it's been extremely rewarding, and I continue to really hope that the CBC will change and reform, because it's a you know, as someone who believes in institutions, I would really like to see that institution thrive in the future. In terms of the US context, again, I really haven't worked a lot in the US, but I know that a lot of the problems I've interviewed a lot of American journalists at this point, I know that some of the problems are very similar. The economic precarity underlies all of it. It's a real problem for the industry. I guess the ideological capture is one way of talking about it, this, this collection of views that the elites hold very dear right now that are not shared by the rest of the population. I don't know how to talk about that view. Is it called wokeism? Is it identity politics? But your listeners, I'm sure, will understand what I'm trying to get at, that that also has overwhelmingly been a force in American journalism as well, and then in American journalism, we've seen our US counterparts really lead the way in the independent media, thinking of people like Barry Weiss here,
Susan Lapin 22:42
I was actually going to ask you a question about that, because I see you as part of a cohort, and Barry Weiss and you, and then there's Megan dam and even Ali arm Hersey, Ali Ayan, Hirsi, Ali. And what would you, I think you're very much of the same ages and same experiences of having all of a sudden found yourself on the right, and it must be like, wait, wait a second. How am I on the right? Where the bad attitude? But what would you and we do have? And as you read our book, the holistic you, one of our passions is trying to help people who are now 20 or 21 or 22 not have to go through 20 years of following certain things. What would your advice be to a 20 year, 21 year old woman who came to and said, I want to be a journalist or I, what would you how? What would you advise? Yeah,
Tara Henley 23:33
there's so much to unpack there. I mean, I think the first thing is, I very much identified with the left my whole life, and now I feel a little bit more politically homeless, and I think that that's actually a useful thing for young journalists to come from that vantage point is I don't feel attached to the right or the left, and I feel like my job is to be most attached to the citizenry and to try to serve that. And so actually, one of the commitments that I have now is I don't vote because I don't want interesting I don't want to have a horse in the race. I want to be equally critical. I want to not be tribal. I don't want to feel attached to any political party. So that would be, I think, one of the first pieces of advice, this piece of advice, to me, surprise you, and I just gave this piece of advice recently to some young journalists, is take care of your home life first. Because what we what we have to deal with on a daily basis right now as journalists, is such a roller coaster, and you cannot survive it if you don't have a solid foundation. Please,
Daniel Lapin 24:31
please unpack that a little bit more. Tara, yes. So
Tara Henley 24:34
actually, Nelly Bowles, Barry's wife, was one of the people that said this to me, which is very helpful advice is that if you want to be wild in your work life, you need to be super regular in your home. Get really interested. Nice way of putting isn't it. And I spent a lot of my career single, and I no longer single, and the stability you have from having a solid, stable home life, I think, is key to surviving the. Roller coaster of the media right now, and that and outside interests are really important too. Like, I love cooking, and oftentimes, when I'm in the kitchen and I'm listening to music, and I think, you know, if journalism doesn't work out, if I, if I can't get the revenue from journalism, I'll be just fine. You know, writing a food blog and cooking, because it gives me so much joy. It's so much pleasure. I love feeding people. So the biggest thing, I think, for young journalists, is that understand that you're stepping into extreme volatility in every way, and that if you can give yourself a really good foundation, if you could have solid friendships and close family relationships and a spouse and pets and a full life outside of that, you can weather that storm in a in a much, much better way, and you can, I think, be of service, especially in this moment, much much better if you're grounded in kind of lasting values and stable settings. I think you're much more useful to the rest of the world, because everything right now is so polarized and so tribal and so emotional that you have to take care of your own emotional life first.
Susan Lapin 26:05
And well, recently, you have started a series on your podcast focusing on men, which has been very interesting, and that's something we've been concerned with. We actually have six daughters and one son, so we are a little we've been skewed growing up. But in this one, we have six, six sons in law, so and grandson. So we're, you know, we are very concerned about about men in society. And you specifically, at the end of each episode, you say it's a memory of Mark Antoine juvenile, if I'm if I'm saying his name correctly. So would you share a little bit, maybe about what led you to start this series and and again, how your views might be different. When you were 20 years old, it was probably a lot of Go, girl. You know, it's all about the women and empowering women, and somehow, in doing so, we've we've lost a whole generation of men, and somehow we have to find a way for men and women to realize that we're in this together. Yes,
Tara Henley 27:03
I could not agree with you more, and I definitely came from a very staunch feminist perspective. I still care very much about women's lives and their stories, but I think it's really, really important for us to think about men and the challenges that men are going through right now as well. And so I've been thinking about that for some time. I'd started researching that. I know that this generation of men is seeing declining educational achievement, declining job rates. I know that men are feeling very isolated, and we have higher substance abuse rates, higher overdoses, higher suicide rates. Those things we have in common, both America and Canada and that so many of the men that I talked to in the sort of 20 to 45 age range are feeling quite lost in adrift in terms of their role. What? How does it how? What does it mean to be a man in this culture? What does it mean to be responsible to those around you? And because so many of the traditional male traits have been either now ignored or dismissed. There's a lot of talk about toxic masculinity. Rider role is not as relevant as it used to be. The protective role is not as relevant as it used to be when we live in such safe and stable societies, some of us. So
Susan Lapin 28:16
coming back a little bit was certainly there been instances in America. I know for sure, this is, you know, on the, I'm sorry, Daniel Penny, who recently where, you know the fact that he was prosecuted for coming to the aid of a subway car. Again, the elites, I would say, prosecuted him, and the people were, thank God that there's a man who steps forward. It's
Tara Henley 28:37
a tricky thing that the level of street violence we're seeing right now. We do see that in Toronto as well. And I think about this a lot, just out on the streets, it does not feel particularly safe, right? And you do go back thinking as you're walking, oh, there's a big guy walking behind me is, you know, I feel a little safer. I mean, it just naturally, your brain goes there. But getting back to the issue of men, I was already really caring deeply about this issue. Try to talk about this without being emotional. I've not really talked about it much, but we did lose a family friend, Mark Antoine Jubenville. He rest in peace, and I had known him since he was 12, good friend of our family and Rabbi Susan. He was really the best of us. He was a firefighter. He was a very brave individual. He cared so much for his community, for his family, for his friends. He would do anything for the people in his life. He believed very strongly in being of service. He was raised by a very strong Catholic woman who taught him, taught him to put self, others before self. And unfortunately, last year, he he died. He he drove into a wall in a parking garage in Vancouver, and he's very, very much missed. And so these, I don't connect the series to his life. I don't have a lot of knowledge about what was going on in his life, but I know that he was very much missed. Is very much. Missed by by everyone in our circle. And I wanted to honor him that you are
Susan Lapin 30:04
really I mean, it is something memorializing him by your So, okay, move away from an emotional to catch your breath right now, just again, just to bring Canada back into it. Obviously, it's been a momentous week right now we're as we're taping. We're just two days after the inauguration, but Justin Trudeau is going to be stepping down, so things, major things are going on in Canada. Do you see a trajectory of the government moving, and it's rather than, you know, we, I kind of feel like in America, we've just been flip flopping. We, you really can't know, from four years to the next four years instead of having a continuation of American policy. You know it. I understand, and I approve of the fact that Donald Trump basically undid the executive orders of Joe Biden with his executive orders. But that's not good for the running of a country for it's a flip flop like that. Do you what do you look forward to seeing in Canada with Justin Trudeau leaving and having been repudiated. I mean, he's leaving because he really lost his popularity completely. He
Tara Henley 31:07
really did. We're at a very strange moment right now because he has stepped down as a Liberal Party leader, and he intends to step down as Prime Minister when he is replaced, and in the meantime, he has prorogued parliament to give the Liberal Party a chance to run a leadership race, so we don't have a functioning Parliament till March.
Susan Lapin 31:27
That's a long time in a world that's going crazy, that's having a lot happening. Yes,
Tara Henley 31:30
and you know, of course, Donald Trump has been talking about tariffs, and so it's a particularly pivotal time. So it's very, very concerning. We also don't know. I mean, the polls show very, very strongly that if an election were held today that Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, would win. What's especially interesting about that is that he has won. The youth, like the the young people in the country have gone really in favor of the conservatives, which is not a typical dynamic in a western democracy. Really, really interesting and so, but we don't know what will happen between now and the election. We really don't know. If we just don't know. There's all kinds of parliamentary things that could happen. And it's really, really an uncertain time, so it's very hard to know. I expect a Conservative government, but I can't be sure that we'll have one, and I don't know what that would mean at this point in time either, I mean, the the country is facing some really intractable problems. We have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis, we have an opioid crisis, we have a health care crisis. These are massive, massive problems that I don't know. The different leadership could could solve overnight, and then we, like you, have a very polarized and quite angry electorate, and I think there's lots of reasons for people to be angry, but I don't know how you heal those divisions and you bring people back from from that level of anger. So quite concerned, right?
Daniel Lapin 32:54
Your whole training and background and personal life for years has been a focus on accurate, precise reporting of what is But truly, there must be occasion Tara where you say to yourself, if only I was in charge, I know what needs to happen.
Tara Henley 33:19
Well, I think, I mean, I work in current affairs, and so I don't do investigative reporting, and I don't do a lot of reporting. I do. I do a lot of synthesizing opinions and trying to look through documents and trying to synthesize all the information for listeners. I think, think it's very difficult times to be a journalist. I do. I'm very critical of the media, but I also want to extend a lot of empathy to my colleagues, because it's very difficult times. It's an unusual amount of vitriol from the public. And again, I think the public deserves to be angry. I think the media has failed in some of its basic functions. But what that means on the street and at rallies and it political events and online can can be really distressing for individual journalists to have to feel, and again, the financial precarity we just can't not mention that over and over again. So I think it's difficult times we have to find the right balance of critiquing our colleagues, but also extending empathy to all of us as well.
Daniel Lapin 34:16
And as far as the maladies afflicting men who are the villains. That's such a good question. Sorry, I'm also thinking,
Susan Lapin 34:25
I mean, what I would say? Good thing. You didn't ask me
Tara Henley 34:29
So good question. And it's not that's not what I've thought about really, really deeply. Do you have ideas on
Daniel Lapin 34:34
that? Yes, to some extent, my instinctive view on this is that that like like in the world of physics, nature abhors a vacuum, and when a role of influence and power, what I think of as the masculine imperative of being a giver, put. Being out, being a shaper, being an influencer. When that is removed, when the possibility of that is taken away, then I think feminine energy rushes into to take its place, and it's that it's not an environment in which masculinity thrive.
Tara Henley 35:18
I've heard, I've heard lots of, actually feminist commentators talk about this, the feminization of public life. I also wonder about the birth strain and about the dissolution of families in general. I know that the men in my life and in my family, I have seen them become husbands and fathers, and the sort of deep meaning and purpose that they find from that and the way that that has shaped their lives in really profound ways. And in Canada right now, for example, our birth rate has hit historic lows. Yeah, we're now one of the lowest low fertility countries in the world. I think, think that the lack of family connections. Women feel it very strongly. I felt it incredibly strongly. But men, I believe they must feel it too, very
Susan Lapin 36:04
much so. And I think one of the, I mean, if you ask me, one of the the decoupling, and it was scientific, the birth control pill came along, along with in America, at least, the civil rights legislation, which started saying to black women, quite frankly, you don't need men. We'll give you more money if you don't have a husband than if you do. And that bled out to the rest of society and and all those things that basically said it was the beginning of identity politics. Really, men versus women, women versus them, instead of we're all in this together that it is as a world
Daniel Lapin 36:40
to just enlarge on that very slightly Susan, I would say that I don't think women generally understand, in an internalized kind of a way, the extent to which men need to be needed. And the message ever since was that I don't remember it was Germaine Greer's classic about women need men like need a bicycle, which was very funny at the time, but, but that's a method that somehow has permeated, and so a man who isn't needed is not a happy Man, and
Tara Henley 37:19
it's so untrue that they're not needed. I started my career in hip hop as a music critic, and I interviewed young men. And these are black young men, white young men from tons of different contexts that through line that I observed was a lot of these young men had grown up without dads, and I, you know, I have some experience with that myself, too, my my dad was was gone for part of my adolescence and and that I just have never heard anybody who has had an absent dad talk about that as if it didn't matter. Those men are very needed, very needed. There's just no way it could be interpreted doing the interviews I did, there's no way it could be interpreted otherwise. It's what
Daniel Lapin 38:07
things that struck me over the last few months of the American election campaign, is the vast difference between rural and urban voters and one of those areas really does impact this gender issue, because if you're living in a city, a woman or a man are both equally capable of picking up the phone and calling the repairman or The plumber, or, for that matter, the police or or transport or animal animal pest control, all it takes is a phone call and a woman and a man can both do it. But if you're in an urban neighborhood and somebody has to go up on the roof to stop a leak, and you know, it'll take three days before you can get a serviceman to come. At that point, the woman pretty much says to her husband, honey, could you go and take care of that? I just
Tara Henley 39:11
had someone on the podcast raise this exact point, a liberal who had moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York, and her views on gender really changed where she got out there, because, as you say, the roles and responsibilities are very different, and some of the work that has to be done in a rural setting is dangerous work. It's very difficult work. And she was saying didn't want to do it. Was so grateful my husband could and did. And so it started to give her more insight into those roles. She also noticed that on the farm that she owns and operates, she has young children come and stay, and that the young boys did a lot of work. She was saying, you know, it's, it's not just the patriarchy that ends, you know, we were young boys on farms. It's because they have all this energy and they have all this ability, and they have a different work load. Work capacity, and I do think we need to start recognizing these differences more. Well, we certainly
Susan Lapin 40:04
agree with you. I mean, if you read our book, we know that we very much feel that strongly. Tara, any closing words, but you'd like to add before we finish this up, this interview up, yeah,
Tara Henley 40:16
I'm just curious about you. I raised secular, and I have been talking more and more to people of faith, because I want to hear the different perspectives and how that influences their work. And I guess just being in a time of division in both of our countries right now, if How do you think about that division, and how do you think about
Daniel Lapin 40:35
us coming together, the division between faith and secularism, faith and
Tara Henley 40:39
secularism written poor American and Canadian, Republican, Democrat. Well, if
Daniel Lapin 40:45
I I'll just jump in first while you put your thought together soon. But part of the the political plaque, that vast cultural canyon that cuts through America, it's been characterized as populist versus elite. It's also possible to characterize it as university centric, as opposed to non University centric. Can be those who are focused on words and ideas and those who are focused on things, back to the urban, rural distinction, but it is also a distinction between comfort with traditional Bible based Christian faith and intense discomfort with that. And so previous administrations in the United States of America would never have incorporated the Battle Hymn of the Republic as music for the inauguration. It couldn't happen. Glory, Glory hallelujah was not heard in the Obama administration or in the Biden administration. And so there very much is the difference. And going back to the the question you mentioned a few minutes ago of fertility rates, which are really important, because economic reality is the downstream of fertility reality. And it's interesting, and you probably know this, that the only western industrialized democracy that defies these very, very gloomy fertility figures of well below replacement is Israel which and again, it's not because of the Muslim population or the religious population. Israel, secular population dramatically outperforms any other western country when it comes to fertility. And so again, in our book and in our coaching work, we see a very strong connection between family and faith and the there's certain optimism that come from a faith centric view of reality, and if there's any characteristic desperately needed for family formation, it's optimism. And so I think there's a good reason that every attempt to economically stimulate fertility has been doomed and has been futile almost everywhere, a little less so in in Hungary, but still nonetheless not adequate to reverse the trend. The one, the one answer, which is validated by easily observing fertility performance in pockets of religious resilience, is that faith and fertility do seem to go together. And yeah, that, that would seem to be my thought on that.
Susan Lapin 43:44
I would just add I totally agree with everything you said, but I think that we have, we have to understand that people need to believe. People need to have faith in something. And if you don't have faith in God or in the in the traditional religion, you are going to still believe in things. And I think that's part of what went wrong with COVID. There was a belief it wasn't scientifically proven that, for example, that you know, this did not originate deliberately in fine art. All those things were all belief systems. It's a belief system that says all people want the same thing. Their culture doesn't matter, human beings are all alike, so you're going to have belief in something. And I don't think that we should be mandating church or synagogue or that anyone should have to make a statement of belief that, however, the idea that there's a that America certainly, and I don't know about Canada, but America was founded. We actually wrote a whole book about this. In the 1990s America was founded not as a Christian theocracy, but on Judeo Christian values. And there are beautiful words of the founder saying, this will only work as long as the people are believers. This won't work without it. And I think that's something we just have to recognize that. People the idea that, well, we'll only will be scientific. Well, we've seen doctors and scientists basically lie and cheat and unable to deal with scientific facts because their belief they've come up with a different belief system, and that keeps them so I think people need faith. I'd
Daniel Lapin 45:18
love to hear you react, if you wouldn't mind, to one more point I'll add to Susan, we find ourselves an interesting situation, because in the United States of America, and I'm pretty sure this is true for Canada as well, the Jewish population is disproportionately secular, even atheistic. And so whereas it is organically impossible for somebody to say I am a Christian atheist, it's perfectly common and and quite, quite quite frequently encountered for Jews to say I'm Jewish and I'm an atheist. The the Democratic Party in America has often been joked as the uncircumcised wing of the American Jewish community, but, but that isn't correct, because it is circumcised. It is very heavily Jewish, and apropos of what Susan said, and this is what I wanted to throw out. It is very interesting that one of the areas that has replaced faith is the mental health profession. And again, it's not an accident that where as Jews constitute as many as about 14% of America's doctors, they are much closer to 30% of America's psychiatrist. And so in essence, in Judaism, starting with Sigmund Freud, who was a Jew, the idea has been very much that if you want to secularize the soul, turn to the psychiatrist, and that's really very much where we stand today. I believe this has something to do with the meteoric growth in the size of the diagnostic and statistical manual of the mental health profession, and the vast increase in the number of maladies that come under the category of mental health. To me, the corresponding to the growth in secularism is not an accident or coincidence.
Tara Henley 47:29
It's so interesting. And I think people, when you look at the mental health rates and you talk to people, people are really suffering. They're and they're suffering. They're suffering alone and then often in silence, and so I'm seeing the people I know and the people I interview become very much more open minded into other ways of doing this, because whatever we're doing right now does not seem to be working very well, not very well.
Susan Lapin 47:55
Well. We really, we really do appreciate the part you have played and you are playing. You do interviews, fascinating interviews again. Lean out with Tara Henley, I do, I do recommend that people listen to your podcast. And I appreciate, I appreciate what you are doing for opening conversation and presenting ideas that people may not hear otherwise.
Daniel Lapin 48:20
We've tried to learn interviewing tips from you as well. I say we we struggle with elements
Tara Henley 48:28
well. Thank you so much for your kind words. Rabbi And Susan, thank you for a wonderful conversation. Thank you
Daniel Lapin 48:35
Well, I hope you enjoyed the conversation that Susan and I had with Tara Henley. And as you know, from from time to time, we managed to devote a podcast to conversation with somebody that that we enjoy talking to, and we think that you will enjoy hearing that as well. One of the things we're going to come up with again soon. You may remember a few weeks back, we had a podcast on which we had an opportunity to meet a happy warrior. And we did that, and so we're going to be doing that soon. We've got another happy warrior, this one also living outside the United States of America, who we want to talk to on the show, and we'll be doing that as well. Thanks for helping to promote the show. It's obviously working very well, and we really do appreciate that. If you are interested in the coaching any aspect of the 5f coaching system, whether you're interested in building up your life through that, or whether you'd like to be accredited to help others do just. That please go to this website, www.wehappy warriors.com, slash 5f coaching, and you'll be able to find out more information about that at this advanced time. We haven't yet advertised it, but, but there it is. It's available for you. So until we get together next week, want to thank you very much for being part of the rabbi Daniel Lapin show. And I want to wish you a wonderful week of climbing onwards and upwards with your family, your finances, your faith, your fitness and your friendships. I'm Rabbi. Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
