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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 in the US we read Paushat Nasso, and we’ll split hairs with Michael Boryde. But this is not an episode about hair. It’s an episode about whether Judaism is governed by text alone or by the Jewish people who live them. So, Rabbi Broyde, before I introduce you, I have to say that my son went to Emory and he was an undergraduate, but he took an elective in one of your courses, and at the end of the course, you invited him, along with the whole class, to your home. So this is Hakarat Hatov. We are inviting you into our home here at Madlik. We are absolutely delighted to have you. I covered this subject maybe four years ago, and you reached out to me, and now you’ve published a whole book. So welcome to Madlik.

Michael Boyd [00:02:59]:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:01]:
So let me tell our audience a little bit about you. You are a professor of law at Emory University School of Law and the Berman Projects Director of its center for Study of Law and Religion. You were a Senior Global Scholar for the United States Fulbright Scholars Program at Hebrew U and a Visiting professor at Stanford University of Law and have visited at many other law schools. You teach advanced Jewish law at Columbia University, my alma mater, but I didn’t go to the School of Law and is a professor of the TAM Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory. You held a variety of rabbinic positions in the past, from the Rabbi of the Young Israel Congregation in Atlanta to Director of the Bet Din of America as well as Rosh Kollel of the Atlanta Torah Mitzion Kollel. But of all these things, for some reason this subject has intrigued you for 30 years and so I’d love for you to share with us what intrigues you about women’s head covering that has led you to write multiple monographs and now finally a 500 page book.

Michael Boyd [00:04:11]:
And it’s an excellent question. The uniting characteristic of all the things I’ve written about in halacha are about how halacha confronts modernity. Whether it’s my article on celebrating Thanksgiving and Halacha or the use of electricity in halacha or so much more, I’m profoundly interested and how halacha has adapted to life in America. And hair covering is an excellent example of this because modest non Jewish women historically didn’t cover their hair. When we came to America a century and a half ago, you were hard pressed to find a religious woman who covered her hair and an evolution has occurred as it has occurred in many other areas of Halacha as secular America evolves. How the hallafic community responds to that evolution intrigues me very much. So I view hair covering as no different than any of the many other areas. I answer lots of questions of halacha in our little universe, and people ask about areas ofhalacha where the reality in America doesn’t correspond to the historical reality. I don’t get a lot of questions about when Shabbos begins in America because Shabbos begins in America, the same test that it began in Europe. But I get a lot of questions about electricity and modesty and celebrating secular holidays and so many other modern American pop[ular culture].

Adam Mintz [00:06:16]:
So Michael, this is obviously fascinating. Can you just explain for our listeners what it means? Hair covering for women? I think most of our community, if they think of women covering their hair, they think that they go into shul and either they put on a hat or they put on a doily. What are you referring to when you

Michael Boyd [00:06:35]:
say hair cover? That’s an excellent question. And to some extent the answer is what I mean is the practice of women to cover their hair in some way and in some form when they go outside. Fifty years ago, this was commonly a wig, which we’ll call the shaitul in Israel, it’s commonly a tichel or a hat or a wrap, and there are many more varieties of it. But I’m not talking here about covering one’s hair only in shul. I’m talking about covering one’s hair all the time when one is outside. That’s a very good point.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:22]:
And I would guess that most of our listeners have seen Orthodox women who have their hair covered, whether with a wig, with a hat on, the wig, with a kerchief, variations. And in your book, you talk a little bit about how it can identify you, both in terms of what tribe you come from, but also whether you’re married or not married. So it has a sense of symbolism. But I think that most of us would assume that, and I’ll use the word that most people use, that is authentic Judaism. And somehow our parents or grandparents decided to shed their hair covering. And there’s a division now between either modern Orthodox or Conservative Reform, typical Jews. And one of the things that you argue is that, in fact, over the last 2, 3, 400 years, recent history, the truth is that the norm was that most women, as Orthodox and observant as they might have been, did not cover their hair. And one of the intriguing things that you reference is something called the Limudei Zechut, this kind of making an argument to stand up for our forebears, to make sure that we’re not under an illusion, that those of us who can remember our grandmother or great grandmother who didn’t cover their hair, that somehow they were doing something wrong, that there is a tradition in Judaism to kind of argue for the fidelity of a Jewish community that doesn’t seem to adhere to the Halachah. And I just founded that fascinating. You quoted Moshe Feinstein, you quoted the Shulchan Aruch, that basically there is a tradition of defending communities whose observance is different than ours, and maybe from some perspective, less observant than ours. Talk about that for a second, because that was novel to me.

Michael Boyd [00:09:38]:
I think that what Rabbi Feinstein means, and it’s not unique to him, is that when I encounter our community that generally keeps Halakhah, they keep Shabbat and they keep kosher, and you see an odd practice that’s inconsistent with what you think the text requires, you should seek to defend that odd practice. We’re not talking about defending the practice of a community that’s wholeheartedly unobservant. We’re talking about defending the practices of a community that is wholeheartedly observant. And yet they’re not doing this. And you should seek to work very hard to defend the practices of a community that is, on the whole, observant, even if they’re not doing this. I think that that’s standard rabbinic care. Rabbis defend the practices of generally observant communities that don’t seem to be observant in this specific detail or that specific detail. And I very much believe in doing that. I grew up in a community that’s Shomer Shabbos and keeps Kosher and married women didn’t cover their hair. But that not covering the hair was not connected to a general laxity of observers. As I observed to somebody else in a different context. Our grandparents struggled mightily to keep Shabbat when keeping Shabbat was hard. If they didn’t cover their hair, it’s because they didn’t think they had to, not because it was too much. Keeping Shabbat was too much, and they did it anyway. Had you told them that halakha requires hair covering, they would have covered their hair. They didn’t think halakha requires it. That’s my general understanding of what we’re talking about. Now, Michael.

Adam Mintz [00:11:56]:
this is fascinating. So let’s go back to Rabbi Feinstein. The idea that you need to defend the practices to justify the practices of a basically observant community, even situations where they may not be doing what your interpretation of the Halakha requires. What’s the halachic rationale for justifying behavior that’s not halakhic?

Michael Boyd [00:12:25]:
So I think that Rabbi Feinstein is in your core intellectual aporalists, which is he understands that many areas of halacha are open to more than one reasonable explanation. And even though he has an opinion on which of these explanations is correct, he recognizes that other explanations are possible and other hallafic authorities will adopt other explanations. And when I encounter a community that’s basically observant, I need to search mightlily to find an explanation for why they’re doing it. I think that that’s right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:11]:
I love his language, though. He says one must find a reason why they conducted themselves this way. It’s almost a variation on what we call dan l’kav zechut. It almost sounds like a Hasidic story or Rav Kook when he saw a car driving by on Shabbat and said mazel tov, because they must be going to the hospital to give birth to another Yiddisher kint. I love the fact that it almost empowers us and obligates us to find the beauty of the Jewish people. And I know there is a halachic issue here, but you have to agree there is a nuance that it’s worth our while to go that extra mile to determine and to prove that previous generations, or maybe parallel communities are actually beautiful Jews. We’re not going to dwell on this too much, but I do think that for 30 years, in one of your statements, you said you’ve done this. And that has been one of the compelling reasons. And that’s fascinating to me.

Michael Boyd [00:14:23]:
I think that Rabbi Feinstein is no rabbi Kook. He’s only prepared to do this for communities that are essentially observant and that this is a very important distinction. Rabbi Feinstein doesn’t say this for everybody. He thinks that when you encounter an Orthodox community, that’s what you should get.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:49]:
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Michael Boyd [00:19:39]:
No, Jewish law is governed by the Talmud. It’s not governed by Rashi. And the Talmud makes it clear that the verses here deal with head covering. And however, whatever is going on in Rashi is an excellent question, but it’s essentially a very technical question in Rashi. By the way, your translation of Rashi is not quite correct because Rashi makes no mention of married women. Rashi said, from here we see that women Cover their hair. Somebody in your translation inserted married in the text.

Adam Mintz [00:20:21]:
Take it up with Sefaria!

Michael Boyd [00:20:23]:
Okay. And they presumably took it from somebody else. It’s not an. It’s not a translation. It’s an editorialization. Rashi doesn’t say it in Hebrew. Rashi says Mikan. Here it’s to Jewish women that uncovered hair is a disgrace or a degradation for them. Well, whatever Rashi means, Rashi is channeling the Gemara in Ketrubos. And the Gemara Ketuboss clearly understands that what we’re dealing with here is head covering rather than head disheveling. Had Rashi gone in a different direction, it would have been very hard to harmonize Rashi with the Gemara.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:15]:
So let’s go to that Talmud in Ketubot, because the Talmud in Ketubot raises another, I would say binary that I had never really heard of. And that is, it’s talking about on what basis can a man divorce his wife? And it says there are certain things where the wife violates precepts of Moses: “Dat Moshe”. And there are other characterizations where a wife violates precepts of. And here the translation, I don’t think you will agree with either of Jewish women. I think the Hebrew says “Dat Yehudit”. But in any case, it’s a binary, and you wrote a whole monograph on this. Between the laws of Moses, which you say are objective, they’re from the Torah, and then there’s dat Yehudit. And this is really the basis of your whole argument. They are more, I would say, not subjective so much as talui al hazman v’al Hamakom. They are dependent on circumstance. And they are exactly what Rashi was talking about before, which is they are dependent on the normative activity of the Jewish community. Could you explain and unpack a little bit this binary between Dat Moshe and Dat Yisrael and the fact when you marry somebody, you say kedat Moshe v’Yisrael, you’re actually referring to these two different concepts.

Michael Boyd [00:23:02]:
I’m not 100% sure that the marriage ritual refers to them, but it doesn’t matter one way or another. Dat Moshe is a reference to immutable law, whether it’s Torah law or rabbinic law. It’s a reference to law that doesn’t evolve based on customary norms. And Dat Moshe is a reference to law that evolves along customary norms. And Dat Moshe doesn’t essentially change, and Dat Yehudit does essentially change. And thus the heart of the book is pointing out the following idea. Rambam in his code, calls the rules of Hair covering and modesty Dat Moshe. But when the Shulchan Arach Yoseph Karo writes his code, he moves these things from Da Moshe to Dat Yehudit, referencing to me the following basic idea. All matters of modesty are customary and driven by the norms of the world around us and not driven by anything else.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:25]:
I think when I read that original Rashi and he said, mikan, from here we learn. It could have been. We learn, but it also could have been Rashi putting on his sociologist, his anthropologist hat, and say, this is where most of the people in the community take the fact that women are supposed to cover. In a sense, rabbis become anthropologists. They become descriptors of the practice of the community. And I want to use that as a segue into a fascinating responsa that you bring. It’s the response of Ben Ish Chai. I alluded to it in the introduction. He was a Baghdadi Jew. And he again describes the women of his day. And he describes. It’s a. I think, give us the background. It’s a fascinating story of a man torn between his parents and his wife. It’s an insight into a period in Jewish history where maybe a Baghdadi Jew was being influenced by Europeans and European practice. And then he goes ahead and gives the halakhic ramifications. So tell us about this fascinating response of the Ben Ish Chai.

Michael Boyd [00:25:49]:
The Ben Ish Chai was writing a book for Jewish women in his community, and he’s acutely aware of the fact that Western women in Europe do not cover their hair. And yet the women in his community are. And he lays out what I think is the correct norm, which is we live in an Arab society where the Arabs cover their hair and you have to dress in social norms of the community around you. And the European Jewish women live in a Christian society where the women don’t cover their hair and they don’t have to cover their hair. And I think that the Benish Chai is the single greatest halachic authority who adopts the full blown thesis of subjectivity. Now, it’s easy for him to do this because he’s explaining to the women why in a place where they don’t live, they conduct themselves differently. But it’s a very important thesis. It’s the thesis of social subjectivity. And the Ben Ish Chai has it absolutely correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:07]:
I love the fact, again, that he quotes the women themselves. He says, the women make this argument. These are their words which they answer for this custom. And we do not have an answer to push them away. I find that Amazing. But if you could also touch upon the censorship that you have discovered or uncovered with regard to this, because those who disagreed with it found it so unnerving.

Michael Boyd [00:27:36]:
I didn’t discover it and I didn’t uncover it. Jacob Zephone pointed it out to me and I incorporated it in the book just as a notation. I’m not really interested in that topic. This is a fine topic for somebody like Dr. Mark Shapiro, but the later generations are always uncomfortable with comments of previous generations. And this is an example of that. I’ve not investigated too much who censored and why, but it’s a common thing that when you find venerated people saying things that you think are ridiculous, you don’t share them so quickly.

Adam Mintz [00:28:18]:
Now, first of all, the whole thing is fantastic. My question is, do you think the Beni Shai, being a Baghdadi rabbi, that he was more inclined to appreciate cultural norms while somebody living in Eastern Europe might have been less inclined?

Michael Boyd [00:28:40]:
That’s an excellent question. I’m not 100% sure. Baghdad in the life of the Ben Ish Chai was a transition point. We close our eyes and we think that Ben Ish Chai lived in Aladdin, but he was living in a Baghdad that transitioned from a pure Islamic society to a French British society. And it was undergoing an enormous cultural revolution while he is there. And I think he is trying to manage the transition from being a purely Islamic society to being a Western society. Just like Rabbi Mastass the older, who was the Chief Rabbi of Morocco as the French slowly take over. Is managing a similar transition. Transition moments cause you to really examine your principles.

Adam Mintz [00:29:39]:
That’s fascinating, Geoffrey Sharon in Sotheby’s, she sold the tefillin of the Ben Ish Chai. So you see, Michael, that it was a transition period to the west, but they still had very much of the magic symbolism of the East. That’s also reflective of all of this.

Michael Boyd [00:29:58]:
Absolutely. And the Baghdadian community remains extremely traditional all the way until the end. No doubt. No doubt.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:11]:
Picking up a little bit on where Adam was going, you bring up the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, the great Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. And those of us who know Chabad know that in Chabad, almost universally, not only are the wives of the Chabad rabbis typically very pretty, God bless them, but they wear Sheitals and they wear fake hair coverings that look like really great hair. And OvadiaYosef feels very strongly, especially for Sephardim, who are obviously his Kehillah, that they not use hair to cover hair. And in his explanation, he does say in particular to Sephardim, who had always conducted themselves this way in times of the past. And again, I think this triggered in me this sense that we are involved here with culture wars, with people identifying themselves, whether of their marital status or from which community they come from. And from that perspective, the sociology that you identify lies behind halacha, I guess, also shows itself. Do you feel there’s any weight there that Ovadia Yosef felt so strongly about this in terms of Sephardic women giving up what made them proud? Sephardic women doing something different than the [Bagdadi] Ben Ish Chai that we just talked about? He wants them to retain their identity. And covering the hair is one way that he feels very strongly about.

Michael Boyd [00:32:05]:
Well, I want to reflect for a minute how unusual the wig covering is. We don’t permit things that should be covered to be covered by something that looks like it. We don’t permit people who need to cover their chest to cover their chest with pictures of their chest, and we don’t permit people who need to cover their legs to cover their legs with pictures of their legs. The practice of covering hair with a wig is extraordinarily unusual, and it itself reflects the de-eroticization of hair. If hair were genuinely erotic, we would not permit hair to be covered with hair. And the Ashkenazi factit of hair covering has this double unusualness. Single women don’t cover their hair, and married women cover their hair with an invisible covering, with a covering that looks like hair. The Sephardic community always had some doubts about both of these because the Rambam draws no distinction between single and married and certainly doesn’t permit a wig. And the Shulchan Arach Rabbi Caro in the 1500s notes that there are some places where single women don’t cover their hair without fully endorsing this. Yet Ashkenazim haven’t lived in a community where single women cover their hair in a very long time, and they haven’t lived in a community where married women didn’t cover their hair with a wig in a very long time. The weirdness of hair covering is embodied in both of these ideas. I’m not going to psychoanalyze Rabbi Yosef here. He’s telling you what I think is the simplest explanation of the halacha, which is if hair needs to be covered, it needs to be covered with something that doesn’t look like hair, just like if legs need to be covered, they need to be covered with something that don’t look like legs. And if buttocks need to be covered. We don’t cover them with pictures of buttocks and so on and so forth. Rabbi Yosef’s position is exceptionally intuitive. The Ashkenazi custom, very well established as it is, reflects an embarrassment with hair covering, which is we cover in a way that doesn’t let people know we’re covering.

Geoffrey Stern [00:34:57]:
We had a guest who said that the modern kippah in Israel might be a kippa shekufa, an invisible kippah. And what you just said reminded me of that in terms of a Sheitel is covering hair with hair is a hidden head covering.

Michael Boyd [00:35:13]:
I was just in Israel last week when an eminent Torah scholar remarked to me that the liberalities and modesty rules in our community in Israel comes from the fact that the community that we don’t like. This was a reference to the Arab community in Israel is certainly more modest than us. And we see in Israel, he said, that modesty is not connected to virtue. You can say many bad things about Israel’s Arab neighbor, but you probably can’t say that they’re immodest. And the community in Israel hopes that the winner isn’t the most modest because that’s not us. In America, orthodoxy perceives itself as aligned with more modest community, and that itself creates an interesting social tension between Israel and America.

Geoffrey Stern [00:36:25]:
Okay, Michael,

Michael Boyd [00:36:28]:
thank you very much.

Geoffrey Stern [00:36:29]:
Amazing. It was great having you. And maybe we’ll have you back on Thanksgiving to share with us your insight into that hag.

Adam Mintz [00:36:40]:
Very good.

Michael Boyd [00:36:41]:
Thank you very much.

Adam Mintz [00:36:42]:
Thank you, Rabbi Professor Michael Broyd. Shabbat shalom, everybody. Thank you, Geoffrey. An amazing week as always. We look forward to seeing everybody next week.

Geoffrey Stern [00:36:53]:
See you all next week.

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 start the fourth book of the Torah, Parashat Bamidbar. We will suggest that this is the book where the rubber hits the road and a radical new political model is launched. So join us for We The Tribes. So before we started, I asked you if you had ever heard of this Daniel Elazar. I had not. And I’ve kind of skimmed through, done a fast read through two of his books. He, we will see, is a world renowned scholar in federalism and obviously also a very knowledgeable Jew. Fascinating take this week, I think, on Bamidbar Are you strapped in and ready?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:24]:
This is amazing. Yeah, he’s a Jewish political theorist, which I think, you know, there aren’t that many of which is really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:31]:
Okay, so here we go. We are in Numbers 1, 1-4. On the first day of the second month in the second year after the exodus from the land of Egypt, God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai in the tent of meeting, saying, take up the head count, take a census of the entire community. And it uses the word community or assembly or edah, which means like the ruling council or the children of Israel by their clans, by their father’s houses, according to the number of names every male per capita, which really means “kup”. It means a head count. And you and Aaron shall record them by their groups from the age of 20 years up. All those in Israel who are able to bear arms associated with you shall be a representative from every tribe, each one the head of his ancestral house. So, Rabbi, the first thing that struck me is because I’m still a little bit in Portugal, I looked at Abarbanel, and his first question was, he goes, you know, I don’t quite get this, as if this is at Sinai. Why are they at the tent of meeting? I didn’t get to the part where he gives the answer, but I think what we’re going to see is this is almost the setting for a new constitution. And it’s not so important where, when, and how. They are setting up something directly connected to the Sinai revolution. And it is normative. So there’s a tent of meeting. And then the other thing that struck me was all of the different words used for describing who we’re talking about. It says, So edat, as I said from Everett Fox, talks in terms of edah can mean a ruling council or the entire people. Then it says for their families, for the heads of each group. And then it talks about ish, ish, lemate, ish, rosh, levet, avotav, hu, a representative from every tribe, each one the head of his ancestral house. Maybe I’ve been reading too much about gerrymandering and who represents who and where the lines have divided. But it seemed to me, Rabbi, looking at it fresh through fresh eyes, this year, we’re really talking and deciding who has a voice, the different superstructure going down from individual all the way up to the head of the representative, so to speak, of each tribe. It just struck me the way it parsed it.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:05:32]:
I think that’s right. Let me go back to your first question. So it says in the second year after the exodus from the land of Egypt, God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai in the Tent of Meeting. So what’s the significance of the Tent of meeting? So the Book of Numbers is the book of the journey of the Jews. You know, it’s an interesting thing. The book of Exodus talks about the journey. They leave Egypt, they go to Sinai, and they start traveling. The book of Leviticus takes off. It’s like a big bracket. Cause it tells you all about the tabernacle and the sacrifices. But there’s no narrative, there’s no story, there’s no journey. And the journey continues here in the Book of Numbers, chapter one, I think, in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting. That’s how that, you know, that was showed, they were journeying. They weren’t at Mount Sinai anymore. They weren’t actually in the tabernacle. It was the tent of meeting, which seemed to kind of travel with them. So I think that an important point. And for sure, there’s a big emphasis here on levels of authority, on how the people are divided. You know, that’s an important thing today when we take a census. The census takers, I don’t know who they are exactly, but they’re not the governors, they’re not the mayors. Right. You just have people who are working for the department of the census or whatever. You have it. But there. But here in the Torah, they want to tell you that the people in charge of the census are the governors and the mayors. It elevates the importance of the census. So it’s interesting to compare their census to our census. It’s also will be important to, you know, that we’ll get to it in his work what the purpose of a census is. Right. Like you said, you know, in the United States now we have all these court cases about, you know, how you divide the districts, which is related to the census. Right. You know, every state has a number of representatives depending on their population and how they divide the state. So obviously that’s not what the Torah does. And that’s also interesting to compare one with the other.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:37]:
I love it all. I love it all. What follows after what we just read is then it goes tribe by tribe, nasi, the leader by leader, and it counts everything. And it’s at this point that this Daniel Elazar kind of also tries to put the Book of Numbers into context. He says, going back to the book of Genesis, a principal purpose of the Jacob and Joseph stories is to explain the foundation of the twelve tribes of Israel. While those twelve sons of Jacob may have been the ancestors, real or eponymous, of the original 12 tribes of Israel, in fact, history indicates that while the number remained the same, the identities of the 12 tribes shifted. The beginnings of the shift are described in Bereshit. In the process, we have the final dimension of covenants developed in Bereshit, namely the establishment of the basis for a covenantal polity, a tribal federation. So again, you can go look at B’reishi, you can look at the whole story of Exodus, and you can say it’s doing many different things. There are times where I’ve looked at it and it talks about sibling rivalry, and you can go chapter by chapter by chapter, seeing how that all develops. You can go through Bereshit and say it all has to do with who’s the chosen. Is it the first son or the second son, what this guy is doing? And we’ll see when we get to his bio that he is a federalist, meaning to say that just as with the states, the 13 states, there are separate, smaller entities and then there’s an overall government. He’s looking at everything that lies before this book of Numbers as preparation for what happens the second. We read the verses we started with today. And so he looks back at all those narrative stories about the patriarchs and the matriarchs, and he’s saying they’re all there to establish this confederacy of tribes. It’s going to change the way we look at everything before and possibly everything after. And I just love that because they’re all right of course, there are just different lenses that we can look through.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:09:54]:
Amazing. Okay, let’s go for it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:57]:
So he says, in keeping with the organic character of the 12 tribe kinship group, before Sinai, the tribes were governed by customary law. Through the Sinai covenant, God changes the moral basis of the Israelites obligations and rights as much as he changes their content. So what he’s arguing, and he doesn’t say it as a commentary on our verses, but the fact that it mentions Sinai is at Sinai, when God already makes a covenant with this disparate group of people. Six, we always thought there were 600,000 Jews. We’re going to see in a second that there were 12 tribes camped around with flags. But he was establishing a new basis for the social contract. And that I think becomes fascinating when you think back to the verses that we started reading. So for instance, in Numbers 2 2, the next chapter of our parsha, it says, the Israelites shall canmp each household with its standard under the banners of their ancestral house. They shall camp around the tent of meeting at a distance, camped at the front or east side. The standard of the division of Judah, troop by troop, chieftain of the Judahites, Nachshon ben aminadav. So I had to drop a celebrity name. But the point is that what he’s doing is he’s changing our vision of what happened at Sinai. And all of a sudden, now we don’t see 600,000 individuals. We see 12 tribes camped around sticking their flag, so to speak, in the ground. And if it reminds us of Washington, trying to bring together these 13 states because there were things that had to be done, I don’t think it’s that far fetched.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:42]:
I think that’s great. Now, of course, you have to remember that in this week’s Torah portion, it tells us that the census of the Jews, which is really the census of the men who are over 20 years old, was 603,550, which means that there were between 2 and 3 million people. So part of it, Geoffrey, has to do with communication. That is, how did they communicate? Moses spoke. You know, you get the impression when you read the Torah that Moses spoke and everybody heard. Right. There was a microphone and everybody heard. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. There had to be some kind of system. And would you describe the way they camped? Is part of the system of protection? Correct, but it’s also of communication. That’s the way they got the word out.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:27]:
I love that. And absolutely. And it’s all because we’re visualizing it slightly differently. If we go to Rashi Legilgalotam. by their polls, he says by means of shekels, and then he refers back to Exodus 38. So this isn’t the first time that we’ve come across this. But again, we have two variations on the story. One is where they count by their head count, and the other is where they do it by shekels. Rashi is trying to combine the two. Ibn Ezra, he says, as I have already explained, the meaning of gilgalatam, their poles, the word gulgulatam their poles literally means their skulls. Galgal, it’s round and so called because it is round. He sees this as different. But what I’m trying to say, and I think even Eleazar kind of referenced it, we have these traditions of 12. Sometimes the names will change. We have these traditions of polling. Sometimes it’s referred to by skulls, sometimes it’s by shekels. The details are not important. These are combining of different traditions. But the resulting vision, that is what is ultimately important and what we are going to look at. The Emek Devar says as follows, the tribal leaders were already agreed upon by each tribe as worthy to be the head. Here in our Parsha, God agreed with their selection and appointed them with his word. And this is what the verse means. Each man shall be the head of his father’s house. The man who is already the head will be appointed to take charge of the counting by God’s command. So, Rabbi, there’s already been a primary. There have already been county elections. As you were saying before, there is already. The polling stations have been set up. There are so many levels, what you call communication. It’s necessary for communication. But I love the way the Emek Davar says, we’ve already assumed all of this political superstructure. And we’ve gotten to the point where the 12 Nassiim, the 12 princes of each tribe, are presented before Moses, before God, and approved.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:14:46]:
Fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:47]:
Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit about how the number 12 is achieved. So there are numerous times where the 12 is achieved. In our particular Parasha, it does something interesting. It says, from the sons of Joseph, in verse 1: 10, there was Ephraim the Elishama, son of Ammihud, and Manasseh Gamaliel son of Pedisur. So how do you get to 12? If Joseph is divided into two, you leave out Levi. So in our particular rendering of the 12 tribes, we don’t have Levi. And of course, if you say, why not? You could make the argument because since we’re looking at military age and Levi did not serve in the military, that’s why they were left out.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:15:40]:
And they didn’t have land. They didn’t have. They didn’t have a portion in the land because they lived in houses. They lived in special cities because they had a rotation to work in Jerusalem. Slow.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:53]:
Absolutely. But the point is that while we all agree that there are 12 tribes, if we look at the different lists in the Torah, depending on the needs and the context, those numbers change. So in our parsha, it says, like we just said, the Levites, however, were not recorded among them because, as Moses had spoken, do not on any account enroll the tribe of Levi or take a census of them with the Israelites. And so therefore, we use Joseph, we split him, and we take his sons, Jacob’s grandsons. If we go to Exodus, it talks about, these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob there to get the number 12. We obviously include Joseph and Levi, and that’s how we get to 12. There are renderings in the book of Judges where they leave out different tribes. Judas, Shimon, and Labor, Levi are left out. The point that these modern scholars are making is that it’s not always important who made up these tribes. What was important was that there was a confederacy of 12 tribes. We’re creating a structure. And I would even argue that, you know, there are those who say, who was the tribe of Levi? Why can they not bear arms? Is it because of what happened in Genesis when Shimon and Levi went and they did a massacre? Did they have a… violent tendency? The point is, are these tribes necessarily all the children of the same patriarch? It wasn’t important at this point. This was a revolutionary confederacy of 12 disparate tribes. And they were all confederated, based on a covenant and a belief system. And that’s why this scholar who strutted between the biblical world, he was a religious Jew and a scholar of Judaica and a political scientist. He sees this as being absolutely unique in the history of politics.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:18:07]:
I’ll just say we’re not so different. You talk about the United States, it’s 50 states. If I asked you to talk about the states, there’s no way you would mention all 50 states. You’d mention some states. We have 50 states like New York, California, Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, whatever. You would say the detail is not important. It’s the fact that you have a United States of America.. The detail wasn’t so important. The point was you had a federation of 12 tribes in Israel.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:38]:
Absolutely.

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Geoffrey Stern [00:19:48]:
So I I’ve hinted that I found the guy’s bio so interesting. I am going to run through it as if he was a guest. He unfortunately passed away in 1999. So this Daniel Elazar was a political scientist known his seminal studies of political culture of the US States. He was professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan University in Israel and Director of the center for the Study of Federalism and professor of Political Science at Temple University. He was the founder and President of the Jerusalem center for public affairs. In 1986, President Reagan appointed him a citizen member of the U.S. advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the major intergovernmental agency dealing with federalism. He was a appointed for a second term in 88 and a third in 91. He was the author and editor of more than 60 books. His books in the area of federalism Included the American Partnership, American Federalism, the American Mosaic. And this is I found fascinating. He was also the author of multi generational study of the development of civil community in Midwestern cities. This guy was not just a tangential professor of political science who had a slight interest federalism. He was absolutely absorbed by this federalism. And lucky for us, he also wrote books on the Torah. So he writes. And now he’s talking about our book, the fourth book of the Torah. Numbers in Hebrew Bamidbar continues the constitutional corpus and is understood in the Jewish tradition to be an indivisible part of the original constitution. Numbers is an elaboration of aspects of the regime. It concentrates on the operational dimensions of the government of the tribal confederation. He gives a list. So now we’re starting.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:21:44]:
Wow, look at that list.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:45]:
He is going to give us a list of what happens in the rest of this book through his lens. We already looked backwards, now we’re looking forward. So the national consensus by tribes and the federal means by which the census is taken. Two, the manner of forming the tribes around the tent of assembly. Three, the divisions of the tribe of Levi. Four, operational rules for managing the camp. Removing lepers, corpses. We focus on the lepers and corpses. He’s focused on operational rules for managing the camp, the order of tribal sacrifices. Okay, that you could say that’s not surprising. Technical details for praying the Levites for service. Trumpet calls for public assembly. That gets into your aspect of communication, Rabbi. Implementation of the death penalty commandment that all Israelites put on a garments with fringes. So that he’s looking at.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:40]:
Interesting that that’s part of it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:42]:
Because he’s looking at it like. What’s the word I’m thinking of? It’s not a costume, it’s a uniform. He’s seeing it as a uniform.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:50]:
That’s fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:51]:
Then he goes. Provision for the division of land of canaan in chapters 26. Provision for succession of Moses. Adjudication of vows, division of spoils of war. Provision for the settlement of the two and a half tribes on the other side of the Jordan. Rules for conquering the west bank, the borders of the land of 12 tribes. Allocation of the Levites, cities of refuge, rules regarding the tribal lands. If you look at the Book of Numbers from his lens, this is creating the boundaries and the mechanics of this federalist revolution. It’s just amazing how you can look at it all differently when you look at it through a lens such as this.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:23:37]:
That’s fantastic. And that’s great that he lays out the entire Book of Numbers based on.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:43]:
On that, he says this is a book filled with the day to day stuff of government and politics, worth a political commentary in its own right. In that sense, it is an excursus on the Book of the Covenant and the other constitutional laws of Exodus and Leviticus. If the decalogue is the covenant and the Book of Covenant is the basic constitution, Numbers provide several organic laws designed to implement the covenant and the Constitution in the real world occupied by the Israelites, both in the desert and what was to become the historic land of the 12 tribes on both banks of the Jordan. He just makes us look at our Parsha and this Book of Bamidbar differently. And now I want to go a little bit into what federalism is through his lens, because that’s the key argument here, that it is novel and that it appeared once, maybe twice, because he includes Switzerland, but once before the Constitutional Congress and the federal government. So he says federalism has to do with the need of people and polities to unite for common purposes, yet remain separate to preserve their respective integrities. It is rather like wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too. So again, he sees this as radical. The federal idea itself rests on the principle that political and social institutions and relationship are best established through covenants, compacts and other contractual arrangements, rather than or in addition to simply growing organically. In other words, that humans are able to make constitutional choices. We’re going to get into this “organical” in a second. The term federal is derived from the Latin for foedus, which like the Hebrew term Brit means covenant. There have been three critical federal experiments in the history of humanity to date. The Israelite tribal federation described in the Bible, what was the first. More than 3,000 years ago, it formulated the founding principle of federalism by transforming the vassal treaty among unequals into a covenant among equal partners, equal at least for the purpose of covenant. That led to the establishment of a polity of tribes maintaining their liberties within the framework of a common constitution and law. Although external pressures ultimately brought about the demiss of the tribal federation as a regime, the Jewish people lived on as the first federal people. And they have continued to use federal principles in their internal organization to the present day. So that is the most profound statement he makes. Because, Rabbi, if there’s anything that we do at Madlik is we marvel at the Jewish people’s ability to welcome different opinions, but respect different opinions. And ultimately what he’s saying is that’s what federalism is, that we are united as a people. And not only can can we disagree, but we have to disagree. We have to retain our identity. That is fascinating. So he says that other countries are started and maintained through the glue of conquest. So conquest tends to produce hierarchically organized regimes ruled in an authoritative manner. Think power pyramids with the conqueror on top. You guessed it, that is ancient Egypt. Then there is another model. The organic model has proved most attractive political philosophers, precisely because at its best, it seems to reflect the natural order of things. So if you recall a second ago, he said, before Sinai, the Jews had tradition, they had common practices. They were a people, they were naturally formed. That was the moment where they were just like the Greeks. What happened, according to this scholar at Sinai, was all of a sudden the organic model changed into a covenantal model. Covenantal foundings emphasize the deliberate coming together of humans as equals to establish bodies politic in such a way that all reaffirm their fundamental equality and retain their basic rights. It really is fascinating.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:05]:
It’s fantastic. That’s a fantastic couple of paragraphs.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:07]:
So he makes us look at all of this stuff so differently. He goes on to say that the biblical design is federal in three ways. First, it’s based upon a network of covenants, beginning with those between God and man, which weave the web of human, especially political relationships in a federal way, that is through a pact, association and consent. And again, you won’t be able to read what follows after reading this and not think in terms of groups coming together. Even Zelophchad’s daughter, We normally read that through a feminist lens. And once you look at this, what happened was they came up with pushback. How can we have tribal and distinct, different tribes if women who marry out of the tribe and don’t have the father or brother to do it? This was kind of like something that has to go to court. It has nothing to do with feminism. It has to do with how do we retain the Confederacy. 2. The classical biblical commonwealth was a fully articulated federation of tribes instituted and reaffirmed by covenant to function under a common constitution and common laws. Any and all constitutional changes in the Israel polity were introduced through covenanting. And even after the introduction of the monarchy, the federal element was maintained until most of the tribal structure structures were destroyed in external voices. The third thing that he says is fascinating. He says even in the end of Days, where it’s all la dee da, universal lambs lying down with sheep. If you look at Ezekiel, he talks about the End of Days and he talks about the tribes, and he talks about the 12 tribes being reinstated. Rabbi. In the same words as he talks about, the nations of the world will come. And if you read through this len, what happens is the lens that normally we call universalism, where we all become homogenous and lose our distinctions. If you take this to the end, even the biblical eschatology looks where we retain our distinct characteristics, whether we’re inside of Israel or around the world. And I just thought that this was fascinating. He even has a term that he talks about a federalist state of mind, that you think about things differently. I just am so thankful that I discovered him. And it makes you really think about how revolutionary this material is, but also to think about it differently. And I have to say what I have to do is control myself, because the gut reaction is we’re projecting back in time.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:03]:
Right. Well, I was going to say that it’s so modern. The question is, is it really modern? Or what is it saying is this is built into the human fabric of the way states are designed, developed.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:13]:
And if you have those 12 tribes around the thing, and then you talk about laws that help to support the 12 tribes, and you look at the cities and you say, how are they distributed amongst the 12 tribes? And the Levi’s, it makes you say, this is real. This is not some theology they were putting together the real thing, confederacy of tribes.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:36]:
Amazing. This is really good. Okay, enjoy the beginning of the Book of Numbers, everybody. We got a good couple of weeks coming up. You see from the professor, we have a great couple of weeks coming up. Great. Shabbat Shalom, everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:49]:
And I think we have Shavuot coming, so we.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:52]:
Yeah, and Chag Sameach, who will pick it up in Parashat Naso in two weeks from now.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:57]:
So get around Sinai next week, plant your flag, keep your independence, but also listen to the words that everybody else will be listening to. Accept the Torah in your own way. Sabbat Shalom, and we will see you all next week.

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 Safaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Behar-Bechukotai and finish the book of Leviticus. Join us as we challenge the biggest perception of the Sabbath. That it’s a day that we rest from creation. Join us for Made on Shabbat. Well, we’re finally finishing Leviticus and you are dressed up because tonight when we record is Lag b’Omer and you’re going to be officiating at a wedding.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:01:23]:
No better way to celebrate Lag B’Omer than to officiate at a wedding. So happy. Almost lag B’Omer, everybody. And enjoy whatever you plan to do on this on this holiday.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:35]:
Fantastic. And you know, Lag B’Omer is part of the omer. It’s part of counting. It’s a cycle of seven. It’s kind of clearly linked to the seven days of creation which is Shabbat, and the seven year cycle which is the Sabbatical and the Shemitah. So it’s all connected, isn’t it? And maybe tonight we’ll even find it’s something to be happy about. So here we go. We are in Leviticus 25:1 God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, speak to the Israelite people and say to them, when you enter the land that I assign you, the land shall observe a Sabbath of God. Six years you may sow your field, and six years you may prune it the vineyard and gather in the field. But on the seventh year, the land shall have a shabbat, a complete rest, a Sabbath of God. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of untrimmed vines. It shall be a year of complete rest for the land. And in verse 6 it says, Now The Sabbath yield…. In the Hebrew, it says Shabbat Aretz, the Sabbath of the land. Our good friend Everett Fox says, now the Sabbath yield shall be to you for your servant and for your handmaid, for your hired hand, and for the resident settler who sojourns with you and your cattle and the beasts of your land may eat of its yield. So, Rabbi, we are going to focus on an enigmatic expression. You know, somebody could say it’s a typo. Somebody could say that maybe it was transcribed improperly and we shouldn’t build a mountain on a. Mohil. I will argue that some of the explanations that we’re going to get are so pristine or so valuable it works building the Mohil. So the. The problem is it says והיתה שבת הארץ לכם, it doesn’t say והיתה תבואת הארץ לכם the crops that you collect. So as Rashi says, since Scripture does not say Vahayita Shabbat, Vahayta tavu ata, aretz lahem la Chichay, that the crops or the yield of the land should be to you. But it says, it says only that which has been treated according to the sabbatical year has been dedicated free to all of you. So there is a problem here, that you are actually not harvesting the Shabbat. You’re harvesting the harvest of the sabbatical year. And so what Rashi learns from here, which follows the sifra and the midrashim, is that when it says that you harvest the Shabbat haretz, it means those crops that have been let to lie fallow and can be yours, and it excludes maybe some other crops. But it is a challenge of wording here. And that’s what we’re going to kind of follow the commentaries on. Ramban says the Sabbath Haaretz, the Sabbath produce of the land shall be yours, he says, or it may be the year itself is called Shabbat Haretz, just as the seventh day is called Shabbat of Hashem. So just like we refer to it as Shabbat Hashem, here we’re calling it Shabbat Haaretz. The reference thereof is to the produce of the Sabbath year. So what intrigued me, Rabbi, and this is why we’re talking about the side of Shabbat when we normally think of Shabbat as a day where you don’t produce anything, and the sabbatical year, the produce of the sabbatical year, when we don’t normally think of the sabbatical year as producing anything. That was the irony. That was the contrast that intrigued me. And so far we’ve looked at two commentaries, Rashi and Ramban. And they all recognize the linguistic problem, but Rashi has a halachic outcome from it, which is only crops that have been let follow. So let’s say you had a farmer who wasn’t following the rules, and then halfway through the year, he said, you know what? I’m going to make it hefker. I’m going to make it available that you might not be able to harvest. It’s like too little and too late. And according to the Ramban, he almost makes this sabbatical year like an Earth day. Just like Sabbath of the week belongs to God, the Sabbath of the Shemitah, of the Sabbatical cycle belongs to the land. But they’re all dealing with this Shabbat haretz.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:06:41]:
Yeah, I mean, you have to deal with Shabbat haretz because it’s almost like an oxymoron. It’s almost like two words that don’t fit together, because Shabbat means Shabbos and Haaretz means the land. What does the land have to do with Shabbos? So, you know, they have to be what the significance of Shabbat HaAretz is, if the Torah puts those two words together.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:06]:
Yeah. And of course, I think just looking at the two commentaries that we have, Ramban makes a lot of sense because we’re letting the land rest. So you have a Shabbat, God has a Shabbat. The sabbatical year is the Shabbat haretz. And that’s why I said it kind of reminds me of Earth Day. So the Hizkuni says what the earth produces during that year is for all of you to serve as food. You are not obligated to tithe any part of it, nor to set it aside for the poor. It is not yours to distribute. Neither is what it produces to be converted into libations to be offered in the Temple. So I take this as almost a commentary on the Ramban. The Ramban says that this is the Shabbat of the land. And if you follow the Hizkuni, it means the land and not God’s, unlike normal produce that you have to go to the Temple and you have to give a little bit to God, a tenth. This is the land’s gift to you, but it clearly is. It belongs to you. Again, they’re learning all sorts of interesting things from what you call this oxymoron, we get to a commentary who I had not heard of before, but this is the one that really started me thinking. It’s called Haktav v’hakabalah. It seems that he wrote at the beginning of the Haskalah of the Enlightenment. And he. He was trying to show how all the laws of the oral tradition are actually in the Torah.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:08:45]:
That being said, now just explain that for one second. That’s what the modern. Many of the modern scholars tried to object to. You know, that the Oral Torah was made up. Right. There’s no connection between the Oral Torah, the written Torah. So he was a traditionalist. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg and he tried to show that the entire Oral Torah was rooted in the written Torah. So he actually was important.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:11]:
Okay, fantastic. But he has a turn of phrase here that sets your teeth on edge. He goes, hashabat lo ta’achal, you don’t eat the Sabbath. He says, this is a problem. The Sabbath of the land shall be for you to eat. You do not eat the Sabbath itself. Therefore, the commentaries add implicitly the produce of the Sabbath of the land. So I think he’s arguing that you can’t understand it literally. It doesn’t read properly. That’s. But I take him to show that we have a problem here. Houston, we have a problem. You can’t eat the Sabbath. And then he goes on to say something absolutely brilliant. He says, that is from that which we have rendered ownerless. So he picks up on what Rashi said, that Rashi says it shows that you can only eat the stuff that was set aside by the farmer at the beginning of the sabbatical year. And so that is what it means, Shabbat Aretz According to them, the word Shabbat here carries the sense of you shall cause to cease, as in you shall remove leaven, meaning nullification, and making it ownerless So he is saying that what we learn between Shabbat Haretz is this sense of nullification. You know, Rabbi, we’ve talked about how much I love the concept of Bitul Chametz before Pesach. I love Bitul nidarim before Yom Kippur. Here we have built into the Sabbath, in this case, the Sabbath of the land. This concept of it’s ownerless. You have to let it go, and you have to let it go in order to be free. But he literally uses these words, and it becomes fascinating. The Mei Hashiloach. Another commentary.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:25]:
Wow, we’re going all over the place

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:26]:
today that I don’t quote very much, says, behold, the blessed one shows Israel that the life of Israel runs counter to nature. For according to nature, a person must act, and through those actions receive sustenance and influence. This, however, applies only to the nations of the world, whose life does not emerge from contradiction. Tzimzum and cessation. We’ll get to those heavily loaded words in a second, he says. But the life of Israel is beyond the grasp of this world. Their primary influx comes Davka, precisely from contraction and from cessation, from pulling themselves back through their resting in the seventh year, from working the land, likewise from adding from the Hol, the ordinary unto Kedushah, the sacred. Reminiscent of last week’s segment, he goes on to say, and this is the meaning of the Sabbath of the land shall be for you to eat that from the very act of ceasing they receive good sustenance, for within the cessation is hidden the greater part of goodness. What he is saying is the. The Shabbat. The concept of Shabbat, of pulling back is actually the produce itself. This is the output, this is the production. It’s really quite, I think, poetic.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:12:53]:
That’s very creative.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:56]:
So to fill in our listeners, when he says the word Tzimzum, which is contraction, that clearly makes us think of a Kabbalistic notion made by the Arizal that God, instead of creating the world by emanating His presence onto it, actually MeztamTzem pulled himself back and made room for creation. But he’s only kind of intimating that. What he’s saying here is the very concept of Shabbat, when we pull back from working the land, and by association, maybe when we pull back from working on Shabbat, we are actually doing something positive. We are. He doesn’t quite say this mimicking God when he created the world. And of course there is a connection between Shabbat and creation because it’s the day that God rested. But it’s just. It’s lyrical, it’s fascinating, it’s poetic, and it’s powerful.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:13:54]:
Now, the idea that we’ll mimic God in the Shmita year also is really interesting because creation just has that God took off on the seventh day. But the idea that from there we learn that you have to let the land lay fallow every seven years is a jump of the Mei Hashiloach, which is fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:14]:
And it’s what it’s. The jump is that if it was just on the seventh day, you could say there’s a direct parallel between God’s seven days and ours. But if you go now to the Shmitah, what it’s saying is there’s a parallel between how God acts and how we try to act Whether it’s seven days or seven years, this concept for a Jew and what it’s saying is this is baked into the Jewish psyche. And the Weltanschauung is that when we pull back, when we stop, we are actually giving room for creation. And that is the subject matter of today’s discussion. But it comes from these. I wouldn’t say they’re ancient sources. The Mei Hashiloach is also probably what, the 1800s.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:15:00]:
1800s, correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:01]:
Yeah, but I just love the fact that they’re not standing on a soapbox and making this point. But the point is coming out and it’s absolutely fascinating. So I want to pivot from this strange word, Shabbat Harets, to another strange word that has always intrigued me, which is la sot et has to do the Sabbath, if that sounds familiar to you. When we make kiddush on Shabbat, we say the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath for some move in Israel at Ashabbat. And then it says to make take the Sabbath laso at Hashabbat, which again is strange. Rabbi, if you think that the Shabbat is all about not doing work, ceasing, what actively are you doing?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:15:51]:
God’s the one, if anyone. God’s the one who makes Shabbat.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:56]:
Yes. So it’s right. You can see why I combined the two concepts. They’re both enigmatic and they make us think about Shabbat differently and production on Shabbat differently. So it comes from Exodus 31:16, and it says the children of Israel ought to keep the Sabbath, to make the Sabbath observance throughout their generation as a covenant for the ages. That’s Everett Fox’s translation. But it says for some of Israel at the Shabbat, and there you clearly have observed the Sabbath la Sote at the Shabbat, literally to do the Shabbat. And that is an enigma that again, the commentaries are going to help us with. Commentary that we’re looking at is the Ibn Ezra. And he says the meaning of lasot in lasot et Hashabbat, he says, is thus similar to the meaning of lasot and get dress. And he hastened to dress. He is part of a group of commentaries that say when you make Shabbat, you prepare for Shabbat. It almost goes onto the preparations of the day. But again, he can’t ignore it. He’s trying to find what can you actually be doing that is related to Shabbat, where you don’t do anything. The Seforno says the Shamuveni Yisrael Etashabbat in this life to make the Sabbath on a day that is totally Shabbat. Bayom Sekoulo, Shabbat. So again, they’re taking the word lasot Shabbat very seriously.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:17:33]:
And what just the drosha. That’s not really what it means. You would say that’s a Dvar Torah, right?

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:40]:
It is a Dvar Torah. And I warned you we were going to be very close to a Dvar Torah. The Rabbeinu Bachia says very similar. Observe the Sabbath day actively. The plain meaning of this is to provide himself with the necessities required on the Sabbath. That was similar to the Ibn Ezra. A midrashic approach. Anyone observing the Sabbath properly on terrestrial earth is considered as if he had made it in the celestial region. What is meant by this midrash in the Mechiltah is that keeping the Sabbath is testimony that a person is a true believer in God and his Torah. Anyone who ignores the laws of the Sabbath thereoi testifies that he is a heretic and does not believe. So the way I read this, Rabbi, is I focus less on your making Shabbat in another world. And I focus more on the fact that when you keep the Shabbat, you’re making a profound step statement, and that is positive. When you keep the Sabbath, you are. We all know in India they call the Jews the Sabbath keepers. It defines them, it becomes their fingerprint. But I think the way I translate is that, yes, you are creating on something on Shabbat. Because by keeping Shabbat, you’re standing on a soapbox in Hyde park and you’re making a statement. You’re creating a reality. So I don’t have so transcendental and go into creating it in another world. And I think I’m permitted to read that into Bachia.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:19:17]:
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And Bachia is much less of what I call the Dvar Torah. It’s much closer to what the words really mean. La sota ta Shabbat.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:29]:
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Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:14]:
Right. Okay. The idea is that you write the creation is the ability to stop to work. Right. That’s a pretty sophisticated idea that you need to create. The ability to not, I guess people who work, people who run businesses, know that you need to be focused in order not to work. Sometimes it’s easy to work. It’s hard not to work.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:42]:
I love that. I just because you said economics, I started to think of the concept of opportunity cost. There’s a cost when you don’t do something. Not doing something also creates, whether economic good or loss. But I love the fact that. Fact that these, as you say, are very sophisticated concepts and they’re coming through the commentaries on these, on these. pesukim, the Torah Temima, maybe you can fill our listeners in a little bit on the Torah Temima, my sense is this was a great scholar who, when you go through the Torah Temima Chumash, you see every place in the Talmud that that piece of pasuk is referenced. But clearly we’re going to see. He also gave a commentary when he felt he had to.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:23:37]:
So I just want to tell you that was written also around the year 1900. And what he did was he tells you, he lets you know all of the Talmudic references that quote that verse in the Torah. You know, today we cheat because we have AI. That’s easy to do, but he did it without AI, which was pretty impressive.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:58]:
So listen to what he says in the small print. He starts by quoting the Talmud to make the Sabbath it is taught. Reb Eliezer Ben Porta says, the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath to make the Sabbath. This teaches that anyone who keeps the Sabbath is considered as if he has made it. Wow, he’s making the Shabbat. This is really in line with what we said a second ago. Now listen to the Torah Temimah The reasoning of this interpretation is straightforward. The verse emphasizes to make the Sabbath. But what making applies here according to the simple sense it should have read, the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath for their generations and no more. Because of this deviation in language, we derive that whoever keeps the Sabbath is as if he made it. From this shift in language, the sages derive their teachers teaching. And now he goes on. And the meaning of this general principle that whoever keeps the Sabbath is as if he has made it can be explained as follows. The commandment of Sabbath is different from all other commandments. All other commandments have visible concrete forms. Titsit, the fringes. tefilin; the boxes we put on our hand and on our head. Shofar, Sukkah, Lulav, they’re all material. Even when they are not being performed, they still exist as recognizable objects distinct from those of other nations. But the commandment of Shabbat is not like this. Without its actual observance, there is no recognizable indication that the day actually is Shabbat. The nature of the day itself is no different from other days. Therefore, its very existence is only recognizable through its being performed and observed. And thus anyone who keeps the Sabbath is considered as if he has made it, because through his actions he makes it recognizable and defined. This takes what I said before of standing on a soapbox in Hyde park to a totally new level. You are not just preaching an ideology, you’re creating a human construct. If we did not keep the Sabbath, there would be no Sabbath. There’s no significance to the seven days. And what connects it also to the shmita. If we didn’t keep every seventh year as a sabbatical year and stop working, there’s nothing in the fabric of the universe that says rest; stop. We really are creating the Sabbath and the sabbatical. These are conventions.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:26:37]:
Well, we use the cycle, we create the calendar, right. And by observing Shabbos and by observing Shmitah. And that’s why it’s la’.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:47]:
Ah.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:26:47]:
So.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:49]:
So it’s just pretty amazing. I think that if you look at the two sets of commentaries on the two different verses, certainly I’ve picked and chosen, but all of them talk about this ability to create something from nothing, to create something by possibly letting go or pulling back, whether it’s tsimtsum, whether it’s copy, what is transcendent and godlike about just letting the space create newness. I think it really gives us a whole new kind of vision of what Shabbat is. You know, there are those that say Shabbat is the great gift of the Jews to the world. And, you know, you can make a case just on a day-off and the social implications of leisure. But this takes it to another level.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:27:42]:
Yeah, this is fantastic. Okay, let’s hear it for the Torah Temima. The Torah Temima., you know, the way it’s written is that on top, in big letters, they tell you what the Talmudic quote is. On the bottom, in really small letters, he has this commentary. And, you know, the jewel is in the small letters. So you need to concentrate. I’ll just tell you that my father, for all the years, he used to have a Torah Temima. in his tallis bag. And on Shabbos, during Torah reading, he would study the Torah Temima., he thought the Torah Temima was the most brilliant and the most fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:15]:
I have to agree. And I have to say that when my oldest son became bar mitzvah and somebody said to me, what should we get him? I get him a Torah Temima.. I don’t know whether it’s been translated into English.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:26]:
Is it in English on Sefaria or you translated this?

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:29]:
I translated it. But I. I just, as you say in the fine print, he really comes through. And he doesn’t always do this. Sometimes he just does enough.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:41]:
Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:42]:
Anyway, let us always associate the joy, the positivity and the creativity of when we count and we reach a milstone like L’ag B’Omer or, like seven days of creation or the sabbatical. And let us always find new insights into our ancient traditions. And texts.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:29:04]:
And this week we finish a book of Leviticus Chazak. Chazak. Finit. Chazak. Shabbat Shalom, everybody. See you next week.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:13]:
See you all next week.

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 Emor and we ask, what if disqualification’s not the only way to read it? What if hidden inside this seemingly harsh system is a radically different idea, not of exclusion, but of permission? Tonight, we’re going to read these three prohibitions not as isolated rules, but as a single unified vision of holiness, and then ask a question that might turn the whole thing on its head. What if holiness isn’t about being perfect, but about what we allow? Well, Rabbi, I am back from biking in Portugal and reading the Abarbanel. I’m back to my favorite Rashi and the Midrash. How are you doing?

Adam Mintz [00:02:47]:
I’m doing well. Welcome back. And this is a great topic. Let’s go tackle Parshat Emor.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:53]:
So we are in Leviticus 21:1, and God said to Moses, speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them, none shall defile himself for any dead person among his kin. So in the Hebrew, among his kin means Lo Yitame B’Amav. And if you read it before you get to all the commentaries, Rabbi, it kind of sounds like he is distancing himself from his people. Don’t. Don’t defile yourself for your brothers and your sisters, except for the relatives that are closest to him, his mother, his father, his son, his daughter and his brother. So basically it is restricting the circle of relatives that a standard Cohen can mourn for. Can defile himself. I said mourn for. But that’s the next verse, because right now it means you really can’t touch a dead person, which will make you tameh. But it goes further. They shall not shave smooth, smooth any parts of their heads, or cut the side growth of their beards, or make gashes in their flesh. So those are typical standard, I would say, Goyisha, ways of mourning for your dead, and you can’t do it. They shall be holy to their God and not profane the name of their God. For they offer the eternals, offerings by fire, the food of their Lord of God, and so must be holy. So this is the first part, because there are kind of three sections here, and I’m going to argue that they are actually connected. The first has to do with who you can mourn for. The next has who you can marry. In verse seven, it says they shall not marry a woman defiled by prostitution, nor shall they marry one divorced from a husband. For they are holy to their God, and you must treat them as holy, since they offer the food of your God. Again, Lechem Eloheim. They shall be holy to you. For I, God, who sanctify you, am holy. What we’re doing is we are segueing from the laws of mourning, where you are to distance yourself from who you can mourn for, to the laws of marriage where you have to distance yourself from who you can marry. And it goes on to say that the priest who is exalted above his fellows. Now we’re talking not just about any Cohen, but the Cohen Gadol on whose head the anointing oil has been poured, and who has been ordained to wear the vestments shall not bear his hair or rend his vestments. So again, he cannot mourn for those same circle of people. He shall not go in where there is any dead body. He shall not defile himself, even for his father or mother. So the circle gets even smaller. He shall not go outside the sanctuary and profane the sanctuary of his God. For upon him is the distinction of the anointing oil of mine. The Eternals. So he can’t go out to even participate in the funeral at all. He has to go about his business. He has to act as though nothing disruptive has happened. Rabbi, it struck you, too, that these are, if you read them together, they’re an issue of distancing oneself, of limiting the circle of people that you can mourn for and who you can marry. This is the first year I kind of put those two together.

Adam Mintz [00:06:31]:
Yeah, there’s no question. That’s right. You know, in last week’s Torah reading, Kedoshim, the word kadosh is understood by Rashi as being separate. Holiness and separateness in the Torah seem to be connected. So you’re 100% right for putting them together. And I think that’s a theme in this second half of the book of Leviticus.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:52]:
Yeah. So now we’re going to get a little bit to this word, halalim. Those priests, those kohanim, who have lost their priestly status for reasons connected with their birth or marriage, they either married the wrong person or they are the child of someone who. A Cohen who married the wrong person. You may not defile themselves by the dead. Scripture therefore says unto the priests, only those sons of Aaron are included who have not lost their priestly character. So even this, this is, you could say it’s a privilege, but it certainly goes with the ability of being an active Kohen, a Halal who is no longer part of that caste. It does not apply to him. Kedoshim Tiihiyu. They shall be holy, Rashi says, even against their will, the court shall force them to remain holy in respect to this. So these are strict rules that have to do with the caste you were born into, and you have to distance yourself from who you mourn for. And this, of course, we come across all the time with kohanim who. who lose a relative. And there are separate parts of the cemetery where are segregated for kohanim so that they don’t have to go in. So far, these rules, even though we don’t have a temple today, still apply to Kohanim. Rashi goes on, thou shalt sanctify him even against his will. And this, it says, if he is not willing to divorce the woman whom he had illegally married, you flog him, you chastise him until he divorces her. I assume from that it means you can reinstate yourself, but he goes on, holy unto thee. Treat him with sanctity, that he should be the first in all holy matters. Meaning to say, reading of the law, he gets the first aliyah, and that he should have the first right to recite the benedictions at a meal. So why he does what Abarbanel did last week, he brings this into the present. When we bench, if a Cohen is present, he is the one. He leads the benching. And if we’re in an Orthodox synagogue, when you have the aliyah, the first aliyah is called the Kohen aliyah. So it’s a privilege, it’s an obligation that lasts until today. The hair of his head shall not be in disarray. He shall not let his hair grow wild on account of ritual mourning for the death of a near relative and what is called letting the hair grow wild, leaving it uncut for more than 30 days. So we learn a little bit about the laws of mourning, but basically Rashi is just filling in the blanks. Here’s one that’s interesting. When it says he shall not go out from the sanctuary, this means he must not follow the funeral bier, attend the funeral of his father or his mother. A rabbi is further derived from this. In Sanhedrin, the halacha that the high priest made the sacrificial rites. When an onan, when he is literally in mourning, he, according to some, can perform the rites, and according to others, he must perform the rites. The following is how this is implied. Even if his father or his mother died, he is not required to leave the sanctuary, as may be assumed, but may perform the service. Interesting what the Talmud says. So the Talmud says in Sanhedrin 18A, if a relative of the high priest dies, he does not follow the bier. This is what the funeral procession that Rashi quoted, carrying the corpse. Since it is prohibited for the high priest to become ritually impure, even for immediate relatives, rather, once the members of the funeral procession are concealed from sight by turning onto another street, he can reveal himself on the street they departed. And when they are revealed, then he is concealed. And in this way he goes out with them until the entrance of the gate of the city from where they take out the corpse. Since the dead were not buried in Jerusalem, this is according to the great Rabbi Meir. So, Rabbi, my reading from this Talmud in Sanhedrin was, this is certainly a little bit about how it looks. It’s a little bit about the perception. You could easily say he shouldn’t go out because he might touch the corpse and become tame. Rabbi Meir is adding to that. He says, don’t get caught seen there. When they pass on Avenue A, you can be on the side street and look at them. When they pass you by, it’s clearly about appearances as much as anything else.

Adam Mintz [00:11:45]:
Can you imagine the Pope going to the local supermarket in Rome? I mean, that would be terrible for the image of the Pope. That is the same thing here. It’s the optics are bad, but I

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:58]:
think it’s not simply the optics of going to the corner Marcolet, the grocery store. It’s the optics of participating in this amazingly disruptive event. I think what I’m taking away this year from these verses is it’s not simply about maybe he might touch the dead person and become tamey. It goes more than that in the Pasuk. It goes more than that because it says he shouldn’t go through the shaving of his head, he shouldn’t go through the mourning motions. And in the Talmud, Rabbi Meir accentuates that by saying he shouldn’t be seen at the funeral. He has this desire to see his father, his mother being buried, but he cannot be seen doing that. Because I think the optics, to use your wor, Rabbi, is the optics have to be that he’s not touched by death, that his life is going on. And that struck me a lot this year.

Adam Mintz [00:12:59]:
Life, you know, the temple is the opposite of death, because the temple is supposed to give life. And if the Cohen Godel is supposed to be in the temple, he can’t come in contact with death. It’s fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:12]:
So in thetora.com it does kind of see the uniqueness of combining these two sets of laws. The laws of mourning and. And impurity provided by death and marriage. It says immediately following the laws restricting contact with the dead are the laws about maintaining the priest and his family holiness with respect to marriage. This is followed by laws for the high priest in the same order. So there’s no question that these two first kind of paragraphs are situ it together and start one thinking. Some suggest lineal purity is a rationale only for the restrictions on the high priest who must marry a virgin. This is supported by the motive clause that he shall not profane his seed among his kids. However, this consideration does not justify the blanket prohibition of a widow. The priest could simply wait a fixed amount of time. So what we’re finding, especially amongst the moderns, is they’re trying to figure out they can maybe understand the thing about mourning, but the thing about not marrying. So you could say not marrying a virgin. There’s a lot to be made of in ancient society in general about a woman who’s special just for you, who hasn’t been defiled hasn’t been touched. And that’s why he says you could understand this to be that, that the Cohen has to marry up. He can’t marry used goods. But that doesn’t explain necessarily a widow or some of the other things. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But the commentaries are struggling over this. There are some scholars who talk about a profane woman is a cultic prostitute, not just any prostitute. And one of the commentary said not quite clear why a cultic prostitute should be less problematic than an ordinary prostitute. But bringing in a avodah zora always ups the ante. But again, they’re trying to figure this out. They’re trying to understand why these women are clearly okay for Israelite and not okay for a cohen.

Adam Mintz [00:15:35]:
It’s interesting. The cultic prostitute seems to be something that was, that was very familiar in the ancient world. It’s not like taken out of nowhere.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:45]:
And of course the irony of a cultic prostitute is if there is one, she is called a kadesha. Which is

Adam Mintz [00:15:56]:
right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:56]:
Yes.

Adam Mintz [00:15:56]:
Which basically means separate. Right. The prostitute is separate. She’s not really part of society.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:03]:
So there’s also, you know, as Freud pointed out in his book Totem and Taboo, there’s a connection between that which is forbidden, which is separated from us, and that which is holy, which is separated from us. So again the commentaries are trying to understand what the Cohen becomes who doesn’t follow these rules. He becomes a halal or a halalah. And we’ve kind of talked about this word a little bit. There was a Israeli, a great Israeli movie called Filling the Void (למלא את החלל). And halal can mean a void. Interpretations of halal is to pierce to profane. According to this interpretation, the term refers to a penetrated woman, either any non virgin or a woman who has been raped. And that the priest according to this would have to marry a virgin. That again we’re trying to figure out what is this word that is the opposite it used here for holy in thetorah.com it brings a scholar named Sarah Shechtman. And she argues that these laws have to do with the nature of the marital bond, which she suggests conceptualizing as a cord binding husband and wife. In ancient Israel, a woman’s status was determined by her primary male bond. Unmarried women are connected to their fathers and married women to their husband. When a woman was widowed, the cord dissolved. There is no idea in the ancient world of an unconnected woman. She had to belong to somebody through it left alone of a mark to render the woman unfit for marriage to the high priest. When she was divorced, the court was cut, but it remained present because her prior husband was still alive, leaving her primary male bond hanging. So I really, what struck me, Rabbi, was the lengths to which these modern commentaries were struggling and trying to create a thesis, an explanation for these laws. We always ask this, what is the problem that Rashi is trying to solve? So what is it about these rules? And of course, you probably come into contact with these in terms of conversion. When you convert somebody, that’s an issue. Marrying a kohen as well.

Adam Mintz [00:18:44]:
Very big issue. Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:47]:
These are inscrutable type of rules that are still here because kohanim take their lineage very seriously. But again, it’s not that much stranger than other laws in the Torah that we have to figure out. I mean, it seems to me the most, I think, knee jerk explanation that I would give is that the kohen is on a higher level. He’s a higher caste. I kind of intimated that before. And therefore, while the rest of us of our people don’t have to be so particular in who we marry, the choices for a kohen, like a king maybe are more limited. And it has to do with aesthetics or anything. It basically is all of these women are, I would say, not the perfect match. It’s not the match made in heaven. When you meet a couple and they say, we were seventeen, we met in high school and we’ve been married ever since, you know, you go, it’s a beautiful story. That doesn’t mean that the rest of us who have more, every story is the same story.

Adam Mintz [00:20:02]:
Right?

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:03]:
There’s nothing wrong with divorce in Judaism. There is nothing wrong with marrying a widow. I would venture to say it’s a mitzvah. So that to me is, and I think they kind of hesitating to say this, that. But it does strike me as odd that all of these commentaries are kind of squirming one more. And this one, I think really reflects how, how hard they have to press. Dr. Eve Lavavi Feinstein argues, I believe these laws reflect a notion common throughout the Bible, that a man who has sex with a woman marks her permanently, leaving her, so to speak, with something of his essence. When sex takes place outside of marriage, it may be regarded as contamina, polluting the woman. The root tame. Pollute is frequently used to describe the effect of adultery on a woman, which involves the introduction of a foreign or improper essence. I mean, what challenges me with an explanation like that, Rabbi, is it’s hard to translate it into Hebrew. I don’t know what it means, what is essence?

Adam Mintz [00:21:08]:
Right. What is essence?

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:11]:
It’s really kind of fascinating. So what I want to do is I think that all of these scholars have forgotten the third leg of this parasha. Because the next thing that happens is we Read in Leviticus 21:16 as follows, and there’s no gap. And God spoke further to Moses, speak to Aaron and say, no man among you offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God. Again, we have this ochel Eloheim. No one at all who has a defect shall qualified. No man who is blind or lame, or has a limb too short or too long, no man who has a broken leg or a broken arm, or his hunchback or a dwarf or a scurvy, no man among the offspring of Aaron the priest who has a defect shall be qualified to offer God’s offering by fire. Again, it has that word about Lechem Elohav having a defect. He shall not be qualified to offer the food of his God. He may eat of the food of his God, of the most Holy, as well as of the Holy. But he shall not enter behind the curtain or come near the altar, for he has a defect. He shall not profane these places sacred to me, for I, God, have sanctified them to me. Rabbi, it gets back to that piece of Talmud from Rabbi Meir where he said, it’s the optics, as you said, when it says enter behind the curtain. It struck me, as we are talking a little bit theater here. This is the show of holiness. And in the show of holiness, everything has to be perfect. There can’t be someone who’s maimed as much as God loves the maimed. There can’t be someone who’s not married to that Hollywood marriage. And there can’t be someone who is mortal in a sense, and mourning. And of course, that goes against what we typically say about the laws of Kahuna. Typically. Rabbi, I argue that a Cohen can’t come in touch with death because the Egyptian pharaohs and their priests worship death and we move away from death. But what this reading will say is that the Cohen has to death doesn’t own him, that in fact he’s like God, that he’s not impacted by death. Do you think that this third leg, this third group of rules, has an impact on how you read the first two?

Adam Mintz [00:23:52]:
Well, there’s no question. And the juxtaposition, the fact that it comes right afterwards shows that it’s all the same thing. Look at the end Kiani hashem, mechadishem. It’s the same word for I, God have sanctified them. And the word mekadishchem is the same word as kadosh, meaning to sanctify. So clearly it’s talking about the same thing. It’s all how do you separate the kohed and how do you define what that separation is?

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:21]:
And what’s fascinating to me. And I keep on saying it, but now I’m going to kind of hit it on its head. This lechem elohav is kind of rare. It only really occurs in this, these three parshiot, in these three different relationships. And of course, to be specific, lechem elohav literally would mean the bread of God. But I think the general interpretation means it has to do with the sacrifices, it has to do with all of the nutrients, the foodstuffs that we give to God. But it does. This is kind of a unique vision for the Kahuna, for the priests. And I think it’s one that we don’t really kind of isolate or focus on too much. I said in the intro, you know, what would it be like if we weren’t affected by death? What would it be like if we had the perfect spouse and family? What would that is this is a kind of a unique to me interpretation of kedusha that we don’t normally, I think, address directly. The Ralbag in his explanation says the fact that she was divorced, getting back to that middle segment shows that something negative about her. So he in a sense kind of gives a little remez to the fact that what linked the second portion is something wrong. There’s something wrong. And of course, what could be more wrong than death? You know, man was born in the Garden of Eden, he was going to live forever. He was born in the Garden of Eden, unitary, not even needing another a spouse. And he clearly was born in the Garden of Eden, complete and beautiful and pure. And so much of our religion and Judaism celebrates all of the opposites of that. It celebrates cleaving to one spouse, finding somebody, making someone else whole, which by definition means they’re not complete without you. And it talks about that we are gathered to our people, our life is mortal. So I think this really to me also shows a path not taken because I would say mainstream Judaism has not followed this path. If you look at the Hasidic stories, they celebrate the people who are imperfect. As the great Leonard Cohen said, it’s the crack that lets the light in. So let’s look at a slightly different interpretation of halal. And in Hebrew, it means to pollute, defile, profane, but also litten, loosen, open, untie, become free, become lawful. And this is something that’s fascinating. The same word that means defile can also mean to free. In our tradition, Rabbi Hulin is food that has taken. You’ve taken the truma, the meisser, you’ve taken the 10th of it and given it to the priest. And now it becomes profane. Yes, but it also becomes hulin. Permitted.

Adam Mintz [00:27:48]:
Permitted. Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:49]:
Permitted to eat. Eat. Actually, the Arabs have captured that when we see a restaurant or a food stand, that is halal. The Arab word for halal is permissible. It’s the same as hulin. It means that something that is not too holy to be eaten. It is something that is part of us, that is given to us. A hulin, as I said before, is referring to animals or birds consumed in nine.

Adam Mintz [00:28:20]:
I wonder whether the word comes from the word chol. Chol, meaning like the weekdays, the ordinary, as opposed to Shabbos, or the chulin, as opposed to the sacred.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:33]:
I think they’re all connected. And we always knee jerk when we say hiloni means secular, but it also means part of the normal life. So I do think it’s kind of fascinating, number one, the juxtaposition between what is holy and. We’ve seen what that can mean. And that which is permissive, which is the. You’re permitted to marry who you want, you’re permitted to not be perfect. You’re permitted to confront your mortality. I just found that kind of fascinating. And I must say, getting. Just getting back from Portugal, one of the things that was fascinating to me was the power of the monasteries in Portugal and the fact that they so ruled the country that at a certain point in time in 1834, a new king arose and he kicked them out. In other words, we see that a little bit with Hamas and Isis, where this religion can take people and isolate them too far from normal people and where they can kind of do damage. And it kind of, I guess, sensitized me to the power of the hulin, the power of the hol. In juxtaposed to the perfect world of

Adam Mintz [00:29:57]:
the kodesh, it all goes back to Portugal. This was amazing. Everybody should enjoy the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, which is a great Torah portion. Shabbat shalom to everybody. And we look forward to seeing you next week. We’re going to finish up the book of Vayikra, of Leviticus next week. Bahar Bechukotai. Have a good week everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:16]:
Looking forward to next week. Some people will let out a sigh of let out a breath of air when we finish Vayikra, but we’ve enjoyed every page. Look forward to seeing you all next week. Shabbat Shalom.

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 Parshat Acharei Mot from Lisbon. At least I’m in Lisbon. And we explore Abarbanel’s bold reading of Achasrei Mot. So join us for Brotherly Love in Lisbon. So, Rabbi, you were in Scotland a week and a half ago. I’m in Lisbon now. We are the traveling podcast, Torah Podcast.

Adam Mintz [00:01:44]:
Here you go. Lisbon has amazing Jewish history. The Abarbanel is remarkable.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:49]:
It is so amazing and intriguing and complicated. I’ll tell you. You know, Abarbanel is included in Sefaria and every week as I go through stuff … first of all, he’s not translated into English in Sefaria. And then second of all, we’re going to see in a second. He has a very unique and long-winded way of presenting his commentary. And as a result, until this week, I have really not dived into him. Have you learned him on a regular basis?

Adam Mintz [00:02:22]:
No. I’ll tell you the truth. It’s long and complicated. You know what he does is I’ll tell you a yeshiva joke because you like yeshiva jokes. He has very, very long questions. They used to say that you’re not allowed to read Abarbanel on Shabbos afternoon because the problem is you read all his questions, but the questions are so long that you fall asleep and you’re left with all the questions, but you don’t get any answers? So that’s the kind of the feel you get from Abarbanel.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:52]:
I was going to say that sometimes the Abarbanel seems as long as the galut itself, as the exile. It is very long. But this is what it takes. You have to go to Lisbon to get this opportunity…. excuse. So I want to go a little bit into his history. The first thing that I’m going to say is we are going to refer to him as a Abarbanel. But I learned in my research this week that most scholars believe his name was Abrabanel, as in Abraham. I’m going to go with the street and call him Abarbanel. But anyway, the other fascinating thing is, and I’d love to know your take on this, he’s not called Rabbi Isaac ben Yehuda Abarbanel. He’s called Don Isaac Abarbanel. And I would say that makes him also kind of unique amongst the commentators that we read every week, that whether he was a rabbi or not, he certainly was not referred to as a rabbi. He was referred to as a Don.

Adam Mintz [00:03:50]:
He was a politician. He was an important person in the government in Spain before the expulsion, and he was part of the group that were expelled on July 31, 1492.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:05]:
So I think what we’re going to find is, at least in Portugal, what I’m learning is you can’t really ever distinguish between religion, culture, politics, power, economics. And that’s his story. So he was a statesman, a philosopher, and yes, a biblical exegete. Born in Lisbon, the city that I’m privileged to be in, he received a broad education embracing Jewish religious philosophy, besides the traditional disciplines, also the basic work of classical literature and the writings of the foremost Christian theologians. His father, Judah Abarbanel, engaged successfully in both commerce and state finance. After his father died, he succeeded him as treasurer of King Afonso V of Portugal. This guy was like a Rothschild. He came from one of the most established families who was known not only for their wealth, but for their economic know how. And he was able to write these commentaries that we’re lucky to visit. His importance at court was not restricted to his official sphere of activities. Of a loan to the state of 12 million rays raised from both Jews and Christians in 1480, more than 1/10 was contributed by a Abarbanel himself. This was a wealthy man, a real don. When in 1471, 250 Jewish captives were brought to Portugal after the capture of Arquilla and Tangier in North Africa, Abarbanel headed the committee which was formed in Lisbon to raise the ransom money. So bottom line is, notwithstanding his high position and the great wealth he had inherited from his father, his love for his afflicted brethren was unabated. This was truly the pillar of the community. He was also in touch with cultured Christian circles. His connection with members of the aristocracy were not founded only on business, but also on the affinity of humanism. We always tal;k about Spain and now Portugal as the New York of their era. This man was truly integrated into the highest realms of society. He mixed easily with his Christian peers. And then it all came to an end. The period of tranquility in Lisbon ended with the death of Anfonso in 1481. And what I have found, Rabbi, is Portugal is even up until today, is more about who’s in power then about ideology. He was riding the horse of one king who died. And like the ancient pharaoh, there was a new pharaoh in town. The nobles rebelled against him, but the insurrection failed. Abarbanel was also suspected of conspiracy and forced to escape. He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1485. So he left Portugal not because he was Jewish, but because he was on the wrong side of the aisle. He was following the old king, and there was a new king in town. He moved to the border of Spain and Portugal, a little town called Segura. And then we’re going to talk about his exegesis, how he interpreted the Torah. And I have to say, Rabbi, when you go on tours in a city like this, they say, maybe he walked here, maybe he said this, maybe this happened. I feel so privileged that we’re going to be reading the Commentary of Abarbanel. We don’t Have to speculate what he said. We’re actually going to be reading his (original) words. And I find that. So that’s the privilege of learning Torah, is it not?

Adam Mintz [00:07:55]:
It’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. I love that too. To go to these cities and to think, you know, you walk the streets of. You walk the streets of Paris and you think about the rabbis who were in Paris and Rome and Florence, and you’re a little more exotic in, you know, in Portugal and Lisbon, and that’s fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:16]:
But I think by reading his commentary, we have a better insight into him than maybe an archeologist walking on cobblestone. So in terms of how he interpreted his commentary works, the first thing that makes it unique is that unlike usual biblical commentaries, he took special interest in the social and political conditions of the time into consideration. And I have to say that today we’re going to be Diving into his commentary on our parsha. And I’m going to make the case that we’re going to see all of these different tools that I’m referencing. He believed that mere commentary was not enough, but that the actual lives of the Jewish people must be deliberated on as well when discussing such an important topic as the Torah. The second thing that made him unique is his preoccupation with Christian exegesis and exegesites. He did not hesitate to borrow from Jerome, Augustine and others when there commentaries seemed correct to him. And interestingly enough, the Christian scholars of the 17th and 18th century actually quoted him. They went to the degree of translating his commentaries and they used him as a guide. So it was a reciprocal relationship. The next thing is he also took the time to include introductions. We’re going to see this all in this week’s commentary. He’s making this accessible. As academic and as knowledgeable as he was, he was very invested in making it available to the normal person. And finally, his commentaries, as you said a second ago, are preceded by a list of questions or difficulties that he sets out to explain over the course of the chapter. Not only did this make it easier for scholars to find the answers they were looking for, but these lists of difficulties aided the average student in studying his work. But for us, as we gaze to the side and we see Rashi saying mountains in a sentence or two, as you say, your eyes can get glazed over when you look at his list of questions. One fascinating thing of interest is in researching him, I found one of the seminal books on Don Isaac, Arbrabanel is written by none other than Ben Zion Netanyahu, the father of the current Prime Minister of Israel. I am traveling on this trip with my friend Andy Boas, who went to Cornell. When I brought this up over dinner, he said he took a course from Ben Zion Netanyahu at Cornell. It wasn’t on the Abarbanel, it was on Zionism. But this was a scholar who was very passionate, very opinionated. Maybe he believed his way was the only way. But again, fascinating that here we have a prime minister whose was a scholar in Spanish Jewry, Portuguese Jewry, and also a Abarbanel.

Adam Mintz [00:11:35]:
That’s amazing. Yeah, but seeing Netanyahu, that’s funny. So it all comes around. All comes around. Back to Lisbon.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:41]:
There we go. So here we are, we’re studying a Parasha. We’re in Leviticus 16 and in verse seven. And this is the core of the Yom Kippur ritual, I guess it says, the kohen, Aaron is to take two hairy goats. This is the way Fox translates for lokach et shneh ha’si’irim. The word for hair is sa’ar. So his translation emphasizes the fact that you take two hairy goats.

Adam Mintz [00:12:11]:
That’s funny, by the way. You could just say that si’rim means goats, because goats have hair. But he thinks there’s special kinds of goats, which is hairy goats. Okay, great.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:21]:
And we’re gonna get to the connection in a second. So he says he is to take two hairy goats and stand them before the presence of God. At the entran of the tent of appointment, Aaron is to place upon the two hairy goats lots, one lot for God and one lot for Azazel. So as Everett Fox says, the identification of this name, Azazel, has been a subject of debate for centuries. Proposals include ez azel, meaning a goat that escapes. Hence the English word scapegoat. We’ve dealt with this in other episodes and another reading signifying a fierce reading. So we are going to find a unique new commentary by Abarbanel that revolves around both this hairy goat as well as his interpretation of Azazel. But before we get there, this is how Abarbanel starts. He said, since this section deals with the service of the great and awesome day of the Lord, the Day of Atonement, it is fitting to examine it in depth. Therefore, I will now undertake an explanation of that Holy servants, in its entirety and in its proper order, what he does. And I went ahead and I took his commentary and I put it into one of those online engines that counts words and pages. He spends the next four pages of his commentary, Rabbi. Giving his reader an exact, I guess, synopsis of what happens on Yom Kippur. And so this is kind of getting at what I was saying in the introduction in terms of how he approached the Torah different. He felt that he had to bring it to light. He had to make it into a narrative. He says, I am going to tell you all of this as an attractate Yoma, all of this by way of exposition and narrative. I think only a Barbanel does this. And I think it speaks to his feeling that he has to make this meaningful and understandable to his readership.

Adam Mintz [00:14:29]:
Okay. I mean, that’s fantastic. And again, his strength is his weakness. Right? So the fact that he writes at such length is what makes him amazing. And also is the reason, like you said, that you and I are a little afraid to tackle a Barbanelle.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:46]:
Perfect.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:49]:
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Geoffrey Stern [00:15:56]:
So now we’re skimming forward and we’re getting to the next section of a Abarbanel where he’s going to ask his questions. So he says it is now appropriate to raise regarding each of these services three question so altogether there will be 21 questions. And although I will mention here matters that have already been mentioned earlier, there is no fault or deficiency in doing so, for the proper order of investigation and clarification of the subject requires it. So again, this is how he introduces week in, week out, chapter by chapter, he’s going to ask his questions. We are going to focus on only the questions that he asks regarding the scapegoat to Azazel. So question number six how could Israel offer that goat to Azazel? Whether Azazel refers to the celestial forces, as Ibn Ezra says. So again, these commentaries are trying to associate these two paired goats, and Ibn Ezra seems to be comparing it to the stars, to the powers in the sky, or evil angels, as Ramban says, it’s certainly not fitting to offer a sacrifice to anything other than God or alone, says Abarbanel. One who sacrifices to other gods shall be destroyed, except to the Lord alone. If you remember in an earlier episode, Rabbi, we talked about Ramban saying it’s a Shohad le’Satan. It’s like Azazel is to the Satan. He’s saying this sounds wrong. No matter who you associate these two goats with, they take away, they detract from the oneness of God. Good question. Question.

Adam Mintz [00:17:41]:
Very good question.

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:42]:
The twin goats. Why did the Torah command that the high priest cat slots over the two goats, and that they be equal in appearance, height and value, and that they be taken together as is taught in the Mishnah and Yoma, it is as if the Holy One, blessed be he, and Azazel, were equal in status. So he’s kind of piling on his earlier question. Not only do you have, what in the Talmud would be called, Shtai Reshuyot, two powers, but you’re making those powers identical. And therefore their offerings must be equal and determined by lot without preference. Would it not have been sufficient to designate one goat verbally to Azazel without casting lots, without requiring such equality? Something quite astonishing. So it’s both the fact that they have to be equal and this thing of chance, Rabbi, that you’re just rolling the dice. And finally, finally, question number nine. Why does the High Priest confess the sins of Israel over the scapegoat and not over the goat, whose blood is brought into the holy of holies, just as he confesses it over his own bull? So here we have. Remember that Cohen puts his hands on that scapegoat and confesses the sin of the Jewish people on the scapegoat. You would expect that the goat that is going to God, that would be like all the other sacrifices that are brought in the Mishkan or the Temple upon which he gives his declaration of confession. So I think, Rabbi, you’ll agree that these are good questions. Anybody can start a Devar Torah with questions. We’re not going to lose any great sleep over them. I think the key is going to be where he’s taking us and the fact that he’s kind of bringing us. And let’s assume that we’re typical Portuguese Jews. He’s bringing us into the study hall, he’s asking these questions, and now he’s going to give us his thought process. And this becomes fascinating.

Adam Mintz [00:19:44]:
This is fascinating, and it’s great. And again, you’re sitting there in Lisbon, so where you are is the study hall. The Lisbon, the Portuguese study hall of Abarbanel. So take it away from the study hall.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:58]:
Great. So he goes to the trouble of giving us his hav emina, his first explanation. He says the two goats represent the two famous twins of the Torah, Jacob and Esau. As for the goat, for Azrazel, my view is that these two goats symbolize Esau and Jacob, who were both brothers, children of one man and one woman, twins born at the same hour. Remez la esav soyushnem achim b’ neisa echad v’ issa achat t’ umim noldim be’ sa achatשהיו שניהם אחים בני איש אחד ואשה אחת תאומים נולדים בשעה אחת. They were born at the same hour. Therefore, the goats were to to be equal in every respect. And their taking was together, as the Mishnah teaches. They were goats. Because Esau was by nature hairy. Rabbi.

Adam Mintz [00:20:48]:
Now you know why I emphasize he plays on that. That’s important.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:52]:
As it says, behold, Esau, my brother is a hairy man. And the matter of the lots was that both were equal in nature and status. But the providence of God and his compassion. Jacob was set apart for the Lord’s inheritance and portion while Esau was distanced from the service and love of his Maker. As the prophet Malachi says. I have loved you, says the Lord. Yet you say, in what have you loved us? Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? Says the Lord, yet I love Jacob. And Esau I hated. So this is new. Now we’re starting to get a little vitriol towards Esau. Not that he simply wasn’t chosen. Remember, his father loved him, but that God hated him. Let’s go a little bit further, he says. And the goat of Azazel, which symbolized Esau, he is Edom. Rabbi, you and I both know what Edom stands for, right? It is Rome. It is Christianity.

Adam Mintz [00:21:58]:
And remember, the Christians are the enemy to Abarbanel because they were responsible for the expulsion from Spain in 1492.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:07]:
We don’t know when this is written. Remember, on the one hand, he deals with Christians. He works in the government. He respects them, he studies their commentary. But on the other hand, as you say, the Christians that he was actually bumped heads with and the people were the ones that kicked him out.

Adam Mintz [00:22:26]:
The bad guys.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:27]:
Bitter and fierce in power and wickedness. So what happened to Esau? He was sent into the wilderness, to a land cut off. So too was Esau in his youth. A man skilled in hunting. A man of the field. A violent man, I would add. And God distanced him from his inheritance, from the inheritance of the Lord. As the prophet said, I made his mountains of desolation. And our sages, in their wisdom, already alluded to this symbolism in Bereshot Rabbah, where they said, the goat shall bear upon it. This is Esau. All their iniquities. The iniquities of the innocent one. Tam. As it says, Jacob was a wholesome man, Ish tam. So anyone reading this in the 14 century knows exactly what our Abarbanel is talking about. If I said in the introduction that one of his ways of studying the Torah was to make it relevant, Rabbi. This all of a sudden becomes very relevant. He goes on. Thus, the scapegoat was not an offering to Azazel. Therefore, it did not merit slaughter or sacrifice upon the altar, but rather total removal and being cast into a land cut off, where there is no habitation. It was as though this was a prayer to God that so he should do to his enemy. Abarbanel, I am going to show, is quoting a tradition that we come across in the Passover Seder when we say Shafak hamatcha Al hagoyim, where we use prayer to curse Esav and our enemies. He is putting that right in the middle of the right at the center of the Yom Kippur liturgy, Ze tefillah le Elohim, and that they should become שלא יקטרג על ישראל. כלומר שלא יהי עו לישראל למכשול These are words that are being used that on the day of judgment sound very familiar to us. Therefore, those impurities and sins should fall upon the seed of Easu, not unto Jacob. So what he’s trying to do is the goat that went to God, that was Israel, and the goat that went Lazazel, this was our enemies. And, Rabbi, there is a book that, you know, I love very much, and it’s by a guy named Israel Yuval, and it’s called Two nations in your Womb. And he says that basically the biblical struggle between Jacob and Esau was not understood as a past event, but as an ongoing historical confrontation between Israel and Edom. That is the basis of his whole book. And he says that basically in Ashkenaz and Poland, it was customary, following the kedusha of the Morning prayer of Yom Kippur, to recite 15 liturgical poems based on Jeremiah. They include sharp condemnations and curses against the Gentiles and plea to God to bring destruction upon them. He says these are texts that demonstrates the abyss of hostility and hatred between medieval Jews toward Christians. This was a strong tradition. It uses verbs such as swallow them, shoot them, loop them off, make them bleed, crush them, strike them, curse them, ban them, destroy them. Rabbi, I think Abarbanel could have easily stopped at this point in his commentary, and he would have been standing very firmly within a tradition of associating the Sir l’Azazel with our enemy, the Christians. And we would have understood him. We would have contextualized him. We would have given him plenty of credit for having said that. But he has a second opinion. And the second opinion is fascinating because it is in his mind, the truth. And so what he says is as follows. He said, but the interpretation that seems most correct to me in this matter is that the two goats symbolize the congregation of Israel as a whole, but under two different conditions. When they are good and upright, walking after the Lord their God and cleaving to him. They are for the Lord Their fat parts and inward parts, which, as I explained, symbolize their inward thoughts, are offered upon the altar of God and their blood is brought within the veil and sprinkled upon and before the ark cover all this symbolizes cleaving to God and that they will merit the life of the world to come and to be tachat Kanfey Shechina. So now let’s get to the second goat. But if Israel is evil and sinful toward the Lord and does not keep his charge and the honor of his sanctuary, then its lot and portion is to be for Azazel that is to be distanced from the blessed God and his holy ones and to become a fierce people going into exile before an oppressor. So now remember, we said the word Oz can mean goat, but it can also mean fierce and strong. And he says, there’s a part of Israel, if they don’t believe, they don’t keep the laws. They’re going to be exiled, but they’re going to be fierce. And they are going to be distanced from the blessed God and his holy ones. And to become a fierce people going into exile before an oppressor. For Azazel is a compound name of two words, Az and Azal, meaning this people will go away and be sent off from its land because of its fierce faced people. Rabbi, he’s saying that the Sir L’Azazal represents us in the Golah, us in exile, us in Portugal. Its punishment in this world will be that it is dragged from land and distance from the delight of the righteous and from the radiance of the Divine Presence. All this is included in the name Azazel. The fierce one shall go away to shame and everlasting disgrace. And Aaron shall take the two goats and place them before the Lord. Why should the goat sent away stand before the Lord because he too is holy,. If not because both symbolize the congregation, whether holy or sinful. So this is the two arms of Judaism. Therefore both are brought near that holy place as if to say, here, O Israel, is the place of your holiness, if only you are willing and obedient. The Lord waits to be gracious to you. But if you turn away from him, the hand of the Lord shall be against you and he will send you from the land. So now he’s talking to his people. Then he says as follows. He says, the matter is equal in the goats, for both signify the nation. Now is the punchline how great is this statement and how mighty its promise for that sinful goat, symbolizing the congregation of Israel will not perish nor be consumed in exile, but shall stand alive before the Lord that is preserved in its religion and in the maintenance of its Torah until the time and moment come. At the end of its exile, well, he will atone for it because of the sufferings it endured in exile. He makes us into the seir lazazel. He gives us strength. For him, it’s not killed. It’s set live into the wilderness. But basically, he says that if they walked after the Lord and kept his Torah would be decreed into together with a promise of what would in the end be theirs atonement and redemption. Thus he says, I have answered my three questions. So I think it’s fascinating that, number one, he doesn’t go down the road of cursing the the Christians. He goes down the road of giving hope and inspiration to his fellow Jews in exile. He tells them that they have to be strong. And if you think about it a little, what he’s saying is, we are all brothers. We are all. A little bit of us is one of those two goats, and we are all connected. So I just found it so fascinating to read how he really does come up with an absolutely unique interpretation. He shows us a direction we could easily go down in terms of the blame game and the hate game. And instead, he provides a message of inspiration, of strength, and of hope.

Adam Mintz [00:31:22]:
This is amazing. Wow. And as you walk the streets of Lisbon, this, you know, this is kind of a call. The Abarbanel is talking not only to his generation, but to all generations. And this Shabbat we read Achrei Mot, we’re going to be thinking about this. Fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:39]:
Okay, well, Shabbat shalom, regards from Lisbon, and look forward to next week where we go back to regularly scheduled commentaries. He’s a long one, but he this week, it was definitely worth reading.

Adam Mintz [00:31:54]:
Amazing. Thanks a lot.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:55]:
Shabbat shalom. See you all next week.

Adam Mintz [00:31:57]:
Shabbat shalom. Enjoy.

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 Parshat Tazria mitsora. It contains the strange laws of biblical leprosy, tzarat of the skin of garments, and even houses. So join us for when homes are torn open. Well, Rabbi, welcome back from Scotland. It sounds like you went from castle to castle and you must have seen a few walls yourselves. Maybe they were needing in renovations.

Adam Mintz [00:01:57]:
I would imagine that there were treasures inside those walls. We didn’t break them open, but I’m sure there were treasures there.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:04]:
Treasures, secrets you can imagine. Only imagine what those walls have heard, right?

Adam Mintz [00:02:11]:
That is for sure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:13]:
So here we are back in Vayikra We took a few episodes off to get into our favorite subject matter, the Haggadah. We’re in Leviticus 14. And this is after, as I said in the intro, go this enigmatic leprosy tzarat, starting with on the skin, then going into clothing. And now we’re at the last kind of rung or use case for this leprosy, this tzarat. God spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, when you enter the land of Canaan, that I give you as a possession and I inflict an eruptive plague upon a house in the land you possess. Ki tavo el haretz kenan asher ani noten lehem la’ ahuza v’ netati neggat tzarat bebayit eretz ahuzat. So that is full of so many kind of conditions and explanations that we haven’t found in the other instances of this leprosy there it talks about if your skin is, well, white, if it has a hair. It more describes the tzarat itself. Here it almost seems like conditional. And our good buddy Rashi picks right up on it. He says, when you come to the land, I will put the plague of leprosy. This was an announcement to them that these plagues would come upon them because the Amorites concealed treasures of gold in the walls of their houses. During the whole 40 years, the Israelites were in the wilderness in order that these might not possess them when they conquered Palestine. And in consequence of the plague, they would pull down the house and discover them. I had never really focused on this before, Rabbi, but it certainly seems to be that it’s a little bit of a kind of exactly the opposite. A pumf va kert vina ha’apachu to what you would expect. Because there’s the benefits.

Adam Mintz [00:04:26]:
You say, it’s surprising. You know, they look at these laws of tzarat of leprosy and need to make it positive. So they twist it to get a positive out of it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:40]:
But correct me if I’m wrong, when it comes to getting tzurat of your skin or even your clothes, I mean, I was actually surprised how almost universal the explanation was that it had to do with speaking lashon harah, speaking badly of others. It was a punishment. This is a case of when bad things happen to people who are doing bad things. And that’s why it’s even more surprising that the rabbis, at least these rabbis, went out of their way to make this seem as though there was a good side to it. There was a benefit. In the Vayikra Rabba that Rashi quotes, it actually says besura hay lehem by itself, I guess, means we normally say besurah tovah, but. Right.

Adam Mintz [00:05:31]:
I was gonna say besora usually is positive, I think.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:35]:
Yeah. Commentary or the translator says this is a glad tiding to them, that it’s interesting.

Adam Mintz [00:05:42]:
The word glad is in parentheses. I wonder what that’s all about.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:46]:
Well, because I think it’s missing besura tovah.

Adam Mintz [00:05:49]:
Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:50]:
And I think if we’re going to. It just dawned on me as we’re speaking actually besurah means more of a message. There is a message here, and they turned it into a good message. But I think maybe the direction that we’re going to be going is that there clearly was a besurah, a message here. The rabbis in Vayikra said, and it is written, I will place a mark of leprosy. Rab Hia taught, is this good tidings for them that leprosy will befall them? He’s asking a question. Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai taught, when the Canaanites heard that Israel was coming upon them, they arose and concealed their money in the houses and in the fields. The Holy One, blessed be, he said, I promised their ancestors, meaning the ancestors of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, that I will take their descendants into a land full of everything good, as it is stated in Deuteronomy. Houses full of everything good. What does the Holy One, blessed be he, do? He brings leprosy into one’s house and the owner demolishes it and finds the concealed cache within. So really, it’s. They go out of their way to say not only is it going to be a land of milk and honey, but they find a verse that says, houses full of everything good. But again, we’re starting. The word Naga is very similar to the word of plagues that were on the Egyptians. And I’m wondering if that was kind of one of the things that maybe piqued their creativity, where they said the plague was on the house, but not necessarily upon the Jew living in it. But it is just fascinating. And of course, like anything like this, Rabbi, you wonder whether there was a preexistent tradition or whether there was a problem here that this was meant to address.

Adam Mintz [00:07:51]:
Yeah, well, that’s the question, right? What? You know, that’s what we always were taught. What’s bothering Rashi? What’s the problem here?

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:00]:
So I think if we go back to the pasuk, it actually says, you know, tavo el ha’aretz. So first of all, it’s not clear that the other incidences of Tzarat are what we call mitzvah toluyat b’aretz, that they are dependent on being in the land of Israel. You could make a case, Rabbi, that you could be living in Babylonia and you could develop this skin condition. You’d travel to the Cohen in Israel and you’d get it diagnosed. There’s nothing about those laws that say they’re toluyat Ba’Aretz, but here it does clearly say the land of Canaan even more. So it talks when you enter the land of Canaan. So I think that made them. And then it goes further and it says, when it is your possession. So we’re gona see that the rabbis really are kind of struck by all of these conditions. And then it says, and I inflict eruptive plague. That’s the translation that we have natati Negat sarat. I don’t know. It certainly negat has the concept of a plague upon the house. And again, it gets back to Eretz ahuzat’hem, the land you possess. So I think the rabbis, if we had to ask what was causing this kind of surprising turn, certainly there are enough words in this verse to strike us as interesting or strange.

Adam Mintz [00:09:32]:
Yeah, well, that’s for sure. And you got to go back to the fact that the very idea of Tzarat is so strange, right? I mean, the fact that there’s a disease in the Torah and that, you know, when you get the disease, you go to the priest, you go to the kohen. You know, instead of going to the doctor, you go to the kohen, and if it comes back, you go back to the kohen. It’s like you go to the doctor and the doctor says, if you’re not better in two weeks, come back to me. So the same thing with the Cohen. The Cohen says, here, you know, here’s what I see now. And if you’re not better in a week, come back to me. So this is really a story about pre penicillin medicine and how they dealt with illness, illness that they didn’t really understand. So they put it in kind of religious terms.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:22]:
But of course, here it’s not so religious because it doesn’t seem, we’re going to find out in a few seconds that those, they were commentaries who saw it as a punishment, a spiritual type of thing. But if you follow the train of the rabbis that we’ve just picked up on thanks to Rashi, it was almost a reward. It was a basura. The Iben Ezra says as follows, he was struck by the language of that I will give you. So what he’s saying is, since it is contingent upon going into the land that God will give us, there must be something positive about this. And he says, and it must be based on providence. You know, getting back to what this actually is, I think the consensus, Rabbi, you would agree with me. We’re talking about some sort of mold which we moderns can associate with. If you ever know somebody who has a house that has mold, it’s very difficult to get rid of.

Adam Mintz [00:11:29]:
And also, by the way, it’s white. So the whole thing that, you know, you see white and it’s the same white, that’s the white of this seharat, by the way. You know, it’s not really leprosy because leprosy is not white. Leprosy, you know, disforms you. That’s why they had leper Colonies and leper hospitals. But it probably is closer to what we call today psoriasis, some kind of skin disease that turned white. So absolutely right. The mold is right in line with what we’re talking about.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:02]:
I mean, in the previous verses, where it does talk about this quote unquote, leprosy of the body, it does have that sense of when you walk through the street, somebody calls in front of you that here comes this person with this disease. So there definitely is some social disgrace (stigma), and there is this sense of it’s contagious. But let’s continue with the house. So the Sifra says as follows, Then he shall raise the house. So what we haven’t really gotten into is what the Cohen does. And as you said before, he comes, he pokes around, he says, let’s wait a week. He comes back, he sees if it’s gone away, they remove some stones, and at the end of the day, if they can’t get rid of it, they do rip down the house or rip down the wall. But in our verses it says, then he shall raise the house, its stones, its wood, and all the mortar of the house. So says the Sifre, the Midrash, we are hereby taught that a house is not subject to plague, spot, uncleanliness, unless there be in it stones, wood and mortar. And so some of the commentaries point out here, this is why it had to be in the land of Israel, because in the in the desert they lived in tents. Again, it was fascinating to me, given the direction that the rabbis went, in terms of finding things inside of your walls that would only happen if you have stones, wood, or mortar. I think.

Adam Mintz [00:13:33]:
I think that’s right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:34]:
The Hizkuni, a later commentary says as follows, when you will come to the land of Canaan. A different explanation. The reason why when a plague breaks out on a house, it must be destroyed is that the earth of the land of Israel is holy, and its does not gladly suffer ritual contamination. So there still is this element of why only in the land of Israel. The midrash that we studied was Canaanites hiding things in it. But clearly there is this level of getting to some level of purity. The Kli Yakar says, when you come to the land of Canaan, which I am giving you as a possession, when it says, and I will place a plague of leprosy in a house of the land of your possession, it should have simply said, in your houses. Why does it say in the houses of the land of your possession? So he says, according to Rashi’s explanation that the Amorites hid treasures. This is not a difficulty because it specifies your possession to exclude houses that the Israelites would build there, which would not relate to this reason. So as they would say in the yeshiva, there’s a halakhic difference here. If Rashi is correct, then if you built a new house, you wouldn’t have to go look for Tzerat. It must not be Tzarat.

Adam Mintz [00:14:58]:
Right. That’s interesting. You’re right. I mean, he kind of plays with the midrashic idea to teach you a law, which is fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:06]:
But again, it focuses on the fact that whether there are treasures or secrets hidden in the walls, it has to be a house that has a history. If you built it last week or even a year or two or three ago, if it’s new construction that you built, maybe according to this understanding, there is no law of Tzarat. And I think that this focus on a history is fascinating in terms of what the rabbis bring. I was talking to you before the show about walking through Scotland and going into these old castles. And you know what those walls would say? Because we do have a phrase in if these walls could talk. It’s an English phrase. I did a little bit bit of research and it’s first found in the 19th century. Variants of the conceit asking what objects would say if they could speak appear in English literature and periodicals in the 1800s. But, Rabbi, there is a sense that whether the walls can talk, whether they have ears, or whether there is a history in them. I think that’s what fascinated me about this midrash, that the midrash captured the. That you were being, I guess, compelled to get into the history of those walls somehow.

Adam Mintz [00:16:35]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s great. The idea of if the walls could talk, if the walls could talk, if you knew what was behind every wall. Right. We also have the idea, you know, what’s behind the wall, what’s in the hidden compartments. Somehow walls, you know, you know, hide things from us.

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:00]:
And of course, that would be the major connection to Tzaras of the body, because everybody, as I said before, associates Tzarat with lashon Hara. About speaking badly of somebody, it would be very easy to say that the walls have ears and they are the first place that is going. They’re going to hear your lashon hara and the berkat Asher actually says one who speaks Lashon haru are first. The walls of his house begin to change. If he repents, the house is purified. If he persists in his wickedness until the house must be demolished, then the leather items, then it gets to your skin. So he connects them all. But again, what I’m starting to argue is that the two are not that far apart. Because if your walls have history, they have history that you’ve created. And maybe they have prehistory before you moved into. But the walls have ears. We are going to say on Madlik is much older than the 16th century. Clearly the concept of your walls have ears goes back to the rabbinic period where they associated tzara’at of a house, of a wall to Lashon Hara and what those walls might have heard.

Adam Mintz [00:18:22]:
Fantastic. That is really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:26]:
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 now I said in the intro, we’re going to talk about archeology. There is a word in archeology, and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. It’s called spolia and spolia from the Latin for spoils, meaning things that were cast away. And we’ve had another episode where we talked about found art or found objects. So spolia are stones taken from an old structure and repurposed for new construction or decorative purposes. It is the result of an ancient and widespread practice, spoliation, whereby stone that has been quarried, cut and used in a built structure is carried away to be used somewhere else. The practice is of particular interest to historians, archaeologists and architectural historians, since the grave monuments and architectural fragments of antiquity are frequently found embedded in structures built centuries or millennia later. You find this on Har Scopis (and Zaytim). Where the Arabs took tombstones from Jewish homes and from Jewish graves, and they used them for building. It’s almost like those Ancient books that Sharon gets to where sometimes they bound a book with paper from another book

Adam Mintz [00:20:54]:
book they reach out, has an amazing thing. She found a Samaritan Ten Commandments. And they found it. An Arab had used it as a stone in their front, you know, in the entrance way of their house. And only then they realized they’re actually with the Ten Commandments on it. It’s exactly what you’re describing. That’s great. She’s going to love this.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:18]:
So again, I found a whole study from a city in the ancient near east where it’ all about this spolia. And it says and I wanted to bring it up to current state of the art. Originally regarded as not deserving much attention and seen as simply epitomizing the decline of urban communities, reused architectural and sculptural elements are now generally considered important pieces of evidence to shed light on building processes. Besides these structural functions, reused material could be used for aesthetic or ideological reason. So what I’m trying to argue, Rabbi, is I’m taking the license to look at what the rabbis thought about of people living in Canaan were hiding things. But again, it’s a bigger story. It’s the story of coming to a home and finding a history there and discovering something about your predecessors and maybe something about yourself. So I did a little comparison here between an archaeologist and a Cohen, you know, it says the Cohen sees discoloration in the. In the wall. The archaeologist notices a structural anomaly. The Cohen orders the house emptied. The archaeologist clears the site. The Cohen scrapes or removes stones. The archaeologists excavate layers if needed. The Cohen dismantles the house. The archaeologist conducts a controlled demolition. Listen. The Cohen reveals what is batoch hakir, what’s inside of the wall. And the archaeologist reveals artifacts. Bartoch hakir. It’s a funny way. So it’s really. The Midrash becomes radical if you look at it this way. And so the plague is not a destruction, it is a gift. And it’s diagnostic. It’s kind of an excavation, just like archeology. You don’t discover the past by preserving. You discover it by breaking it open. And these foreign materials show, you know, they raise moral questions. They raise questions about yourself. Unresolved ownership, moral residue, otherness embedded in Betoch Hakir. It becomes something that is fascinating. Especially Rabbi, if we listen to the Kle Akar and we say this doesn’t work in new construction. This is only so. So you cannot live in a house that doesn’t have a history in it. And the foreign materials can show all sorts of things. Past wealth is where the midrash takes us. But you cannot live in a house without confronting what it contains. Just like spoila, the walls are never neutral. They are composed of a prior life. And it just opens up a whole new way of looking at what even in the Bible is clearly a process. The person who owns the house is going through a transformation as this happens. And it’s why only in Israel, because holiness in the Torah is not escape, you could say it’s intensification. This is our land. And I’ve always argued that the brilliance of our Torah, especially when you get into these debates about colonialism and all that, is, first of all, we recognize there were refugees, there were movements (migrations) of people. But the Torah never neglected the fact it advertised the fact that we came. We might have left the land and go to Egypt. We came into the land again, there were other people there. It becomes part of taking possession. You don’t just move in. You have to reckon. Biblical leprosy of houses is not about disease. It’s about a historical consciousness, especially as

Adam Mintz [00:25:29]:
well, I would say conquest is a big deal in the Torah. Right. The fact that they conquered the land of Israel, they took the people who were there, and they took over their houses and they took over their cities. So this very much fits into that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:45]:
Yeah. And it can be something that’s a gift, and it can be something that’s a challenge. So I wanted to segue to an Israeli artist named Elit Azoulay, and I actually have one of her paintings. It’s a photograph, and I’m showing it on the screen right now. And everything that she does, Rabbi. She associates the story behind objects and what she noticed. She used to pass by demolition sites in New Tel Aviv, and she found out that when they building in the 40s, the 30s and the 40s, construction materials were very scarce. So if there was a button factory next door or a factory that had a surplus material, they would mix that into the cement. And just as Sharon could find artifacts within a book cover, you could find artifacts of the Halutzim and the life they lived. Lived only 30, 40, 50, 60 years old. And what happened was she went to a brutalist structure. I’m showing it here on Zichon Yaakov. And, Rabbi, this is the only time in my life that I had a visceral (negative) experience inside of a building. My wife said we were going to a new concert hall, and it was in Zichon Yaakov and I Picture Zichon Yaakov as vistas of seeing out in the beautiful vista of Israel. We got inside and there wasn’t a window in the structure. They call that Brutalist. They call that Brutalist. And if it sounds brutal, it is. And so I just happened to have that in my mind and I couldn’t get out soon enough. And so when I really, I really don’t know what happened to me, but when I came to this artist and I said, we bought this painting from you two years ago. Could you describe it? She told me it comes from that building. And she says that building was originally built as a place for a sanitarium. And then after the Yom Kippa war, they did interrogations of soldiers who were captured. And then it became a concert hall. It had a whole history. And in the photo that I bought, she was peeling away the different levels of it. There’s a Hieronymous Bosch on the right, which might have been part of, of when it was a rehabilitation center. But she kind of opened up my eyes to a modern day house that had Tza’arat house, that had stories in it. And there was a show at the Jewish Museum where all she had on the wall were objects, found objects, and you would put on a headset and you would listen to the story behind each object. So this really is a kind of continuation of what we discussed in a prior episode when we talked about found objects. But clearly there is this sense that she has brought to the fore, that maybe in every country, every wall has a story. But certainly in Israel, where you only have to dig just a little bit below the surface and you come to different strata of Byzantine or Roman or other types, layers also in the walls, there are all sorts of stories heard. And I think as we conclude, if you think about what happened and what is happening today in Israel and the pictures, you know, on the one hand, I was in a building in Bat Yam that was hit by a missile six months ago. And what was striking to me was on the one hand, how the feeling of anguish in seeing people’s belongings scattered all over. And then I saw the Miklat (shelter) and Rabbi, there wasn’t a piece of paint missing from the Miklat, it was on the same floor. So on the one hand, when we see what the destruction is, we can be proud of the fact that the state of Israel invested so much time, effort, coding in protecting its citizens. But I think also there are so many stories that have to, to be preserved in the buildings, in these, in these buildings. And I think if you do go back and you start finding those buttons and those surplus manufactured goods, you realize that this wasn’t the first time that our people have gone through trouble, that we have had to live by our wits to be opportunistic. And I think as desperate as you might feel when you look at your beautiful city of Tel Aviv or in the south or in the north, I think there is a little bit of Basurah Tovah that we can potentially not only preserve the stories of those who were before us, but also the fact that they had hope and they had resilience and that they built those houses against great odds as well. I think there are stories there. That’s my takeaway from the Tzarat.

Adam Mintz [00:31:02]:
That’s beautiful. That’s amazing. Connection from this idea of Tzarat. That’s beautiful. That’s great. Enjoy the parsha, everybody. This is also Rosh Chodesh. Chodesh Tov to everybody this weekend, and we look forward to seeing you next week. A whole new story. Thank you, Geoffrey and I hope to

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:23]:
make it, and if I do, I will be in Portugal, so you never know if we can pull that off. All the best. Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.

What’s bothering me is where is the stranger? Everybody asks why Moses is missing from the Haggadah. It’s a good question, but I don’t think it’s the right one. Because if the Exodus story is meant to shape our moral imagination, then maybe we should be asking something else. Where is the stranger? The Torah could not be clearer. Not once, not twice, but over and over again. Some say 36 times. You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. And even more radically, ve’ahavtem et hager ki gerim hayitem be’eretz mitzrayim. You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. This isn’t a side note. It’s the moral center of the Torah, or what those in marketing called a cta, a call to action. And yet, on the night when we tell the story of being strangers, on the night when we relive oppression, on the night when we celebrate liberation, the stranger is missing. No section, no voice, no seat at the table. I hear you objecting. Wait, don’t we begin the seder with kol dichfin yetie vyechol? All who are hungry, come and eat. Beautiful. Open, generous. But let’s be honest. Is that really the stranger? Or is it an invitation to those already inside our circle and community? So I think the answer is hiding in plain sight. Especially if you study the Mishnah. The Mishnah in Psachem tells us how to tell the story. Matkhil be’ genut umsayim bishvach. Begin with disgrace and end with praise. And here’s what we all remember, this oddity, and expound from my father was a wandering Aramean. Continues the Mishnah until you complete the entire section. Ad sh’yigmor kol ha parsha kula until the end. So this is the parasha we call Bikurim. We start to count the Omer on the second night of the Seder that leads till Shavuot. Which is the harvest festival par excellence. And we bring the bikurim, the first fruits, to the priest. And we follow a very ancient formula. And it’s starts literally with, my forefather was a wandering Aramean. And this is what, according to the Mishnah, is the crux is the core of the Magid section of telling our story. As I said before, it begins with our humble beginnings and ends with a crescendo of how great we are. And as the Mishnah says, you have to read it. Call Parsha, Kulo, the whole parasha until the end. And we don’t. So let me read it to you so you really remember where we are. In the seder. My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers. We stop, we read a commentary. And sojourn, then we read a commentary. But there he became a great and very populous nation. We stopped there. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us. We stopped there. We are conducting a Mishnayic learning session. We are quoting these verses that the Mishnah says are really important for Magid. And we’re parsing each one and telling each one, and we go on. And then it says in verse 8, the Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand. We stop there. By an outstretched arm and awesome power, we stop there. And by signs and wonders. And that’s where the Haggadah stops quoting. It doesn’t quote verse nine that says, he brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. We don’t quote verse 10. Therefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil which you, O Lord, have given me. You shall leave it before the Lord your God and bow low before the Lord your God. And we don’t read the next verse because if we read it to the end, we would land here. He brought us to this place and gave us this land. And you shall rejoice, you and the stranger in your mist. Ata v’halevi, V’hager Asher, B’ kir, bechar. That’s it. Hager Asher be kira, Becha is the punchline. It’s the end. It’s what the Mishnah says we have to read until that’s the punchline. Not just liberation, shared joy, not just leaving Egypt, creating a society that includes the Ger, the other. So why was it removed? Why was it cut? Because the rabbis who shaped the Haggadah lived in exile. They couldn’t bear to say we are in the land. They couldn’t celebrate shared prosperity and the ending with the ger the stranger. When you’re at the bottom of the social order, you don’t talk about how to treat the stranger. You are the stranger. So they stopped the story early and in doing so they removed the ger. But the Torah had already warned us before Egypt, before redemption with Abraham and Sarai, the first Jews, they are vulnerable, displaced, dependent, and then they have power over Hagar the Egyptian, the stranger. And what happens as Rabbi Shai held in a lecture called An Exodus for Egyptians Reading Genesis and Isaiah together, Rabbi Shai held in the Jerome L. Stern Pre Passover lecture in 2021. Quoting Tikva Frymer-Kensky writes with regard to Sarah’s statement of her slave Hagar, we like to believe that suffering makes us more sympathetic to the suffering of others. It does not. Sarai’s own experience as a slave does not make her more empathetic to the slave in her own home. On the contrary, it makes her want to assert her dominance and authority so she won’t lose it again. As usual, the biblical narrator does not comment on the actions. It is left to the reader to note how easily the oppressed can become oppressors. When God raises high the lowly, how will the newly empowered behave toward those who lack power and autonomy? That’s the end of the quote that Shai Held brought of Tikva Frymer-Kensky and it made me think when we talk about humble beginnings, is it truly going far back enough to My ancestor was a wandering Aramean? Or might we not go back to Sarai and Hagar? The first slave in the Bible was not a Jewish slave to Egyptians, but as Shai Held points out, it was an Egyptian slave to early Jews. 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 Gadyah 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, which brings us to now, for the first time in 2000 years, we are no longer only telling the story, we are living inside of it. We are back in the land of Israel, which means the part of the Haggadah ommits is no longer theoretical and frankly should not and no longer be omitted. And that changes everything, because now we can no longer stop at Vayotzanu Hashem miMitzrayim. God took us out of Egypt. We must continue. And he brought us to this place and he gave us this land, Eretz zavat halav udvash, this land of milk and honey. And then the Torah says in verse 10 va’ atah. “And now” this is the exclamation, the blessing, the affirmation of he who is truly celebrating and bringing the first fruits. And it goes on to say that, you gave me these fruits, you gave me this bounty. I am going to bow before God. And you shall enjoy and be happy with all the good that God gave you. That should actually be part of the hagaddah. And we should be parsing every word in those verses the same way we do with the prior verses. And when we get to Vahager Asher bekiubecha, we should be telling a midrash very similar to what Shai held and what Tikva Frymer-Kensky has told. Because redemption is not just about leaving oppression. It’s about what you do with power. And this is not an abstract thought. Rabbi Kenneth Brander, the Rosh HaYeshiva of Ohr Torah, recently wrote clearly and courageously against extremist violence by Jews against Palestinians in the West Bank. His argument is not political, it is Torah based. That violence against the vulnerable betrays the very story we tell at the Seder. And this exposes a real struggle within religious Zionism, because religious Zionism tells a story of return, of redemption. But the Torah’s story does not end with return. It ends with. With responsibility. So the question is not, did we make it back to the land? The question is, what do we do now that we have power? We spend the night telling a story. But the Mishnah tells us how to tell it. Start with shame, end with praise. So what is the real praise? Not that we made it to the land, but that we learned the lesson that we remember we were strangers, and therefore we make space for the stranger. Because the true test of leaving Egypt is not how we remember the past, it’s how we treat the other, the ger. Now that we are no longer strangers. Moadim l’Simcha.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Jeffrey 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 always included in the show notes. This week is just a week before Passover, and we have the distinct pleasure of visiting with our friends at the Shittim Institute. In past pre-Passover episodes, they have shared with us Haggadot from the kibbutzim, and we have explored something we call Yahadut Yisraelit, which is the organically grown secular but culturally rich Judaism created by pioneers on Israel’s kibbutzim starting in the ’20s and the ’30s. Today we are catching up with Eran Yaarkoni, the CEO of Shittim Institute, and Anton Marx, of all places, Congregation Adat Israel in Philadelphia. They are visiting the US with a traveling exhibit called Haggadot of Help. The exhibit emerges from the cultural and spiritual world of the Gaza border kibbutzim deeply affected by October 7th. For decades, these communities have created and read their own Haggadot, texts that reflect their values, struggles, and hopes. Today, these Haggadot stand as a living legacy, carrying voices of creativity, responsibility, and moral courage in the face of profound loss. Bringing them to the U.S. is an act of connection, linking Israeli and North American communities Through shared memory, ritual, and story. At its heart, this is an invitation to reflect together on what it means to be Jewish right now, which stories we choose to tell, and how we carry them forward across oceans, across differences, and toward a shared visit. This is our first live visit to an exhibit, and although we will try our best to describe everything we see, we encourage you, our listeners, to watch this on YouTube YouTube and Spotify. So, Eran and Anton, it is an absolute pleasure for me to, uh, to be here with you today. I visited in Israel, and now you are in Philadelphia, the city of, uh, liberty for America, and you are bringing us the, uh, the hope of the Haggadot. Welcome to America.

Eran Yarkoni [00:04:03]:
Thank you, thank you. Thanks for having us.

Anton Marks [00:04:05]:
Thank you very much.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:07]:
So tell us, tell us, I just walked into the show and I’m seeing my old friends. Tell me about the exhibit.

Anton Marks [00:04:15]:
So we’ve got this incredible exhibit, as you say, “Haggadot of Hope: Stories of Freedom from the Gaza Border Kibbutzim,” which includes excerpts. We’ve got here a map of the kibbutzim on the Gaza border. We’ve got 17 kibbutzim here whose haggadot are represented in this exhibition. We’re traveling around the East Coast of North America, from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and then up to Massachusetts. 14 locations in 13 days. And we’re happy to be here to share this amazing treasure trove of excerpts of Haggadot from these kibbutzim. The kibbutzim, most of these kibbutzim were established in the 1940s, 1950s, and up until today, they have been rewriting and revisiting their Haggadot, incredible pieces of art and creativity and messages of unbelievable messages of hope and optimism, which is, you know, even we’ve got Haggadot here represented from 2024, 2025 communities that have experienced incredible amounts of trauma, incredible amounts of loss, and yet their Haggadot, when you flick through the pages, of expressing their hopes and their dreams for a better future, for peace. So yeah, the exhibition is here in North America. We’ve already done a couple of events. We’re now in our third community. The response so far has been fantastic, and we’d like to share some of the excerpts with your listeners.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:57]:
Fantastic. You know, we are commanded in the Haggadah to act as though we are going out of Egypt, and it It seems to me that every time, every generation that celebrates the Seder, we’re actually living in different periods. Sometimes it’s a golden age. I think most American Jews and maybe some Israelis are used to the Seder being a celebration. We live in good times. We have so much to be thankful for. Our predecessors might have suffered. You can say sometimes we forget that for many of our forefathers, whether in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s in Israel or in 2,000 years of Jewish history, Passover was a tough time. It was a Leil Shemurim. And I think to have us look at Haggadot from that time period, people that we can really associate with, I mean, the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s weren’t that long ago. We can still see kibbutzim in Israel. The message has to be so powerful. I was wondering before we begin, if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about Shittim and how it is that you, your institute, has access to these Haggadot. Tell us about the amazing trove, the amazing archive of Haggadot, but also in general, the daily rituals and communal cultural events and texts of the Kibbutz movement.

Anton Marks [00:07:41]:
So I can tell you that Shittim Institute was established by Aryeh Ben-Gurion, the nephew of the famous David Ben-Gurion, and he was an educator on Kibbutz Bet HaShita up in the north of Israel between Afula and Beit Shan, Kibbutz Bet HaShita. And he was looking for materials that he could use within his educational work with the kids of the kibbutz, and he started collecting materials that had been put together on his kibbutz for different holidays and festivals, whether it was programs for Bar/Bat Mitzvah, whether it was for Pesach, whether it was for Yom Hatzma’ot or other festivals. And at a certain point he was like, okay, I’ve collected these materials for my kibbutz, but surely there are other kibbutzim that need, that are creating materials and that there are other educators on other kibbutzim that would like materials similarly to me to work with the kids. And so he started wandering around the neighboring kibbutzim and he started collecting these materials. And first of all, he put them in a milk crate underneath his bed. And eventually that milk crate wasn’t big enough. And he was given a room on the kibbutz and he filled the room with materials from the kibbutzim. And eventually today, what we have all these years later is the archive. It’s a nationally officially recognized archive with over 1 million pieces from all of the kibbutzim, around about 250 kibbutzim from all over the country. And it’s cataloged. According to theme, according to festival, according to holiday, according to life cycle event. All of these materials, they say that if you put them end to end, it will reach a third of a mile in distance, most of which is available, accessible digitally on our website, which exists today in English, Hebrew, and Spanish. And around the archive, it’s an educational center where we run programs for school principals, for teachers, and programs all over the country in Israel, bringing these materials to life because they are educational materials. And we’re putting together lots of programs. On top of that, we’re today mentoring, working together with the cultural coordinators of kibbutzim on the Gaza border, now also communities in the north that have been evacuated. And that’s all part of our work to make these materials accessible and to delve into the content here because it’s absolutely incredible stuff. And Israeli society is looking for inspiration and materials for which to use during our holiday celebrations. And now for the first time, we’ve crossed the pond and we’re here in North America in order to bring these materials to a new audience that we feel can benefit from seeing this 100-year creativity of kibbutz Judaism.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:28]:
You whetted our interest, so please show us around the show or take us to a sample of what the Haggadah that the kibbutz created is unique and how it has a unique message for us.

Eran Yarkoni [00:10:44]:
So as for example, so let’s start with the main idea or the main unique approach that the kibbutzim developed for the Haggadah. They looked after how to tell the story, not as a historical story that finished 3,000 years ago, but as a continuous story that we are still a part of it. Because they wanted that the story of the Exodus will be the inspiration for their own journey. And so, and this is, the main entrance, let’s say, to understand the secrets of the Haggadah of the kibbutzim. So we can see like here in the Kibbutz Givim, when they talked about Behol Dor Vador, so they draw a painting of a woman that came out from Egypt. And it’s like a chain of people and continuity till their days in the 1950s when the last chain is the pioneer who arrived to establish kibbutz Gvaram in the Gaza border. So this is an interesting example. Another one.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:13]:
So, Eran, let me stop you for a second because for those of us who cannot see the video, it kind of reminds me of sometimes you see when people describe evolution where they have a primitive, whether it’s a monkey or whatever, and then slowly it evolves through Neanderthal man and then through the caveman up until present-day man. And that drawing kind of captures that. And what that means is evolution is not simply a way of understanding what you’re looking at, but the word actually works. That for the person who drew that image, Judaism had evolved. And when you evolve, where you are today is critical, but you can never forget your past. Your past gives more meaning to where you are today. And so in every generation, the Bechol Dor Vador reminds us of L’dor Vador. It’s both a mesorah, a tradition, but it’s also an evolution. Things change. I I love it.

Anton Marks [00:13:23]:
So just to continue what you said, I will show you another example, a fabulous or very, very exciting example. Just I want that you will be able to see it from before we talked about Gvar Am from 1950. And now I want to show you the same approach that you talk about it from 2024, 2 years ago, half a year after October 7 massacre, in kibbutz Neer Oz, one of the kibbutzim that had the worst hurt in this massacre, they sat around their Haggadah that they wrote a few days before the seder, and they wrote for themselves like this. As we face the challenge of creating memory, how will Neer Oz and its people be remembered in the eyes of history? This book is being written now. The task is ours. So they took the mission to be the history, not just to learn about the history. And as they say to themselves on these days, Half a year after October 7th, now we are the history. People will learn about us and we will need to know it now to remember it and to be like symbol, like a lighthouse for others.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:01]:
And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Matlik Podcast, it’s reading texts. And talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGif 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. VoiceGif 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’nei mitzvah practicing their laning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gadyar 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. I think most students of Judaism would normally take the concept of bechol dor v’dor and the idea of chayev kol adam to look upon himself as though he had experienced the Exodus as looking backwards, as re-experiencing something in the past. And I think you’ll agree with me that what the kibbutznikim did, not only in the ’20s and ’30s, but 2 years ago in the Haggadah that you show, is that in every generation, generation, we are required to rewrite the Haggadah, to write it afresh. If you could just talk to our listeners a little bit about what the traditional kibbutzim Haggadot did in terms of almost including a little almanac or diary of the past year, what soldiers had fallen, what milestones the kibbutz had gone through. That was part of their experience of rewriting the Haggadah, every Seder.

Eran Yarkoni [00:17:14]:
Yes, if I understood what you said, that I will say like this, that the right way to use the Haggadah is like a framework, like a vessel that you can fill it with your story and your values that you want to resonate and the things that you want to reinforce. And this is the, I think this is the right way to celebrate the Passover is that you need to think, what do you have to bring to the world? What is your own story? And what is your unique part in the long chain of the Jewish peoplehood.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:05]:
Yes, I think we’re all touching upon the same subject. Let me ask you this. The picture that you have of the Niroz Seder, or the Seder that they wrote that, where did they hold it? Were they in Niroz or they were still?

Eran Yarkoni [00:18:23]:
No, on this time they were evacuated to Eilat. It was a set in a Malone, in a hotel. And I think only 3 or 4 months ago, we’re talking about 2 years later, they started to go back to their homes.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:48]:
I’m wondering if the fact that they were in Galut when they had that Seder, impacted their Seder?

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:57]:
We in the real Galut are used to sitting here and saying, “B’Shana haba b’Yerushalayim.” But I wonder if it entered into their Seder, “B’Shana haba b’Nir Oz.” So I will ask Anton now to take you to another board with a blessing of Kibbutz Nirim next to Nir Oz in the same region council that were They were evacuated to Beersheva, and let’s see their Haggadah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:29]:
Fantastic.

Anton Marks [00:19:30]:
Okay, so as Eran said, Kibbutz Nirim 2024, again, only half a year after the 7th of October massacres, to our return to Nirim, to the kibbutz, to the community, to our land, and to the home we have always loved. So here they are. Within their Haggadah. The end of the Haggadah is about hope. It’s about looking to the future. It’s about looking forward and being optimistic. And here is what Kibbutz Nirim are asking for next year, that they will return to their kibbutz after being evacuated, return to their home.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:05]:
Now, was that integrated into Koso Ravi’i, into the actual prayer?

Anton Marks [00:20:10]:
Exactly, exactly. That is their fourth cup. In their Haggadah from 2024. That is part of their fourth cup’s blessing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:19]:
Could you read that in Hebrew, please?

Anton Marks [00:20:21]:
I could try. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:32]:
And, you know, had they made that blessing without that, it wouldn’t have been authentic. The beauty of these kibbutzim Haggadah is you could argue that they are diverging from the traditional Haggadah, but on the other hand, they are taking the Haggadah more seriously because it is impacting their life. And I think part of what you’re doing in this tour is uniting our communities in the United States with those in Israel. And it’s at a moment like this when in fact all of us, or at least the kibbutznikim, were in galut, that we have now a special connection that we never had they had before. And what they read and wrote into their blessing now gives us more meaning to us and potentially helps them have an insight in what it is, 2,000 years of Jewish yearning and the way we live, hoping to come to Israel. It’s an amazing— by reliving and rewriting the Haggadah, they actually bring it to life and bring our communities together. It’s so wonderful. I was actually at Nerim 6 months after October 7th. And I think what a lot of people don’t realize is many of the kibbutzim were celebrating the night before their anniversary of their founding. I don’t know whether it was 70 years or 80 years. They were actually doing a seder, if you will. And the next morning, this all happened. Just amazing history.

Anton Marks [00:22:11]:
I think you’re right in terms of what we can learn and what we can take from this. I think the beauty of the Kibbutz Haggadah is that it’s not a historical document. It’s not a historical document that’s set in stone, that ends with the Exodus from Egypt, and that’s it. We’re just sitting and we’re having a history lesson about what happened. For them, Exodus didn’t end with the Yitziat Mitzrayim. It’s continual. It’s a continual process of what is our Mitzrayim now, What was it when we wrote our Haggadah 5 years ago, when we wrote it 20 years ago, when we wrote it 40 years ago? It’s something that’s real. It’s something that tells the current situation, the current story, and the current dilemmas that we have. It’s set in the present as well as in the past, and it’s also looking forward. That whole process of rewriting and renewing, we ask on Passover, Manishtanat, What has changed this year? And if we ask those questions, we’re asking about what our current reality looks like. And therefore, we can always respond and say, how do we respond and how do we understand our current reality to give us an idea and understanding of what we should be doing?

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:26]:
So I’m glad you mentioned the Ma Nishta now, because in the kibbutzim haggadot, that’s the first thing I go to. I’m a collector of kibbutzim haggadot, and the first thing I go to is to look at how they changed, how they modified, how they personalized the Ma Nishtana. Do you have a place in the exhibit that you focus on the Ma Nishtana?

Anton Marks [00:23:48]:
So yeah, Ma Nishtana is an opportunity to look at the current reality and see how it has changed from the previous year. And so here we’ve got an example, actually an old example from 1958 at Bor Chayil that I think is interesting. Before we get on to answering your question about after October 7th. And here, Bor Chayil said, on all other nights, we worry about the youth in the diaspora and their struggles. On this night, we trust in their strength and in their role in building the state and our kibbutz home. So what you see here is the connection between Israel and the diaspora, that Israel needs the diaspora and the diaspora needs Israel. And this is what Bor Chayil are putting inside their Haggadah from 1958. I thought that was nice. A nice excerpt to share with you.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:35]:
Do you have that in Hebrew that you could read to us? Is that on the side there?

Anton Marks [00:24:39]:
So in Hebrew, we’ve got— Beautiful, beautiful. And so that was written in the ’30s or ’40s? ’50s, ’58. In the ’50s. ’58 by Kibbutz So they’re looking at the diaspora, they’re looking at their responsibility towards the diaspora, and they’re understanding that the diaspora also has a responsibility to the state.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:14]:
It’s amazing to me that the diaspora made it into their Haggadah, that we were, that in itself is such a revelation that they were do’agim, they were worried about the youth of the diaspora. That in itself connects our two communities. Go on.

Anton Marks [00:25:33]:
Of course, of course. And then we’ve got, we move across here to Kibbutz Erez from 2024, and they’ve put in their Haggadah on all of the Seders. Again, what has changed this year? On all of the Seders, we sit among neighbors and on green lawns. On this night, we are displaced. Kibbutz Erez, displaced from their kibbutz, and they couldn’t be in their home in Erez, so they put into their Haggadah their longing to go home.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:02]:
Amazing.

Eran Yarkoni [00:26:03]:
Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:04]:
You know, I think most people think that asking questions at the seder, even including someone who’s contrary like the Rasha, or sharing with each other our troubles, our burdens, our questions, would detract from the power of the seder. But I think what these Ma Nishtanot show is that that actually by identifying the challenges of the moment, you put the challenges of the moment into the context of something that’s 2,000, 3,000 years old, something which in the context of everybody seated around the Seder. And so it gives you strength because at the end of the day, what your show is about, besides connecting the disparate communities of Jews and lovers of Israel around the world, it’s also, how does the Seder give us strength? How does it give us hope for the future? And I think it’s not by shying away from the challenges. If anything, what your various excerpts this afternoon have shown is by including them, by writing them into the Haggadah. Of the therapy and part of the exercise in terms of uniting us but also giving us strength.

Anton Marks [00:27:36]:
Most certainly, most certainly. It makes it immediate, it makes it real, it makes it about what we’re dealing with right now. And part of the idea of coming now, specifically now, to the US and to meet communities is about trying to grapple with the current challenges that we’re facing And we have many, many shared challenges and shared obstacles that we need to deal with. And to do it together will make us all stronger. So yeah, we’ve come across, traveled through several countries to make it here in a time of war in order to meet people and have that conversation about the now and about the things that we’re dealing with, but also about looking forward to the future and hopefully strengthening each other and giving each other the support that we need in these times.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:23]:
Wonderful. So before I put up the schedule of the show as it goes around the East Coast, what has been the response so far? How many days have you been here? Where have you been so far? And what has been the response? Maybe give us some anecdotes that impressed you or that made an impact on you.

Anton Marks [00:28:43]:
Yeah, I mean, this is the third day we’ve been here. We’re in Philadelphia. We’ve been in two communities yesterday and the day before. Today is the third. After today, we head towards New York. What can I say? We’ve had tears. We’ve had people where this experience, this exhibition, has been a very touching and very emotional. Passover has a place in, I think, every Jew’s heart. It’s a time for family and a time to think back. Again, that question we keep returning to of what’s different this year from last year. People have been recalling missing family members. Both in Israel, in the war, but also those that have passed away in the last 12 months. And people have really, really responded well and connected. It’s very different on a lot of levels, the kibbutz celebration of the seder to what communities, how communities celebrate here. On the other hand, yeah, there’s similar questions about the guests and about how we set up the tables, but also the deeper questions of where we are today and what does it mean to be free and what’s challenging us to be free right now. What are the things that we need to, what are the chains that we need to break out from? And I think the kibbutz Haggadah, the kibbutz way of asking these deep and meaningful and difficult questions is meeting people where they are right now in America. And I’m looking forward to meeting more people and having more responses and more conversations. Because it definitely sparks conversation. And for me, that’s what it’s about.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:15]:
It’s so wonderful. So I have the schedule up. We will typically publish next week, but you will be in New Jersey up until the 26th. You’re going to be at Golda Och Academy and then in Massachusetts at the end of the month. And hopefully this can become something that’s ongoing because I reach out to you guys every Chag. I think your email address and maybe the URL of the Shittim Institute is Chagim. It’s holidays. Whenever there is a holiday, and we’ve done an episode on Shavuot last year, it’s just amazing how the kibbutzim members, some of them came from traditional backgrounds and were very learned, but how they adopted our traditions and made it relevant and made it their own. And I think as we all try to cope with the challenges that we’re facing and that we will face for many years to come. I think that what the Shittim Institute has is going to be an amazing resource for us to cope and to be inspired to create our own responses in our own ways. So I love what you’ve done. and I encourage all of our listeners to visit Shittim when you go to Israel and to make it your business to learn more about the kibbutz haggadot, the kibbutz Yahadut Yisraelit, unique blend of Judaism. And I want to thank you, Anton and Eran, for taking the time. I know you have to pack up and go to New York to spend some time with us, and I might even see you tomorrow. In New York. But thank you so much and take this opportunity to wish you a Chag Sameach, a spring full of growth and hope for all of us. Thank you so much.

Eran Yarkoni [00:32:26]:
Thank you, Geoffrey. To you and your listeners too, Chag Pesach Sameach.

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 Vayikra. Join us as we trace the strange history of rabbinic authority, from sacrifices and smicha to Sanhedrin, Napoleon, and the modern idea of Daas Torah. Rabbi, I hope we have time for it all. We shall see.

Adam Mintz [00:01:46]:
Wowee, what a week this is going to be.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:49]:
So I’ve always been really struck by smicha and the dual way it’s used. We’re going to start in Leviticus 1, and we just opened up a new book, everybody, Vayikra, where 4 verses in, it talks about a smicha in regard to the sacrifices. And then we’re going to start exploring, as we always do. So in Leviticus 1:4, it says he is to lean his hand onto the head of the offering, up that there may be acceptance on his behalf to effect ransom. Now, Fox, Everett Fox, already says that lean his hand, the meaning of this act has puzzled commentators. It might symbolize ownership, a statement of the reason for the sacrifice, or perhaps identification with the animal as a substitute for the life of the worshiper. And that, Rabbi, kind of links to the next problem that he has, which is is this question of what lekapar alav is, which he translates on to affect ransom. To affect ransom, Hebrew kapar. The aspect of ransoming mentioned here does not recur with the other sacrifices. Some have postulated an original non-priestly venue for this type of offering, but it certainly does remind us of the scapegoat of the Seel Azazel, where literally the sins of the Jewish people are transferred the goat. So we have both this smicha, which is putting the hands on the animal that’s going to be sacrificed, and we have this sense of somehow some sort of kapara or ransom, all in one verse.

Adam Mintz [00:03:38]:
That is, I mean, the whole thing is interesting. The relationship between kapara, meaning atonement, like Yom Kippur, and ransom is also interesting. Somehow ransom is a form of atonement. But okay, let’s go. Let’s leave it to smicha for today.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:53]:
But we do have the kaparot with the chickens on top. You’re basically transferring by touching an animal your guilt. And that’s why I said both personal and societal. The Chizkuni says something very similar to what Fox just said. He says, and you will rest your hands. According to the plain meaning of the text, this is not a commandment, but the Torah describes the norm when people offer such an animal. It describes an activity. So it’s almost the rabbi, and I’m going to argue this, it’s almost natural. This is not necessarily Jewish or one of our innovations or introductions. It’s natural. And I, you know, I love when we integrate the movements of the body or the position of hands into our prayer gestures. This is clearly a gesture that the Chiskuni is arguing is almost natural and universal.

Adam Mintz [00:04:53]:
That is very— I mean, I think it’s right. But it is interesting that the Chizkuni says that that’s why we do it. We do it because that’s what everybody does. That’s how they prepare themselves for an important action.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:05]:
He says, כך מנהג בני אדם. It seems to be the minhag, the tradition of human life.

Adam Mintz [00:05:11]:
Now, it’s not only placing your hands on something, but probably shaking hands is related to that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:18]:
I never thought of that. I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, so we’re introducing more ingredients to the mix. Now, I am now showing— if you’re watching this on video on YouTube, I am showing a picture of my grandmother blessing my father. And this is literally how she blessed us. She took both of her hands. She put them on our head. In her case, she held her mouth very close to us. She would whisper the blessing and end with a kiss, you could feel the transference. Is this a traditional way of blessing one’s children, Rabbi, putting the hands on the head, or was it just my grandmother?

Adam Mintz [00:06:01]:
No, no, no. That’s traditional. She seems very dramatic about it. But, but yeah, it’s very traditional. Where was she from?

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:10]:
She was from the Lower East Side. She was born in the Lower East Side. Her father was a chazan from Austria-Hungary. But I assume this was traditional. She did not make this up. This is the way she was blessed.

Adam Mintz [00:06:23]:
That’s what she got from her father or from her mother or from her grandmother, for sure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:28]:
I think so. I think so. So this universality of this notion of this movement is fascinating. And our good friend Shlomo Freud, otherwise known as Sigmund, actually focused very much on transference. And he, in regards to psychoanalysis, it’s a technical term, but it represents a crucial concept in psychoanalysis, referring to the displacement of feelings, fantasies, and desires from past relationships onto the therapist. Uh, in modern, uh, listings of this in, in, in the academia, it says empirical research has shown that transference phenomenon occur in all close relationships, including therapeutic settings, and are influenced by factors like the patient’s attachment style. While the relationship between transference and therapy outcomes remain ambiguous, insights gained from transference work, particularly through its interpretation, are seen as beneficial. So again, what I’m saying is this concept of transferring, whether it’s onto an animal, whether it’s onto one’s child, it seems to be very natural and very potent. And analyzing it, as we are going to do today, will give us insights, I think. But I just love that this is such a minhag b’nei adam that we’re going to be looking at today.

Adam Mintz [00:07:57]:
And that’s interesting. And transference, I mean, you know, that’s taking it to the next level. That’s what you saw when your grandmother blessed your father. You saw a transference. Haskuni’s not talking about that. That’s your interpretation of what the experience is, what the ritual is.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:16]:
Yeah. I don’t know what happens in Orthodox shuls. I know in my conservative synagogue, at a bar mitzvah, at a certain point in time, the rabbi will take his hands.

Adam Mintz [00:08:26]:
Correct. And give them the priestly blessing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:28]:
Priestly blessing. He doesn’t do the thing that Dr. Spock with his hands, but he gives him the priestly blessing by hovering his hands over. Is that— is there a mesorah? Is there a minhag for that?

Adam Mintz [00:08:39]:
I think that that’s the same tradition. That’s your grandmother’s tradition, which is transferred to the rabbi for sure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:48]:
Okay, let’s move on. Now we’re doing RabbiDavid Zvi Hoffmann. And since we are studying the Book of Leviticus, you all should know that this was David Zvi Hoffmann’s book. He picked Leviticus. There are many rabbis that cringe at the thought of Leviticus giving sermons, explaining anything. It’s all about sacrifices. But David Zvi Hoffmann actually took it upon himself to explain it. This is what he writes with our pasuk in mind. He says the word his hand, yado, must be understood as referring to both hands. This is especially clear in light of the explicit verse later in the Book of Leviticus, which cites, and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the goat. That, if you recall, is the scapegoat on Yom Kippur. Accordingly, our sages established the rule in Menachot. This serves as a general principle. Wherever the Torah says his hand, it means two hands. Further proof goes on, David Zvi Hoffmann, that the laying on of hands was performed with both hands can be seen in the following verse in Leviticus 8:14, 18, and 22. They lay their hands. So when it actually came to carrying out the rules, or actually, I would say, describing what we are prescribed here. It’s with two hands. And then he says, similarly, in the book of Numbers 27:18, God tells Moses, and you shall lay your hand upon him, Joshua. So I found it fascinating that there was the beginning of a segue between the smicha of putting your hands, maybe your sins, maybe your problems onto the animal that was going to be sacrificed and transferring leadership, as happened with Joshua. David Zvi Hoffmann does not see a disconnect when it comes to smicha. It is the same smicha that you do on sacrificial animals as you do in the penultimate transfer of leadership. When Moses transferred the leadership onto Joshua, It says, lay your hand upon him.

Adam Mintz [00:11:05]:
Right now, it’s interesting. He proves that the singular hand means hands in the plural, because in that story of Moses and Joshua, God says, place your hand. And what he does is he places his hands. And obviously he’s listening to God. So it must be that hand and hands are the same thing. So not only does he connect them, but he proves from there what it really And in the process, he connects them.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:35]:
So he’s helping me segue into leadership.

Adam Mintz [00:11:39]:
Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:40]:
Now we go into the Talmud in Chagigah. And the Talmud, the Gemara raises an objection and it says, speak to the children of Bnei Israel. That comes from verse 1:2. We started with Leviticus 1:4, but in 1:2 says, this is for all the children of Israel. The word Bnei literally means sons of, and it states nearby and he shall place his hands on the head. He quotes our verse. Here he goes. From which we learn that the sons of Israel place their hands, but the daughters of Israel do not place them. So now we’re trying to say who gets the right to do smicha. And we have our heroes. Rabbi Yose and Rabbi Yishmael say it is optional for the daughters of Israel to place their hands סוֹמְכוֹת רְשׁוּת. They may place their hands if they so choose, although they are not obligated to do so. In Hebrew, it says, so it talks about smichat b’nasim. And of course, we’re taking a little bit of a tangent here, Rabbi, because I wanted to find out if any of the rabbis who are approving of smicha for women cited this verse. You’ll see that.

Adam Mintz [00:12:58]:
And what’s the answer? No.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:01]:
Only at Madlik will we make that connection. But they come close. But meanwhile, I love their reasoning. In order to give pleasure to the women. And they go on. Rabbi Yosei said, the sage Abba Eleazar related to me the following incident. On one occasion, we had a calf for peace offering, and we brought it to the women’s courtyard, and the women placed their hands on it. We did this not because there is an obligation of placing hands in the case of women, but in order to please the women. Rabbi, you almost have— you do have a Talmudic parallel to taking the Sefer Torah and bringing it into the women’s section. It’s just beautiful. That is not an innovation. It’s right in line with the enlightened rabbinic thinking.

Adam Mintz [00:13:52]:
Fantastic. Okay, I love it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:54]:
So this is just a tangent, but I will say that luminaries like Rabbi Daniel Sperber and like Rabbi Avi Weiss do in fact bring this ruling, but they don’t bring it to justify smicha for nashim, but they do justify it to let women put on tefillin, let women study Torah, let women do a whole host of things because the rabbis clearly had no objection. To the contrary, it gave them pleasure to give women this availability. That was an aside, but certainly one worth taking.

Adam Mintz [00:14:31]:
I mean, that is interesting that women’s involvement in ritual is kidei lateit nachat ruach le’nashim. I mean, they make a very interesting point there.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:44]:
And you could make the case, what happens when you do a good sacrifice? What does it give? It’s a ruach. It is a sort of— there is an expression in the Bible for what it does for God, that it’s pleasing to God. Is there not?

Adam Mintz [00:14:59]:
Correct. Well, the whole idea of bringing the incense to God is supposed to be a sweet smell for God Rei’ach Nicho’ach. There’s very much that idea that we treat God the way we would want to be treated.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:14]:
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’nei mitzvah practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chag GadYa in a voice 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. Now we are going to go a little bit into looking at the Mishnah on this. And the Mishnah in Menachot 92a says, for all offerings, there is no mitzvah of placing hands on the head of the offering except for the bull that comes to atone for a community-wide violation of any one of the mitzvot that was perpetrated due to an erroneous ruling of the Sanhedrin, where the judges of the Sanhedrin are required to place their hands upon its head. And the second instance is the scapegoat brought on Yom Kippur. In both of those instances, we have smicha, even though it is not personal, it is societal. Rabbi Shimon says also in the case of the goat that comes to atone for a community-wide perpetration of idol worship that occurred. So Rabbi, I see this as another segue in understanding the smicha that we see in sacrifices towards leadership. And what I mean by is saying that is if the whole community sins, it is, in a sense, it has an ability to convey that sin upon the animal. But it’s a special type of sin. It’s when their leadership sins. It’s when the Sanhedrin makes a mistake and the Sanhedrin says it’s okay to do this. It turns out it is avoda zarah. And we see that in the Torah itself. It’s not as though everybody gets into a row like a receiving line and the animal that’s going to be sacrificed passes by and all 600,000 men put their hands on it.. No, it’s their leadership who is empowered to put their hands on the animal as a shaliach, so, so to speak, of the people. It says in Leviticus 4:13, if it is the whole community of Israel that has erred and the matter escapes the notice of the congregation so that they do any of the things by God’s commandments ought not to be done and they realize their guilt, when the sin through which they incurred guilt becomes known, the congregation shall offer a bull of the herd as a purgation offering and bring it before the tent of meeting. Here’s the kicker. The elders of the community shall lay their hands upon the head of the bull. So, Rabbi, I am making an argument that the connection between leadership and smicha when it comes to the karbanot is even stronger. Because when the community sins, the community’s designated leaders are the ones who, in a sense, the designated leaders are the ones who have smicha, are the ones who put their hands upon the animal. They’re kind of attached at the hip.

Adam Mintz [00:19:32]:
That’s interesting.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:34]:
Wow.

Adam Mintz [00:19:34]:
Okay, so the smicha is done by the zakainim, and that’s what smicha is. That the transference is done by the leadership. That’s really your point.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:48]:
Yeah. And what I didn’t say till now is even though Freud talks about transference in psychological terms, I think in religious, spiritual terms, I think we do have a sense of there is a power of spirit that can be transferred. Transferred and it can be accepted. And I think ultimately what the texts are showing is that just as possibly bad vibes or bad spirits can be transferred onto a sacrifice that is being made to expunge the guilt, it can also be transferred from a Moses to a Joshua and from a Joshua onto the next thing in a positive vibe. There is clearly a belief in this power of being able to transfer this spiritual power from person to person, from community to community.

Adam Mintz [00:20:48]:
That is very powerful. You’re right. And it’s right here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:51]:
Okay, so the Ibn Ezra says the elders of the congregation, the elders are the leaders. They will lay their hands on their on behalf of all of Israel, for it is impossible for all of Israel to place their hands. So in a sense, what he’s saying is what I exactly just said, that we have smicha within smicha, that they are placing their hands because they have already been made. They have been vested with the power to represent the Kahal, the rest of Israel. So let’s look at Numbers for a second, because now we get to the crux of leadership. Numbers 27, it says, and God answered Moses, single out Joshua son of Nun as an inspired man and lay your hands upon him. Have him stand before Eleazar the priest and before the whole community and commission him in their sight. Invest him with some of your authority so that the whole Israelite community may obey. But he shall present himself to Eleazar the priest, who shall on his behalf seek the decision of the Urim before GOD. By such instructions shall they go out, and by such instructions shall they come in. He and all the Israelites and the whole community. Moses did as God commanded. He took Joshua and had him stand before Eleazar the priest and before the whole community. He laid his hands upon him and commissioned him as God had spoken through Moses. This is the mold, the template for leadership and transferring and authorizing leadership in our religion.

Adam Mintz [00:22:33]:
And of smicha. And the reason that we call the getting the rabbinic seal as getting smicha. I’ll just say that if you ever went to the rabbinical, the smicha at the Jewish Theological Seminary of the Conservative Movement, I think that the chancellor of the seminary actually puts his or her hands on each one of the rabbinic candidates. So they actually take it to that level. I was never there. I don’t know where, but someone told me that when I got smicha in YU, they didn’t touch me. I promise you.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:11]:
And I can say in researching this, that is, the Talmudic says you don’t have to. It’s allegorical when it comes to smicha. We’ll see that there are other requirements. So first of all, we would be negligent if we didn’t quote the first mishnah in Pirkei Avot. Here is, I think, what could be considered the introduction of the whole Mishnah. It begins in, in Avot. And basically what it says is Moses received the Torah at Sinai, transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly. And they said something really smart. Simon the Righteous was one of the last of them in the Great Assembly, and he said something smart. Antigonus, a man of Socho, received the oral tradition from Shimon the Righteous. And he said it goes on Mishnah to Mishnah, and it’s saying Yose ben Yoezer of Zeredah and Yose ben Yohanan of Jerusalem received the oral tradition from them, meaning from Shimon the Tzadik. And so every one of the initial Mishnayot in Avot is introduced by saying there was a direct line from Moses to Joshua. So this truly is the the basis of smicha and of rabbinic authority.

Adam Mintz [00:24:38]:
Fantastic. Yeah, that is the most important mishnah in all of Mishnah, of course. And the question you asked, which this isn’t the time to go into it, but that’s a very good question. That really should be the first mishnah at the beginning of all of the Mishnah. It’s funny that it’s put at the end of Avot. That’s a whole long conversation for another Madlik some other time. It’s the beginning of our Avot, but you’re saying that our Avot should be the beginning of Berachot. It should be the beginning of all the Mishnah. Okay, the commentaries ask that question.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:08]:
It’s always good when we get material for another episode. So the Mishnah in Sanhedrin says the following. It says, smichatz kenim va’arifat agalah b’shloshad. The laying of hands by the sages and the breaking of the red heifer’s neck in a case where a person was found are performed in front of a panel of 3 judges. So now we’re getting down into the weeds a little bit. And the laying of hands of the sages, meaning to say when they give smicha, it has to be done by a beit din of 3. Is that the case nowadays, Rabbi?

Adam Mintz [00:25:50]:
No. I mean, this doesn’t— the smicha today is just symbolic. We don’t need 3. But that is interesting. That is what the Mishnah says.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:00]:
And of course, you get that in conversion. There you do have other requirements. Correct. In conversion, you need a bechted.

Adam Mintz [00:26:07]:
Absolutely. Yes.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:08]:
Correct.

Adam Mintz [00:26:09]:
Okay.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:09]:
But again, I just couldn’t get over the fact that they can talk about both of these smichot in the same breath, which just gives me fodder to say I’m not out on a limb here. And of course, Rabbi Yochanan says it is referring to the ordination of elders, meaning to appoint sages and grant them the title of rabbi. So that is in front of 3. When did smicha go into disuse? That was during the Roman period. The Talmud in Sanhedrin 14a says, at one time, the wicked kingdom of Rome issued decrees of religious prosecution against the Jewish people with the aim of abolishing the chain of ordination. Basically, what it says is they forbade it on the capital punishment. If you gave smicha, they realized, they thought this would destroy us. But the truth is, as you say, we continued the tradition, if not the halacha. There were laws that said that smicha cannot be done outside of Eretz Yisrael. And for a while they dealt with that. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides actually addresses addresses the problem. He says that at first, whoever had received smicha would convey smicha on his students. Afterward, as an expression of honor to Hillel the Elder, the sages ordained that smicha would not be conveyed upon anyone unless license had been granted by the Nasi. So maybe it became a little political. But at the end of the day, what Rambam does is he suggests some solutions. And he says that basically there should only be— if there’s only one judge in Eretz Yisrael, he should call two other judges and make them smicha. Then they should get 70 judges and give them smicha. He should create a Sanhedrin. But at the end, he says, hadavar tzurich hakla. This issue needs resolution. Maimonides, in a sense, this was not recognized as one of the major challenges that we came up against. We survived just well and fine. But clearly there was a disruption here. And it’s fascinating in Maimonides’ time what happened. I will say in Napoleon’s time, in terms of allowing Jews to become citizens, Napoleon wanted to come to certain conclusions about laws of interest. He wanted to have some— he wanted to have an authoritative body that could let him know what was right or wrong so that they could join the mass. And they put it together. I don’t know how well that was accepted. Clearly, it was outside of Eretz Israel. Clearly, it was an accommodation. But even today, we don’t have a Sanhedrin in Israel. What is the status? Do we need a Sanhedrin?

Adam Mintz [00:29:19]:
We don’t have— what we say, Jeffrey, is we don’t have a pope. There’s no central authority in Judaism. And as you and I both No, that’s good and that’s bad, right? Sometimes it would be good to have a central authority, but we have thrived in the fact that we have a multiplicity of opinions. Shivim panim la Torah. My risket always used to talk about that, that there is no one set law for everybody. The law is kind of a tug of war between what the rules are and what people need. And that’s the role of the rabbi to try to resolve that tug of war.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:04]:
But I love the fact that you said we don’t have a pope. I think this is a situation where most Jews would agree that we’ve evolved in a good way, that we ultimately found a golden mean or a way where rabbis are basically given authority by their followers, by people who are inspired by them. It’s not doctrinaire and it’s not dogmatic. I will say that in the Haredi community, there is this sense of das Torah, and we could have a whole episode just on that. But basically, they have gone back to a model where the rabbi knows everything, not only Torah, but they go to him for economic advice, for political advice, for social advice. And I think that the brilliance of the tradition that we follow today is that on the one hand, we honor the ability of our people. I won’t say unique, unique, but certainly something that we should be proud of. Our ability to transfer our traditions, our knowledge, our wisdom, our experience, our emotions from one to another, both on a personal and a societal level. But on the other hand, we have been able to contain it to the degree that it enables us to flourish. And I think that’s ultimately what we celebrate when we dive into this concept of smicha, is the ability and the magic of transference as something that we Jews have been able to master and to modify and to explore and enlarge.

Adam Mintz [00:31:48]:
Amazing. Fantastic topic. Shabbat shalom, everybody. Enjoy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:53]:
Shabbat shalom. And 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 Parshat Vayikel Pekudei. Join us as we explore the sources for a popular midrash about an enigmatic and seemingly trivial detail in the inventory report of the Mishkan. Rabbi, I’ve read this story. I’ve heard this story a million times before.

Adam Mintz [00:02:18]:
And you love it every time.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:21]:
I love it every time, but I never realized how enigmatically it was written. You know, it’s like sometimes we have the Midrash of Abraham knocking down his Terach, his father’s idols, and we assume it’s in the text. I didn’t assume the story was in the text, but at least I thought that the text would kind of have some synergy with it. I think we’re going to find that really, on the face of it, it’s hard to understand.

Adam Mintz [00:02:47]:
Yeah. Okay, let’s go. Let’s run with it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:51]:
Okay, so we are in Exodus 38:8, and in this total inventory of all of the materials used, it says he made the laver of copper and its stand of copper from the mirrors of the women who perform tasks at the entrance of the tent of meeting. As though there were women standing by the tent of meeting doing their tasks. Some other translations are with the mirror of the women’s working force, which was doing their work at the entrance of the tent of appointment. So it was almost as if we had women seamstresses, like you would assume you were in a shirt factory in the Lower East Side. Another translation, JPS, is who perform tasks. It says the precise nuance of the Hebrew is uncertain. Tzavah at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And the the last one is a translation by Kehot Chumash. It says the legions of women who congregated in the courtyard outside the entrance of the tent of meeting. I think what’s really not bothering but kind of triggering everybody is it says, right?

Adam Mintz [00:04:12]:
So is a hard word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:16]:
So we all know the word tsava from army, from a group of workers, but it’s certainly makes it sound like anything that the Midrash that we all know. And it’s a tease. I’m not telling you what the Midrash is for a few seconds, but it’s almost a union, a group. And like, you and I, Rabbi, should know exactly who these women are.

Adam Mintz [00:04:36]:
I think the Kahak Chumash, which is the Chabad Chumash, legions of women is probably the most literal. But it’s hard to know what that means. I don’t know what legions of women mean. That’s why everybody translates it differently.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:48]:
So as long as we’re doing translations, the earliest translation, of course, is Onkelos. And he says the women who had gathered to pray, in parentheses, it says at the entrance of the tent of meeting. But in the Aramaic, I think the praying is there, is it not? Nasi de’etian le’tzalah. So again, it’s a group of women coming to pray. And certainly, you know, we always focus on a minyan needs men, but there are plenty of places, maybe even a kever rochel or something that you do find that are specifically, or by self, I think, self-qualification, women go to pray. It seems to be one of those places as well. Now, again, what I want to do is say how different this is than everything else that we’re reading in the parsha. Because everywhere else in the parsha, it says, like in Exodus 35:29, thus the Israelites, all the men and women whose hearts moved them to bring anything for the work that God through Moses had commanded to be done. Rabbi, it is not alien to this parsha that women were giving. It’s almost— I almost wanted to do a whole episode on the amount of times that it says ish v’isha. I mean, there will be some takeaways from today’s parsha to see how women-friendly or women-inclusive it is. But even if you forget about the mirrors, there are so many times in our parsha that almost, almost nonchalantly, it talks about men and women were giving. So that’s not what is unique here.

Adam Mintz [00:06:32]:
Yeah, well, that’s for sure. I thought you were going to say that it tells you about philanthropy, that not only men are philanthropists, but women are philanthropists too.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:39]:
Let’s save that for the appeal this week, this Shabbat. But meanwhile, this kind of bowl of washing does come up later, and we’re going to see a reference in Numbers and a reference in the Book of Samuel are going to help us start to untangle this mystery. In Numbers 5:17, it says, the priest shall take sacral waters in an earthen vessel and take some of the earth that is on the floor of the tabernacle. The priest shall put it into the water. This was a trial by fire, a trial by some sort of a physical change where the sotah, the woman who is suspected by the husband for cheating, they go through this ceremony. And the assumption is that they’re taking the water from this copper vessel that we’re discussing, moving it into an earthenware vessel. And this is where, between this and our verse, we get Rashi quoting the famous Midrashim, which we will quote now. So we’re kind of going to go to the endgame, talk about the Midrashim that explain this strange situation, and then go back and try to parse it. So Rashi says, the mirrors of the women crowding. The Israelite women possessed mirrors of copper into which they used to look when they adorned themselves. Even these they did not hesitate to bring. Notice Rashi is already hedging his bet. He’s not saying that it’s made only from the mirrors, but he says, and included in the other contributions that they’re bringing is also from these. And it says they did not hesitate to as contribution towards the tabernacle. Now Moses was about to reject them since they were made to pander to their vanity. So this reminds one of all of those great Hasidic stories where it seems that the glutton becomes the most holiest. So here is the women who are vain and looking into their mirrors. Moses wants to shoo them away. And like that boy with the whistle on Yom Kippur and the Midrash— this is not a Hasidic story, this is a Midrash— says Godsaid to them, accept them. These are dearer to me than all the other contributions, because through them the women reared those huge hosts in Egypt. And now he’s going to explain. For when their husbands in Egypt were tired through the crushing labor, they used to bring them food. The women would bring them food and drink and induce them to eat. Then the women would take the mirrors, and each gazed at herself in her mirror together with her husband, saying endearingly to him, see, I am handsomer than you. Thus they awakened their husband’s affection and subsequently became the mothers of many children. As it is said, I awakened thy love under the apple tree, referring to the fields where the men worked. This is what refers to when it says marot hatsavaot, the mirrors of the women who reared the hosts. Really playing with the words here. So the hosts that we’re talking about are the progeny that they engendered by tempting their husbands, by seducing their husbands with these mirrors. And it was for this reason that the laver was made of them, the mirrors, because it served the purpose of promoting peace between man and his wife. Here, too, a little strange. You’d think it served the purpose of having a lot of kids, but now he’s already segueing into the other situation. So now they’re making peace between man and wife by giving of its waters to be drunk by a woman whose husband has shown himself jealous of her and who nevertheless has associated with another. So while she’s taking the woman’s side, it’s not that the woman is suspected, it’s the man who’s jealous. And they’re using exactly this basin, which is made from those mirrors that made Shalom Bayit, to bring them together and thus affording her the opportunity to prove her innocence. He says, Rashi goes on, you may know that the marot mentioned in the text were really mirrors. In the Hebrew it says, so what does the translator take that to mean? He takes it to mean that they do not mean something else that marot means. They do not mean visions or appearances. So the the translation and the commentary that Rashi throws out, actually, Rabbi, became almost a favorite of mine, that the marot nashim was the vision of the women. It was their sense of beauty. It was sense of appearance.

Adam Mintz [00:11:48]:
You like the rejected explanation.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:50]:
I do. And every rejected explanation has its day, right? So anyway, they make a point of saying that the contribution of the mirrored copper was so unique that it actually wasn’t tallied in the inventory. That is the actual subject matter of our parsha. Rashi does use the French to help us understand it. Miroir in old French. So we have a really nice Rashi. So really, this is the famous Rashi quoting the famous Targum. But again, Rabbi, once you read the verse and once you understand that there are multiple problems— one, what is this multitude? Two, what is this almost service that they seem to be serving regularly in front of the tent of meeting? There are so many questions here. The fact is, we’re just now inaugurating the tent of meeting. So how can they even make a reference to people gathering on a regular basis in front of a tent of meeting? But I did notice, Rabbi, that something happens here that I know you love, and that is a hapax legomenon, that this is the only time in the Torah that the word mar’ah is used. So we only have one instance to mirror. Maybe that says something about the lack of vanity in our culture. We have a lot of words we discovered last week for turning things upside down. Only one word for mirror.

Adam Mintz [00:13:31]:
That is actually great that that’s true. Okay, so what that shows is that you only know that it needs mirrors in context here. It’s not like you know it from somewhere else.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:44]:
Yeah, absolutely. And there is an article in thetorah.com by a professor, Rabbi Rachel Edelman, and she says that the word mareh is similar to an Akkadian word, namaru, which comes from the word to see. But she also says, and I found I found this fascinating. Akkadian has a second term for mirror as well, mitsalu. I felt that had the word tzel in it, that had the word tzelem, that had the word image in it. It’s not that surprising, Rabbi, that we have an issue with something that has to do with showing an image. Right? Right. You’re looking at yourself and you’re looking at the image of God. Is that even allowed? So I think that it’s a strange object, It’s definitely— it’s a trigger for us to evaluate what’s going on here. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at the 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’nei mitzvah practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad 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 the second external quote in the Tanakh is absolutely fascinating. And a lot of the commentaries bring it. It’s from 1 Samuel 2:22. If you remember, who was, who was having trouble having a baby? Hannah. Hannah. So Hannah, who, who invented the silent prayer, is barren. And she goes to the temple and she meets with Eli and she promises that if she has a child, she will dedicate that child to God. That becomes Samuel. That part of the story is over. And now we get to Eli, who was the kohen who helped her. He was very old when he heard all that his sons were doing to all of Israel and how they lay with the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the tent of meeting. So you could make a case this is totally irrelevant in terms of subject matter, but very relevant. The word is there. There was this thing. There were women who performed tasks at the entrance of the tent of meeting. But you cannot ignore that there’s innuendo here that the sons of Eli were sleeping with them. So there was something amiss going on, it says. And many of the Jewish commentators all try to water it down. They said they weren’t sleeping with them, they were delaying them. These are women who had just given birth and wanted to give the sacrifice that you have to give 30 or 60 days after giving birth. They were delaying them. They were stopping them from going home and laying with their husbands. The rabbis have a real problem with this innuendo. But Josephus says that the sons of Eli were guilty of impurity with the women that came to worship God at the tabernacle, obliging some to submit to their lust by force. So Josephus probably did not make this up. This was a common interpretation in his day. So now things are starting to get a little bit more interesting. There’s a slight amount of innuendo, Rabbi, I would say, with just the the vanity of the mirrors that Rashi was talking about. But he flips it like the Baal Shem Tov would. You would think that they were grubber. You would think that they were vain. No, their intentions were good. Now we have a situation where they were actually part of— they were obviously on the receiving end. They were not the protagonist. But again, these women who were gathered were engaged in no right. It does become kind of fascinating.

Adam Mintz [00:18:29]:
Amazing. So it’s so interesting that you take a verse that is completely unconnected, but then you see that this idea that women had this role. And I just want to point out that in the Torah, that role is in the temporary tabernacle. By the time we get to Samuel, there still is no temple, but at least the tabernacle is more established. So if you have a role that was already in the Book of Samuel, that’s probably a role that continued to exist.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:02]:
Right. And of course, the biblical critics would say there’s a good possibility this is a newer text. So we get from the time of Samuel, they projected it back.

Adam Mintz [00:19:13]:
Right. I’m saying they borrowed the idea from the Torah. We don’t need any of that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:18]:
You don’t need it. But there is a connection between the two. So there is. I’ll give you a number of different explanations for what is going on here. Roman de Vaux, who was a Catholic scholar, writes, these women— he compares them to the young women who in pre-Islamic Arab society would keep watch over the kibba containing a tribe’s idols. I guess I thought back to, was it Rachel sitting on her father’s teraphim? So he sees these women gathered there as, as gods. Shadal is very pragmatic. He says, that the reason they use copper of the mirrors is, first of all, very pragmatic, because to make a mirror out of copper, it has to be highly polished form of copper. Right. It can’t have any contaminants in it. So he wasn’t referring back to any other stories, any other narrative. They just said, oh, you got some mirrors, let’s use the copper from those mirrors. Then he goes, the women who assemble, but perhaps the meaning is similar to the phrase to serve in the service, to serve in the army, to serve in the service of God.

Adam Mintz [00:20:35]:
Well, it’s the same word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:36]:
Tzovot is like the word tzava, right? So he says, meaning a fixed time to perform labor for a day, 2 days, or whatever period it may come from. So in his read, there were women who got together, who came as a group to contribute to building the tabernacle. Thus, some of the women established for themselves a regular practice of going to the entrance of the tent of Moses, which was called the tent of meeting. See, that’s also a problem because we’re at the dedication— we’re not even dedicating the tent yet, and all of a sudden there are women showing up. So he makes it the tent of Moses. There everyone would bring their contributions. He says there they performed work connected with the sacred donations, for example, spinning the goat hair or doing other kinds of work. These women donated their mirrors. So he’s trying to explain which group they were. So he says, similarly, the women who assembled in the days of the sons of Eli, quoting our verse from 1 Samuel, would bring offerings and remain there for a day or two, staying before the Lord. He goes, the verse that we started with related to the craftsmen that Bezalel made the copper bronze washing basin for the divine dwelling and the stand and the basin out of the mirrors of the women who served at the entrance. Copper was in fact the material out of which most mirrors in the ancient Near East were doing. So everybody is trying, in a sense, to explain what these groups of women were, what they were doing, what they were doing there. One of the commentaries explains that, in fact, the mirrors were not out of vanity. These Israelite women were adopting a pagan form of worship. Their mirrors might then have been taken from them and placed into to a more properly biblical cultic function.

Adam Mintz [00:22:34]:
That’s very important, by the way, right? That turns the whole thing around. It’s about something else. It’s about cults. It’s about religion.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:43]:
And the truth is that we have many images of mirrors, especially from Egypt. I’m going to show you some in a second. And all of them are related to the gods. Maybe a god of childbirth, of virility, all that. I have to say, Rabbi, And here’s some of these pictures here that you can see. This is one, and you can see it is a deity who is involved with being able to give birth. And it is that deity who is attached to fertility is the word that I’m looking for. In the version on the right, which is from the Met, it’s Hathor, who is a major ancient Egyptian goddess of love, beauty, music, and fertility. And I’ll be honest, Rabbi, I was surprised that none of the commentators linked the story of Samuel with the story of Hannah. Meaning to say, Hannah went to Eli because she was looking to solve her fertility problem. Maybe there are women who were gathered outside of the tent of meeting who gathered there because they were having challenges giving birth, who like Hannah were trying to find a way to become fertile or to have an easy birth and that would totally make sense for women to be gathered to relate to the story of Hannah, but also to relate to very old pagan practices. Because you, if you know people who are having problems becoming fertile, they go everywhere, they look everywhere, they try They might as well go to the temple.

Adam Mintz [00:24:31]:
Now, that’s interesting. I think the reason they don’t connect it is because the word sovot doesn’t suggest it. But I think your explanation is very good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:41]:
So it’s a group of women. I think there’s a strong possibility that they were looking for fertility. They were coming to a holy site like we would see people coming to Kever Rachel or whatever. And the picture that I had at the side was of this Hathor, who was a goddess, a typical goddess of love, beauty, music, and fertility and joy, often depicted as a woman with cow horns holding a sun disk. When I went to the Met recently for their exhibit, the amount of women gods really surprised me, and the amount of gods with this sun disk on top. And of course, when we’re looking at these mirrors, it’s in the form of that sun disk. It’s kind of fascinating.

Adam Mintz [00:25:27]:
Fascinating. Yeah, that sun disk is a famous popular image. I don’t know why that is.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:33]:
It’s because they worship the sun. Yes. Yes. Now, in Egyptian, according to thetorah.com, the word for mirror is ankh, which also means life. The ankh is an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol representing life and eternal life, often called the key of the Nile, a powerful emblem. It signified divine immortality, fertility, and protection. So again, I think that we’re kind of discovering different things. But I do love the fact that according to this one interpretation, they were taking something that had been used for idolatry and I say repurposing it into something holy. We do have another instance of that. I think the incest pans that were held by the Benei Korach were then beaten into a covering for the altar. So that would be almost a mussar haskel, an ethical lesson. Every time you look at it, you see not the greatness of the women as Rashi would have it, but the fact that they gave up their idolatry. Cassuto has the following. He says that the difference between our mirror episode and everything else in the Parsha is that only here is the matter of the construction mentioned. What relates to its use is omitted. Even the word for washing is not included. So he goes to the extreme. He goes, we are only interested in the construction of the basin. We’re not interested even in its functionality. And the exception is ours. He says the detail is obscure. Many explanations have been proposed. We’ve certainly seen a few of them. He says, according to some, the intention— it seems that the intention is to indicate that the lever and its base, the basin, were not made from the material of the Lord’s offering. Designated for service. This is because they themselves were not directed for the sacred service, but only for preparing the priest. He’s trying to say why the basin was not even included in the inventory. He says the mirrors that the women brought were therefore a unique category, not included among the sacred contribution. He says perhaps an ancient poetic tradition told that the woman, moved by generosity of heart, came in great numbers to present before Moses the objects most precious to them, such as their mirrors. And I must say, in all of the images of the mirrors that I saw, they belonged to wealthy people. These were like jewels. They would stand there in a long line, literally assembling in ranks at the entrance of the Temple of Meeting before the tent of Moses. And he says, since the matter was already known to the audience through poetic tradition, the hint would have been easily understood. So this is a typical Cassuto move. That we read the parsha year in and year out, there’s certain expectations of what the audience knows. There are times when the audience winks. He is trying to give some feet for the Rashi quoted midrash that people would understand some of the background, that they would wink and they would think about that, which is great. Yeah. So again, I just find all of this fascinating. But if you do buy into any of the explanations that relate to idol worship, that relate to Eli’s time where the women were maybe just hanging around the temple. Some commentaries even go so far as to talk about Kadeshah, a temple harlot. It seems that both the text of the Torah and the rabbis were going out of their way to hide it, perhaps on account of its unseemly nature. The details were omitted or expunged from the Torah’s account. So, Rabbi, the way I want to conclude is, you know, my dad was an art collector. And in the art world, there’s something called a found object. I mean, Andy Warhol might be the most famous. He took a standard can of Campbell’s tomato soup and he made it into a piece of art. And people said, what’s that? You’re just finding something. The idea of finding a found object and by putting it on a pedestal and knowing that it has a history in and of itself encourages people to think about what they know differently. The idea of dignifying commonplace objects in this way was originally a shocking challenge to the accepted distinction. It continues to arouse questioning. Rabbi, I am going to suggest today that we might have the first instance of a found object as relates to not so much art, although certainly B’Tzalel and the people involved with building the temple were considered craftsmen. But even with regard to holiness, and that the idea— and that’s why I love Cassuto’s argument, saying they don’t even talk of what you do here about the washing. What we are talking about is making something holy and making it holy from a found object. And the beautiful thing about a found object like Midrash is that everything is in the eyes of the beholder. Everybody comes and sees in it their own idea of where it came from.

Adam Mintz [00:31:19]:
That’s amazing. I want to tell you something. That’s amazing. Your father would be proud.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:23]:
So I’m going to finish with one more step. I am showing a picture of a Menashe Kadishman sculpture, and it’s a sculpture about birth. And he gave it to the town in Israel. And all of a sudden, a custom spread. This goes back 15 years amongst the Orthodox Jewish Jewish community of Israel. Young women have been reportedly flocking to the Ramat Gan National Park, national park in the suburb of Tel Aviv, where sculptures of Menashe Kadishman are lying. And what they’re doing is— one of the artworks in question is also titled Birth and shows an abstract figure which appears to be pregnant. Another sculpture shows a round hollow in its center where the womb would be. In recent weeks, visitors were stunned to see Orthodox women sitting on the sculptures or lying flat on their surfaces while reading Tehillim, while reading Psalms. The city had to issue the following edict. Rabbi, we inform the public that this statue has no special powers and is merely one of the many works of art on display in the park. So I just love it that this concept of imbuing something with powers, it comes from the people, not from the object. And that’s ultimately why it was so important, I believe, to mention the provenance of this wonderful basin in the Mishnah.

Adam Mintz [00:32:52]:
That’s amazing. Really good today. Yashir koach. Shabbat shalom, everybody. Enjoy the double parsha, the end of the book of Shemot. Next week we’re going to begin the book of Vayikra.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:02]:
Shabbat shalom. Amen. Shabbat shalom. See you all next week.