Human-Divine Interactions

0:38 – Geoffrey Stern

Well, welcome, Rabbi Adam, and welcome, Berel Dov Lerner from Israel. I believe that you live on a kibbutz?

1:05 – Berel Dov Lerner

Sheluhot [in Israel’s Beit Shean Valley].

1:06 – Speaker 2

Oh, you live in Sheluhot. Wow, that’s fantastic. You didn’t move from Washington, D.C. To Sheluhot, did you?

1:16 – BDL

Well, I had a few stations in life before I moved to Sheluhot, but I was in a Garin Aliyah kibbutz, as they say, of Bnei Akiva in the old days. If people know Bnei Akiva, it was a religious Zionist youth movement. It used to be very kibbutz-oriented. And way back in the day, this was already more than 40 years ago, we had a group that was all supposed to move to Sheluhot. And I moved there with my wife, Batsheva, and our first child, Tviki, was then only about three months old. And I’ve been there since then. So I mean, in between, I had been in Baltimore in school and I was in Chicago.

2:02 – GS

Yeah, you got a B.A. at John Hopkins, an M.A. In Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. In Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. You also studied at Yeshivat HaKibbutz Hadati, and you currently are an Associate Professor at the Western Galilee College in Akko. It is absolutely great to have you. As you said, we were conversing before we got on, that you just published a book, and you stumbled across Madlik as maybe a platform that could grow the audience and interest in your book, and we are going to do that today.

2:40 – GS

I must say that we at Madlik are always quoting and maybe misquoting texts, maybe they’re biblical texts, maybe they’re rabbinic texts, sometimes they’re contemporary authors, but this is the first time that we actually have the author on the podcast, so I’m a little concerned. I kind of feel like a scene in Annie Hall where somebody quotes Marshall McLuhan, and Woody Allen says, well, I actually have Marshall McLuhan right here. [and you don’t know what you’re talking about – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWUc8BZgWE ] So you are going, and we had a few discussions before the podcast.

3:14 – GS

We might have even different ideas about what you say, but in any case, we are going to learn Torah, and that is the exciting thing about today. As I said, It is the Parshat Ki Tisa, and we’re continuing our study of the Mishkan, the tabernacle, and the different accoutrements and things that were there. Two weeks ago, we did the menorah. Last week, we did the Urim V’tumim. And this week we are going to delve into something made of a completely new material, not used yet in the tabernacle, which was all gold and silver.

3:49 – GS

And in Exodus 30: 18 it says, make a laver, a basin of copper, and a stand of copper for it, for washing, and place it between the tent of meeting and the altar. Put water in it. In Exodus 38: 8 next, week’s parasha, it gives a little bit more flavor. He says now when he’s making it, he said he made the layer of copper and its stand of copper from the mirrors of the woman who performed tasks. בְּמַרְאֹת֙ הַצֹּ֣בְאֹ֔ת Precise meaning of the Hebrew is a little uncertain. And it was, again, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.

4:29 – GS

And there is an amazing, famous Rashi that goes on to the explanation of why the biblical texts says it was made of mirrors, and it says the Israelite women possessed mirrors of copper into which they used to look when they adorned themselves. Even these they did not hesitate to bring as a contribution toward the tabernacle. Rashi could have stopped there. That would have been a wonderful reason to have it. But it continues… Now Moses was about to reject them. In the Hebrew it says, v’hayah mo’as moshe. וְהָיָה מוֹאֵס מֹשֶׁה

5:02 – GS

If you know Yiddish, mo’as is like meese, meeskite. It was disgusting to Moses. And Moses explains, since they were made to pander to their vanity, But the Holy One, blessed be He, said, Accept them, these are dearer to Me than all the other contributions, because through them the women reared those huge hosts in Egypt. For when their husbands were tired through the crushing labor, they used to bring them food and drink and induce them to eat. Then, these women, would take the mirrors, and each gazed at herself in her mirror together with her husband, saying endearingly to him, See, I am handsomer, I’m more beautiful than you.

5:46 – GS

Thus they awakened their husband’s affection. In Hebrew it says, U’mitokh kach me miviot, leba’aleyhen lidey ta’eva,  וּמִתּוֹךְ כָּךְ מְבִיאוֹת לְבַעְלֵיהֶן לִידֵי תַאֲוָה literally lust. And subsequently became the mothers of many children. It goes on and then it gives one more fascinating ramification of this, and it says, and it was for this reason that this labor, this basin, was made of the mirrors, because it served the purpose of promoting peace between man and wife. Vis-a-vis by giving of its waters to be drunk by a woman whose husband had shown himself jealous of her and who nevertheless had associated with another.” So, we will in the future talk about the Sotah and this ritual.

6:34 – GS

If a husband doubts his wife’s fidelity, he makes her drink water that has God’s name erased in it, and it’s out of this lowly copper basin. And the reason this, Rashi, made me think of you, Berel, was because the premise of your book, I would say in very floating terms, is, strange is the way of the Lord. Or I would say, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Or, as your subtitle says, sometimes man works in cross purposes to God. There is this dialectic between how God plans and sometimes how man are the most primary human needs.

7:40 – GS

And there was a part in your book, and I’m going to let you kind of pick up here, where you talk about, throughout your book you have many women heroes, and I would venture to say part of it has to do with women more than any other being perpetuate the species. That’s their job. They are birthers. And as a result, if God has one intention for the world, humans have another, mostly primarily to preserve their species. So why don’t you kind of jump in here and maybe segue a little bit to what you’ve written about in the book about the Vayishretzu, how the women and the children of Israel not only seduce their husbands, but also how the text talks about them, and what that represents in terms of your premise.

8:31 – BDL

Well, first of all, As you mentioned, I may want to explain things a little differently than you have. I think that my general thesis is a bit more radical, that it’s not just that people have different motivations than God does, but I say that these motivations can be completely legitimate for human beings, that you can have a situation in which God is pursuing a plan which is appropriate for God as God, and that people don’t wanna go along with it because they have completely moral, appropriate, correct moral duties that they’re following that don’t exactly match the divine plan.

9:22 – BDL

In any case, what I did with this story of the women. It was in the context of a broader theme. It had to do with what happened in Egypt. What was the nature of the persecution of the Israelites in Egypt? And my claim was that Pharaoh was trying to rob them of their humanity, what philosophers would call their agency, their ability to run their own lives. Largely by controlling their relationship to time. I have a whole long analysis about how you can see that time is disrupted for the Israelites in Egypt.

10:14 – BDL

I argue that there are some things that Pharaoh achieves with his methods. For instance, when Moses first goes to the Israelites and tells them that they’re going to go out of Egypt and go to the land of Canaan. They believe him, but then Pharaoh increases their work and that breaks their spirit. They didn’t believe him anymore. That worked, but Pharaoh really wanted to control the population. And here the problem is, I see the description of the growth of the Israelite population uses words like Vayishretzu, which means something like that they swarmed.

11:00 – BDL

It’s a term that is used in the story of creation to talk about sea animals, the way they sort of just reproduce unthinkingly and just produce swarms of offspring. And it involves the same root, sherets, that is, that does not get, it’s looked at as being very animalistic in the Torah. A sheretz is a super unkosher animal. There’s no chance for a sheretz to be kosher. It’s kind of an icky, very low animal kind of being. And this is used to describe the Israelite reproduction And in addition, I mentioned how when the midwives had to explain to Pharaoh why they did not succeed in killing the Israelite sons, which they had been ordered to do, they say that the Israelite women are hayot, which could be understood as saying they’re animals.

12:19 – BDL

And just the same way that the fish in the sea don’t need midwives to give birth to reproduce, that’s the way these Israelite women are. My argument was that while belief in the redemption required some kind of relationship to time, and so because it’s a hope for the future, so that Pharaoh managed to destroyed to some extent, but as far as reproduction, here it’s presented as a kind of animalistic thing, which is not dependent on a kind of human thinking, planning, motivations, hope for the future, and so there his plans failed to cut back on the Israelite population.

13:16 – AM

Anyway, that’s First of all, Berel, that’s very interesting. As Geoffrey mentioned, we love words. And I want to go back to the word by Vayishretzu, relating to the word sheretz. Because the word shertez is such a famous word, right? The idea of sheretz meaning a disgusting insect. And by Vayishretzu, the Jews populated, which is a totally positive word. How do you explain the use of a word like that in both a negative and a positive connotation?

13:58 – BDL

As I said, I think it’s a matter, in my interpretation, it’s in order to explain how Pharaoh could not get a handle on it. Because he was trying to destroy Israelite humanity. And as I mentioned, that included things like hope for the future, but in as much as reproduction is described in animalistic terms, his attempts to destroy Israelite humanity could not really affect their reproduction.

14:40 – GS

So I want to jump in. I emphasized the Midrashic use of the word moes, that it was disgusting to Moses, that here we were taking these mirrors that were used to create lust as something into the Holy of Holies. And I think that’s what made me connect the dots, so to speak, with what you’re saying. Now, you commented to me in our email correspondence, here the women were disobeying Pharaoh, but they were actually fulfilling God’s wish that the Jewish people survive and create a nation down in Egypt.

15:20 – GS

The only thing that I would say is that in a sense, you know, Moses was taking the holier-than-thou church lady type of approach, that you can’t create anything holy out of something that is unholy. And I think what all of these things have in common—and we’re going to talk about some other women mentioned in your book in a second. Is that the women and humankind in general has a different prerogative than God. And you might share with us what you think those two prerogatives are. My read was the human prerogative, first and foremost, is preservation of the species, And here these women do what it needs to be done, not concerned about how it looks or how thorough.

16:10 – GS

And maybe we’re talking about the patriarchy and God, the guy in charge. You know, after all, in the big picture, God wrote the Bible. The Bible decreed that the Jews were persecuted in Egypt. You could easily throw up your hands and say, this is the way it’s supposed to be. They would not be the first slaves in history to embrace their status as underlings and slaves. But the women had nothing of it. And that’s what attracted it to me in terms of the bigger picture of your book. So let’s talk a little bit about the other women in your book that I believe you also really celebrate, whether it is Eve, who, for the preservation of our species, actually took a bite of the apple, maybe, you could argue.

17:01 – GS

You do mention Rebecca intervened by tricking Jacob. Tamar, the harlot by the wayside, certainly intervened. You know, all of these interventions were looked down upon in the same way as Moses is looking down upon these mirrors. But nonetheless, you do reference the midwives, you talk about Rahab, the prostitute in the wall around Jericho, and of course you get into Ruth and Esther, Esther who lived with the pagan king, and some people argue because of her sin she could never go back to Mordechai.

17:45 – GS

She had to almost sacrifice her purity. Talk to us about all these women. Pick a few, jump in and, you know, am I pushing something into your text, or is there something there there?

17:57 – BDL

I can say something about it. I mean, as for Eve; Chava, I don’t think that I really had a particularly positive take on her deciding to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but I did go into the idea that it led in God’s punishments to a break between human duties and the way God set up the world, that there’s these punishments given that people will have to work hard, men will have to work hard, women will be subservient to their husbands, et cetera. And I see that as an example of, it’s not a commandment, it’s something that people have to struggle against, but it is a truth of human existence, of human history, According to the story, God sort of implanted into the human situation, but it’s the human responsibility, the legitimate human responsibility to fight against it.

19:11 – BDL

Now, as for the other people who you brought up, so Rebecca, I understand as being on the ball as far as how the divine plan is working out, she realized that Jacob was the one who had to continue Abraham’s family. He had to get the blessings and the covenant. And there was clearly a problem with Esau. He had already married a Canaanite woman. He was going in a bad direction. As I see it, a lot of the concern in Genesis is dealing with the threat that this nascent Israelite community will simply disappear and dissimilate into Canaanite society.

20:00 – BDL

She realized that Esau was going that way, so she understands that Jacob should be the proper inheritor, and she moves on it in a very tricky way. And similarly, not necessarily I don’t know, tricky, but you have the stories of, I read the story of Ruth as being one in which really the divine plan itself is forwarded entirely by people showing human kindness. And In general, I think that my idea was that what God wants is to create a worthy world and certainly a part of a worthy world in God’s eyes would be a world in which humans are kind.

21:01 – BDL

So, there’s not really a tension there, but I do a kind of thought experiment. I say, suppose somebody found a Dead Sea scroll they didn’t know about the Book of Ruth, and all it had were the first few verses up to the part where Naomi tells her daughter-in-law that she is too old to have children, and then you have the last verses where the women of the town say that a child is born to Naomi. Any biblical scholar would assume that in the middle of the story, the middle of the story consisted of the usual….  An angel or some kind of prophet came to Naomi and announced to her that she would have a child.

21:46 – BDL

And miraculously, even though she was old, she managed to get pregnant and all this. But none of those standard biblical elements appeared. Instead, it was just Ruth saying, you know what? I’m not going to desert you. I’m going to stay with you. I’m going to take care of you. And Boaz, instead of saying, who are these people, why should I deal with them? Some poor relative shows up from Moab with her Moabite daughter-in-law and I’m going to deal with this instead. He gets on board with the situation, he helps out.

22:25 – BDL

And the result of all that is the continuation of the line which leads to King David and to the Messiah. So there you really have an example, a very hopeful, positive example of how a complete harmony between human interests and divine interests, human duties and divine plans fit together for the biggest goal of God for the Jewish people of reaching the Messiah. As for Esther, I saw her as a kind of a tragic figure. You’re right, she ended up having to marry this drunken Persian emperor.

23:17 – BDL

And I see that story as being a story about the dangers and sacrifices required to live in the diaspora. The Jews need the gentile larger society to love them, but their identity and the rules of the Torah limit their interactions. Jewish women are not available to these Persians. So how much can they be loved? And so this one Jewish woman had to sort of lose her piety in order to show that at least the emperor could get a Jewish woman. A Jewish woman was available to him and she took the brunt of all of the paradoxes and conflicts of life in the diaspora.

24:21 – GS

So what I’m reading, and I love that when you get to Ruth, it’s not trickery as it is with Rebecca, it’s not sinning maybe as it is with Eve, it’s not personal status as it is to Tamar and Rahab. It’s another human emotion, which is human love, maybe romantic love, that saves the day. But in all of these things, my read is what you show is that God works in his or her way, which we can’t really fathom anyway, so it’s silly to talk about it, but man works and mankind and womankind work in our way.

25:05 – GS

Sometimes to achieve the same goal, and sometimes not so much. And for the balance of this conversation, maybe we’re going to focus on situations that you raise where the goal is maybe not quite the same. But before I do, I want to share with you one Chidush (innovation) that I came up with this week in preparing. I always thought about the copper as something that was not a precious like gold and silver, and therefore the copper, because of its pedestrian status, it was in the temple to represent what we’re talking about now, these very human, mundane, maybe sometimes disgusting, mo’as types of characteristics that we have to get there.

25:55 – GS

But when I looked at the story of Eve again, and the punchline there is, yes, she’s now going to have to give birth. Maybe give birth is the punchline, and then give birth in pain. She created procreation. But for man, it says that he will live by the sweat of his brow, labor. And for those of you who know your Bible, bronze and copper, in biblical literature, are two metals that are reflected one against the other. It’s a curse if the sky is bronze, because bronze does not sweat. It’s a curse if the earth is copper, because if the earth sweats at the wrong time, the crops will decompose.

26:40 – GS

The point is that copper sweats, and I just love the idea that this copper laver or bowl that is celebrating humanity and the devious ways that we have to create a future for ourselves is not only semi-precious, but it also sweats. So anyway, I wanted to share that. But let’s get to a case where I think you really portray how man and God can differ, not only in how they achieve their goals, but what their goals are. And you do it in Saul and Amalek, and I could have picked that, but I chose the other example of Abraham arguing with God about Sodom.

27:27 – GS

And I want you to share with us, and if you could, because since the war we’ve been really relating everything that we talk about a little bit to the matzav, the situation in Israel, share with us the thoughts that you had and the example you had when you gave Gilad Shalit in reference to this different goals and motives and maybe a morality of God and Abraham in the story of Sodom.

27:57 – BDL

Okay, so first of all, what did I think was going on with Sodom? Well, we see Abraham is informed by God that God is troubled by what’s happening there, And God seems to be inviting Abraham to give some input into the decision-making process about what to do with Sodom. And I think that the reason why we haven’t talked about the covenant part of the book, while there can be cross purposes, like for instance, in this case, it could be either simple human solidarity that Abraham is saying, hey, a lot of people live in that city and I don’t want to see them get killed, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a human being to say.

28:54 – BDL

Or it could be that he had a feeling of responsibility to his nephew Lot who is in the city and he was really pleading to save it in order to save his nephew Lot. And that’s also a completely legitimate individual concern Well, God is looking at a kind of bigger picture of what to do with this terrible society. God seems to work in history at a large-scale viewpoint. He deals with nations, maybe with cities, and obviously, you know, when God judges a nation, there are actually all kinds of people in the nation.

29:43 – BDL

He seems some of them are good, and a lot of them are bad, whatever, he decides to punish them, but he’s punishing them as a group. So I compared Abraham’s situation to what happened with the family of Gilad Shalit, that the family was insisting that Gilad Shalit, who had been taken hostage before a previous war with Hamas. His family was saying that he should be freed at any price, release all the terrorists, whatever it takes. And I can see how it would be appropriate for a parent to talk this way about their child.

30:31 – BDL

But the prime minister was in a different situation, he has to worry about national security. He has bigger issues to deal with. So he can’t free Gilad Shalit at any price if it’s going to harm a lot of other citizens in the country, because he has his responsibilities as a prime minister. I gave an example, if people remember the show West Wing, There were a few episodes of that in which the president’s daughter had been kidnapped, and the first thing he did was he sort of temporarily resigned because he realized that he would be incapable of being a proper father and being a proper president at the same time in dealing with such a situation.

31:33 – BDL

So the problem is that since God had a covenant with Abraham, God has to take into account Abraham’s interests. Abraham has a stake in the decision-making. Also, I think it’s Rashbam who says, Sodom is a city in Eretz Yisrael, and God had promised Eretz Yisrael to Abraham. So if you’re going to destroy a city, in the land that he’s supposed to be getting. Again, he’s a stakeholder and he has legitimate interests in what happened there. And that’s why God has to have this dialogue with him.

32:13 – BDL

And that’s why Abraham feels completely justified to press his interest in the in the masa u’matan, what’s it called?

32:25 – Multiple Speakers

The back and forth. The communication, the back and forth.

32:28 – BDL

Negotiations and haggling with God. He has a legitimate interest here, and God has to listen to him because he has a covenantal relationship with God, which requires God to take into account what he wants, and just as Abraham has to take into account what God wants.

32:47 – AM

Geoffrey, that’s an interesting explanation. You know, we actually, we could go on for hours having this conversation. And I think we really appreciate that you took the time. Geoffrey, thank you for taking the time to really to lead this discussion and Berel for reaching out to us. The book is fascinating. Your ideas are creative and fascinating. And we hope that you’ll join us again. Geoffrey, this is the kind of conversation we like to have, right? Disruptive Torah.

33:22 – GS

Absolutely. Once I saw the title, I knew that this book and Beell was meant for us, and as I read it, I was convinced even further. There’s so much more that we can discuss in the future. Berel, I hope you will join us to discuss some other aspects of your book. But I love, in summary, how you really explore and showcase how man and God can be different, and that not only by the way we act, but precisely in these situations, we have different morality, we have different objectives, and until we realize that, we don’t see—we can’t we look at our text, and the text not only condones it, it celebrates it.

34:14 – GS

And I think that’s another aspect that you bring to the show, which is that your interpretation of our Torah is one that makes it such a richer tradition, that embraces division, embraces conflict, sometimes the conflicts are resolved, sometimes they are ongoing dialectic. So I hope you’ll come back for another time. Those of our listeners, in the notes that accompany the podcast, there will be links to articles by Berel, and the book is available on Amazon in hardcover, fairly expensive, but a little bit less so in Kindle, and if, for whatever reason, you want to read it and that price is too high for you, just contact us and we’ll make sure that you’re able to read it.

35:10 – GS

Thank you again, Berel.

35:12 – AM

Thank you, Berel. Thank you, Geoffrey. Geoffrey, looking forward to seeing you on Monday (at the Sefaria 10^th Anniversary Gala). Enjoy your weekend in California.

35:20 – GS

Berel, I give you the last word.

35:23 – BDL

Thank you very much. If you could see me, I’m blushing from all your kind words. And have a Shabbat Shalom.

35:32 – GS

Thank you so much, and you can join us any week now that you’re a member of Clubhouse, and we’d love to hear your thoughts. I come to Israel, so does Rabbi Adam, on a regular basis. Maybe we’ll come up and meet you. You sound like you’re our kind of guy.