#  Hope Podcast: Featuring Josh Kurtz, MDiv '25, and Francesca Rubinson, MDiv '24 

 





September 10, 2024

 

 

 

In this episode of the Hope Podcast, we interview Josh Kurtz, MDiv '25, and Francesca Rubinson, MDiv '24. They discuss their relationship to Judaism, the role it has played in their lives, and the ways in which they find hope in community and writing.



 

 Harvard Divinity School · Hope Podcast: Featuring Josh Kurtz, MDiv '25, and Francesca Rubinson, MDiv '24 

 



 

 

 

RILEY BROWN: Welcome to The Hope Podcast, a show about Harvard Divinity School students and how they find hope in difficult times. My name is Riley Brown, and I am a second year masters of divinity candidate, a chaplain intern in the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life here at HDS, and I will be the host of today's conversation.

I am joined by Francesca Robinson and Josh Kurtz, friends, fellow chaplain interns, and this is our inaugural episode, and we thought it would be best to just do it all together with all of your chaplain interns here together. So, Josh and Francesca, thank you for joining me.

JOSH KURTZ: Thank you for having us.

\[LAUGHTER\]

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Thanks, Riley. It's good to be here all together with our little coworkers team of hopeful chaplain interns.

RILEY BROWN: Yes, yes. Keeping hope alive, the chaplain interns altogether. I wanted to begin with having you each introduce yourselves a little bit to the audience. Where are you from? And do you follow or belong to a religious or spiritual tradition? Whichever one of you would like to go first.

JOSH KURTZ: I'm happy to go. Yeah, so as Riley said, my name is Josh. I'm a second year masters of divinity student at HDS. I grew up in Northern New Jersey and, thank you, and I identify as Jewish. And I grew up in the Jewish community.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: So I can just say, I'm Francesca Robinson. I'm a third year master of divinity student here at HDS, also a chaplain intern. I grew up in New York City, in Washington Heights. And I'm also Jewish, like Josh.

RILEY BROWN: Yeah, so having introduced yourselves, could you give us a brief spiritual autobiography, how the role your tradition has played in your life, and how you've understood yourself relative to your tradition or lack thereof?

JOSH KURTZ: That's a big and really good question. OK, I will try to be brief and as eloquent as possible about this. But it's been many years since I had to write my Jewish journey story. So, although there was a period of my life where I had to write that one a lot. Yeah, so I grew up in a-- oh thank you. Sorry, I don't know if you want me to lean back or lean forward.

RILEY BROWN: I think it's a hot mic. So you lean back a little bit more.

JOSH KURTZ: Oh, Yes. If you're-- yeah, if you're listening to this, just know it's a hot mic.

RILEY BROWN: It's a hot mic

JOSH KURTZ: And it's a hot mic. Also, if anyone didn't know who happens to go to HDS, we have a recording studio. It's wild.

RILEY BROWN: We're in a recording studio Hall.

JOSH KURTZ: Yeah, in dev hall. So make your podcast here.

RILEY BROWN: If you want to join, email me.

\[LAUGHTER\]

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: We're raw and unfiltered.

JOSH KURTZ: Yes we are. Yeah, OK. So growing up as a child, I belonged to a large reform Jewish congregation in Northern New Jersey. It was one of many very large congregations that basically all looked the same. And when I was growing up, I found a lot of joy and community there. And that community was called Temple Emeth in Teaneck, New Jersey.

I feel like most times I meet Jewish friends, they were born in Teaneck, New Jersey, too, so if anyone's out there, and wants to talk about Teaneck. Yeah, I think that community is where I first fell in love with particular aspects of Jewish traditions, certain songs, certain rituals around holidays and so on. But I do feel like at the same time, the center of my Jewish life as a child was my grandparents dining room table.

I feel like-- my mum side of the family immigrated to the US from Romania in the 60s. And my grandparents survived the Holocaust there. And so they had a very, I think, specific relationship to Jewish community. They were pretty secular, but found a lot of value in the cultural traditions and the oral history. And so my first understanding of what it meant to be Jewish and live Jewishly was with N being in community with my family and doing rituals and eating together.

And this is not a very unique story, but as I got older, I feel like I started feeling more alienated from the Jewish community in part because I started questioning my community's unequivocal support for the state of Israel, and also just because it was middle school and I didn't like Hebrew school very much. And I think that's probably-- yeah, I feel like it's relatable for people of all faith traditions.

Until simultaneously I was feeling more and more sort of alienated from the synagogue community because I just wasn't really finding meaning in Hebrew school. And then also I was getting into more and more fights with my family around Israel, around Zionism, around what it means to be Jewish, around what the identity could look like. And so by the time I was in high school, I think, I had not stopped identifying as Jewish, but removed myself from the tradition a little bit.

That's my early journey. I feel like the past many years has been a homecoming or a return in some ways to Jewish community. Fran and I both did Avodah which is-- I always like to describe it as AmeriCorps, but Jewish, where you spend a year living in Jewish intentional community. And I feel like that experience and also some of the communities that I was in college made me realize that there were all these other possibilities for how to form really loving and justice centered and creative Jewish communities.

And that is now work I think about all the time, so it's interesting. I feel like when I came to div School, I didn't necessarily think that Judaism was going to become the major thing I think about or one of the major things I think about, but I'm feeling really good about it.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Yeah.

RILEY BROWN: Great.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Thanks, Josh.

JOSH KURTZ: Thank you.

RILEY BROWN: Thank you, Josh. And Fran?

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Well, it's cool to be here with the three of you and to be sitting with Josh, who as Josh already shared, we have some overlap and some similarities in our stories. And I think that's one of the reasons why we're friends and collaborators and a bunch of different realms, including being chaplain interns. But I can share a little bit about my early spiritual life journey and background a bit more.

So I also grew up attending a reform Jewish synagogue in New York City, in Washington Heights, which, as I was speaking about before, has this specific history of being both a Jewish immigrant neighborhood and an immigrant neighborhood more recently for a lot of folks from Latin America and from the Caribbean, which you may have seen in the Heights would recommend. I do wish there was one small Jewish girl in the background, but that's OK. It's fine. We love Lin-Manuel.

JOSH KURTZ: Lin, if you're listening, please sponsor us.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Please sponsor this podcast.

JOSH KURTZ: Do you have any job openings?

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: We would love to know and to work with you. And so I grew up as a Jewish kid in Washington Heights. And I do think one thing that's relevant or interesting is that I have an extended interfaith family. My dad and his family have been Jewish and been Jewish New Yorkers actually for a long time. My great grandma, my dad's side, her parents emigrated from Austria-Hungary.

She was the first in her family born in the US. And she was born in a tenement on the Lower East Side. And a family story that I would hear growing up a lot is that once my parents wanted to take my grandparents, my great grandma, who lived until 101, I got to know her and I knew her and she passed away when I was 10, but they wanted to take her on a trip to the Tenement Museum, which is this museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that has preserved what it was like for immigrant families and what their lives were like in the kind of turn of the century New York City.

And the tour guide is trying to give her tours, and my grandmother's going around and seeing like, it wasn't quite like that. And she was telling all these stories, and I was too young to remember it. I wasn't there, but I do feel like I up with a lot of emphasis being placed on Jewish culture, on Jewish history. We were definitely would celebrate big holidays. We would gather with extended Jewish family for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah for big passover seders, but we weren't necessarily the most traditionally observant. We were reform, which has its own understanding of Halakhah, Jewish law, that we could talk about more at length if you want us to. But I don't think that's the point of this podcast.

So I grew up with this New York Jewish family. And then my mom is actually a Jew by choice. She converted to Judaism when she married my dad. And so I have all these, actually, other cousins and family members who I love very much, who live in Northern California. And my mom's was raised in a Christian tradition, but she just drifted away from that. It wasn't incredibly meaningful for her later on in life, and she decided she wanted to be Jewish and have a Jewish family.

But my aunt and uncle actually have become connected to and are really find so much meaning and joy in the Episcopal Church. My aunt and uncle live on an Episcopal, or until relatively recently, because they're just getting older and changed jobs, lived on an Episcopal retreat center. So I think I might be one of the only Jewish American kids from New York City who grew up going to both Jewish summer camp and then a week of Episcopal Church camp with my cousins.

So Bishop's Ranch in Northern California, would recommend. It was a very groovy, hippy dippy. And I would sing the songs. And I just wouldn't say the name Jesus. I don't know. It was interesting. It was a little confusing. It was definitely formative. Because I always knew I was Jewish and I was raised Jewish. I had a bat mitzvah. But I do think being exposed also to family members who had different faith commitments and faith practices, but all of the teachings I received were very centered on and on justice, on the concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world for my Jewish family.

I saw that those were values that were shared across different traditions, and I think got me interested in thinking about religion in nuanced ways. I think just having a slightly strange and perhaps unique experience growing up, but like we all do. And I think a lot of people at HDS have some of those elements in their story of learning that religion is not a monolith. And sometimes that can be a way in to thinking critically about religion and how it operates in our lives.

RILEY BROWN: Thank you both for sharing that. Yeah, it's interesting hearing how much, despite being not Jewish, being a Christian myself, how much I relate to both of your stories, just in personal. Josh, I really was like the middle school, I don't want anything to do with you anymore. And then coming to Divinity School and being like, oh, I guess this really is important to me.

JOSH KURTZ: Thank you, Krista Tippett, for bringing me into Divinity School. And so many of us.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: I would love to talk to you about Krista Tippett.

JOSH KURTZ: I literally any time. Krista, if you're listening. Please, please let us work it on being-- will do feel dead, will do anything.

RILEY BROWN: Yes all of our many, many, many listeners who are no doubt famous religious figures in the world, please reach out to us. In light of talking about your upbringing, I'm curious what brought you each to HDS?

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: I can go first this time. Just to, yeah, to fast forward a little bit. I do think that when I-- I think I had a similar experience to Josh of a little bit not being as interested in Jewish traditions in the Hebrew school after my bat mitzvah, I don't know. We had the choice to go on to Hebrew high school if we wanted to. And I went for a little bit for the Kosher Chinese food. And then I was just yeah, I don't know, this wasn't the center of my life because, I don't know, I was in high school and I wanted to hang out with my boyfriend. I don't know.

I was happy. I was doing my own thing having a little bit of teenage rebellion. But when I got to college, I went to Tufts University, also in the Boston area, and I came in being like, wow, I've been so inspired by Parks and Rec, by the West Wing. I'm going to study political science. I'm going to work for social justice in that way by being a political advocate. And I still think that is really important. And definitely care a lot about political change and social justice.

But I randomly stumbled into studying religion because I had the last registration time of a freshman. And a lot of the classes I was interested in taking filled up my first year of college, and I was like, there's this class called the Bible as literature. Let me just take it. It sounds interesting. And I took it, and it was the first time that I had read-- it was specifically focused on the book of Genesis, and it was the first time that I had read sacred texts, read Torah since my bat mitzvah in a deep way.

And it really opened something up for me. It made me think about Judaism in a new light especially bringing in, for the first time, some historical critical views of the Bible, but also thinking about this as literature, as mythology, as stories that are live because they are interesting and meaningful and have been told and retold in so many different ways. And so that was the beginning of my return into religion and spirituality, and thinking about my own Jewish spirituality because of my growing interest in academic study of religion. I also wanted to think more about my own spiritual practices and how Jewish traditions fit into my life.

And so that led me to study religion all through college. Then I did the Avodah Jewish Service Corps that was, again, bringing in those ideas of what does justice anti-poverty work look like, and what does communal Jewish life look like, and how do those intersect? And I had a really positive experience in Avodah even though it was the COVID year, which was intense and weird and a lot of its own ways, but I considered both rabbinical school and a more non-denominational religious studies degree in that time.

And I decided I wanted to come to HDS because I really wanted to continue my Jewish learning. But I also was interested in doing it in an environment of not only Jewish people. I was interested in being in this multi-faith, very diverse, in so many different kinds of ways, environment. And I think that has been a really valuable part of my time at HDS is getting to learn from people from so many different traditions and backgrounds.

RILEY BROWN: Josh.

JOSH KURTZ: Thank you, Riley and Fran. Yeah, I mean, Fran, I relate to a lot of your story. I feel like that's been the story of our friendship too of like, oh, we're actually having similar interests in things. Yeah, by the time I started freshman year of college, I think that if anyone would have told me the first day of college that I would become a religious studies major and then go on to Div School, I would have laughed for hours because at that point, I had felt, for all these different reasons, not connected to the Jewish community both because of politics and but also just because I didn't really have a conception of what I felt connected to spiritually.

But I went to Brown University, and they have this program for freshmen where you take freshman seminar, and then the professor automatically becomes your advisor for your first year. So it's a nice way of getting to know your advisor both on an academic level and also a personal level. And randomly, I ended up taking this class called modern problems of belief with an amazing professor named Mark Cladis. Mark, if you're listening, I'm sure you're not, but thank you for everything.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Shout out to Professor Joel Rosenberg, was my first class in religious studies.

JOSH KURTZ: Yes, we'll do the classic-- can we do the classic podcast thing where at the end, instead of thanking all the editors and researchers, we just go through a list of all of our teachers. But I took this class and it really, I think, changed my life and how I think about everything. I think that I had associated religion so much with, one, very bureaucratic institutions, two, with different family conflict, and three, with boring Hebrew school, and having to learn these rituals and stories I didn't really feel connected to.

But in this class, we spent an entire semester just thinking about how people have made meaning in their lives through stories, through narrative and also through experiences of the divine in various ways. This is going to sound so cliché, but we read Fear and Trembling and I remember just being absolutely floored by that. So yeah, I ended up studying religion for four years. I got really obsessed with Simone Weil. If anyone's listening to this and wants to talk to Simone Weil, there are about five of us in the world. So you should-- let's be friends.

And then when I was doing Avodah, so basically we all live in a Jewish intentional community and a corp, and we all have different jobs at local nonprofits. And I was working as a community organizer for HIAS, which is a refugee resettlement organization that historically resettled Jewish refugees, but now resettles all refugees. They resettled my family. And I really loved that experience. It just felt so meaningful and powerful to do faith based organizing and just seeing how powerful it is when folks are able to bring their spiritual values and their ethical values to activism work. That felt really amazing.

And also at the same time, I did not have-- I didn't feel like I had the Jewish literacy or really the skills to do the work as well as I wanted to. So I started thinking about divinity school then for that reason just to figure out, oh, how can I build the tools and gain the knowledge to be an effective, faith-based organizer and interfaith organizer too.

And I had a very full circle couple of years because HIAS resettled my family from Romania. And then immediately after that job, I moved to Romania. And so I feel like I was like starting to approach Judaism in all of these different ways, both as a trove of resources that could be used for social justice work, but also as my own family's immigration story.

And then fast forward a bunch of years, I was planning on applying to Divinity School. And the pandemic started. And the experience of living through the pandemic, I think, brought up a lot of much broader questions for me around community and grief and spirituality and our connections to each other. And I think, like many people, I would spend hours walking around just listening to On Being episodes, and having this conviction that, oh wait, Krista Tippett is the one having the big, hard conversations that I want to be having. So again, Krista, thank you.

Yeah so I came to Div School in order to do all of that. Yeah, I think that's my story. Thank you for asking.

RILEY BROWN: Thank you for sharing such great stories. I want to shift gears here for a little bit. The central theme of this podcast is hope. But before we talk explicitly about what gives you hope, I was curious if each of you could talk about what I would call vehicles for hope. Or I was talking to our boss, the beloved Kerry Maloney, the head chaplain here at HDS.

JOSH KURTZ: Kerry, if you're listening to this, we love you.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: We love you, and please sponsor us

\[LAUGHTER\]

RILEY BROWN: Maybe we should have you on sometime, Carrie. But she used this illustration of if hope is a seed, what is the kind of tools that you use to foster it or till the ground to help it grow? So I was curious if there are any insights or practices that you would consider your tools or vehicles for growing hope that you engage in regularly that give you strength.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: I have one that comes to mind, which seems like very basic, but eating together with friends, I think is something that I have found to be incredibly grounding and to provide me with hope, and feels like a form of community care both to make food for other people, but also to have someone say, I'm going to cook for you. Come to my house and we'll eat together. That was what first came to mind for me. And I've had some experience both this year working as University chaplain and last year working at Tufts, my Alma mater, as University chaplain.

And when we've been doing interfaith community building work and thinking about how do we truly get people to connect with each other across lines of difference, I feel like you just always have to start with having a meal together and often talking about foods that come from your culture, your tradition, that foods that serve as comfort foods, foods that serve as special treats for you. That's something that I think I use to water my own seed of hope is to eat good food with friends and people I care about, and really set that time aside intentionally.

I think that's something that actually came out of Avodah experience too of having Shabbat meals every week with a large group of people. Not even only with my nuclear family, but with my 10 housemates. And that's something I live with college friends now and we have house dinners. So we try to do them every couple of weeks. But that sense of coming home to a group of people to share a meal is really grounding for me.

JOSH KURTZ: Yeah, I mean, I definitely share Fran's love of community gatherings around food. Yeah, something I'm thinking about a lot recently is I think there's-- I feel like there's something really beautiful and nourishing and something that feels hopeful that happens when there's a group of people singing together. And I feel like that isn't necessarily something I sought out before coming to HDS that much. I was always really happy when I was in a group of people and someone started singing, or it was made socially acceptable in a group for everyone to start singing, including badly.

But I feel like there's so many opportunities I found at HDS, but also just in the area to do that. There's this really beautiful event that happens once a month at a synagogue where people just-- it's in lieu of a regular Shabbat service. People will just sing in concentric circles. And I think especially over the past few months when it feels community so many Jewish communities feel so broken in a lot of ways.

I feel like there's just there's something about sitting around and all singing together and not feeling hyper aware of your own voice because so many other people are singing and hearing harmonies. That feels, I don't know, it feels like one of the most nourishing activities.

RILEY BROWN: Yeah, I really appreciate both of you saying that because each of your things, I remember one time, one of the other things I do as a chaplain intern is hand out apple cider, as you both know, and as you both have participated in. And I was sitting outside one time and someone came out and asked me if I'd eaten lunch. And here I am handing out tea. And I said, no, but I'm going to eat after this. And he said, no, have some of-- I got a quesadilla, I have extra, have some with me.

And I said, no, it's really OK. And he was insisting, and I was just so overwhelmed by how kind he was. And he said, where I come from, we never eat alone. And we ate together. And I think that has been one of my most meaningful experiences as being a chaplain intern. I think about it often. But just you both emphasize community, and I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. And in so far as community being what can foster hope.

JOSH KURTZ: Can I also just quickly put a plug-in for how Fran is an amazing song leader in community, and I feel very blessed that I've gotten to have a lot of those very nourishing, hopeful moments because Fran has created them.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Thank you so much, Josh. I can also just say on that note, I also love, I love song leading, I love being in a song circle, and other people are song leading whether that is a Kabbalat Shabbat, a Jewish liturgy inflected service, or whether it's also in a protest. I find that singing together is so powerful and so moving, or at a noon service or an event in the wider HDS community.

And I have also had really positive experiences, I'm hoping there's some HDS students listening, with Joyous Noise, the chanting community that is run by some fellow students who gather and just really we chant very simple songs. There's only one or two lines and you just repeat the same lines over and over and over again sometimes for 20 minutes, half an hour. And that was a practice that was unfamiliar to me before coming to HDS, and was something that I felt like was a space that allowed me to feel a lot of feelings and also just get into a more meditative place when I've been just going through hard times this past year.

So I really appreciate Joyous Noise and also JAM Collective, which meets on Fridays with, musical instruments. Wow, they're amazing.

RILEY BROWN: Shout out to Joyous noise and the JAM Collective. We appreciate you. Having discussed these kind of tilling the ground and planting your little seeds of hope, what you use to till the ground, what would you guys describe then-- to state it plainly, what gives you hope? What is the little seed that you hope grows if-- that you hope grows.

\[LAUGHTER\]

But if that's the same thing as your tool for planting it, then that's fine. But I'm curious just to state it plainly, since that's the whole theme of the podcast. What gives you hope?

JOSH KURTZ: Wow, sorry, that was I am-- yeah, I feel like this is such a good-- yeah, it's such a good question. I think I've been thinking a lot recently about when hope is like a useful emotion and when grief or anger or despair are a useful emotion and what is the right driver of change or action at different times. And I think it changes a lot.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of things that bring me hope. I feel like over the past it's been a difficult five, six months, year on campus in a lot of reason. For a lot of reasons, I think it has felt hard to find hope at times about what the future of this community and other communities around the world will look like. And I think that I-- it's been really beautiful to see-- and I'll just talk about it in the Jewish context for a second.

Obviously there's so much conflict and divisiveness and polarization happening within Jewish communities right now. And also it's been like so beautiful and hopeful to see all these wild, creative new communities pop up around the world. And to see so many of my own friends realizing that the thing that they want in the world doesn't exist yet, and so going ahead and creating it.

I mean, I have one of my really close friends wanted to start an anti-fascist klezmer band in DC and they just started last week and now they have this beautiful community where they're coming together and they're making music. And they're like reconnecting to the instruments they played as children in school. And so I think that in this moment of grief, it also feels like there's just so many opportunities for real creativity.

Yeah, and for real imagination about what are the sort of communities that we need to build in order to sustain the world and each other in the future. Yeah.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Well, Josh. You were saying, I hope I'm going to be eloquent. And I think that was incredibly eloquent.

JOSH KURTZ: Thank you.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: I think I echo a lot of what you shared and I actually do have hope. I have hope because of my friends and collaborators and allies and folks who I think are deeply committed to seeing to the idea that another world is possible. A world where all human lives are valued, where everyone is free. And to just even to hear people saying that and voicing that and saying that that is possible and that we can work towards that even if it's not here yet.

I mean, that's what I think of when I think of the Jewish or the Hebrew words like olam ha-ba, the world to come. The world to come, that is something that, at least the way I was taught to me and my Jewish community, was that's something that we construct together and work towards making happen even if we don't get to see it necessarily in our time or in this exact moment. And I also think a lot about the words of a rabbi named Benay Lappe who's one of the founders of SVARA, the radically queer Yeshiva, who has taught me wonderful, amazing things about Talmud but also has this teaching-- she does a ted talk about it, "Benay Lappe Crash Talk. Go look it up.

JOSH KURTZ: It's so good.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: It's amazing. But she has this concept of the unrecognizable Jewish future, which I think is also could be generalized-- could apply to all people or many different groups of people. But that the Judaism that my grandparents or my great grandmother who grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side, she couldn't imagine the kind of Jewishness that I'm experiencing, the kind of just culture and moment that we live in. And it does give me hope that it's possible for all kinds of different things to be constructed and to be possible.

And while it's also scary, I think it's comforting in some ways to think that hopefully one day I have descendants that their lives will look very different than mine and hopefully even more liberated and even more full and beautiful and creative and still deeply Jewish, but Jewish, in maybe a different way than I was raised.

JOSH KURTZ: Yeah, can I add something to that? Yeah, that's really beautiful. And once again, Benay Lappe, if you're listening to this, we would love to work for you.

\[LAUGHTER\]

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: We \[INAUDIBLE\], but we want to be sponsored by you.

JOSH KURTZ: Yes. Yeah, I mean-- I think about hope so much in a Jewish context and in this moment. But I think-- a way I've been thinking about hope more broadly right now is I feel like I've been turning so much to examples in the natural world of resilience and creativity. And I know that scientists will be angry at me for anthropomorphizing animals. And I know there are all these debates of can we find inspiration in animals, or are we just making them too much like humans? But if I have one minute, can I nerd out about something?

RILEY BROWN: Oh you may.

JOSH KURTZ: OK, I'm finding a lot of hope in brine shrimp at the moment because brine shrimp are amazing. They're these tiny, tiny shrimp. And they give birth two ways. Some parts of the year when the weather conditions are really good, and it's safe for them to give birth to children, they'll give birth to live little baby brine shrimp. But other times of the year when the weather is bad or it's about to be too cold, or if there's an environmental threat like, if, I don't know, climate change has led to a situation where the water is too salty or whatever, then brine shrimp will give birth to these little eggs that are called cysts.

These eggs are amazing. They have survived being taken to outer space and then coming back, and they can still hatch. These eggs can hatch after hundreds of years. They can be boiled. I went to a brine shrimp cyst processing facility where we watch them getting cleaned in industrial cleaners and then dried in industrial dryers. And then they're packaged and sent around the world for aquaculture. And they can still hatch.

They can survive literally anything. Quick aside, Tim Hawks, I would love to work for the brine shrimp industry if you remember me. This is just now a podcast for Fran and I to get jobs.

\[LAUGHTER\]

No, but really, I feel like I've been-- it is, and I don't know, it feels almost feels like trite to say or cliche to say, oh, I'm finding hope or inspiration in these other beings. But I think it's just, I don't know, beings like brine shrimp have reminded me that the human-- our way of seeing the world is just one way of seeing and being in the world. And there are so many other beings who have developed over millions of years such beautiful ways of surviving and being resilient and taking care of each other.

RILEY BROWN: Lessons from the brine shrimp. Maybe we should have a whole separate podcast about what we can learn, what kind of hope we can glean from the brine shrimp.

JOSH KURTZ: I have so many guest ideas.

RILEY BROWN: Well, Thank you guys so much for sharing. I really appreciate all that you've been so willing to say. Before I let you go, the last question I wanted to ask is if you had any parting wisdom by way of recommendation. Is there a practice, podcast, book, movie, or whatever else you might recommend listeners who need a little hope?

JOSH KURTZ: Wow. Well, Fran and I both really love to write and find a lot of hope in writing, and I feel like there are so many poets who have been bringing me hope recently. Should we read something?

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: Yeah, Josh and I both, yeah, I guess maybe this is more of a tool, but I think Josh and I are both writers. Josh mostly, we write lots of different kinds of things, but poetry. And I've been working on fiction and creative transformations of stories from sacred texts recently. And so yeah, I think we actually both have a poem to read on the podcast. Would that work for you, Riley?

RILEY BROWN: Yes.

JOSH KURTZ: Yes, I'm-- sorry, I'm pulling mine up.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: I could read this one first, Josh.

JOSH KURTZ: OK, yes. Perfect.

FRANCESCA ROBINSON: So I want to share this poem. Some of you listening, some of the many people listening might know that I practice, I also engage in its process of making midrash, which is like a Jewish methodology of interpretation and finding a lot of different meanings and sometimes very creative and very wildly imaginative meanings within biblical texts. And this is a poem that I'm going to share. It's by Padraig Ó Tuama, who's a wonderful Irish poet whose name, I'm sorry, I almost mangled, but I think got it correctly.

But it speaks to this idea of telling new stories, which I think is also something that's giving me hope, the capacity of humans to tell new stories. So this poem is called "Narrative Theology #1" by Padraig Ó Tuama.

"And I said to him, are there answers to all of this? And he said, the answer is in a story. And the story is being told. And I said, but there is so much pain. And she answered plainly, pain will happen. Then I said, will I ever find meaning? And they said, you will find meaning where you give meaning. The answer is in a story, and the story isn't finished."

JOSH KURTZ: Thank you, Padraig and Fran. Just to go on the theme of beautiful, wise Irish poets, I'm going to read this "Blessing" by John O'Donohue, which chances are if you're already finding yourself listening to this podcast, you already know this poem, but I'm going to read it. Yeah, and there's a lot of people know I do a lot of thinking about grief and poetry, so I feel like this poem is a really beautiful and hopeful exploration of grief.

Blessing. "On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window, and the ghost of loss gets into you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green, and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the currach of thought, and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters, a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours. May the clarity of light be yours. May the fluency of the ocean be yours. May the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life."

RILEY BROWN: Beautiful. Thank you both. That is all I have for you today. And that concludes the first Hope Podcast. Thank you. Yes.

JOSH KURTZ: It's so hopeful. Thank you, Riley, for being your own vehicle of hope.



 

 



 

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