Culture Wars

 So Rabbi, welcome back to another exciting week of Madlik Disruptive Torah.

We’re finishing the Book of Numbers this week, are we not?

AM: It’s really exciting.

And I want to say that this combination of these two parishes of Matot and Masse actually is the longest combination of the year.

So we have those people who like to hear Torah reading.

This is a good week to go to shul.

GS: Okay, you heard it, you heard it here first.

So, you know, I think there’s so many different themes about how we put together this show, but one theme that’s starting to come up, and it came up a little bit in the parasha where I said that Elohei HaRuchot, that God being called God of the Spirit or the Wind, only occurs twice in the whole Tanakh.

Tonight, we are dealing with a word that only occurs once in all of Tanakh.

It’s almost as though we are starting to focus on words and words that are pregnant with meaning and impact, but Tarbut especially, that it only occurs once, is just crazy.

AM: I had never realized that.

GS: I saw the word when I was reviewing the parasha, and as usual, I kind of looked it up, and I looked it up in the lexicons and all that, and you’ll see, boom, it only appears here.

Pretty amazing.

AM: That is pretty amazing, yes.

I just want to tell you, there’s a word for that.

The word is a Hapax legomenon.

GS: That sounds Greek to me.

AM: Here you go, hapex legomenon.

There’s actually an entry in Wikipedia, but that means a word that is only found once in the Torah, hapex legomenon.

GS: Okay, we now know that.

So to pick up, it is a long parsha, and I must say, as I was reading through it and trying to figure out what I was going to talk about, and it starts with wars and pillaging and killing and all of that stuff, and I go, my goodness, what am I going to do?

But part of that pillaging was stealing a lot of cattle.

And then in Numbers 32, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the Reubenites and the Gadites come in front of Moses, and it seems they had a lot of those pillaged cows, and they became de facto herders.

And all of a sudden, they say in verse five to Moses, it would be a real favor to us, they continued, if this land were given to your servants as a holding and not to move us across the Jordan.

So you could even argue, I don’t know how strongly, but you could make the argument that this story of Gad and Reuben not wanting to cross over because they were herders, the context had to be established of how they got their herds and so forth and so on.

And the rest is a prequel, so to speak.

But here we have this unbelievably fascinating story where the Jews have left Egypt, they’ve been in the desert for 40 years, they’re at the apex about to cross over the Jordan, and here come these two tribes and say, actually, we would prefer not to cross over the Jordan, we just had a battle, we conquered this land that is great for grazing, would it be okay if we stayed on this side?

And here’s where we get into the dialogue.

In verse 6, Moses replied to the Gadites and the Reubenites, are your brothers to go to war while you stay here?

Why will you turn the mind of the Israelites?

Lama tnu’in et lev bnei Yisrael.

So it’s an argument within an argument.

He’s arguing against what they want to do, and he’s also saying, what are the rest of the Jews gonna say?

You are, in a sense, influencers, and you’re going to influence the Jewish people.

He continues, Why would you turn the minds of the Israelites from crossing into the land that God has given them?

This is what your fathers did.

So now he recounts the whole story of the maraglim, of the scouts who were sent, and brought back a bad report.

And the scouts were influencers, cultural influencers, if you will, if they were anything.

And they influenced a whole generation not wanting to go into the promised land.

They turned the minds of the Israelite, via nu et lev bene Yisrael, from invading the land that God had given them.

Thereupon, and again, this is just Moses putting together this argument, thereupon God was incensed and swore none of the men from 20 years up who came out of Egypt shall see the land that I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob except Caleb and Joshua, and we know all about that.

So he’s really saying you guys are just following in your father’s footsteps.

A whole generation was to die in the desert to bring in a new generation, a new vision, and look where you are.

And in verse 14, he says, And now you, a breed of sinful fellows, have replaced your fathers to add still further to God’s wrath against Israel.

If you turn away from God, who then abandons them once more in the wilderness, you will bring calamity upon all this people.

So what’s fascinating here is, Moses does not even consult with God.

This is a discourse, this is an argument between Moses and these herders.

And you could almost make the case, because the herders come back and they say, we’re happy to fight, we just want to come back.

Clearly, the rabbis were not big fans of them.

They said they were going to settle their herds and then their kids, and they called them out on their priorities there.

But the truth is, they didn’t put up an argument.

This is clearly Moses projecting on to them, whether it was deserved or not.

And what he’s saying is that you are a breed of sinful fellows.

Tarbut, anashim chataim.

Breed of sinful fellows is the translation that I had.

Everett Fox says, a brood, sinning men.

It seems to whether it’s brood or a raav, it comes from the word many.

Tarbut, you can hear the word “Rav”, many in there.

The Ibn Ezra says, the word tarbut is connected to the word ribiti, to be brought up.

AM: It’s interesting, that’s an eichah (Lamentations) word.

It’s all related to Tisha b’Av, that’s an eichah word.

GS: Eichah is so rich, is so rich.

AM: Yeah, fantastic.

GS: And then he (Ibn Ezra)  goes on, it is close in meaning to the word raav, officers, and that comes from Esther.

And then he goes, the meaning of tarbut is grown up in years.

We’re going to kind of try to put all of these things together.

There is a commentary called Chiba Yitairah that says tarbut comes from the word piriah, ribiah, be fruitful and multiply because culture is transmitted from generation to generation.

It seems to me that there is a confluence here of two main concepts.

One is a concept of leadership or continuity, but in any sense, that all impacts upon this sense of influences.

You are kind of regurgitating, transferring thoughts and ideas that have already had purchase and you’re moving them forward, or you’re creating ideas.

He calls Rav Officers.

AM: It is really fascinating how the rabbis and rabbinic traditions are coming at it from all so many different directions.

GS: When we look at it, of course, we see the word tarbut and we say tarbut means culture.

But this gives us a sense…

AM: What’s interesting is that you can explain the word culture here also.

Tarbut ra means that you guys have a bad culture.

We talk that way also.

GS: Absolutely, and I think, though, if you were to do one of these association tests, and I would say culture, your initial knee jerk would be something good.

And I think the starting point here that we’re going to see is the initial reaction to culture seems to have been bad.

And it could go either way.

We both have seen people that come from a bad culture, and people that come from a good culture.

But the knee jerk reaction seems to be, and maybe it’s because of this verse, where the word was first floated, so to speak.

AM: It seems to be bad.

GS: The Ahiba yetira continues.

And he says, there was also a culture of sinful people, because at the beginning of 40 years in the desert, they complained in Tivran, the graves of lust.

And at the end of the water of Strife and the fiery serpents, he’s going through all of what we do in Numbers, all of the various tribulations and sins that they did for all those years.

Israel did not succeed in improving their deeds in the desert.

Therefore, if they continue to leave them in the desert and sealed it for all this people, because only, this commentary says, only when you get into the land does the culture begin.

AM: Fascinating.

I don’t know when the Chibat Yitairah is written.

Note: Chibbah Yeteirah on Torah, Commentary

Author: Yehuda Herzl Henkin

A contemporary commentary on the Torah by Rabbi Yehudah Herzl Henkin.

Composed: Jerusalem  (c.1988  – c.1992 CE)

It sounds almost like a current commentary, a Zionist commentary, that you have to be in the land.

But again, the argument that Moses is making, and this is not Drash, this is in the Pesukim, this is what he’s telling them is, is he’s recounting the scouts.

He could be recounting all of these other things, the Het HaEgel (Golden Calf), the Bitter Waters.

He says, you’re just following in your parents’ footsteps, and you’re going to influence this new generation in the same way that your parents did.

And this he tags with the word tarbut.

AM: That is great.

I mean, that’s nice.

I mean, by the way, you say culture, we do use the idea of it’s a bad culture.

There’s a bad culture here.

That is a phrase we use.

GS: And you just reminded me about how we use culture in a petri dish or in yogurt.

AM: Hey, that’s right.

And that’s funny.

I didn’t think of that.

GS: I hadn’t thought of it till this moment.

But again, there’s this puru urevu (be fruitful and multiply)  aspect of it, this biological aspect of it, this growth, maybe decay, but certainly growth.

It’s a, I think what we might find is that even though it is a very modern term and we have to protect ourselves from projecting backwards, as you said a second ago, there are seeds in it that can easily give birth to a broader, more modern idea of culture.

So I did a search on Sefaria, and I saw wherever it said Tarbut, and I have to say in many cases is Tarbut Ra, we’ll get to those in a second.

But then I pulled off the shelves in my library, a book that one of our listeners, Judy Shapiro, had recommended I get.

It’s a dictionary.

It’s called Ha’Milon HaChadash by Even Shoshan.

And I did a screenshot and put it in into the notes.

So the first thing he says under Tarbut, he says, B’mikra rak b’ketuv t’arbut anashim chate’im.

So the first thing he does is he confirms my suspicion that our verse is the only place in the whole Torah that it occurs.

And then he does, it’s a modern Hebrew dictionary that includes the uses of the word Tarbut in contemporary language going all the way back.

And he says all the things that you would associate with tarbut.

He talks about culture, he talks about enlightenment, in science, in art, in literature.

And he talks how it’s used in modern Hebrew.

He talks about the Misraad haChinuch v’haTarbut.

I don’t think it’s called that anymore, but the Ministry of Education, there was a time where it was called the Ministry of Education and Culture.

That’s so interesting.

Because culture is such a powerful term in our tradition, we’re going to find out.

He talks about…

AM: Now, does Even Shoshan tell us where the word tarbut as culture, where it comes from?

GS: So, you’re reading it as I am.

He seems to be more into, and I haven’t used him a lot before, he seems to be more, a little bit like Jastrow, I guess.

He’s showing all the places that it’s used.

AM: Right, I know that.

So, I just wondered whether in addition, he has, because that would be interesting.

Yeah.

GS: So anyway, he talks about Pu’lo Tarbut Bekerav HaTzava, that in the army, they have cultural lessons.

I’m going to get to that before we finish, because of what happened in Israel this week.

Then he talks about Tarbut HaGuf, health, taking care of one’s body.

I was surprised to learn, because I went to Ahad Ha-Am, when I started thinking about culture and cultural Judaism.

And he was a big supporter of exercise as well.

So there’s Tarbut HaGuf, there’s Tarbut HaLashon, there’s Nimus, … using manners, there’s Derekh Eretz, which we all know, and we’re going to try, unlike him who just mentions it, we’re going to see that the rabbis actually did connect Tarbut culture with what is a much more familiar term, Derekh Eretz.

The coolest thing that he came up with, and when you do a search for Tarbut in, let’s say, Sefaria, you’re going to come up with two main hits.

One we’re going to see is Tarbut Ra, which is a bad culture, and the other is animals that are Bnai Tarbut, aka domesticated animals.

AM: Oh, that’s great, yeah.

GS: The Mishnaiic word for domesticated animals is Bnai Tarbut for an animal.

And it has implications because when you have an ox that gores somebody, you get charged double if you had an inkling that maybe he was a wild ox.

But if you have a domesticated animal, you’re only charged half because you can be forgiven thinking, he’s not an attack dog, he was trained, he’s a good behaving dog.

So this is all in this beautiful rendering of all the ways that it’s used.

But I think it’s a wonderful lesson of how words that we study in a parsha in the Torah have a long life and have meaning up until today, but that there’s a connective tissue between them.

And I just love that.

AM: I love that too.

That is absolutely fantastic.

And, you know, in each one of the, it’s interesting the medieval commentators, you know, they’re, you know, they’re struggling also to try to understand the word.

GS: So there’s one concordance that I always seem to go to.

It’s called Strong’s Concordance.

And he says, Tarbut, offspring or progeny, used contemptuously of base persons.

So he captures a little bit of what I think our starting block is because it only occurs once and because it occurs in our verse as a polemic against these herders who seem not to want to engage in the project.

It starts off with a bias for bad.

And I think that is kind of fascinating because there is a connection up until today about many, I think, I wouldn’t say classical Jews, I would say traditional Jews who when you talk to them about culture, they automatically think alien culture.

They all already think of something, as I said in the introduction, that is contradistinct to Torah.

But of course, we have things that are outside of Torah that can be good and independent.

There is this enigma, I think, here.

And I think if any of us had to picture in our own mind where these culture wars appear, the clearest example is with the Hellenists and with Chanukah.

So, I went to my old buddy, Pene Halacha, and we visited him before when he talks about holidays.

Note:

Peninei Halakhah

Halakhah

Author:Eliezer Melamed

Peninei Halakhah (“Pearls of Jewish Law”) is a contemporary, easily accessible, and thorough presentation of practical halakhah (law), written in modern Hebrew by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, Rosh Yeshiva and rabbi of the community of Har Bracha. Consisting of sixteen volumes and expanding, it includes a range of sources, explanations of the spiritual foundations of laws, differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi practice, and footnotes at the end of every chapter with elaborations and additional sources. The work is popular in Israel, where it is often used as the standard halakhah textbook in religious Zionist schools, and in Jewish communities throughout the world.

Composed: Har Brakha (c.2006 – c.2010 CE)

And he says, after the war against the Greeks ended in a military and political victory, the cultural struggle returned to the fore, Milchemet HaTarbut.

So the name of our podcast is Culture Wars, and certainly from a historical point of view, the way we study Chanukah, it’s about a culture war.

It’s about Hellenism, which had a very strong tradition and made so many contributions to the world, but it was in conflict with Judaism.

I just happened to find this Pene Halacha, he obviously has an issue with Tarbut, because he says something about Matzah that just blew me away.

He’s trying to explain why we eat Matzah at the Seder.

And he says, We can thus understand why the nation of Israel came into being as slaves in Egypt.

All other nations develop naturally from the ground up, from family to clan to tribe to nation.

As they grow, they develop cultures.

They evolve out of the circumstances of their lives, the climate of their territories, their conflicts with their neighbors.

As part of the emergence of their culture, they develop some type of deistic belief.

Since human beings are evolved in their invention, such belief are adulterous.

So he’s clearly not a big fan of culture.

He’s saying that what makes the Jewish people unique is as slaves, and this is fascinating because it almost is one talking about the African Americans in a Black Studies Class, that they were robbed of their culture, that as slaves, they had no culture of their own.

He goes on, in contrast, Israel became a nation as slaves devoid of any culture.

They could not develop their own culture while being enslaved and lacking national self-esteem.

At the same time, Egyptian culture was foreign to them and possibly despised by them, as it was associated with their tormentors.

I mean, really, he’s almost like a student of Black history, you know, and what it means to be a slave and to have to accept the religion of your master.

And so, he says, Israel was thus a tabula rasa, ka’daf halak, free of preconceived notions and perfectly capable of absorbing the true faith.

He makes an argument that not having culture was not a tick, it was part of the program, that what makes the Jewish people, the Israelites, unique is that we were grown in a pitri dish, to use that term again, without any culture.

Note : Ergo Mattzah is flat w/o any culture!

And you can make a case that culture is bad.

It’s kind of fascinating how this tension between Torah and culture plays out in so many writings and thought leaders.

AM: It’s so interesting.

I mean, and it’s true.

I mean, what’s interesting is that it’s true, not only in Judaism, but just generally, you know, culture as opposed to religion, culture as opposed to education, culture as opposed to intellectuals, right?

All of that stuff.

GS: So I think what I want to do is I want to trace a few kind of sources that use culture as the tarbut rah, see how they used, go a little bit into, and then kind of segue into Rabbinic texts that are starting to see in culture something positive and see how that all plays out.

So in Chagigah 15a, Acher, that’s Alisha Ben-Abuyeh, the showcase, the poster child of heresy, he asked Rabbi Meir, his student, another question, again, after he had gone astray.

The word that the Talmud uses about after he had gone astray is sheyatsa le-tarbut-wah, he went to bad culture.

It’s in the source sheet, you can read this story, you can read another story about him, that he says the gates for repentance are open to everybody except me.

But the idea is that tarbut-rah is a very, those are birds of a feather that flock together.

When it says tarbut, it’s going to come with bad culture, bad, he left.

And Rabbi Yoḥanan said in Barakot 7b other aggadic statements in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai: The existence of wayward children in a person’s home is more troublesome than the war of Gog and Magog

So here too, kasheh tarbut ra betoch beito shal adam.

This tarbut ra was a tag.

Tarbut would almost always be associated with the bad.

So where I saw, and I kind of mentioned this in our Milon HaChadash, where tarbut came to be associated with something good, but not only with something good, but the where word started to, I think, resonate with how we use it today was with those animals.

Rabbi Liezas said, when these animals are domesticated, they are not considered for one.

So that’s what I told you before, that if you have a domestic animal and it gores or hurts somebody, you only pay half a fine because you can be excused.

My Golden Retriever was just, who knew he had this in him?

So it says, bizman shahin bnei tarbut enan mu’adin.

Bnei tarbut, to me it’s fascinating that he uses the word bnei, which we normally associate with child or human.

But I think it is not insignificant, the word tarbut using domesticated, because we do use domesticated for someone who gains culture.

We talk about a rogue who gets married and all of a sudden becomes domesticated.

We talk about adventurers who come home to settle and they become domesticated.

There is a thread there already to the way that we use the term.

And I was surprised, none of the rabbinic authorities really went in that direction.

But it’s Mishnaic Hebrew and it clearly, domestication and culture are something that have a connection.

AM: Now, I think that’s interesting, by the way, that it’s in Mishnaic Hebrew and it’s in biblical Hebrew, and it’s not exactly the same meaning, right?

I mean, that’s interesting.

I mean, you wouldn’t necessarily guess that.

You would think that the rabbis would follow a biblical definition, but it’s not absolutely true.

GS: Well, except it was only used once, so it’s hard.

Yeah, okay, that’s correct.

It’s hard, but the domestication is kind of fascinating.

So even in Shir Hashirim Rabba, it talks about a good person having a good child, a bad person having a bad child, and it talks about a good person having a bad child and a bad person having a good child.

So it already is breaking the mold of, it always has to be bad.

But when it says a wicked person begetting, a wicked person has an illusion in the Bible, and an illusion in Proverb, and an illusion in common parlance.

In the Bible, it says, and it quotes our verse, Behold, you have risen instead of your father.

So you guys are just following in your evil parents’ footsteps.

A proverb, [as it is written]: “as the ancient proverb says: From the wicked, wickedness will emerge”

But again, what it’s saying is, it’s in the context of, you can have all these combinations.

You don’t have to necessarily go to a Tarbut Ra.

And so I think where the break happens, and this we saw in Milon Hadash, where he associates the word Tarbut with Derech Eretz.

And there’s a commentary on Pirkei Avot that’s called the Machzor Vitri.

It’s actually a prayer book, but it was written by a student of Rashi.

And in it, he has Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, and he has a commentary.

So on that piece of Pirkei Avot that says in Avot 3.17, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: Where there is no Torah, there is no right conduct; where there is no right conduct, there is no Torah.

In Hebrew, it says, Im ein Torah, im ein Derech Eretz, ve im ein Derech Eretz, ein Torah.

So he associates Derech Eretz with Tarbut.

He says, if there is no Torah, there is no Derech Eretz.

There is no person who is well versed in Derech Eretz and the culture and the custom of everything, unless he learns Torah in the totality of the Torah.

He finds all wise rules and rules everywhere.

And how should he behave?

And if there is no way of the land, if there’s no Derech Eretz, there is no Torah.

If a person does not have culture to comport himself in a fitting way, his Torah will not elevate him at all and it won’t be sustained.

The Torah teaches us culture like the laws of the Tractate of Derech Eretz.

So here you have a commentary who is using the word Derech Eretz as Tarbut.

He is using it in the modern sense.

This is from the 11th century.

So we can safely say by the time we get to the 11th century that people are using Tarbut as we use it today as culture.

There are times, for instance, a father says to his child, Ah, you is preferable for you to sit on the rubbish heaps of a place called Mata Mechasa and do not sit in the palaces of Pompadita.

He’s comparing two yeshivot.

Rashi says in Mata Mechasa, there were Torah scholars prepared to lead and a beautiful cultural disposition, the Tarbut Yafa.

But in Pompadita, they did not have an enlightened culture.

Lo-ha-yu Tarbut Ma’aliyah.

These sources, by the way, did not come out of Sefaria.

They came out of Milon Chadash.

AM: Oh, that’s great.

So you really do see how it started to be used as culture, as Derikh Eretz, and Derikh Eretz is a Mishnaic term.

And so you have these two traditions.

And there is a conflict between them.

There were some that see this tarbut as something that is in conflict with our Torah.

And there are others that see it as something that completes and makes whole Torah as Torah in Derekh Eretz.

Achad Ha-Am was one of the great thinkers who thought that the future of Zionism could not be only political.

It had to also look at the culture.

So what I want to finish with, Rabbi, is that this week in the news cycle, it was very, very busy.

And along with all of our listeners, I pray that there will be peace in the North, and that Iran and Hezbollah will think twice about attacking Israel.

But that was in the last few days.

Earlier in the week, for those who follow Israel News, something amazing happened, more so because it was during the three weeks, and more so because clearly whoever did this was not listening to the Madlik Podcast last week, when we talked about zealots, and we talked about vigilantism and taking the law into your own hands.

What happened was the Israeli military court arrested five or six soldiers on their suspicion, they haven’t been tried yet, that they abused Palestinian prisoners, and they followed the law.

Talking about culture, the Israeli IDF is based on a culture of a high moral standard, and that culture is so baked in, it’s not even they do it because it’s the right thing to do, which is certainly the case, but it’s their culture, it’s their identity.

If you take certain things away from the IDF, it no longer has that identity.

And there are words like purity of arms, tahar haneshech, that are [associated with that identity]. I have nephews who let their gun on the side of a door, and they went to the latrine, and as a result, they docked and couldn’t go home for the weekend, because the tahar haneshech says, you always have to hold that gun, and certainly you have to use it in an appropriate manner.

So all of a sudden, the military court arrested these soldiers, and people who were part of the extremist party, members of Knesset, announced everybody go and protest, and literally these hilltop youths that I was describing last week went down to army bases, and they broke into army bases.

Police did not arrive for hours.

You had during the three weeks, Jew on Jew fighting to get them off of the base, and they were undermining the very core of the culture of the Israeli army, and I would say the culture of the state of Israel.

So you have a culture war going on where there are people who are not only vigilantes, but they also believe that culture smacks of Hellenism, culture smacks of alienism, and all they listen to are the rules of the Torah as they interpret them, and we are watching under our own eyes the culture wars that are described here and that we’ve kind of traced in front of us.

It’s amazing, but it’s also very scary and saddening.

AM: It’s very sad.

I mean, and you’re right, it’s especially a lesson during the three weeks.

So, you know, we finish the Book of Bamidbar this week, and, you know, all of these lessons that we’ve been talking about last week and this week, I mean, you know, we see them kind of, you know, playing out in real life.

We hope that, you know, all the good lessons that we study in Bamidbar will also play themselves out, and we look forward next week to starting the Book of Devarim.

Devarim is a very different kind of book, so get ready, everybody.

Shabbat shalom.

GS: Shabbat shalom.

Let’s all pray for peace, pray for unity, pray for Derek Eretz im Torah.

We’ll see you all next week with a new book of Devarim.