https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IT2IvmP1Wnk
How often did people sit down with Putin in the last three years? Like almost never? Well if he has a tilt towards paranoia, paranoia, and he is a Russian so he might, then that’s not such a good idea and you don’t know. I would say that’s one thing perhaps that Trump was good at, to sit down with people like Kim Jong-un and perhaps with Putin and to at least be there in the same room with them in some credible way. We have no idea how much international peace depends on those strange bonds of at least quasi-trust that are forged not as a consequence of the shared propositional beliefs but just as a consequence of that recognition of common humanity. It isn’t obvious at all to what degree you can get that in the deepest sense through mere abstract communication. Eating with someone is probably one of the most primordial things that you can do. It is so profound that it’s beyond rational discussion. It precedes any political discussion you can have which is why it’s so traditional for heads of states to eat together. How do you see that they don’t steal your food? Well, there were times, or kill you for it. I mean there were times where that was like, especially if you were eating with a stranger, that was a crucial issue, especially if you were both actually hungry. So it was a real test of, well it really is a real test of civilization to see if people can sit down and share a meal. In dating, when I speak to singles on my radio show, I’m just realizing it now because of this discussion. So it goes from, if they meet through an internet site, which by the way I recommend to singles all the time, and they meet through an internet site, so then they will email, then they will talk, then they might video, then they rarely go for a meal, they’ll meet at Starbucks. When it graduates to a meal, everybody knows this is a bit more serious. This is the beginning of something intimate. A meal? So it’s a very interesting thing about the meal. Well it’s a very embodied act, unlike the rest of those acts that can be mediated electronically. Well Starbucks is embodied too, but it’s not a meal, it’s a coffee. Right, right. You don’t use your teeth on coffee. Uh-huh. There’s an interesting side to this too. One of the saddest statistics I heard recently was about the number of children who grow up in homes that never eat together, or less than once a week. So we’ve had this kind of total devastation of domestic, little dish in the house of people eating together. So I think you can understand some of the civic fragmentation we have at the level that Many people growing up without any kind of human frame to their shared experience at all, no rituals. But it’s very interesting, so there’s a certain sense in which eating with another person is inherently an other focused ritual. But this is also explicitly so, right? Because it’s, we must hold a feast unto the Lord. And so it seems to me this is why things like the ritual side, we talk about college dinners, but also at home dinners, why grace before meals is so important. Orientation of the whole activity towards that superordinary principle, which I would argue you can do damn well, even if, maybe especially if you’re an atheist. You write your own prayer. Express gratitude. It does bring everybody’s attention to what’s trying to be a credent. They won’t do it. It’s like when I advocate the Sabbath, so atheists call my show, well, we could have a night a week with our family every week. I said, of course you can, but you won’t. I do it because I actually believe God said honor the Sabbath each week. That’s the ultimate reason I take a break from everything one day a week. Yeah, well you have a moral, well the thing is one of the reasons not to take a break is because you have moral obligations. It’s like, well I have work to do seven days a week, 24 hours a day. It’s like, well you need a moral obligation that’s even more serious to get a serious person to take a break. By the way, this again, this food thing just occurred to me because I had thought about this, but I forgot about it until now. So in the Holy of Holies is the Ark with the Ten Commandments and one other thing, a table. And in Jewish life, the table is the center of religious life. It is the table at home is more important than the synagogue. Ask any religious Jew. There’s no debate about what I’m saying. The center of Jewish religious life is the house and the center of religious life in the house is the table. And I can say that the Friday night Shabbat dinner and Saturday Shabbat lunch in my upbringing were more formative than any other single event. It is where I learned to think, learned to speak. There was no tolerance for a stupid comment from me. And I learned because my brother is six years older, so he had the dominated conversation with my father at the Shabbat table. And then when I finally spoke up, I remember the very first time I spoke up, my father said that’s bullshit. And it was the greatest thing he could have said to me. There was no, oh, that’s really sweet, Dennis. What a thought. I got none of that. And to this day, I have always asked when I speak, is my father, what would my father say? That is what you should ask. That’s right. That’s a prayer, man. When I first came here in 68, picking up what Stephen says, that shocked me more. There was no family dining table. And in six weeks from East Coast to West, there was no family. You know, the family dining table was like a Grand Prix pit stop and the mother racing off to a soccer match or a violin lesson. I learned everything from my family heritage at the dinner table. So what you’re saying, I think, is incredibly important. The central ritual in Christian religious practice is also a ceremonial feast. The delivery of the host is precisely that. I mean, it’s primordial, but it’s also a revolution in the history of religion because, you know, sacrifice, the idea that feasting becomes sanctified, you’ve got sacrifice early on, you’ve got human sacrifice early on, you’re not going to sort of eat to sacrificial human victims. Yeah, sometimes you do. Well, sometimes they did. There are cannibalistic moments, threads there. But you do have this shift towards the vertical sanctifies the horizontal, as it were, the family and the community. And it’s a sanctification of the body too, because there’s nothing, in some sense, there’s almost nothing more bodily than eating. You want to bring that up to the highest place.