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 Parshat Chayei Sarah, I’m thinking about a recent Friday night at Hakhel, a partnership minyan in Jerusalem.

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Its founders, Ephraim and Oshrat Shoham, told us how they built a community where women participate fully in leading prayer and reading Torah.

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They did it through shared commitment and communal decision-making.

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Oshrat said she began Hakhel because she was a feminist.

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Then she turned to Ephraim and said that she and her colleagues could not have done it
without partners who were equally committed to feminism.

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Their community has endured profound loss, including the kidnapping and murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the death of their son, Yuval Shoham, in Gaza.

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What does it take to build a community that can lead, welcome, and care for one another?

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Join us for “Sarah: Leading Without Authority.”

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Rabbi, I’m in Israel right now.

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I’m actually in the north, at a kibbutz called Ayelet HaShahar. Thirty years ago, I worked in the lul with the chickens,

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but now it’s a luxury hotel.

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How are you today?

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The Shohams are good friends of ours, and it all comes full circle. They’re amazing people.

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They’ve suffered a terrible loss, but they’re amazing people.

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So it is truly amazing.

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What they told us is that he is a professor of medieval Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University. He was in the United States and discovered what we now call a

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partnership minyan, or egalitarian minyan.

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It didn’t have a rabbi. And even though sometimes in these minyanim, like the one I visited at Hakhel, there is separate seating, what happens on the bimah is—

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His wife, by the way, is an attorney.

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These women, who are doctors and lawyers and academics and can do everything as well as any man, can read from the Torah, serve as shlichot tzibbur, and lead the

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congregation.

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And they really told us this even before they got into the Goldberg-Polins and their son.

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They told us how they brought that idea from America.

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I think we should be proud that they took an idea American Jewry came up with and asked, “Why shouldn’t it work in Israel?”

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And they came back to Israel.

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They had already started a community and a congregation.

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They pushed it as far as they could, and ultimately decided they had to break away.

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They created Hakhel and I made a direct connection.

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And I tried to do this in in the introduction.

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Between this egalitarian minyan, the fact that it was started by women who I will
characterize as at least historically leading without authority, and the fact that they

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built such a strong community that it could withstand all the pressures

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And create this, he they described what it was like to have a hostage in their midst.

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These were people—Jon and Rachel—who had to travel around the world.

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They needed a whole support superstructure.

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When the terrible thing happened and Hersh was killed, it was a shiva around the world.

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The whole congregation had to be behind them day in and day out, bringing meals at every hour.

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The support.

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infrastructure that was created.

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Their son was riding a tank through Gaza, poking his head out from the turret and screaming, “Hersh! Hersh!”

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His nightmare was that Hersh would be underground and be hit by Israeli troops. And then he was killed.

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I made a direct connection between this woman-created environment, this woman-created

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community—with the support of men leading without authority—and what they created. It made me look at our parsha and at Sarah in a totally

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different way.

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So here we are, looking at these verses from a whole new vantage point.

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Are you ready to go Adam?

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I’m ready.

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This is amazing.

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Okay.

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Let’s go.

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So our parsha begins in Genesis 23:1: “Chayei Sarah.”

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Sarah’s lifetime—the span of Sarah’s life—came to one hundred and twenty-seven years.

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Sarah died in Kiryat Arba, now Hebron, in the land of Canaan, and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her.

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The translation doesn’t really capture the Hebrew, because it says: “The life of Sarah was me’ah shanah,

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ve’esrim shanah, vesheva shanim, shnei chayei Sarah.”

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The word shanah is repeated over and over again.

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And I think to understand some of the rabbinic texts that we’re going to look at
that help parse this, we have to backtrack to the pesukim that preceded it in last week’s

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parsha.

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We’ve done this a few times in the last few weeks.

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Here we are in Genesis 22:19.

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Abraham then returned to his servants.

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What is “then”?

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Then is after the Akedah, after the binding of Isaac.

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It says that Abraham returned to his servants.

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It doesn’t say he returned with his son Isaac.

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He departed together with his servants to Beersheba.

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Remember, a moment ago it said Sarah died in Kiryat Arba, in Hebron.

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And Abraham stayed in Beersheba.

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Every word has profound meaning.

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They were not living together, at least on the face of it.

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Some time later, Abraham was told, “Milcah too has borne sons to your brother Nahor: Uz the firstborn, and Buz his brother, Kemuel, the father of Aram, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel.”

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Pildas, Zilpach, and Betuel.

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And then in verse 23 it says, “Bethuel being the father of Rebekah.”

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These eight Milcah bore to Nahor, Abraham’s brother.

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So we have the end of the Akedah, then a genealogy that includes Rebekah, who will become Isaac’s wife, the second matriarch.

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Then we have Chayei Sarah, where we learn that Sarah is living in Hebron while Abraham is in Beersheba.

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So Rashi says as follows: “And Abraham came from Beersheba.”

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“The narrative of Sarah’s death follows immediately after the binding of Isaac, because through the announcement of the binding—that her son had been made ready for sacrifice and had almost been sacrificed—she received a great shock.”

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sacrifice and had almost been sacrificed, she received a great shock.

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“Literally, her soul flew from her and she died.”

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So, Rabbi, first of all, they make a connection between the Akedah and her death. It could be that she heard about it.

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But what we also have to understand is she wasn’t told about it before.

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But what we also have to understand is that she wasn’t told about it beforehand. So, talking about a woman without authority, she wasn’t included in the decision-making process concerning the life of the son they had waited so long for.

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Crazy.

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I think the term they use in America today is that she had no agency.

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That means she didn’t have the ability to have an opinion, right?

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That’s what everybody wants today.

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We all want agency.

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We all want the right to have an opinion.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So we’re going to go through a few other commentaries.

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I’ve picked and chosen them because they have insights that I think will help paint the picture I’m trying to describe.

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But I think that.

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You will agree it is a lens to which to see this story through.

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So our good friend Chizkuni says, “And Sarah died.”

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It is most unusual for the Torah to report the fact that a woman died.

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“When such a death is reported, it is not only a compliment to the life these women had lived, but it is also associated with a remarkable event.”

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He goes on …

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And he goes in a different direction than I’m going to go.

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But what I love is that he points out—and here we’re talking about the patriarchy—that the rabbis, who were clearly men, were not insensitive to the fact that their document hardly mentioned

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women.

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When it does mention women, the Chizkuni—and, I would argue, all the rabbinic commentaries—are sensitive to that and ask: What is the takeaway?

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The Kli Yakar says as follows: “And Sarah’s life was one hundred years.”

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“Regarding Abraham, it states, ‘These are the years of Abraham’s life which he lived,’ adding the phrase ‘which he lived’ because he was a man of vitality. He accomplished many things in his knowledge of God throughout his life, recognizing his Creator at three years old.”

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“This was unlike Ishmael, who only repented in his later years.”

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This was unlike Ishmael, who only repented in his later years.

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Regarding Sarah, it does not say “which she lived”.

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Listen carefully.

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“Because a woman experiences the pain of childbirth and pregnancy and is under her husband’s authority, not all of her days are called “life”.”

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Rabbi, isn’t that exactly what you just said?

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That’s amazing, that’s correct.

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Meaning that she doesn’t have agency.

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It’s amazing that in Prague, in 1600,

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the Kli Yakar was talking exactly the same language we talk today.

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It is.

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And again, you know I’m a big fan of the rabbis.

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I think that they are helping and sensitized to the issues here.

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Rabbeinu Bahya says as follows: “A person’s praise and good deeds become known and widely recognized only on the day of their death.”

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At birth, after all, no one knows who the person will be.

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“But at death, everyone knows them and recalls the good deeds and acts of righteousness they performed.”

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Our sages taught something similar about Sarah, our matriarch.

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As long as Sarah lived, a lamp burned in her tent from one Sabbath eve to the next.

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There was a blessing in the dough, and a cloud was attached to the tent.

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When she died, these ceased, and her merit became known.

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That’s fascinating, and it’s based on a Midrash we’ll look at.

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Sarah also died and was buried in the land of Israel after living a long life, as it is written: “Sarah’s life was one hundred years, twenty years, and seven years—the years of Sarah’s life.”

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And immediately afterward it is written: “Sarah died in Kiryat Arba, that is Hebron, in the land of Canaan.”

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This portion ought to have been joined directly to the preceding portion, the binding of Isaac.

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So now he’s taking Rashi to task.

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He says: “Rashi, you say that this portion follows immediately after the Akedah, but when we read it, it doesn’t actually.”

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“Because Sarah died and her soul departed upon hearing the news of the binding.”

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It is well known that the portions of the Torah, as they are arranged and placed next to
one another, are joined for a profound reason.

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They are not juxtaposed in vain.

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Sometimes their juxtaposition reveals a splendid teaching about the renewal of the world,
etc.

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Why then does the portion about Nahor appear and interrupt the sequence?

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“At the time of the binding, immediately after those genealogies, Rebekah was born, the woman destined to be Isaac’s wife.”

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“By the time Rebekah was born, Sarah had already died. Therefore, the Torah places ‘Sarah died’ directly afterward.”

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“We can now understand Rebekah’s placement between the portion of the binding that precedes it and the portion about Sarah’s death that follows.”

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The Midrash says Sarah’s death was placed next to the binding because of what Sarah heard.

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In doing so, the Midrash treats Rebecca and Sarah as though they were one person.

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Listen carefully.

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Rebekah was born only after Sarah died, took Sarah’s place, and resembled her in her good deeds.

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This is what the sages teach through the phrase “Sarah his mother.”

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This is when Isaac finds Rebekah in his mother’s tent: “And behold, she was Sarah his mother”—the Midrash we mentioned.

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So it is saying that Sarah and Rebecca become the same person.

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And the Midrash goes on to say that the light

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burned throughout the week, and the loaves of bread that were displayed and fresh throughout the week,

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ceased when Sarah died, but continued in Sarah’s tent with Rebekah.

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And it adds to what Rashi says: when Rebekah came, the cloud returned.

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All the days Sarah was alive, the doors were kept

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wide open for guests.

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When Sarah died, that opening ceased.

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When Rebekah came, the opening returned.

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All the days Sarah was alive, there was a divine blessing in her dough.

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When Sarah died, that blessing ceased.

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When Rebecca came, it returned.

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So clearly, Rabbi, there is a parallel between the way they describe Sarah’s tent and our
tabernacle.

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You cannot ignore it.

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We’re talking about the bread, the lechem hapanim.

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We’re talking about the light, the menorah.

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We’re talking about the cloud of glory.

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And we’re talking about the tent being open.

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The Mikdash was active.

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It was in operation.

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This is amazing. I think it not only puts Sarah in a new light,

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but it says two things: what Sarah started became a tradition and lasted.

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Unlike the Tabernacle and Temples, which did not last, we light candles every Friday night.

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We bake challah every Friday night.

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Sarah’s tent is still alive.

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And it talks about a masorah, a tradition that lasted.

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It clearly is making

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a reference to a different type of Mishkan.

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It’s juxtaposing Sarah’s Mishkan with Moses’ Mishkan, if you will.

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What do you think of that?

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Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s amazing.

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And the fact that the light of Sarah’s Mishkan continues—that’s really what it’s all about, right?

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That’s what continuity is. That’s what the book of Bereshit is about.

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The amazing thing, Geoffrey, is.

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Then we usually think about the book of Bereshit in terms of the men.

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That’s what you said, because the men have agency.

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But here, what that Midrash does is turn it around and say that continuity is carried through the women, not through the men.

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The light, the candle, continues through the women.

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That’s what this whole thing is about.

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Do the women have agency?

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That’s what the Kli Yakar said:

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that women don’t have agency because they’re under their husbands’ authority and struggle to give birth.

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But here that midrash says it’s the women who have agency and continuity is achieved
through the women.

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That’s remarkable.

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I love it.

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That’s www.voice.gift, and use code MADLIK for 15 percent off.

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Thanks.

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And now back to our podcast.

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So it makes you want to go back and say maybe we have misapprehended Sarah.

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And I did just that.

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So it makes you want to go back and say, maybe we’ve misunderstood Sarah. And I did just that. I’m going back to Genesis 12:5, which says Abraham took his wife Sarai, his brother’s son Lot, all the wealth they had amassed, and the people they had

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acquired in Haran.

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Now, obviously, the standard interpretation, the peshat, if you will, is that they took their servants with them.

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But the Midrash, echoed by Rashi, asks: Why does it say “the people they had “made” in Haran”?

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“The souls whom they had brought beneath the sheltering wings of the Shechinah.”

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“Abraham converted the men, and Sarah converted the women.”

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“And Scripture accounts it to them as if they had made them.”

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So again, they were in this midrash, they’re equal.

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They’re equal for their gender communities.

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And then, if you go to last week’s parsha, Vayera, it says at the beginning—

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Abraham was at Elon Mamre.

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God appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamre.

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He was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot.

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And where was Sarah?

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She was inside the tent.

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Well, Rabbi, we did a whole episode.

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The language it uses is that Abraham is yoshev petach ohel, sitting at the entrance of the tent.

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Well, turn around your gaze.

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When Exodus says

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that the women made the copper stands from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the “entrance of the Tent” of Meeting, at the petach ohel moed,

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we reflexively assume they’re outsiders.

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The men are inside; the women are at the entrance, outside.

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Maybe they’re there because they had just given birth and were tamei.

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Whatever the traditional explanations are for someone standing at the entrance, I challenge us to look back at Abraham, who is standing at the entrance of the tent.

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He’s the one on the outside.

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Sarah is running the Mishkan.

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Sarah is running the ohel.

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It gives us a little tweak, a chance to look at some of these things slightly

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differently.

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Now, what do you make?

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Let’s just go back a second.

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What do you make of that?

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What do you make of that? Is Abraham’s petach ohel the same as the petach ohel moed?

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And therefore what?

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And therefore, you could very easily look at the women in Shemot, standing outside and performing tasks, as being outside because they weren’t holy enough,

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because they weren’t in a state of sufficient purity to be inside.

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They were not in a state of purity enough to be on the inside.

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So I challenge us to look again at what happened with Abraham, with Sarah inside the tent, with its light, its cloud of glory, and the challah that lasted all week,

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lasted all a week.

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while Abraham is outside,

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at the petach ohel.

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He’s, you know, maybe like the guys you see in an Arab village, smoking

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their water pipes,

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and you know the women are getting all the work done.

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I’m just saying that if we start to understand Sarah as an amazing, independent woman—and, of course, now let’s go back to where they were

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living—

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Sarah was in a different place from Abraham.

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And the commentaries go out of the way to say, where was Sarah?

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She was in

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Kiryat Arba, Hebron, in Canaan.

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She was in the Holy Land.

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She died in the Holy Land.

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Abraham was on the outside.

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It shows the possibility of a thread here: what I’m calling a change-maker without authority.

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that she had this inner strength.

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It’s not on the chapter headings, but it sure as hell is making the point that.

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This woman, and the tradition she created and passed on to her daughter-in-law and the generations after us, represented a quiet inner strength that I thought I saw a little of

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in Hakhel, a community that was also created from the ground up.

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Now that’s amazing.

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Let me just say that’s a remarkable idea.

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Let’s just give give credit where credit is due.

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You usually think of petach ohel as the entrance to the tent. We learned that Abraham was there

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to meet the guests.

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That’s what we learned in school, that he was there to meet the guests.

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But your suggestion is that it’s better to be ba-ohel, inside the tent, just like being in the ohel moed, in the Tabernacle.

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So Sarah was holier because she was inside the tent.

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She wasn’t only at the petach ohel moed.

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That’s a fantastic idea.

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That the

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Leadership has to be in the tent, not outside the tent.

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You’re really turning the whole 3,000 years of midrashic tradition, you’re turning on its
head, and it’s fantastic.

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Ephraim Shoham would smile if he heard this.

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I’d like to be a little more nuanced. Abraham is an example of leading with authority, and Sarah is an example of leading without

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authority.

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And both of those have their day.

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One makes change from the top down, and the other makes change from the bottom up.

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I’m on a JDC mission, and we’re seeing a lot of that.

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After October 7, when the government was absent, the people who came forward were volunteers and nonprofit organizations.

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Individuals who seized the moment and the day.

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These people literally saved the State of Israel.

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There were municipalities that don’t have a lot of authority.

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I heard a whole speech, and I’d never really understood this. Ronald Heifetz—

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I’d never heard of him before.

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If we have time, we’re going to read some of what he wrote about the concept of leading without authority.

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If we have time, we’re gonna read some of what he wrote about this concept of leading
without authority.

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But that’s what I would like to suggest.

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It’s not a question of more holy or less holy, but two different models of leadership: leading with authority, which Abraham represents,

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and leading without authority, which Sarah

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and Rebecca, the matriarchs, and the remarkable women who followed represent.

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I searched to see if anybody thought like I did, and found a Substack post published on October 18, 2026, by Rebecca Cypess,

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a professor at Yeshiva University.

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She’s a provost.

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Yes.

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She makes the argument a little differently, but it’s worth reading because she also identifies creativity as central.

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She writes: “God’s communications with Abraham show that God considers the patriarch a true partner, to the extent that God is unwilling to hide from Abraham.”

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So now we’re talking about Sodom and Gomorrah.

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While the Torah is more reticent

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in describing Sarah’s status, it hints at a similarly robust partnership.

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“Sarah’s role as a true partner in fulfilling God’s vision is signaled, for example, by the fact that God changes her name from Sarai to Sarah at the same time that He gives a new name to Abraham.”

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name to Avraham.

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I had not mentioned that, but that is true.

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Not only does the Torah take the time to mention her death, but it takes the time to change her name.

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I think that’s probably unique in our tradition.

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“She played a role equal to that of her husband in shaping the lives and outlooks of people around her, which constitutes another form of creation.”

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Perpetual life, ever fresh and abundant bread, and a cloud hanging over the tent.

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Why would the Midrash focus on these three miraculous events?

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What message is it trying to convey?

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“Through her tent, the Midrash suggests Sarah created the model for the Jewish people’s means of communicating with God.”

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“For the Midrash, Sarah’s tent was a place where light was never extinguished, bread was plentiful and always fresh, and a cloud was suspended at the entrance.”

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“These three miracles corresponded to the three sacred items of the Kodesh: the menorah, the shulchan and its ever-fresh bread, and the golden altar where incense burned morning and

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night.”

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So she makes that same connection from the Midrash.

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She also points out that the midrash adds

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in addition to what Rashi says, that the doors of the tent were kept right open.

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she comes up with a theory of maybe Rashi left that out.

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But I want to finish by reading a little from Leadership Without Easy Answers.

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We’re focusing on women, Rabbi, but leadership without authority is Gandhi.

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Leadership without authority is Martin Luther King Jr.

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These people weren’t presidents, congressmen, or senators.

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This Harvard scholar, who studies how organizations make change, focuses on the distinctive power of leadership without

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authority.

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He writes: “The scarcity of leadership from people in authority, however, makes it all the more critical to the adaptive process of polity that leadership be exercised by people

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without authority.”

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“These people, perceived as entrepreneurs and deviants, organizers and troublemakers, provide the capacity within the system to see through the blind spots of the dominant viewpoint.”

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Because we are not used to distinguishing between leadership and authority, the idea of
leadership without authority is new and perplexing, except that we just found it in Sarah.

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“As a result, the person without authority gives few relevant pointers from scholarship.”

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“Analysts have generally neglected the distinctive problems and opportunities.”

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So what he’s suggesting is we should start a whole study, beginning with Sarah, of leaders
without authority.

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“Leadership may more often emerge from the foot of the table, but that is not where we spend most of our time looking.”

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“We study the lives and characteristics of heads of state and CEOs of corporations, assuming all the while that we are studying leaders and not simply authority figures who serve.”

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It points to the fact that there are leaders who don’t have authority, and should not have authority.

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“I use the metaphor of the table, where the head is traditionally a man and the foot characteristically a woman. That is no accident,” he writes.

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“Leadership without authority has been the domain to which women have been restricted for ages.”

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I was at a JDC lecture where they were talking about top-down

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and bottom-up leadership, and they mentioned this.

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He says, “Yet the constraints of authority are such that there may also be advantages to leading without it.”

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Bottom-up.

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“Yet the constraints of authority are such that there may also be advantages to leading without it.”

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“First, the absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making.”

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“Instead of providing answers that soothe, one can more readily raise questions that disturb.”

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This is Sarah’s response to the Akedah.

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Sarah’s response was that she went and died.

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She didn’t take it lying down.

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she really that is part of her story.

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“One does not have to keep the system on an even keel.”

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“One has more latitude for creative deviance.”

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“Second, leading without or beyond one’s authority permits focusing hard on a single issue.”

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“One does not have to contend so fully with meeting the multiple expectations of multiple constituencies and providing the whole environment for everybody.”

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It’s a breath of fresh air.

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You can focus just on building community.

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You don’t have to worry about the economy and the war machine.

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“One can have an issue focus.”

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“Third, operating with little or no authority places one closer to the detailed experiences of some of the stakeholders in the situation.”

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“One may lose the larger perspective, but gain the fine grains of people’s hopes, pains, values, habits, and history.”

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And that’s what I saw in Hakhel.

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This was a community that could feel people’s pains, values, habits, and history in a way I think other congregations, with different evolutions,

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did not.

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I was really inspired, and I hope we can all be inspired by Sarah, the renewed, newly discovered Sarah as a leader without authority.

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That’s amazing.

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And to see that the reason Hakhel was so poignant to you was because there was women’s leadership in that role—or maybe men’s and women’s leadership—I think

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is fascinating.

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Anyway, that’s bringing Chayei Sarah, through the model of Sarah,

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to today’s world.

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00:32:25,615 –> 00:32:26,936
So thank you, Geoffrey.

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Shabbat shalom to everybody.

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00:32:28,357 –> 00:32:30,259
We look forward to seeing you next week.

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00:32:30,259 –> 00:32:33,641
Geoffrey, back on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

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00:32:33,641 –> 00:32:35,543
Shabbat shalom, everybody.

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00:32:35,543 –> 00:32:46,831
Shabbat shalom from Israel. Let’s bring Sarah back to life again and have a Chayei Sarah that can inspire and guide us as we move forward.

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All the best and see you next week.

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Amen.

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00:00:59,168 –> 00:01:05,623
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish
text or tradition.

14
00:01:05,623 –> 00:01:14,189
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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00:01:14,189 –> 00:01:19,633
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

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00:01:19,633 –> 00:01:21,734
This week’s parsha is Vayera.

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00:01:21,734 –> 00:01:26,870
We’ll begin with Abraham and Sarah running and rushing to welcome their guests.

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00:01:26,870 –> 00:01:33,493
And follow that urgency through the Mussar tradition and into Franklin’s art of
self-improvement.

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00:01:33,493 –> 00:01:39,355
So join us: Abraham, Master of Mussar and Industry.

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Well, Rabbi, another week brings another surprise.

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00:01:42,196 –> 00:01:52,701
I had never known that Franklin was involved with the Mussar movement, and we are going to
find that trail, and it’s pretty, pretty, pretty strong.

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00:01:52,701 –> 00:01:55,692
But anyway, let’s go to the parsha.

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00:01:55,692 –> 00:02:06,583
We are in Vayera. We’re in Genesis 18:1, and it says, “And God appeared,” Vayera, which is
why the parsha is named Vayera.

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It comes from the word to see.

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Vayera: “He appeared to him in the terebinths of Mamre.”

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00:02:11,616 –> 00:02:17,549
He, meaning Abraham, was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot.

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Looking up, he saw three figures standing near him.

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00:02:21,322 –> 00:02:32,208
As soon as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them, and bowing to
the ground, he said, “My lords, if it please you, do not go on past your servant.”

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Let a little water be brought, bathe your feet, and recline under the tree.

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00:02:37,751 –> 00:02:41,993
“Let me fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves.”

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Then go on, seeing that you have come your servant’s way.

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00:02:46,256 –> 00:02:49,558
They replied, “Do as you have said.”

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00:02:49,558 –> 00:02:50,696
Verse six.

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00:02:50,696 –> 00:02:59,649
Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said, “Quick, three seahs of choice flour! Knead
and make cakes.”

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00:02:59,649 –> 00:03:03,760
So we’re going to focus on—there’s a lot of activity here.

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00:03:03,760 –> 00:03:08,292
He’s sitting, it’s calm, it’s quiet, he’s observing, he’s looking.

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00:03:08,292 –> 00:03:14,454
All of a sudden he stands up like a new customer is coming into his booth.

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00:03:14,454 –> 00:03:22,460
And he runs out, he bows down, he greets them, but then the real word is “Vayemaher
Avraham.”

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00:03:22,460 –> 00:03:33,207
He hastened to the tent and he says to Sarah, “Vayemaher, vayomer mahari.” He says, “Quick,
bring these cakes.”

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00:03:33,207 –> 00:03:39,612
So instead of going through all the classical commentaries, we are going to start at the end
first.

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00:03:39,612 –> 00:03:43,394
So the second I read this, I said, somewhere in my mind, there’s

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gotta be some Mussar scholar who looks at this and says, “The lesson here is about zerizut,
zerizim makdimim.”

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00:03:53,179 –> 00:03:55,941
Get up early in the morning and go get them.

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00:03:55,941 –> 00:04:02,885
Because I knew that that was the kind of thing, as I said in the intro, that we would spend
a month on in the yeshiva.

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00:04:02,885 –> 00:04:12,940
We used to have va’adim. They were at midnight with Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, and we would work on
one simple thing, and it could be

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00:04:12,940 –> 00:04:18,752
just a concept as simple as zerizut, as zealousness.

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00:04:18,752 –> 00:04:21,353
It had to be at midnight!

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00:04:21,353 –> 00:04:25,555
So because you need focus and quiet outside.

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00:04:25,555 –> 00:04:31,938
So the first scholar that we’re going to read is Rav Yerucham Halevi.

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00:04:31,938 –> 00:04:36,820
This actually, if you go to Wikipedia, it has a nice list of students.

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00:04:36,820 –> 00:04:39,061
One of the students is Shlomo Wolbe.

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00:04:39,061 –> 00:04:42,674
So I might have actually heard this through the mouth

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00:04:42,674 –> 00:04:51,279
of Rav Yerucham’s student himself, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, but he looks at these verses the way
a mussarnik would look.

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00:04:51,279 –> 00:04:56,902
And he says, quoting the verse, “He lifted his eyes and saw, and he ran.”

55
00:04:56,902 –> 00:05:04,126
Says Rav Yerucham, “Abraham hurried to the tent of Sarah and said, ‘Quick, three measures of
fine flour.'”

56
00:05:04,126 –> 00:05:07,308
Then Abraham ran to the cattle and so on.

57
00:05:07,308 –> 00:05:10,930
He gave the food to the servant who hurried to prepare it.

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00:05:10,934 –> 00:05:13,696
This is the real point, says Rav Yerucham.

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00:05:13,696 –> 00:05:16,699
“He hurried” is the most important part.

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00:05:16,699 –> 00:05:19,421
“Quick, three measures of fine flour.”

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00:05:19,421 –> 00:05:26,247
The “quick” matters more than the three measures of flour, says Rav Yerucham.

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00:05:26,247 –> 00:05:35,875
Now, quoting another great mussarnik, the Saba of Kelm, of blessed memory, used to make a
point about the blessing to engage in words of Torah.

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La’asok bedivrei Torah.

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00:05:38,637 –> 00:05:40,376
Torah should become

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00:05:40,376 –> 00:05:47,148
for a person, an esek, a business, a serious occupation like a business.

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00:05:47,148 –> 00:05:57,711
In business, says Yerucham, when a customer comes into a shop, especially a valued customer
who brings in a lot of profit, everybody gets to their feet to welcome him, serves

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00:05:57,711 –> 00:05:59,171
him, and do what he wants.

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In Abraham’s house, whenever a guest came in, everyone in the household got to their feet.

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00:06:04,113 –> 00:06:09,260
They all ran around with him because they understood the great opportunity

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the guest brought with him.

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This is the secret of running and returning, running toward God.

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He goes on.

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00:06:17,516 –> 00:06:24,401
Rabbi Eliezer said, and this is a quote from the Talmud, “In all my days no one ever arrived
at the study hall before me.”

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Yet once I got up early and found the dung carriers and straw gatherers already there.

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00:06:30,105 –> 00:06:38,090
I said, “If you seek her like silver and search for her like hidden treasures, then you will
understand the fear of the Lord.”

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00:06:38,090 –> 00:06:41,612
We are not even dung carriers or straw gatherers.

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00:06:41,612 –> 00:06:49,955
He’s looking at the lowest of the low menial laborers, and he’s saying they have more
gumption, they have more zeal than me.

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I thought I was getting up early, I was the first clocking in to work.

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00:06:53,757 –> 00:06:58,699
But here we have these menial laborers are there already.

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00:06:58,899 –> 00:07:05,496
He says no one knows how to measure the importance of getting an early start on a mitzvah.

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00:07:05,496 –> 00:07:14,333
Getting up a little earlier to go into the synagogue for prayer, or arriving a few minutes
before the study session begins.

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00:07:14,333 –> 00:07:22,960
Perhaps all a person’s happiness and success come more from getting there early than from
the act itself.

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00:07:22,960 –> 00:07:34,529
A person may perform many very great deeds yet lose the whole dynamic of r”unning and
returning”, he says in quotations, which is the condition and the purpose of all divine

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service.

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00:07:35,340 –> 00:07:42,793
So I was struck by, first of all, the two business associations.

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00:07:42,793 –> 00:07:49,736
When he talks about the Saba of Kelm, he talks about a businessman in his shop.

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00:07:49,736 –> 00:07:54,738
When he brings from Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Eliezer is looking at these menial laborers.

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00:07:54,738 –> 00:08:02,631
And then when he says at the end, perhaps all a person’s happiness and success, Rabbi, this
sounds more like self-help.

89
00:08:02,631 –> 00:08:05,122
This sounds more like a business

90
00:08:05,122 –> 00:08:12,977
journal, like, you know, influence people and make friends, and Fast and Slow.

91
00:08:12,977 –> 00:08:22,474
These are advices from being observant, from looking around, and yes, bringing them into how
we study Torah.

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00:08:22,474 –> 00:08:29,440
But from the second I read it, I felt a taste of the Mussar movement.

93
00:08:29,440 –> 00:08:37,932
And we’re going to explore these analogies that seem to crop up all the time to business, to
esek.

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00:08:37,932 –> 00:08:44,634
We’re also going to focus a little bit on—it’s bigger than just Torah.

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00:08:44,634 –> 00:08:48,115
It’s happiness and success comes more.

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00:08:48,115 –> 00:08:50,696
What is your experience with Mussar?

97
00:08:50,696 –> 00:08:55,778
Have you had this type of experience studying Mussar in this way before?

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00:08:55,778 –> 00:08:57,816
So, first of all,

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00:08:57,816 –> 00:09:07,294
there was a huge debate whether Mussar should be incorporated into the regular study.

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00:09:07,294 –> 00:09:15,461
So you went to a yeshiva where really the main rabbinic character in the yeshiva was a
mussarnik.

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00:09:15,461 –> 00:09:18,423
So Mussar played a very important role.

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00:09:18,423 –> 00:09:26,209
The other tradition, the kind of more Lithuanian tradition, they always said that Mussar was
like medicine.

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00:09:26,209 –> 00:09:27,232
If you’re sick.

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00:09:27,232 –> 00:09:28,443
It makes you better.

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00:09:28,443 –> 00:09:30,824
But if you’re better, it makes you sick!

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00:09:30,824 –> 00:09:34,965
So, first of all, that’s interesting about Mussar.

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00:09:34,965 –> 00:09:47,791
But there’s no question that for those who embraced, like Rabbi Wolbe, who embraced Mussar,
Mussar became really the foundation stone upon which everything else was based.

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00:09:47,791 –> 00:09:54,616
And what they always wanted to do is go back to the stories in the Torah and see if you
could

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00:09:54,616 –> 00:10:00,168
find a basis for these Mussar traditions.

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00:10:00,168 –> 00:10:06,430
So what you’ve chosen is very traditional in the Mussar world, which makes it fantastic.

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00:10:06,430 –> 00:10:06,970
Great.

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00:10:06,970 –> 00:10:15,953
So what we’re gonna do, we started with a very late mussarnik, and now we’re gonna go back
because it’s kind of like BC and AC.

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00:10:15,953 –> 00:10:18,666
There’s before Rabbi Israel Salanter.

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00:10:18,666 –> 00:10:22,329
And after, because he did not invent these texts.

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00:10:22,329 –> 00:10:33,488
In fact, everybody who studies Mussar is studying older texts, Mesilat Yesharim and others
that Rabbi Israel recommended, but they came way before.

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00:10:33,488 –> 00:10:36,426
So we’re going to take this trip that I promised.

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00:10:36,426 –> 00:10:43,766
We’re going to start in Middle Age Germany, a book called Orchot Tzadikim.

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00:10:43,778 –> 00:10:46,649
and in that it says as follows.

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00:10:46,649 –> 00:10:50,780
And again, we’re diving deep into this concept of zeal.

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00:10:50,780 –> 00:10:54,261
So, Sha’ar ha-Chamishah Asar, Sha’ar ha-Zerizut.

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00:10:54,261 –> 00:10:57,442
We are looking in the 15th chapter on zeal.

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00:10:57,442 –> 00:11:00,963
And this is the type of things that a Mussar book would do.

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00:11:00,963 –> 00:11:04,684
Zeal for the Torah and the commandments is a great quality.

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00:11:04,684 –> 00:11:07,535
And so is zeal that aims to make a better world.

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00:11:07,535 –> 00:11:08,205
I love that.

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00:11:08,205 –> 00:11:10,720
It’s both Torah and a better world.

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00:11:10,720 –> 00:11:15,653
And it is a quality of the righteous in the service of the Creator, may He be blessed.

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00:11:15,653 –> 00:11:21,347
Our sages of blessed memory said, the zealous are early to perform their religious duties.

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00:11:21,347 –> 00:11:25,800
That comes from the Talmud: “Zerizim makdimim lemitzvot.”

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00:11:25,800 –> 00:11:29,324
That is a key operating phrase here.

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00:11:29,324 –> 00:11:37,638
Concerning Abraham, our father, in the account of the sacrifice of Isaac—so they don’t
use—the first proof text does not come from our parsha.

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00:11:37,638 –> 00:11:43,200
It comes from the famous parsha of the sacrifice of Isaac.

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00:11:43,200 –> 00:11:46,321
And Abraham rose in the morning.

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00:11:46,321 –> 00:11:57,962
Even though it was difficult for him to offer up his only son, he nevertheless did the will
of the Creator with zeal, with zerizut, arising early in the morning.

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00:11:57,962 –> 00:12:07,665
He who performs his deeds with zeal demonstrates convincingly that he loves his Creator as a
servant who loves his master and hastens to do his will.

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00:12:07,665 –> 00:12:09,925
Now we’re gonna dive just a little bit deeper.

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00:12:09,925 –> 00:12:16,667
For zeal depends upon the heart of a man as when a man cleanses his heart of all other
thoughts.

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00:12:16,667 –> 00:12:25,490
So when you get zealous about something, when you jump to action, you automatically cleanse
your heart of other intentionality.

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00:12:25,490 –> 00:12:27,750
The adrenaline begins.

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00:12:27,976 –> 00:12:34,350
And clings to one thought only, then he makes himself alert and will no doubt succeed.

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00:12:34,350 –> 00:12:41,826
Now he’s even gonna make the argument that it was zerizut that helped Abraham get through
this test,

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because it made him focus on the challenge at hand and not think about his relationship with
his son, his family, and all that.

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00:12:51,954 –> 00:13:04,964
But I want to stop here because again, it’s typical of the mussarniks that they will now
spend a day on thinking about how zealousness clarifies one’s thoughts, how zealousness

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00:13:04,964 –> 00:13:07,145
focuses one’s attention.

145
00:13:07,145 –> 00:13:08,282
He goes on.

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00:13:08,282 –> 00:13:12,506
Now you ought to remember the things that men tend to be lazy about.

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00:13:12,506 –> 00:13:16,490
So the opposite thing of zealousness is laziness.

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00:13:16,490 –> 00:13:25,418
And if you must look up something in a book and you do not know where to find it, you must
be quick to go and to ask someone who is familiar with the subject.

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00:13:25,418 –> 00:13:33,524
If a poor man comes to your house to ask for bread, do not say I cannot go and get the
bread, but go quickly and bring it.

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00:13:35,200 –> 00:13:38,392
So here now it’s seizing the opportunity.

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00:13:38,392 –> 00:13:43,845
If I’m reading a book and I have a question, I’ll say, you know what, I’m gonna see Adam
tomorrow, I’ll ask him then.

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00:13:43,845 –> 00:13:45,676
That doesn’t cut it.

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00:13:45,676 –> 00:13:51,879
The idea of being zealous is to grab it when it is fresh and go for it.

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00:13:51,879 –> 00:13:57,482
Again, another aspect of what zerizut can mean.

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00:13:57,672 –> 00:14:07,966
So the next chapter, he goes, “The general rule in this matter is that a man should examine
himself and ask himself which sin he does customarily.”

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00:14:07,966 –> 00:14:20,870
Again, he’s starting to focus the difference between zerizut and atzlut, which is laziness,
but also custom, because when you do something with zeal, you’re outside of your custom

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00:14:20,870 –> 00:14:21,678
zone.

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00:14:21,678 –> 00:14:28,121
and he should hasten to set up fences in order to take care to cease committing that
particular transgression.

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00:14:28,121 –> 00:14:32,943
He should also examine himself as to which commandment of God he is lax in.

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00:14:32,943 –> 00:14:36,705
For example, an idler, adam batlan.

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00:14:36,705 –> 00:14:41,467
So we always think of bittul Torah as not studying Torah.

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00:14:41,467 –> 00:14:45,128
Here we’re looking at the Batlan from a different perspective.

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00:14:45,128 –> 00:14:47,429
Someone who’s not doing anything.

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00:14:47,429 –> 00:14:49,772
He’s not moving in any direction.

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00:14:49,772 –> 00:14:56,808
He should understand right off that his idleness is a result of his being concerned with
idle things.

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00:14:56,808 –> 00:15:03,134
He who attaches himself to idle things will obviously reject Torah and prayer and all that
is good.

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00:15:03,134 –> 00:15:07,458
Again, Mussar doesn’t focus directly on Torah and prayer.

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00:15:07,458 –> 00:15:14,163
It’s focusing on the human being who is expected to read, study Torah and do prayer.

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00:15:14,163 –> 00:15:17,736
It’s trying to change the essence of our behavior.

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00:15:17,736 –> 00:15:23,812
Such a man should depart from people who waste time in idle talk, and he should not be their
companion.

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This will be a cure for his illness.

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00:15:26,535 –> 00:15:29,397
And he says, and for all these zeal is required.

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For if he is too lazy to root out these evil qualities, then they will become fixed in his
heart so firmly that he will be unable to uproot them.

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He should be alert to seek peace and to pursue it.

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00:15:42,750 –> 00:15:44,170
Rodef shalom.

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00:15:44,170 –> 00:15:47,972
Again, it’s this running, it’s running after.

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00:15:47,972 –> 00:15:54,454
So again, this idea of zeal is not always just to do something.

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It’s, as we saw with the Akedah, to cleanse one’s thought, to focus.

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It’s as we see here, not to be idle, to be moving, to be energized, to be constantly
reacting.

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Your thoughts till now, Rabbi?

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00:16:08,729 –> 00:16:13,941
So I’m most interested in the idea of being an adam batlan.

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Because you talked about bittul Torah.

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00:16:16,122 –> 00:16:18,083
Bittul Torah is in the moment.

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You don’t study Torah.

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00:16:19,783 –> 00:16:23,685
Adam batlan—batlan is a description of the person.

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He’s an idler.

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00:16:24,826 –> 00:16:26,886
He’s batel all the time.

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00:16:26,886 –> 00:16:28,787
He doesn’t do anything.

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00:16:28,787 –> 00:16:36,128
In the eyes of Jewish tradition, of the mussarniks, but of Jewish tradition, there’s nothing
worse than being idle.

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00:16:36,128 –> 00:16:42,003
In a weird way, Geoffrey, it’s better to do bad things than it is to do nothing.

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00:16:42,024 –> 00:16:43,005
Interesting.

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00:16:43,005 –> 00:16:43,545
Interesting.

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00:16:43,545 –> 00:16:45,727
And we’re gonna touch upon that too.

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00:16:47,409 –> 00:16:51,012
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And now back to our podcast.

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00:17:53,292 –> 00:17:57,024
So let’s continue with this older text, Orchot Tzadikim.

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00:17:57,024 –> 00:18:06,550
He says, Rabbi Yehuda, the son of Tema, said, Be bold as a lion, light as an eagle, fast as
a deer, mighty as a lion, to do the will of your father in heaven.

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00:18:06,550 –> 00:18:08,771
That comes from Pirkei Avot.

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00:18:08,771 –> 00:18:15,735
See how they warn, meaning the rabbis, that one make himself light and strong in order to
fulfill the commandments.

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00:18:15,735 –> 00:18:20,482
So this is not only act, but building up the muscle memory

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00:18:20,482 –> 00:18:21,343
to act.

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00:18:21,343 –> 00:18:26,105
Thus did David say, I made haste and delayed not to observe thy commandments.

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00:18:26,105 –> 00:18:30,768
Thus did our rabbis expound, and ye shall observe the matzot.

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00:18:30,768 –> 00:18:32,529
That’s what it says in Exodus.

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00:18:32,529 –> 00:18:39,592
The rabbis said, “Do not read it as matzot, unleavened bread, but read it as mitzvot.”

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00:18:39,592 –> 00:18:43,106
So it says, you shall observe the mitzvot.

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00:18:43,106 –> 00:18:47,309
That they shouldn’t become chametz, that they shouldn’t sour.

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00:18:47,309 –> 00:18:49,971
That gets back to what we were saying before.

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00:18:49,971 –> 00:18:55,335
You’ve got to have the clock running and ticking, as when we make matzot.

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00:18:55,335 –> 00:19:02,219
Meaning, if an opportunity comes to you to do a good deed, do not let it grow stale, but do
it at once.

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00:19:02,219 –> 00:19:06,682
And this comes from the Rabbi Ishmael.

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00:19:06,682 –> 00:19:12,232
So he goes on and he says as follows, in twelve:

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00:19:12,232 –> 00:19:18,926
Even though zeal is a very good quality, one must be careful not to work too quickly.

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00:19:18,926 –> 00:19:24,529
For one who rides quickly is liable to stumble, and one who runs quickly may fall.

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00:19:24,529 –> 00:19:29,652
It is not wise to attempt to repair anything in haste, but rather with deliberation.

226
00:19:29,652 –> 00:19:32,193
So now he’s turning it and turning it.

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00:19:32,193 –> 00:19:36,476
He’s looking at zeal can be good, but it can also be bad.

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00:19:36,476 –> 00:19:40,608
And thus said our teachers: be deliberate in judgment.

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00:19:40,608 –> 00:19:42,679
So it’s nuanced.

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00:19:42,679 –> 00:19:53,726
And zeal means that one’s heart must be stirred and one’s thoughts aroused and one’s limbs
must be light for one’s work, but one ought not to be hasty in any manner.

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00:19:53,726 –> 00:20:01,030
All of these matters require great wisdom as to when to hurry and when to tarry.

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00:20:01,030 –> 00:20:08,810
So again, he’s nuancing zeal. The way I look at it is a runner

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00:20:08,810 –> 00:20:09,731
who’s focused.

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00:20:09,731 –> 00:20:11,042
The adrenaline is going.

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00:20:11,042 –> 00:20:12,333
He’s in the starting block.

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00:20:12,333 –> 00:20:15,395
He’s not doing anything without thought.

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00:20:15,395 –> 00:20:17,417
All of his activities are thoughtful.

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00:20:17,417 –> 00:20:25,883
Do not confuse zeal with being not deliberate, without being focused and conscious.

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00:20:25,883 –> 00:20:28,044
You can see it’s growing.

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00:20:28,044 –> 00:20:32,848
We’re getting deeper and deeper into it. Well, that’s the way they always do it, right?

241
00:20:32,848 –> 00:20:35,129
It gets, in a sense, more complex.

242
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Okay, this is great.

243
00:20:36,736 –> 00:20:48,137
And finally he ends up, because I am gonna go and make a big deal, starting with Yerucham,
they all seem to bring this into our everyday life, not just Torah and prayer.

244
00:20:48,137 –> 00:20:57,804
And it says in 13, just as a man must be quick in the matter of the Torah, so should he be
quick in the matters of this world and be alert in his work.

245
00:20:57,804 –> 00:21:02,217
Great success is in store for him who does his work with alertness.

246
00:21:02,217 –> 00:21:12,134
Therefore, son of man, be alert in what concerns both worlds, and be quick in your work
which is needed for this world, in order that you will soon be free to do the work of

247
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heaven.

248
00:21:12,745 –> 00:21:14,636
So again, it’s important.

249
00:21:14,636 –> 00:21:17,827
That this affects every aspect of your life.

250
00:21:17,827 –> 00:21:26,970
And Rabbi, one of the things that I thought to myself is, what does an unemployed yeshiva
student who knows nothing about business, how does he read all these texts?

251
00:21:26,970 –> 00:21:37,580
Because at the end of the day, all of their nimshal, all of their analogues are in the
business world of commerce, of building things, of makers.

252
00:21:37,580 –> 00:21:44,037
You should be involved in the elections in Israel, because this is what they’re arguing
about, whether the yeshiva boy should go to work or not.

253
00:21:44,037 –> 00:21:44,727
So here you go.

254
00:21:44,727 –> 00:21:45,418
Okay.

255
00:21:45,418 –> 00:21:50,964
So now we’re moving from the 1400s to the 1700s, the 18th century.

256
00:21:50,964 –> 00:21:58,692
And this is a very famous tract that is recommended by Rabbi Israel Salanter.

257
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It’s called Mesilat Yesharim,

258
00:22:00,806 –> 00:22:16,834
The Path of the Just, and it was written by Moshe Chaim Luzzatto. And we are going to read a
little bit of it, and it starts as follows. It’s in chapter seven:

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00:22:16,834 –> 00:22:25,100
There are two divisions of zeal. One applies before beginning a deed, and the other one
after beginning a deed.

260
00:22:25,100 –> 00:22:32,176
Before beginning a deed: that one not allow a mitzvah to become delayed, like chametz. He
uses the same proof text.

261
00:22:32,497 –> 00:22:42,305
Rather, when the time of its performance comes, or when it happens to present itself to him,
or when the thought of performing it enters his mind, he should hurry and hasten to

262
00:22:42,305 –> 00:22:52,436
seize hold of it and to perform it, and not allow time to go by in between, for there is no
danger like its danger.

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00:22:52,436 –> 00:22:57,169
Okay, it’s the chapter on zerizut, we get it, but I think he means it.

264
00:22:57,169 –> 00:23:04,773
Since behold, each new second that arises can bring with it a new impediment to the good
deed.

265
00:23:04,773 –> 00:23:09,356
You know, there’s a great saying in the Talmud for someone who stops learning.

266
00:23:09,356 –> 00:23:12,558
And it says, “Yom, yomayim e’ezveka.”

267
00:23:12,558 –> 00:23:16,851
Every day I stop learning, it’s the opportunity cost of not learning.

268
00:23:16,851 –> 00:23:19,296
It’s like instead of I stop for one day.

269
00:23:19,296 –> 00:23:24,729
Now I’m back two days because I missed the day I would have learned, and I missed the Torah
that I could have learnt.

270
00:23:24,729 –> 00:23:26,690
This is similar.

271
00:23:26,690 –> 00:23:31,953
He really sees that every second lost is almost doubled.

272
00:23:31,953 –> 00:23:37,256
Therefore, the sages of blessed memory exhorted us, and you shall watch over the matzot.

273
00:23:37,256 –> 00:23:42,900
If a mitzvah comes to your hand, do not delay its performance, allow it to get chametz.

274
00:23:42,900 –> 00:23:45,221
and he uses the same proof text.

275
00:23:45,221 –> 00:23:47,550
And then he goes, and they said,

276
00:23:47,550 –> 00:23:50,852
Zealous people do mitzvot as early as possible.

277
00:23:50,852 –> 00:23:59,318
Likewise they said, and that’s where we have this zerizim makdimim, kedem, in the morning,
do it the first thing.

278
00:23:59,318 –> 00:24:05,423
Likewise, they said, a person should always run to perform a mitzvah, even on the Sabbath.

279
00:24:05,423 –> 00:24:11,767
So on the Sabbath, you’re not allowed to take a pesiah gasah, you’re not allowed to jog or
run.

280
00:24:11,767 –> 00:24:16,098
When it comes to a mitzvah, it’s docheh Shabbat, if you will.

281
00:24:16,098 –> 00:24:19,160
That’s how important zerizut is.

282
00:24:19,280 –> 00:24:30,168
For the trait of zeal is a very high spiritual level of shleimut, of perfection, which a
person’s nature impedes him from attaining at the current time.

283
00:24:30,168 –> 00:24:38,634
But he who strengthens himself and takes hold of it as much as he can will in the future
world merit to truly attain it.

284
00:24:38,634 –> 00:24:43,960
The creator, may his name be blessed, will bestow it to him as a reward for his striving.

285
00:24:43,960 –> 00:24:46,112
For it during the time of his service.

286
00:24:46,112 –> 00:24:51,476
Rabbi, you can imagine during this one-month period that we’re working on zerizut.

287
00:24:51,476 –> 00:24:55,360
The person who is working on zerizut is trying to train himself.

288
00:24:55,360 –> 00:25:00,624
If someone calls his name, instead of waiting for a second, he turns immediately.

289
00:25:00,624 –> 00:25:01,965
He runs to the bus.

290
00:25:01,965 –> 00:25:05,168
It changes the way you think for that period.

291
00:25:05,168 –> 00:25:09,892
You’re focused on this one trait.

292
00:25:09,892 –> 00:25:13,068
And then he goes on to talking about after the deed.

293
00:25:13,068 –> 00:25:16,239
The division of zeal after the deed is as follows.

294
00:25:16,239 –> 00:25:20,620
Since one took hold of a mitzvah, he should hasten to complete it.

295
00:25:20,620 –> 00:25:29,803
This is not in order to lighten on himself like one who desires to cast a burden off, but
rather out of the fear lest he not merit to complete it.

296
00:25:29,803 –> 00:25:32,764
So there’s something in finishing the act.

297
00:25:32,764 –> 00:25:37,765
Again, very interesting, but you can see we’re going down in levels.

298
00:25:37,765 –> 00:25:42,006
He quotes Bereshit Rabbah that says,

299
00:25:42,294 –> 00:25:47,016
“One who begins a mitzvah but does not complete it buries his wife and sons.”

300
00:25:47,016 –> 00:25:53,809
So they’re using proof texts, but they’re clearly going to places that—this was—they were
breaking ground.

301
00:25:53,809 –> 00:25:57,781
They were really going into physical traits.

302
00:25:57,781 –> 00:26:07,085
And in 16, he says, Likewise you will observe that all the deeds of the tzadikim of the
righteous are always performed with haste.

303
00:26:07,085 –> 00:26:09,356
He quotes our parsha.

304
00:26:09,356 –> 00:26:18,493
By Abraham it is written, and Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said, Make ready
quickly three measures of fine meal.

305
00:26:18,493 –> 00:26:22,216
And he gave it to the lad, and he hastened to prepare it.

306
00:26:22,216 –> 00:26:25,359
So it uses our parsha as proof text.

307
00:26:25,359 –> 00:26:29,602
So no big surprise that Rav Yerucham brought that in

308
00:26:29,602 –> 00:26:31,983
to his commentary.

309
00:26:31,983 –> 00:26:40,805
He goes, “You can see that a man whose soul is afire in the service of his Creator certainly
will not become lazy in doing the mitzvot.”

310
00:26:40,805 –> 00:26:50,828
Rather, his movements will be like the quick movements of fire, for he will not rest nor be
still until he has finished completing the deed.

311
00:26:50,828 –> 00:26:58,402
Now, I am sure that there are other character traits that will create this “bren”, this fire
within you.

312
00:26:58,402 –> 00:27:04,287
But we’re focused on zerizut and how you would polish that muscle, so to speak.

313
00:27:04,287 –> 00:27:08,850
It’s kind of just fascinating, this focusing on one trait, is it not?

314
00:27:08,850 –> 00:27:10,111
Yeah, that’s fantastic.

315
00:27:10,111 –> 00:27:11,132
I agree with you.

316
00:27:11,132 –> 00:27:17,577
I mean, and that’s what the mussarniks did. They believe that people kind of—they lose
focus.

317
00:27:17,577 –> 00:27:20,659
And then you become a batlan if you lose focus.

318
00:27:20,659 –> 00:27:25,352
So therefore focus on this and make sure that you get this right.

319
00:27:25,696 –> 00:27:28,948
And so now he’s going even further, he’s getting practical.

320
00:27:28,948 –> 00:27:32,270
And he’s saying, How do you build this feeling within you?

321
00:27:32,270 –> 00:27:40,634
So he says, “Reflect further that just like an inner fieriness of soul leads one to act with
zeal, so too the opposite.”

322
00:27:40,634 –> 00:27:44,756
Outwardly acting with zeal leads to an inner fieriness of the soul.

323
00:27:44,756 –> 00:27:48,204
Outward actions affect inner being, namely:

324
00:27:48,204 –> 00:27:59,990
When one feels himself performing a mitzvah with great swiftness, this will move his inner
being to kindle a flame also, and the desire and want will increasingly intensify within

325
00:27:59,990 –> 00:28:00,501
him.

326
00:28:00,501 –> 00:28:08,205
If he acts in a sluggish manner in the movement of his limbs, so too the movement of his
spirit will die down and extinguish.

327
00:28:08,205 –> 00:28:11,607
This is something experience can testify to.

328
00:28:11,607 –> 00:28:17,822
It’s kind of like, Rabbi, when we tell our son who’s going on an interview, ‘Sit up, look
alert.’

329
00:28:17,822 –> 00:28:19,763
Look at them in the eyes.

330
00:28:19,763 –> 00:28:22,624
And ultimately, I know I do this all the time.

331
00:28:22,624 –> 00:28:25,845
You only have to be coached once in sales.

332
00:28:25,845 –> 00:28:28,305
If you’re on the phone with somebody, smile.

333
00:28:28,305 –> 00:28:28,715
Why?

334
00:28:28,715 –> 00:28:29,886
They can’t see me.

335
00:28:29,886 –> 00:28:30,746
Smile.

336
00:28:30,746 –> 00:28:32,727
They can talk differently, right?

337
00:28:32,727 –> 00:28:33,467
Yes.

338
00:28:33,467 –> 00:28:37,168
So this is what the Mesilat Yesharim is doing.

339
00:28:37,168 –> 00:28:43,050
So we did two texts that were pre-Rabbi Israel Salanter,

340
00:28:43,080 –> 00:28:47,073
and now I want to go a little bit into Rabbi Israel Salanter.

341
00:28:47,073 –> 00:28:51,296
And the next quotes are basically from an iconic book.

342
00:28:51,296 –> 00:28:57,921
It’s by Immanuel Etkes, and it’s called Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Mussar Movement.

343
00:28:57,921 –> 00:29:10,690
And he says as follows: “The message implicit in the ideas that Salanter began to
disseminate among the Jews of Vilna in the mid-1840s contains several components.”

344
00:29:10,690 –> 00:29:19,793
The first of these was that the religio-ethical improvement of the Jew demanded an
investment of time, attention, and spiritual energy.

345
00:29:19,793 –> 00:29:27,555
In order to exemplify the impossibility of this widespread attitude towards yir’ah and
Mussar—people didn’t focus on it.

346
00:29:27,555 –> 00:29:28,896
They go, Am I saying my prayers?

347
00:29:28,896 –> 00:29:29,936
Am I reading the Torah?

348
00:29:29,936 –> 00:29:30,896
That’s all.

349
00:29:30,896 –> 00:29:35,357
Salanter used a parable closest to his audience’s experience:

350
00:29:35,598 –> 00:29:36,962
How much thought

351
00:29:36,962 –> 00:29:45,713
does the merchant with wares engage in before concluding a given business deal, to decide
whether to carry it out or to refrain from it?

352
00:29:45,713 –> 00:29:49,237
He will think it over within himself and consult with his friends.

353
00:29:49,237 –> 00:29:53,824
He will examine the details, seek out possible errors until the matter is clear.

354
00:29:53,824 –> 00:30:02,162
So, in the study of our holy Torah, each one on his own level will study and examine it to
uncover its hidden treasures.

355
00:30:02,162 –> 00:30:09,749
He’s saying, just like a businessman evaluates a deal, asks for consultations, thinks about
it, the same thing.

356
00:30:09,749 –> 00:30:15,774
I just love the fact that he’s bringing an example from a business.

357
00:30:16,335 –> 00:30:19,456
and the trivial mentality of business.

358
00:30:19,456 –> 00:30:29,984
The second major component of his message is implicit in the very system of ethical
education expressed in another homily, once again taken from the realm of commercial life.

359
00:30:29,984 –> 00:30:33,686
A person who is troubled will do badly wherever he turns.

360
00:30:33,686 –> 00:30:39,938
His business will do poorly, his power and his intellect will be confused, held back by his
worries and confusion.

361
00:30:39,938 –> 00:30:49,404
And if a person comes and says to him, I see a light for you, if you do such and such a
thing according to the proper estimate, you will be able to profit a thousand, thousand

362
00:30:49,404 –> 00:30:55,828
gold dinars, he will summon all his powers of concentration until that matter becomes
enrooted in his heart.

363
00:30:55,828 –> 00:30:58,150
So he’s really saying, you need self-help.

364
00:30:58,150 –> 00:31:05,484
You need, we need, just as in business, we would reach out if somebody said, I can be your
guide, I can give you guidance.

365
00:31:05,484 –> 00:31:13,298
The same with regard to living a Jewish life, an ethical life, a life of good.

366
00:31:13,298 –> 00:31:17,581
And there were many times that Israel Salanter seemed like he was depressed.

367
00:31:17,581 –> 00:31:21,442
But here he has an optimistic tone.

368
00:31:21,442 –> 00:31:28,967
So what happened is one of the books that Israel Salanter recommended was called Cheshbon
HaNefesh.

369
00:31:28,967 –> 00:31:32,909
And it was written by a rabbi, Menachem Mendel Lefin.

370
00:31:33,389 –> 00:31:34,670
And in it,

371
00:31:34,760 –> 00:31:37,611
it gets into great detail.

372
00:31:37,611 –> 00:31:45,665
It was written in about 1808 in Vilna, and this Lefin was actually quite a maskil.

373
00:31:45,665 –> 00:31:49,937
He had met Mendelssohn, he had written books on medicine.

374
00:31:49,937 –> 00:31:54,519
The heart of the book is the following device, referred to in the title page.

375
00:31:54,519 –> 00:32:01,766
The one engaged in training himself is to prepare a list of 13 attributes, midot, that he
wishes to improve.

376
00:32:01,766 –> 00:32:05,748
He then prepares a brief maxim for each of these 13 traits.

377
00:32:05,748 –> 00:32:09,510
Each one is directed toward one of the traits requiring improvement.

378
00:32:09,510 –> 00:32:15,993
The student is then to divide the year into seasons, devoting a week to the improvement of
each attribute.

379
00:32:15,993 –> 00:32:26,016
During that week, he is to use the appropriate Mussar maxim in order to focus his attention
upon the attribute requiring improvement.

380
00:32:26,016 –> 00:32:32,049
At the end of the first 13 weeks, the student returns to the beginning of the process,
rinse, and repeat.

381
00:32:32,049 –> 00:32:37,351
Thus, over the course of a year, each attribute receives four weeks of attention.

382
00:32:37,351 –> 00:32:48,096
Now, as Etkes says, there are many people who found this same theory published 10 years
earlier in the writings of Benjamin Franklin.

383
00:32:48,096 –> 00:32:53,750
And I share for you, those of you who are looking at this on video,

384
00:32:53,750 –> 00:33:00,555
This is the chart that Benjamin Franklin has in his book.

385
00:33:00,555 –> 00:33:05,658
And if you can see the one that’s about the fifth one down is industry.

386
00:33:05,658 –> 00:33:12,223
First of all, he says, “Lose no time, be always employed in something useful, cut off all
unnecessary actions.”

387
00:33:12,223 –> 00:33:13,864
That’s what Franklin says.

388
00:33:13,864 –> 00:33:20,109
Now let’s look at the Jewish version of this published in Cheshbon HaNefesh.

389
00:33:20,109 –> 00:33:22,710
So now we look at zerizut.

390
00:33:22,864 –> 00:33:24,235
What is zerizut?

391
00:33:24,235 –> 00:33:31,170
Always find something to do for yourself or for a friend, and don’t allow a moment of your
life to be wasted.

392
00:33:31,170 –> 00:33:36,283
It is clear that Lefin also says, “I read this somewhere.”

393
00:33:36,283 –> 00:33:37,915
He doesn’t say the name Franklin.

394
00:33:37,915 –> 00:33:40,607
Probably if he did, no one would have read the book.

395
00:33:40,607 –> 00:33:41,457
Absolutely.

396
00:33:41,457 –> 00:33:51,574
But here he has a man who, clearly, we all know: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man
wealthy, healthy, and wise.”

397
00:33:51,574 –> 00:34:01,761
This was a man who not only was an inventor, but was someone who tried to figure out maxims
and ways that could make people better.

398
00:34:01,761 –> 00:34:03,843
Clearly, he was frugal.

399
00:34:03,843 –> 00:34:13,770
Clearly, he believed in focusing one’s attention on living an industrious life of creating
things, of building things.

400
00:34:13,770 –> 00:34:20,236
But it is just amazing that the Mussar movement was able to take

401
00:34:20,236 –> 00:34:25,849
this thought process and this program and use it in the way they did.

402
00:34:25,849 –> 00:34:34,033
And I will just finish up by leaving us with the thought that I think it goes both ways.

403
00:34:34,033 –> 00:34:43,317
That truly the mussarniks understood they were doing more than just Torah and tefillah. They
were changing how you comport yourself

404
00:34:43,317 –> 00:34:45,298
and how you have to stay active.

405
00:34:45,298 –> 00:34:53,420
And it truly was a book about getting fulfillment, getting happiness, and being a successful
human being.

406
00:34:53,420 –> 00:35:05,417
And I think from that perspective, it is just amazing how these two traditions kind of
focused and folded over each other, and the Mussar movement still lives on to today.

407
00:35:05,417 –> 00:35:12,286
I would be surprised if many of them knew that in fact they were carrying out Ben Franklin’s
regimen.

408
00:35:12,286 –> 00:35:12,962
Love it.

409
00:35:12,962 –> 00:35:14,342
This is fantastic.

410
00:35:14,342 –> 00:35:19,494
Everybody, this is Vayera, one of the most famous parshiot, the parsha of Akedat Yitzchak.

411
00:35:19,494 –> 00:35:22,625
You talk about zerizut and you talk about focus.

412
00:35:22,625 –> 00:35:25,186
So we should all take these lessons to heart.

413
00:35:25,186 –> 00:35:29,707
And maybe this should be the beginning of our 30 days to focus on the way we should act.

414
00:35:29,707 –> 00:35:31,888
Have a great trip to Israel.

415
00:35:31,888 –> 00:35:33,598
Look forward to continuing next week.

416
00:35:33,598 –> 00:35:38,410
I guess transatlantic parsha next week for Chayei Sarah.

417
00:35:38,410 –> 00:35:39,590
Looking forward to everybody.

418
00:35:39,590 –> 00:35:40,700
Shabbat Shalom.

419
00:35:40,770 –> 00:35:41,813
Shabbat shalom.

420
00:35:41,813 –> 00:35:43,948
Let’s all get up and do something now.

421
00:35:43,948 –> 00:35:44,760
zerizut.

422
00:35:44,760 –> 00:35:46,325
Shabbat Shalom.

423
00:35:46,325 –> 00:35:48,150
See you all next week.

424
00:35:48,150 –> 00:35:50,164
Rabbi Wolbe would be very proud.

425
00:35:52,756 –> 00:36:00,272
Zeal, zerizut, can serve holiness or enterprise. It can affect attitude and condition our
responses.

426
00:36:00,272 –> 00:36:03,194
By itself, it’s morally neutral.

427
00:36:03,294 –> 00:36:08,598
What other basic dispositions in your life might you focus on for 30 days?

428
00:36:08,779 –> 00:36:11,420
Ben Franklin and I want to know.

9
00:00:55,450 –> 00:00:56,671
Welcome to Madlik.

10
00:00:56,671 –> 00:01:02,614
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light
on a Jewish text or tradition.

11
00:01:02,614 –> 00:01:10,919
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite
podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack.

12
00:01:10,919 –> 00:01:16,181
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show
notes.

13
00:01:16,181 –> 00:01:27,847
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.

14
00:01:27,908 –> 00:01:32,244
Every generation created its own revolutionary Abraham.

15
00:01:32,244 –> 00:01:45,351
Each theologian celebrated him for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy and
remarkably for discovering an unquestionable truth that looked suspiciously
like the orthodoxy of the

16
00:01:45,351 –> 00:01:47,482
theologian’s own day.

17
00:01:47,542 –> 00:01:52,665
Even the nature of his rebellion changed, depending on who was telling the
story.

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00:01:52,665 –> 00:02:01,834
Abraham was a satirist, a provocateur, a philosopher, a heretic, or a migrant
crossing borders and engaging with other cultures.

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00:02:01,834 –> 00:02:08,957
So join Rabbi Mintz and me as we ask what made Abraham the original outlier.

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00:02:08,957 –> 00:02:12,399
Well, Rabbi, if there’s ever a Rorschach block, it’s Abraham.

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00:02:12,399 –> 00:02:15,400
All we know is that he got up and went: Lech Lecha.

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00:02:15,400 –> 00:02:20,342
But what his revolution was, who he was, we don’t know.

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00:02:20,780 –> 00:02:24,193
And of course, that’s the mystery that the Torah wants to give you.

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00:02:24,193 –> 00:02:28,147
So that in every generation and every year we can ask the same question.

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00:02:28,147 –> 00:02:29,659
Because that’s the question.

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00:02:29,659 –> 00:02:31,650
What does it mean to be an outlier, right?

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00:02:31,650 –> 00:02:34,063
Each one of us is outliers in our own way.

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00:02:34,063 –> 00:02:36,405
What made Abraham the first outlier?

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00:02:36,405 –> 00:02:38,326
The Avraham HaIvri.

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00:02:38,527 –> 00:02:41,000
Not only the first, but kind of powerful.

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00:02:41,000 –> 00:02:45,826
I mean, if you think of the Abrahamic religions, we’re talking billions of
people.

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00:02:45,826 –> 00:02:54,315
That were impacted by this journey that started one foot at a time, Lech
Lecha.

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00:02:54,315 –> 00:03:06,387
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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00:03:06,387 –> 00:03:07,628
will show you.

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00:03:07,689 –> 00:03:09,080
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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00:03:14,754 –> 00:03:18,196
So that’s the story.

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00:03:18,196 –> 00:03:24,141
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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00:03:26,472 –> 00:03:34,684
To find some really important little baggage and breadcrumbs in what occurs
before.

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00:03:34,684 –> 00:03:36,665
So let’s go back a few Psukim.

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00:03:36,665 –> 00:03:39,722
We’re gonna be in Genesis 11:22.

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00:03:39,722 –> 00:03:43,367
and it says something that seems pretty innocuous.

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00:03:43,367 –> 00:03:45,367
And it’s talking about the genealogies.

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00:03:45,367 –> 00:03:48,948
There were 10 generations between Noah and Abraham.

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00:03:48,948 –> 00:03:54,880
So it says, when Serug had lived 30 years, he begot a person named Nahor.

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00:03:55,054 –> 00:03:59,916
After the birth of Nahor, Serug lived 200 years and begot sons and daughters.

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00:03:59,956 –> 00:04:04,098
When Nahor had lived 29 years, he begot Terah.

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00:04:04,278 –> 00:04:09,940
After the birth of Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and begot sons and daughters.

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00:04:09,940 –> 00:04:16,463
When Terah had lived 70 years, he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

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00:04:17,003 –> 00:04:24,136
And my first surprise this week that I had never thought of was brought by our
friend Cassuto.

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00:04:24,194 –> 00:04:27,016
Cassuto says, Abram.

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00:04:27,016 –> 00:04:31,239
It is not explicitly stated that he was the firstborn.

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00:04:31,239 –> 00:04:44,689
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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00:04:44,689 –> 00:04:48,352
born when his father Terach was 70 years old.

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00:04:48,352 –> 00:04:50,133
I had never thought about that.

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00:04:50,133 –> 00:04:52,034
I mean, if you think about it, Rabbi.

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00:04:52,034 –> 00:05:00,619
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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00:05:00,619 –> 00:05:01,879
And guess what?

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00:05:01,879 –> 00:05:09,163
The son, the second son, always gets to the top, and the firstborn is always
thrown away.

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00:05:09,163 –> 00:05:12,766
I had never thought … that started already with Cain and Abel.

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00:05:12,766 –> 00:05:13,726
So we got it.

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00:05:13,726 –> 00:05:15,337
We got it now, right?

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00:05:15,337 –> 00:05:16,307
Okay.

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00:05:16,388 –> 00:05:21,350
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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00:05:27,482 –> 00:05:34,567
So unless we have a compelling reason to see it otherwise, Abraham was the
firstborn.

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00:05:34,567 –> 00:05:41,051
Already that makes him an outlier in our tradition, but maybe it makes him
foundational.

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00:05:41,051 –> 00:05:46,028
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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00:05:51,960 –> 00:06:05,385
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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00:06:05,385 –> 00:06:06,166
firstborn.

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00:06:06,166 –> 00:06:07,298
So he’s still at it.

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00:06:07,298 –> 00:06:09,049
Cassuto has this on his mind.

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00:06:09,049 –> 00:06:10,949
You could say that’s not true.

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00:06:10,949 –> 00:06:15,021
You could say that maybe it was the firstborn who’s named after the
grandfather.

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00:06:15,021 –> 00:06:22,843
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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00:06:22,843 –> 00:06:26,784
You know, the Sephardic tradition is to name after the grandfather who’s
alive.

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00:06:26,784 –> 00:06:30,425
The Ashkenazic tradition is to name after the grandfather who’s dead.

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00:06:30,425 –> 00:06:32,756
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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00:06:42,001 –> 00:06:46,182
Because clearly, when they were born, rabbi, we knew nothing about any of
that.

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00:06:46,182 –> 00:06:47,552
It didn’t make any difference, correct.

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00:06:47,552 –> 00:06:48,761
Look what he says.

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00:06:48,761 –> 00:07:02,356
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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00:07:02,370 –> 00:07:12,214
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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00:07:12,214 –> 00:07:27,841
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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00:07:27,841 –> 00:07:31,648
I love it when Cassuto waxes poetic.

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00:07:31,648 –> 00:07:36,102
I mean it’s very creative of Cassuto, cause he makes that up.

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00:07:36,102 –> 00:07:40,666
It’s really a dvar Torah that he makes up, which is fantastic, right?

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00:07:40,666 –> 00:07:47,111
Well, again, if you look at it the way he does, which is this is a tradition
that was formed.

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00:07:47,111 –> 00:07:50,934
This was passed down from generation to generation.

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00:07:50,996 –> 00:07:57,329
It gives you a little bit more wiggle room to say this was the
remembered tradition.

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00:07:57,329 –> 00:08:07,132
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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00:08:07,272 –> 00:08:16,617
But I love that he says this was a חידש חידוש חשוב ונשגב בחיי המשפחה … לאנושות חדשה
.

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00:08:16,617 –> 00:08:19,078
He’s creating a new humanity.

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00:08:19,078 –> 00:08:20,178
So that

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00:08:20,280 –> 00:08:23,711
Thread is going to run through today’s interpretations.

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00:08:23,711 –> 00:08:30,573
Everybody saw or projected onto Abraham this man who is changing humanity.

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00:08:30,573 –> 00:08:39,416
And clearly in the book of Genesis, he is now standing out as a firstborn who
changed the rules.

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00:08:39,416 –> 00:08:42,677
And the question is: what was the rule change?

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00:08:42,677 –> 00:08:45,130
And that’s what we’re going to be talking about.

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00:08:45,130 –> 00:08:50,033
Another interesting little diyuk that I found was the Kli Yakar.

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00:08:50,033 –> 00:09:04,863
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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00:09:04,863 –> 00:09:08,105
But what does his original name mean?

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00:09:08,105 –> 00:09:09,544
He was called.

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00:09:09,544 –> 00:09:15,178
Abram, says the Kli Yakar, as he was the father of Aram.

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00:09:15,178 –> 00:09:17,360
Remember our friends, the Arameans?

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00:09:17,360 –> 00:09:25,005
so he was either a leader or he was born into this location.

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00:09:25,005 –> 00:09:26,787
And what did he become?

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00:09:26,787 –> 00:09:29,114
He became a man of the world.

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00:09:29,114 –> 00:09:37,324
I love that too, that it kind of parallels or contrasts what he became to
where he was born.

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00:09:37,324 –> 00:09:49,374
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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00:09:49,374 –> 00:09:52,107
So I quoted a little bit more here.

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00:09:52,107 –> 00:10:05,632
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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00:10:05,632 –> 00:10:14,286
And in both of them, we can now define the programmatic theology, the politics
of theology in the Bible.

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00:10:14,286 –> 00:10:16,587
What are both of them critiquing?

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00:10:16,587 –> 00:10:20,068
They’re critiquing the empire and imperialism.

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00:10:20,068 –> 00:10:28,332
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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00:10:28,332 –> 00:10:31,593
He was rejecting that imperialism.

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00:10:31,593 –> 00:10:34,434
So too, Moses was

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00:10:34,434 –> 00:10:38,297
The one who broke away from the same thing in Egypt.

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00:10:38,297 –> 00:10:43,240
And then Sacks makes another point, which I think we all too forget.

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00:10:43,240 –> 00:10:56,169
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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00:10:56,169 –> 00:11:03,134
So what he’s saying is: we are watching in real-time a revolutionary, maybe a
young revolutionary.

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00:11:03,134 –> 00:11:09,518
Somebody who is taking all the accepted orthodoxy of the past and throwing it
out the door.

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00:11:09,518 –> 00:11:14,242
A freedom fighter, if you will, a rebel with a cause.

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00:11:14,242 –> 00:11:26,010
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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00:11:26,010 –> 00:11:27,290
same old gods.

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00:11:27,290 –> 00:11:31,453
So I love that insertion of the new here.

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00:11:31,453 –> 00:11:32,524
But I think.

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00:11:32,524 –> 00:11:36,118
That you have to go back to the Haamek Davar last week.

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00:11:36,118 –> 00:11:37,759
And I’m gonna review it quickly.

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00:11:37,759 –> 00:11:41,343
The Haamek Davar says at the beginning of Babel.

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00:11:41,343 –> 00:11:52,290
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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00:11:52,290 –> 00:11:54,791
They were against migration.

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00:11:54,791 –> 00:12:10,336
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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00:12:10,336 –> 00:12:17,158
If you hear in the word lehit’ha”lech” the word lech from Lech Lecha, you are on
the mark.

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00:12:17,158 –> 00:12:18,648
So already.

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00:12:18,648 –> 00:12:32,828
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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00:12:32,828 –> 00:12:46,338
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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00:12:46,338 –> 00:12:49,759
The unanimity of thought that they were trying to impose.

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00:12:49,759 –> 00:13:03,085
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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00:13:03,085 –> 00:13:10,668
not the message that God objected to, not the ideology, but they believed in
only one ideology.

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00:13:10,668 –> 00:13:15,944
And I’m gonna suggest today, Rabbi, that it’s not so much what

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00:13:15,944 –> 00:13:22,858
Abraham’s message was because we’re going to see at least five or six
different versions of his message.

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00:13:22,858 –> 00:13:33,625
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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00:13:33,625 –> 00:13:37,487
and so I think that’s really important.

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00:13:37,487 –> 00:13:42,706
And if you want to talk about modern day philosophy, what

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00:13:42,706 –> 00:13:52,529
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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00:13:52,529 –> 00:13:56,090
And I don’t mean liberalism being a liberal or progressive.

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00:13:56,090 –> 00:14:09,664
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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00:14:09,664 –> 00:14:10,104
different

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00:14:10,104 –> 00:14:11,155
Places.

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00:14:11,155 –> 00:14:20,739
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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00:14:20,839 –> 00:14:24,181
And he had to live somewhere else.

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00:14:24,181 –> 00:14:24,541
Right?

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00:14:24,541 –> 00:14:34,536
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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00:14:34,866 –> 00:14:35,747
Absolutely.

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00:14:35,747 –> 00:14:47,533
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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00:14:47,533 –> 00:14:48,173
past.

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00:14:48,173 –> 00:14:51,395
But what I want to point out is what makes them unique.

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00:14:51,395 –> 00:15:01,441
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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00:15:01,441 –> 00:15:04,296
But let’s put that to the side for a second.

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00:15:04,296 –> 00:15:11,109
And a person comes in, a 50 or 60 year old, and wants to buy an idol.

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00:15:11,109 –> 00:15:23,795
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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00:15:23,895 –> 00:15:27,117
And he would shame that person to leave.

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00:15:27,117 –> 00:15:30,058
So clearly he’s a provocateur.

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00:15:30,136 –> 00:15:36,189
Clearly, if you’re a shop owner, he’s not the guy who’s gonna take over the
family business.

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00:15:36,630 –> 00:15:42,013
This is someone that the Midrash is injecting great personality into.

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00:15:42,013 –> 00:15:46,235
oh He has a sense of humor, he’s a satirist.

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00:15:46,235 –> 00:15:55,360
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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00:15:55,360 –> 00:15:58,474
So Abraham, after she

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00:15:58,474 –> 00:16:02,755
leaves, goes ahead and takes out a bat and destroys the idols.

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00:16:02,755 –> 00:16:05,976
His father comes in and says, What happened here?

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00:16:05,976 –> 00:16:07,387
Abraham tells him a story.

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00:16:07,387 –> 00:16:09,077
The woman brought in some food.

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00:16:09,077 –> 00:16:12,848
All the idols started fighting each other, and this is what happened.

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00:16:12,848 –> 00:16:15,759
And his father says, Are you mocking me?

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00:16:15,759 –> 00:16:17,754
Are they sentient at all?

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00:16:17,754 –> 00:16:23,981
And Abraham said to him, Do your ears not hear what your mouth is saying?

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00:16:24,382 –> 00:16:25,742
so here too.

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00:16:25,792 –> 00:16:38,509
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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00:16:38,509 –> 00:16:43,231
He’s the kind of son that we love to have after he gets through his growing
pains.

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00:16:43,231 –> 00:16:45,273
but it’s a tough haul.

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00:16:45,273 –> 00:16:50,215
He’s really focused on the hypocrisy of the generation before.

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00:16:50,215 –> 00:16:55,500
And then the third part of the same Midrash is his father takes him to the
authorities.

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00:16:55,500 –> 00:17:02,650
His father takes him to King Nimrod, and King Nimrod says to him, Bow down.

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00:17:02,650 –> 00:17:06,097
And the young Abraham says, Who should I bow down to?

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00:17:06,097 –> 00:17:08,798
And he goes through this whole causality.

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00:17:08,798 –> 00:17:10,940
Should I bow to the stone?

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00:17:10,940 –> 00:17:12,581
But who created this stone?

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00:17:12,581 –> 00:17:15,142
And should I go to the light and the stars?

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00:17:15,142 –> 00:17:19,788
So here he almost sounds like a philosopher.

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00:17:19,788 –> 00:17:30,084
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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00:17:30,084 –> 00:17:35,357
So I think it, as much as anything else, Rabbi, shows his personality.

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00:17:35,357 –> 00:17:38,069
This is not a tight philosophical argument.

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00:17:38,069 –> 00:17:39,449
What do you think?

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00:17:39,550 –> 00:17:46,764
Yeah, I mean, what they want to point out is that the creator,

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00:17:46,764 –> 00:17:52,417
the outsider, what you call the outlier, it’s in his personality.

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00:17:52,417 –> 00:17:58,241
Being an outlier means that he doesn’t sit around and just take orders.

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00:17:58,241 –> 00:18:00,782
I want to go back to that idea of Nahor.

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00:18:00,782 –> 00:18:08,607
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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00:18:08,607 –> 00:18:14,880
Avraham, even in his name, is someone who breaks with the tradition.

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00:18:14,880 –> 00:18:18,533
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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219
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220
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221
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00:19:31,120 –> 00:19:31,861
Thanks.

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.

419
00:34:15,976 –> 00:34:21,350
The kind of question we ask after we’ve exhausted all the usual small talk.

420
00:34:21,350 –> 00:34:23,122
How are you feeling?

421
00:34:23,122 –> 00:34:24,382
Anything new?

422
00:34:24,443 –> 00:34:25,723
Anything good?

423
00:34:25,984 –> 00:34:27,465
Here’s my question.

424
00:34:27,666 –> 00:34:29,206
What’s your next trip?

425
00:34:29,267 –> 00:34:30,367
Let me know.

7
00:00:58,486 –> 00:00:59,586
Welcome to Madlik.

8
00:00:59,586 –> 00:01:01,287
My name is Geoffrey Stern.

9
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.

10
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.

11
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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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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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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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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So perhaps the opposite of Babel is not division.

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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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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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about the Netziv.

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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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00:03:23,266 –> 00:03:28,168
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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00:03:39,510 –> 00:03:44,372
See how I put a name as a single thing and scattered as the opposite?

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00:03:44,372 –> 00:03:50,014
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.

52
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.

55
00:05:51,102 –> 00:05:52,643
In Israel.

56
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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00:06:28,131 –> 00:06:32,935
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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00:08:07,156 –> 00:08:20,819
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.

88
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.”

92
00:09:26,948 –> 00:09:29,529
This is going to be The Capital.

93
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.

94
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.

98
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.

99
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.

104
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.

106
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.

107
00:10:23,665 –> 00:10:24,716
They were what

108
00:10:24,716 –> 00:10:28,139
They were, and in its simplicity, there is no sin.

109
00:10:28,139 –> 00:10:30,411
On the contrary, all appears well.

110
00:10:30,411 –> 00:10:36,876
But the problem was that they all thought the same thing.

111
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.”

123
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.

127
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.

132
00:12:30,921 –> 00:12:34,243
And from this we understand how big and deep the furnace was.

133
00:12:34,243 –> 00:12:36,704
From that furnace, Avraham Avinu was saved.

134
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.

137
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.

140
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.

145
00:13:44,686 –> 00:13:51,420
The problem of groupthink was solved by Abraham, who broke from it.

146
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.

147
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.

155
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.

159
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.

165
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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00:17:54,055 –> 00:17:58,499
He goes on, lest we be scattered over all the face of the earth.

203
00:17:58,499 –> 00:18:04,765
However, he writes, we must understand why they feared that someone might leave to another
land.

204
00:18:04,765 –> 00:18:10,358
And it is understood that this was related to the uniformity that was among them.

205
00:18:10,358 –> 00:18:17,740
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.

207
00:18:23,762 –> 00:18:27,983
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.

209
00:18:36,285 –> 00:18:40,476
So he connects the dots.

210
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.

211
00:18:47,143 –> 00:18:49,685
And more is explained on verse 6.

212
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.

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And we’ll give that quote in a second.

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This is but the beginning of the transgression.

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They want to remain in one place.

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He says it all started by saying people can’t move freely.

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You have to stay in the ghetto.

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“And now nothing will be withheld from them which they propose to do.”

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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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And this brings killing and violent destruction of civilization.

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And it does not help that at this moment they are together with one opinion.

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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.

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He references a later commentary that he gives when the tribes of Jacob
are formed.

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In Genesis 28, the Ha’amek Davar says, “And you shall become an assembly of
peoples.”

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What does he say that means?

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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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governed by a single authority.

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He does not let up.

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God therefore told Jacob that his descendants would become ten peoples, that is,

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Each tribe would possess its own customs and constitute a people unto itself.

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This sounds like the Federalist episode that we did.

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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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This was a major key to what he believed in.

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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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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.

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

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You see, we end Devarim, and now we get into Genesis, and they’re all connected.

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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.”

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He is speaking of God.

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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

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a generation such as the one that lived during the destruction of the Second Temple,
who are described as perverse and twisted.

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

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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

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

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

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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.

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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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This is how the Torah presents the acknowledgment of God’s justice.

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

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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.

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

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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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

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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.

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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.”

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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00:34:01,166 –> 00:34:01,927
Amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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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
00:02:33,814 –> 00:02:34,834
What happened?

33
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.

34
00:02:43,850 –> 00:02:53,174
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
00:02:53,174 –> 00:03:04,060
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.

36
00:03:04,060 –> 00:03:08,963
He says, now listen to the correct and clear explanation of the verse in its simplicity.

37
00:03:08,963 –> 00:03:14,246
The Holy One, blessed be he, created all things from absolute nonexistence.

38
00:03:14,246 –> 00:03:21,770
Now we have no expression in the sacred language in lashon kodesh for bringing forth
something from nothing.

39
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.

41
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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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00:03:40,706 –> 00:03:46,351
Fit to assume form and to proceed from the potentiality into reality.

43
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.

45
00:03:52,757 –> 00:03:57,701
After the hhyly, he did not create anything, but he formed and made things with it.

46
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.

50
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.

52
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?

56
00:04:37,523 –> 00:04:41,646
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.

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

59
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.

60
00:05:04,144 –> 00:05:12,928
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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00:05:51,998 –> 00:05:57,561
He uses this word yeshme ayan, which is kind of also very interesting.

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00:05:57,561 –> 00:05:59,912
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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00:06:21,628 –> 00:06:32,124
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.

76
00:06:38,707 –> 00:06:44,294
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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00:06:49,596 –> 00:07:02,881
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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00:07:05,442 –> 00:07:12,190
So he brings, for instance, Genesis 1: 21, that God created the sea monsters.

81
00:07:12,190 –> 00:07:23,822
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

83
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Biological building-blocks of the universe and creating man.

84
00:07:31,929 –> 00:07:33,330
He had created the animals.

85
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.

86
00:07:38,834 –> 00:07:53,004
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.

88
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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00:12:00,908 –> 00:12:05,970
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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00:12:07,551 –> 00:12:11,194
And I don’t actually believe we have it in Hebrew.

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00:12:11,194 –> 00:12:13,126
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.

138
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.

152
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.

154
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

157
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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?

162
00:14:37,440 –> 00:14:41,461
So Nachmanides already said it’s a tenet of our faith.

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00:14:41,461 –> 00:14:44,322
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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00:15:03,489 –> 00:15:14,403
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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00:15:23,597 –> 00:15:25,928
You have an association with it.

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00:15:26,180 –> 00:15:31,874
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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00:16:29,301 –> 00:16:36,368
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.

187
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.

192
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.

195
00:17:43,908 –> 00:17:45,069
So I don’t know, Rabbi.

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00:17:45,069 –> 00:17:51,092
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.

206
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.

208
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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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.

229
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.

230
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.

232
00:20:36,876 –> 00:20:44,692
That guides us and makes the world meaningful and makes our Torah meaningful and makes
revelation and miracles meaningful.

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00:20:44,692 –> 00:20:54,499
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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00:20:54,499 –> 00:21:04,586
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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00:21:04,790 –> 00:21:08,191
Let me just say, I mean, what you’re saying, of course, is fascinating.

236
00:21:08,191 –> 00:21:16,295
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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00:21:16,295 –> 00:21:19,096
We’ve got to take that for granted now.

238
00:21:19,096 –> 00:21:30,320
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.

240
00:21:34,658 –> 00:21:39,283
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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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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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.

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And he basically, as you say rabbi, you look at the modern rabbis, he came out of the
Slobotka yeshiva.

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And then he became the head of the first Judaic Studies program
in the United States at Harvard.

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and the person who followed him was Isidore Twersky, who I took a course from.

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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.

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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

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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.

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was that the medieval philosophy began with the premise that philosophy which
knew not scripture.

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So if you look at Aristotle and Plato, they didn’t know anything about Judaism or
revelation.

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So it starts with Philo introducing Aristotle and Plato and us to

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Plato and Aristotle, and it ends with a philosophy which tries to free us from scripture.

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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

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00:24:25,630 –> 00:24:28,411
revelation and philosophy.

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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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And Plotinus, if you know anything about Plato, Plato believed in forms.

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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

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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.

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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.

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But that idea of the sun actually maintains and powers and emanates power to the sun.

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So what he does is it is now conceived as being eternally generated or emanated from the
essence of God.

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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.

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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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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.

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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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Then we go to al-Fārābī, who was a Muslim philosopher.

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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.

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00:27:24,450 –> 00:27:25,821
Go to al-Fārābī.

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00:27:25,821 –> 00:27:29,865
he really looked up to this al-Fārābī.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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00:28:38,568 –> 00:28:44,032
Emanation, to make it very simple, is like if you have a candle of light.

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00:28:44,032 –> 00:28:48,786
And it gives me light, the light that I get does not detract from the candle.

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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.

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It was the perfect kind of highway.

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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.

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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

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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

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stage.

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So what

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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.

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00:30:31,038 –> 00:30:37,842
the Tanya, the and the Hasidim looked at our prayer book and says.

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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.

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00:31:04,121 –> 00:31:06,070
There is no disconnect.

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Between the world and God.

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00:31:08,651 –> 00:31:13,523
We are constantly emanated from God.

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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.

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00:31:19,916 –> 00:31:23,297
That’s by the way, the reason we watch Negel wasser, right?

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00:31:23,297 –> 00:31:25,918
It’s a new start every morning.

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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.

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And I had never realized Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam community at age, I
think it was 23.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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00:33:39,676 –> 00:33:42,638
And next week we’ll start with Noah.

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00:33:42,638 –> 00:33:43,998
See you all there.

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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?

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00:34:01,587 –> 00:34:02,709
I’d love to hear from you.

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00:34:02,709 –> 00:34:04,250
Look forward to your comments.

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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.

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00:04:15,020 –> 00:04:19,113
But they also kind of know that the world… it’s not about cosmology.

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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

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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.

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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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00:05:33,564 –> 00:05:36,146
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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00:05:40,619 –> 00:05:42,810
Cassuto is great on Bereshit.

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00:05:42,810 –> 00:05:45,913
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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00:05:57,521 –> 00:06:00,242
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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00:06:04,125 –> 00:06:12,411
The historic allusions to events of local, national, international importance that lie
behind the text, [requires] scholarly commentary to make intelligible.

80
00:06:12,411 –> 00:06:13,512
We’ve heard that before.

81
00:06:13,512 –> 00:06:17,394
We have to know the context in the ancient Near East.

82
00:06:17,434 –> 00:06:23,212
Even to the religiously oriented, some of the religious concepts and values

83
00:06:23,212 –> 00:06:26,264
Will hardly be palatable today.

84
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.

85
00:06:31,728 –> 00:06:37,292
So he says this situation actually didn’t come only in contemporary modern minds.

86
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.

87
00:06:43,722 –> 00:06:50,872
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.

88
00:06:50,872 –> 00:06:52,584
They would want to know ontology.

89
00:06:52,584 –> 00:06:55,846
When did matter existence begin?

90
00:06:55,846 –> 00:07:01,911
The old culture from which the Hebrew Bible had issued disintegrated and became radically
transformed.

91
00:07:01,911 –> 00:07:06,895
We forgot what the context was of the original people that listened to.

92
00:07:06,895 –> 00:07:08,316
Very good, yeah.

93
00:07:08,316 –> 00:07:15,338
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.

95
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

96
00:07:35,787 –> 00:07:38,259
prevailing mythological worldview.

97
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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00:07:41,964 –> 00:07:49,999
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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00:07:50,039 –> 00:07:57,264
Nowhere else in the contemporary world did it become the regnant idea, obsessive and
historically significant.

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00:07:57,264 –> 00:08:06,109
Israel’s monotheism constituted a new creation, a revolution in in religion, a sudden
transformation.

101
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.

103
00:08:18,150 –> 00:08:22,412
Israel actually saw itself developed and its fate was unique.

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00:08:22,412 –> 00:08:27,735
If you read this, you start to look at Israel as the chosen people slightly differently.

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00:08:27,735 –> 00:08:35,786
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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00:08:35,786 –> 00:08:40,651
Or in Leviticus, we are set apart from other peoples, they’re just saying a fact.

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00:08:40,651 –> 00:08:43,793
They’re saying our worldview is totally different.

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00:08:43,793 –> 00:08:49,339
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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00:08:49,339 –> 00:08:52,042
So here’s what was different.

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00:08:52,042 –> 00:09:00,770
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.

112
00:09:10,526 –> 00:09:12,073
And that’s what everybody would have been.

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00:09:12,073 –> 00:09:14,879
Another great phrase, theobiography.

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00:09:14,879 –> 00:09:22,474
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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00:09:26,735 –> 00:09:31,379
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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00:09:45,931 –> 00:09:54,860
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

122
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said, it’s missing.

123
00:10:06,024 –> 00:10:07,514
The whole story is missing.

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00:10:07,514 –> 00:10:11,435
We are absolutely working in parallel universes here.

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00:10:11,435 –> 00:10:20,138
And that’s what becomes so absolutely different and radical about this text.

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00:10:20,684 –> 00:10:21,745
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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00:10:46,296 –> 00:10:53,009
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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00:10:53,009 –> 00:10:54,770
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.

137
00:11:03,074 –> 00:11:05,035
But that was as far as it got.

138
00:11:05,035 –> 00:11:06,556
It was fetishism.

139
00:11:06,556 –> 00:11:12,264
They didn’t understand the the whole world view of paganism.

140
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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00:11:21,973 –> 00:11:29,730
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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00:11:29,730 –> 00:11:34,584
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.

145
00:11:38,882 –> 00:11:42,403
The notion of the birth of God, no biography of God.

146
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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00:11:54,286 –> 00:12:00,908
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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00:12:18,718 –> 00:12:22,319
It’s in the grammar of the words that we’re looking at.

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00:12:22,319 –> 00:12:31,781
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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00:12:34,476 –> 00:12:36,748
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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00:12:40,530 –> 00:12:46,254
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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00:12:53,059 –> 00:13:03,570
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.

163
00:13:07,202 –> 00:13:08,473
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.

168
00:13:30,405 –> 00:13:32,506
And then it

169
00:13:32,536 –> 00:13:33,647
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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00:13:41,821 –> 00:13:45,473
in the source sheet, you can see Cassuto saying that in Hebrew.

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00:13:45,473 –> 00:13:56,234
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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00:13:56,234 –> 00:14:07,204
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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00:14:30,635 –> 00:14:41,002
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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186
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188
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190
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191
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193
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195
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196
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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.

200
00:16:30,053 –> 00:16:36,554
In the promised land, we have found artifacts and things from Babylonia and from
Egypt.

201
00:16:36,554 –> 00:16:41,536
But you will never find a piece of the Torah in Egypt or in Babylonia.

202
00:16:41,536 –> 00:16:42,576
It wasn’t read.

203
00:16:42,576 –> 00:16:43,596
It was ignored.

204
00:16:43,596 –> 00:16:44,937
It was not heard of.

205
00:16:44,937 –> 00:16:49,516
It was so different than what.

206
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.

210
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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00:17:19,284 –> 00:17:29,754
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.

213
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.

214
00:17:46,397 –> 00:17:47,538
And it’s not.

215
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?

220
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.

221
00:18:22,279 –> 00:18:24,342
They had heard them multiple of times.

222
00:18:24,342 –> 00:18:29,288
They knew when to cheer when Mordechai was mentioned and boo when Haman was mentioned.

223
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.

224
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.

226
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.

228
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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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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00:19:45,678 –> 00:19:54,565
You know, what Alter is saying is that the Torah is written for a sophisticated audience,
for an audience that knows Torah.

238
00:19:54,565 –> 00:19:55,768
And therefore you could refer.

239
00:19:55,768 –> 00:19:58,601
Refer to something and people should understand it.

240
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.

241
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.

245
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

247
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.

249
00:20:50,331 –> 00:20:53,473
a breath away from starting the Torah all over again.

250
00:20:53,473 –> 00:20:58,618
So we know that is the minhag, the custom that we have now.

251
00:20:58,618 –> 00:21:01,060
That’s why we call the last day Simchat Torah.

252
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.

255
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,

257
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

258
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…

262
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?

265
00:22:15,741 –> 00:22:19,484
Which is Moses says, You’ve read the whole book now.

266
00:22:19,484 –> 00:22:23,327
You’ve read the whole Five Books, your eyes have changed.

267
00:22:23,327 –> 00:22:27,124
You see the world differently, you have a different Weltanschauung.

268
00:22:27,124 –> 00:22:29,515
Now let’s start reading Bereshit all over again.

269
00:22:29,515 –> 00:22:31,415
It’s gonna be different this time.

270
00:22:31,415 –> 00:22:35,097
So sure enough, I did find in the Sefat Emet.

271
00:22:35,097 –> 00:22:45,200
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

272
00:22:45,200 –> 00:22:49,041
can see, and to them was given an opening of the eye.

273
00:22:49,041 –> 00:22:51,542
So in the Hebrew, he says,

274
00:22:51,542 –> 00:22:55,325
He combines l’einei kol Yisrael, Bereshit bara.

275
00:22:55,325 –> 00:22:58,367
He does exactly what I’m suggesting we should do.

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00:22:58,367 –> 00:23:01,008
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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The tradition to finish the Torah on Simchat Torah and begin it the same day is a very old
tradition.

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That might go back, you know, 1500 years.

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So it’s not something they invented in Poland a hundred years ago.

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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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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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You finish one tractate, you go on to the next one.

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But when you finished one tractate, the prayer that you say is Hadran alach.

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The word Hadran means we should repeat it.

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So we don’t actually do it, but at least we say it.

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You finish learning Bava Kamma, you spend months learning Bava Kamma.

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And the first thing you say is, I want to do it all over again.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It’s not about what came before us.

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It’s not about the heavens.

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You want to study astronomy, go somewhere else.

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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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It’s not what the book is about.

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And I love that.

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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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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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The Holy One, blessed be, he said to it.

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And he ends by saying, The Ten Commandments begin with an Aleph, Anochi.

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So again, I think, .. I’m taking a little poetic license.

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But what I’m saying is what preceded the bet was the Aleph.

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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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He was not birthed, that matter was.

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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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It’s all about starting in the middle.

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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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So the crux of the story is God creates through speaking.

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Vayomer, God speaks.

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Vayavdel.

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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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Dividing is another way of understanding.

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Vayavdel is to distinguish between two things.

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then it goes on and it has words like Vayikra.

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He gave names, he tried to theorize.

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These are all things that the text is giving us permission or an obligation to do.

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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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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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discern and distinguish between light and dark, between hard and soft, between rich and
poor.

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We have to learn to call things as they are, to give value judgments.

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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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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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That’s really good.

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Really, really good.

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A good way to end the Torah and to begin the Torah, which is really the challenge for this
week.

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Fantastic.

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So let’s wish our all of ourselves a Simchat Torah.

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And we’re looking forward to an amazing year in Madlik.

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Unbelievable.

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See you all next week.

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Be well.

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Mm-hmm.