Here’s a short excerpt from our most recent Q/A salon in the Team Human Kibbitz room. Listen to the whole show by clicking on the button above.

Dave: My name is Dave. I just have a thing about putting pretend names on discord, I guess. Super excited to be here, love the community. I am a theology professor living outside of Boston. And I want to talk about your monologue of “changing the register.” I’ll throw a couple balls into the air here and then I would just love to — I’m also a musician — so I’d love to hear you riff on some of that stuff.

So I actually am just coming from a class where I’ve been really frustrated because I feel like they see the professor as an enemy. And so I was talking to them about how I see us as co-collaborators. We’re experiencing things together. I’m just trying to “change the register” of what’s happening in the classroom.

Even broader than that, one of the other groups I’m part of is what call theopoetics: trying to change the conversation in religion from theology (which is about logic and logos and a correspondence theory of reality) to poetics, which is about doing and making (that’s what poetics means) and possibility. So it occurs to me after I heard your monologue on that, “Oh, that’s what we’re doing. We’re like trying to change the register from this logical, correspondency, absolutist kind of thing to more of a possibility and opening and doing kind of thing.

And so I was looking at my copy of your book Nothing Sacred. It looks like this is the 20th anniversary of that book, by the way. Congratulations.

Rushkoff: Yeah, obviously it worked really, it worked really well to create a more peaceful relationship between civilization and Judaism. Yeah. Oh well.

David: Your work is done here. (laughter)

But it occurred to me that this is what you were trying to do in that book: change the register, right? Of Judaism or religion and spirituality more broadly speaking. I’m curious to hear you think a little bit about that some more.

The question that I often get is, why do you bother teaching religion anymore? Because it’s not an important category. And my response is usually, well, I think religion or spirituality just relate to the things that make us human. And so I don’t know, I would love to hear you think out loud about how Nothing Sacred relates to changing the register and relates to anything going on in the world today. And what the value still lies in these traditions and changing the traditions.

Rushkoff: Well, let me start in a self deprecating way. Nothing Sacred, the book, was great in a lot of ways, because what I was trying to do was point out to my fellow so-called lapsed Jews that we were still practicing the core tenets of Judaism in our social justice work and in all of our of progressive activities. And that part was really nice. It was nice to show people where Judaism came from — that it wasn’t meant as a religion, but kind of an anti-religion. Judaism was a way of getting over religion and moving towards a much more internalized, spiritual approach to doing life.

Where I think Nothing Sacred falls short is that it favors the intellectual and social activist path over the more embodied path that includes prayer and spiritual experience. In that book I argue that, sure, you can go to synagogue and pray and have these wonderful, immersive Grateful Dead experiences if you need them, but only do that as much as you have to, to fuel yourself so you can get out into the real world and actually do the real purpose of Judaism, which is make the world a better place. Let’s get on with the actual work. Every minute that you’re spending singing in synagogue with people and feeling good is one minute that you’re not doing the work, that you’re not doing the good.

I feel like I over-emphasized the universal values and abstractness of the Jewish process to the exclusion of the importance of local connections and even local gods, if you want to call it that. I was so proud of the way Judaism denied everyone their local gods. I was arguing that that part of why Jews are oppressed and hated wherever they go is because they don’t believe in whatever the local gods are. They believe in their own abstract God that knows no place. It’s just everywhere and it has no name. (Or it does have a name, but you can’t say it.) It’s so unknowable. Local people always resent that because we don’t accept their provincial God.

And now I’m realizing that the local gods. do matter. I mean, as long as you don’t really, really, really believe in them as, as things — the local stuff, your connection to your place, these identities do matter to people. If you take away their identities, which is what we’ve seen in the American liberal project to some extent, if you take away their identities, they’re going to go extreme. They’re either going to go MAGA blood and soil, or they’re going to go to the other side and become intersectional identitarians, right? Where you find the exact decimal coordinates of your overlapping intersection. Your identity politics ends up defining you more than your common humanity with others.

So there are negative effects to not embracing the people’s local, felt, embodied reality. Yes, Nothing Sacred was about changing the register on religion and turning this faith into something much more open source and participatory and everchanging. I was saying that the Jewish continuity is not continuity to the way your parents did it, it’s continuity to the process itself — to change itself and to life itself. And at that point in my life, I guess I was still developing intellectually and philosophically, and I lost track of the embodied — which I’m reclaiming now that I’m understanding that this “Team Human” thing is: we are embodied. That’s part of it.

As to your other question of why bother teaching religion and spirituality anymore? I would say, because the only thing we have to distinguish ourselves from the AIs that they’re building is our faith that we are different. That’s the only thing that will remain consistent, right? We have faith that as they develop this human capability or that human capability, there’s one more thing that we can do that they can’t.

Yes, your computers can think and play chess and win at Go, but they can’t know what it’s like to sip a cup of coffee. And eventually AI will drink coffee and say I do actually know. Now I know that this is what it’s like to drink coffee! So then we’ll tell them, You can’t wonder, you can’t deal with ambiguity. You can’t deal with this and you can’t do that. And I think in the end, our ability to distinguish human beings from AI depends on our ability to distinguish ourselves from our utility value under capitalism. And it requires some amount of faith to continue to be able to do that. And that’s where religion and spirituality come in for me.

That’s the important of the Sabbath, which I talked a lot about in Nothing Sacred. I love the Sabbath because it’s an affirmation that human beings matter. That you don’t have to do anything. You’re allowed to take one day a week and celebrate the fact that you are alive and that, as Mr. Rogers would say, you are special just the way you are. You don’t need to do anything.

And that’s really the best thing that religion does: it affirms that this life is sacred, that we are sacred. No thing is sacred. That is what I really meant by “nothing sacred”: that nothingness, doing nothing affirms the sacred. The only way to affirm the sacred is to have faith that even when you have nothing and no evidence, it’s still sacred.

The older I get, the more important I think some spirituality is. Whether you want to do your spirituality in a coherent religion or whether you want to do it in something that wouldn’t be called a religion, it doesn’t matter. I never liked “religions.” I liked Torah, but I never liked Juda-ism once they made it an “ism”

because I don’t believe it was ever supposed to be. I thought Torah was supposed to help us get over religion. They made it into a a religion, into “Judaism” because they were getting persecuted. It needed to look like they had a religion that was like everybody else’s. The whole reform movement in Germany was to make Judaism seem like everyone else’s religions. How about if we just make it look like a church? We’ll put in an organ, we’ll put people in pews and then everyone won’t be as alienated by this stuff that we’re doing.

It was a good idea but it didn’t work long term. And it kind of confused Jews and made them think that they had a religion rather than a practice that was really more like Buddhism.

And finally, to your question of changing the register. I mean, for me, what you’re talking about is changing the register from, from probability to possibility; from certainty to questions. Again, that brings us back to AI. Artificial Intelligence is about reverting to the mean, finding the most probable outcome, the most probable answer —whereas human beings living life is about finding new possible outcomes. And I like living in the space of possibility, though, which is the dangerous place, right? Possibility.

Actually, it just seems more dangerous. It’s actually probability and certainty that is the dangerous place. even in reality. You want to avoid getting whopped in the back of the head? It’s the people who stay uncertain, who stay vulnerable, that can see behind them. That’s because they’re open and they’re feeling. It’s so hard to realize that being more sensitive to everything — 360 degree sensitivity — is actually a safer place to be, because you’re going to feel what’s coming before it gets there way easier than if you’re standing in the place of certainty.

It’s tricky. And religion and spirituality, for me, are ways of training people in and practicing moving into that much more uncertain space of faith.