madlik

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week’s Parsha is Ra’eh. Is Judaism really a religion of reward and punishment, or is it something far more profound? A religion about becoming. Join us for Becoming Good. Rabbi, you’re in Eretz Yisrael, in Jerusalem, the holy city of Jerusalem. How are you today or this evening?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:01:50 – 00:02:03]

I’m great. Jerusalem is great. It’s a wonderful— it was a hot day today. today, but a wonderful, cool evening. And we had sushi because what more Jewish food could you have than sushi for dinner? So let’s get down to Becoming Good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:05 – 00:02:20]

Sounds great. The Rabbi and I were davening in the same Beit Knesset, Beit Chaverim, in the holy city of Westport, Connecticut, this last Shabbat. So it’s rare that we’re in the same room, let alone the same shul together. But that was a lot of fun.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:20 – 00:02:21]

That was a treat.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:22 – 00:02:50]

It was. So we’re in Deuteronomy 11:26, and it says, see, this day I set before you blessing and curse. Blessing if you obey the commandments. We’ll get to that in a second because it’s not quite “if”. Of the Eternal your God that I enjoin upon you this day.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:50 – 00:02:51]

Verse 28.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:51 – 00:03:58]

And curse If you do not obey. Here, when it gets to the curse, it says the word we’re expecting to hear. Vahakalalah im lo tishma’u. If you do not obey the commandments of the Eternal, your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin you this day and follow other gods whom you have not experienced. So it’s a big moment. We’re going to end up looking at 2 different mountains. You’re going to be given a choice between good and bad, blessing and curse. But as I said, the word for the blessing is strange. Everett Fox says, the blessing that you hearken to. So he has to add in parentheses, the blessing provided that you hearken to. We are expecting on both sides of the coin this conditional if, but we don’t find it in the Hebrew. It sounds as if asher tishma’u, that you will, keep. It’s very positive leaning, but it’s not what we expect.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:03:59 – 00:04:08]

It’s interesting that Everett Fox wants to add the word “provided” that, because, again, that’s not what you would expect, but that’s not the impression you get from the text itself.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:10 – 00:04:55]

But by putting it in parentheses, at least he lets us read it true to the text. The blessing that you hearken to, it’s just descriptive, not prescriptive, not contingent at all. Rashi says, Et ha bracha al manat asher tishma’u. He is not pulling any punches. He is saying, on condition that you should obey. The translator says that’s— he’s translating asher tishma’u. But I think the translator is not off the mark. Rashi is really trying to explain what it means. But no one seems to focus on the fact that it actually says it when it comes to the Klalah (curse).

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:04:55 – 00:04:55]

Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:57 – 00:05:48]

Shema’u. So now we get to our friend the Ibn Ezra. And the Ibn Ezra says as follows, the blessing, if ye shall hearken. For if you hearken, behold, you are blessed. A blessing means an addition of the good. A curse means a diminution. The word klala, curse, is related to the word kala, light. So he almost sees it as an additive, as a progression. The klalah, the curse, is you’re going to be— there’s going to be mass taken away from you. And on the other hand, a blessing means that you have an addition, a hosafa, if you will.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:05:48 – 00:06:04]

Isn’t it interesting that the Ibn Ezra sees it in mathematical terms, right? That you’ll add or you’ll subtract. And the word Klalah from the word Kala, which means to decrease in number. That’s a fantastic explanation.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:04 – 00:06:52]

I think so. But also the Hebrew is great because it says, ki b’shma’chem, in the listening, hinei atem mevorachim, you are blessed. We heard the sermon in the synagogue we were at this Shabbat talked about how many times, and we’ve talked about this too, the word Shmiyah, the word listening, is mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy But what I love here is, what’s the expression about that? It’s not the proof is in the pudding or the truth is in the eating. The point is, ki b’shmachem, with listening, hinei atem mevorachim, you are blessed. He does try to finesse the fact that it’s not conditional, but it’s actually kind of, it’s organic, if you will.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:06:52 – 00:07:51]

You know, I just want to tell you, based on the sermon that we heard, Sharon asked me a question. She said, shouldn’t the Torah rabbis than focusing on listening, focus on action? Why is listening good enough? Shouldn’t it say, if you do, this is the blessing, with the condition that you shall obey, but not listen, but actually obey? What’s interesting in the translation of Rashi that I just noticed now is that Rashi is sensitive to Sharon’s question because it says, with the condition that you should obey. That’s not what Rashi says. Rashi says, asher tishma’u, with the condition that you should listen. But Rashi doesn’t like that, you should listen, because listen is not enough. Rashi makes it— well, the translation of Rashi makes its own interpretation, which is listening is not enough. Listening is only helpful if it’s the first step towards obeying. That’s great. Sharon’s going to love this.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:52 – 00:09:55]

Okay. And I think maybe some of the material that we’re going to get to later are going to get into this concept of praxis as opposed to doxis, as opposed to listening and belief, this concept of actually doing and the effect that it has. But let’s move on with our wonderful texts. So, of course, this concept that Ibn Ezra is hinting at, and I think that the Hebrew naturally intones this And that is the blessing, goes to— reminds me of Ben Azai in Pirkei Avot 4:2. He says, be quick in performing a minor commandment as in the case of a major one, and flee from transgression. For one commandment leads to another commandment, and transgression leads to another transgression. For the reward for performing a commandment is another commandment. Or in Hebrew, it comes off much better. The reward for performing a mitzvah, a good deed, deed of doing good is to do more good. And the reward for committing a transgression, doing an aveira, is another transgression. That, to me, resonated a little bit. What the Ibn Ezra was saying was that it’s not as though the blessing is external to the activity. It is the activity. And the reward is, again, not external. It is doing more of the same thing. I did note that similar to Ekev, where Rashi starts talking about using your heel to go over minor commandments, we do have this sense of be careful of the small acts. The small acts are like that drop of water in a puddle. They make ripples and they have an effect. But I do believe that this Pirkei Avot, Ben Azai text is relevant. Don’t you think so?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:09:55 – 00:09:57]

Yeah, there’s no question. That’s a great text.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:00 – 00:11:19]

So there’s one more in Pirkei Avot that I was thinking of, and that’s in Pirkei Avot 1:3. It says, Antigonos, a man of Socho, received the tradition from Shimon the Righteous. He used to say, do not be like servants who serve the master in the expectation of receiving a reward. אלא הווי כעבדים ושמשים את הרב שלא על מנת לקבל פרס, but rather be like servants who serve the master without the expectation of receiving an award, and let the heaven be upon you. There is definitely a very strong thread in our tradition, Rabbi, that goes against this whole concept of reward and punishment, and there’s a very strong thread that the reward. is the reward, and the punishment is the punishment. You pick your tale, you make the bed that you sleep in type of thing. But it’s not a quid pro quo. It is what it is. And you shouldn’t be doing these commandments in order to receive that award. And so the reading of our parsha should actually be not im, because im implies unconditioned.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:19 – 00:11:19]

Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:20 – 00:11:35]

If it really should be in asher, that. And that’s where I’m sensing this resonance, both in terms of the interpretation of the verse, but also in the rabbinic tradition.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:35 – 00:12:04]

Yeah, well, that’s interesting about what your reason for fulfilling the commandment should be. Should you have an ulterior motive? We all have ulterior motives, right? We go to work so we can make a lot of money. We go to school so we can be smart. We get married because we want a big family. Everything’s with an ulterior motive. It’s really surprising to say that you should serve God without an ulterior motive. I just want to point out how surprising that is, how out of the ordinary that is.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:04 – 00:12:11]

Maybe the word you’re looking for is radical. Clearly, in the world of religion—

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:12:11 – 00:12:17]

What do you mean, Geoffrey? Disruptive is the word you want. Radical.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:17 – 00:12:48]

We’re all on the same page. Yes, it is absolutely radical. But I think to read it back into our “asher” is the most exciting part. But nonetheless, to recognize, because let’s not fool ourselves, Rabbi, there are plenty of rabbis in the rabbinic tradition that talk about tzchar and onesh, about (reward and) punishment. You know, some of them will say, why do bad things happen to tzaddikim in this world? Because they’re going to get their rewards in the world to come.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:12:48 – 00:12:49]

In the world to come.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:49 – 00:13:27]

And vice versa. There’s plenty of that. But what I was focusing on, whether we call it radical or disruptive, is this very strong sense that for some of them anyway, it wasn’t about brownie points and it wasn’t about getting a frask in panim, a slap on the face. It was doing it for no ulterior motives, as you said a second ago. So let’s go to the Mishnah Torah, Maimonides’ Rules of Repentance 5:4. And this, of course, is very apropos as we start now traversing into the holidays.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:13:27 – 00:13:28]

Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:29 – 00:15:32]

Yes. So he writes, if God would decree for a person to be righteous or wicked, or if something existed in a person’s nature that would pull him in a certain path, or to a certain opinion, or to a certain characteristic, or to certain action, like the stupid astrologers make up. In other words, you’re predestined. predestined, how could God command us through the prophets, do this and don’t do that, improve your ways and do not follow your wickedness, when from the beginning of his creation, it was already decreed for him, or his nature pulls him towards something that he cannot escape? And what place would there be for the entire Torah? Good question. So what Maimonides comes out to say is that virtues we acquire by first having actually practiced them. This is what’s going to resonate with Sharon. It’s about how you act. Just as we do the arts, we learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learned it. For instance, men become builders by building houses, harpers by playing on the harp. Similarly, we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. So this I just quoted from Aristotle, actually. But if I go back to Maimonides, he says, therefore, we judge a person according to his action. If he did good, we will do good by him. And if he did evil, we do poorly by him. As the prophet says in Isaiah, this is from your Malachi, this is your own doing, and they have chosen their own ways. So Maimonides, a true Aristotelian, believes that it is praxa, it is what you do that That basically makes who you are. And I think that is a very, very strong Jewish belief, is it not?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:15:32 – 00:15:54]

It sure is. And again, that requires some analysis that we’re going to do in terms of what’s the relationship between listening and practice. Now, the Rambam is aware of this question, as we’ll see in a minute. The Rambam believes that you can’t do if you don’t first listen. Right. You can’t be a good doer if you’re not a good listener.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:55 – 00:17:26]

Correct. Absolutely. So let’s look at Mishnah Torah in repentance. In 3:4, he says, therefore, a person needs to see himself all year long as if he is half innocent and half guilty, and also see the whole world half innocent and half guilty. If he sins one sin, he has tilted herself and the whole world to the side of guilt and caused its destruction. If he does one mitzvah, he has tilted herself and the whole world to the side of innocence and caused redemption and rescue, as it says. So we talked a second ago about the small little acts, even the small commandments that somehow or other the commentaries seem to be focused on week in and week out. I think it comes from this aspect as well, that if it is actions that aaffect who our character ends up being, then even the smallest action can become a tipping point. And I think that is amazing about this concept of being— how you be is how you will become. And therefore, you have to watch even the small things. I love this concept that the whole world could be on the tipping point. And I am using Sefaria’s translation. And I love the fact that It’s in the feminine. It says herself.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:17:26 – 00:18:18]

Yeah, I hadn’t realized. When you were reading the feminine, I was sure that this was some liberal Connecticut thing. But it turns out that you’re following Sefaria. That’s very funny. Now, let me just say, of course, that this Maimonides is based on a famous mishnah in the Tractate of Sanhedrin that says that’s why human beings were created as one, that everybody comes from Adam. Where everybody comes from Adam and Eve. That if you save the whole— if you save one person, it’s as if you saved the whole world. And if you kill one person, it’s as if you killed the whole world. And if you do one good act, then you save the whole world. Means it’s an amazing thing to think of 8 billion people in the world and then to think about the fact that the world was started by one person. So therefore, we need to take— we need to look at each individual person and each individual act as if they are the entire world.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:18 – 00:18:18]

Yeah.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:18:18 – 00:18:24]

That’s an absolutely remarkable idea.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:24 – 00:19:00]

It is. And again, getting back to this gender issue, if you read the Hebrew, the Hebrew is written gender neutral, which is unbelievable that the person who made the translation picked up on that. Chita echad, one person sins, harei hachuya et atsmo ve’et kol ha’olam. So this is an example of a small little action, how you translate a word, can change generations, can make us look at the Rambam and read him in the Hebrew text all over again. I just love it.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:19:00 – 00:19:07]

Geoffrey, the next Sefaria dinner, we’re going to have to make a point about how that— what they changed with that little translation. That’s fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:08 – 00:20:10]

You got it. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old-school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’nai Mitzvah practicing their laining, capturing Grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad GadYa in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift, and use code MADLIK for 15% off.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:20:11 – 00:20:12]

Thanks.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:12 – 00:23:08]

And now back to our podcast. So anyway, this concept of small little things is brought up again in the Talmud in Yuma, which comes from Yom Kippur. That is the tractate that deals with the high holidays of Yom Kippur. And the sages taught the following with regard to the verse, and do not impurify yourselves with them so that they should not thereby become impurified. A person who impurifies himself a bit, they impurify him greatly. There is, getting back to these small little acts, there is a multiplier effect. You take a little step and the rest of the step is taken for you, with you, supportive of you. If a person purifies himself by his own volition below on earth, they purify him all the more so in heaven. I love this idea that not only is doing a small act of good or bad capable of tipping the scale, but it is also— it’s a trigger, and it’s a trigger for other forces. And all of these concepts These concepts, I believe, and I’m arguing, are concepts that create the velocity and the movement and the progression of doing good without a quid pro quo. It’s this sense of maximizing. It’s the sense of naturally moving a little and it becomes a tipping point, moving a little and it becomes taken to the next power. But of course, Of all the sources that I found today, the one that most surprised me and blew me away was from the Sefer HaChinuch. And the Sefer HaChinuch, I’ve talked about it before, is written by a dad to his son who moved away from home. And basically what he does, he goes through the parshiot, the readings of the week, and he identifies every commandment of the 613 commandments for his son. That’s his lens that he looks at each parsha. So we get to the 16th commandment, which is, do not break a bone for the Passover sacrifice. And the author of the Sefer HaChinuch takes this to mean, again, small little actions have profound effects. He says, it is fitting for us to do acts that show within us the great stature which we achieved at that time. And in the act and reenactment that we do, this thing is placed in souls for eternity. So kind of as the opposite of what maybe Lenin said about to make breakfast, you have to break a few eggs. Here we’re saying is—

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:23:08 – 00:23:10]

Is Lenin the one who made that up?

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:10 – 00:23:14]

I think it was Lenin or Trotsky or one of those guys.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:23:14 – 00:23:19]

That’s pretty funny. Now they call it Elon Musk who says that. Okay, that’s okay.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:19 – 00:25:21]

Good. No, it definitely wasn’t Elon So, so the idea of not breaking the bones, of dealing with this delicately, we’re eating our revolutionary meal called the Paschal Sacrifice. And he says, because the act, a reenactment of what we do, is placed in our souls for eternity. He goes on a few paragraphs later. You must know, he says to his son, that a man is acted upon according to his And his heart and all his thoughts always follow after the actions that he does, whether good or bad. And even he who in his heart is a complete sinner, and all the desires of his heart are only for evil, if his spirit shall be enlightened and he will pull his efforts and actions to persist in Torah and commandments, even if not for the sake of heaven, he shall immediately incline towards good. Good. And from that which is not for its own sake comes that which is for its own sake, for the hearts are drawn after the actions. So this is the answer to Sharon’s question, I believe. But there is no question that this is clearly not a quid pro quo. This is clearly not paying one’s penance to get redemption. There is a natural organic process that happens when we start doing things in the right way. You know, there are people that look at Israel today and they see how open they are to the LGBTQ community. And some people have the audacity to call that pinkwashing. In other words, they’re pretending as if they’re open to the gay community to get their liberal progressive brownie points. And to that, I always respond, maybe the rest of the Muslim and Arab world should pinkwash for a generation or two. Because if they did it for a generation or two, it would be true.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:25:21 – 00:25:22]

Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:22 – 00:25:45]

There’s nothing wrong with aspirationally acting above your class, aspirationally trying to act as though you could be better than you are. And that’s what this is all about. And that’s, I think, what this Asher is. It’s a beautiful Sefer HaChinuch. What can you tell us about him? Had you known this one before? I had never seen this.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:25:45 – 00:26:57]

Yes. So let me just first tell you what you said, of course, is that he wrote it for his son. He lived in northern Spain in the 1200s, and he had a son the way we all have children, and he wanted to make sure that he stayed connected to Judaism. So what he did was he tried to make the parsha something that was interesting to him. And that’s an amazing idea that after the action our hearts will move. For the hearts are drawn after the actions. And that’s what he tells his son. That’s what each generation tells the next generation, that do good things, even if you don’t mean it, do good things because our hearts are drawn after the actions. Sometimes our kids say, I don’t want to do that. I don’t really believe in it. I don’t want to to do it. Don’t do it. Go to shul, study some Torah, study the weekly portion. Watch Madlik every single week. What’s it going to mean? I don’t know. But the Chinuch thought that after the hearts are drawn, the hearts are drawn after the actions.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:57 – 00:28:10]

I just think the way that the text itself is worth visiting. If you’re listening to this and you have access to the Sefaria notes to see this in the original, especially if you’re a Hebrew reader, as the rabbi quoted from it, is just beautiful. And of course, we’re touching upon behavioral psychology, if you will. But what I wanna do is to to now take it into the present in terms of contemporary philosophy of ethics. There is an amazing concept of something called dispositional ethics, dispositional understanding of reality. And to explain that to you, there’s something called conditional. We all know that if Newton taught us, and David Hume, the great empiricist, taught us, you know, if A hits B, then B will follow that force. Everything is conditional. There is a train of thought in philosophy called dispositional. So to put it into the language of our discussion, conditional would say, if you obey, then God will bless you.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:10 – 00:28:10]

Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:11 – 00:28:50]

That’s the im. Dispositional would mean listening is itself the disposition that constitutes and generates blessing. So one of the contemporary, the early contemporary proponents of dispositional thinking was someone called Gilbert Ryle. And he says, to possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state or to undergo a particular change. It is to be bound or likely to be in a particular state or undergo a particular change when a particular condition is realized. You’re ready. You have the potential.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:50 – 00:28:50]

Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:50 – 00:29:44]

To say that glass is brittle is not to describe something presently occurring in the glass. You’ll only know glass is brittle if you break it. But it has that disposition in it. It is to say what it would do under certain conditions. Another one of these thinkers, Brian Ellis, said the essential properties of things are dispositional. So classic science will say as follows. Classic science will say A causes B, so there is an external sequence. A dispositional view is different. Things possess powers, tendency, or dispositions. A seed is disposed toward becoming a tree. A magnet is disposed to attract iron. A knife is disposed to being sharp when our finger touches it.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:29:44 – 00:29:44]

Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:46 – 00:30:09]

sandpaper is rough. It’s only rough in the instance that something smooth is scratched on it. So modern philosophy has increasingly challenged Hume’s thought of the world as a chain of external causes and effects. This kind of reminds you of the Maimonides that he was talking about. Are we born bad or are we born good?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:30:09 – 00:30:09]

That’s funny.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:10 – 00:32:34]

So philosophers from Gilbert Ryle to Elizabeth Anscombe and Brian Ellis have argued that the deepest features of reality are not merely events, but dispositions, virtues, and powers. So that is so similar to some of the texts that we looked at. And the Torah’s grammar in this asher hints at something richer. Blessing is not merely conditional, it is generative. A mitzvah does not simply earn blessing, it creates the kind of person for whom blessing becomes natural. Modern philosophers could call this a dispositional account of reality. Ben Azai said it centuries earlier, schar mitzvah, mitzvah. And I always knew about this dispositional philosophy, but I was reminded of it when I was reading Shai Held’s book about Judaism is about Love. So to give you an example, because we’re talking about hearing, he’s talking about how can you command somebody to love his fellow? V’ahaftah re’acha kamocha. And so he says, notice that we’re not seeing two passages from Maimonides, whereas the first holds that love your neighbor refers to concrete kindness we perform for others. Okay, so Maimonides in that position says you can’t command love, but you command actions of love. The second position of Maimonides maintains that his concern is with what we wish for others. In one place, then, Maimonides seems to belong to the positive action school, but in the other, he appears to belong to the emotional school. Which one is it? asks Shai Held. Does he think love your neighbor refers to emotions or to actions? asks Shai Held. And Shai answers, my sense is that he thinks it refers to both. For Maimonides, love is a disposition, a quality of character, and as such, it is both emotional and actional dimensions. I want only good for my neighbor and I act accordingly. And I think that sums up my read of what asher means. It’s not conditional. It is behavioral. It is dispositional. You create the conditions for doing another mitzvah and for listening to the mitzvot.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:32:36 – 00:33:13]

And actually, you were clearly walking home with us on Shabbat afternoon because that would have answered Sharon’s question. And that’s what it means. Asher tishnu’u vehaya im shamoa. That’s not the end. That’s just creating the situation that will set up the next mitzvah. And once you have the next mitzvah, then skar mitzvah, mitzvah. The reward of doing one mitzvah is performing another mitzvah. This is great. Parashat Re’eh, each one of these weeks, Geoffrey in the dvarim, one is better than the next. And this one is really, really good today.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:13 – 00:33:26]

Well, Shabbat Shalom. Let us all wish that we shall all be disposed to having a Shabbat Shalom and to making of ourselves what we want Shabbat shalom, and we’ll see you next week.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:33:26 – 00:33:29]

Shabbat shalom from Jerusalem. See you next week. Be well.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:33 – 00:33:55]

The Torah’s question isn’t only whether we’re doing the right thing today, it’s whether today’s actions are creating the person we’ll be tomorrow. So here’s my question for you: what is one habit in your life that isn’t just changing what you do, but is changing who you are. I’d love to hear from you.

21
00:01:19.128 –> 00:01:22.846
Sacks. Welcome to Madlik. My

22
00:01:22.846 –> 00:01:26.589
name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark and shed some light

23
00:01:26.830 –> 00:01:30.525
on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we

24
00:01:30.525 –> 00:01:34.107
host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform

25
00:01:34.476 –> 00:01:38.026
and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a

26
00:01:38.026 –> 00:01:41.704
source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show

27
00:01:41.704 –> 00:01:45.495
notes. This week’s parsha is Eikev, and we’ll explore how

28
00:01:45.559 –> 00:01:49.269
the Jewish story is neither a circle nor

29
00:01:49.573 –> 00:01:53.276
a straight line. It is history that rhymes.

30
00:01:53.917 –> 00:01:57.588
Somehow, Rabbi, I feel like we’ve touched on this before, but

31
00:01:57.973 –> 00:02:01.596
I couldn’t resist. It’s a good topic.

32
00:02:01.596 –> 00:02:04.642
I don’t know if we have or we haven’t, but it’s a really good topic. Let’s take it away.

33
00:02:05.427 –> 00:02:08.569
And it’s rare that I stop on the second word of the parsha and go,

34
00:02:08.954 –> 00:02:12.801
“That’s it. That’s what we’re going to talk about.”

35
00:02:12.881 –> 00:02:16.568
The parsha is called Eikev because it usually gets named after one of

36
00:02:16.568 –> 00:02:20.271
the early words in the parsha. And our parsha

37
00:02:20.271 –> 00:02:23.716
begins, “V’haya eikev.”

38
00:02:23.716 –> 00:02:26.937
V’haya has a

39
00:02:27.065 –> 00:02:30.414
sense of future focus, and eikev is

40
00:02:30.446 –> 00:02:34.036
enigmatic. So the Metsudah Publications

41
00:02:34.036 –> 00:02:37.785
translation translates it as follows:

42
00:02:37.978 –> 00:02:41.455
“In the future, as a consequence of your heeding

43
00:02:41.663 –> 00:02:45.429
these laws and your guarding and fulfilling them, Hashem,

44
00:02:45.429 –> 00:02:48.699
your God, will guard for you the covenant and the kindness

45
00:02:49.051 –> 00:02:52.562
that He swore to your forefathers.”

46
00:02:52.562 –> 00:02:56.345
Everett Fox translates it,

47
00:02:56.393 –> 00:02:59.615
“Now it shall be…”

48
00:03:00.080 –> 00:03:03.623
Again, it’s a word that speaks about the future,

49
00:03:03.623 –> 00:03:07.422
because that’s how he translates eikev—

50
00:03:07.694 –> 00:03:10.612
“because of your

51
00:03:11.221 –> 00:03:15.068
hearkening to these regulations by keeping and observing them,

52
00:03:15.068 –> 00:03:18.915
Hashem will keep for you the covenant of loyalty

53
00:03:18.915 –> 00:03:22.560
that He swore to your fathers.”

54
00:03:22.560 –> 00:03:26.399
So if you look at

55
00:03:26.399 –> 00:03:30.161
Targum Yonatan, the Aramaic translation

56
00:03:30.258 –> 00:03:33.523
of the Torah,

57
00:03:33.636 –> 00:03:36.282
it says, “V’haya halaf”—

58
00:03:36.282 –> 00:03:39.461
“in the future,” “as a consequence,”

59
00:03:40.155 –> 00:03:43.839
“in exchange for.”

60
00:03:43.872 –> 00:03:47.307
Rabbi, I think when I sell my chametz,

61
00:03:47.307 –> 00:03:51.056
or when I got married and wanted to transfer the value of my ring,

62
00:03:51.056 –> 00:03:54.540
there’s something called chalifin, is there not?

63
00:03:54.540 –> 00:03:58.297
Yes. That is correct. You learned about that in yeshiva.

64
00:03:58.297 –> 00:04:01.782
It’s an exchange.

65
00:04:02.135 –> 00:04:05.972
You hold up a token or a handkerchief,

66
00:04:06.004 –> 00:04:09.778
and you make a symbolic exchange.

67
00:04:09.778 –> 00:04:13.567
I’ll explain how chalifin works.

68
00:04:13.711 –> 00:04:17.530
It’s an exchange, but not an equal exchange.

69
00:04:17.562 –> 00:04:21.057
You give me your chametz and I give you my pen.

70
00:04:21.570 –> 00:04:25.385
Your chametz could be worth $10,000. The pen is worth fifty cents.

71
00:04:25.497 –> 00:04:29.344
But symbolically it shows that we’re serious,

72
00:04:29.344 –> 00:04:33.111
because we’ve exchanged the pen.

73
00:04:33.111 –> 00:04:36.670
So chalifin means to exchange.

74
00:04:36.718 –> 00:04:40.501
Targum Yonatan therefore understands

75
00:04:40.710 –> 00:04:44.557
the verse as a consequence or exchange for

76
00:04:44.637 –> 00:04:47.971
your heeding these laws.

77
00:04:48.196 –> 00:04:51.996
There really is a sense of quid pro quo,

78
00:04:52.172 –> 00:04:55.939
of causal relationships.

79
00:04:55.939 –> 00:04:59.674
Rashi says…

80
00:05:00.268 –> 00:05:04.019
“If you will hear the heel.” Eikev

81
00:05:04.435 –> 00:05:08.218
also means “heel,” the bottom of your

82
00:05:08.218 –> 00:05:11.986
foot. If even the lighter commandments, which a

83
00:05:11.986 –> 00:05:15.240
person usually treads on with his heels,

84
00:05:15.753 –> 00:05:19.584
which a person is inclined to treat lightly, you will hearken to

85
00:05:19.680 –> 00:05:23.430
them. So now the plot thickens,

86
00:05:23.929 –> 00:05:27.505
because there’s another problem besides the first two words

87
00:05:27.714 –> 00:05:31.165
of this verse. The other problem is

88
00:05:31.504 –> 00:05:35.250
that it says mishpatim. It doesn’t say mishpatim v’chukkim.

89
00:05:35.734 –> 00:05:39.364
So they’re trying to figure out: What is this consequence?

90
00:05:39.574 –> 00:05:42.796
And Rashi goes—you know you have an enigmatic word

91
00:05:43.279 –> 00:05:46.839
when we go out of the lane, so to speak,

92
00:05:47.145 –> 00:05:49.802
and say, “No, no, no. Eikev has nothing to do with quid pro quo or

93
00:05:49.802 –> 00:05:53.263
causal relationships or a

94
00:05:53.407 –> 00:05:57.173
trade. It has to do with a body part—your heel—and

95
00:05:57.253 –> 00:06:01.051
it has to do with, as a consequence of your

96
00:06:01.195 –> 00:06:04.832
keeping even the lowly commandments, which you

97
00:06:04.944 –> 00:06:08.614
might tread upon.” We’re really—I don’t know if you can call

98
00:06:08.630 –> 00:06:12.460
this peshat or midrash—but definitely it’s an inkblot test.

99
00:06:12.572 –> 00:06:16.386
People are coming at it with different theories.

100
00:06:17.844 –> 00:06:21.485
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s so great because it’s the first word.

101
00:06:22.004 –> 00:06:25.756
It’s the word after which the parsha is named. We

102
00:06:25.789 –> 00:06:29.327
have no idea what it means, and that

103
00:06:29.359 –> 00:06:33.166
means it’s going to get fun. So Ibn Ezra

104
00:06:33.166 –> 00:06:36.748
says eikev, “because,” has the same meaning as

105
00:06:37.022 –> 00:06:40.720
eikev, “reward forever.” He brings a

106
00:06:40.850 –> 00:06:44.522
verse from Psalms that says, “Natiti libi

107
00:06:44.733 –> 00:06:48.396
la’asot chukecha le’olam eikev.” I am

108
00:06:48.396 –> 00:06:51.555
resolved to follow Your laws to the

109
00:06:51.764 –> 00:06:55.596
utmost, forever. And in the translation that

110
00:06:55.596 –> 00:06:59.220
Sefaria gives, it’s uncertain. The Hebrew is uncertain.

111
00:06:59.957 –> 00:07:02.876
So now it means

112
00:07:03.886 –> 00:07:07.477
some sort of reward, but kind of a

113
00:07:07.542 –> 00:07:10.652
destiny—a kind of reward

114
00:07:11.230 –> 00:07:15.030
clearly in the future. You know, the Psalm that

115
00:07:15.030 –> 00:07:18.269
he quotes is translated as “the utmost” or “forever.”

116
00:07:18.863 –> 00:07:22.427
Very, very interesting that all of this baggage

117
00:07:23.201 –> 00:07:26.216
or nuance is being piled onto this

118
00:07:27.153 –> 00:07:30.432
one word. It’s fantastic. This is a

119
00:07:30.562 –> 00:07:33.597
fantastic word. So in

120
00:07:33.806 –> 00:07:37.375
Sefaria, you can click on any word and a dictionary comes up.

121
00:07:37.890 –> 00:07:41.217
So in that dictionary, eikev means consequence,

122
00:07:41.762 –> 00:07:45.279
gain, reward, end; as an adverb, as a

123
00:07:45.409 –> 00:07:48.649
consequence, because, consequently. So there clearly is

124
00:07:50.666 –> 00:07:54.305
this causal relationship, this reward

125
00:07:54.513 –> 00:07:57.799
for proper behavior. It’s

126
00:07:57.799 –> 00:08:01.534
future-oriented. When you say a causal relationship, it’s

127
00:08:01.614 –> 00:08:05.205
something that goes from now to the future. Clearly,

128
00:08:05.413 –> 00:08:09.245
there’s a lot in this one word. And now we’re going to

129
00:08:09.277 –> 00:08:12.948
go to a Ramban, Nachmanides, that

130
00:08:13.108 –> 00:08:15.528
I found to be just a

131
00:08:16.795 –> 00:08:20.578
kind of journey through this word, connecting all of

132
00:08:20.578 –> 00:08:23.912
these different meanings that started me thinking:

133
00:08:24.585 –> 00:08:28.321
What is history? What is Jewish history? And I think, as we read through

134
00:08:28.417 –> 00:08:32.248
it, maybe you’ll also have that same feeling. So

135
00:08:32.280 –> 00:08:36.095
Ramban says eikev means “because.” So also,

136
00:08:36.352 –> 00:08:40.119
“Eikev—because of the fact that Abraham hearkened to

137
00:08:40.119 –> 00:08:43.870
My voice.” So he quotes a use of the word

138
00:08:43.982 –> 00:08:47.637
in Genesis with Abraham. Rashi says, “If you will hearken

139
00:08:47.813 –> 00:08:51.564
even to the lighter commandments, which a person usually treads

140
00:08:51.596 –> 00:08:54.882
upon with his heels, those commandments which a

141
00:08:55.107 –> 00:08:58.938
person is inclined to treat lightly, then God will

142
00:08:59.050 –> 00:09:02.705
keep His promise to you.” And the commentators have said that the meaning of the

143
00:09:02.737 –> 00:09:06.184
word eikev is that, in the end, there will be a

144
00:09:06.184 –> 00:09:09.614
reward. So that was kind of like the last, Ibn Ezra.

145
00:09:09.951 –> 00:09:13.125
Similarly, “In keeping the ordinances of God,

146
00:09:13.542 –> 00:09:17.164
eikev rav, there is great reward.” So he

147
00:09:17.228 –> 00:09:21.060
quotes another verse. The verse here is thus stating:

148
00:09:21.476 –> 00:09:25.163
“And the end, the ultimate consequence of your hearkening to the

149
00:09:25.244 –> 00:09:28.535
ordinances and of your observing them, is that God shall keep the

150
00:09:28.615 –> 00:09:32.021
covenant and the mercy, and He will love you.”

151
00:09:32.648 –> 00:09:36.279
So I love this “ultimate consequence.” We are looking at

152
00:09:36.327 –> 00:09:39.766
the arc of history. And so Ramban now says, “This is

153
00:09:39.862 –> 00:09:43.461
correct, for in the sacred language, the beginning of anything is

154
00:09:43.574 –> 00:09:47.253
called rosh, ‘head.'” As it is said, rosh,

155
00:09:47.430 –> 00:09:50.964
the beginning. Rosh Hashanah is now around the corner.

156
00:09:51.270 –> 00:09:54.819
That’s the head of the year. So also, the leader of the

157
00:09:54.819 –> 00:09:58.095
generation is called the head of the people. The head of the

158
00:09:58.095 –> 00:10:01.884
yeshiva is called the Rosh Yeshiva. That was—I

159
00:10:01.884 –> 00:10:05.721
put that in; Ramban did not. Similarly, the

160
00:10:05.721 –> 00:10:09.286
conclusion of any matter is called eikev, “heel,”

161
00:10:09.896 –> 00:10:13.493
as the sacred language adopts these figurative expressions

162
00:10:13.830 –> 00:10:17.443
from the human body. And thus, the head of the people—

163
00:10:17.443 –> 00:10:20.524
That’s very interesting. And the heel is the end,

164
00:10:21.040 –> 00:10:24.842
right? That actually is fantastic, isn’t it? So now

165
00:10:25.954 –> 00:10:29.753
he is linking what Rashi said, which I said was taking

166
00:10:29.868 –> 00:10:33.408
a left turn off the highway. And

167
00:10:33.488 –> 00:10:37.216
Ramban is saying, “No, no, no. There is something there”—that the

168
00:10:37.216 –> 00:10:40.879
heel is a body part that is used for the

169
00:10:41.073 –> 00:10:44.833
end. So we do have this kind of time

170
00:10:45.218 –> 00:10:49.000
element to eikev. Scripture also speaks, says

171
00:10:49.000 –> 00:10:52.751
Ramban, of the head and the tail. Of course, we all know that

172
00:10:52.751 –> 00:10:56.581
from Pirkei Avot. And Onkelos rendered the word

173
00:10:56.678 –> 00:11:00.059
eikev as chalaf, “in exchange for,” like

174
00:11:00.059 –> 00:11:03.553
chalef, “in return for your service.” Onkelos

175
00:11:03.986 –> 00:11:07.785
thus made it an expression of something roundabout—the

176
00:11:08.057 –> 00:11:11.840
end result of a series of events—derived from the

177
00:11:11.840 –> 00:11:15.527
verse, “V’haya he’akov lemishor—the crooked shall be

178
00:11:15.527 –> 00:11:19.359
made straight.” That is, the circuitous road that goes

179
00:11:19.375 –> 00:11:22.886
roundabout will become a straight, level path. So

180
00:11:22.886 –> 00:11:26.396
before we get to that unbelievably profound

181
00:11:26.669 –> 00:11:30.276
verse in Isaiah, because we already mentioned Rosh

182
00:11:30.276 –> 00:11:33.178
Hashanah, now we’re going to have to mention Simchat Torah—

183
00:11:33.402 –> 00:11:37.234
hakafot, when we dance around. So

184
00:11:37.474 –> 00:11:41.033
what our rabbi is taking from chalifin is not

185
00:11:41.033 –> 00:11:44.849
simply an exchange. It’s a circle

186
00:11:44.849 –> 00:11:48.343
through which it flows. Right. It’s a perpetual

187
00:11:48.472 –> 00:11:52.078
exchange. It’s like the—what is one of the

188
00:11:52.078 –> 00:11:55.573
Newtonian laws? That energy is conserved.

189
00:11:55.910 –> 00:11:59.741
The metaphors are just piling

190
00:11:59.997 –> 00:12:03.572
in, each becoming more fascinating than the other. But

191
00:12:03.700 –> 00:12:07.035
yes, let’s get back to the verse in

192
00:12:07.291 –> 00:12:10.754
Isaiah: “The crooked shall be made straight.”

193
00:12:11.475 –> 00:12:14.986
Again, this is a wonderful short story by

194
00:12:15.002 –> 00:12:18.817
Agnon that you all have to read. But basically,

195
00:12:19.234 –> 00:12:22.808
what it’s saying is that, at the end of days, all

196
00:12:23.097 –> 00:12:26.912
these circuitous pathways that we’ve taken, all

197
00:12:27.088 –> 00:12:30.887
these detours that we’ve taken, all these compromises that we

198
00:12:30.887 –> 00:12:34.061
might have made—everything will be straightened out.

199
00:12:34.558 –> 00:12:38.325
Again, Isaiah is talking about the end of days. So

200
00:12:38.325 –> 00:12:41.644
now you can see why I’m reading history, and I’m

201
00:12:41.852 –> 00:12:45.459
reading an insight into Jewish history from here.

202
00:12:45.844 –> 00:12:49.210
Ramban continues. He uses other

203
00:12:49.547 –> 00:12:53.201
metaphors for hakafah, eikev, and being

204
00:12:53.554 –> 00:12:57.353
surrounded. He says, “The verse here is thus stating, according

205
00:12:57.401 –> 00:13:00.832
to Onkelos, ‘And it shall come to pass that the

206
00:13:00.848 –> 00:13:04.615
effect caused by your hearkening to the ordinances

207
00:13:04.615 –> 00:13:08.350
and your performing them will be that God will keep His covenant with

208
00:13:08.446 –> 00:13:12.117
you.'” “He has explained it well,” says Ramban about Onkelos.

209
00:13:12.614 –> 00:13:16.365
A similar expression is biglal, “for the sake of this thing,”

210
00:13:16.541 –> 00:13:20.171
which means “on account of,” from the word v’galelu,

211
00:13:20.573 –> 00:13:24.245
“and they rolled the stone.” If you hear the word gilgal (reincarnation) in

212
00:13:24.342 –> 00:13:28.158
there, you’re not off the mark. And he

213
00:13:28.158 –> 00:13:31.493
says these are expressions of rolling and circling.

214
00:13:31.912 –> 00:13:35.375
Therefore, they called Jacob Yeshurun, from the root

215
00:13:35.375 –> 00:13:38.442
yashar, “straight” and “upright,” because the

216
00:13:38.684 –> 00:13:42.503
opposite of the deceitful one is he who is upright.

217
00:13:42.842 –> 00:13:46.275
So now we’re getting into the moral arc of

218
00:13:46.701 –> 00:13:49.969
history. Right. It’s different. A circle is

219
00:13:50.082 –> 00:13:53.925
different from being upright. You said a circle is more

220
00:13:53.974 –> 00:13:56.769
about this perpetual movement.

221
00:13:57.187 –> 00:14:01.035
Upright is more about there being a direction—and this is

222
00:14:01.228 –> 00:14:04.765
upright. I’ll go one step further.

223
00:14:05.912 –> 00:14:09.379
We started by talking in the introduction about the

224
00:14:09.379 –> 00:14:12.846
Greeks, who thought everything was cyclical. Everything just

225
00:14:12.846 –> 00:14:16.685
repeats itself. And maybe the rationalists, like Descartes and others,

226
00:14:16.781 –> 00:14:19.731
who looked at history and said everything was a straight line.

227
00:14:20.228 –> 00:14:23.899
Here I am going to take a little bit of liberty

228
00:14:23.995 –> 00:14:27.185
with “deceitful” being the opposite of

229
00:14:27.297 –> 00:14:30.263
yashar, in the sense that it’s not straight—

230
00:14:31.144 –> 00:14:34.783
that it wiggles. It goes serpentine, if you will, from

231
00:14:34.831 –> 00:14:38.518
that great movie called The In-Laws. It’s not

232
00:14:38.518 –> 00:14:42.205
direct. It can be deceitful, but it can also

233
00:14:42.205 –> 00:14:46.053
be the ugly truth of the way

234
00:14:46.197 –> 00:14:49.953
we plod through life. And that, I think, is the dichotomy

235
00:14:50.290 –> 00:14:54.045
that Ramban is now adding to the baggage. Similarly,

236
00:14:54.077 –> 00:14:57.912
the end part of the foot is called eikev, as it is said, “And his

237
00:14:57.928 –> 00:15:01.684
hand seized b’eikev, the heel of Esau.” So now we’re bringing it

238
00:15:01.700 –> 00:15:05.519
back home. Jacob grabbed

239
00:15:05.631 –> 00:15:09.419
Esau’s heel, and that’s why he got his name. But his name

240
00:15:09.467 –> 00:15:12.981
is also, in a sense, because he was

241
00:15:13.078 –> 00:15:15.920
deceitful—he bought the birthright, and so forth and so on.

242
00:15:17.012 –> 00:15:20.769
Yeah, I mean, that heel—and Ramban is always well known

243
00:15:20.881 –> 00:15:24.558
for that. What’s the connection between

244
00:15:24.558 –> 00:15:28.107
“V’haya eikev tishme’un,” the beginning of this week’s

245
00:15:28.107 –> 00:15:31.463
Torah portion, and the story of Esau and

246
00:15:31.623 –> 00:15:35.188
Jacob, and holding on to the heel? It’s the same

247
00:15:35.332 –> 00:15:36.681
Torah. It’s the same story.

248
00:15:39.136 –> 00:15:42.053
And now, a word from our sponsor.

249
00:15:42.944 –> 00:15:46.698
If there’s one thing we value at the Madlik podcast, it’s reading texts

250
00:15:47.067 –> 00:15:50.811
and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something

251
00:15:50.924 –> 00:15:54.539
I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your

252
00:15:54.539 –> 00:15:58.341
hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s

253
00:15:58.341 –> 00:16:01.838
inspired by those old-school museum audio guides,

254
00:16:02.354 –> 00:16:05.974
but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to ten

255
00:16:06.087 –> 00:16:09.527
hours of audio across 999

256
00:16:09.963 –> 00:16:13.533
numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a

257
00:16:13.533 –> 00:16:17.038
comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same

258
00:16:17.168 –> 00:16:20.802
number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’nai Mitzvah

259
00:16:20.802 –> 00:16:24.390
practicing their leining, capturing Grandpa’s favorite tune,

260
00:16:24.826 –> 00:16:28.285
or recording Chad Gadya in a voice that matters.

261
00:16:29.125 –> 00:16:31.800
Go to Voice.Gift. That’s

262
00:16:31.882 –> 00:16:33.245
http://www.voice.gift.

263
00:16:36.054 –> 00:16:39.137
And use code MADLIK for 15% off.

264
00:16:40.170 –> 00:16:42.946
Thanks. And now, back to our podcast.

265
00:16:45.004 –> 00:16:48.584
So I’m going to make an argument that all of these

266
00:16:48.777 –> 00:16:52.357
words and concepts are being thrown

267
00:16:52.551 –> 00:16:56.080
into the cholent of Jewish historiography.

268
00:16:56.596 –> 00:17:00.351
In other words, what appears straight can sometimes

269
00:17:00.383 –> 00:17:04.026
be crooked. What appears aimless is going toward some

270
00:17:04.026 –> 00:17:04.291
future.

271
00:17:07.519 –> 00:17:11.223
What seems unintentional is intentional.

272
00:17:11.547 –> 00:17:15.025
He’s bringing a lot into this.

273
00:17:15.446 –> 00:17:18.653
And I do believe, though, that he feels that

274
00:17:18.930 –> 00:17:22.574
eikev, if you look at it even in our verse, is

275
00:17:22.574 –> 00:17:26.365
saying: Because, through better or worse, through thick or

276
00:17:26.365 –> 00:17:30.205
thin, through direct or indirect progress, you have kept those

277
00:17:30.302 –> 00:17:33.732
commandments and have reached this point in history, God will be

278
00:17:34.267 –> 00:17:37.963
loyal to you. Right. So he says, “So

279
00:17:37.995 –> 00:17:41.362
also is the expression, ‘They came upon him ba’akifin,'”

280
00:17:41.667 –> 00:17:45.419
meaning with circuitous and subtle arguments. The word

281
00:17:45.515 –> 00:17:49.331
akeivin—as these two letters, the bet and the peh, were considered

282
00:17:49.379 –> 00:17:52.907
interchangeable. So he’s really bringing it full circle. If you think that the

283
00:17:53.131 –> 00:17:56.563
arc of history has a morality to it, what

284
00:17:56.739 –> 00:18:00.475
ultimately he is, I think, intoning is the fact

285
00:18:00.764 –> 00:18:04.339
that you get to the end. It’s not quite “the ends justify the means,”

286
00:18:04.932 –> 00:18:08.345
but it is the fact that, to get to the end,

287
00:18:08.922 –> 00:18:12.623
it’s not always a straight path. And the straight path might

288
00:18:12.687 –> 00:18:16.227
not get you to the end, but the circuitous route

289
00:18:16.564 –> 00:18:20.281
that is the history of the Jewish people will get you

290
00:18:20.297 –> 00:18:23.710
there. I just find it a totally amazing

291
00:18:24.222 –> 00:18:28.003
Ramban. Well, I’d say—and of course, it’s true—

292
00:18:28.244 –> 00:18:31.945
Ramban lived through a very difficult period in

293
00:18:31.945 –> 00:18:35.601
Spain, when the Jews were challenged.

294
00:18:35.745 –> 00:18:39.197
He participated in a famous disputation with a Christian in

295
00:18:39.214 –> 00:18:42.200
1263. He understood the

296
00:18:42.200 –> 00:18:46.021
circuitousness of Jewish history. And

297
00:18:46.053 –> 00:18:49.602
we’re not going to get into it—we’ve covered it so many times before—but

298
00:18:49.666 –> 00:18:53.375
Ramban is the one who also championed ma’aseh avot

299
00:18:53.375 –> 00:18:56.634
siman la-banim—that what happens to previous

300
00:18:56.634 –> 00:19:00.247
generations gets repeated later.

301
00:19:00.745 –> 00:19:04.084
Rabbi, you and I heard a lecture from Shai Held

302
00:19:04.823 –> 00:19:08.335
this past Erev Pesach, and he said something

303
00:19:08.447 –> 00:19:11.974
from Tehillim (Hallel) that really had my mind spinning. In

304
00:19:11.974 –> 00:19:15.548
Tehillim, we say, “Mah lecha hayam ki tanus, haYarden

305
00:19:15.580 –> 00:19:19.347
tisov le’achor?” What is with you, sea,

306
00:19:19.428 –> 00:19:23.034
that you flee? That means the splitting of the Red Sea. And the Yarden, the

307
00:19:23.115 –> 00:19:26.721
Jordan, turned backward when the Jews were entering the Promised Land.

308
00:19:26.962 –> 00:19:30.713
So even the splitting of the Red Sea was a kind

309
00:19:30.713 –> 00:19:34.304
of prequel to the splitting of the Jordan. So really,

310
00:19:34.656 –> 00:19:38.296
Jewish history does repeat itself. But each

311
00:19:38.409 –> 00:19:41.956
time, it’s a different and unique situation. Yeah, very good. And I

312
00:19:42.100 –> 00:19:45.616
think that’s what he meant by ma’aseh avot siman

313
00:19:45.632 –> 00:19:47.991
la-banim. So, I mean, to give you that

314
00:19:48.120 –> 00:19:51.795
60,000-foot review of history in

315
00:19:51.988 –> 00:19:55.808
terms of what I think the consensus is, the Greeks—especially

316
00:19:55.904 –> 00:19:59.660
Plato, the Stoics, and Polybius—held a cyclical

317
00:19:59.757 –> 00:20:03.593
view of history, while the Hebrew Bible is distinctive in insisting

318
00:20:03.625 –> 00:20:07.445
that history moves forward toward a goal: creation,

319
00:20:07.862 –> 00:20:11.618
covenant, redemption. What is unique about the Torah is not simply

320
00:20:11.650 –> 00:20:15.020
that it combines linear and cyclical time, but that

321
00:20:15.020 –> 00:20:18.679
recurring historical patterns occur within a purposeful

322
00:20:19.256 –> 00:20:22.899
historical journey. And I am going to be

323
00:20:23.027 –> 00:20:26.734
arguing that, in this one Ramban, you kind of find

324
00:20:26.734 –> 00:20:30.345
it all. Yeah, well, that’s why Ramban is so great. You know, he

325
00:20:30.345 –> 00:20:34.100
is kind of a collector of material, but he also

326
00:20:34.100 –> 00:20:37.693
has a strong point of view himself. So

327
00:20:37.965 –> 00:20:41.476
recently I’ve been rediscovering—or discovering—Jonathan Sacks,

328
00:20:41.973 –> 00:20:45.307
because I think that we on Madlik tend to bring in

329
00:20:45.724 –> 00:20:48.898
contemporary thinkers and such, and I think Sacks does as well.

330
00:20:49.330 –> 00:20:52.873
This is what he writes in his introduction to

331
00:20:52.953 –> 00:20:56.560
Covenant and Conversation: Genesis. He says, “According to

332
00:20:56.560 –> 00:21:00.231
many anthropologists and historians, a quite new and

333
00:21:00.327 –> 00:21:04.142
different form of time was born in ancient Israel. Often this is

334
00:21:04.238 –> 00:21:07.733
called linear time. I prefer the phrase covenantal

335
00:21:07.845 –> 00:21:11.692
time. The Hebrew Bible is the first document to see time

336
00:21:11.772 –> 00:21:15.523
as an arena of change. Tomorrow need not be the same as

337
00:21:15.556 –> 00:21:19.178
yesterday. There is nothing given, eternal, and immutable

338
00:21:19.419 –> 00:21:23.202
about the way we construct societies and live our lives together.

339
00:21:23.555 –> 00:21:27.209
Time is not a series of moments traced on the face of a watch,

340
00:21:27.722 –> 00:21:31.345
always moving, yet always the same. Instead, it is a

341
00:21:31.345 –> 00:21:35.113
journey with a starting point and a destination, or a story with a

342
00:21:35.113 –> 00:21:38.691
beginning, middle, and end. Each moment has meaning, which can

343
00:21:38.868 –> 00:21:42.526
only be grasped if we understand where we have come from

344
00:21:42.639 –> 00:21:46.313
and where we are going. This is time, not as in

345
00:21:46.586 –> 00:21:50.341
nature, but as in history.” So

346
00:21:50.822 –> 00:21:54.096
this is a thought very similar to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi:

347
00:21:54.673 –> 00:21:58.107
that the Jews, because they saw time

348
00:21:58.220 –> 00:22:01.798
differently, actually made history differently.

349
00:22:02.296 –> 00:22:05.457
It was a living history. History was a

350
00:22:05.601 –> 00:22:09.389
part of memory and really

351
00:22:09.758 –> 00:22:13.353
a part of our ritual. Another example

352
00:22:14.107 –> 00:22:17.831
that is brought—I saw something by Ismar Schorsch—and he says:

353
00:22:17.943 –> 00:22:21.281
Take mo’ed. Ohel Mo’ed is a Tent of Meeting.

354
00:22:22.051 –> 00:22:25.582
But what he says is that Judaism

355
00:22:25.582 –> 00:22:29.177
replaced nature with history. So mo’adim used to be

356
00:22:29.418 –> 00:22:33.268
agricultural holidays based, in fact,

357
00:22:33.444 –> 00:22:37.018
in nature, in the material world, and Jews

358
00:22:37.210 –> 00:22:40.575
made them into history. So Passover

359
00:22:40.880 –> 00:22:44.629
became the Exodus story. Shavuot, which is the first

360
00:22:44.661 –> 00:22:47.850
grain harvest, became the giving of the Torah. It’s a

361
00:22:47.850 –> 00:22:51.408
fascinating way of looking at how we treat history.

362
00:22:51.616 –> 00:22:55.318
Of course. But it’s history as memory. It doesn’t

363
00:22:55.382 –> 00:22:59.213
matter whether the sea split. That’s not what it’s about.

364
00:22:59.505 –> 00:23:03.068
It’s about the fact that we remember that the sea split.

365
00:23:04.590 –> 00:23:07.719
And as I said in the beginning, we use that as a

366
00:23:07.831 –> 00:23:11.525
paradigm and a lens to understand what’s happening to

367
00:23:11.622 –> 00:23:15.407
us in the present. And it becomes a

368
00:23:15.407 –> 00:23:18.773
part of our present

369
00:23:19.030 –> 00:23:22.841
vocabulary. And I think that’s a little bit of what happens at the Seder, when we

370
00:23:22.841 –> 00:23:26.440
have to say that we must see ourselves as though we

371
00:23:26.554 –> 00:23:29.658
left Egypt. But we are still “we” — So I want to

372
00:23:29.754 –> 00:23:33.184
introduce our listeners to a thinker from the

373
00:23:33.184 –> 00:23:36.647
1700s called Giambattista Vico,

374
00:23:37.048 –> 00:23:40.462
whom I came across through Isaiah Berlin. And

375
00:23:41.119 –> 00:23:44.822
he saw history not as a straight line of progress,

376
00:23:45.127 –> 00:23:48.878
but as a dynamic, spiraling journey. What he called it

377
00:23:48.910 –> 00:23:52.485
was corsi e ricorsi, a dance of

378
00:23:52.517 –> 00:23:55.819
rise and fall, creation and decay. And he

379
00:23:56.444 –> 00:24:00.291
really was unlike the Enlightenment thinkers, who believed

380
00:24:00.436 –> 00:24:03.802
in inevitable progress. Vico thought history

381
00:24:03.802 –> 00:24:07.232
advances through recurring patterns—not circles,

382
00:24:07.585 –> 00:24:10.984
but spirals. And what intrigued

383
00:24:11.753 –> 00:24:15.536
Isaiah Berlin was, first of

384
00:24:15.664 –> 00:24:19.463
all, that every age has its own way

385
00:24:19.752 –> 00:24:23.231
of evolving. You never go back to where you started at the

386
00:24:23.295 –> 00:24:26.901
beginning, even though there is this cycle, and that’s what makes it

387
00:24:27.206 –> 00:24:31.005
a spiral. And then the other thing that

388
00:24:31.294 –> 00:24:34.933
is fascinating—as an aside—he (Vico) said all of this

389
00:24:34.933 –> 00:24:38.058
applies to everybody except the Hebrews. And most

390
00:24:39.004 –> 00:24:42.547
people think that he (Vico) was protecting himself from the Roman Catholic Church.

391
00:24:43.413 –> 00:24:47.115
It was such a radical idea that, of all the people he

392
00:24:47.115 –> 00:24:50.754
spared from history as a spiral, it was the Jews. And

393
00:24:50.770 –> 00:24:54.570
I’m arguing that that’s exactly who he was talking about.

394
00:24:54.666 –> 00:24:58.240
That’s amazing. But anyway, what Isaiah

395
00:24:58.321 –> 00:25:01.126
Berlin loved about it was that it

396
00:25:01.126 –> 00:25:04.059
challenged monism—

397
00:25:04.797 –> 00:25:08.419
the idea that there is only one single objective truth or perfect

398
00:25:08.419 –> 00:25:11.977
system for how human beings should live. Isaiah

399
00:25:12.025 –> 00:25:15.214
Berlin was terrified of monism because he believed it

400
00:25:15.214 –> 00:25:18.965
inevitably led to authoritarianism and utopias

401
00:25:19.077 –> 00:25:22.250
that justify violence. So there’s a little bit of

402
00:25:22.362 –> 00:25:25.776
relativism here, but what it’s saying is that every nation

403
00:25:26.433 –> 00:25:29.863
goes through its own corso e ricorso. In

404
00:25:30.120 –> 00:25:33.710
the case of the Jewish people, we have

405
00:25:34.046 –> 00:25:37.076
Creation, we have Genesis, we have

406
00:25:37.509 –> 00:25:40.843
the Exodus. We take these concepts, these

407
00:25:41.035 –> 00:25:44.690
benchmarks, and we recycle them and recycle them,

408
00:25:45.107 –> 00:25:48.297
and we move forward without leaving them

409
00:25:48.489 –> 00:25:51.792
behind. And he found that to be

410
00:25:52.176 –> 00:25:55.831
extremely insightful. But what I could

411
00:25:55.927 –> 00:25:59.630
not really believe were the

412
00:25:59.630 –> 00:26:02.868
two kinds of theories that Vico had.

413
00:26:03.381 –> 00:26:06.812
One was called the verum factum principle. It says

414
00:26:06.988 –> 00:26:10.258
that humans can truly understand society and history

415
00:26:10.611 –> 00:26:14.266
because we made them ourselves, whereas only God

416
00:26:14.362 –> 00:26:17.199
can fully understand the natural, physical world.

417
00:26:18.049 –> 00:26:21.319
Isaiah Berlin felt that he really was creating

418
00:26:21.351 –> 00:26:25.038
sociology, economics—the human sciences, so to

419
00:26:25.038 –> 00:26:28.693
speak. And what Vico was arguing is

420
00:26:28.725 –> 00:26:32.300
that, through verum factum, we humans

421
00:26:32.572 –> 00:26:36.355
can understand human history better than anything else. Yeah, that’s

422
00:26:36.355 –> 00:26:39.914
right, because we live it and we make it. It is truly

423
00:26:40.091 –> 00:26:43.200
ours. And I think that takes that eikev

424
00:26:43.297 –> 00:26:46.583
concept, where it’s a part of the human body, but

425
00:26:46.663 –> 00:26:50.446
it’s something through which we can truly understand how we

426
00:26:50.446 –> 00:26:54.245
meander through history, taking a left turn and a right turn. The

427
00:26:54.373 –> 00:26:58.221
other thing he argued for was fantasia. Vico argued

428
00:26:58.221 –> 00:27:01.892
that, to understand the past, we cannot use mathematical formulas.

429
00:27:02.228 –> 00:27:05.915
We must use active, empathetic imagination—fantasia—

430
00:27:06.220 –> 00:27:09.810
to enter the minds of past cultures. Berlin saw this as

431
00:27:09.923 –> 00:27:13.642
the true birth of modern social science, cultural

432
00:27:13.754 –> 00:27:17.425
anthropology, and genuine historical sympathy.

433
00:27:18.002 –> 00:27:21.320
It’s just truly amazing. The second thinker that

434
00:27:21.769 –> 00:27:25.440
Berlin loved was Herder, and Herder did talk about the Jews.

435
00:27:25.937 –> 00:27:29.784
Herder was a Lutheran minister and

436
00:27:29.784 –> 00:27:33.503
was German. He argued for the emancipation of the Jews, but he

437
00:27:33.631 –> 00:27:37.478
also argued for the return of the Jews to their promised homeland. Because,

438
00:27:37.478 –> 00:27:40.989
again, he saw that every society does not need to become

439
00:27:41.230 –> 00:27:44.788
universal. It needs to find that which is particular

440
00:27:44.788 –> 00:27:47.962
about it—those prisms,

441
00:27:48.475 –> 00:27:52.130
that mythology—and build upon it. And

442
00:27:52.867 –> 00:27:56.266
language was very important to

443
00:27:56.394 –> 00:28:00.225
Herder. And if we’ve proved anything today by using one

444
00:28:00.321 –> 00:28:03.511
word, eikev, and looking at all the baggage that it has,

445
00:28:03.944 –> 00:28:07.471
we’ve proven the point that different words can trigger

446
00:28:07.471 –> 00:28:10.885
different results. But I think, really,

447
00:28:11.222 –> 00:28:14.684
there is something unique about the Jewish

448
00:28:14.845 –> 00:28:17.890
vantage point on history. And I think it’s

449
00:28:17.890 –> 00:28:21.177
self-fulfilling. It truly is our best

450
00:28:21.177 –> 00:28:24.671
guarantee that, as our verse says,

451
00:28:25.248 –> 00:28:28.807
eikev—because we have remained

452
00:28:28.855 –> 00:28:31.484
loyal to this evolving

453
00:28:32.077 –> 00:28:35.331
historical narrative—we will survive.

454
00:28:35.636 –> 00:28:38.698
Right. God will keep His promise to us.

455
00:28:39.451 –> 00:28:43.074
I just love this insight that humans can

456
00:28:43.202 –> 00:28:46.841
understand history better than anything else because we live it. I

457
00:28:46.841 –> 00:28:50.672
mean, it’s fantastic. I mean, you really end here

458
00:28:50.672 –> 00:28:54.167
with Yerushalmi again. It’s really Yerushalmi’s notion

459
00:28:54.439 –> 00:28:58.094
that history is what you live. It’s not what happens

460
00:28:58.206 –> 00:29:01.957
to you, but how you live it. And it gives

461
00:29:01.957 –> 00:29:05.708
us a whole new, I think, toolkit for when

462
00:29:05.885 –> 00:29:09.427
we study our texts—how we go through that

463
00:29:09.427 –> 00:29:13.034
layered approach of commentary and commentary and commentary. We’re

464
00:29:13.178 –> 00:29:16.801
actually looking at concepts that were

465
00:29:16.930 –> 00:29:20.546
created and meant something in one age, and will mean

466
00:29:20.643 –> 00:29:24.324
something else in another age, and will mean something

467
00:29:24.661 –> 00:29:28.261
still more for our children’s children. And we need

468
00:29:28.293 –> 00:29:32.053
to take the time, as Vico argued and Herder

469
00:29:32.133 –> 00:29:35.975
argued, to understand what it meant in all of those different periods,

470
00:29:36.313 –> 00:29:39.646
to be able to process it,

471
00:29:40.097 –> 00:29:43.881
to be inspired by it, and to be guided by it. And that,

472
00:29:43.897 –> 00:29:46.826
at the end of the day, is this kind of chalifin

473
00:29:46.843 –> 00:29:50.560
and these hakafot and all

474
00:29:50.560 –> 00:29:54.200
of these wonderful words and language that we came

475
00:29:54.200 –> 00:29:57.560
across today. Fantastic. This is really, really

476
00:29:57.560 –> 00:30:01.120
good. We’re ready for Eikev in Westport. We’re ready

477
00:30:01.120 –> 00:30:04.720
for Eikev. We’re ready for Rosh Hashanah, for Simchat Torah. We

478
00:30:04.720 –> 00:30:08.520
can go on vacation. What do you mean? We’re ready to sell

479
00:30:08.520 –> 00:30:12.260
our chametz. Fantastic. Shabbat shalom, everybody. This is

480
00:30:12.260 –> 00:30:14.960
great. I look forward to next week. Shana tovah.

481
00:30:16.299 –> 00:30:18.933
Shabbat shalom. See you all next week.

482
00:30:21.680 –> 00:30:25.153
Here’s a question I invite you to consider: If

483
00:30:25.153 –> 00:30:28.676
history truly does rhyme and is created by people

484
00:30:28.869 –> 00:30:32.445
rather than impersonal forces, what role does each of us

485
00:30:32.558 –> 00:30:36.296
play in writing the next chapter? I’d love to hear from you.

19
00:01:13.332 --> 00:01:17.173
Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik,

20
00:01:17.189 --> 00:01:20.240
we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition.

21
00:01:20.740 --> 00:01:24.248
Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your

22
00:01:24.248 --> 00:01:27.029
favorite podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack.

23
00:01:28.652 --> 00:01:32.394
We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included

24
00:01:32.490 --> 00:01:36.039
in the show notes. This week's Parsha is V'yetchanan.

25
00:01:36.681 --> 00:01:40.197
Join us as we explore the Torah's revolutionary portrait of

26
00:01:40.213 --> 00:01:44.035
flawed leadership and ask what happens when a culture moves

27
00:01:44.051 --> 00:01:47.262
from acknowledging human weakness to celebrating it.

28
00:01:48.001 --> 00:01:51.581
Why does Judaism preserve the failures of its greatest heroes

29
00:01:51.918 --> 00:01:55.593
without ever turning failure into a virtue? And

30
00:01:55.689 --> 00:01:58.799
what might that teach us about leadership, morality,

31
00:01:59.376 --> 00:02:03.111
and ourselves? So another— that was a mouthful. That's another week. That's it.

32
00:02:03.159 --> 00:02:05.724
What a great topic. Here we go. Let's go.

33
00:02:07.022 --> 00:02:10.661
So Va'etchanan means that Moses

34
00:02:10.693 --> 00:02:14.460
was pleading with God in Deuteronomy 3:23. He

35
00:02:14.460 --> 00:02:18.259
pleaded, O my sovereign God, you who let your servants see the first

36
00:02:18.372 --> 00:02:21.882
works of your greatness and your mighty hand, who has

37
00:02:22.058 --> 00:02:25.729
power whose deeds no God in heaven or earth can equal. So he's laying

38
00:02:25.906 --> 00:02:29.682
on the praise. Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good

39
00:02:29.714 --> 00:02:33.490
land on the other side of the Jordan. This is his on-the-mountaintop

40
00:02:33.506 --> 00:02:36.360
moment. That good hill country and the Lebanon.

41
00:02:37.358 --> 00:02:41.159
But God was wrathful with me on your account. Now he's

42
00:02:41.159 --> 00:02:44.928
turning to the children of Israel. It's because of you guys. And would not

43
00:02:44.928 --> 00:02:48.619
listen to me. God said to me, enough. Never speak to

44
00:02:48.619 --> 00:02:50.537
me of this matter again.

45
00:02:51.939 --> 00:02:53.647
It's too much.

46
00:02:57.212 --> 00:03:00.679
Don't speak to me of this matter again. Go up to the

47
00:03:00.679 --> 00:03:04.436
summit of Pisgah and gaze to the west, the north, the

48
00:03:04.436 --> 00:03:07.823
south, the east. Look at it well, for you

49
00:03:07.887 --> 00:03:11.467
shall not go across yonder Jordan. Give

50
00:03:11.563 --> 00:03:15.031
Joshua his instructions, imbue him with strength and courage,

51
00:03:15.416 --> 00:03:19.124
for he shall go across as the head of this people, and he

52
00:03:19.124 --> 00:03:22.865
shall allot to them the land that you may only

53
00:03:22.913 --> 00:03:26.573
see. God definitely rubs it in. You're only

54
00:03:26.573 --> 00:03:30.281
gonna see it. This is as good as it gets. But really, this is a

55
00:03:30.281 --> 00:03:33.058
question of Moses's mortality,

56
00:03:33.571 --> 00:03:37.215
Moses finishing his life's mission,

57
00:03:38.387 --> 00:03:42.159
and Moses confronting the fact that he's not

58
00:03:42.159 --> 00:03:45.947
perfect, that he did something wrong. I mean, you even sense in it he's still

59
00:03:46.011 --> 00:03:49.719
blaming the Jewish people. It's still— he's a little bitter.

60
00:03:50.040 --> 00:03:52.993
It's all there. It's sad.

61
00:03:53.956 --> 00:03:57.038
But on the other hand, We're not taking away,

62
00:03:57.713 --> 00:04:01.422
as we'll see with the rabbis, from the greatness of Moses. But

63
00:04:01.422 --> 00:04:05.179
it is what it is. Right. Well, that's for sure. And you

64
00:04:05.179 --> 00:04:08.888
have to remember that it wasn't the people's fault that he

65
00:04:08.888 --> 00:04:12.259
hit the rock. That was his own decision. So he blames the

66
00:04:12.324 --> 00:04:15.872
people. That's just what frustrated people do, is they blame

67
00:04:16.016 --> 00:04:19.533
others rather than taking responsibility for themselves, on themselves.

68
00:04:19.661 --> 00:04:23.363
So that's not such a good It's not. The

69
00:04:23.363 --> 00:04:27.160
flaws are still there. We are who we are. You know, they say it's

70
00:04:27.160 --> 00:04:31.000
hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I guess that

71
00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:34.348
applies to all of us, even if we are Ein Moshe

72
00:04:34.478 --> 00:04:38.232
Kemoshe. I mean, he was the greatest, but nonetheless. So

73
00:04:38.232 --> 00:04:42.044
in Bamidbar Rabbah, it says, Rav l'chem b'nei Levi,

74
00:04:42.819 --> 00:04:46.615
it's too much for you, the son of Levi. That is a quote from

75
00:04:46.615 --> 00:04:50.083
Numbers. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, you struck with a rod,

76
00:04:50.116 --> 00:04:53.888
and with you struck you are stricken, he

77
00:04:53.888 --> 00:04:57.575
said, it is too much for you. Rav Lachem, tomorrow you will

78
00:04:57.640 --> 00:05:01.343
hear. So again, the Midrash picks up

79
00:05:01.631 --> 00:05:05.174
on this Rav Lachem, it's too much, and it

80
00:05:05.334 --> 00:05:09.117
focuses on 2 instances. One was with

81
00:05:09.261 --> 00:05:12.836
the sons of Levi. This was Korach's rebellion. And

82
00:05:13.413 --> 00:05:16.523
it says, just as Bnei Korach, the Levi,

83
00:05:16.780 --> 00:05:20.466
overreached, you're also overreaching. In Sotah, Rabbi

84
00:05:20.466 --> 00:05:24.057
Levi says, Moses proclaimed to the Jewish people when

85
00:05:24.073 --> 00:05:27.824
rebuking them with the term rav, and therefore it was

86
00:05:27.921 --> 00:05:31.303
proclaimed to him with the term rav that he would not

87
00:05:31.447 --> 00:05:35.230
enter the land of Israel. The Gemara explains he proclaimed with the

88
00:05:35.230 --> 00:05:38.981
term rav when speaking with the congregation of Korach, you take too

89
00:05:38.997 --> 00:05:42.732
much upon yourselves. So it's even interesting

90
00:05:43.165 --> 00:05:46.580
that they're not totally focused on which

91
00:05:46.676 --> 00:05:50.283
crime that Moses committed that

92
00:05:51.084 --> 00:05:54.595
was responsible for him not seeing his

93
00:05:54.771 --> 00:05:58.490
life's mission fulfilled. Was it actually hitting the rock,

94
00:05:59.260 --> 00:06:02.611
or was it the way he talked to the children of Israel? Which is

95
00:06:02.707 --> 00:06:06.298
interesting, right? Means his frustration with the people

96
00:06:06.715 --> 00:06:10.018
may have ultimately been his downfall.

97
00:06:11.381 --> 00:06:15.180
But clearly, I love the fact that it says rav lachem.

98
00:06:16.014 --> 00:06:19.750
Rav, I guess most people would listen to it and say it means rabbi.

99
00:06:20.118 --> 00:06:23.806
But rav is like rov. It means like many. You're

100
00:06:23.806 --> 00:06:26.932
taking too much. Too much, right? Right.

101
00:06:27.958 --> 00:06:31.405
And I would say the word here is overreach. We're

102
00:06:31.405 --> 00:06:35.204
humans at the end of the day, and we can't necessarily— we'll

103
00:06:35.268 --> 00:06:39.083
see Rav Sacks in a second— we can't necessarily fulfill our life's mission.

104
00:06:39.436 --> 00:06:42.850
We can't necessarily do it all ourselves in one generation,

105
00:06:43.427 --> 00:06:47.259
and we are not perfect. So let's focus a little bit

106
00:06:47.435 --> 00:06:51.282
on some of the other rabbinic material. In Devarim Rabbah,

107
00:06:51.298 --> 00:06:54.873
it says, I pleaded with the Lord at that time, saying—

108
00:06:55.226 --> 00:06:58.880
Rabbi Yochanan said, from here you learn that no creature has

109
00:06:59.137 --> 00:07:02.888
any claim on its Creator, as Moses, the master

110
00:07:02.904 --> 00:07:06.078
of all the prophets, came only with an expression of plea.

111
00:07:06.687 --> 00:07:10.182
So he's focused on the word Va'etchanan. And what he's

112
00:07:10.278 --> 00:07:14.029
saying is, this is the real difference between us humans,

113
00:07:14.205 --> 00:07:17.780
even the greatest prophet who ever lived, the greatest leader who

114
00:07:17.892 --> 00:07:21.707
ever lived, we are not gods. And at the end of the day,

115
00:07:22.140 --> 00:07:25.795
we can only get down on our knees, as the case may be,

116
00:07:26.003 --> 00:07:29.754
and plead with God. But I think this is what he's saying, the way

117
00:07:29.771 --> 00:07:32.864
my takeaway is, this is the boundary between

118
00:07:33.121 --> 00:07:36.872
humans, creations of God, and God, him

119
00:07:36.920 --> 00:07:40.655
or herself. Right. There's no question that that's right. Okay,

120
00:07:40.671 --> 00:07:44.198
great. Let's see why. Great Midrash right here. So here's a

121
00:07:44.198 --> 00:07:47.820
fascinating Midrash. So God is figuring out how

122
00:07:47.981 --> 00:07:51.427
is he going to give the bad news to Moses and who's going to

123
00:07:51.555 --> 00:07:54.617
deliver the— who's going to give him the death kiss, so to speak.

124
00:07:55.339 --> 00:07:59.026
And what I found in it, in one of the dialogues, and I'm taking this

125
00:07:59.026 --> 00:08:02.813
just a little moment, is something

126
00:08:02.878 --> 00:08:06.558
fascinating. So I believe it was Shmuel who was

127
00:08:06.833 --> 00:08:10.578
sent; the prophet Samuel. And Samuel says to Moses, I

128
00:08:10.627 --> 00:08:14.244
came to take your soul. He, meaning Moses, said to him, who sent you?

129
00:08:14.646 --> 00:08:18.438
He said to him, the one who created all creations. He said to him, meaning

130
00:08:18.502 --> 00:08:22.203
Moses said to Samuel, you will not take my soul. He said to him,

131
00:08:22.348 --> 00:08:26.188
anyone who comes into the world, their souls are given to me. Moses

132
00:08:26.188 --> 00:08:29.899
said to him, I have greater strength than anyone

133
00:08:29.948 --> 00:08:33.494
else who comes into the world. Wow. He said to him, what is your

134
00:08:33.494 --> 00:08:37.149
strength? He said to him, and this could have been

135
00:08:37.662 --> 00:08:40.916
the myth of Moses, and that's why I'm quoting it.

136
00:08:41.413 --> 00:08:44.747
Moses says, I am the son of Amram. I

137
00:08:44.795 --> 00:08:48.402
emerged circumcised from my mother's womb.

138
00:08:48.722 --> 00:08:51.977
There was no need to circumcise me. So if getting

139
00:08:52.025 --> 00:08:55.599
circumcised is kind of a fix, fixing the mold,

140
00:08:55.776 --> 00:08:58.902
Moses says, I was born pure, complete.

141
00:08:59.607 --> 00:09:03.037
On the day that I was born, I was able to speak. I walked on

142
00:09:03.053 --> 00:09:06.660
my feet. I spoke with my father and my mother, and I did not

143
00:09:06.740 --> 00:09:10.588
even suck milk. This almost sounds like a typical

144
00:09:10.684 --> 00:09:14.403
Near Eastern myth of a deity being born,

145
00:09:14.691 --> 00:09:18.138
a perfect human being. When I was 3 months old, I

146
00:09:18.138 --> 00:09:21.504
prophesied, said Moses, and said that I was destined to

147
00:09:21.504 --> 00:09:25.143
receive the Torah from fiery flames. When

148
00:09:25.496 --> 00:09:29.118
I was walking outside, I entered the king's palace. He goes

149
00:09:29.343 --> 00:09:33.126
on and on and talks about everything that he did. I received the

150
00:09:33.126 --> 00:09:36.653
Torah from the right hand of the Holy One, blessed be he. I taught it to

151
00:09:36.797 --> 00:09:40.630
Israel. He says, I caused the sun and the moon

152
00:09:40.662 --> 00:09:44.029
to stand still in the heights, and I struck with the staff in my hand

153
00:09:44.029 --> 00:09:47.413
and I killed them. Who is there among those who come

154
00:09:47.621 --> 00:09:51.165
into the world who can do that? So if you want to talk

155
00:09:51.165 --> 00:09:54.853
about a flawed personality, in this particular

156
00:09:54.853 --> 00:09:58.589
Midrash where Moses is addressing Samuel, he's saying,

157
00:09:58.926 --> 00:10:02.550
I'm not that guy. I was as close to perfection as you

158
00:10:02.694 --> 00:10:05.841
get. Go from here, wicked one. You must not say that.

159
00:10:06.724 --> 00:10:10.096
Go flee from me. I will not give my soul to you. And so what

160
00:10:10.096 --> 00:10:13.387
was the takeaway? That God himself had to come

161
00:10:13.692 --> 00:10:17.401
and take Moses away, which on the one hand is a

162
00:10:17.401 --> 00:10:21.239
great honor, the kiss of death, so to speak. But

163
00:10:21.239 --> 00:10:24.900
on the other hand, you have this vignette and you realize how

164
00:10:25.028 --> 00:10:28.625
this story could have gone. And it makes, I think,

165
00:10:28.947 --> 00:10:31.843
The absolute unanimity

166
00:10:32.183 --> 00:10:35.775
amongst our commentators, and I would say

167
00:10:36.471 --> 00:10:40.021
the legend of the street, that we look at our

168
00:10:40.021 --> 00:10:43.643
most famous, our most quote-unquote perfect

169
00:10:43.643 --> 00:10:47.248
leader, and we find the imperfections. We don't shun away

170
00:10:47.329 --> 00:10:50.958
from them. We don't varnish it. It is what it is, and

171
00:10:50.958 --> 00:10:53.668
it makes it that much more profound, I believe.

172
00:10:54.492 --> 00:10:57.653
Fantastic. I mean, that's it. To recognize their

173
00:10:58.166 --> 00:11:01.599
failings is to appreciate them as human leaders.

174
00:11:02.818 --> 00:11:06.540
So Jonathan Sacks wrote a book on leadership. I have a link to

175
00:11:06.540 --> 00:11:10.198
an article that he wrote. He goes, for us as Jews, and by the way,

176
00:11:10.278 --> 00:11:13.760
I quote Jonathan Sacks, but I think you will agree with me, Adam,

177
00:11:14.049 --> 00:11:17.353
that there is kind of unanimity about the

178
00:11:17.353 --> 00:11:21.108
failure of our leaders. There is no one who takes the

179
00:11:21.108 --> 00:11:24.910
crash course from you to becoming a Jew,

180
00:11:25.359 --> 00:11:29.194
who probably doesn't hear from you to explain that, unlike maybe other

181
00:11:29.226 --> 00:11:33.061
religions whose founders or leaders

182
00:11:33.061 --> 00:11:36.430
are perfect, we do not shellac, we do not

183
00:11:36.430 --> 00:11:39.960
varnish our leaders. So that's a very important

184
00:11:39.960 --> 00:11:43.377
point about the need to have your leaders be

185
00:11:43.410 --> 00:11:47.148
perfect. You say, like, Christianity has that.

186
00:11:47.517 --> 00:11:50.967
The leader needs to be perfect. Judaism never had it.

187
00:11:51.529 --> 00:11:55.302
Recently, obviously, the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox,

188
00:11:55.687 --> 00:11:58.352
are in the headlines. The

189
00:11:58.817 --> 00:12:02.397
ultra-Orthodox tend to deify

190
00:12:03.071 --> 00:12:06.892
their leaders. They follow their leaders.

191
00:12:07.004 --> 00:12:10.712
They don't ask any questions. Whatever the leader says, that's

192
00:12:10.777 --> 00:12:14.485
what they do. The leader cannot be wrong. We know

193
00:12:14.565 --> 00:12:18.337
that Hasidic sects are like that. And I think, Geoffrey, it's a

194
00:12:18.418 --> 00:12:21.997
very important point to say that that's not really

195
00:12:22.173 --> 00:12:25.431
the Jewish way. That's a much more

196
00:12:25.720 --> 00:12:29.363
modern phenomenon because they feel as if they were

197
00:12:29.973 --> 00:12:32.990
being attacked by secular culture. So they

198
00:12:33.103 --> 00:12:36.714
need to fall into themselves and make their

199
00:12:36.714 --> 00:12:40.485
leaders perfect. But I think that's a critical point,

200
00:12:40.710 --> 00:12:44.305
especially now, to keep in mind about what's happened

201
00:12:44.514 --> 00:12:48.254
in certain sectors of Judaism. I love it. You heard it first here

202
00:12:48.417 --> 00:12:50.961
on Madlik from Rabbi Adam Mintz himself.

203
00:12:53.250 --> 00:12:56.099
And now a word from our sponsor.

204
00:12:56.984 --> 00:13:00.832
If there's one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it's reading texts

205
00:13:01.234 --> 00:13:04.838
and talking about them. That's why I'm excited to share something

206
00:13:05.015 --> 00:13:08.632
I created called VoiceGiftt PLAY. It fits in the palm of your

207
00:13:08.632 --> 00:13:12.444
hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It's

208
00:13:12.444 --> 00:13:15.909
inspired by those old-school museum audio guides,

209
00:13:16.375 --> 00:13:20.129
but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10

210
00:13:20.129 --> 00:13:23.643
hours of audio across 999

211
00:13:23.996 --> 00:13:27.670
numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a

212
00:13:27.670 --> 00:13:31.167
comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same

213
00:13:31.296 --> 00:13:34.906
number to play it back. It's perfect for B'nai Mitzvah

214
00:13:34.906 --> 00:13:38.467
practicing their layning, capturing Grandpa's favorite tune,

215
00:13:38.981 --> 00:13:42.344
or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters.

216
00:13:43.167 --> 00:13:45.992
Go to voice.gift, that's

217
00:13:45.992 --> 00:13:49.865
www.voice.gift,

218
00:13:50.123 --> 00:13:53.257
and use code MADLIK for 15% off.

219
00:13:54.243 --> 00:13:57.005
Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

220
00:14:00.022 --> 00:14:03.318
So now we continue with Jonathan Sacks and his

221
00:14:03.577 --> 00:14:07.035
rendering of this, but it's not unique. For us as Jews,

222
00:14:07.067 --> 00:14:10.382
humanity at its highest is still human. We are mortal. We are creatures

223
00:14:12.582 --> 00:14:16.268
Of flesh and blood. We are born, we grow, we learn, we mature,

224
00:14:16.509 --> 00:14:20.036
we make our way in the world. If we are lucky, we

225
00:14:20.100 --> 00:14:23.803
find love. If we are blessed, we have children. but we

226
00:14:23.947 --> 00:14:27.618
also age. The body grows old, even if the spirit stays

227
00:14:27.794 --> 00:14:31.401
young. We know that this gift of life does not last forever,

228
00:14:31.673 --> 00:14:35.408
because in this physical universe, nothing lasts forever, not

229
00:14:35.489 --> 00:14:38.999
even planets or stars. Now he's focused on the mortality

230
00:14:39.095 --> 00:14:42.943
aspect of what's going on in Moses's mind. For each of

231
00:14:42.943 --> 00:14:46.485
us, therefore, there is a a river we will not cross,

232
00:14:46.805 --> 00:14:49.994
a promised land we will not enter, and a

233
00:14:49.994 --> 00:14:53.776
destination we will not reach. Even the greatest

234
00:14:53.776 --> 00:14:57.622
life is an unfinished symphony. Moses's death on the

235
00:14:57.622 --> 00:15:01.356
far side of the Jordan is a consolation for all of us.

236
00:15:01.852 --> 00:15:05.394
None of us should feel guilty or frustrated or angry or

237
00:15:05.394 --> 00:15:08.984
defeated that there are things we hope to achieve

238
00:15:09.240 --> 00:15:12.526
but did not. This is what it is to be

239
00:15:12.526 --> 00:15:16.277
human. Okay, so now he has the second thing. It's you can't

240
00:15:16.293 --> 00:15:20.060
finish it all in your one generation. Nor should we

241
00:15:20.060 --> 00:15:23.506
be haunted by our mistakes. That, I believe,

242
00:15:23.827 --> 00:15:27.498
is why the Torah tells us that Moses sinned. Did it

243
00:15:27.498 --> 00:15:31.201
really have to include the episode of the water, the stick, the rock, and

244
00:15:31.201 --> 00:15:34.920
Moses's anger? It happened. But did the Torah have to

245
00:15:34.952 --> 00:15:38.783
tell us it happened? It passes over 38 of

246
00:15:38.799 --> 00:15:42.470
the 40 years in the wilderness in silence. It does

247
00:15:42.566 --> 00:15:45.914
not report every incident, only those that

248
00:15:45.931 --> 00:15:49.503
have lessons for posterity. Why

249
00:15:49.567 --> 00:15:53.284
not then pass over this too in silence, sparing

250
00:15:53.877 --> 00:15:57.530
Moses's good name? What other religious literature

251
00:15:57.626 --> 00:16:00.846
has ever been so candid about the

252
00:16:00.846 --> 00:16:04.611
failings of even the greatest of its heroes? That's, by

253
00:16:04.611 --> 00:16:07.976
the way, a good question. I mean, you'll never hear the traditional

254
00:16:07.976 --> 00:16:11.645
commentators ask that question, because if the Torah has it, the Torah

255
00:16:11.645 --> 00:16:15.287
wants to have it. But that's his question. And that is, why

256
00:16:15.512 --> 00:16:18.754
bother? What do you need to hear about Moses's failings for?

257
00:16:19.204 --> 00:16:22.864
Wouldn't it be a better picture of Moses not to have those

258
00:16:22.976 --> 00:16:26.588
failings? Even the greatest human being made mistakes,

259
00:16:26.652 --> 00:16:30.280
failed as often as they succeeded, and had moments of black

260
00:16:30.280 --> 00:16:34.052
despair. What made them great was not that they

261
00:16:34.132 --> 00:16:37.872
were perfect, but that they kept going. They learned from every error,

262
00:16:37.888 --> 00:16:41.388
refused to give up hope, and eventually accepted the great gift that

263
00:16:41.580 --> 00:16:45.366
only failure can grant. Namely humility. They understood

264
00:16:45.366 --> 00:16:48.764
that life is about falling 100 times and getting up again.

265
00:16:49.277 --> 00:16:53.044
It is about never losing your ideals, even when you know how hard

266
00:16:53.044 --> 00:16:56.715
it is to change the world. It's about getting up every morning and walking

267
00:16:56.971 --> 00:17:00.771
one more day toward the promised land, even though you know you may

268
00:17:00.771 --> 00:17:04.425
never get there, but knowing also that you helped

269
00:17:04.522 --> 00:17:08.161
others get there. I think about what's going on in

270
00:17:08.433 --> 00:17:12.280
this moment, but again, I want to focus on today's

271
00:17:12.280 --> 00:17:15.518
episode less on the mortality aspect, which is

272
00:17:15.727 --> 00:17:19.536
critical, less on the intergenerational aspect, which

273
00:17:19.536 --> 00:17:22.910
is you can't do it all. We all need to create our own Joshua,

274
00:17:23.360 --> 00:17:26.684
but focus on the flawed part of it, that there is a

275
00:17:26.684 --> 00:17:30.128
profound Jewish benchmark lesson

276
00:17:30.403 --> 00:17:33.960
that we learn. If we— you asked, why does it have to

277
00:17:34.009 --> 00:17:37.577
mention it? And by the way, the Abarbanel asks the same thing. It's

278
00:17:37.577 --> 00:17:41.306
because the lesson is too important to miss, that even if it

279
00:17:41.306 --> 00:17:44.967
detracts a little bit from Moses' kavod, the lesson takes precedence. Right.

280
00:17:47.306 --> 00:17:51.153
Which is remarkable. Let's say it. That's remarkable. And you

281
00:17:51.169 --> 00:17:54.936
notice that Rabbi Sacks, that Jonathan Sacks, wrote this in a dvar

282
00:17:54.936 --> 00:17:58.688
Torah for Vezot HaBerachah, which is about the mortality of

283
00:17:58.704 --> 00:18:02.535
Moses, the fact that he died. So you understand why he's focusing on

284
00:18:02.551 --> 00:18:06.061
mortality, even though we're interested in something else. Yeah.

285
00:18:06.382 --> 00:18:10.053
And I'll just add, Nahum Sarna is another one. In his book on

286
00:18:10.470 --> 00:18:13.836
Genesis, he talks about Abraham and Isaac and all their

287
00:18:13.836 --> 00:18:17.427
failures, passing their wives off as sisters

288
00:18:17.539 --> 00:18:21.387
and all of that. Really does say that if you compare this to

289
00:18:21.692 --> 00:18:25.396
other mythologies in the ancient Near East,

290
00:18:26.182 --> 00:18:29.935
it is striking how different it is. This was

291
00:18:29.983 --> 00:18:33.655
something that was very unique. But now I want to talk about the

292
00:18:33.671 --> 00:18:37.183
flawed part, because the argument that I'm going to

293
00:18:37.183 --> 00:18:40.535
take today is that it's a very nuanced

294
00:18:40.535 --> 00:18:43.405
argument, and there's a big difference between

295
00:18:43.678 --> 00:18:47.526
recognizing failure in our leaders and

296
00:18:47.830 --> 00:18:51.261
idealizing failures. There's a difference between

297
00:18:51.357 --> 00:18:54.883
saying that our leaders have flaws and

298
00:18:54.980 --> 00:18:58.715
saying that a flaw is their ultimate credential.

299
00:18:59.292 --> 00:19:02.754
And I think I want to do is compare it to the Sermon on the

300
00:19:02.754 --> 00:19:06.457
Mount, and not necessarily the pashat of the Sermon on the

301
00:19:06.457 --> 00:19:10.256
Mount, but certainly a way that it has been taken

302
00:19:10.673 --> 00:19:14.456
or mis-taken. So let's just read the Sermon on the Mount a little bit.

303
00:19:15.162 --> 00:19:18.846
And of course, Jesus goes up onto the mountain. And he says what they call

304
00:19:18.879 --> 00:19:22.694
the Beatitudes. It's really, blessed are the poor in spirit.

305
00:19:22.920 --> 00:19:26.167
Think of blessed as ashrei. Ashrei ha'ish shelo yish

306
00:19:26.232 --> 00:19:29.927
gachecha. So happy are those who are poor

307
00:19:30.331 --> 00:19:34.091
in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed

308
00:19:34.123 --> 00:19:37.804
are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the

309
00:19:37.804 --> 00:19:41.435
meek, for they will inherit the land. So

310
00:19:41.515 --> 00:19:45.326
it's almost as though, Rabbi, you could take it to mean that the

311
00:19:45.326 --> 00:19:46.978
poor in spirit are going to go to the head of the line. Yes.

312
00:19:49.708 --> 00:19:53.500
Those who mourn will go again ahead of those who

313
00:19:53.500 --> 00:19:57.276
simply are living a normal life. And those that

314
00:19:57.340 --> 00:20:00.519
are meek, they will be the ones. They become

315
00:20:00.729 --> 00:20:04.240
almost the ideal. Blessed are those who hunger and

316
00:20:04.304 --> 00:20:08.025
thirst for righteousness. Now, I must say that if you ask the

317
00:20:08.025 --> 00:20:11.777
typical man on the street, they're going to forget about poor

318
00:20:11.988 --> 00:20:15.643
in spirit and think it's poor. They will think less about

319
00:20:15.707 --> 00:20:18.961
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and think of those who are hunger—hungry,

320
00:20:18.978 --> 00:20:22.723
right? Right. Blessed are those

321
00:20:22.819 --> 00:20:26.490
who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is

322
00:20:26.522 --> 00:20:30.033
the kingdom of heaven. Again, the argument that I will be

323
00:20:30.049 --> 00:20:33.864
making is there are those who believe that something like this is

324
00:20:33.896 --> 00:20:37.599
teaching us that if you're persecuted, by right you

325
00:20:37.824 --> 00:20:41.286
must be better. You must— it's almost a

326
00:20:41.430 --> 00:20:44.749
badge of entitlement, if you will.

327
00:20:45.678 --> 00:20:49.478
And now what we're going to see is how

328
00:20:49.750 --> 00:20:53.469
this has been interpreted, because I think the first

329
00:20:53.533 --> 00:20:57.188
thing that we have to understand is in one aspect, it comes

330
00:20:57.220 --> 00:21:00.779
right out of Judaism, and it's really a nuance. So if you

331
00:21:00.971 --> 00:21:04.722
look at Isaiah 61, the Spirit of God is upon

332
00:21:04.754 --> 00:21:08.233
me because God has anointed me. He says, I have been

333
00:21:08.345 --> 00:21:11.615
sent as a herald of joy to the humble,

334
00:21:12.112 --> 00:21:15.142
levasar anavim shalchini,

335
00:21:16.040 --> 00:21:19.759
to bind up the wounded of the heart, to proclaim release of

336
00:21:19.807 --> 00:21:23.141
the captives. But as a Jew reading this, you know what

337
00:21:23.894 --> 00:21:27.677
it means. If you find somebody poor, make him less poor. If you

338
00:21:27.742 --> 00:21:31.284
find somebody who's captured, release him. It doesn't

339
00:21:31.348 --> 00:21:35.019
mean to say when it says that I am celebrating these

340
00:21:35.115 --> 00:21:38.450
people that they have more inherent worth. In

341
00:21:38.498 --> 00:21:42.073
Isaiah 61:1-3, it says,

342
00:21:42.810 --> 00:21:46.577
I have been sent as a herald of joy to the humble, to bind up

343
00:21:46.577 --> 00:21:49.895
the wounded of the heart, to proclaim release to the captives, to

344
00:21:50.023 --> 00:21:53.358
comfort all who mourn, to give them a turban

345
00:21:53.566 --> 00:21:57.228
instead of ashes, the festive anointment instead of mourning,

346
00:21:57.665 --> 00:22:01.400
a garment of splendor instead of a drooping spirit. They

347
00:22:01.562 --> 00:22:04.909
shall be called oaks of victory. You could

348
00:22:05.087 --> 00:22:08.885
really interpret this as saying that they go to the head of the

349
00:22:08.885 --> 00:22:12.469
line. But as a Jew, when we read it, we know what it means.

350
00:22:12.807 --> 00:22:16.101
It's to pick them up and bring them into the

351
00:22:16.101 --> 00:22:19.829
community, to give them the same tabernacle of victory

352
00:22:20.279 --> 00:22:24.087
that all of us are entitled to. But it is a nuance, Rabbi.

353
00:22:24.135 --> 00:22:27.373
Yes. Now, this is obviously, you know,

354
00:22:28.692 --> 00:22:31.957
that the Sermon on the Mount is based on these

355
00:22:32.134 --> 00:22:35.945
verses in Isaiah. It's not that it just happens to be

356
00:22:35.945 --> 00:22:39.786
similar. What they did is they took the verses in Isaiah

357
00:22:40.171 --> 00:22:43.676
and they reformulated them as the

358
00:22:43.886 --> 00:22:47.332
fundamental principles, tenets of

359
00:22:47.429 --> 00:22:51.069
Christianity. So the point that you're making isn't

360
00:22:51.069 --> 00:22:54.645
just an interesting point. Yeah. It actually is the difference

361
00:22:54.645 --> 00:22:58.380
between Judaism and Christianity back to the origins of

362
00:22:58.477 --> 00:23:02.067
Christianity. And exactly. And

363
00:23:02.163 --> 00:23:05.674
if in fact the reading of those who

364
00:23:05.770 --> 00:23:08.688
argue that the Sermon on the Mount is the

365
00:23:08.688 --> 00:23:12.487
celebration and the idealization of those

366
00:23:12.519 --> 00:23:16.206
who are today's, who are suffering, shall today

367
00:23:16.446 --> 00:23:20.149
be the leaders. It comes from a change, a

368
00:23:20.149 --> 00:23:23.387
slight change of, I would say, emphasis. So in

369
00:23:23.484 --> 00:23:26.941
Psalms it says, but the lowly shall inherit the land.

370
00:23:30.058 --> 00:23:32.912
You and I would read this and we would say they get a plot of

371
00:23:32.912 --> 00:23:36.636
land along with everybody else. It doesn't mean that they will

372
00:23:36.845 --> 00:23:40.612
inherit the land as opposed to everybody else. Correct.

373
00:23:40.950 --> 00:23:44.597
It's so fascinating because you're right, Jesus was speaking

374
00:23:44.790 --> 00:23:47.811
to fellow Jews, and whether he made this

375
00:23:48.390 --> 00:23:51.822
paradigm shift or it was made— it's what they

376
00:23:51.822 --> 00:23:54.424
heard, there's no question that there was this shift

377
00:23:54.424 --> 00:23:57.964
in the Hebrew Bible, the poor are

378
00:23:57.964 --> 00:24:01.732
blessed because God hears their cry and society must

379
00:24:01.732 --> 00:24:05.306
restore them, not because deprivation itself is

380
00:24:05.402 --> 00:24:09.105
inherently superior. The goal of the Exodus is not

381
00:24:09.105 --> 00:24:12.359
permanent marginality. It's freedom, land,

382
00:24:12.472 --> 00:24:16.239
abundance, national flourishes. If you read the

383
00:24:16.239 --> 00:24:19.797
Bible, there are 2 things that I want to bring out. Number one, in

384
00:24:19.862 --> 00:24:23.581
Devarim, the book that we're in, it says, there shall be no needy among

385
00:24:23.677 --> 00:24:27.396
you. And then a few verses later, it says, for there will never

386
00:24:27.396 --> 00:24:31.195
cease to be needy ones in your land. And that's not a contradiction.

387
00:24:31.628 --> 00:24:35.363
It just means that the obligation is on us to

388
00:24:35.363 --> 00:24:39.162
make sure that those who fall through the cracks are pulled up and

389
00:24:39.242 --> 00:24:42.288
brought with us. It wasn't a

390
00:24:42.288 --> 00:24:45.863
transformation. And then the other thing

391
00:24:45.975 --> 00:24:49.822
is the Bible celebrates success. The

392
00:24:49.982 --> 00:24:53.733
Bible celebrates prosperity. It never

393
00:24:53.894 --> 00:24:57.693
idealizes poverty. So in Deuteronomy 8:10, it

394
00:24:57.693 --> 00:24:59.632
says, when you have eaten your fill,

395
00:25:01.659 --> 00:25:05.448
Give thanks to the Eternal your God for the good land given to you. You

396
00:25:05.448 --> 00:25:09.284
have to be thankful for the good. You never put it down. When you have

397
00:25:09.284 --> 00:25:12.730
eaten your fill and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and

398
00:25:12.730 --> 00:25:16.578
flocks have multiplied, it says in Deuteronomy 8, and your silver

399
00:25:16.610 --> 00:25:20.319
and gold have increased and everything you own has prospered. It doesn't say

400
00:25:20.400 --> 00:25:24.244
give it away. It doesn't say it's going to blind you. It says,

401
00:25:24.761 --> 00:25:26.796
beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God. That's right.

402
00:25:26.940 --> 00:25:30.482
forget God who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.

403
00:25:30.819 --> 00:25:34.506
Beware that you don't look and appreciate

404
00:25:34.506 --> 00:25:38.161
those people who don't have it as good as you. It's really

405
00:25:38.257 --> 00:25:42.008
a nuance of a change, but it is connected to this thing of

406
00:25:42.040 --> 00:25:45.695
flaws. Flaws are important. They will always exist, and they

407
00:25:45.791 --> 00:25:49.478
are there for us to learn from, as Rabbi Sacks says, and

408
00:25:49.510 --> 00:25:53.261
it's there for us to tweak and fix, not

409
00:25:53.261 --> 00:25:56.756
disappear. But they are never there for us to

410
00:25:56.932 --> 00:26:00.717
absolutely laud. what I am going to share

411
00:26:00.717 --> 00:26:04.214
with you is an amazing scholar that I discovered this

412
00:26:04.471 --> 00:26:07.872
week named David Flusser. He was an

413
00:26:08.001 --> 00:26:11.290
immigrant from Czechoslovakia.

414
00:26:11.867 --> 00:26:15.445
He studied at Charles University. He was taken

415
00:26:15.621 --> 00:26:19.199
under the wing of a professor. He was fascinated in religion

416
00:26:19.488 --> 00:26:23.306
and a professor of Christianity, and he fell in love with Christianity.

417
00:26:23.643 --> 00:26:27.189
He comes to Israel, he makes Aliyah, and he actually

418
00:26:27.189 --> 00:26:30.924
becomes an Orthodox Jew, and he's teaching at the Hebrew University.

419
00:26:31.069 --> 00:26:34.511
And one of his main motivations in life

420
00:26:35.012 --> 00:26:38.819
is to show that Jesus was like Hillel in a sense. He was a

421
00:26:38.819 --> 00:26:42.519
great leader. He was a great thought leader. And so he

422
00:26:42.600 --> 00:26:46.274
connects what Jesus says to strands within

423
00:26:46.387 --> 00:26:50.103
Judaism. Listen to what he does with the Sermon on the

424
00:26:50.103 --> 00:26:52.737
Mount. He connects it to the Essenes,

425
00:26:55.921 --> 00:26:59.625
the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the desert.

426
00:27:00.090 --> 00:27:03.520
He says, contrite of spirit, ani ruach,

427
00:27:03.953 --> 00:27:07.319
the Sons of Light called themselves evionei

428
00:27:07.319 --> 00:27:11.054
chaschesed, paupers of grace. So

429
00:27:11.070 --> 00:27:14.853
he's taking the word that said, you who are poor of spirit.

430
00:27:15.398 --> 00:27:18.957
These appellations are characterized by a paradoxical

431
00:27:19.326 --> 00:27:23.109
combination of a term depicting the abject state of

432
00:27:23.109 --> 00:27:26.924
the sect in the present with a second one which proclaims

433
00:27:26.956 --> 00:27:30.695
triumphantly the plenty of God's grace bestowed on his

434
00:27:30.792 --> 00:27:34.384
elect. So Rabbi, if we had a sect in Judaism

435
00:27:34.593 --> 00:27:37.976
that celebrated poverty, that celebrated living in the

436
00:27:38.056 --> 00:27:41.728
desert without everything, with giving away possessions, it was

437
00:27:41.841 --> 00:27:45.384
the Essenes. And what he's showing is that this

438
00:27:45.384 --> 00:27:49.070
paradoxical contrast between the present plight and

439
00:27:49.166 --> 00:27:52.990
persecution of the blessed and their future glory

440
00:27:53.103 --> 00:27:56.846
in the kingdom of heaven is also the main burdens of

441
00:27:57.039 --> 00:27:59.378
what Jesus was saying on that mount. Right.

442
00:28:01.742 --> 00:28:04.985
What he is saying is that these aniim, these poor,

443
00:28:05.740 --> 00:28:09.047
poor of spirit, I should say, are endowed with the

444
00:28:09.047 --> 00:28:12.499
supreme gift of divine bliss with the Holy Spirit.

445
00:28:13.125 --> 00:28:16.449
He says, I have tried to show that one of the central doctrines of the

446
00:28:16.449 --> 00:28:20.254
sect was that only the elect, the members

447
00:28:20.286 --> 00:28:24.108
of the sect, have the Holy Spirit bestowed upon them. It is

448
00:28:24.204 --> 00:28:27.785
the Spirit, that Spirit, that makes them different from

449
00:28:27.817 --> 00:28:31.124
others. So it was in the Essenes, according to this

450
00:28:31.124 --> 00:28:34.511
scholar, that all of a sudden, All right. All of a sudden, being poor,

451
00:28:35.056 --> 00:28:38.152
being persecuted, being downtrodden

452
00:28:38.425 --> 00:28:42.195
became an entitlement. They were special.

453
00:28:42.436 --> 00:28:46.238
They were the children of light. The notion that the poor endowed with

454
00:28:46.286 --> 00:28:48.949
the Spirit are participants in the true

455
00:28:49.253 --> 00:28:52.911
eschatological community therefore fits.

456
00:28:53.424 --> 00:28:57.242
It is well known that Jesus and our community of purpose saw in

457
00:28:57.339 --> 00:29:01.126
poverty a way to attain salvation. So the

458
00:29:01.126 --> 00:29:04.485
truth is those who read into this a

459
00:29:04.501 --> 00:29:07.746
radical statement that having

460
00:29:07.859 --> 00:29:11.410
flaws actually gains you a seat at the

461
00:29:11.410 --> 00:29:14.704
table were not far from the source.

462
00:29:15.170 --> 00:29:18.319
Wow. Now, I will say that

463
00:29:18.785 --> 00:29:22.272
Martin Luther actually read the text in a

464
00:29:22.272 --> 00:29:25.678
similar fashion. And what Martin Luther says

465
00:29:26.016 --> 00:29:29.422
that the poor in spirit are those who know and feel their

466
00:29:29.422 --> 00:29:32.972
spiritual poverty, that they have nothing of their own before

467
00:29:33.085 --> 00:29:36.684
God. So if Christianity believes that you can only get redemption

468
00:29:36.796 --> 00:29:40.636
through God, you have to feel that you've lost every other chance.

469
00:29:41.294 --> 00:29:44.700
The more flawed you feel you are, the more you

470
00:29:44.813 --> 00:29:48.395
realize, as in Va'etchanan, that Moses says, I have

471
00:29:48.508 --> 00:29:52.074
no chance. I have to pray to God. Right. He took

472
00:29:52.123 --> 00:29:55.811
this to the extreme. A man will find out that he is so

473
00:29:55.811 --> 00:29:59.562
depraved that no strength, no works, no merit of his own

474
00:29:59.594 --> 00:30:03.089
will ever deliver him from his guilt. Therefore, he must utterly

475
00:30:03.121 --> 00:30:06.920
despair of himself and seek outside of himself the righteousness

476
00:30:07.112 --> 00:30:10.703
of Jesus. So the point is that whether this was

477
00:30:11.056 --> 00:30:14.021
the only reading of the Sermon on the Mount or not,

478
00:30:14.326 --> 00:30:17.644
certainly there were those, and I will say Christian

479
00:30:17.708 --> 00:30:21.491
socialists later on, read it this way, that

480
00:30:21.556 --> 00:30:25.327
they said that the New Testament Jesus identifies himself with the

481
00:30:25.327 --> 00:30:29.167
hungry, the poor, the sick, and the prisoners. This is the source of

482
00:30:29.506 --> 00:30:33.217
what we call populism today, that the masses know

483
00:30:33.314 --> 00:30:36.938
more than the leaders because the masses are more flawed than the

484
00:30:36.938 --> 00:30:40.706
leaders. They don't excel at anything. To the contrary, the less

485
00:30:40.706 --> 00:30:43.878
they excel, the more they are entitled. It's a

486
00:30:43.878 --> 00:30:47.236
fascinating switch. And it's a

487
00:30:47.236 --> 00:30:51.012
Christian switch. I mean, they don't think of

488
00:30:51.012 --> 00:30:54.532
it that way, but that's where it finds its source. This is

489
00:30:54.564 --> 00:30:57.898
part of what they call the Judeo-Christian tradition,

490
00:30:59.053 --> 00:31:02.531
that these political ideas of today are

491
00:31:02.739 --> 00:31:06.138
based on these religious

492
00:31:06.266 --> 00:31:08.719
ideas from the beginning of Christianity.

493
00:31:09.857 --> 00:31:13.528
So one of the young political, and

494
00:31:13.704 --> 00:31:16.862
I would say Jewish people who were

495
00:31:16.926 --> 00:31:20.693
behind -Graham Platner; Rebecca Katz says, the era

496
00:31:20.693 --> 00:31:24.508
of the perfect candidate is over. People are flawed and they not only

497
00:31:24.541 --> 00:31:28.099
forgive politicians who aren't perfect, but they relate more to them.

498
00:31:28.468 --> 00:31:31.530
That being flawed becomes the—

499
00:31:31.898 --> 00:31:35.201
it's not a glitch in the software, it is the

500
00:31:35.201 --> 00:31:38.743
software. It's fascinating, the world that we have

501
00:31:38.807 --> 00:31:42.190
moved into. And as Bret Stephens, and I'm going to

502
00:31:42.238 --> 00:31:46.069
finish with him, he says, a progressive movement ceases

503
00:31:46.181 --> 00:31:49.740
to be progressive when it becomes embarrassed by progress.

504
00:31:50.413 --> 00:31:54.084
When achievement is treated as exploitation,

505
00:31:54.437 --> 00:31:57.931
prosperity as moral compromise, resilience as

506
00:31:58.108 --> 00:32:01.458
privilege, and excellence as exclusion. A moral

507
00:32:01.570 --> 00:32:05.385
conviction of our time, especially prevalent on the cultural left,

508
00:32:05.674 --> 00:32:09.136
is that the powerful are presumptively bad while

509
00:32:09.345 --> 00:32:12.599
the powerless are presumptively good. These

510
00:32:12.695 --> 00:32:16.238
categories aren't just political, they are also social, economic,

511
00:32:16.382 --> 00:32:20.037
ethnic, and racial. It's why so many conversations today

512
00:32:20.229 --> 00:32:23.740
revolve around the concept of privilege, a striking

513
00:32:23.836 --> 00:32:27.331
redefinition of success that removes the presumption of

514
00:32:27.395 --> 00:32:30.715
merit from those who have it and the stigma of

515
00:32:30.747 --> 00:32:34.518
failure from those who don't. Rabbi, I

516
00:32:34.518 --> 00:32:38.016
believe that he's hitting the nail on the head. And the distinction

517
00:32:38.129 --> 00:32:41.306
between accepting flaws,

518
00:32:41.900 --> 00:32:45.495
accepting flaws in our leaders is one thing, and

519
00:32:45.495 --> 00:32:48.704
taking it to the extreme of making that a

520
00:32:48.945 --> 00:32:52.234
qualifier is something that has been a total

521
00:32:52.250 --> 00:32:55.588
misunderstanding of what you said a second ago is our

522
00:32:55.845 --> 00:32:59.120
Judio-Christian traditon. This is

523
00:32:59.168 --> 00:33:02.859
amazingly important. And this week we observe

524
00:33:02.908 --> 00:33:06.375
the fast day of Tisha B'Av, also as a time to think

525
00:33:06.375 --> 00:33:09.601
about humility and what that means and how we

526
00:33:09.826 --> 00:33:13.662
balance all those things. So we want to wish everybody a Shabbat Shalom. You should

527
00:33:13.662 --> 00:33:17.225
have a meaningful Tisha B'Av, and we look forward to seeing you next week where

528
00:33:17.225 --> 00:33:20.885
we will talk about Parashat Eikev. Thank you, Geoffrey. This is an amazing topic.

529
00:33:21.479 --> 00:33:25.296
Shabbat Shalom, and celebrate your flaws—but not too

530
00:33:25.329 --> 00:33:28.657
much. Shabbat shalom, and see you all next week.

531
00:33:30.334 --> 00:33:32.065
Shabbat

532
00:33:35.575 --> 00:33:36.627
shalom.

At first glance, it feels strangely

3
00:00:13.160 –> 00:00:16.560
familiar. Haven’t we heard these stories before? The Exodus,

4
00:00:16.560 –> 00:00:20.040
Sinai, the spies, the wilderness, wanderings. It’s all

5
00:00:20.040 –> 00:00:23.760
repetition. But maybe repetition isn’t a flaw.

6
00:00:24.000 –> 00:00:27.750
Maybe it’s the point. Why does Moses spend his

7
00:00:27.750 –> 00:00:31.470
final weeks retelling a story everyone already knows? Why do

8
00:00:31.470 –> 00:00:34.590
the rabbis praise the student who reviews a lesson

9
00:00:34.590 –> 00:00:38.110
101 times? And why does Ben Bag

10
00:00:38.110 –> 00:00:41.430
Bag famously teach turn it over and turn it over,

11
00:00:41.750 –> 00:00:45.550
for everything is in it? Two thousand years ago, the

12
00:00:45.550 –> 00:00:48.950
Roman philosopher Seneca warned that reading too many

13
00:00:48.950 –> 00:00:52.630
scrolls too quickly would leave us distracted, restless, and

14
00:00:52.630 –> 00:00:56.230
unable to think deeply. Sound familiar? In an

15
00:00:56.230 –> 00:00:59.830
age of endless scrolling and shrinking attention spans,

16
00:00:59.990 –> 00:01:03.590
perhaps Deuteronomy has something surprising to teach

17
00:01:03.590 –> 00:01:07.190
us about the art of paying attention.

18
00:01:09.110 –> 00:01:12.630
Welcome to Madly. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a

19
00:01:12.630 –> 00:01:16.470
spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with

20
00:01:16.470 –> 00:01:20.230
Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite

21
00:01:20.230 –> 00:01:23.440
podcast platform and now on YouTube and

22
00:01:23.440 –> 00:01:27.080
Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria,

23
00:01:27.080 –> 00:01:30.880
and a link is included in the show notes. This week’s Parasha is

24
00:01:30.880 –> 00:01:34.720
Devarim. Join us as we explore Deuteronomy and

25
00:01:34.720 –> 00:01:38.240
the Art of Attention and discover why Moses

26
00:01:38.320 –> 00:01:42.080
final retelling of the Torah may offer the oldest and

27
00:01:42.080 –> 00:01:45.440
perhaps the best antidote to our modern

28
00:01:45.520 –> 00:01:49.130
epidemic of distraction. Well,

29
00:01:49.130 –> 00:01:52.930
welcome back, Rabbi. We missed you last week, but it’s nice to be

30
00:01:52.930 –> 00:01:56.770
back. But you had a great conversation. It was truly

31
00:01:56.930 –> 00:02:00.370
illuminating. And one of the things that he said towards the end

32
00:02:00.610 –> 00:02:04.130
was, we’re finishing the Torah. And of course, he was right, because

33
00:02:04.210 –> 00:02:07.970
Numbers ends the Torah. And Mishneh Torah, the

34
00:02:07.970 –> 00:02:11.610
name for Deuteronomy, really means a copy

35
00:02:11.610 –> 00:02:14.290
of the Torah. And that’s where the Greek

36
00:02:14.370 –> 00:02:17.410
Deuteronomy comes from. Second law.

37
00:02:18.510 –> 00:02:22.230
So it really is a review, it’s a repetition. And

38
00:02:22.230 –> 00:02:25.710
that’s what we’re going to focus on today.

39
00:02:26.110 –> 00:02:29.950
In the yeshiva, we called it Chazorah. And

40
00:02:29.950 –> 00:02:33.670
in Yeshiva, Chazorah was important. And I think when it comes to

41
00:02:33.670 –> 00:02:36.910
the book of. The Book of Deuteronomy, that’s also important.

42
00:02:37.310 –> 00:02:40.750
I mean, to give you a sense of what Chazorah was. And I think I

43
00:02:40.750 –> 00:02:44.390
did come across it a little bit in college where you would have a

44
00:02:44.390 –> 00:02:47.950
professor give a class and then there was a TA and the teacher’s

45
00:02:47.950 –> 00:02:51.450
assistant would come out later and meet and smaller groups.

46
00:02:51.610 –> 00:02:55.130
But in the yeshiva, you would prepare for a

47
00:02:55.130 –> 00:02:58.730
shiur, a class bechavrusa. And then you would

48
00:02:58.730 –> 00:03:02.570
go over it, Bechavrusa. And at least my experience

49
00:03:02.810 –> 00:03:06.649
was, for instance, in Be’er Yaakov, where the

50
00:03:06.649 –> 00:03:09.850
Mashgiach gave most of his really exciting

51
00:03:09.930 –> 00:03:13.770
shmoozin on Shabbat, you couldn’t write it down. You couldn’t write it down.

52
00:03:14.810 –> 00:03:18.450
So you literally had to review it. And many of the

53
00:03:18.450 –> 00:03:22.240
great books that we have, for instance, on many of

54
00:03:22.310 –> 00:03:26.110
of the Hasidic great leaders, they never wrote it down. It’s their students who

55
00:03:26.110 –> 00:03:29.830
kind of wrote it down. So this is a big part of our tradition. Very

56
00:03:29.830 –> 00:03:33.510
important. Okay, let’s go for it. Okay, so it’s

57
00:03:33.510 –> 00:03:36.950
only in Deuteronomy 18, where it actually

58
00:03:37.190 –> 00:03:40.990
uses this word, Mishneh Torah. And there, of course, it

59
00:03:40.990 –> 00:03:43.990
is talking about the rules of the kings,

60
00:03:44.790 –> 00:03:48.150
and they shall have a copy of this teaching

61
00:03:48.150 –> 00:03:51.990
written for him, for the king. But again, this

62
00:03:51.990 –> 00:03:55.650
has been the traditional exploration, explanation of

63
00:03:55.650 –> 00:03:59.170
what Mishneh Torah is, this fifth book of

64
00:03:59.650 –> 00:04:03.370
the Torah. And of course, a lot of time is spent,

65
00:04:03.370 –> 00:04:07.010
Rabbi, on nitpicking and seeing how

66
00:04:07.090 –> 00:04:10.130
in the repetition, maybe the story changes,

67
00:04:10.370 –> 00:04:14.130
maybe how a different phrase is used, word is

68
00:04:14.130 –> 00:04:17.570
used. We’re going to explore just the story of the

69
00:04:17.570 –> 00:04:21.410
scouts in a few minutes. But of course, and I’m quoting

70
00:04:21.410 –> 00:04:25.090
from a Sefaria, a wonderful source that I discover,

71
00:04:26.110 –> 00:04:29.710
where he gives an introduction. And he says, the people, the scholars

72
00:04:30.430 –> 00:04:34.270
from the critical theory, obviously,

73
00:04:34.270 –> 00:04:37.230
who believe that Torah was written by many

74
00:04:37.790 –> 00:04:41.390
different authors, they will argue that that’s not a big

75
00:04:41.390 –> 00:04:44.790
surprise. Deuteronomy was edited by a different

76
00:04:44.790 –> 00:04:48.190
editor and different sources got inside.

77
00:04:49.470 –> 00:04:53.110
We find that even in the Mishnah, where

78
00:04:53.110 –> 00:04:56.670
we have the Mishnah and then we have a Beraita, and the Beraita

79
00:04:56.670 –> 00:05:00.410
maybe didn’t make the Mishna, but it’s a variation of it.

80
00:05:00.730 –> 00:05:04.330
It’s at the most basic level, this is varying

81
00:05:04.330 –> 00:05:08.170
texts. And that truly is something

82
00:05:08.650 –> 00:05:12.490
that is part of our tradition as well. We understood

83
00:05:12.490 –> 00:05:16.170
way back when there was no only recording. There were

84
00:05:16.170 –> 00:05:20.010
variations on everything. It’s really baked into our tradition.

85
00:05:20.650 –> 00:05:24.410
Amazing. Really good. So I do

86
00:05:24.410 –> 00:05:28.050
think, though, that even the classical commentators clearly, and

87
00:05:28.050 –> 00:05:31.670
I’ve always argued this, nothing that modern scholarship

88
00:05:31.670 –> 00:05:35.470
has brought up by way of a question or a problem that the

89
00:05:35.470 –> 00:05:39.310
classical commentaries didn’t already identify. And so,

90
00:05:39.310 –> 00:05:43.030
for instance, they will ask, so why were

91
00:05:43.030 –> 00:05:46.590
they repeated? What laws were repeated? So by way of

92
00:05:46.590 –> 00:05:49.750
example, Ramban Nachmanides says

93
00:05:50.310 –> 00:05:53.950
this book is known to constitute a review of the

94
00:05:53.950 –> 00:05:57.550
Torah. He uses that same

95
00:05:57.550 –> 00:06:01.110
word, hasefer hazeh yadushu, Mishneh Torah,

96
00:06:02.370 –> 00:06:05.810
in which Moses, our teacher, explains to the generation

97
00:06:05.810 –> 00:06:09.490
entering the land most of the commandments of the

98
00:06:09.490 –> 00:06:13.210
Torah that pertain to Israelites. And he distinguishes that

99
00:06:13.210 –> 00:06:17.050
from the priests. The priests. Nachmanides, for

100
00:06:17.050 –> 00:06:20.890
some reason, says, they don’t need that much Chazorah. They got it the first

101
00:06:20.890 –> 00:06:24.530
time. But the rest of us, Pashut Yisraelim, we

102
00:06:24.530 –> 00:06:28.130
need to be repeatedly admonished.

103
00:06:29.010 –> 00:06:32.770
And he uses this word, yahzir otam,

104
00:06:33.090 –> 00:06:36.430
this word from Chazarah. We have to be reminded.

105
00:06:37.070 –> 00:06:40.590
Sometimes you have to repeat the things. Multiple warnings,

106
00:06:40.910 –> 00:06:43.630
so forth and so on. So again, Nachmanides

107
00:06:43.870 –> 00:06:47.550
recognizes what is going on. And his take is,

108
00:06:47.710 –> 00:06:51.350
this is like Cliff Notes. Before you go into

109
00:06:51.350 –> 00:06:55.190
the land, you know your mom told you everything. Then as you’re at the

110
00:06:55.190 –> 00:06:58.750
door about to go, she gives you the short version. Don’t forget this,

111
00:06:58.750 –> 00:07:02.450
don’t forget that. Interesting. Well, I

112
00:07:02.450 –> 00:07:06.290
mean, interesting and logical. I mean, it makes sense that that’s what

113
00:07:06.290 –> 00:07:09.650
they need. Especially. You see, repetition is important

114
00:07:10.050 –> 00:07:13.850
because Moshe is going to die. He’s not going to

115
00:07:13.850 –> 00:07:17.330
be there. And they’re on the banks of Moab, and they’re moving.

116
00:07:19.090 –> 00:07:22.690
It’s part of the transmission process. It’s part of creating

117
00:07:22.690 –> 00:07:26.130
something that lasts beyond you. I love that. So

118
00:07:27.010 –> 00:07:30.850
we’re going to take one example, but there will be many examples in the

119
00:07:30.850 –> 00:07:34.630
Book of Devorim where there are variations. So we’re

120
00:07:34.630 –> 00:07:38.350
going to talk about the seminal moment of sending

121
00:07:38.350 –> 00:07:42.190
the scouts. In Deuteronomy 1:22, part of our

122
00:07:42.190 –> 00:07:45.950
parasha, it says, then all of you came to me,

123
00:07:45.950 –> 00:07:49.710
says Moses, and said, let us send agents

124
00:07:49.710 –> 00:07:53.390
ahead to reconnoiter the land for us and bring back word.

125
00:07:53.710 –> 00:07:57.430
In 23, he says, I approved of the plan, and So

126
00:07:57.430 –> 00:08:01.110
I selected 12 of you, one representative from

127
00:08:01.110 –> 00:08:04.810
each tribe. So first of all, it just us. Right from the beginning,

128
00:08:04.970 –> 00:08:08.410
it tells us what we already know, which is the whole Book of Devorim is

129
00:08:08.410 –> 00:08:12.250
written in the first person. It’s Moses speaking. This is novel. This is

130
00:08:12.250 –> 00:08:16.050
not something that we’ve had. But more to that, you could say

131
00:08:16.050 –> 00:08:19.849
that Moses is looking at it from his perspective, right? Means he changes

132
00:08:19.849 –> 00:08:23.370
the story and gives it from the way he remembers it,

133
00:08:23.690 –> 00:08:27.130
or this is the way it was. And the other version is a different

134
00:08:27.130 –> 00:08:30.490
variation. That’s correct. It’s not. In numbers 13,

135
00:08:30.970 –> 00:08:34.740
this is the. The fourth book of the Torah, it says, God

136
00:08:34.900 –> 00:08:38.700
spoke to Moses, saying, sent agents to scout

137
00:08:38.700 –> 00:08:42.420
the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite

138
00:08:42.420 –> 00:08:46.180
people and someone of each tribe. In verse 3.

139
00:08:46.180 –> 00:08:49.900
So Moses, by God’s command sent them out from

140
00:08:49.900 –> 00:08:53.380
the wilderness of Paran. Rabbi, this is not a

141
00:08:53.540 –> 00:08:57.100
slight of hand. It’s clear in the Devorim text.

142
00:08:57.100 –> 00:09:00.660
It’s I, I, I. Moses is the one who’s taking

143
00:09:01.060 –> 00:09:04.160
responsibility, authority approach

144
00:09:04.400 –> 00:09:08.120
Moses. And in Numbers, God

145
00:09:08.120 –> 00:09:11.600
is the one who commands Moses to send the spies. The

146
00:09:11.600 –> 00:09:15.440
whole story is different. So just to give you an example

147
00:09:15.440 –> 00:09:19.280
of how these variations stimulate thought, I’m

148
00:09:19.280 –> 00:09:23.000
going to quote Rashi, not because I think he’s convincing, but because

149
00:09:23.000 –> 00:09:25.920
again, he shows you the type of,

150
00:09:26.720 –> 00:09:30.520
I think, gymnastics that have to be done if

151
00:09:30.520 –> 00:09:33.920
you want to reconcile the two texts.

152
00:09:34.160 –> 00:09:37.780
So Rashi in numbers says, according to your

153
00:09:37.780 –> 00:09:41.500
own judgment, I do not command

154
00:09:41.500 –> 00:09:45.180
you, but if you wish to do so, send them. So

155
00:09:45.500 –> 00:09:49.260
he’s caging here. He’s saying God didn’t tell Moses to do

156
00:09:49.260 –> 00:09:53.020
it. He simply gave Moses permission to do it.

157
00:09:53.020 –> 00:09:56.780
And that, of course, reconciles it with our verse

158
00:09:56.860 –> 00:10:00.300
in Deuteronomy. But I would argue

159
00:10:01.180 –> 00:10:04.780
that in fact, what we are seeing in front of us is two

160
00:10:04.780 –> 00:10:08.360
variations. And those variations elicit different

161
00:10:08.360 –> 00:10:12.200
approaches. And maybe you can say elu v’elu, that this

162
00:10:12.200 –> 00:10:15.800
one and this one, they’re both, both true from a certain perspective.

163
00:10:16.200 –> 00:10:20.040
Good. Okay. That’s an interesting approach, that they’re

164
00:10:20.040 –> 00:10:23.880
both true. It just depends how you look at it.

165
00:10:23.960 –> 00:10:27.560
They, you know, now it’s hard because God commands Moshe to send the

166
00:10:27.560 –> 00:10:31.400
spies and the people approach Moshe, you need to tell a different

167
00:10:31.640 –> 00:10:35.160
story. You need to say the people initiated it.

168
00:10:35.670 –> 00:10:39.430
And then because the people initiated it, God commanded

169
00:10:39.430 –> 00:10:43.270
Moses to send the spies. That’s a twist. And again,

170
00:10:43.350 –> 00:10:47.030
I’m sure if this was the subject matter of today’s

171
00:10:47.030 –> 00:10:50.350
discussion, we would find 5, 10, 15 other

172
00:10:50.350 –> 00:10:53.470
variations on this which were trying to

173
00:10:53.470 –> 00:10:57.230
reconcile. And maybe they would say, like me, that they’re different, but

174
00:10:57.230 –> 00:11:00.870
they’re both true. The point is that reading

175
00:11:00.870 –> 00:11:04.550
a story, or I would say telling a story at

176
00:11:04.550 –> 00:11:08.330
least twice, you’re going to get some variation. And

177
00:11:08.330 –> 00:11:12.090
that, I think, is the point. And that, I

178
00:11:12.090 –> 00:11:15.850
think, has gotten our attention. And today we’re talking about how

179
00:11:15.850 –> 00:11:19.610
do you keep attention and how. What is the

180
00:11:19.610 –> 00:11:23.210
best defense against attention disorder where you

181
00:11:23.210 –> 00:11:27.010
stop being attentive and you stop growing with the texts.

182
00:11:27.570 –> 00:11:31.210
So we’re going to go to the Mishnah in Avot, and

183
00:11:31.210 –> 00:11:34.610
I’ve quoted this before, it says, ben Bog

184
00:11:34.610 –> 00:11:38.290
Bog said, I’ll get to his name in a second, turn it over

185
00:11:38.290 –> 00:11:41.990
and turn it over for all is therein, and

186
00:11:41.990 –> 00:11:45.750
look into it and become gray and old therein and do not

187
00:11:45.750 –> 00:11:49.350
move away from it, for you have no better portion than

188
00:11:49.350 –> 00:11:52.830
it. So first of all, I could not but be amazed.

189
00:11:52.830 –> 00:11:56.550
Rabbi, I think I’m going to quote another Gemara

190
00:11:56.550 –> 00:12:00.350
from Hagigah in a second. And there we quote a Bar Hei.

191
00:12:00.350 –> 00:12:03.790
Hei. It is kind of funny that the two

192
00:12:03.870 –> 00:12:07.390
scholars who are talking about repetition, they’re not

193
00:12:07.470 –> 00:12:10.940
funny name not only funny, but the name repeats

194
00:12:10.940 –> 00:12:14.580
itself, right? It’s fascinating. But in any case,

195
00:12:14.580 –> 00:12:18.340
what does he say? He says a few things. He says hafachbo v’

196
00:12:18.340 –> 00:12:22.180
hofachbo, which really means to go in it over and over, turn

197
00:12:22.180 –> 00:12:25.860
it over, look at it anew each time. And then he

198
00:12:25.860 –> 00:12:29.540
talks about this being a life endeavor, grow gray and

199
00:12:29.540 –> 00:12:33.380
old with it. And then something that I had tried to ignore last

200
00:12:33.380 –> 00:12:37.060
time I mentioned this Mishnah, he says, don’t go to other sources,

201
00:12:37.840 –> 00:12:41.560
stay with this source and keep at it.

202
00:12:41.560 –> 00:12:44.960
Keep constantly going back to it. And I think again,

203
00:12:45.520 –> 00:12:49.040
this is part of the Mishneh Torah tradition

204
00:12:49.280 –> 00:12:52.760
that we are exploring today. But it’s a

205
00:12:52.760 –> 00:12:56.520
wonderful seminal expression, is it not? Yeah,

206
00:12:56.520 –> 00:13:00.280
well, and don’t move away from it, tell, you know, because that’s,

207
00:13:00.280 –> 00:13:04.120
that’s people’s, that’s what generally you do after

208
00:13:04.120 –> 00:13:07.790
you go through something and once or a few times you tend

209
00:13:07.790 –> 00:13:11.030
to move on to the next thing. And what they say is when it comes

210
00:13:11.030 –> 00:13:14.670
to Torah, don’t move on to the next thing, but continue to

211
00:13:14.670 –> 00:13:18.310
focus on this. Absolutely, absolutely. And

212
00:13:18.470 –> 00:13:22.150
I think that we are going to see and it is going to blow us

213
00:13:22.150 –> 00:13:25.550
away. I hope that Seneca, the Roman

214
00:13:25.550 –> 00:13:29.270
philosopher, said something very similar. And I’m curious

215
00:13:29.270 –> 00:13:33.070
to know whether anyone listening or you, Rabbi, think that there might

216
00:13:33.070 –> 00:13:36.550
have been some influence. But let’s continue. In Hagiga, the

217
00:13:36.550 –> 00:13:40.130
Gmorra records another discussion between Bar Hei Hei

218
00:13:40.290 –> 00:13:44.050
and Hillel. Bar Hei Hei said to Hillel, what is the

219
00:13:44.050 –> 00:13:47.770
meaning of that which is written? Then you shall again discern between

220
00:13:47.770 –> 00:13:51.570
the righteous and the wicked, between he who serves God and he who does

221
00:13:51.570 –> 00:13:55.170
not serve him. This is a verse in Malachi. There are

222
00:13:55.170 –> 00:13:59.010
two redundancies, the righteous who serves and the wicked.

223
00:13:59.250 –> 00:14:02.290
So what does he answer? He says one who

224
00:14:02.290 –> 00:14:05.850
reviews his studies 100 times is

225
00:14:05.850 –> 00:14:08.850
not comparable to one who reviews his studies

226
00:14:09.390 –> 00:14:13.230
101 times. And then I love the

227
00:14:13.230 –> 00:14:16.950
fact that they use the modern day equivalent

228
00:14:16.950 –> 00:14:20.510
of an Uber driver, the donkey

229
00:14:20.510 –> 00:14:24.230
drivers, as proof. And what they say is if

230
00:14:24.230 –> 00:14:27.750
you buy a pack of tickets from the donkey

231
00:14:27.750 –> 00:14:31.470
driver for 10 and you need to get an 11th

232
00:14:31.470 –> 00:14:35.310
ride, you’ve got to buy 20. So what they’re trying to say is

233
00:14:35.390 –> 00:14:39.030
it’s not incrementally. One more now you’re

234
00:14:39.030 –> 00:14:42.730
going into the next hundred of studying.

235
00:14:42.890 –> 00:14:46.570
But I think what they’re also saying, and I might be going out on a

236
00:14:46.570 –> 00:14:50.130
ledge here, is that this is practical. You can learn it

237
00:14:50.130 –> 00:14:53.610
from real life. You can learn it from donkey drivers.

238
00:14:53.850 –> 00:14:57.370
This need to repeat stuff is

239
00:14:57.850 –> 00:15:01.450
powerful tool for pedagogy and for learning.

240
00:15:01.930 –> 00:15:05.730
The idea is, of course, if you buy the extra, if you

241
00:15:05.730 –> 00:15:09.400
need the extra ride, you have to buy the extra. Tag is that you should

242
00:15:09.400 –> 00:15:13.080
always be looking forward, you know, always study more. You may not

243
00:15:13.080 –> 00:15:16.920
know yet that you need to study more, but always be looking

244
00:15:16.920 –> 00:15:20.560
forward to studying more. It’s a great image, right? It’s the Uber driver

245
00:15:20.560 –> 00:15:24.120
image. It’s a good image, though. We don’t buy Uber tickets. We don’t buy

246
00:15:24.120 –> 00:15:27.920
Uber tickets by the 10. No, not that. If they listen to

247
00:15:27.920 –> 00:15:31.760
the podcast, they might come out with that idea. It’ll be a new subscription

248
00:15:31.760 –> 00:15:34.840
model. But, you know, I didn’t put it in the show notes, but I think

249
00:15:34.840 –> 00:15:38.440
Malcolm Gladwell once talked about the difference

250
00:15:38.440 –> 00:15:42.260
between good to great is practice, practice. And he actually kind

251
00:15:42.260 –> 00:15:46.060
of documented how many times the Beatles practiced, how many times

252
00:15:46.060 –> 00:15:49.420
musicians and actors practice. There is no question

253
00:15:49.580 –> 00:15:52.940
that repetition is something that

254
00:15:53.180 –> 00:15:56.940
is coming across loud and clear in our

255
00:15:57.020 –> 00:16:00.820
tradition. And it’s worth stopping and focusing on, I

256
00:16:00.820 –> 00:16:04.500
believe so. In the Talmud, In Avodah Zarah 19A,

257
00:16:04.500 –> 00:16:08.140
it says the Gemara cites other statements relating

258
00:16:08.140 –> 00:16:11.850
to Torah study. Rava said that Rav Sephora said that

259
00:16:11.850 –> 00:16:15.570
Rav Huna says, what is the meaning of that which is written?

260
00:16:15.730 –> 00:16:18.690
Wealth gotten through vanity,

261
00:16:18.930 –> 00:16:22.770
Mehevl shall be diminished, but he who gathers little

262
00:16:22.770 –> 00:16:26.450
by little shall increase. It’s a verse

263
00:16:26.450 –> 00:16:30.090
in Proverbs. It says, what is the meaning if a

264
00:16:30.090 –> 00:16:33.650
person turns his Torah into many bundles,

265
00:16:33.810 –> 00:16:36.530
they take the word hevel and they change it into

266
00:16:36.770 –> 00:16:40.570
chavilot, which is in modern day Hebrew, when you come back from the

267
00:16:40.570 –> 00:16:43.830
grocery store with a bunch of packages, you’re carrying

268
00:16:43.830 –> 00:16:47.430
chavilot. By studying large amount in short

269
00:16:47.430 –> 00:16:50.950
period of time without reviewing his Torah will

270
00:16:50.950 –> 00:16:54.470
diminish. But if he gathers his knowledge little by

271
00:16:54.470 –> 00:16:58.110
little, by studying slowly and reviewing his

272
00:16:58.110 –> 00:17:01.830
knowledge, that shall increase. So here

273
00:17:01.830 –> 00:17:05.670
again, what they’re looking at in, in the yeshiva, we

274
00:17:05.670 –> 00:17:09.150
would call bekiyus and b’iyun

275
00:17:09.630 –> 00:17:12.740
a normal nomenclature we would call

276
00:17:12.810 –> 00:17:16.410
encyclopedic study and a study in

277
00:17:16.410 –> 00:17:20.170
depth. And that’s a good translation

278
00:17:20.170 –> 00:17:22.730
of terms that you really never ever translate.

279
00:17:25.610 –> 00:17:28.810
And now a word from our Sponsor.

280
00:17:29.370 –> 00:17:32.850
If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading

281
00:17:32.850 –> 00:17:36.690
texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to

282
00:17:36.690 –> 00:17:40.490
share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in

283
00:17:40.490 –> 00:17:44.290
the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book.

284
00:17:44.610 –> 00:17:48.090
It’s inspired by those old school museum audio

285
00:17:48.090 –> 00:17:51.690
guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY

286
00:17:51.690 –> 00:17:54.210
stores up to 10 hours of audio across

287
00:17:54.450 –> 00:17:57.650
999 numbered recordings.

288
00:17:58.130 –> 00:18:01.570
You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or

289
00:18:01.570 –> 00:18:05.320
explanation, and enter the same number to play it back.

290
00:18:05.640 –> 00:18:08.680
It’s perfect for B’nai Mitzvah, practicing their layning,

291
00:18:08.920 –> 00:18:12.680
capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad

292
00:18:12.680 –> 00:18:16.280
Yah in a voice that matters. Go to

293
00:18:16.280 –> 00:18:18.560
voice.gift, that’s

294
00:18:18.560 –> 00:18:22.280
http://www.voice.gift

295
00:18:22.520 –> 00:18:25.880
and use code MADLIK for 15% off.

296
00:18:26.680 –> 00:18:29.560
Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

297
00:18:32.050 –> 00:18:35.730
So it really is, I must say I tried to do Daf

298
00:18:35.730 –> 00:18:39.170
Yomi for about a year and a half. That’s all I lasted. You didn’t enjoy

299
00:18:39.170 –> 00:18:42.730
it because you couldn’t really understand it, right? I love to dive

300
00:18:42.730 –> 00:18:46.210
deep. I love to dive deep and not so wide. Me too. And

301
00:18:46.210 –> 00:18:49.810
that’s, and that’s what we do on Madlik week in and week

302
00:18:49.810 –> 00:18:53.650
out. But I love the fact that the rabbis are

303
00:18:53.650 –> 00:18:57.450
talking about pedagogy and they’re talking about

304
00:18:57.450 –> 00:19:01.290
it in a very profound way and

305
00:19:01.290 –> 00:19:04.830
they’re saying that you have to, you have

306
00:19:04.830 –> 00:19:08.590
to take your study in little bite

307
00:19:08.590 –> 00:19:12.430
sized pieces and then savor them and go over them and

308
00:19:12.430 –> 00:19:15.550
review them. And that is in fact

309
00:19:16.270 –> 00:19:20.110
the biggest, I think, way to ensure

310
00:19:20.830 –> 00:19:24.670
that they affect you and they change the way your life

311
00:19:24.670 –> 00:19:28.430
is. And you know, I have a friend who’s a,

312
00:19:29.120 –> 00:19:32.800
a defense lawyer for criminals and

313
00:19:33.360 –> 00:19:36.960
when it comes to the police and lawyers, they have

314
00:19:36.960 –> 00:19:40.760
techniques about making the

315
00:19:40.760 –> 00:19:44.320
potential criminal repeat the story over and over again.

316
00:19:44.640 –> 00:19:48.320
We all know they divide the people if there were two culprits

317
00:19:48.480 –> 00:19:51.200
to get variations of the story.

318
00:19:52.080 –> 00:19:55.520
But just having the same person repeat the story

319
00:19:55.600 –> 00:19:58.640
over again is to look for consistency

320
00:19:59.520 –> 00:20:03.100
they have getting new details. Asking an

321
00:20:03.100 –> 00:20:06.540
individual to walk through an event again often

322
00:20:06.620 –> 00:20:10.380
leads to reminiscence, remembering minor details that didn’t

323
00:20:10.380 –> 00:20:13.900
seem important in the first telling. I love this

324
00:20:13.900 –> 00:20:17.260
increasing cognitive load. So

325
00:20:17.500 –> 00:20:21.340
by by asking someone to recount the subject and

326
00:20:21.340 –> 00:20:24.540
write it over again, maybe outside of

327
00:20:24.540 –> 00:20:28.220
chronological order, increases the mental

328
00:20:28.220 –> 00:20:31.980
effort required, which makes people say things that they might not

329
00:20:32.360 –> 00:20:36.080
thought of before or make them slip. I think that it’s

330
00:20:36.080 –> 00:20:39.400
a fascinating mirror to look at how

331
00:20:39.400 –> 00:20:42.600
lawyers and police use

332
00:20:42.760 –> 00:20:46.200
repetition to try to get to

333
00:20:46.840 –> 00:20:50.360
the truth. And clearly there’s always going to be cross

334
00:20:50.360 –> 00:20:54.120
examination. But you have all of this in the way

335
00:20:54.120 –> 00:20:57.840
that our texts are studied. And I think what comes clear from this,

336
00:20:57.840 –> 00:21:01.580
I’d love to know your take is that we have nothing to hide. In other

337
00:21:01.580 –> 00:21:03.820
words, we are willing to

338
00:21:05.660 –> 00:21:09.460
project and to enable our texts to be

339
00:21:09.460 –> 00:21:13.140
looked at in multiple ways. We are not afraid of

340
00:21:13.140 –> 00:21:16.899
the variant readings. If you go back to that concept

341
00:21:16.899 –> 00:21:20.540
of different texts make it into the canon,

342
00:21:21.100 –> 00:21:24.060
I just think it’s a wonderful lens to look at this through

343
00:21:24.860 –> 00:21:27.820
in terms of the techniques we use.

344
00:21:30.110 –> 00:21:33.870
Torah is a. Is an old famous idea, right? There are 70

345
00:21:34.030 –> 00:21:37.790
faces to the Torah. So that’s interesting. Rabbi Lamb, who was the president

346
00:21:37.790 –> 00:21:41.550
of Yeshiva University, his book is called 70 Faces of

347
00:21:41.550 –> 00:21:45.270
the Torah, his collection of his sermons, because there are so many different

348
00:21:45.270 –> 00:21:48.830
ways to look at it. And that’s what’s so great. You know, Madlik is like

349
00:21:48.830 –> 00:21:52.510
the rabbi sermon. He gives a sermon on the same portion every

350
00:21:52.510 –> 00:21:56.230
single year. And the good rabbi knows how to turn it over and

351
00:21:56.230 –> 00:21:59.480
over 70 different, different ways. But again,

352
00:22:01.080 –> 00:22:04.280
I think the shivim panim l’Torah, that there were 70

353
00:22:04.440 –> 00:22:07.720
faces to the Torah. And the other phrase that I used

354
00:22:10.360 –> 00:22:14.120
that this and this. And what of course you’re referring to is,

355
00:22:14.120 –> 00:22:17.760
you know, the joke about the rabbi who talks to a husband and wife or

356
00:22:17.760 –> 00:22:21.440
having an argument, and he comes out and he goes, well, the wife is

357
00:22:21.440 –> 00:22:24.760
right. And then he listens to the husband and he goes, the husband is right.

358
00:22:25.000 –> 00:22:28.320
So his rebbitzin asks him, how can they both be right? And he goes, you’re

359
00:22:28.320 –> 00:22:32.060
right. Also, you’re. The point is that

360
00:22:32.060 –> 00:22:34.580
by saying shivim panimla Torah, especially

361
00:22:35.700 –> 00:22:39.300
when it comes to a sacred text, I think is

362
00:22:39.300 –> 00:22:42.980
radical because what we’re saying is that there,

363
00:22:42.980 –> 00:22:46.580
at least from our perspective, there is

364
00:22:46.660 –> 00:22:50.260
no ultimate truth. There are different faces,

365
00:22:50.820 –> 00:22:54.660
different lenses that we can look at and different

366
00:22:54.660 –> 00:22:58.160
reflections that. That reflect maybe the same kernel.

367
00:22:58.560 –> 00:23:02.280
But clearly, we submit is

368
00:23:02.280 –> 00:23:05.920
the word I was looking for. We submit our texts

369
00:23:06.160 –> 00:23:10.000
to the same type of critical review that I think

370
00:23:10.160 –> 00:23:13.840
is in a court of law, even if that’s capital punishment and

371
00:23:13.840 –> 00:23:17.680
criminal law. Fantastic. So

372
00:23:18.000 –> 00:23:21.840
what I discovered, and I discovered it from a

373
00:23:21.840 –> 00:23:25.680
amazing article. It was an op ed in

374
00:23:25.760 –> 00:23:29.580
the New York Times this past week. And

375
00:23:29.740 –> 00:23:33.580
what the Op ed was called is There’s an ancient

376
00:23:33.740 –> 00:23:37.260
solution to our modern crisis of attention.

377
00:23:37.660 –> 00:23:41.300
It was written BY A professor, S.J. Murray, who is a

378
00:23:41.300 –> 00:23:44.540
professor of great texts and creative writing at

379
00:23:44.540 –> 00:23:47.580
Baylor University. And he quotes

380
00:23:47.580 –> 00:23:51.260
Seneca. I had Never realized that Lucius

381
00:23:51.260 –> 00:23:54.980
Aeneas Seneca was. He lived in. He

382
00:23:54.980 –> 00:23:58.740
was born in Cordova, Spain in 4 B.C. i

383
00:23:58.740 –> 00:24:02.480
mean, Cordova is. You didn’t know that anybody was in Cordova Spain

384
00:24:02.480 –> 00:24:06.160
in 4 BC he wasn’t. And maybe what. He left

385
00:24:06.160 –> 00:24:09.960
a few things in the water because Cordova, what is.

386
00:24:10.200 –> 00:24:12.840
Is. Is a key city.

387
00:24:13.720 –> 00:24:17.320
Many great scholars passed through many. The Rambam was

388
00:24:17.320 –> 00:24:21.160
there from southern Spain. That’s where the Rambam was born. Yeah, it’s very

389
00:24:21.160 –> 00:24:24.760
important there. Okay, so there was something in the water.

390
00:24:24.760 –> 00:24:28.280
But again, putting it into context, this is before

391
00:24:28.920 –> 00:24:32.700
the rabbis of the Talmud. And I would say

392
00:24:32.700 –> 00:24:36.500
that Seneca could have been fairly widely read. Listen to what

393
00:24:36.500 –> 00:24:40.020
he says. And now I’m quoting from

394
00:24:40.180 –> 00:24:43.620
letters from a Stoic. Letter number two.

395
00:24:44.100 –> 00:24:47.940
Judging from what you tell me and from what I hear, I feel that you

396
00:24:47.940 –> 00:24:51.140
show great promise. I think he’s writing to a student.

397
00:24:51.540 –> 00:24:55.260
You do not tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with

398
00:24:55.260 –> 00:24:58.980
one move after another another restlessness of that sort

399
00:24:58.980 –> 00:25:02.780
is symptomatic of a sick mind. Nothing

400
00:25:02.780 –> 00:25:06.140
to my way of thinking is a better proof of a well

401
00:25:06.140 –> 00:25:09.700
ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop

402
00:25:09.940 –> 00:25:13.580
just where he is and pass some time in his own

403
00:25:13.580 –> 00:25:17.380
company. Be careful, however, that there is no element

404
00:25:17.380 –> 00:25:21.220
of discursiveness and desulteriness about his. This reading

405
00:25:21.220 –> 00:25:24.900
you refer to this reading of many different authors

406
00:25:24.900 –> 00:25:28.050
and books of every every description.

407
00:25:28.450 –> 00:25:32.090
You should be extending your stay among writers whose

408
00:25:32.090 –> 00:25:35.890
genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment

409
00:25:35.890 –> 00:25:39.690
from them. If you wish to gain anything from your reading that will

410
00:25:39.690 –> 00:25:43.490
find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere

411
00:25:43.650 –> 00:25:46.050
is to be nowhere. It’s a great phrase.

412
00:25:47.410 –> 00:25:50.570
People. He could have been an

413
00:25:50.570 –> 00:25:54.330
existentialist. People who spend their whole life traveling

414
00:25:54.330 –> 00:25:57.850
abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find

415
00:25:57.850 –> 00:26:01.390
hospitality, but no real friendships. The

416
00:26:01.390 –> 00:26:04.710
same must needs be the case with people who never set about

417
00:26:04.710 –> 00:26:08.390
acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one

418
00:26:08.390 –> 00:26:11.310
great writer, but skip from one to another,

419
00:26:11.710 –> 00:26:15.430
paying flying visits to all of them. I mean, this

420
00:26:15.430 –> 00:26:19.070
is the second part of Hofach bo or Hofach bo

421
00:26:19.230 –> 00:26:22.670
that he says you’ve got even until your old age.

422
00:26:22.990 –> 00:26:26.750
These are your friends and you’ve got to come back to them

423
00:26:26.830 –> 00:26:30.350
over and over again. And then he says something

424
00:26:30.810 –> 00:26:34.170
that this op ed picks up on. And actually the

425
00:26:34.170 –> 00:26:37.890
professor says he literally uses it. And Rabbi, I

426
00:26:37.890 –> 00:26:41.410
have to say, because I prepare for Madlik every

427
00:26:41.410 –> 00:26:45.050
week, I end up doing this organically.

428
00:26:45.370 –> 00:26:49.130
He says each day to acquire

429
00:26:49.290 –> 00:26:52.930
something which will help you to face poverty or death

430
00:26:52.930 –> 00:26:56.330
and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different

431
00:26:56.410 –> 00:26:59.870
thoughts, pick out one. One to be digested

432
00:26:59.870 –> 00:27:03.670
throughout that day. This is what I do myself, he

433
00:27:03.670 –> 00:27:07.110
says. Out of the many bits I have been reading,

434
00:27:07.350 –> 00:27:10.710
I lay hold of one. So fantastic.

435
00:27:11.510 –> 00:27:15.270
So it’s like every week I tried to pick a nugget and

436
00:27:15.270 –> 00:27:18.710
I’ve got to say, you’re thinking about it. You have to do that.

437
00:27:18.870 –> 00:27:22.550
Because to be everywhere is to be nowhere. So if you

438
00:27:22.550 –> 00:27:26.270
just say I want to study the Entire Parsha, you won’t be anywhere.

439
00:27:26.270 –> 00:27:28.250
You have to pick out one thing.

440
00:27:30.010 –> 00:27:33.370
It’s truly amazing. So this is what this

441
00:27:33.690 –> 00:27:36.810
professor writes in the New York Times. He says

442
00:27:36.810 –> 00:27:40.410
Seneca’s concept corresponds to what psychologists call

443
00:27:40.410 –> 00:27:43.889
deep processing. By returning to the same idea

444
00:27:43.889 –> 00:27:47.530
repeatedly, we signal to our brain that the idea is

445
00:27:47.530 –> 00:27:51.050
worth moving into the architecture of long term

446
00:27:51.050 –> 00:27:54.650
memory. Each time we retrieve an idea from memory,

447
00:27:54.810 –> 00:27:58.390
we also wrap wrap it in new associations, a process

448
00:27:58.630 –> 00:28:02.310
known as reconsolidation, which ensures that

449
00:28:02.310 –> 00:28:05.990
those ideas remain relevant to our life as time

450
00:28:06.070 –> 00:28:09.750
goes on. About 2,000 years ago, the

451
00:28:09.750 –> 00:28:13.270
Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention.

452
00:28:13.670 –> 00:28:17.310
The problem wasn’t caused by smartphones or TikTok, writes

453
00:28:17.310 –> 00:28:20.710
this professor. It was because papyrus had become more

454
00:28:20.710 –> 00:28:24.550
widely available. As a result, scrolls became

455
00:28:24.550 –> 00:28:27.930
plentiful and wealthy leaders had access more

456
00:28:27.930 –> 00:28:31.170
texts than ever before. Seneca

457
00:28:31.170 –> 00:28:34.210
observed that the minds of those who read too many

458
00:28:34.290 –> 00:28:37.370
scrolls too quickly became restless and

459
00:28:37.370 –> 00:28:41.170
unsteady. This kind of mind was less able, he

460
00:28:41.170 –> 00:28:44.610
noted, to stay in one place and spend time with

461
00:28:44.610 –> 00:28:48.090
itself. Seneca did not have access to modern

462
00:28:48.090 –> 00:28:51.730
scientific studies or survey data. But he would

463
00:28:51.730 –> 00:28:55.290
not have been surprised by our plight. Professors

464
00:28:55.290 –> 00:28:58.970
report that students now have difficulty watching feature length

465
00:28:58.970 –> 00:29:02.190
films, let alone finishing books.

466
00:29:03.150 –> 00:29:06.910
Fantastic. And it’s right of course. So

467
00:29:06.910 –> 00:29:10.630
I just feel there were parts of the Talmud that

468
00:29:10.630 –> 00:29:14.110
I didn’t even reference. I think it was in Avodah

469
00:29:14.110 –> 00:29:17.670
Zora where they had different of the rabbis saying they

470
00:29:17.670 –> 00:29:21.510
finished reading the Parasha and one of them wanted to read Tehillim and

471
00:29:21.510 –> 00:29:24.990
another one wanted to read Mishle. And they were really

472
00:29:24.990 –> 00:29:27.870
talking. And I think the overwhelming

473
00:29:28.670 –> 00:29:32.170
approach was stick that you really

474
00:29:32.250 –> 00:29:35.850
believe in. Don’t go from book to book. But the

475
00:29:35.850 –> 00:29:39.010
parallelism of these two of

476
00:29:39.010 –> 00:29:42.730
Seneca and the Talmudic

477
00:29:42.730 –> 00:29:46.490
rabbis is amazing. One thing I will say for

478
00:29:46.490 –> 00:29:49.930
the rabbis that as much or as little

479
00:29:50.090 –> 00:29:53.450
as they reflected what they read in Seneca,

480
00:29:53.690 –> 00:29:57.090
their traditions have stayed the test of time. Whereas

481
00:29:57.090 –> 00:30:00.930
Seneca needs a New York op ed to

482
00:30:00.930 –> 00:30:04.720
remind him back. Because truly what

483
00:30:04.720 –> 00:30:08.400
we do week in and week out is truly that it’s to

484
00:30:08.560 –> 00:30:12.240
review the same material over again, to hold it

485
00:30:12.240 –> 00:30:15.840
close to us, to discover who we are, to meet old

486
00:30:15.840 –> 00:30:19.640
friends again. And of course that’s what keeps

487
00:30:19.640 –> 00:30:23.440
our tradition alive, which is why it’s why it keeps going from

488
00:30:23.440 –> 00:30:27.000
generation to generation. Okay, so that’s

489
00:30:27.000 –> 00:30:30.330
amazing. This is great. Great. Enjoy Devarim, everybody.

490
00:30:30.890 –> 00:30:34.450
Have a meaningful Tisha Bav and we will see you guys all next

491
00:30:34.450 –> 00:30:38.210
week. Be well. Enjoy Mishneh Torah. Read it

492
00:30:38.210 –> 00:30:41.930
again and read it once more. Shabbat Shalom. We’ll see you

493
00:30:41.930 –> 00:30:43.370
all next week.

494
00:30:46.090 –> 00:30:49.730
Before you go, I’d love to hear from you. Ben Bag Bag

495
00:30:49.730 –> 00:30:53.290
tells us to turn it over. Turn it over. Turn it over.

496
00:30:54.020 –> 00:30:57.660
What’s one book, one Torah passage, one prayer or even

497
00:30:57.660 –> 00:31:00.820
one song that you’ve returned to again and again?

498
00:31:01.380 –> 00:31:05.140
What did you discover the 10th time that you completely missed the first?

499
00:31:05.620 –> 00:31:08.900
Share it in the comments. I promise to read every one of them.

My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week on Pashat Pinchas, we celebrate the independence of Artzot Habrit, the United States. So welcome to Zelophehad’s Daughters of the Revolution. Rabbi it’s going to be Shabbos.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:12]:
Shabbos, July 4, 250 years to the United States. What could be better than that?

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:18]:
And what a better excuse than to look through our texts with a new lens. So here we are in numbers 26 1, and it starts by saying when the plague was over. And of course, this has to do with Pinchas, who has the name of the Parsha named after him. But once again, the Israelite community has sinned. They’ve been punished, and it’s time for a new census. God said to Moses and Eleazar, son of Aharon the priest, take a census of the whole Israelite community from the age of 20 years up, by their ancestral houses, all Israelites able to bear arms. So Moses and Eliezer the priest, on the steps of Moab at the Jordan near Jericho, give instructions about them, namely those from 20 years up, as God has commanded. Moses, the descendants of the Israelites who came out of the land of Egypt were Reuben, Israel’s firstborn descendants of Reuben. And now we’re going to start seeing him parse down to names that maybe thousands of years ago made sense to anybody. And they: “I knew that guy, I knew that clan, I knew that family”. But for us, what they’re showing is how material this was, how we were really going into the weeds. Descendants of Reuben: [Of] Enoch, the clan of the Enochites; of Pallu, the clan of the Palluites; of Hezron, the clan of the Hezronites; of Carmi, the clan of the Carmites. Those are the clans of the Reubenites. You really get a sense of disparate people joining together. There were 43,730 born to Pulu, Born to Pallu: Eliab. (9) The sons of Eliab were Nemuel, and Dathan and Abiram. These are the same Dathan and Abiram, chosen in the assembly, who agitated against Moses and Aaron as part of Korah’s band when they agitated against GOD. So, Rabbi, it’s not only going into the weeds in terms of families and clans, and you get this sense that they’re putting them together, but where appropriate, it’s even given a little bit of their baggage, their history, their culture. Yes, the Reubenites, those were the guys who brought us Dathan and Abiram. It is kind of fascinating. But if you throw yourself into it, maybe even put on your cap of the Constitutional Convention, you’re starting to see different groups, different states, different jurisdictions, different places throughout the country, and they’re all kind of coming together. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:05:12]:
It is amazing, yeah. I mean, it really makes this part of the Parasha, which in a way is kind of the dry part of the Parasha, it makes it really come alive.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:21]:
Well, we’re going to see in context. It absolutely provides the context that we need. So Emek Davar says, why does it start by saying it came to pass after the plague? The principal purpose of this census was to prepare for the apportionment of the land, as will be explained later. Therefore, the Torah first notes that it took place after the plague because those who remained alive were precisely those who would stand to inherit the land. That’s the Ibn Ezer’s view as well. But, Rabbi, it seems to me this is not the first time that we’ve had one of these lists. I mean, we started on Parashat Numbers itself, Bamidbar, and it started with a list.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:06:03]:
What do you mean? The book is called Numbers because all it has is a list of numbers of people. Right. So that it gave the book the name.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:12]:
So I think we’re going to see that first of all, there’s a little bit of an exception here because it doesn’t only include the landowners. We’re going to see it actually lists 13 tribes because it brings in the Levites too, who didn’t get land, presumably. But also this coming after the plague, it almost seems, and this is what I’m going to argue, that at a parashat drachim, at episodes, at discrete moments where calamity has occurred, where something is heard, the group has to regroup and almost in a sense recount, but maybe also rededicate themselves to this federation of tribes, make sure everybody’s counted, everybody’s a flag holder, everybody’s a card carrying member. And presumably especially after a plague, after hardship hits. And that’s what I am going to argue. But it is important to note that the classical commentators do not gloss over the fact that it all starts by saying, Vayehi Acharei HaMagefa.. so now we get to another one of the recitations and it says, these were the descendants of Gilead, Isaiah, the clan of Israelites, of Helak, the clan of Helakites. I mean, it almost sounds out of a comic book. And where we’re hearing names like Superman came from (Krypton), these sounds so foreign, all these names, these clans. Shechem, the clan of Shechemites, that rings a cord. Shmida, the clan of the Shmidites. Heifer, the clan of the Heiferites. And then in 26: 33 it says now Zelophehad son of Hepher had no sons, only daughters. The names of Zelophehad’s daughters were Mahla, Noah, Hagla, Milcha and Tirzah. We are going to see that these women are mentioned three times in our verses. But again, it’s adding some of the baggage, it’s adding some of the color. And we’re not going to go into the description of every one of these clans and tribes, just the ones that give us a little backstory. So God in 52 said to Moses saying, among these the aforementioned, shall the land be apportioned as shares according to the listed names, with larger groups increase the share, with smaller groups reduce the share. Each is to be assigned its share according to its enrollment. The land wherever is to be Apportioned by goral, by lot. And the allotment shall be made according to the listings of their ancestral tribes. Each portion shall be assigned by lot, whether for large or smaller groups. So this too, what we’re showing is. Rabbi, this is not some sort of de facto, some kind of just formulitic division of the land. We can imagine again if we put on our three sided constitutional congress hat they were discussing what’s fair, what’s right, how do we divide things up?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:09:29]:
Isn’t it interesting that they use a lot? Right. They use something that’s totally by chance so that they want to make sure that it’s fair and even, I mean, that’s the over.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:40]:
You can’t not but make any other conclusion. It’s not drash, it’s here. Rashi says the names of the tribes were written on 12 tablets and those of the 12 districts on 12 tablets. They mixed them up in an urn and the prince of a tribe inserted his hand into it and took out two tablets. They came up in his hand, the hand of the tablet bearing the name of the tribe and the tablet relating to the district that had been declared by the Urim and Tummim to be intended for it. And ultimately what it is a combination, a hybrid where the land was not divided by measurement alone. So they didn’t say 50 acres. 50 acres. 50 acres because one district is superior to another, but it was divided by estimating its fertility. A bad piece of land sufficient to sow a Kor was regarded as the equivalent of a good piece of land sufficient to sow a seir, all dependent upon the value of the soil. Rabbi, I don’t think Rashi’s reading stuff into here. The rabbis understood that this division, first of all, this bringing in of all of these clans and then this division of the apportionment that they were going to get was very thought out, very meticulous and fair. Overriding a term here, there’s no question about it.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:09]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s it. It was fair. It didn’t, it didn’t allow for favoritism. All the things that we could imagine in terms of trying to build order into a system of 3 million people where it’s very hard to create order.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:25]:
And it wasn’t cookie cutter either, because if you notice before it did say it was apportioned larger land to more people. This was almost representative government. I mean, Rashi has picked to talk about agriculture, but you can imagine other factors entering into it, sociological and things like that. Then in 26 and this is why I said, we really have 13 tribes here. These are the clans of Levi, the clan the Libnites, the clan of the Hebronites, the clan of the Machlites, the clan of the Mushites, and the clan of the Korah, Achites, Kohat Begat, Amrah. Their enrollment was 23,000, comprised all males from a month up. They were not part of the regular enrollment of the Israelites, since no share was assigned to them among the Israelites. So they get honorable mention, but they are mentioned. And we’re going to see that the number 13 has significance to us on July 4th. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Ramban says, and these are they that were numbered of the Levites, he says, I don’t know why he commanded the Levites should be counted here, what purpose it served now by counting them since they did not receive any portion in the land, answers the Ramban. Perhaps they were counted because it was only to these Levites that they gave the 48 cities to dwell in and their open land for their cattle and not to those who were born afterwards. Rabbi, the different tribes had different functions. We have something called Washington D.C. it does not have senators. I had to Google that. I had to look that up. It doesn’t have representation. The point is they lived in different types of areas, but they were all counted here after this Magefa in terms of creating this federation of clans of tribes. Now let’s get to the stars of our show. The daughters of Zelophehad. The daughters of Zelophehad of Manasseh family, son of Chefer, son of Gilad, son of Machia, son of Manasseh, son of Joseph, came forward. This is in 27 1. The names of the daughters were Machla, Noah, Hagla, Milka and Zirach. It names them a second time. They stood before Moses, Eleazar, the priests, the chieftains and the whole assembly. It’s a constitutional congress at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And they said, our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of the faction, Korach’s faction, that banded together against God, but he died for his own sins. A little bit of color, a little bit of context, and he has left no sons.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:14:09]:
That’s an interesting verse, right? That he wasn’t a bad guy. He may have been a sinner, but he wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t a rebel.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:19]:
But again, the way I take it is, and I said in the intro, the disenfranchised. Here you have a constitutional congress 3,000 years ago, if you had to pick the lowest of the low, you might pick five daughters. You know, clearly women were. This was not a matriarchal society. And then not only were there five daughters, they were five daughters of a self proclaimed sinner. They’re coming up and they’re showing it all. They’re saying we are the disenfranchised. They say that. But the problem is you have just created this amazing methodology of dividing the land equally and fairly. We got a little question here and it relates to us because what is going to happen, happened to our father’s portion. Now, I know many people are going to read women’s lib into this and clearly, as I said before, the fact that these are women making the first constitutional argument is definitely significant. No one can take that away from the text. But what they’re arguing for is not women’s rights. What they’re arguing is they have punctured a hole. They found an inconsistency in this rule of dividing up the land because their father’s portion will fall through the cracks.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:15:39]:
Right. I mean that, that’s correct. I mean they, they found a problem in the law. And that’s so interesting because the Torah is the book of the law. And these women have found the fact that have found, you know, the case that’s not covered. We do that all the time. We study Talmud all the time. It’s all about cases and what cases are covered and what cases are not covered. But here it’s the Torah itself, which almost sounds like the Talmud. These five women almost sound like they’re rabbis who were sitting and studying the Talmud.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:16]:
And I think there’s a piece of Talmud that says just that, that they were brilliant and they got it right. And of course, God said to Moses, the plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just, you shall give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen, transfer their father’s share to them. Like any constitutional law or ruling from the Supreme Court, there are some conditions. In numbers 36, 6, it says, provided they marry into a clan of their father’s tribe, no inheritance of the Israelites may pass from one tribe to another. So again, Rabbi, putting on my constitutional hat, when you were trying to get those 13 states to join the union, that was not the time to get a little soft and say, but there are some times where Rhode Island is going to get diluted because its daughters are ….

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:17:11]:
No, you have to be strict to dilute the tribe.

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:15]:
They Were not. So I want to point out something that I’ve kind of been hinting at. There are many women in the Torah who we have no clue what their names were. Noah’s wife, no name, but she features in, Lot’s wife, no name. Pharaoh’s daughter, Jephthah’s daughter, who drove a stake through the Sirach’s head. We don’t even know her name. And here we have these five women who are mentioned three times. It is unbelievable. I mentioned in the introduction that these were not only women, but they were daughters of a Sabbath desecrator. Where did I get that from? So as regards what the sin of the father was that the daughters refer to, Rabbi Akiva said that he was the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath day. Rab Simon said he was the one of those presumed to disobey God command. But again, Rabbi, I think if you’re trying to make a case that everybody in this clan, everybody in these families, from the highest to the lowest, is representative, I don’t think you could have picked a better case than five daughters who had no brother, no man running the house. And their father was a famous sinner. He was the guy gathering those sticks on Sabbath that was put to death. It’s quite remarkable, quite remarkable.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:18:38]:
Now the second opinion is that he was from the Mapilim. That does relate to the case of the spies. But you know, the Mapilim were the people who went up, they try to conquer the land of Israel on their own. In a way they were just overly aggressive. But you know, what they would wanted to do was not altogether bad.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:59]:
I love that it brings in different potential narratives, but each person has an identity here. These are not numbers. If that is something that comes across in this narrative, I think it’s because it’s intended. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their leyning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters, go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. Let’s go a little bit further. Before we move on to the Constitution in July 4th, I just thought it would be helpful to put a period in Zelophehad’s Constitutional query. We are about to celebrate Tisha B’Av. People might not realize that while Tisha B’Av is the saddest day of the year, a few days later, the 15th of AV, it’s like Valentine’s Day in Rabbinic Judaism, that girls used to go dancing outside, and it was considered one of the most happy days. This was the day, according to the Talmud in Taanit, in which the members of different Tribes were permitted to enter one another’s tribe. So literally, it goes back to Zelophehad and it says, you know what? We’re not Rhode island joining the 13 anymore. We’ve lived in the land. People feel a little bit more comfortable. And maybe what defines us is less that we belong to that clan, but more that we, I don’t know, we’re a New Yorker or we’re a New Englander. There are other things that define us that we won’t be challenged by a woman marrying outside of a historic clan. These laws developed, these identities of the different clans developed. And I just think it’s precious.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:21:47]:
Absolutely precious. Fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:50]:
So now we’re going to get into federalism. And in the first Parsha of Bamidbar; Numbers, we talked about a scholar named Daniel Elazar who makes a case that the two greatest examples of what he calls federalism occurred in the ancient Israelite federation of tribes and the 13 colonies. And it’s going to be July 4th in a few days. What better time to bring this up to date? So he says federalism has to do with the need of people and polities to unite for common purpose, yet remain separate to preserve their respected integrity. It is rather like wanting to have one’s cake and eat it, too. Politically, a covenant involves a coming together of basically equal humans who consent with one another through a morally binding pact, establishing a new framework. Rabbi I think it is sublime that the Hebrew word for the United States is our Artzot Habrit.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:57]:
You love that, don’t you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:58]:
It is the land of the covenant, the person, Yehuda Halevi, whoever Ben Yehuda, who formulated that, understood the subject matter of today’s podcast. The covenant idea has within in it the seeds of modern constitutionalism, writes Daniel Elazar mutually accepted limitations on the power of all parties. We had that with the bnot Zelophehad for the good of keeping the Constitution. They couldn’t marry out for a few generations. But it is to preserve and that’s what they were arguing for, to preserve this federalism. So we’ve all seen the play Hamilton in Federalist paper number nine. He talks about the definition of a Confederate republic seems simply to be an assemblage of societies. The extent, modifications and objects of the federal authority are mere matters of discretion. So long as the separate organization of the members be not abolished, you have to keep your identity so long as it exists by a constitutional necessity for local purposes through it should be in perfect subordination to the general authority. Literally what they were imagining was this type of federalist association of the different states. And I will argue for the people within those states, whether those people are families, clans or individuals, constituent parts of the national sovereignty. So I said to my good buddy ChatGPT, were there any speakers during the constitutional era who actually made a reference to the 13 or 12 tribes and reflected on them and the states? So There was a Reverend Joseph Huntington, pastor of the First Church in Coventry, Toland College, Connecticut. And he says “these 13 United States or tribes of Israel”, making a clear comparison in language to the civil structure between America and Israel. Good old Thomas Paine says that the Hebrew form of government was a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes and that it was sinful to acknowledge a king other than God. Rabbi One thing they all agreed upon is when we get to the book of Samuel and Israelites pick a king, that was the end of it. They were picking their [King] George. But until then they were a shining light on the hill. There was another preacher named Samuel Langdon, and he actually became the president of Harvard from 1774 to 1780. Langdon recounted how God had commanded Moses to bring 70 men chosen from among the elders and officers and present them at the tabernacle so that they might share the burden of government with him. Remember Yitro? That’s what Yitro is about. Thus the American preacher concluded a senate was constituted as necessary for the future government of the nation. Like Huntingdon before him, Langdon purposely conflated the American (or rather Latin) and Hebrew nomenclatures Let’s have a drum roll. Senate with Sanhedrin. exegesis was foreseeable. The Hebrew government I never would have dreamed. Rabbi but these. There are scholars that say that the senate took its name as much from the Greek [and Roman] Senate as from the Sanhedrin. So every tribe, Langton pointed out, had elders and a prince with which Moses did not interfere. Those tribal leaders had an acknowledged right to meet and consult consent of the congregation to do whatever was necessary to preserve good order and promote the common interest of the tribe. In short, according to Langdon’s interpretation, the tribes resembled the American states under the Constitution. They were quasi autonomous, semi sovereign entities. Also, as in the United States, the local government of the Israelite tribes was structurally very similar to the general government. Each had a president and senate at its head, while the whole of the Hebrew people assembled and gave their voice in great matters. Instead of the twelve tribes of Israel, we may substitute the thirteen states of the American Union. That is a quote.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:27:46]:
That’s a quote. That’s amazing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:48]:
You can find in the show notes the text of these speeches. The main speech by Langdon is called the Republic of the Israelites, an example of the American states. And this is not history in reverse. This was in 1780. He delivered this. But he was a lifelong believer in it. John Huntington also talks about. What he does is he actually shows that he’s a scholar. And he read Parashat Pinchas because he says, we find the nation by divine order, composed of a number of states, that is to say, 13, called the tribes of the children of Israel. Jacob had 12 sons, but then, you know, the tribe of Joseph was subdivided and became two tribes, that is the tribe of Ephraim and the tribe of manasseh, which made 13 united, free and independent states. They didn’t have to be. And they didn’t all make the direct connection. But it’s cute that this one did. It shows the level of knowledge they had of our scripture. I used to go to Public School PS6 in Manhattan, and we used to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning. I understand that in Congress they pledge allegiance every morning. I wish they would pay attention and have a little more Kavannah. But the history of the Pledge of Allegiance was written not in the 1700s. It was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, 27 years after the Civil War. אַחֲרֵ֣י הַמַּגֵּפָ֑ה And I put that in there. It was when our nation was broken, when the Constitution cracked, that he felt there had to be. And this was a minister, by the way, in the original verbiage, it was written for the youth. It did not include God’s name. He decided not to put that in because he didn’t want to divide people. It says, I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. You have this one nation and you have liberty and justice for each individual. This kind of sums it up. And Rabbi, if it reminds you in Deuteronomy 20 when it says God says atem nitzavim hayom, you stand this day, all of you, before the Eternal your God, your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, the entire body of Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from wood chopper to water drawer to enter into the covenant of the Eternal, your God, which the eternal your God is concluding with you this day with its sanctions in order to establish you this day. And we were on the steps of Moab, about to cross into the promised land as God’s people and in order to be your God as promised you. I think that 250 years is a good time to look at our declarations, look at the commitments, to pledge allegiance to this amazing concept of being united. Disparate people united by an idea that doesn’t detract from our individuality, but actually celebrates our individuality, but makes us one and united for a greater good.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:19]:
Love it. Happy July 4th. Happy 250. Here’s to another 250 and many more.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:26]:
Yes, and we will survive any Magefa (plague). Actually, the silver lining of surviving a magefa, of going through a hard time is reconstructing and rededicating ourselves. And I think both in America and Israel, we are going through tough times. We need to rededicate ourselves.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:44]:
Amen.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:45]:
Before we sign off, we’d like to leave you with a question. This week’s Parsha reminds us that unity doesn’t require uniformity, that tribes, families and individuals can remain distinct while sharing a common covenant. So here’s our question: what is the one value or commitment that can still unite people who profoundly disagree? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below and let’s continue the conversation together.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:32:16]:
Shabbat Shalom, everybody. Happy July 4th.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:19]:
Shabbat Shalom. Yom ha’atzmut l’Artzot Habrit Samayach . See you all next week.

My name is zGeoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a Spark and shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform, and now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Chukkat Balak, a summer parasha. We also month of Tammuz and have just crossed the summer solstice. We are about to begin the three weeks of mourning and the situation in Israel is once again uncertain. Welcome to a midsummer nightmare. So, Rabbi, it is interesting times that we live in, but I am sure that those who are very troubled by the current edition of the Iran deal will be talking about the three weeks and the bad news that occurs to the Jews during this period. Clearly, while other people are celebrating a midsummer’s night dream, we Jews in the middle of the summer are agonizing about our history and our future.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:41]:
I mean, that’s for sure true. I mean, obviously the fact that the temples were destroyed on the ninth day of that fell during the summer, the rabbis don’t make a point of the fact that it is in the summer, but we all know and it has a lot to do with summer camp and kids, that the summer is associated with Tisha B’av and the summer is associated with destruction and, you know, in Messiah and all those kinds of things. So it’s interesting the way that kind of evolved over time, even though in the earliest sources that wasn’t really such a big deal.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:17]:
So we’re used to looking at the December dilemma where we compare maybe how we Jews celebrate the middle of the winter, the depths of darkness. But I don’t think we look enough at the summer solstice and how our culture celebrates, commemorates, lives through it, as opposed to what Shakespeare was clearly talking about. A Midsummer’s Night Dream is about a party. Makes sense. As I said in the intro, the sun is shining, we’re in the middle of the summer. You would think it would be a time to celebrate. But near Stonehenge, they seem to have now found. It was in the Times that I picked it up, they found 48 pits that are carbon dated 5,000 years ago. And based on what they found there, broken shards of dishes and jugs and food and bones that must have been eating. The idea is there was a celebration there as well. And if you’ve ever seen pictures of the sun peeking out through stoneheads, it’s on that longest day of the year and boom, it’s set up so that you see it. You can really see how it’s epic. And it is the pinnacle of something and something to celebrate. I mean, I think you don’t need. Need a philosopher to tell you that the way you observe and travel through the calendar obviously affects your mindset. But there are some scholars that I dug up, Jonathan Z. Smith, who really sees religion as an act of deliberate human ingenuity and imagination. And he focused a lot on sacred calendars. And we don’t do that maybe enough. But clearly the cycle of the year is a language in and of itself. It really impacts the way we think. And there were modern additions to that, like summer camp, as you mentioned.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:05:12]:
Now, I think first of all, you think about it for a minute. So yesterday was the longest day of the year. And there was a big music festival in Paris. Now, around the world, they had the celebration, the longest day of the year. When you think about it, today was a little shorter than yesterday. Each day is going to be a little shorter until December 21st. First. Now that’s a kind of frightening to think that we’re now on a downward trajectory until the coldest, you know, darkest time of the year. And here I’m here in Paris, and it was 102 degrees today. And you know, and it got dark. Shabbat was out at 11:04, so you can’t get any later than that. But that’s it, it’s over. Because now we’re starting to get shorter and shorter and shorter. And you’re 100% right. It’s a little bit depressing to think that December 21st is right around the corner.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:09]:
So tell me, what were the celebrations like in Paris? How did you feel it? Because in New York you don’t feel it at all.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:06:14]:
We had a wedding, so we didn’t participate. I’ll tell you the only way we knew. They were worried that there was going to be traffic leaving the city because of these music celebrations. But, you know, but June 21st is a day of celebration. You know, it’s the pinnacle. We’ve reached the pinnacle, the longest day of the year. And again in Europe it’s more of a big deal than it is in America, because when it gets dark at 11 o’, clock, we finished dinner tonight at 9:30 and we started walking home. It really looks like 2 o’ clock

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:43]:
in the afternoon, so. So another scholar, Mircea Eliade, wrote actually a book, Sacred Time and Myths. And again, I’m wondering if how much of your feeling of it’s the longest day, which translates in tomorrow is getting a little shorter, is kind of something that’s written into your DNA as a Jew, or is this how everyone else feels? Or is there an alternative Eat, drink and be merry? It’s just something to celebrate. Stop with the worry already. I’m just curious because we’re going to look a little bit in our tradition where some of that is baked in. They did see the decline at that moment of the pinnacle.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:07:29]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to know. I know that, you know, Shabbat candida lining this week, if last week in New York it was 8:14, so this week it’s going to be 8:13. Like it doesn’t really make any difference. But that’s, you know, that’s symbolic in the fact that we’re starting to get shorter.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:47]:
You know, you just said something that triggered a thought in my mind because our religion and there are other religions I think that operate this way, but certainly ours is so set in the calendar at least once a week. You need need to know when the sun sets. It’s kind of like a built in Stonehenge. We take it with us. And you really feel that because you see the numbers. I’m wondering if that’s a part of it. I mean, Other religions, the secular calendar is midnight. There’s nothing in the universe that signals midnight. It’s something that you read on your clock. But we really do live by sunrise and sunset, whether it’s our prayers, whether it’s the weekly Shabbat, So maybe that enters into it for sure.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:08:32]:
I mean, and the Muslims are like that too, you know, I’ll just say something interesting, since we want to talk about other religions. You know, the Muslims have Ramadan, and Ramadan is they fast the daylight for 30 days. Now, Ramadan is interesting because Ramadan shifts to different periods during the year. Each year it jumps 11 days earlier. So some years Ramadan is in the middle of the summer and they fast till 9 o’ clock at night. And sometimes Ramadan is in December and they fast till 4 o’ clock in the afternoon. So they’re also very sensitive in terms of Ramadan to, you know, the period, the time of year.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:10]:
So again, that would be a study worthwhile. Which. What happens when you have a culture where holidays are not linked to the solar cycle at all, such as the Muslims? You know, if the Christians followed a similar calendar, Christmas could be in August, one year. What does that do to your psyche? Is outside of our realm of expertise or wisdom. Maybe someone’s written about that, but with us, that’s an amazing segue into the one posse that really determined that we did have to adjust. The word is intercalate our calendar. So in Deuteronomy it says, observe the month of Aviv. Aviv means either spring or when the crop begins to bud and offer a Passover sacrifice to the eternal your God. For it was in the month of Abiyiv that God took you out of Egypt. Rashi says this means before it comes, watch whether it will be capable of producing ripe ears. So he takes the Aviv to be a fruit that blossoms, so that one may offer the omer meal offering during it. And if not. So if you’re at a time of year that you think is Aviv, but it’s not blossoming yet, if you don’t see that yet, then you have to intercalate the year, meaning add a month to the winter period. In Hebrew, it’s aver et. So we Jews kind of learn from this. There might be other places as well that we have a hybrid between a lunar calendar where every month is Mechadesh, it renews, and the solar calendar, which is the seasons of the year. And because of Passover for sure, maybe others as well, we have to adjust our calendar. But the solar year Therefore becomes important. Now that is also comes out in the commandments. We all know there are 613 mitzvot, but as they reference them that Rav Simlay taught in Makot 23B, he says 365 prohibitions corresponding to the days of the number of days in the solar year. So again, many people think that, that Judaism operates on a lunar calendar. Clearly the solar calendar entered into their symbolism, entered into their worldview. You can’t ignore it.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:41]:
Right? That’s for sure. I mean, that, that actually I mentioned before about Ramadan. That’s the difference between Judaism and Islam. Islam is completely lunar. Islam doesn’t incorporate the solar year, but Judaism incorporates the solar year. And since the lunar year is 11 days shorter than the solar year, and therefore the lunar year would jump earlier by 11 days. So every three years we need a shnata ibor. And you know, of course, the word ibor means pregnant. The year is pregnant because it has an extra month. So therefore the year is pregnant. Literally. You can’t beat that use of that phrase there.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:18]:
And we, of course, because we’re matlic, would say it’s also pregnant with meaning. Right? I mean, that’s just the way we think. But the point is that when I talk about the summer solstice, people shouldn’t look at me and go, are you kidding? That has nothing to do with Judaism. No, the solar year was important. And now we’re going to come across a piece of Talmud that really does, I think, kind of paraphrase what you were saying a second ago. When you felt the day after the solstice, you already felt a little bit of dread, you felt a little bit of the days are getting shorter. So this is what it says with regard to the dates of these festivals. The sages taught when Adam, that means the original Adam, the first man, saw that the day was progressively diminishing as the days became shorter. Here in the translation it says the autumnal equinox. But the truth is he could have seen it on June 23. He did not yet know that this is a normal phenomenon. And therefore he said, woe is me. Perhaps because I sinned, the world is becoming dark around me and will ultimately return to the primordial state of tohu and vohu, of chaos and disorder. And this is the death that was sentenced upon me from heaven. He arose and spent eight days in fasting and in prayer. Once he saw that the season of Teyvet, the winter solstice, had arrived, and saw that the day was progressively lengthening after the solstice, he said, clearly the days become shorter and then longer, and this is the order of the world. So again, the rabbis in this piece of Talmud recognize that we are all affected by the shorter days and the longer days and that it’s natural to have those types of feelings that you kind of just vary from your, from your kishkas, from your gut said, this is how we all feel. And so like any great midrash, this translates something that become very natural, but I will argue maybe reflects a uniquely Jewish approach to how we view these seasons.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:14:36]:
It’s such interesting psychology because you’re right, I say, you know, a piece of me said that today’s a little shorter than yesterday and we’re getting close to December. But I, I’m not worried because I know when we get to December, the days will start getting long again. But Adam, Adam in the Garden of Eden, he was nervous because he didn’t know how that the cycle would continue. And I think that’s really beautiful. The cycle of the year is the cycle of life. And the greatest comfort we have when things are bad is the fact that things are going to get better.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:09]:
Yes. And that’s how we typically feel, I think, certainly as Jews. And I would say that would be the gut response I would have when I repeat and retell this midrash around Hanukkah time. And I say that as we Jews are surrounded by darkness, we light a candle. That is Mosef v’holech. If you read the midrash that we just talked about a second ago, you will notice the language kind of resonates that he saw the days getting shorter and shorter and then ultimately he saw that they were mosefer choleg. So it kind of ties into that. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Dalik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLay. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. Voice Give Play stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai mitzvah, practicing their laning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to Voice gift. That’s http://www.voice and use code MADLIK for 15% off.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:16:51]:
Thanks.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:52]:
And now back to our podcast. What we’re going to explore now is something that I hadn’t really given some thought to, and most of us, I don’t believe, do either, which is the opposite of that. We all know how we feel in the darkness of the winter and how we light that light, and that gives us hope. What we’re going to turn to now is what we feel in the lightness of the summer and how, at least from a Jewish perspective, we seem to find that feeling of dread and uncertainty. So first of all, let’s talk about the month that we’re in. I believe last week when we recorded Madlik, it wsas Rosh Hodesh Tammuz. We are in Tammuz now. There’s going to be a fast day coming up, Shiva aserbeh, Tammuz, the 17th of Tammuz, which marks the beginning of the three weeks of mourning. So Tammuz is the tenth month of the civil year, but the fourth, fourth month of the Jewish year, starting with Nisan. And just like the modern Assyrian calendar, Tammuz is the name, an ancient name in the ancient near east. It’s 29 days and the name of the month was adopted from the Syrian and Babylonian month Arab Damuzu, named in honor of the Mesopotamian deity Damuzid, Hebrew Tammuz, known to the Sumerians as Damuzid the Shepherd. And it’s an ancient Mesopotamian and Levantine deity associated with agriculture and shepherds, who is also the first and primary consort of the goddess Inanna, otherwise known as Ishtar. This becomes interesting, and so far I’m quoting from our good buddy Wikipedia. Tammuz is mentioned by name in the Book of Ezekiel. We’re going to visit that in a second and probably alluded to in other passages from the Hebrew Bible. In late 19th and early 20th cent century scholarship of religion, Tammuz was widely seen as a prime example of the archetypal dying and rising God. And that’s God with a small g. But the discovery of the full Sumerian text of Inanna’s descent in the mid 20th century appeared to disprove the previous scholarly assumption that the narrative ended with Dumuzid’s resurrection, and instead revealed that it ended with Damuzid’s death. However, the rescue of Dumuzid from the underworld was later found in the text return of Dumuzi translated 63 so Rabbi, there’s a little bit of a controversy about whether this fallen God who dies in the middle of Tammuz, actually is resurrected and comes back to life. Or it’s a real doubter and he goes down in the grave. But it is rather interesting that we have a month named after a pagan God, is it not?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:19:50]:
Yeah, very interesting. I mean, and obviously that’s something that happened later you say it’s mentioned in the book of Ezekiel, that’s something that happened after the destruction of the temple, during the time of the temple and the. And the verse in Zechariah says you refer to the fast of the fourth. So it’s the fast of the fourth month is this 17th day of Tammuz, which is the fast of the fifth month, which is Tisha B’Av during the fifth month. Month. So they describe these days not in terms of Thomas and ah, but in terms of fourth and fifth month. But that is interesting, right? And that’s. That shows, by the way, an evolution, we would say today, Geoffrey, an assimilation of the Jews into the culture and that they actually took the names of the month. Our Jewish months become the names. And I just was officiated a wedding yesterday, and in the ketuba we said Tammuz. What a crazy thing to say. Tammuz in the ketuba, which is after this, you know, this, this ancient God. Why do we say Tammuz? But that became part of our acculturated tradition that we adopted the names of these months. And if you ask any yeshiva Bacher, every Yeshiva bacher will tell you that Tammuz must be holy, right? There must be a name directly from God on that side.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:07]:
I was talking to my brother the other day and he gave me from the Kabbalah Center the meaning of Tammuz. And trust me, it had not to do with an ancient deity. But anyway, this is what Wikipedia quotes is Ezekiel 8, 14, and it says, next God brought me. This means he brought Ezekiel to the entrance of the north gate of the house of God. And there sat the woman bewailing Tammuz. She was Mevachot, et ha Tammuz. And I was told, have you seen a mortal? You shall see even more terr abominations than these. So this is a fascinating pasuk, because on the one hand, number one, it shows that, and this should be no big surprise that there were Israelites and Jews who were still worshiping foreign gods. In this case, it’s Tammuz. But she was crying for Tammuz. Again, if you, if you connect the dots, you know, the Tammuz was someone who was a deity that was more at a certain period, I would assume, during Tammuz. And then if that’s not interesting enough, then Yechezkel says, and as a punishment, guess what? There are going to be more terrible things that happen than these. He’s almost precasting the terrible things that happen during Tammuz. Am I reading too much into this?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:40]:
No, you’re reading it. That’s a very interesting verse. Verse, right. I mean, that’s a funny way to say it, right? You wouldn’t say. Doesn’t deserve the, you know, the proper article, the hey at the beginning. But that’s obviously with the way they referred to it. Anyway, it’s a great verse and.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:03]:
And again, it’s like so many other things that forecast because the Jews cried in the desert, many bad things happened on that day here because they worshiped Tammuz. Again, they are going to have some real things to warn about. Interestingly, in Ezekiel 1, where Ezekiel has the famous Merakava vision, the vision of the chariot, the real vision of all that is in our mystical tradition, it’s in the 13th year, on the fifth day of the fourth month. It also happens to be in the month of Tammuz, which again, a kind of lit a light for me that in this Tammuz was bad, was tragedy, was going down to the depths, but also the ability to see the light, to see this.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:24:03]:
I want to just tell you that the verse says in Zechariah, Vitzom Hashvi, and the first of the seventh month and the first of the tenth month, which is the tenth of Taylor, it. They will be days of celebration. So even the fast days which are identified as these months will be. They will be days of celebration. So that’s interesting that you quote the verse from the beginning of Ezekiel, because that’s the same idea. And that’s the same thing as when the days get shorter and the days get longer. And that is that we believe the greatest consolation we have is that even when things are really bad, there’s only one way to go. And that is up.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:52]:
Absolutely. And that. Thank you for adding that verse. Maybe text me the sukim for that and I’ll add it to the Sefaria show notes. But again, along with what you just said, is a tradition that I have the source in the show notes. But I think if you ask people, they will tell you that Tisha B’Av is the day that we sunk to the depths. But it’s also the day when the quote unquote Messiah will be born in Ekheraba. It Says there’s a conversation between a mother whose child is born on Tisha B’Av. It says, because my child has a horse. Fate. She says he said to her, the sage said to her, why? She said to him, because upon his arrival the temple was destroyed. The sage said to her, we rely on the master of the universe that upon his arrival it was destroyed, and upon his arrival it will be rebuilt. So again, again, this concept that you said a second ago, that we Jews can see the glass half full even as we are looking at the glass half empty, or completely empty in the case of Tisubov. So it is really kind of parallel to what we would think of in terms of Kislev and being in the depth of the winter. But I take away from this and I can’t but think of the current situation that we’re in, that in the heights of the summer when that light is streaming through Stonehenge and we look like we’re in the pinnacle. We Jews, based on this kind of narrative and this and our experience over that same 5,000 years as those people living in, celebrating in those pits, we’ve learned to think differently. And the way we think is that we never can afford to be at the pinnacle and that we always have to find and work at finding the real light and the real potential. And I think that’s the real lesson that we took from a Tammuz, which was a deity who perished at the height of. Height of the. Of the solstice. And we. We must have learned and eternalized a message in there that leads us to look for what’s not obvious with all of the light shed on all of the details. Things might look bad or they might look good, but we look for that which is kind of underneath that we need to kind of work on. And we do find the potential. We do have that gnawing feeling within our gut that when things look like they’re good, that we have to be on. On guard. And I think that’s just part of our calendar. But clearly we are affected by the solstice like any other culture. But I think we do it in a uniquely Jewish way.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:00]:
I think that’s beautiful. What a great way to enter the. These shorter days. They don’t get short by much right now, but it’s something to remember as we reach those shorter days. Days. So we want to wish you a happy summer to everybody. Shabbat Shalom . This week we read. We read a double parsha getting us ready for the fast, the 17th of Thamus. And we look forward to seeing everybody next week. Thank you, Geoffrey; Bonsoir to everybody. Good evening, good night, and look forward to next week.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:30]:
Thank you so much. And we will see you all next week. Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom.

My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Korach. Join us as we jump into Korach’s crevasse and discuss creation and recreation in Judaism. I’ll tell you, Rabbi, my favorite verse, I would say, but it’s not a verse. My favorite sentence in all of our liturgy is ubetu mechadesh ma’aseh Bereshit, that God every day recreates creation. And here we have. We’re going to see the rabbis have a real problem with anything being created after the Genesis was over.

Adam Mintz [00:02:25]:
Yeah, I mean, it comes up a couple of times. I mean, it’s like the splitting of the sea. How can you have a splitting of the sea even though it breaks the rules of nature?

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:33]:
Good.

Adam Mintz [00:02:33]:
This is going to be an interesting exploration.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:36]:
And we’ve done Korach a few times, so who knew? I never knew this verse had the word Bria in it. So we start in Numbers 16:30. But if God creates a new creation and the ground opens mouth and swallows up them, all that is theirs and they go down in live in Sheol. So this is Moses talking. He says, then you will know that these men have scorned God. So it’s at the end of the rebellion and it’s almost like a test. But the Hebrew, as I said before, the Imbri, ah, yevra hashem. And if Moses says to God, you will create a new creation and create this crevasse to swallow them up. And then of course, it does use this word. Sheol means pit, I would say Everett Fox says sheol, the underworld, which in the Bible is a nondescript gray space, rather like the Greeks, Hades, and not the later heaven and hell of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So it’s not typically associated with Gehennom, which has that baggage. So we have those two kind of interesting words used in our verse.

Adam Mintz [00:03:48]:
That’s going to be a good. That’s going to be a good Madlik someday to talk about Shaol and Gehenna and hell and all those things. Okay, really good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:56]:
Well, we’ll touch upon it a little bit today. But first we have to get to the cowards. Ibn Ezra, he doesn’t want to have any part of it. He says bria. And if the word God will make a new thing. Some say that the word bria, a new thing, refers to bringing forth of something that was never in existence. He says, in other words, creation. I have already explained that the word bria is related to the word of Uvara. Hack in the hack of them, many cities have been split open and those who dwell in them have gone down to the pit. This guy is from California. He knows all about earthquakes and the earth opening up and creating a crevasse. He says there’s no issue here. It has nothing to do with creation. Just walk away from it. Right?

Adam Mintz [00:04:50]:
He’s forced to say that because he can’t imagine that there should be a new creation.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:56]:
Okay. And it’s hard for us to understand how important this discussion is because frankly, for us, I don’t know, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. If God created the world and stopped, or if God created the world and kept on creating. But let’s look at the Mishnah, which is the earliest source we have, I think, for this, what seems to be a very profound philosophy. The Piuke Avot says in 5, chapter 5, 6, 10 things were created on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight, and these are them. Number one, the mouth of the earth. So it lists 10 things, including some that our listeners are surely aware of. The mouth of the donkey, that relates to Bilaam, the rainbow, maybe for Noah the Manna but it starts with the mouth of the earth. And Rabbi, it starts with the mouth of the earth because of our verse and i only realize this year, if our verse did not walk along, use that word, Bria creation, it would not have triggered. It’s truly a trigger for this Mishnah. But what the Mishnah is implying, and we’re going to see how Maimonides reads it in a second, is that everything ceased to be created on the seventh day. And in that Ben Hashot, in that twilight time, God added a few extra things. But as we’ve said so in the past, it’s kind of like writing a program that has programming in it for the year 2000, has programming in it for a lunar eclipse. Everything was created and written into the fabric of the universe according to this Mishnah, in the seven days of creation or at the last minute, at twilight of the last day.

Adam Mintz [00:06:46]:
Fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:48]:
So what does Maimonides say in his commentary on this Mishnah? He says, we have already mentioned in the eighth chapter, that’s one of his books, that they would not believe in creation by the divine will. At every instant they. I assume he’s referring to the rabbis. Rather, at the beginning of things, he placed into their nature that they should do everything that they would do in the future, whether they be things that would happen constantly, that being a natural thing, or whether it be something unusual, that it being a miracle, it is all one. Regarding this, therefore, they said on the sixth day he placed into the nature of the earth, that it would sink under Korach and his community. He goes on to say, and don’t think that these 10 miracles are all encompassing. If you have a miracle that happened is not included in this list, then it was actually just done during the first seven days. Get over it. But I think my first takeaway has always been one of amazing respect for the rabbis. So many religions are based on miracles that somehow when nature changes, it proves something, that somehow it’s a convincing argument and that somehow we want God to swoop down Deus ex machina and change things for us. And it seems that the rabbis, and this is amplified by Maimonides, have a real problem with miracles. And I’m proud to be part of that religion. What’s your take?

Adam Mintz [00:08:23]:
No, I mean, you know that I have a problem with miracles. The Judaism, at least the way we have it through the lens of Rambam, is a rationalist religion. And therefore the idea that there should be new creations, in a sense, that’s kind of a scary model. We we would prefer that Judaism makes sense for us.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:44]:
So that’s on the one hand. But on the other hand, it does seem as though maybe if Maimonides had made this up by himself, I would say he’s over influenced by Greek philosophy. He’s over influenced by foreign philosophies that somehow have to understand how creation happened. It was a problem because it is miraculous, but they put it in a box. It was like the first power and the second power and then let’s move on. But we Jews, actually, if you read the whole Torah, God is very involved in humanity. He’s very involved with our lives. So I’m kind of torn between, on the one hand, loving the fact that there are no miracles and that we don’t emphasize or celebrate miracles, and on the other hand, that it kind of does say God’s role has kind of finished, at least as it relates to the physical world. Creation. That’s just something that’s kind of hanging over this discussion. Let’s go to the Talmud in Sanhedrin that actually talks about the episode that is under discussion in Sanhedrin 110a. It says, Rava taught. What is the meaning of that which is written? But if the Lord creates a new creation and the earth opens up its mouth, that is our verse says the Talmud, Moses said before the Holy One, blessed be he if Gehenna. Now, our readers, our listeners, need to know Gehenna is not mentioned in the Pasuk Gehenna. Am I right in saying it carries more baggage than Sheol?

Adam Mintz [00:10:37]:
It definitely does. Right. Definitely carries more baggage. It’s interesting that that’s the way they give it to us in the English here, because like Everett Fox said in the translation beforehand, Gehenna represents something that was important in Judaism and Christianity later. That’s not reflected in the Torah. Okay.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:56]:
And it’s not simply the translation. The Talmud does say Gehennam. So this is what the rabbis are adding, right?

Adam Mintz [00:11:04]:
It’s already the rabbis, but it’s not in the Torah itself.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:07]:
Oh, absolutely. So let’s pause it out. Second, as you said, we might dedicate a whole discussion to this one day. But Sha’ Ul basically means the pit. And up until this moment, if you go through the whole Torah, when somebody dies, he might be gathered to his people, he might bless them. There’s no talk of another world, and he goes down into the pit, into the earth. It’s pretty physical. Gehennom, I think, really does carry with it. It’s not quite the hell of the Christians, but it does Carry it a little more baggage. Am I correct in that?

Adam Mintz [00:11:45]:
There’s no question that that’s right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:47]:
Okay, but you’re right.

Adam Mintz [00:11:48]:
It’s from the rabbis. It’s the Roman period, the Greek period. It’s a whole different thing than what the Torah is talking about.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:54]:
Okay, so this is what the rabbis put into Moses mouth. Moses said before the Holy One, blessed be he if Gehenna is already created, good. But if not, God should create it now. Now, if you just stop right there, that kind of fits into the narrative in an exciting way, because a rebellion just occurred. You could make a case that it was a unique rebellion. Maybe you could make the case that all of the shortfallings of the Jews until this moment were against God. We had the golden calf. We had murmurings. Here was a revolution against Moshe, and he needed some tools in his toolbox. He needed a fiery hell it to be able to hold that over somebody. And if you read that into this verse, it’s kind of into this sentence from the Talmud. It’s pretty good. He says, if God’s got a helm and a brimstone, I’m going to use it. And if he does it, he better create it. I just found that delightful.

Adam Mintz [00:12:57]:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah, that is great. Okay,

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:02]:
and now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift Play stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gadyah in a voice that matters. Go to Voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So now the rabbis say, for what was Moses asking? If we say that his request was for God to actually great Gehennim. But isn’t it written in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun? Ein chadash tachat Hashemesh. There are new creations after the six days.

Adam Mintz [00:14:30]:
There are no new creations.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:32]:
There are no new creations after the six Days of creation. So first of all, we all know Qohelet; Ecclesiastes is wisdom literature. And probably that was not the intention of the writer. He was talking about the way people use it in our actually language and literature. But the rabbis, good. They took it as this seems to be the source for where the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot came from. And they seem to take it as nothing can be created. Just kind of interesting.

Adam Mintz [00:15:06]:
Yeah, I mean, but that’s not surprising because the rabbis often take verses out of context. Not just from the book of Ecclesiastes, but generally they take things out of context. So I’m not so worried about that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:19]:
We’re not worried, but we do know that they felt compelled that there is this. They feel compelled to stop creation after creation finished. And they use this verse to amplify that. But you’re absolutely correct. What interests me more is that they felt compelled to do this. So what is their solution? Rather, Moses asked God to bring the opening of Gehenna close to there so that the assembly of Korach would be buried alive. So what it’s saying is he is talking to the staging. He’s saying, if Gehennom is here, fine. Otherwise I need you to send a truck to go get Gehenna. Because we need the opening in the earth tout suite, to swallow up these sinners.

Adam Mintz [00:16:09]:
Which is interesting, means that these things are created to. To. To solve a problem. Right? They. They needed to do something to the assembly of Korak. So therefore they. They made this new creation. No, God wouldn’t have made a new creation except that he needed it. The manna was a new creation, but he needed the manna because the Jews needed a way to eat in the desert.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:34]:
Yes, yes. But what I love about this piece of Talmud is it mixes up a few things. There is no way that we cannot take Gehenna as an added layer to Sheol. It’s not a translation, it is an interpretation. It is an up to date ism where they. And they, therefore, I don’t think I’m stretching when they say in their mind, Moshe is actually asking for a new moral force. He’s asking for a new tool to hold over the sinners of Korach. And he says, if it exists, fine. Otherwise we better create it. They have a problem with that. So they mollify it by saying, we’re talking about transportation issues, not real creation issues. But I just love the mix of it all. So let’s go to the other extreme. This beautiful saying that say before the morning shema every day. And it says, hameer la’ arez veledarim oleh barachamim. He illuminates the earth and provides light for those who dwell on it with compassion. And it says, and his goodness renews every day continually the work of creation. So I did a little searching and I found the source for this is actually in the Talmud, in Hagigah and Resh Lockesh said, because sometimes you do wonder, rabbi, in our liturgy, was the liturgist making this stuff up?

Adam Mintz [00:18:10]:
I’d say in general, the answer is no. There always is an earlier source to

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:14]:
the liturgy, which again, and normally it’s a pretty obvious source, but here it’s not so obvious. So in Hagiga 12B Resh Lakish said. There are seven firmaments, and they are as follows. Vilon, rakia, shkalim, zehulun, ma’ on, mekon, and aravot. The gemara proceeds to explain the role of each firmament. Vilon, even in modern Hebrew, is a curtain is the firmament that does not contain anything, but enters at morning and departs in the evening and renews the act of creation daily, as it is said, who stretches out the earth as a curtain and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in it. So it’s actually it is God, because obviously these different firmaments are related to God, but it’s not that obvious or powerful. The liturgist deserves a lot of credit for taking that concept and giving it to you. Every morning when you wake up as if to say, today’s a new day, Adam. You’re waking up in the morning. You can do anything today.

Adam Mintz [00:19:35]:
I just want to say that, you know the way that the davening that the liturgy is arranged in the morning. So we have the Shema, which is the center of the liturgy, and the blessings around the Shema, actually correspondent to the paragraphs of the Shema. So the first thing of that God creates new things that corresponds to SHMA yisrael hashem, elokenu hashem. That is what God is. It says, listen, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. What does it mean? The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And so the. The blessing the liturgy comes to tell you what that means is that God creates everything. So you’re right to like that sentence more than any other sentence in the liturgy, because that really defines what God’s role in the world is, to create new things every day.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:26]:
That’s amazing. I think we can end the podcast right now. We have a new kavanaugh. When we say the Shema, we need to focus on the fact that what that means to tell us is that God is creating the world every day. And every day when you wake up, it’s a new day. The world is an oyster. Anyway, anyway, let’s go and see. In the Psalms, there is one more kind of allusion to this. It says in Psalms 104, send back your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. Tishlach uchacha Yevraun Utah chadesh penei adama. Again, it’s just a beautiful interpretation. And I love the word for chadash, which of course comes also to us on the monthly cycle of Chodesh.

Adam Mintz [00:21:15]:
Today is Rosh Chodesh.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:17]:
Beautiful. So it’s perfect. So there’s this sense always in Judaism of renewal and of creating all over again. I did kind of know that there was this concept of perpetual renewal. And I found it, of all places, highlighted in Chabad. It seems that there’s a link to the doctrine of perpetual creation. And according to this article that I found the great work of Jewish philosophy, such as Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed, Remarx Pardus Rimonim, Rav Yeshaya Ahurowitz Shalach and Rav Shmiel Zalman of Ladi and the Tanya, I should say, discuss this doctrine of perpetual creation and cite spiritual, logical and philosophical proofs that such is indeed the nature of existence. I don’t know if this is the polar opposite of saying that God stops creating at the seventh day. I just feel that both of them, you can kind of have both in both hands. On the one hand, Eyn Somchina al hanes is a beautiful concept in the Talmud, Never rely on miracles. Not even our philosophy and our religion is based on the miracles. And on the other hand, when you live your life every day, it’s as if the world was created on that day. It’s kind of similar to having the two polar opposites of “I am from dust, from ashes” in the one hand, and the other is “bishvili nivrah haolam. The will is created. For me, I love this polarity.

Adam Mintz [00:22:54]:
Yeah. I mean, that tension is what life is about. Right. You need to be humble, but you need to be self confident at the same time.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:03]:
So I think that if you had. I really do feel, and I would love if we could find a source for really why the rabbis had such a strong problem with God continuing creation afterwards. Of course, you know, we’ve discussed this before. Vayechal Elohim et yom Hashvi’ I v’ Eichal is ending. There is this sense of ending. It’s a word, Rabbi. It could be interpreted. Anyway, I’m curious and I don’t know if we’ll find the answer today of what was driving the rabbis to start the infinite, omnipotent God from creating after creation. I’m curious to know what your thoughts are. But I do believe that in Judaism, if you had to take those two poles, I would say making renewal is a much more powerful, powerful.

Adam Mintz [00:24:03]:
I would agree with you. I think it’s protecting the six days of creation. If God can do everything. So if God created the world, God could do everything, including including create that which wasn’t yet needed for creation. I think it’s something like that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:20]:
But it’s a little bit of a mystery. You know, it’s also a little bit of a mystery. The rabbis clearly ended up believing, as did all of the Jewish medieval philosophers, in Yeshmi ayin creation ex nilo from nothing. If you read Beresheat itself, it’s not already clear. God started creation and he took pre existing matter, it almost seems. But this became something that was a stake in the ground. And I think this is one of those things. And I’m willing to say as long as it has no implications for how I think and how I live my life, I’m fine. And actually we already discovered some positive implications. This idea of not relying on miracles, I think is a beautiful idea and distinct to Judaism.

Adam Mintz [00:25:08]:
Really very, very good. Yeah, I agree with you.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:11]:
So let’s just finish up by talking now about how the rabbis almost are tripping over themselves in that Talmud in Sanhedrin, because what they actually are doing is they’re saying there’s nothing new. You can’t create gehennim. Whether they’re talking in a material sense or a philosophical sense, but by saying the word gehennim, they’re creating this new concept, or at least they’re comporting it. You know, the Torah itself has a shadowy note ocean of the afterlife. You know, the dead go to Sheol, a neutral underworld. We don’t have any stories about people coming back from the underlying coming back to life. But the rabbis read into sheol. Sheol is gehennim. And that creates an interesting literary effect. The rabbis are reading a later doctrine back into the earlier text, not the first text. So you could say that this sugya kind of what if the rabbis are creating a moment here. So in the process of kind of distancing themselves from creation, they are actually creating something and trying to put it into. That’s pretty fun.

Adam Mintz [00:26:29]:
That’s pretty good. Okay.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:31]:
It is kind of interesting. It’s not the first irony that we’ve had, but I do feel that there’s no question in the Rabbis minds Korach was sending… Moses was sending these people down to hell. And that’s not altogether clear in the text. As opposed to the Peshat, like we always used to say is he sent them to an untimely death when the earth opened up and sold.

Adam Mintz [00:27:02]:
Hell was not a factor in the Chumash. Right. It doesn’t matter whether it’s hell or not. He needed to get rid of them and he got rid of that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:09]:
So I want to end up by a famous slogan of the Chatam Sofer, the. As you know, and probably can fill in the blanks. Rabbi lived at the period of the Haskalah, of the beginning of the enlightenment of the Reform movements, where people were thinking outside of the box and really being Mechadesh, they were innovating and renewing. And he took, took an innocuous phrase of Hadash Yisroel min Hatorah that relates to what? The new crop. You can’t eat the new crop until a certain amount of time or until the second year. And he took that, as I would say, something that is an overarching directive of the ultra Orthodox community up until today, which is no more creation. Kadash is us from the Torah. And that’s even though we all know that the Talmud was full of creations, fixed prayer was not in the Bible. We had Kabbanot, the synagogue itself, the Passover, Seder, Ketubah, rabbinic holidays, and of course Gehennom itself was created.

Adam Mintz [00:28:27]:
It was a self serving concept of the Hasam Sofer because it was his way of rejecting the Reform movement.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:34]:
Yes, but I think the takeaway that I have today from Korach is that we have always, we have always renewed ourselves and it is baked into us even when we have some conflicting conceptual issues that we have to deal with as we did in this Parasha. But it’s that that reimagining of Moses in Sanhedrit to me is just pristine, where Moses says, I need hell. And if you’re not going to, if you haven’t created it yet, you need to create it now. It’s just, it’s just wonderful. So once again at Madlik we have taken four innocuous words. We’ve dived down into the crevasse and discovered a lot of gems and things to think about. Wonderful.

Adam Mintz [00:29:28]:
Fantastic. Shabbat shalom, everybody. Enjoy. Parashat Korach next week. Week double Parasha Kukat balak.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:36]:
Does that mean we’re catching up to Israel?

Adam Mintz [00:29:38]:
We’re catching up to Israel next week. Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:40]:
Fantastic. Okay. Shabbat shalom, everybody, and see you all next week.

My name is Geoffrey Stern and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week in the US we read Parashat Sh’lach through Contemporary Eyes with Pamela Pelled. Welcome Pam, Yesterday there were bombs falling in Israel and had we scheduled yesterday we would not be here. So it really is great to see you.

Pamela Peled [00:02:03]:
Thank you. It’s nearly midnight in Israel at the moment and last night as you say, we spent dodging missiles. So I might be a little bit bleary eyed, but I apologize.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:18]:
Thank you for joining us. We appreciate it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:21]:
Absolutely. So the book that you wrote is actually was published I believe in 2011 and so from a certain perspective I felt like nothing had changed. It had kidnappings, it had press and media that were distorting the story. So I think the good news and the bad news is that your book could have been published today and maybe we’ll see. We would have to tweak it for TikTok and Instagram, but otherwise just like the Bible and the Torah portion, things never change.

Pamela Peled [00:02:55]:
I’m very happy to be connected to the Bible like that, but it’s true. It’s sad how the situation is possibly even worse today than it was during the Intifada.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:07]:
Well, we’ll get into that, but let’s just because we are a parasha podcast, let’s start with the sources in numbers. And talking of the spies or the scouts, it says, thus they spread columnies among the Israelites. It’s really about spreading information. Literally. We always think it’s the content of the information, but from the get go, it’s this activity of disseminating and maybe repackaging information about the land they had scouted, saying, the country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. Clearly they were commentating as much as they were observing. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishing great size. Eretz Ochelet, Yoshevar. It is a place that eats its settlers, and they are Anshei Midot. We saw Nephilim there. I guess that’s some sort of giant. The Anakites are part of the Nephilim. And here’s the punchline. We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them. So really we’re talking about perception. What. What do those verses mean to you? Pam?

Pamela Peled [00:04:29]:
It’s very difficult to talk about this at this point in time because we’re living through such a difficult time in Israel and we feel sometimes that it is a land that eats its inhabitants. Unfortunately, after three years of war and so many people we know dead and wounded, and, you know, I’m not sure how political we should become, but what feels to us like a government that’s just out to destroy us. And so these words are very resonate very deeply. But putting that aside for the moment, you know, this parasha starts when, when the spies come back and they say, and they told him, we came to the land to which you sent us. And indeed it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. And Rashi says that when you spread a falsehood, you have to start with something true and something positive, and then it becomes easier to disseminate the falsehood. But it’s very interesting, this parasha. I was looking at it again today, because the spies are actually telling their truth. They saying what they say saw, and they were frightened. And they weren’t actually cursed because they told their truth. They were cursed because of the implications that they gave to their truth. In other words, because they didn’t trust 100% that God could get them out of any mess. And that’s something that we could argue about for the rest of time, I think. You know, and it’s not really what I discuss in my book. I don’t put any. I don’t I don’t show the country through the divine lens of prophecy for the future. And I have to say that I think in my very humble opinion, but I have worked with this a lot. I think that one of the very big problems in Israel today is this messianic fervor and people thinking that if you say something wrong about the government or the country, you’re a traitor or the future of the country. You don’t accept the narrative. And it’s very, very frightening to me. I don’t know if you want me to get into that. The laws now being passed about to try and curtail the freedom of the press here and to put people into positions of power that toe the government line. But that’s a really a huge subject that I’m sure we can talk about at another time. I dealt with in my book, and I’m very conflicted this, I can say it. In the beginning, When I was 10 years old, the Six Day War broke out. So you can easily work out how old I am today. And I went to a Jewish day school in South Africa, in a very apartheid South Africa, I should add. And they broadcast the Six Day War, the news about the war, every day, which was broadcast in the corridors and in the classrooms. And I came home to my parents and I said, I want to go and live in Israel. And my parents were tremendously shocked. They were big Zionists, but, you know, they taught Zionism but hoped somebody else’s children would actually go and live there. But I never changed my mind from the age of 10. And when I was 16, my parents brought me to Israel to have a look at this country. And I said, that’s it. And I really, I was one of those crazy Zionists who said, how can we not be part of the biggest miracle of the millennium? So what if we don’t make the same amount? And my husband was the same, I must say, he was from London. And we used to go overseas to our friends and see that they were all much richer than us and they had better cars and their children were studying at prestigious universities. And we used to say, should we be there? And we always said, no, we are so happy and proud and privileged and lucky to be part of Israel. And I still really do believe that. But at the same time, we feel at the moment that the country has been hijacked, the country we know and love, by a government just wanting to stay in power and by the leader of the government not wanting to go to jail and not wanting to let

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:13]:
me Let me jump in here because what you’re saying is so fascinating to me. Number one, you started by saying we all, in a knee jerk type of way, look at the 10 spies who come back with a bad, a quote unquote bad report as the bad guys here. And I think I was going to quote a midrash that comes out because the other sin was that they cried during that night. And the Talmud says they cried bechi Shel chinam. And they did it on tish of night. So it puts this whole calamity in this same lens at level of institutional problem as the destruction of the Temple. But what I’m getting at is they cried for no reason. What you’re saying is by both focusing on them saying they said that the country eats up its people. Well, what happens if a time comes where the country actually is eating up its people, number one. And number two, what happens, And I’m going to coin a word here, if it’s not a Bechi shel Chinam, but a Bechi SHel M’chir, maybe it’s not pointless whining, but maybe it is a legitimate despair. And that is the moment that we’re in that makes us read this story in a totally new fashion, but also looks at us. I mean, I love the fact that you brought your strong Zionist background in because you were the Joshua. You and your husband were the Joshua and the Calebs, and you came and you raised a family. You’re living in the country and now you’re looking at it and maybe legitimately you’re saying this is a land that right now seems to be eating up its, its people.

Pamela Peled [00:11:11]:
That’s exactly. And we, we did, we did come here very young and we sent all our children not only to the army, but also for a year of service that they didn’t get paid for before the army. And I won’t get into the game of how many people we know have been hurt or killed in the army. And we’re living in a time, you know what’s going on now with the Haredim. You know what’s going on with, with how they refusing to go to the army. And Netanyahu and his government are completely bowing down before them because they need their votes so desperately. The Likud knows that the Haredim have to go to the army and work and pay taxes, otherwise the country will implode. They know Netanyahu himself has been saying it for many, many years, but suddenly, just today, they’re passing another huge budget for the Haridim. It’s crazy. But more crazy than that is that they’re calling people like me leftists. They sneer leftists and traitors. First of all, I’m not sure that I’m a leftist. What is a leftist? I think I’m a very sane center person. But you just have to open your mouth to disagree. And you called a traitor.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:34]:
I mean, Rabbi, it is interesting how clearly this is contextual. There was a time when what they saw maybe didn’t merit their lack of faith. But there have to be times where you have to call a spade a spade.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:12:47]:
So I have a difference. So first of all, Pam, thank you so much for your insights and for your, you know, for your genuine. You got a very authentic view of what you know, what led you to move to Israel and you know, and how you feel. Now I’ll just say that several weeks ago we interviewed Adam Furziger.

Pamela Pellet [00:13:10]:
He was once my rabbi.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:13:13]:
Oh, you’re rabbi. So I’ll tell you a story about your rabbi, Rabbi Furziger.

Pamela Pellet [00:13:16]:
Just for a very short time, he was my Rabbi.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:13:18]:
Rabbi Professor Adam Furziger. So he tells he, he highlights Americans who moved to Israel, who made a difference. And one of the people who he highlights is Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, who was a rabbi at Yeshiva University, who moved to Israel and started in Yeshivat Har Etzion and became extremely important in Israel. And the story he tells is as follows. He says that during the Six Day War, there was a bus that went from New York to a rally in Washington, which I guess was asking the government for funds or for arms during the war, literally to save the state of Israel. And the story he tells in the book is that when Rabbi Lichtenstein got off the bus back in New York, he came home and he said to his wife, I don’t want to be a spectator anymore. We’re moving to Israel. So it’s interesting that in that generation there were, you know, that people, you know, it’s exactly the same story as you are telling. What I have a different question based on our story of the Maraglim. When you went to Israel at 16 years old, having decided at 10 that you were going to move to Israel, were you like the maraglim? Did you see giants there who you weren’t going to be able to conquer, or was everything rose colored for you?

Pamela Peled [00:14:45]:
I wouldn’t say everything was rose colored, but I loved living in Israel and I always felt it was a great privilege and I was very happy to be part of the national journey. But it feels today that that is no longer the case because this particular government, for reasons of its own, like for example, today there was a photo being sent of Netanyahu’s face and saying, a rocket a day keeps prison away. So we don’t know anymore why are these wars being fought now. There’s lots of issues here at the same time as really, really fearing this government and fearing for the future of Israel as a democratic state. Really, really, really fearing. At the same time, we do have implacable enemies, there’s no doubt about it, who want us all dead. So we’ve always had, and we’ve always managed to fight them without losing faith in our own government. And there’s definitely, definitely an unfair, anti Semitic, anti Israel flood of feeling in the world today. I’m not so sure it’s wonderful to be a Jew in London or in New York at the moment, or in Toronto. I think it’s not. And I think I still would prefer to be here than anywhere else. But it’s not nice to be here and to be a part of the working, contributing, paying taxes side of the population and to send our kids to the army and to do all this. Where the money that should go to my daughter on the northern border. She lives right on the Lebanon border. They’ve had the most ghastly three years. Ghastly, ghastly. They’ve moved about 15 times and been whatever. So the money that’s supposed to go to her is, Is conditioned on a tax break for the settlers on the West Bank. And then so much money goes to the Haredim that there’s nothing over for them. That’s just ridiculous. You know, that’s what’s happening. So there’s all these intersecting whirlwind of things going on. I was just reading today, there’s a book by doctors, Doctors of Human Rights or whatever that organization is. They’ve just written a book and one of the. I can tell you who it was, if you like, one of the Norwegian physicians. His name is Dr. Mads Gilbert. He says the suffering and destruction that he saw in Gaza made Dante’s Inferno look like a tea party. What about mentioning the suffering in Kfar Aza where they came and shot women up their bodies and took their babies and cut off their… Really, you know, there’s definitely, definitely that side of Israel where people are happy and rejoice in Israel’s destruction. I would very much highly, highly, highly recommend to your viewers on this point to read Howard Jacobson’s searing new novel called Howl H O W L. A Howl of anguish of what it feels to be a Jew in London after the 7th of October. And I’ll skip Geoffrey if I may, to your next point, that you asked about Hasbara and you said what about internal Hasbara? To our own people. And for me, you know, this is the most terrifying thing. I don’t know how I would cope if I was living in America, a pro Israel, Zionist, proud Jew, and my children would go to “From the River to the Sea” demonstrations. It happened to someone we know, a very dear friend’s daughter, after 7 October, went to her from the river to the Sea demonstration in the States. And I called her and I said, you know, darling, you calling for my death when you say that. And she said, it’s metaphorical. It’s metaphorical. I’m not. So what does that mean? So everything is so crazy at the moment, don’t you think?

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:08]:
Yeah, it’s. It’s really a perfect storm. And we’re talking about two separate issues, but there actually is a connection between them. I mean, you are clearly someone who, who loves Israel to your core. On the other hand, you’re not rosy eyed. You see the reality, you’re living the reality. There is in your eyes, and I think I happen to agree with you, a very corrupt government. There’s a population that votes in that government over and over again. Let’s not forget about that. And then there’s the whole other question of, in other words, do we keep this to ourselves or can we talk about it? That’s more of an American Jew problem where we struggle. Can we critique the government from the outside?

Pamela Peled [00:19:58]:
And having said that, there still is a real, true problem, that whatever Israel does, no matter how justified the war is, we will get blamed and we will be called genocidal. It beggars belief that they talk about Israel’s genocide after the 7th of October. Beggars belief.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:20]:
You know, I mean, I think sometimes I think about, I’d love to know what you guys think is that if you’re raising a child and everything that child does you say is bad at a certain point of time, the child doesn’t feel at all controlled by outside morality, outside rights, because the whole world judged them with a crooked measuring stick. And I think what it really emphasizes, our need to find our core. And that’s where you’re fighting the internal battle, Pam, because there are those, you can call them messianists, you can call them nationalists, people who feel we don’t have to answer to the world morality because there is no morality because we are criticized for whatever we do. And I think that’s the quagmire here. And you know, we love to have neat, clean answers, but it’s very hard to tell the difference between the Joshua and the Calebs and the 10 spies in a situation where we’re all trying to understand and process and explain and show the facts. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called Voice Gift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ nai Mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad ya in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

Pamela Peled [00:22:37]:
So for many years I’ve been teaching students to go out into the world and advocate for Israel. And one of the things that I’ve been teaching because having grown up in Apartheid South Africa, I can teach very reliably I think why Israel is not an apartheid state. Definitely not. And I. We don’t have to go into that Israel, I’m talking about Israel proper. Obviously it’s not. There were separate hospital, you know what Apartheid was. There were separate buses and separate hospitals and separate where you could live and Israel’s not in Apartheid state. But I have to say that in latter years with Ben G’vir and the, people going wild on the West Bank, it’s become very difficult to explain that you know and the provocation and the violence, the terrible violence that this, that the so called settlers perpetrate on a daily basis. So it, it actually, it’s a terrible thing to do. But it also really affects and does it, it does terrible things for Israel’s image and it seems so sad. So people like me and there are lots of people like me, I’d say half the country thinks like me. We just wonder if this government gets in again and keeps pouring money into a population that’s growing exponentially. The Haredin. Can the country actually survive never mind anything else can it survive economically? It’s a big question. So we’re just praying, you know.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:24:17]:
Thank you again for, you know, from. From an insider’s view. That’s what Geoffrey. That’s the title today, you know, is that this is an insider discussion. We all know how to read the New York Times, but this is an insider discussion. I want to go back to something that Geoffrey mentioned before, and that’s the source that we have from the Talmud. In Ta’ nit: atem bechitem bechi shel chinam, you cried needlessly that night. V’ani koveia alechem bechi ldorot, and I’m going to force you to weep in future generations. Which, of course, was the establishment of Tisha B’Av. So you talk about, you know, you talk about the problem of the Haridim, the problem of settler violence. And I just wonder, you know, bechi shel chhinam. Needless weeping. How do you define. What’s the distinction? When is it weeping? That has a value. And when is it weeping? That is needless.

Pamela Peled [00:25:20]:
I think it probably has a value if it can be changed. I think if there’s something that you can do to change it, then there’s a value to weeping. I mean, look, I think this is a discussion that’s beyond me, because why would God want his people? It’s too much for our brains. Why would God want his people to suffer for the rest of time? We think immediately of the Holocaust. Is that God? Is that because of the spies? Too crazy for me to. I would prefer to stick to what’s going on now. Those questions are questions of faith and questions of, you know, religion. And I don’t think anyone can answer them. Can you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:20]:
My read on Bechi shel chinim is inauthentic crying. There’s no question. A mother loses a son and cries. That’s authentic. No one would ever call that inauthentic or. I love the fact that it used chinam. Because we talk about Sinat Chinam is the source of Tisha B’Av.

Pamela Peled [00:26:44]:
Av.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:44]:
Normally we say the reason why there was a Tisha B’ av is because people hated each other for no reason. And in a very fascinating sense, these two midrashim are connected. Because the crying over things needlessly, I think, speaks to both when people posture, when people use. Whether it’s the situation like what happened in Gaza and like what happened in Iran. The world is not looking at the West Bank. Let’s do what we want there. When people use the fact that no matter what we do, we’re disenfranchised from the world. So that gives us free reign. I think that there’s an inauthenticity here, and that is the source, I think, for future generations, meaning to say that’s our curse. And I don’t take it, Pam, as much as a curse that we have to carry that cross. I think it’s what we, Jews in particular, have to be concerned about. And when we see ourselves divided, we know we’ve lost too many Temples, too many times have we had a chance to make a go at it, and we’ve lost it. And I think that’s the challenge here, with no easy answers. I mean, I think just to give you a little insight, in some of the thinking that’s going on in the United States, where antisemitism is growing, there are people like Dan Sinor, who wrote Startup Nation, and Bret Stephens, who said the biggest answer to antisemitism is that we have to dive and invest more in ourselves and our own pride, whether it’s pride or whatever. I think the idea is, and this is what was so fascinating to me, is that we can’t solve the problem of hasbara. But clearly one of the sources, if this is in fact an issue of they went around re explaining facts. Hasbara begins at home. Hasbara begins inside of our own heart.

Pamela Peled [00:28:56]:
I agree with you 100%. And that’s the main thing that I would like to give to the listeners is our feeling of deep conflict at the moment. Because on the one hand, really, I love Israel. I’ve lived here my whole life. We’ve brought our children up here. My husband spent his whole life dedicated to working for Israel too. And we love it. But we feel that we are now branded as traitors to the country because we don’t like the government. And so we still see the unfairness of the way the world views Israel. We still feel that it’s the only place for Jews to be safe. And why wouldn’t anybody want to? I feel that we’re still so proud of our startup nation, but the startup nation people are leaving. People, doctors are leaving and the leaving for the first time ever, I think, I think double the people are leaving to who are coming. It’s never been before in the history of Israel. I don’t think. And you know, when your prime minister stands up and sneers at you that you’re a leftist because you want a commission of inquiry, as to why the 7th of October happened and sneers that you traitors that you want. It’s very hard to keep a balance especially when you’re under attack from Iran and on seven fronts at once and terrorism and it’s, it’s been dramatic and all we can say is that we actually holding our breath till the elections. And there’s this feeling that if it sane. If I told you what the government was busy with today on the day that we were being bombed, do you know they were busy discussing whether Tali Gottlieb’s immunity should be taken away. Tali Gottlieb is a member of Knesset who can only be described as. She screams, she pulls her hair, she’s peculiar, she screams, she doesn’t talk and she, at the beginning of the war wanted to get back at somebody who was protesting the war. So she revealed this woman’s husband’s details and he works for the security of Israel. She said his name, where he lived, she revealed it all and she’s up for treason or for threatening the security of Israel. So today that is what the Israeli government was dealing with. How to not get rid of her immunity so she won’t be tried for endangering the security of Israel because can you, can you believe it? Can you, can you actually believe that we turn on the TVs to see if our kids are going to go to school tomorrow. How many people have been killed? What’s happening? Are we at war again? And we see t got lip screaming and not one person from the Likud says a word about it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:02]:
So we’re getting to the end. I want to tell you and share with you what my takeaway is. My takeaway is that we read this story of the scouts coming back as if they’re tourists giving their travelogue. And yes, we see that there’s a Talmud that says this is on par with the destruction of the Temple. And it’s sometimes hard for us to understand the angst that was going on at that moment. But I think what you’ve done is to literally bring it into today’s moment. And it’s too easy for us, especially living here in the States, who read about this in a scroll or a newspaper to not understand that Israel in your eyes, and I personally share your view, is going through such a moment, such a do or die moment, such as is this generation going to make it or not moment. And I think you’ve really through just speaking your heart have put us into a little bit better mind frame to understand what this is all about. And we have to. If we’re talking about, you know, we all blatantly say, what’s new in Israel? This is literally a moment.

Pamela Peled [00:33:26]:
Well, I would like to believe, because I’ve been so. It’s been terrible here. It’s really with the bombs and the running to shelters and knowing people dying all over the place and our kids in Lebanon and in Gaza and just terrible, terrible stuff. It’s really been terrible. But I would like to end on a optimistic note because I do believe, I really do, that if the government changes and we get a sane and decent government moment, we are going to have such a restart in Israel. That’s what I’m praying for. And when they say that we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, we’ll learn to be grasshoppers that stand on our back legs. And Israel, there’s. We’ve got our energy and we’ve got our. We know how to jump as grasshoppers. Whatever. We’ll be okay. We just need to be gifted with not even great leaders, just leaders like we’ve always had, like Rabin, all our leaders until this time. Leaders who really put the good of the country in front of their own good. That’s all we need. You know, we didn’t always agree. I didn’t adore Begin, but I never believed that he put his own good in front of the good of the country. He obviously cared about the country. So that’s what we need. And I would like to be the Zionist that I once was and say that. Come along and join us. Normal people, come and vote. We need every vote. Just people who aren’t, you know, just crazy messianics and who live in the real world. Come and join us. Come and vote. Come and change our government and come and rebuild our beautiful, tiny, beleaguered, fabulous little country. That’s my takeaway.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:35:32]:
Thank you so, so much. This was really. Geoffrey this was really fascinating. Really an insider’s view. And please, God, again, we should be the grasshoppers standing on our back legs, proud of who we are and what we stand for. Shabbat Shalom, everybod, everybody in Israel, actually, they read Parashat Sh’lach this past week. This week they read Korah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:35:52]:
But, Pam, we will.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:35:53]:
We’ll leave the. We’ll leave the. The image of the grasshoppers for everybody. Grasshoppers on their back legs. Thank you so, so much.

Geoffrey Stern [00:36:01]:
Thank you so much, Pam. Great seeing you, Adam.

My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed a light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Beha’alotcha and we revisit a subject very close to my heart. So join us for Entitlement Reform cont.. We’ve done this before, Rabbi, but I sure have. It’s a great time here again, I really learned something. And when I said that it’s almost on the equal footing of Sinai and Exodus, you’re going to see why I was blown away. But let’s dive right into it, because you’re in London town, it’s late at night there, and you’re on your way to Georgia, of all places. And we’re not talking about the state in the southern part of the United States either. So here we go. We are in Numbers 8:1 God spoke to Moses saying, speak to Aaron and say to him, when you mount the lamps, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the lampstand. Now, this has nothing to do with the subject matter that we’re going to talk about, but Rashi, quoting the Midrash, says something that I think gives us a context. And he says as follows, when thou lightest the lamps, Rashi asks, why is the section treating of the candelabra put in juxtaposition with the section dealing with the offerings of the princes. He answers because when Aaron saw the dedication offerings of the princes, he felt distressed because neither he nor his tribe was with them in the dedication. Whereupon the Holy One, blessed be he, said to him, by your life, Bechayai, your part is of greater importance than theirs, for you will kindle and set in the orders of the lamps. Rabbi, it was competitive. And we spent so many verses in last week’s Parsha detailing each and every prince of each and every tribe that you’ve got to. You shouldn’t need a Rashi to tell you that the Levi’s felt left at the sidelines. But the reason, I say it has context, is because we are going to be talking about a transference from those leaders and those entitled people of power to the Levites. So the kind of juxtaposition and the interaction between the Levites, who were a stateless kind of tribe and the other tribes has a bearing what thinks you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:12]:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, the. This first Rashi kind of, you know, raises a flag to say that all of these issues here are connected to one another. Right. And, you know, and the role of Levi and where it came from, that that’s really what all these Torah portions are about. Now, I think we’re going to discuss today why, especially here, does the Torah bother to bring this up again? Like you said, this comes up a whole bunch of places. Why does it come up here specifically? But yeah, you’re right. From the very first Rashi in the parsha you know that this is going to be the thing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:51]:
Okay, so now let’s get to the meat of the matter. We are in numbers 8:14, and it says, thus you shall set the Levites apart from the Israelites, וְהִבְדַּלְתָּ֙ אֶת־הַלְוִיִּ֔ם מִתּ֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל And the Levites shall be mine. Vayhu li halavim’.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:14]:
Thereafter the Levites shall be qualified for the service of the tent of meeting, once you have purified them and designated them as an elevation offering, for they are formally assigned to me from among the Israelites. He keeps on focusing on from among the Israelites, I have taken them, meaning the Levites for myself, in place of all the first issue of the womb of all the male firstborn of the Israelites. Pitrat kolrechem bechor kol b’ nei yisrael lekakhti otamli. So netunim netunim is emphatic. I’ve taken them. I’ve taken them. And then it uses this word, mitoch. There’s kind of like a trade off from out of the B’ Nai Yisrael. And then it does something that we’re going to get into a little bit is that Peter rechem is that which opens up the womb, which rabbi is from the maternal side. And Bechor is the firstborn. You would normally think on the father’s side. So we’re combining a lot of ideas here. Then it says in verse 17, for every male firstborn among the Israelite, human as well as animal is mine. Interesting. I consecrated them to myself at the time that I drum roll. That I smote every male firstborn in the land of Egypt. Wow. We are going back to the Exodus. We’re making a direct correlation to the plague, the last plague where the firstborn of Egypt were killed. Now I take the Levites instead of every firstborn of the Israelites. And from among the Israelites, I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his sons to perform this service for the Israelites in the tent of meeting and to make expiation for the Israelites so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming too near the sanctuary. There’s a lot of baggage here.

Adam Mintz [00:07:21]:
There’s a lot of stuff there.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:24]:
I had never really thought of the tie in to the death of the firstborn and this concept of the firstborn because it’s not exactly something that is Jewish. In other words, in many cultures there is this sense of the firstborn gets a larger portion. There’s an entitled class. But that was the first thing that kind of struck me. And going to see that even this idea of firstborn, human and animal somehow ties into the Exodus story. Just fascinating how it is trying to give legs to something that is occurring kind of in front of our eyes here as we speak in the Book of Numbers.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:14]:
Yeah, okay, very interesting. Let’s go on. Let’s see what we have.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:17]:
Okay. So Rashi says, and I have given the Levites to do the service of the children of Israel that there will be no plague among the children of Israel. The meaning is I have given them etc so that it shall be unnecessary for them to come near the sanctuary. Because. And this is the translator who puts it in having sinned by worshiping the calf, if they come near, there will be a plague among them. So I don’t know how much you feel the translator has legs to stand on, but certainly there is this tying it into the plague of the firstborn. But clearly also what happened at the sin of the golden calf was those that sinned, the earth opened up. There was a Plague upon them. And the Levites were the ones who were pure, but also took Mi L’Hashem Eliy took the leadership role there. It does make you think, where do we know, in fact, why the firstborn lost the the right and why the Levites had to serve instead of them?

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:29]:
Well, let’s say the first thing. The story in, in Exodus chapter 32 that says that the Levites got up and they said, Mi L’Hashem Eliy means they. They protected God, they protected Moshe. And the fact that the firstborn were included among the people who worshiped the golden calf, none of that. Geoffrey is explicit. You can’t know, right? You don’t know that the firstborn worshiped the golden calf. All you know is, is the Torah doesn’t distinguish between the firstborn and everybody else. You know, Levi seems to be the good guy, but you don’t actually know whether or not Levi participated in the worship of the golden calf. If anything, the one who was responsible for the golden calf was Aaron , and he was the Cohen Gadol. So he is the chief Levi. So this, you know, this is like we always like to say, this is reading history backwards because God chose the Levites over the firstborn. Therefore, we read back in that story of the golden calf that the firstborn were guilty and the Levites were innocent. I’m just pointing out here that the rabbinic read sometimes becomes what we like to call the peshat Sometimes it becomes the literal read, even though the literal read doesn’t actually say that. To say it another way, the way we always learned in yeshiva, and that is that Rashi’s explanation isn’t Rashi’s explanation. Rashi’s explanation, because Rashi is so famous, his explanation becomes the simple explanation of the Torah. And this is an example.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:14]:
You took the words out of my mouth because I think if most Jews were asked why the firstborn were passed over and the Levites got it, they would just say, as a matter of fact, it was because of the sin of the golden calf. And what we are learning, that not only in this Rashi is it in parentheses, because it’s only a translation, but it is totally rabbinic. And you can look at the story as you did Adam and say, it’s not altogether clear that that was the moment, because who says the Levi’s hand clean? So now what I want to do is go to those verses that do connect to the firstborn. And that is something that I think most of us, including myself, really didn’t focus on till now. And now a word from our Sponsor if there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing Grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad GadYa in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. And now we go back to Exodus 12 and it says, it was in the middle of the night God struck down all the male firstborn in the land of Egypt. From the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon. And all the firstborn of the cattle. So the first surprising thing that all the commentaries have a challenge with is why the cattle? Not only because there was a plague a few plagues earlier where all the cattle were killed. But what does the cattle have to do with all of this? There were some commentaries that go so far as to say, we’re talking about domestic animals who were spared the other plague. It’s a problem. So now we continue. But it does have this issue of the firstborn. So in Exodus 13:12 it says, now here is the halachic takeaway. You set apart for God every first issue of the womb. Every male firstling that your cattle drop shall be God’s. But every firstling donkey you shall redeem with a sheep. If you do not redeem it, you shall break its neck. And you must redeem every male firstborn among your children. This stood by itself in Devarim. It ends right here. But in Exodus, look what it ties it to. In verse 14 it says, and when in the time to come a child of yours asks you, what does this mean? This comes right out of the seder. But at the seder we don’t replace firstborn at the seder. We’re talking about Matzah and Marah. You shall reply to him. It was with a mighty hand that God brought us out of Egypt, the house of bondage. When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let Us go. God slew every male firstborn in the land of Egypt, the firstborn of both human and animal. And here’s the takeaway. Therefore, I sacrifice to God every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every male firstborn among my children. We should be having this discussion at the Seder if we are loyal to the question of this one of the four children. I had never really focused on this, Rabbi.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:25]:
Fantastic. So verse 14, which is of course taken from the Haggadah, this is the question of the third son, the simple son. When your son will ask you, what does this mean? You should say, with a mighty hand, God took us out of Egypt. It’s not explicit. What does it mean, Mazot? What is that? You know, what is that referring to? Now, your read of these verses is interesting because you’re trying to read it to say, what is this all about? Meaning, why is it that the firstborn are separated to be special? What’s that all about? And God answers, because I took you out of the land of Egypt. And therefore. And that was represented by the fact that the firstborn of the Egyptian were killed. So all of a sudden, this is a great read, Geoffrey. All of a sudden, the killing of the firstborn becomes front and center in the story of the Exodus. All of a sudden, the whole Exodus story is about the killing of the firstborn. Now, that is for sure not the way we learned it in Yeshiva. It’s not the way you say it at the Seder, but you’re a hundred percent right. These verses seem to suggest. Mazot, what is this about? The whole story revolves around this point.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:46]:
It is literally nestled between verses 12 and 13, which talk about the redemption of the firstborn. And verse 15, which again gets back to the firstborn. It’s hard not to read it as one piece. It is absolutely fascinating. So if we look at numbers 3:12. And again, Rabbi, one thing we always know, that there are multiple ideas behind every rule. Whether it’s, why is it called Beersheba? Because there are seven wells, or because we had an oath there. So there’s different pathways. In numbers 3 12, it says, I hereby take the Levites from among the Israelites in place of all the male firstborn, the first issue of the womb among the Israelites, the Levi shall be mine, for every such firstborn is mine. At the time that I smote every male firstborn in the land of Egypt, I consecrated every firstborn in Israel, human and animal, to myself, to be mine… Gods. So here it already, whatever happened, Rabbi, that made the Levi’s take the baton from the firstborn. Here it already packs it into two verses and it rates it back all the way to the Exodus, like our other verse did. And it ties the knot to firstborn gave it to the Levites. And here we are. Rashi says on numbers 3 12, behold, I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel. This means I. Whence do I claim the right in them among the children of Israel that the Israelites should have to hire them for my service? It is through the firstborn, to whom I surely have a tithe, that I have a claim on them. He goes. For originally, the service, the priestly functions, was performed by the firstborn. But when they, the Israelites among them, their firstborn too, sinned by the worshiping of the gold calf. So here it is not the translator, it’s actually Rashi who says it. They became disqualified. And the Levites who had not worshiped the idol were chosen in their stead. And this comes from Zevachim. Again, it’s Rabbinic. Rashi is bringing this tradition that we feel almost is the pashat, as you say. But in Numbers three, it all kind of gets mixed together. There is almost a direct line from what happened at the last plague to the Levites in our pasha. And then something happens that I had never focused on before, Rabbi, and that I was blown away by in last week’s Parasha, in numbers 3:39. It tells a story. And that’s why I say this is on the same level as Exodus from Egypt or Sinai. It is a moment in our history. All the Levites who were recorded, whom at God’s command, Moses and Aaron, were courted by their clans. All the males from the age of one month up came to 22,000. So, Rabbi, we’ve been spending a few weeks now counting each tribe by head, counts who’s going to go into the military. Many times we say the Levites don’t get counted, they don’t serve. Here we count all the males. From the age of one month up, they are 22,000. And then it says, and God said to Moses, record every firstborn male of the Israelites from the age of one month up and make a list of them. To make a long story short, all the firstborn males as listed by name recorded from the age of one month up came to 22,273. So we have Levites that come to 22,000, and we have the firstborn comes to 22,273. Rabbi, we gotta just. We’re trying to balance the books and we’re trying to reconcile our accounts. And we’re off by 273. And as the redemption price of the 273 Israelites, firstborn over and above the number of the Levite, take five shekels, per head head. So make a long story short, these sukim are crafting a scene, a powerful scene where you’re lining up, it’s putting meat on this story. You’re lining up all the Levites and you’re transferring power in this magical moment. And because we’re not even talking about a myth, there are real numbers here. The numbers don’t add up. Then we get into the five shekels behavior head. So I was so struck that they made a moment just like the Exodus moment and just like they made the Sinai moment a moment for the transference away of primogenita of the value, the entitlement of the firstborn to the Levites. I had never focused on this before.

Adam Mintz [00:22:01]:
It’s fantastic. Now I want to tell you something amazing. You know, you get to 22,000 and then there are 273 extra. The way you get to 22,273 is actually a trick because the other tribes are counted from the age of 20. The Levites are counted from the age of one month. So first of all, it’s interesting that their tribe is so much smaller than the other tribes, but it’s almost, Geoffrey As if the Torah is working backwards. It’s almost as if the Torah needs to get to the number where the number of Levites and the number of firstborn is going to be the same. So they actually, you know, play a little game with the math and they say, well, when it comes to the Levites, if you count the Levites from one month old, then you’ll get to 22, 273. We only have to exchange 273. If we take him from 20 years old, we’re gonna have to exchange 10,000. We can’t do that. So even there, you see, the Torah is very much interested in redeeming one for the next.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:04]:
It could have easily been an origin story like George Washington cutting down the cherry street. We didn’t have to get into numbers. What the editor, what the writer of this text is trying to do is he’s trying to make it real. He’s trying to make you so that you could visualize this moment. And I took it this year. He’s Trying to emphasize the power of this moment. So there is an article in thetorah.com it’s called Laws of the Firstborn, how they connected to the 10th plague by a professor, Rabbi David Frankel. And what he tries to do is to show to what degree the writer of this story God, Moses. Editors later it doesn’t really matter to us. What matters is that what the writers are trying to do is to show how powerful this moment was. He makes an argument there is no to have the animal, the firstborn animals die in the last plague. The reason they brought that in was because there was a pre existing tradition and law about giving the firstborn animal. We’ve seen that already. And he wanted to connect it. They wanted to connect it to the powerful Exodus story and they wanted to connect it to the firstborn of humans as well. And so what they did is we would call it a mashup. Now. They mashed up these varying traditions to give this power. He says it is clear that this combined complex of firstling firstborn laws was of great importance to the later editors of the Pentateuch. This is evident from the brief law collection in Exodus. And here he brings even one more mashup of verses. In Exodus 34 it says, you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread. Eating unleavened bread for seven days as I have commanded you at the set time of of the month of Aviv. For in the month of Aviv you went forth from Egypt. Every first issue of the womb is mine. From all your livestock that drop mail as firstlings, whether cattle or sheep, but the firstling of a donkey, you shall redeem. You must redeem every male firstborn among the inhabitants. None shall appear before me empty handed. So he even brings it to the annual sacrifice that you bring in the pilgrimage festival. They wove this concept of the firstborn. Rabbi, I don’t know what I’ve been reading. I’ve been missing this. I mean there is at so many levels it is trying to bring in this issue of the firstborn into the Exodus story that you cannot ignore it. I’ll say something else that he said. When the firstborn at the Seder or about the Seder asks it, it’s because he really felt that this was annualized in this verse in Shemot, you get it as part of the pilgrimage festival that we are annualizing this concept of the firstborn. We think of it, when your child is born, 30 days later, there’s a pidyon haben. What this is trying to do is to keep that story, that narrative and the message behind it, which we’ll get into next in front of us at all times.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:35]:
Yeah, so that’s fantastic. So what I think another piece of this is that you see another example of the tragedy of the golden calf, because the golden calf created a rupture in the way it was supposed to be. The story of the Exodus is the story of the firstborn, of the choosing of the firstborn of the Israelites. But because of the golden calf, the firstborn lost their right. That actually is a bigger deal than we were ever willing to make make of it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:11]:
So. So what you’re saying is part and parcel of, I would say, celebrating the firstborn is also acknowledging what was lost when we gave up the firstborn. So he says to explain how two ritual practices simultaneously symbolize a single event, the editor of the Law of Exodus simultaneously added the death of the firstling animals to the plague of the firstborns. Not only the Egyptians first born was destroyed, but so also their firstlings that he makes over and over again, and he doesn’t really have a takeaway, is that the Torah is intent on combining all of these messages. I would say that what the real takeaway is is that this becomes a story about breaking the ideology of the birthright. Because if you think about the most basic message of Pharaoh is from Pharaoh to anybody who was in charge in the prisons, whatever, this is breaking down, primogeniture, breaking down, as I say, entitlement. And this is, I think, why this becomes so important. The Torah systematically dismantles the hierarchical assumptions of the ancient Near East. Human dignity is not determined by birth. And that really comes through to me. Rabbi, when we think of what we’ve been reading numbers about all these heads of the tribes, all these Nissim, all of these famous people, and then woof, it gets transferred to the landless Levites. And I think ultimately what happens. And we’ve come across this. We came across this in Joshua Berman, who in his book Created Equal how the Bible Broke with Ancient Political thought, that everything that we read about the revolution leads us to believe that we’re breaking down these hierarchies. We saw it recently in Daniel Elazar and when we talked about federalism, the firstborn lose the priesthood, and eventually the rabbis declare that a Torah scholar takes precedence over an ignorant high priest. So ultimately where this all goes, Rabbi, is where we get to the rabbis and the rabbis say, even the Levites who had the temple, but the temple was destroyed, so maybe they had the manoah and the light. We have midrashim that talk about that in this week’s Parasha. But ultimately, what the rabbis did was the rabbis said in the Mishnah in Horiot that a priest precedes a Levite, a Levite precedes an Israelite. We’re ready for a Mishnah that talks about the hierarchy. And then it says, after all of the hierarchies and a convert goes in front of an emancipated slave, it gets to the very bot says, when do these halached precedents take effect of hierarchy? In circumstances when they are all equal in terms of wisdom. But if there was a mamzer who is a Torah scholar and a high priest who is an Am Haaretz, an ignoramus, a mamzer takes first place. So my argument today, Rabbi, is one of the reasons why this, I would say, segue and this evolution from the exodus from Egypt and bringing down the pharaoh and giving it to the firstborn and bringing one’s first, the best for God and that whole tradition and then moving it to the Levites because we’ve fallen short. And then the temple being destroyed and there are no, there’s no more temple for the Levites, all led to a wonderful, I would guess, evolution in Judaism that broke down all of the hierarchies in favor of learning and real authority, which is character. There’s a beautiful thing in Avot, Rabbi Simmons said there are three crowns. The crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, the crown of royalty. But the crown of a good name supersedes them all. It’s just, I think, a wonderful story, but it’s not so much a drush when you look at the actual narrative that we saw for the first time today through fresh eyes and the actual recasting of the whole Exodus.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:47]:
Amazing. This is really, really good. And, you know, again, we’re reading these stories that we read every single year, but we have a new twist on him this time. Thank you so much, everybody. Enjoy Parashat Beha’alotcha. We look forward to seeing you next week. Shabbat Shalom from Georgia, the other Georgia Shabbat Shalom.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:06]:
We can’t wait. We can’t wait to hear all about it as you in the Book of Numbers as we travel. So Shabbat Shalom. And we will see you all next week.