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Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat b’ Shelach and focus on the correct translation of a single word and rabbinic interpretations that rather than uplift and unify, try to diminish and divide. So welcome to Left Behind. Rabbi, how are you this week? You ready to come join the journey?

Adam Mintz [00:02:36]:
It’s great. Enjoying the snow and this is such a great topic. I’m really looking forward today.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:42]:
So we really shouldn’t be surprised about a tradition about there were those who were left behind. Because if you remember from the Haggadah, when the wicked son says, what does this service mean to you? To you? He says, not to him. When he sets himself aside from the community, he denies the very core of our beliefs. And you must set his teeth on edge and tell him, listen, because of this, the Lord acted for me when I came out of Egypt, for me. And and not for him. Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed. ILU haya sum lo haya, Nigel. So we should not be surprised that there’s a tradition that some people didn’t meet the benchmark.

Adam Mintz [00:03:30]:
Right. I mean. Right. I mean, that’s problematic, though Rabbi Riskin always taught us, how can you leave people like the Rasha out?. You know, so that. That requires its own explanation. But let’s. Let’s go to the next source.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:46]:
You know, sometimes when we encounter traditions that rub us the wrong way, we learn something. We learn about why we feel they’re wrong. We have to dig a little deeper, and maybe we learn something in the process.

Adam Mintz [00:03:59]:
No question about it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:00]:
Let’s go to that ambiguous word that I refer to in Exodus 13:18. It says, so God let the people round about by way of the wilderness. At the Sea of Reeds, now, the Israelites went up armed out of the land of Egypt. In Hebrew it says, וַחֲמֻשִׁ֛ים עָל֥וּ בְנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם chamushim, for those of you who know a little Hebrew comes from the word hamesh. It also comes from hamsa, where you have that beautiful hand that we all share in the middle East. I guess when you say, hello, rabbi, you’re showing that you have, of course.

Adam Mintz [00:04:42]:
A hand is also five, because you have five fingers. It’s the same word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:46]:
Exactly it. Exactly it. So they’re all united. But here, the translation that we’re going to start with is hamushim means armed. You know, I did a little research. Armaments and arms. Clearly, when you have an armament, whether it’s a sword or a spear, it’s connected to the arm. But chamesh and hand and fingers, you. You know, you. You have a handgun. It is clearly when you say, hi, you’re raising your palm open to show that you’re not armed. There’s a connection between the Hamesh, the five fingers, the anatomy, I should say, and the weapons. But then we get to Rashi, and Rashi goes ahead and says the word chamushim means provided with weapons. He quotes the mechilta because he led them by a circuitous route through the wilderness. He brought it about that they went from Egypt. To make a long story short, we’re going to see that the Israelites fought the Amalekites. And how could they fight the Amalekites if they didn’t have any weapons? So Rashi makes the very practical point that here is a hook to hang on saying, no. They left not only with jewels and trinkets and maybe some food, but they also left with, with weapons. And then he says, but there is another explanation. Another explanation of Hamushim is only one out of five went forth from Egypt. And four parts of the people died during the three days of darkness because they were unworthy of being delivered. So the Hebrew meitu beshalosha ymai afela in the exact Hebrew, it doesn’t say the reason for that. We have to go to actually the Rashi on the plague of darkness in Exodus 10:22, last week’s parasha. And why did he bring darkness upon them? Because there were wicked people amongst the Israelites of that generation who had no desire to leave Egypt. Interestingly, wicked by itself would mean that they did not deserve to leave Egypt. But he says rashayim velo rotzim latzet. So it’s a double edged sword. They were evil and probably didn’t deserve to leave. They were evil and they probably, probably didn’t want to leave.

Adam Mintz [00:07:12]:
Well their evil this was that they didn’t want to leave.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:17]:
I think that would be the straightforward explanation.

Adam Mintz [00:07:19]:
Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:20]:
And so these die during the three days. And the interesting thing is why did they, why did they die during the plague of darkness? So it wasn’t an embarrassment. It was done very quietly in the back, in the background, in the shadows. Now what’s amazing, and we’re going to find many interpretations that are both uplifting and also those that grind us a little bit. The fascinating thing is Jonathan Sacks in his commentary on the Haggadah, very in line with what you were saying a second ago with regard to Rabbi Riskin. He says as follows. And he’s talking about the four sons and where was a fifth child? The late Lubavitcher Rebbe suggested that there is a fifth child on Pesach. The four children of the Haggadah are all present sitting around the table. The fifth child is the one who is not there. The child lost throughout outmarriage and assimilation. Rabbinic tradition tells us that in Egypt many Jews assimilated and did not want to leave. The Torah uses a phrase to describe the Israelites departure from Egypt. Bechamoshim alub b’ nei yisrael mi mitzrayim. This is normally translated as the Israelites went out of Egypt armed for battle. However, Rashi, he cites our Rashi instead. It may be related to the word hamesh. 5 the sentence could therefore be translated as only a fifth of the Israelites left Egypt. So if you remember this in a few months when you’re at your seder, you can actually refer to this concept of the fifth. And I think maybe you’ll agree with me, Adam, that Rabbi Sacks is putting a positive turn on it.

Adam Mintz [00:09:04]:
Yeah, for sure. And you’re not surprised because he always sees it as positive. And here he’s putting a positive spin on it, for sure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:12]:
So what he’s saying is that while there are those who want to write off the five, whether you mean it’s the fifth or whatever, we actually include the fifth child in the Seder at the suggestion of a great Hasidic master of inclusion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. But again, the discussion about this simple word revolves around, again, inclusion and exclusion. So let’s go a little bit further, because we’ve seen some negative and some positive. The most beautiful positive is from the Targum Yerushalmi. It’s written in heavy duty Aramaic. We could bring our friend, the Aramaic talker, to help us here. And basically what it says, and the word of the Lord conducted the people by the way of the desert of the Sea of Suf. Armed in good works, he says b’uvda tova so he says they were armed and they were armed in a good way. They were armed with Maasim Tovim with good works. Fascinating that every. We’re involved in a polemic. Rabbi.

Adam Mintz [00:10:26]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s remarkable that we’re able the same thing that is bad, according to one, is not only okay, but it’s wonderful. Armed did good works. Right. He takes it to the complete other extreme.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:40]:
So it’s interesting. We’ll come back to a little theory that I have. It’s the Targum Yerushalmi. He’s a resident in Jerusalem. But the idea is, does Hamaish, what does it trigger? Does it trigger that they were those that were left behind? Does it trigger that they were armed with good deeds? Does it trigger us to remember those who aren’t here but are invited to come? So let’s go back to the source. The source did not come from the rabbis. It came earlier than that. It came from Ezekiel. And Ezekiel wrote, he was in Babylonia, in the exile in Babylonia a generation before Ezra. Nehemiah actually left Babylonia. And he is the one who kind of rewrites and reimagines the Exodus from Egypt. And he is Talking in Ezekiel 20: 5-10, he talks about how God came and said to the Jewish people, to the Israelites, I gave you my oath, I’m going to redeem you. I’m going to bring you to a land of milk and honey. And then he gets to verse 8 and he says, but they defied me and refused to listen to me. They did not cast away the detestable things that were drawn to, nor did they give up the fetishes of Egypt. So they this is the first scriptural reference we have that there was anything wrong with them. Then I resolved to pour out my fury upon them, to vent all my anger upon them there in the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it not might not be profaned in the sight of the nations among who they were. We’ve touched on this issue of Hillel Hashem before. Va asa lamont shami levilti hachael. So God is almost forced so as not to be embarrassed in front of the goyim, to redeem the people of Israel. But here we have Ezekiel, I would say, rewriting the story, the narrative.

Adam Mintz [00:12:48]:
It’s remarkable that God saves the Jews to prevent a Hillel Hashem. Isn’t that a weird rereading of the.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:56]:
Story, but that we did in another podcast, correct?

Adam Mintz [00:13:00]:
We’ve talked about this before.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:02]:
I think it was called Filling the Void. But today what we’re focusing on is rewriting the narrative of the Exodus as if it were in a week, last week. Everybody leaves. Now all of a sudden, they didn’t deserve to leave, they didn’t want to leave, they were debilitated, so forth and so on. So my sense, Rabbi, is he’s projecting a little bit of what was going on in Babylon, that here we were in the first Diaspora and there were some Jews who, if they were to get the MEMO. Were leaving Babylon, they might stay. They did not want to leave Babylon. He was talking to those Jews. He was making a modern argument from the ancient Exodus story. And true enough, if we look at Ezra a generation later, who is actually identified with the return, the first return to Zion, he starts in Ezra 1: 4-6 v’Kol Hanishar. And all of those who remain, whoever that may be, let the people of that place render assistance with silver, gold, goods and livestock. Does that sound a little bit familiar? That the people that are staying are showering those who are leaving and making an exodus with. With. With jewels and. And things Here he’s almost recast those who are remaining as those remaining behind in Egypt. It is truly impactful and amazing.

Adam Mintz [00:14:39]:
It’s truly amazing. This is amazing, correct?

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:43]:
And how does he refer to those who are leaving? He says, and all those whose spirit has been roused by God, get ready to go up to build the house of God. He says, let them go. And he says, that Those who are around them, he talks about their neighbors should support them with silver vessels again. So you really have this new dialectic where when we left Egypt, it was the remaining Egyptians, maybe according to this lens, the remaining Egyptians and the Jews or the Israelites who didn’t want to go. Now we’re leaving Babylon and the same thing has happened. And sure enough, in Ezra 2, much later in Ezra, it says the sum of the entire community was 42,360. Rabbi, there were a whole lot more than 42,360 Jews in Babylonia. And we know because we celebrate a holiday called Purim, where those are the ones who remain behind. So I really think I said this in the introduction, but it really did dawn on me this year that part of the source for this narrative was that it did become a polemic. And it was used the first time in the Return from Babylonia. And it was used as a polemic and a disparaging argument against those who were not up to the task of leaving the comfort and the grandeur of Babylonia.

Adam Mintz [00:16:20]:
Right. I mean, there it’s more complicated because they refused to do the thing that was the right thing to do, which is going back to Israel and rebuilding the temple.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:31]:
Absolutely. So in Deuteronomy 4, we do have this sense of a God who ventured to go and take one nation from the midst of another by wonderful acts and portents, by war, by a mighty hand and outstretched arm. And here we’re starting to explore a few of the midrashic materials that start to flush out the narrative of those who either left behind or didn’t want to go. So in the Yalkut Shimoni, it says a nation from the midst of a nation, and teaches that these were uncircumcised and these were uncircumcised. Meaning to say there were Israelites who were uncircumcised and Egyptians were uncircumcised. These grew long hair, and those grew long hair. They looked exactly like the Egyptians and they didn’t want to go. And had, in the words of Rav Shmuel Bab Nachman, the Holy One not been bound by an oath to the patriarchs, Israel would never have been redeemed from Egypt. So again, this, this argument against the Rasha at the Seder comes back that had it not been for you, would not have been redeemed. But it’s, it is fascinating that now we’re starting to talk that they were acculturated, that they were mimicking the, the, the the ways of the Egyptians. And if you follow my though pattern where this was written in rabbinic terms after the return from Babylonia, after we had a diaspora, again, again, it was throwing a disparaging look at those who were not following the rabbinic model. And so they had assimilated. They. Had they been in Egypt, they would not have left, Right?

Adam Mintz [00:18:32]:
Right. So they. Had they been in Egypt, they wouldn’t have left. They were in Babylonia. They refused to leave. It’s the people who are comfortable. Sometimes you’re comfortable in slavery, sometimes you’re comfortable in luxury. It’s people who don’t want to leave. Right. The people who did want to leave Germany in the 1930s. Right. Sometimes people just want to remain in their status quo, you know?

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:59]:
And the amazing thing about it is we’re now going to look at a verse that we all know, and we know it from the Haggadah. And what it highlights is we don’t normally think about the slaves being redeemed, as those slaves have to merit redemption. When people are persecuted, when. When there’s an orphan, when there’s a massacre, you go and save people. You don’t ask questions. Are they good? Are they bad? And so when God saw the children of Israel, and God knew, I believe this was at the burning bush, says the Midrash, I have seen the affliction of my people, and God knew, as I know, its pains literally. These are the verses that we interpret in the Haggadah, and we interpret them line by line. God knew that meant he saw that they separated from their wives and from husbands. These are. We’re feeling the simpatico of these suffering people. Alternatively, though, another rabbinic thought is God saw that they did not have good deeds for which their redemption would be warranted. Really doesn’t even fit into the context of the narrative, because why is he interrupting Moses at the burning bush to say, he’s going to save these people? But again, it almost looks like they’re finding an excuse to drive home the message that not everybody was redeemed. And maybe they’re looking at an audience and they’re saying, not every one of us deserves to be redeemed. It’s truly used as a polemic. And when I said that they have weaponized the Exodus, weaponized redemption, I was referring to something like this. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift Play it fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. Voicegift Play stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing Grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to Voice gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So there’s a an amazing article that I read and that is quoted in the source sheet and it’s written by a scholar from, from the OU, or at least it’s written on the OU’s website. And he basically questions the the other midrash that we’ve talked about in the past, which is that his name is Dr. Ari Zivotofsky
.

Adam Mintz [00:22:30]:
He’s a professor in Bar Ilan University.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:33]:
Amazing. And what he does is, if you follow the train of this thought, it goes on to say that not only were do we have midrashim that say that the Jews were uncircumcised, the Egyptians weren’t circumcised, the Jews had long hair, the Egyptians had long hair. It says that the Jews that were redeemed were redeemed for three reasons. They didn’t change their Jewish names, they didn’t change their Hebrew language or their Jewish language. We’ll see that there’s a difference in a second. And they didn’t change their dress. So we’re going to take a look at those in a second. But before we do, he quotes an amazing scholar I have never heard from. His last name is Salant. And just like Rabbi Yisrael Salant, he was a Mussarnik. And he goes and he gives, I’ve quoted it in the source sheet. He gives an amazing interpretation of Hamushim. And what he says is he combines all the traditions, but he gives it a positive spin. He says, you know, if 1, if 3/5, 4/5 of the Jews were killed in Egypt, clearly it was only the grownups and it was not their children. So if there was not their children, who was going to take care of all of these orphans? And he says that the reason there is a discussion about both the only the fifth left and four fifths stayed and the good deeds is the good deeds of those who left was they took the orphans with them. And so I say to myself, wow, that is a wonderful glass is half full type of rabbi who looks at these arguments and at these traditions and says, I got to stir up something positive about this. And actually that the hamushim is not the fraction, but the righteous and kindness of Israel, that each person bore a burden not on his own. So thank God for commentary.

Adam Mintz [00:24:36]:
I love it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:38]:
Thank God for Drash and commentary that enables the kind of like a Rorschach test, that enables the beauty and the happiness and the joy of a rabbi’s soul to project onto the various commentaries that we’ve looked at and come up with something that is totally positive. I could not not quote that piece of Torah. But let’s now go to the tradition that says that they didn’t change their names or language. We’re going to Vayikra Raba. And it says, Rav Huna said in the name of Bar Kapara, due to four matters, Israel was redeemed from Egypt because they did not change their name, their language. They did not speak Lashon Hara, slander. And there was none among them who was found to be steeped in licentiousness. So again, what they are trying to do is. And it seems to me it’s such a. There’s no need for it to justify redeeming these slaves, the slaves who had their freedom robbed from them. But nonetheless, I think the only conclusion that you can reach is they’re doing it because they wanted to have an argument for themselves in their day to convince people not to change their name, not to change their language.

Adam Mintz [00:26:04]:
That’s for sure. Right. This goes. I mean, that’s why Riskin changed his name from Steven to Shlomo. That’s a sign of a commitment.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:14]:
Yeah, yeah. So I am going to quote a little bit from Robby Ari Zivotofsky. And he said that the triad of Jewish names, language and dress is not referred to in the earlier sources. It’s a very scholarly argument. And he goes over many different sources. The first time that he finds all three of them mentioned together is in Rabbi Elia Bachour, who lived in, what, the 16th century? And there are those that even call out the mention of it and say, you’re making this up. It didn’t appear. But I wanna pick up with when this was brought into the Haskalah, when the Enlightenment came. And according to Rabbi Zivotofsky, this triad of Jewish names, language and dress is not referred to again until the early 19th century when it re. Emerged with renewed significance. During that century’s battle against the reform movement. I would add the Haskalah, the Enlightenment in general. And we have Hatam Sofer, the most important purveyor of this new midrash. He calls it. And he referred to the triad of shem, which means name, Lashon, which is language, and malbush, which is dress, which spell shalom. They spell completeness. And, Rabbi, we’re not making this up. We heard in the yeshiva world this is a biggie. This is.

Adam Mintz [00:27:54]:
Zivotofsky shows that, you know, that this is a. They’re a pro. This is a problematic source. But he’s doing that because we all grew up that way. He grew up that way too. He grew up in West Hempstead. He grew up exactly that way.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:06]:
The first thing that happened to me when I became religious, they said, what’s your name? I said, Geoffrey. They said, what’s your Hebrew name? And luckily I was Shlomo. I love Shlomo. And that’s what I became, because a Jew needs to be called by his Jewish name, name. And I had to change the way I dressed. Now, how dressing like people dressed in medieval Europe is a return to the original dress, that I don’t know, but certainly that. But here is something fascinating. Rabbi, let’s talk about the language here. Zivotofsky writes, in a strange twist, Rabbi Yakutiel Yehuda Halberstein, the Klausenburger Rebbe writing in New Jersey in 1977 and quoting the Hatam Sofer, uses our opening midrash to emphatically insist that one speak only Yiddish and not the local language, or wait for it, or Hebrew. He argues that the unique Jewish languages that the Jews created in the various exiles, which were a deliberate corruption of the local language, meaning Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Malayalam, are the true Jewish languages that should be preserved. So what he’s trying to do is he has this wonderful polemic, but one piece doesn’t fit in. The Zionists are the one that have reinvented Hebrew. The Zionists are the one who are going back to the midrash and saying, but we actually speak Lashon Kodesh. And I think this is the most telling and fascinating, strange and amusing little piece, because it really does show that this was all a polemic, and it stays with us today. I mean, ultimately, we all have to decide who are the pharaohs of the day, who are the Israelites of the day, who are the Moses of the day. No one can decide that for us. But clearly Exodus and liberation does get Polemicized and in the case of the haredim, really, they are not making THE authentic argument. They are making an argument that they have created over time. And they are have no more acclaim to authenticity than Ben Yehuda, who rediscovered that amazing lesson kadosh that the midrash referred to. So that is our study today, and I think we’re finished.

Adam Mintz [00:30:42]:
That’s amazing to pull it all around the Zivotofsky and changing language and how they. They. They’ve kind of corrupted. That Midrash. That is fantastic. Okay, everyone, get ready. Parshat b’. Shalach. We take the Jews out of Egypt, and everyone’s going to know now what the word chamushim is all about. Thank you so much, Geoffrey. Shabbat shalom, everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:03]:
Shabbat shalom. And I can only assure you that we were all worthy of redemption, and we will all be worthy of whatever redemption we make for ourselves. So Shabbat shalom. Enjoy the parasha.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some late on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week, we read Parashat Bo. Last week he explored the essence of the Mussar movement and mentioned in passing the magic of Hasidism, joy, and radical inclusion. This week, we’ll explore the source of inclusion in the Exodus story, but we’ll start with a seminal Hasidic story. So, Rabbi Adam, welcome back. You know, we’re starting to get a little autobiographical here. You always get to talk about how you know the guests. Well, I must say that besides Mussar, Hasidism was a big impact on my life. And I think the first book that I read that really got me interested in Judaism was a book by Martin Buber, very thin, called The Ten Rungs. But then I read Hasidic tales, and I read the Legend of the BAAL Shem. And at the beginning of the book, The BAAL Shem, he writes in his introduction that in his sense, what brought all of the stories, what the magic of Hasidism was. And he writes, no prayer is stronger in grace and penetrates in more direct flight through all the worlds of heaven than those of the simple man who does not know anything to say and only knows to offer God the unbroken promptings of his heart. God receives them as a king receives the singing of a nightingale in his gardens at twilight. A singing that sounds sweeter to him than the homage of the princes in his throne room. The Hasidic legend cannot give enough examples of the favor that shines on the undivided person and of the power of his service. And then he goes and tells a really famous story. I knew this story. Everybody knows the story, but I didn’t realize it was a. He brought it as a template. And it’s a story of a simple boy on Yom Kippur who says to his father as they walk into synagogue for Kol Nidre, I have a whistle and I want to blow the whistle. And his father hushes him. And then they come for Shacharit, and then they come for Musaf, and then they come for Mincha. And finally they’re at Neelah. And as you can imagine, the Hasidim are praying. They’re all dressed in white. The crescendo is being reached. And he turns to his dad and he pulls the whistle out of his pocket and he blows it. And everybody turns around and looks at him as though he has done the most terrible thing. All stood startled and bewildered. But the BAAL Shem raised himself above them and spoke. The judgment is suspended and wrath is dispelled from the face of the earth. So what he said is, the simple whistle of this peasant child was more pure and more powerful than the princes in his throne room. And I thought we’d start with that because we really are talking today about inclusion and exclusion. You’ve clearly heard that story before. Did you read the story before? The legends of the BAAL Shem Tov.

Adam Mintz [00:04:54]:
Yeah. I mean, that story is older than Hasidim, but it’s a great. It says so much, that story. Good. This is a great topic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:03]:
Okay, so we are in Exodus in Shemot, Exodus 10:8. So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. They were fetched. And he said to them, Pharaoh said to them, go worship your God. Who are the ones to go? He says, Mi, v’Mi Haholchim? Moses replied, we will all go, regardless of social station. Actually, the Hebrew says. He really says, our children and our daughters will go. But the translation of the jps, and we’ll get to that in a second, actually puts this already a social stratosphere into it. And it says, regardless of social station, we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds, for we must observe God’s festival. But he said to them. So Pharaoh turns to them and says, God be with you. The same as I mean to let your dependence go with you. Clearly you are bent on mischief. So Pharaoh is, he’s not a fool. He goes, if you’re going to worship your God, you don’t need to take the women and the children. They, they don’t count at a minyan. He said, no, your gentlemen go and worship. So here too, the jps and we’re going to get to the logic and wisdom of this translation. But in the Hebrew it says, it doesn’t say your gentleman, it says, hagvarim will go with you and worship, since that is all that you want. And they were expelled from Pharaoh’s presence. So fascinating how the translation really tries to all of us sudden put into this a sense of Pharaoh is letting the gvarim, the ones that matter, those that have strength. And it also tries to put into regardless of social station. So let’s look at it for a second. First of all, I think the most amazing little comment is from Everett Fox and he says the answer is rhythmical or almost ritual. You know, Rabbi, when we talk about everybody as part of this thing, what is the expression that we use that ends with the taf? It says ha’ anashem v’ nashim v’taf. That is almost a mantra of Judaism that we include the elder men, the elder women, and the taf and the children. And I think that Everett Fox captures it by saying it almost sounds rhythmical and like a ritual. I was struck that.

Adam Mintz [00:07:55]:
That’s very good. That’s very creative. Good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:58]:
So another commentary that I looked at, he picks on this word that JPS translates as gentleman. The Hebrew says hagvarim. He says, unlike in the writings of the prophets, this term men, gevarim, as distinct from anashim, is quite rare in the Torah. Yet it appears twice in our parasha. It may be intended to point to a very thin stratum of an elite few, not merely men, but gentlemen or Torah elites who regard the worship of the Lord as their private preserve and are reluctant to allow others to share in it. I mean, the commentators are really digging in here. It could have been so easy, almost knee jerk to say this is about Moses trying to pull a fast one and Pharaoh calling him and says, what do you need everybody to go for?

Adam Mintz [00:08:54]:
Right. Well, that’s super interesting because you’re right, you don’t need to translate gvarim as being a special group. But he feels that that kind of enhances the story. Good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:06]:
So now we’re going to the Torah, a woman’s commentary, and it says regardless of social station. So it is taking the JPS translation. It says literally with our underlings and with our elders. Or alternatively you could translate it with our youths and with our old folks. The Hebrew terms can refer either to socioeconomic status or to age. And so I think everybody, the sense of na’ar is a. We normally think of a na’ar as a child. If you say something silly in the yeshiva, they might call you a na’ar.

Adam Mintz [00:09:45]:
That’s by the way, that’s a Yiddish ism. The word na’ar in Yiddish means a fool. You know that because the word narishkite means foolishness, perfect, which obviously comes from the Hebrew, but it’s a Yiddish word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:59]:
Okay, yeah, but I think our knee jerk reaction would have been this is an ageism. Nar is youth. I think in benching, we say Na’ar Hayiti gam zekaniti. It’s the opposite of being aged. But if you look into the dictionary that is provided in Sefaria, it also refers to a retainer, a servant. So. So again, if you’re talking the language of class and status and you’re retranslating our pesukim, you could say that Moses returns to Pharaoh and says, no, no, no, stop with the gevarim. Those that have status, we’re talking about even their servants, even their those who to who serve them. So it really is quite, quite amazing. I think in modern Hebrew, the word Mi u’Mi portion who and who. If you want to give a list of who’s who in the Knesset or who’s who in Israel, it’s Mi uMi b’ yisrael Knesset. So we almost take. Again, this sense is used in the nomenclature as who’s who, who’s on the list.

Adam Mintz [00:11:11]:
I think that the phrase Mi uMi HaHolchim is also kind of a colloquial phrase. You want to know who’s coming along, who’s invited to the party. Sometimes people are coming for Shabbos. I say to Sharon, Mi uMi Haholchim means who, who’s coming? It’s taken from this verse.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:29]:
It is. And I must say I was so confident that if I did a Google search and I said, Mi uMi HaHolchim in Israeli literature, in Yiddish literature, I would have come up with more hits. But I think you have the same feeling that I do. It really is an expression.

Adam Mintz [00:11:48]:
It’s gotta be.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:49]:
It’s who, who’s invited, who’s included. So just continuing a little bit further as we look at the verses themselves, the Ramban says, but who are they that shall go? Pharaoh desired that their leaders, elders and officers should go, men that are pointed out by name. Moses answered him that also the sons and daughters will go. For we must hold a feast unto the eternal. And it is mandatory upon all of us to take part in the feast. So really, the Ramban says people who have a name, the real intelligentsia. I love that he really drives the point home. And I love the fact that he now starts. It started me thinking, rabbi, this is the first and the Exodus. What is the big point that Moses is making? He goes, we want to go out and celebrate. We want to have a chag. The commentaries can’t even agree what the chag is it clearly.

Adam Mintz [00:12:57]:
That’s funny. That’s correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:58]:
Today is Rosh Chodesh as we record. Maybe it was Rosh chodesh. The point is, we Jews cannot celebrate without our families. It would be unheard of.

Adam Mintz [00:13:09]:
Very good. That’s very. Yeah, A lot of this comes from. That’s a great Ramban.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:16]:
And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for b’nai mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So this weekend I went to the Met. It’s an amazing show. It shows you all the gods. And if you recall, Rabbi, the first episode of this season, we did it, about Tselem Elohim, the image of God. And I looked at this statue that we’re showing if you’re watching this on YouTube, where a pharaoh has himself sitting next to a God and they’re literally twins. They’re dressed the same, they’re seated the same. It’s clear that in Egypt, if you want the image of God, you’re talking about Pharaoh. Pharaoh is the image of God. And therefore we can almost understand when Moses talks to Pharaoh for the first time, God says to him, I am Going to make you a God to Pharaoh. You have to be on the same level. But what we are doing here, Rabbi, I really believe is a continuation of the revolution that started in Genesis, and that is that the way the Bible looks at this is every human being is in the tselem Elohim, that is in the image of God. And if you take that to its practical conclusion, everybody’s gotta leave. Everybody, from the biggest to the smallest, is all created b’tselem elohim. And you really have this contrast between the two cultures and the two religions.

Adam Mintz [00:15:51]:
Yeah, that’s super interesting. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is interesting. The idea that they’ll be arguing about who goes out. Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:00]:
How.

Adam Mintz [00:16:01]:
How religion is observed, the idea that maybe religion is only observed by the elders, it’s such a foreign idea to us. Right. The idea that only Zikanenu, only the elders, only the important people will worship God is such a foreign idea. But clearly that’s what Pharoah and Moshe are arguing about.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:23]:
It is. And clearly, look, we have remnants in our Torah, the priestly caste. It was there. This wasn’t a clear, clean break. When Ramban says, this is not about people called by name, he is referring to verses in our Torah where the nasi’im, the princes, are paraded, and they are people of name, of course. So I think what’s fascinating to me is you could very easily say that we’re doing a drash today, that all we’re doing is saying mi v’miholchim. It’s clear. The pashut P’shat, the obvious interpretation is here. The negotiation. Negotiations begin. And Pharaoh says, I want to let you go. Now let’s discuss the details. Who’s going to go? And Moses tries to pull a fast one and say, we all have to go. And there. And that’s what it all is. But I think, at least looking at it through the lens of the commentaries, who literally pick out for us, and I think they make a case about the unique use of the word gvarim, that clearly we’re not just talking about people here or about naarim. I. I think you really can make a case, Rabbi, that this is truly an argument about a different gestalt, a different view of what it means to who is important. When Pharaoh thinks he’s thinking about princes, when Moses is thinking he’s thinking about the masses. “Ad Taff”. Until the smallest.

Adam Mintz [00:18:03]:
So, and I’m saying it’s not. It’s who’s important and who’s important in religion. Because what they’re arguing about is who’s gonna worship God, who’s gonna be part of the religious festival. Good. All fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:16]:
So I found two articles that I’m gonna quote at length. They are modern, contemporary articles written. The first one we’re gonna quote is by Rabbi Moshe Aberman and he’s from Yeshiva Haretzion. This is Rabbi Lichtenstein. This is a major place. And he is taking the argument for us. And he says, Moses states before Pharaoh that for the purpose of worshiping God, all of Israel must participate. Pharaoh, however, responds that worship is carried out by the men, the leaders of the people and the heads of families. And therefore there is no need for women and children. Moses position is that in Judaism, every person as such stands in a personal relationship before the Holy One. Blessed be heaven. In light of this, each and every individual must be partner in the experience of worship. This position is reflected and firmly grounded in several places in the Torah. So the reason I found this so I think impactful was that he’s going to make an argument that what we’re discussing now shows its face later. This was not a kind of a unit, an isolated instance that we’re kind of projecting and reading into it. So the first example that he brings is in Deuteronomy 31:12. And it’s the Mitzvah of Hakel, of gathering the people together. What was it? Was it every seven years?

Adam Mintz [00:19:51]:
Yes, the at the end of the Shmita year, the sukkos after the Shmita year.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:56]:
So assemble the people, says the Torah, the men, the women and the little ones. Anushim v Nasim vataf. So this is the expression that we use even in say, when we say everybody’s invited. It’s. This is not. It’s co ed and it’s co generational. It’s everybody and it says, your sojourner, the gear, who is within your gates, in order that they may hearken, in order that they may learn and have awe for God, your God, and take care to observe all the words of this instruction. So what this Rabbi Moshe Aberman is saying is this is not an isolated instance and we are not looking at a back and forth posturing of Moses and Pharaoh. This is essential to the revolution, to the. The program, so to speak.

Adam Mintz [00:20:49]:
Well, and that it’s a change from the Egyptians. It’s different than from what everybody else did.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:56]:
It’s radical. It’s a radical break. Everyone participates, men, women, children, even residents, aliens, adds this rabbi. Similarly, he continues, at the time of entering the covenant in the plains of Moab, on the eve of Israel’s entry into the land, it is stated now we’re quoting Deuteronomy 29. You stand this day, all of you, before God, your God, your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, every householder in Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp. From wood chopper to water drawer. We spent a whole episode on this.

Adam Mintz [00:21:38]:
Talk about what that means, but again.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:40]:
That it brings it into the context of what Moses is arguing with Pharaoh to me made it very profound, amazing, really good. The last thing that he begins is, you know, and again, I had never really thought this before, and I said it a second ago, that here we are, we’re leading a revolution. And ultimately, what does Moses post on the, on the doorpost in terms of what he’s asking from Pharaoh? He’s asking Pharaoh, we need to celebrate, to have a chag. I just thought, when I thought about it for a second, I thought that also was an amazing statement. So in Deuteronomy 16:14, it says, you shall rejoice in your festival, tvisamachat b’chagecha, who? with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the family of the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow in your communities. And this to me really tied what Moses was demanding of Pharaoh and the Exodus and the actual Halachot that came out as a result that the only way that the Israelites can celebrate. And by the way, the word hag is related to the Arabic word hajj. This it’s with everybody. It is with everybody. This was a revolution that getting back back to that wonderful story we started with Buber that everybody to the whistleblower has to be a part of or you can’t do it right now.

Adam Mintz [00:23:19]:
I think the hajj, though to Mecca is only the men, right?

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:23]:
Well, they translated the word, but maybe not the concept, right?

Adam Mintz [00:23:27]:
I think so.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:27]:
I don’t know.

Adam Mintz [00:23:27]:
You have to study. You have to study the Muslim halacha.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:31]:
I think women go too, but definitely to me it was just amazing. So there is another scholar who quotes and he, believe it or not, this is almost like a teshuvah, a responsa, where a woman, an elderly woman, dedicates something to a synagogue in modern day in Jerusalem, and the rabbis of the synagogue refused to take it from a woman. And so this rabbi, his name is Ovadia, he’s actually a professor also Aviad Hakouin. He writes the following interpretation based on, in part on our pursuit. He says one of the most striking features of the story of the exodus from Egypt is inclusion, not exclusion. All the children of Israel are gathered beneath the wings of the worship of the Lord according to Pharaoh’s approach, echoes of which are often heard even in many circles of our own day. The worship of the Lord and entry into his sanctuary are an exclusive matter, by invitation only, for men only. The bitter fruit of the tree of exclusion. And this is all in Hebrew. I just translated it. Go worship the Lord your God. Who and who are going? Quoting our verse here, Pharaoh gives voice to his distorted conception of religion and those who practice it. If the purpose of leaving Egypt is to worship of the Lord, then this rite belongs only to a select few rabbis, priests, religious functionaries, and Anshei Shlome, the insiders. Pharaoh asks Moses to prepare for him a list of the who and who the important people demanded, worthy of participating in the act of religious worship. He wants the event to be exclusive, by invitation only, just as the Egyptians conduct their own ceremonies. I love the way he’s rephrasing it.

Adam Mintz [00:25:36]:
Almost into modern by invitation only part.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:41]:
So according to Pharaoh and those who follow in his path, he’s. He’s basically pointing his finger at these, these rabbis. He wouldn’t accept. The worship of the Lord is gendered and sectorial matter. Against this background Pharaoh’s command in Exodus 10:11 becomes all the more striking and intelligible. Go then you men, and worship the Lord, for that is what you seek. So this was the time that Gevarim was used. Indeed, Moses, our teacher’s inclusive model does not grant rights alone. It also creates obligations. Those who bear the Torah and serve as guides must find solutions within the framework of Halachah to the exclusion of women from the various Batim houses. So he is issuing, based on our little narrative and dialogue, a challenge to the halachic authorities of today that they need to find a way of including everybody into a larger tent.

Adam Mintz [00:26:49]:
Great. That. That’s the question about a woman donating something. And he goes back to this story. Who would have thought such a thing?

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:57]:
It’s just. It’s just wonderful. I have to also say, I believe we lost a great leader. The OU. Was it. Was it Moshe Hauer? Rabbi. What was his name?

Adam Mintz [00:27:09]:
Yeah, Moshe Hauer.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:12]:
He also has a article written with the. The name of the article is who and who will Go? And he uses it, interestingly, as an excuse to help to define who’s included. What he talks about is Rabbi Saloveitchik and many of the Orthodox permitted it almost obligated the Orthodox to participate in anything that was communal, even though maybe that was not the case when it came to theology or discussions of Torah.

Adam Mintz [00:27:46]:
With other denominations, with the non Orthodox.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:49]:
Right, with the non Orthodox. And he actually uses the article as a way to say, but there are lines. And. And what he talks about is, you know, when certain people go and they don’t support the people living in Israel, they’ve crossed a line. But after he passed away to a T Rabbi, every Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular leader that had anything to do with him all literally talked about his inclusiveness, that he walked. He walked the walk. So it’s fascinating that he wrote that. I think there’s too much when we discuss the Exodus, whereas too much we still have, which is the exclusionary. There’s a very tiny little posuk that says when the Jews left, they went hamushim armed. And the amount of people that quote a tiny midrash that is isolated, that only a fifth of the Israelites left Egypt, boggles the imagination. It boggles the imagination. The people that quote the midrash that says, we survived because we didn’t change our garb and we didn’t change our.

Adam Mintz [00:29:14]:
Language, our names and our language.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:16]:
There’s too much of that and not enough of the inclusion part that everybody know what language they spoke, no, what matter what clothing they wore, were invited in this amazing activity Exodus. And I think that while I will characterize those midrashim that talk about who were left behind and who were excluded as isolated, what we’ve tried to show today, and I think we have a leg to stand on, is that me u miholchim. Who and who is going as an inclusive statement is actually baked into the halacha, later baked into the Torah. And I think the stories what Martin Buber identified in the Hasidic movement, if you recall, we had the first rabbi, the gay rabbi, and we asked him, what is the future? He said, “be like Chabad”. And when we asked him, what do you mean? He goes, chabad accepts everybody. I think the walking rules that we have from this week’s Parasha is inclusion is what it’s all about.

Adam Mintz [00:30:30]:
About. Amazing. What a great topic. Shabbat Shalom, everybody. We look forward next week to crossing the Red Sea with all of you. Shabbat Shalom.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:40]:
Shabbat Shalom. Everybody is welcome. And by the way, if you ever listen to the podcast and you want to give us a star or say something nice, go ahead and do it. Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Vayera, and it gives me the delightful excuse to introduce to my Madlik family, my teacher and arguably the last great Mussar masterer, Rav Shlomo Wolbe. So, Adam, we’ve talked many times about Rabbi Riskin, who is a Rebbe that you and I share together, but I don’t think we have ever really talked about Rav Shlomo Wolbe. And I went after I went to Torah Vodaas and I went to a year at Long Beach Yeshiva. I was looking for more and I ended up in Beer Yaakov, which in the days was a little town, orange groves. On the other side of town was Tunis, which literally, if you went there, you thought you were in Tunisia. There was an unpaved road. We would go there. The yeshiva bochers would go there every Friday to use their hamsa there they had a schwitz. They didn’t call it a Schwitz because it was Tunisian. And then we would go to the mikvah and we got out every four weeks. So we were. It was like a little bit of a monastery. And I Really, I must say that I discovered there. You know, there are the Musser Institute today where people study Mussar. And I think if most people were asked what Mussar is, they would probably say it’s like ethics. It’s doing the right thing. And I think today, through this exploration of Kotzer Ruach, of katnut, which means smallness, and Gadlut, which is greatness, we’re gonna see a whole new insight. Mussar is, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it because a lot of us know about the Hasidic movement, and I think if I had to characterize that, that would be the joy of being a Jew. The Haskalah was the Enlightenment. To be able to look at our Torah on a more scientific level. Zionism we talk all about all the time. But Mussar is something that I think people don’t understand as much. But it too was a movement that came out of the Haskalah, where we were redefining what Judaism is.

Adam Mintz [00:04:02]:
Can you tell us a little bit about the biography of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe?

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:07]:
Absolutely. So he was born in 1914, passed away in 2005, so 20 years ago. He actually grew up in Berlin, and he did not grow up in a religious home. I believe his father was a professor of linguistics at the University of Berlin. And somehow he became a Baal Teshuva. He discovered Judaism through his local community, and he got so involved. Kind of parallels my story a little bit, but l’havdil, I do not compare myself to Shlomo Wolbe. He ended up in the Mir Yeshiva, and there he met HaRav Yerukim Leibovitz, who was known as the the Alter fro Mir and Yechezkel Levenstein. These were greats of the Mussar movement.

Adam Mintz [00:05:01]:
These were in Mir in Lithuania.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:04]:
Absolutely. And then when the war started, as a German citizen and as a Jew, he was not in good shape. He was able to go to Switzerland during the war. Then he ended up in another neutral country, Sweden, and he actually ran a girls school there. So I remember being at the yeshiva. These elderly women would come to visit him all the time, and he would say, those are my girls. He would. He taught refugee girls, and he was obviously a linguist himself, spoke a bunch of languages. And he married the daughter of the Mashgiach from the Slabotka Yeshiva in Israel. So he was held in very high regard and very well known. He started Be’er Yaakov, usually at a yeshiva. It’s the Rosh haYeshiva who’s the star, but I went to Be’er Yaakov because of Wolbe and every year he would take one student to study Chumash and Rashi with him in the morning. With the first 15, 20 minutes of the day, everybody, as I talk about it all the time on Madlik, about studying Chumash and Rashi. In the second year, I was privileged to be that student. And I wish I could tell you that I remember all of his chiddushim from studying early in the morning Chumash and Rashi. But I must have gotten something because I love Rashi and I love studying Chumash, which is the first thing that I think ties us to the Madlik podcast. But he, after Be’er Yaakov went on to start something called the Beit haMussar. And he literally was thought of as one of the great Mussarniks, the types of things that he would do that maybe others don’t follow. He believed that when one studied Mussar, which means like Chovot Halavavot, where you would study a book that was called the Duties of the Heart, meaning the premise of the book is we spend a lot of time thinking about our duties, of actions, of what we eat and what we can eat, what we pray, what we can pray, and Chovot Halevavot, Duties of the Heart says, why don’t we focus a little bit on how that’s changing us or who we are? You had to study that alone, without a study partner, without a havruta. And the other thing that we used to do is we used to have va’adim, small groups of students that would get together sometimes at midnight with the mashgiach. And you could work for six months on one concept. You could work on thought and there might be thought exercises. It almost sounds like psychotherapy sometimes. How do you control your thought? How do you think about one thing and then focus on something else? Just fascinating and not within the mainstream of what I think most people are exposed to when they talk about Judaism. But I want to start with a quote that is quoted in many places and unfortunately the whole article that we’re going to read is not quoted. So I went ahead and I translated the whole thing and I’m going to post it. But it says like this. This matter is one of the foundations of our faith. He says, if I were asked what my personal credo is, Mahu ha ani maman sheli, we always say, animan, I believe in the 13 attributes. Rav Wolbe says, what would I answer if somebody asked me what my personal Ani Ma’amin is? He says, I would answer I believe in the greatness of the human being. I believe that the human being is so great that he can stand before his Creator, hear him, and that is prophecy. And speak to his Creator. That is prayer. The greatness of the people of Israel reached its summit when the entire nation stood at Mount Sinai. He goes on, and this is how we’re going to start with the end. He says, in God, all people believe. Well, maybe that was true one time, in the greatness of the human being. Not all believe. That a human being can attain a living relationship with his Creator. And not only that, but that the Creator will reveal himself to him, speak with him, that a human being can walk before God in the land of the living. This is our faith. So these quotes. If you were to ask me, Rabbi, I would say it could be Erich Fromm talking humanism. “You shall be as gods” they are. But in the Hebrew, it’s lyrical. He says, if you were to ask me what my Ani Mamin is, I would say I believe in the greatness of the human being. It’s quite remarkable. What do you know of Rabbi Wolbe or of the Mussar movement? Rabbi?

Adam Mintz [00:09:58]:
I don’t know much about Rabbi Wolbe other than the fact that he started Beer Yaakov. I just know the kind of the outline of his life. But the Mussar movement, this is. It means it’s easy to believe in God. The real challenge is, do you believe in human beings? That’s what a remarkable idea that is.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:19]:
And I think, even though in the article that we will be going through a little bit today, superficially, I might add, doesn’t quote a verse from our Parasha, I think you’ll see why it triggered a sense in me of this is the perfect segue into this question of self doubt, belief, the greatness of the wonder of humanity in our poarsha. After God gives Moses the message one more time. And now Moses is in Egypt, it says in Exodus 6: 9. But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage. Mikotzer ruach, u’me avodah kasha. They did not have the ability to listen to Moses. It wasn’t philosophical, it wasn’t theological. It was the overbearing of their situation. Rashi says, what is this? He says through anguish, literally shortness of spirit. You almost get a sense of shortness of breath, but this is shortness of spirit. If one is in anguish, his breath comes in short gasps and he cannot draw long breaths. What struck me, Rabbi, was we were talking about the Inability to accept a message, the message of the Torah, and it had to do with you as a person. It didn’t have to do with anything external. The Ramban says similarly that they paid no attention to his words because of impatience of spirit. As a person whose soul is grieved on account of his misery, Cassuto talks about a state of depression. He says there’s a parallel in Ugaritic. Some of the other commentaries talk about impatience or fatigue. But it is a kind of a striking expression, isn’t it, Rabbi?

Adam Mintz [00:12:28]:
Well, first of all, let’s go back to the Rashi. The Rashi is remarkable because we know that’s true from psychology, that when you’re anxious it’s sometimes hard to catch your breath. And it’s so amazing that that’s what Rashi, that’s the way Rashi explains the Chumash, that they couldn’t, literally they couldn’t catch their breath. They were so upset. It’s not that they were exhausted. It’s not like they ran a marathon. They couldn’t catch their breath. When you’re anguished, then it’s hard to catch your breath. It’s like Cassuto said, it’s some kind of psychological condition, which is fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:10]:
And that qatsar is small, but it’s also, it feels almost like narrow, it’s short. The interesting thing where Rabbi Volber is going to go is these are all negative situations, negative personal situations that we can almost understand viscerally, you know, how can you start be thinking about big ideas and revelation and all that when all you can think about is how to get another few calories into yourself to get some sleep. But this is how Rav Shlomo Wolbe begins this article, I must say. His main book is called Ali Shor. This book is called Ben Sheishet le Asur, which literally means between the 6th and the 10th. They’ve changed the name of the book because between the 6th and the 10th, Rabbi, I think, means between June 6th of the Six Day War and or the sixth month of June and the 10th, which was the October (Yom Kippur) War. He was using a secular reference even in his title for the book. But listen to how he starts this monumental essay. He starts it with Sophocles. The Greek describes in a singular poem the greatness of the human being, declaring many things are awe inspiring, but the most awe inspiring of them all is the human being how many mashgiachs. And if I’ll have to put a picture of Wolbe in the substack post, but he literally was from casting central in terms of a Haredi Jew. How many would start an essay quoting Sophocles? And then he goes on, and this was a kind of a talk he gave to religious high schoolers. He talks about getting onto the moon. There’s even more to be in awe of the human being. But he does say the event calls for renewed reflection on the old question of human greatness. And this is what he’s concerned with. He’s considered with Gadlut Ha’. Odam. He says, has humanity, through such achievements, exhausted all that lies within its power for building the world? So as a mussarnik, we can start with being a slave and not having the luxury of thinking big thoughts, but we can also think in terms of living in a world where man can land on the moon and man can control his agriculture. And also, is the answer outside of us or is it inside of us?

Adam Mintz [00:15:49]:
That’s also a very important question, right? Is the answer outside or inside of us? That’s also about the greatness of human beings, that the answer is generally inside of us.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:03]:
And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’nai mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Had Gadya in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So he goes on a little bit and you can read this almost through modern lenses here. He kind of takes on almost consumerism. They make their bellies into gods. He’s talking about successful technological man. Their Torah is their clothing. You know, when they wake up in the morning, they’re not considering what tallis they’re going to wear. They’re talking about their clothing. And their morality is the fortifying of their dwelling, a good structure. Economics. Civilization enlarges the world and diminishes the human being, for it turns our gaze outward while the human inner life steadily contracts and grows impoverished. So he’s going to make an argument, Rabbi, that it’s not simply that when man is small and he’s a slave, or when man thinks he’s great and can achieve everything. In both of those cases, he might by mistake lose focus on himself. He believes there’s an actual connection between that. If you focus your time on that which is outside of you, by definition, you will lose the ability to look at what is inside of you. And that, he will argue, is the source of the real greatness of man. Not only the greatness of man, but like the founding fathers, he asks, will the human being be happier than then? Will all of this great success, outward success, be more successful? And he goes, and he brings Dynamite and Nobel as an example of when we create these amazing inventions. Again, following up on what Sophocles said in terms of admiring what man can create, it has the intent, it has the ability to bring us down. And then he says, our intention is not to deny the value of improving secular living conditions, but to show that this outward gaze builds up the external world at the expense of the human being himself. So in a sense, it’s a very modern question. I mentioned consumerism a second ago. But again, all of these externalities, do they really solve the issue of who man is, what makes us happy? And does it represent actually the thing which, whether it’s Sophocles or any of us, can truly admire about the potential for greatness in human beings? He goes on to critique Marxism, and he says, Marxism does the same thing as capitalism. It just takes the controlling factor out of the hand of each of us who wants to control our destiny and says the Politburo should do it. But in either case, its own only. It is only fixing the world from outside, external. So if I have to stop here, I want to say we’re reading only one essay from a great Mussarnik. But if I had to put my horse in the race, I would say that what the Mussarniks brought to the world was not a higher, finer sense of ethics. Ethics might be an outcome, but the truth is it was a higher, finer sense of understanding the importance of us as an individual. If we are slaves, we cannot think big. If we think of ourselves as small, we cannot think big if somebody else makes us small, or if we put all of our focus on things outside of us, which by definition diminishes who we are, we cannot think big.

Adam Mintz [00:21:15]:
Yeah, I mean, that. That’s the idea of thinking big, what he’s saying is means we have to be able to think within ourselves, because externalities can’t really make us big in a meaningful way.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:29]:
Absolutely. But again, you can see how I was attracted to this man. He starts with Sophocles. He’s talking about modern Marxism. This was a man when he showed up for a schmooze. He would have a pack of books and he didn’t. He would just go from. He had a little note, a little placeholder in each one. And he would go from one to the other. But here it is, next position. You can see even why I love the man. He says I can testify from experience. Once I stood atop a very high mountain, surrounded by ancient snow covered peaks and a vast eye expanding horizon. I believe that all my small traits would vanish. Amadti la’ atzmi b’amad k’zeh vaday yibatlu b’kirbi kol hamidot hakatantiot. Not the smallness. He thought that all of the katantiot, all of those narrow small things would vanish. But I soon realized that inwardly nothing had changed. Only the grand landscape had momentarily concealed the pettiness within. In again, in the Hebrew it talks about ha katantanuyut sheba libi. He is literally contrasting gadlut greatness and katantaniyut. The smallness that we all … the trivialities, the things that kind of.

Adam Mintz [00:23:04]:
That’s a great word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:07]:
I think it comes very close to Katsir Ruach. It’s the smallness of the breath. It’s this shortness and smallness. And it’s what made me think of this essay. But I love the fact that he references an experience that any of us could have on a hike, looking on from a mountain at the gloriousness of the horizon, thinking all those big thoughts. But does it actually affect us? He says he is still the human being. Even if his peak ascends to the heavens, even if his head reaches the clouds through some outward experience, he remains the same human being with the same traits and impulses. So where is the repair of the human being? And where is the repair of the world? So notice he links repair of the human being. Don’t look out, look in.

Adam Mintz [00:24:03]:
Did you used to hear these ideas from him? Is this familiar to you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:08]:
So literally, I knew what I wanted to find. I googled Gadlut v’ katnut and Rav Shlomo Wolbe. And I started to see this quote that I quoted at the beginning of our discussion. And nobody gave the source. So it took me a while to pull out my Ben Sheshet l’aser the book and actually find it there. But yes, that is how he spoke. It was a major theme for him, and it worked in many different directions. Once we were spending a whole, I would say, semester on sin. And he started by saying, does sinning upset you? Does it make you despair? Well, who do you think you were before the sin? Moshe Rabbeinu. So there too, he was using Gadlut, but he was using it. Don’t let it impugn your progress. You had not such a big shot. We all stumble. It was a major poll with him, I believe, this small and largeness.

Adam Mintz [00:25:13]:
Was he someone who was like. Was very humble in his personality?

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:18]:
Absolutely. He was kind of hard of hearing. So he always would go like this to hear you. He’d cup his ears. And he was therefore kind of intimate. But he was very soft spoken.

Adam Mintz [00:25:31]:
Oh, he was. Did you used to go to his house for Shabbos?

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:35]:
No, we would go mostly after Shabbos for the Vadim. They would always be there. There would be a heater and we’ kind of sit around. And he’d be wearing those woolen house shoes that I know Kippy Ben Kiipod wore. They’re plaid, brown plaid. But it was quiet. He could shout. He would shout. When he would say, who do you think you are, Moshe Rabbeinu? At that point, he would shout. But I mean, there was one time he used to tell a story from Reb Yerucham. And Rabbi Yerucham came over to a student and said, have you ever said Shema? And the student says, of course, Rabbi, I say it twice a day. He says, so you mean you accept upon yourself the Ol Malchut Shamayim, the yoke of heaven, twice a day, and you never feel like rebelling? And the student said, of course not, Rebbe. So he said to him, so then you’ve never said Shema in your life. This was the kind of. It was a little bit like the Kotzk Rebbe too. It was sharp. It was sharp, sharp.

Adam Mintz [00:26:39]:
Surprising. What he said surprised you. That’s what the real good musserniks do.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:45]:
Surprised you. Stopped you in your tracks and made you want to think. And so what he ends up by saying is the quotes that I gave you. And yes, he makes a long Talmudic argument about combining Abraham, Moses and the Messiah, that according to the Talmud, they all rode a Hamor (donkey), the same Hamor. A Rashi in last week’s Parasha talked about the Hamor that Moshe rode. And he Says, really, it’s not a Hamor, it’s Homer, it’s material. And what both of them, all three of them were great leaders. And he says what we need to be, each one of us is a great leader. The way he ends is fascinating. Of course he does the perfunctory we’re waiting for the Great One, the Messiah who should come. But he said, says, yet the awe inspiring power of the human being is not reserved for one meaning the Messiah alone. For each and every one of us, let us uncover the treasures of kindness in our hearts, the flame of faith, and marshal our faculties to magnify our deeds, each in his own place and surroundings. For it is upon us to ascribe greatness to the Master of all. He’s quoting the Aleynu (prayer) there. He says, to give greatness to the Creator of the beginning, Greatness of whom he blessed be. He is great even without us, but it is upon us to give our own greatness in service of God. The awe inspiring power of the human being lies in his inner life. Let us reveal its light through our deeds. So now when we say Aleynu le shabayach la’adon hakol, yotzer bereishit, the Gedulah, the greatness that we are ascribing in the words of Shlomo Wolbe is not to God. It is, it’s to ourselves. It’s to celebrate the greatness that God put in us. And it is that, I think that is ultimately the story of the Exodus, which is how to put the greatness back into the hearts of the broken Israelite slaves. And I think that really is the whole story. It’s not so much of all of the signs and wonders and even convincing Pharaoh. It’s taking this downtrodden people and trying to make them believe in their own greatness, right?

Adam Mintz [00:29:31]:
I mean, believe in themselves, believe that they can do it. I mean, Moshe had part of that. That’s why Moshe grew up in the house of Pharaoh, because allowed him to believe in himself, so he could then teach that to the slaves. That’s what the Ibn Ezra says on last week’s Parasha. Okay, Beautiful. This was fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:50]:
I adjure all of you, if you’re interested, look in the Sefaria source sheet and read the whole article of Shlomo Wolbe and introduce yourself to the world of Mussar. But in any case, Shabbat Shalom and let us all never have Kotzer Ruach, shortness of spiritual breath. Let us all strive for the stars. Wishing you all a Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.

Adam Mintz [00:30:19]:
Shabbat shalom. Fantastic.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read a new book of the Torah and are excited to be joined by Ilana Kurshan. Ilana is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She has worked in literary publishing both in New York and in Jerusalem as a translator and foreign rights agent, and as the book’s editor of Lilith Magazine. Kurshan is a graduate of Harvard University, summa cum laude in history of science, Something close to My Heart, and Cambridge University with a master’s in Philosophy and English literature. She teaches and studies Torah in the Jerusalem where she lives with her husband and five children. Welcome, Ilana. It’s an absolute pleasure to start the new year with you as our guest.

Ilana Kurshan [00:02:23]:
Thank you so much. It’s so wonderful to be here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:27]:
So, you know, every time we have a wonderful author like you, I get to read the book and I absolutely enjoyed it. We’re coming back from New Year’s break and I have to say I was in LA reading Fancy Nancy to my granddaughter. She actually, the book that she got for Hanukkah that she loves has to do with a snowman farting. We’re not gonna get into that. But I know about Fancy Nancy, and I know from my older granddaughter about Amalia Badalia. So it was like meeting new/old friends and bringing them to something that Adam and I love passionately, which is Torah. So why don’t you just spend a few minutes talking about your past and history and what brought you to write this, a wonderful book.

Ilana Kurshan [00:03:15]:
Sure. So, first of all, it’s very nice to be starting a new safer as we start the new secular year and that Sefer Shmote and January 1st often overlap. So it’s nice that it’s nice to have that synchrony. And I always think that when we start reading Sefer Shmot, it’s good preparation, like getting us in the mind already starting to think about Pesach as the next major, you know, in a Torah sense of a chag coming up. So. So it’s nice to be nice to have our head in Shmot. So I wrote my book Children of the Book, basically, because. So I’ll tell you, my. My youngest child, who is five, likes to hear the same books again and again. And, you know, he goes through phases with books where there’ll be a set of a few books that he wants to hear over, such that no sooner have we turned the last page than already he’s asking me to start again and read over from the beginning, and then he’ll, you know, have a few books that we read over and over. And at some point, it occurred to me, as I was reading to my kids, the same book, same picture books over and over, it occurred to me that this idea of reading the same five books over and over is a very Jewish way of reading, because as Jews, we read the five books of Moses again and again every year in synchrony. Right. Starting in the fall with Bereshit and then concluding the following fall when we conclude SeferDevarim. And this is just how we read Torah. We read books. We read these same books again and again. And the reason we’re reading them is not because, you know, we want to find out what’s going to happen at the end. Please don’t give us any spoilers. We need to know. Or because we want to have these books to, like, a Goodreads log and say, like, look how many books I read this year. You know, people are always advertising at the end of the year how many books they read. That’s not why we read Torah. It’s also not why, by the way, it’s also not why we read the prayer book. Like we read the Sidur because we’re trying to forge some sort of connection through the text. Right. It’s not about checking the book off a list. And I think the same is true when we read with children or grandchildren. The point is not getting through the book, finding out what happens, saying, done with that one. No, the point is the connection that’s forged with the child. The experience of rereading, of somehow managing to glean new meaning both in the text, but also in your relationship with the child through that experience of rereading. And what I tried to do in my book was really to explore the connections between the experience of reading with children and the five books of the Chumash. So, yeah, one, one quick example. You know, when as a parent, one of the parents of a newborn, one of the first books you read to your child, like soon as you get back from the hospital, Right. What do you get as your baby gift? You get some kind of black and white book that’s a series of black images on a white background. White images on a black background. Because babies can only see two infants. Newborns can only see two colors, right? They can only see black and white. And these are books, like usually they’re board books so the baby can drool all over it. And I remember reading this book to my firstborn and thinking at the time my son was still, you know, he was up at all hours of the day, all hours of the night, and sleeping through the day because babies don’t have their circadian rhythms adjusted yet. And I remember thinking that as I was reading him this book, I was really teaching him how to separate black, how to distinguish black from white so that his world could sharpen into focus, and how to tell day from night so he could sleep more regularly. Darkness from light. Yeah. And it occurred to me that this was also God’s first act in creating the world, was separating light from darkness. And moreover, as I read to him from the words that, you know, there were no words in this book. But as I pointed to the objects in these black on white illustrations, Bottle bath boat. I realized I was essentially summoning the world into being through language for my child, which is really what God did. Baruch shemar vay olam. That’s how God created the world. And that really launched my exploration of all of these parallels between the texts we read with our children and the experience of reading with our children and the books of the Torah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:25]:
Just , Just love it. And I was, you know, thinking about the Haggadah, which is As I said in the intro, the logistwetting book club. And on the one hand, you have to tell your child bayomahu for the purpose at hand, but then it also talks about all the days of your life. And as I was looking at the midrashim, one of them caught my eye. And it says, if you have no one to read it to, you should read it to the Le Briot, the creations. Which almost sounds like the wild things, you know, we are. The idea of reading out loud is. Is the idea of. It’s practical for the moment, but then it transcends the moment and it’s at every age. It’s really quite. And as you say, we read the Torah every week in the synagogue. Reading it out loud. We did a prior episode where we used a scholar to explain all the minutia of Jacob of Yaakov conniving way out of the. To get the birthright, because the audience knew what was going to happen. Like Megilat at Esther. They booed at the right time, they snickered at the right time. We compared it to drama and all of a sudden read it differently. And I think today what we’re going to try to do is read the verses, some verses from the Torah as a children’s story and see also how that affects us. And when I was talking to you by text before, you said, why don’t we talk about the burning bus? So the burning bush is kind of amazing because if you read through it, first of all, one word comes up over and over again. In Exodus 3:1-7, it says, Now Moses was shepherding the flock of Yitro, his father in law, priest of Midian. He led the flock behind. We’ll get to a second what that. What Everett Fox says about that. And then a messenger of God appeared to him, using the Hebrew word that is going to come back over and over again. Vayar malach hashem. And then it says, in a blazing fire, out of a bush, he gazed again using the same word to look. And there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight. Again, the same word, to look. Why doesn’t the bush burn? He asks inquisitively asking a question as our children do. When God saw that he had turned aside to look. So God now notices the reader of the events and is. Is impressed. God called to him out of the bush. Moses, Moses. He answered, here I am. It goes on and continues. And Moses hid his face. He was afraid to look. Things in this story disturbed him. But I would hazard to guess he couldn’t look and he couldn’t look away. And then now God said, I have seen, yes, seen the affliction of my people. So here is the punchline. God says, using it twice. So I think you cannot read this story, and I thank you so much for bringing it to my attention without looking at this idea of the visualization of events and being impressed by what you see. Is that what you had in mind when you. When you said, let’s focus a little bit on this?

Ilana Kurshan [00:10:52]:
Yes, in part. I mean, I think this story is really about stopping to pay attention that you. So often we go through life running from one thing to the next, trying to get things done, be productive, squeeze as much into the day as we can. And the reason that God chooses Moshe based on this story is because Moshe is someone who stops to notice when things are amiss. And this really typifies Moshe. He stops to notice the bush that’s burning but not consumed. What could this be? Asura nav’. Ere. Let me stop and go look and see what’s going on here. Moshe stops. He sees injustice, right? He can’t stand it. When he gets completely riled up. When he sees the Egyptian beating the Hebrew, when he sees one Hebrew beating another. Moshe is a person who notices when things are amiss in the world. And he can’t stand still and ask questions, why is the world like this? Does it have to be this way? Can the world be otherwise? And that is what God is looking for in a. In a messenger, in a redeemer. It’s interesting because I would argue that the rabbis actually remake Avraham in Moshe’s image. Because when they try to figure out why God chooses Abraham, they say, and this is the midrash, Abraham passed a burning building. And he said, why is this building burning? Why isn’t someone paying attention to it? Which is a famous midrash that I think is very much modeled on, you know, we know nothing about Abraham, but let’s take what we know about Moshe and apply that to Abraham. It’s very interesting. But. But yeah, really with Moshe, Moshe is someone who notices. And I think this is something that we really do also when we. When we read, and especially when we read aloud with an auditor, when we read aloud to our children, we pay much closer attention. We’re really. We’re paying attention to our child. We’re paying attention to the text that reading really demands of us. The in art of attention, an ability to really attune our senses to the text. And I think Jews are the best close readers that Midrash. The entire enterprise of Midrash, of commentary on canonical texts, the entire enterprise of midrash is grounded in an art of close reading. What does it mean to notice when something in the text is amiss? Why does it say Achar Hamidbar? Everett Fox picks up on that. It’s unusual. Why that terminology, right? What does it mean to notice the bumps, the inconsistencies, the unusual features of the text and to use those as a starting point for engagement, for dialogue? And that’s what Moshe does, that’s what the rabbis do. And it’s really, I think, what reading does for us. And that reading forces us to slow down, to pay attention. And especially in our rapidly pacing, you know, modern lives, I think there is such a place, you know, we’ve lost, to a large extent, we’ve lost the art of reading as books are meant to be read. Like, I don’t know how many of us has ever sat in an armchair with a pipe, a proverbial pipe, you know, and read for four hours, like by the fireside, the way people used to read Dickens. Like, we don’t read that way anymore in most books. In many books are getting shorter, chapters are getting shorter. People just read differently. We consume texts differently. But if we can reclaim the lost art of deep engagement with text, if we can slow down and stop to notice, I think there are many, many rewards, rewards to be to be gained.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:32]:
He says fairy tales often portray the heroes going deep into a forest and the lake. So when we’re used to Everett Fox saying words sound like this, and it’s supposed to bring up this association here, he actually goes into a fairytail. And you wonder, Adam, I’m wondering what you think in terms of. The story is almost crafted, not only describing something that is based on looking, but making the reader look in terms of, I’m going down the rabbit hole. I have to be attenuated to these changes. It really changes the whole way you read the text when you start reading it through the eyes of a child who asks the question, the annoying question, what’s with that bush? What’s. What’s different? What do you think, Adam? And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift Play. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any Book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. Voice Give Play stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their laning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

Adam Mintz [00:16:27]:
So, Elana, so what you said, obviously, and you said it so beautifully, I would just add one little thing. Why this story, which obviously is, you know, is a major story. This is the story where Moses is chosen by God. Moses, who’s going to be the leader. Maybe in order to have vision, in order to be able to see in the future, you have to be able to look in the present very carefully. Someone who just thinks about the future, we kind of, you know, we consider them a luftwe. Right? We consider them that they’re not grounded enough. We don’t take them seriously. The real leader is the one who can have vision for the future because they understand the present. And maybe that’s what I thought in why the word vayar repeats itself so many times here. I don’t know what you think about that.

Ilana Kurshan [00:17:18]:
I love that idea and I think it very much. It overlaps very nicely with the idea that God’s first command to Moshe is . Moshe has to take off his shoes because he has to feel the earth with his feet. He has to be grounded. He has to be present. He has to be there. In fact, it reminds me there is a beautiful poem by the 19th century poet Jared Manley Hopkins, who was devout Christian. And I’m convinced this poem is based on the burning bush scene, although I’ve never heard anyone say it. But he has a poem. The world is charged with the glory of God, nor can foot feel being shod. I’ve skipped a little bit in the middle. But that is to say, because we have our shoes on, we don’t feel that the whole earth is on fire with God, you know, and it’s really like God wants Moshe to be wholly there and to see that the world is infused with divinity, that the whole world is. The whole world is on fire if you pay attention, right? The whole world is on fire with God’s glory, if you pay attention. But yes, very much. That you have to be rooted in this world. Which also links to the idea that. Why does Moshe even get to the bush? Because one of his sheep wanders off, and Moshe, who very much is doing his job, he’s responsible for the sheep. You know, he follows Miz Midrash. He follows the stray sheep and comes to the burning bush. Because Moshe’s doing his job in this world. It’s not because he has a fantastical vision that he follows or he sees something in the sky. No, he’s doing his job of, you know, following, tending to his sheep, which is his job. You know, he’s very much rooted in this world. And yes, I agree. That equipment to be, you know, to be the shepherd of B’ Nai Yisra’ el Katson Hasher in Lehem Roec. Right. Like, that’s the idea. He’s gonna be the shepherd of the children of Israel, so that they should not be like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. He goes from being a shepherd of sheep to a shepherd of people, which involves, on the one hand, being a person who can go up on Sinai and receive the divine gift of the Torah, but also someone who can listen to the people’s complaints and answer their questions and deal with all their problems. So Moshe really has to have a foot in this world. And also you can.

Adam Mintz [00:19:38]:
If you want to jump a little bit, Ilana, you could say maybe that was Moses’s problem when he came down the mountain holding the tablets and he saw the Jews worshiping the golden calf. Maybe he got a little caught up in the moment and he broke the tablets. Maybe had he had a little bit of a better vision if he’d been able to balance what he saw in the moment. You say being grounded, but he wasn’t grounded. He got afraid. He saw them worshiping an idol. He became afraid, and he broke the tablets. And maybe that, you know, was. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to handle it.

Ilana Kurshan [00:20:15]:
Yeah. You know, I write about the. Of course I write about the Golden Calf episode in my book, and I write about it in terms of. Similar to the terms you’re describing, that I was coming home one day from teaching. I was teaching Torah. It happened to be that parsha of the Golden Calf, Parshat Kitisa. And I came home, and we have a rule in my house, or we did at the time, that kids are not allowed to be on electronic devices when parents aren’t home. And I come in the house, and I find my kids are all huddled around the iPad all watching something on the tablet and I get very, very angry because they violated the rule. And I run over to them and I say, what are you doing? I am going to smash this tablet. And then of course, I realized that I have to contain my rage because I don’t want to be like Moshe. I don’t want to smash the T. And, you know, I need to be more forgiving and patient. So. So, yes, I very, very much identify with that story. And I think for me, the tension between screens and between reading is that reading requires us to pay attention on a whole other level. When we don’t have the images fully formed before us in dynamic shape, shifting color, as one does with a video. Say, you know, you really have to do the imaginative work of conjuring those scenes. And this is especially true when children make the transition from picture books to chapter books. You really have to be able to imagine, you know, what is depicted in words, which is really, I think, the challenge of monotheism, right? Everyone around you worships gods of stone and wood that they can see and touch, right? And feel. But you’re being asked, we as Jews are being asked to worship a God who, you know, as Moshe said, says, who should I say, sends me at the burning bush? He says, in our Parsha. But, but, but God, when the people ask me, you know, like, who, who told you? Who told you he’s going to redeem us? Who, who, who sent you to us? God says, Ehiye asher Ehiyey, in this very scene, I will be what I will be. And Moshe’s like, what? You gotta be kidding me. Like I’m supposed to say, I will be what I will be like, tell me you’re the God of the sky, the God of the, the sun. Tell me you’re a cow like the Egyptians worship. What is this? I will be what I will be. And God caters to Moshe and gives him some signs, you know, put your hands in your breast. But I think that’s really God. God making an allowance for Moshe, recognizing that Moshe’s gonna have to talk to people who are not necessarily going to be able to buy into this idea of this invisible abstract God. Like, like, like the, like the, like the non visual books that we read. If you are with me through that analogy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to say I really got into the role as I was reading your book. And when it said, take off your shoes, I start thinking of, you got to take off your shoes and start reading on the carpet. You know, you got to get comfortable. It’s in your House. You have many scenes reading in bed, when you wake up and when you go to sleep. It just made me think about everything differently. And I want to get back to this. Reading picture book books and reading images. And I remember once I was. Before I went to Columbia as a philosophy student, I said, I’m going to have to read a lot of books. So I took a speed reading class, and I was terrible. And part of the theory behind speed reading is when we start reading, we go from left to right or right to left, depending on the language. But we stop being able to scan the whole page. And children, according to this theory, see a page differently. They can see the whole page visually. And they were trying to get us to change the way reading. As I said, they were unsuccessful. But what was fascinating to me was his ability to see the whole picture in ways that adults can’t. And you have this little part of the book that talks about the Seven Silly Eaters by Marianne Hoberman. And it’s a wonderful story about everybody as a finicky eater, and they all have their own special foods, until one night they put everything together like a chulent, and they wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden they can eat the food together. But what’s missing from this story? Tell us about your Liav, who noticed a cello at the beginning of the story and the end of the story that you totally missed, and what it said about the book that he understood.

Ilana Kurshan [00:24:41]:
Yeah. Yeah, okay, so I’ll say. So I was reading. This is one of my favorite books, and I think it’s one of the best books, one of the best books to read aloud with children. And if you’re not familiar, I really recommend the Seven Silly Eaters. It was also recently translated into Hebrew in rhyme. It’s a book in rhyme. It’s a delightful book. Anyway, silly means picky in the book, I should say. Anyway, so I read this book many, many, many times with my kids. But it was on one of those many, many rereadings that my daughter Liav, who happens to be a violinist, and maybe this had something to do with it, but she said to me, she said, you know, it’s this book about this. This utterly exhausted mother who has to cook different food for each of her seven children and never gets a moment to herself. And my daughter pointed out that when the book begins, on the opening page of the book, the mother, you see her pregnant with her first child. Over the course of the book, she has these seven children. She’s playing the cello and at the end of. And in the middle of the book, the cello. Throughout the entire book, the cello languishes against a wall. And you see it in every picture. But, of course, the mother doesn’t have a free second to play her cello. She’s busy with her children. But then on the last page, once the children. I won’t spoil the book, but come up with a way, an ingenious way to feed themselves. The mother in the last scene is playing the cello again. And I, as the reader of this book, was very focused on the text. I’m also a very textual person. I’m not a visual person. And I was very. You know, I read this book many, many times, never noticed the role of the cello in the book. And my daughter. It was almost like, you know, I just thought of this now. It was almost like she was listening to a sonata. And she said, did you notice, Ima, that the cello is in there in the beginning? And then it comes. You hear the strains of the cello again in the end. And I was just focused on the whole orchestra and, you know, didn’t notice the cello part, you know, but she pointed that out to me, and it really made me realize, first of all, you know, that one can always get new things out of a book with every rereading, apropos of how we began with rereading Torah. But also that very often the book that you as a parent are reading is not the same as the book your child is hearing that you’re focused on on some aspect of the text. And your child may be focused on a completely different aspect of the text. Like. Like, my son, who went through a phase where he was obsessed with trains and, like. And. Or was trains. And then he went through a car phase anyway, he would notice the vehicles in every book we read. And, like, even, like, this random picture of, like, a toy car in the corner of a kid’s bedroom. But that’s all he would focus on. And I’d be reading the story about the boy and his brother fighting, and he’d be like, you know, how come this car. How come the car is upside down? Do you think he threw it? And I’m like, what are you talking about? You know, all that is to say that I think the things that kids notice are often very different from, you know, what we notice. I’ll tell one more story about that. When my son, My oldest son, who is now 14, but when he was, like, I don’t know, 4 years old or 5 years old, I took him for his annual like, checkup at the pediatrician. And they did some kind of developmental checkup with him where they would show him pictures, and he had to tell a story about what was in the picture to make sure he understood. Cause and effect, I think, was the idea. So the doctor showed him a picture of a boy, you know, who. A boy who’s tripped, and he falls on the ground, and his water. His water bottle spills everywhere. And so there’s a puddle of water from his bottle, and there’s a little stone. You’re supposed to say. And I guess what you’re supposed to say is, oh, the boy tripped over the rock, and so his water spilled. You’re supposed to understand the causality. And my son took one look at this picture and said, oh, the boy thought that you’re supposed to hit the rock to make the water come out, but really he was just supposed to talk to it. And the doctor was like, I have never heard that before. You know, And I was like, this is great. My son is paying attention to different things, and he sees the world through the lights of Torahj. How wonderful. So anyway, I think he kind of failed the developmental test test, but he. But he passed with flying colors in my book.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:47]:
So that’s an amazing story. You know, I think you could easily read the book of Genesis all about sibling rivalry. It’s not about the Oedipus complex. It’s always about these two siblings, the firstborn, the second born. And then all of a sudden, you get to Exodus, and in the second part of the story, where Moses, as I said in the intro, said, I can’t talk. I’m thick lips, and so forth and so on, all of a sudden he says, oh, but, you know, I have an older brother. And you think back to the beginning of the story where Miriam is involved, and so much of what your book is having five children, you know, that it’s all about what one says, what one thinks, how they’re all different. And I think even that it made me read the story totally differently when I was looking at it from the. Through the lens of a young child and how, you know, you talk about breaking the tablets, and that’s all the kinds of things that kids do that parents who are dealing with kids do. And here we have this sibling rivalry type of thing where one kid realizes that the older child is giving him some tools that he doesn’t have yet, that they can fill in for each other, that they can get along. It just really what I would. I would love if listeners to this Podcast. And I really think that we should all grab your book and read it. What it does is it opens up a whole new way of reading our texts. Not dumbing them down as a child story, but thinking in terms of number one, how they were written. We always talk about telling the story to your children. I don’t know, I normally think of telling it to a 17 year old, not necessarily, necessarily a 4 year old or a 5 year old, but it talks, it teaches us to look at the stories at a more primal level, at a more visual level. I think it’s such an eye opener, literally, that really enriched my read of just the few verses that I read after I took off my shoes, got on the carpet and started looking at the Torah as a picture book. And the only thing that I’ll finish with is grandparents, because I have a feeling that Adam and I, when we think about some of these books, we’re at the stage in our life reading to our kids. And you have one wonderful part where you have one child who’s very proficient in the English and the other who says, I am slow of speech and slow of tongue in her own words. And you enlist your grandparents who live in the States to read with her remotely. And I think if we have, if I have a New Year’s resolution, it’s to read more to my grandkids. But tell us about the way that reading books really kind of not only helped her master her self courage to read, but also brought in the whole family together and created and sustained and complemented those relationships with grandparents.

Ilana Kurshan [00:31:58]:
Yeah, it really did. And I think it goes back to what you said about Moses and Aaron, that, that, you know, they’re both leaders of the Jewish people, but they have very distinctive roles to play and they really have to carve out their own roles. And you know, in the midrash, the rabbis look back to the burning bush as a place where there was initially some confusion about who was gonna have what role. Was Moshe originally supposed to be the high priest? And what, you know, was it because. Was it a punishment for Moshe that he was reluctant to take on this role, that Aaron took on this role? So this is really the site where that, where that individuation really happened, which is interesting. And I think, yes, for my daughters, the reason one of my daughters started reading with my parents is because I have twins and they both read very proficiently in Hebrew from a young age. But reading in English, which was very important to me for reasons that should be apparent if you’ve been listening until now, reading in English was much harder for one of my twins. And I would read every day with her sister, and she just refused because, you know, she felt too threatened by her sister’s proficiency. And I was lamenting this situation to my mother. This was during the pandemic. And my mother said, well, you know, I’m free now. You know, I’m not going into the office. Why don’t you have her call me every morning and we’ll read together? And that was really, really valuable. And it became a regular thing where I would send everyday photocopy. You know, I would photograph with my phone pictures of the next few pages in whatever book they were reading, send them to my mother so that my mother could follow along as my daughter read to her. And what really also made the difference was that this daughter insisted on reading completely different books from her twin. Like, it’s an age when kids read a lot of long series books. And her sister had a series that she loved reading was the Ivy and Bean series, I remember. And my other daughter was like, I’m not reading any of those books. Those are my sister’s books. I won’t read them. Those are her books. You know, it’s like it was in the same way that they had different friends in school, they also really started to individuate in terms of their reading preferences. And that’s only continued to this day. Like, they read very different kinds of books. They have different tastes. One reads more in Hebrew, one reads more in English. Although, ironically, those have reversed from the way it was when they were, you know, whatever it was, eight years old. You know, there are books that I still read aloud to both of them, of course, but when it comes to the books they choose to read individually, they have very, very different tastes. And I think that was also important, yes, in bringing the family together, but also in terms of enabling them to each discover, you know, who she was as an individual independent of her relationship.

Adam Mintz [00:34:40]:
As grandfathers we appreciate that book. We appreciate that story. Sorry. And we know your parents and we love your parents. So that’s also a nice piece to all of this.

Ilana Kurshan [00:34:53]:
Very nice.

Geoffrey Stern [00:34:53]:
So everybody, there will be a link to Children of the Book by Ilana Kurshan in the show notes. I encourage you all to grab a copy and read it. And as much, I encourage you all to read the Torah differently through the eyes of a child once in a while. And more importantly, to read it to the children in your life, whether they’re your kids, whether they’re your grandkids or just a youngster nearby. There is nothing like reading aloud. So, Ilana, thank you so much for joining us. Shabbat Shalom. And everybody enjoy cracking open this new book of Shemot.

Adam Mintz [00:35:30]:
Fantastic. Thank you, Elana.

Ilana Kurshan [00:35:32]:
Thank you both. Thank you.

Welcome to Madlk. My name is Geoffrey Stern. And at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition, which makes a lot of sense during Hanukkah because we do say, la HADLIK nir shel Hanukkah. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week, we celebrate Hanukkah. So take out your harmonica and drink your gin and Tanukah and let’s get disruptive. Join us for Hanukkah, the civil war we forgot, and the shamash we need. Well, Rabbi, happy Hanukkah to you. When this is broadcast, we’ll be right in the midst of hanukkah at candle 3 or 4 or 5. I’m not quite sure.

Adam Mintz [00:01:46]:
Great. This is what a good topic. And I’m looking forward Happy Hanukkah to everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:51]:
So, you know, in Hebrew school, and I would say in our liturgy and in the Talmud and in Jewish tradition, it’s all about a miracle of oil that was supposed to last for one day and lasted for eight. And then it’s also about defeating the Greeks. I’ll never forget I was. When I took my grandkids to Israel for the first time. They went to a Hebrew day school and they saw their first Israeli soldier. They turned to me and they go, who are they fighting? The Greeks. Because we j. That was our first battle with the Greeks. But in any case, if you, you know, you look at the Sidur, it talks about the few against the many. It talks about the weak into the hands of the mighty. It really seems. And we can read different things into it. But on the face of it, it’s a battle against a common enemy, Greece. And when you think of the miracle, it unique. Rabbi I’ve always thought that we Jews don’t really celebrate miracles that much. We don’t have our patriarchs walking on water or turning water into wine or wine into water. There is an anomaly here, and you have to kind of dig pretty far down to find in the Talmud a reference in the Talmud, Shabbat 21b, where it says, okay, so there was this deal about this hidden flask of oil.

Adam Mintz [00:03:24]:
This is the only place in the Talmud that they tell this story.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:27]:
Yep. And again, we have these wonderful, joyous traditions. But at the end of the day, the story of Hanukkah itself is a little bit of an enigma. And what we’re going to do today is to dive down and go behind the Hebrew school facade and try to find out what really was going on there.

Adam Mintz [00:03:50]:
Okay, let’s go.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:52]:
So, you know, the truth is, if you think about Hanukkah and the almost destruction of the temple or the desecration of the temple, you know, it could be very similar to Tisha B’Av and the three weeks where we mourn it. The big difference, of course, is that it wasn’t irreversibly destroyed. But when we talk about the temple being destroyed, we talk about Sinat Chinam, about useless and unjustifiable hate. The truth is that if you look into the sources themselves, you start to see that this was less about an external enemy and more about an internal friction. I will argue even a civil war if you go to Maccabees 1. And of course, we only have the Greek. We don’t even have an early Hebrew. It wasn’t admitted into the canon. But it talks about in those days, went there out of Israel, wicked men who pursued many saying, let us go and make a treaty with the heathen that are around us. For since we departed from then or since we separated from them, we have had much sorrow. So these are people that are saying, you know why the goyim hate us so much? Because we’re different than them. So this plan pleased them. Well, then certain of the people were so forward that they went to the king, the Syrian king, Antiochus, and he gave them license to do after the ordinances of the heathen. This is a little bit of a giveaway that they had to get permission. You really think that this was kind of a treaty where they were saying, we want to be part of the city states, we want to be legit. They built a place of exercise, a gymnasium in Jerusalem. And they followed the customs of the heathen and made themselves uncircumcised. They forsook the holy covenant and joined themselves to the heathen and were sold to do mischief. This is really, if you look at the Maccabees, this is the actual beginning of the story. But you can’t really stop here because if you go on, it says now, when the kingdom was established before Antiochus, he thought to reign over Egypt, that he might have the dominion of two realms. He made war against Ptolemy, King of Egypt. The truth is, Rabbi, I did a little bit of research this year and it turns out that really this was less a story about may, maybe religion and less about culture and more about who rules us. Is it the Ptolemies in Egypt or are we going to make a deal with the Selucid/Syrians, the Hellenists? And before we get deep into that history, I’d like to kind of explore how throughout our history we have taken these two groups, the Hellenists and the Maccabees, and kind of use them to epitomize our own fights and our own kind of culture wars. You know, when going back to that Hebrew school narrative, the authentic Jews were the Maccabees and the Hellenists, as I quoted from the book of Maccabees, they were kind of, whether through surgery or otherwise, trying to take away their Jewishness. They were self hating Jews or that, a prototype of that. But the truth is that as I said a second ago, it really, if you look into, was about who do we go in empire. The fight wasn’t about Greek culture versus Torah. According to modern academics, it was a battle between factions inside of Judea over which foreign empire to align with Syria or Egypt. The question wasn’t should we become Greek? It was should we stay with the Egyptian Ptolemites or switch allegiance to the Syrian Seleucids? As one historian put it, the quarrels were fractional ones. The issue being whether the old and popular government of the Ptolemies should continue or whether the Jews should deliver themselves over to the Syrian kings and Hellenization. And that was something that I hadn’t really ever realized before. But it does kind of sculpt the conversation that we’re going to have today. Because on the one hand it was an internal feud, but on the other hand, it’s not so clear what position each of the sides took.

Adam Mintz [00:08:24]:
Right. That’s the most interesting piece of all. You’re not sure what they argued about and what side each took. So let’s see what we have.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:34]:
So there is one train of thought that there was a group called the Tobiads and they actually, they actually have a castle in Iraq. These were land owning Judeans in Jordan. They were very rich and they had an invested interest in making a treaty and inviting the Seleucids to rule over Palestine, over Judea. It had to do with who to pay taxes to, so forth and so on. But the, the truth is that we are so used to taking the Hellenizers as opposed to the authentic Jews that if you look at today there are people, and I have sources in Sefaria notes who will say, you know who the the Maccabees were, they were the Zionist nationalists and who were the Hellenists? They are the foreign funded human rights NGOs who are taking foreign money, foreign influence and trying to push it upon the authentic Jews in Israel. This is from an article written in the last few years. This fight is going on in the Knesset as we speak. I found an amazing speech made by Louis Brandeis and he made it before the State of Israel was started in 1912. And I think it’s worth quoting at length. He says the Jewish calendar has many sorrowful days. Hanukkah, the feast of the Maccabees, is one of the few joyous red letter days. It celebrates a victory, not a military victory alone, but a victory also of the spirit over things material. Not a victory only over external enemies, the Greeks. So he does understand it wasn’t only against the external enemies, the Greeks, but a victory also over more dangerous internal enemies, the seduces the Tzedukin, a victory of the many over the ease, loving, safety playing privileged powerful few who in their pillancey would have betrayed the best interests of the people. A victory of democracy over aristocracy. So just goes to show that you can switch this dialectic so easily. And he goes on to say for the Zionists the day has special significance. The Maccabees victory proved that the Jews then already an old people, possessed the secret of eternal youth, the ability to rejuvenate itself through the courage, hope, enthusiasm, devotion and self sacrifice of the plain people. In that distant past the plain people achieved a rebirth. They will bring again a Jewish renaissance. So he’s talking to an American audience who is very settled in the golden of Medina. And he is talking about the simple people in Judea fought against those who were satisfied and who had those vested interests. It’s amazing how Brandeis and I’m sure he was aware of the modern take already in his days, is really understanding what’s at stake here. It’s not so much about the Greek, it’s more of an internal conflict. And he poses it as the Maccabees become the democrats. They’re the people fighting for the common man, so to speak. Fascinating, is it not?

Adam Mintz [00:12:00]:
Absolutely fascinating, yes.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:03]:
So other writers compare Judah Maccabee to Herzl. Look, I was going through my library. You can only read so much. This is a book that a member of my congregation who was in his 90s was clearing out his library he gave to me. It’s from the Jewish Publication Society, Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights. And it was written in, I don’t know, like 1925 or 40, before the state. So he writes as follows. And it’s fascinating. Between Herzl and Maccabeus, separated by 21 centuries, there are many similarities, but a few differences outstanding. They are alike in that the one man has no more a statesman when the suffering of the Jews awakened his sympathy, than the other was a soldier when called upon to lead his people in war. So the first thing he says is Judah Maccabee was probably a peasant farmer and Herzl was a journalist. Neither of them were in the state making movement. He says of the differences between them, the most important is that they came from opposing sides in that the Maccabees took up the struggle to save traditional Judaism, while Herzl came from what today corresponds to the Hellenistic party of the earlier times. So this, you know, we have religious Zionists today, and some of them forget that. The reason they have to say religious Zionists is because the original Zionists were not religious. In fact, they were children of the Enlightenment, of the Haskalah. And so it was very easy for this author to say that actually Herzl was a Maccabean type of figure, but he was secular, going against the quote, unquote, traditional Judaism that was saying, we don’t need a state, we’ll wait for God to give us a state.

Adam Mintz [00:13:54]:
Right, okay. That’s fantastic. Really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:57]:
So I think that the idea is that each of these thinkers, and there are many more, have painted the Maccabees and the internal struggle as their struggle of the day. A little bit of a question, Rabbi, is why the rabbis buried the story? In other words, all of this conflict, you and I are aware of it. In the yeshiva, our rebbe would tell us about the Hellenists, but basically they buried in our liturgy, in our prayers, under a miracle of a lost barrel of oil or fighting the Greeks. And so maybe it’s because unlike Tisha bav, the temple wasn’t destroyed. Unlike Tisha bav, the rabbis were using Hanukkah to sustain us through the Gola, through the exile and the tough times. A civil war is not something you might teach in Hebrew school. A civil war is not something you celebrate with Sufganiyot. So the rabbis redirected the holyday towards a small jar, divine grace, because civil wars are ugly, factionalism is shameful. And maybe the rabbis believe the Jewish people couldn’t survive if Hanukkah remained a memory of how we tear ourselves apart. It’s kind of like Passover. On Passover, we try to build ourselves up. I think the rabbis kind of understood that Hanukkah we needed. In the darkness of the Gola, in the darkness of winter, we maybe we have enough holidays that talk about how we have this innate ability to tear ourselves apart. But do you think, first of all, that the rabbis did hide this story? And do you agree that maybe some of these are the reasons for why they did?

Adam Mintz [00:15:43]:
I think yes, they did hide the story. I mean, I think that’s always part of the fun, is it’s conjecture. Why exactly did they hide the story? I don’t know the answer. Right. But these are definitely possibilities. It’s fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:58]:
So I want to end on a high note, and I was doing some research, which I’ll get to in a second. As you know, I love Yahadut Yisraelite Israeli-Judaism, but where I’m going to start is a real machlokos. We started at the beginning. Say, where’s the argument here? And it’s a machlokis between Hillel and Shammai. And we all know that Hillel and Shamai are the poster children of Machlocis Lashem Shamayim. And Hillel says, on the first day, you kindle one light and you grow from there. Mosef Vaholech and Shammai says, you start with eight candles and you end up with one. So one of the commentaries that I said is, why are they arguing about this? Unless Hanukkah fell in disuse, I’m not sure that’s a good argument. We have arguments about how Tefillin are put together so well, why were they discussing it? Weren’t people wearing Tefillin? So I think probably it doesn’t mean anything. There were different traditions. They were trying to codify the law. But I do think that what it shows is that you know, maybe we can take it a little bit metaphorically and say, you know, whether you light the candle from the right or the left, whether you see the glass half full or half empty, because that. That’s absolutely the whole sense of the argument. Shammai would say the pach Shemin, the vial of glass that held the oil was enough. It was full on the eighth day, on the first day. And then it got smaller and smaller and smaller. And Hillel says, no, the miracle got bigger and bigger and bigger. So really it was of a perspective. But whatever you can say is that both of them agreed that you had to have a light. And the key was that it doesn’t get extinguished. But I would say that you can have a healthy arguments and somehow come together. And what happened was I was in Israel and I bought this book, and it is a book for families. It was. It’s full of songs and poems and games that you can play in all of the hagim. And I started to look at Hanukkah and I discovered something pretty amazing. There must be seven stories in it. And the first story that struck my interest is Rotze Lehiot Shamas. I want to be the shamas. Now, the shamas is the candle that we use to light the other candles. Okay, I say, it’s a nice story. We’ll read a little bit about it later. Then I turns the page and lo and behold, the next story is Hasamash, the samas, the candle that we use to light light. And then finally I turn a few page later and it says, hHaNir HaTishi, The Ninth candle. So, Rabbi, there are six stories here, and three of them are about the shamash. And I want to finish with the pedagogic lessons that the early starters of Israel put into the holiday. And what the lesson is that they wanted their children, the future children, to take away with. And so the first story is by Rahel Rosner. And she says as follows. And I have the stories in the safaria notes. So if you want to read them to your kids or just to yourselves, you can go ahead and do it. It says, our counselor, Lily, prepared a party in honor of Hanukkah. She said that the parents would even come to the clubhouse. There would be refreshments, we would play the dreidels. But most important of all, we would put on a play. And for a play, you need costumes. Two weeks before the holiday, Lily assigned us our roles r the first candle. Yona, you’re the second Saglit, third Ophir, fourth Shai, Fifth. Ravital Sixth. At this point I already began to worry that I wouldn’t be in the show at all. There are so many children. There are only eight candles. But suddenly I heard her call my name and say, miri Shamash. I hadn’t thought of that, that there even is a Shamas. And I didn’t want to be the Shamas. And that’s exactly what I told Lily. Lilly said that every part is important, that there are children who don’t participate in Hanukkah events at all. I knew she was right. But it didn’t matter to me that this Shamash is important or that its role is good. I simply didn’t want to be one of the quote unquote helpers, the one whose light is for others and not for me. Certainly, I heard Ravital say, Miri, come, let’s switch places. I couldn’t believe my ears with you. Well, maybe it’s very kind of you, I said, but do you really want to be the Shama? I don’t want you to do me a favor just because your name fits. But Ravital, I like that. Miri is light, right? Right. But Ravital truly wanted to be the Shamash. She was that kind of girl, a serious one. And for her, the role actually made things easier. She knew a beautiful song about all the candles. And in her view, you absolutely had to know that none of the candles can be lit without the Shamash. I, on the other hand, still didn’t want to it. It wasn’t so simple for me. I peaked at Ofa’s script and saw a lovely song in under in honor of the Shamash. What luck. He even did the Hora step to the side that I never managed to do. When I saw Ravital practicing, I began to sway. She was placing the little flame hat on her head and bowing. I breathed in and said, oh, how lovely this part is, this bowing and lighting the other candles. She was helping everyone, dancing as she went, just bowing. I thought between the candles she needed only to bow and during the dance to light them. How I love to dance. I held a little flame over the third candle’s light. It always gives me a special glow. She ends by saying, but Ravi Tal took her special candle and I saw Ophir again holding his. And suddenly I understood she was the one who started the lighting of all the different candles. And I realized I could now say, miri, it was good that you switched places and dance to role. So it’s a story, and we hear this so much about Israeli youth that they are tight. They are. They sometimes lose their own identity and they think about each other. I think Noah was telling us that, about watching his kids become Israelites. And you see this pedagogic story pushing the Shamash as the one that bows to the other supports the others. If it was a singular story, Rabbi, I think we could ignore it. But now let’s read the next story. Shamas by Miri Zelazan. True, I am only a simple candle flickered the light of the Shamas. And yet the light of generations of heroes and of the holy mountain did not come from my flame alone, my friends, the flame that kindled within you the burning strength of generation after generation. Where was your light? Where was the courage of the generations of the fighters through the ages? Was it only in my warm, simple heart that the first spark of light was light lit? Therefore, my friends, remember well, as long as your light shines, it is the simple Shamish’s glow that burns within your hearts. On the window stood there stood a gold minor, Turned the wintry night at hover dark, sending out abundant radiance. Eight lovely candles, proud and bright, their heads burning without fear, stood upright like wicks in a single perfect row, and warming itself itself a little to the side, amid the scent of rising dough, stood one Shamish candle, shining there in silence. The eight candles gazed at it from their lofty seats, and in their eyes sparks of fire and a stirring in their hearts. We are the brilliance of generations. Our light is consecrated. You are but a little strength in service. And who are you? Shamash? Indeed I am only a simple candle flickered the light of the Shamash. And yet the light of the generations heroism and of the holy temple. Did my light alone, my friends, ignite within you the flaming brightness of courage through the ages? Where was your light? Where was the valor of the generations of the fighters of long ago? Was it only in warm and humble heart that the first spark of light was kindled? Therefore, my friends, remember well, as long as your light still shines, it is the simple Shamish’s glow that burns within your hearts. Reminds me a little bit of what Brandeis was saying.

Adam Mintz [00:24:42]:
He was saying it’s just like Brandeis.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:45]:
It’S the common man. But again, I think it’s amazing to me, and I can’t prove it. Statistically it’s only one book and one compendium of stories. But the idea of really taking the whole story and saying it’s about serving each other, it’s about uniting each other. We’ll end with the ninth candle By Chana Nir Allow me a personal confession. I am the ninth candle. Even though I sit off to the side, in the end I am only the Shamash. Yet it is dear to me to be so a follower, a tale for all generations. My work is not easy at all, for as I work, my body is consumed, and by the time I ignite each candle, I am already worn down by half. Yet in my heart there is no bitterness. All my satisfaction is kindling. And when the candles here are burning and every person’s face is glowing, so I look quietly on from the side, and joy stands firm in my heart. For I, the chosen Shamash, am the one who makes every candle burn. And if this calling to me is sweet, for without flower there is no Torah and even the holy of holies cannot be sustained without attendance. Therefore blessed is the one who studies the Chumash, but do not weep for the Shamash. Nice rhyme!

Adam Mintz [00:26:13]:
That’s great.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:14]:
And facing the eight festival lights, remember me, the one who gave with all his heart from his flame and from his strength, and whose words of Torah never ceased. For this is what it means to be a Shamash.

Adam Mintz [00:26:27]:
That is the best one of all.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:30]:
You know, I think there is a sense it talks about the menorah and the haughtiness of it, of it looking down, of the richness of it. That gets a little bit into the Brandeis again, but also the idea that each one of the eight candles has their own name and they are. Have their own identity, have their own ideology, possibly. And here these three stories, these three poems are celebrating the Shamash who tries to bring them all together, who tries to light them and be. And let them be in their own. Live their own lives, but be together, I think ultimately in a very genuine and a very, very organic way. It’s as though these stories understand that the challenge of Israel, but also the challenge and potential of Hanukkah is to not, I think, whitewash the differences that might be pulling us apart, but just to try to find that common sense of service. And it’s a beautiful story to tell to kids.

Adam Mintz [00:27:37]:
It’s beautiful. And the idea of service and commonality, I mean, those are wonderful lessons of Hanukkah. It’s interesting. Started with the divisions and now we come and end the way they turned it into the unity.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:50]:
And it almost feels organic. But I mean, the truth is that, oh, my goodness, what’s going on in Israel today is crazy. What’s going on in the world in terms of conflict today? Right.

Adam Mintz [00:28:04]:
So it’s nice to have focus on a holiday of Hanukkah when we could talk about that unity. That’s great. Thank you, Geoffrey. Happy Hanukkah to everybody. These are beautiful stories to study for Hanukkah. Be well, everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:17]:
Feel free to look them up in the Safaria notes. They’re in translated English, but the original Hebrew. For those of you who are Hebrew speakers, enjoy the light. And make sure to keep the light, the candle lit. Because, my gosh, we surely need it. Shabbat Hanukkah Shalom!

What does that mean for the Judaism of tomorrow

Adam Mintz [00:01:38]:
Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week we read Parashat Vayeshev. This week on Madlik, we welcome Rabbi Steve Greenberg, founding director of Eshel, to explore whether our tradition is ready not just to make room, but to grow. Well, welcome, Steve. This is an absolute pleasure and I understand that you know Adam from the good old days on Roosevelt Island.

Steve Greenberg [00:02:20]:
Adam used to come to Roosevelt island when I. It was my first pulpit and he used to come and actually provide laning and davening to kind of, you know, actually needed him because he was lonely on Roosevelt island in those years.

Adam Mintz [00:02:35]:
I’d say camaraderie was the best part of it.

Steve Greenberg [00:02:39]:
It’s good to be here with you, Jeffrey and Adam.

Adam Mintz [00:02:42]:
So anyway, I was doing my research and I came across this unbelievable YouTube. It’s a three minute clip of you where you talk about the first time you decided to get the aliyah, maybe even lane, the aliyah from Yom Kippur. And at Mincha, where we read this parsha that deals every sort of sexual, illicit relations in the eyes of the Torah. And you said that your willingness to be vulnerable to the text required the text to be vulnerable to me and everyone like me. The people who decide what this text means have never heard my story and the story of people like me. And if they did, they would no longer be so sure of the meaning of this text. The letters will become faces. So this Yom Kippur, I got the notice from my rabbi that I was lad on Mincha, and he said, I only have the first two aliyot, and the chazan was going to take the third aliyah. And I said to him, the chazan has nothing else to do in Yom Kippur but to take the third aliyah. Well, we have an amazing chazan, and he happens to be gay. And I think that he was following a minhag that you created in this little vignette that you recorded. And I don’t know whether you realize that there are gay people who are taking that aliyah to own it, but also to give a face behind the text. Welcome, Rabbi Steve.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:14]:
Thank you so much, Jeffrey. It’s a beautiful story to hear.

Adam Mintz [00:04:17]:
So tell us your story, Al Rey Alechad, and then we’ll get into some of the verses. And as you said, I’m optimistic.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:24]:
Well, firstly, I just want to say that.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:27]:
That was the very beginning of my struggles. I spent, you know, 15 years going to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services and putting the tallis over my head and weeping when those verses were read. And finally, after, like, I had run out of tears, I decided to.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:50]:
See if I could get the aliyah. And I found that, you know, it was a possible way for me to actually walk directly into the lion’s den, you know, like on Yom Kippur on the day that is a death rehearsal and an opportunity to square yourself in Kolsh, Baruch hu. And it was terrifying. But when the verses began to be read, a calm came over me that was like nothing. I expected that, as you said, I being willing to be vulnerable to the text, my not walking away actually required the text to respond to me and in a way, to acknowledge people like me. And on some level, I recognize God did. It’s just the rabbis, we’re not, like, up to speed yet. And so the question that I had to figure out was, well, I don’t know what these verses mean, but I don’t think anybody else does quite yet either. And so I began to actually focus my attention on learning what might have been the possible readings of that text that could still allow for gay and lesbian people to feel like they belonged in the covenantal community.

Adam Mintz [00:06:04]:
And believe it or not, you know what, the rabbis can change the meaning of a verse 180 degrees. They actually in the midrash say, and he never ceased to be with her after that. So I think it’s true that.

Adam Mintz [00:07:33]:
Once we take a face behind a verse, we could go 180 degrees. It struck me between the eyes.

Steve Greenberg [00:07:40]:
Well, that text is actually really a powerful one. I’m not sure it parallels the story perfectly for a couple of reasons. But what it demonstrates, I think, is that the pathways toward God’s will are not always obvious and sometimes are counterintuitive. And that we actually know from the story of the Mashiach in general who comes through all kinds of fractures in the traditional that are, they remain prohibited. Right. Yet nonetheless, they become a piece of the story. And so part of the tension that I experience in this work is to how do we get communities to commit to a tradition and make room for people who don’t obviously fit? There’s a new movie out that Eshel is behind, which we’re supporting in many places called Holy Closet. And it’s a story of 7, 8, 8 minute vignettes of the life of queer Orthodox Jews. And it’s life cycle moments. It’s dating, it’s marriage, it’s children. And each one of these stories is powerful because they’re not waiting for rabbis to say it’s okay they’re deciding that they are going to retain their faith, they’re going to retain their commitment to halacha, and they’re going to live out a life of love and commitment, even if they don’t have a full answer to these questions and even if the community is only partially willing to engage them. So part of what’s changing is the recognition that the energy, you might say, of Tamar is to imagine that she is called to be part of something. That the pathway is not clean or easy. And that I think is where we are, is that we are refusing. Here’s what we used to do. We used to either be silent, marry against our needs and someone else’s needs, right. Or undermine or live a life of loneliness. Or we left. And now what we’re trying to claim is you can be real about who you are and stay. And that possibility of demanding to be part of the system, even when it’s not clear how that will work out, is a piece of the energy that I think is generating a lot of success both here and in Israel.

Adam Mintz [00:10:18]:
Now, how much, Steve, do you think that that’s a result of the fact that generally communities are more bottom up than top down now means authority within the Jewish community is less important than maybe it was when we were in Rab?

Steve Greenberg [00:10:37]:
Well, I think that’s partially true, although one could claim that it’s always been that way. It’s just that it hasn’t been recognized. Meaning, I think, you know.

Steve Greenberg [00:10:50]:
In other words, the rabbis recognized that they couldn’t either portray God as an imperious dictator, nor they themselves could be one. And why? Because they had to make the Torah livable to the human beings that they loved and cared for, because so did God. And so on some level, I think the insight may be now.

Steve Greenberg [00:11:12]:
I can tell you that I do same-sex commitment ceremonies. They’re not kedushin, but they do celebrate the love of two men or two women. And Orthodox family members and community members are showing up and dancing. And they’re not asking their rabbis, is it okay or not okay. They are simply saying, I love these people and I’m not gonna live in a world where I can’t celebrate the love of people who I care about.

Adam Mintz [00:12:03]:
I mean, I’ll just tell you, in conversion, I find that a lot of that changed over Covid. It’s like you said about rabbis, you know, over Covid, you were allowed to find Google rabbis because you didn’t got a shul anymore. And you know that to me, that changed everything. So all of a sudden, if you wanted to convert and your rabbi said no, it didn’t make any difference because I can Google Mints and I can convert or I can. I can Google green, find someone to, you know, to officiate at my ceremony. So, I mean, it’ll be interesting, you know, over time how much, how we’ll see how much Covid changed all these things.

Steve Greenberg [00:12:40]:
I think you might be right. It’s also just. I think it’s the fact that people want to be personally committed to something rather than controlled by it. And I think that Orthodoxy, we have a tension in Orthodoxy of passion and submission. There is this tension of personal passion and commitment and personal involvement of Kavanaugh vs. Kavua. Right. Of Keva. So I kind of think you’re probably correct that we get requests. I can talk about Escher a little bit, the organization for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, and we have support groups and we have conferences and retreats for queer people, for the families of Orthodox, for Orthodox parents. We have a warm line and we are getting an unbelievable number, you know, this too, Adam, of queer people who want to convert to Orthodox Judaism. So there’s something about Orthodoxy that conveys a kind of mature ability to respond to. To these kinds of challenging questions and nonetheless remain disciplined and knowledgeable and committed. And I think that is an exciting change in kind of the way Orthodoxy was framed even 20 years ago.

Adam Mintz [00:14:07]:
So let me just jump in. I think this a bottom up. You also see in Israel, even within the Orthodox who don’t accept the Rabbanut anymore, who don’t want them to marry them, and they are also coming together in their own services that maybe they end up being common law partners, but they don’t want to use the Rabbanut anymore. That can be a part of it. But I think this, what. What really came across to me, you talk about the kabbalistic mystical tradition where the Messiah comes out of Moab, where he. He lives with his daughters, and it comes from Ruth, the Moabite. But even in the Halacha, without getting into the mystical here, we have a situation in t.

Adam Mintz [00:14:53]:
She on the one hand, is not allowed to marry her brother in law while the brother is alive. And Then you get in Deuteronomy, this law of Yibum, which literally means to build up.

Adam Mintz [00:15:07]:
I think the most obvious question that I would say or I would pose to a gay Orthodox person is, here is a religion that rejects you. Why do you want to still be Orthodox? And what we’re finding is, again, it’s this. This attraction that, no, I belong. You are not going to tell me whether I am a part of my community. It’s my Shabbat, it’s my Pesach, and I want to be a part of it. And I’m going to be as tenacious as a Tamar or Benoit Tzalafkad, or any of those quote, unquote, outsiders. And I think that is very ham. It’s very. From the arm oriented, and I think it’s very powerful. And ultimately, if you were a student of Jewish law, it’s the way many changes happen from the bottom up.

Adam Mintz [00:16:08]:
I just before Steve, you answer, I just want to add one little piece, one question, and that is the bottom up. What about top down? Have you seen any movement from the top from the rabbinic establishment different than it was 20 years ago?

Steve Greenberg [00:16:25]:
Yes, of course, because eventually, you know, rabbis hear stories of people. People come to them, you know, and cry and open up their hearts. And rabbis, hearts break.

Steve Greenberg [00:16:40]:
I said, well, I could tell him what you told me, Yitzchak, Gabe, you will never. You’ll never love. You’ll never dance with someone you’re passionate about. You will never be held by someone when you’re sad or when you’re sick. You will never make love to another human being your entire life because something is terribly wrong with you. He said, oh, my God, I’d never say that. I said, yitzi, you just did. I said. He said, well, what would you say? I said, why not this? You know, Yitzi, I don’t. I mean, you got Gabe, I don’t know why God makes gay people and gives them a nearly impossible life, but here’s what I’m going to tell you to do. You keep 612 mitzvot and you do the best you can. And when you go to Shamayim and on the day you have to account your life in front of the Holy Throne, you will have a damn good argument was merciful, it’ll all be fine. And join my shul. Can you do that? And he said, I could. And then I said something else. I said, I’m going to push you one step further. Could you say to Gabe, Gabe, I’m 40 years older than you. I’ll be in Shemaim before you get there. I want to make you a promise the day that you make that argument in front of the Holy Throne while you kept the mitzvot, but this. You had to choose life instead. You had to choose a life of love and connection. I will be behind you, cheering you on. And he began to cry. My goal is to make rabbis feel that they hold responsibility for the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people who want just a normal life of commitment and love and connection and Shabbos and Yontef and learning. But they don’t want to be alone. And therefore the tradition has to actually find mechanisms by which that can be made possible.

Adam Mintz [00:19:00]:
I mean, I think it’s so strong in our tradition that laws that are not sustainable ultimately go away. I think taking interest Ribbit, where it uses the same sort of emotionally laden language to describe it as disgusting and commerce needed to go on. I think that there are members of the community who might in the morning go to school. This is my grandfather, and go to the office in the afternoon. They had to make a living under every circumstance we get to understand. And this, I think, is the thread that I want to continue on. Not only should they be accepted, but there are situations where people make compromises. People take that zigzag course and don’t go straight where they are truly holier than us, where this is a community that by their very existence and trying to. And staying with Orthodoxy are making so much more of a sacrifice than any one of us. It’s almost like, who are we to judge? And I’m speaking in the. In the. In the. In the presence, in, in from the voice of the institutional, the. The past.

Adam Mintz [00:20:34]:
Identify as LGBTQ. And you have people like Lao Lavie who are saying it makes sense. These are people who are sensitized to suffering. He talks about perfectly suited for communal work because they believe in community. The most people who have gone through an experience of coming out know what it means to really care the attention about the people who are around you. I just love that it’s not a coincidence, it’s not a tick. It’s the actual program. And I do think that what I’m seeing, what you see in Israel, and I’m curious to know your impressions, are there Orthodox families who are. Whose children have. Have come out and maybe through the help of an organization such as yours, or independently are starting to realize how holy their children are and are starting look at those children with awe and say, maybe they’re holier than I am.

Steve Greenberg [00:21:43]:
First Lang. Of course this is happening. And.

Steve Greenberg [00:21:48]:
Part of the difficulty with our work is that we engage with parents who love their kids and want to accept their kids, but it’s not enough. They also want the Orthodoxy they love to not reject their kids as well. And they’re frustrated. It’s not so simple to say love your kids and then go to a shul that rejects them. So they become parents, become real activists, impressing their communities to be really responsive and thoughtful. And that is actually, we see that among the most articulate defenders of queer people are their parents. Right? So that’s one thing that’s happening. The other, I would just say is that, you know, you mentioned that there’s a lot of spiritual life in the queer community. And I think in part it’s because when you don’t fit expectations, you ask yourself a lot of questions about who am I? Where am I? What do I care about? Where do I belong? And I’m looking for a tradition. I’m looking for a way to fit. And then I encounter this tradition that is cacophonous and wild and open and thoughtful and has all kinds of spaces in it for controversy. And I think maybe I can fit there. And it’s really kind of remarkable to me. But it is true that there is a kind of spiritual energy inside the queer community that is really.

Steve Greenberg [00:23:15]:
Has and will in the future enrich the Jewish community and in particular the Orthodox community. A community that says, we have a vision for your life.

Steve Greenberg [00:23:29]:
Even if you’re LGBTQ is a community that is responding to the whole human being. A community that says, we only have a vision for your life if you’re straight is a club. It’s a club for straight folks. And nobody really wants to be in a club for straight folks. They want to be like me. I want to belong to a shul that has old and young and straight and gay and people of different colors and people who speak different languages. I want the human experience to be alive in the religious community. And that is what our organization is doing in many different ways all over across the US and Canada as well. You should know that on March 13, March 13 this year to the 15th, we have our national retreat this year in Baltimore. And it is a wonderful queer gathering of Orthodox, queer Jews and all kinds of people who fit in those categories in various ways. And then the very last day of April and the beginning of May, April 30, I guess, until May 3, is our parent retreat. And it’s also in Baltimore, and it’s an amazing gathering of 150 parents of queer Jews who come together and support each other and make the world, you know, the Jewish world more comfortable for their kids.

Adam Mintz [00:24:48]:
I have a question. You talk about a club versus a shul or, you know, a religion of accepting different kinds of people. And I always understood that a big part of the opposition to accepting queer children or members of the shul is this fear that it won’t be a club anymore. Meaning that they’re so used to it being a club, they’re so used to everything fitting into the box, that the fear that it might not be a box anymore is extremely frightening to the establishment. How do you respond to that?

Steve Greenberg [00:25:28]:
That we all have to become Chabad? And what I mean by that is Chabad. And the Rebbe, I think, envisioned this, though maybe even the rabbi maybe didn’t realize how far it would go. He created the biggest tent for Kadosh Baruch Hu imaginable. My brother, when he met the Chabad rabbi, didn’t keep kosher, didn’t keep Shabbos, nothing. He was respectful. He loved me, but. But they welcomed him in fully, with open arms, without a commitment to every last mitzvah as long as he was willing to engage them on the mitzvot that he found that he connected to through them and with them. And today, my brother’s in a very different place than he was when he met them. An open tent is a tent that says, look, we have these structures, we have these commitments, and we recognize that it’s a moving target. People need to fall in love with the Torah. They need to fall in love with Kadosh Baruch Hu. And that is not immediate. And it’s not about control. It’s about discovery and passion. And so therefore, you have to keep the doors open. And this, on some level, is Avram Avinu and Sara. You know, the Parshios of Bereshit are amazing around this.

Adam Mintz [00:26:47]:
This.

Steve Greenberg [00:26:48]:
Avram and Sara opened their door to total strangers and Sodom is fearful of them. So if you want a shul like Sodom that closes the doors and says, oh, you know, and not poor people and not really, you know, people who are different from us, then, you know, you can exclude the people and make a Mitzvah dome that cuts off the legs of people who are too tall or stretches them too short because they have to look just like you. So. So this notion that our world is made. Look, let me just say another thing. We are all addicted to familiarity. And it’s okay. There’s nothing evil about our love of our small groups. We just gotta be ready when called to. To open the doors. Because that is also what Avram and Sara do. And so we’re both. We’re both an exclusive people. Here’s right, Adam. We are. We have our exclusive commitments. Becoming a Jew is not easy, but we are a people committed to every last human being on the planet as well. And therefore our doors are open.

Adam Mintz [00:27:50]:
You know, there’s a short story by Arthur Miller, and in it he has a line. The Jews have their Jews. And it seems to me that the characteristic. It’s actually about Vichy France. But what it seems to me is that the characteristics of the orthodox, queer gay community is one that wants families, they want community, they want Shabbat, they want and are willing to fight for and make sacrifices for. And in a sense, And I’m not. I’m like a broken record, I keep on pushing you. And I’m saying, I think at this point, what we’re seeing is that the gay community, Orthodox gay community, is inspirational. It is actually potentially leading us in a new direction. But part of it is because it reflects what the Jew has always been, a persecuted minority. A minority that has certain values that we all attest to. And I just, you know, I’m wondering, and I don’t think that you can have an answer to this. I know that right now you do not do an actual kedushin ceremony because you’re working within the parameters that exist at this time. But I think there is such potential here. And it’s not as though our people haven’t gone through an evolution in terms of statuses. And I mean, the whole Kohanim was something that came and went and is gone. It’s just a fascinating moment, I think, in Judaism and also a moment that I think we should be open to any potential triggers and catalysts that help us rejuvenate ourselves and help us move to that next level. And I just think that it’s a wonderful moment. And what I want to do in closing is spend a little bit more time. You described Eshal in terms of the retreat, and I can only imagine how profoundly empowering it must be for parents who can’t talk about their children with the pride that they want in their community back in Brooklyn or Washington Heights or in Muncie. And now can come like mothers, new mothers who can’t describe what it’s like to feed their child in the middle of the night or whatever because they grave another mother who understands what, what the joys are, what the fears are, what the challenges are. What other things besides the Shabbaton do you do? What’s your geographical reach?

Adam Mintz [00:30:25]:
Where is your growth? What projects are you working on? Let’s finish talking about Esso.

Steve Greenberg [00:30:31]:
Well, thank you. So our new strategic plan is very exciting for the next three years. We’re growing our hubs and we’re going to be in different places around the US we’re going to expand that, we’re working in schools and we’re going to grow that. We have a resource library that we’re building so that we will be actually, I think if you are an Orthodox person or committed to tradition and you’re looking for the nexus of these issues, we will be a go to space for finding materials that you might need for educators looking for curricular ideas. Lastly, I would say we are a space where the frameworks for an Orthodoxy that is really open-hearted toward difference is actually moving. So we have the Make Space for Difference project where principals or rabbis or teachers can put up a sign on their doors to demonstrate that they are standing up for the openness to difference, and it includes queer difference. We are developing an allies project because often what happens is Orthodox people who feel like they’re supportive don’t know quite what it requires or could offer to them and what is it that they should do or think that might make this actually happen in their communities. While there are a growing number of communities that are partially welcoming, there are many Orthodox communities where there’s anxiety and fear and even bullying or language that’s really unpleasant, especially now in the political frame that we’re in. And so we’re offering people to gather and figure out, what do you do when a homophobic comment crosses your Shabbos table? And how do you respond to a teacher that has said something in class that’s hurtful, like about gay people, and your child has a gay uncle. So. So how do we help people engage the realities that they’re facing? We have a warm line that is growing every year for people literally all over the world who are encountering these two challenges and trying to put them together and trying to find ways to understand themselves and find a community. If you are a queer person and you finally found someone to love, but you don’t know where to live because you have no idea what synagogue will be there for you, we have interviewed over 300 Orthodox rabbis of congregations, and we can tell you Sunny Epstein is like, is the expert in this, and she can tell you where you can move to, where you can find one or two or maybe even more congregations where you can belong and find a school and maybe a summer camp for your kids. I want to end with one. The real question at the core of this is whether or not the tradition itself can move. So I want to just end with one beautiful midrash that I just love to pieces. When I found it, I was incredibly joyous. Is that there is. The rabbis are studying the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, and the fourth chapter begins in . I saw the oppressed, and there’s no one to help them. And they have no power. And their oppressors have all the power, and there’s no one to comfort them. And. And he raises his hand. A tailor raises his hand. Daniel Chayota. He’s not a rabbi. I know who that verse is talking about. He’s talking about Mamzerim. Mamzerim. Yeah. They’ve done nothing wrong. They’re totally innocent. They are innocent, but their parents screwed and messed up and had sex with someone they shouldn’t have had. And therefore they can’t get this Geoffrey. They can’t marry into the community. They are excluded from love. Love and partnership and community. Right. That’s what they’re excluded from. And he can’t bear it. He says, these are the oppressed who are their oppressors? The Sanhedrin, Hagdolah, the great Sanhedrin, who comes to exclude them from the Torah, from the community with a verse in the Torah, Mamzer loyvo bakala Mamzer can’t marry. And so he basically says he turns his Sanhedrin into oppressors. And since there’s no comforter, he says, he says he puts words in God’s mouth. Then I says, the Lord will comfort them. And then he says, at the end, in the end of days, all the Mamzerim will be pure. And so right now, we maybe not have an easy answer, but no, in the end, it’ll be solved. And if you look at the response, I think following Daniel, you’ll find that Chazal began to make it not so easy to reveal who is a Mamzer and not so permissible to tell anybody who is a mamzer. And ultimately, even if we didn’t get rid of the category, we made the category largely inoperative. Unless you happen to be an Israeli rabbi who’s trying to revive it. My point being is that you have this text here that basically claims that the Torah can be used to oppressive ends if the rabbis are not responsible. And being responsible means that you recognize that a verse that might have had use at one moment is no longer effective to accomplish its good ends and is actually now accomplishing bad ends. And now here’s the point. Why did the rabbis include a tailor in the canon of the rabbinic literature that accuses them of oppression? And the answer is they knew it, and they didn’t want to hide from the fact that it’s possible to read the Torah and wearing all the responsibility that you have and still be an oppressor, because you’re not taking the human story into your heart and into your thoughts and ultimately into your halachic equation. And so, yes, I believe actually the tradition will have room. It already has some, and it will have future more room for LGBTQ folks and others who want to actually be part of this grand imagination of Am Israel.

Adam Mintz [00:36:47]:
Amen. So we will include a link to Eshal, your organization, in the show notes. Anyone who wants to provide support is welcome. And hopefully you’ll be a guest on the podcast again. If there’s ever a parsha you want to talk about or current event, just shoot me a note. We’ll definitely have another Roosevelt Island reunion. Thank you for joining us. Shabbat Shalom Always, Steve.

Adam Mintz [00:37:13]:
Thanks so much.

Steve Greenberg [00:37:14]:
Be well. Pleasure. Everyone wants to be in touch. It’s stevechelonline.org okay, all the best.

Adam Mintz [00:37:21]:
Thanks so much.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:11]:
Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week, we read Parashat Vayishlach, and we’re joined by Professor Adam Ferziger. Professor Ferziger argues that Anglo Modern Orthodoxy hasn’t just immigrated to Israel. It has reshaped Israeli Judaism from within. So we’ll ask, how is Modern Orthodoxy influencing Israeli religious life, from education and community to feminism and LGBTQ inclusion? And if the next generation of Israeli leaders is likely to affect a population that is increasingly traditional, shouldn’t we all be paying attention? Adam Ferziger holds the Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar Ilan University. Welcome, Rabbi Adam and Professor Adam. I’m surrounded by Adams today.

Adam Ferziger [00:02:22]:
Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:25]:
It really is exciting to have you. And I must say that the first time I invited you was for Parashat Lech Le’Cha, where we did something on Aliyah. We did it with your cohort at Bar Ilan. Noah Efron. And he actually said, what did American Jewry bring to Israel? He said, environmentalism, and not-for-profits. But you are focused on the religious sphere, and I would love. Adam. Professor Adam, I’ll call you, if you could tell us maybe your personal story, how you arrived to Israel, and maybe the changes that you saw that maybe triggered the writing of this book.

Adam Ferziger [00:03:05]:
Okay, thank you. So my wife, Dr. Naomi Ferziger and I, she wasn’t a doctor yet there either. We arrived in Israel in 1987. We had actually both spent time on gap year programs. I’d been spent two years in a Yeshiva in BMT in Yeshiva Hartzion here, and then went back to college in America. And we were studying, we were living in Jerusalem. And then after two years we moved to Kfar Saba, which is a very Israeli town in the center of the country, adjacent to Ranana. Many people from the United States know Ranana better and.

Adam Ferziger [00:03:41]:
We spent 33 years there. We brought up our children there. I was a communal rabbi for a good number of years. And even after I stopped being a rabbi in a more official capacity, I continued to be involved in Jewish life and religious life there, primarily offering services to non-observant Jews in that area. And in the meantime I developed an academic career and did my PhD. I had the privilege to write my MA with a very well known Jewish historian by the name of Jacob Katz from the Hebrew University through YU, but Katz was my advisor and then I worked with Professor Gershon Bacon at Bar Ilan and I was privileged to eventually become part of the tenured faculty and become a professor. So that’s my very quick professional trajectory. And in terms of what I’m looking at here, it’s a big change when I came to Israel. I’ll give an example from politics, even though my book is really not focused on politics. In 1988 there was an election and there was a party called Meimad, which was supposed to be a moderate, traditionalist, religious oriented party that was running as.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:04]:
An alternative to the more right wing.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:07]:
More settler-oriented, more focused on stringency in their interpretation of Jewish law. Religious Zionist party that had been dominant for many years and had increasingly taken on these positions. And I spoke to lots of people and it seemed clear that Meimad was.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:28]:
going to get like 5, 7, 10 seats and it got none, zero.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:35]:
And I realized after thinking about it.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:37]:
That it wasn’t that everyone was voting.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:40]:
Meimad, but I knew everyone who voted.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:43]:
Meimad because it was such a small little cadre of Anglo immigrants.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:51]:
And for many years I could give many anecdotal examples.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:56]:
The sense was that the Modern Orthodoxy.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:59]:
Or types of perspectives that I’d grown up with in the United States and internalized from different places were really on the periphery, even deviant in a certain way.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:10]:
And we can get into that.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:11]:
And that changed in the 2000s, and.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:14]:
That’S really the starting point.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:16]:
For my book, why did that change? How did that change?

Adam Ferziger [00:06:21]:
And we can talk more about that. So that’s the starting point. Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:25]:
So you saw that little bubble of.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:31]:
Modern Orthodoxy, what you in the book call moderate Orthodoxy, grow from a bubble to something that you argue in your book. And I think for someone like me that reads the paper all the time about those settlers and those hilltop youths and those nationalist Zionists with the focus on nationalism and all that, very encouraging in terms of how deep it is. But I don’t think it’s a story that we all know. I think if you were to ask most Americans what forms of Judaism have the potential and are slowly having impact or failing to make impact, they would talk about Conservative/Masoreti Judaism, they would talk about Reform/Progressive Judaism, maybe even Havurah Judaism. But what your book kind of really highlighted for me, that I hadn’t really realized that for whatever reasons, most of those foreign imports remain foreign imports. And you have a wonderful chapter on comparing Reform and conservative to McDonald’s and Starbucks. But the focus of your book is the radical difference between Modern Orthodoxy as practice in the US and what it encounters encountered, and then what it is slowly gaining traction in Israel. Why don’t you, for our readers, for those of us who are not that I would say, knowledgeable in the nuances of these differences, why don’t you paint a picture? Of haredim we all know they pretty distinctive with their long coats and payes, but why don’t you draw a map a little bit within the Kipa Seruga, the knitted (Kippa) Yarmulke.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:18]:
community and what it is you’re focused on in particular?

Adam Mintz [00:08:22]:
And just what can you say? One thing to add, Adam, and that is why don’t you give us a little background about modern Orthodoxy in America so that people could understand that distinction?

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:32]:
Okay.

Adam Mintz [00:08:33]:
It’s great.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:33]:
Yeah. Sometimes when I get interviewed, they want really short, quick answers. And I’m really happy that you guys are digging in deep. It’s a lot more as a professor, sort of my comfort zone. But you could stop me at any.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:44]:
Point if you feel like I’m, you know, I tell my students the same thing. So that’s, that’s the best way to, to move forward.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:50]:
But I’ll just say, Geoffrey, I did write a book about haredim in America, and actually it has a little bit of a different twist there.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:58]:
It’s called Beyond Sectarianism and won a.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:00]:
National Jewish Book Award. So there’s also work to talk about there.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:04]:
Maybe another time.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:05]:
But just to give a backdrop So I always start with a point, and.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:09]:
I’m starting actually with Adam’s question, because it’s the backdrop is that when Jews.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:14]:
Became integrated more into society, the question was those people who everyone had a.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:19]:
Choice, what do you do? Some people made the choice of becoming acculturated, some people made the choice of becoming, developing new versions.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:28]:
Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionists, all sorts of approaches to how to integrate the new world.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:34]:
In which Jews were becoming or being.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:38]:
welcomed to some degree with their religious values and identity.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:43]:
Zionism is one response to that as well.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:46]:
But there was a group which I.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:48]:
also believe, following my teacher Jacob Katz, I had a choice.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:52]:
And they became known as the Orthodox. The people who continued to see the Jewish law as the basis for their religious values and behaviors, but did not. But okay, that’s the point of departure for the Orthodox. And then the Orthodox split. Those people who you call haredim, who sort of tried to insulate themselves because they saw modernity principally as a threat, as a danger, and only engaged to the degree they needed to financially, politically.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:23]:
or from a survivalist perspectives.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:25]:
And those starting with a bunch of.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:28]:
People, certainly Samson Raphael Hirsch, the rabbi, Frankfurt am Main, was a critical person.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:32]:
In this process who actually said that modernity offers opportunities and actually Judaism can flourish in ways it never could when it was more ghettoized or limited, etc.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:43]:
because of the lack of emancipation, etc..

Adam Ferziger [00:10:46]:
So the modern Orthodoxy that developed in America, which had institutions that grew in.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:53]:
The early 20th century, like yeshiva University, like the Hebrew Day School movement, like the more modern Orthodox types of congregations affiliated.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:01]:
With OU, Young Israel, to a certain.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:03]:
Degree, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:07]:
Of America, were different shades of that idea that we need to live and we can actually, if we do this right, Judaism can flourish. Many of them were also very pro Zionist. Over time they had a titular figure in Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who became the leading rabbinical figure in Yeshua University himself.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:27]:
With a PhD from German University.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:30]:
And.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:32]:
This is the world in which I grew up in.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:35]:
I grew up in a place called Riverdale, New York. I went to a synagogue where the rabbi in the 60s and early 70s was Rabbi Dr. Yitz Greenberg, and went to a school called Ramaz, founded by the Lookstein family.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:49]:
And that world was a world in which we weren’t taught about conflict. We talked about balancing or about navigating and about enjoying and drawing from the benefits of literature, of intellectual pursuits, of academia, of science, etc as part of our broader sort of synthetic Jewish identity. Now I want to be very clear, religious Zionism is a derivative of that as well.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:21]:
Absolutely.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:22]:
The idea of Torah+ the idea of not just Torah is certainly implicit in the idea that Zionism can be integrated with religious commitment.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:34]:
Zionism was founded by people who are.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:36]:
Not oriented towards religion. Its main thinkers in the early period were people who saw Zionism as an alternative to religion. So there’s a synthetic foundation for religious Zionism in Israel, certainly. However, initially there were quite a few people who had some overlays, people related to the religious kibbutz movement, some people who started Bar Ilan University and other areas who actually had a lot more similarities to Modern Orthodox.

Adam Ferziger [00:13:06]:
Actually, over time, particularly after the Six Day

Adam Ferziger [00:13:09]:
War, the strand of religious Zionism that became much more dominant, and it was clearly dominant when I arrived in Israel was that which was affiliated with the Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook camp, known as the Merkaz HaRav group, who were certainly very positive about the State of Israel and about a certain degree of social integration with secular Jews. However, they were much more redemption oriented. They saw the State of Israel as a fulfillment of a messianic dream or as a stage in that messianic process. They saw the Six Day War as a triumph in that magical process, so to speak. And together with that, over time they began to also adopt more stringent approaches to Jewish law and personal practice. And so much so that some people refer to aspects of that camp today as Hardal. Now, Hardal in Hebrew means mustard, but.

Adam Ferziger [00:14:19]:
In the colloquial language, Hardal means.

Adam Ferziger [00:14:24]:
National Haredi. So they’re Zionist, but in terms of their personal practice, they’re more like Haredim, not into movies and books, not into academics very much, except for practical things. Much more oriented towards the secular is what goes to serving in the army, to the function of the state and everything else when it comes to culture and values, stems primarily or from one’s more narrowly religious world. And as I said, when I arrived in Israel, that was on the rise. And the people who were considered the spokespeople, the.

Adam Ferziger [00:15:09]:
representatives in that, in the Parliament, the Israeli Parliament, the people who were the inspirational figures primarily were those related to that camp. And I studied in institutions where I was exposed to those people. And they were wonderful people. And they are wonderful people. And I don’t write for the pejorative, but as a historian, I experienced and then asked the question of something changed. Something changed. I’ll just give you one little anecdote that seems very kind of minor, but it was cute. I remember when my daughter, who’s now 25, was in the Bnai Akiva youth movement, which is the main religious Zionist youth movement. And they had a camp. And it’s funny, actually, coming from America. In America, you go to camp for seven weeks or four weeks. In Israel, you go to camp for a week. That’s the longest amount of time. And they still have visiting day, which took us about four kids to realize. And so by my daughters, I had four boys and two girls. By my daughters, I said, come on, you gotta come. You gotta bring us food, whatever. So we show up in this camp, and by that point, the Hardal approach is clear. So much so that the girls, no matter what they did at home, they could only come to camp wearing skirts.

Adam Ferziger [00:16:23]:
They had to wear skirts the whole time.

Adam Ferziger [00:16:25]:
It was a thing. You had to wear a skirt. So I’m sitting on some mound with my daughter and my wife, and we’re eating some sushi, actually, and I see these girls walking by in jeans, and I say to my daughter, hey, that’s interesting. My wife would say, Adam, you’re not doing research right now. You’re visiting your daughter. But what can I do? I asked her a question, and she said, oh, they’re from the religious kibbutz movement. They have a grandfather clause because in the 1950s, they wore pants that they’re allowed to. But they’re, like, peripheral.

Adam Ferziger [00:17:00]:
They’re not part of the mainstream.

Adam Ferziger [00:17:04]:
And I can keep going. Of course, the focus of my book is on the change, on the fact that today the religious Zionist community is much more diverse. And there are. I want to be clear, the Merkaz HaRav is still the majority. I don’t want to make it sound like there’s been a reversal, but there has been a diversification. The world of religious Zionism is broader, is more assorted, has many more voices, and those voices are legitimate voices that come across in the press, come across in synagogue life, come across in public life, and more and more, these are people who are academically trained rabbis, who are academically trained women who are very, very strong in their religious backgrounds and parochial backgrounds, together with new perspectives, who have authority, who have impact, people who are involved in more critical study, people.

Adam Ferziger [00:18:08]:
Who are very appreciative of the broader Israeli culture that’s developed in many areas that go beyond religion. And these are people who are central voices with institutions that attract thousands of.

Adam Ferziger [00:18:24]:
students year in, year out.

Adam Ferziger [00:18:26]:
And we still haven’t come to the punchline of courses. What happened and how did this develop? Which is my big question. I’m happy to answer it. Do you want to interject in between, or should I just answer the question right away?

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:41]:
What I’d like to interject is, for the most part, I think, really your story is the story of students meaning to say that we have Rav Kook and we have Rav Saloveitchik. Growing up, I was taught that Rav Kook, he was the one who saw a car driving by on Shabbat, and he would say, mazel tov. They must be be going to deliver another Jewish baby into the State of Israel. He was the one who said that our chayalim soldiers and Halutzim, pioneers who don’t keep a single commandment, are the holiest nefashot, the holiest souls. But in a sense, what he was doing was not so much embracing the secular world as he was patronizing it to be very straightforward. They were Klei kodesh. They were holy tools. And I think the way that in (slang) English, we use the word “tools” fits the job. The State of Israel became for then a tool to achieve the messianic and the spiritual goals. And I have to say, if I was stuck in a room and I had to read the writings of Rav Soloveitchik or Rav Kook, I would definitely pick Rav Kook. He’s lyrical, he’s poetic, he’s idealistic. But then there is Rav Soloveitchik. And when he talked about embracing secularism, he meant getting a degree which he had and which he flouted. And his students are really. That you trace in this book, showcase the power of embracing, whether it’s the state, whether it’s science, whether it’s medicine, whether it’s diplomacy, academia, knowledge, and working with that Torah Im Derech. And I think that is the power of this book. And I think for me, as someone who feels maybe that religious Zionism has been a little hijacked and the press focuses on those who are followers of Rav Kook. What your book does is it really highlights this growing, you know, we talk about segments, and you said, rightly, don’t misunderstand me, this is not the largest segment, but I think in terms of growth, it’s one that you have identified and that we should all be focusing on. So now go ahead and tell us why.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:02]:
First of all, Geoffrey, I’m so glad that you said students, because in the end of the day, I am a.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:09]:
Big believer in education. And maybe because I’m a believer in.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:12]:
Education, it made me gravitate towards noticing.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:17]:
Some things that maybe other people hadn’t.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:19]:
Noticed, and I’m very proud of that because I think that is a big.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:23]:
Part of the story.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:25]:
Just to echo what you said and Rav Kook, there’s a great book that Marc Shapiro just put out in English.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:32]:
About Rav Kook that’s worth reading, that that offers a very interesting reading of him.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:37]:
But Rav Kook’s son, Tzvi Yehuda, who was the central figure in post 67.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:45]:
Religious Zionism, took a lot of what.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:48]:
Rav Kook had said that you described and maybe made it a little bit.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:52]:
More parochial in certain ways and a little bit more redemptive in ways that his students ran with it in one way.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:59]:
But I will say that there’s a famous quote that really echoes what you were saying before that’s written. Amos Oz was the late great Israeli.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:08]:
Author in his book Po V’Sham b’Eretz Yisrael, in his.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:11]:
Book where he describes walking around Israel in 1982 and all these different places that he visited. So he has one point where he talks about Rav Kook and he talks about how Rav Kook adopted the framing of what’s called Tinok shenishba (a child who was kidnbapped), that secular Jews should be embraced because even though they do lots of sins, they really are just ignorant. They don’t know what they’re doing, and therefore they’re really good people in their souls. They’re Pintala Yids, and we should give them sort of.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:42]:
Let them get a

Adam Ferziger [00:22:44]:
pass because they’re a Tinok Shenishba, they’re an infant taken captive, which is a Talmudic and Maimonidian formulation.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:53]:
So Amos Oz responds. He says, call me a Rasha, call me a wicked person, call me apikores, call me a heretic, but just don’t.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:06]:
Patronize me and call me a baby.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:08]:
I know exactly what I’m saying, and you may not like it, and I’m willing to debate you, but respect me.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:15]:
For the decisions I made.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:17]:
And interestingly, one of those agents of change that I highlight, the one I call the game changer, Rabbi Dr. Aaron Lichtenstein, in a book that came out in 2016, quotes Amos Oz and he says how much he; Lichtenstein, does not identify with the Tinok Shenishba approach and really understands very well that criticism that Oz had. And he seeks to find an alternative means of communication and of connection to Jews with whom he disagrees. And he says, I’m happy to respectfully disagree with people and then move from there. I don’t have to turn them into.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:01]:
People who I can just sort of dismiss their opinions.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:05]:
Now, what I saw in the book.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:09]:
Or in my research, and that’s where it came, is that.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:15]:
There’s this gap.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:18]:
I identified a group of eight personalities, seven of them direct students of Soloveitchik, but all of them people who were sort of inspired by the integrationist synthetic Torah Umada; Torah and science approach, who made aliyah, who immigrated to Israel between 1965 and 1982.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:43]:
Lichtenstein, who I mentioned already, Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, the son in law of Soloveitchik.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:49]:
And Rabbi Dr. Nahum Ravinovich and Dr. Chaim Bravinder, and Rabbi Dr. Daniel Trapper and Rabanit Hana Henkin and Rabanit Malka Bina, and Rabbi Dr. David Hartman and Rabbi Dr. (Steven) Shlomo Riskin. All people who had begun their careers in North America, in the modern Orthodox world came to Israel. And what was common to all them is besides their backgrounds, in variety of ways they all led institutions for higher learning, higher Torah learning in Israel for men or women, in which Israelis over time began to study. Now, here’s the thing. When they started these institutions, they were really Martians, they were really outsiders. And they were looked at that way by the Merkaz HaRav world, by the mainstream religious Zionist, certainly the Haredim as well. But somehow, slowly but surely, their Israeli students studied with them, heard their approach, their ideas, internalized them. And here’s the key. But they didn’t copy them. And that’s why I call it ISMO Israeli Moderate Orthodoxy and not Israeli Modern Orthodoxy. Because it’s not the same, it’s Israelified, it’s recalibrated. Any good teacher knows that there’s good students take what they learn and then they process it. Any good student does that, that internalization, then processing. But historically, this is what accounts for the delay they arrived, those eight that I mentioned, those pioneers, by 1982, 83. But it took another 15, 20 years until the recalibrated ideas started to really impact Israeli society.

Adam Mintz [00:26:49]:
Why?

Adam Ferziger [00:26:50]:
Because in the meantime, their students themselves became leaders of institutions. Their students themselves became public figures, their students themselves became spokespeople, and they established.

Adam Ferziger [00:27:05]:
Constituencies throughout Israel. And therefore the process has two pieces. The early agents are those American modern Orthodox figures who came here, very, very profound individuals. But the second agents are their Israeli students who do the key process. And that’s exactly, Geoffrey, where pointing to students is so important, because it’s the students and the way they take it.

Adam Ferziger [00:27:33]:
And made it Israeli, made it local, didn’t just make it an imported product. And that was actually the place where I applied the McDonald’s/Starbucks analogy, using some transnational theory, which is really not looking at religion at all, but how do globalized products succeed? And following the work of someone named Mel Van Elten, I understood that the products which tried to be duplicated, like Starbucks in all sorts of countries, didn’t necessarily succeed in places where they had a different coffee taste, but the ones in which they sent people out to check the market and to learn what were the tastes, what were the flavors that they would like, what were the pita.

Adam Ferziger [00:28:23]:
In the Big Mac that had to be part of it, and the hummus and the tahina and integrated the local with the imported and created something sui generous, something new. Those were the products that succeeded in the new place. And that analogy helped me to think about why these, this Israeli moderate orthodoxy, at least in part to account for.

Adam Ferziger [00:28:48]:
Its success in the 21st century.

Adam Mintz [00:28:50]:
Now, I have a question, Adam, obviously this is all amazingly fascinating. I’m interested. You talk about the globe, you wrote about the global product. What about the immigrant experience? Meaning that is that true about all immigrant groups, that they only make an impact in their new place after a generation, you say after 15 years. Is that always true? Or because Jews and the Torah world focus on education, it was more true in the experience of the students. Rabbi Soloveitchik.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:26]:
So, you know, it’s a great question. I wish that I had an absolute answer. I think it depends. I think that there are profound people who arrive. I mean, Rabbi Soloveitchik was an immigrant himself.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:38]:
And after he had done his PhD and after. But he was young and he was.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:42]:
He was him a long time.

Adam Mintz [00:29:44]:
We don’t know anybody, right? We grew up together. We don’t know anybody from the 40s.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:49]:
I mean, look at my friend Seth.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:51]:
Farber’s book about Soloveitchik in Boston.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:53]:
It was complicated and people forget about those things when people reach these heights. And Lichtenstein today is considered, you.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:00]:
know, a very important figure in Israeli.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:02]:
Religious history and, and cultural history. But it was only when he was.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:08]:
Soon before his death, actually, I think it was in 2013, not 2016, when.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:12]:
A book was written in Hebrew by an Israeli author, Rabbi Chaim Sabbato, who’s a very well known author who interviewed Lichtenstein and put Lichtenstein’s ideas into Hebrew and in a language that spoke to Israeli readers, that people other than his direct students and their student students really became exposed. So I would say, Adam, and he.

Adam Mintz [00:30:35]:
Won the Israel Prize, which also made him the Israeli.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:39]:
And you know, and things happen. But I think that immigrants play really interesting roles. I was introduced to a wonderful book.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:48]:
About an Italian immigrant Catholic priest in Philadelphia. I forget the name of the book right now.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:55]:
Who serviced an immigrant Italian Catholic community.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:59]:
In Philadelphia for, like, 50 years.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:02]:
And after he passed away, the congregation found his diaries that were up in the attic of the church, and they gave permission to a professor from Temple.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:13]:
University to review them.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:14]:
He wrote this wonderful book, and he argued the following, which is interesting when.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:19]:
It comes to the subject of immigrant leaders.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:21]:
He said, the assumption is that you.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:24]:
Have an immigrant priest and immigrant rabbi.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:27]:
An immigrant imam, that they are sort of like the hedge against integration, against acculturation. They’re the ones who are always representing the old place. They’re the ones who are always trying to prevent people from becoming acculturated or assimilated with their local place. But it turns out that that’s not necessarily the case. That actually what they are are bridge builders. They are. Are.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:53]:
Cultural agents for facilitating a more stable integration into the new place. It’s very hard to integrate.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:01]:
I’m an immigrant. It’s not easy. Your language.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:07]:
Your accent, your proclivities, the kind of food you like, there are all sorts of things. Even if you find employment and even if you have economic stability and. And having a priest or a rabbi or someone who gives you stability and gives you a sense of continuity and a sense of connection to your roots and not a complete detachment is critical for facilitating that type of integration. So that really opened my eyes. And it’s not just valuable in terms of American society. I think it’s very valuable for some of the figures and how they have functioned in Israel in terms of.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:47]:
The adjustment to society.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:50]:
But what I think is fascinating is how the Israelis then ran with it and often radicalized. And when it comes to feminism, when it comes to attitudes towards academic issues, when it comes to society, culture, all sorts of things, a lot of the students were more radical than the Americans were, but they built upon it. And even among the eight of them, there’s a lot of differences between David Hartman and Aharon Lichtenstein, even though they.

Adam Ferziger [00:33:18]:
Were chavrutoed, even though they were study.

Adam Ferziger [00:33:20]:
Partners in YU when they were younger, et cetera, et cetera. But the milieu that was created is.

Adam Ferziger [00:33:27]:
Something that spectrum that applies to all them.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:31]:
Thank you. So I want to close. It would be very easy to say, based on this discussion, that Agents of Change, American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism would be a book that would be of interest only or primarily to people that are interested in Israeli Judaism who are interested in the minutia that we’ve discussed today of Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik. But I will argue, as anyone who knows driving a car in Israel today, turning the channels, wanting to hear a song by Arik Einstein, the old songs of the Labour Party will find that, that the population in Israel, and this I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, has even been increased by the war that we’ve gone through in the last two years, is a population that is much more traditional. The songs are much more traditional. Many of them are actually using prayers and piyyutim and poetry that is deep in our religious tradition. And my sense is, and I’d love to know in al regel echad (on one foot), Professor Adam, what you think. But my guess is that if we had to predict where the next leadership, where the next generation of leadership will come from, it is highly likely that he will be wearing a kippa seruga or she will be having a hair scarf on her hair. And therefore it becomes rather important for all of Israel and I would argue for all of world Jewry to watch this nascent movement of moderate Orthodox Jews who are either going to lose out to those who have different interpretations of Judaism or are going to win and introduce a moderate Orthodoxy that will affect every Jew in the state. And I would therefore argue that your book should be of interest to anyone who’s interested in the arc of where Israel is going, whether it’s politics, diplomacy, foreign policy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:35:33]:
The different tribes and the relationship between them. What thinks you?

Adam Ferziger [00:35:38]:
So first of all, I endorse completely what you just said, and I do think that the book is not, not targeted just to specialists and people who.

Adam Ferziger [00:35:48]:
Are interested in the trajectory of orthodoxy. And the last chapter, really, there’s a chapter on Reform Judaism in Israel, but the last chapter, there’s a lot about the role of women. But the last chapter really speaks about two things that.

Adam Ferziger [00:36:04]:
Are very pertinent to your point. One is that actually, I think if I am a historian, but let’s say if we want to predict, I would say that the next leader of Israel might have a kippah shkufa. What’s a kippah shkufa? It’s an invisible kippah. And that’s a term that is often used by young people who come from observant families and grew up wearing a kippah. And they decided even if I do keep Shabbat, I don’t necessarily want to wear a kippah, not because I’m less observant, but because I don’t want to be divisive socially, not because they’re embarrassed, not because anyone’s going to be negative towards them. But I want to feel my camaraderie in that way.

Adam Ferziger [00:36:53]:
Yes. Serving in the army together with people of all types and putting their lives.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:00]:
On the line definitely only strengthen that sense of wanting to emphasize the camaraderie. Having said that, the second point that comes across very clearly in that chapter is a term that I didn’t make up that appears in a book by Shmuel Rosner & Camil Fuchs. But I really liked it. The term is Israeli Judaism, one word, #yahadutyisraelit.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:25]:
And Israeli Judaism is sui generis.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:29]:
It’s new.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:30]:
It’s something that’s a product of 75, 76, of sovereignty. It’s a product of struggling with a tradition that emerged for over 2000 years as a minority in dominant Christian or Muslim environments that now has to reinvent itself in an environment of majority, with all the challenges, moral policy, religious, social involved. But there’s a new product here which is emerging. And these are people that American Jews of all stripes can be in conversation with, can talk to, not always agree. And there’s certainly levels of politics and other areas where this group has different.

Adam Ferziger [00:38:20]:
Maybe priorities or orientations I’m not trying.

Adam Ferziger [00:38:22]:
To whitewash, but they’re people who share a lot. And so much has been written lately about a people divided and about how the gulf, the gap between American Jewry, diaspora Jewry, or world Jewry, and Israeli Jewry is sort of becoming insurmountable. And there are levels at which that exists, but there are also levels that, as you said, Geoffrey, and as Adam, you drew attention to that are not given sufficient currency and attention. And actually, I think that those are areas that maybe reading my book will.

Adam Ferziger [00:39:05]:
Help people to think about them more clearly and maybe something positive will come out of that. I would certainly be very, very happy if that were the case.

Geoffrey Stern [00:39:15]:
Amazing. Well, thank you for joining us and we look forward to continuing the conversation. And to our listeners, the book is worth reading. It really is an eye opener. So thank you, Adam. Thank you, Adam. We’ll see you all next week. Shabbat Shalom.

Adam Mintz [00:39:33]:
Shabbat Shalom.

Adam Ferziger [00:39:34]:
Shabbat Shalom. Lehitraot, Toda Raba.

Geoffrey Stern [00:00:28]:
And imagine that this same Christian not only speaks the language of the Talmud more fluently than most Jews, but also served as an IDF paratrooper officer fighting for Israel while preserving one of the world’s oldest living cultures. This week in Vayetzei, we hit the Torah’s own Rosetta stone. Laban names a stone mount in Aramaic, Jacob names it in Hebrew, and a linguistic border comes into focus. Two peoples, two histories, one shared tongue. Our guest is Shadi Khalloul who lives at the intersection. He’s building schools, training soldiers, defending Israel, and reviving Aramaic, the ancient Internet that once linked Jews, Christians and the entire Near East. Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Vayetzei. We are joined by Shadi Khalloul, founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic association and the Christian Aramaic Jewish Pre-Education Military Program. He was the first Christian to become a paratrooper officer in 1995 and has dedicated his life to bettering the lives of Israel’s Aramean Christians and preserving the heritage and increasing the recognition of Aramaic culture and language. Due to his efforts, the first public elementary school in Israel to teach Aramaic was established in Gush Halev. Shadi, welcome. Let’s explore the language that still connects us. Shadi, it’s such a pleasure to have you. Hello.

Shadi Khalloul [00:02:23]:
Hello, Geoffrey. How are you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:26]:
Fine, thanks. So I am so thrilled. I have, and I’m sure Adam has questions that we’ve been dying to ask somebody who speaks Aramaic for our whole adult lives. But let’s start. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Shadi Khalloul [00:02:43]:
Yes, Geoffrey. So again, Shalom from Israel, Shlomo, as we say in Aramaic, Shloma or Shlomo from the Galilee, Israel. I am living here. I was born here. For generations we have been here, as you mentioned, together with the Jewish people. We are the indigenous people of the region. And I grew up here as a Christian Maronite, which is a Syriac Aramaic community who inhabited this region since time immemorial. And we have been also living here. And thank God we today actually still testify for our heritage, rich heritage, common heritage, together with the Jewish people in this region, which is the Aramaic Hebraic heritage. And as I, as you know and mentioned, I am Israeli citizen, proud citizen of the State of Israel, happily live in Israel, thank God I live in Israel and not in any other Arab dictatorship state around us. And I say that because I appreciate living in Israel for its Jewish democracy that allow other citizens from all backgrounds this equal democratic rights as you all know and enjoy it in Western civilizations and states as well. And so I decided to serve in the IDF as a paratrooper and I become an officer. And I led, not Christians, I led Jews younger than me under my charge, under my responsibility, I took care of them, I gave order to them, and not the opposite only. And this is a testimony of how liberal and free this state is. And I am glad to also testify that I continued and came to USA to actually reach a high education which is trying to build my American dream. And it was in Las Vegas, Nevada that people think it’s only the Sin City, but God exists also there. And in this Sin City actually God revealed for me our Aramaic heritage again. And through the Bible, the Holy Bible, he actually revealed. This revelation gave me the understanding that my role is not building American dream, but Aramaic dream. So I returned back to the Holy Land, Israel to build this Aramaic vision and to help my country Israel through this vision to build Christian-Jewish relations. So I am very now working on building this relations through our Israeli Christian Aramaic NGO that I founded this NGO through returning, by returning from USA and until now from 2007 then 2025, we achieved so many things that you mentioned part of them. One of them is permit for teaching Aramaic heritage and language in our elementary school which was not allowed under Arab Islamic curriculum. Second, I achieved the recognition of the State of Israel of our Aramaic national identity, which is the only state in the Middle East that recognize us while Arab states still reject and deny our Aramaic identity. And they try to force Arabization and Islamization. This is the real colonization that it is called colonization and not the opposite. And so Israel is the only place to recognize us while others try to colonize us through Arabization and Islamization. And third, I am, I established a school, as you call it, for Christian Jewish leadership through a program of seven month program where both youth from both sides, half, half, about 60 people live together, study together, learn together, deepen their studies about their own culture, their own identity and about other side. And by this we send them both to serve the country and defend the country together. At the end, that’s how we build positive leadership and coexistence based on loyalty to the state that allow them both to thrive and prosper in this region. So I am happy to be part of all this and speak with you about it and the obstacles we face and the vision that we are still trying to achieve, which is to continue our work for best of Israel and our Christian and Jewish relations and our Christian existence and resilience in this region as well.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:03]:
Wow.

Shadi Khalloul [00:08:03]:
The next step is building a town, Aramaic town and Aramaic school in Haifa. And in other part, Aramaic town with a Maronite can revive their identity, their language, their existence will be strengthened and be a peace builders and bridge for peace in this region and example for how peace can exist in this region. Maybe Arabs can follow and copy this model.

Adam Mintz [00:08:33]:
Amazing. Now let me. First of all, what you’re saying is amazing and we wish you well and we can’t wait to follow you. But we want to focus today on the Aramaic for a minute. Can we come back for a minute? Does your community, does your family, do they speak Aramaic to one another? When you go to school, when you go to the store, do you speak Aramaic to one another?

Shadi Khalloul [00:09:01]:
Okay, so the Aramaic people has Aramaic language and it’s called Aramaeans. And those Aramains are. They have different churches. One of the churches is the Syriac Orthodox Church, which is still speak Aramaic. They go to school, they speak Aramaic with each other. They have a language that still preserving it, speaking Aramaic in daily life. When a born, a newborn, you know, is born, he. His mom sing for him in Aramaic, speak with him in Aramaic. When they go to a shop, they speak in Aramaic. When they go to school, they speak in Aramaic. Now the Syriac Maronite community, they pray in Aramaic. And the last people who pray, who spoke Aramaic were in. Were tested. How you call it, where they. They. They stopped speaking it in 1925 in Shari, the region which is Mount Lebanon. And since then they preserve the language as a holy language, same or similar to Jews in Diaspora, where the Jews kept preserving Hebrew language as a prayer language, as a sacred language, while speaking English or French or German or. Or other foreign languages, local languages, wherever they exist, but preserving the prayer language as Hebrew. That’s the case for Maronites. So as our community, as a Maronite community, we pray in Aramaic. We now try to revive it as a spoken language here in Israel. And other Syriac Orthodox, our brothers in the Syriac Orthodox Church, which are our own people as well, because we are Syriac Maronites, they are Syriac Orthodox, we all Aramaeans, they still speak it in daily life. And when I go to conferences to Europe, for example, to the diaspora of Aramaic diaspora that was ethnic claims in the Middle east, in Syria and Lebanon, during history time and less it’s 100 years I speak with them in Aramaic, for example.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:24]:
So it’s fascinating. There are so many parallels between our peoples, but in a sense you’re doing what (Eliezer) Ben Yehuda did a hundred or so years ago when he tried to take this lashon hakodesh that was used only in the prayers the Hebrew and create a modern language. He had to just to invent a word for electricity, chashmal. And you’re fortunate that there are some communities that actually still speak it and don’t only pray in it, but you are literally reviving the Aramaic language as a spoken language. And that’s amazing. The other thing that’s amazing is I never knew my Hebrew name is Shlomo. And now in Aramaic that means hello, I love that. So I. I don’t want us to believe or our listeners to think that the relationships between our two people has always been so smooth and la dee da. There has been some tensions. We’re going to go to the Torah now and we’re going to about this Rosetta Stone moment where it was actually a peace agreement between two parties that had some friction. But why don’t you tell our listeners about your town? Because it would be easy for you to say you love being an Israeli and you want to be part of the society if your town during the 48 war was untouched. But in my research that’s not the case. You suffered at the war of independence and therefore even more inspirational in the sense of what you’re doing today. Tell us about your your town and your people and where you are now.

Shadi Khalloul [00:13:03]:
Yes, my original town was called Kfar Baram and this was the only Maronite, Aramaic Syriac town in Upper Galilee close to the Lebanese border or Israeli Lebanese border. This town ended up in the British mandate and it was under French mandate. And in 1924, 25 a new compulier committee moved the borders north and we ended up under British. And during the war of independence we were caught between the clashes of Arab armies that invaded Israel, invaded the land of Israel trying to wipe out the Jewish communities. And the Jews defended themselves and they clashed with them. And the Jewish army actually won that war. And in this clash between the two forces, we were caught in this clash and we were asked to leave the town for two weeks, sorry time. And this two weeks time ended up to be actually until now, 77 almost years. With promises from all government officials, from prime ministers, from Supreme Court, from everyone. You want that we will fix this problem once the situation, the security issues in the border with Lebanon and then between this Arab Israeli conflict will end. This will also end. I urge, like my forefather urged the country. We have nothing to do with this conflict. We are not part of this conflict. We are not the Palestinians, we are not Arabs. We are rather being Maronite Aramaic people. Aramaic people that share with the Jews common heritage, that share with the Jews same history, same enemies that want to annihilate us in this region. They in the letter they said, please treat us as a Jew speaking Arabic. We are. Because we are not enemies, we are Aramains. And based on that, we are still working to fix this issue in a positive way. Because my forefathers write this clearly who they are in 1949 to Ben Gurion. So I cannot now, because of what happened now try to ignore my forefathers and be siding with someone who is trying to annihilate us for centuries in this region since the Arab Islamic colonization of our lands. I know the truth. The truth will set us free. And however and how much it will take, we will keep working in the same direction and the same vision for building peace between us and the Jews as a model, as a bridge for others to follow and pass on it toward a really true peace in this region. For between the indigenous people of the Jewish and Christians of this region and other nations that today become Muslims. And they need to be taught how we can build peace. And this will be the example for them to teach them how peace can be built between us first. And they can copy it if they want. And if they don’t want, they’re to blame and not us. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

Adam Mintz [00:16:43]:
So just to ask you a question. So we appreciate. Thank you so much for giving us the background and for your passion. Where else are there Aramaic communities in the world world? You talked about the Church. What other countries have these communities where Aramaic is spoken and where the prayers are said in Aramaic?

Shadi Khalloul [00:17:05]:
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. That what we call the land of Aram in the Bible the land of Aram. In the Bible it’s called by the Greek, Syria. It’s the same land of Israel, like the same case of land of Israel being called Palestina under Adrianus to punish the Jews and to mix, to make people confused about the origins of them and ignoring the true history of this region and the true names of the region because it’s easy for them to control. That’s what they did for us in what we call the land of Aram. When the Greeks occupied this region, they called our land Syria. And since then, the others who came after the Greeks continue using this name. But in the Bible it’s written obviously the land of Aram and the people who living there are Arameans. And the descendants of those people are the Christian native people of this land that still speak this language Aramaic. Because those Aramains adopted Christianity in the first stages of Christianity because it came from Jewish who were speaking same language like them, Aramaic.

Adam Mintz [00:18:32]:
So I want to talk about that for a minute. In the Jewish tradition, the speaking of Aramaic actually goes back to the later books of the Jewish Bible. In the books of Ezra, among other places, we have passages actually in Aramaic, which means that 2,500 years ago, before the Greeks, before Christianity, Jews seem to have been speaking Aramaic. And what you’re telling me is that your tradition also predates Christianity. The country of Aram is the country where people spoke Aramaic. So what you, this is fascinating, Geoffrey, and that is that the spoken language of the different people, and again, this is pre-Christianity, it’s not pre-Judaism, but it’s pre-Christianity that the different people in the region, Jews and non Jews, were speaking Aramaic. That was what we call the lingua franca, which means the spoken language of the people. Then you, your community adopted Christianity in its very early stages and you maintained Aramaic. The Jews largely gave up Aramaic. There were some communities in Kazakhstan and places like that where they, they still spoke some Aramaic, but basically we don’t have that tradition. So you maintain the tradition, but that the tradition goes all the way back. Geoffrey, that’s an amazing thing. Now, what you’re going to show in this week’s Torah portion is that Laban calls the place Ygar Sahaduta, which is also his Aramaic language. And we know that Jacob, at least he’s given credit such by the Torah, gives it a Hebrew name, Galed. So you see, Shadi, that all the way back in the time of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, you already see that there are different languages that Laban uses the Aramaic And Jacob uses the Hebrew. And so these traditions might go back. But if we date these stories 4,000 years ago means that already 4,000 years ago, this was the language of the region.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:05]:
And more importantly. And I’m going to jump in here, because at Madlik, we like to look at the sources. And I have never studied these sources with someone who speaks Aramaic. So you got. You can’t hold me back any longer. So first of all, as the rabbi said, we have this peace agreement between our two peoples in translation from Hebrew to Aramaic, which means already that the two languages connect us. But one of the things that I’m going to argue today is that Aramaic was a language that was different from every other language in the Middle East. It was a language of diplomacy, and it was a language of international affairs. And our source here, which even according to most modern critics who love to date things much later, the critics say that here, when they make a covenant, and that’s what they did, they took the stone and they set it up as a pillar, they both called it in their own language. And in chapter 31, verse 53 of Genesis, they say, may the God of Abraham’s house and the God of Nahor’s house, their ancestral deities, judge between us. So here we have not only language uniting us, but even religion uniting us. It becomes a kesher, a connection between us. Getting back to some of the things that you said, and I just want to go over a little material and then we’ll talk. So Yigar Saduta Rashi, our classical commentary says, this is the Aramaic of Gilad. In Hebrew he says, targumo shell Gilad, the Targum that we have Onkolos, and all that literally means translation. But every Jew knew when you said translation, you were meaning the Aramaic translation. That’s how close the language was. In the Targum Yonatan, which is our transl. Here, it says, v’ karalei lavan o ger sahir vayakov karalei belishon beit kedusha. So you were referring before Saadi to Lashon Hakodesh, which is in your language. Some of you only pray in Aramaic. In our culture, before Ben Yehuda came, some of us could only pray in Hebrew. So again, we have a testament to Targum, which is translation, and we have Lashon kodesh, which is the language of our heritage. I will say there’s a tradition of Shnayimikra v’ echa Targum that every week a Jew is supposed to read the script in Hebrew twice and the Targum once. That’s the regard that we hold for Targum. And I will also say that there was something called a matargaminon when the Torah was read in public in Hebrew, because most Jews at a certain period of time didn’t speak Hebrew, they spoke Aramaic. There was someone who stood right next to them. And when the reader of the Torah said, bereshit baray elohime temaim va aretz, the matagaminum translated that in real-time into Aramaic. That’s how close our traditions are. And the idea that Aramaic was a language of diplomacy, which is what we have here, makes it a fascinating language. Because unlike most languages, and I’ll say maybe the only exception similar, is Yiddish, most languages are made by ruling powers in their day. Romans came with Latin, Greeks came with Greek. What made Aramaic important was that it transcended statehood. People talked or used Aramaic because it was a language that united everybody. It wasn’t linked to any one particular ruling party. It made it like today. English is the language of diplomacy. Maybe 100 years ago, French was the language of diplomacy in the Middle East, Aramaic was the language of diplomacy. I am going to put links in the notes not only to Shadi’s website and his charities, but also to an amazing book called Aramaic, A History of the First World language. Aramaic united the whole Middle East. Do you agree, Saadi, that Aramaic is a unique, uniting language?

Shadi Khalloul [00:25:57]:
Yes, indeed, I agree with you. It’s not only as uniting as a religious thing. What unite us is the ethnic background of this as well. If I go back to Abraham, you mentioned Abraham and Nahor. Nahur was the brother of Abraham and Nahor. If you go to Abraham house and to Isaac, for example, who Abraham, you know, he wanted him to get married. He sent Eliezer to Aram to get a wife for Isaac. And who was this wife? The wife was called Rebekah, the sister of Laban, the Aramean from the house of Nahur. So we are talking about a people as well that were once one people united and then developed as faith, as religions later on. And you can see also, for example, from Abraham we have Ishmael, Ishmael from Hagar the Servant, they call it Arabs, Muslims today, they all come from this Aramaic background. And let me tell you more than this. The Arabic language development was developed by script and language as a spoken language from Aramaic. So the Arabic language developed from Aramaic. The Hebrew language too was parallel to Aramaic and developed and mixed with Aramaic. And if you go to Eliezer ben Yehuda, for example, you find out that 70% of Ben Yehuda modern language of Hebrew was back from Aramaic that still existed as a spoken language. So all, like you have many. I can give you many examples, many examples of Hebrew words that originated from Aramaic today in our Hebrew language too. And I, for example, if you, if you go to a Yemeni Jew and go and hear how he reads Hebrew based on the ancient grammar of Hebrew and how you should pronounce the words and how it is pronounced in the Mediterranean or Eastern slang, you will think he is speaking Aramaic even though he’s reading Hebrew.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:43]:
Amazing. So we share the sources that you just organically brought in. Genesis 24:10, it says he made his way to Aram Naharaim. Aram is Aramaic. When he says in Genesis 25 that Isaac was 40 years old when he took his wife Rebecca, daughter of Betuel the Aramean of Padam Aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. So I wanna add a little bit to some of the magic of what makes Aramaic so magical. And that is, not only was it a language of diplomacy, but it was a language of a wandering nomadic people. And that is something that unites the Jewish people and the Aramaic people. How many people, Rabbi Adam, do we talk to that talk about their diaspora, that talk about their galut? We have so much in common. But I want to bring everybody back to the Passover Haggadah. In the Passover Haggadah at a certain place, we said Arami Oved avi that. And we’re quoting a very ancient text that’s used in the Bikurim ceremony when you bring your first fruits. It’s in Deuteronomy 26. And basically the Haggadah tries to translate it differently, but the real translation is an Aramean nomad was my father. So again, the language of Aramaic was a language that superseded borders. It superseded, transcendent ethnicity. It was. I am going to go out on a limb here. Shadi I believe that Aramaic was the first Internet. I believe it was the first meta language that enabled people of different backgrounds to talk amongst themselves for discovery. Am I going too far here or do you agree with me?

Shadi Khalloul [00:30:45]:
You are not. That’s why the Assyrian Empire adopted Aramaic. That’s why the Persian Empire adopted Aramaic. That’s why in the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, they tried to impose Hellenic or Greek on the people, while Aramaic resisted and kept being used until the 7th century, until the Arab Islamic conquest in the 7th century. The Aramaic, as you mentioned, was the Internet of those days. It was the connecting language between People, it’s a language where Jews spoke it until 7th century. Like, like those early Christians who developed from Judaism back then and from Aramaic. People who were pagans and adopted the Christianity from the first disciples who were Jews. We cannot deny this. This is a fact and history denying it. It’s denying the roots of Judaism and the roots of Christianity that developed from here, [not] from the Vatican, not from the Western civilization. It developed here in the land of Israel.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:50]:
So in the New Testament there are two, what I would call today selfies, places where we get to hear Jesus speak in his own language. He’s quoted in Mark 5:41, where he’s talking to a young girl who’s maybe rejected. Maybe people think that there’s something wrong with her, she’s a prostitute or whatever. And he says, why don’t you say. Say it in Aramaic? What does he say?

Shadi Khalloul [00:32:17]:
Talita kumi.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:20]:
Talita kumi. Which. And it’s quoting in Mark, the New Testament we only have in Greek. But it preserves language from Jesus himself. When he’s on the cross, he goes, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But in the, in, in the New Testament it says, go ahead.Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani this is the Aramaic translation of Psalms 22. In Hebrew it’s Eli Eli lama azavtani. And in the Targum of Tehillum it says Eli eli matul ma shabaktani. It uses the same word that the New Testament puts into Jesus’ mouth. We can say as Jews we need to know Aramaic. But Shadi, I think you would agree with me if you’re a Christian, the thrill of being able to learn a language that according to the New Testament itself, most probably Jesus spoke has to be extremely thrilling.

Shadi Khalloul [00:33:29]:
It is actually very emotional for me actually to think that how people connected to each other and why those wars develop, they shouldn’t be developed. We are all brothers, we all want people here. And unfortunately, this development of this region specifically during history of Middle east just make it nonsense. We are same people. We are same brothers and sister from the same forefathers. We should actually know the facts. And once we reveal this Aramaic to others, maybe, maybe we will put again and in the minds of people a little bit here of peaceful attitude. Specifically making the Arabs knowing their roots again that there were not Arabs here in this region. They were speaking Aramaic like us. And only this type of Arabism was developed in the seventh century. If they know back their roots, they maybe would better respect the Jews and the minority of Aramaic or Christians that they still exist. In this region. This is something really, I think that can make a solution and good manner for the state of Israel and for Lebanon and for Syria and for the entire region. I want to mention for you, Adam and Geoffrey, one thing about the Talita Kumi story that you need to know about this. What made me come back from United States to Israel? These two words of in the Bible. I was a student in Las Vegas my last semester. I took Bible as English literature as an easy course to earn credit and finish my degree as a bachelor degree in International Business and Finance. And I took that course and not Shakespeare as English Literature because I come from this area. I learned the Bible. It’s easy. And though we were reading the Bible and once we read this verse, one of the students, American Youth, the instructor was a professor, a Catholic professor. He said, no, don’t. Stop, stop. This is not English. This is Aramaic. That’s still written as it is, as Jesus spoke it. And you know, Jesus was a Jewish person. He spoke Aramaic language. And this is the language of the Jews back then. And he said this sentence, so it’s not English. And it kept being this. AND UNFORTUNATEL IT DIED. He said, I said, excuse me, it didn’t die. We still speak it. We still pray in this language. We still exist. He said, who you are? I said, my name is Shadi. I’m Israeli Christian. I belong to the Syriac Aramaic Maronite Church of Antioch. And this is who we are. I said, sorry, we don’t know about you. Prepare presentation next week. And I ended up preparing presentation and saying, oh my God, why I spoke. I now I need to. I prepare presentation. I already want to build my business. I have my business already and don’t have time to invest on. I wanted to have this easy course. I ended up deepening my knowledge about our roots, about our heritage, about our language, about our history. And I discovered how in common we share with the Jewish people here, how we have this beautiful heritage together and how impactful it can be on societies here in this region. And I said, wait, wait. After I gave this lecture about language and I told them the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic prayer as the only prayer actually. Jesus said, and it was in Aramaic. We still pray it in as it is. I mean, this is the Lord prayer in Aramaic, as it is in the Aramaic words and language. So I, I saw people crying. I saw people asking me how we can help your people, how we can help your language, how we can assist your community. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I ran away from my Community. I finished my military service. I came to the United States to build my American dream. These guys pushing me back to Israel to help my people and my community and build my Aramaic dream. So I ended up at the end, deciding that I will go back home and build my Aramaic dream. And that’s what I am doing. From one verse in the Bible was mentioned by you, Talitha Kumi.

Adam Mintz [00:38:30]:
That’s an amazing story. Wow!

Geoffrey Stern [00:38:33]:
So we are trapped for time because otherwise, I could continue this all day. But just as it was a thrill for your Christian brothers to hear you say the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

Shadi Khalloul [00:38:49]:
It’s a Jewish prayer. Hey, he wasn’t.

Geoffrey Stern [00:38:51]:
Of course, Adam and I. Adam and I understood 80% of what you were saying. It was amazing. I was ready to join your synagogue. So listen, I don’t know how big your screen is. Can you read the halachma Anya? Can you read it on the screen in. In your accents? I don’t. I’m putting you on the spot. What I am asking Saadi to do is we start our seder, the holiest, arguably holiest moment of a Jewish family once a year. And we don’t speak Hebrew. We speak Aramayach.

Shadi Khalloul [00:39:27]:
I would say it in my language, in my accent, because all the ha. What you say ha in Aramaic, we say ho. The A alif at the end of the word is for us translated as kamat Skatan with o. So it’s like we are Ashkenazi Jews. You remember?

Adam Mintz [00:39:46]:
You know?

Shadi Khalloul [00:39:47]:
Okay, so ha is ho lahma. Instead of saying, we say in Hebrew it’s low and not la. So we say it low. So that’s how it is. It’s pronounced for us in our Western Aramaic dialect. It’s more Galilean Direct or Jerusalem Talmud more area. So what you see here, it’s a mix of Aramaic and Hebrew, by the way, right?

Adam Mintz [00:40:45]:
Correct. Well, that’s the way it was written.

Shadi Khalloul [00:40:47]:
Aramaic and Hebrew. It’s not pure Aramaic. What I. So you have many Aramaic words and many Hebrew word mixed together.

Adam Mintz [00:40:56]:
Amazing. Shadi. I have to sneak out, but this was. Geoffrey this is absolutely amazing. The only podcast in history where we have someone who said the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic and read Halachma Anya. Jeff, we have to start that. Everyone’s going to read Halachma Anya in the original Aramaic. Thank you so much, Shadi, and we wish you well.

Geoffrey Stern [00:41:17]:
Shadi, I want to say that I teared up a little bit when you were saying that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:41:22]:
Because I felt like I was closer to the way my great, great, great, great, great grandfather would have said it. This is just so beautiful. For our listeners, I’m going to put a link to Shadi’s charities in Israel, amazing schools that he’s creating, pre military academies that he’s creating. And he’s going to be listed with PEF Israel soon. And I’ll put a link there when he has it. Shadi, you are my new brother. Aramaic has let us two people discover, rediscover ourselves all over again. And I agree with you. I think their potential here to create a new Middle East is possible. So thank you so much for joining us. I look forward next time in Israel to come visit you in person.

Shadi Khalloul [00:42:11]:
Always welcome. Thank you so much. Todah Raba.

Welcome to Matlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. If you like the podcast and listen regularly, why don’t you give us a few stars and write a comment or ask a question? This week we read Parashat Toledot. Rather than excuse or explain away the troubling aspects of Jacob stealing the birthright, we ask why the Torah chose to portray the third patriarch in this manner, and what are the takeaways? Rabbi, you know, sometimes we just have to ask how much are we projecting our modern morality onto it? And also, it occurred to me, if we were reading a novel, and I’m not suggesting that the Torah is a novel, but there are plenty of pieces of art we view, listen to music, read books. There are troubling things in it. It’s called a plot. And we don’t always have to explain the dark side of some of our characters, even if there are heroes. What says you

Adam Mintz [00:02:19]:
I couldn’t agree more. I mean, as we’ll see, part of this discussion is how the commentaries explain these verses. So we have to kind of see the way the verses have traveled through history. Jacob is seen in a certain way. But I think you’re right. We need to take a modern view and to see what do we think about this trickery.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:41]:
So I’m not bringing all the verses because I think most of us are pretty aware of the storyline. It starts one day with, well, I should go back. It starts with Yaakov’s name. Yaakov means heel. He was born holding onto the heel of his brother. You could call him a heel holder. Ekev means crooked. So baked into his name was already a sense that this guy did not go straight. Maybe when his name was ultimately changed to Yisra’El, that was a change to Yashar (straight). But at this point in time, there’s definitely a kind of a cloud in the horizon that this guy is going to weave and go zigzag, as they say in the (movie) In Laws. And then we get to one day he’s cooking at home, and his brother comes in and he sells his brother’s birthright for the red porridge. And then we fast forward to this week’s part of the parsha that we’re talking about. And that is where his father, Yitzhak, is contemplating his end. And he asks for his eldest son, biologically eldest son, Esau, to go out and catch him some game. And Rivkah, his wife and Yaakov’s mother, overhears what’s going on, and she tells Yaakov, he’s giving out the blessing. You’ve gotta go and steal the blessing. And maybe Yaakov protests a little. I said in the intro that we can put some blame on Rivka herself because she is the schemer behind this. But in any case, we get to Genesis 27:18, and Yaakov, went to his father and said, father? And he said, yes. Kind of reminds you of the Akeda, doesn’t it? And he says, which of my sons are you? Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you have told me. Pray, sit up and eat of my game, that you may give me your innermost blessing. So there are times in the psukim where Esau even acknowledges the fact that he’s been wronged twice in his mind. He was taken advantage of at that breakfast deal, the power breakfast, where he gave up his birthright from 60,000ft. Rabbi, what’s your sense for the story?

Adam Mintz [00:05:24]:
Well, let me start like this. And he went to his father and said, father? And he said, yes, which of my sons are you? What a crazy question. You know, he sent Esau to get the food, and now the son brings the food. Obviously, it’s Esau. Why is he suspicious? And you wonder about what he’s thinking, Isaac, does he not trust his wife? Does he not Trust his sons. But that’s a very strange question. Since the son has fulfilled his request, it’s obviously Esau.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:04]:
So I would go out on a limb here and say we have four characters. We have Esau, we have Yaakov, we have Rivka, and we have Yitzhak. And what you are just saying is that Yitzhak himself might have been eyeing on this. Because if he’s asking which of the sons are you, in a sense he’s saying to himself, you know, I started this little charade maybe, and which of my sons took the bait? Which of them is coming? So it seems like the story is very open ended. I compared it to the Akedah. I think that, yes, there’s these pregnant pauses throughout out where he says father. And he said, yes. And they go, which of my sons are you? And of course the Akeda, we had your son, your favorite son, the son that you love. And the other thing in Esau’s favor, because you could clearly argue that this is all about money. We all watch Sucession. There are hundreds of stories of children fighting over the patrimony and fighting over the inheritance. Here he says, your innermost blessing is the way it’s translated. But again, it is a very rich story and there are multiple ways that you could look at each character. You said, let’s see how the commentaries see it. I would think, if thinking back to the commentaries, definitely the first, I would say straw dummy is a Esav. The second, he walks in famished, they pounce on him. They say he was a glutton. He spent all of his time outside hunting. He was in Yiddish, we call it Prust. He was a bal basar. He was a grubba. He was the antithesis of Yaakov, who maybe spent his time in tents, according to the rabbis in the Yeshiva of Shame and Aver. But let’s talk about these two charact. They are definitely characterized, I think more by the rabbi. Very few of the rabbinic texts come down on Yaakov for stealing the blessing, to my knowledge, I mean, for sure.

Adam Mintz [00:08:32]:
You know, you get the sense that the chapter ends like this is what was supposed to happen, you know. And you said Yaakov is zig. You use the phrase zigzag. He’s a zigzag man. In next week’s power show with Laban, he’s also a zigzag man. Right. It doesn’t go straight. You know, he wants to marry Rachel and he marries Leah. But in the end it kind of works out, I think that’s the same sense you get here, that it’s zigzag. It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s that Jacob’s life is a zigzag. By the way, when he deals with his son Joseph, it’s also a zigzag. You know, he makes a mistake, he favors him, but in the end, it all works out.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:18]:
You know, funnily enough, if you look at the text itself, the only I would say moral or character I would say read is in the beginning and the end. In the beginning, it says that Esau married two Canaanite wives. And it says that, interestingly, that Yitzchak and Rivkah did not approve. Correct. So here it has. We’re seeing that Yitzchak did not approve.

Adam Mintz [00:09:49]:
Of him, even though at the beginning it says that Yitzchak favors Esau.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:55]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So again, it just shows you you can disapprove of a favored son. And that’s, I think, part of the challenge that we have where we’re trying to read the Torah as black and white. And it is pushing back, finishing up the story about the kind of ethical commentary that the Bible itself gives. At the end, it says Esau recognized that his parents didn’t like his choice of wives. And it said he married, I believe it was a Hittite, someone who was not part of the Canaanite people that are not thought well of in the text. So I think we can say that in the text itself, it does kind of lean on Esav a little bit. But again, even there, and this is kind of a direction that we’re going to pursue a little more. He evolves. He got the message. You could easily say he was spurned. He didn’t get the blessing. He walked away. He didn’t walk away. He went back to the beginning in the parsha, scratching his head is, what did I do wrong? My marriage choice is there in Pasuk 18 or whatever. And he picked another wife. But I think, again, getting back to Yaakov, I didn’t see in any of the commentaries anything that was potentially really disparaging about what he did, and especially disparaging in terms of either tricking Esav at the power breakfast to sell his birthright, or in the latter vignette, to trick his father to give him the blessing.

Adam Mintz [00:11:39]:
There’s no question about that. You know, the rabbis and that here they’re led by Rashi. There’s this idea that in the end, Jacob is right. So When Jacob says, I am, you know, you know, he says to him, who are you? And he says in verse 18 on the top, I am Asav, your firstborn. And Rashi, of course, says that you put the comma after the word I am, I am. He says, who are you? I am. And a sub is your firstborn. Now, that’s crazy, but that’s how far Rashi goes to justify what Jacob says.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:16]:
And of course, one thing that you do get is the whole kind of anti Semitic trope that the Jews are crafty, that they are Talmudic, that they’ll split a hair just the way you just did, where he says hineni, and then he says, I am, and then he says, esau is your firstborn. This kind of hair splitting, in a sense, back in the days of the Torah itself, whether it was sensitive to the potential of what others would say or not, it didn’t have any reservations about telling it like it is. So I found a scholarly study. It’s written by Yair Djokovic, who’s a professor emeritus of Bible at the Hebrew University and professor of Jewish peoplehood at IDC Herzliya. And he asks, why was this included? So he’s not asking the most basic question, which is, how could this be? He’s asking what the text of the Bible or the Torah wanted us to learn from it. And he starts by saying, and this is kind of interesting, and I think the best modality to put ourselves in, Rabbi, is the modality of Megillat Esther. We always forget that the Torah is a written work that was read publicly on a regular basis. And the crowd came in every Shabbat or during market days to hear this text read. And they knew certain history and legends. They knew that Haman was bad and you move the grager (noise maker) and they knew that Esther was in Mordechai was good. So he says the tales of Jacob’s trickery and fraud were already well known. Biblical stories were not created ex nilo from the imagination of writers. Most biblical stories represented adaptations of oral traditions, traditions that were modified in order to suit the interests of the writers. So I love the fact that he says there were expectations here. People knew who Yaakov the trickster was. So you couldn’t whitewash this story. You had to present the story that people knew from their Tzena Urena and from the past. But nonetheless, you had the authorship to position it and to place it in a way that you wanted. I hadn’t really thought of that, but I do think that we don’t think enough about this text as a text that was written and read in public and had that interaction with the audience.

Adam Mintz [00:14:53]:
Well, adaptions of oral traditions, we don’t usually think of the Torah that way, but it’s so interesting because that’s the way we do it on Madlik. Geoffrey, It’s an oral tradition. Discuss it. And what he’s saying is that’s been true for 3,000 years, that they discussed the text, and there were certain expectations. People came to the text with certain expectations.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:18]:
You know, earlier, in this week’s Parsha, it has the story of Beer Sheba about the seven wells. And in this week’s Parsha, there’s a back and forth. The local people are filling up Isaac’s Wells, and he’s having them redug. And at the end of the day, it says they call the place Beer Sheva because of the seven wells. And it’s called Beer Sheva Ad Hayom Hazeh. Those of you who remember earlier parshiot, we have Abraham in a story of wells as well. And there he makes a covenant and a peace treaty. And it says, and it’s called Beersheba because of the Shavuah of the oath that was written there, Ad Hayom Haze. And I think that’s a perfect example, Rabbi, where the listener knew that it was called Beer Seva. The listener is the Ad Hayom Haze-nick. He’s the one who knows what it’s called. And the text is filling in the blanks. And interestingly enough, it parallels this story also in the sense there are two versions. Just like Beersheva, there are two versions here. You could make the case that stealing the blessing, it was stole twice. It was stolen once over breakfast. And by that I mean that he took advantage of his famished brother. He took advantage of maybe his adolescent young brother, where he grew up faster, he was more mature, and then later on, he obviously fleeced him and took advantage of him a second time. But you don’t have to consider the two stories as part of the same narrative. You could consider them as different versions, just like the of Beer Sheva’s name of the same story.

Adam Mintz [00:17:09]:
That’s fantastic. I mean, that’s also not the way you usually think of it. But you raise an important question, Geoffrey, and that is, what’s the connection? The Torah doesn’t connect the two stories. The question is, are they the same story, what you call two versions? Are they two parts of the story? Do they just tell you about the relationship between Jacob and Esau? That basically we would say Jacob has his number, right? Jacob knows how to outsmart Esau.

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:41]:
And I think, as you always say, the version that we heard in Cheder would be that they’re part of the same story and that the first story justifies the second. It was a legal sale and therefore. But in the words of the text itself, Esav says, you have tricked me twice in his mind, and this is the narrative putting words into his mouth. They are also part of the same narrative, but they are duplicity to the power of two.

Adam Mintz [00:18:12]:
Right? Now, you know, technically it can’t be that the second story follows on the first story, because if it was true that Jacob deserved the blessing because he bought the right of the firstborn, then Rebekah should have gone to Isaac and said that Jacob deserves the blessing. Because the fact, you see, Rebecca took a huge chance. Let’s just talk about it in terms of a movie. Rebecca takes a huge chance when she tries to fool Isaac because if Isaac somehow finds out, the one he’s angry at is Rebecca. So, you know, so obviously she had no choice. So you see that the fact that he bought the first born-ship doesn’t give him the right to steal the blood blessings.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:01]:
Although maybe if Wendy was here, she would say it’s a proof that this couple didn’t talk to each other, just like Sarah didn’t talk to Abraham.

Adam Mintz [00:19:10]:
Right? That’s the old story, that she was only three years old and there was no equality there. Because you would say, in today’s world, you’re talking about how we look at it today. In today’s world, it’s ridiculous if the wife thinks the husband is making a mistake, so she goes to the husband. The idea of a wife tricking the husband this way, you would say that in the 21st century, that is a recipe for disaster.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:33]:
Although, again, and we’re gonna move on, it is pretty clear that as an ancient text, this text definitely gives a lot of power to women behind the veil. It’s like shadow theater where both Sarah last week, I will go back all the way to Eve, who controls how we live, whether we’re in paradise or in Paradise, Lost. And here we have also Rebecca controlling the narrative. So the second reason that this Professor Jackovic gives, and this is kind of fascinating, and he says the second reason for admitting Jacob’s misdeeds has to do with the character of biblical literature from the first Temple period. The literature we find avoids providing readers with perfect heroes.

Adam Mintz [00:20:26]:
What.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:27]:
What can we mortals learn from heroes who exhibit no speck of wrongdoing? On the contrary, only characters that have made mistakes, atoned for them and changed their behavior can provide models for us. Only from the experiences of such imperfect human heroes can we comprehend the moral fallibility of humans and mysterious workings of God in human affairs. This again reminds me back of reading Magillat Esther in public. It’s a passion play. The audience is on the edge of its seats. It’s seeing the different plot turns. But they’re not only plot terms, they’re changes in character. They’re challenges that the protagonists are going through. I kind of like this.

Adam Mintz [00:21:19]:
Yeah, this is fantastic. This is a great article.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:23]:
And so he says, not only do characters that transgress, make amends and learn from their sins provide more depth and interest than those who tread only the virtuous path, but flawed, complex figures give us someone to identify and emphasize with. And here’s where he goes a little bit further. And he says that while Jacob’s deceitful deed also presents his punishment. Rabbi, this is the prequel for the next two parshiot and the next two parshiot. We’re gonna see how Jacob has to flee his home because he’s done something wrong, because he’s not made a friend in his brother. His mother says, go away for a few days. Come back. When it simmers down. Guess what, Rabbi? He never sees his mother again. The father who is on his deathbed will see Jacob again, but Rebecca, who was pulling the strings of the puppets, will never see him again. He gets tricked multiple times. I’ll say he gets fleeced multiple times. He gets fleeced in marrying Rachel and he ends up with Leah. And then he has to work another seven years for Rachel. He gets fleeced by his father in law multiple times. You can talk it about Mida k’neged mida that he is punished in kind. And therefore it does become a kind of morality play. And we don’t need the rabbinic commentaries to comment on the initial story, but they definitely do comment on the aftermath.

Adam Mintz [00:23:00]:
Math, for sure. I mean, and that’s right. And again, in the end, it works out for Jacob. But you’re right, he’s fleeced. He has a very difficult time. And we always say that Jacob is the first, you know, is the first figure in the Torah who has to deal with the difficulties of life.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:18]:
And again, as long as we are looking at, as I said before, the different characters and I mentioned this, Esau is the one who’s craving meat. He’s the prosta bal habasar. He’s discredited at the beginning for his Marriage choices. And then we get to Rebecca. The blame is deflected onto Rebecca, who initiates the whole deception. And as I said before, she says, let the sin be on me. She actually actively participates in that deflection. And then, as I said before, she does get punished because of her scheming these few days that she sends away her. Her son becomes a lifetime. She never gets to see him again.

Adam Mintz [00:24:09]:
Right. It’s interesting that the Torah tells us in a couple of weeks that the maidservant that it seems to be that Rivkah remained interested in Jacob, and she sent kind of an emissary with Jacob on his travels to protect Jacob. So the special relationship between mother and son continues even when Jacob is sent away from his home.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:37]:
Yeah, and, you know, we talked a little bit before about his name. And I think, you know, if someone was to say to us, rabbi, that the story of Job or the megillah of Esther, did it really happen in that way, or was it a morality tale that was to bring in the audience? We would all say, yes. But there is also a very strong tradition that maasei avot siman lebanim, that the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs are a Siman. They’re symbolic, if you will. And so, yes, we can get back to the fact that his name was called Yaakov, which is a heel sneak. And so in chapter 27, verse 36, we hear it from Esav himself. He becomes the commentator, he becomes the myth reader. He says, is that why his name was called Yaakov, the heel sneak? He says, for now he has sneaked against me or cheated me twice. My firstborn, right? He took, and now he has taken my blessing. So in the text itself of the Torah, Esau does a little commentary and he goes. His name provided space for this in the later prophets. Rabbi, Jeremiah actually does the same thing. In Jeremiah 9, it says עָק֣וֹב יַעְקֹ֔ב Yaakove Ekev each of you, beware of your friend. He’s giving moral advice. Trust not even your kinsfolk. For every sibling takes advantage, every friend deals basely. In the Hebrew, it says. He uses the name of the heel guy as watch out for your brother. They use this as a morality tale in the later prophets. Let’s go back to other sneak or stories in the Bible where our patriarchs are using trickery. We have multiple stories of Abraham going down to Egypt, and in this week’s Parasha, Isaac going down to Gerar, where he lies about his wife, and she is my sister. So again, getting back to the professor’s point of not whitewashing our characters. In a sense, even Yaakov, or Isaac, I should say, opened him up to being tricked because he tricked Avimelech. It’s all that goes around, comes around. And you could make a case, Rabbi, that what we are learning is Avera Goreret Avera, that once you go down the slippery slope of playing with the truth, it never stops.

Adam Mintz [00:27:28]:
Well, there is a problem here though, because his father also used this trick. So here he’s following his father. Interestingly, his father got away with it, but he gets in trouble. The king sees him fondling his wife and he gets in trouble. So in a way, Isaac, Isaac is not as good as his father in all of this. And then he gets tricked by his son, not quite as sly as his father was or as astute as his father was.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:06]:
Although at the end Isaac sowed in that land and reaped a hundredfold the same year. He does get material benefits from his manipulations.

Adam Mintz [00:28:16]:
Right? Okay.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:17]:
But as you say, he was tricked himself. And maybe we need to go back and read the Akeda and other stories about Abraham and see if he also wasn’t on the wrong end of the stick at a certain point because he had manipulated the truth. Now the truth was being manipulated about him. So I want to end with something that has always fascinated me about The Guide for the Perplexed. And normally I bring it up when the Jews left Israel and they went the long route, instead of going directly into the Promised Land, they have a 40 year adventure. And Maimonides has a famous theory and he calls it the ruse, the Divine Ruse where God has to take them from one place to another place, from being lowly slaves in an idolatrous society to followers of the one God. And to do that he needs some time. And he has to build a temple as he institute mitzvot and stuff like that. The goal is very far away. And so what Maimonides brings is a theory of he has to trick them. Small little tricks along way. But what I had not noticed is he begins talking about that in a biological fashion. And he says in Guide for the Perplexed part three, on considering the divine acts or the processes of nature, we get an insight into the deity’s Willy graciousness. And in the Hebrew translation, because it was written in Arabic, it calls Aromat Ha’Eloha, the trickery of God. And what he does is he’s not presupposing Darwin by any chance, but he is saying that biologically the animals and biology develops over time, it’s fascinating because it gets very close to evolution.

Adam Mintz [00:30:15]:
Evolution.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:16]:
And he doesn’t say mutation, but he does say that things develop from one to the other. And he talks about this gradual development. The nerves are enabled to set the lens in motion. And I quote, this says Maimonides as one instance, because this is the most evident in the wonders described in the book on the use of limbs by Galen. And basically what Maimonides comes with, which is his own theory of evolution. And I will argue that what he does is by caging it in this amazing term of God’s holy trick, it gives us a sense of how we evolve. And we are, I think, privileged when we read a story like we’re reading this weekend in the weeks to come to have a first row seat on the development of our morality. And when we react to the story in a certain way. Rabbi, we are using a time honored tradition of that audience listening to the sometimes cheering and sometimes going back in absolute disgust. But here we are.

Adam Mintz [00:31:26]:
That’s fantastic. That’s a great Maimonides. Yeah, that’s good. I love it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:31]:
Okay, well, Shabbat Shalom. Thanks for joining us.

Adam Mintz [00:31:34]:
Shabbat sounds really good. Thank you very much, Geoffrey.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:36]:
We’ll see you all next week.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and on Madlik, we light a spark and shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a sort sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Chayei Sara. Join us for a conversation with Professor Rabbi Wendy Zierler, a scholar dedicated to the enterprise of feminist midrash, who has recently published a book on Hebrew poetry. We’re excited to explore a feminist midrashic approach to Sarah and to get a taste of what Hebrew poetry has to teach us about our matriarchs. Wendy, thank you so much for joining us. We’re real excited.

Wendy Zierler [00:02:10]:
Such a pleasure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:12]:
And as I said in the intro last week, we were talking about Sarah’s laugh and how God or somebody accused her. Did you laugh? And she said no. And we looked at The Torah Commentary of Women in Sefaria, and we were blown away by a totally new approach. So we’re excited to start looking at the Torah all over again through the eyes of our women who have so much to add and have been kind of behind that veil, standing by the doorway, ready to laugh, incite, and contribute. So I want to start because I kind of discovered you in a TheTorah.com article. At Madlik, we love TheTorah.com and it talks literally about our Parasha, and it asks some interesting questions. But let’s start with the parsha itself. It says, now Sarah’s life was 100 years old and 20 years and 7 years, thus years of Sarah’s life. So the interesting thing is that it talks about her death, even though the parsha itself is called Chaye Sarah (The Life of Sarah). And in your article, you says it gives us very little insight into Sarah’s internal religious life. Isn’t it kind of ironic and maybe representative of how women are represented in the Torah that we have a Parasha called Chayei Sarah and we talk about her death?

Wendy Zierler [00:03:46]:
Certainly this opening to the Parasha is a real provocation to try and tease out from whatever we do have of Sarah’s life, whatever detail we do have in the text, to find out something about her and to imagine, to fill in the gaps of her text. I will say, apropos of your teaser, where you talked about discovering Sarah’s laughter, I mean, we know that Abraham laughed and then she laughs, and she sort of gets slammed for it by God. But later, it’s as though her laugh gets approved and endorsed. She gets the last word on laughing because when Yitzchak is born, she names him and basically creates a liturgy for his birth, a celebratory liturgy. God made laughter for me. Anyone who hears will laugh along with me and then recite the poem herself. So we know that there’s a lot there to Sarah. We know there has to be more than what this kind of dismissing her off stage in Parashat Chayei Sara seems to imply. We know that there has to be more because God insists that she has to be the progenitor of the next generation. Moreover, we’ve got this loud pronouncement by God in Genesis 21. Kol asher Tomar, Elecha, Sara, shema, bekola. “Anything that Sarah says to you, listen to her”, be obedient to her. So my question is, of course, what is it about Sarah’s life that we want to emulate? Why is it that she is held out as this matriarch? And so I try to both call attention to what’s there in the biblical text, but then imagine the empty spots in different ways.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:34]:
I mean, there’s so much. Like in the Akedah last week we were kind of reading between the lines. There’s, you know, the midrash that says the Torah was written in balck ink and on white parchment. And I think the endeavor that you’re involved with, with your peers is to coax out what’s in between the lines. Sarah is the only matriarch who tells us how long she lived. Everett Fox points out. And then the next mystery that comes up is in the next verse. And Sarah died in Kiriat Abba, that is Hebron in the land of Canaan. And Abraham CAME to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. Talk to us about what is the question that all the commentaries are asking here.

Wendy Zierler [00:06:22]:
Okay, so what is glaring and calls out for comment here is the idea that at the end of the Akedah in Genesis 22, Avraham is described as going to Beersheva. And then we find out later that Sarah dies in Kiryat Arba. So it seems that at her death they’re not living together. And this is something that the commentaries can’t suffer, that idea. Whereas I actually believe, and here I think that the text is telling us something very directly that the Torah is very honest to us about what the Akedah exercise, what kind of effect it has on the family. I don’t think that it’s an accident that Genesis 22 begins with under the sign of love. And it’s the first time that the verb ahavah (love) appears in the Bible, Ahavta et Yitzhak (loved Isaac), the first time we ever hear that verb. And that by the end of that parak, at the end of that chapter, love disappears out of the text. When God says, you’ve done this thing, I now know you’re a God fearer. Kilo chasachta et bin cha et Yechibcha, that you didn’t withhold your son, your only son. And it doesn’t say Asher ahafda (that you loved). And my reading, I mean, what lurks behind my torah.com article is a kind of pre existent reading that asks the question where the rabbis ask, where was Sarah and Akeidah, why is she absent? And they supply different answers. My understanding is she’s there to represent another alternative. If Avraham shows and succeeds in a test of God, awe of God, fear, then Sarah is reserved. Her absence reserves another option, which is the option of love. And that’s why theverb Ahahve (love) . The second time the verb ahavah appears is at the end of Genesis 24, where we hear that Yitzhak took Rivkah into his mother’s tent and loved her. I see the Torah being very honest about what it means that Avram was willing so utterly to. To obey God and detach from all earthly commitments. That’s why at the end of the Akedah when it says the word yachdav (together) is not used in relation to Yitzchak and Avraham, but it’s Avraham and N’arav (the youths), that’s a very loud rhyme. So my argument is that there’s a breakdown in the relationship between Avraham and Yitzhak at the end of the Akedah. There’s a breakdown in the relationship between Avraham and Sarah at the end of the Akedah. And dare I say there’s a breakdown in the relationship between Avraham and God at the end of the Akedah, because never does God speak to Avraham directly again. In fact, at the end of Genesis 22, he only speaks to him through an angel. And in order to the next thing we know is Avraham needs to get a match for his son, and he’s doing it through the agency of somebody else, not himself. There’s a lack of that. That attachment is broke down and so broken down. And so attachment has to be reconstituted elsewhere through Sarah. And so she represents that model. Her absence is actually a very loud presence in my view.

Adam Mintz [00:09:42]:
And is that why at the end of this week’s Parusha that Rivka replaces Sara, that that’s an important piece?

Wendy Zierler [00:09:50]:
Yes, that Rebecca comes. Rebecca and Sarah are identified with one another. Now, on the one hand, Rebecca continues Abraham’s model in that she’s someone who left Haran, she is a leave taker, and yet she’s right away signaled as an object of love. And so she, in my view, marks the reinsertion of Ahava (love) into the text and in fact, the possibility of family continuity. Because if you’re going to kill your son on a mountaintop, that son is not going to be available to be your successor and your descendant on the most basic level. And so what I wrote in TheTorah.com is kind of a sequel to that, or it’s the backstory. How is it that Sarah was able to exercise some agency even though she wasn’t there on that mountaintop?

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:42]:
What I want to kind of focus on is in the rabbinical commentaries that you cite Rashi, Ramban and others, it’s almost painful to watch them try to figure out why Abraham was not with Sarah. It is so beyond them to believe that Sarah could be independently living on her own, not like Hagar, that she was exiled, she didn’t go back to her father’s house, she’s an independent woman, living by herself. Rashi says, you know what, Abraham was doing chores or something, and it was on his way home, and he got caught away from home when he got that call. Ramban. It’s a very, very long. Ramban talks about also that it must be that he was just doing some errands while he was in Hebron. It seems to me that because they couldn’t imagine that Sarah was by living by herself, it affected their commentary. And I think that the most basic, I guess, trivial level, the fact that you, a woman is willing to look at it and say they were separated, opens up, first of all to throw out a lot of kind of splitting hairs and going in the wrong direction, but also enables us to focus on why they were living alone and why Isaac was not with his father either, and why he (Abraham) was by himself. But I want to focus on Sarah and not on Abraham so much. And you spoke a little bit about this concept that love was missing, and I love that as well. But then why don’t you talk about the Midrash that we now are kind of given license to write now that we say that no, they were separated, they were living alone. What then can you understand and fill in the blanks about Sarah that we now have license to imagine?

Wendy Zierler [00:12:50]:
Yeah, yeah. So look, I think that the rabbis in the Middle Ages also, they elevated the Akedah spiritual exercise in ways that I don’t think I share that same conviction. And maybe because they were living in a world of common martyrdoms. But getting to your question, I mean, once you imagine the possibility that there was a real rift or that there was a difference of opinion, different spiritual directions, instead of imagining that Sarah got wind of the Akedah and dropped dead on the spot out of the shock of it, or instead of imagining, as the Midrash and Tanchuma does, that Abraham resorts to all kinds of stratagems to deceive her. You know, he says there’s no way that she’s ever going to agree to this Akedah exercise. I better pretend that I’m taking Yitzhak out to like an Outward Bound trip, that I’m taking him, like off to Cheder or so on, because otherwise if she hears about this, she’ll kill herself. I’m imagining that she heard about this and knowing that the initial news that she would give birth, that she would have a child, happened in Elonay Mamre, which is just a few paces away from Kiriat Arba, she went back to the place of that original prophecy, that original visitation from the three angels and waited for them to come again, because she couldn’t imagine theologically that this God who had directed their lives and brought her this beneficence, this great, like embodied laughter known as Yitzhak, that would ever ask for that, for that joy to be destroyed just for the sake of some kind of test. And that she would wait for these angels to show. She would laugh when, you know, in gratitude when they showed up. And then she would say, please do me a favor, go one of you to Har Moriah and tell him whatever you need to tell him to get him to feel that he’s still okay even if he doesn’t do this thing. In other words, that’s why we have one malach (angel). We have two. Then it repeated, stop, stop him from his sense, his conviction that unless he does this thing, he’s fallen short. And once she does that, once she knows that Yitzhak is safe and that he’s going to survive, given how old she is, she is able to meet, you know, to meet her end. And that’s why she lives in Kiryat Arba, because she’s returning to that original scene. In my Torah.com article, I talk about how Avram is perennially restless. He goes from place to place to place to place to place. And that most of the time we see Sara just being taken with, as if a passive agent. And I wanted to suggest that there has to be something more than that passivity to justify her being such a linchpin in the history of this first stage of our founding family.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:05]:
You know, it’s interesting, one of the commentaries you bring told Toldot Yitzchak actually asked two questions. The first question is why they’re not living together. But the second question is, and this kind of relates to the book that you wrote, and we’ll get to in a second. Why did Abraham not do any long term planning? Why didn’t he buy a plot? Asks the Toldot Yitzchak. And what he answers is that Sarah knew that she had to be buried in Canaan. And when she felt that she was losing her health, she went there. But I think that’s another way of saying that Sarah determined where the Ma’arat HaMachpelah (Cave of the Patriarchs) was. Sarah determined that they were not only going to be patriarchs, they were going to be matriarchs. And in a sense, it was Sarah who determined that this was going to be the anchor of the Jewish people, that in this place, she was coming back to that place where the three angels came she was waiting for angels that never came to tell her about the Akedah. But in a sense, it wasn’t a foreseen conclusion that we were going to have three Avot and Arba Imahot, that we were going to have strong Matriarchs. And here she really determined the architecture and the geography of the Jewish people. And that’s how profound she was, both in life and in death. I mean, I just wonder. You say that, you know, she determines it. You know, Wendy, from the fact that God changes her name, also that she’s a player, that she’s part of the covenant. You know, it would have been very easy for God to change Abraham’s name, and Sarah would have remained Sarai. And the covenant is through Abraham, it’s through Isaac and through Jacob. And the wives are the wives. But the Torah from the very beginning goes out of its way to say that Sarah’s part of the covenant. I wonder how that plays out in the Chayei Sara story.

Wendy Zierler [00:18:12]:
Well, I’ll tell you how I think it plays out. I think it’s extremely important to note that Sarah has her name changed because she’s the only matriarch that we have who experiences a name change. And the next person to experience a name change is Yaakov, who goes from Yaakov to Yisrael. And I make an argument in my article and elsewhere that in effect, what that means is that Yaakov is named after Sarah because it says Kisarita em im Elohim va Adam (I struggled with God and Man). That word Sarita, is an evocation of Sarah. Right? So Yisrael has that root. And so we’re seeing in that naming that, you know, he becomes the eponymous hero of the whole of Genesis in being Yisrael. For us, that is bringing Sarah back into the center of the action. And that her struggles, whatever it is that she went through, in having to assert her position, both vis a vis Hagar, but also with Avraham, that that is something that gets echoed and developed in the personality of Yaakov turned Yisrael.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:29]:
I love that. I mean, last week we read into her laughter. Exactly that. Arguing, struggling with God, wrestling with God that you just brought out, that was a very strong laugh. But I want to segue now into your book, which I read cover to cover in the last 24 hours. I absolutely love. You might not know this, but on Madlik, we love to go back to the Yahadut Yisraelite, the Israeli Judaism, in the kibbutzim and we look at kibbutzim, haggadot, and we just love going back because they look at Judaism totally differently. You have done the same thing with Hebrew poetry. And this book is so many things. One of it, as I alluded to before it occurred, because you lost your parents, your father tragically, then your mother, then your mother in law. You were in multiple years of mourning and teaching this Hebrew poetry was what kind of enabled you to move from the different moments and tragedies that you were. But what I’d like to do is to now go into that poetry. And what I’ve done, with your permission, is pick three poems. I don’t know whether we’ll have a chance to get to all three of them, but the first one deals with Al Shelosha Dvarim (On Three Things), and it is written by Leah Goldberg. And it’s a kind of rumination on three things. The world stands al haTorah v’al’ha’avoda v’al gemilot Hasidim. But it puts a new twist on it. Give us a sense of what Leah Golderg is doing in this poem. Teach it like you would on a Tuesday morning.

Wendy Zierler [00:21:20]:
Oh, I probably need a little bit more time, but I’ll say it over as quickly as I can. So what we know from Pirkei Avot is that there were two versions of the three cardinal things that the world stands on. There’s the Mishnah that comes in the second Mishnah. In the first parak of Pirkei Avot, which comes in the name of Simon Hazadik, one of the last elders of the Knesset, hagedola, he says the world stands on Torah avudah u’gemilut hasadim (Torah, Service and Good Deeds). Before that, that first chapter of Pirkei Avot ends. We’ve got another rendition of that in the 18th Mishnah, where Shimon Ben Gamliel rewrites it and says that the world stands on Din Emet and Shalom (Justice, Truth and Peace). Between the time of Shimon Ha Tzadik and Shimon Ben Ganliel, the Temple had been destroyed. The possibility of a kind of more parochial or particularistic list of cardinal threes was no longer possible. And so the list had to become more universalistic. And what Leah Goldberg is registering in writing her poem in 1949 as part of a series of children’s poems is the need in 1949 to recognize the epoch making event of the establishment of the State of Israel and the need to establish a new set of three. And that in every major Edan, every major epoch, we’re going to have to go through this exercise. And the rabbis have taught us it’s a traditional thing to negotiate a new list. Now, what Leah Goldberg does in the poem, it’s called Al Shalosha Devarim, and she has three different versions of workers of a sort, who assert their three important things. I will note that all of their things are work. So, like, if we were to sing the song, it would be “al HaOvoadah, Al HaAvodah, AlHaovodah” because that’s what mattered in the beginning of the state of Israel, to assert productive labor. But Leah Goldberg, as a person who understood the legacy of the spirit, first of all, she includes the artist among her workers. She has a fisherman, a farmer, and an artist. So you need the sea, the land, and also the mind, the heart, the spirit. And then she goes to the fourth principle. So she busts up the rule of three, which we can say is, you know, shalosh Avot, she says, arba imahot. She gives us the human being, the Adam, and we know from Breshit Aleph (Genesis 1) that the Adam is created. So the human being ha Adam is an egalitarian construction, and that Ha’Adam is not limited by three things, nor is that Adam limited to one sphere of activity. The Adam is interconnected and makes allusions and references to what matters to the farmer and what matters to the fisherman and what matters to the artist, and also alludes to other matters of the spirit and Jewish culture, hagim and Hulin, holidays and weekdays. That human being is Ha’ poeah Eaynav (opens the eyes), which makes us think of the brachot in the Birkota HaShahar. Now, what of course she’s noting, and we can’t ignore it, is she’s offering a secular list that is nevertheless informed and inspired by Judaism, by Jewish culture.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:58]:
And what I love, and you say this later in the book, is, as you correctly say, man was created male and female, androgynous, possibly. She almost transcends gender by being a woman. She not only can take us to look at things as a woman, but can also say, just get rid of the whole gender thing. Look at the “rainbow palette”, this is how you translate, opens it up. And I think what I think about when I think of On Three is a tripod. And there’s nothing sturdier and more set than a tripod. And we’re just giving you a taste, dear listener, of Madlik, of what’s in this book. Because every one of these poems is a gem. I read it in Kindle. And in the subnotes, there’s a hyperlink to songs where Arik Einstein is singing a poem. It just makes you so proud of our culture that we have pop singers singing poetry. But the next thing you go to is Yehuda Amichai. And he talks about men, women and children. And he talks about this tripod and how he wants to be a part of this tripod. He’s almost jealous that he’s not included with. On the one hand, he goes Jews, Christians and Muslims. But he also talks about blood, sweat and tears. He talks about. Does he say; Hersh Shotah v’Katan ( a deaf person a dumb person and a minor). He says widows, orphans and bereaved parents. There are so many threesomes there that are packed that he almost wants to be a part of this rowdy crew. But it’s kind of. There’s a tension there because he’s acknowledging that some of them are at the bottom of the pile.

Wendy Zierler [00:26:42]:
Yeah. This is a poem written from the point of view of someone who feels like such a super outsider. If only he could have belonged to some trio. And we think about triangles, this stability of the triangle. It’s the geometric metric form that has the least number of lines, yet still closed. Right. It’s that stable form. And he wishes that he could be part of some sort of stable form, even if it would mean being part of that category of the disenfranchised or the bereaved, those who actually are not considered halachically responsible or to be disabled in some manner, just to be part of something. And yet I note in my analysis of this poem that he keeps on saying ani rotze l’hiot, you know, I want to belong to something. And when you say “I” so many times, then you’re asserting that individuality, the very same idiosyncratic outsider, you know, not quite fitting into, like the square peg in a round hole sensibility that gets him into this situation to begin with, where he doesn’t feel like he belongs to anything. And, you know, and he makes clear what he’s looking for in this three is something permanent. In the same way that Al shelosha dvarim haolam omed is a sense of permanence. I note in my book that I read this as an explicit allusion to Leah Goldberg, who of course is explicitly alluding to the sages, because we know that Leah Goldberg was a major mentor for Yehudah Amichai, which is an extraordinary historical fact, because until then we do not have an example of a single woman poet who was a mentor or a model for an important male writer. It just didn’t exist in the Hebrew language.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:34]:
That’s fascinating.

Wendy Zierler [00:28:36]:
Well, look, my whole career has been dedicated to exploring this one big question, which is what happens when women enter into a Hebrew literary tradition that’s been going on since the Bible, where women have been absent since the Bible, with the exception of a few, a handful of poems, there is nothing, there is no book, full book written in the Hebrew language by a woman since the closing of the biblical canon. It isn’t until the 19th century, the end, the very end of the 19th century, that women enter into the Hebrew literary tradition. And so it has to be different if after all this time, women finally can actually represent their own lives and represent their own experiences. And this idea of a woman being the dedication page is an earth shattering, like a seismic shift. I wrote a book about the first Hebrew woman, short story writer Chava Shapiro, and she dedicated her book in 1908 to her mother, Mukdash l”imi. It’s the first time that we have a dedication by a woman to a woman of that sort. And so these are just among the many, many incredible historical shifts that we’ve been experiencing over the past century.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:55]:
I love the way you weave Yehuda Amichai and the woman that he was inspired by in that narrative. And then the book itself weaves the narrative of those two, three years you went through during Covid together with your congregation every Tuesday morning reading of these poems and making it kind of talk to our situation, your situation. I just love that what your book shows, number one. And I totally recommend it if you’re interested in Hebrew poetry. The book is just full of both the Hebrew and the English with the links to the song sung by pop stars in Israel. And then there’s the backstory. One of the earliest women who actually was writing poetry was a niece of Shmuel David Lezzatto. The Shadowlah commentary that we love that comes through weaving the stories behind it. We’re not going to get a chance to get to the third poem, but I think that’s totally in line with where we need to go from here. This is the first chapter, not the last chapter in looking at these new voices and the way that these poems who are writing in Hebrew. And I’ll finish with this. It’s the language itself that has within it the ability to carry thoughts that started 2,000 years ago and went through commentaries and through seder tables and through family histories and land here with all that baggage and all that nuance and give us totally new sense of what it is our tradition is and makes it sure that it’s going to stay alive and have the dynamism that it had at the very beginning. It’s a wonderful contribution. I hope you’ll come back.

Wendy Zierler [00:31:51]:
WENDY well, I’ll just say that part of my goal, my whole career has been to argue that modern Jewish literature can serve as an important layer of commentary on our traditional sources, that just because it doesn’t come delivered to us in that conventional form of the hardback burgundy or navy cover with the gold lettering and the marbleized leaf, that it doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of unfolding canon and a very important layer of parshanut. And in the same way that the rabbis often felt the need to fill in gaps and they used their creativity and their subjectivity to try to bridge the gap between their time and the time of the Tanakh, they taught us, they teach us how we can, through creative interpretation and through creativity, do that in our own day to day.

Adam Mintz [00:32:43]:
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Wendy .

Wendy Zierler [00:32:46]:
Thank you so much for inviting me.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:48]:
So run out and get Going out with Knots My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry by Wendy Zierla. And truly, I hope we’ll have you back again. But thank you so much for joining us. Shabbat Shalom to everyone and enjoy Chayei Sarah thank you.