madlik

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Welcome to Madlik.

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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.

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Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite
podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack.

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We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show
notes.

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This week’s parsha is Lech Lecha, and we explore the many Abrahams imagined by
the Bible, the Midrash, the Book of Jubilees, Philo, Maimonides, and later
commentators.

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Every generation created its own revolutionary Abraham.

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Each theologian celebrated him for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy and
remarkably for discovering an unquestionable truth that looked suspiciously
like the orthodoxy of the

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theologian’s own day.

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Even the nature of his rebellion changed, depending on who was telling the
story.

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Abraham was a satirist, a provocateur, a philosopher, a heretic, or a migrant
crossing borders and engaging with other cultures.

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So join Rabbi Mintz and me as we ask what made Abraham the original outlier.

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Well, Rabbi, if there’s ever a Rorschach block, it’s Abraham.

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All we know is that he got up and went: Lech Lecha.

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But what his revolution was, who he was, we don’t know.

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And of course, that’s the mystery that the Torah wants to give you.

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So that in every generation and every year we can ask the same question.

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Because that’s the question.

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What does it mean to be an outlier, right?

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Each one of us is outliers in our own way.

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What made Abraham the first outlier?

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The Avraham HaIvri.

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Not only the first, but kind of powerful.

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I mean, if you think of the Abrahamic religions, we’re talking billions of
people.

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That were impacted by this journey that started one foot at a time, Lech
Lecha.

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So the parsha takes its name after the first verse, and it says, God said to
Abraham, Lech Lecha, go forth from your native land and from your father’s
house to the land that I

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will show you.

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I will make of you a

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Great nation, and I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you shall
be a blessing.

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So that’s the story.

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But the pre-story is actually included at the end of last week’s parsha.

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And I was so delighted.

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To find some really important little baggage and breadcrumbs in what occurs
before.

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So let’s go back a few Psukim.

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We’re gonna be in Genesis 11:22.

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and it says something that seems pretty innocuous.

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And it’s talking about the genealogies.

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There were 10 generations between Noah and Abraham.

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So it says, when Serug had lived 30 years, he begot a person named Nahor.

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After the birth of Nahor, Serug lived 200 years and begot sons and daughters.

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When Nahor had lived 29 years, he begot Terah.

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After the birth of Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and begot sons and daughters.

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When Terah had lived 70 years, he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

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And my first surprise this week that I had never thought of was brought by our
friend Cassuto.

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Cassuto says, Abram.

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It is not explicitly stated that he was the firstborn.

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However, since the biblical text contains no indication to the contrary, we
should understand the text as intending to convey that Abraham was the
firstborn, and that he was

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born when his father Terach was 70 years old.

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I had never thought about that.

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I mean, if you think about it, Rabbi.

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There’s a case to be made that the whole book of Genesis is not about Oedipal
complexes, it’s about sibling rivalry.

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And guess what?

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The son, the second son, always gets to the top, and the firstborn is always
thrown away.

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I had never thought … that started already with Cain and Abel.

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So we got it.

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We got it now, right?

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Okay.

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But now what the Cassuto is saying is if the verse says

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Abram, and then it says Terah lived 70 years, he begot Abram Nahor and Haran.

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So unless we have a compelling reason to see it otherwise, Abraham was the
firstborn.

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Already that makes him an outlier in our tradition, but maybe it makes him
foundational.

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And what Cassuto goes on to say is even more interesting.

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The fact that Nahor was named after his grandfather, right?

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The grandfather was Nahor.

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He had Terah, and then his second-born grandson was called Nahor, following
the practice of papponymy; naming a child after his grandfather does not imply
that he was the

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firstborn.

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So he’s still at it.

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Cassuto has this on his mind.

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You could say that’s not true.

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You could say that maybe it was the firstborn who’s named after the
grandfather.

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But if of course you know here that it’s not clear whether it was after the
grandfather who was alive or the grandfather who was dead.

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You know, the Sephardic tradition is to name after the grandfather who’s
alive.

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The Ashkenazic tradition is to name after the grandfather who’s dead.

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So that’s just kind of interesting also.

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And the third tradition is what Cassuto is talking about, is we’re not so
interested in what really happened.

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We’re interested in what the tradition did.

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Because clearly, when they were born, rabbi, we knew nothing about any of
that.

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It didn’t make any difference, correct.

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Look what he says.

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On the contrary, perhaps the tradition intended to suggest that it was the
second son rather than the first who perpetuated the inheritance of idolatrous
family.

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The second son, who bore the same name as his grandfather, resembled his
grandfather and did not free himself from his spiritual inheritance.

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The first son, Abraham, however, introduced a momentous and exalted innovation
into the life of the family and became an av-ram, an exalted father to a new
humanity.

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I love it when Cassuto waxes poetic.

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I mean it’s very creative of Cassuto, cause he makes that up.

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It’s really a dvar Torah that he makes up, which is fantastic, right?

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Well, again, if you look at it the way he does, which is this is a tradition
that was formed.

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This was passed down from generation to generation.

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It gives you a little bit more wiggle room to say this was the
remembered tradition.

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And it might very well be that Abraham was so iconoclast that he might have
been the firstborn, which was kind of interesting.

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But I love that he says this was a חידש חידוש חשוב ונשגב בחיי המשפחה … לאנושות חדשה
.

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He’s creating a new humanity.

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So that

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Thread is going to run through today’s interpretations.

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Everybody saw or projected onto Abraham this man who is changing humanity.

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And clearly in the book of Genesis, he is now standing out as a firstborn who
changed the rules.

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And the question is: what was the rule change?

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And that’s what we’re going to be talking about.

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Another interesting little diyuk that I found was the Kli Yakar.

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We all know when Abraham’s name was changed to Avraham, it meant av hamon
goyim, that he was the father, the progenitor of many nations.

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But what does his original name mean?

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He was called.

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Abram, says the Kli Yakar, as he was the father of Aram.

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Remember our friends, the Arameans?

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so he was either a leader or he was born into this location.

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And what did he become?

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He became a man of the world.

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I love that too, that it kind of parallels or contrasts what he became to
where he was born.

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So anyway, last week in discussing the Netziv, and we’re going to stay with
the Netziv a little bit today, I quoted Rabbi Sacks, and you were pleasantly
surprised.

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So I quoted a little bit more here.

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But what Rabbi Sacks says is this Tower of Babel story is right before the
birth of Abraham, in the same way as the story of [Moses] Egypt is before the Exodus.

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And in both of them, we can now define the programmatic theology, the politics
of theology in the Bible.

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What are both of them critiquing?

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They’re critiquing the empire and imperialism.

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So, in terms of Abraham, remember last week how he was thrown into the same
furnace as the bricks of the Tower of Babel?

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He was rejecting that imperialism.

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So too, Moses was

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The one who broke away from the same thing in Egypt.

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And then Sacks makes another point, which I think we all too forget.

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We sometimes forget, says Sacks, because Judaism is quite old, that the Bible
presents Judaism or Abrahamic faith as a late comer, not as the original faith
of humanity.

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So what he’s saying is: we are watching in real-time a revolutionary, maybe a
young revolutionary.

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Somebody who is taking all the accepted orthodoxy of the past and throwing it
out the door.

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A freedom fighter, if you will, a rebel with a cause.

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This is the birth of a young tradition because it was in a world that for
thousands of years had done things primarily in the same way, just with
different local names for the

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same old gods.

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So I love that insertion of the new here.

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But I think.

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That you have to go back to the Haamek Davar last week.

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And I’m gonna review it quickly.

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The Haamek Davar says at the beginning of Babel.

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By the Netziv, the first thing he says is that clearly they moved and settled
in this valley of Babel and they wanted to stay there.

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They were against migration.

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And the Haamek Davar says that’s against a principle, a basic principle of the
Bible, which is that God says, fill the land and replenish it, walk to all its
places.

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If you hear in the word lehit’ha”lech” the word lech from Lech Lecha, you are on
the mark.

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So already.

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The Netziv is talking that the most important thing that we can say about our
tradition is we acclaim movement, migration, moving from place to place, being
dynamic.

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And then, of course, he says that this burning kivshan, which Abraham was
thrown into, they were trying to burn that wanderlust inside of Abraham as
much as

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The unanimity of thought that they were trying to impose.

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And of course, the main point that I want to bring from the Netziv is where
the Netziv is different than every other commentary on the Tower of Babel, is
he’s saying it’s

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not the message that God objected to, not the ideology, but they believed in
only one ideology.

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And I’m gonna suggest today, Rabbi, that it’s not so much what

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Abraham’s message was because we’re going to see at least five or six
different versions of his message.

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But clearly what made him iconoclast was that he left, was that he moved, that
he rejected the orthodoxy of the day.

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and so I think that’s really important.

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And if you want to talk about modern day philosophy, what

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Abraham was basically arguing, especially in the mouth of Rabbi Sacks and the
Netziv, is what’s called the tradition of liberalism.

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And I don’t mean liberalism being a liberal or progressive.

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I mean liberalism in the sense that our human society has to be designed to
support the expression of different opinions, different ideas, and support
citizens from

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different

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Places.

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This is what in Rabbi Sacks’s view was the most important introduction of the
Torah at this point, and it was personified with Abraham.

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And he had to live somewhere else.

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Right?

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I think, I mean, that’s what we’re going to develop here in all these sources,
but the fact that he moved somewhere else identifies what you call that
liberalism.

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Absolutely.

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So I’m not gonna go into all of these midrashim and these viewpoints of
Abraham in the same depth because some of them are so well known and we’ve
covered them already in the

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past.

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But what I want to point out is what makes them unique.

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So in Bereshit Rabbah, we all know the story of Abraham tending his father’s
shop, which again would lead us to believe he might have been the firstborn.

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But let’s put that to the side for a second.

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And a person comes in, a 50 or 60 year old, and wants to buy an idol.

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And make a long story short, Abraham would say to him, Woe to this man who is
60 years old and seeks to prostrate himself before something that is one day
old.

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And he would shame that person to leave.

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So clearly he’s a provocateur.

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Clearly, if you’re a shop owner, he’s not the guy who’s gonna take over the
family business.

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This is someone that the Midrash is injecting great personality into.

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oh He has a sense of humor, he’s a satirist.

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The next story or sub-story in the Midrash is where the woman comes in and
wants to give food to the idols.

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So Abraham, after she

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leaves, goes ahead and takes out a bat and destroys the idols.

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His father comes in and says, What happened here?

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Abraham tells him a story.

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The woman brought in some food.

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All the idols started fighting each other, and this is what happened.

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And his father says, Are you mocking me?

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Are they sentient at all?

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And Abraham said to him, Do your ears not hear what your mouth is saying?

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so here too.

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He is the one who holds the mirror up in front of those married to the status
quo, those just repeating the mantras of the past, and says, listen to what
you’re saying.

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He’s the kind of son that we love to have after he gets through his growing
pains.

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but it’s a tough haul.

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He’s really focused on the hypocrisy of the generation before.

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And then the third part of the same Midrash is his father takes him to the
authorities.

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His father takes him to King Nimrod, and King Nimrod says to him, Bow down.

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And the young Abraham says, Who should I bow down to?

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And he goes through this whole causality.

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Should I bow to the stone?

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But who created this stone?

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And should I go to the light and the stars?

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So here he almost sounds like a philosopher.

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But he also stands up for what he believes in, and Nimrod throws him into that
famous kivshan shel esh, into the furnace.

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So I think it, as much as anything else, Rabbi, shows his personality.

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This is not a tight philosophical argument.

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What do you think?

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Yeah, I mean, what they want to point out is that the creator,

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the outsider, what you call the outlier, it’s in his personality.

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Being an outlier means that he doesn’t sit around and just take orders.

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I want to go back to that idea of Nahor.

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I think Cassuto hit it on the head by pointing out the fact that the other
brother has the name of the grandfather.

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Avraham, even in his name, is someone who breaks with the tradition.

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And if you’re gonna break with the tradition, you’re gonna be a provocateur.

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00:18:18,533 –> 00:18:21,775
That’s just part of what breaking with the tradition means.

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00:18:21,775 –> 00:18:25,897
We would call it in simple language, Geoffrey, a troublemaker.

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00:18:25,978 –> 00:18:26,658
You got it.

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00:18:26,658 –> 00:18:28,599
You hit the nail on that head.

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00:18:30,121 –> 00:18:33,723
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223
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224
00:19:31,861 –> 00:19:34,452
And now back to our podcast.

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00:19:36,920 –> 00:19:41,193
So another midrash that again maybe is a little bit less known.

226
00:19:41,193 –> 00:19:48,777
We have covered it in the past, and I really learned about it from Shai Held’s
book, Judaism Is About Love.

227
00:19:48,897 –> 00:19:55,761
and it starts by quoting a rabbi Yitzhak who says, Forget your people and your
father’s house, quoting Psalms.

228
00:19:55,761 –> 00:20:04,352
So clearly they understood that baked into Lech Lecha was leaving your parents
and your father’s house.

229
00:20:04,352 –> 00:20:15,528
And it starts by a person who’s passing from place to place, and he passes by
a house, and either there’s a candle in the window, or if you believe Shai
Held’s interpretation, the

230
00:20:15,528 –> 00:20:17,529
house is beginning to burn down.

231
00:20:17,529 –> 00:20:21,531
And Abraham says, Is there a master of this house?

232
00:20:21,531 –> 00:20:26,637
And finally, God comes out and says to him, I am the owner of the world.

233
00:20:26,637 –> 00:20:28,544
I am the owner of the house.

234
00:20:28,544 –> 00:20:34,879
Now Shai Held interprets this following the Radal as saying this was
different.

235
00:20:34,879 –> 00:20:36,821
This was a moral argument.

236
00:20:36,821 –> 00:20:41,354
What Abraham was actually saying was, does anybody care?

237
00:20:41,354 –> 00:20:44,147
I’m not here to preach a God.

238
00:20:44,147 –> 00:20:46,689
I’m preaching a God that cares.

239
00:20:46,689 –> 00:20:48,716
And that’s what he discovered.

240
00:20:48,716 –> 00:20:57,328
Believe it or not, Rabbi, what I take from this midrash is unlike the one
before that happened in his hometown, here he’s traveling already.

241
00:20:57,328 –> 00:21:00,694
He’s already passing from place to place.

242
00:21:00,694 –> 00:21:09,978
So it’s almost as though the notion of becoming Abraham was only after he
left.

243
00:21:09,978 –> 00:21:14,360
And that’s going to be an ongoing theme of today’s discussion.

244
00:21:14,360 –> 00:21:15,561
But what did he do?

245
00:21:15,561 –> 00:21:27,437
He left home and started observing, looking around and saying that if you’re
in the desert and you see a house, it probably did not fall

246
00:21:27,437 –> 00:21:28,747
there by itself.

247
00:21:28,747 –> 00:21:30,648
You might not think that in a city.

248
00:21:30,648 –> 00:21:31,708
Full of buildings.

249
00:21:31,708 –> 00:21:34,028
But when you’re traveling, you notice things differently.

250
00:21:34,028 –> 00:21:35,789
You recognize that.

251
00:21:35,789 –> 00:21:36,179
Yes.

252
00:21:36,179 –> 00:21:37,270
That’s fantastic.

253
00:21:37,270 –> 00:21:40,770
That’s great to pick up on from passing from place to place.

254
00:21:40,770 –> 00:21:42,811
That’s the whole trick here.

255
00:21:42,811 –> 00:21:43,451
Yep.

256
00:21:43,451 –> 00:21:46,791
So now we’re gonna fly forward to Maimonides.

257
00:21:46,791 –> 00:21:50,593
And I said everybody saw it in their own eyes.

258
00:21:50,593 –> 00:21:54,664
So Maimonides is clearly an Aristotelian philosopher.

259
00:21:54,664 –> 00:21:57,224
I love the way he introduced.

260
00:21:58,135 –> 00:22:05,118
He calls him the pillar of the world, amudo shel olam.

261
00:22:05,139 –> 00:22:09,001
Clearly, this is not just another patriarch.

262
00:22:09,001 –> 00:22:13,403
I would say we’re looking at an Abraham and we’re looking at a Moses.

263
00:22:13,403 –> 00:22:16,905
That’s how pivotal these personalities are.

264
00:22:16,905 –> 00:22:20,227
And he says, look how he describes his Abraham.

265
00:22:20,227 –> 00:22:25,089
He says, after this mighty man was weaned, he began to explore and think.

266
00:22:25,089 –> 00:22:26,700
Though he was a child,

267
00:22:26,700 –> 00:22:40,034
He began to think, the translator says “incessantly” through the day and night,
wondering how is it possible for the sphere to continue to revolve around
without having anyone

268
00:22:40,034 –> 00:22:41,194
controlling it?

269
00:22:41,194 –> 00:22:44,295
Who is causing it to revolve?

270
00:22:44,295 –> 00:22:48,756
Ergo, surely it does not cause itself to revolve.

271
00:22:48,756 –> 00:22:51,137
This is a logical philosopher.

272
00:22:51,137 –> 00:22:56,098
He’s looking at cause and effect, and he’s looking for the First Cause.

273
00:22:56,730 –> 00:23:01,974
Obviously, Rambam sees Abraham like he imagines himself.

274
00:23:01,974 –> 00:23:05,397
This is what Rambam would have thought about as a philosopher.

275
00:23:05,397 –> 00:23:06,618
Absolutely.

276
00:23:06,618 –> 00:23:13,513
And I love the fact that he says he had no teacher, nor was there anyone to
inform him.

277
00:23:13,513 –> 00:23:19,427
This is truly a person who came up with this all his own.

278
00:23:19,427 –> 00:23:23,610
He knew that the entire world was making a mistake.

279
00:23:23,662 –> 00:23:29,668
What caused them to err was their service of the stars and images, which made
them lose awareness of the truth.

280
00:23:29,668 –> 00:23:32,912
Well, everybody else saw a star and a moon.

281
00:23:32,912 –> 00:23:40,039
The young Abraham says, I see something and I want to know what caused it,
what was behind it.

282
00:23:40,099 –> 00:23:43,523
And then he began to formulate replies.

283
00:23:43,523 –> 00:23:46,798
And in Ur Kasdim, he started to debate.

284
00:23:46,798 –> 00:23:49,139
and then he started to teach.

285
00:23:49,139 –> 00:23:56,402
So truly this is someone, original thinker, discovers the truth and needs to
share it.

286
00:23:56,402 –> 00:24:01,144
And then again, Maimonides cannot get away from Lech Lecha.

287
00:24:01,144 –> 00:24:07,127
And he says at the end, he was saved though, a miracle and left for Haran.

288
00:24:07,127 –> 00:24:09,887
He got the hell out of that place.

289
00:24:10,228 –> 00:24:15,490
Now it’s important that Abraham was forty years old when he became aware of
his creator.

290
00:24:15,490 –> 00:24:17,081
He’s not a kid, right?

291
00:24:17,081 –> 00:24:20,253
He’s already a seasoned philosopher.

292
00:24:20,414 –> 00:24:25,317
But again, even that seasoned philosopher, and we know Maimonides traveled.

293
00:24:25,317 –> 00:24:29,920
We know that his brother died, was a merchant who died on a ship.

294
00:24:29,920 –> 00:24:34,003
But I was in Morocco, and they said this is where he went to school.

295
00:24:34,003 –> 00:24:38,686
And then in Egypt, we know that he lived in Cairo, in Fustat.

296
00:24:38,686 –> 00:24:43,570
He clearly in his own life could look back and say, Thank God I moved from
there.

297
00:24:43,570 –> 00:24:44,174
But

298
00:24:44,174 –> 00:24:53,917
Clearly, he understands that as much as he could formulate replies and debate
and teach these people in Haran, he had to go.

299
00:24:53,917 –> 00:24:57,818
He had a following, true, but he had to move on.

300
00:24:57,818 –> 00:25:03,420
So all of them understand the importance of this movement.

301
00:25:03,420 –> 00:25:06,301
So I had known about Maimonides.

302
00:25:06,301 –> 00:25:09,058
The next source I had known nothing about.

303
00:25:09,058 –> 00:25:11,079
It’s the Book of Jubilees.

304
00:25:11,079 –> 00:25:12,910
It’s actually fairly old.

305
00:25:12,910 –> 00:25:16,022
It was composed in the second century BCE.

306
00:25:16,022 –> 00:25:19,401
I’m not sure we have it in the original Hebrew.

307
00:25:19,401 –> 00:25:21,255
We probably do.

308
00:25:21,255 –> 00:25:23,767
We have it in translation.

309
00:25:23,767 –> 00:25:26,068
Greek or something, right?

310
00:25:26,068 –> 00:25:26,948
Yep.

311
00:25:26,948 –> 00:25:32,151
So, so this is how it, or I should say, the people who wrote it.

312
00:25:32,151 –> 00:25:37,386
And it was probably written over many years, they looked upon Abraham.

313
00:25:37,386 –> 00:25:42,591
And it’s a fascinating kind of a change in this story.

314
00:25:42,591 –> 00:25:54,280
So in the book of Jubilees, book twelve it says, And in the sixtieth year of
the life of Abram, that is, in the fourth week in the fourth year thereof,
Abram rose by night and

315
00:25:54,280 –> 00:26:01,266
burned the house of the idols, and he burned all that was in the house, and no
man knew it.

316
00:26:01,266 –> 00:26:06,240
And they arose in the night and sought to save their gods from the midst of
the fire.

317
00:26:06,240 –> 00:26:08,491
And Haran haste to save them.

318
00:26:08,491 –> 00:26:13,113
But the fire flamed over him, and he was burned in the fire.

319
00:26:13,113 –> 00:26:19,976
And he died in Ur of the Chaldees before Terah his father, and they buried him
in Ur of the Chaldees.

320
00:26:19,976 –> 00:26:28,820
Boy, now we have a combination of the fire and the house burning down, and we
have a combination, and this is probably before the Midrashim.

321
00:26:28,820 –> 00:26:33,240
So we have all of these stories circulating, but it’s amazing.

322
00:26:33,240 –> 00:26:36,231
How radical this Abraham becomes.

323
00:26:36,231 –> 00:26:40,963
I want to tell you the Book of Jubilees is really an early midrash.

324
00:26:40,963 –> 00:26:44,674
I mean, they don’t look at it that way, but that’s the way we would look at
it.

325
00:26:44,674 –> 00:26:48,195
It’s an early version of these stories.

326
00:26:48,675 –> 00:26:57,000
But clearly it’s reshuffling the ingredients, or I should say, the
ingredients that we come across later.

327
00:26:57,000 –> 00:26:59,881
Are presented in a totally different manner here.

328
00:26:59,881 –> 00:27:08,553
It’s his brother Haran who gets burned in the fire, in the burning house.

329
00:27:08,553 –> 00:27:10,824
But clearly Abraham is a radical here.

330
00:27:10,824 –> 00:27:13,595
and then it goes on.

331
00:27:13,595 –> 00:27:22,057
And in the sixth week, in the fifth year thereof, Abraham sat up throughout
the night on the new moon of the seventh month.

332
00:27:22,057 –> 00:27:24,206
So this is Rosh Hashanah, I guess.

333
00:27:24,206 –> 00:27:33,889
To observe the stars from the evening to the morning in order to see what
would be the character of the year with regard to the rains.

334
00:27:33,889 –> 00:27:35,389
No philosopher here.

335
00:27:35,389 –> 00:27:37,120
He’s the guy who writes the almanac.

336
00:27:37,120 –> 00:27:41,751
He’s the guy who’s trying to determine when to plant and what to plant.

337
00:27:41,751 –> 00:27:48,813
He’s doing the time-honored tradition of gazing to the stars and trying to
figure out what kind of a [agricultural] year they’re gonna have.

338
00:27:48,813 –> 00:27:53,174
He’s not a philosopher, but he is observing and he sees.

339
00:27:53,174 –> 00:27:56,755
And he was alone as he sat and observed.

340
00:27:56,755 –> 00:27:58,716
And a word came into his heart.

341
00:27:58,716 –> 00:28:00,776
Now he’s having a revelation.

342
00:28:00,776 –> 00:28:07,278
And he said, All the signs of the stars and the signs of the moon, of the sun,
are all in the hand of the Lord.

343
00:28:07,278 –> 00:28:09,259
Why do I search them out?

344
00:28:09,259 –> 00:28:13,180
If he desired, he caused it to rain, morning and evening.

345
00:28:13,180 –> 00:28:15,881
And if he desireth, he will withhold it.

346
00:28:15,881 –> 00:28:18,681
And all things are in his hand.

347
00:28:18,681 –> 00:28:21,208
So first he’s meditating.

348
00:28:21,208 –> 00:28:31,983
Then he comes up internally with an observation that you don’t read the stars,
you try to access the power behind the stars, and that’s God.

349
00:28:31,983 –> 00:28:41,927
And then it says, and he prayed that night and said, My God, God most high,
thou alone art my God, and thee and thy dominion have I chosen.

350
00:28:41,927 –> 00:28:47,489
And thou hast created all things and all things that are the work of thy
hands.

351
00:28:47,489 –> 00:28:49,592
Now he says, Deliver me.

352
00:28:49,592 –> 00:28:59,890
From the hands of evil spirits who have sway over the thoughts of men’s
hearts, and let them not lead me astray from thee, my God.

353
00:28:59,890 –> 00:29:06,775
And I want to say at this point, Dayenu, if Jubilees had ended there, it would
have been pretty fascinating.

354
00:29:06,775 –> 00:29:10,497
But look what it says in 31.

355
00:29:10,677 –> 00:29:17,302
And the Lord God said, Open his mouth and his ears that he may hear and speak
with his mouth

356
00:29:17,302 –> 00:29:20,063
with the language which hath been revealed.

357
00:29:20,063 –> 00:29:31,828
For it had ceased from the mouths of all the children of men from the days of
the overthrow of Babel, and I opened his mouth and his ears and his lips, and
I began to speak

358
00:29:31,828 –> 00:29:35,270
with him in Hebrew in the tongue of the creation.

359
00:29:35,270 –> 00:29:45,144
So believe it or not, the Book of Jubilees is connecting this to the Tower of
Babel, where in a sense they weren’t only unifying language, Rabbi,

360
00:29:45,144 –> 00:29:48,275
They were destroying that language called Hebrew.

361
00:29:48,476 –> 00:29:55,180
And now Abraham leaves, has to leave, and he’s speaking a different language.

362
00:29:55,180 –> 00:30:02,724
And it’s a language that was the individualized language [Hebrew], not the universal
language [Aramaic], of creation.

363
00:30:02,744 –> 00:30:09,488
So we’re gonna finish before we just open this up to discussion with Philo of
Alexandria.

364
00:30:09,488 –> 00:30:13,614
And Philo of Alexandria says, we have a very

365
00:30:13,614 –> 00:30:23,940
Clear proof of the mind’s “migration” from astrology and the Chaldean Creed in
the words which follow at once the story of the “departure” of the sage.

366
00:30:23,940 –> 00:30:26,461
God, it says, was seen by Abraham.

367
00:30:26,461 –> 00:30:38,548
This shows that God was not manifested to him before, when is he in his
Chaldean way he was fixing his thoughts on the choric movement of the stars
with no apprehension at all of

368
00:30:38,548 –> 00:30:42,670
its harmonious and intelligent order of things outside.

369
00:30:42,690 –> 00:30:55,163
But then when he had “departed and changed his habitation”, he could not help
but know that the world is not sovereign but dependent, not governing, but
governed by its maker and

370
00:30:55,163 –> 00:30:56,314
first cause.

371
00:30:56,314 –> 00:31:01,775
And this his mind then saw for the first time with its recovered light.

372
00:31:01,775 –> 00:31:03,866
You know, Rabbi, it just dawned on me.

373
00:31:03,866 –> 00:31:12,398
I have a cousin who’s a retired pilot from El Al, and he works with troubled
kids and they go camping.

374
00:31:12,398 –> 00:31:15,461
Kind of like a survival thing.

375
00:31:15,461 –> 00:31:19,145
And by learning to camp, they learn self-esteem.

376
00:31:19,145 –> 00:31:22,032
They learn to rely on each other.

377
00:31:22,032 –> 00:31:25,204
It’s like the wilderness program that they send troubled kids on, you know.

378
00:31:25,204 –> 00:31:25,791
Of course.

379
00:31:25,791 –> 00:31:36,598
And I just thought when I was reading this, that Philo, too is saying it
wasn’t until he left and departed that he could start questioning what

380
00:31:36,618 –> 00:31:38,880
Is the maker and who is the maker?

381
00:31:38,880 –> 00:31:50,493
Who are the governed? It seems so amazing that no matter where they come from,
because clearly Philo is coming from a different environment than

382
00:31:50,493 –> 00:31:55,428
others, but ultimately they see the power of travel.

383
00:31:55,428 –> 00:31:58,761
just amazing to me.

384
00:31:58,772 –> 00:32:05,564
And the last—I thought I had finished, but I have one more explanation.

385
00:32:05,564 –> 00:32:14,127
In Bereshit Rabbah, it says Rabbi Berekhiah began: By the fragrance of your
oils, your name is poured-out oil.

386
00:32:14,127 –> 00:32:24,308
Rabbi Berekhiah said, To what was Abraham our patriarch compared? To a flask
of balsam oil surrounded with a fastened cover that was placed

387
00:32:24,308 –> 00:32:30,041
in a static corner—I added the word static—and its fragrance did not diffuse.

388
00:32:30,041 –> 00:32:33,623
When it was moved, its fragrance diffused.

389
00:32:33,623 –> 00:32:45,840
So the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Abraham our patriarch: Move yourself
from one place to another, and your name will be exalted in the world.

390
00:32:45,840 –> 00:32:46,961
Fantastic.

391
00:32:46,961 –> 00:32:49,733
It’s a celebration of this movement.

392
00:32:49,733 –> 00:32:51,954
They get into the name Ivri.

393
00:32:52,386 –> 00:32:56,527
and Abraham calls himself an Ivri later on.

394
00:32:56,527 –> 00:33:04,590
Rabbi Yehuda says the entire world was on one side and he was on the other
side, ever.

395
00:33:04,590 –> 00:33:10,132
Rabbi Nehemiah said, because he was among the descendants of Ever.

396
00:33:10,132 –> 00:33:12,346
And here’s here’s the third one.

397
00:33:12,346 –> 00:33:17,036
It is because he is from the other side of the river, and he spoke.

398
00:33:17,036 –> 00:33:21,509
the Hebrew language [Ivrit]. We kind of have it all together.

399
00:33:21,509 –> 00:33:27,114
He brought this singular language that had been tried to be destroyed at
Babel.

400
00:33:27,114 –> 00:33:28,304
He just moved.

401
00:33:28,304 –> 00:33:34,079
It’s one of those days, Rabbi, where we start by saying, What’s the deep
meaning of Lech Lecha?

402
00:33:34,079 –> 00:33:37,341
And we end up saying, It’s just Lech Lecha.

403
00:33:37,341 –> 00:33:42,275
The message is you gotta move, you gotta travel, you gotta do what you do
every Pesach.

404
00:33:42,275 –> 00:33:44,034
Experience the world.

405
00:33:44,034 –> 00:33:46,396
You have to experience the world.

406
00:33:46,396 –> 00:33:50,600
And that, my friends, is the message of Lech Lecha.

407
00:33:50,600 –> 00:33:51,081
Good.

408
00:33:51,081 –> 00:33:51,962
This was a good one.

409
00:33:51,962 –> 00:33:53,043
Really good one again.

410
00:33:53,043 –> 00:33:54,604
Thank you so much, Geoffrey.

411
00:33:54,604 –> 00:33:56,526
Look forward, Shabbat Shalom, everybody.

412
00:33:56,526 –> 00:33:59,209
Look forward next week to Parshat Vayera.

413
00:33:59,209 –> 00:34:01,431
Each Parsha is better than the one before.

414
00:34:01,431 –> 00:34:02,652
Be well, everybody.

415
00:34:02,652 –> 00:34:05,084
Who knows where our travels will take us?

416
00:34:05,084 –> 00:34:07,967
Shabbat Shalom and enjoy Lech Lecha.

417
00:34:07,967 –> 00:34:09,458
See you all next week.

418
00:34:12,373 –> 00:34:15,976
So I want to leave you with one simple question.

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00:34:15,976 –> 00:34:21,350
The kind of question we ask after we’ve exhausted all the usual small talk.

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00:34:21,350 –> 00:34:23,122
How are you feeling?

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00:34:23,122 –> 00:34:24,382
Anything new?

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00:34:24,443 –> 00:34:25,723
Anything good?

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00:34:25,984 –> 00:34:27,465
Here’s my question.

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00:34:27,666 –> 00:34:29,206
What’s your next trip?

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00:34:29,267 –> 00:34:30,367
Let me know.

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00:00:58,486 –> 00:00:59,586
Welcome to Madlik.

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00:00:59,586 –> 00:01:01,287
My name is Geoffrey Stern.

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00:01:01,287 –> 00:01:06,068
And at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition.

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00:01:06,068 –> 00:01:14,331
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

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00:01:14,331 –> 00:01:20,112
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

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00:01:20,212 –> 00:01:26,804
This week we read Parshat Noach, which concludes with the enigmatic story of the Tower of
Babel.

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00:01:26,946 –> 00:01:32,211
We are not going to survey the traditional explanations of what its builders did wrong.
Instead,

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we will bring two religious thinkers into conversation: the Netziv of Volozhin, addressing
ideological conformity, Jewish division, and the return to Zion in the nineteenth century,

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00:01:43,540 –> 00:01:52,347
and Pope Leo addressing artificial intelligence and the concentration of technological
power in our own day.

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Both see Babel as a warning

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00:01:54,932 –> 00:02:03,344
against imposed uniformity, and both turn to the return from Babylonian exile and the
rebuilding of Jerusalem as an alternative.

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00:02:03,344 –> 00:02:07,986
People with different backgrounds, opinions, and roles joining together.

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00:02:07,986 –> 00:02:13,307
Not because they have become identical, but because they have found a common purpose.

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00:02:13,307 –> 00:02:17,028
So perhaps the opposite of Babel is not division.

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00:02:17,028 –> 00:02:22,610
Perhaps it is unity strong enough to preserve difference.

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00:02:22,610 –> 00:02:24,394
Join us for “A Rabbi,

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00:02:24,394 –> 00:02:26,075
a Pope, and Babel.”

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00:02:26,075 –> 00:02:30,315
Kind of like a rabbi and a Pope walk into a bar, right?

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00:02:32,016 –> 00:02:37,558
So we’re just going to go over the verses themselves.

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And then what I would love you to do, Adam, is introduce us to who the Netziv was.

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00:02:42,899 –> 00:02:48,561
In the second part of the discussion, we know who the Pope is and the era that
he lives in.

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What we really need, to engage them in conversation, is to understand the same

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00:02:53,332 –> 00:02:54,823
about the Netziv.

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00:02:54,823 –> 00:03:04,510
So here we are in Genesis 11, and it says as follows: Everyone on earth had the same
language and the same words.

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Safa achat u’devarim achadim.

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00:03:07,827 –> 00:03:10,113
It uses the word “one” twice.

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00:03:10,113 –> 00:03:16,938
And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and
settled there.

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They said to one another, Come, let us make bricks, Levanim, and burn them hard.

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Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar.

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And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the sky to make “a”
name for ourselves.

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Else we shall be “scattered” all over the world.

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See how I put a name as a single thing and scattered as the opposite?

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Everything is going towards concentration of ideas, power.

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00:03:50,050 –> 00:04:03,117
God came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built, and God said, if,
as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing

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that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.

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00:04:07,940 –> 00:04:19,734
Let us, talking to the heavenly tribunal, then go down and confound their language there,
so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.

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00:04:19,734 –> 00:04:35,594
So I think, Rabbi, the reflex is that the problem with the Tower of Babel was
somehow that they were ganging up on God, that they were trying to dislocate God.

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00:04:35,594 –> 00:04:44,241
But the thinkers that we’re going to focus on today come at it with a totally
different approach, as I said in the intro.

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00:04:44,241 –> 00:04:48,184
So before we get into the Ha’amek Davar, the

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00:04:48,184 –> 00:04:50,081
commentary of the Netziv,

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00:04:50,081 –> 00:04:52,136
Tell us a little bit about him.

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00:04:52,684 –> 00:05:01,158
The Netziv, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, was born in 1816 in Belarus.

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00:05:01,219 –> 00:05:04,921
He died in 1893 in Warsaw, Poland.

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00:05:04,921 –> 00:05:16,007
He lived during the premier period of the Lithuanian
yeshiva movement.

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00:05:16,007 –> 00:05:21,462
And he was the head of the most famous Lithuanian yeshiva.

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00:05:21,462 –> 00:05:24,884
Which was called the Volozhin Yeshiva.

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00:05:24,884 –> 00:05:33,630
But at the same time, the Jewish enlightenment was very strong in Poland and Lithuania.

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00:05:33,630 –> 00:05:51,102
That included people, both Orthodox and secular, who believed in Jewish literature, in Hebrew
literature, and by extension, the creation of a Jewish homeland.

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In Israel.

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00:05:52,643 –> 00:05:56,206
Theodor Herzl comes from this period.

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00:05:56,206 –> 00:05:58,828
Ahad Ha’am comes from this period.

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00:05:58,828 –> 00:06:08,476
So the arguments over the Land of Israel as a Jewish homeland
played themselves out during this period.

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00:06:08,476 –> 00:06:14,701
And Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin was on the side of Zionism, on the side of
Israel.

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One last point: we’re going to study the Ha’amek Davar, the Netziv’s commentary

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on Chumash. Every morning after davening, the Netziv used to give a class on the parsha.

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And that became the commentary that we study today.

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So it’s pretty remarkable to think that this conversation was probably shared on a weekday
before they read Parshat Noach, sometime in the middle of the 1800s in Volozhin, Lithuania.

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I’ve had this one commentary in my mind since I discovered
it maybe two or three years ago, trying to figure out what lay behind it, because he did

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00:07:02,825 –> 00:07:04,826
fight the Reform Movement.

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00:07:04,826 –> 00:07:18,253
If you Google him, you will see a very traditional Jew from
Central Casting, and the Volozhin Yeshiva was the Harvard of the traditional

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00:07:18,253 –> 00:07:19,296
yeshivot.

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00:07:19,296 –> 00:07:23,028
So it’s really fascinating that he walked a line.

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00:07:23,028 –> 00:07:38,327
I also did a little research, and there was a Soloveitchik who was his vice rosh
yeshiva. They had some diversity of opinion because I think the

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00:07:38,327 –> 00:07:46,590
Netziv was very much into understanding, as we’ll see today, what lay underneath the
text.

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00:07:46,590 –> 00:08:01,121
And the Soloveitchik was Chaim Soloveitchik, who
ultimately went to Brisk and developed this highfalutin Brisker Torah, which is much more

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00:08:01,182 –> 00:08:02,863
theatrical/theoretical.

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00:08:02,863 –> 00:08:03,186
Yeah.

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00:08:03,186 –> 00:08:03,990
Right.

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00:08:04,134 –> 00:08:06,235
But anyway, a fascinating guy.

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00:08:06,235 –> 00:08:06,986
So

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By the way, this relates to the Stern family. His son was Meir Berlin, and when he moved
to Israel, he changed his name and became a great Zionist leader.

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00:08:20,819 –> 00:08:28,646
He called himself Meir Bar-Ilan, and Bar-Ilan University was named after the son of the
Netziv, Meir Bar-Ilan.

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00:08:28,920 –> 00:08:29,750
Yep.

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00:08:30,211 –> 00:08:31,631
This is an important person.

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00:08:31,631 –> 00:08:34,523
So we’re going to go through the commentary.

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00:08:34,523 –> 00:08:41,727
As with typical rabbinic commentaries, it has a tagline: it takes from the pasuk and
then it gives an explanation.

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00:08:41,727 –> 00:08:45,279
And we’re both going to jump in when we have something to say.

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00:08:45,279 –> 00:08:52,453
So the Ha’amek Davar says this one language that I emphasized, that is what caused the first
sin.

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00:08:52,453 –> 00:08:54,844
He actually says aveira aleph.

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00:08:54,844 –> 00:08:58,238
So you could say it’s the first or it’s the big sin.

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00:08:58,238 –> 00:09:04,623
This is that they agreed to stop in one single place, b’kibbutz echad.

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00:09:04,623 –> 00:09:11,508
So I couldn’t escape the delicious irony of him saying they wanted to be all in one
kibbutz.

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00:09:11,508 –> 00:09:14,630
But of course, the word kibbutz means one gathering.

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00:09:14,630 –> 00:09:20,706
So the Ha’amek Davar is drilling down and saying, even before we get to the language part,

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00:09:20,706 –> 00:09:26,948
we have a migration, and they come to a central location and say, “We don’t want to move
from here.”

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00:09:26,948 –> 00:09:29,529
This is going to be The Capital.

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00:09:29,529 –> 00:09:34,891
And this is against the will of God that said to fill the land and replenish it.

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00:09:34,891 –> 00:09:40,373
That is, to walk to all its places since the land was created to be settled.

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00:09:40,373 –> 00:09:41,033
I love this.

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00:09:41,033 –> 00:09:44,734
From the get-go, he’s saying you shouldn’t even

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00:09:44,754 –> 00:09:47,247
have people gathered in only one place.

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00:09:47,247 –> 00:09:52,822
There’s not only one place to be, let alone one language to speak, or one thought to have.

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00:09:53,634 –> 00:09:54,984
Which is fantastic.

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00:09:54,984 –> 00:09:57,026
It’s against ghettoism.

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00:09:57,026 –> 00:09:57,807
It is.

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00:09:57,807 –> 00:10:00,068
And the next thing is the same words.

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00:10:00,068 –> 00:10:04,331
The text did not explain what those words were.

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00:10:04,331 –> 00:10:08,935
Rather, it leaves as a hint, as explained in Midrashim.

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00:10:08,935 –> 00:10:12,277
But the words themselves are not explained by the text.

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00:10:12,277 –> 00:10:23,665
It just told us that they were the same words to teach us that it wasn’t because of the
content of the words themselves that the Holy One, blessed be he, was distressed.

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00:10:23,665 –> 00:10:24,716
They were what

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00:10:24,716 –> 00:10:28,139
They were, and in its simplicity, there is no sin.

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00:10:28,139 –> 00:10:30,411
On the contrary, all appears well.

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00:10:30,411 –> 00:10:36,876
But the problem was that they all thought the same thing.

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00:10:36,876 –> 00:10:40,479
And this came to be the problem of the settlement.

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00:10:40,479 –> 00:10:41,319
Groupthink.

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00:10:41,319 –> 00:10:42,991
So it’s amazing.

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00:10:42,991 –> 00:10:49,910
He says it’s not even what they said. It’s not the content; it’s the form. They wanted
groupthink.

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00:10:49,910 –> 00:10:57,646
They wanted everybody to have the same words, the same language, and the
same ideas.

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00:10:58,562 –> 00:11:02,389
Right. That is the Netziv’s explanation.

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00:11:02,389 –> 00:11:05,073
That’s not obvious from the text.

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00:11:05,073 –> 00:11:13,576
The fact that the same language means that everyone will believe the same thing, that’s
really a very modern kind of explanation.

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00:11:14,356 –> 00:11:19,248
And he was on the cusp of modernity.

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00:11:19,248 –> 00:11:29,871
But again, when I read the text, you can see that once he came up with this
explanation, he focused on the key word throughout all of this:

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00:11:29,871 –> 00:11:32,826
word echad, one, single, only.

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00:11:32,826 –> 00:11:34,652
“Burn them thoroughly.”

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00:11:34,652 –> 00:11:40,694
So now he’s picking up the innocuous fact of burning those levanim, those bricks.

124
00:11:40,694 –> 00:11:46,118
And he says there’s no place in the text where something is told that has no impact on the
story.

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00:11:46,118 –> 00:11:53,322
So he’s saying every piece of literature here—and now he sounds like a literary
critic, it’s put there for a reason.

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00:11:53,322 –> 00:12:02,328
And it appears that here there is a hint regarding our sages’ tradition that Avraham
Avinu was thrown into the fiery furnace.

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00:12:02,328 –> 00:12:06,054
So he’s trying to make a linguistic,

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00:12:06,054 –> 00:12:17,926
a metaphorical connection that the reader, the listener, would
appreciate, between when Abraham, the founder of our religion, was thrown into a fiery

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00:12:17,926 –> 00:12:18,924
furnace,

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00:12:18,924 –> 00:12:25,958
with these levanim, these bricks that were cured, that were made in the fiery furnace.

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00:12:25,958 –> 00:12:30,921
The text is informing that this furnace was for the need of the city and the tower.

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00:12:30,921 –> 00:12:34,243
And from this we understand how big and deep the furnace was.

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00:12:34,243 –> 00:12:36,704
From that furnace, Avraham Avinu was saved.

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00:12:36,704 –> 00:12:38,765
I don’t think he goes far enough.

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00:12:38,765 –> 00:12:47,532
What he’s trying to do, I think, by connecting it to Avraham Avinu, is say that this is a
critical moment for us.

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00:12:47,532 –> 00:12:54,528
Just as Abraham was thrown into the fiery furnace because he had a different idea, these
bricks were also.

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00:12:54,528 –> 00:12:58,731
Now Rashi, whom we’re not going to quote, asks: why does it say levanim?

138
00:12:58,731 –> 00:13:04,065
Because in this area they didn’t have hewn stones, which are all different from each
other.

139
00:13:04,065 –> 00:13:17,182
This is an embrace of industrialization, of sending something through an extrusion and
coming out with the same bricks, and levanim clearly means from the word white.

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00:13:17,182 –> 00:13:21,601
Everything has to be the same color, so to speak.

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00:13:21,601 –> 00:13:22,994
And I am embellishing here.

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00:13:22,994 –> 00:13:32,859
Right. I would just add one little piece, and that is that Abraham was the correction
of the Tower of Babel.

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00:13:33,040 –> 00:13:41,325
Because the Tower of Babel wanted groupthink, and Abraham said, “I’m going to think
differently than everybody else.”

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00:13:41,325 –> 00:13:44,686
So it’s not just a random connection.

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00:13:44,686 –> 00:13:51,420
The problem of groupthink was solved by Abraham, who broke from it.

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00:13:52,312 –> 00:13:57,872
(Rabbi Sacks says) This pivotal story comes before the birth of Abraham, just as the Exodus comes before Sinai.

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00:13:57,872 –> 00:14:01,138
And both of them are saying that you have to be different.

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00:14:01,138 –> 00:14:03,254
We do not believe in groupthink.

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00:14:03,254 –> 00:14:03,975
That’s brilliant.

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00:14:03,975 –> 00:14:05,537
That’s what he (Rabbi Sacks) says.

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00:14:05,578 –> 00:14:06,420
Fantastic.

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00:14:06,420 –> 00:14:07,280
Okay.

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00:14:07,423 –> 00:14:12,184
So now, “and its top is in the sky,” it says of the tower.

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00:14:12,184 –> 00:14:18,906
The Netziv says it is obvious that you should not think this would be one city for the
whole world.

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00:14:18,906 –> 00:14:25,208
Rather, they thought that the nearby cities would be subject to this city that had
a tower.

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00:14:25,208 –> 00:14:30,789
Now we think of the tower in terms of its watching over them — Big Brother.

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00:14:30,789 –> 00:14:33,368
And they would be able to see

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00:14:33,368 –> 00:14:42,686
from it into the distance, over all their settlements, so that no one would be able to separate
themselves and go to another land.

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00:14:42,686 –> 00:14:45,869
That’s why they needed its top reaching the sky.

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00:14:45,869 –> 00:14:50,554
So it is not only an observation tower; it becomes a prison.

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00:14:50,554 –> 00:14:53,226
And they’re stopping the movement of people.

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00:14:53,226 –> 00:14:56,218
They move to this place not to move again.

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00:14:56,218 –> 00:15:00,172
The imagery almost makes you wonder whether the Netziv

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00:15:00,172 –> 00:15:02,798
was talking about communism or socialism.

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00:15:02,798 –> 00:15:03,470
I think this was before that.

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00:15:03,470 –> 00:15:11,714
Well, that’s an interesting thing: to guarantee groupthink, you can’t let people
move around.

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00:15:11,714 –> 00:15:22,620
You can’t let people read different newspapers, because the minute they’re
introduced to new thought, they’re going to break from that groupthink.

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00:15:23,000 –> 00:15:25,432
The Netziv almost sounds like George Orwell.

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00:15:25,432 –> 00:15:26,653
We go on.

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00:15:26,653 –> 00:15:29,795
And we will make a name, a name for ourselves.

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00:15:29,795 –> 00:15:33,717
People were set up to watch—anashim mashgichim.

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00:15:33,717 –> 00:15:44,254
Again, I couldn’t get away from the delightful word mashgiach here:
somebody looking over other people’s thoughts and put in charge of the matter.

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00:15:44,254 –> 00:15:52,938
And there were army chiefs in charge of punishing those who transgressed, since otherwise
there would be no need for the tower.

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00:15:52,938 –> 00:15:56,544
And all of this was due to fear and suspicion.

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00:15:56,544 –> 00:15:59,749
The word that he uses in Hebrew is chashash.

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00:15:59,749 –> 00:16:00,460
Right.

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00:16:00,460 –> 00:16:02,541
That’s also interesting.

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00:16:02,541 –> 00:16:05,383
Why do you want groupthink?

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00:16:05,383 –> 00:16:12,356
Because you’re afraid that if people think their own thoughts, they’re going to break away.

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00:16:12,356 –> 00:16:15,758
That’s related, by the way, to the Haredim in Israel.

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00:16:15,758 –> 00:16:21,201
There’s an insistence that everybody think the same thing.

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00:16:21,201 –> 00:16:25,974
The minute somebody is different, and that’s our friend Rabbi Bombach, right?

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00:16:25,974 –> 00:16:30,306
Rabbi Bombach believes that the education should be different. That

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00:16:30,306 –> 00:16:35,484
goes back to the Tower of Babel—that difference is scary.

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00:16:36,140 –> 00:16:44,145
He is definitely talking to his audience, what we would call the
ultra-Orthodox haredim of his day.

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00:16:44,145 –> 00:16:46,678
Clearly, there were differences.

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00:16:48,384 –> 00:16:51,916
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And now back to our podcast.

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He goes on, lest we be scattered over all the face of the earth.

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However, he writes, we must understand why they feared that someone might leave to another
land.

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00:18:04,765 –> 00:18:10,358
And it is understood that this was related to the uniformity that was among them.

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And since people’s opinions are not identical, they feared that people might abandon
this philosophy and adopt another.

206
00:18:17,740 –> 00:18:23,762
So he is saying it’s human nature to have different ideas, and they were fighting
that.

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Therefore, they sought to ensure that no one would leave their society.

208
00:18:27,983 –> 00:18:36,285
And one who veered from this uniformity among them was judged with burning, just as they
did to our forefather Abraham.

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So he connects the dots.

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00:18:40,598 –> 00:18:47,143
And the same words can be seen as the fact that they would kill whoever did not think like
them.

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00:18:47,143 –> 00:18:49,685
And more is explained on verse 6.

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00:18:49,685 –> 00:18:51,607
They are one people.

213
00:18:51,607 –> 00:18:57,421
The explanation of “people” is that they all follow one custom.

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00:18:57,421 –> 00:19:02,735
He uses the word minhag here, as it is written later in Genesis 28.

215
00:19:02,735 –> 00:19:06,700
And we’ll give that quote in a second.

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00:19:06,700 –> 00:19:09,631
This is but the beginning of the transgression.

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00:19:09,631 –> 00:19:11,782
They want to remain in one place.

218
00:19:11,782 –> 00:19:15,493
He says it all started by saying people can’t move freely.

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You have to stay in the ghetto.

220
00:19:17,354 –> 00:19:21,416
“And now nothing will be withheld from them which they propose to do.”

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00:19:21,416 –> 00:19:28,268
If they finish the tower, they will proceed to a second thought: forcibly preventing ideas
other than

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this one.

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00:19:28,979 –> 00:19:34,165
And this brings killing and violent destruction of civilization.

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00:19:34,165 –> 00:19:39,592
And it does not help that at this moment they are together with one opinion.

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00:19:39,592 –> 00:19:44,938
It might be nice once in a while that we agree on things, but in this case,

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since force is involved and it’s a regime, it’s not a good thing.

227
00:19:51,098 –> 00:19:59,418
He references a later commentary that he gives when the tribes of Jacob
are formed.

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00:19:59,418 –> 00:20:06,230
In Genesis 28, the Ha’amek Davar says, “And you shall become an assembly of
peoples.”

229
00:20:06,230 –> 00:20:08,611
What does he say that means?

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00:20:08,611 –> 00:20:13,794
An assembly, kahal, consists of ten, as it says in Ketubot.

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00:20:13,794 –> 00:20:25,643
The word peoples refers to groups distinguished from one another by their different ways
of life, so that each is considered a people unto itself, even though they are all

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00:20:25,643 –> 00:20:27,785
governed by a single authority.

233
00:20:27,785 –> 00:20:29,426
He does not let up.

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00:20:29,426 –> 00:20:35,350
God therefore told Jacob that his descendants would become ten peoples, that is,

235
00:20:35,358 –> 00:20:41,382
Each tribe would possess its own customs and constitute a people unto itself.

236
00:20:41,382 –> 00:20:45,125
This sounds like the Federalist episode that we did.

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00:20:45,125 –> 00:20:54,711
Although they would all share one Torah and one king, they would nevertheless differ in
their ways of conducting worldly life.

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00:20:54,742 –> 00:20:59,975
This was a major key to what he believed in.

239
00:20:59,975 –> 00:21:04,338
And we’re now going to visit his introduction.

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This is a very famous introduction.

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00:21:11,320 –> 00:21:12,070
Great.

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00:21:12,070 –> 00:21:20,215
And in the introduction, he says Genesis is referred to as Sefer HaYashar, the
book of the upright.

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And he wants to know why.

244
00:21:21,930 –> 00:21:25,218
And he starts by quoting the song of Haazinu.

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00:21:25,218 –> 00:21:30,250
You see, we end Devarim, and now we get into Genesis, and they’re all connected.

246
00:21:30,250 –> 00:21:39,265
It says, “The Rock, perfect is His work, for all His paths are justice; a faithful God
without injustice, righteous and yashar is He.”

247
00:21:39,265 –> 00:21:41,186
He is speaking of God.

248
00:21:41,186 –> 00:21:53,043
By praising God as yashar—which means straight, or upright—the Torah
acknowledges the Holy One, blessed be He, and His judgment against

249
00:21:53,043 –> 00:22:02,559
a generation such as the one that lived during the destruction of the Second Temple,
who are described as perverse and twisted.

250
00:22:02,559 –> 00:22:08,834
The opposite of Yashar, which means straight and upright, is perverse and twisted.

251
00:22:08,834 –> 00:22:22,938
We explained: though they were religious and pious—now he’s talking to his crowd — toiling
in Torah study, they were not upright in their societal behavior, and so due to the

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00:22:22,938 –> 00:22:34,221
baseless hatred, the sinat chinam for one another residing within their hearts, they
suspected anyone—here’s the word chashash—who was not religious in accordance with their

253
00:22:34,221 –> 00:22:38,272
worldview to be a Sadducee or a heretic.

254
00:22:38,272 –> 00:22:39,623
An Apikoros.

255
00:22:39,623 –> 00:22:49,967
He is describing an insular, ultra-Orthodox community where everybody
who is not like them is suspect.

256
00:22:49,967 –> 00:22:59,891
This deficiency in the Torah scholars’ character led to rampant murder, along with the
transgression of all the other evils in the world, causing the temple’s destruction.

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00:22:59,891 –> 00:23:04,013
This is how the Torah presents the acknowledgment of God’s justice.

258
00:23:04,013 –> 00:23:07,994
So he really doubles down in his introduction.

259
00:23:08,066 –> 00:23:15,233
And he says this applies to Torah scholars even when their actions are performed
for the sake of heaven.

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00:23:15,233 –> 00:23:18,196
Intention does not let you off the hook.

261
00:23:18,196 –> 00:23:21,560
So now he says, so what is Yashar about Genesis?

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00:23:21,560 –> 00:23:32,020
If you look at our forefathers, if you look at Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they were civil
with the other nations of the world, despite the latter being detestable idol worshippers.

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Our forefathers nevertheless extended them love and concern for their welfare, as this
fortifies God’s creation.

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00:23:39,574 –> 00:23:52,151
So he’s not only critical of the insular ghetto, where my way is the only way; he is saying
that the reason Genesis is called Yashar is because our forefathers showed the way that

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00:23:52,151 –> 00:23:57,024
Abraham, who was pushed into the kivshan ha’esh, nevertheless accepted the people of Sodom.

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He argued for them.

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00:23:58,524 –> 00:24:01,474
So it’s really

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00:24:01,474 –> 00:24:08,337
amazing, this Netziv, and I’m so glad that we could read it pretty much in its
fullness.

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00:24:08,337 –> 00:24:10,318
It’s in the source sheet.

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00:24:10,318 –> 00:24:12,719
But we’re now going to go to the Pope.

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00:24:12,719 –> 00:24:17,800
And I wanted a segue to the Pope because you’ll see that the Pope sounds like Sacks.

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00:24:18,841 –> 00:24:20,862
Well, I’ll tell you how that came about.

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00:24:20,862 –> 00:24:25,414
(Allen Brill) He hangs out with Catholics; he’s a scholar of mysticism.

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00:24:25,464 –> 00:24:26,844
Seton Hall. Give him credit.

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00:24:26,844 –> 00:24:29,185
Oh, okay.

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00:24:29,185 –> 00:24:30,880
So I sent him a text.

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00:24:30,880 –> 00:24:33,911
And I said, Did the Pope read the Netziv?

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00:24:33,911 –> 00:24:38,552
He says, Don’t go look at the Netziv, look at Rabbi Sacks.

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00:24:38,552 –> 00:24:43,914
So I did just that because you’ll see in a second how the Pope sounds so close.

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00:24:43,914 –> 00:24:47,795
And here’s a quote from Rabbi Sacks.

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It’s in a lecture delivered.

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00:24:50,096 –> 00:24:55,097
The subject is called “Making Space: A Jewish Theology of the Other.”

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00:24:55,097 –> 00:24:58,708
And the first lecture was titled “After Babel.”

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00:24:58,772 –> 00:25:05,626
It was at Oxford and was attended by people from different
religions.

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00:25:05,626 –> 00:25:06,347
Who knows

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00:25:06,347 –> 00:25:10,229
whether the Pope was there or not? We need to find out.

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00:25:10,229 –> 00:25:18,338
So here Rabbi Sacks says as follows: “Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel, is a
story rooted in the fact

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00:25:18,338 –> 00:25:23,482
that the one language is not some utopian harmony and some golden age.

289
00:25:23,482 –> 00:25:33,991
It is, in fact, what the 19th-century Jewish commentator, the Netziv, intuited when he said that Babel
is the first totalitarianism.

290
00:25:33,991 –> 00:25:39,115
This is not an ideal harmony; it is an imposed uniformity.

291
00:25:39,115 –> 00:25:41,817
Babel is cosmopolis.”

292
00:25:41,817 –> 00:25:44,760
So he cites the Netziv.

293
00:25:44,760 –> 00:25:47,566
But now we are going

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00:25:47,566 –> 00:25:49,368
to the Pope.

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00:25:49,368 –> 00:25:55,893
And we’re going to have to read it quickly, but all of this is in the
source sheet.

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00:25:55,893 –> 00:25:59,316
So I found it in the Wall Street Journal on May twenty-fifth.

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00:25:59,316 –> 00:26:07,272
The title of the Wall Street Journal article was Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical
Tower of Babel.

298
00:26:07,288 –> 00:26:18,471
Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence threatens to normalize an anti-human
vision, and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few

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00:26:18,471 –> 00:26:20,522
private actors must be countered.

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00:26:20,522 –> 00:26:32,265
The pontiff’s encyclical letter, a text poised to define Leo’s papacy, reads like
a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and, more broadly, to humanity about the future

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00:26:32,265 –> 00:26:36,236
of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance.

302
00:26:36,236 –> 00:26:43,911
The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced to mere cogs in a system driven toward
ever greater efficiency.

303
00:26:43,911 –> 00:26:49,234
Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces.

304
00:26:49,234 –> 00:26:57,779
The primary choice is not between a yes or no to technology, but rather constructing Babel or
rebuilding Jerusalem, he wrote.

305
00:26:57,779 –> 00:27:03,064
In the Bible, the Tower of Babel symbolizes a top-down, grandiose project.

306
00:27:03,064 –> 00:27:08,957
where decisions are driven by pride, profit, and a push for homogenization.

307
00:27:08,957 –> 00:27:19,563
In the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the Pope suggests, diverse people work
together to rebuild the walls and establish fraternal coexistence within them.

308
00:27:19,563 –> 00:27:22,624
So this is called Magnifica Humanitas.

309
00:27:22,624 –> 00:27:26,498
I really suggest that you read not only the article,

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00:27:26,498 –> 00:27:34,190
but also the full encyclical, which is linked in the Sefaria source sheet.

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00:27:34,190 –> 00:27:34,772
Now

312
00:27:34,772 –> 00:27:37,063
I’m going to quote just a few things.

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00:27:37,063 –> 00:27:47,776
He says, “The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the
fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective

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00:27:47,776 –> 00:27:48,986
imagination.

315
00:27:48,986 –> 00:27:52,327
Never has humanity had such power over itself.”

316
00:27:52,327 –> 00:28:01,560
He goes on to say, “Most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar
and merely hoping for the best.

317
00:28:01,560 –> 00:28:07,232
For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no
longer be avoided.

318
00:28:07,232 –> 00:28:11,193
Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves?

319
00:28:11,193 –> 00:28:15,034
What direction should we choose as a people and as a humanity?”

320
00:28:15,034 –> 00:28:17,595
So now he has the images.

321
00:28:17,595 –> 00:28:27,180
He says, “In order to answer these questions and discern how to navigate
responsibly the era of AI, I would like to bring to mind two scenes from the Bible.

322
00:28:27,180 –> 00:28:33,474
The construction of the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem in
Nehemiah 2 through 6.”

323
00:28:33,474 –> 00:28:43,360
The story of Babel appears in the book of Genesis at the origins of humanity, immediately
after the genealogies of Noah’s sons, after settling in a plain in the land of Shinar,

324
00:28:43,360 –> 00:28:47,843
the people decided to build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.

325
00:28:47,843 –> 00:28:53,566
Fearing being scattered across the earth, they sought to guarantee stability and power.

326
00:28:53,954 –> 00:28:57,815
for themselves, and above all, to make a name for themselves.

327
00:28:57,815 –> 00:29:03,958
“It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single
direction,” writes the Pope.

328
00:29:03,958 –> 00:29:06,799
However, the project concealed a profound danger.

329
00:29:06,799 –> 00:29:15,778
It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that
eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.

330
00:29:15,778 –> 00:29:25,801
When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks
down, languages are confused, and people no longer understand each other.

331
00:29:25,801 –> 00:29:28,461
The result is not unity but dispersion.

332
00:29:28,461 –> 00:29:39,544
Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from
self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and aspires to reach

333
00:29:39,544 –> 00:29:41,565
heaven without God’s blessing.

334
00:29:41,565 –> 00:29:45,366
There’s more there, but I want to finish with

335
00:29:45,366 –> 00:29:53,174
the other part, because this does not appear so far in the Netziv, and it’s
fascinating.

336
00:29:53,174 –> 00:29:57,998
In the book of Nehemiah, this is the other choice that we have according to the Pope.

337
00:29:57,998 –> 00:30:02,923
It opens at a time of great vulnerability in the history of ancient Israel.

338
00:30:02,923 –> 00:30:11,062
After the Babylonian exile, a portion of the people returned to Jerusalem, but the city
was still in ruins, the walls collapsed and the gates burned.

339
00:30:11,062 –> 00:30:18,644
Nehemiah, a Jew in the service of the Persian king Artaxerxes, received news of the disastrous
state of his ancestral city.

340
00:30:18,644 –> 00:30:22,295
Before taking action, he fasted, prayed, and interceded for the people.

341
00:30:22,295 –> 00:30:28,867
He then asked the king for permission to return to Jerusalem, and upon arriving, examined
the destroyed areas in silence.

342
00:30:28,867 –> 00:30:31,528
He did not impose solutions from above.

343
00:30:31,528 –> 00:30:40,780
He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened
to their concerns, coordinated their efforts, and addressed any opposition.

344
00:30:40,780 –> 00:30:48,156
The narrative shows how the city is reborn not through the initiative of one man, but
through the shared responsibility of all.

345
00:30:48,156 –> 00:30:53,400
Men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households, and young people all play a part.

346
00:30:53,400 –> 00:31:01,240
It is an undertaking with God at the center which “rebuilds relationships before rebuilding
with stones”.

347
00:31:01,240 –> 00:31:11,874
Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language, not of uniformity but of
communion: the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and

348
00:31:11,874 –> 00:31:14,556
recognize that their strength comes from the Lord.

349
00:31:14,556 –> 00:31:16,676
That is what the Pope wrote.

350
00:31:16,676 –> 00:31:20,538
And I’m racking my brain: did the Netziv say the same thing?

351
00:31:20,538 –> 00:31:22,139
And guess what, Rabbi?

352
00:31:22,139 –> 00:31:22,669
He did.

353
00:31:22,669 –> 00:31:30,802
He wrote two letters discussing his Zionism, because he was, as you say, an outlier.

354
00:31:30,910 –> 00:31:34,133
And as an outlier, he had to defend himself.

355
00:31:34,133 –> 00:31:46,583
The first letter, by the way, was originally entered in the register
of the Volozhin branch of Chovevei Zion in Kislev 5646, late 1885.

356
00:31:46,583 –> 00:31:59,233
The Netziv calls supporting settlement a mitzvah and an obligation, and
insists that the undertaking involve b’khol sugei Bnei Yisrael, every kind and class of Jew.

357
00:31:59,233 –> 00:32:00,714
Then he goes on.

358
00:32:00,822 –> 00:32:12,462
Just as in the days of Ezra the Scribe, who gathered several thousand people
in Babylonia from every kind of human being, great Torah scholars, and those who feared

359
00:32:12,462 –> 00:32:23,251
God, but also people married to foreign women, who were accustomed to desecrating the
Sabbath and knew no Torah at all, all of these were gathered together and prepared the

360
00:32:23,251 –> 00:32:28,790
settlement of the Land in its cities until afterward the Land became filled with its
children.

361
00:32:28,790 –> 00:32:33,734
So he is saying the same thing in the service of Zionism.

362
00:32:33,734 –> 00:32:45,172
In the second letter, he says, the second precious quality is the unifying of many
different opinions around one common center, a focus toward which all the dispersed of

363
00:32:45,172 –> 00:32:51,146
God’s people may turn, dispersed both geographically and in opinions that differ.

364
00:32:51,212 –> 00:32:55,084
radically regarding the conduct of Jewish life.

365
00:32:55,084 –> 00:33:02,327
He is talking about the heterogeneity of the chalutzim who started
the settlements.

366
00:33:02,327 –> 00:33:11,561
We have merited in this matter, the settling of the land has become the central bar
extending through Israel from one end of the world to the other, uniting them in one

367
00:33:11,561 –> 00:33:13,792
shared understanding regarding this matter.

368
00:33:13,792 –> 00:33:18,770
And when all Israel are united, they are all called chaverim.

369
00:33:18,770 –> 00:33:21,094
I would say, mamash.

370
00:33:21,094 –> 00:33:23,602
So Rabbi, isn’t this amazing?

371
00:33:23,602 –> 00:33:35,100
By the way, the fact that you connect the Netziv on the Tower of Babel with
Babylon and the letters about Zionism is absolutely remarkable.

372
00:33:35,892 –> 00:33:41,667
Anyway, it’s just amazing to read these two thinkers together because we understand what
the Pope is talking about.

373
00:33:41,667 –> 00:33:51,495
We’re living it, but we can therefore look at the Netziv and say that
ultimately he was making the same point for a different time and different issues.

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00:33:51,495 –> 00:34:00,522
But a powerful thinker against groupthink, an outlier, a truly amazing person.

375
00:34:01,166 –> 00:34:01,927
Amazing.

376
00:34:01,927 –> 00:34:02,938
This is great.

377
00:34:02,938 –> 00:34:05,071
Everybody enjoy Parshat Noach.

378
00:34:05,071 –> 00:34:06,573
We’ll see you next week.

379
00:34:06,573 –> 00:34:08,476
And there’s a lot to think about here.

380
00:34:08,476 –> 00:34:12,381
Let’s hear it for the Netziv, Rabbi Sacks, and the Pope.

381
00:34:12,381 –> 00:34:13,682
Shabbat Shalom.

382
00:34:13,728 –> 00:34:14,230
Amen.

383
00:34:14,230 –> 00:34:15,195
Shabbat Shalom.

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00:34:15,195 –> 00:34:17,314
See you all next week.

14
00:01:03,574 –> 00:01:09,880
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

15
00:01:09,880 –> 00:01:17,869
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

16
00:01:17,869 –> 00:01:23,094
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

17
00:01:23,094 –> 00:01:27,746
This week we read Parshat Bereshit, the very first parsha of the Torah.

18
00:01:27,746 –> 00:01:39,429
Join us as we travel from Genesis to Plato and Aristotle from Plotinus to Maimonides, Al
Farabi and Crescas from the Kabbalah and the Tanya, all the way to that great Jewish

19
00:01:39,429 –> 00:01:44,471
heretic and God-intoxicated man, Baruch Spinoza.

20
00:01:44,471 –> 00:01:47,492
And so, what does it mean to create?

21
00:01:47,492 –> 00:01:48,812
Well, that’s a mouthful.

22
00:01:48,812 –> 00:01:52,773
We’re gonna have to talk like New Yorkers really quickly today.

23
00:01:53,093 –> 00:01:55,134
Okay, I mean the word bara is interesting.

24
00:01:55,134 –> 00:01:55,734
Good, let’s go.

25
00:01:55,734 –> 00:01:57,064
Let’s start.

26
00:01:57,336 –> 00:02:00,826
So, you know, last week we focused on where was God.

27
00:02:00,826 –> 00:02:07,350
but this week we’re gonna focus on the world, the creation itself.

28
00:02:07,350 –> 00:02:19,676
And if you recall last week, Rashi and Ibn Ezra both favored a translation which was When
God was creating, which kind of took the focus over where this all started.

29
00:02:19,676 –> 00:02:24,450
But we’re gonna follow a bunch of commentators and philosophers.

30
00:02:24,450 –> 00:02:29,912
Who say, no, the way you heard it the first time, “In the beginning” was the right way.

31
00:02:29,912 –> 00:02:33,814
And therefore it begs the question: what was the beginning?

32
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What happened?

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00:02:34,834 –> 00:02:43,850
And to start that, we’re gonna start with Ramban; Nachmanides, who says as follows: In the
beginning, God created.

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It was indeed very necessary to begin the Torah with the chapter of In the Beginning God
Created, for this is the root of faith.

35
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And he who does not believe in this and thinks the world was eternal denies the essential
principle of the Judaic religion and has no Torah at all.

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00:03:04,060 –> 00:03:08,963
He says, now listen to the correct and clear explanation of the verse in its simplicity.

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00:03:08,963 –> 00:03:14,246
The Holy One, blessed be he, created all things from absolute nonexistence.

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Now we have no expression in the sacred language in lashon kodesh for bringing forth
something from nothing.

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00:03:22,110 –> 00:03:24,732
Other than the word bara, created.

40
00:03:24,732 –> 00:03:31,178
Everything that exists under the sun or above was not made from nonexistence at the
outset.

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00:03:31,178 –> 00:03:40,706
Instead, he brought forth from total and absolute nothing, a very thin substance devoid
of corporeality, but having a power of potency.

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Fit to assume form and to proceed from the potentiality into reality.

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00:03:46,351 –> 00:03:49,194
This was the primary matter created by God.

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00:03:49,194 –> 00:03:52,757
It is called by the Greeks hyly; matter.

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00:03:52,757 –> 00:03:57,701
After the hhyly, he did not create anything, but he formed and made things with it.

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00:03:57,701 –> 00:03:59,293
So it’s an interesting thing.

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00:03:59,293 –> 00:04:03,426
First of all, we learned from the Ramban, and I think this is how I kind of grew up.

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00:04:03,426 –> 00:04:09,540
That yesh me’ayin creation ex nihilo was almost a major tenet of our religion.

49
00:04:09,540 –> 00:04:09,960
Correct.

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00:04:09,960 –> 00:04:15,073
That you have to believe in this miracle that God created something from nothing.

51
00:04:15,433 –> 00:04:22,137
Now, what but what’s interesting is he adds an additional piece, and that’s what the word
bara means.

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00:04:22,137 –> 00:04:26,020
You started by saying that bara the word bara is so significant.

53
00:04:26,020 –> 00:04:30,462
bara means yesh me’ayin creation ex nihilo.

54
00:04:31,318 –> 00:04:34,320
And what he also does is he adds a step.

55
00:04:34,320 –> 00:04:37,523
So he says, What did God create ex nihilo?

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We don’t have a word for this in Hebrew, only in Greek.

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00:04:41,646 –> 00:04:52,174
He created this kind of thin substance devoid of corporeality, but having the
potential for all of matter.

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00:04:52,174 –> 00:04:58,562
And then he says, bara possibly also can mean formed and made things with it.

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00:04:58,562 –> 00:05:04,144
So you create the Play-Doh, and then from the Play-Doh you create everything that follows.

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So it does seem that there is a sensitivity, Rabbi, to kind of breaching this gulf between
nothing and something.

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And he does it in a way that we’ll see that Plato might have done, at least according to
the rabbinic understanding, was that he created this intermediary substance.

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And yes, you’re correct that bara then becomes.

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00:05:27,534 –> 00:05:33,656
creating something from nothing, but he also forms into it, making things with it.

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So the Ibn Ezra says as follows.

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He says, Rov Hamforshim Amu Shahabriya Lahoze yesh me’ayin.

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He says most of the commentaries say that it means ex nihilo.

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He uses this word yeshme ayan, which is kind of also very interesting.

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It’s a very simple way of saying this.

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Yesh means yesh li bbayit, yeshli kadur.

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I have something, yesh and me’ayin, ayin means nothing.

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So creating something from nothing.

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But

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The Ibn Ezra says the meaning of bara is to cut or to set a boundary.

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if you recall, again, we did an episode three, two years ago about Splitting The
Adam, where he focused on this concept of mavdil.

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He divides between light and darkness, between the water and the earth.

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So even in bara, there are those commentaries like

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the Ibn Ezra who says it is to create a boundary.

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Now, the Ibn Ezra actually comes off and says that bara does NOT mean something from
nothing, because he brings a bunch of different verses where the word bara is used and it

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was not something from nothing.

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So he brings, for instance, Genesis 1: 21, that God created the sea monsters.

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And three times the word is used in one verse, where God created man in his own image, in
the image of God created Bara, male and female, he created him.

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So there clearly God was taking from the

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Biological building-blocks of the universe and creating man.

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He had created the animals.

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00:07:33,330 –> 00:07:38,714
So Ibn Ezra is making a case that no, it doesn’t have to be something from nothing.

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But really, the only reason we quote this, and I would say even modern scholars also
believe that the original meaning has more to do with shaping things, with

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dividing things, they quote.

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00:07:55,698 –> 00:08:03,724
verses like in Psalms where it says, Fashion a pure heart for me, O God, create in me a
steadfast spirit.

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So the word create can mean pretty much like you and I use it in the nomenclature.

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You know, we create something.

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Do we have to create it out of nothing?

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This radical leap?

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Not so much.

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But we are going to spend most of the time today.

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trying to just determine number one where this idea came from, and then to see how
Jewish, non-Jewish, and Jewish thinkers who were influenced by the non-Jewish world

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kind of navigated what it means, how it affects us, how we can I would say
square the circle in terms of philosophy and

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What we read in the Bible.

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but this is so we are going less in terms of trying to understand the exact text
because I think the consensus is for many that the text doesn’t even talk or care about,

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and that was the purpose of yes, last week’s discussion.

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It’s not interested in these issues of cosmology.

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Here we are now going.

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Diving deep into medieval Jewish and general philosophy, where we ask all of these
questions that could cross a rabbi’s eye, Diddle D, Diddle Do.

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I think the way I would say it in Gemara language, you would say there are two issues.

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One is what the word bara means.

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00:09:43,822 –> 00:09:47,464
That’s a disagreement between Ramban and Ibn Ezra.

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00:09:47,464 –> 00:09:51,496
Ramban says bara means creation ex nihlo.

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00:09:51,616 –> 00:10:05,293
Ibn Ezra says the word bara doesn’t necessarily mean creation, Yesh M’Ayin, because there
are many, there are many examples where the word bara means yesh M’Yesh, means something

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from something.

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Then what you’re pointing out is there’s a second issue, and that is what you say the
Medieval issue.

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And that is what did creation look like?

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What actually happened?

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And I would even add to that, the other issue is why does it matter?

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Why does Ramban say that this is a major tenet of our faith?

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You know, why is it so important?

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And that is also going to come up in our discussion.

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So if we go to the sources, believe it or not, I have not be successfully found
in any early sources in the Mishnah, in the Talmud, any reference to this so-called tenant

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of faith that the world was created from nothing.

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The earliest seems to be in the book of Maccabees, which isn’t even included.

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In our canon.

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And I don’t actually believe we have it in Hebrew.

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We probably have it only in Greek.

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00:12:13,126 –> 00:12:19,601
But in any case, in the book of Maccabees II, 7:33, it says, and it’s a mother talking to
her children.

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00:12:19,601 –> 00:12:31,030
I ask you, child, to look at heaven and earth, see everything that is in them, and know
that God made these things from nothing and created humankind in the same way.

137
00:12:31,030 –> 00:12:34,073
So it’s striking that this is the first reference.

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00:12:34,073 –> 00:12:39,418
It’s also striking that it is written probably in Greek first.

139
00:12:39,418 –> 00:12:42,361
And so what it does is it raises a flag, Rabbi.

140
00:12:42,361 –> 00:12:48,227
It says that probably this whole issue came up when the Jews were confronted with
Hellenism.

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00:12:48,227 –> 00:12:53,572
And all of a sudden they had to start thinking about these issues.

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A hundred years after

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00:12:55,852 –> 00:13:02,047
the book of Maccabees, we have Philo of Alexandria, the great Philo.

144
00:13:02,047 –> 00:13:07,152
And he says, Moses, who had early reached the very summits of philosophy.

145
00:13:07,152 –> 00:13:10,054
So now we’re already dipped in the pond.

146
00:13:10,054 –> 00:13:20,384
Now we’re saying that Moses not only was a Hacham, not only was he a Torah scholar, not
only was he a Navi, but he was “epis” a philosopher.

147
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And now, once he’s a philosopher, we have to start squaring the circle.

148
00:13:25,278 –> 00:13:37,026
And he says that he was well aware that it is indispensable that in all existing things
there must be an active cause and a passive subject, and that the active cause is the

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00:13:37,026 –> 00:13:38,707
intellect of the universe.

150
00:13:38,707 –> 00:13:42,766
So now we have Philo kind of feeding us.

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00:13:42,766 –> 00:13:51,613
the thought of the day, which is that this active cause therefore became molded and
molded onto our God.

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00:13:51,613 –> 00:13:55,125
And the passive subject is the universe.

153
00:13:55,125 –> 00:13:56,456
It is interesting.

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00:13:56,456 –> 00:13:58,837
It’s called the intellect of the universe.

155
00:13:58,837 –> 00:14:04,972
That’s going to be of interest when we get all the way to the end of the story at
Spinoza.

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00:14:04,972 –> 00:14:15,648
The passive subject is sometimes inanimate and incapable of motion by any intrinsic power
of its own, but having been set in motion and fashioned and endowed with the life of by

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the intellect, became transformed into that most perfect work, this world.

158
00:14:20,151 –> 00:14:30,216
So what he sees is a creator, a God who gives inanimate objects motion, dynamism, life,
if you will.

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And then, as I said before.

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The other part of the question is why?

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Why is this so important?

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00:14:37,440 –> 00:14:41,461
So Nachmanides already said it’s a tenet of our faith.

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What does Philo do?

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00:14:44,322 –> 00:14:51,884
He says, because this is important, because these qualities tend to produce piety, namely
providence.

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00:14:51,884 –> 00:14:57,066
The reason proves that the Father and Creator has care for that which he has created.

166
00:14:57,066 –> 00:15:03,489
If you don’t have a universe and a world that is created by God, you don’t have a caring
God.

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For a father is anxious for the life of his children, and the workman aims at the duration
of his works, and he employs every device imaginable to ward off everything that is

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pernicious or injurious.

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This is clay in the hands of the potter.

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It’s not only paternal, it’s when you create something, you kind of own it.

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You have an association with it.

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and he says the same thing is with the created worth.

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So Philo not only says I wanna put this on strong philosophical ground, but he also
says it’s important to have a God who creates, because without that there’s no providence.

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And we’re gonna hear that from a few of our thinkers.

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00:15:49,460 –> 00:15:56,436
Maimonides in the Guide lays out what he believes to be three different perspectives on
this.

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00:15:56,436 –> 00:16:08,666
He says the first is ours, which is those who follow the law of Moses, our teacher, hold
that the whole universe, everything except God, has been brought by him into existence out

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of non-existence.

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In the beginning, God alone existed, and nothing else, neither angels nor spheres, nor the
things that are constrained within the spheres existed.

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He then produced them from nothing, all existing things such as they are by his will and
desire.

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And Maimonides again goes on echoing the other thinkers.

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This is the first theory, and it is undoubtedly a fundamental principle of the law of our
teachers, Moses.

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It is next in importance to the principle of God’s unity.

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00:16:40,392 –> 00:16:42,822
Do not follow any other theory and

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Abraham, our father, was the first that taught it after he had established it by
philosophical means.

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00:16:48,845 –> 00:16:55,469
So again, they are doubling down on this, even though you don’t necessarily have to read
it into the verse.

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It could be while God was creating and not Bing Bang from the creation of the beginning.

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00:17:01,072 –> 00:17:04,014
He says it’s a fundamental principle.

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The second theory, and this is going to echo a little bit of what Ramban said, is the
theory of Plato.

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and there he created from a preexisting substance.

190
00:17:16,133 –> 00:17:22,019
if you recall, Nachmanides actually used a Greek word.

191
00:17:22,019 –> 00:17:28,584
And he said that this is a theory of all philosophers whose opinion and works are known to
us in this.

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00:17:28,584 –> 00:17:35,350
It is impossible to assume that God produced anything from nothing or that he reduces
anything to nothing.

193
00:17:35,350 –> 00:17:40,076
That is to say, it is impossible that an object consisting of matter and form.

194
00:17:40,076 –> 00:17:43,908
Should be produced when that matter is absolutely absent.

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So I don’t know, Rabbi.

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To me, the whole issue is you they’re trying to make the leap.

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And a lot of them say, let’s take small steps.

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00:17:54,314 –> 00:17:59,497
And if you slice it and dice it, somehow it becomes more palpable.

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00:17:59,497 –> 00:18:09,538
And what he is saying is: on the one hand, while it’s impossible to say something
from nothing, you can do something that has the potential.

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For something, but isn’t quite yet something.

201
00:18:12,480 –> 00:18:15,381
And so you kind of have a solution.

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00:18:15,381 –> 00:18:21,845
he says the people to say that God can produce a thing from nothing.

203
00:18:21,845 –> 00:18:23,746
So here’s an interesting argument.

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He says the reason why they argue you can’t have God produce something from nothing, it’s
like saying two plus two equals five.

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00:18:31,850 –> 00:18:35,152
And it’s like saying a triangle has four sides.

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00:18:35,152 –> 00:18:37,113
It just doesn’t fit into it.

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00:18:37,113 –> 00:18:39,094
Nothing by definition.

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00:18:39,114 –> 00:18:41,716
Nothing by definition means no thing.

209
00:18:41,716 –> 00:18:48,960
But again, at least Maimonides says this is an acceptable position.

210
00:18:48,960 –> 00:19:01,569
And Aristotle, who normally is Maimonides’ go-to guy, in this case believes that the earth
is eternal, that everything is eternal, that matter doesn’t change, and therefore there

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00:19:01,569 –> 00:19:02,429
is stasis.

212
00:19:02,429 –> 00:19:03,870
And so he says.

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00:19:03,870 –> 00:19:11,419
this is a position that the universe is in totality, never been different, nor will
it ever be.

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00:19:11,419 –> 00:19:13,861
And that’s the three positions.

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00:19:13,861 –> 00:19:25,484
He goes on to say that the foundation of our religion has to be that there is a God
who cares, who is involved.

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00:19:25,484 –> 00:19:35,759
He said we should necessarily be in opposition to the foundations of our religion to
believe in the eternity of the universe, because it would reject all hope and fears

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00:19:35,759 –> 00:19:37,559
derived from Scripture.

218
00:19:37,760 –> 00:19:39,941
In other words, you can’t punish somebody.

219
00:19:39,941 –> 00:19:47,004
You can’t have God cannot have any control over us if everything is eternal.

220
00:19:47,004 –> 00:19:52,086
Accepting the creation, we find that miracles are possible, that revelation is possible.

221
00:19:52,086 –> 00:19:55,507
And that every difficulty in this question is removed.

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00:19:55,507 –> 00:19:59,688
We might be asked: why has God inspired a certain person and not another?

223
00:19:59,688 –> 00:20:02,489
Why has he revealed the law to one another?

224
00:20:02,489 –> 00:20:07,651
Once you promise you predicate that God can create the world, he can do anything.

225
00:20:07,651 –> 00:20:11,892
And he or she can have desires and wishes and commands over us.

226
00:20:11,892 –> 00:20:19,134
And that’s again why Maimonides feels that believing in this is so important.

227
00:20:19,134 –> 00:20:19,946

228
00:20:19,946 –> 00:20:22,469
And what he says is fascinating.

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00:20:22,469 –> 00:20:28,694
He says, owing to the absence of all proof, we reject the theory of the eternity of the
universe.

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00:20:28,694 –> 00:20:32,058
So what he says is, you can’t prove any of these.

231
00:20:32,058 –> 00:20:36,876
So as long as we can’t prove any of these, it’s best to have a theory.

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That guides us and makes the world meaningful and makes our Torah meaningful and makes
revelation and miracles meaningful.

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It’s in a sense, it’s kind of interesting because it’s saying that maybe there are
different parallel paths between belief and science.

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But what he’s definitely saying is until science can prove something, we have the option
of picking the theory that fits our mold best.

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Let me just say, I mean, what you’re saying, of course, is fascinating.

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Let me just take a step back to say, you know, it’s interesting that Maimonides in the
Guide quotes Plato and Aristotle.

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We’ve got to take that for granted now.

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But today, if the greatest rabbi in the world quoted Plato and Aristotle, you’d wonder,
right, about whether they really were the greatest rabbi of you know of all time.

239
00:21:30,320 –> 00:21:34,658
And Maimonides quotes Plato and Aristotle, and it’s totally.

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That’s part of his understanding of what creation is all about.

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So even that is interesting that Maimonides tries to understand and he appreciates the fact that the understanding about what the world is and how it came up

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came how it came about, that sometimes the non-Jews have you know have
insight that the Jews never had.

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I couldn’t agree more.

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00:22:02,817 –> 00:22:08,271
I mean, in a sense, he was not quoting other religious thinkers.

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He’s quoting what he believes to be the best practices of the day in terms of
cosmology, understanding the world.

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00:22:16,156 –> 00:22:20,759
But I think what you’re saying is an amazing segue to where I want to go.

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Because I want to introduce our listeners to a scholar who has made a great impression on
me.

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his name is Harry Wolfson.

249
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And he basically, as you say rabbi, you look at the modern rabbis, he came out of the
Slobotka yeshiva.

250
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And then he became the head of the first Judaic Studies program
in the United States at Harvard.

251
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and the person who followed him was Isidore Twersky, who I took a course from.

252
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And he says that

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Wolfson heard the last Shiur of Yitzhak Blazer, who was a Mussurnik who studied under Rabbi
Yisrael Salanter.

254
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And then he went on to write, talk about books and listening and learning and
dissecting the works of the non-Jew.

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basically what Wolfson did is he took Philo as the beginning of medieval philosophy, and
he took Spinoza as the end of medieval philosophy, and he studied in between the church

256
00:23:24,685 –> 00:23:32,860
fathers, the Kalam, which was the Islamic school of philosophy, and he did it all as a
Talmud Hacham.

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He learnt all of the languages necessary, Greek and Arabic.

258
00:23:37,464 –> 00:23:41,126
and what he basically argued.

259
00:23:41,126 –> 00:23:53,574
was that the medieval philosophy began with the premise that philosophy which
knew not scripture.

260
00:23:53,574 –> 00:24:01,058
So if you look at Aristotle and Plato, they didn’t know anything about Judaism or
revelation.

261
00:24:01,058 –> 00:24:07,512
So it starts with Philo introducing Aristotle and Plato and us to

262
00:24:07,512 –> 00:24:13,545
Plato and Aristotle, and it ends with a philosophy which tries to free us from scripture.

263
00:24:13,545 –> 00:24:25,630
So it starts with trying to bring the Torah into the world of Greek philosophy, and it
ends with Spinoza, according to Wolfson, where we try to leave the world of scripture and

264
00:24:25,630 –> 00:24:28,411
revelation and philosophy.

265
00:24:28,411 –> 00:24:36,674
And the most exciting thing that he tracks is the introduction of somebody called
Plotinus.

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00:24:36,722 –> 00:24:43,287
And Plotinus, if you know anything about Plato, Plato believed in forms.

267
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So there was a form of a table up in the Himmel; in the shamayam
in the heavens, just like we have a Mikdash Sel Ma’ala and a mikdash shel mata, and

268
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then down below was a physical parallel of that.

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Plotinus did something amazing.

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He says that not only are there pure images and forms of everything that ends up being
physical in the theoretical world, but that is a correlation and

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relationship between them.

272
00:25:21,013 –> 00:25:33,218
So that if you will, that if there is a theory or an ideal of sun, there is a
correspondence not only to a real sun.

273
00:25:33,218 –> 00:25:42,887
But that idea of the sun actually maintains and powers and emanates power to the sun.

274
00:25:42,887 –> 00:25:51,174
So what he does is it is now conceived as being eternally generated or emanated from the
essence of God.

275
00:25:51,175 –> 00:25:59,138
And this was an amazingly exciting and evocative idea.

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That now we can have something in the heaven, something in the world of theoretics that
could actually have an impact, an ongoing impact on the world, the created world.

277
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And so creation almost becomes something that happens on an ongoing basis.

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It’s something that’s regular.

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And so he traces this through all of the medieval philosophers.

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00:26:24,853 –> 00:26:26,776
And yes, Rabbi, he goes.

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To the church fathers, he finds someone called John Scotus Erigena, who maintains that
when we say creation from nothing, when we say creatio ex nihilo, nothing is God.

282
00:26:44,461 –> 00:26:56,010
And he says it beautifully the nothing from which the world was created means God, to whom
alone may be applied the negation of all that can be spoken or thought of.

283
00:26:56,010 –> 00:27:05,173
So since God is the one that has no physical attributes, he is nothing and the world
emanates from him.

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00:27:05,173 –> 00:27:11,770
Then we go to al-Fārābī, who was a Muslim philosopher.

285
00:27:11,770 –> 00:27:24,450
by the way, when Maimonides talked to Ibn Tibon to translate the Mora Nevuchim, he says
if you want to go to look at somebody who you can use as a guide.

286
00:27:24,450 –> 00:27:25,821
Go to al-Fārābī.

287
00:27:25,821 –> 00:27:29,865
he really looked up to this al-Fārābī.

288
00:27:29,865 –> 00:27:36,842
he regarded him, and many of the philosophers regarded him as the second teacher,
second to Aristotle.

289
00:27:36,842 –> 00:27:45,922
So we’re living in a world where Christian and Jewish and Muslim philosophers are
talking one.

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00:27:45,922 –> 00:27:50,105
to the other, whether physically or through their writings.

291
00:27:50,105 –> 00:28:01,133
And al-Fārābī was the first one to say that this idea of Plotinus did not contradict
creation ex nielo, creation Yesh Me’Ayin.

292
00:28:01,133 –> 00:28:14,542
Because if God actually can emanate the world, on the one hand, you can say that it was
created from nothing, from God or from these emanations.

293
00:28:14,542 –> 00:28:19,125
but on the other hand, it can jive with Greek philosophy.

294
00:28:19,125 –> 00:28:22,968
So this was an amazing bridge that they came up with.

295
00:28:22,968 –> 00:28:33,715
And later a thinker named Hasdai Crescas picked up on the al-Fārābī and was able to say,
actually, he gave it like a Hershey.

296
00:28:33,715 –> 00:28:36,997
He says, You can now believe in emanation.

297
00:28:36,997 –> 00:28:38,568
So, what is emanation?

298
00:28:38,568 –> 00:28:44,032
Emanation, to make it very simple, is like if you have a candle of light.

299
00:28:44,032 –> 00:28:48,786
And it gives me light, the light that I get does not detract from the candle.

300
00:28:48,786 –> 00:28:54,071
The sun can give light, and we can get light from the sun without it detracting.

301
00:28:54,071 –> 00:29:09,364
So, in that sense, you can have the power of God and God’s essence emanating on the world
without it detracting or impugning God Himself or herself with physicality.

302
00:29:09,364 –> 00:29:12,266
It was the perfect kind of highway.

303
00:29:12,370 –> 00:29:24,237
but what I want to do in the time that remains is talk about what the ramifications of
these medieval scholars discussing this stuff were.

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00:29:24,237 –> 00:29:27,739
And one of them is something that we know from the Kabbalah.

305
00:29:27,739 –> 00:29:39,008
We know in the Kabbalah there was a school of Isaac Loria where he talked about God
emanating himself in a unique way.

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00:29:39,008 –> 00:29:51,025
In the Sefer Etz Chaim, which is Chaim Vital, giving the notes, the transcript of the
discussions of Isaac Luria, he says, know that before the emanation were emanated and the

307
00:29:51,025 –> 00:29:56,188
creation were created, there was a supernatural light that filled all of existence.

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00:29:56,188 –> 00:30:06,703
And he goes, and then what happened is, behold, God contracted himself, may he be blessed,
in the middle point, precisely at the point where his light was in its most absolute

309
00:30:06,703 –> 00:30:07,534
stage.

310
00:30:07,534 –> 00:30:08,476
So what

311
00:30:08,476 –> 00:30:17,471
getting back to this concept of nothing, instead of emanating out, God was able to
contract in and give space for something.

312
00:30:17,471 –> 00:30:21,934
but what does that do to us in terms of creativity?

313
00:30:21,934 –> 00:30:31,038
Think of the pedagogic lesson there, that you can give, you can create the next generation
by pulling back.

314
00:30:31,038 –> 00:30:37,842
the Tanya, the and the Hasidim looked at our prayer book and says.

315
00:30:37,842 –> 00:30:49,671
we say in the prayer book every every day we continuously, the work of
creation is renewed. הַמְ֒חַדֵּשׁ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּכָל־יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית

316
00:30:49,671 –> 00:31:04,121
In the Tanya, he uses our philosophical language of efes mamesh, of nothing, to say that
God, on a regular daily basis, is responsible for the world staying alive.

317
00:31:04,121 –> 00:31:06,070
There is no disconnect.

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00:31:06,070 –> 00:31:08,651
Between the world and God.

319
00:31:08,651 –> 00:31:13,523
We are constantly emanated from God.

320
00:31:13,523 –> 00:31:17,665
God re-creates, means it’s a set.

321
00:31:17,665 –> 00:31:19,916
We get a new start every morning.

322
00:31:19,916 –> 00:31:23,297
That’s by the way, the reason we watch Negel wasser, right?

323
00:31:23,297 –> 00:31:25,918
It’s a new start every morning.

324
00:31:26,079 –> 00:31:34,166
And to take it to the farthest extreme, which is where Wolfson goes, is then Spinoza comes
about.

325
00:31:34,166 –> 00:31:41,649
And I had never realized Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam community at age, I
think it was 23.

326
00:31:41,649 –> 00:31:43,690
It’s absolutely crazy.

327
00:31:43,690 –> 00:31:46,191
But this is what Spinoza said.

328
00:31:46,191 –> 00:31:50,994
Spinoza said, you know, this emanation thing, you’re just kicking the can down the road.

329
00:31:50,994 –> 00:31:54,895
There is no difference between God and that which is created.

330
00:31:54,895 –> 00:32:01,570
Whatever is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

331
00:32:01,570 –> 00:32:05,932
God is the immanent, not the transitive cause of all things.

332
00:32:05,932 –> 00:32:10,194
So he understands there are things, but God is all of those things.

333
00:32:10,194 –> 00:32:14,816
The human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God.

334
00:32:14,816 –> 00:32:18,317
There is also in God an idea of the human mind.

335
00:32:18,317 –> 00:32:28,714
So all of a sudden, you can understand why a great German romantic poet said that Spinoza
was a Gott-trunkener Mensch

336
00:32:28,714 –> 00:32:34,519
Spinoza is a God-intoxicated man because he saw everything as God.

337
00:32:34,519 –> 00:32:36,060
He said, You’re making a mistake.

338
00:32:36,060 –> 00:32:37,882
Don’t make the distinction.

339
00:32:37,882 –> 00:32:45,208
If you go to the extreme of emanation or tzimtzum, it is ultimately that God is the mind of
everything.

340
00:32:45,208 –> 00:32:49,692
We are living in God’s mind, and God’s mind is in us.

341
00:32:49,692 –> 00:32:54,116
And this, according to Wolfson, was the beginning of modern philosophy.

342
00:32:54,116 –> 00:32:57,258
And so it’s a wonderful trip.

343
00:32:57,602 –> 00:33:12,081
But it all started because they decided they had to reconcile Greek philosophy with
Judaism, some people call that approach as making philosophy

344
00:33:12,081 –> 00:33:14,392
the handmaiden of religion.

345
00:33:14,392 –> 00:33:24,460
But I look at it in terms of look at all this creative thinking that it created that gives
us new modalities for thinking about creation itself.

346
00:33:24,460 –> 00:33:26,791
how we create and who we are.

347
00:33:26,791 –> 00:33:28,732
I think it’s wonderful.

348
00:33:28,892 –> 00:33:29,492
Amazing.

349
00:33:29,492 –> 00:33:30,973
This is really, really good.

350
00:33:30,973 –> 00:33:33,754
What a good way to start this year in the Torah.

351
00:33:33,754 –> 00:33:36,595
Welcome to Parshat Bereshit everybody.

352
00:33:36,795 –> 00:33:39,676
Shabbat Shalom, welcome to Parshat Bereshit.

353
00:33:39,676 –> 00:33:42,638
And next week we’ll start with Noah.

354
00:33:42,638 –> 00:33:43,998
See you all there.

355
00:33:46,510 –> 00:33:48,512
So here’s my question for you.

356
00:33:48,512 –> 00:33:51,916
Were we just counting angels on the head of a pin today?

357
00:33:51,916 –> 00:34:01,587
Or is there something valuable about watching great minds wrestle with difficult
questions, even when those questions may be problems of their own making?

358
00:34:01,587 –> 00:34:02,709
I’d love to hear from you.

359
00:34:02,709 –> 00:34:04,250
Look forward to your comments.

360
00:34:04,250 –> 00:34:05,231
Thanks.360
00:34:04,250 –> 00:34:05,231
Thanks.

6
00:00:34,198 –> 00:00:39,641
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we like to light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

7
00:00:39,641 –> 00:00:47,505
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

8
00:00:47,505 –> 00:00:53,349
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

9
00:00:53,349 –> 00:00:54,950
This week is a little different.

10
00:00:54,950 –> 00:01:03,276
On Simchat Torah, we will hear the very last parsha of the Torah, V’zot HaBracha, and then
almost without taking a breath.

11
00:01:03,276 –> 00:01:06,629
We will take out another Torah and begin Bereshit.

12
00:01:06,629 –> 00:01:19,399
We will hear the Torah’s final words, Asher asah Moshe, l’einei kol Yisrael, which Moses did
to the eyes or before the eyes of all Israel, and then immediately go to Bereshit Bara

13
00:01:19,399 –> 00:01:23,222
Elohim, when God began to create.

14
00:01:23,262 –> 00:01:26,945
I want to suggest that we don’t put a period after Yisrael.

15
00:01:26,945 –> 00:01:28,364
Let’s just keep reading.

16
00:01:28,364 –> 00:01:37,818
Because maybe there is something that Moses did to the eyes of Israel, something that
changed the way Israel saw the world, that made it possible for Israel to hear those next

17
00:01:37,818 –> 00:01:42,900
words, Bereshit bara Elohim, in an entirely new way.

18
00:01:43,141 –> 00:01:46,954
The Gospel of John famously begins: In the beginning was the IDEA.

19
00:01:46,954 –> 00:01:50,484
I want to suggest in the beginning was a new idea.

20
00:01:50,484 –> 00:01:53,385
So, Adam, that’s what I want to talk about today.

21
00:01:53,385 –> 00:01:55,830
What was the new idea?

22
00:01:55,830 –> 00:01:59,592
What was so radical about the way Genesis imagined God?

23
00:01:59,592 –> 00:02:03,392
And what does that new idea ultimately tell us about ourselves?

24
00:02:03,392 –> 00:02:05,995
We’re gonna spend the whole day on one pasuk.

25
00:02:06,076 –> 00:02:07,156
That’s amazing.

26
00:02:07,156 –> 00:02:13,940
And it’s a great yeah, we would call it a yeshiva, a great khap to connect the end of the
Torah to the beginning of the Torah.

27
00:02:13,940 –> 00:02:23,485
Well, you will hear that I found that there was a whole genre of interpretations,
including the Sefat Emet who builds mountains and hills on that.

28
00:02:23,485 –> 00:02:25,708
But what I’m gonna don’t tell them Torah Vodaath.

29
00:02:25,708 –> 00:02:27,259
But you’re becoming a chassid.

30
00:02:27,259 –> 00:02:35,062
But before I give that away, what I’m really saying is that the Torah that we read was
meant to be read and it was meant to be heard.

31
00:02:35,062 –> 00:02:42,306
And it was heard by people who knew what was coming and had read all the way till the end
of Devarim and were reading over again.

32
00:02:42,306 –> 00:02:51,750
So it’s not quite as cute as it sounds, because what we’re going to say is how
revolutionary this was, but to the people who heard it,

33
00:02:51,776 –> 00:02:53,567
It didn’t sound revolutionary at all.

34
00:02:53,567 –> 00:02:55,228
It was what they expected.

35
00:02:55,228 –> 00:02:58,230
And that is as radical as it gets.

36
00:02:58,251 –> 00:03:00,632
So here we go, Genesis 1:1.

37
00:03:00,632 –> 00:03:08,746
“When God began to create the heaven and earth”, in contrast to other people who say “In the
beginning God created”, which is how you and I grew up.

38
00:03:08,746 –> 00:03:15,382
But that is the way the moderns, whether it’s Robert Alter or the JPS Tanakh,
translate it.

39
00:03:15,382 –> 00:03:19,465
And fascinating, that’s the way Rashi and the Ibn Ezra go.

40
00:03:19,465 –> 00:03:21,146
So Rashi says.

41
00:03:21,230 –> 00:03:23,831
In the beginning God created.

42
00:03:23,831 –> 00:03:33,716
Wherever the word Reishit occurs in scripture, it is in the construct state, meaning in
the beginning of the reign of Yehoyakim.

43
00:03:33,716 –> 00:03:44,201
So the Bereshit comes before the reign, the beginning of his kingdom, Reishit Mamlachto,
the first fruits of the corn, Reishit degancha.

44
00:03:44,201 –> 00:03:47,798
So he says this is the beginning of creation.

45
00:03:47,798 –> 00:03:49,659
We’re not even talking about matter.

46
00:03:49,659 –> 00:03:52,180
We’re not even talking about the creation of the world.

47
00:03:52,180 –> 00:03:54,961
It’s all starting in mid sentence.

48
00:03:54,961 –> 00:04:05,286
Similarly, here you must translate Bereshit bara, Elohim, as though it is read
Bereshit bero at the beginning of God’s creating.

49
00:04:05,286 –> 00:04:15,020
So I’m even adding to the fact that not only is the writer assuming that the
listener knows that God is there already and God has no history.

50
00:04:15,020 –> 00:04:19,113
But they also kind of know that the world… it’s not about cosmology.

51
00:04:19,113 –> 00:04:20,834
It’s not about creating matter.

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00:04:20,834 –> 00:04:23,276
The Ibn Ezra says as follows.

53
00:04:23,376 –> 00:04:26,939
Others say that the bet of Bereshit is a preposition.

54
00:04:26,939 –> 00:04:33,464
They explain that scripture intends to preclude the thought that heaven and earth were
preexisting.

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00:04:33,464 –> 00:04:41,050
Hence it states, in the beginning, I believe that Bereshit is in the construct in the
beginning of the reign of Jehoukam.

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00:04:41,050 –> 00:04:41,770
So what

57
00:04:41,770 –> 00:04:44,771
Ibn Ezra does is says this is not just wordplay.

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00:04:44,771 –> 00:04:47,773
There’s actually a philosophical nuance here.

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00:04:47,773 –> 00:04:58,357
That if you say Bereshit bara in the beginning God created, you really are, in a sense,
telling the story of the creation of matter and that before God created, there was

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00:04:58,357 –> 00:04:58,977
nothing.

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00:04:58,977 –> 00:05:03,199
In Latin, that means creatio ex nihilo, there was nothing there.

62
00:05:03,199 –> 00:05:07,141
In Hebrew, it’s yesh me’ayin, something from nothing.

63
00:05:07,141 –> 00:05:10,102
But if you take this interpretation,

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00:05:10,410 –> 00:05:12,033
You don’t have to go for that.

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00:05:12,033 –> 00:05:17,762
In the beginning of his creation, he took the sun, he took the moon, he took pre-existing
matter.

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00:05:17,762 –> 00:05:23,361
So it really is fascinating if you just read this in a very kind of normal way.

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00:05:23,361 –> 00:05:25,048
What it

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00:05:25,048 –> 00:05:27,420
presupposes and what is not there.

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00:05:27,420 –> 00:05:33,564
So I’m going to read a little bit of Nahum Sarna because we are reading the Torah for
the first time.

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And he has Understanding Genesis.

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00:05:36,146 –> 00:05:40,619
And we’re also going to do a little Cassuto today because we’re really setting the stage,
okay.

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Cassuto is great on Bereshit.

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We are setting the stage for all that follows.

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00:05:45,913 –> 00:05:50,416
So why not reach out to the giants on whose shoulders we stand at?

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00:05:50,416 –> 00:05:53,908
So Sarna says as follows: To be sure any work

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00:05:53,908 –> 00:05:57,521
of hoary antiquity is bound to prove difficult reading.

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Problems of text and language are unavoidable.

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00:06:00,242 –> 00:06:04,125
The modes of literary expression will be strange to your ears.

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The historic allusions to events of local, national, international importance that lie
behind the text, [requires] scholarly commentary to make intelligible.

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We’ve heard that before.

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00:06:13,512 –> 00:06:17,394
We have to know the context in the ancient Near East.

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00:06:17,434 –> 00:06:23,212
Even to the religiously oriented, some of the religious concepts and values

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00:06:23,212 –> 00:06:26,264
Will hardly be palatable today.

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00:06:26,264 –> 00:06:31,728
Of course, that’s where Madlik gets its juice from, when we find out what, how they thought
differently.

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00:06:31,728 –> 00:06:37,292
So he says this situation actually didn’t come only in contemporary modern minds.

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00:06:37,292 –> 00:06:43,636
It existed as soon as the ancient Near Eastern world succumbed to the flood tides of
Hellenism.

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A Hellenist would open up a book on creation and they would want to know cosmology, they
would want to know the history of the cosmos.

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00:06:50,872 –> 00:06:52,584
They would want to know ontology.

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00:06:52,584 –> 00:06:55,846
When did matter existence begin?

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00:06:55,846 –> 00:07:01,911
The old culture from which the Hebrew Bible had issued disintegrated and became radically
transformed.

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00:07:01,911 –> 00:07:06,895
We forgot what the context was of the original people that listened to.

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Very good, yeah.

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So he says, and this is what we’re going to argue: that if you can, as best you can, put
yourself into the shoes

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00:07:15,338 –> 00:07:23,866
Of someone pre-Hellenism, someone before we started looking at these texts differently.

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00:07:23,866 –> 00:07:35,787
The Hebrew cosmology represents a revolutionary break with the contemporary world in which
it lived, a parting of the spiritual ways that involve the undermining of the entire

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00:07:35,787 –> 00:07:38,259
prevailing mythological worldview.

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00:07:38,259 –> 00:07:41,964
So now he’s talking about the [Ancient] Near East, where you have stories of

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Gods fighting with each other, gods giving birth to each other, gods taking domains, one
took the sea, one took the earth.

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Nowhere else in the contemporary world did it become the regnant idea, obsessive and
historically significant.

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Israel’s monotheism constituted a new creation, a revolution in in religion, a sudden
transformation.

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00:08:06,109 –> 00:08:08,330
Because of the things it doesn’t say.

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00:08:08,396 –> 00:08:18,150
The extraordinary consciousness of difference which characterized ancient Israel was
superimposed itself upon the awareness of a common background.

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00:08:18,150 –> 00:08:22,412
Israel actually saw itself developed and its fate was unique.

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If you read this, you start to look at Israel as the chosen people slightly differently.

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When I the Israelites in Exodus 33 say that we are distinguished from every people on
the face of the earth.

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Or in Leviticus, we are set apart from other peoples, they’re just saying a fact.

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They’re saying our worldview is totally different.

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There is not someone in the Ancient Near East who could read our text and even understand
what we’re talking about.

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So here’s what was different.

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The outstanding peculiarity of the biblical account is the complete absence of mythology
in the classic pagan sense of the term.

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00:09:00,770 –> 00:09:10,526
The religion of Israel is essentially non-mythological, there being no suggestion of any
theobiography, any biography of God doesn’t exist.

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00:09:10,526 –> 00:09:12,073
And that’s what everybody would have been.

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Another great phrase, theobiography.

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You know, there’s a phrase in the yeshiva that says, I came to see a movie about creation,
and it nothing was there.

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00:09:22,474 –> 00:09:25,184
Ha’ikar chaser min hasefer {the main subject matter is missing from the book].

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00:09:25,184 –> 00:09:26,735
This is a story of creation.

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It doesn’t talk about creation the way the ancient Near East would have talked about it.

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00:09:31,379 –> 00:09:37,384
Scripture themselves do not openly betray a true understanding of a mythological paganism.

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00:09:37,384 –> 00:09:45,931
In fact, as a result of their thoroughgoing monotheism, the picture they paint of the
religion of the contemporaries of Israel is really a distortion.

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So, Rabbi, we can’t help but look at this not only from the idea of the text and
what the text is saying, but from the idea of the listeners.

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And it was so clear that the listeners were so comfortable with what they were reading and
seeing that they didn’t understand what a pagan who would have walked in who would have

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said, it’s missing.

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The whole story is missing.

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We are absolutely working in parallel universes here.

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And that’s what becomes so absolutely different and radical about this text.

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That’s fantastic.

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00:10:21,745 –> 00:10:28,177
This is really a good, this is kind of a summary of everything included in this whole
discussion.

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00:10:28,737 –> 00:10:29,138
Yeah.

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00:10:29,138 –> 00:10:33,650
And again, because we’ve spent so many times doing this, we can actually understand it.

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00:10:33,650 –> 00:10:40,704
So for instance, and this is all based, even though I’m using the words of Nahum Sarna,
it’s based on the words of Yehezkel Kaufmann.

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And what he said, that if you read the rest of the Bible, not only creation.

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But if you read the rest of the Bible, the picture they paint of the religion of the
contemporaries of Israel is a distortion.

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It’s a caricature, rabbi.

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00:10:54,770 –> 00:10:56,191
It’s almost a comic book.

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00:10:56,191 –> 00:11:01,873
How many times do you have to say, How can you bow down to a statue that you made that
morning?

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00:11:01,873 –> 00:11:03,074
I get it already.

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00:11:03,074 –> 00:11:05,035
But that was as far as it got.

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00:11:05,035 –> 00:11:06,556
It was fetishism.

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00:11:06,556 –> 00:11:12,264
They didn’t understand the the whole world view of paganism.

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00:11:12,264 –> 00:11:19,741
So remote are the biblical writers from the religious atmosphere of the pagan world that
they are unable to present a true picture of it.

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00:11:19,741 –> 00:11:21,973
So, we’re looking at both sides.

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We’re looking at something radical as it is, as it’s written, something radical that the
listener felt very comfortable with hearing.

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And therefore, we can make this argument that this is truly a paradigm shift.

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00:11:34,584 –> 00:11:38,882
it’s a paradigm, it’s a shift in the grammar that is used.

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00:11:38,882 –> 00:11:42,403
The notion of the birth of God, no biography of God.

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00:11:42,403 –> 00:11:46,784
It doesn’t even begin with a statement about the existence of God.

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00:11:46,784 –> 00:11:49,025
That of course talks to us as moderns.

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00:11:49,025 –> 00:11:54,286
You know, we would start by saying if you’re writing a theology, say, and God exists.

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So, it really is fascinating what’s not in this story.

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00:12:00,908 –> 00:12:06,874
You know, the Torah does not begin by saying, in the beginning was God.

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00:12:06,874 –> 00:12:09,475
It doesn’t talk about God’s existence.

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00:12:09,475 –> 00:12:11,274
It says God created.

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00:12:11,274 –> 00:12:18,718
And almost even with the creation, you can say that it doesn’t even talk about the
creation of matter.

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It’s in the grammar of the words that we’re looking at.

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So, what I’d like to do is look at Cassuto, who says something very similar, but I
think he adds even some more nuance to it.

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So he talks about.

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the rest of the Ancient Near East.

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00:12:36,748 –> 00:12:40,530
And he says they began as a rule with a theogony.

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We’ve heard of the word progeny and it’s the history of God.

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00:12:46,254 –> 00:12:53,059
That is with the origin of the gods, the genealogy of the deities who preceded the birth
of the world and mankind.

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And they told of the antagonism between this god and that god of frictions that arose from
those classes of will and of mighty wars that were waged by the gods.

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00:13:03,570 –> 00:13:07,202
They connected the genesis of the world with the genesis of the gods.

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You couldn’t separate them.

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00:13:08,473 –> 00:13:09,874
There were hostilities.

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00:13:09,874 –> 00:13:22,160
And of course, all of these great biblical scholars say if you read the texts, which we’re
not going to get into today, when it says tohu va-vohu, yes, maybe it echoes Tiamat and

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other gods that were there.

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00:13:24,502 –> 00:13:30,365
It makes reference to it, but what it leaves out is just absolutely amazing.

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And then it

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Goes on.

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00:13:33,647 –> 00:13:41,821
He says, Then came the Torah and soared aloft as on eagles’ wings above all of these
notions.

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in the source sheet, you can see Cassuto saying that in Hebrew.

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He’s clearly taking a word out of creation of God hovering over the planet as saying that
the Torah’s account of creation hovered over everything.

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Are not many gods but one God, not theogony, a history of God, for a God has no family
tree, no wars, nor strife, nor the class of wills, but only one will, which rules over

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00:14:07,204 –> 00:14:09,946
everything without the slightest let or hindrance.

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00:14:09,946 –> 00:14:18,273
Not a deity associated with nature and identified with it wholly or in part, but a god who
stands absolutely above nature outside of it.

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00:14:18,273 –> 00:14:23,990
And nature and all of its constituent elements, even the sun and all the other entities,
be

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00:14:23,990 –> 00:14:27,112
They never so exalted are only his creatures.

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00:14:27,112 –> 00:14:30,635
So this is a highfalutin biblical scholar saying this.

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But what I want to argue is that in those words and in that context, even the simplest
Israelite listening to it would have known what is missing.

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00:14:41,002 –> 00:14:50,829
And he would have known starkly what is being shown here, a God who is in charge of the
world and manifesting it and manipulating it.

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It’s profound.

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00:14:52,182 –> 00:14:54,223
That’s that that is really profound.

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00:14:54,223 –> 00:15:01,385
So it’s you have to appreciate the background to understand how the Jew is reading this
story.

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00:15:01,385 –> 00:15:06,046
That’s really what both Sarna and Cassuto are getting to.

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00:15:07,846 –> 00:15:11,427
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188
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190
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193
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195
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197
00:16:09,583 –> 00:16:12,284
And now back to our podcast.

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00:16:13,684 –> 00:16:20,846
And you know, one of the things that I was thinking about, and in Sarna’s introduction,
he kind of gets into this.

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00:16:21,120 –> 00:16:30,053
Here we have this crazy tiny little country that never had a major empire between the
superpowers of Babylonia and Egypt.

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00:16:30,053 –> 00:16:36,554
In the promised land, we have found artifacts and things from Babylonia and from
Egypt.

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00:16:36,554 –> 00:16:41,536
But you will never find a piece of the Torah in Egypt or in Babylonia.

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It wasn’t read.

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00:16:42,576 –> 00:16:43,596
It was ignored.

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00:16:43,596 –> 00:16:44,937
It was not heard of.

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00:16:44,937 –> 00:16:49,516
It was so different than what.

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00:16:49,516 –> 00:16:53,189
The reader would have expected that it had no readership.

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00:16:53,189 –> 00:16:58,433
That struck me again this year, that this was so different.

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00:16:58,433 –> 00:17:05,679
But I want to get back a little bit to the fact that my main point here is about the
reader and the listener.

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00:17:05,679 –> 00:17:10,132
That the reader and the listener found this so completely obvious.

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00:17:10,132 –> 00:17:19,284
And I can’t stress enough Yehezkel Kaufmann’s point of view, which is that we really
do have.

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A book that is so isolated, so talking in a different grammar and a different context
than everything around it, that one didn’t understand the other.

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00:17:29,754 –> 00:17:36,828
The way that the Torah portrays polytheism and paganism is childish.

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00:17:37,069 –> 00:17:46,397
And the way it describes creation is diametrically different, on a different plane than
anyone would have expected.

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00:17:46,397 –> 00:17:47,538
And it’s not.

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00:17:47,538 –> 00:17:50,060
here, but it’s very loudly here.

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00:17:50,060 –> 00:17:56,083
And I want to focus a little bit on the fact, I said this in the intro, that this was a
text that was meant to be read.

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00:17:56,083 –> 00:18:05,189
And so in in prior episodes, at one point, we were reading the story of Jacob stealing
the blessing and how he was doing all these bad things.

218
00:18:05,189 –> 00:18:07,290
And then finally he succeeded.

219
00:18:07,290 –> 00:18:14,390
And we talked about how is it possible or why would a sacred script have all these
things inside of it?

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00:18:14,390 –> 00:18:22,279
And one of the things we said, and the example I gave was Megillat Esther and Purim, is
the people that heard these stories had heard them before.

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00:18:22,279 –> 00:18:24,342
They had heard them multiple of times.

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00:18:24,342 –> 00:18:29,288
They knew when to cheer when Mordechai was mentioned and boo when Haman was mentioned.

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00:18:29,288 –> 00:18:34,708
They knew that Jacob went through a tough stretch and had to cut a few corners in the
beginning.

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00:18:34,708 –> 00:18:44,207
That’s what you really have to understand as we begin this journey all over again this
year, when we read this, and we’re doing it for the first verse.

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00:18:44,207 –> 00:18:53,446
That we’re trying to get into the head of the listener who listened to this and knew what
he was hearing and knew what he expected and knew what wasn’t there.

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00:18:53,446 –> 00:18:58,841
Robert Alter talks about something called Type Scenes.

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00:18:58,841 –> 00:19:00,672
He says, What I’m suggesting.

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00:19:00,672 –> 00:19:10,089
Is that the contemporary audience of these tales, being perfectly familiar with the
convention, took particular pleasure in seeing how in each instance the convention could

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be through the narrator’s art both faithfully followed and renewed for the specific needs
of the hero under consideration, or in this case, the subject matter.

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In some cases, moreover, the biblical authors counted on their audience’s familiarity with
the features and function of the type scene.

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00:19:27,192 –> 00:19:32,146
Could merely allude to the type scene or present a transfigured version of it.

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00:19:32,146 –> 00:19:40,053
And that’s why when you read the modern scholars and they start to draw parallels to the
Babylonian mythology, it’s just a little hint here and there.

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00:19:40,053 –> 00:19:40,627
Go on, Adam.

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00:19:40,627 –> 00:19:40,787
Right.

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00:19:40,787 –> 00:19:42,745
Well, I want to say that’s brilliant.

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00:19:42,745 –> 00:19:45,678
You were talking before about being a sophisticated audience.

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You know, what Alter is saying is that the Torah is written for a sophisticated audience,
for an audience that knows Torah.

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00:19:54,565 –> 00:19:55,768
And therefore you could refer.

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00:19:55,768 –> 00:19:58,601
Refer to something and people should understand it.

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00:19:58,601 –> 00:20:07,509
So when Laban says to Jacob, here we don’t give the younger before the older, it doesn’t
tell you what it refers to.

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00:20:07,509 –> 00:20:14,615
But you need to be sophisticated enough to know but you younger, you took you took over
for the older.

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00:20:14,615 –> 00:20:17,858
And it’s a criticism, it’s a veiled criticism.

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00:20:17,858 –> 00:20:20,519
So that’s a brilliant point by Alter.

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00:20:20,700 –> 00:20:23,148
And it makes us read the text differently.

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00:20:23,148 –> 00:20:29,621
Because we’re reading, even reading a play is always gonna be different than
reading prose.

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00:20:29,671 –> 00:20:40,956
but this is a live audible text that was read over and over again to an audience,
which of course brings us to Simchat Torah and brings us to the unique way that we are

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00:20:40,956 –> 00:20:45,988
going to be hearing V’zot HaBracha, which doesn’t get its own Shabbat.

248
00:20:45,988 –> 00:20:49,910
It is only read in conjunction.

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00:20:50,331 –> 00:20:53,473
a breath away from starting the Torah all over again.

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00:20:53,473 –> 00:20:58,618
So we know that is the minhag, the custom that we have now.

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00:20:58,618 –> 00:21:01,060
That’s why we call the last day Simchat Torah.

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00:21:01,060 –> 00:21:06,645
We have a Chatan Torah, we have a Chatan Bereshit, and we have a Chatan Devarim.

253
00:21:06,645 –> 00:21:09,130
And they’re married together.

254
00:21:09,130 –> 00:21:11,950
There is this continuation.

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00:21:11,950 –> 00:21:15,433
And as I said in the beginning, it kind of struck me.

256
00:21:15,433 –> 00:21:16,916
I said to myself,

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00:21:16,916 –> 00:21:29,095
Was there anyone who therefore, because the law says that you have to go directly from
this is V’zot HaBracha to Bereshit, who tried to connect them the way you and I, rabbi, would do

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00:21:29,095 –> 00:21:33,798
between connecting Bereshit to Noach or connecting Noach to Lech L’cha

259
00:21:35,144 –> 00:21:41,510
And so sure enough, if you read the text, it has potential.

260
00:21:41,510 –> 00:21:51,450
The last pasuk in the Torah says, and we quoted it before, for all the great might and
awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel.

261
00:21:51,450 –> 00:21:57,576
So it says…

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00:21:57,576 –> 00:22:05,572
You can read Asher asah Moshe l’einei kol Yisrael as what Moses did to the eyes of all Israel.

263
00:22:05,572 –> 00:22:07,374
And then you read this parsha.

264
00:22:07,374 –> 00:22:15,741
So now I’m saying to myself, is there a classical commentary who actually misread or read
the way I did?

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00:22:15,741 –> 00:22:19,484
Which is Moses says, You’ve read the whole book now.

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00:22:19,484 –> 00:22:23,327
You’ve read the whole Five Books, your eyes have changed.

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You see the world differently, you have a different Weltanschauung.

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Now let’s start reading Bereshit all over again.

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It’s gonna be different this time.

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So sure enough, I did find in the Sefat Emet.

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And the Sefat Emet says every individual Israelite has a unique mode of perception through
which he is able to see and apprehend something particular in the world that no one else

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can see, and to them was given an opening of the eye.

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So in the Hebrew, he says,

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He combines l’einei kol Yisrael, Bereshit bara.

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He does exactly what I’m suggesting we should do.

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And he says it’s pekichat ayin.

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It opens up the eye.

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So, in a way, and he does a whole lot of other things, he does recognize that we see our
texts differently, we see the world differently, we are a people that have gone

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through.

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This paradigm shift.

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Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh actually wrote, Moshe tiken et bechinat ha-re’iyah.

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Moshe actually fixed the ability, the faculty of sight, as in which Moses did to
the eyes of all Israel.

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so I have company here that at least there is another scholar that said this
connection.

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And so what I’m arguing today, rabbi, is the unique.

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condition that we have on Simchat Torah of reading the end of the Torah with the
beginning, on a much higher scale without going to pesukim is demonstrating something.

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It’s demonstrating that if you read this whole book and then reread this whole book and
reread it again, and if you heard it from your father and from your grandfather and you

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told it over to your children, you are creating a universe of grammar that’s going to
enable you

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To hear it read differently.

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Maybe sometimes it’ll preclude you from understanding some other cultures.

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But this is a different grammer.

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But that’s okay also.

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That’s that’s true.

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It is okay.

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But if you go down from 60,000 feet, you can make a drash and say that Moshe really ends
the Torah by saying, I’ve changed the way you see, and starts by saying Bereshit bara,

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uh-huh.

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Did you see what I didn’t say there?

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You see what was missing?

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It’s I think it’s a nice, it’s a nice way to think and remind ourselves how important
this reading of the Torah is, because that is actually what we’re celebrating on Simchat

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Torah anyway.

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As much as celebrating the Torah, we’re celebrating the cycle of reading the Torah and
hearing the Torah.

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And um I just wanted to pause for a second.

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To focus on the Simchat Torah aspect of this and this concept of reading this cycle and
reinforcing ideas that we have and then re laying them over the texts every year newly.

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So I just want to say, of course, this is fantastic.

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00:25:20,923 –> 00:25:28,822
The tradition to finish the Torah on Simchat Torah and begin it the same day is a very old
tradition.

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00:25:28,822 –> 00:25:31,823
That might go back, you know, 1500 years.

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00:25:31,823 –> 00:25:35,524
So it’s not something they invented in Poland a hundred years ago.

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00:25:35,524 –> 00:25:47,257
This is kind of part and parcel of the experience of reading the Torah is to go
front to back, which is basically what we’re starting to do next week, which is to go from

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Bereshit bara to the end, but also back to front.

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00:25:51,309 –> 00:25:56,500
Now you know that when we finish the Talmud, we go on.

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But what you know we go like dafyomi.

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00:25:59,310 –> 00:26:02,923
You finish one tractate, you go on to the next one.

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00:26:02,923 –> 00:26:09,789
But when you finished one tractate, the prayer that you say is Hadran alach.

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00:26:09,949 –> 00:26:13,532
The word Hadran means we should repeat it.

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00:26:13,532 –> 00:26:17,356
So we don’t actually do it, but at least we say it.

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00:26:17,356 –> 00:26:21,379
You finish learning Bava Kamma, you spend months learning Bava Kamma.

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00:26:21,379 –> 00:26:25,258
And the first thing you say is, I want to do it all over again.

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00:26:25,258 –> 00:26:33,865
So even so it’s so interesting, Geoffrey, that your point about finishing and going back
and forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards is actually something that has it’s

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so much part of our tradition that it’s it’s even made its way into the oral tradition,
into the Talmud.

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Fantastic.

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I love that.

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So if it’s not talking about cosmology, and if it’s not talking about ontology and the
history of God, what are we supposed to take?

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00:26:51,926 –> 00:26:58,268
And I went back to something that I think anyway is something that every kid hears when
they start the Bereshit.

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It’s a piece of Talmud, a piece of Midrash that says, why was the Torah started with
the letter bet and not the letter Aleph, I assume?

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So Rabbi Yonah said in the name of Rabbi Levi, why was the world created with the letter
bet?

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00:27:12,712 –> 00:27:21,610
It is because just as the bet is closed on all three of its sides, but open in its front,
so you do not have permission to ask.

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00:27:21,610 –> 00:27:29,574
what is below, what is above, what was before, and what is after, but only from the day
when the world created and onward.

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00:27:29,574 –> 00:27:42,902
So I have to say before we get into it, when it says what was before and what is after,
what it means is prehistory and after history, the eschatology, the end of days.

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00:27:42,902 –> 00:27:51,698
What it is permissible to discuss is how we live a better life, how we make our pathway,
how we follow the path of Torah.

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00:27:51,698 –> 00:28:01,487
and I think if you wanted to get a very crude message of the Torah is not about
cosmology, it would be here.

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00:28:01,487 –> 00:28:03,569
It’s not about what came before us.

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00:28:03,569 –> 00:28:04,910
It’s not about the heavens.

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You want to study astronomy, go somewhere else.

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00:28:07,673 –> 00:28:14,980
You wanna try to parallel the texts of the six days of creation to the Big Bang Theory,
you’re wasting your time.

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00:28:14,980 –> 00:28:16,721
It’s not what the book is about.

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00:28:16,721 –> 00:28:17,900
And I love that.

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00:28:17,900 –> 00:28:28,253
The other thing that it says, it goes on, Rabbi Acha bar Chanina said in the name of Rabbi Acha, for
twenty-six generations the Aleph complained before the throne of the Holy One, blessed be.

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00:28:28,253 –> 00:28:34,155
It said to him, Master of the universe, I am the first of the letters, but you did not
create your world with me.

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00:28:34,155 –> 00:28:36,535
The Holy One, blessed be, he said to it.

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00:28:36,535 –> 00:28:41,957
And he ends by saying, The Ten Commandments begin with an Aleph, Anochi.

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00:28:41,957 –> 00:28:46,530
So again, I think, .. I’m taking a little poetic license.

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00:28:46,530 –> 00:28:50,712
But what I’m saying is what preceded the bet was the Aleph.

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00:28:50,712 –> 00:28:56,496
And what preceded the Aleph meant was the assumptions that the
reader has.

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That we already assumed that God was never created.

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00:28:59,337 –> 00:29:02,379
He was not birthed, that matter was.

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00:29:02,379 –> 00:29:10,570
So in a sense, what it’s saying is we begin with a bet because the Aleph is the
assumptions, the unwritten assumptions that we learnt as we go through the Torah.

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It’s just start in the middle.

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00:29:12,224 –> 00:29:14,885
It’s all about starting in the middle.

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00:29:15,350 –> 00:29:22,514
And then, as we have in the past, you start to look at that what is the really the crux of
the story.

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00:29:22,514 –> 00:29:26,226
So the crux of the story is God creates through speaking.

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Vayomer, God speaks.

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00:29:29,188 –> 00:29:30,469
Vayavdel.

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00:29:30,469 –> 00:29:35,531
I think two years ago the name of our subject matter for the podcast was Splitting the
Adam.

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Because we went into all the times that God divides.

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00:29:39,924 –> 00:29:43,702
Dividing is another way of understanding.

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00:29:43,702 –> 00:29:48,124
Vayavdel is to distinguish between two things.

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00:29:48,174 –> 00:29:52,366
then it goes on and it has words like Vayikra.

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00:29:52,366 –> 00:29:55,187
He gave names, he tried to theorize.

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00:29:55,187 –> 00:30:01,170
These are all things that the text is giving us permission or an obligation to do.

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00:30:01,170 –> 00:30:08,753
And finally, Vayar Elohim ki tov to evaluate, to give value and to give and to
evaluate things.

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So once you get beyond bara.

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00:30:12,446 –> 00:30:23,075
All of the verbs that are used are verbs that we are encouraged to use ourselves as we
come into a world that we’ve been given, that pre-exists, and we have to learn how to

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00:30:23,075 –> 00:30:29,040
discern and distinguish between light and dark, between hard and soft, between rich and
poor.

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00:30:29,040 –> 00:30:33,363
We have to learn to call things as they are, to give value judgments.

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00:30:33,363 –> 00:30:36,948
We need to give our own names and structure things.

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It to me it changes the whole Genesis story.

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00:30:39,779 –> 00:30:46,981
But again, you can only do that and understand that and value that when you see what we’ve
left behind and what it’s fantastic.

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00:30:46,981 –> 00:30:48,161
That’s really good.

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00:30:48,161 –> 00:30:49,241
Really, really good.

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00:30:49,241 –> 00:30:54,423
A good way to end the Torah and to begin the Torah, which is really the challenge for this
week.

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00:30:54,423 –> 00:30:55,303
Fantastic.

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00:30:55,303 –> 00:30:59,184
So let’s wish our all of ourselves a Simchat Torah.

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00:30:59,184 –> 00:31:02,925
And we’re looking forward to an amazing year in Madlik.

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Unbelievable.

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00:31:03,835 –> 00:31:05,626
See you all next week.

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00:31:05,626 –> 00:31:06,686
Be well.

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00:31:07,462 –> 00:31:08,733
Mm-hmm.

4
00:00:26,128 –> 00:00:27,199
Welcome to Madlik.

5
00:00:27,199 –> 00:00:32,928
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

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00:00:32,928 –> 00:00:41,165
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

7
00:00:41,165 –> 00:00:47,070
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

8
00:00:47,070 –> 00:00:51,674
This week we read Parshat Ha’Azinu, Moses’ final song.

9
00:00:51,674 –> 00:01:02,122
It begins by calling upon heaven and earth, retells the creation of Israel in language
that echoes the creation of the world, and ends with three deeply

10
00:01:02,122 –> 00:01:13,085
ambiguous words, ve-khiper admato amo, and he will cleanse his people’s ground, or perhaps
he will cleanse the ground of his people.

11
00:01:13,405 –> 00:01:19,527
Ha’Azinu suggests that Israel’s story recapitulates humanity’s story.

12
00:01:19,527 –> 00:01:25,349
Adam was placed in Eden to serve and protect it, as was Israel placed in the promised
land.

13
00:01:25,349 –> 00:01:30,124
Neither humanity nor Israel possesses its home unconditionally.

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00:01:30,124 –> 00:01:36,718
Both are stewards and both are subject to eviction when they betray what was entrusted to
them.

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00:01:36,718 –> 00:01:43,341
As we approach Yom Kippur, the day of kapparah, we generally ask whether God will cleanse us.

16
00:01:43,341 –> 00:01:46,903
Ha’Azinu poses a much more unsettling question.

17
00:01:46,903 –> 00:01:50,625
What if the earth must be cleansed from us?

18
00:01:50,625 –> 00:01:59,710
So join us as we discuss and the earth will be cleansed, Ha’Azinu, Yom Kippur, and the point
of no return.

19
00:01:59,754 –> 00:02:10,123
And if Madlik lights a spark for you, please subscribe on YouTube, Substack, or your
favorite podcast platform, and share this episode with someone who enjoys looking at the

20
00:02:10,123 –> 00:02:12,505
Torah from a different angle.

21
00:02:12,505 –> 00:02:15,677
Rabbi, Rosh Hashanah is over, and here we are.

22
00:02:15,677 –> 00:02:19,090
Today is Tzom Gedaliah, and we’re back to Devarim.

23
00:02:19,090 –> 00:02:21,652
how are you, Shanah tovah?

24
00:02:21,652 –> 00:02:28,930
Shanah tovah, this is a big one because of course this Shabbat is the last, the last
portion that’ll be read on a Shabbat.

25
00:02:28,930 –> 00:02:32,634
The last portion of V’Zot HaBracha is read, of course, on Simchat Torah.

26
00:02:32,634 –> 00:02:34,235
So this is a big one, everybody.

27
00:02:34,235 –> 00:02:35,656
Let’s get going.

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00:02:35,677 –> 00:02:37,739
And this is a song.

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00:02:37,739 –> 00:02:45,706
And most of us will know in the morning liturgy we sing the Shirat HaYam, the song of the
Red Sea.

30
00:02:45,706 –> 00:02:54,304
Maybe some of us know the song of Devorah, but this is a big deal when the Torah puts
inside of itself

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00:02:54,304 –> 00:02:55,154
A song.

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00:02:55,154 –> 00:03:06,421
So I’m gonna backtrack just a few pesukim before our portion begins, because the
introduction to it actually is contained at the end of last week’s parsha.

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00:03:06,421 –> 00:03:15,847
So in Devarim 31:19, it says, Therefore, write down this poem, this Shira, and teach it to
the people of Israel.

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00:03:15,847 –> 00:03:22,410
Put it in their mouths in order that this poem may be my witness against the people of
Israel.

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00:03:22,818 –> 00:03:27,119
Ha-shirah ha-zot le’ed bivnei Yisrael.

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00:03:27,119 –> 00:03:36,582
When I bring them into the land flowing with milk and honey that I promised an oath to
their fathers, and they eat their fill and grow fat and turn to other gods and serve them,

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00:03:36,582 –> 00:03:48,475
spurning me and breaking my covenant, and the many evils and troubles befall them, then
this poem, this Shira, shall confront them as a witness, since it will never be lost from

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00:03:48,475 –> 00:03:50,406
the mouth of their offspring.

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00:03:50,406 –> 00:03:51,598
For I know what

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00:03:51,598 –> 00:03:57,461
plans they are devising even now before I bring them into the land that I promised an
oath.

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00:03:57,461 –> 00:04:00,603
This was truly one literary unit.

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00:04:00,603 –> 00:04:02,064
It was a song.

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00:04:02,064 –> 00:04:08,988
And Moses had the confidence to say that you’re gonna remember this song.

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00:04:08,988 –> 00:04:11,139
Forget about everything else that I’ve said.

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00:04:11,139 –> 00:04:15,452
Somehow you’re gonna take this piece of poetry with you.

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00:04:15,452 –> 00:04:20,034
And most of us will recognize the beginning of it at least.

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00:04:20,092 –> 00:04:24,633
but it is a beautiful, but as I learnt this year, it’s a powerful song.

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00:04:24,633 –> 00:04:28,684
But shirah is important when it has one of these literary units.

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00:04:28,684 –> 00:04:37,227
Of course, now if we know that there are only two poems of the Torah, this and Oz
Yashir, when the Jews cross the sea.

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00:04:37,227 –> 00:04:40,748
So that just highlights the fact that this is special.

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00:04:40,748 –> 00:04:49,802
And in the Torah scroll itself, the only two places where it’s not written just as
paragraph form, but it’s actually written in two columns as

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As a poem is again Oz Yashir and here it has.

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00:04:53,304 –> 00:05:00,027
So if you get called to the Torah, this Shabbat, you will see that the Torah it looks
different in the scroll, which is amazing.

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Perfect.

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00:05:00,888 –> 00:05:10,473
So it starts Ha’Azinu, Hashamayam V’adabera, give ear, O heavens, let me speak, let the earth
hear the words I utter.

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May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like showers on your
growth, like droplets on the grass.

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For the name of the Eternal I proclaim, give glory to your God, the rock, the
Selah, whose deeds are perfect, yea, all of whose ways are just, a faithful God never

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false, true and upright indeed.

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00:05:34,736 –> 00:05:41,239
So he’s really called the celestial powers, the whole earth, as a witness.

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And then he begins really what he’s going after, which is this is a warning to take with
you, as we saw in the introductory verses.

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Unworthy children, that crooked, perverse generation, their baseness has played God false.

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Do you thus requit God or dull and witless people?

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Is not this the Father who created you, fashioned you, and made you endure?

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So we’re getting many touch points, as I said in the intro, that will kind of make us feel
that we’re playing with creation.

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When you bring heaven and earth to bear on you.

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When you talk about rain and dew falling on new growth and grass, he says, remember the
days of old, consider the years of ages past, ask your parent who will inform you, your

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elders who will tell you.

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00:06:32,866 –> 00:06:36,129
So it’s paternal and maternal also.

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When the Most High gave nations their inheritance, at his dividing the human race,

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He stationed boundaries for peoples by the number of gods.

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In our Masoretic Text, it says that by the number of the children of Israel, we’re going to see
that in other versions it says the children of gods.

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But now he’s hearkening back to what we’ll be reading in a few weeks when the earth was
divided into different languages.

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And there was a tradition that there were angels that took.

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care of every nation.

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00:07:08,701 –> 00:07:15,517
in verse 9, it continues for the eternal’s portion is this people, Jacob, God’s own
allotment.

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God found them in a desert region, in an empty, howling waste.

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When he refers to this howling waste of the desert, it says, b’tohu, which again, those
of us who are preparing for two weeks from now, we refer to Genesis, where—

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in the beginning—God created the world—it was tohu va-vohu.

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So he’s really talking about creating the world, but also creating the Jewish people out
of nothing in the desert, then engirded them, watched over them, guarded them as the pupil

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of one’s eye, like an eagle who rouses its nest, gliding down to its young.

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We’ll see that Ibn Ezra says “yerachef” recalls “merachefet”, that God’s spirit hovered
over the planet and its young.

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God spread wings and took them, bore them along on pinions.

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00:08:08,362 –> 00:08:16,208
So there’s a lot of imagery here that harkens back to the big story, the big story of
creation.

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It’s really powerful.

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Amazing.

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I just want to say, Uve-tohu yelel yeshimon, that the word tohu has not been used since
the first chapter of Bereishit, which is really remarkable.

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Wow.

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That makes it that much more powerful for sure.

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So I based a lot.

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Of my readings on the JPS commentary of Jeffrey Tigay, a real scholar.

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And he makes note that this poem is different than the rest of Deuteronomy,
and it should be because it’s a Shirah, it’s a different format.

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he says that the theme of covenant is not which is central to Deuteronomy, is not
mentioned here.

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He’s hearkening back to creation more than covenant.

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the frequent Deuteronomic references to Exodus and the patriarchs and the fact that
God promised the land has no echo here.

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The conception of the punishment is also different.

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We’re going to get to that in a second.

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In Ha’Azinu it’s limited to war and natural disasters in the land, whereas elsewhere in
Deuteronomy there is exile and return.

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And the point that he’s trying to make is not only is Ha’Azinu independent in its
composition, he feels it’s older than the rest of Deuteronomy.

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We’ve come across this concept before.

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Shirat HaYam is considered older because it’s brought into the text.

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The Bikkurim that we visited a few weeks ago, it’s considered older because again, it’s a
formula that you’re reciting.

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he says the concluding description, which we haven’t gotten to yet, about Israel’s
deliverance implies it was probably composed after a particular disaster to offer an

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explanation of hope and deliverance.

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Quite likely it was adopted by Deuteronomy because it explained a disaster in theologically meaningful terms.

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He says that the poem is older than Deuteronomy, is also suggested by its affinities with
several other books in the Bible.

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Among them parallels in the book of Hosea.

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So he brings down a bunch of prophets that also talk about I bring to witness the heaven
and the earth and all that.

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And what he argues is several prophets and psalmists were influenced by one classic poem.

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Since they’re all saying something similar, you can make the case they all
saw the Mona Lisa because all of their art kind of reflects a different variation on what

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they all saw together.

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Correct.

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That’s really good.

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Okay, very, very good.

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So this is something old and it’s something that stands on its own.

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Even Josephus says that Moses read them a poetic song which was composed in hexameter
verse and left it to them in the holy book.

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He goes on to say he delivered these books to the priests with the ark into which he also
put the Ten Commandments written on two tablets.

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He delivered them to the tabernacle.

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So we have a tradition that this Shira was almost housed in its own scroll, that it was
set beside the Ten Commandments, and I would say the fragments of the Ten Commandments

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that were in the tabernacle.

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It really did have an independent power to it.

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And Tigay says something that struck me.

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He talks about how this was used in later times and he does reference Josephus, but he goes
on to say that rabbinic sources report that the Levites read parts of the poem in the

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temple while the additional Musaf offering was made on Shabbat.

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They completed it over a six week cycle and then began again.

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This is something that I was not aware of, that this really on its own.

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Yeah, that’s yeah, that’s great.

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Okay.

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And then he goes on to say that in one of the Qumran manuscripts that they found with the
Essenes, it apparently contained only this Shira, only this poem, and was not part of a

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longer Torah scroll.

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So it really was independent.

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Well, I didn’t know that.

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So that this stood on its own for the people in Qumran.

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That’s fantastic.

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Yep.

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Perhaps it was used for the reading the poem on some similar occasion.

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And then he goes on, nowadays Ha’Azinu or the preceding Torah portion, Vayelech is read on the
Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and this I did not know.

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In the Sephardic liturgy, it is read on the ninth of Av during the morning service in
place of Shirat HaYam, in place of the song of the sea, and

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That I did not ever realize.

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I didn’t know that either.

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That’s amazing.

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So we learn a lot from Edot HaMizrach.

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we did last week and we’re learning this week as well.

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What that means is that number one, they inherently understood it stood on the same level
as Shirat HaYam, but it had a different function.

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And when you are talking about Tisha B’Av and the destruction of the temple, and you wanna
say this is what happens, it’s not time for Shirat HaYam, where we

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see the manifestation of God and miracles.

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It’s for this song, which we will see, was very humbling, very profoundly unsettling.

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but I love that they absolutely replaced Shirat HaYam with Ha’Azinu on Tisha B’Av.

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Yeah, that is fantastic.

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Okay.

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Yeah, I mean and you see that it’s the two songs.

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They’re very familiar with it.

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One replaces the other because they’re both the songs of the Torah.

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Okay, let’s take it away and let’s see about exile.

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And now back to our podcast.

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00:15:12,858 –> 00:15:24,264
So we’re not going to quote the whole shirah, but we’re gonna pick up at verse 15, pasuk 15,
it says, and then Yeshurun grew fat and kicked, you grew fat and gross and coarse.

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So really, this is according to those that say this was very old.

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It was before.

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The Israelites were even exiled.

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But that doesn’t mean that they weren’t rebelling.

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And it doesn’t mean that they weren’t suffering military defeats or natural disasters and
they were trying to make sense of them.

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You guys got too comfortable.

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You were fat and gross and coarse, you forsook God, spurned the Rock, the rock of your
support.

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You kindled wrath with alien things, provoked anger with abominations.

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They sacrificed to demons, no-gods, gods they had never known, new ones who came but
lately, who stirred not your father’s fears.

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You neglected the rock who begot you, forgot the God who labored to bring you forth again,
these kind of creation and birthing metaphors.

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God saw and was vexed and spurned these sons and daughters.

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God says, I will hide My countenance from them.

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And see how they fare in the end, for they are a treacherous breed, talking about the
Israelites, children with no loyalty in them.

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They incensed me with no-gods, b’lo El, vexed me with their futilities.

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I’ll incense them with a no-folk, b’lo am.

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Very poetic and very kind of almost modern and contemporary in the languages.

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You want a no god, I’m gonna give you a no nation.

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vex them with a nation of fools, for a fire has flared from my wrath and burned to the
bottom of Sheol, the pit’s consumed the earth and increased, eaten down the base of the

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hills, will sweep misfortune upon them, use up my arrows on them.

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and so really this is a hard message that Moshe is giving.

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This Shira is not a song to dance to.

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and then it goes on towards the end and it says, See then that I, I am He.

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There is no God beside me.

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I deal death and give life.

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Sounds a little bit like what we’ve been doing over the last few days.

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Ani amit va-achayeh.

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I wounded and I will heal.

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No one can deliver from my hand.

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It fits perfectly that the cycle of reading the Torah comes right between Rosh Hashanah and
Yom Kippur.

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And we hear God speaking in this manner.

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I raise my hand to heaven and I say, as I live forever, when I wet my flashing blade and
my hands lay hold on judgment, vengeance will I wreak on My foes, will I deal to those

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who reject me?

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I will make my arrows drunk with blood.

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this is real strong language of taking.

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revenge for those misdeeds.

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It’s not a hundred percent clear if it’s our enemies or if it’s us, as my sword devours
flesh, blood of the slain and the captive from the long haired enemy chiefs.

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O nations, acclaim His people.

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Now he’s clearly talking about the nations of the world who will learn the lesson, for God
will avenge the bloods of those servants, wreak vengeance on opponents, and this is where

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it ends.

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The punchline is in our text

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Ve-khiper admato amo and cleanse this people’s land or cleanse the land of the people, or we
will see all of the various different interpretations because it’s not clear who the

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subject is and who the object is here.

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Correct.

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And you know that we use that verse every Shabbat in the prayer of Av HaRachamim.

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Which is the memorial prayer for those who were killed in the crusades, the kiper
admato.

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Somehow the death, the suffering of the Jewish people is in itself a form of atonement.

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And of course, we have to mention kiper comes from the same root as the word we use on Yom Kippur.

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Correct.

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So it can mean cleanse, and it can mean the day of a judgment, it can be

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to get forgiveness.

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it’s a profound word that affects us all in these days.

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so Rabbi Zev Farber writes an article in TheTorah.com.

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It’s called Ha’Azinu the Song’s Enigmatic Climax.

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And he brings all of the different texts.

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He says the Torah, the text that we have ends with the phrase, Ve-khiper admato amo

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This final phrase is doubly ambiguous.

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Both the subject and the object of the verb kaper, which means to atone or
cleanse, is unclear.

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Who exactly will be cleansing what?

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He says it as succinctly as you can.

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he says we need to consider three possible subjects here.

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It could be God that is cleansing the land and the people.

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And true enough, he claims that Onkelos, this is the interpretation that he gives, he
combines the two of them.

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And he says, God atones or cleanses his people and his land, or his land and his people.

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But it’s not clear from the language itself if that’s the case.

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a variant reading is in the Samaritan Pentateuch and in the version found in Qumran.

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In the Dead Sea scrolls, it says “me-amo”, he will cleanse the land of his people.

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Rabbi, that is revolutionary.

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Right, that’s a whole peshat, correct.

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That is totally different.

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And in the Septuagint, which is what our Christian brothers and sisters base their thing
on, it says, and the Lord shall purge the land of his people.

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Really something that should to use biblical language should set our teeth on edge.

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And that’s what the scholar before said.

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It doesn’t talk of exile, but it talks of expunging the Israelites from the land.

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Very, very powerful and unnerving.

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So my argument is going to be that Ha’Azinu in a brilliant manner.

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marries the creation of the world and God creating the world for humankind and the
creation of the Jewish people and God creating the promised land for them.

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And in both cases, what he’s arguing on a macro and a micro level is if we don’t clean up
our act, if we don’t act in accordance with his desire when he created us,

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We should not think that everything revolves around us.

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he created the world and he put us in there to watch over it.

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And if we don’t watch over it properly, we will get lost.

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the world might continue, but it will be without us.

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Without us, right.

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Which is a fascinating, I would say, paradigm shift.

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So what I wanted to go through is quickly go through some of the commentaries who really
pick up on the I would say, hints.

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That the beginning is talking about creation.

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When it says “esev” that God put his presence down like dew and watered the land, a single
stalk is called “esev”, says Rashi.

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similarly, each species of herbs by itself is called “esev”.

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And he compares, at least the translator compares us to look at Rashi on Genesis 1:11,
where it talks about the vegetation on the face of the earth.

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Ibn Ezra, when it describes God hovering like an eagle over its young, says that “yerachef” is related to the word

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“merachefet” in Genesis 1:2. The cloud of glory did likewise when Israel journeyed.

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He makes an exact parallel between God creating in the desert and protecting.

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And the creation story.

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And finally, you know, I will say that even the word create, it says God found
him in the wilderness, yimtza’ehu be’eretz midbar, uve-tohu yelel yeshimon, yesovevenhu yevonenehu, yitzrenhu ke-ishon

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eino.

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He guarded him as the pupil of his eye and surrounded him.

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This “yitzrenhu”—“formed him”— evokes the formation of Adam.

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So clearly the beginning of this thing is putting us all on notice, whether as a human
being or as an Israelite, that we were all created by God.

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He protected us, he watered the earth upon which we live.

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and that’s who is talking to us.

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we are being addressed by the creator.

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So I’ll just say that this idea.

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That there this connection to creation is really the idea that the purpose of creation is
for the Jews to enter the land of Israel.

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So we use all of the verbs from creation here to say that God created the world in order
that the Jews should come to the land of Israel.

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In the Yom Kippur davening, there’s a part of the Yom Kippur davening in the afternoon in the
Musaf.

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Which is a which is a very hard part.

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It’s the poetic part.

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It talks about the service of the high priest in the Holy of Holies.

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Yom Kippur was the one day a year where the high priest actually went into the Holy of
Holies and asked God to forgive the Jewish people.

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And in as an introductory paragraph that actually was written about a thousand years ago,
what talks about this service.

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And it does an amazing thing, Geoffrey.

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It starts by talking about creation, Adam and Eve.

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And it goes to the story of creation.

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And it gives you the impression that the reason that God created the world was so that
the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur.

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So that literary technique of connecting things to creation, giving the impression that
the entire purpose of creation is this.

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Whether it’s the Jews entering the land or the high priests entering the
holy of holies, it’s a very it’s a similar strategy, which is amazing.

284
00:26:11,729 –> 00:26:15,651
A strategy that’s used by the Torah and later on used by the rabbis.

285
00:26:15,651 –> 00:26:22,834
And I think that it’s amazing and I can’t wait to focus on that piyyut or
that argument.

286
00:26:22,834 –> 00:26:26,475
But what it does, rabbi, is it also raises the stakes.

287
00:26:26,475 –> 00:26:33,478
Because that means that if we don’t fulfill our promise and we don’t live up to our
tafkid,

288
00:26:33,478 –> 00:26:37,061
our role—what we’re supposed to be doing, we can lose it all.

289
00:26:37,061 –> 00:26:40,063
We can lose the land of Israel and we can lose the earth.

290
00:26:40,063 –> 00:26:42,245
It raises the stakes.

291
00:26:42,245 –> 00:26:57,196
And I want to make an argument that this sense of the land being cleansed of the people
because they didn’t live up to their potential and actually did damage is actually a very

292
00:26:57,196 –> 00:26:59,968
strong thread in in the Torah.

293
00:26:59,968 –> 00:27:06,410
We all know obviously about Adam and Eve and God in the Garden of Eden and being expelled.

294
00:27:06,410 –> 00:27:14,142
and we can talk about in search of Eden and back to Eden, but the truth is it was a
one-way street.

295
00:27:14,142 –> 00:27:18,218
We were expelled, mortality was created.

296
00:27:18,218 –> 00:27:20,104
It was.. you’ve lost it.

297
00:27:20,104 –> 00:27:28,926
And I wanna say that there’s a strong thread, even in the halakhah, that if we don’t treat
the land properly, we will be expunged.

298
00:27:28,926 –> 00:27:37,253
So the most obvious one is in Leviticus 25, and it’s talking about the laws of the
sabbatical, the Shemitah.

299
00:27:37,253 –> 00:27:42,506
And it says, But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is mine.

300
00:27:42,506 –> 00:27:46,266
you are but strangers resident with me.

301
00:27:46,266 –> 00:27:56,786
and then you know it says ki li ha’aretz, and then it says that speak to the
Israelite children.

302
00:27:56,786 –> 00:28:03,269
and say to them, When you enter the land that I assign you, the land shall observe a
Sabbath day.

303
00:28:03,269 –> 00:28:07,431
We could easily make this a turn of phrase, something poetry.

304
00:28:07,431 –> 00:28:12,493
But I want to give ourselves the humility here that we all think the world is created for
us.

305
00:28:12,493 –> 00:28:20,036
Sometimes we have to think the world was created and we were given the obligation to be
stewards of it.

306
00:28:20,046 –> 00:28:25,090
and in this case, if you read the peshat, it says the land.

307
00:28:25,090 –> 00:28:27,151
Has to keep its Shabbat.

308
00:28:27,351 –> 00:28:40,159
And it goes on to say that when I scatter you among the nations, in Leviticus 26, it says,
and I will unsheath the sword against you, your land shall become a desolation and your

309
00:28:40,159 –> 00:28:41,120
cities a ruin.

310
00:28:41,120 –> 00:28:42,540
Here’s the punchline.

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00:28:42,540 –> 00:28:49,665
Then shall the land make up for its Sabbath years through the time that it is desolate,
and you are in the land of your enemies.

312
00:28:49,665 –> 00:28:52,162
Then shall the land rest and make up.

313
00:28:52,162 –> 00:28:53,984
For its Sabbath years.

314
00:28:53,984 –> 00:29:02,171
It really does focus on the power and the principle of the land itself in these laws.

315
00:29:02,171 –> 00:29:12,641
In Leviticus eighteen, again it says, Thus the land became defiled, and I called it to
account for its iniquity, and the land spewed out its inhabitants.

316
00:29:12,641 –> 00:29:18,616
Va-taki ha’aretz et yoshveha, and it goes on in verse 27.

317
00:29:18,616 –> 00:29:30,236
For all those abhorrent things were done by the people who were in the land before you,
and the land became defiled, so let not the land spew you out for defiling it, as it

318
00:29:30,236 –> 00:29:32,718
spewed out the nation that came before you.

319
00:29:32,718 –> 00:29:38,182
This really connects it in a way that Exodus story does not to the Canaanites.

320
00:29:38,182 –> 00:29:45,849
The Canaanites—you only had a right to take the land from the Canaanites because
they are doing what you’re doing now.

321
00:29:45,849 –> 00:29:47,886
They didn’t live up.

322
00:29:47,886 –> 00:29:50,128
To the promise of the land.

323
00:29:50,128 –> 00:29:54,972
it’s really powerful and fascinating.

324
00:29:54,972 –> 00:29:58,174
And in numbers it actually uses our language.

325
00:29:58,174 –> 00:30:05,580
You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land and the land
can have no expiation.

326
00:30:05,580 –> 00:30:07,621
It says “lo yekhappar”.

327
00:30:08,108 –> 00:30:17,691
For blood that is shed on it, except for the blood of the one who shed it, you shall not
defile the land in which you live, in which I myself abide, for I, God, abide among the

328
00:30:17,691 –> 00:30:18,721
Israelite people.

329
00:30:18,721 –> 00:30:27,984
It’s a powerful way of looking at the creation, but also of the world, but also creation
of the land of Israel.

330
00:30:27,984 –> 00:30:32,025
That we are stewards, and if we don’t live up to our promise, we’re out.

331
00:30:32,786 –> 00:30:33,730
Amazing.

332
00:30:33,730 –> 00:30:42,555
This is such a good topic and such a good way to wrap up the Torah or to get to the last
the last chapter, which will get ready for Simchat Torah.

333
00:30:42,555 –> 00:30:49,279
So Yekhuppar, kipper, kippurim, the purpose of creation is us.

334
00:30:49,279 –> 00:30:51,980
Really beautiful Yom Kippur ideas.

335
00:30:52,280 –> 00:30:56,803
And one of the Midrashim that I came across was fascinating.

336
00:30:56,803 –> 00:31:03,156
In Kohelet Rabbah, it says, see the work of God for who can mend what He has warped.

337
00:31:03,156 –> 00:31:09,092
Re’eh et ma’aseh ha-Elohim, ki mi yukhal letakken et asher ivveto.

338
00:31:09,092 –> 00:31:10,794
It says, See the works of God.

339
00:31:10,794 –> 00:31:21,204
When the holy one, blessed be he, created Adam the first man, he took him and showed him
all the trees in the Garden of Eden, and he said to him, See my creations, how beautiful

340
00:31:21,204 –> 00:31:22,890
and exemplary they are.

341
00:31:22,890 –> 00:31:25,411
Everything I created, I created for you.

342
00:31:25,411 –> 00:31:29,373
Make certain that you do not ruin and destroy my world.

343
00:31:29,373 –> 00:31:33,850
For if you destroy it, there will be no one to mend it after you.

344
00:31:33,850 –> 00:31:39,277
I kind of think the end of Ha’Azinu, Rabbi, is almost like a mic drop.

345
00:31:39,277 –> 00:31:47,341
It’s almost like, and the earth will cleanse itself of you; full stop.

346
00:31:47,341 –> 00:31:48,401
This is the moment.

347
00:31:48,401 –> 00:31:50,104
This is the moment of Ne’ilah.

348
00:31:50,104 –> 00:31:51,785
Ne’ilah—we have to fix it.

349
00:31:51,785 –> 00:31:57,789
We look around the world we live in and there are so many things that need our fixing,
global things.

350
00:31:57,789 –> 00:32:03,684
I don’t know if it’s… whatever the issue, because I don’t want to be stuck in
environmentalism.

351
00:32:03,684 –> 00:32:05,125
It’s much bigger than that.

352
00:32:05,125 –> 00:32:08,287
It’s the way we’re acting.

353
00:32:08,287 –> 00:32:18,456
It’s almost as if Ha’Azinu is making this move from the individual to the many.

354
00:32:18,456 –> 00:32:26,313
From the people of Israel writ small for what the humanity is writ large.

355
00:32:26,313 –> 00:32:31,778
And it makes a wonderful parallel that if we fail, there is no recourse.

356
00:32:31,778 –> 00:32:36,022
There’s no next year, there’s no return from exile.

357
00:32:36,022 –> 00:32:38,964
And that makes it so unique and special.

358
00:32:38,964 –> 00:32:45,550
And I think that’s what gives it such an edge, and it makes it so fascinating that it

359
00:32:45,550 –> 00:32:47,631
comes right before Yom Kippur.

360
00:32:47,631 –> 00:32:51,192
It uses the word kapparah of cleansing, but guess what?

361
00:32:51,192 –> 00:32:53,372
It’s not cleansing us.

362
00:32:53,372 –> 00:32:55,893
It’s cleansing the world of us.

363
00:32:55,893 –> 00:32:59,214
And that has to be a powerful mirror to look at.

364
00:32:59,214 –> 00:33:04,936
And we have to say, are we gonna fix ourselves or is there no one left to fix it?

365
00:33:04,936 –> 00:33:06,556
And that’s powerful.

366
00:33:06,596 –> 00:33:07,716
Amazing.

367
00:33:07,716 –> 00:33:09,517
Shabbat shalom everybody.

368
00:33:09,517 –> 00:33:13,110
G’mar chatimah tovah have an easy and meaningful fast.

369
00:33:13,110 –> 00:33:15,692
And we look forward to circling back to you after the fast.

370
00:33:15,692 –> 00:33:21,897
This was a perfect pre-Parshat Ha’Azinu, pre-Yom Kippur learning together.

371
00:33:21,897 –> 00:33:25,741
We’ll see you all next time when we finish the book of Devarim.

372
00:33:25,741 –> 00:33:30,905
So have an easy fast, a meaningful fast, and we’ll all see you.

373
00:33:30,905 –> 00:33:31,875
Is it next week?

374
00:33:31,875 –> 00:33:35,108
Do we have No, I think next week is before Sukkot.

375
00:33:35,108 –> 00:33:38,991
It’ll be in two weeks before Simchat Torah will finish up the Torah.

376
00:33:38,991 –> 00:33:39,702
Amazing.

377
00:33:39,702 –> 00:33:42,644
Shabbat shalom and tzom tov.

378
00:33:45,582 –> 00:33:54,567
So let me ask you personally, what do you think is the existential issue facing us today,
as human beings or as Jews?

379
00:33:54,627 –> 00:34:03,892
What will determine whether we can still change and be cleansed, or whether we’ve waited
too long and the earth needs to be cleansed of us?

380
00:34:04,112 –> 00:34:06,313
I’d really love to hear what you think.

381
00:34:06,313 –> 00:34:10,135
So please share your answers in the comments.

382
00:34:10,156 –> 00:34:12,657
And have a shanah tovah.

9
00:01:03,116 --> 00:01:04,327
Welcome to Madlik.

10
00:01:04,327 --> 00:01:10,633
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

11
00:01:10,633 --> 00:01:18,060
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

12
00:01:18,060 --> 00:01:23,785
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show notes.

13
00:01:23,785 --> 00:01:29,780
If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to subscribe and feel free to give us a star or two.

14
00:01:29,794 --> 00:01:43,706
This week we read Parshat Ki Tavo and encounter Mikra Bikkurim, a first-person script that
begins the Exodus before Pharaoh and carries it forward into every generation.

15
00:01:43,706 --> 00:01:48,871
So join us for liberation, personal, and recurring.

16
00:01:48,871 --> 00:01:53,364
Well, Rabbi, it's almost Rosh Hashanah, and we're talking about Passover, as usual.

17
00:01:53,486 --> 00:01:54,019
Perfect.

18
00:01:54,019 --> 00:01:54,552
You know what?

19
00:01:54,552 --> 00:01:58,189
That just shows the Jewish calendar goes round and round.

20
00:01:59,272 --> 00:02:02,775
And I think maybe at the end we'll tie it into Rosh Hashanah.

21
00:02:02,775 --> 00:02:06,928
So if you're in a Rosh Hashanah state of mind, stick with us.

22
00:02:06,928 --> 00:02:18,285
So as I said, in Deuteronomy 26:1, it says, When you enter the land that the eternal your
God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle it.

23
00:02:18,285 --> 00:02:20,337
I mean, that's what Deuteronomy is all about.

24
00:02:20,337 --> 00:02:24,080
Instructions for when you actually get into the land.

25
00:02:24,080 --> 00:02:27,564
You shall take some of your first fruit of the soil.

26
00:02:27,564 --> 00:02:39,147
Which you harvest from the land that the Eternal Your God is giving you, put it in a
basket, and go to the place where the Eternal Your God will choose to establish the divine

27
00:02:39,147 --> 00:02:39,918
name.

28
00:02:39,918 --> 00:02:53,351
You shall go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, "I acknowledge this day
before the Eternal Your God, that I have entered the land that God swore to our fathers to

29
00:02:53,351 --> 00:02:54,742
assign us."

30
00:02:55,234 --> 00:03:01,836
The priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down in front of the altar of
the eternal your God.

31
00:03:01,836 --> 00:03:06,257
You shall then recite as follows before the eternal your God.

32
00:03:06,257 --> 00:03:09,178
"My father was a fugitive Aramean.

33
00:03:09,178 --> 00:03:13,459
He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there.

34
00:03:13,579 --> 00:03:17,380
But there he became a great and very populous nation.

35
00:03:17,380 --> 00:03:20,581
The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us.

36
00:03:20,581 --> 00:03:23,702
They imposed heavy labor upon us.

37
00:03:23,702 --> 00:03:31,929
We cried to the Eternal, the God of our ancestors, and the Eternal heard our plea and saw
our plight, our misery and our oppression.

38
00:03:31,929 --> 00:03:42,577
God freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power and by
signs and portents, bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with

39
00:03:42,577 --> 00:03:43,798
milk and honey.

40
00:03:43,798 --> 00:03:49,642
And so I now bring the first fruits of the soil that You, O Eternal, have given me."

41
00:03:49,702 --> 00:03:59,575
You shall leave the basket before the eternal your God and bow low before the eternal your
God, and you shall enjoy together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst all the

42
00:03:59,575 --> 00:04:04,706
bounty that the Eternal Your God has bestowed upon you and your household.

43
00:04:04,706 --> 00:04:16,579
So the reason I say that this is I'd say iconic, but also an outlier, and I try to
emphasize the "I" is because it really is a formula.

44
00:04:16,579 --> 00:04:18,690
Gerhard von Rad,

45
00:04:18,690 --> 00:04:22,352
Was a great biblical critical scholar.

46
00:04:22,352 --> 00:04:30,317
And he called this a little historical creed, or as he said in German, kleines geschichtliches Credo.

47
00:04:30,317 --> 00:04:39,302
He believed it was an exceptionally early liturgical formula, subsequently incorporated
into Deuteronomy.

48
00:04:39,302 --> 00:04:42,624
His argument rests on several observations.

49
00:04:42,624 --> 00:04:46,018
It has the compact form of an oral formula.

50
00:04:46,018 --> 00:04:53,442
Now, if you weren't following the screen, even in our translation, it puts the two
statements in it in quotation marks.

51
00:04:53,442 --> 00:04:58,515
Rabbi, it really is a formula, kind of like a berakhah that you would do today.

52
00:04:58,515 --> 00:05:04,168
You would hold up your berakhah card in front of you or your siddur and you would read from
it.

53
00:05:04,168 --> 00:05:06,369
It's a quote.

54
00:05:06,369 --> 00:05:07,630
It's compact.

55
00:05:07,630 --> 00:05:14,840
The declaration reduces Israel's foundational story to a short sequence: an Aramean
ancestor.

56
00:05:14,840 --> 00:05:23,232
Descent into Egypt, multiplication into a nation, Egyptian oppression, Israel's cry, God's
deliverance, entrance into the land.

57
00:05:23,232 --> 00:05:34,035
And for those of you who are knowledgeable with the Haggadah, if I had read it in
Hebrew, you would have recognized it from the Haggadah, where every phrase becomes a touch

58
00:05:34,035 --> 00:05:36,596
point for a comment.

59
00:05:36,596 --> 00:05:43,882
It maintains no names, no dates, no genealogies, or narrative details.

60
00:05:43,882 --> 00:05:55,816
says von Rad, because it's compressed, it has a rhythmical character, as typical of
something memorized and repeatedly recited in worship, rather than composed as ordinary

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00:05:55,816 --> 00:05:57,566
historical prose.

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00:05:57,566 --> 00:05:59,847
It is also attached to a ritual.

63
00:05:59,847 --> 00:06:08,716
So these are all reasons that this scholar said there's something unique about this and he
thought it made it very old.

64
00:06:08,716 --> 00:06:19,590
And of course, we do have in the Torah, such as, correct me if I'm wrong, Rabbi, Az Yashir
Moshe, which is the Song of the Sea, that scholars will say.

65
00:06:19,590 --> 00:06:21,240
It seems to be older.

66
00:06:21,240 --> 00:06:23,511
It's a text that was brought in.

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00:06:23,511 --> 00:06:29,593
And of course the Torah itself makes references to Sefer Milhamot, Sefer Melakhim.

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00:06:29,593 --> 00:06:40,956
There is an understanding within even the Torah, even if you don't buy into biblical
criticism and the fact that some editor came along, clearly it does reference

69
00:06:40,956 --> 00:06:44,077
pre-existing phrases, formulas.

70
00:06:44,077 --> 00:06:46,817
And I think that's what he's kind of saying here.

71
00:06:46,817 --> 00:06:48,838
He thought this was very old.

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00:06:48,910 --> 00:06:49,280
Also

73
00:06:49,280 --> 00:06:50,811
that's for sure right.

74
00:06:50,811 --> 00:06:53,314
Az Yashir is like this recitation.

75
00:06:53,314 --> 00:06:55,396
It's not part of the story.

76
00:06:55,396 --> 00:06:57,057
It's not part of the narrative.

77
00:06:57,057 --> 00:06:58,649
It's separate from the narrative.

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00:06:58,649 --> 00:07:00,621
Az Yashir comes in the middle.

79
00:07:00,621 --> 00:07:03,473
Here also it's a recitation.

80
00:07:03,473 --> 00:07:04,444
Where does that come from?

81
00:07:04,444 --> 00:07:07,196
So that's kind of separate from the story.

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00:07:07,878 --> 00:07:08,599
Absolutely.

83
00:07:08,599 --> 00:07:10,321
It's like Az Yashir Moshe.

84
00:07:10,321 --> 00:07:13,244
They make it sound like this was a pre-existing song.

85
00:07:13,244 --> 00:07:15,667
Here it's a pre-existing formula.

86
00:07:15,667 --> 00:07:28,240
But the other things that become fascinating as we'll see is it's written for the future
because it's a formula that Moses is giving to the people that they will say in the future

87
00:07:28,240 --> 00:07:30,732
and they will recite themselves.

88
00:07:30,732 --> 00:07:42,529
The farmer is explicitly instructed to say these words while presenting the first fruits
at the sanctuary, because first fruit offerings were presumed to be very old, von Rad

89
00:07:42,529 --> 00:07:43,449
reasoned.

90
00:07:43,449 --> 00:07:48,192
That the accompanying recitation might also preserve an early cultic tradition.

91
00:07:48,192 --> 00:07:59,200
You know, clearly, if in an agrarian society, the most basic thing that you do if you believe that God is responsible for any sort of

92
00:07:59,738 --> 00:08:04,900
success on your end is you thank God with your first fruits.

93
00:08:04,900 --> 00:08:08,742
It seems like it's a very seminal moment.

94
00:08:08,742 --> 00:08:19,907
He conceded that there was no objective chronological marker, but argued that the
formula's concise, simple form and its connection to an ancient ritual brought it close to

95
00:08:19,907 --> 00:08:23,408
Israel's earliest formulations of its history.

96
00:08:23,609 --> 00:08:26,890
What makes it interesting is the formula moves from

97
00:08:26,890 --> 00:08:34,657
Exodus directly toward the land without mentioning Sinai, the covenant at Horeb, and
without mentioning Moses.

98
00:08:34,657 --> 00:08:38,200
Sounds like when we talk about the Haggadah and we say what's missing.

99
00:08:38,200 --> 00:08:42,124
Clearly in the Haggadah we say doesn't mention Moses.

100
00:08:42,124 --> 00:08:49,480
I think this kind of sensitized me to say, hmm, it actually in the Haggadah doesn't
mention giving the Torah at Mount Sinai either.

101
00:08:49,742 --> 00:08:57,967
I think it's more significant that it doesn't mention Sinai because we know that the book
of Deuteronomy is basically first person Moses.

102
00:08:57,967 --> 00:09:00,849
So he's the one who's telling them what to do.

103
00:09:00,849 --> 00:09:03,831
So it's not so surprising that Moses isn't there.

104
00:09:03,831 --> 00:09:08,734
But the fact that Sinai's not there, that's a good dvar Torah for everybody's Seder.

105
00:09:08,898 --> 00:09:09,438
Yeah.

106
00:09:09,438 --> 00:09:21,653
And of course, because Von Rad was a biblical critic, meaning to say that he felt that the
Torah was comprised of edited documents put together at a later time, his argument was why

107
00:09:21,653 --> 00:09:23,764
was it not mentioning Sinai?

108
00:09:23,764 --> 00:09:34,349
He argued that the Exodus land tradition, was one group of texts, and the Sinai
tradition were circulated separately and were combined only later.

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00:09:34,349 --> 00:09:38,082
You can buy it and you can you can take it or you can leave it.

110
00:09:38,082 --> 00:09:43,066
But the point was that he clearly identified that Sinai was missing.

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And then he says, this thing about my father was an Aramean seems to preserve an unusual
ancestral memory, which rings true because every year we twist our heads and our

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minds to know what's going on here.

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Who is this Aramean?

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It it's old.

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The other commentaries, and I'm gonna quote a little bit from Jeffrey Tigay.

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Who wrote the JPS commentary on Devarim?

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He says the Hebrew Arami Oved Avi is alliterative.

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What does that mean?

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It has a repetition with the same starting sounds in a group of nearby words, which would
facilitate memorization of this phrase.

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I've seen explanations before that say we use this because people knew it, because farmers
used it.

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Everything had to be memorized because, as Sharon will be happy to tell you, there were no
books.

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And so you had to write it on, you know, on parchment and that was too expensive.

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So something like Arami oved avi had to be known.

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And of course, that's why it's chosen for the Haggadah, because they didn't have Haggadot
in those days.

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These things had to be known to the people.

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And the idea was that you were talking about your old, old ancestors that maybe
you have forgotten.

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They were vulnerable migrants.

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They were poor people, and here you were celebrating the shefa, the richness of the
moment.

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makes perfect sense.

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He adds something else.

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He says that not only would

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This keep the memory of Israel's landless beginnings fresh in the farmer's mind, but he
continues: this clause of saying that your forefather was an Aramean probably was very

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ancient, for it is unlikely that Israelite tradition would have chosen to describe
Israel's ancestors as Arameans once Arameans of Damascus became aggressive toward Israel

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in the 9th century BCE.

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So again,

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There are many scholars, both critical, or in the case of Jeffrey Tigay, more classical,
more traditional, who are arguing that there's something unique about this and it's

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possibly old.

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So let's look at

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about the historical point about what the role of the Arameans was.

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Okay.

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So let's look at the classical rabbinic commentaries and who they say this wandering
Aramean was.

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The Ibn Ezra says that it refers to Jacob.

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I think that's typically what we think of in the Haggadah because we see him fleeing from
Laban.

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So he says that he was poor and had no money.

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So again, echoing what I said a second ago, that we will find later the Mishnah talks
about going from Gnut to

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From maybe embarrassment to shevach, to being very successful.

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Here it's very simple.

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He was poor and had no money, and here you're bringing this basket of rich first crop.

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And it says its import is I did not inherit the land from my father, for my father was
poor when he came to Aram.

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He was also a stranger in Egypt, he was few in number.

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The Rashbam says, Arami oved avi.

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he says it means my father Avraham, who was an Aramite, lost in exile from his
birthplace, Aram.

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We dealt with this a lot in a very popular segment where we talked about the use of
Aramaic.

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and everybody comes from Aram.

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The meaning of the word Oved here is similar.

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the root used to describe wandering without specific objective, almost like walking
because one is lost.

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We also find the word in this connection in Jeremiah.

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My people were lost sheep, their shepherd led them astray.

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עמי רועיהם התעום

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I find the reference to Jeremiah important because remember that Jeremiah is a prophet in
the future of exile and return.

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And so just as our forefathers were lost.

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exile wandering, so too when we bring up that basket of first fruits, we're referring
in the instance where sometime in the future will be again refugees.

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We come from refugees.

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Don't, don't worry about it.

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You can get over it.

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and then of course I love the Shadal.

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By the way, that the word, my father was a wandering Aramean.

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So we always focus on the word Aramean, but the word wandering is a very interesting term,
right?

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That my father was a wanderer.

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That's what you say.

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We're always refugees.

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And we're always referring to that in good times and bad.

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And I think that's powerful.

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Shadal says, My father, this includes all the patriarchs as one, for they wandered from
nation to nation.

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And he says, the Rashbam, who said it was Abraham, was on the right track.

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What I'm trying to get to, Rabbi, very similar to what we did last week with Isaiah, where
he tried to broaden our history.

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To Noah, to Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Sarah.

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Here it's becoming irrelevant who we're referring to with this ambiguous term Aramean,
because its import is that it could be any one of our relatives.

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It could be any one of our patriarchs and ancestors.

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And that's why I love that Shadal says it's all of them.

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It takes away the historic.

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historical antecedents of one Exodus, of one leader of Moses, and it broadens it out.

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And I think that too makes it much more important.

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Fantastic.

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And now back to our podcast.

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So the Exodus prototype precedes Egypt.

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it doesn't e start with Egypt, it goes farther back.

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and I think that if you argue with those who argue that this is an older text, even
as some who say that the present declaration

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belongs to the late monarchic or exilic Deuteronomic period, or others who propose reading
it in relation to returning exiles and those who had remained in the land, it makes

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perfect sense.

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I love the fact that almost the rabbis and the biblical critics are saying this
statement

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becomes so useful because it's not relational to one particular period.

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It could be very old or it could be literally at the moment that Isaiah, who we were
reading last week, was talking.

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Well and of course and we use it every year at the Seder.

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So it kind of—it's above time.

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It is.

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And I love that you brought that up because I'm going to segue now into the Seder because
I'm going to argue today, and we do this many times at Madlik, where we say, you know, the

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biblical critics and the rabbis definitely recognize the same problems.

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And in this particular case, they came out with the same solution.

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So the rabbis of the Haggadah are writing a document.

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Most of us would agree it was made for exile.

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It certainly was made for a post-temple time.

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They didn't need a Haggadah when you were bringing your Passover sacrifice, but they
wrote it for transitional periods, and they went and picked this same ceremonial

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formulaic statement that a farmer says when he brings his crops, and they modeled the
whole Haggadah after it.

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So this is what they say in the Mishnah in Pesachim.

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He begins, matchil b'genut u'mesayem b'shevach—he begins with the Jewish people's disgrace.

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I would say better, humble beginnings.

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I don't know why we say disgrace, and concludes with their glory.

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He expounds from the passage, an Aramean tried to destroy my father.

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That's Deuteronomy 26, 5.

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And here the Mishnah is telling us what to do at the Seder at the moment of Maggid, that we
are required to tell the story.

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The declaration one recites when presenting the first fruits in the temple, until he
concludes explaining the entire section.

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So that's why we are discussing.

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Passover today because it is literally our paragraph in the Torah portion of this week
that provides the basis, the proof text that we use in the Haggadah.

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In terms of the traditional Talmudic explanations of what it means to begin with genut,
with what I call our humble beginnings.

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Rav says it's idolatry and Shmuel says it's slavery.

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But again, if you look at the context, it's clear as any entrepreneur who is successful
and talks back to his humble beginnings that this is part of this wonderful formula.

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I started, my dad had nothing, and this is what God gave me and created this wonderful shefa.

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I'll just say that Jewish tradition teaches us always to go back to our humble beginnings.

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I wonder if that comes from the Haggadah.

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That's just part of our DNA, that that's our tradition, that you always you start
from our humility.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And it's and it's very powerful, but we think of it so many times as something it's kind
of the right thing to do.

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But I think what we're going to take away today is, but it's a powerful, empowering
thing to do.

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Because if your beginnings are humble and you were a wanderer, guess what?

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If you're a wanderer again, you're going to take solace from that.

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You're going to say, I've been here before.

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I've seen this movie, and I know we can get out of it.

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so again, the key question is why not go to the book of Exodus to base the Haggadah on?

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Why go to Deuteronomy?

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And the answer seems to be that Exodus contains all the details of the events.

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But Deuteronomy contains a speech in which an Israelite is commanded to retell those
events.

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Exodus is third-person narrative.

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The Israelites were enslaved, God heard them, God brought them.

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but here it's first-person.

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He saw us—and look, it comes right from the Haggadah.

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Vayare'u otanu ha-Mitzrim, va-nitzak, va-yotzieinu, va-y'vieinu.

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It happened to me, says this farmer.

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It brings it

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into the present.

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And that's of course what the next Mishnah says.

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B'khol dor va-dor chayav adam lir'ot et atzmo k'ilu hu yatza mi-Mitzrayim.

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Therefore, each person, and they took that right from the farmer, because the farmer is
standing there reciting a formula that Moses provided in the book of Deuteronomy on the

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banks of Moab, that he was to say in the future to relive the moment.

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I think it's magical.

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It's fantastic.

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Well, that's the most famous line of all, right?

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We have to imagine that we left Egypt.

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We have to imagine ourselves as slaves and we have to imagine ourselves as achieving our
freedom.

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Yes.

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And of course, it therefore tells the next most famous thing, which is that therefore we
need to look upon ourselves as if we went out.

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And then it goes on to learn from Laban, and it says therefore we went down to
Egypt and resided there just a handful of souls, and there we became a nation large and

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plenty.

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It feeds right into the story of

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The Haggadah.

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And I would say that it becomes now very similar to what we were stretching for last
week.

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And this becomes, therefore, an outlier for another reason.

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If you recall, last week we said you'll never find Moses talking about Abraham.

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You'll never find Moses talking besides the covenant.

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You'll never find him talking or referencing Noah.

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You'll never find him talking or reference Adam and Eve.

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But here by using this word Aramean, which is in the book of Deuteronomy, it opens up
permission for us to say this story goes way back.

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And as a result, and this is key, it goes way forward, that it will be with us all the
time.

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And that's why we can say, V'hi She'amda, that it is in every generation.

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That they stand up against us.

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That's literally what it's saying.

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It's saying that the Exodus story was not a one-off.

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The Exodus story was a model, a template, that we can repurpose going forward.

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So it's, I think, fascinating to look at this in the context of what we were discussing
last week with regard to Isaiah.

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That's that is actually fantastic, right?

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To look forward, to look backwards.

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yeah, I mean, the question to me is why is it that we need to see it as if we left
Egypt?

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What do we gain by acting as if we were slaves and we were free?

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I think it means that we appreciate Jewish history.

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And that's what Isaiah is, right?

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That if we understand that experience of going from slavery to freedom, then we are we fit
into every period of Jewish history.

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B'khol dor va-dor—in every generation.

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I totally agree.

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And what I'm trying to say, I guess, is we know when Isaiah lived.

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Isaiah lived at, you know, some of what he wrote, he might have written even in Babylon,
and some when he came back to Israel and was hoping that others would follow him.

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The rabbis, we know when they wrote the Haggadah.

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It was after the temple was destroyed, probably even after the Jews were exiled from the
land.

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So imagine the audacity.

298
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Of picking a paragraph that a farmer who farms the Holy Land, the Promised Land, says, and
you're asking a community that is no longer in that land to take power from it.

299
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But again, what it shows is that the power of this, these phrases were literally not for
when we saw the liberation or were living the liberation.

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But when we were backsliding into some sort of golah or exile.

301
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And I think that's therefore—I would even say—that almost gives a little bit of
strength to the argument that this might have been written at the same time as Isaiah or

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edited and brought in at the same time as Isaiah.

303
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That supports that idea.

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But certainly, whether you buy into that or not, it becomes powerful in those
instances.

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And I think that is what makes it l'dor va-dor.

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It makes it something that transcends a particular moment or a particular time.

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And of course, what that means is that the rabbis take it from the temple to the home,
from the pilgrim's basket to the Seder table, from possession of the land to life in

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dispersion.

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00:26:32,989 --> 00:26:34,962
it makes it

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so much more powerful going forward.

311
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And I think that it to me, this convergence of criticism, biblical criticism, and the
rabbinic interpretation really proves to me that there aren't really any

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conflicts here, that we can look at these timeless texts and we can look at them ha
hafokh bah va-hafokh bah, from every different perspective, and we come out many times

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with the same language.

314
00:27:05,287 --> 00:27:10,148
but at the end of the day, all of these texts give us a grammar.

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00:27:10,148 --> 00:27:13,289
And the grammar has two components to it.

316
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On the one hand, it's personal.

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I emphasized when I read the text how it says I, I, I.

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It is a single individual farmer.

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and the other part is because it separates it from a particular exodus.

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From a particular Moses or a Jacob or an Isaac or an Abraham, it means that it's a
recurring pattern.

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It doesn't really matter who the key players are, because in every generation it has
meaning for us.

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So this first person script is something that we started by saying makes it unique, but it
becomes very important.

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And the recurring pattern, I think this idea of Bikurim too is important.

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It wasn't done on a particular holiday.

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There's an open season, so to speak, for bringing bikkurim.

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This wasn't the kind of bikkurim that we think of on Shavuot.

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00:28:06,715 --> 00:28:12,039
It is bikkurim that was brought whenever you got those new crops.

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You were empowered then to come to the place that God chose and present these
gifts.

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So I think it's a wonderful, wonderful message.

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A fantastic message.

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It's really, really good.

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00:28:25,708 --> 00:28:30,852
And connecting it to Isaiah and what we've done the past two weeks is also wonderful.

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This is week number six of the seven haftarot.

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Yes.

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00:28:34,683 --> 00:28:41,127
So now I want to get back to the open question that Von Rad opened, which is what about
Sinai?

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Why do we not mention Sinai, therefore, in the Haggadah?

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Why do we not mention Sinai in the Bikurim formula?

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00:28:50,454 --> 00:28:55,918
Sinai is so important, even in the Haggadah.

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00:28:55,920 --> 00:28:58,371
You might say we do mention it in Dayenu.

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We say, had you not given us the Torah, would it have been enough?

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But ultimately, there is an article in TheTorah.com that literally asks this question.

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and it comes up with numerous answers, none of which I find particularly appealing.

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It seems to me, Rabbi, and this I'm gonna go out on a limb and I want to know what you
think.

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I think that while Exodus repeats itself over and over again, this kind of revelation at
Sinai might have been a one-off.

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In other words, we don't want prophets coming and making new laws.

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The law was given at Sinai once.

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00:29:38,748 --> 00:29:51,854
Yes, we re-listened to that law, but that moment where we had this kind of public
opening up of heaven and getting God's opinion, getting God's laws.

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It happens only once.

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It happens once, and it's unlike Exodus, where we can make the case that it can become
very personal.

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I, we argue against private epiphany.

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We don't want a Paul walking on the way somewhere and saying, Hey, I just got this great text from God.

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It's gonna change.

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00:30:13,861 --> 00:30:19,006
And I think that the rabbis understood that in the famous Talmud of

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the Oven of Akhnai.

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They said, “Lo ba-shamayim hi,” quoting Deuteronomy: the Torah is not in heaven.

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00:30:26,813 --> 00:30:34,619
They said, Rabbi Yirmiyah says, since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not
regard any divine voices anymore.

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It's nitnah livnei adam.

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So maybe, maybe that is the answer of why Sinai is not connected.

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00:30:43,146 --> 00:30:48,202
And I'll go one step further because I did promise to tie things into Rosh Hashanah.

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00:30:48,202 --> 00:31:00,127
On Rosh Hashanah, right after we recite this iconic paragraph that's used to get to teshuvah,
that's get that gets us absolved.

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“Adonai, Adonai.”

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00:31:01,728 --> 00:31:08,551
In the Selichot, we say, “We have all sinned—aval anachnu va'avoteinu chatanu.” [We and our fathers]

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00:31:08,551 --> 00:31:17,356
Again, there we're using this same tool, which is to say that we've been sinning from time
immemorial.

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We were sinning before, we're sinning today, and we're going to sin in the future, and we know
how to deal with this.

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We were given tools to deal with this.

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I think it's the same type of comforting context where we connect ourselves with the past
that gives us power into the future.

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Think that's great.

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00:31:37,987 --> 00:31:44,812
I just say that you know, this declaration is very much tied into bringing us to the land.

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00:31:44,812 --> 00:31:51,716
You know, Sinai is important, but Sinai is like a parallel train track to going into the
land.

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00:31:51,716 --> 00:31:56,860
Sinai is independent, you're obligated to keep the law even outside the land.

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Going into the land is something else.

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00:31:58,771 --> 00:32:02,184
So I think also, in light of what you said, I think we understand that.

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Sinai is something else.

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This is about getting into the land.

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perfect.

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00:32:07,727 --> 00:32:21,216
So anyway, another Shabbat as we get ready for Rosh Hashanah and Passover, but one
which really teaches us these timeless tools that the Torah provides or people, in order

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to repurpose stories from the past, traditions from the past, laws and truths from the
past to give us strength today and into the future.

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00:32:31,608 --> 00:32:32,271
Fantastic.

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00:32:32,271 --> 00:32:33,526
Shabbat Shalom, everybody.

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00:32:33,526 --> 00:32:34,892
We'll see you next week.

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00:32:34,892 --> 00:32:36,780
We're getting close to the end of the Torah.

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00:32:36,780 --> 00:32:37,820
Be well, everyone.

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00:32:41,336 --> 00:32:47,429
Do you agree that the Exodus repeats itself while Sinai happened only once?

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00:32:47,489 --> 00:32:52,252
Or do you believe that revelation can also occur in our personal lives?

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00:32:52,492 --> 00:32:56,975
I'd love to hear your thoughts, disagreements, and questions in the comments section.

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00:32:56,975 --> 00:33:05,139
Please also share other questions about Jewish texts and traditions that you'd like us to
explore in future Madlik deep dives.

00:02:10,999 –> 00:02:12,280
Welcome to Madlik.

23
00:02:12,280 –> 00:02:18,784
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

24
00:02:18,784 –> 00:02:27,554
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast
platform and now on YouTube and Substack.

25
00:02:27,554 –> 00:02:35,479
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

26
00:02:35,660 –> 00:02:47,999
Join us for Sing Without a Song as we explore how Isaiah reintroduced Genesis into the
Jewish imagination, how the rabbis made consolation grow progressively more joyous as Rosh

27
00:02:47,999 –> 00:02:49,580
Hashanah approaches.

28
00:02:49,856 –> 00:03:01,059
And why the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana hears in one barren woman’s voice the voices of Sarah,
Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Hannah, and Zion herself.

29
00:03:01,180 –> 00:03:09,494
Sometimes we sing because redemption has arrived, and sometimes we sing to make room for
it.

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So, Rabbi, usually I don’t sing the haftarah, but it is my parashah.

31
00:03:14,276 –> 00:03:25,240
So I’m gonna look straight into the camera and say, “Rani akarah lo yaladah, pitzchi rinah
v’tzahali.”

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I am not known for doing the tunes correctly, but that line I can do.

33
00:03:29,641 –> 00:03:32,362
So here we have repurposing.

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00:03:33,088 –> 00:03:42,005
So, as I said, this week is, what, the fifth week of the consolation haftarot.

35
00:03:42,026 –> 00:03:54,056
And it says, Sing, O barren one, thou that didst not bear, break forth into singing and
cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child.

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For more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, says the
Lord.

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00:04:01,302 –> 00:04:08,806
I mean, that sentence is just—I was too young at 13 to appreciate the power of that
sentence.

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00:04:08,806 –> 00:04:17,831
I mean, it’s basically telling someone who, in the biblical tradition, a woman who was
barren and could not have children, that was like about the worst thing that could happen

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00:04:17,831 –> 00:04:18,652
to someone.

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00:04:18,652 –> 00:04:27,557
And it’s asking that woman to sing, and that woman to believe that she is luckier than the
children of the married wife.

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00:04:27,557 –> 00:04:30,368
It’s really radical.

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00:04:30,368 –> 00:04:33,388
In terms of what Isaiah, the hope

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00:04:33,388 –> 00:04:38,059
That he’s trying to convey to these children of Zion.

44
00:04:38,059 –> 00:04:46,172
It goes on: Enlarge the site of your tent, extend the size of your dwelling, do not stint;
lengthen the ropes and drive the pegs firm.

45
00:04:46,172 –> 00:04:53,384
So he’s saying, Come on, build up the temple, build up the land, for you shall spread out
to the right and to the left.

46
00:04:53,384 –> 00:04:58,165
Here we go again with Lecha Dodi: “Yamin u’smol tifrotzi.”

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00:04:58,165 –> 00:05:01,740
Your offspring shall dispossess nations and shall

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00:05:01,740 –> 00:05:08,454
People the desolate towns, fear not, you shall not be shamed, do not cringe.

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00:05:08,454 –> 00:05:20,920
“Ki lo tevoshi v’al tikalmi”—again in the Lecha Dodi—you shall not be disgraced, for you
shall not forget the reproach of your youth, and remember no more the shame of your

50
00:05:20,920 –> 00:05:26,023
widowhood, for the one who made you whose name is God of hosts.

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00:05:26,023 –> 00:05:31,636
So, again, and then it goes on to say—and we’re using now the grammar

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00:05:31,636 –> 00:05:33,026
of marriage.

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00:05:33,057 –> 00:05:36,329
the God of hosts will say, I will espouse you.

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00:05:36,329 –> 00:05:40,511
The Holy One of Israel who is called the God of all the earth will redeem you.

55
00:05:40,511 –> 00:05:48,616
So it’s basically talking about redemption and God reuniting maritally with His
people.

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00:05:48,616 –> 00:05:53,098
God has called you back as a wife forlorn and forsaken.

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00:05:53,098 –> 00:06:00,514
Can one cast off the wife of his youth, said your God, For a little while I forsook you

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00:06:00,514 –> 00:06:03,938
But with vast love I will bring you back.

59
00:06:03,938 –> 00:06:12,867
In slight anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with kindness everlasting I will
take you back in love, said God your Redeemer.

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00:06:12,867 –> 00:06:23,400
And now in verse 9 it says, For this to me is like the waters of Noah, as I swore that the
waters of Noah nevermore would flood the earth.

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00:06:23,400 –> 00:06:34,188
So I swear that I will not be angry with you or rebuke you, for the mountains may move and
the hills be shaken, but my loyalty shall never move from you, nor my covenant of

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00:06:34,188 –> 00:06:38,821
friendship be shaken, said God, who takes you back in love.

63
00:06:38,821 –> 00:06:51,628
And I think it’s so appropriate that we’re reading this combined with Deuteronomy because
what occurred to me, Rabbi, was the four books of Moses, meaning if you take away Genesis.

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00:06:51,628 –> 00:06:54,999
How many times is there a reference to Adam and Eve?

65
00:06:54,999 –> 00:06:58,120
How many times is there a reference to Noah?

66
00:06:58,120 –> 00:07:05,922
Even when there’s a reference to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, it’s not about the stories
of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

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00:07:05,922 –> 00:07:09,963
It’s about the covenant made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

68
00:07:10,064 –> 00:07:18,246
By reading this combined with the fifth book of Moses, we really have an aha moment and
said yes.

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00:07:18,262 –> 00:07:26,475
This is the first time that we are getting references to those wonderful foundational
stories in Genesis.

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00:07:26,475 –> 00:07:29,288
It really just hit me between the eyes this year.

71
00:07:29,518 –> 00:07:43,552
So the fact is that the haftarah is both for Noach and for Ki Tetze, but it’s
for different reasons, meaning it’s for Ki Tetze because of the beginning of the haftarah, and

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00:07:43,552 –> 00:07:46,423
it’s for Noach because of the end of the haftarah.

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00:07:46,423 –> 00:07:50,184
So you’re right, you know, it’s used in both ways.

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00:07:50,184 –> 00:07:58,546
And the fact that it tells the story, but that’s really independent of the Deuteronomy,
and that’s interesting how you connect both pieces together.

75
00:07:59,266 –> 00:08:06,208
And I have to say, I was lockstep with you until I started thinking a little bit more
about it.

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00:08:06,208 –> 00:08:16,631
Because we’re gonna find, if I am successful with my argument, that Noah is not the only
isolated case of a reference to Genesis.

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And, you know, the modern biblical scholars will say that the book of Genesis was just
being edited in the fifth century BC when Isaiah was written.

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00:08:25,953 –> 00:08:28,428
That doesn’t interest me so much.

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00:08:28,428 –> 00:08:41,119
What interests me is that Isaiah is the first one of the Nevi’im who is referencing our own
books and referencing our own traditions and referencing our own stories and doing what we

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00:08:41,119 –> 00:08:51,528
do with Midrash every week, which is bring the story of Noah up to speed with now, with a
people that is waiting for a God to keep his promise.

81
00:08:51,528 –> 00:08:59,561
Or Adam and Eve, who are in the Garden of Eden, and he’s trying to promise the people
that you are going to return to a new Eden.

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00:08:59,561 –> 00:09:03,283
It’s just amazing to me that we haven’t realized it.

83
00:09:03,283 –> 00:09:18,079
But from Isaiah, we’re going to see that not only does rani akarah have a reference in the eyes of
the rabbis to the barren women of our tradition who gave birth, and that’s all in Genesis

84
00:09:18,079 –> 00:09:20,822
pretty much, but also mei Noach.

85
00:09:20,822 –> 00:09:27,518
So again, I would be remiss if I didn’t quote Genesis 8:1, which says, “Vayizkor Elohim et
Noach.”

86
00:09:27,518 –> 00:09:37,196
Now, when we, in a few weeks, are in synagogue and we are going through the Zikhronot, we will
have 10 verses that prove that God remembers.

87
00:09:37,196 –> 00:09:39,948
And correct me if I’m wrong, Rabbi, this is the first one.

88
00:09:39,948 –> 00:09:49,046
The earliest verse of God remembering a promise that He made, a commitment that He has,
is to Noah.

89
00:09:49,046 –> 00:10:02,628
And I feel that comes directly out of the fact that Isaiah was able to contemporize Noah
for his day and age, and the services on Rosh Hashanah are contemporizing it

90
00:10:02,628 –> 00:10:04,680
for our day as well.

91
00:10:05,196 –> 00:10:21,357
So, the fact that you said about how Isaiah contemporizes the story of Noah—when you
think about it, remembering Noah is even more important than

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00:10:21,357 –> 00:10:23,708
remembering Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

93
00:10:23,708 –> 00:10:30,152
Because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a covenant, but Noah actually means to save the
world.

94
00:10:30,522 –> 00:10:32,103
I absolutely love it.

95
00:10:32,103 –> 00:10:32,693
It’s both.

96
00:10:32,693 –> 00:10:35,564
No, people talk about Isaiah as universal.

97
00:10:35,564 –> 00:10:38,684
You know, he’s the one who has the big picture, the ideas.

98
00:10:38,684 –> 00:10:44,346
Let’s look at a little bit of this modern scholarship, because it’s really contemporary.

99
00:10:45,765 –> 00:10:49,367
And now a word from our sponsor.

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Thanks.

110
00:11:47,508 –> 00:11:50,170
And now back to our podcast.

111
00:11:51,854 –> 00:12:01,640
So there’s a book that came out in 1998 by Benjamin Sommer, and the book’s title
is A Prophet Reads Scripture.

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00:12:01,640 –> 00:12:09,614
It’s an allusion to Isaiah reading Bereshit, reading his own Torah, so to speak, our own
Torah.

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00:12:09,614 –> 00:12:19,230
There’s another scholar that I quote in the Sefaria source notes, and it’s called—it’s
by Richard Schultz, Building on the Beginnings of

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00:12:19,230 –> 00:12:30,518
Isaiah’s diverse use of Genesis, and it explores the ways in which Isaiah reuses various
traditions and reinterprets various texts of Genesis.

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00:12:30,518 –> 00:12:42,506
And then finally, I’ll quote Klaus Westermann, who says, Isaiah looks back into the past
in search of a turning point comparable with the one which confronted Israel.

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00:12:42,506 –> 00:12:48,034
He has to go further back to the turning point in primeval times, which marked the end of

117
00:12:48,034 –> 00:12:52,018
catastrophic events involving the whole human race!

118
00:12:52,018 –> 00:12:57,163
He puts an exclamation after the whole human race, as you said a second ago.

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00:12:57,163 –> 00:13:00,005
Several contextual comments are pertinent.

120
00:13:00,005 –> 00:13:08,914
As with God’s promise with regard to the waters of Noah, the divine promise here has
implications that extend beyond national Israel.

121
00:13:08,914 –> 00:13:13,398
The covenant of peace announced in Isaiah 54:10.

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00:13:13,398 –> 00:13:18,162
corresponds to the covenant made with Noah and all living creatures.

123
00:13:18,223 –> 00:13:33,807
And he goes on and talks about how he is taking this story which predates Abraham and
the birth of our people and uses that along with marriage, which again is a universal

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00:13:33,807 –> 00:13:38,774
example of taking one’s estranged wife back.

125
00:13:38,774 –> 00:13:41,776
Now let’s look a little bit at Abraham and Sarah.

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00:13:41,776 –> 00:13:53,045
In last week’s reading, a few verses before the reading began, in Isaiah 51, it says,
Listen to me, you who pursue justice, you who seek God.

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00:13:53,045 –> 00:13:59,730
Look to the rock you have hewn from, to the quarry you were dug from.

128
00:13:59,730 –> 00:14:05,206
Look back to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who brought you forth.

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00:14:05,206 –> 00:14:12,472
For he was only one when I called him, meaning Abraham, but I blessed him and made him
many.

130
00:14:12,472 –> 00:14:18,216
Again, this is Isaiah doing something that Moses never does, but we never realized it.

131
00:14:18,216 –> 00:14:22,239
Does Moses ever say to the Jewish people, Why are you so upset?

132
00:14:22,239 –> 00:14:23,800
What about Abraham?

133
00:14:23,800 –> 00:14:26,162
He went through similar type things.

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00:14:26,162 –> 00:14:31,486
He doesn’t, but Isaiah does, which is absolutely fascinating.

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00:14:31,592 –> 00:14:45,730
In Isaiah 51:3, it says, Truly God has comforted Zion, comforted all her ruins, made
her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of God.

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00:14:45,730 –> 00:14:48,411
Again, you would never have Moses doing this.

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00:14:48,411 –> 00:14:53,974
He’s reading those texts that we’re gonna start all over again in a month and a half.

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00:14:54,170 –> 00:14:58,554
And he is rounding the circle, so to speak, rounding the square.

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00:14:58,554 –> 00:15:07,623
It’s just unbelievable because we take it so for granted that we kind of missed the
references in the last four books of Moses.

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00:15:07,623 –> 00:15:10,015
I was just blown away, I think, with that thought.

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00:15:10,015 –> 00:15:11,402
Okay.

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00:15:11,402 –> 00:15:15,645
So you know, this is a perspective.

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00:15:15,645 –> 00:15:22,591
The Isaiah from so many hundred years later is able to have a perspective.

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00:15:22,591 –> 00:15:27,855
And see things from perspective, you have a whole different view.

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I’ll just I’ll

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veer a little bit to say the following.

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That’s what we do in the Haggadah.

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You know, in the Haggadah, the book of Exodus.

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In the Haggadah, we tell the story from the book of Deuteronomy.

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Because when you look back on something, you remember it differently.

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Right?

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Even little things.

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Like you think about the Knicks winning the championship.

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So you know you live those games.

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And now you think back.

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I was just watching the last couple of minutes, a couple of nights ago, and
you remember differently a few months later.

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Even a few months makes such a difference in terms of perspective.

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Absolutely.

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And and again, that’s what, in a sense, repurposing is when you take something you saw
once and you’re using it slightly different, or it means slightly different things to you

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when you see it again.

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But again, getting back to our haftarah of rani akarah, when these modern-day
commentaries talk about Abraham, they only refer to

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to this one verse that actually talks about Abraham.

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But if you look at it through these lenses—and we’re gonna get to the Pesikta in a
second—they actually saw in rani akarah: God finally brought life from what seemed to be

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two sterile bodies.

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They look back at the whole magic of Genesis because you could read Genesis from Adam
and Eve until Joseph and his blessing Manasseh and Ephraim as a struggle to give birth.

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As a struggle to continue your line, so to speak.

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And that’s what rani akarah is doing.

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It’s saying to these people then and now that this is what we’ve always been up against,
and we have survived.

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so let’s go.

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the thing that I struck in this week, and I couldn’t pull myself away from looking
at this whole, what you call, this Haggadah

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of reading the haftarot in kind of as a commentary as we prepare for Rosh Hashanah.

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So, there is a Tosafot, which is a commentary on Rashi and the Talmud, that actually
talks about, and it’s in Megillah, and it actually talks about these seven haftarot that

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we say after Tisha B’Av.

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and it says we get this.

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From the Pesikta—we follow the Pesikta.

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It argues with people that change the order because it says that it is the nature of
these consolations to become progressively greater and more praiseworthy.

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So if every week we step

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Up another level.

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This week we’re talking about using Genesis.

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It’s because they’re supposed to grow dramatically.

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just like in the Haggadah, they have Detzach Adash Be’achav to help us memorize the ten plagues.

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There is a similar mnemonic for remembering these seven haftarot.

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And it says this practice, established according to the Pesikta, should never be

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Altered.

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Now, I have to tell you, Rabbi, and this is kind of an interesting story.

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When I was young, I guess I was a yeshiva bocher, and my parents were visited by the head
of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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actually, he wasn’t the head then, but he was like the main fundraiser.

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And his name was Bernard Mandelbaum.

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And he must have heard that I was a yeshiva bocher because he gave me his two volume highly scientific.

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textual emendation of the Pesikta, and it’s based on an Oxford manuscript, which he argues
is the best one.

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Did he actually translate it?

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He wrote it, he did it, and he gave it to me.

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And I have it sitting here.

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And I pulled it out of my library because in his introduction, he says the following.

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Well, first of all, I have to say the Pesikta is a relatively early collection.

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it was written in the fifth or sixth century AD, which is early.

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we have Midrash [Rabba] on Genesis.

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many, this is an early one.

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And what it does, exactly as you say, Rabbi, is it works on each haftarah of the seven
weeks up to Rosh Hashanah, and it gives a running commentary.

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And hopefully we’ll have time to look at one or two of its commentaries.

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But he has a strange question.

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Ha-she’elah ha-ikrit.

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And the question is the place of the last two chapters, which are the repentance chapters.

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After the consolation, we get to the repentance chapters.

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And there’s a big problem because the problem is the Pesikta actually begins like you
would expect with Rosh Hashanah.

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It’s already covered Rosh Hashanah in the beginning.

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So why, when it ends the year, would it come back to Rosh Hashanah?

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So what he says is—and this might be a little bit too much in the weeds for some of
our listeners, but he says the chapter.

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of Dirshu, which is the first haftarah of repentance, is completely missing from the
Oxford manuscript.

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And Shuvah is in its proper order between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

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So what he argues is that they were later additions, which actually gives a lot more power
to my argument from last week, which is: if you want to prepare for Rosh Hashanah, forget

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about Teshuva.

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Think about the consolation, the joy, the radical joy of being a wife who gets returned to
her husband.

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So I

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That’s great.

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I’m gonna support you with the following.

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The haftarah of Dirshu is actually not a haftarah from a Shabbat.

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The

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Dirshu—the day after Rosh Hashanah is a fast day, you know.

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It’s called Tzom Gedaliah.

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In the afternoon of Tzom Gedaliah, we read the haftarah of Dirshu, which is about
repentance.

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But it’s not, Geoffrey, connected directly to this whole thing.

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I’m surprised that it even comes up.

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I guess the Pesikta is talking about all the different haftarot.

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If you ask me, that’s just by chance that there’s a fast day.

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By the way, that has nothing to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

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So I think that just strengthens your point.

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And it’s not the Pesikta; it’s different versions of the Pesikta.

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The Oxford Pesikta doesn’t have it.

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So now let’s go back to our two haftarot, because we’ve begun a journey together.

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If you think about Isaiah 51, it has Abraham and Sarah, the barren couple, become a
multitude.

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Isaiah 51:3: Eden—the wasteland becomes a garden.

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Isaiah 54:1: The barren woman is ordered to sing.

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That’s our haftarah.

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And Isaiah 54, the catastrophe ends with an everlasting promise.

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We’re taking them all together.

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Isaiah is using the whole book of Genesis to teach Zion how to begin again.

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But now let’s read the Pesikta for our parashah.

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And again, try to think of it as if we’re reading the Haggadah.

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So it says, “Sing, O barren woman.”

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It establishes the barren woman in a home as a joyful mother of children.

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It quotes Psalms and then it says, There are seven barren women: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel,
Leah, the wife of Manoah, Hannah, and Zion.

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What it is saying is this is not an

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isolated, trivial reference.

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This is the core of our narrative.

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And it says, “He establishes the barren woman in a home.”

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This refers to our mother Sarah.

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Now, Sarah was barren—exactly like the Haggadah would do it.

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It brings a prooftext.

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As a joyful mother of children, as it is written, Sarah has nursed the children.

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It goes on and talks about Rebecca.

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Again, Rebecca is joyful.

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It talks and it gives verses for Rachel, but Rachel was barren.

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And then it says, as a joyful mother of children, as it is written, but you shall conceive
and bear a son.

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And it goes all the way from these individual women to Zion.

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And it says, when it gets to Zion—it says, quoting our verse—

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And it says another interpretation.

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He establishes the barren woman in a home.

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This refers to Zion, as it is written, “Sing, O barren woman who has not given birth.”

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So it’s taking another midrash and it’s bringing it to our pasuk.

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But now we get really interesting because now, in the next Pesikta, it says Rabbi
Reuben interpreted, “Sing, O barren woman.”

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And it says he read the word rani, sing, as the Greek word eirene, meaning peace.

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He’s quoting Greek, and it’s universal—it’s peace.

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Peace will come to you, O barren woman.

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Rabbi Meir said, “Do not read akarah, barren, but akurah, uprooted.”

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She is the nation whom the nations of the world uprooted.

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Which is what Scripture says in Psalms Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of
Jerusalem’s fall, how they would raze it, raze it down to its foundations.

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And now we get to Abba bar Kahana, who said the principal guests, the most prominent
descendants, came from Leah, yet Rachel was regarded as the principal one, ikar.

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So now he’s taking akarah, which normally would mean barren, and he’s slightly changing it
to ikar, the most important.

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But Rachel was barren. Rabbi Isaac said Rachel was the mainstay, the ikarah of the
household, as it is written.

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But Rachel was barren, akarah.

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Read it instead as:

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Rachel was the mainstay.

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Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught: Because everything depended on Rachel,

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The children of Israel were called by her name.

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Rachel weeps for her children.

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What they are literally doing is, Rabbi, in a few weeks, when we read Bereshit and we
start talking about the major themes in Bereshit, and we start talking about the theme of

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the barren woman, Isaiah is giving us a pedestal to stand on.

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He is saying that’s the way he read it, and that’s the way he read it to a people that
felt that they had been deserted.

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And it’s just, to me, it’s just amazing, and I think it really does tie together the fact
that these same parshiyot, these same words from the prophets, can be read in the context

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of Genesis.

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But they can also be read in the context of the haftarot of consolation.

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Because in a sense, he’s using Genesis and the stories of Genesis and the stories of our
past.

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We haven’t even touched on when he talks about Rosh Hashanah and the New Year and the
narratives of creation.

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Maybe we’ll get that next week.

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I don’t know.

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We have a few more weeks to go before we get there.

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We’ll be good.

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Anyway, I just found it so unbelievable, this year’s reading of these haftarot,
because it’s really a book.

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The haftarot are being quoted in sequence.

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And they’re using it to build a case, I believe, for Rosh Hashanah.

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And now we know where it comes from, whether it came from the Pesikta or whether the
Pesikta was the first to codify it.

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This is an ancient tradition.

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And we are fortunate to be following in those footsteps as we prepare for Rosh
Hashanah.

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Fantastic.

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Thank you so much, everybody, and have a great week.