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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 Clubhouse every Thursday at 8 PM Eastern and share it as a Madlik podcast on your favorite platform. Today we’ll explore the Torah’s preeminent use of a hue of blue called tekhelet in the construction of the Tabernacle and in the priestly garb. This rare and dear dye extracted from a non-kosher mollusk was also used on the four-cornered tallit of every simple Jew. So get ready to decorate and take out your color strips as we ask, why blue and white? Well, welcome. I think last week I said stay tuned for our fashion edition. Maybe it’s going to be more like the Pantone edition or the pick your— the color for your wall edition. But in any case, here we are. We’re starting to decorate our Tabernacle. Last week, we had a lively discussion of about why after saying, build me a temple, God said, v’shachanti betocham, I will live in them. And over the week I’ve been thinking about it, and I started to think that, you know, maybe it foreshadowed a time already when you built the temple, when you built the mishkan, the tabernacle, that you wouldn’t have it. And I think that foreshadowing thought is going to come through a little bit in our discussion of the emergence and history of this wonderful hue of blue called tekhelet, how it starts and how from the way it starts and its history, it foreshadows its later development. So we are in Exodus, 26, and I am just going to pick those verses that mention our color. And you’ll see that I’m, I’m not really, looking for a needle in a haystack. This tekhelet, this blue, is actually featured throughout and grows with importance. So Exodus 26:1, it says, as for the tabernacle, make it of 10 strips of cloth. Make these a fine twisted linen of blue, purple, and crimson yards. Tekhelet v’al g’man betolat shani. And then in Exodus 26, it says, make loops of blue wool on the edge of the outermost cloth of the one set, and do likewise on the edge of the outermost. So at first it’s mentioned amongst another palette of different colors, and now all of a sudden It’s the edging color. In Exodus 26:31, it says, you shall make a curtain of blue, parochet techelet. Those of you who know about synagogue architecture know what a parochet is. It is, the frontal canopy in front of the holiest place in the synagogue. So you shall make a curtain of blue, purple, and crimson yarns and fine twisted linen. It shall have a design of keruvim worked into it. In 26:36, it says, you shall make a screen for the entrance of the tent, petach ohel, and it shall be blue, purple, and crimson yards. So blue is being featured, regularly. And in fact, on this, if you look into the notes, I actually have some illustrations from a wonderful book called The Tabernacle, Its Structure and Utensils. And the, the figurative elements of the parochet are actually the cherubim themselves are in blue. In Exodus 28:31, it says you are to make the tunic for the ephod completely of this blue, khalil techelet. And of course, the ephod was almost a royal garment, a smock. it was the,— it looked almost like an apron. So it was frontally— it’s what you saw when you saw the high priest. In Exodus 28:36, it shall— it says, you shall make a frontlet, this tzitz, on the pure gold. And this is that, of course, what, what the Kohen wore on his forehead. And it was made of gold. And engrave on it the seal of God, suspended on a cord of blue, a p’techil techelet, so that it shall remain on the headdress. So if you start to actually visualize this use of blue, it is, I would say, the preeminent color. I’d love to know what you think, Rabbi, but certainly when you look frontally at the Kohen, it’s the smock, it’s what he’s wearing, and it’s that, that golden name of God that sits on his forehead, is tied with these, petil techelet. So are you struck as I am by this use of this, uh, this blue? Yes, I am.

Adam Mintz [00:07:51]:
And obviously the blue is also in the tallit, so it goes beyond the priest. But there’s no question that blue— this blue, this techelet— is the most significant color. It’s not only in the Kohen’s clothing, but I would say in the entire Torah. If you were to ask me what is the color of the Torah, I would tell you the color of the Torah is Techelet

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:17]:
so the official color of the Torah, of the Israelites, of the Jewish people, becomes blue. And you’ve already begun our journey because you referenced the tallit. In Numbers 15, it says— and we say this every day as the third paragraph of the Shema— and Hashem said to Moses as follows: Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes —on the corners of their garment. V’asu lahem tzitzit al kanfei bigdeihem. Throughout the ages, let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. Al tzitzit ha’kanaf petihil techelet. There shall be for you a fringe. Look at it and recall all the commandments of God and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. Thus you shall be reminded to observe all my Commandments and to be holy to God. I, God, am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God. I am God. So, so that’s almost— is it a fast forwarding? Is it a similar parallel to what we had last week where, with this direct connection between what happened institutionally in a tabernacle and what happens to individual Jews? I was kind of struck by that. Do you think there’s, there’s any, anything there? I wonder.

Adam Mintz [00:09:53]:
And, you know, what’s the connection? But well, first of all, let’s say like this. There clearly is a connection between the tallit and the clothing of the kohen because they’re both clothing. You have to remember, this is an important thing to remember. We wear the tallit as a special garment. We wear it over our clothing. That’s not what the Torah has in mind when it talks about a tallit. When the Torah talks about a tallit, it means that they used to wear these kaftans, and the kaftans had four corners, and they used to put tzitzis on the bottom of the kaftans. So it actually was their clothing. So there actually is a much closer connection between the description of the, of the techelet in the tallit and the clothing of the kohanim.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:48]:
Absolutely. And again, there’s, there’s, forgive the pun, there’s a thread that connects what happened in the Tabernacle in terms of the, the aesthetic choice of color for the edifice itself, for the wearing of the high priest, and the way that a simple— any Jew could wear. In a sense we are going over some familiar territory. For those of you who have been with us for the past year we had a fashion episode where we talked about Korach, who led a rebellion against God. And his argument, according to the rabbinic sources, was that he was wearing a talit shekulo techelet. And according to the Midrash, he didn’t just bring an argument, he actually showed up with a bunch of kohanim, and they were wearing this garment that was fully techelet. What I was struck by as I read this and I considered what the ephod actually was actually very close to the garb that we are describing right now. If you looked at the Kohen, the predominant color would be this techelet. So, in a sense, again, maybe foreshadowing a later time, but at the time that this was written The kohanim were set aside by wearing this, blue. And if anything the thread on the corners of the tallit reflected the total effect, if you will, the total look fashion. But you can’t get away from the fact that there has to be a connection. This is the first time that Techelet, to my mind, is actually mentioned in the Torah, and it’s mentioned with regard to the Tabernacle. And here every Jew, later on is commanded to simulate that in some regard. And I think that’s kind of a powerful, a powerful message. I would agree with that.

Adam Mintz [00:13:16]:
I mean, let’s, let’s think about the Do you think the fact that it’s blue is significant? I mean, like, it could be any color, and in the Torah this week there are other colors. Why is blue such an important color? So I’ll tell you what the Midrash says. The Midrash says that when you look at the blue on the tallit, you’re supposed to think of the sea. When you think of the sea, then you’re supposed— the blue of the sea, then you’re supposed to think of the blue of the heavens. And that reminds you of God. So the blue is actually a color that reminds you of God. It’s a little indirect, but it reminds you of God. Isn’t that interesting?

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:01]:
I think it is. And of course, if you add to that that the, techelet itself comes according tradition from a dye— we’ll get into the history of the dye in a few minutes— but from a Mollusc which is in the sea. So form follows function type of thing. You look at the blue, it inspires you to think both by way of its origins, and its color of the sea, then the sky, the firmament, and then God. And those are great associations. Those associations are in the Talmud, in the rabbinic literature. I think if you were to ask me, reading the text itself, what the association is, I would put it into the context of everything else that’s in our parsha, which is very rare materials, beautifully selected stones that create this urim vetumim, the very best, the hidur of the thing. And I would add, and this will come up in our discussion, very dear in the sense of very rare, very expensive, very exclusive, by the laws of supply and demand, hard to come by. And so I think there’s also, if you look at, for instance, the word ephod, this smock that I was describing, that was worn by King David and and by King Solomon. These were royal garments. And to me, the most— I would say straightforward association is in exclusivity, something that is of a very, very high value, hard to come by. Do you, do you think there’s any merit to that, as opposed to the associative thinking of what it reminds one of? Good.

Adam Mintz [00:16:06]:
I think that there is absolutely something to be said for that. Now, it’s interesting when you think about supply and demand, JeGeoffrey, where they get this mollusc from in the desert, how they have the color of techelet in the desert.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:23]:
Well, you know, I wasn’t in your synagogue last week, so I didn’t hear your sermon. But if I recall, you were going to talk about how many of the materials, by tradition, rabbinic tradition, for the mishkan were brought with the Jews down into Egypt. And I, and I added to that that there’s much talk about when the Jews left Egypt, they were given riches, that worked for them and against them. When it came to the golden calf, they all seemed to have jewelry to contribute. But it is an issue. And, you know those who would question the how this could have been done in the desert. Either you believe in miracles or you don’t. So I do think it’s a good question. And obviously part of that is a mollusk, it comes from the sea, and here they are in a desert. That makes it a little bit more challenging. Specifically here is because the mollusk comes from the sea and here they are in the desert. No question about it. And, and again, I think that whether it’s the Tabernacle, the mishkan, or the temple, you know, one can, can make many cases that there is foreshadowing of what would become a mishkan or what was to be a mishkan. But I think that, you know, it comes down to, to belief and perspective. But I think if you get over that, there is no question that the kohanim in the tradition of giving honor to God and building cathedrals and beautiful edifices, were decked out in the best. And that there’s no question that tekhelet, to me, has level of royal blue to it. and that comes out, I think, a little bit in Korach’s argument as well, where he’s looking for authority, he’s looking for exclusive, power grabbing, so to speak. So I think from that perspective, it becomes fascinating if one traces the history of the use of tekhelet directly from being used by a kohen gadol, a high priest, and then ultimately, being part of— if even with a thread— of a pashuta Yid, so to speak, of this. So I want to— of the simple Jew—

Adam Mintz [00:18:51]:
something that reminded me. You said royal blue, and I thought to myself, where does royal blue come from? And let me read you from Wikipedia. Royal blue is a deep and vivid shade of blue It is said to have been created by clothiers in Rhodes, Somerset, a consortium who won a competition to make a dress for Queen Charlotte, consort of King Charles III. So isn’t that interesting? Means even in England there was significance to blue as being the royal color.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:30]:
Well, absolutely. And in some of the readings that I’ve gone through this week, you know, there was talk about during the Roman period period already, only the Caesar was allowed even to wear it. So one cannot help but think of Exodus 19, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, that ultimately this, seamless, transition from the Kohen wearing tekhelet, the Tabernacle, the Temple of God being really accented heavily in tekhelet, and then the simple Jew having that Techelet. It seems to me overwhelming that the message is that you are a kingdom of priests in a sense. And that to me is, you know, is very similar, like I said from the beginning, to the message that we might have taken last week, which is God says build the temple, but I’m going to live in each one of you, right? I think that’s beautiful.

Adam Mintz [00:20:31]:
And of course that relates to the fact that it’s not only the Kohen, but it’s also in the Talit. So we are a a kingdom of priests, and therefore it starts with the priests and then it goes to each and every one of us. It’s such a nice idea, right? It flows so beautifully.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:49]:
It flows, and you could say it’s hermeneutics and parashanut and, and giving d’rush, but the truth is that the temple, the tabernacle, did not last. Techelet as a part of a temple and part of a priestly culture did not last. The remnant of of it was in that thread. And so it’s less of a commentary. But yes, I know when you look at it, you’re supposed to remember the sea and the firmament and then God, but you can’t help but also remember the rich history of it in the Torah itself, and that, that history carries on in each Jew. And I don’t think that’s hermeneutics. I think that’s actually— that’s what it really It was a material, a material signification in a sense. And that is kind of fascinating.

Adam Mintz [00:21:46]:
You know, it’s also interesting that for centuries the techelet was lost. You know that, right? We didn’t have techelet. About 25 years ago, there were two people, students of Rabbi Riskin in Efrat, who actually went diving in the sea off of Haifa, and they found what they claim to be techelet. And today you can actually buy a tallit with techelet in it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:16]:
So you’re— again, you’re, you’re pushing us forward, rabbi. I love it. We’re going forward in the history of this— I wouldn’t say idea, but a color. And yes, the Talmud does say that in, in the Midrash Tanhuma, it says, that— that when there was real blue, but now we only have white because the blue has been hidden. She’Hatechelet nignaz. I always thought that it was obviously something that was extinct, and I always loved the concept of we are guardians of God’s world, and if we don’t take care of it, not only can we lose a species, we can lose a commandment. I mean, that’s a big deal. When one of the 613 commandments, you can’t fulfill it anymore. That’s right. So, I always think there’s a lesson there. And I was at the (Jerusalem) aquarium, and like any aquarium and any museum in Israel, during Chol Hamoed, Hasidim come and everybody comes. And I said, you have to have a whole area of this on techelet, because it’s some— it’s an aspect of Judaism that is connected to the (antrural) world that we are the guardians of. So there’s a whole separate mission there. But again, it’s related because just as the temple was lost, just as the Mishkan was lost, just as the Kohanim were lost, so the mollusk was lost. And I almost regret the fact that we, quote unquote have refound it because looking at the simple white tallit reminds you as much of what is there as what is not there. And I think that’s a beautiful message as well. But you’re correct, that this is an area where science impacts Judaism, discovery, in academics. It’s fascinating. It’s a beautiful, beautiful narrative arc of history, so to speak. One other aspect of how it quote unquote was hidden was that because it was very expensive— on the one hand, it’s a wonderful lesson that even though it’s expensive, even though it’s quote-unquote royal blue, every Jew can have it. But at the end of the day, when the rubber hits the road, it’s expensive. And what that meant was it created a situation for fake tekhelet. And I mentioned this a little bit when we discussed Korach, but Yigal Yadin, in a book on Bar Kokhba, was excavating a cave and he found, balls of wool that were blue. And he says, wow, this is amazing. Not only have I found tefillin, but I also found tekhelet. And it was clear that the Zealots were keeping all of these commandments. And then he sent it to a lab, and the lab came back— and this is all in his footnotes, this is a general, an archaeologist, but he’s tying it all into the Talmud— he says it was clear that this was not tekhelet, it was fake tekhelet, and that that probably the Zealots were duped along with many other Jews in buying this from incorrect sources. And in the source sheet, I have, places in the Talmud where it talks about this. But ultimately, it is very possible that the rabbis, in order to stop corruption and to snuff out these black markets for fake tekhelet, said there’s no mitzvah. And that’s an amazing lesson to take from this color. And again, it’s the absence of the color that teaches us, but it is an amazing lesson. That is an amazing lesson.

Adam Mintz [00:26:15]:
That’s right. I mean, let’s just take a step back. The fact that the Talmud knows about fake tekhelet, so that kind of points to your idea that it was, it was expensive and it was special, right? Because you only make replicas of things that are worth it, right? You only make replicas of things from Tiffany’s, right? Things that are really worth it. So, so techelet obviously was something that was very, very special. And it’s also interesting that it shows how important it was, how important people, you know, that people could be duped. You know, people aren’t duped for just anything. People are duped for things they want, and what they wanted was techelet because that was the royal color.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:03]:
Yes, so that is definitely a fascinating aspect. So I want to get back to kind of the verses that we talked about at the beginning when we were describing the fashion, so to speak. And it says, ‘va’asita tzitz,’ that you should make this frontlet. And then it talked about a patil techelet, a cord of blue. And those two words also are pregnant with, with fascinating meaning in history. So tzitz, can mean, wings. In Jeremiah it says, ‘Tenu tzitz leMoav’— give wings to Moab. And of course, those who know about the Hebrew for the commandment of tzitziyot, it’s ‘an kanaf’— the corners. But kanafayim is wings as well. So, uh, it kind of—

Adam Mintz [00:27:57]:
and explain What does tzitz mean in this week’s parasha?

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:01]:
So in this week’s parasha, it means, ‘V’Asita Tzitz zahav tahor,’ you shall make a frontlet. Everett Fox says a flower or a gleamer, perhaps alluding to its shining quality or its shape of some kind on his forehead. Absolutely. Very similar to maybe where tefillin is.

Adam Mintz [00:28:26]:
I always thought that the tzitz was a funny thing. Can you imagine wearing a gold flower on your forehead?

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:35]:
Well, I mean, again, it’s very similar to tefillin, and it’s very similar to the headdress and the helmet that the Egyptians and many Sumerians wore. With the Egyptians, it had this snake coming out, but, maybe it’s the third eye. This seems to be— the forehead seems to be a place where there was embellishments, kamiyot, magical things. So yes, to us it’s probably strange, but I think it’s a frontlet. It’s, not your license plate in the back.

Adam Mintz [00:29:16]:
It’s, it’s the way you go forward. Look at the picture. The picture of the tzitz seems to be— it’s very narrow. So it may be— it’s like the tefillin. Maybe they have the same idea that it’s kind of just a more elaborate type of tefillin made out of gold.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:35]:
No, no, no argument there for sure. But tzitz has another meaning as well. In Numbers 17, it says, the next day Moses entered the tent of the pact, and there the staff of Aaron of the house of Levi had sprouted. It had brought forth sprouts, produced blossoms, and borne almonds. So this was a particular situation, but there it talks about v’ya’tzitz— tzitz— produced blossoms. So we have the first image is one of soaring, of wings, of something that’s shiny and translucent. And then we have this other aspect of tzitz as a blossom of life.. And these— of course, you can’t ignore the connection between tzitz and tzitziyot, as a, a sprout from the four corners of the garment. So the— we’re, we’re playing with language again, how that commandment of tzitziyot for the civilian Jew, if you will, connected with many of these concepts that we see regarding the priestly garments. And that to me is fascinating and, and kind of exciting.

Adam Mintz [00:31:00]:
That is really exciting. I think it’s interesting because you start with something as kind of mundane as the color. Doesn’t sound like it’s going to be interesting, but there’s so much richness in trying to figure out the color that it really brings the whole thing to life and it really adds a different element. You know, usually when you learn Tetzaveh, you talk about the different articles of clothing, the things themselves. But thinking about the colors is really so much more striking because that’s actually what people saw. Well, well, absolutely.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:33]:
We’re getting— we’re getting towards the end of our half hour, and, the, the subject of tonight was why blue and white. And we’ve talked a lot about the blue. We’ve even talked about the white, where the rabbi said once the blue was hidden, it’s all white? But as you know, and you could probably sense when I quoted Yigal Yadin, the general and the archaeologist who knew his Talmud, somehow the Zionists, as secular as they were, understood this message, all the messages that we’ve talked about, tonight. And when they picked the colors for the flag of Israel, which really, if you think about it, looks like that tallit, it has those blue stripes on it. We call the tzitzitz. When Rabbi Herzog made the prayer for the State of Israel, and in it he played with that— this idea that we say every day, 3 times a day when we, when we pray, and we talk about umatzmiach Yeshua, that the deliverance should sprout. I just love that word, that, you know, deliverance, you can say, could explode, it could come out, but that deliverance should sprout is amazing to me. And of course, he said, ‘Reishit tz’michat gu’ulatenu.’ I was going to say, that’s the same thing, right? Took the same concept. So we’ve really— we’ve taken, the history of a simple color and traced it through the ancient texts all the way to modern-day Israel. And it’s an inspiration, hopefully, to us all. May you glow in the shine of the tekhelet this Shabbat. And join us next week.

Adam Mintz [00:33:32]:
What do we have next week, Rabbi? Next week we have the sin of the golden calf. There’s so much next week. Wow. This, you know, the breaking of the tablets and the sin of the golden calf.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:42]:
We’re going to be busy all week preparing for next. I can’t wait. Shabbat shalom to everybody and have a great Shabbat. And see you all next week.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week we read Parashat Terumah. Most sermons this week will focus on the obligation of charity, tzedakah, but we dig a little deeper and explore the often overlooked language of exchanging gifts. So join us for No Free Gifts. Well, Rabbi, welcome. You are 13 hours ahead of us in Hong Kong. And my recollection of Hong Kong, I once went there for a wedding and there was a whole tea ceremony before with exchanging of things. There’s this red envelope that they exchange on Chinese New Year, which is happening right now. The whole ritual of exchanging gifts is highlighted in the Far East. I’m wondering, are you exposed to any of the festivities going on?

Adam Mintz [00:03:09]:
So I’m going to tell you something. Last night we went to the flower market. One of the gifts they exchange for Chinese New Year’s are flowers. Literally, there must have been 50,000 people who were at this flower market last night at 10:00 at night, buying flowers to exchange. Chinese New Year actually begins on Tuesday. So on Monday night, they’re actually— the flower market is open all night long so that people are there all night long buying flowers that they exchange. So I was thinking about that. It’s exactly the same tradition, this idea of exchanging gifts. So here, being in Hong Kong is just perfect for this.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:58]:
You know, normally you read Terumah and I don’t focus on the gifting part. It’s always, you know, everybody has to provide their Terumah, their, their, their tzedakah. But we’ll see in a second that there definitely is a very strong gifting aspect. And of course, the only mitzvah that we have, to my knowledge, of gifting happens on Purim. Shalach manot is not gifts for the poor. That is matanot la’anim. This is literally to peers. So I think we’re going to have a fascinating little visit to the world of gifts in the Torah. We are in Exodus 25:1, and it says, God spoke to Moses saying, tell the Israelite people to bring me gifts. You shall accept gifts from me from every person whose heart is so moved. And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper. Our buddy Everett Fox is a little bit closer to the Tikchu et Terumati. He says, Speak to the children of Israel that they may take me a raised contribution from every man whose heart makes him willing. He says, and this is the contribution that you are to take from them: gold, silver, and bronze. So I, I read in between the lines there, Rabbi, that there’s something a little bit more complex about the gift giving than we would think as a triviality or maybe even a character trait. No, this is— we’re going to see the laws of, of of giving. What, what are your impressions of this?

Adam Mintz [00:05:37]:
Yeah, no, that’s right. You shall take a truma. I’ll just tell you a really interesting thing. The word natan in Hebrew, to give, is one of those words that is, that is whether you read it forwards or backwards, it’s the same word. Nun, tet, nun. It’s natan. And Rabbi Lookstein always liked to say that that’s the reciprocity of gift giving, that it’s about exactly what you said, is about creating relationships. And I’m going to send him this Madlik because he’s really going to enjoy the fact that the whole topic is based on that little dvar Torah that I heard from him many, many years ago.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:19]:
That is fantastic. So Rashi says the following, yedavnu libo, the word yedavnu, that his heart kind of, our English translation was that his heart His heart makes him willing. Rashi says is the same root as nidava, and that is a goodwill gift. Goodwill. And then he’s going to start talking French, and we’re going to have quite a little French today because we’re also going to visit Marcel Mauss. But in Rashi’s words, it is apaisement in Old French. And Rashi is correctly referenced in two other Rashis that we’re going to visit because this apaisement, which, you know, could be translated to appeasement, Rabbi, is really saying something about gift giving already, that there is an ulterior motive, that there is a, I would say, a sociological and anthropological utility to this gift giving. He quotes two other times that Rashi uses this. In Genesis 33, it says, but Jacob said, no, I pray you, if you would do me this favor, accept from me this gift. So if you recall, this is where Jacob is leaving the house of Laban. He’s going to be reunited with his brother Esau. He is very concerned. They did not leave on good terms, and he’s sending gifts in front of him. And so Rashi on that says, and thou wast pleased with him, you are reconciled me. Whatever the term ratza, the verb or noun for ratzon, willing, occurs in scripture, it means propitiating. Old French, apaisement. English, appeasing. So here too, the, well, actually this is really a thing for him. It doesn’t even use the same Hebrew terms as we were using for Nadav. Here it is just willing Ratson, and he really understands at many different levels. He goes even further. He says, it shall not be l’ratson, acceptable as a sacrifice to you for the purpose of one of the purposes of the sacrifice is to conciliate and to propitiate. I really have to look that up in my SAT list.

Adam Mintz [00:08:47]:
Propitiate, I think. Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:48]:
Propitiate. Okay. But again, he brings it even to God, that when you give a sacrifice to God, you are, in a sense, appeasing. You’re creating a conciliation with God. So, so Rashi is very— he really has focused on this in Leviticus. When you sacrifice an offering “l’ratzonchem”, this means as much as appeasement in Old French, favorable acceptance. This is the literal meaning of the verse. Our rabbis, however, taking the word in its primary sense of will, intention, learn from here as regards one who is handling a sacrifice that he does everything with intentionality. Either way you look at it, gifting or giving a sacrifice, no big surprise there, is not something that is unintentional. It has clear teleology. You want to achieve a certain end. But clearly, this is a Rashi thing.

Adam Mintz [00:09:49]:
Yeah, well, I mean, this is super fascinating because usually, Geoffrey, we don’t look at the French in the Rashi. Usually when we were in yeshiva, when Rashi quotes French, that was like a sign to say, skip this, don’t worry about it. Right. And what we’re really pointing out here is that Rashi connects it by using the same French word. That shows that Rashi has the same explanation. That’s absolutely fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:20]:
And you could maybe go out on a limb and say that when Rashi has to dig deep and go to his native language of French, it’s because he thinks there’s something potentially missing from the standard translation, maybe in terms of language, but maybe also in terms of cultural baggage. And I clearly feel that Rashi has a very strong strong sense of gifting. He would— I will argue today that he is the Marcel Mauss of the rabbinic, of the classical rabbinical commentaries. So I reference Marcel Mauss.

Adam Mintz [00:10:57]:
That’s an interesting question. You know, scholars have spent a lot of time talking about that, and we don’t know the answer why Rashi sometimes uses French. You know, obviously sometimes he uses French and sometimes he doesn’t. When does he use French? And he doesn’t tell us. And, you know, that’s interesting. So you say that he uses French when he feels sometimes that the French can do a better job than the English. That’s why we always talk about Rabbi Riskin. Every once in a while, Rabbi Riskin would use a Yiddishism because Rabbi Riskin would say that word, the idea is only captured in Yiddish. There’s no English word for whatever idea. We would say it’s like chutzpah, right? There’s no English word for chutzpah, or chutzpah is an English word. So that’s a similar thing. Big means I can’t— this Rashi says I can’t say it in Hebrew. I need to say it in French, in something that we all understand.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:00]:
And maybe I’m no expert by a long shot in French language or culture, but it seems to me the French have this ability to do things that some of us might consider very utilitarian, but they make it seem like it’s graceful. They make, make it seem like it’s beautiful. And in a sense, this Marcel Mauss argued that gifting is not what it appears to be. And on the one hand, we’re going to see in a second that he makes it very transactional, meaning to say that it has social function built into it. But the background is he is arguing against a form of economics and philosophy called utilitarianism. And what that believed was that everything is done for economic reasons and that it’s all a question of supply and demand and need and goods. And what Marcel Mauss was arguing in this is that if you look at the world only in that way, you’re missing a whole language of reciprocity, of social interactions. And that’s what he tried to bring out in the book called The Gift. And basically what he says is the name of the book, and it came came out in 1925, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. And according to Marcel Mauss, that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction, he wrote. Even the idea of a pure gift is a contradiction. By ignoring the universal custom of compulsory gifts, we make our own record incomprehensible to ourselves. Right across the globe and as far back as we can go in the history of human civilization, the major transfers of goods has been by cycles of obligatory returns of gifts. You know, Rabbi, if last week we talked about the dependencies and the codependencies that were baked into Mishpatim and the code of law, I think here we’re starting to look at the, the whole gift mitzvah is one that is designed to manipulate and navigate these reciprocal relationships. And so therefore, it’s part of this glue that brings us all together. You know, when I first heard of Marcel Mauss, the most famous and strange ritual that he talks about is something called the potlatch. And in the potlatch, there are great king or tribal head. He doesn’t even give you something. He invites you over to his house and he goes, you see that Rolls-Royce out there? I’m gonna burn it. You see that valuable painting over there? I’m gonna burn it in your honor. It was a way of transferring not so much to you, but showing something about yourself. And it had no, um, a visible rationale to it. And he came along and he says, no, everything that is done is done for a reason. The potlatch is an example of a total system of giving. Read this too fast and you miss the meaning. Spelt out, it means that each gift is part of a system of reciprocity in which the honor of giver and recipient are engaged. It is a total system in that every item of status or of spiritual or material possession is implicated for everyone in the whole community. The system is quite simple. Just the rule that every gift has to be returned in some specified way sets up a perpetual cycle of exchanges within and between generations. In some cases, the specified return is of equal value, producing a stable system of statuses. In others, it must exceed the value of the earlier gift, producing an escalating contest for honor. Think of me taking you out to a restaurant where it’s $30 a plate. You take me out to a restaurant that’s $40 a plate. That doesn’t sound so strange anymore. That’s potlatching. The whole society can be described by the catalog of transfers that map all the obligations between its members. The cycling gift system is the society. Sacrifice, in an earlier work he wrote, is a gift that compels the deity to make a return. Do ut des. I give so that you may give. He builds a case for a foundation to human society based on collective versus individual exchange practices. So here too, it goes against utilitarianism, but it also goes against this radical individualism that we were talking about last week. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Adam Mintz [00:17:10]:
It’s absolutely fascinating. So let’s talk about sacrifice, because this week we talk about the, the temple. But obviously that’s just an introduction to sacrifices. And he makes an amazing point, which is that sacrifice is a gift that compels the deity to make a return Do ut des means I give so that you may give. Now, that’s one thing when we do that with other human beings, but he’s saying you do that with God also. That’s amazing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:44]:
You know, it is. But also, if you look at it from the perspective of potlatching, and this will not seem very strange to you, Rabbi, where Mr. Shapiro gives $500,000 to dedicate the social hall and Mr. Levi gives $1,000,000 to dedicate the sanctuary, and all of a sudden we are giving to God, but through that God, we are creating these reciprocal relationships. But you’re right, it ties directly into everything that we’ve been talking about. There is no, I would guess, disconnect between giving one human to another and giving to God and so forth and so on.

Adam Mintz [00:18:25]:
Yeah, I mean, you, you raise the point about what God gives back to us. What humans give back to one another sometimes is honor, what we would say coveted, right? If you put your name on the main sanctuary as opposed to the social hall, so you get more coveted than the other guy. I don’t know that that’s when with, with God, that’s not exactly what God gives back to us. So that’s the example you gave is interesting. The reciprocity between humans is not the same as the reciprocity between, between man and God.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:05]:
Okay, I’m going to grant you that. And now a word from our sponsor. This week we’re talking about the art and language of gifting. So I want to share something I created called VoiceGift Tag. It looks like a simple gift tag, but it records up to 60 seconds of your voice. Press record, say something you actually mean, a bracha, a joke, a memory, and attach it to your mishloach Manot. Long after the hamantaschen have been eaten and the wine drunk, they can press the button, hear your familiar voice, and say.

Adam Mintz [00:19:44]:
L’chaim!

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:44]:
L’chaim! Visit voice.gift. That’s http://www.voice.gift and use code Madlik for 15% off. And now back to our podcast. So we are now going to move into the only place that I know within Judaism and within our halacha that there are halachot of how to give a gift. Because on Purim is the only time I think— maybe I’m wrong— that we are required to give a gift. Not, as I said before, to someone who’s in need, not to someone who’s poor, but simply to exchange gifts. Something that our Christian brothers and sisters do on Christmas. They don’t have halachot for that. You know, there’s an amazing comic thing by Elon Gold where he talks about, thank God we Jews don’t have Christmas trees. And he goes into the halachot that we Jews would probably create if we had Christmas trees. How short is it? How long? How long does it stay in the water? How do you bring it in? Is it top down, bottom up? But in a sense, Rabbi, we’re going to start looking at the halachot of gifting because we do have that one moment in the calendar where we have to give. Are there any— are you struck in the same manner that it’s the only time we have a mitzvah?

Adam Mintz [00:21:05]:
Yeah, it’s very interesting, right? I mean, and the idea of Purim is an idea of reciprocity, is that I think that since in the kingdom of Achashveirosh, the reason the Jews were successful at the end is because there was unity among the people. Everybody fought for everybody else. So that’s expressed by, number one, taking care of the poor, but even reciprocity of gifts, because we’re all part of the process.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:37]:
Absolutely. I did question for a second why we don’t make a bracha on Mishloach Manot. And I did find in some of the commentaries that they say you should not deliver your Mishloach Manot before you read the Megillah because it’s going to be covered under the Shekhiyanu. But it is interesting that there isn’t a bracha.

Adam Mintz [00:21:57]:
If you want to give a dvar Torah, here’s the dvar Torah. Why doesn’t charity charity get a bracha. Right? What an amazing mitzvah. But you don’t make a bracha. You don’t recite a blessing on charity. So there are two explanations that they give. One explanation they give is that you only make a bracha when there’s a fixed amount. Meaning you’re supposed to eat matzah, but you eat a certain amount of matzah. You’re supposed to take the lulav and etrog on Sukkot, but there’s a certain, you know, there’s a certain amount, the amount of times that you do it. The same thing with blowing the shofar. But there’s no amount of charity means the more the better. So therefore, you can only make a bracha on something that’s fixed. That’s number one. The second explanation, which is kind of a little more amusing, is that you can’t make a bracha on charity because charity is dependent on somebody else. If I give charity to a poor person, I can’t recite a blessing because what if the poor person doesn’t want my money? So therefore, I wouldn’t fulfill the mitzvah. So therefore, we don’t make a bracha. Something that’s dependent on someone else, we don’t make a bracha. But either way, that’s very good. And you’re right, that is absolutely the tradition. And in some shuls on Purim morning, they’ll announce that everybody should have in mind during the Shechianu the other mitzvot of Purim day. So that’s very good. Okay, great.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:21]:
I love that you say that it’s dependent on the receiver, which again is that reciprocity.

Adam Mintz [00:23:28]:
Right. That’s a good— right. That’s approved.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:30]:
So in Esther, Megillat Esther 9:19 It says, that is why village Jews who lived in unwalled towns observe the 14th day of the month of Adar and make it a day of merrymaking and feasting and as a holiday, an occasion for sending gifts to one another. Usually, you know, we always say you lose things in translation. In the Hebrew it says, al ken hayyudim hapruzim. Getting back to what you were saying before, that therefore the Jews that were spread out came together by giving these gifts one to another. Kind of emphasizes that in Esther 9:22, a few verses later. It says, the same days in which the Jews enjoyed relief from their foes, in the same month they had been transferred, they were to observe them as days of feasting and merrymaking, and as an occasion for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor. So this is the point that I made earlier, that mishloach manot is by definition not charity. There are two separate mitzvot here. Mishloach manot sending gifts to a peer, to someone who is a friend. No economic utilitarian need. This is not the purpose of this gift. And there is an amazing article that I quote from the OU. It’s by Rabbi Dr. Ari Zivatovsky. We have quoted him.

Adam Mintz [00:24:58]:
We come back to him, right?

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:00]:
But if you want to see, uh, the real version of what Ari Gold was saying about what would Jews do to a Christmas tree, you see 2 or 3 pages of him breaking down the laws of how do you give shlach manot? I mean, it seems pretty easy. It says I have to give you a gift. So he says as follows, and I’m just quoting a little bit. I certainly recommend you all take a bigger look at it. Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, who lived in the 16th century and is best known as the author of Lechado Dodi, provides another reason in his work Manot HaLevi, which he sent to his father-in-law as Shaloch Manot. So here already we See, it’s not only foodstuff. I can send you a good, a good sefaria source sheet, and that will do us fine. He explains the mitzvah is intended to engender friendship and brotherhood among Jews. The other opinion is that it was a practical way to ensure that everybody will have sufficient food for the meal. So we have a utilitarian and we have a reciprocal relationship. And he bases it on the earlier verse Esther 3, where Haman said to King Achashveirosh, there is a certain people who are scattered and dispersed among the other people. Usually you and I take that to mean they were just living apart. The way he’s taking it is that Haman made a mistake. He thought we weren’t united. He thought that we were not talking to each other, and therefore the, uh, the cure was— and maybe We weren’t. Maybe we were so assimilated we forgot the ties that bind. So according to this Rabbi Alkobaraz, that’s what Shalach Manot means to do, to argue or to make a case that we are together by giving gifts one to another. According to Rav Alkobaraz, sending non-food items is acceptable because such a package also engenders friendship. It has halachic ramifications. While the Terumat Hadeshen rejects any item that cannot be used for the meal. And so this is all fascinating. The Mishnah in Megillah says the gifts are distributed to the poor. Rav Yosef taught a beraita that says, and sending portions one to the other, because it says portions in the plural, two portions to one person. The verse continues and gifts to the poor indicating two gifts to two people. So, so again, they start getting into what everybody sent to everybody else. So we have this two. So I think the tradition, you will agree, Rabbi, is you have to send at least two different foodstuffs to two different people, uh, to fulfill the, the commandment. Again, I love this two-ness because it has this reciprocity built in. You have fulfilled two mitzvot through us, our teacher that said the mitzvah of sending portions one to another and the mitzvah of gifts to the poor. To Rabbi Oshaya who was poor. So sometimes if you give a gift to a poor person, you get a double.

Adam Mintz [00:28:13]:
He doubled.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:14]:
Yeah. So now we get into the narrative. The Gemara relates that Rabba sent Purim portions from the house of the Exilarch to Marei Bar Mar in the hands of Abaye, who was his nephew and the student. The Purim portions consisted of a sack full of dates and a cupful of roasted flour. Abaye said to him, now Marei will say the popular expression, even if a farmer becomes the king, the basket does not descend from his neck. So Rabbi, they are exchanging foods, but with those foods they’re exchanging expressions, they’re exchanging, uh, a different cultural baggage, right? Rabbi was named the head of the yeshiva in Pumbedita, and nevertheless he continued to send very plain gifts because he was impovished.

Adam Mintz [00:29:06]:
Now that’s interesting, right? So the type, the type of gift you send is also significant, right?

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:15]:
They were expressing themselves through the gifts. I just find it absolutely amazing. Mari Bar Mar sent back to him a sack full of ginger and a cup full of long papers, a much more expensive gift. Abaye said to him, the master Raba will now say, I sent him sweet items and he sent me pungent ones. So again, what I love is they are exploring the language of gifting, that by picking the particular gift, you are saying something. In describing that same incident, Abaye said, when I left the house of Master Rabba to go to Maribamar, I was already satiated. However, when I arrived there in Maribamar’s house, they served me 60 plates of 60 kinds of dishes. And, uh, he goes on, this explains the folk saying that people say the The poor man is hungry and does not know it. That reminds me of my grandmother who grew up in a tenement in the Lower East Side. And she said, we were poor, but we didn’t know it. I just love that they are communicating through these gifts, these handpicked gifts that they give. The Gemara relates that Rabbi Bar Avin and Rabbi Chanina Bar Avin would exchange their meals with each other to fulfill their obligation of sending portions on Purim. Combine the two traditions.

Adam Mintz [00:30:42]:
Well, that’s actually the most logical thing, because if you— I mean, that’s, that’s real reciprocity. That’s real friendship, is to exchange meals. That’s, you know, that’s not just symbolic, that’s real.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:56]:
But I love the fact that, uh, at a minimum, so it’s nothing out of your pocket, I take what I was going to eat and I give it to you, you take what I was going to eat and I give it to me. Uh, there’s also, I believe, a Midrash that in, in, in heaven, everybody is seated next to somebody else and their hands are tied straight. So what they do is they simply feed the person sitting next to them. And in hell, they have the same association, but they can’t figure out to feed the person sitting next to them.

Adam Mintz [00:31:32]:
So that’s amazing. Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:34]:
So I love this. I just I just love this. In Mishnah Torah, Maimonides writes, what is the nature of our obligation for this feast? A person should eat meat and prepare an attractive feast as his means permit. He should drink wine until he becomes intoxicated and falls asleep in a stupor. Similarly, a person is obligated to send 2 portions of meat, 2 other cooked dishes, or 2 other foods to a friend, as implied by Esther sending portions of food to one to another. So Rabbi Riskin took this reciprocity and this fact that the Shalach Manot was meant to address the m’fuzar, the disparate nature of the Jewish people. He says you have to send a cooked food because we have— we think normally, Rabbi Riskin said, of kashrut as something that divides us. I don’t eat in your house, you don’t eat in my house. And what Shalach Manot requiring a cooked food was saying is that you will eat food from my kitchen and I will eat food from your kitchen, and therefore Kashrut will bring us together, not send us apart. But again, just another language of gifting.

Adam Mintz [00:32:46]:
Fantastic. That’s so good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:50]:
So I want to wish everybody a Shabbat Shalom. You, Adam, in Hong Kong, and no matter where you are, discover as we approach Purim this wonderful language of gift giving and what is hidden in our texts and in the language the halacha.

Adam Mintz [00:33:08]:
Fantastic. Shabbat shalom, everybody, and happy almost Purim. Enjoy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:13]:
All the best.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week we read Parashat Mishpatim, We love it when we read our texts and see things we’d never seen before. This week we notice that when the Israelites should be expecting an emancipation proclamation, they are actually introduced to a code of law that provides for slavery. We look back and realize that when the slaves were in Egypt and they’re instructed to prepare the first Seder in Egypt, they are told to include their slaves. When in the Ten Commandments they are introduced to the Shabbat, they are commanded to let their slaves rest too. Confused? So are we. Join us for freedom back to slavery. I had never really thought of that before, Rabbi, that here we are, the first rules that come out, and you expect Abraham Lincoln to stand up and say there’s no more slavery. And we start with the rules of slavery.

Adam Mintz [00:02:50]:
It’s crazy. It’s totally crazy. I know. Okay, let’s see what we could make out of it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:56]:
Let’s read the verses first. We’re at Exodus 21:1. These are the rules that you shall set before them. Verse 1. That’s the intro. This is it. And here it goes. When you acquire a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve 6 years. In the 7th year, he shall go free without payment. If he comes in single, he leaves single. If he says, I do not wish to go free, his master takes him before God, he shall be brought to the door or the doorpost, and his master pierces his ear with an awl, and he shall then remain his master’s slave for life. We’re really talking about long-term servitude. When someone sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go free as other slaves do. So it really reads like Hammurabi’s Code or an Eshnunna Code, but it talks about this institution of slavery which just blows your mind, right?

Adam Mintz [00:03:54]:
I mean, One thing that’s not entirely clear is whether the Torah is in favor of slavery or not. It clearly has it. But, you know, you have this funny thing about piercing the slave’s ear if he wants to remain a slave. That suggests that the Torah doesn’t want eternal slavery.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:15]:
You could make the case, Adam, and I think we’re going to look at commentaries who say just that, that these are not so much laws of slavery as laws of emancipation. There are actually laws under what conditions can a slave go free. But still, it does strike you as being very strange. And I had never really thought about— sure, I was being a little tongue-in-cheek when I said the first Seder, God said, and bring your slaves along. Slaves did not typically have slaves, but when it gave the rules for future generation to these slaves, it says, and in the future, when you celebrate this holiday, everybody’s included, including your slaves. When it gives the Ten Commandments to these newly freed people, it says, and even your slaves can’t work. So there’s this real tension between, yes, emancipation, but nonetheless clearly recognizing the category. So the one classic rabbinic commentary that really calls a spade a spade is the Ramban. The Ramban on 21:2 says, if you buy a Hebrew slave. God began the first ordinance with the subject of a Hebrew servant because the liberation of the servant in the 7th year contains a remembrance of the departure from Egypt, which is mentioned in the first commandment, just as he said on it, you shall remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the Eternal thy God redeemed thee. Therefore I command thee this thing today. Ramban clearly connects the profundity and He’s focused on the emancipation rule. He’s not so much focused on when you have a slave, but when the 7th year comes, you have to free the slave. This is why the prophet Jeremiah was very stringent about it and said, thus said the Eternal, the God of Israel, I made a covenant with your fathers. At the end of 7 years, ye shall go, every one his manservant and every one his maidservant. And on account of its violation, God decreed the exile, just as the Torah decreed exile for the sabbatical rest of the land, which was not observed. So interestingly, what he does is he talks into the future in terms of Jeremiah. We all are aware that the Jews were exiled because they didn’t keep the Shmitah year, the sabbatical year. Baked into that, according to the Ramban, is also letting their indentured servants go. And our rules that we have in Mishpatim don’t stop with dealing with the slave in the first verses. It talks rules about in Exodus 21:20, when a man strikes his servant or his maidservant with a rod so she dies. It has rules about how do you make remuneration. Interestingly enough, it says that if he dies under his hand, it is to be avenged. So Everett Fox says it doesn’t tell you the exact punishment, but it sounds like death if you kill a slave and he dies.

Adam Mintz [00:07:34]:
Nevertheless, if that’s interesting, because I studied it with someone yesterday, and he asked me, and what’s the punishment? And I said, it’s not clear from the Torah. It’s interesting that Everett Fox says, and it’s not clear, but it must be death, because that’s kind of the default punishment. That’s very smart.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:54]:
Absolutely. But if he lives for a few days, it sounds like he just has to make monetary remuneration. And on this, Everett Fox says he has human rights, but not those of a free man is what Plaut says. Alternatively, Cassuto suggests that the master has lost his own money thereby. You’re paying him not for the loss to the servant, but to the master. The point is it’s baked into the rules. This is a code of law that is written recognizing, adopting, if you will, but definitely adjudicating with slavery around. It goes on. Verse 27, if you knock out the tooth of their slave, the slave goes free on account of the tooth. So it really is baked into it. And of course, baked into it is also the famous language of, and you shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. So it would be very easy to argue, Rabbi, that we’re not so much talking about slavery, we’re not even talking necessarily about emancipation. We’re talking about doing things humanely. Taking the world as it was and making sure that you do it in an elevated way. But it is fascinating that it’s the first law, and it is fascinating how baked it is to this whole code of law.

Adam Mintz [00:09:22]:
Yeah, that is fascinating. Okay, good. Let’s go on and see what we have.

Speaker C [00:09:28]:
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Geoffrey Stern [00:10:18]:
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Speaker C [00:10:20]:
That’s http://www.voice.gift and use code Madlik for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:35]:
So we go on, and it’s kind of interesting. I raised the question of, did they celebrate the Passover with slaves? And clearly, if the law is that you shall bring your slave to the Passover Seder, clearly it does. When I thought about having a Passover Seder with slaves, Rabbi, I think back to pre-Civil Civil War America. I think back to the people in the South. And if you read about that, there’s an interesting comment because we look at it as it’s— how could you possibly celebrate the redemption, the liberation of slaves and have slaves? So there was a New York Times article literally about this moment in Jewish history. And one rabbi says, Lance Sussman, the senior rabbi of Congregation Knesset Israel in Elkin Park, Pennsylvania writes, the Passover narrative, he adds, didn’t become an abolitionist-related story until after World War II and the civil rights era. Originally, Passover was theological. It’s about redemption and the power of God. It’s not really about setting human beings free in a universal way. You know, whenever we look at these texts, we have to make sure that we’re not projecting back. And what his argument is, is that this question is almost a modern question and that Passover, if you really think about it, is about liberation in a theological way. And of course, that made me think of our good buddy Yeshayahu Leibowitz. And Yeshayahu Leibowitz says that really he diminishes the redemptive significance of Passover by emphasizing the core of Judaism as acceptance of the yoke of heaven, the Ol Malchut Shamayim and the Ol Mitzvot. But here’s what’s interesting, and this harkens back a little bit to my intro when I talked about free Tibet and freedom. Now, he says the danger he saw was the corruption of religion by the powers of government in a way that led to false messianism. When you start throwing around the word freedom, Rabbi, you can get into dangerous waters. When you see the world in black and white, when you start using ideology and projecting it back into the Exodus story, Leibowitz was concerned about that. And he says, no, this was taking slaves out of Egypt who were forced to worship Pharaoh and bringing them into the desert to worship God. And God has his own rules. But it is kind of fascinating, I think, the way we naturally, knee-jerk way, think of what freedom is and what freedom of the Exodus was.

Adam Mintz [00:13:41]:
Yeah, no, that’s super interesting. That Lance Sussman is also interesting. But yeah, this is— I mean, let’s take a second. This is what Yeshayahu Leibowitz stood for. The idea that it wasn’t about freedom, that Judaism is about, or religion’s about serving God. That’s all. It’s not about celebration. It’s not about being happy. Our role in life is to serve God. Which is very, very interesting.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:11]:
So I’m going to make kind of a radical argument today. And I grant you that Leibowitz is talking about serving God. But I think the way we look at the text today, the opposite of slavery is not freedom. The opposite of slavery is dependency. Dependency on your, your other, on society, on the rules of law, on holy texts. It’s not being totally independent. And I I read an article this weekend in the Times about there’s a whole movement of people trying to copy the house of Thoreau. And can’t— they he claims that he built it in 2 weeks. People have struggled to build a house without tools by a pond. And they argue, if you really look at it, he wasn’t that independent. I joked he sent his laundry back to his mom. But to be totally independent is not necessarily a realistic goal. Realistic thing, and it might not even be something that we want to aspire for other than to have like the aspiration of freedom. I think that Rabbi Riskin always used to quote Viktor Frankl. He says Viktor Frankl said that on the East Coast we have the Statue of Liberty and on the West Coast we have to have the Statue of Responsibility. I think that’s the way I interpret Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Bob Dylan, is that the opposite thing of slavery is not necessarily to be ultimately free and independent of everybody, but actually depend in a just way.

Adam Mintz [00:15:53]:
So I just want to say, you said something really interesting before the Rabbi Riskin, which is famous. Of course, I smile when you remember that. But I think that there’s something here about responsibility. What does that mean, responsibility? You say serving God. So your radical explanation here is to say it doesn’t mean only serving God, but it means serving other people.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:23]:
It means serving other people in the sense that there are reciprocal relationships, there are codependencies. And if you look, and I think if I’m successful, and then you go back and read the rest of the rules, whether it has to do with not taking interest from your brother, this whole sense of brother, you have to be dependent on each other in a just way. Are there going to be class stratifications. Of course, there are people who are more successful and people that are less, but it all has to be governed by rules of fairness. And that is ultimately the freedom that mishpatim in the Torah, I will argue, gives you. So let’s look a little bit further. The laws of slavery are fascinating. And on thetorah.com, the lights are going off. There are at least 4 or 5 articles on the same subject matter because it turns out that the same rules are treated in 3 places, and in each place they’re treated slightly differently. So in Leviticus, we have all of a sudden it doesn’t talk about ivri, a Hebrew. It talks about your brother. And instead of going out in the 7th year, it talks about you going out in the yovel, in the Jubilee year. It does make a reference that they, along with children, shall be free of your authority. Go back to their families, for they are my servants who I freed from the land of Egypt. They may not give themselves over into servitude. You shall not rule over them ruthlessly, but you shall fear your God. So in Leviticus, it clearly makes a connection that’s unspoken a little bit in Mispatim to the Exodus, the way the Ramban sees it. It has some variations. It refers to it as a brother as opposed to a Hebrew, and it has going free in the Jubilee year, which was the 49th year, and not in the 7th year.

Adam Mintz [00:18:31]:
Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:32]:
And, you know, there are commentaries that are saying the legislation assumes that Israelites are enslaving one another and it attempts to stop the practice. Whenever you have these variations and you get the academics in and they go, this is the P script and that’s the E script, they’re all going to want to project different cultural things. I’m not that smart, but it’s clear that there are different texts. That are dealing with. The final text is in Deuteronomy. And here, interestingly, it says, “When you set them free, do not let them go empty-handed. Furnish them out of the flesh, the threshing floor, which the Eternal God has blessed you. Bear in mind that you were slaves in the land of Egypt and the Eternal God redeemed you.” Again, makes the connection to leaving Egypt, makes the connection that we’ve seen in multiple episodes of those that were made behind giving food food and support to those that were leaving. It’s clear that the text itself was very aware, I won’t say of the irony, but definitely of the connection. So let’s look at some of the critiques. Zev Farber in thetorah.com is using our three different treatments of slavery as a proof that the Torah was written by different scribes. And the editors put put them together. He says the laws contradict in significant ways, such as whether the slave should be paid upon release, when the slave must be released. This latter fundamental differences suggest that these different laws reflect different norms from different times and places. What he argues that I think everybody kind of agrees with is we might refer to Mishpatim as a code of law in the same way that we might refer to Hammurabi’s code as a code of law. What Farber is arguing is that it’s not systematic, that these are collections of laws.

Adam Mintz [00:20:41]:
Means the code is not a lawyer who sat down and organized everything. I would say it’s more like an encyclopedia of laws.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:53]:
Some of them go as to say it’s not so much a code of law, it’s a reflection of rulings that were had. What I’m trying to say is that you You don’t have to buy into Farber’s radical explanation that this proves that the Torah was written by different scribes in different eras with different motives and then combined to believe that we have a living, dynamic Torah that evolves but is also based on different data points. And if we’re having a discussion about freedom, about slavery, there’s no one answer, which is something that we say over and over again on Madlik. Another scholar, Aaron Koller, who’s more traditional, he says no. He does something very typical of a classic rabbinic commentary. He explains there are two types of indentured servants, and the law that talks about giving freedom in 49 years is an indentured servant who became poor because he lost his land. After 49 years, he’s going to get back his land. I’m starting to talk like a yeshiva bachor because that’s what he does. He tries to pull it all together, but important for our discussion, he says knowledge of the social and legal realities of the ancient Near East, often available only through study of other cultures such as those of Mesopotamia, are critical for a full understanding of the world of biblical law. So here too, he’s not necessarily buying into multiple authors, but what he is buying is— and I’m trying to make the argument— that there’s codependencies even in texts. There are— there’s— you can’t take anything in isolation or by itself, not in terms of slavery and freedom, and not in the sense of the texts that deal with slavery and freedom. And I will argue every text.

Adam Mintz [00:22:55]:
I would just say, look at Aaron Koller . Look at the title of his essay, The Hebrew Slave: Reading the Law Collections as Complementary. Obviously, his article is a reaction to Farber’s argument that there are different authors. You don’t have to say there are different authors. You could say that the author of the Torah just had different, you know, different examples of slavery. So you say it like Yeshiva Bucher, like you would say, like a Lithuanian, that there are two rules of slavery. I just want to point out one thing about Aaron Koller that’s interesting, because, you know, he says that you’re a slave according according to, to Leviticus, you’re a slave until the, until the sabbatical, until the, sorry, the Jubilee year. Now, we know in Leviticus that in the Jubilee year, land goes back to its original owner. So it’s actually very creative of Aaron Koller that he puts those two laws together, because the Torah doesn’t put them together. But he— I mean, they’re written next to one another, but the Torah doesn’t put them together. But he says it’s the same law. So even in that, in that complementary, you see a certain level of creativity.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:06]:
And what his argument is, is you’ve got to know the rules of the land. You’ve got to know the infrastructure, the economy, the way that everything worked, and then you can understand it better. The third one I’m going to quote from thetorah.com is James Diamond. And he is the one who talks about really these laws are as much rules of abolition as they are of slavery. Slavery. He says, although it sanctions the institution of slavery, biblical law begins the process towards abolition, a process still unresolved in various parts of the world in the 21st century. By regulating and restricting the absolute control a master could exercise over an Israelite slave, through limited in scope, both the Covenant collection and the Deuteronomy collection transformed the Hebrew slave from pure chattel owned by the master to to some form of independent personalhood bearing legal rights. The process culminates in Leviticus 25, which avoids the locution Hebrew slave, eved ivri, altogether, preferring your brother. So everybody is reading something into it, but the evolution is key. I think if you want to use slavery in the ancient Bible as a test case of how Jewish and Israelite law evolves, it is well-founded. You can clearly see an evolution here. When we get to the rabbinical period, it starts to get interesting. The Baraita says that there shall not be a situation in which you eat fine bread and he eats, meaning your Jewish slave, inferior bread from coarse bread mixed with bran, which is of lower quality. There shall not be a situation in which you drink aged wine and he drinks inferior new wine. There shall not be a situation in which you sleep comfortably on bedding made from soft sheets and he sleeps on straw. And from here, the sages famously said, anyone who acquires a Hebrew slave is considered like one who acquires a master for himself. So in true fashion, the rabbis made the regulations regarding having an indentured servant so overbearing that they almost made it better not— I’d rather not have a slave. It becomes you buying yourself a master. And Maimonides follows the same track. He admits that in the law itself, and here he’s talking about a non-Jewish slave, because throughout we’ve been mentioning a Hebrew slave. Maimonides in Mishnah Torah for slaves at the end says it is permissible to have a Canaanite slave perform excruciating labor, although this is the law, the attributes of piety and the way of wisdom is for a person to be merciful, to pursue justice, not to make his slaves carry a heavy yoke nor cause them distress. So he takes this as a teaching moment and he brings a whole bunch of Psalms and verses from the prophets that talk about acting towards the slaves the way God acted towards the people of Israel. So what I wanna quote now is there is a monograph that I found, nothing to do with the Bible. It was written by Robert Adams, and it must have been after a discovery, an archaeological discovery in Ur, Ur of the Kashdim. And what he found was that the slaves are working on projects along with free men, something that really shouldn’t surprise us. And what he does is he challenges the whole way way of looking at biblical slavery. And he says you have to look at it in the context of changing gradations of impairments of freedom without the anachronism of introducing absolute individual rights. If we look at these ancient texts and project back a concept of human rights and individual rights, we are never going to hear the, uh, the sound behind the music.

Adam Mintz [00:28:40]:
That’s correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:42]:
And so what he does is he says you really have to understand that there were graded series of impairments of the lives of working men and women. And that to me, if you use that lens to look at Mishpatim, you start to see that the master has obligations to the slave, that the slave is trying to work his way out of debt. The master is trying to handle how to deal with his own economic needs. There were totally stratifications and everybody is mixed together. And so I started by saying it’s all about codependency. Our friend Joshua Berman writes that the truth is, if you look at all of these laws, you will see whether it’s the law of every 6 years or 7th year, whether it’s the law of the sabbatical, these ways of making people loan money to each other. He says social stratification emerged as free citizens lose control over their means of production. A common pattern of this process was as followed. A peasant, a small landowner, resides on a small plot of privately owned land and engages in subsistence farming. As his margins of profits are slim, he can go into debt for any number of reasons, personal illness, crop failures, taxation, or the monopoly of resources by the state or private elite. His first line of recourse is to procure a loan that puts into light the laws that we’re going to see about interest, which he can only get at high interest. The high interest renders him insolvent, so he is forced to sell or deliver family members into debt slavery to pay off the debt. When this does not secure the means to pay off the debt, he has to resort to relinquishing or selling his own land, his means of production, and finally to selling himself. So what he argues is that the laws that we’re reading now with quote-unquote slavery, I will say indentured built into it is looking at the whole spectrum of economic codependency. And he says, to counter this cycle, the biblical laws introduce a series of legal and conceptual reforms that together seek to achieve social equality, but of a very specific kind. It is not the egalitarianism developed since the French Revolution with its emphasis on the individual and inalienable human rights, nor does this equality manifest itself in family organization, size of holdings. Rather, it takes the form of an economic system that seeks equality by granting communal and divine legitimization of respective households that assist one another in agrarian labor and granting relief to other households in need. And I think if we look at that, we can really see who those freed slaves are serving. They’re serving God, but yes, they’re serving in the image of God each other. They’re creating a community based on these communal relationships that I think once we look through this lens, all that follows will become very clear. And the connection to leaving Egypt couldn’t be more direct.

Adam Mintz [00:32:11]:
That’s amazing. Wow. Let’s hear it for Professor Josh Berman, who really pulls it all together. This is an amazing topic. Goes back to Viktor Frankl and Bob Dylan and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. But you really turned slavery into a much bigger topic that’s as relevant today as it was 3,500 years ago. Shabbat shalom, everybody. We’ll be in Hong Kong this Shabbat. But wherever you’re going to be this Shabbat, enjoy Shabbat shalom. Enjoy Parashat Mishpatim. It’s also Shabbat Shkalim. We announce the month of Adar. It’s almost Purim time, almost Passover time. Get ready, everybody. Enjoy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:51]:
Shabbat shalom. Let us all celebrate and invest in the dependency we have on each other. Shabbat shalom. See you all next week.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or traditional. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week, we read Parshat Yitro. Jethro, a Midian priest, is credited with inventing the Israelite judiciary system. But this week, we discover that he contributed something much more profound. Join us for Blessed are the Survivors. Well, Rabbi, I tell you, I read the book by Eli Sharabi, and then I heard him in person, and it is just, you know, the main thing that was missing was bitterness. And I know I haven’t. I didn’t go on zoom to many funerals of people that perished in this last war, but everybody to a T that I saw, there was no bitterness. It was all really celebrating the lives of the precious people that were lost. And we’re not going to talk about that that much, although maybe we are, but it was just so, so impactful. Have you come into contact with any of the hostages?

Adam Mintz [00:02:40]:
Yeah, I have. And you’re right. I mean, and then you also have Hirsch Goldberg-Polin’s parents, Rachel Goldberg, who’s been speaking all over, and she also. It’s about gratitude, right? It’s about gratitude. It’s about hope. It’s about future, which is. You’re right, it’s something that you. You know, it would have been very easy to turn it into despair and anger and all those things that you really don’t feel that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:05]:
Yeah. So I’m going to start by reading a little bit from Eli Sharabi’s book Hostage. And for those who haven’t read it, I would recommend reading it. It is a very quick read. I won’t say it’s a light read, it’s a quick read, but it’s compelling. And this is what he writes, talking about that, that thanking circle, if you will. “Even in those excruciating times, we had a fixed ritual at the end of every day, which we refused to skip. The four of us sit and try to think of something good that happened to us that day, whatever day we just had. I came up with the idea spontaneously one evening to lift everyone’s spirits. I told them, come on, let’s think of something good that happened today. Just one thing. They went along with me and it became a habit. At first, we rack our brains to find one good thing. Then, as time goes by, we challenge ourselves to come up with three. Sometimes it’s really hard, and sometimes it’s easy to find three. And we even continue to four or five. There are days when we even managed to find 10 good things. One good thing might be, for example, if they suddenly let us drink tea, or if the tea was sweet. Another good thing might be if a particularly cruel guard we disliked didn’t show up that day, or if the day went by without any humiliations, or if we got a smell of a piece of fruit from one of our captors. Slowly, this routine begins to affect our whole day. We find ourselves searching for the good things for which we can express gratitude in the evening. Hope is never something that comes easily. It’s always something you’ve got to fight for, to work on, like Kiddush every Friday night, like Eli’s Havdala songs at the end of every Shabbat, like the prayers that open every morning. This circle of thanksgiving is something that we stick to cling, to cleave to, to search for something good, to stay optimistic, to win.” And I gotta say, what he was, was, he was an elder amongst the hostages because the three of the hostages came from the. The music festival. And he was 40, wife, two kids. He was the chief financial officer of Kibbutz Be’eri. He ran a business and he didn’t become religious afterwards. He talks. He says, I’m a Very practical person. And from the second that I was kidnapped, I realized I only had one job, and that was survival. And this thanking thing was his survival mechanism. And it really is profound. Of course, one of the other members was not religious, but had been religious. So he had all those prayers in his mind and they encouraged him. They encouraged him to say Havdala, to say the morning prayers, to say Birchat Hamazon. It just comes across. But this insight, I think, into being thankful as a survival mechanism to me was profound, absolutely profound.

Adam Mintz [00:06:12]:
And that’s interesting, you know, that you remind everybody that he was different. He wasn’t just somebody who was there at Nova. He was somebody who had a job, had a business, had a family. So he was coming at it from a different place.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:24]:
So we get to our Parsha. It’s Exodus 18:9. And Jethro was jubilant. Little discussion about what the word is for. Is it chedva or is it. Some even say he was shaking like charadei. But anyway, he was emotionally impacted because all of all the good things that God had done for Israel, that he had rescued him from the land of Egypt. And he said, blessed be God. Jethro said, who delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh, who delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that God is greater than all gods, yes, by the result of their very schemes against the people. And Jethro, Moses, father in law, brought a burnt offering and sacrifices for God. And Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to partake of the meal before God with Moses, his father in law. Next day, Moses sat as a magistrate among the people, while the people stood about Moses from morning until evening. And that’s where we typically start paying attention. That he sees that Moses is judging day in and day out. And he says, you’ve got to put a judiciary together. But I want to focus on these verses, starting with blessed be God, he goes, baruch hashem, asher hitzil, etchem. He really makes a blessing. Let’s go to Cassuto, he says. And Jethro rejoiced. He had already been glad over the general reports that he heard at the outset, and now he rejoiced even more over the details that Moses told him about all the good that God had done for Israel. Kind of like Sharabi, he parses the good, if you notice, he says, they took them out and Pharaoh let you go. And he’s finding good within the good. Vaichar is an expression of joy. Chedva, the rendering of the Septuagint, which translates it as his flesh was seized with trembling, is unfounded.

Adam Mintz [00:08:28]:
That’s because the word haridi, the Reish, is missing. So it’s kind, it’s kind of made up. But that is interesting, though.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:36]:
Well, it could be the Septuagint had a slightly different text. Yeah, correct.

Adam Mintz [00:08:39]:
Absolutely right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:40]:
But, but the point is that I’m making is this was a highly unusual verb, but it was also extremely impacted by what he saw. And the, the, the Midrash in Sanhedrin says he was covered with goosebumps. So again, all of the commentaries are making note of how he was affected. Cassuto goes on that and Jethro, blessed be the Lord. This is an expression of praise and thanksgiving. So blessing is a concept of praise and thanksgiving to the God whom you call Hashem. And he says, who delivered you, you, Moses and Aaron, your brother, from the hand of Egypt and then the hand of Pharaoh who threatened you, and likewise who delivered the people from beneath the burden of bondage. Again, this parsing, this looking into the details, the threefold repetition of the language of deliverance is intended for emphasis, writes Cassuto. So that is basically the pshat, the, “the explanation of the text. If we go to the Talmud in Barakot, and this is a key piece of Talmud, we’re talking about a Mishnah in Barakhot. And the Mishnah says, and this in the introduction to the Mishnah it says, includes in this chapters, contains a series of blessing and Halachot that are not recited at specific times like we would if we were putting on tefillin or if we were eating an artichoke, but rather in response to various experiences and events. And the Mishnah says one who sees a place where miracles occurred on Israel’s behalf recites blessed, who perform miracles for our forefathers in this place. One who sees a place from which idolatry was eradicated, recites blessed, who eradicated idolatry from our land. The interesting thing is a lot of what these have in common is you’re not actually even visual fully seeing the action. You’re seeing the outcome of the action, and you’re in the place at a later time. So it says, one who sees conspicuous natural occurrences recites a blessing for Zeke and Zavaot; for thunder and for winds and lightning. Blessed, whose strength and power fill the world for extraordinary mountains, hills, seas, rivers and deserts. We can picture Rabii Wolbe up on the top of the mountain. One recites blessed is the author, author of Creation, Rabbi Yehuda Says one who sees the great sea recites a special blessing, blessed who made the great sea. As with all blessings of this type, one only recites it when he sees the sea, intermittently, not on a regular basis. It’s got to have impact on you. For rain and other good tidings, one recites the special blessing, blessed who is good and who does good. And for bad tidings, one recites a special blessing, blessed. The true judge Dyan HaEmet similarly built a new house on purchased land, new vessels, he recites, Shhechianu v’higianu lazman hazeh; Who has given us life, sustained us, and brought us to this time. And then the Mishnah says a general principle. One receives a blessing for the bad that befalls him, just as he does for good. That’s kind of fascinating that you’re supposed to give a blessing, and I don’t think it’s one of being stoic. It’s really just recognizing it and possibly seeing the good in anything or finding the good in anything.

Adam Mintz [00:12:18]:
Well, I don’t know. Finding the good, finding God in everything.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:23]:
Yeah, yeah, I would. I would give that. I’ll give you that. The Mishnah says, and one who cries out over the past in an attempt to change that which has already occurred is a vain prayer. It’s a bracha l’vatala. So if your wife is already pregnant and you pray that you hope that she has a boy or a girl, it’s too late. So that’s interesting. The rabbis knew when the gender was determined. I’ll give them that. And you can’t cry over spilt milk is the way that we would say it. But I love the fact that a bracha is forward-leaning. It’s not as if we’re asking God to change anything. That is not the purpose of these brachot. They are literally to recognize good or bad. It’s a wonderful group of brachot, is it not?

Adam Mintz [00:13:12]:
It’s fantastic. That section at the end of the Tractate of Braakot is absolutely wonderful.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:20]:
And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at the Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGive 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 dot gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So it goes on a little more. And it says that the mission articulates a general principle. One is obligated to recite a blessing for the bad that befalls him, just as he recites a blessing for the good that vbefalls him, as it is stated. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. This is what we say twice a day in the Shema. Ve’ahavtaet Hashem Elokecha bchol levavcha, vchol nafshacha u’vechol Meo’dech. And one of the interpretations of Me’odecha is not so much with all your money and with all your physical being, with all your might means with every measure that he mets out to you, whether it’s good or bad, thank him. So it really is profound if you look at it from the perspective of Eli Sharabi’s circle, because ultimately, what Eli Sharabi was doing was finding the good in the bad and then finding the good and passing it and really focusing on it as a way of, almost a teleology, finding an end in order for you to survive.

Adam Mintz [00:15:35]:
I just say it’s interesting that the reciting of blessings and what Eli Sharabi did, it’s important to say it. It’s not only that you think it, but you have to say it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:48]:
And I think when we heard Eli Sharabi talk, he. He said something more than he wrote in the book. He said when he first came up with the idea, they looked at him like he was crazy, because what he was really doing was creating a ritual. Just as you say, Adam, he said, it’s not enough to think it. He didn’t say, everybody make sure you think of something. Creating a ritual, it was a communal ritual. Call it a zimun, call it a minyan. It was getting together on a regular basis. And now is where it gets interesting, because up till now, we’ve been in a Mishnah. So now the Gemara says, with regard to the obligation to recite a blessing for a miracle, the Gemara asks, from where are these matters derived? Rabbi Yochanan said, the verse states, and Jethro said, blessed be the Lord who delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians. He brings our verse. Interesting. If you saw in the translation, it’s almost as though he’s Talking about one of the blessings, the blessings for a miracle in the above long list. Rashi picks up on that. And Rashi says, this is how the passage should be read. From where do we know that we recite a blessing over a miracle? So he adds a word. He’s almost saying, there’s a textual error here that how do we know that you make a blessing on miracles? We know it from Yitro. Rabbi, it seems to me it’s kind of strange, because my original, when I read this, I said, he’s talking about the whole Mishnah. How do we know to make these blessings? Right? So. So the Netzsiv has a commentary, and he says, from where do we derive this? The wording from where to derive these matters implies that the question applies to all the blessings listed in the Mishnah. So he has a problem because he has to explain around Rashi and ends up saying is fascinating. He says that the blessing that Yitro that Jethro made to give us a paradigm as an example was the most extreme. Not only was Jethro not there for the miracle, he wasn’t even in the place. He wasn’t a participant, and he wasn’t there at the same time. He was neither in the place or the zaman of the miracle, and still he was the one who was able to say the blessing. So the way the Netsiv learns it is. Yes, yes, it’s. How do we know that? But once we know that, that covers the whole Mishnah. So I stand by my original radical impression that I got when I read the Parsha this year, that it’s really the whole Mishnah. He taught us how to bless. He taught us how to be thankful for the good and the bad. And this is as important, if not more important, I think, than giving us a judiciary.

Adam Mintz [00:18:40]:
That’s fantastic. That’s very good. It’s not that Netziv. It’s the Node b’Yehuda. They’re similar. The Netziv lived in Valozhyn, the Node B’Yehudah lived in Prague. But that’s extremely creative to be able to see the Rashi that way and to say, there’s another way to say it, and that is it replies to all blessings. Fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:01]:
But I think it just struck me when I read that after that long litany of blessings, it says, how do we know this? We know it from Yitro. So now we get to something fascinating. Now we have a Mechilta de Rabi Yishmael that focuses on the fact that Jethro was the one who made this blessing and not the people of Israel. Mechita d’Rabbi Yishmael. And Yitro said, blessed is the Lord. Rav Pippes said, scripture speaks to the discredit of Israel. 600,000 men having been there and not one of them having stood up to bless the Lord until Jethro came and did so. And Jethro said, blessed is the Lord who rescued us. You know, it’s one thing to say that we needed Jethro to teach us about the judiciary, that we were just faltering along, but that we couldn’t find one of the 600,000 men or women or children who had the compuncture to make a blessing. I think he comes down a little hard on, on, on the Jewish people. But I love the fact that again, what he’s doing is emphasizing the fact that Jethro has really making a contribution here and it’s a profound contribution. There is a variation on this midrash that ends as follows. He says, therefore his descendants, meaning Jethro’s descendants, merited to sit in the lishkat ha gazit, the chamber of hewn stone. So normally we say the descendants of Jethro were able to sit in the chamber of hewn stone. If you remember, when the temple was built, you took, couldn’t take a chisel to the stone. It all had to be.

Adam Mintz [00:20:54]:
That’s from this week’s Parasha also.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:56]:
Absolutely. There was only one place where they were able to use hewn stones, and that was the Supreme Court, if you will. So it’s obvious to think that why was the Supreme Court given to the descendants of Jethro? Again, because he made the contribution the judiciary. This variation on the midrash says, no, it was given that chamber, this, the great Sanhedrin, because he made blessings. It’s just very, very profound. But there is a TheTorah.com article that actually uses this midrash to make a fascinating observation. And the observation that it makes, Rabbi, is up until this time, and actually in the whole Five books of Moses, the only people who make blessings are non-Jews. I never thought of that before.

Adam Mintz [00:21:54]:
The.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:54]:
The first one he brings is Noah. So Noah says in. In Genesis 9:26, Noah says, Baruch Adoshem Elokei Shem Vayehi Canaan Eved Lamo. Blessed is the eternal, the God of Shem. Let Canaan be a slave to him the next time.

Adam Mintz [00:22:12]:
I mean, that’s not exactly. It’s a different kind of blessing, but still it has the phrase Baruch Hashem, Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:19]:
Then the next one he gives is from a priest. If you recall, Yitro is a Cohen Midian. This is Malkitzedek. And he blessed him, meaning he blessed Abraham, saying, blessed be Abraham of God most High, Creator of heaven and Earth. Baruch Avraham, Elokei Shamayi v’ha’aretzi. That is a blessing. And again, they’re picking out all the examples of where there were blessings. And the Last one that TheTorah.com brings is from Eliezer when he’s sent to find a mate for Abraham’s son Yitzchak. And he says, blessed be the eternal of God, my master Abraham, who has not withheld steadfast faithfulness from my master. That kind of does sound like blessing.

Adam Mintz [00:23:06]:
That does.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:07]:
But. But the interesting thing is that TheTorah.com is trying to say from this that in the biblical narrative, at least of the Five Books of Moses, blessing is not a Jewish thing. It’s something that came from the non-Jews. I, I take a different way of looking at it. What I take it to mean is this, that blessing is a very human thing. And I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the Jewish people and the Israelites with regard to blessing unless they learned the lesson so well that they outdid the rest of the world. Because I challenge you, Rabbi, that when Eli Sharabi was introduced and my rabbi gets up and removed the yellow pin that he had been on his lapel for the hostages for two plus years, last hostage was released that week. And he said everybody, Jew, non Jew, knew what was going on. The concept of making a Shekhianu, of thanking God for bringing us to this moment, I think is profoundly Jewish. So. So maybe I’m right. Maybe it’s not that we invented it, but we perfected it. It has become such a, you know, you almost can say in the nomenclature, “I should make a Shekhianu”, or it was a “shechiyanu moment”.

Adam Mintz [00:24:37]:
Well, I would just add the following. It’s interesting that the blessings from the non-Jews are blessings of Jews. We all know that praise is better from outside, right? When praise comes from someone who’s connected to you, so you say, ah, they have to say something nice. But if it comes to someone from outside, then you say, wow, that must really be genuine. Because they didn’t have to be nice to me and they were still nice to me. So I wonder whether that’s part of the TheTorah.com’s point is that the blessings come from non-Jews. The blessings are basically of Jews, not Noah. But in the other cases, the blessing are. The blessings are of Jews that comes from outside.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:23]:
I. I totally agree with you, but I think I’ll take it even a little further. It’s not only from somebody outside. You said earlier that it’s important to verbalize it. And not only is it important to verbalize it, it’s important to verbalize it in. In. In front of somebody else. And that somebody else says AMEN. That’s the beginning of our little thanking circle. This idea of making it audible, this idea of listening to somebody else say how good things are. And you answering Amen. I think it is part of this whole process. I’ll say it’s human. I’ll say it’s human, but we have to work at it. I’ll say it’s human. But in a situation when you’re 50 meters underground in a tunnel, it becomes the most profound thing that you can do to survive. Because ultimately what you’re doing is you’re hearing it with your own ears. And maybe you’re not saying it, your fellow is saying it, but you’re finding something good. You’re finding something meaningful, even in the bad. And even if you find it in the good, you find a way of looking deeper and parsing it. And. And I just found it to be a profound lesson. And if you look at the verse, it’s actually all there.

Adam Mintz [00:26:38]:
It’s fantastic. And you said before, which of course is right. It’s the fact that it’s a ritual. It’s just that you do it. But he turned it into a ritual the minute that you do it every day. The same way that we make kiddush every Friday night. It’s the power of ritual. And obviously, even though he was secular, he appreciated the Jewish ritual. There’s no. Nobody in Israel, Geoffrey is actually secular. They all know what kiddush is. They all know what Yom Kippur is. They all appreciate the. The, you know, the annual rituals.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:12]:
Yeah, I. I totally agree. But again, I will say that the fact that we’re bringing the non Israelite into the picture means that the basis for this is. Is. Is more. More broad than any religion. It’s. It’s very human. So we’re going to end with another quote from the book. And I think if you were to ask most people what the kind of the mantra of survival was for the hostages will quote something that Hirsch Goldberg Polin said. So, actually, Eli Sharabi did meet Hirsch Goldberg Polin, and I’m going to read a part of the book. That talks about that, where he makes this famous quote, which, by the way, comes from Nietzsche, but it comes through Viktor Frankl from Nietzsche. So Sharabi writes, everybody is struggling. On our second day here, someone sighs and Uri looks at him and says to Hirsch Goldberg, Polin. Hirsch, tell them the sentence you kept telling us back at the house. What sentence? We asked. Tell them, says Ori. Hirsch looks at us. “He who has a WHY can bear any HOW”, he says. I mull it over. The saying feels like a gift. It matches the spirit I am already in, says Eli Sharabi. Even before hearing the words, I’m already living them. I have a wife. Why? Many whys. And I’m focused on surviving, on living, on being, on returning alive and well to my family and my life. I have a why. The first night in the tunnel passes. Then the second. Soon another will pass. I can do this. I can survive anything. One day, as we eat our pita, Ori Danino tells us about his family. He comes from an ultra Orthodox, religiously observant home. He tells us about his father, rabbinic scholar, and his own choice to lead a different life. At the end of the meal, I ask him if he still remembers birkat hamazon, the Jewish grace after meals. By heart, of course, he says. I ask him to recite it for us, the whole thing out loud, he says. I nod. We all nod and gather around him. Ori closes his eyes and begins. Baruch atah hashem elokenu melech olam hazan et haolam kulo betuvo. Blessed are you, O God. O God, King of the world, who nurtures the world. all batuvo, all in good. Literally, they were using this no longer Orthodox Jew as a carrier of the traditions that we have. And that ultimately, when we start saying birchat Hamazon, we’re talking about everything is good. It comes right out of that circle. It comes right out of the Mishnah that we learned. It is really profound. And I think getting back to he who has a WHY can bear any How. When you say a Shehechiyanu, what are you ultimately saying? You’re saying, who brought me to this space and brought me to this time? What you’re making of every place and every time is a target, is something to aspire to. You’re giving yourself a WHY so that you can bear any HOW.

Adam Mintz [00:30:44]:
The HOW. That’s amazing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:45]:
Ties it all together.

Adam Mintz [00:30:47]:
That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s Nietzsche. That’s. I didn’t know it was a Victor Frankl. That’s Fantastic. That’s amazing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:52]:
So anyway, let us all celebrate Yitro this Shabbat, not only for giving us the judiciary, but much more for giving us a concept of blessings that we should bless every moment and every time for having us achieved whatever the goal is that we can find in that moment and recognize the good and ultimately realize that what we’re doing is not just some la de da, feel good ritual. It might actually be the secret to survival.

Adam Mintz [00:31:23]:
Amen. Shabbat shalom. That’s really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:26]:
Shabbat shalom.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat b’ Shelach and focus on the correct translation of a single word and rabbinic interpretations that rather than uplift and unify, try to diminish and divide. So welcome to Left Behind. Rabbi, how are you this week? You ready to come join the journey?

Adam Mintz [00:02:36]:
It’s great. Enjoying the snow and this is such a great topic. I’m really looking forward today.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:42]:
So we really shouldn’t be surprised about a tradition about there were those who were left behind. Because if you remember from the Haggadah, when the wicked son says, what does this service mean to you? To you? He says, not to him. When he sets himself aside from the community, he denies the very core of our beliefs. And you must set his teeth on edge and tell him, listen, because of this, the Lord acted for me when I came out of Egypt, for me. And and not for him. Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed. ILU haya sum lo haya, Nigel. So we should not be surprised that there’s a tradition that some people didn’t meet the benchmark.

Adam Mintz [00:03:30]:
Right. I mean. Right. I mean, that’s problematic, though Rabbi Riskin always taught us, how can you leave people like the Rasha out?. You know, so that. That requires its own explanation. But let’s. Let’s go to the next source.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:46]:
You know, sometimes when we encounter traditions that rub us the wrong way, we learn something. We learn about why we feel they’re wrong. We have to dig a little deeper, and maybe we learn something in the process.

Adam Mintz [00:03:59]:
No question about it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:00]:
Let’s go to that ambiguous word that I refer to in Exodus 13:18. It says, so God let the people round about by way of the wilderness. At the Sea of Reeds, now, the Israelites went up armed out of the land of Egypt. In Hebrew it says, וַחֲמֻשִׁ֛ים עָל֥וּ בְנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם chamushim, for those of you who know a little Hebrew comes from the word hamesh. It also comes from hamsa, where you have that beautiful hand that we all share in the middle East. I guess when you say, hello, rabbi, you’re showing that you have, of course.

Adam Mintz [00:04:42]:
A hand is also five, because you have five fingers. It’s the same word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:46]:
Exactly it. Exactly it. So they’re all united. But here, the translation that we’re going to start with is hamushim means armed. You know, I did a little research. Armaments and arms. Clearly, when you have an armament, whether it’s a sword or a spear, it’s connected to the arm. But chamesh and hand and fingers, you. You know, you. You have a handgun. It is clearly when you say, hi, you’re raising your palm open to show that you’re not armed. There’s a connection between the Hamesh, the five fingers, the anatomy, I should say, and the weapons. But then we get to Rashi, and Rashi goes ahead and says the word chamushim means provided with weapons. He quotes the mechilta because he led them by a circuitous route through the wilderness. He brought it about that they went from Egypt. To make a long story short, we’re going to see that the Israelites fought the Amalekites. And how could they fight the Amalekites if they didn’t have any weapons? So Rashi makes the very practical point that here is a hook to hang on saying, no. They left not only with jewels and trinkets and maybe some food, but they also left with, with weapons. And then he says, but there is another explanation. Another explanation of Hamushim is only one out of five went forth from Egypt. And four parts of the people died during the three days of darkness because they were unworthy of being delivered. So the Hebrew meitu beshalosha ymai afela in the exact Hebrew, it doesn’t say the reason for that. We have to go to actually the Rashi on the plague of darkness in Exodus 10:22, last week’s parasha. And why did he bring darkness upon them? Because there were wicked people amongst the Israelites of that generation who had no desire to leave Egypt. Interestingly, wicked by itself would mean that they did not deserve to leave Egypt. But he says rashayim velo rotzim latzet. So it’s a double edged sword. They were evil and probably didn’t deserve to leave. They were evil and they probably, probably didn’t want to leave.

Adam Mintz [00:07:12]:
Well their evil this was that they didn’t want to leave.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:17]:
I think that would be the straightforward explanation.

Adam Mintz [00:07:19]:
Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:20]:
And so these die during the three days. And the interesting thing is why did they, why did they die during the plague of darkness? So it wasn’t an embarrassment. It was done very quietly in the back, in the background, in the shadows. Now what’s amazing, and we’re going to find many interpretations that are both uplifting and also those that grind us a little bit. The fascinating thing is Jonathan Sacks in his commentary on the Haggadah, very in line with what you were saying a second ago with regard to Rabbi Riskin. He says as follows. And he’s talking about the four sons and where was a fifth child? The late Lubavitcher Rebbe suggested that there is a fifth child on Pesach. The four children of the Haggadah are all present sitting around the table. The fifth child is the one who is not there. The child lost throughout outmarriage and assimilation. Rabbinic tradition tells us that in Egypt many Jews assimilated and did not want to leave. The Torah uses a phrase to describe the Israelites departure from Egypt. Bechamoshim alub b’ nei yisrael mi mitzrayim. This is normally translated as the Israelites went out of Egypt armed for battle. However, Rashi, he cites our Rashi instead. It may be related to the word hamesh. 5 the sentence could therefore be translated as only a fifth of the Israelites left Egypt. So if you remember this in a few months when you’re at your seder, you can actually refer to this concept of the fifth. And I think maybe you’ll agree with me, Adam, that Rabbi Sacks is putting a positive turn on it.

Adam Mintz [00:09:04]:
Yeah, for sure. And you’re not surprised because he always sees it as positive. And here he’s putting a positive spin on it, for sure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:12]:
So what he’s saying is that while there are those who want to write off the five, whether you mean it’s the fifth or whatever, we actually include the fifth child in the Seder at the suggestion of a great Hasidic master of inclusion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. But again, the discussion about this simple word revolves around, again, inclusion and exclusion. So let’s go a little bit further, because we’ve seen some negative and some positive. The most beautiful positive is from the Targum Yerushalmi. It’s written in heavy duty Aramaic. We could bring our friend, the Aramaic talker, to help us here. And basically what it says, and the word of the Lord conducted the people by the way of the desert of the Sea of Suf. Armed in good works, he says b’uvda tova so he says they were armed and they were armed in a good way. They were armed with Maasim Tovim with good works. Fascinating that every. We’re involved in a polemic. Rabbi.

Adam Mintz [00:10:26]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s remarkable that we’re able the same thing that is bad, according to one, is not only okay, but it’s wonderful. Armed did good works. Right. He takes it to the complete other extreme.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:40]:
So it’s interesting. We’ll come back to a little theory that I have. It’s the Targum Yerushalmi. He’s a resident in Jerusalem. But the idea is, does Hamaish, what does it trigger? Does it trigger that they were those that were left behind? Does it trigger that they were armed with good deeds? Does it trigger us to remember those who aren’t here but are invited to come? So let’s go back to the source. The source did not come from the rabbis. It came earlier than that. It came from Ezekiel. And Ezekiel wrote, he was in Babylonia, in the exile in Babylonia a generation before Ezra. Nehemiah actually left Babylonia. And he is the one who kind of rewrites and reimagines the Exodus from Egypt. And he is Talking in Ezekiel 20: 5-10, he talks about how God came and said to the Jewish people, to the Israelites, I gave you my oath, I’m going to redeem you. I’m going to bring you to a land of milk and honey. And then he gets to verse 8 and he says, but they defied me and refused to listen to me. They did not cast away the detestable things that were drawn to, nor did they give up the fetishes of Egypt. So they this is the first scriptural reference we have that there was anything wrong with them. Then I resolved to pour out my fury upon them, to vent all my anger upon them there in the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it not might not be profaned in the sight of the nations among who they were. We’ve touched on this issue of Hillel Hashem before. Va asa lamont shami levilti hachael. So God is almost forced so as not to be embarrassed in front of the goyim, to redeem the people of Israel. But here we have Ezekiel, I would say, rewriting the story, the narrative.

Adam Mintz [00:12:48]:
It’s remarkable that God saves the Jews to prevent a Hillel Hashem. Isn’t that a weird rereading of the.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:56]:
Story, but that we did in another podcast, correct?

Adam Mintz [00:13:00]:
We’ve talked about this before.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:02]:
I think it was called Filling the Void. But today what we’re focusing on is rewriting the narrative of the Exodus as if it were in a week, last week. Everybody leaves. Now all of a sudden, they didn’t deserve to leave, they didn’t want to leave, they were debilitated, so forth and so on. So my sense, Rabbi, is he’s projecting a little bit of what was going on in Babylon, that here we were in the first Diaspora and there were some Jews who, if they were to get the MEMO. Were leaving Babylon, they might stay. They did not want to leave Babylon. He was talking to those Jews. He was making a modern argument from the ancient Exodus story. And true enough, if we look at Ezra a generation later, who is actually identified with the return, the first return to Zion, he starts in Ezra 1: 4-6 v’Kol Hanishar. And all of those who remain, whoever that may be, let the people of that place render assistance with silver, gold, goods and livestock. Does that sound a little bit familiar? That the people that are staying are showering those who are leaving and making an exodus with. With. With jewels and. And things Here he’s almost recast those who are remaining as those remaining behind in Egypt. It is truly impactful and amazing.

Adam Mintz [00:14:39]:
It’s truly amazing. This is amazing, correct?

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:43]:
And how does he refer to those who are leaving? He says, and all those whose spirit has been roused by God, get ready to go up to build the house of God. He says, let them go. And he says, that Those who are around them, he talks about their neighbors should support them with silver vessels again. So you really have this new dialectic where when we left Egypt, it was the remaining Egyptians, maybe according to this lens, the remaining Egyptians and the Jews or the Israelites who didn’t want to go. Now we’re leaving Babylon and the same thing has happened. And sure enough, in Ezra 2, much later in Ezra, it says the sum of the entire community was 42,360. Rabbi, there were a whole lot more than 42,360 Jews in Babylonia. And we know because we celebrate a holiday called Purim, where those are the ones who remain behind. So I really think I said this in the introduction, but it really did dawn on me this year that part of the source for this narrative was that it did become a polemic. And it was used the first time in the Return from Babylonia. And it was used as a polemic and a disparaging argument against those who were not up to the task of leaving the comfort and the grandeur of Babylonia.

Adam Mintz [00:16:20]:
Right. I mean, there it’s more complicated because they refused to do the thing that was the right thing to do, which is going back to Israel and rebuilding the temple.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:31]:
Absolutely. So in Deuteronomy 4, we do have this sense of a God who ventured to go and take one nation from the midst of another by wonderful acts and portents, by war, by a mighty hand and outstretched arm. And here we’re starting to explore a few of the midrashic materials that start to flush out the narrative of those who either left behind or didn’t want to go. So in the Yalkut Shimoni, it says a nation from the midst of a nation, and teaches that these were uncircumcised and these were uncircumcised. Meaning to say there were Israelites who were uncircumcised and Egyptians were uncircumcised. These grew long hair, and those grew long hair. They looked exactly like the Egyptians and they didn’t want to go. And had, in the words of Rav Shmuel Bab Nachman, the Holy One not been bound by an oath to the patriarchs, Israel would never have been redeemed from Egypt. So again, this, this argument against the Rasha at the Seder comes back that had it not been for you, would not have been redeemed. But it’s, it is fascinating that now we’re starting to talk that they were acculturated, that they were mimicking the, the, the the ways of the Egyptians. And if you follow my though pattern where this was written in rabbinic terms after the return from Babylonia, after we had a diaspora, again, again, it was throwing a disparaging look at those who were not following the rabbinic model. And so they had assimilated. They. Had they been in Egypt, they would not have left, Right?

Adam Mintz [00:18:32]:
Right. So they. Had they been in Egypt, they wouldn’t have left. They were in Babylonia. They refused to leave. It’s the people who are comfortable. Sometimes you’re comfortable in slavery, sometimes you’re comfortable in luxury. It’s people who don’t want to leave. Right. The people who did want to leave Germany in the 1930s. Right. Sometimes people just want to remain in their status quo, you know?

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:59]:
And the amazing thing about it is we’re now going to look at a verse that we all know, and we know it from the Haggadah. And what it highlights is we don’t normally think about the slaves being redeemed, as those slaves have to merit redemption. When people are persecuted, when. When there’s an orphan, when there’s a massacre, you go and save people. You don’t ask questions. Are they good? Are they bad? And so when God saw the children of Israel, and God knew, I believe this was at the burning bush, says the Midrash, I have seen the affliction of my people, and God knew, as I know, its pains literally. These are the verses that we interpret in the Haggadah, and we interpret them line by line. God knew that meant he saw that they separated from their wives and from husbands. These are. We’re feeling the simpatico of these suffering people. Alternatively, though, another rabbinic thought is God saw that they did not have good deeds for which their redemption would be warranted. Really doesn’t even fit into the context of the narrative, because why is he interrupting Moses at the burning bush to say, he’s going to save these people? But again, it almost looks like they’re finding an excuse to drive home the message that not everybody was redeemed. And maybe they’re looking at an audience and they’re saying, not every one of us deserves to be redeemed. It’s truly used as a polemic. And when I said that they have weaponized the Exodus, weaponized redemption, I was referring to something like this. And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift Play it fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. Voicegift Play stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing Grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to Voice gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So there’s a an amazing article that I read and that is quoted in the source sheet and it’s written by a scholar from, from the OU, or at least it’s written on the OU’s website. And he basically questions the the other midrash that we’ve talked about in the past, which is that his name is Dr. Ari Zivotofsky
.

Adam Mintz [00:22:30]:
He’s a professor in Bar Ilan University.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:33]:
Amazing. And what he does is, if you follow the train of this thought, it goes on to say that not only were do we have midrashim that say that the Jews were uncircumcised, the Egyptians weren’t circumcised, the Jews had long hair, the Egyptians had long hair. It says that the Jews that were redeemed were redeemed for three reasons. They didn’t change their Jewish names, they didn’t change their Hebrew language or their Jewish language. We’ll see that there’s a difference in a second. And they didn’t change their dress. So we’re going to take a look at those in a second. But before we do, he quotes an amazing scholar I have never heard from. His last name is Salant. And just like Rabbi Yisrael Salant, he was a Mussarnik. And he goes and he gives, I’ve quoted it in the source sheet. He gives an amazing interpretation of Hamushim. And what he says is he combines all the traditions, but he gives it a positive spin. He says, you know, if 1, if 3/5, 4/5 of the Jews were killed in Egypt, clearly it was only the grownups and it was not their children. So if there was not their children, who was going to take care of all of these orphans? And he says that the reason there is a discussion about both the only the fifth left and four fifths stayed and the good deeds is the good deeds of those who left was they took the orphans with them. And so I say to myself, wow, that is a wonderful glass is half full type of rabbi who looks at these arguments and at these traditions and says, I got to stir up something positive about this. And actually that the hamushim is not the fraction, but the righteous and kindness of Israel, that each person bore a burden not on his own. So thank God for commentary.

Adam Mintz [00:24:36]:
I love it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:38]:
Thank God for Drash and commentary that enables the kind of like a Rorschach test, that enables the beauty and the happiness and the joy of a rabbi’s soul to project onto the various commentaries that we’ve looked at and come up with something that is totally positive. I could not not quote that piece of Torah. But let’s now go to the tradition that says that they didn’t change their names or language. We’re going to Vayikra Raba. And it says, Rav Huna said in the name of Bar Kapara, due to four matters, Israel was redeemed from Egypt because they did not change their name, their language. They did not speak Lashon Hara, slander. And there was none among them who was found to be steeped in licentiousness. So again, what they are trying to do is. And it seems to me it’s such a. There’s no need for it to justify redeeming these slaves, the slaves who had their freedom robbed from them. But nonetheless, I think the only conclusion that you can reach is they’re doing it because they wanted to have an argument for themselves in their day to convince people not to change their name, not to change their language.

Adam Mintz [00:26:04]:
That’s for sure. Right. This goes. I mean, that’s why Riskin changed his name from Steven to Shlomo. That’s a sign of a commitment.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:14]:
Yeah, yeah. So I am going to quote a little bit from Robby Ari Zivotofsky. And he said that the triad of Jewish names, language and dress is not referred to in the earlier sources. It’s a very scholarly argument. And he goes over many different sources. The first time that he finds all three of them mentioned together is in Rabbi Elia Bachour, who lived in, what, the 16th century? And there are those that even call out the mention of it and say, you’re making this up. It didn’t appear. But I wanna pick up with when this was brought into the Haskalah, when the Enlightenment came. And according to Rabbi Zivotofsky, this triad of Jewish names, language and dress is not referred to again until the early 19th century when it re. Emerged with renewed significance. During that century’s battle against the reform movement. I would add the Haskalah, the Enlightenment in general. And we have Hatam Sofer, the most important purveyor of this new midrash. He calls it. And he referred to the triad of shem, which means name, Lashon, which is language, and malbush, which is dress, which spell shalom. They spell completeness. And, Rabbi, we’re not making this up. We heard in the yeshiva world this is a biggie. This is.

Adam Mintz [00:27:54]:
Zivotofsky shows that, you know, that this is a. They’re a pro. This is a problematic source. But he’s doing that because we all grew up that way. He grew up that way too. He grew up in West Hempstead. He grew up exactly that way.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:06]:
The first thing that happened to me when I became religious, they said, what’s your name? I said, Geoffrey. They said, what’s your Hebrew name? And luckily I was Shlomo. I love Shlomo. And that’s what I became, because a Jew needs to be called by his Jewish name, name. And I had to change the way I dressed. Now, how dressing like people dressed in medieval Europe is a return to the original dress, that I don’t know, but certainly that. But here is something fascinating. Rabbi, let’s talk about the language here. Zivotofsky writes, in a strange twist, Rabbi Yakutiel Yehuda Halberstein, the Klausenburger Rebbe writing in New Jersey in 1977 and quoting the Hatam Sofer, uses our opening midrash to emphatically insist that one speak only Yiddish and not the local language, or wait for it, or Hebrew. He argues that the unique Jewish languages that the Jews created in the various exiles, which were a deliberate corruption of the local language, meaning Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Malayalam, are the true Jewish languages that should be preserved. So what he’s trying to do is he has this wonderful polemic, but one piece doesn’t fit in. The Zionists are the one that have reinvented Hebrew. The Zionists are the one who are going back to the midrash and saying, but we actually speak Lashon Kodesh. And I think this is the most telling and fascinating, strange and amusing little piece, because it really does show that this was all a polemic, and it stays with us today. I mean, ultimately, we all have to decide who are the pharaohs of the day, who are the Israelites of the day, who are the Moses of the day. No one can decide that for us. But clearly Exodus and liberation does get Polemicized and in the case of the haredim, really, they are not making THE authentic argument. They are making an argument that they have created over time. And they are have no more acclaim to authenticity than Ben Yehuda, who rediscovered that amazing lesson kadosh that the midrash referred to. So that is our study today, and I think we’re finished.

Adam Mintz [00:30:42]:
That’s amazing to pull it all around the Zivotofsky and changing language and how they. They. They’ve kind of corrupted. That Midrash. That is fantastic. Okay, everyone, get ready. Parshat b’. Shalach. We take the Jews out of Egypt, and everyone’s going to know now what the word chamushim is all about. Thank you so much, Geoffrey. Shabbat shalom, everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:03]:
Shabbat shalom. And I can only assure you that we were all worthy of redemption, and we will all be worthy of whatever redemption we make for ourselves. So Shabbat shalom. Enjoy the parasha.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some late 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 Bo. Last week he explored the essence of the Mussar movement and mentioned in passing the magic of Hasidism, joy, and radical inclusion. This week, we’ll explore the source of inclusion in the Exodus story, but we’ll start with a seminal Hasidic story. So, Rabbi Adam, welcome back. You know, we’re starting to get a little autobiographical here. You always get to talk about how you know the guests. Well, I must say that besides Mussar, Hasidism was a big impact on my life. And I think the first book that I read that really got me interested in Judaism was a book by Martin Buber, very thin, called The Ten Rungs. But then I read Hasidic tales, and I read the Legend of the BAAL Shem. And at the beginning of the book, The BAAL Shem, he writes in his introduction that in his sense, what brought all of the stories, what the magic of Hasidism was. And he writes, no prayer is stronger in grace and penetrates in more direct flight through all the worlds of heaven than those of the simple man who does not know anything to say and only knows to offer God the unbroken promptings of his heart. God receives them as a king receives the singing of a nightingale in his gardens at twilight. A singing that sounds sweeter to him than the homage of the princes in his throne room. The Hasidic legend cannot give enough examples of the favor that shines on the undivided person and of the power of his service. And then he goes and tells a really famous story. I knew this story. Everybody knows the story, but I didn’t realize it was a. He brought it as a template. And it’s a story of a simple boy on Yom Kippur who says to his father as they walk into synagogue for Kol Nidre, I have a whistle and I want to blow the whistle. And his father hushes him. And then they come for Shacharit, and then they come for Musaf, and then they come for Mincha. And finally they’re at Neelah. And as you can imagine, the Hasidim are praying. They’re all dressed in white. The crescendo is being reached. And he turns to his dad and he pulls the whistle out of his pocket and he blows it. And everybody turns around and looks at him as though he has done the most terrible thing. All stood startled and bewildered. But the BAAL Shem raised himself above them and spoke. The judgment is suspended and wrath is dispelled from the face of the earth. So what he said is, the simple whistle of this peasant child was more pure and more powerful than the princes in his throne room. And I thought we’d start with that because we really are talking today about inclusion and exclusion. You’ve clearly heard that story before. Did you read the story before? The legends of the BAAL Shem Tov.

Adam Mintz [00:04:54]:
Yeah. I mean, that story is older than Hasidim, but it’s a great. It says so much, that story. Good. This is a great topic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:03]:
Okay, so we are in Exodus in Shemot, Exodus 10:8. So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. They were fetched. And he said to them, Pharaoh said to them, go worship your God. Who are the ones to go? He says, Mi, v’Mi Haholchim? Moses replied, we will all go, regardless of social station. Actually, the Hebrew says. He really says, our children and our daughters will go. But the translation of the jps, and we’ll get to that in a second, actually puts this already a social stratosphere into it. And it says, regardless of social station, we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds, for we must observe God’s festival. But he said to them. So Pharaoh turns to them and says, God be with you. The same as I mean to let your dependence go with you. Clearly you are bent on mischief. So Pharaoh is, he’s not a fool. He goes, if you’re going to worship your God, you don’t need to take the women and the children. They, they don’t count at a minyan. He said, no, your gentlemen go and worship. So here too, the jps and we’re going to get to the logic and wisdom of this translation. But in the Hebrew it says, it doesn’t say your gentleman, it says, hagvarim will go with you and worship, since that is all that you want. And they were expelled from Pharaoh’s presence. So fascinating how the translation really tries to all of us sudden put into this a sense of Pharaoh is letting the gvarim, the ones that matter, those that have strength. And it also tries to put into regardless of social station. So let’s look at it for a second. First of all, I think the most amazing little comment is from Everett Fox and he says the answer is rhythmical or almost ritual. You know, Rabbi, when we talk about everybody as part of this thing, what is the expression that we use that ends with the taf? It says ha’ anashem v’ nashim v’taf. That is almost a mantra of Judaism that we include the elder men, the elder women, and the taf and the children. And I think that Everett Fox captures it by saying it almost sounds rhythmical and like a ritual. I was struck that.

Adam Mintz [00:07:55]:
That’s very good. That’s very creative. Good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:58]:
So another commentary that I looked at, he picks on this word that JPS translates as gentleman. The Hebrew says hagvarim. He says, unlike in the writings of the prophets, this term men, gevarim, as distinct from anashim, is quite rare in the Torah. Yet it appears twice in our parasha. It may be intended to point to a very thin stratum of an elite few, not merely men, but gentlemen or Torah elites who regard the worship of the Lord as their private preserve and are reluctant to allow others to share in it. I mean, the commentators are really digging in here. It could have been so easy, almost knee jerk to say this is about Moses trying to pull a fast one and Pharaoh calling him and says, what do you need everybody to go for?

Adam Mintz [00:08:54]:
Right. Well, that’s super interesting because you’re right, you don’t need to translate gvarim as being a special group. But he feels that that kind of enhances the story. Good.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:06]:
So now we’re going to the Torah, a woman’s commentary, and it says regardless of social station. So it is taking the JPS translation. It says literally with our underlings and with our elders. Or alternatively you could translate it with our youths and with our old folks. The Hebrew terms can refer either to socioeconomic status or to age. And so I think everybody, the sense of na’ar is a. We normally think of a na’ar as a child. If you say something silly in the yeshiva, they might call you a na’ar.

Adam Mintz [00:09:45]:
That’s by the way, that’s a Yiddish ism. The word na’ar in Yiddish means a fool. You know that because the word narishkite means foolishness, perfect, which obviously comes from the Hebrew, but it’s a Yiddish word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:59]:
Okay, yeah, but I think our knee jerk reaction would have been this is an ageism. Nar is youth. I think in benching, we say Na’ar Hayiti gam zekaniti. It’s the opposite of being aged. But if you look into the dictionary that is provided in Sefaria, it also refers to a retainer, a servant. So. So again, if you’re talking the language of class and status and you’re retranslating our pesukim, you could say that Moses returns to Pharaoh and says, no, no, no, stop with the gevarim. Those that have status, we’re talking about even their servants, even their those who to who serve them. So it really is quite, quite amazing. I think in modern Hebrew, the word Mi u’Mi portion who and who. If you want to give a list of who’s who in the Knesset or who’s who in Israel, it’s Mi uMi b’ yisrael Knesset. So we almost take. Again, this sense is used in the nomenclature as who’s who, who’s on the list.

Adam Mintz [00:11:11]:
I think that the phrase Mi uMi HaHolchim is also kind of a colloquial phrase. You want to know who’s coming along, who’s invited to the party. Sometimes people are coming for Shabbos. I say to Sharon, Mi uMi Haholchim means who, who’s coming? It’s taken from this verse.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:29]:
It is. And I must say I was so confident that if I did a Google search and I said, Mi uMi HaHolchim in Israeli literature, in Yiddish literature, I would have come up with more hits. But I think you have the same feeling that I do. It really is an expression.

Adam Mintz [00:11:48]:
It’s gotta be.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:49]:
It’s who, who’s invited, who’s included. So just continuing a little bit further as we look at the verses themselves, the Ramban says, but who are they that shall go? Pharaoh desired that their leaders, elders and officers should go, men that are pointed out by name. Moses answered him that also the sons and daughters will go. For we must hold a feast unto the eternal. And it is mandatory upon all of us to take part in the feast. So really, the Ramban says people who have a name, the real intelligentsia. I love that he really drives the point home. And I love the fact that he now starts. It started me thinking, rabbi, this is the first and the Exodus. What is the big point that Moses is making? He goes, we want to go out and celebrate. We want to have a chag. The commentaries can’t even agree what the chag is it clearly.

Adam Mintz [00:12:57]:
That’s funny. That’s correct.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:58]:
Today is Rosh Chodesh as we record. Maybe it was Rosh chodesh. The point is, we Jews cannot celebrate without our families. It would be unheard of.

Adam Mintz [00:13:09]:
Very good. That’s very. Yeah, A lot of this comes from. That’s a great Ramban.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:16]:
And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory, or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for b’nai mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So this weekend I went to the Met. It’s an amazing show. It shows you all the gods. And if you recall, Rabbi, the first episode of this season, we did it, about Tselem Elohim, the image of God. And I looked at this statue that we’re showing if you’re watching this on YouTube, where a pharaoh has himself sitting next to a God and they’re literally twins. They’re dressed the same, they’re seated the same. It’s clear that in Egypt, if you want the image of God, you’re talking about Pharaoh. Pharaoh is the image of God. And therefore we can almost understand when Moses talks to Pharaoh for the first time, God says to him, I am Going to make you a God to Pharaoh. You have to be on the same level. But what we are doing here, Rabbi, I really believe is a continuation of the revolution that started in Genesis, and that is that the way the Bible looks at this is every human being is in the tselem Elohim, that is in the image of God. And if you take that to its practical conclusion, everybody’s gotta leave. Everybody, from the biggest to the smallest, is all created b’tselem elohim. And you really have this contrast between the two cultures and the two religions.

Adam Mintz [00:15:51]:
Yeah, that’s super interesting. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is interesting. The idea that they’ll be arguing about who goes out. Right.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:00]:
How.

Adam Mintz [00:16:01]:
How religion is observed, the idea that maybe religion is only observed by the elders, it’s such a foreign idea to us. Right. The idea that only Zikanenu, only the elders, only the important people will worship God is such a foreign idea. But clearly that’s what Pharoah and Moshe are arguing about.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:23]:
It is. And clearly, look, we have remnants in our Torah, the priestly caste. It was there. This wasn’t a clear, clean break. When Ramban says, this is not about people called by name, he is referring to verses in our Torah where the nasi’im, the princes, are paraded, and they are people of name, of course. So I think what’s fascinating to me is you could very easily say that we’re doing a drash today, that all we’re doing is saying mi v’miholchim. It’s clear. The pashut P’shat, the obvious interpretation is here. The negotiation. Negotiations begin. And Pharaoh says, I want to let you go. Now let’s discuss the details. Who’s going to go? And Moses tries to pull a fast one and say, we all have to go. And there. And that’s what it all is. But I think, at least looking at it through the lens of the commentaries, who literally pick out for us, and I think they make a case about the unique use of the word gvarim, that clearly we’re not just talking about people here or about naarim. I. I think you really can make a case, Rabbi, that this is truly an argument about a different gestalt, a different view of what it means to who is important. When Pharaoh thinks he’s thinking about princes, when Moses is thinking he’s thinking about the masses. “Ad Taff”. Until the smallest.

Adam Mintz [00:18:03]:
So, and I’m saying it’s not. It’s who’s important and who’s important in religion. Because what they’re arguing about is who’s gonna worship God, who’s gonna be part of the religious festival. Good. All fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:16]:
So I found two articles that I’m gonna quote at length. They are modern, contemporary articles written. The first one we’re gonna quote is by Rabbi Moshe Aberman and he’s from Yeshiva Haretzion. This is Rabbi Lichtenstein. This is a major place. And he is taking the argument for us. And he says, Moses states before Pharaoh that for the purpose of worshiping God, all of Israel must participate. Pharaoh, however, responds that worship is carried out by the men, the leaders of the people and the heads of families. And therefore there is no need for women and children. Moses position is that in Judaism, every person as such stands in a personal relationship before the Holy One. Blessed be heaven. In light of this, each and every individual must be partner in the experience of worship. This position is reflected and firmly grounded in several places in the Torah. So the reason I found this so I think impactful was that he’s going to make an argument that what we’re discussing now shows its face later. This was not a kind of a unit, an isolated instance that we’re kind of projecting and reading into it. So the first example that he brings is in Deuteronomy 31:12. And it’s the Mitzvah of Hakel, of gathering the people together. What was it? Was it every seven years?

Adam Mintz [00:19:51]:
Yes, the at the end of the Shmita year, the sukkos after the Shmita year.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:56]:
So assemble the people, says the Torah, the men, the women and the little ones. Anushim v Nasim vataf. So this is the expression that we use even in say, when we say everybody’s invited. It’s. This is not. It’s co ed and it’s co generational. It’s everybody and it says, your sojourner, the gear, who is within your gates, in order that they may hearken, in order that they may learn and have awe for God, your God, and take care to observe all the words of this instruction. So what this Rabbi Moshe Aberman is saying is this is not an isolated instance and we are not looking at a back and forth posturing of Moses and Pharaoh. This is essential to the revolution, to the. The program, so to speak.

Adam Mintz [00:20:49]:
Well, and that it’s a change from the Egyptians. It’s different than from what everybody else did.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:56]:
It’s radical. It’s a radical break. Everyone participates, men, women, children, even residents, aliens, adds this rabbi. Similarly, he continues, at the time of entering the covenant in the plains of Moab, on the eve of Israel’s entry into the land, it is stated now we’re quoting Deuteronomy 29. You stand this day, all of you, before God, your God, your tribal heads, your elders and your officials, every householder in Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp. From wood chopper to water drawer. We spent a whole episode on this.

Adam Mintz [00:21:38]:
Talk about what that means, but again.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:40]:
That it brings it into the context of what Moses is arguing with Pharaoh to me made it very profound, amazing, really good. The last thing that he begins is, you know, and again, I had never really thought this before, and I said it a second ago, that here we are, we’re leading a revolution. And ultimately, what does Moses post on the, on the doorpost in terms of what he’s asking from Pharaoh? He’s asking Pharaoh, we need to celebrate, to have a chag. I just thought, when I thought about it for a second, I thought that also was an amazing statement. So in Deuteronomy 16:14, it says, you shall rejoice in your festival, tvisamachat b’chagecha, who? with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the family of the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow in your communities. And this to me really tied what Moses was demanding of Pharaoh and the Exodus and the actual Halachot that came out as a result that the only way that the Israelites can celebrate. And by the way, the word hag is related to the Arabic word hajj. This it’s with everybody. It is with everybody. This was a revolution that getting back back to that wonderful story we started with Buber that everybody to the whistleblower has to be a part of or you can’t do it right now.

Adam Mintz [00:23:19]:
I think the hajj, though to Mecca is only the men, right?

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:23]:
Well, they translated the word, but maybe not the concept, right?

Adam Mintz [00:23:27]:
I think so.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:27]:
I don’t know.

Adam Mintz [00:23:27]:
You have to study. You have to study the Muslim halacha.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:31]:
I think women go too, but definitely to me it was just amazing. So there is another scholar who quotes and he, believe it or not, this is almost like a teshuvah, a responsa, where a woman, an elderly woman, dedicates something to a synagogue in modern day in Jerusalem, and the rabbis of the synagogue refused to take it from a woman. And so this rabbi, his name is Ovadia, he’s actually a professor also Aviad Hakouin. He writes the following interpretation based on, in part on our pursuit. He says one of the most striking features of the story of the exodus from Egypt is inclusion, not exclusion. All the children of Israel are gathered beneath the wings of the worship of the Lord according to Pharaoh’s approach, echoes of which are often heard even in many circles of our own day. The worship of the Lord and entry into his sanctuary are an exclusive matter, by invitation only, for men only. The bitter fruit of the tree of exclusion. And this is all in Hebrew. I just translated it. Go worship the Lord your God. Who and who are going? Quoting our verse here, Pharaoh gives voice to his distorted conception of religion and those who practice it. If the purpose of leaving Egypt is to worship of the Lord, then this rite belongs only to a select few rabbis, priests, religious functionaries, and Anshei Shlome, the insiders. Pharaoh asks Moses to prepare for him a list of the who and who the important people demanded, worthy of participating in the act of religious worship. He wants the event to be exclusive, by invitation only, just as the Egyptians conduct their own ceremonies. I love the way he’s rephrasing it.

Adam Mintz [00:25:36]:
Almost into modern by invitation only part.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:41]:
So according to Pharaoh and those who follow in his path, he’s. He’s basically pointing his finger at these, these rabbis. He wouldn’t accept. The worship of the Lord is gendered and sectorial matter. Against this background Pharaoh’s command in Exodus 10:11 becomes all the more striking and intelligible. Go then you men, and worship the Lord, for that is what you seek. So this was the time that Gevarim was used. Indeed, Moses, our teacher’s inclusive model does not grant rights alone. It also creates obligations. Those who bear the Torah and serve as guides must find solutions within the framework of Halachah to the exclusion of women from the various Batim houses. So he is issuing, based on our little narrative and dialogue, a challenge to the halachic authorities of today that they need to find a way of including everybody into a larger tent.

Adam Mintz [00:26:49]:
Great. That. That’s the question about a woman donating something. And he goes back to this story. Who would have thought such a thing?

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:57]:
It’s just. It’s just wonderful. I have to also say, I believe we lost a great leader. The OU. Was it. Was it Moshe Hauer? Rabbi. What was his name?

Adam Mintz [00:27:09]:
Yeah, Moshe Hauer.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:12]:
He also has a article written with the. The name of the article is who and who will Go? And he uses it, interestingly, as an excuse to help to define who’s included. What he talks about is Rabbi Saloveitchik and many of the Orthodox permitted it almost obligated the Orthodox to participate in anything that was communal, even though maybe that was not the case when it came to theology or discussions of Torah.

Adam Mintz [00:27:46]:
With other denominations, with the non Orthodox.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:49]:
Right, with the non Orthodox. And he actually uses the article as a way to say, but there are lines. And. And what he talks about is, you know, when certain people go and they don’t support the people living in Israel, they’ve crossed a line. But after he passed away to a T Rabbi, every Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular leader that had anything to do with him all literally talked about his inclusiveness, that he walked. He walked the walk. So it’s fascinating that he wrote that. I think there’s too much when we discuss the Exodus, whereas too much we still have, which is the exclusionary. There’s a very tiny little posuk that says when the Jews left, they went hamushim armed. And the amount of people that quote a tiny midrash that is isolated, that only a fifth of the Israelites left Egypt, boggles the imagination. It boggles the imagination. The people that quote the midrash that says, we survived because we didn’t change our garb and we didn’t change our.

Adam Mintz [00:29:14]:
Language, our names and our language.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:16]:
There’s too much of that and not enough of the inclusion part that everybody know what language they spoke, no, what matter what clothing they wore, were invited in this amazing activity Exodus. And I think that while I will characterize those midrashim that talk about who were left behind and who were excluded as isolated, what we’ve tried to show today, and I think we have a leg to stand on, is that me u miholchim. Who and who is going as an inclusive statement is actually baked into the halacha, later baked into the Torah. And I think the stories what Martin Buber identified in the Hasidic movement, if you recall, we had the first rabbi, the gay rabbi, and we asked him, what is the future? He said, “be like Chabad”. And when we asked him, what do you mean? He goes, chabad accepts everybody. I think the walking rules that we have from this week’s Parasha is inclusion is what it’s all about.

Adam Mintz [00:30:30]:
About. Amazing. What a great topic. Shabbat Shalom, everybody. We look forward next week to crossing the Red Sea with all of you. Shabbat Shalom.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:40]:
Shabbat Shalom. Everybody is welcome. And by the way, if you ever listen to the podcast and you want to give us a star or say something nice, go ahead and do it. Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Vayera, and it gives me the delightful excuse to introduce to my Madlik family, my teacher and arguably the last great Mussar masterer, Rav Shlomo Wolbe. So, Adam, we’ve talked many times about Rabbi Riskin, who is a Rebbe that you and I share together, but I don’t think we have ever really talked about Rav Shlomo Wolbe. And I went after I went to Torah Vodaas and I went to a year at Long Beach Yeshiva. I was looking for more and I ended up in Beer Yaakov, which in the days was a little town, orange groves. On the other side of town was Tunis, which literally, if you went there, you thought you were in Tunisia. There was an unpaved road. We would go there. The yeshiva bochers would go there every Friday to use their hamsa there they had a schwitz. They didn’t call it a Schwitz because it was Tunisian. And then we would go to the mikvah and we got out every four weeks. So we were. It was like a little bit of a monastery. And I Really, I must say that I discovered there. You know, there are the Musser Institute today where people study Mussar. And I think if most people were asked what Mussar is, they would probably say it’s like ethics. It’s doing the right thing. And I think today, through this exploration of Kotzer Ruach, of katnut, which means smallness, and Gadlut, which is greatness, we’re gonna see a whole new insight. Mussar is, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it because a lot of us know about the Hasidic movement, and I think if I had to characterize that, that would be the joy of being a Jew. The Haskalah was the Enlightenment. To be able to look at our Torah on a more scientific level. Zionism we talk all about all the time. But Mussar is something that I think people don’t understand as much. But it too was a movement that came out of the Haskalah, where we were redefining what Judaism is.

Adam Mintz [00:04:02]:
Can you tell us a little bit about the biography of Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe?

Geoffrey Stern [00:04:07]:
Absolutely. So he was born in 1914, passed away in 2005, so 20 years ago. He actually grew up in Berlin, and he did not grow up in a religious home. I believe his father was a professor of linguistics at the University of Berlin. And somehow he became a Baal Teshuva. He discovered Judaism through his local community, and he got so involved. Kind of parallels my story a little bit, but l’havdil, I do not compare myself to Shlomo Wolbe. He ended up in the Mir Yeshiva, and there he met HaRav Yerukim Leibovitz, who was known as the the Alter fro Mir and Yechezkel Levenstein. These were greats of the Mussar movement.

Adam Mintz [00:05:01]:
These were in Mir in Lithuania.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:04]:
Absolutely. And then when the war started, as a German citizen and as a Jew, he was not in good shape. He was able to go to Switzerland during the war. Then he ended up in another neutral country, Sweden, and he actually ran a girls school there. So I remember being at the yeshiva. These elderly women would come to visit him all the time, and he would say, those are my girls. He would. He taught refugee girls, and he was obviously a linguist himself, spoke a bunch of languages. And he married the daughter of the Mashgiach from the Slabotka Yeshiva in Israel. So he was held in very high regard and very well known. He started Be’er Yaakov, usually at a yeshiva. It’s the Rosh haYeshiva who’s the star, but I went to Be’er Yaakov because of Wolbe and every year he would take one student to study Chumash and Rashi with him in the morning. With the first 15, 20 minutes of the day, everybody, as I talk about it all the time on Madlik, about studying Chumash and Rashi. In the second year, I was privileged to be that student. And I wish I could tell you that I remember all of his chiddushim from studying early in the morning Chumash and Rashi. But I must have gotten something because I love Rashi and I love studying Chumash, which is the first thing that I think ties us to the Madlik podcast. But he, after Be’er Yaakov went on to start something called the Beit haMussar. And he literally was thought of as one of the great Mussarniks, the types of things that he would do that maybe others don’t follow. He believed that when one studied Mussar, which means like Chovot Halavavot, where you would study a book that was called the Duties of the Heart, meaning the premise of the book is we spend a lot of time thinking about our duties, of actions, of what we eat and what we can eat, what we pray, what we can pray, and Chovot Halevavot, Duties of the Heart says, why don’t we focus a little bit on how that’s changing us or who we are? You had to study that alone, without a study partner, without a havruta. And the other thing that we used to do is we used to have va’adim, small groups of students that would get together sometimes at midnight with the mashgiach. And you could work for six months on one concept. You could work on thought and there might be thought exercises. It almost sounds like psychotherapy sometimes. How do you control your thought? How do you think about one thing and then focus on something else? Just fascinating and not within the mainstream of what I think most people are exposed to when they talk about Judaism. But I want to start with a quote that is quoted in many places and unfortunately the whole article that we’re going to read is not quoted. So I went ahead and I translated the whole thing and I’m going to post it. But it says like this. This matter is one of the foundations of our faith. He says, if I were asked what my personal credo is, Mahu ha ani maman sheli, we always say, animan, I believe in the 13 attributes. Rav Wolbe says, what would I answer if somebody asked me what my personal Ani Ma’amin is? He says, I would answer I believe in the greatness of the human being. I believe that the human being is so great that he can stand before his Creator, hear him, and that is prophecy. And speak to his Creator. That is prayer. The greatness of the people of Israel reached its summit when the entire nation stood at Mount Sinai. He goes on, and this is how we’re going to start with the end. He says, in God, all people believe. Well, maybe that was true one time, in the greatness of the human being. Not all believe. That a human being can attain a living relationship with his Creator. And not only that, but that the Creator will reveal himself to him, speak with him, that a human being can walk before God in the land of the living. This is our faith. So these quotes. If you were to ask me, Rabbi, I would say it could be Erich Fromm talking humanism. “You shall be as gods” they are. But in the Hebrew, it’s lyrical. He says, if you were to ask me what my Ani Mamin is, I would say I believe in the greatness of the human being. It’s quite remarkable. What do you know of Rabbi Wolbe or of the Mussar movement? Rabbi?

Adam Mintz [00:09:58]:
I don’t know much about Rabbi Wolbe other than the fact that he started Beer Yaakov. I just know the kind of the outline of his life. But the Mussar movement, this is. It means it’s easy to believe in God. The real challenge is, do you believe in human beings? That’s what a remarkable idea that is.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:19]:
And I think, even though in the article that we will be going through a little bit today, superficially, I might add, doesn’t quote a verse from our Parasha, I think you’ll see why it triggered a sense in me of this is the perfect segue into this question of self doubt, belief, the greatness of the wonder of humanity in our poarsha. After God gives Moses the message one more time. And now Moses is in Egypt, it says in Exodus 6: 9. But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage. Mikotzer ruach, u’me avodah kasha. They did not have the ability to listen to Moses. It wasn’t philosophical, it wasn’t theological. It was the overbearing of their situation. Rashi says, what is this? He says through anguish, literally shortness of spirit. You almost get a sense of shortness of breath, but this is shortness of spirit. If one is in anguish, his breath comes in short gasps and he cannot draw long breaths. What struck me, Rabbi, was we were talking about the Inability to accept a message, the message of the Torah, and it had to do with you as a person. It didn’t have to do with anything external. The Ramban says similarly that they paid no attention to his words because of impatience of spirit. As a person whose soul is grieved on account of his misery, Cassuto talks about a state of depression. He says there’s a parallel in Ugaritic. Some of the other commentaries talk about impatience or fatigue. But it is a kind of a striking expression, isn’t it, Rabbi?

Adam Mintz [00:12:28]:
Well, first of all, let’s go back to the Rashi. The Rashi is remarkable because we know that’s true from psychology, that when you’re anxious it’s sometimes hard to catch your breath. And it’s so amazing that that’s what Rashi, that’s the way Rashi explains the Chumash, that they couldn’t, literally they couldn’t catch their breath. They were so upset. It’s not that they were exhausted. It’s not like they ran a marathon. They couldn’t catch their breath. When you’re anguished, then it’s hard to catch your breath. It’s like Cassuto said, it’s some kind of psychological condition, which is fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:10]:
And that qatsar is small, but it’s also, it feels almost like narrow, it’s short. The interesting thing where Rabbi Volber is going to go is these are all negative situations, negative personal situations that we can almost understand viscerally, you know, how can you start be thinking about big ideas and revelation and all that when all you can think about is how to get another few calories into yourself to get some sleep. But this is how Rav Shlomo Wolbe begins this article, I must say. His main book is called Ali Shor. This book is called Ben Sheishet le Asur, which literally means between the 6th and the 10th. They’ve changed the name of the book because between the 6th and the 10th, Rabbi, I think, means between June 6th of the Six Day War and or the sixth month of June and the 10th, which was the October (Yom Kippur) War. He was using a secular reference even in his title for the book. But listen to how he starts this monumental essay. He starts it with Sophocles. The Greek describes in a singular poem the greatness of the human being, declaring many things are awe inspiring, but the most awe inspiring of them all is the human being how many mashgiachs. And if I’ll have to put a picture of Wolbe in the substack post, but he literally was from casting central in terms of a Haredi Jew. How many would start an essay quoting Sophocles? And then he goes on, and this was a kind of a talk he gave to religious high schoolers. He talks about getting onto the moon. There’s even more to be in awe of the human being. But he does say the event calls for renewed reflection on the old question of human greatness. And this is what he’s concerned with. He’s considered with Gadlut Ha’. Odam. He says, has humanity, through such achievements, exhausted all that lies within its power for building the world? So as a mussarnik, we can start with being a slave and not having the luxury of thinking big thoughts, but we can also think in terms of living in a world where man can land on the moon and man can control his agriculture. And also, is the answer outside of us or is it inside of us?

Adam Mintz [00:15:49]:
That’s also a very important question, right? Is the answer outside or inside of us? That’s also about the greatness of human beings, that the answer is generally inside of us.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:03]:
And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift PLAY. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. VoiceGift PLAY stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’nai mitzvah, practicing their layning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Had Gadya in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast. So he goes on a little bit and you can read this almost through modern lenses here. He kind of takes on almost consumerism. They make their bellies into gods. He’s talking about successful technological man. Their Torah is their clothing. You know, when they wake up in the morning, they’re not considering what tallis they’re going to wear. They’re talking about their clothing. And their morality is the fortifying of their dwelling, a good structure. Economics. Civilization enlarges the world and diminishes the human being, for it turns our gaze outward while the human inner life steadily contracts and grows impoverished. So he’s going to make an argument, Rabbi, that it’s not simply that when man is small and he’s a slave, or when man thinks he’s great and can achieve everything. In both of those cases, he might by mistake lose focus on himself. He believes there’s an actual connection between that. If you focus your time on that which is outside of you, by definition, you will lose the ability to look at what is inside of you. And that, he will argue, is the source of the real greatness of man. Not only the greatness of man, but like the founding fathers, he asks, will the human being be happier than then? Will all of this great success, outward success, be more successful? And he goes, and he brings Dynamite and Nobel as an example of when we create these amazing inventions. Again, following up on what Sophocles said in terms of admiring what man can create, it has the intent, it has the ability to bring us down. And then he says, our intention is not to deny the value of improving secular living conditions, but to show that this outward gaze builds up the external world at the expense of the human being himself. So in a sense, it’s a very modern question. I mentioned consumerism a second ago. But again, all of these externalities, do they really solve the issue of who man is, what makes us happy? And does it represent actually the thing which, whether it’s Sophocles or any of us, can truly admire about the potential for greatness in human beings? He goes on to critique Marxism, and he says, Marxism does the same thing as capitalism. It just takes the controlling factor out of the hand of each of us who wants to control our destiny and says the Politburo should do it. But in either case, its own only. It is only fixing the world from outside, external. So if I have to stop here, I want to say we’re reading only one essay from a great Mussarnik. But if I had to put my horse in the race, I would say that what the Mussarniks brought to the world was not a higher, finer sense of ethics. Ethics might be an outcome, but the truth is it was a higher, finer sense of understanding the importance of us as an individual. If we are slaves, we cannot think big. If we think of ourselves as small, we cannot think big if somebody else makes us small, or if we put all of our focus on things outside of us, which by definition diminishes who we are, we cannot think big.

Adam Mintz [00:21:15]:
Yeah, I mean, that. That’s the idea of thinking big, what he’s saying is means we have to be able to think within ourselves, because externalities can’t really make us big in a meaningful way.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:29]:
Absolutely. But again, you can see how I was attracted to this man. He starts with Sophocles. He’s talking about modern Marxism. This was a man when he showed up for a schmooze. He would have a pack of books and he didn’t. He would just go from. He had a little note, a little placeholder in each one. And he would go from one to the other. But here it is, next position. You can see even why I love the man. He says I can testify from experience. Once I stood atop a very high mountain, surrounded by ancient snow covered peaks and a vast eye expanding horizon. I believe that all my small traits would vanish. Amadti la’ atzmi b’amad k’zeh vaday yibatlu b’kirbi kol hamidot hakatantiot. Not the smallness. He thought that all of the katantiot, all of those narrow small things would vanish. But I soon realized that inwardly nothing had changed. Only the grand landscape had momentarily concealed the pettiness within. In again, in the Hebrew it talks about ha katantanuyut sheba libi. He is literally contrasting gadlut greatness and katantaniyut. The smallness that we all … the trivialities, the things that kind of.

Adam Mintz [00:23:04]:
That’s a great word.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:07]:
I think it comes very close to Katsir Ruach. It’s the smallness of the breath. It’s this shortness and smallness. And it’s what made me think of this essay. But I love the fact that he references an experience that any of us could have on a hike, looking on from a mountain at the gloriousness of the horizon, thinking all those big thoughts. But does it actually affect us? He says he is still the human being. Even if his peak ascends to the heavens, even if his head reaches the clouds through some outward experience, he remains the same human being with the same traits and impulses. So where is the repair of the human being? And where is the repair of the world? So notice he links repair of the human being. Don’t look out, look in.

Adam Mintz [00:24:03]:
Did you used to hear these ideas from him? Is this familiar to you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:08]:
So literally, I knew what I wanted to find. I googled Gadlut v’ katnut and Rav Shlomo Wolbe. And I started to see this quote that I quoted at the beginning of our discussion. And nobody gave the source. So it took me a while to pull out my Ben Sheshet l’aser the book and actually find it there. But yes, that is how he spoke. It was a major theme for him, and it worked in many different directions. Once we were spending a whole, I would say, semester on sin. And he started by saying, does sinning upset you? Does it make you despair? Well, who do you think you were before the sin? Moshe Rabbeinu. So there too, he was using Gadlut, but he was using it. Don’t let it impugn your progress. You had not such a big shot. We all stumble. It was a major poll with him, I believe, this small and largeness.

Adam Mintz [00:25:13]:
Was he someone who was like. Was very humble in his personality?

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:18]:
Absolutely. He was kind of hard of hearing. So he always would go like this to hear you. He’d cup his ears. And he was therefore kind of intimate. But he was very soft spoken.

Adam Mintz [00:25:31]:
Oh, he was. Did you used to go to his house for Shabbos?

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:35]:
No, we would go mostly after Shabbos for the Vadim. They would always be there. There would be a heater and we’ kind of sit around. And he’d be wearing those woolen house shoes that I know Kippy Ben Kiipod wore. They’re plaid, brown plaid. But it was quiet. He could shout. He would shout. When he would say, who do you think you are, Moshe Rabbeinu? At that point, he would shout. But I mean, there was one time he used to tell a story from Reb Yerucham. And Rabbi Yerucham came over to a student and said, have you ever said Shema? And the student says, of course, Rabbi, I say it twice a day. He says, so you mean you accept upon yourself the Ol Malchut Shamayim, the yoke of heaven, twice a day, and you never feel like rebelling? And the student said, of course not, Rebbe. So he said to him, so then you’ve never said Shema in your life. This was the kind of. It was a little bit like the Kotzk Rebbe too. It was sharp. It was sharp, sharp.

Adam Mintz [00:26:39]:
Surprising. What he said surprised you. That’s what the real good musserniks do.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:45]:
Surprised you. Stopped you in your tracks and made you want to think. And so what he ends up by saying is the quotes that I gave you. And yes, he makes a long Talmudic argument about combining Abraham, Moses and the Messiah, that according to the Talmud, they all rode a Hamor (donkey), the same Hamor. A Rashi in last week’s Parasha talked about the Hamor that Moshe rode. And he Says, really, it’s not a Hamor, it’s Homer, it’s material. And what both of them, all three of them were great leaders. And he says what we need to be, each one of us is a great leader. The way he ends is fascinating. Of course he does the perfunctory we’re waiting for the Great One, the Messiah who should come. But he said, says, yet the awe inspiring power of the human being is not reserved for one meaning the Messiah alone. For each and every one of us, let us uncover the treasures of kindness in our hearts, the flame of faith, and marshal our faculties to magnify our deeds, each in his own place and surroundings. For it is upon us to ascribe greatness to the Master of all. He’s quoting the Aleynu (prayer) there. He says, to give greatness to the Creator of the beginning, Greatness of whom he blessed be. He is great even without us, but it is upon us to give our own greatness in service of God. The awe inspiring power of the human being lies in his inner life. Let us reveal its light through our deeds. So now when we say Aleynu le shabayach la’adon hakol, yotzer bereishit, the Gedulah, the greatness that we are ascribing in the words of Shlomo Wolbe is not to God. It is, it’s to ourselves. It’s to celebrate the greatness that God put in us. And it is that, I think that is ultimately the story of the Exodus, which is how to put the greatness back into the hearts of the broken Israelite slaves. And I think that really is the whole story. It’s not so much of all of the signs and wonders and even convincing Pharaoh. It’s taking this downtrodden people and trying to make them believe in their own greatness, right?

Adam Mintz [00:29:31]:
I mean, believe in themselves, believe that they can do it. I mean, Moshe had part of that. That’s why Moshe grew up in the house of Pharaoh, because allowed him to believe in himself, so he could then teach that to the slaves. That’s what the Ibn Ezra says on last week’s Parasha. Okay, Beautiful. This was fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:50]:
I adjure all of you, if you’re interested, look in the Sefaria source sheet and read the whole article of Shlomo Wolbe and introduce yourself to the world of Mussar. But in any case, Shabbat Shalom and let us all never have Kotzer Ruach, shortness of spiritual breath. Let us all strive for the stars. Wishing you all a Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.

Adam Mintz [00:30:19]:
Shabbat shalom. Fantastic.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read a new book of the Torah and are excited to be joined by Ilana Kurshan. Ilana is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She has worked in literary publishing both in New York and in Jerusalem as a translator and foreign rights agent, and as the book’s editor of Lilith Magazine. Kurshan is a graduate of Harvard University, summa cum laude in history of science, Something close to My Heart, and Cambridge University with a master’s in Philosophy and English literature. She teaches and studies Torah in the Jerusalem where she lives with her husband and five children. Welcome, Ilana. It’s an absolute pleasure to start the new year with you as our guest.

Ilana Kurshan [00:02:23]:
Thank you so much. It’s so wonderful to be here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:27]:
So, you know, every time we have a wonderful author like you, I get to read the book and I absolutely enjoyed it. We’re coming back from New Year’s break and I have to say I was in LA reading Fancy Nancy to my granddaughter. She actually, the book that she got for Hanukkah that she loves has to do with a snowman farting. We’re not gonna get into that. But I know about Fancy Nancy, and I know from my older granddaughter about Amalia Badalia. So it was like meeting new/old friends and bringing them to something that Adam and I love passionately, which is Torah. So why don’t you just spend a few minutes talking about your past and history and what brought you to write this, a wonderful book.

Ilana Kurshan [00:03:15]:
Sure. So, first of all, it’s very nice to be starting a new safer as we start the new secular year and that Sefer Shmote and January 1st often overlap. So it’s nice that it’s nice to have that synchrony. And I always think that when we start reading Sefer Shmot, it’s good preparation, like getting us in the mind already starting to think about Pesach as the next major, you know, in a Torah sense of a chag coming up. So. So it’s nice to be nice to have our head in Shmot. So I wrote my book Children of the Book, basically, because. So I’ll tell you, my. My youngest child, who is five, likes to hear the same books again and again. And, you know, he goes through phases with books where there’ll be a set of a few books that he wants to hear over, such that no sooner have we turned the last page than already he’s asking me to start again and read over from the beginning, and then he’ll, you know, have a few books that we read over and over. And at some point, it occurred to me, as I was reading to my kids, the same book, same picture books over and over, it occurred to me that this idea of reading the same five books over and over is a very Jewish way of reading, because as Jews, we read the five books of Moses again and again every year in synchrony. Right. Starting in the fall with Bereshit and then concluding the following fall when we conclude SeferDevarim. And this is just how we read Torah. We read books. We read these same books again and again. And the reason we’re reading them is not because, you know, we want to find out what’s going to happen at the end. Please don’t give us any spoilers. We need to know. Or because we want to have these books to, like, a Goodreads log and say, like, look how many books I read this year. You know, people are always advertising at the end of the year how many books they read. That’s not why we read Torah. It’s also not why, by the way, it’s also not why we read the prayer book. Like we read the Sidur because we’re trying to forge some sort of connection through the text. Right. It’s not about checking the book off a list. And I think the same is true when we read with children or grandchildren. The point is not getting through the book, finding out what happens, saying, done with that one. No, the point is the connection that’s forged with the child. The experience of rereading, of somehow managing to glean new meaning both in the text, but also in your relationship with the child through that experience of rereading. And what I tried to do in my book was really to explore the connections between the experience of reading with children and the five books of the Chumash. So, yeah, one, one quick example. You know, when as a parent, one of the parents of a newborn, one of the first books you read to your child, like soon as you get back from the hospital, Right. What do you get as your baby gift? You get some kind of black and white book that’s a series of black images on a white background. White images on a black background. Because babies can only see two infants. Newborns can only see two colors, right? They can only see black and white. And these are books, like usually they’re board books so the baby can drool all over it. And I remember reading this book to my firstborn and thinking at the time my son was still, you know, he was up at all hours of the day, all hours of the night, and sleeping through the day because babies don’t have their circadian rhythms adjusted yet. And I remember thinking that as I was reading him this book, I was really teaching him how to separate black, how to distinguish black from white so that his world could sharpen into focus, and how to tell day from night so he could sleep more regularly. Darkness from light. Yeah. And it occurred to me that this was also God’s first act in creating the world, was separating light from darkness. And moreover, as I read to him from the words that, you know, there were no words in this book. But as I pointed to the objects in these black on white illustrations, Bottle bath boat. I realized I was essentially summoning the world into being through language for my child, which is really what God did. Baruch shemar vay olam. That’s how God created the world. And that really launched my exploration of all of these parallels between the texts we read with our children and the experience of reading with our children and the books of the Torah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:25]:
Just , Just love it. And I was, you know, thinking about the Haggadah, which is As I said in the intro, the logistwetting book club. And on the one hand, you have to tell your child bayomahu for the purpose at hand, but then it also talks about all the days of your life. And as I was looking at the midrashim, one of them caught my eye. And it says, if you have no one to read it to, you should read it to the Le Briot, the creations. Which almost sounds like the wild things, you know, we are. The idea of reading out loud is. Is the idea of. It’s practical for the moment, but then it transcends the moment and it’s at every age. It’s really quite. And as you say, we read the Torah every week in the synagogue. Reading it out loud. We did a prior episode where we used a scholar to explain all the minutia of Jacob of Yaakov conniving way out of the. To get the birthright, because the audience knew what was going to happen. Like Megilat at Esther. They booed at the right time, they snickered at the right time. We compared it to drama and all of a sudden read it differently. And I think today what we’re going to try to do is read the verses, some verses from the Torah as a children’s story and see also how that affects us. And when I was talking to you by text before, you said, why don’t we talk about the burning bus? So the burning bush is kind of amazing because if you read through it, first of all, one word comes up over and over again. In Exodus 3:1-7, it says, Now Moses was shepherding the flock of Yitro, his father in law, priest of Midian. He led the flock behind. We’ll get to a second what that. What Everett Fox says about that. And then a messenger of God appeared to him, using the Hebrew word that is going to come back over and over again. Vayar malach hashem. And then it says, in a blazing fire, out of a bush, he gazed again using the same word to look. And there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight. Again, the same word, to look. Why doesn’t the bush burn? He asks inquisitively asking a question as our children do. When God saw that he had turned aside to look. So God now notices the reader of the events and is. Is impressed. God called to him out of the bush. Moses, Moses. He answered, here I am. It goes on and continues. And Moses hid his face. He was afraid to look. Things in this story disturbed him. But I would hazard to guess he couldn’t look and he couldn’t look away. And then now God said, I have seen, yes, seen the affliction of my people. So here is the punchline. God says, using it twice. So I think you cannot read this story, and I thank you so much for bringing it to my attention without looking at this idea of the visualization of events and being impressed by what you see. Is that what you had in mind when you. When you said, let’s focus a little bit on this?

Ilana Kurshan [00:10:52]:
Yes, in part. I mean, I think this story is really about stopping to pay attention that you. So often we go through life running from one thing to the next, trying to get things done, be productive, squeeze as much into the day as we can. And the reason that God chooses Moshe based on this story is because Moshe is someone who stops to notice when things are amiss. And this really typifies Moshe. He stops to notice the bush that’s burning but not consumed. What could this be? Asura nav’. Ere. Let me stop and go look and see what’s going on here. Moshe stops. He sees injustice, right? He can’t stand it. When he gets completely riled up. When he sees the Egyptian beating the Hebrew, when he sees one Hebrew beating another. Moshe is a person who notices when things are amiss in the world. And he can’t stand still and ask questions, why is the world like this? Does it have to be this way? Can the world be otherwise? And that is what God is looking for in a. In a messenger, in a redeemer. It’s interesting because I would argue that the rabbis actually remake Avraham in Moshe’s image. Because when they try to figure out why God chooses Abraham, they say, and this is the midrash, Abraham passed a burning building. And he said, why is this building burning? Why isn’t someone paying attention to it? Which is a famous midrash that I think is very much modeled on, you know, we know nothing about Abraham, but let’s take what we know about Moshe and apply that to Abraham. It’s very interesting. But. But yeah, really with Moshe, Moshe is someone who notices. And I think this is something that we really do also when we. When we read, and especially when we read aloud with an auditor, when we read aloud to our children, we pay much closer attention. We’re really. We’re paying attention to our child. We’re paying attention to the text that reading really demands of us. The in art of attention, an ability to really attune our senses to the text. And I think Jews are the best close readers that Midrash. The entire enterprise of Midrash, of commentary on canonical texts, the entire enterprise of midrash is grounded in an art of close reading. What does it mean to notice when something in the text is amiss? Why does it say Achar Hamidbar? Everett Fox picks up on that. It’s unusual. Why that terminology, right? What does it mean to notice the bumps, the inconsistencies, the unusual features of the text and to use those as a starting point for engagement, for dialogue? And that’s what Moshe does, that’s what the rabbis do. And it’s really, I think, what reading does for us. And that reading forces us to slow down, to pay attention. And especially in our rapidly pacing, you know, modern lives, I think there is such a place, you know, we’ve lost, to a large extent, we’ve lost the art of reading as books are meant to be read. Like, I don’t know how many of us has ever sat in an armchair with a pipe, a proverbial pipe, you know, and read for four hours, like by the fireside, the way people used to read Dickens. Like, we don’t read that way anymore in most books. In many books are getting shorter, chapters are getting shorter. People just read differently. We consume texts differently. But if we can reclaim the lost art of deep engagement with text, if we can slow down and stop to notice, I think there are many, many rewards, rewards to be to be gained.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:32]:
He says fairy tales often portray the heroes going deep into a forest and the lake. So when we’re used to Everett Fox saying words sound like this, and it’s supposed to bring up this association here, he actually goes into a fairytail. And you wonder, Adam, I’m wondering what you think in terms of. The story is almost crafted, not only describing something that is based on looking, but making the reader look in terms of, I’m going down the rabbit hole. I have to be attenuated to these changes. It really changes the whole way you read the text when you start reading it through the eyes of a child who asks the question, the annoying question, what’s with that bush? What’s. What’s different? What do you think, Adam? 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. 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.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

Adam Mintz [00:16:27]:
So, Elana, so what you said, obviously, and you said it so beautifully, I would just add one little thing. Why this story, which obviously is, you know, is a major story. This is the story where Moses is chosen by God. Moses, who’s going to be the leader. Maybe in order to have vision, in order to be able to see in the future, you have to be able to look in the present very carefully. Someone who just thinks about the future, we kind of, you know, we consider them a luftwe. Right? We consider them that they’re not grounded enough. We don’t take them seriously. The real leader is the one who can have vision for the future because they understand the present. And maybe that’s what I thought in why the word vayar repeats itself so many times here. I don’t know what you think about that.

Ilana Kurshan [00:17:18]:
I love that idea and I think it very much. It overlaps very nicely with the idea that God’s first command to Moshe is . Moshe has to take off his shoes because he has to feel the earth with his feet. He has to be grounded. He has to be present. He has to be there. In fact, it reminds me there is a beautiful poem by the 19th century poet Jared Manley Hopkins, who was devout Christian. And I’m convinced this poem is based on the burning bush scene, although I’ve never heard anyone say it. But he has a poem. The world is charged with the glory of God, nor can foot feel being shod. I’ve skipped a little bit in the middle. But that is to say, because we have our shoes on, we don’t feel that the whole earth is on fire with God, you know, and it’s really like God wants Moshe to be wholly there and to see that the world is infused with divinity, that the whole world is. The whole world is on fire if you pay attention, right? The whole world is on fire with God’s glory, if you pay attention. But yes, very much. That you have to be rooted in this world. Which also links to the idea that. Why does Moshe even get to the bush? Because one of his sheep wanders off, and Moshe, who very much is doing his job, he’s responsible for the sheep. You know, he follows Miz Midrash. He follows the stray sheep and comes to the burning bush. Because Moshe’s doing his job in this world. It’s not because he has a fantastical vision that he follows or he sees something in the sky. No, he’s doing his job of, you know, following, tending to his sheep, which is his job. You know, he’s very much rooted in this world. And yes, I agree. That equipment to be, you know, to be the shepherd of B’ Nai Yisra’ el Katson Hasher in Lehem Roec. Right. Like, that’s the idea. He’s gonna be the shepherd of the children of Israel, so that they should not be like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. He goes from being a shepherd of sheep to a shepherd of people, which involves, on the one hand, being a person who can go up on Sinai and receive the divine gift of the Torah, but also someone who can listen to the people’s complaints and answer their questions and deal with all their problems. So Moshe really has to have a foot in this world. And also you can.

Adam Mintz [00:19:38]:
If you want to jump a little bit, Ilana, you could say maybe that was Moses’s problem when he came down the mountain holding the tablets and he saw the Jews worshiping the golden calf. Maybe he got a little caught up in the moment and he broke the tablets. Maybe had he had a little bit of a better vision if he’d been able to balance what he saw in the moment. You say being grounded, but he wasn’t grounded. He got afraid. He saw them worshiping an idol. He became afraid, and he broke the tablets. And maybe that, you know, was. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to handle it.

Ilana Kurshan [00:20:15]:
Yeah. You know, I write about the. Of course I write about the Golden Calf episode in my book, and I write about it in terms of. Similar to the terms you’re describing, that I was coming home one day from teaching. I was teaching Torah. It happened to be that parsha of the Golden Calf, Parshat Kitisa. And I came home, and we have a rule in my house, or we did at the time, that kids are not allowed to be on electronic devices when parents aren’t home. And I come in the house, and I find my kids are all huddled around the iPad all watching something on the tablet and I get very, very angry because they violated the rule. And I run over to them and I say, what are you doing? I am going to smash this tablet. And then of course, I realized that I have to contain my rage because I don’t want to be like Moshe. I don’t want to smash the T. And, you know, I need to be more forgiving and patient. So. So, yes, I very, very much identify with that story. And I think for me, the tension between screens and between reading is that reading requires us to pay attention on a whole other level. When we don’t have the images fully formed before us in dynamic shape, shifting color, as one does with a video. Say, you know, you really have to do the imaginative work of conjuring those scenes. And this is especially true when children make the transition from picture books to chapter books. You really have to be able to imagine, you know, what is depicted in words, which is really, I think, the challenge of monotheism, right? Everyone around you worships gods of stone and wood that they can see and touch, right? And feel. But you’re being asked, we as Jews are being asked to worship a God who, you know, as Moshe said, says, who should I say, sends me at the burning bush? He says, in our Parsha. But, but, but God, when the people ask me, you know, like, who, who told you? Who told you he’s going to redeem us? Who, who, who sent you to us? God says, Ehiye asher Ehiyey, in this very scene, I will be what I will be. And Moshe’s like, what? You gotta be kidding me. Like I’m supposed to say, I will be what I will be like, tell me you’re the God of the sky, the God of the, the sun. Tell me you’re a cow like the Egyptians worship. What is this? I will be what I will be. And God caters to Moshe and gives him some signs, you know, put your hands in your breast. But I think that’s really God. God making an allowance for Moshe, recognizing that Moshe’s gonna have to talk to people who are not necessarily going to be able to buy into this idea of this invisible abstract God. Like, like, like the, like the, like the non visual books that we read. If you are with me through that analogy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to say I really got into the role as I was reading your book. And when it said, take off your shoes, I start thinking of, you got to take off your shoes and start reading on the carpet. You know, you got to get comfortable. It’s in your House. You have many scenes reading in bed, when you wake up and when you go to sleep. It just made me think about everything differently. And I want to get back to this. Reading picture book books and reading images. And I remember once I was. Before I went to Columbia as a philosophy student, I said, I’m going to have to read a lot of books. So I took a speed reading class, and I was terrible. And part of the theory behind speed reading is when we start reading, we go from left to right or right to left, depending on the language. But we stop being able to scan the whole page. And children, according to this theory, see a page differently. They can see the whole page visually. And they were trying to get us to change the way reading. As I said, they were unsuccessful. But what was fascinating to me was his ability to see the whole picture in ways that adults can’t. And you have this little part of the book that talks about the Seven Silly Eaters by Marianne Hoberman. And it’s a wonderful story about everybody as a finicky eater, and they all have their own special foods, until one night they put everything together like a chulent, and they wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden they can eat the food together. But what’s missing from this story? Tell us about your Liav, who noticed a cello at the beginning of the story and the end of the story that you totally missed, and what it said about the book that he understood.

Ilana Kurshan [00:24:41]:
Yeah. Yeah, okay, so I’ll say. So I was reading. This is one of my favorite books, and I think it’s one of the best books, one of the best books to read aloud with children. And if you’re not familiar, I really recommend the Seven Silly Eaters. It was also recently translated into Hebrew in rhyme. It’s a book in rhyme. It’s a delightful book. Anyway, silly means picky in the book, I should say. Anyway, so I read this book many, many, many times with my kids. But it was on one of those many, many rereadings that my daughter Liav, who happens to be a violinist, and maybe this had something to do with it, but she said to me, she said, you know, it’s this book about this. This utterly exhausted mother who has to cook different food for each of her seven children and never gets a moment to herself. And my daughter pointed out that when the book begins, on the opening page of the book, the mother, you see her pregnant with her first child. Over the course of the book, she has these seven children. She’s playing the cello and at the end of. And in the middle of the book, the cello. Throughout the entire book, the cello languishes against a wall. And you see it in every picture. But, of course, the mother doesn’t have a free second to play her cello. She’s busy with her children. But then on the last page, once the children. I won’t spoil the book, but come up with a way, an ingenious way to feed themselves. The mother in the last scene is playing the cello again. And I, as the reader of this book, was very focused on the text. I’m also a very textual person. I’m not a visual person. And I was very. You know, I read this book many, many times, never noticed the role of the cello in the book. And my daughter. It was almost like, you know, I just thought of this now. It was almost like she was listening to a sonata. And she said, did you notice, Ima, that the cello is in there in the beginning? And then it comes. You hear the strains of the cello again in the end. And I was just focused on the whole orchestra and, you know, didn’t notice the cello part, you know, but she pointed that out to me, and it really made me realize, first of all, you know, that one can always get new things out of a book with every rereading, apropos of how we began with rereading Torah. But also that very often the book that you as a parent are reading is not the same as the book your child is hearing that you’re focused on on some aspect of the text. And your child may be focused on a completely different aspect of the text. Like. Like, my son, who went through a phase where he was obsessed with trains and, like. And. Or was trains. And then he went through a car phase anyway, he would notice the vehicles in every book we read. And, like, even, like, this random picture of, like, a toy car in the corner of a kid’s bedroom. But that’s all he would focus on. And I’d be reading the story about the boy and his brother fighting, and he’d be like, you know, how come this car. How come the car is upside down? Do you think he threw it? And I’m like, what are you talking about? You know, all that is to say that I think the things that kids notice are often very different from, you know, what we notice. I’ll tell one more story about that. When my son, My oldest son, who is now 14, but when he was, like, I don’t know, 4 years old or 5 years old, I took him for his annual like, checkup at the pediatrician. And they did some kind of developmental checkup with him where they would show him pictures, and he had to tell a story about what was in the picture to make sure he understood. Cause and effect, I think, was the idea. So the doctor showed him a picture of a boy, you know, who. A boy who’s tripped, and he falls on the ground, and his water. His water bottle spills everywhere. And so there’s a puddle of water from his bottle, and there’s a little stone. You’re supposed to say. And I guess what you’re supposed to say is, oh, the boy tripped over the rock, and so his water spilled. You’re supposed to understand the causality. And my son took one look at this picture and said, oh, the boy thought that you’re supposed to hit the rock to make the water come out, but really he was just supposed to talk to it. And the doctor was like, I have never heard that before. You know, And I was like, this is great. My son is paying attention to different things, and he sees the world through the lights of Torahj. How wonderful. So anyway, I think he kind of failed the developmental test test, but he. But he passed with flying colors in my book.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:47]:
So that’s an amazing story. You know, I think you could easily read the book of Genesis all about sibling rivalry. It’s not about the Oedipus complex. It’s always about these two siblings, the firstborn, the second born. And then all of a sudden, you get to Exodus, and in the second part of the story, where Moses, as I said in the intro, said, I can’t talk. I’m thick lips, and so forth and so on, all of a sudden he says, oh, but, you know, I have an older brother. And you think back to the beginning of the story where Miriam is involved, and so much of what your book is having five children, you know, that it’s all about what one says, what one thinks, how they’re all different. And I think even that it made me read the story totally differently when I was looking at it from the. Through the lens of a young child and how, you know, you talk about breaking the tablets, and that’s all the kinds of things that kids do that parents who are dealing with kids do. And here we have this sibling rivalry type of thing where one kid realizes that the older child is giving him some tools that he doesn’t have yet, that they can fill in for each other, that they can get along. It just really what I would. I would love if listeners to this Podcast. And I really think that we should all grab your book and read it. What it does is it opens up a whole new way of reading our texts. Not dumbing them down as a child story, but thinking in terms of number one, how they were written. We always talk about telling the story to your children. I don’t know, I normally think of telling it to a 17 year old, not necessarily, necessarily a 4 year old or a 5 year old, but it talks, it teaches us to look at the stories at a more primal level, at a more visual level. I think it’s such an eye opener, literally, that really enriched my read of just the few verses that I read after I took off my shoes, got on the carpet and started looking at the Torah as a picture book. And the only thing that I’ll finish with is grandparents, because I have a feeling that Adam and I, when we think about some of these books, we’re at the stage in our life reading to our kids. And you have one wonderful part where you have one child who’s very proficient in the English and the other who says, I am slow of speech and slow of tongue in her own words. And you enlist your grandparents who live in the States to read with her remotely. And I think if we have, if I have a New Year’s resolution, it’s to read more to my grandkids. But tell us about the way that reading books really kind of not only helped her master her self courage to read, but also brought in the whole family together and created and sustained and complemented those relationships with grandparents.

Ilana Kurshan [00:31:58]:
Yeah, it really did. And I think it goes back to what you said about Moses and Aaron, that, that, you know, they’re both leaders of the Jewish people, but they have very distinctive roles to play and they really have to carve out their own roles. And you know, in the midrash, the rabbis look back to the burning bush as a place where there was initially some confusion about who was gonna have what role. Was Moshe originally supposed to be the high priest? And what, you know, was it because. Was it a punishment for Moshe that he was reluctant to take on this role, that Aaron took on this role? So this is really the site where that, where that individuation really happened, which is interesting. And I think, yes, for my daughters, the reason one of my daughters started reading with my parents is because I have twins and they both read very proficiently in Hebrew from a young age. But reading in English, which was very important to me for reasons that should be apparent if you’ve been listening until now, reading in English was much harder for one of my twins. And I would read every day with her sister, and she just refused because, you know, she felt too threatened by her sister’s proficiency. And I was lamenting this situation to my mother. This was during the pandemic. And my mother said, well, you know, I’m free now. You know, I’m not going into the office. Why don’t you have her call me every morning and we’ll read together? And that was really, really valuable. And it became a regular thing where I would send everyday photocopy. You know, I would photograph with my phone pictures of the next few pages in whatever book they were reading, send them to my mother so that my mother could follow along as my daughter read to her. And what really also made the difference was that this daughter insisted on reading completely different books from her twin. Like, it’s an age when kids read a lot of long series books. And her sister had a series that she loved reading was the Ivy and Bean series, I remember. And my other daughter was like, I’m not reading any of those books. Those are my sister’s books. I won’t read them. Those are her books. You know, it’s like it was in the same way that they had different friends in school, they also really started to individuate in terms of their reading preferences. And that’s only continued to this day. Like, they read very different kinds of books. They have different tastes. One reads more in Hebrew, one reads more in English. Although, ironically, those have reversed from the way it was when they were, you know, whatever it was, eight years old. You know, there are books that I still read aloud to both of them, of course, but when it comes to the books they choose to read individually, they have very, very different tastes. And I think that was also important, yes, in bringing the family together, but also in terms of enabling them to each discover, you know, who she was as an individual independent of her relationship.

Adam Mintz [00:34:40]:
As grandfathers we appreciate that book. We appreciate that story. Sorry. And we know your parents and we love your parents. So that’s also a nice piece to all of this.

Ilana Kurshan [00:34:53]:
Very nice.

Geoffrey Stern [00:34:53]:
So everybody, there will be a link to Children of the Book by Ilana Kurshan in the show notes. I encourage you all to grab a copy and read it. And as much, I encourage you all to read the Torah differently through the eyes of a child once in a while. And more importantly, to read it to the children in your life, whether they’re your kids, whether they’re your grandkids or just a youngster nearby. There is nothing like reading aloud. So, Ilana, thank you so much for joining us. Shabbat Shalom. And everybody enjoy cracking open this new book of Shemot.

Adam Mintz [00:35:30]:
Fantastic. Thank you, Elana.

Ilana Kurshan [00:35:32]:
Thank you both. Thank you.

Welcome to Madlk. My name is Geoffrey Stern. And at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition, which makes a lot of sense during Hanukkah because we do say, la HADLIK nir shel Hanukkah. 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 celebrate Hanukkah. So take out your harmonica and drink your gin and Tanukah and let’s get disruptive. Join us for Hanukkah, the civil war we forgot, and the shamash we need. Well, Rabbi, happy Hanukkah to you. When this is broadcast, we’ll be right in the midst of hanukkah at candle 3 or 4 or 5. I’m not quite sure.

Adam Mintz [00:01:46]:
Great. This is what a good topic. And I’m looking forward Happy Hanukkah to everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:51]:
So, you know, in Hebrew school, and I would say in our liturgy and in the Talmud and in Jewish tradition, it’s all about a miracle of oil that was supposed to last for one day and lasted for eight. And then it’s also about defeating the Greeks. I’ll never forget I was. When I took my grandkids to Israel for the first time. They went to a Hebrew day school and they saw their first Israeli soldier. They turned to me and they go, who are they fighting? The Greeks. Because we j. That was our first battle with the Greeks. But in any case, if you, you know, you look at the Sidur, it talks about the few against the many. It talks about the weak into the hands of the mighty. It really seems. And we can read different things into it. But on the face of it, it’s a battle against a common enemy, Greece. And when you think of the miracle, it unique. Rabbi I’ve always thought that we Jews don’t really celebrate miracles that much. We don’t have our patriarchs walking on water or turning water into wine or wine into water. There is an anomaly here, and you have to kind of dig pretty far down to find in the Talmud a reference in the Talmud, Shabbat 21b, where it says, okay, so there was this deal about this hidden flask of oil.

Adam Mintz [00:03:24]:
This is the only place in the Talmud that they tell this story.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:27]:
Yep. And again, we have these wonderful, joyous traditions. But at the end of the day, the story of Hanukkah itself is a little bit of an enigma. And what we’re going to do today is to dive down and go behind the Hebrew school facade and try to find out what really was going on there.

Adam Mintz [00:03:50]:
Okay, let’s go.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:52]:
So, you know, the truth is, if you think about Hanukkah and the almost destruction of the temple or the desecration of the temple, you know, it could be very similar to Tisha B’Av and the three weeks where we mourn it. The big difference, of course, is that it wasn’t irreversibly destroyed. But when we talk about the temple being destroyed, we talk about Sinat Chinam, about useless and unjustifiable hate. The truth is that if you look into the sources themselves, you start to see that this was less about an external enemy and more about an internal friction. I will argue even a civil war if you go to Maccabees 1. And of course, we only have the Greek. We don’t even have an early Hebrew. It wasn’t admitted into the canon. But it talks about in those days, went there out of Israel, wicked men who pursued many saying, let us go and make a treaty with the heathen that are around us. For since we departed from then or since we separated from them, we have had much sorrow. So these are people that are saying, you know why the goyim hate us so much? Because we’re different than them. So this plan pleased them. Well, then certain of the people were so forward that they went to the king, the Syrian king, Antiochus, and he gave them license to do after the ordinances of the heathen. This is a little bit of a giveaway that they had to get permission. You really think that this was kind of a treaty where they were saying, we want to be part of the city states, we want to be legit. They built a place of exercise, a gymnasium in Jerusalem. And they followed the customs of the heathen and made themselves uncircumcised. They forsook the holy covenant and joined themselves to the heathen and were sold to do mischief. This is really, if you look at the Maccabees, this is the actual beginning of the story. But you can’t really stop here because if you go on, it says now, when the kingdom was established before Antiochus, he thought to reign over Egypt, that he might have the dominion of two realms. He made war against Ptolemy, King of Egypt. The truth is, Rabbi, I did a little bit of research this year and it turns out that really this was less a story about may, maybe religion and less about culture and more about who rules us. Is it the Ptolemies in Egypt or are we going to make a deal with the Selucid/Syrians, the Hellenists? And before we get deep into that history, I’d like to kind of explore how throughout our history we have taken these two groups, the Hellenists and the Maccabees, and kind of use them to epitomize our own fights and our own kind of culture wars. You know, when going back to that Hebrew school narrative, the authentic Jews were the Maccabees and the Hellenists, as I quoted from the book of Maccabees, they were kind of, whether through surgery or otherwise, trying to take away their Jewishness. They were self hating Jews or that, a prototype of that. But the truth is that as I said a second ago, it really, if you look into, was about who do we go in empire. The fight wasn’t about Greek culture versus Torah. According to modern academics, it was a battle between factions inside of Judea over which foreign empire to align with Syria or Egypt. The question wasn’t should we become Greek? It was should we stay with the Egyptian Ptolemites or switch allegiance to the Syrian Seleucids? As one historian put it, the quarrels were fractional ones. The issue being whether the old and popular government of the Ptolemies should continue or whether the Jews should deliver themselves over to the Syrian kings and Hellenization. And that was something that I hadn’t really ever realized before. But it does kind of sculpt the conversation that we’re going to have today. Because on the one hand it was an internal feud, but on the other hand, it’s not so clear what position each of the sides took.

Adam Mintz [00:08:24]:
Right. That’s the most interesting piece of all. You’re not sure what they argued about and what side each took. So let’s see what we have.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:34]:
So there is one train of thought that there was a group called the Tobiads and they actually, they actually have a castle in Iraq. These were land owning Judeans in Jordan. They were very rich and they had an invested interest in making a treaty and inviting the Seleucids to rule over Palestine, over Judea. It had to do with who to pay taxes to, so forth and so on. But the, the truth is that we are so used to taking the Hellenizers as opposed to the authentic Jews that if you look at today there are people, and I have sources in Sefaria notes who will say, you know who the the Maccabees were, they were the Zionist nationalists and who were the Hellenists? They are the foreign funded human rights NGOs who are taking foreign money, foreign influence and trying to push it upon the authentic Jews in Israel. This is from an article written in the last few years. This fight is going on in the Knesset as we speak. I found an amazing speech made by Louis Brandeis and he made it before the State of Israel was started in 1912. And I think it’s worth quoting at length. He says the Jewish calendar has many sorrowful days. Hanukkah, the feast of the Maccabees, is one of the few joyous red letter days. It celebrates a victory, not a military victory alone, but a victory also of the spirit over things material. Not a victory only over external enemies, the Greeks. So he does understand it wasn’t only against the external enemies, the Greeks, but a victory also over more dangerous internal enemies, the seduces the Tzedukin, a victory of the many over the ease, loving, safety playing privileged powerful few who in their pillancey would have betrayed the best interests of the people. A victory of democracy over aristocracy. So just goes to show that you can switch this dialectic so easily. And he goes on to say for the Zionists the day has special significance. The Maccabees victory proved that the Jews then already an old people, possessed the secret of eternal youth, the ability to rejuvenate itself through the courage, hope, enthusiasm, devotion and self sacrifice of the plain people. In that distant past the plain people achieved a rebirth. They will bring again a Jewish renaissance. So he’s talking to an American audience who is very settled in the golden of Medina. And he is talking about the simple people in Judea fought against those who were satisfied and who had those vested interests. It’s amazing how Brandeis and I’m sure he was aware of the modern take already in his days, is really understanding what’s at stake here. It’s not so much about the Greek, it’s more of an internal conflict. And he poses it as the Maccabees become the democrats. They’re the people fighting for the common man, so to speak. Fascinating, is it not?

Adam Mintz [00:12:00]:
Absolutely fascinating, yes.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:03]:
So other writers compare Judah Maccabee to Herzl. Look, I was going through my library. You can only read so much. This is a book that a member of my congregation who was in his 90s was clearing out his library he gave to me. It’s from the Jewish Publication Society, Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights. And it was written in, I don’t know, like 1925 or 40, before the state. So he writes as follows. And it’s fascinating. Between Herzl and Maccabeus, separated by 21 centuries, there are many similarities, but a few differences outstanding. They are alike in that the one man has no more a statesman when the suffering of the Jews awakened his sympathy, than the other was a soldier when called upon to lead his people in war. So the first thing he says is Judah Maccabee was probably a peasant farmer and Herzl was a journalist. Neither of them were in the state making movement. He says of the differences between them, the most important is that they came from opposing sides in that the Maccabees took up the struggle to save traditional Judaism, while Herzl came from what today corresponds to the Hellenistic party of the earlier times. So this, you know, we have religious Zionists today, and some of them forget that. The reason they have to say religious Zionists is because the original Zionists were not religious. In fact, they were children of the Enlightenment, of the Haskalah. And so it was very easy for this author to say that actually Herzl was a Maccabean type of figure, but he was secular, going against the quote, unquote, traditional Judaism that was saying, we don’t need a state, we’ll wait for God to give us a state.

Adam Mintz [00:13:54]:
Right, okay. That’s fantastic. Really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:13:57]:
So I think that the idea is that each of these thinkers, and there are many more, have painted the Maccabees and the internal struggle as their struggle of the day. A little bit of a question, Rabbi, is why the rabbis buried the story? In other words, all of this conflict, you and I are aware of it. In the yeshiva, our rebbe would tell us about the Hellenists, but basically they buried in our liturgy, in our prayers, under a miracle of a lost barrel of oil or fighting the Greeks. And so maybe it’s because unlike Tisha bav, the temple wasn’t destroyed. Unlike Tisha bav, the rabbis were using Hanukkah to sustain us through the Gola, through the exile and the tough times. A civil war is not something you might teach in Hebrew school. A civil war is not something you celebrate with Sufganiyot. So the rabbis redirected the holyday towards a small jar, divine grace, because civil wars are ugly, factionalism is shameful. And maybe the rabbis believe the Jewish people couldn’t survive if Hanukkah remained a memory of how we tear ourselves apart. It’s kind of like Passover. On Passover, we try to build ourselves up. I think the rabbis kind of understood that Hanukkah we needed. In the darkness of the Gola, in the darkness of winter, we maybe we have enough holidays that talk about how we have this innate ability to tear ourselves apart. But do you think, first of all, that the rabbis did hide this story? And do you agree that maybe some of these are the reasons for why they did?

Adam Mintz [00:15:43]:
I think yes, they did hide the story. I mean, I think that’s always part of the fun, is it’s conjecture. Why exactly did they hide the story? I don’t know the answer. Right. But these are definitely possibilities. It’s fascinating.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:58]:
So I want to end on a high note, and I was doing some research, which I’ll get to in a second. As you know, I love Yahadut Yisraelite Israeli-Judaism, but where I’m going to start is a real machlokos. We started at the beginning. Say, where’s the argument here? And it’s a machlokis between Hillel and Shammai. And we all know that Hillel and Shamai are the poster children of Machlocis Lashem Shamayim. And Hillel says, on the first day, you kindle one light and you grow from there. Mosef Vaholech and Shammai says, you start with eight candles and you end up with one. So one of the commentaries that I said is, why are they arguing about this? Unless Hanukkah fell in disuse, I’m not sure that’s a good argument. We have arguments about how Tefillin are put together so well, why were they discussing it? Weren’t people wearing Tefillin? So I think probably it doesn’t mean anything. There were different traditions. They were trying to codify the law. But I do think that what it shows is that you know, maybe we can take it a little bit metaphorically and say, you know, whether you light the candle from the right or the left, whether you see the glass half full or half empty, because that. That’s absolutely the whole sense of the argument. Shammai would say the pach Shemin, the vial of glass that held the oil was enough. It was full on the eighth day, on the first day. And then it got smaller and smaller and smaller. And Hillel says, no, the miracle got bigger and bigger and bigger. So really it was of a perspective. But whatever you can say is that both of them agreed that you had to have a light. And the key was that it doesn’t get extinguished. But I would say that you can have a healthy arguments and somehow come together. And what happened was I was in Israel and I bought this book, and it is a book for families. It was. It’s full of songs and poems and games that you can play in all of the hagim. And I started to look at Hanukkah and I discovered something pretty amazing. There must be seven stories in it. And the first story that struck my interest is Rotze Lehiot Shamas. I want to be the shamas. Now, the shamas is the candle that we use to light the other candles. Okay, I say, it’s a nice story. We’ll read a little bit about it later. Then I turns the page and lo and behold, the next story is Hasamash, the samas, the candle that we use to light light. And then finally I turn a few page later and it says, hHaNir HaTishi, The Ninth candle. So, Rabbi, there are six stories here, and three of them are about the shamash. And I want to finish with the pedagogic lessons that the early starters of Israel put into the holiday. And what the lesson is that they wanted their children, the future children, to take away with. And so the first story is by Rahel Rosner. And she says as follows. And I have the stories in the safaria notes. So if you want to read them to your kids or just to yourselves, you can go ahead and do it. It says, our counselor, Lily, prepared a party in honor of Hanukkah. She said that the parents would even come to the clubhouse. There would be refreshments, we would play the dreidels. But most important of all, we would put on a play. And for a play, you need costumes. Two weeks before the holiday, Lily assigned us our roles r the first candle. Yona, you’re the second Saglit, third Ophir, fourth Shai, Fifth. Ravital Sixth. At this point I already began to worry that I wouldn’t be in the show at all. There are so many children. There are only eight candles. But suddenly I heard her call my name and say, miri Shamash. I hadn’t thought of that, that there even is a Shamas. And I didn’t want to be the Shamas. And that’s exactly what I told Lily. Lilly said that every part is important, that there are children who don’t participate in Hanukkah events at all. I knew she was right. But it didn’t matter to me that this Shamash is important or that its role is good. I simply didn’t want to be one of the quote unquote helpers, the one whose light is for others and not for me. Certainly, I heard Ravital say, Miri, come, let’s switch places. I couldn’t believe my ears with you. Well, maybe it’s very kind of you, I said, but do you really want to be the Shama? I don’t want you to do me a favor just because your name fits. But Ravital, I like that. Miri is light, right? Right. But Ravital truly wanted to be the Shamash. She was that kind of girl, a serious one. And for her, the role actually made things easier. She knew a beautiful song about all the candles. And in her view, you absolutely had to know that none of the candles can be lit without the Shamash. I, on the other hand, still didn’t want to it. It wasn’t so simple for me. I peaked at Ofa’s script and saw a lovely song in under in honor of the Shamash. What luck. He even did the Hora step to the side that I never managed to do. When I saw Ravital practicing, I began to sway. She was placing the little flame hat on her head and bowing. I breathed in and said, oh, how lovely this part is, this bowing and lighting the other candles. She was helping everyone, dancing as she went, just bowing. I thought between the candles she needed only to bow and during the dance to light them. How I love to dance. I held a little flame over the third candle’s light. It always gives me a special glow. She ends by saying, but Ravi Tal took her special candle and I saw Ophir again holding his. And suddenly I understood she was the one who started the lighting of all the different candles. And I realized I could now say, miri, it was good that you switched places and dance to role. So it’s a story, and we hear this so much about Israeli youth that they are tight. They are. They sometimes lose their own identity and they think about each other. I think Noah was telling us that, about watching his kids become Israelites. And you see this pedagogic story pushing the Shamash as the one that bows to the other supports the others. If it was a singular story, Rabbi, I think we could ignore it. But now let’s read the next story. Shamas by Miri Zelazan. True, I am only a simple candle flickered the light of the Shamas. And yet the light of generations of heroes and of the holy mountain did not come from my flame alone, my friends, the flame that kindled within you the burning strength of generation after generation. Where was your light? Where was the courage of the generations of the fighters through the ages? Was it only in my warm, simple heart that the first spark of light was light lit? Therefore, my friends, remember well, as long as your light shines, it is the simple Shamish’s glow that burns within your hearts. On the window stood there stood a gold minor, Turned the wintry night at hover dark, sending out abundant radiance. Eight lovely candles, proud and bright, their heads burning without fear, stood upright like wicks in a single perfect row, and warming itself itself a little to the side, amid the scent of rising dough, stood one Shamish candle, shining there in silence. The eight candles gazed at it from their lofty seats, and in their eyes sparks of fire and a stirring in their hearts. We are the brilliance of generations. Our light is consecrated. You are but a little strength in service. And who are you? Shamash? Indeed I am only a simple candle flickered the light of the Shamash. And yet the light of the generations heroism and of the holy temple. Did my light alone, my friends, ignite within you the flaming brightness of courage through the ages? Where was your light? Where was the valor of the generations of the fighters of long ago? Was it only in warm and humble heart that the first spark of light was kindled? Therefore, my friends, remember well, as long as your light still shines, it is the simple Shamish’s glow that burns within your hearts. Reminds me a little bit of what Brandeis was saying.

Adam Mintz [00:24:42]:
He was saying it’s just like Brandeis.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:45]:
It’S the common man. But again, I think it’s amazing to me, and I can’t prove it. Statistically it’s only one book and one compendium of stories. But the idea of really taking the whole story and saying it’s about serving each other, it’s about uniting each other. We’ll end with the ninth candle By Chana Nir Allow me a personal confession. I am the ninth candle. Even though I sit off to the side, in the end I am only the Shamash. Yet it is dear to me to be so a follower, a tale for all generations. My work is not easy at all, for as I work, my body is consumed, and by the time I ignite each candle, I am already worn down by half. Yet in my heart there is no bitterness. All my satisfaction is kindling. And when the candles here are burning and every person’s face is glowing, so I look quietly on from the side, and joy stands firm in my heart. For I, the chosen Shamash, am the one who makes every candle burn. And if this calling to me is sweet, for without flower there is no Torah and even the holy of holies cannot be sustained without attendance. Therefore blessed is the one who studies the Chumash, but do not weep for the Shamash. Nice rhyme!

Adam Mintz [00:26:13]:
That’s great.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:14]:
And facing the eight festival lights, remember me, the one who gave with all his heart from his flame and from his strength, and whose words of Torah never ceased. For this is what it means to be a Shamash.

Adam Mintz [00:26:27]:
That is the best one of all.

Geoffrey Stern [00:26:30]:
You know, I think there is a sense it talks about the menorah and the haughtiness of it, of it looking down, of the richness of it. That gets a little bit into the Brandeis again, but also the idea that each one of the eight candles has their own name and they are. Have their own identity, have their own ideology, possibly. And here these three stories, these three poems are celebrating the Shamash who tries to bring them all together, who tries to light them and be. And let them be in their own. Live their own lives, but be together, I think ultimately in a very genuine and a very, very organic way. It’s as though these stories understand that the challenge of Israel, but also the challenge and potential of Hanukkah is to not, I think, whitewash the differences that might be pulling us apart, but just to try to find that common sense of service. And it’s a beautiful story to tell to kids.

Adam Mintz [00:27:37]:
It’s beautiful. And the idea of service and commonality, I mean, those are wonderful lessons of Hanukkah. It’s interesting. Started with the divisions and now we come and end the way they turned it into the unity.

Geoffrey Stern [00:27:50]:
And it almost feels organic. But I mean, the truth is that, oh, my goodness, what’s going on in Israel today is crazy. What’s going on in the world in terms of conflict today? Right.

Adam Mintz [00:28:04]:
So it’s nice to have focus on a holiday of Hanukkah when we could talk about that unity. That’s great. Thank you, Geoffrey. Happy Hanukkah to everybody. These are beautiful stories to study for Hanukkah. Be well, everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:17]:
Feel free to look them up in the Safaria notes. They’re in translated English, but the original Hebrew. For those of you who are Hebrew speakers, enjoy the light. And make sure to keep the light, the candle lit. Because, my gosh, we surely need it. Shabbat Hanukkah Shalom!

What does that mean for the Judaism of tomorrow

Adam Mintz [00:01:38]:
Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. This week we read Parashat Vayeshev. This week on Madlik, we welcome Rabbi Steve Greenberg, founding director of Eshel, to explore whether our tradition is ready not just to make room, but to grow. Well, welcome, Steve. This is an absolute pleasure and I understand that you know Adam from the good old days on Roosevelt Island.

Steve Greenberg [00:02:20]:
Adam used to come to Roosevelt island when I. It was my first pulpit and he used to come and actually provide laning and davening to kind of, you know, actually needed him because he was lonely on Roosevelt island in those years.

Adam Mintz [00:02:35]:
I’d say camaraderie was the best part of it.

Steve Greenberg [00:02:39]:
It’s good to be here with you, Jeffrey and Adam.

Adam Mintz [00:02:42]:
So anyway, I was doing my research and I came across this unbelievable YouTube. It’s a three minute clip of you where you talk about the first time you decided to get the aliyah, maybe even lane, the aliyah from Yom Kippur. And at Mincha, where we read this parsha that deals every sort of sexual, illicit relations in the eyes of the Torah. And you said that your willingness to be vulnerable to the text required the text to be vulnerable to me and everyone like me. The people who decide what this text means have never heard my story and the story of people like me. And if they did, they would no longer be so sure of the meaning of this text. The letters will become faces. So this Yom Kippur, I got the notice from my rabbi that I was lad on Mincha, and he said, I only have the first two aliyot, and the chazan was going to take the third aliyah. And I said to him, the chazan has nothing else to do in Yom Kippur but to take the third aliyah. Well, we have an amazing chazan, and he happens to be gay. And I think that he was following a minhag that you created in this little vignette that you recorded. And I don’t know whether you realize that there are gay people who are taking that aliyah to own it, but also to give a face behind the text. Welcome, Rabbi Steve.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:14]:
Thank you so much, Jeffrey. It’s a beautiful story to hear.

Adam Mintz [00:04:17]:
So tell us your story, Al Rey Alechad, and then we’ll get into some of the verses. And as you said, I’m optimistic.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:24]:
Well, firstly, I just want to say that.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:27]:
That was the very beginning of my struggles. I spent, you know, 15 years going to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services and putting the tallis over my head and weeping when those verses were read. And finally, after, like, I had run out of tears, I decided to.

Steve Greenberg [00:04:50]:
See if I could get the aliyah. And I found that, you know, it was a possible way for me to actually walk directly into the lion’s den, you know, like on Yom Kippur on the day that is a death rehearsal and an opportunity to square yourself in Kolsh, Baruch hu. And it was terrifying. But when the verses began to be read, a calm came over me that was like nothing. I expected that, as you said, I being willing to be vulnerable to the text, my not walking away actually required the text to respond to me and in a way, to acknowledge people like me. And on some level, I recognize God did. It’s just the rabbis, we’re not, like, up to speed yet. And so the question that I had to figure out was, well, I don’t know what these verses mean, but I don’t think anybody else does quite yet either. And so I began to actually focus my attention on learning what might have been the possible readings of that text that could still allow for gay and lesbian people to feel like they belonged in the covenantal community.

Adam Mintz [00:06:04]:
And believe it or not, you know what, the rabbis can change the meaning of a verse 180 degrees. They actually in the midrash say, and he never ceased to be with her after that. So I think it’s true that.

Adam Mintz [00:07:33]:
Once we take a face behind a verse, we could go 180 degrees. It struck me between the eyes.

Steve Greenberg [00:07:40]:
Well, that text is actually really a powerful one. I’m not sure it parallels the story perfectly for a couple of reasons. But what it demonstrates, I think, is that the pathways toward God’s will are not always obvious and sometimes are counterintuitive. And that we actually know from the story of the Mashiach in general who comes through all kinds of fractures in the traditional that are, they remain prohibited. Right. Yet nonetheless, they become a piece of the story. And so part of the tension that I experience in this work is to how do we get communities to commit to a tradition and make room for people who don’t obviously fit? There’s a new movie out that Eshel is behind, which we’re supporting in many places called Holy Closet. And it’s a story of 7, 8, 8 minute vignettes of the life of queer Orthodox Jews. And it’s life cycle moments. It’s dating, it’s marriage, it’s children. And each one of these stories is powerful because they’re not waiting for rabbis to say it’s okay they’re deciding that they are going to retain their faith, they’re going to retain their commitment to halacha, and they’re going to live out a life of love and commitment, even if they don’t have a full answer to these questions and even if the community is only partially willing to engage them. So part of what’s changing is the recognition that the energy, you might say, of Tamar is to imagine that she is called to be part of something. That the pathway is not clean or easy. And that I think is where we are, is that we are refusing. Here’s what we used to do. We used to either be silent, marry against our needs and someone else’s needs, right. Or undermine or live a life of loneliness. Or we left. And now what we’re trying to claim is you can be real about who you are and stay. And that possibility of demanding to be part of the system, even when it’s not clear how that will work out, is a piece of the energy that I think is generating a lot of success both here and in Israel.

Adam Mintz [00:10:18]:
Now, how much, Steve, do you think that that’s a result of the fact that generally communities are more bottom up than top down now means authority within the Jewish community is less important than maybe it was when we were in Rab?

Steve Greenberg [00:10:37]:
Well, I think that’s partially true, although one could claim that it’s always been that way. It’s just that it hasn’t been recognized. Meaning, I think, you know.

Steve Greenberg [00:10:50]:
In other words, the rabbis recognized that they couldn’t either portray God as an imperious dictator, nor they themselves could be one. And why? Because they had to make the Torah livable to the human beings that they loved and cared for, because so did God. And so on some level, I think the insight may be now.

Steve Greenberg [00:11:12]:
I can tell you that I do same-sex commitment ceremonies. They’re not kedushin, but they do celebrate the love of two men or two women. And Orthodox family members and community members are showing up and dancing. And they’re not asking their rabbis, is it okay or not okay. They are simply saying, I love these people and I’m not gonna live in a world where I can’t celebrate the love of people who I care about.

Adam Mintz [00:12:03]:
I mean, I’ll just tell you, in conversion, I find that a lot of that changed over Covid. It’s like you said about rabbis, you know, over Covid, you were allowed to find Google rabbis because you didn’t got a shul anymore. And you know that to me, that changed everything. So all of a sudden, if you wanted to convert and your rabbi said no, it didn’t make any difference because I can Google Mints and I can convert or I can. I can Google green, find someone to, you know, to officiate at my ceremony. So, I mean, it’ll be interesting, you know, over time how much, how we’ll see how much Covid changed all these things.

Steve Greenberg [00:12:40]:
I think you might be right. It’s also just. I think it’s the fact that people want to be personally committed to something rather than controlled by it. And I think that Orthodoxy, we have a tension in Orthodoxy of passion and submission. There is this tension of personal passion and commitment and personal involvement of Kavanaugh vs. Kavua. Right. Of Keva. So I kind of think you’re probably correct that we get requests. I can talk about Escher a little bit, the organization for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, and we have support groups and we have conferences and retreats for queer people, for the families of Orthodox, for Orthodox parents. We have a warm line and we are getting an unbelievable number, you know, this too, Adam, of queer people who want to convert to Orthodox Judaism. So there’s something about Orthodoxy that conveys a kind of mature ability to respond to. To these kinds of challenging questions and nonetheless remain disciplined and knowledgeable and committed. And I think that is an exciting change in kind of the way Orthodoxy was framed even 20 years ago.

Adam Mintz [00:14:07]:
So let me just jump in. I think this a bottom up. You also see in Israel, even within the Orthodox who don’t accept the Rabbanut anymore, who don’t want them to marry them, and they are also coming together in their own services that maybe they end up being common law partners, but they don’t want to use the Rabbanut anymore. That can be a part of it. But I think this, what. What really came across to me, you talk about the kabbalistic mystical tradition where the Messiah comes out of Moab, where he. He lives with his daughters, and it comes from Ruth, the Moabite. But even in the Halacha, without getting into the mystical here, we have a situation in t.

Adam Mintz [00:14:53]:
She on the one hand, is not allowed to marry her brother in law while the brother is alive. And Then you get in Deuteronomy, this law of Yibum, which literally means to build up.

Adam Mintz [00:15:07]:
I think the most obvious question that I would say or I would pose to a gay Orthodox person is, here is a religion that rejects you. Why do you want to still be Orthodox? And what we’re finding is, again, it’s this. This attraction that, no, I belong. You are not going to tell me whether I am a part of my community. It’s my Shabbat, it’s my Pesach, and I want to be a part of it. And I’m going to be as tenacious as a Tamar or Benoit Tzalafkad, or any of those quote, unquote, outsiders. And I think that is very ham. It’s very. From the arm oriented, and I think it’s very powerful. And ultimately, if you were a student of Jewish law, it’s the way many changes happen from the bottom up.

Adam Mintz [00:16:08]:
I just before Steve, you answer, I just want to add one little piece, one question, and that is the bottom up. What about top down? Have you seen any movement from the top from the rabbinic establishment different than it was 20 years ago?

Steve Greenberg [00:16:25]:
Yes, of course, because eventually, you know, rabbis hear stories of people. People come to them, you know, and cry and open up their hearts. And rabbis, hearts break.

Steve Greenberg [00:16:40]:
I said, well, I could tell him what you told me, Yitzchak, Gabe, you will never. You’ll never love. You’ll never dance with someone you’re passionate about. You will never be held by someone when you’re sad or when you’re sick. You will never make love to another human being your entire life because something is terribly wrong with you. He said, oh, my God, I’d never say that. I said, yitzi, you just did. I said. He said, well, what would you say? I said, why not this? You know, Yitzi, I don’t. I mean, you got Gabe, I don’t know why God makes gay people and gives them a nearly impossible life, but here’s what I’m going to tell you to do. You keep 612 mitzvot and you do the best you can. And when you go to Shamayim and on the day you have to account your life in front of the Holy Throne, you will have a damn good argument was merciful, it’ll all be fine. And join my shul. Can you do that? And he said, I could. And then I said something else. I said, I’m going to push you one step further. Could you say to Gabe, Gabe, I’m 40 years older than you. I’ll be in Shemaim before you get there. I want to make you a promise the day that you make that argument in front of the Holy Throne while you kept the mitzvot, but this. You had to choose life instead. You had to choose a life of love and connection. I will be behind you, cheering you on. And he began to cry. My goal is to make rabbis feel that they hold responsibility for the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people who want just a normal life of commitment and love and connection and Shabbos and Yontef and learning. But they don’t want to be alone. And therefore the tradition has to actually find mechanisms by which that can be made possible.

Adam Mintz [00:19:00]:
I mean, I think it’s so strong in our tradition that laws that are not sustainable ultimately go away. I think taking interest Ribbit, where it uses the same sort of emotionally laden language to describe it as disgusting and commerce needed to go on. I think that there are members of the community who might in the morning go to school. This is my grandfather, and go to the office in the afternoon. They had to make a living under every circumstance we get to understand. And this, I think, is the thread that I want to continue on. Not only should they be accepted, but there are situations where people make compromises. People take that zigzag course and don’t go straight where they are truly holier than us, where this is a community that by their very existence and trying to. And staying with Orthodoxy are making so much more of a sacrifice than any one of us. It’s almost like, who are we to judge? And I’m speaking in the. In the. In the. In the presence, in, in from the voice of the institutional, the. The past.

Adam Mintz [00:20:34]:
Identify as LGBTQ. And you have people like Lao Lavie who are saying it makes sense. These are people who are sensitized to suffering. He talks about perfectly suited for communal work because they believe in community. The most people who have gone through an experience of coming out know what it means to really care the attention about the people who are around you. I just love that it’s not a coincidence, it’s not a tick. It’s the actual program. And I do think that what I’m seeing, what you see in Israel, and I’m curious to know your impressions, are there Orthodox families who are. Whose children have. Have come out and maybe through the help of an organization such as yours, or independently are starting to realize how holy their children are and are starting look at those children with awe and say, maybe they’re holier than I am.

Steve Greenberg [00:21:43]:
First Lang. Of course this is happening. And.

Steve Greenberg [00:21:48]:
Part of the difficulty with our work is that we engage with parents who love their kids and want to accept their kids, but it’s not enough. They also want the Orthodoxy they love to not reject their kids as well. And they’re frustrated. It’s not so simple to say love your kids and then go to a shul that rejects them. So they become parents, become real activists, impressing their communities to be really responsive and thoughtful. And that is actually, we see that among the most articulate defenders of queer people are their parents. Right? So that’s one thing that’s happening. The other, I would just say is that, you know, you mentioned that there’s a lot of spiritual life in the queer community. And I think in part it’s because when you don’t fit expectations, you ask yourself a lot of questions about who am I? Where am I? What do I care about? Where do I belong? And I’m looking for a tradition. I’m looking for a way to fit. And then I encounter this tradition that is cacophonous and wild and open and thoughtful and has all kinds of spaces in it for controversy. And I think maybe I can fit there. And it’s really kind of remarkable to me. But it is true that there is a kind of spiritual energy inside the queer community that is really.

Steve Greenberg [00:23:15]:
Has and will in the future enrich the Jewish community and in particular the Orthodox community. A community that says, we have a vision for your life.

Steve Greenberg [00:23:29]:
Even if you’re LGBTQ is a community that is responding to the whole human being. A community that says, we only have a vision for your life if you’re straight is a club. It’s a club for straight folks. And nobody really wants to be in a club for straight folks. They want to be like me. I want to belong to a shul that has old and young and straight and gay and people of different colors and people who speak different languages. I want the human experience to be alive in the religious community. And that is what our organization is doing in many different ways all over across the US and Canada as well. You should know that on March 13, March 13 this year to the 15th, we have our national retreat this year in Baltimore. And it is a wonderful queer gathering of Orthodox, queer Jews and all kinds of people who fit in those categories in various ways. And then the very last day of April and the beginning of May, April 30, I guess, until May 3, is our parent retreat. And it’s also in Baltimore, and it’s an amazing gathering of 150 parents of queer Jews who come together and support each other and make the world, you know, the Jewish world more comfortable for their kids.

Adam Mintz [00:24:48]:
I have a question. You talk about a club versus a shul or, you know, a religion of accepting different kinds of people. And I always understood that a big part of the opposition to accepting queer children or members of the shul is this fear that it won’t be a club anymore. Meaning that they’re so used to it being a club, they’re so used to everything fitting into the box, that the fear that it might not be a box anymore is extremely frightening to the establishment. How do you respond to that?

Steve Greenberg [00:25:28]:
That we all have to become Chabad? And what I mean by that is Chabad. And the Rebbe, I think, envisioned this, though maybe even the rabbi maybe didn’t realize how far it would go. He created the biggest tent for Kadosh Baruch Hu imaginable. My brother, when he met the Chabad rabbi, didn’t keep kosher, didn’t keep Shabbos, nothing. He was respectful. He loved me, but. But they welcomed him in fully, with open arms, without a commitment to every last mitzvah as long as he was willing to engage them on the mitzvot that he found that he connected to through them and with them. And today, my brother’s in a very different place than he was when he met them. An open tent is a tent that says, look, we have these structures, we have these commitments, and we recognize that it’s a moving target. People need to fall in love with the Torah. They need to fall in love with Kadosh Baruch Hu. And that is not immediate. And it’s not about control. It’s about discovery and passion. And so therefore, you have to keep the doors open. And this, on some level, is Avram Avinu and Sara. You know, the Parshios of Bereshit are amazing around this.

Adam Mintz [00:26:47]:
This.

Steve Greenberg [00:26:48]:
Avram and Sara opened their door to total strangers and Sodom is fearful of them. So if you want a shul like Sodom that closes the doors and says, oh, you know, and not poor people and not really, you know, people who are different from us, then, you know, you can exclude the people and make a Mitzvah dome that cuts off the legs of people who are too tall or stretches them too short because they have to look just like you. So. So this notion that our world is made. Look, let me just say another thing. We are all addicted to familiarity. And it’s okay. There’s nothing evil about our love of our small groups. We just gotta be ready when called to. To open the doors. Because that is also what Avram and Sara do. And so we’re both. We’re both an exclusive people. Here’s right, Adam. We are. We have our exclusive commitments. Becoming a Jew is not easy, but we are a people committed to every last human being on the planet as well. And therefore our doors are open.

Adam Mintz [00:27:50]:
You know, there’s a short story by Arthur Miller, and in it he has a line. The Jews have their Jews. And it seems to me that the characteristic. It’s actually about Vichy France. But what it seems to me is that the characteristics of the orthodox, queer gay community is one that wants families, they want community, they want Shabbat, they want and are willing to fight for and make sacrifices for. And in a sense, And I’m not. I’m like a broken record, I keep on pushing you. And I’m saying, I think at this point, what we’re seeing is that the gay community, Orthodox gay community, is inspirational. It is actually potentially leading us in a new direction. But part of it is because it reflects what the Jew has always been, a persecuted minority. A minority that has certain values that we all attest to. And I just, you know, I’m wondering, and I don’t think that you can have an answer to this. I know that right now you do not do an actual kedushin ceremony because you’re working within the parameters that exist at this time. But I think there is such potential here. And it’s not as though our people haven’t gone through an evolution in terms of statuses. And I mean, the whole Kohanim was something that came and went and is gone. It’s just a fascinating moment, I think, in Judaism and also a moment that I think we should be open to any potential triggers and catalysts that help us rejuvenate ourselves and help us move to that next level. And I just think that it’s a wonderful moment. And what I want to do in closing is spend a little bit more time. You described Eshal in terms of the retreat, and I can only imagine how profoundly empowering it must be for parents who can’t talk about their children with the pride that they want in their community back in Brooklyn or Washington Heights or in Muncie. And now can come like mothers, new mothers who can’t describe what it’s like to feed their child in the middle of the night or whatever because they grave another mother who understands what, what the joys are, what the fears are, what the challenges are. What other things besides the Shabbaton do you do? What’s your geographical reach?

Adam Mintz [00:30:25]:
Where is your growth? What projects are you working on? Let’s finish talking about Esso.

Steve Greenberg [00:30:31]:
Well, thank you. So our new strategic plan is very exciting for the next three years. We’re growing our hubs and we’re going to be in different places around the US we’re going to expand that, we’re working in schools and we’re going to grow that. We have a resource library that we’re building so that we will be actually, I think if you are an Orthodox person or committed to tradition and you’re looking for the nexus of these issues, we will be a go to space for finding materials that you might need for educators looking for curricular ideas. Lastly, I would say we are a space where the frameworks for an Orthodoxy that is really open-hearted toward difference is actually moving. So we have the Make Space for Difference project where principals or rabbis or teachers can put up a sign on their doors to demonstrate that they are standing up for the openness to difference, and it includes queer difference. We are developing an allies project because often what happens is Orthodox people who feel like they’re supportive don’t know quite what it requires or could offer to them and what is it that they should do or think that might make this actually happen in their communities. While there are a growing number of communities that are partially welcoming, there are many Orthodox communities where there’s anxiety and fear and even bullying or language that’s really unpleasant, especially now in the political frame that we’re in. And so we’re offering people to gather and figure out, what do you do when a homophobic comment crosses your Shabbos table? And how do you respond to a teacher that has said something in class that’s hurtful, like about gay people, and your child has a gay uncle. So. So how do we help people engage the realities that they’re facing? We have a warm line that is growing every year for people literally all over the world who are encountering these two challenges and trying to put them together and trying to find ways to understand themselves and find a community. If you are a queer person and you finally found someone to love, but you don’t know where to live because you have no idea what synagogue will be there for you, we have interviewed over 300 Orthodox rabbis of congregations, and we can tell you Sunny Epstein is like, is the expert in this, and she can tell you where you can move to, where you can find one or two or maybe even more congregations where you can belong and find a school and maybe a summer camp for your kids. I want to end with one. The real question at the core of this is whether or not the tradition itself can move. So I want to just end with one beautiful midrash that I just love to pieces. When I found it, I was incredibly joyous. Is that there is. The rabbis are studying the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, and the fourth chapter begins in . I saw the oppressed, and there’s no one to help them. And they have no power. And their oppressors have all the power, and there’s no one to comfort them. And. And he raises his hand. A tailor raises his hand. Daniel Chayota. He’s not a rabbi. I know who that verse is talking about. He’s talking about Mamzerim. Mamzerim. Yeah. They’ve done nothing wrong. They’re totally innocent. They are innocent, but their parents screwed and messed up and had sex with someone they shouldn’t have had. And therefore they can’t get this Geoffrey. They can’t marry into the community. They are excluded from love. Love and partnership and community. Right. That’s what they’re excluded from. And he can’t bear it. He says, these are the oppressed who are their oppressors? The Sanhedrin, Hagdolah, the great Sanhedrin, who comes to exclude them from the Torah, from the community with a verse in the Torah, Mamzer loyvo bakala Mamzer can’t marry. And so he basically says he turns his Sanhedrin into oppressors. And since there’s no comforter, he says, he says he puts words in God’s mouth. Then I says, the Lord will comfort them. And then he says, at the end, in the end of days, all the Mamzerim will be pure. And so right now, we maybe not have an easy answer, but no, in the end, it’ll be solved. And if you look at the response, I think following Daniel, you’ll find that Chazal began to make it not so easy to reveal who is a Mamzer and not so permissible to tell anybody who is a mamzer. And ultimately, even if we didn’t get rid of the category, we made the category largely inoperative. Unless you happen to be an Israeli rabbi who’s trying to revive it. My point being is that you have this text here that basically claims that the Torah can be used to oppressive ends if the rabbis are not responsible. And being responsible means that you recognize that a verse that might have had use at one moment is no longer effective to accomplish its good ends and is actually now accomplishing bad ends. And now here’s the point. Why did the rabbis include a tailor in the canon of the rabbinic literature that accuses them of oppression? And the answer is they knew it, and they didn’t want to hide from the fact that it’s possible to read the Torah and wearing all the responsibility that you have and still be an oppressor, because you’re not taking the human story into your heart and into your thoughts and ultimately into your halachic equation. And so, yes, I believe actually the tradition will have room. It already has some, and it will have future more room for LGBTQ folks and others who want to actually be part of this grand imagination of Am Israel.

Adam Mintz [00:36:47]:
Amen. So we will include a link to Eshal, your organization, in the show notes. Anyone who wants to provide support is welcome. And hopefully you’ll be a guest on the podcast again. If there’s ever a parsha you want to talk about or current event, just shoot me a note. We’ll definitely have another Roosevelt Island reunion. Thank you for joining us. Shabbat Shalom Always, Steve.

Adam Mintz [00:37:13]:
Thanks so much.

Steve Greenberg [00:37:14]:
Be well. Pleasure. Everyone wants to be in touch. It’s stevechelonline.org okay, all the best.

Adam Mintz [00:37:21]:
Thanks so much.