madlik

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Last week we explored Sarah as a leader without authority.

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This week Rebekah takes us into the difficult question of means and ends.

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Her plan succeeds, but through deception.

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We will discover in the text and later rabbinic thought that when one has authority,
one has the ability and obligation to be thoughtful and straight.

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But when one lacks authority,

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one may be forced to deviate and act impulsively.

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And what does that tension mean for modern Israel?

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A sovereign nation, yet one made up of tribes, many of whom still understand
themselves as minorities without authority?

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What happens when those who learn to lead from the margins come to hold authority of
their own?

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Welcome to Madlik.

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My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a
Jewish text or tradition.

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

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

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This week we read Parshat Toldot and discover how domestic disputes help give
birth to a nation. We wonder:

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What happens when leadership without authority begins to assume authority?

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So, Rabbi, I always thought that if you read all of Bereshit, there are certain key
themes.

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Clearly, one theme is choosing the second son.

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Or even choosing a son—the idea of the chosen one.

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Clearly, one of the main themes is miraculous birth.

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Yes, I said that.

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The Christians didn’t invent that.

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Every birth in Genesis is miraculous in the real sense of the word:

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when you want to have a child and it is difficult.

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But I hadn’t really thought about domestic disputes.

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And we have two parshiot where you can’t help connecting the dots.

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These are women, whether Sarah or Rebekah, who clearly are not on the same page as
their husband.

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I think with Sarah it comes more through the rabbinic texts.

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But clearly with Rebekah, it’s right out there.

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What do you think?

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Yeah, there’s no question that these are miraculous births.

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There’s no question that it’s not only about choosing the younger son, but

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succession. If you had to choose one word to describe the Book of Bereshit, it would
be succession.

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You need a successor.

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And the question is, who is that successor going to be?

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But here we have this domestic rivalry thing.

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And I think that I’ve not really noticed it all these years.

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And it’s easy enough to say, Rabbi, that Genesis

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really focuses on the women.

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It gives the women a real personality.

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It gives them a real role.

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But when I say domestic conflict, it gives them a role vis-à-vis the man.

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There’s a real friction here, there’s a real tension here.

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So let’s look at the verses.

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We are in Genesis 25:20.

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Isaac was 40 years old when he took his wife Rebekah.

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daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean.

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Isaac pleaded with God on behalf of his wife. The Hebrew is lenokhach; it can also
mean “opposite his wife.” She was infertile, and God responded to his plea, and his
wife Rebekah conceived.

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conceived.

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So here we have the miraculous birth theme.

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And this is a funny story, right?

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This is totally unexpected: we have a sense of the babies fighting with one another.

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And we have no sonograms.

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So here you go.

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“But the children struggled in her womb.”

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So all of a sudden, the writer of the text knows we’re talking about twins.

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I can assure you that a woman who has this kind of experience, especially if it’s
her first baby, doesn’t know it’s twins.

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She just knows there’s a lot going on in there.

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And she said, “If so,

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why do I exist?”

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In other words, the text implies that she knew either she was having two children or
that one child had conflicting, polarized impulses.

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It was bipolar, right?

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One way or the other, she said, “What is this?”

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And God answered her.

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So the text says, and God answered her.

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We’re going to see that all of the commentators seem to require

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that it wasn’t God directly, but some sort of oracle—whether Shem or, we’ll see,
perhaps Abraham.

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But the text says, “God answered her: Two nations are in your womb; two separate
peoples shall issue from your body.

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One people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.

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So here we have it for the first time.

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The actual bumper sticker is on the car. It’s not a coincidence that, as you read
Genesis, you find that the older shall serve

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the younger.

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It’s part of the plan.

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When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb.

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So now it makes sense, right?

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What a big surprise:

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“My God, there’s another baby coming out!”

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The first one emerged red like a hairy mantle all over.

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So they named him—vayikre’u—Esau.

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Then his brother emerged.

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holding on to the heel of Esau.

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So the translation says, so they named him Jacob.

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But if you actually read the word, it’s vayikra.

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He named him Jacob in the singular.

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But more importantly, what did they call him?

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They called him Jacob.

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So how does Fox translate Jacob?

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Yaakov, or “heel-holder.”

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The word for a heel is akev; hence Yaakov.

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So “heel-holder” doesn’t have a really nice ring to it.

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It’s hard to make that into a name that means “wow, he’s beautiful, wonderful,
bold.”

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No, he’s a heel holder.

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Isaac was 60 years old when they were born.

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So early on, we already have conflict—not only in the womb,

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but possibly in the way the husband and wife prayed in their different corners.

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Let’s go to Rashi.

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Rashi says, “Facing his wife”—lenokhach ishto: he stood in one corner and prayed,
while she stood in the other corner and prayed.

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I kind of see this, Rabbi, as a parallel to what they said about Abraham and Sarah
when they left on their Lech Lecha journey. It says that they created nefashot.

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The rabbis said

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Abraham made the men, and Sarah made the women.

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So I see this as a hint that they are praying, but they are unique, individual
personalities.

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And, of course, when Rashi says “corner,” he didn’t know anything about heavyweight
boxing, but we can’t help thinking of two different corners.

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Correct.

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Okay.

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The next Rashi: “The children struggled.”

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Another explanation is that they struggled with one another and quarreled over how
to divide the two worlds as their inheritance.

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So that gets back to what you were saying before.

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This is all about succession.

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This is all about who inherits this world, this planet—what Abraham was meant to
give.

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So clearly, this is there from the get-go.

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It’s not only Rashi; it’s in the text itself.

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This is more than two children.

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This is what those children represent and what their progeny will inherit.

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The stakes are high.

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And finally, Rashi says, “He called his name Jacob.”

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Another explanation is that his father called him Jacob because he was grasping
Esau’s heel.

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Rashi picks up on the grammar. It’s almost as if we’re saying that from the moment
they were born—

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where you look at it and it’s already distinctive.

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you could say this child is special, or you could say he’s the runt of the litter.

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He’s not the one who’s going to carry on my dynasty.

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But I love the fact that

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from the get-go, we have this fracture, these differences of opinion. And yes,
Jacob has a problem with his name from the get-go.

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Right.

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Now, let me just say: you skipped over the first opinion in that Rashi, which says
that God called him Yaakov.

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That’s great.

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That opinion says that you already know from the beginning that Yaakov is going to
win,

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because it’s God who calls him Jacob.

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He doesn’t call him Esau, but he calls him Jacob.

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So God is on Jacob’s side.

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So I love that.

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I absolutely love that.

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And it shows that the trajectory of our texts favors the underdog, the one you
wouldn’t instinctively choose as the successor.

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But in this particular case,

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in Yitzhak’s case, he didn’t see it as something flattering.

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I agree with you.

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The first part of Rashi sees it as something flattering. That’s when you truly are
making a paradigm shift.

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So let’s go.

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There’s a lot of minutiae that happens in between.

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There’s the story of the porridge, which was probably put in there to justify the
later narrative.

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I think that’s the way to understand it.

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It’s justifying what was already there.

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But meanwhile, we’re going to the chase.

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In Genesis 27, it says, When Isaac was old and his eyes were too dim to see, he
called his older son Esau and said to him, My son.

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So he calls him my son.

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He’s the older.

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He answered, Here I am.

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In great biblical fashion, he says, “Hineni, Dad. I’m here.”

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And he said, I am old now, and I do not know how soon I may die.

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Take your gear, your quiver, your bow, and go out into the open and hunt me some
game.

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Then prepare a dish for me such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may
give you my innermost blessing before I die.

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Here we go.

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Verse five of chapter twenty seven.

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Rebekah had been listening as Isaac spoke to his son Esau.

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A lot of the commentaries ask, or trouble themselves to ask,

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whether Rebekah told Isaac about the message from God—whether she gave him the memo

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that says the older shall serve the younger.

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What about Isaac?

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Did Isaac consult with Rebekah before he decided to call Esau and ask him to make
him some food and give him a blessing?

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It really does work both ways, but none of the commentaries ask it.

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It’s very strange.

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Yeah, that’s funny, right?

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Because it’s on Rebekah.

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But with Isaac, you don’t expect it of him.

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I like the idea that Isaac and Rebekah didn’t communicate well,

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that neither checked with the other.

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I think that’s the peshat.

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That’s the simple meaning.

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That’s what the text is trying to show us.

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They were not communicating, and they were on different pages from the get-go.

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And it goes on.

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So when Esau has gone out to hunt game, Rebekah said to her son Jacob, “I overheard
your father speaking.”

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So this is how that family ran.

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It was dysfunctional, and that was not the surprise here.

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She overheard your father speaking to your brother Esau, saying, “Bring me some game
and prepare a dish for me to eat,

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so that I may bless you with God’s approval before I die.”

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Again, she adds “with God’s approval,” but she understands the stakes here.

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And now she’s talking to her son, her favorite son.

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Now, my son, listen carefully as I instruct you.

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Go to the flock and fetch me two choice kids, and I will make of them a dish for
your father, such as he likes.

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Then take it to your father to eat, in order that he may bless you before he dies.

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Jacob answered his mother Rebekah,

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“But my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am smooth-skinned.

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If my father touches me, I shall appear to him as a trickster and bring upon myself
a curse, not a blessing.”

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So it’s obvious what’s at stake here, and it’s obvious who’s running the show.

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It’s Rebekah, as you said before, who is the protagonist here.

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And it’s also understood that Jacob is

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going through a learning curve.

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He’s pushing back.

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He’s trying to understand his mother. He’s saying, “I don’t want to do it.”

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But his mother said to him, “Your curse, my son, be upon me.”

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So she takes the authority here.

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She is the one who’s pulling the strings.

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Just do as I say and go fetch them for me.

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Now it’s very important to say here that you don’t yet know who is right.

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You’re right.

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Right. Rebekah is the one taking matters into her own hands.

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But the Torah doesn’t really tip its hand.

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It doesn’t tell you, is she gonna win?

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The drama is still up in the air at this point.

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Well, again, I don’t think you know who’s going to win. But do you know who’s right?

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Because there are two things in the balance.

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One is that she went to the oracle, she went to Shem, she heard from God—so she is
right.

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But what starts to gnaw at you is the means to the end.

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How is she going about it?

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That’s what everybody struggles with.

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They struggle:

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Why didn’t she just tell Yitzhak that she had an oracle?

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Why didn’t she communicate with him?

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And you’re saying this was a dysfunctional family, and she knew Isaac operated on
his own.

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And she is following Sarah,

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who had to stand up, put her foot down, and say, “This is the way it’s going to be.

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I’ve heard from God.”

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So I think it’s complex, for sure.

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So that’s interesting. You think this story plays on the earlier story about going
to the oracle.

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And therefore, you know she’s right, but the means are problematic.

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Number one, they’re problematic because she’s a trickster.

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Number two, they’re problematic because there’s no communication in the family.

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A double.

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Yeah.

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I think that’s why I said in the introduction: if last week we were introduced to
leadership without authority, here we’re trying to find out how that works.

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What are the mechanics of it?

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Rebekah doesn’t have the authority, but she’s taking the lead because she knows
she’s right—because God told her this is how it’s going to end.

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That’s where this becomes interesting, especially to us moderns, but I think to any
listener. I’ve talked about this before: this is as close to

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Megillat Esther as you can get.

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Everybody knows how it’s going to turn out, but there’s a back-and-forth, there’s
drama.

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What I’m saying is that in Esther, you know who the bad guy is.

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There’s a reading of this story, Geoffrey, in which Esau is the sympathetic
character.

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You could say that it’s not his fault.

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And you could even say that Isaac is a sympathetic character.

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It starts by saying he’s old and can’t see; they’re taking advantage of an old
person.

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So what I think we both agree on is that it’s complicated.

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That’s what it’s like when you have leadership without authority.

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You can’t just make an edict and say, “This is what God says. This is the way it’s
going to be.”

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That’s how Moses leads.

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00:19:31,947 –> 00:19:36,631
In Rebekah’s case, she doesn’t have those tools.

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00:19:36,631 –> 00:19:40,180
So we’re really getting into the weeds

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and seeing that people are going to be hurt here.

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She is hacking the system, so to speak.

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But it’s a fascinating and compelling story precisely because it mirrors life when
you’re working from the sidelines.

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We all know this story, and the rabbis parse each word

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to make sure that maybe Isaac never actually tells a lie.

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His father says, “Are you Esau?”

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00:20:13,898 –> 00:20:15,129
And he says, “I am.”

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00:20:15,129 –> 00:20:17,961
And then so forth and so on.

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00:20:17,961 –> 00:20:20,563
“Thou protestest too much,” I think.

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Just let it be as it is.

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00:20:22,745 –> 00:20:30,370
But I think the punchline is: hakol kol Yaakov, vehayadayim yedei Esav—“The voice
is the voice of Jacob, and the hands are the hands of Esau.”

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That ultimately what is happening here is that we end up with.

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00:20:36,620 –> 00:20:47,516
We end up with the voice of Jacob and the accoutrements—the feel of power—of Esau.

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And ultimately, if I had to symbolize this moment, this is what happens:

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through hook or crook, Rebekah and Yaakov get to the point where, even though they
have only the voice and no authority,

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by scheming and conniving, they’re able to get some authority for that moment by
putting on Esau’s hands.

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And that’s what it’s really all about.

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That’s why I say it’s a question of what the ends are and how you get there.

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I said that I don’t really see this as a major theme running through the whole book
of Bereshit, but it is a minor theme.

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And I wanted to pick that up with Sarah and Abraham.

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But before I do, just as with Sarah and Abraham, perhaps there seems to be some
reconciliation at the end, when Abraham comes from Beersheba and buries Sarah in
Hebron.

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00:21:59,034 –> 00:22:05,362
at the end, what are the instructions that both parents give to their son?

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Rebekah says to Isaac, “I am disgusted with my life because of the Hittite women.

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If Jacob marries a Hittite woman like these, among the native women, what

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good will life be to me?”

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00:22:21,548 –> 00:22:26,353
At the beginning, she says, “What good is my life with two children fighting inside
me?”

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00:22:26,353 –> 00:22:30,076
Now she’s saying, “I don’t want you to marry the local shiksa.

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I want you to go back to Aram.”

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00:22:32,359 –> 00:22:36,893
And sure enough, in Genesis 28, Isaac sends for Jacob.

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00:22:36,893 –> 00:22:44,194
This is after he knows that he’s had the wool pulled over his eyes and that he
blessed Jacob.

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00:22:44,194 –> 00:22:50,136
He instructed him saying, You shall not take a wife from among the Canaanite women.

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00:22:50,136 –> 00:22:51,416
So it is interesting.

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00:22:51,416 –> 00:22:55,137
At the end, they finally do agree on that.

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00:22:55,137 –> 00:23:09,921
But I think it’s important to say that if this conflict between husband and wife is
a mini-theme, part of the reason is that it doesn’t end well for anybody.

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00:23:09,921 –> 00:23:13,920
For the first time I started thinking about our patriarchs.

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If you follow the rabbinic commentaries, Abraham and Sarah die separately.

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00:23:19,290 –> 00:23:22,206
They’re estranged from each other.

292
00:23:22,206 –> 00:23:27,800
The Akedah—the binding of Isaac—was just too much for Sarah to bear.

293
00:23:27,800 –> 00:23:34,405
And here, Rebekah pulled all the right strings and achieved all her goals.

294
00:23:34,405 –> 00:23:37,450
But she never sees her son again.

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00:23:37,450 –> 00:23:41,760
We never hear of her with her husband again.

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It’s a tragedy.

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00:23:45,512 –> 00:23:47,834
you can’t say anything but that.

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00:23:47,834 –> 00:23:54,938
And looking forward, we’ll see this with Jacob and Rachel.

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Our patriarchs and matriarchs, if you look at them individually or as couples, are
tragic figures.

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00:24:03,963 –> 00:24:07,225
And they’re not on the same page, right?

301
00:24:07,225 –> 00:24:09,452
I mean, you know, with Jacob.

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00:24:09,452 –> 00:24:16,135
It’s because of his father-in-law, but there’s some confusion about who belongs to
whom.

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00:24:16,135 –> 00:24:20,527
Isaac and Rebekah don’t seem to be on the same page.

304
00:24:20,527 –> 00:24:26,389
And with Abraham and Sarah, because of Hagar, you’re not sure they’re on the same
page either.

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00:24:26,389 –> 00:24:27,110
Yep.

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00:24:27,110 –> 00:24:31,331
So let’s go quickly to Abraham and Sarah.

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00:24:31,331 –> 00:24:38,054
In the little schmooze we had before we started the podcast,

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00:24:38,056 –> 00:24:49,431
I noticed that at the Shtiebel you spoke about Abraham and Rebekah, the
connection between the two of them, and we’ll get to that.

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00:24:49,431 –> 00:25:03,537
In terms of Abraham, in Genesis 21, we all know the story: Sarah was barren, and she
says to Abraham, “Why don’t you take the handmaid Hagar, the Egyptian, and have

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00:25:03,537 –> 00:25:04,586
a child with her?”

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00:25:04,586 –> 00:25:06,868
A surrogate mother, if you will.

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00:25:06,868 –> 00:25:11,561
Then Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing.

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00:25:11,561 –> 00:25:20,586
She said to Abraham, Cast out that slave woman and her son, for the son of that
slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.

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00:25:20,586 –> 00:25:24,948
So this gets to succession, as you were talking about before.

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00:25:24,948 –> 00:25:35,874
Just as some of us question what Rebekah did, there are those who question what
Sarah is doing here.

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00:25:35,874 –> 00:25:36,724
She’s

317
00:25:36,866 –> 00:25:45,634
She’s kicking out this innocent child with a surrogate mother she was responsible
for bringing into the family.

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00:25:45,634 –> 00:25:51,960
And sure enough, the matter distressed Abraham greatly, for it concerned his son.

319
00:25:51,960 –> 00:25:57,865
So now he’s looking at the succession, just like Jacob looks at Esau in the
succession.

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00:25:57,865 –> 00:26:03,530
But when God speaks to Abraham, and the person being addressed is a man,

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00:26:03,666 –> 00:26:05,317
the rabbis have no problem with that.

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00:26:05,317 –> 00:26:08,448
They don’t say it came through Shem or somebody else.

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00:26:08,448 –> 00:26:09,329
It’s direct.

324
00:26:09,329 –> 00:26:13,230
Do not be distressed over the boy or your slave.

325
00:26:13,230 –> 00:26:15,571
That means the boy or Hagar.

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00:26:15,571 –> 00:26:25,295
“Whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says”—the time-honored advice you probably give
every couple under the chuppah.

327
00:26:25,295 –> 00:26:28,307
The best response is always going to be, “Yes, dear.”

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00:26:28,307 –> 00:26:29,957
Yeah, right.

329
00:26:30,338 –> 00:26:31,522
But in any case.

330
00:26:31,522 –> 00:26:37,707
So here again, it’s just as conflicted as the story of Rebekah, but a lot shorter.

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00:26:37,707 –> 00:26:41,430
And we read this on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

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00:26:41,430 –> 00:26:44,032
It’s a powerful story.

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00:26:44,032 –> 00:26:48,816
For it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you.

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00:26:48,816 –> 00:26:55,161
So, Rabbi, it’s interesting that in both cases, God is working through the wife.

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00:26:55,161 –> 00:27:01,176
God is working through the mother and using the mother to shape the

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00:27:01,176 –> 00:27:03,167
destiny of our people.

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00:27:03,167 –> 00:27:03,717
Yeah.

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00:27:03,717 –> 00:27:05,848
There’s a lot to be said there.

339
00:27:05,848 –> 00:27:16,413
The mother understands better than the father, even though the succession is really
the father’s succession, right?

340
00:27:16,413 –> 00:27:18,654
It’s Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

341
00:27:18,654 –> 00:27:23,616
The succession is through the male, but the wife is the one who understands it.

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00:27:23,616 –> 00:27:29,418
Sarah understands it, Rebekah understands it, and maybe Rachel understands it too.

343
00:27:29,624 –> 00:27:43,458
Just as the beginning of Rashi says that God actually called him Yaakov because God
may like the underdog, it’s almost natural

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00:27:43,458 –> 00:27:52,241
that God works through Sarah and Rebekah, who are outliers, leaders without
authority.

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00:27:52,271 –> 00:27:55,756
And so that connects our two parshiot.

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00:27:55,756 –> 00:28:06,092
I want to get into the mashma’ut, the meaning of the name Yaakov, because it’s
pivotal in the story.

347
00:28:06,092 –> 00:28:09,754
Even though it happens a little bit later, we get a name change.

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00:28:09,754 –> 00:28:20,120
In Genesis 32, it says, “Your name shall no longer be Yaakov, but Israel, for you
have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.”

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00:28:20,120 –> 00:28:23,842
And I’m going to turn to our friend the Emek Davar,

350
00:28:23,842 –> 00:28:27,064
who has an amazing interpretation.

351
00:28:27,064 –> 00:28:39,554
He says, “In saying, ‘For you have striven with God,’ he uprooted the name Jacob,
because Jacob indicates ‘the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately
wicked.’”

352
00:28:39,554 –> 00:28:51,352
So what happens with the name change is that Jacob leaves behind the persona of the
one who is deceitful and desperately wicked, and becomes Israel.

353
00:28:51,352 –> 00:28:56,406
Israel denotes straightness, as it says, “The crooked shall be made straight.”

354
00:28:56,406 –> 00:29:02,550
So in the word Yisrael, there is not only the idea of struggling with God; there is
also yashar, straight.

355
00:29:02,550 –> 00:29:09,434
And if you remember, the Netziv said the whole book of Bereshit is called Sefer
HaYashar—the Book of the Upright.

356
00:29:09,434 –> 00:29:10,915
It means “the straight.”

357
00:29:10,915 –> 00:29:20,866
And so the Emek Davar is going to argue that there are two personas, Jacob and
Israel,

358
00:29:20,866 –> 00:29:22,847
and also two personas of our people.

359
00:29:22,847 –> 00:29:35,293
He makes an amazing argument when he takes it up later. He says that when we had our
first redemption out of Egypt, we had to do it with a lie.

360
00:29:35,293 –> 00:29:41,917
We had to say to Pharaoh, “We’re just going to the desert to worship our God, and
we’ll be right back.”

361
00:29:41,917 –> 00:29:45,334
We did it in haste, in the thick of the night.

362
00:29:45,334 –> 00:29:54,480
He says that in the future we’ll be able to do it yashar, like Israel, standing
straight with our arms raised.

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00:29:54,480 –> 00:30:01,204
We’ll do it slowly, in front of the whole world, without cunning and deception.

364
00:30:01,204 –> 00:30:12,002
The Emek Davar creates this paradox: when you’re without authority, you might have to
work

365
00:30:12,002 –> 00:30:20,648
by hacking the system; when you have authority, you’re obligated to walk upright and
be straight.

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00:30:20,648 –> 00:30:28,994
And he makes a wonderful play on what we say in the Haggadah: Do we always have to
remember Egypt?

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00:30:28,994 –> 00:30:30,955
And his answer is yes.

368
00:30:30,955 –> 00:30:40,482
No matter how yashar we become, Rabbi, we need to know that there will be times

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00:30:40,482 –> 00:30:42,524
when we still have to be imaginative.

370
00:30:42,524 –> 00:30:47,448
We still have to be innovative.

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00:30:47,448 –> 00:30:59,968
We still have to think outside the box.

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00:30:59,968 –> 00:31:05,062
And I want to finish, as I did last week, by reading a little from Ronald Heifetz,
who takes the argument about leading without authority to the question of

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00:31:05,062 –> 00:31:10,176
what happens when that leader without authority begins to gain authority.

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00:31:10,176 –> 00:31:20,649
I think that’s the moment we’re in with the State of Israel today.

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00:31:20,649 –> 00:31:25,950
On the one hand, we’re a sovereign state and a nation among the family of nations;
on the other, we’re still a minority fighting for our lives.

376
00:31:25,950 –> 00:31:38,074
It’s the challenge of being able to focus on and balance both of those realities.

377
00:31:38,074 –> 00:31:38,880
He writes: “Over time, a person who begins without authority, or who leads beyond
whatever authority she has, may have to construct, strengthen, and sometimes broaden

378
00:31:38,880 –> 00:31:42,232
her base of informal authority in order to get more leverage.

379
00:31:42,232 –> 00:31:53,680
She may find that an initial, rebellious leadership action puts her in an informal
authority position that requires trust, respect, and moral force in order to sustain
progress.”

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00:31:53,680 –> 00:31:59,524
He talks about Gandhi. He talks about Martin Luther King quoting the Constitution.

381
00:31:59,524 –> 00:32:03,026
He talks about working within the system.

382
00:32:03,026 –> 00:32:08,802
And I think this is what we’re at the precipice of when we see this moment:

383
00:32:08,802 –> 00:32:24,355
Yaakov, who will ultimately become Israel, the nation, is launched from a position
of radical lack of authority. Slowly, he focuses on this and sees it

384
00:32:24,355 –> 00:32:38,104
with open eyes, for what it is—good, bad, and ugly—and then starts to make the
journey

385
00:32:38,104 –> 00:32:45,961
toward balancing the ability to leave those sleights of hand and those cutting
corners behind, and to do it right.

386
00:32:45,961 –> 00:32:47,262
But it’s a challenge.

387
00:32:47,262 –> 00:32:57,310
Nothing shows the challenge our patriarchs face—and that we as a people and nation
face every day—like this story.

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00:32:57,430 –> 00:32:58,611
That’s great.

389
00:32:58,611 –> 00:33:01,474
And I want to say that it’s like the Israeli parliament.

390
00:33:01,474 –> 00:33:07,254
What they’re trying to do now is create order out of chaos.

391
00:33:07,254 –> 00:33:07,524
Right?

392
00:33:07,524 –> 00:33:12,916
There’s no government; they don’t know who goes with whom, and they’re trying to
create order.

393
00:33:12,916 –> 00:33:14,677
It’s the balance.

394
00:33:14,677 –> 00:33:22,360
Leadership is balancing leadership without authority and following a system,
following that authority.

395
00:33:22,360 –> 00:33:24,521
They’re going to have to make compromises.

396
00:33:24,521 –> 00:33:28,403
Everything they said when they ran is going to be tested.

397
00:33:28,403 –> 00:33:36,598
I think it’s a wonderful parsha to read while the Israeli government is going
through this challenge.

398
00:33:36,598 –> 00:33:42,419
And they always say about making laws: it’s like making sausages, right?

399
00:33:42,419 –> 00:33:44,381
You shouldn’t watch how it’s done.

400
00:33:44,381 –> 00:33:45,662
This is the challenge.

401
00:33:45,662 –> 00:33:48,503
It’s messy when you get into the weeds.

402
00:33:48,503 –> 00:33:50,224
So anyway, Shabbat shalom.

403
00:33:50,224 –> 00:33:52,465
Shabbat shalom, everybody. Welcome back, Geoffrey.

404
00:33:52,465 –> 00:33:54,065
We’ll see you next week.

405
00:33:54,245 –> 00:33:55,146
Shabbat shalom.

406
00:33:55,146 –> 00:33:56,136
See you then.

00:00:58,220 –> 00:00:59,140
Welcome to Madlik.

12
00:00:59,140 –> 00:01:05,016
My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition.

13
00:01:05,016 –> 00:01:13,483
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik: Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack.

14
00:01:13,483 –> 00:01:19,108
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes.

15
00:01:19,108 –> 00:01:26,272
This Parshat Chayei Sarah, I’m thinking about a recent Friday night at Hakhel, a partnership minyan in Jerusalem.

16
00:01:26,272 –> 00:01:35,485
Its founders, Ephraim and Oshrat Shoham, told us how they built a community where women participate fully in leading prayer and reading Torah.

17
00:01:35,485 –> 00:01:40,506
They did it through shared commitment and communal decision-making.

18
00:01:40,506 –> 00:01:44,887
Oshrat said she began Hakhel because she was a feminist.

19
00:01:44,887 –> 00:01:54,360
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.

20
00:01:54,360 –> 00:02:04,576
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.

21
00:02:04,576 –> 00:02:10,760
What does it take to build a community that can lead, welcome, and care for one another?

22
00:02:10,760 –> 00:02:14,764
Join us for “Sarah: Leading Without Authority.”

23
00:02:14,764 –> 00:02:17,836
Rabbi, I’m in Israel right now.

24
00:02:17,836 –> 00:02:26,823
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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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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So thank you, Geoffrey.

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Shabbat shalom to everybody.

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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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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.

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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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We’ll begin with Abraham and Sarah running and rushing to welcome their guests.

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And follow that urgency through the Mussar tradition and into Franklin’s art of
self-improvement.

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So join us: Abraham, Master of Mussar and Industry.

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Well, Rabbi, another week brings another surprise.

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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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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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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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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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“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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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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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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All of a sudden he stands up like a new customer is coming into his booth.

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And he runs out, he bows down, he greets them, but then the real word is “Vayemaher
Avraham.”

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He hastened to the tent and he says to Sarah, “Vayemaher, vayomer mahari.” He says, “Quick,
bring these cakes.”

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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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00:03:43,394 –> 00:03:53,179
gotta be some Mussar scholar who looks at this and says, “The lesson here is about zerizut,
zerizim makdimim.”

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Get up early in the morning and go get them.

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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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And he says, quoting the verse, “He lifted his eyes and saw, and he ran.”

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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.

58
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.

60
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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00:05:35,875 –> 00:05:38,576
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

67
00:05:57,711 –> 00:05:59,171
him, and do what he wants.

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00:05:59,171 –> 00:06:04,113
In Abraham’s house, whenever a guest came in, everyone in the household got to their feet.

69
00:06:04,113 –> 00:06:09,260
They all ran around with him because they understood the great opportunity

70
00:06:09,260 –> 00:06:11,091
the guest brought with him.

71
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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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00:06:24,401 –> 00:06:30,105
Yet once I got up early and found the dung carriers and straw gatherers already there.

75
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.

77
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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00:06:49,955 –> 00:06:53,757
I thought I was getting up early, I was the first clocking in to work.

79
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.

81
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.

82
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.

83
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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00:07:34,529 –> 00:07:35,340
service.

85
00:07:35,340 –> 00:07:42,793
So I was struck by, first of all, the two business associations.

86
00:07:42,793 –> 00:07:49,736
When he talks about the Saba of Kelm, he talks about a businessman in his shop.

87
00:07:49,736 –> 00:07:54,738
When he brings from Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Eliezer is looking at these menial laborers.

88
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.

92
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.

95
00:08:44,634 –> 00:08:48,115
It’s happiness and success comes more.

96
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?

98
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.

100
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.

101
00:09:15,461 –> 00:09:18,423
So Mussar played a very important role.

102
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!

106
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.

115
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.

124
00:11:04,684 –> 00:11:07,535
And so is zeal that aims to make a better world.

125
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.

128
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.”

130
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.

134
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.

135
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.

136
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.

140
00:12:27,976 –> 00:12:34,350
And clings to one thought only, then he makes himself alert and will no doubt succeed.

141
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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00:12:41,826 –> 00:12:51,954
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.

146
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.

148
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.

153
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.

154
00:13:51,879 –> 00:13:57,482
Again, another aspect of what zerizut can mean.

155
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.

166
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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00:15:23,812 –> 00:15:26,535
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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00:15:29,397 –> 00:15:38,847
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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00:15:38,847 –> 00:15:42,750
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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00:16:18,083 –> 00:16:19,783
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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195
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205
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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.

213
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.”

216
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.

218
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.

225
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.

227
00:19:32,193 –> 00:19:36,476
He’s looking at zeal can be good, but it can also be bad.

228
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.

232
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.

235
00:20:11,042 –> 00:20:12,333
He’s in the starting block.

236
00:20:12,333 –> 00:20:15,395
He’s not doing anything without thought.

237
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?

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

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00:20:35,129 –> 00:20:36,530
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.

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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.

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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

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00:21:12,134 –> 00:21:12,745
heaven.

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

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

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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
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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:

259
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.

263
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.

18
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.

19
00:02:01,834 –> 00:02:08,957
So join Rabbi Mintz and me as we ask what made Abraham the original outlier.

20
00:02:08,957 –> 00:02:12,399
Well, Rabbi, if there’s ever a Rorschach block, it’s Abraham.

21
00:02:12,399 –> 00:02:15,400
All we know is that he got up and went: Lech Lecha.

22
00:02:15,400 –> 00:02:20,342
But what his revolution was, who he was, we don’t know.

23
00:02:20,780 –> 00:02:24,193
And of course, that’s the mystery that the Torah wants to give you.

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

25
00:02:28,147 –> 00:02:29,659
Because that’s the question.

26
00:02:29,659 –> 00:02:31,650
What does it mean to be an outlier, right?

27
00:02:31,650 –> 00:02:34,063
Each one of us is outliers in our own way.

28
00:02:34,063 –> 00:02:36,405
What made Abraham the first outlier?

29
00:02:36,405 –> 00:02:38,326
The Avraham HaIvri.

30
00:02:38,527 –> 00:02:41,000
Not only the first, but kind of powerful.

31
00:02:41,000 –> 00:02:45,826
I mean, if you think of the Abrahamic religions, we’re talking billions of
people.

32
00:02:45,826 –> 00:02:54,315
That were impacted by this journey that started one foot at a time, Lech
Lecha.

33
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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So that’s the story.

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

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And I was so delighted.

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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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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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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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00:06:39,080 –> 00:06:42,001
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.

154
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.

191
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.

193
00:17:08,798 –> 00:17:10,940
Should I bow to the stone?

194
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?

196
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.

203
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.

211
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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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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.

12
00:01:20,212 –> 00:01:26,804
This week we read Parshat Noach, which concludes with the enigmatic story of the Tower of
Babel.

13
00:01:26,946 –> 00:01:32,211
We are not going to survey the traditional explanations of what its builders did wrong.
Instead,

14
00:01:32,211 –> 00:01:43,540
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,

15
00:01:43,540 –> 00:01:52,347
and Pope Leo addressing artificial intelligence and the concentration of technological
power in our own day.

16
00:01:52,688 –> 00:01:54,932
Both see Babel as a warning

17
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.

18
00:02:03,344 –> 00:02:07,986
People with different backgrounds, opinions, and roles joining together.

19
00:02:07,986 –> 00:02:13,307
Not because they have become identical, but because they have found a common purpose.

20
00:02:13,307 –> 00:02:17,028
So perhaps the opposite of Babel is not division.

21
00:02:17,028 –> 00:02:22,610
Perhaps it is unity strong enough to preserve difference.

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

23
00:02:24,394 –> 00:02:26,075
a Pope, and Babel.”

24
00:02:26,075 –> 00:02:30,315
Kind of like a rabbi and a Pope walk into a bar, right?

25
00:02:32,016 –> 00:02:37,558
So we’re just going to go over the verses themselves.

26
00:02:37,558 –> 00:02:42,899
And then what I would love you to do, Adam, is introduce us to who the Netziv was.

27
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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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00:02:53,332 –> 00:02:54,823
about the Netziv.

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

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Safa achat u’devarim achadim.

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

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

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00:03:16,938 –> 00:03:23,242
They said to one another, Come, let us make bricks, Levanim, and burn them hard.

35
00:03:23,266 –> 00:03:28,168
Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar.

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00:03:28,168 –> 00:03:36,150
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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00:04:03,117 –> 00:04:07,940
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,

47
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.

49
00:05:01,219 –> 00:05:04,921
He died in 1893 in Warsaw, Poland.

50
00:05:04,921 –> 00:05:16,007
He lived during the premier period of the Lithuanian
yeshiva movement.

51
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.

53
00:05:24,884 –> 00:05:33,630
But at the same time, the Jewish enlightenment was very strong in Poland and Lithuania.

54
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.

57
00:05:56,206 –> 00:05:58,828
Ahad Ha’am comes from this period.

58
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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00:06:14,701 –> 00:06:20,826
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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00:06:32,935 –> 00:06:49,906
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.

68
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.

80
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.

83
00:08:41,727 –> 00:08:45,279
And we’re both going to jump in when we have something to say.

84
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.

85
00:08:52,453 –> 00:08:54,844
He actually says aveira aleph.

86
00:08:54,844 –> 00:08:58,238
So you could say it’s the first or it’s the big sin.

87
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.

89
00:09:11,508 –> 00:09:14,630
But of course, the word kibbutz means one gathering.

90
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.

95
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.

100
00:09:54,984 –> 00:09:57,026
It’s against ghettoism.

101
00:09:57,026 –> 00:09:57,807
It is.

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

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

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

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

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.

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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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word echad, one, single, only.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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00:12:17,926 –> 00:12:18,924
furnace,

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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00:14:06,420 –> 00:14:07,280
Okay.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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00:15:59,749 –> 00:16:00,460
Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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00:16:48,384 –> 00:16:51,916
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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.

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

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.

214
00:18:57,421 –> 00:19:02,735
He uses the word minhag here, as it is written later in Genesis 28.

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

216
00:19:06,700 –> 00:19:09,631
This is but the beginning of the transgression.

217
00:19:09,631 –> 00:19:11,782
They want to remain in one place.

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

219
00:19:15,493 –> 00:19:17,354
You have to stay in the ghetto.

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

221
00:19:21,416 –> 00:19:28,268
If they finish the tower, they will proceed to a second thought: forcibly preventing ideas
other than

222
00:19:28,268 –> 00:19:28,979
this one.

223
00:19:28,979 –> 00:19:34,165
And this brings killing and violent destruction of civilization.

224
00:19:34,165 –> 00:19:39,592
And it does not help that at this moment they are together with one opinion.

225
00:19:39,592 –> 00:19:44,938
It might be nice once in a while that we agree on things, but in this case,

226
00:19:44,938 –> 00:19:51,098
since force is involved and it’s a regime, it’s not a good thing.

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

228
00:19:59,418 –> 00:20:06,230
In Genesis 28, the Ha’amek Davar says, “And you shall become an assembly of
peoples.”

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

230
00:20:08,611 –> 00:20:13,794
An assembly, kahal, consists of ten, as it says in Ketubot.

231
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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00:20:41,382 –> 00:20:45,125
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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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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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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.

256
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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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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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amazing, this Netziv, and I’m so glad that we could read it pretty much in its
fullness.

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

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

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

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Well, I’ll tell you how that came about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

375
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
00:03:31,178 –> 00:03:40,706
Instead, he brought forth from total and absolute nothing, a very thin substance devoid
of corporeality, but having a power of potency.

42
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.

44
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.

47
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.

48
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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He created this kind of thin substance devoid of corporeality, but having the
potential for all of matter.

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And then he says, bara possibly also can mean formed and made things with it.

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So you create the Play-Doh, and then from the Play-Doh you create everything that follows.

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

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

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

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creating something from nothing, but he also forms into it, making things with it.

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So the Ibn Ezra says as follows.

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

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

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

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It’s a very simple way of saying this.

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Yesh means yesh li bbayit, yeshli kadur.

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

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So creating something from nothing.

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But

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

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

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

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So even in bara, there are those commentaries like

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

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

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was not something from nothing.

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

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

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So there clearly God was taking from the

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Biological building-blocks of the universe and creating man.

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He had created the animals.

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So Ibn Ezra is making a case that no, it doesn’t have to be something from nothing.

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

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dividing things, they quote.

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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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That’s a disagreement between Ramban and Ibn Ezra.

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Ramban says bara means creation ex nihlo.

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Ibn Ezra says the word bara doesn’t necessarily mean creation, Yesh M’Ayin, because there
are many, there are many examples where the word bara means yesh M’Yesh, means something

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from something.

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

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And that is what did creation look like?

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What actually happened?

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

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

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You know, why is it so important?

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

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

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of faith that the world was created from nothing.

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

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In our canon.

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

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We probably have it only in Greek.

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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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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.

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So it’s striking that this is the first reference.

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It’s also striking that it is written probably in Greek first.

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And so what it does is it raises a flag, Rabbi.

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It says that probably this whole issue came up when the Jews were confronted with
Hellenism.

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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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the book of Maccabees, we have Philo of Alexandria, the great Philo.

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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.

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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.

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

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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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intellect of the universe.

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So now we have Philo kind of feeding us.

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the thought of the day, which is that this active cause therefore became molded and
molded onto our God.

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And the passive subject is the universe.

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It is interesting.

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It’s called the intellect of the universe.

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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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The passive subject is sometimes inanimate and incapable of motion by any intrinsic power
of its own, but having been set in motion and fashioned and endowed with the life of by

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

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

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And then, as I said before.

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The other part of the question is why?

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Why is this so important?

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So Nachmanides already said it’s a tenet of our faith.

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What does Philo do?

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

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The reason proves that the Father and Creator has care for that which he has created.

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If you don’t have a universe and a world that is created by God, you don’t have a caring
God.

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

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pernicious or injurious.

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This is clay in the hands of the potter.

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

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You have an association with it.

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

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

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

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Maimonides in the Guide lays out what he believes to be three different perspectives on
this.

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He says the first is ours, which is those who follow the law of Moses, our teacher, hold
that the whole universe, everything except God, has been brought by him into existence out

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of non-existence.

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

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

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And Maimonides again goes on echoing the other thinkers.

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

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

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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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So again, they are doubling down on this, even though you don’t necessarily have to read
it into the verse.

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

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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.

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if you recall, Nachmanides actually used a Greek word.

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And he said that this is a theory of all philosophers whose opinion and works are known to
us in this.

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It is impossible to assume that God produced anything from nothing or that he reduces
anything to nothing.

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That is to say, it is impossible that an object consisting of matter and form.

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Should be produced when that matter is absolutely absent.

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So I don’t know, Rabbi.

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

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

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And if you slice it and dice it, somehow it becomes more palpable.

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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.

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And so you kind of have a solution.

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he says the people to say that God can produce a thing from nothing.

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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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And it’s like saying a triangle has four sides.

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It just doesn’t fit into it.

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Nothing by definition.

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Nothing by definition means no thing.

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But again, at least Maimonides says this is an acceptable position.

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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.

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And so he says.

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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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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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derived from Scripture.

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00:19:37,760 –> 00:19:39,941
In other words, you can’t punish somebody.

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00:19:39,941 –> 00:19:47,004
You can’t have God cannot have any control over us if everything is eternal.

220
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Accepting the creation, we find that miracles are possible, that revelation is possible.

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And that every difficulty in this question is removed.

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We might be asked: why has God inspired a certain person and not another?

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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.

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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

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00:20:19,946 –> 00:20:22,469
And what he says is fascinating.

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He says, owing to the absence of all proof, we reject the theory of the eternity of the
universe.

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So what he says is, you can’t prove any of these.

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So as long as we can’t prove any of these, it’s best to have a theory.

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That guides us and makes the world meaningful and makes our Torah meaningful and makes
revelation and miracles meaningful.

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It’s in a sense, it’s kind of interesting because it’s saying that maybe there are
different parallel paths between belief and science.

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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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Let me just say, I mean, what you’re saying, of course, is fascinating.

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Let me just take a step back to say, you know, it’s interesting that Maimonides in the
Guide quotes Plato and Aristotle.

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We’ve got to take that for granted now.

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But today, if the greatest rabbi in the world quoted Plato and Aristotle, you’d wonder,
right, about whether they really were the greatest rabbi of you know of all time.

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00:21:30,320 –> 00:21:34,658
And Maimonides quotes Plato and Aristotle, and it’s totally.

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That’s part of his understanding of what creation is all about.

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00:21:39,283 –> 00:21:51,975
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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00:22:01,216 –> 00:22:02,817
I couldn’t agree more.

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00:22:02,817 –> 00:22:08,271
I mean, in a sense, he was not quoting other religious thinkers.

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00:22:08,271 –> 00:22:16,156
He’s quoting what he believes to be the best practices of the day in terms of
cosmology, understanding the world.

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00:22:16,156 –> 00:22:20,759
But I think what you’re saying is an amazing segue to where I want to go.

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Because I want to introduce our listeners to a scholar who has made a great impression on
me.

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his name is Harry Wolfson.

249
00:22:31,080 –> 00:22:38,295
And he basically, as you say rabbi, you look at the modern rabbis, he came out of the
Slobotka yeshiva.

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00:22:38,295 –> 00:22:46,250
And then he became the head of the first Judaic Studies program
in the United States at Harvard.

251
00:22:46,250 –> 00:22:51,050
and the person who followed him was Isidore Twersky, who I took a course from.

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00:22:51,050 –> 00:22:53,442
And he says that

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00:22:53,442 –> 00:23:01,007
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.

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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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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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revelation and philosophy.

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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.

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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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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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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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Go to al-Fārābī.

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he really looked up to this al-Fārābī.

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he regarded him, and many of the philosophers regarded him as the second teacher,
second to Aristotle.

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So we’re living in a world where Christian and Jewish and Muslim philosophers are
talking one.

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to the other, whether physically or through their writings.

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And al-Fārābī was the first one to say that this idea of Plotinus did not contradict
creation ex nielo, creation Yesh Me’Ayin.

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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.

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but on the other hand, it can jive with Greek philosophy.

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So this was an amazing bridge that they came up with.

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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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He says, You can now believe in emanation.

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So, what is emanation?

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Emanation, to make it very simple, is like if you have a candle of light.

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And it gives me light, the light that I get does not detract from the candle.

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The sun can give light, and we can get light from the sun without it detracting.

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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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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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And one of them is something that we know from the Kabbalah.

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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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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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creation were created, there was a supernatural light that filled all of existence.

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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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getting back to this concept of nothing, instead of emanating out, God was able to
contract in and give space for something.

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but what does that do to us in terms of creativity?

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Think of the pedagogic lesson there, that you can give, you can create the next generation
by pulling back.

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the Tanya, the and the Hasidim looked at our prayer book and says.

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we say in the prayer book every every day we continuously, the work of
creation is renewed. הַמְ֒חַדֵּשׁ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּכָל־יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית

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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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There is no disconnect.

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Between the world and God.

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We are constantly emanated from God.

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God re-creates, means it’s a set.

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We get a new start every morning.

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That’s by the way, the reason we watch Negel wasser, right?

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It’s a new start every morning.

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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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It’s absolutely crazy.

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But this is what Spinoza said.

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Spinoza said, you know, this emanation thing, you’re just kicking the can down the road.

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There is no difference between God and that which is created.

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Whatever is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

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God is the immanent, not the transitive cause of all things.

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So he understands there are things, but God is all of those things.

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The human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God.

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There is also in God an idea of the human mind.

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So all of a sudden, you can understand why a great German romantic poet said that Spinoza
was a Gott-trunkener Mensch

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Spinoza is a God-intoxicated man because he saw everything as God.

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He said, You’re making a mistake.

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Don’t make the distinction.

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If you go to the extreme of emanation or tzimtzum, it is ultimately that God is the mind of
everything.

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We are living in God’s mind, and God’s mind is in us.

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And this, according to Wolfson, was the beginning of modern philosophy.

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And so it’s a wonderful trip.

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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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the handmaiden of religion.

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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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how we create and who we are.

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I think it’s wonderful.

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Amazing.

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This is really, really good.

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What a good way to start this year in the Torah.

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00:33:33,754 –> 00:33:36,595
Welcome to Parshat Bereshit everybody.

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00:33:36,795 –> 00:33:39,676
Shabbat Shalom, welcome to Parshat Bereshit.

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And next week we’ll start with Noah.

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See you all there.

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So here’s my question for you.

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Were we just counting angels on the head of a pin today?

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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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I’d love to hear from you.

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Look forward to your comments.

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Thanks.360
00:34:04,250 –> 00:34:05,231
Thanks.