madlik

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.

Geoffrey Stern [00:01:11]:
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 Vayishlach, and we’re joined by Professor Adam Ferziger. Professor Ferziger argues that Anglo Modern Orthodoxy hasn’t just immigrated to Israel. It has reshaped Israeli Judaism from within. So we’ll ask, how is Modern Orthodoxy influencing Israeli religious life, from education and community to feminism and LGBTQ inclusion? And if the next generation of Israeli leaders is likely to affect a population that is increasingly traditional, shouldn’t we all be paying attention? Adam Ferziger holds the Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar Ilan University. Welcome, Rabbi Adam and Professor Adam. I’m surrounded by Adams today.

Adam Ferziger [00:02:22]:
Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:25]:
It really is exciting to have you. And I must say that the first time I invited you was for Parashat Lech Le’Cha, where we did something on Aliyah. We did it with your cohort at Bar Ilan. Noah Efron. And he actually said, what did American Jewry bring to Israel? He said, environmentalism, and not-for-profits. But you are focused on the religious sphere, and I would love. Adam. Professor Adam, I’ll call you, if you could tell us maybe your personal story, how you arrived to Israel, and maybe the changes that you saw that maybe triggered the writing of this book.

Adam Ferziger [00:03:05]:
Okay, thank you. So my wife, Dr. Naomi Ferziger and I, she wasn’t a doctor yet there either. We arrived in Israel in 1987. We had actually both spent time on gap year programs. I’d been spent two years in a Yeshiva in BMT in Yeshiva Hartzion here, and then went back to college in America. And we were studying, we were living in Jerusalem. And then after two years we moved to Kfar Saba, which is a very Israeli town in the center of the country, adjacent to Ranana. Many people from the United States know Ranana better and.

Adam Ferziger [00:03:41]:
We spent 33 years there. We brought up our children there. I was a communal rabbi for a good number of years. And even after I stopped being a rabbi in a more official capacity, I continued to be involved in Jewish life and religious life there, primarily offering services to non-observant Jews in that area. And in the meantime I developed an academic career and did my PhD. I had the privilege to write my MA with a very well known Jewish historian by the name of Jacob Katz from the Hebrew University through YU, but Katz was my advisor and then I worked with Professor Gershon Bacon at Bar Ilan and I was privileged to eventually become part of the tenured faculty and become a professor. So that’s my very quick professional trajectory. And in terms of what I’m looking at here, it’s a big change when I came to Israel. I’ll give an example from politics, even though my book is really not focused on politics. In 1988 there was an election and there was a party called Meimad, which was supposed to be a moderate, traditionalist, religious oriented party that was running as.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:04]:
An alternative to the more right wing.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:07]:
More settler-oriented, more focused on stringency in their interpretation of Jewish law. Religious Zionist party that had been dominant for many years and had increasingly taken on these positions. And I spoke to lots of people and it seemed clear that Meimad was.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:28]:
going to get like 5, 7, 10 seats and it got none, zero.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:35]:
And I realized after thinking about it.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:37]:
That it wasn’t that everyone was voting.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:40]:
Meimad, but I knew everyone who voted.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:43]:
Meimad because it was such a small little cadre of Anglo immigrants.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:51]:
And for many years I could give many anecdotal examples.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:56]:
The sense was that the Modern Orthodoxy.

Adam Ferziger [00:05:59]:
Or types of perspectives that I’d grown up with in the United States and internalized from different places were really on the periphery, even deviant in a certain way.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:10]:
And we can get into that.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:11]:
And that changed in the 2000s, and.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:14]:
That’S really the starting point.

Adam Ferziger [00:06:16]:
For my book, why did that change? How did that change?

Adam Ferziger [00:06:21]:
And we can talk more about that. So that’s the starting point. Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:25]:
So you saw that little bubble of.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:31]:
Modern Orthodoxy, what you in the book call moderate Orthodoxy, grow from a bubble to something that you argue in your book. And I think for someone like me that reads the paper all the time about those settlers and those hilltop youths and those nationalist Zionists with the focus on nationalism and all that, very encouraging in terms of how deep it is. But I don’t think it’s a story that we all know. I think if you were to ask most Americans what forms of Judaism have the potential and are slowly having impact or failing to make impact, they would talk about Conservative/Masoreti Judaism, they would talk about Reform/Progressive Judaism, maybe even Havurah Judaism. But what your book kind of really highlighted for me, that I hadn’t really realized that for whatever reasons, most of those foreign imports remain foreign imports. And you have a wonderful chapter on comparing Reform and conservative to McDonald’s and Starbucks. But the focus of your book is the radical difference between Modern Orthodoxy as practice in the US and what it encounters encountered, and then what it is slowly gaining traction in Israel. Why don’t you, for our readers, for those of us who are not that I would say, knowledgeable in the nuances of these differences, why don’t you paint a picture? Of haredim we all know they pretty distinctive with their long coats and payes, but why don’t you draw a map a little bit within the Kipa Seruga, the knitted (Kippa) Yarmulke.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:18]:
community and what it is you’re focused on in particular?

Adam Mintz [00:08:22]:
And just what can you say? One thing to add, Adam, and that is why don’t you give us a little background about modern Orthodoxy in America so that people could understand that distinction?

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:32]:
Okay.

Adam Mintz [00:08:33]:
It’s great.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:33]:
Yeah. Sometimes when I get interviewed, they want really short, quick answers. And I’m really happy that you guys are digging in deep. It’s a lot more as a professor, sort of my comfort zone. But you could stop me at any.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:44]:
Point if you feel like I’m, you know, I tell my students the same thing. So that’s, that’s the best way to, to move forward.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:50]:
But I’ll just say, Geoffrey, I did write a book about haredim in America, and actually it has a little bit of a different twist there.

Adam Ferziger [00:08:58]:
It’s called Beyond Sectarianism and won a.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:00]:
National Jewish Book Award. So there’s also work to talk about there.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:04]:
Maybe another time.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:05]:
But just to give a backdrop So I always start with a point, and.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:09]:
I’m starting actually with Adam’s question, because it’s the backdrop is that when Jews.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:14]:
Became integrated more into society, the question was those people who everyone had a.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:19]:
Choice, what do you do? Some people made the choice of becoming acculturated, some people made the choice of becoming, developing new versions.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:28]:
Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionists, all sorts of approaches to how to integrate the new world.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:34]:
In which Jews were becoming or being.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:38]:
welcomed to some degree with their religious values and identity.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:43]:
Zionism is one response to that as well.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:46]:
But there was a group which I.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:48]:
also believe, following my teacher Jacob Katz, I had a choice.

Adam Ferziger [00:09:52]:
And they became known as the Orthodox. The people who continued to see the Jewish law as the basis for their religious values and behaviors, but did not. But okay, that’s the point of departure for the Orthodox. And then the Orthodox split. Those people who you call haredim, who sort of tried to insulate themselves because they saw modernity principally as a threat, as a danger, and only engaged to the degree they needed to financially, politically.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:23]:
or from a survivalist perspectives.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:25]:
And those starting with a bunch of.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:28]:
People, certainly Samson Raphael Hirsch, the rabbi, Frankfurt am Main, was a critical person.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:32]:
In this process who actually said that modernity offers opportunities and actually Judaism can flourish in ways it never could when it was more ghettoized or limited, etc.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:43]:
because of the lack of emancipation, etc..

Adam Ferziger [00:10:46]:
So the modern Orthodoxy that developed in America, which had institutions that grew in.

Adam Ferziger [00:10:53]:
The early 20th century, like yeshiva University, like the Hebrew Day School movement, like the more modern Orthodox types of congregations affiliated.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:01]:
With OU, Young Israel, to a certain.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:03]:
Degree, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:07]:
Of America, were different shades of that idea that we need to live and we can actually, if we do this right, Judaism can flourish. Many of them were also very pro Zionist. Over time they had a titular figure in Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who became the leading rabbinical figure in Yeshua University himself.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:27]:
With a PhD from German University.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:30]:
And.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:32]:
This is the world in which I grew up in.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:35]:
I grew up in a place called Riverdale, New York. I went to a synagogue where the rabbi in the 60s and early 70s was Rabbi Dr. Yitz Greenberg, and went to a school called Ramaz, founded by the Lookstein family.

Adam Ferziger [00:11:49]:
And that world was a world in which we weren’t taught about conflict. We talked about balancing or about navigating and about enjoying and drawing from the benefits of literature, of intellectual pursuits, of academia, of science, etc as part of our broader sort of synthetic Jewish identity. Now I want to be very clear, religious Zionism is a derivative of that as well.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:21]:
Absolutely.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:22]:
The idea of Torah+ the idea of not just Torah is certainly implicit in the idea that Zionism can be integrated with religious commitment.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:34]:
Zionism was founded by people who are.

Adam Ferziger [00:12:36]:
Not oriented towards religion. Its main thinkers in the early period were people who saw Zionism as an alternative to religion. So there’s a synthetic foundation for religious Zionism in Israel, certainly. However, initially there were quite a few people who had some overlays, people related to the religious kibbutz movement, some people who started Bar Ilan University and other areas who actually had a lot more similarities to Modern Orthodox.

Adam Ferziger [00:13:06]:
Actually, over time, particularly after the Six Day

Adam Ferziger [00:13:09]:
War, the strand of religious Zionism that became much more dominant, and it was clearly dominant when I arrived in Israel was that which was affiliated with the Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook camp, known as the Merkaz HaRav group, who were certainly very positive about the State of Israel and about a certain degree of social integration with secular Jews. However, they were much more redemption oriented. They saw the State of Israel as a fulfillment of a messianic dream or as a stage in that messianic process. They saw the Six Day War as a triumph in that magical process, so to speak. And together with that, over time they began to also adopt more stringent approaches to Jewish law and personal practice. And so much so that some people refer to aspects of that camp today as Hardal. Now, Hardal in Hebrew means mustard, but.

Adam Ferziger [00:14:19]:
In the colloquial language, Hardal means.

Adam Ferziger [00:14:24]:
National Haredi. So they’re Zionist, but in terms of their personal practice, they’re more like Haredim, not into movies and books, not into academics very much, except for practical things. Much more oriented towards the secular is what goes to serving in the army, to the function of the state and everything else when it comes to culture and values, stems primarily or from one’s more narrowly religious world. And as I said, when I arrived in Israel, that was on the rise. And the people who were considered the spokespeople, the.

Adam Ferziger [00:15:09]:
representatives in that, in the Parliament, the Israeli Parliament, the people who were the inspirational figures primarily were those related to that camp. And I studied in institutions where I was exposed to those people. And they were wonderful people. And they are wonderful people. And I don’t write for the pejorative, but as a historian, I experienced and then asked the question of something changed. Something changed. I’ll just give you one little anecdote that seems very kind of minor, but it was cute. I remember when my daughter, who’s now 25, was in the Bnai Akiva youth movement, which is the main religious Zionist youth movement. And they had a camp. And it’s funny, actually, coming from America. In America, you go to camp for seven weeks or four weeks. In Israel, you go to camp for a week. That’s the longest amount of time. And they still have visiting day, which took us about four kids to realize. And so by my daughters, I had four boys and two girls. By my daughters, I said, come on, you gotta come. You gotta bring us food, whatever. So we show up in this camp, and by that point, the Hardal approach is clear. So much so that the girls, no matter what they did at home, they could only come to camp wearing skirts.

Adam Ferziger [00:16:23]:
They had to wear skirts the whole time.

Adam Ferziger [00:16:25]:
It was a thing. You had to wear a skirt. So I’m sitting on some mound with my daughter and my wife, and we’re eating some sushi, actually, and I see these girls walking by in jeans, and I say to my daughter, hey, that’s interesting. My wife would say, Adam, you’re not doing research right now. You’re visiting your daughter. But what can I do? I asked her a question, and she said, oh, they’re from the religious kibbutz movement. They have a grandfather clause because in the 1950s, they wore pants that they’re allowed to. But they’re, like, peripheral.

Adam Ferziger [00:17:00]:
They’re not part of the mainstream.

Adam Ferziger [00:17:04]:
And I can keep going. Of course, the focus of my book is on the change, on the fact that today the religious Zionist community is much more diverse. And there are. I want to be clear, the Merkaz HaRav is still the majority. I don’t want to make it sound like there’s been a reversal, but there has been a diversification. The world of religious Zionism is broader, is more assorted, has many more voices, and those voices are legitimate voices that come across in the press, come across in synagogue life, come across in public life, and more and more, these are people who are academically trained rabbis, who are academically trained women who are very, very strong in their religious backgrounds and parochial backgrounds, together with new perspectives, who have authority, who have impact, people who are involved in more critical study, people.

Adam Ferziger [00:18:08]:
Who are very appreciative of the broader Israeli culture that’s developed in many areas that go beyond religion. And these are people who are central voices with institutions that attract thousands of.

Adam Ferziger [00:18:24]:
students year in, year out.

Adam Ferziger [00:18:26]:
And we still haven’t come to the punchline of courses. What happened and how did this develop? Which is my big question. I’m happy to answer it. Do you want to interject in between, or should I just answer the question right away?

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:41]:
What I’d like to interject is, for the most part, I think, really your story is the story of students meaning to say that we have Rav Kook and we have Rav Saloveitchik. Growing up, I was taught that Rav Kook, he was the one who saw a car driving by on Shabbat, and he would say, mazel tov. They must be be going to deliver another Jewish baby into the State of Israel. He was the one who said that our chayalim soldiers and Halutzim, pioneers who don’t keep a single commandment, are the holiest nefashot, the holiest souls. But in a sense, what he was doing was not so much embracing the secular world as he was patronizing it to be very straightforward. They were Klei kodesh. They were holy tools. And I think the way that in (slang) English, we use the word “tools” fits the job. The State of Israel became for then a tool to achieve the messianic and the spiritual goals. And I have to say, if I was stuck in a room and I had to read the writings of Rav Soloveitchik or Rav Kook, I would definitely pick Rav Kook. He’s lyrical, he’s poetic, he’s idealistic. But then there is Rav Soloveitchik. And when he talked about embracing secularism, he meant getting a degree which he had and which he flouted. And his students are really. That you trace in this book, showcase the power of embracing, whether it’s the state, whether it’s science, whether it’s medicine, whether it’s diplomacy, academia, knowledge, and working with that Torah Im Derech. And I think that is the power of this book. And I think for me, as someone who feels maybe that religious Zionism has been a little hijacked and the press focuses on those who are followers of Rav Kook. What your book does is it really highlights this growing, you know, we talk about segments, and you said, rightly, don’t misunderstand me, this is not the largest segment, but I think in terms of growth, it’s one that you have identified and that we should all be focusing on. So now go ahead and tell us why.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:02]:
First of all, Geoffrey, I’m so glad that you said students, because in the end of the day, I am a.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:09]:
Big believer in education. And maybe because I’m a believer in.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:12]:
Education, it made me gravitate towards noticing.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:17]:
Some things that maybe other people hadn’t.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:19]:
Noticed, and I’m very proud of that because I think that is a big.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:23]:
Part of the story.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:25]:
Just to echo what you said and Rav Kook, there’s a great book that Marc Shapiro just put out in English.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:32]:
About Rav Kook that’s worth reading, that that offers a very interesting reading of him.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:37]:
But Rav Kook’s son, Tzvi Yehuda, who was the central figure in post 67.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:45]:
Religious Zionism, took a lot of what.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:48]:
Rav Kook had said that you described and maybe made it a little bit.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:52]:
More parochial in certain ways and a little bit more redemptive in ways that his students ran with it in one way.

Adam Ferziger [00:21:59]:
But I will say that there’s a famous quote that really echoes what you were saying before that’s written. Amos Oz was the late great Israeli.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:08]:
Author in his book Po V’Sham b’Eretz Yisrael, in his.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:11]:
Book where he describes walking around Israel in 1982 and all these different places that he visited. So he has one point where he talks about Rav Kook and he talks about how Rav Kook adopted the framing of what’s called Tinok shenishba (a child who was kidnbapped), that secular Jews should be embraced because even though they do lots of sins, they really are just ignorant. They don’t know what they’re doing, and therefore they’re really good people in their souls. They’re Pintala Yids, and we should give them sort of.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:42]:
Let them get a

Adam Ferziger [00:22:44]:
pass because they’re a Tinok Shenishba, they’re an infant taken captive, which is a Talmudic and Maimonidian formulation.

Adam Ferziger [00:22:53]:
So Amos Oz responds. He says, call me a Rasha, call me a wicked person, call me apikores, call me a heretic, but just don’t.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:06]:
Patronize me and call me a baby.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:08]:
I know exactly what I’m saying, and you may not like it, and I’m willing to debate you, but respect me.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:15]:
For the decisions I made.

Adam Ferziger [00:23:17]:
And interestingly, one of those agents of change that I highlight, the one I call the game changer, Rabbi Dr. Aaron Lichtenstein, in a book that came out in 2016, quotes Amos Oz and he says how much he; Lichtenstein, does not identify with the Tinok Shenishba approach and really understands very well that criticism that Oz had. And he seeks to find an alternative means of communication and of connection to Jews with whom he disagrees. And he says, I’m happy to respectfully disagree with people and then move from there. I don’t have to turn them into.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:01]:
People who I can just sort of dismiss their opinions.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:05]:
Now, what I saw in the book.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:09]:
Or in my research, and that’s where it came, is that.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:15]:
There’s this gap.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:18]:
I identified a group of eight personalities, seven of them direct students of Soloveitchik, but all of them people who were sort of inspired by the integrationist synthetic Torah Umada; Torah and science approach, who made aliyah, who immigrated to Israel between 1965 and 1982.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:43]:
Lichtenstein, who I mentioned already, Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, the son in law of Soloveitchik.

Adam Ferziger [00:24:49]:
And Rabbi Dr. Nahum Ravinovich and Dr. Chaim Bravinder, and Rabbi Dr. Daniel Trapper and Rabanit Hana Henkin and Rabanit Malka Bina, and Rabbi Dr. David Hartman and Rabbi Dr. (Steven) Shlomo Riskin. All people who had begun their careers in North America, in the modern Orthodox world came to Israel. And what was common to all them is besides their backgrounds, in variety of ways they all led institutions for higher learning, higher Torah learning in Israel for men or women, in which Israelis over time began to study. Now, here’s the thing. When they started these institutions, they were really Martians, they were really outsiders. And they were looked at that way by the Merkaz HaRav world, by the mainstream religious Zionist, certainly the Haredim as well. But somehow, slowly but surely, their Israeli students studied with them, heard their approach, their ideas, internalized them. And here’s the key. But they didn’t copy them. And that’s why I call it ISMO Israeli Moderate Orthodoxy and not Israeli Modern Orthodoxy. Because it’s not the same, it’s Israelified, it’s recalibrated. Any good teacher knows that there’s good students take what they learn and then they process it. Any good student does that, that internalization, then processing. But historically, this is what accounts for the delay they arrived, those eight that I mentioned, those pioneers, by 1982, 83. But it took another 15, 20 years until the recalibrated ideas started to really impact Israeli society.

Adam Mintz [00:26:49]:
Why?

Adam Ferziger [00:26:50]:
Because in the meantime, their students themselves became leaders of institutions. Their students themselves became public figures, their students themselves became spokespeople, and they established.

Adam Ferziger [00:27:05]:
Constituencies throughout Israel. And therefore the process has two pieces. The early agents are those American modern Orthodox figures who came here, very, very profound individuals. But the second agents are their Israeli students who do the key process. And that’s exactly, Geoffrey, where pointing to students is so important, because it’s the students and the way they take it.

Adam Ferziger [00:27:33]:
And made it Israeli, made it local, didn’t just make it an imported product. And that was actually the place where I applied the McDonald’s/Starbucks analogy, using some transnational theory, which is really not looking at religion at all, but how do globalized products succeed? And following the work of someone named Mel Van Elten, I understood that the products which tried to be duplicated, like Starbucks in all sorts of countries, didn’t necessarily succeed in places where they had a different coffee taste, but the ones in which they sent people out to check the market and to learn what were the tastes, what were the flavors that they would like, what were the pita.

Adam Ferziger [00:28:23]:
In the Big Mac that had to be part of it, and the hummus and the tahina and integrated the local with the imported and created something sui generous, something new. Those were the products that succeeded in the new place. And that analogy helped me to think about why these, this Israeli moderate orthodoxy, at least in part to account for.

Adam Ferziger [00:28:48]:
Its success in the 21st century.

Adam Mintz [00:28:50]:
Now, I have a question, Adam, obviously this is all amazingly fascinating. I’m interested. You talk about the globe, you wrote about the global product. What about the immigrant experience? Meaning that is that true about all immigrant groups, that they only make an impact in their new place after a generation, you say after 15 years. Is that always true? Or because Jews and the Torah world focus on education, it was more true in the experience of the students. Rabbi Soloveitchik.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:26]:
So, you know, it’s a great question. I wish that I had an absolute answer. I think it depends. I think that there are profound people who arrive. I mean, Rabbi Soloveitchik was an immigrant himself.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:38]:
And after he had done his PhD and after. But he was young and he was.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:42]:
He was him a long time.

Adam Mintz [00:29:44]:
We don’t know anybody, right? We grew up together. We don’t know anybody from the 40s.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:49]:
I mean, look at my friend Seth.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:51]:
Farber’s book about Soloveitchik in Boston.

Adam Ferziger [00:29:53]:
It was complicated and people forget about those things when people reach these heights. And Lichtenstein today is considered, you.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:00]:
know, a very important figure in Israeli.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:02]:
Religious history and, and cultural history. But it was only when he was.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:08]:
Soon before his death, actually, I think it was in 2013, not 2016, when.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:12]:
A book was written in Hebrew by an Israeli author, Rabbi Chaim Sabbato, who’s a very well known author who interviewed Lichtenstein and put Lichtenstein’s ideas into Hebrew and in a language that spoke to Israeli readers, that people other than his direct students and their student students really became exposed. So I would say, Adam, and he.

Adam Mintz [00:30:35]:
Won the Israel Prize, which also made him the Israeli.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:39]:
And you know, and things happen. But I think that immigrants play really interesting roles. I was introduced to a wonderful book.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:48]:
About an Italian immigrant Catholic priest in Philadelphia. I forget the name of the book right now.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:55]:
Who serviced an immigrant Italian Catholic community.

Adam Ferziger [00:30:59]:
In Philadelphia for, like, 50 years.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:02]:
And after he passed away, the congregation found his diaries that were up in the attic of the church, and they gave permission to a professor from Temple.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:13]:
University to review them.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:14]:
He wrote this wonderful book, and he argued the following, which is interesting when.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:19]:
It comes to the subject of immigrant leaders.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:21]:
He said, the assumption is that you.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:24]:
Have an immigrant priest and immigrant rabbi.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:27]:
An immigrant imam, that they are sort of like the hedge against integration, against acculturation. They’re the ones who are always representing the old place. They’re the ones who are always trying to prevent people from becoming acculturated or assimilated with their local place. But it turns out that that’s not necessarily the case. That actually what they are are bridge builders. They are. Are.

Adam Ferziger [00:31:53]:
Cultural agents for facilitating a more stable integration into the new place. It’s very hard to integrate.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:01]:
I’m an immigrant. It’s not easy. Your language.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:07]:
Your accent, your proclivities, the kind of food you like, there are all sorts of things. Even if you find employment and even if you have economic stability and. And having a priest or a rabbi or someone who gives you stability and gives you a sense of continuity and a sense of connection to your roots and not a complete detachment is critical for facilitating that type of integration. So that really opened my eyes. And it’s not just valuable in terms of American society. I think it’s very valuable for some of the figures and how they have functioned in Israel in terms of.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:47]:
The adjustment to society.

Adam Ferziger [00:32:50]:
But what I think is fascinating is how the Israelis then ran with it and often radicalized. And when it comes to feminism, when it comes to attitudes towards academic issues, when it comes to society, culture, all sorts of things, a lot of the students were more radical than the Americans were, but they built upon it. And even among the eight of them, there’s a lot of differences between David Hartman and Aharon Lichtenstein, even though they.

Adam Ferziger [00:33:18]:
Were chavrutoed, even though they were study.

Adam Ferziger [00:33:20]:
Partners in YU when they were younger, et cetera, et cetera. But the milieu that was created is.

Adam Ferziger [00:33:27]:
Something that spectrum that applies to all them.

Geoffrey Stern [00:33:31]:
Thank you. So I want to close. It would be very easy to say, based on this discussion, that Agents of Change, American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism would be a book that would be of interest only or primarily to people that are interested in Israeli Judaism who are interested in the minutia that we’ve discussed today of Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik. But I will argue, as anyone who knows driving a car in Israel today, turning the channels, wanting to hear a song by Arik Einstein, the old songs of the Labour Party will find that, that the population in Israel, and this I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, has even been increased by the war that we’ve gone through in the last two years, is a population that is much more traditional. The songs are much more traditional. Many of them are actually using prayers and piyyutim and poetry that is deep in our religious tradition. And my sense is, and I’d love to know in al regel echad (on one foot), Professor Adam, what you think. But my guess is that if we had to predict where the next leadership, where the next generation of leadership will come from, it is highly likely that he will be wearing a kippa seruga or she will be having a hair scarf on her hair. And therefore it becomes rather important for all of Israel and I would argue for all of world Jewry to watch this nascent movement of moderate Orthodox Jews who are either going to lose out to those who have different interpretations of Judaism or are going to win and introduce a moderate Orthodoxy that will affect every Jew in the state. And I would therefore argue that your book should be of interest to anyone who’s interested in the arc of where Israel is going, whether it’s politics, diplomacy, foreign policy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:35:33]:
The different tribes and the relationship between them. What thinks you?

Adam Ferziger [00:35:38]:
So first of all, I endorse completely what you just said, and I do think that the book is not, not targeted just to specialists and people who.

Adam Ferziger [00:35:48]:
Are interested in the trajectory of orthodoxy. And the last chapter, really, there’s a chapter on Reform Judaism in Israel, but the last chapter, there’s a lot about the role of women. But the last chapter really speaks about two things that.

Adam Ferziger [00:36:04]:
Are very pertinent to your point. One is that actually, I think if I am a historian, but let’s say if we want to predict, I would say that the next leader of Israel might have a kippah shkufa. What’s a kippah shkufa? It’s an invisible kippah. And that’s a term that is often used by young people who come from observant families and grew up wearing a kippah. And they decided even if I do keep Shabbat, I don’t necessarily want to wear a kippah, not because I’m less observant, but because I don’t want to be divisive socially, not because they’re embarrassed, not because anyone’s going to be negative towards them. But I want to feel my camaraderie in that way.

Adam Ferziger [00:36:53]:
Yes. Serving in the army together with people of all types and putting their lives.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:00]:
On the line definitely only strengthen that sense of wanting to emphasize the camaraderie. Having said that, the second point that comes across very clearly in that chapter is a term that I didn’t make up that appears in a book by Shmuel Rosner & Camil Fuchs. But I really liked it. The term is Israeli Judaism, one word, #yahadutyisraelit.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:25]:
And Israeli Judaism is sui generis.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:29]:
It’s new.

Adam Ferziger [00:37:30]:
It’s something that’s a product of 75, 76, of sovereignty. It’s a product of struggling with a tradition that emerged for over 2000 years as a minority in dominant Christian or Muslim environments that now has to reinvent itself in an environment of majority, with all the challenges, moral policy, religious, social involved. But there’s a new product here which is emerging. And these are people that American Jews of all stripes can be in conversation with, can talk to, not always agree. And there’s certainly levels of politics and other areas where this group has different.

Adam Ferziger [00:38:20]:
Maybe priorities or orientations I’m not trying.

Adam Ferziger [00:38:22]:
To whitewash, but they’re people who share a lot. And so much has been written lately about a people divided and about how the gulf, the gap between American Jewry, diaspora Jewry, or world Jewry, and Israeli Jewry is sort of becoming insurmountable. And there are levels at which that exists, but there are also levels that, as you said, Geoffrey, and as Adam, you drew attention to that are not given sufficient currency and attention. And actually, I think that those are areas that maybe reading my book will.

Adam Ferziger [00:39:05]:
Help people to think about them more clearly and maybe something positive will come out of that. I would certainly be very, very happy if that were the case.

Geoffrey Stern [00:39:15]:
Amazing. Well, thank you for joining us and we look forward to continuing the conversation. And to our listeners, the book is worth reading. It really is an eye opener. So thank you, Adam. Thank you, Adam. We’ll see you all next week. Shabbat Shalom.

Adam Mintz [00:39:33]:
Shabbat Shalom.

Adam Ferziger [00:39:34]:
Shabbat Shalom. Lehitraot, Toda Raba.

Geoffrey Stern [00:00:28]:
And imagine that this same Christian not only speaks the language of the Talmud more fluently than most Jews, but also served as an IDF paratrooper officer fighting for Israel while preserving one of the world’s oldest living cultures. This week in Vayetzei, we hit the Torah’s own Rosetta stone. Laban names a stone mount in Aramaic, Jacob names it in Hebrew, and a linguistic border comes into focus. Two peoples, two histories, one shared tongue. Our guest is Shadi Khalloul who lives at the intersection. He’s building schools, training soldiers, defending Israel, and reviving Aramaic, the ancient Internet that once linked Jews, Christians and the entire Near East. 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 Vayetzei. We are joined by Shadi Khalloul, founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic association and the Christian Aramaic Jewish Pre-Education Military Program. He was the first Christian to become a paratrooper officer in 1995 and has dedicated his life to bettering the lives of Israel’s Aramean Christians and preserving the heritage and increasing the recognition of Aramaic culture and language. Due to his efforts, the first public elementary school in Israel to teach Aramaic was established in Gush Halev. Shadi, welcome. Let’s explore the language that still connects us. Shadi, it’s such a pleasure to have you. Hello.

Shadi Khalloul [00:02:23]:
Hello, Geoffrey. How are you?

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:26]:
Fine, thanks. So I am so thrilled. I have, and I’m sure Adam has questions that we’ve been dying to ask somebody who speaks Aramaic for our whole adult lives. But let’s start. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Shadi Khalloul [00:02:43]:
Yes, Geoffrey. So again, Shalom from Israel, Shlomo, as we say in Aramaic, Shloma or Shlomo from the Galilee, Israel. I am living here. I was born here. For generations we have been here, as you mentioned, together with the Jewish people. We are the indigenous people of the region. And I grew up here as a Christian Maronite, which is a Syriac Aramaic community who inhabited this region since time immemorial. And we have been also living here. And thank God we today actually still testify for our heritage, rich heritage, common heritage, together with the Jewish people in this region, which is the Aramaic Hebraic heritage. And as I, as you know and mentioned, I am Israeli citizen, proud citizen of the State of Israel, happily live in Israel, thank God I live in Israel and not in any other Arab dictatorship state around us. And I say that because I appreciate living in Israel for its Jewish democracy that allow other citizens from all backgrounds this equal democratic rights as you all know and enjoy it in Western civilizations and states as well. And so I decided to serve in the IDF as a paratrooper and I become an officer. And I led, not Christians, I led Jews younger than me under my charge, under my responsibility, I took care of them, I gave order to them, and not the opposite only. And this is a testimony of how liberal and free this state is. And I am glad to also testify that I continued and came to USA to actually reach a high education which is trying to build my American dream. And it was in Las Vegas, Nevada that people think it’s only the Sin City, but God exists also there. And in this Sin City actually God revealed for me our Aramaic heritage again. And through the Bible, the Holy Bible, he actually revealed. This revelation gave me the understanding that my role is not building American dream, but Aramaic dream. So I returned back to the Holy Land, Israel to build this Aramaic vision and to help my country Israel through this vision to build Christian-Jewish relations. So I am very now working on building this relations through our Israeli Christian Aramaic NGO that I founded this NGO through returning, by returning from USA and until now from 2007 then 2025, we achieved so many things that you mentioned part of them. One of them is permit for teaching Aramaic heritage and language in our elementary school which was not allowed under Arab Islamic curriculum. Second, I achieved the recognition of the State of Israel of our Aramaic national identity, which is the only state in the Middle East that recognize us while Arab states still reject and deny our Aramaic identity. And they try to force Arabization and Islamization. This is the real colonization that it is called colonization and not the opposite. And so Israel is the only place to recognize us while others try to colonize us through Arabization and Islamization. And third, I am, I established a school, as you call it, for Christian Jewish leadership through a program of seven month program where both youth from both sides, half, half, about 60 people live together, study together, learn together, deepen their studies about their own culture, their own identity and about other side. And by this we send them both to serve the country and defend the country together. At the end, that’s how we build positive leadership and coexistence based on loyalty to the state that allow them both to thrive and prosper in this region. So I am happy to be part of all this and speak with you about it and the obstacles we face and the vision that we are still trying to achieve, which is to continue our work for best of Israel and our Christian and Jewish relations and our Christian existence and resilience in this region as well.

Geoffrey Stern [00:08:03]:
Wow.

Shadi Khalloul [00:08:03]:
The next step is building a town, Aramaic town and Aramaic school in Haifa. And in other part, Aramaic town with a Maronite can revive their identity, their language, their existence will be strengthened and be a peace builders and bridge for peace in this region and example for how peace can exist in this region. Maybe Arabs can follow and copy this model.

Adam Mintz [00:08:33]:
Amazing. Now let me. First of all, what you’re saying is amazing and we wish you well and we can’t wait to follow you. But we want to focus today on the Aramaic for a minute. Can we come back for a minute? Does your community, does your family, do they speak Aramaic to one another? When you go to school, when you go to the store, do you speak Aramaic to one another?

Shadi Khalloul [00:09:01]:
Okay, so the Aramaic people has Aramaic language and it’s called Aramaeans. And those Aramains are. They have different churches. One of the churches is the Syriac Orthodox Church, which is still speak Aramaic. They go to school, they speak Aramaic with each other. They have a language that still preserving it, speaking Aramaic in daily life. When a born, a newborn, you know, is born, he. His mom sing for him in Aramaic, speak with him in Aramaic. When they go to a shop, they speak in Aramaic. When they go to school, they speak in Aramaic. Now the Syriac Maronite community, they pray in Aramaic. And the last people who pray, who spoke Aramaic were in. Were tested. How you call it, where they. They. They stopped speaking it in 1925 in Shari, the region which is Mount Lebanon. And since then they preserve the language as a holy language, same or similar to Jews in Diaspora, where the Jews kept preserving Hebrew language as a prayer language, as a sacred language, while speaking English or French or German or. Or other foreign languages, local languages, wherever they exist, but preserving the prayer language as Hebrew. That’s the case for Maronites. So as our community, as a Maronite community, we pray in Aramaic. We now try to revive it as a spoken language here in Israel. And other Syriac Orthodox, our brothers in the Syriac Orthodox Church, which are our own people as well, because we are Syriac Maronites, they are Syriac Orthodox, we all Aramaeans, they still speak it in daily life. And when I go to conferences to Europe, for example, to the diaspora of Aramaic diaspora that was ethnic claims in the Middle east, in Syria and Lebanon, during history time and less it’s 100 years I speak with them in Aramaic, for example.

Geoffrey Stern [00:11:24]:
So it’s fascinating. There are so many parallels between our peoples, but in a sense you’re doing what (Eliezer) Ben Yehuda did a hundred or so years ago when he tried to take this lashon hakodesh that was used only in the prayers the Hebrew and create a modern language. He had to just to invent a word for electricity, chashmal. And you’re fortunate that there are some communities that actually still speak it and don’t only pray in it, but you are literally reviving the Aramaic language as a spoken language. And that’s amazing. The other thing that’s amazing is I never knew my Hebrew name is Shlomo. And now in Aramaic that means hello, I love that. So I. I don’t want us to believe or our listeners to think that the relationships between our two people has always been so smooth and la dee da. There has been some tensions. We’re going to go to the Torah now and we’re going to about this Rosetta Stone moment where it was actually a peace agreement between two parties that had some friction. But why don’t you tell our listeners about your town? Because it would be easy for you to say you love being an Israeli and you want to be part of the society if your town during the 48 war was untouched. But in my research that’s not the case. You suffered at the war of independence and therefore even more inspirational in the sense of what you’re doing today. Tell us about your your town and your people and where you are now.

Shadi Khalloul [00:13:03]:
Yes, my original town was called Kfar Baram and this was the only Maronite, Aramaic Syriac town in Upper Galilee close to the Lebanese border or Israeli Lebanese border. This town ended up in the British mandate and it was under French mandate. And in 1924, 25 a new compulier committee moved the borders north and we ended up under British. And during the war of independence we were caught between the clashes of Arab armies that invaded Israel, invaded the land of Israel trying to wipe out the Jewish communities. And the Jews defended themselves and they clashed with them. And the Jewish army actually won that war. And in this clash between the two forces, we were caught in this clash and we were asked to leave the town for two weeks, sorry time. And this two weeks time ended up to be actually until now, 77 almost years. With promises from all government officials, from prime ministers, from Supreme Court, from everyone. You want that we will fix this problem once the situation, the security issues in the border with Lebanon and then between this Arab Israeli conflict will end. This will also end. I urge, like my forefather urged the country. We have nothing to do with this conflict. We are not part of this conflict. We are not the Palestinians, we are not Arabs. We are rather being Maronite Aramaic people. Aramaic people that share with the Jews common heritage, that share with the Jews same history, same enemies that want to annihilate us in this region. They in the letter they said, please treat us as a Jew speaking Arabic. We are. Because we are not enemies, we are Aramains. And based on that, we are still working to fix this issue in a positive way. Because my forefathers write this clearly who they are in 1949 to Ben Gurion. So I cannot now, because of what happened now try to ignore my forefathers and be siding with someone who is trying to annihilate us for centuries in this region since the Arab Islamic colonization of our lands. I know the truth. The truth will set us free. And however and how much it will take, we will keep working in the same direction and the same vision for building peace between us and the Jews as a model, as a bridge for others to follow and pass on it toward a really true peace in this region. For between the indigenous people of the Jewish and Christians of this region and other nations that today become Muslims. And they need to be taught how we can build peace. And this will be the example for them to teach them how peace can be built between us first. And they can copy it if they want. And if they don’t want, they’re to blame and not us. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

Adam Mintz [00:16:43]:
So just to ask you a question. So we appreciate. Thank you so much for giving us the background and for your passion. Where else are there Aramaic communities in the world world? You talked about the Church. What other countries have these communities where Aramaic is spoken and where the prayers are said in Aramaic?

Shadi Khalloul [00:17:05]:
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. That what we call the land of Aram in the Bible the land of Aram. In the Bible it’s called by the Greek, Syria. It’s the same land of Israel, like the same case of land of Israel being called Palestina under Adrianus to punish the Jews and to mix, to make people confused about the origins of them and ignoring the true history of this region and the true names of the region because it’s easy for them to control. That’s what they did for us in what we call the land of Aram. When the Greeks occupied this region, they called our land Syria. And since then, the others who came after the Greeks continue using this name. But in the Bible it’s written obviously the land of Aram and the people who living there are Arameans. And the descendants of those people are the Christian native people of this land that still speak this language Aramaic. Because those Aramains adopted Christianity in the first stages of Christianity because it came from Jewish who were speaking same language like them, Aramaic.

Adam Mintz [00:18:32]:
So I want to talk about that for a minute. In the Jewish tradition, the speaking of Aramaic actually goes back to the later books of the Jewish Bible. In the books of Ezra, among other places, we have passages actually in Aramaic, which means that 2,500 years ago, before the Greeks, before Christianity, Jews seem to have been speaking Aramaic. And what you’re telling me is that your tradition also predates Christianity. The country of Aram is the country where people spoke Aramaic. So what you, this is fascinating, Geoffrey, and that is that the spoken language of the different people, and again, this is pre-Christianity, it’s not pre-Judaism, but it’s pre-Christianity that the different people in the region, Jews and non Jews, were speaking Aramaic. That was what we call the lingua franca, which means the spoken language of the people. Then you, your community adopted Christianity in its very early stages and you maintained Aramaic. The Jews largely gave up Aramaic. There were some communities in Kazakhstan and places like that where they, they still spoke some Aramaic, but basically we don’t have that tradition. So you maintain the tradition, but that the tradition goes all the way back. Geoffrey, that’s an amazing thing. Now, what you’re going to show in this week’s Torah portion is that Laban calls the place Ygar Sahaduta, which is also his Aramaic language. And we know that Jacob, at least he’s given credit such by the Torah, gives it a Hebrew name, Galed. So you see, Shadi, that all the way back in the time of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, you already see that there are different languages that Laban uses the Aramaic And Jacob uses the Hebrew. And so these traditions might go back. But if we date these stories 4,000 years ago means that already 4,000 years ago, this was the language of the region.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:05]:
And more importantly. And I’m going to jump in here, because at Madlik, we like to look at the sources. And I have never studied these sources with someone who speaks Aramaic. So you got. You can’t hold me back any longer. So first of all, as the rabbi said, we have this peace agreement between our two peoples in translation from Hebrew to Aramaic, which means already that the two languages connect us. But one of the things that I’m going to argue today is that Aramaic was a language that was different from every other language in the Middle East. It was a language of diplomacy, and it was a language of international affairs. And our source here, which even according to most modern critics who love to date things much later, the critics say that here, when they make a covenant, and that’s what they did, they took the stone and they set it up as a pillar, they both called it in their own language. And in chapter 31, verse 53 of Genesis, they say, may the God of Abraham’s house and the God of Nahor’s house, their ancestral deities, judge between us. So here we have not only language uniting us, but even religion uniting us. It becomes a kesher, a connection between us. Getting back to some of the things that you said, and I just want to go over a little material and then we’ll talk. So Yigar Saduta Rashi, our classical commentary says, this is the Aramaic of Gilad. In Hebrew he says, targumo shell Gilad, the Targum that we have Onkolos, and all that literally means translation. But every Jew knew when you said translation, you were meaning the Aramaic translation. That’s how close the language was. In the Targum Yonatan, which is our transl. Here, it says, v’ karalei lavan o ger sahir vayakov karalei belishon beit kedusha. So you were referring before Saadi to Lashon Hakodesh, which is in your language. Some of you only pray in Aramaic. In our culture, before Ben Yehuda came, some of us could only pray in Hebrew. So again, we have a testament to Targum, which is translation, and we have Lashon kodesh, which is the language of our heritage. I will say there’s a tradition of Shnayimikra v’ echa Targum that every week a Jew is supposed to read the script in Hebrew twice and the Targum once. That’s the regard that we hold for Targum. And I will also say that there was something called a matargaminon when the Torah was read in public in Hebrew, because most Jews at a certain period of time didn’t speak Hebrew, they spoke Aramaic. There was someone who stood right next to them. And when the reader of the Torah said, bereshit baray elohime temaim va aretz, the matagaminum translated that in real-time into Aramaic. That’s how close our traditions are. And the idea that Aramaic was a language of diplomacy, which is what we have here, makes it a fascinating language. Because unlike most languages, and I’ll say maybe the only exception similar, is Yiddish, most languages are made by ruling powers in their day. Romans came with Latin, Greeks came with Greek. What made Aramaic important was that it transcended statehood. People talked or used Aramaic because it was a language that united everybody. It wasn’t linked to any one particular ruling party. It made it like today. English is the language of diplomacy. Maybe 100 years ago, French was the language of diplomacy in the Middle East, Aramaic was the language of diplomacy. I am going to put links in the notes not only to Shadi’s website and his charities, but also to an amazing book called Aramaic, A History of the First World language. Aramaic united the whole Middle East. Do you agree, Saadi, that Aramaic is a unique, uniting language?

Shadi Khalloul [00:25:57]:
Yes, indeed, I agree with you. It’s not only as uniting as a religious thing. What unite us is the ethnic background of this as well. If I go back to Abraham, you mentioned Abraham and Nahor. Nahur was the brother of Abraham and Nahor. If you go to Abraham house and to Isaac, for example, who Abraham, you know, he wanted him to get married. He sent Eliezer to Aram to get a wife for Isaac. And who was this wife? The wife was called Rebekah, the sister of Laban, the Aramean from the house of Nahur. So we are talking about a people as well that were once one people united and then developed as faith, as religions later on. And you can see also, for example, from Abraham we have Ishmael, Ishmael from Hagar the Servant, they call it Arabs, Muslims today, they all come from this Aramaic background. And let me tell you more than this. The Arabic language development was developed by script and language as a spoken language from Aramaic. So the Arabic language developed from Aramaic. The Hebrew language too was parallel to Aramaic and developed and mixed with Aramaic. And if you go to Eliezer ben Yehuda, for example, you find out that 70% of Ben Yehuda modern language of Hebrew was back from Aramaic that still existed as a spoken language. So all, like you have many. I can give you many examples, many examples of Hebrew words that originated from Aramaic today in our Hebrew language too. And I, for example, if you, if you go to a Yemeni Jew and go and hear how he reads Hebrew based on the ancient grammar of Hebrew and how you should pronounce the words and how it is pronounced in the Mediterranean or Eastern slang, you will think he is speaking Aramaic even though he’s reading Hebrew.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:43]:
Amazing. So we share the sources that you just organically brought in. Genesis 24:10, it says he made his way to Aram Naharaim. Aram is Aramaic. When he says in Genesis 25 that Isaac was 40 years old when he took his wife Rebecca, daughter of Betuel the Aramean of Padam Aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. So I wanna add a little bit to some of the magic of what makes Aramaic so magical. And that is, not only was it a language of diplomacy, but it was a language of a wandering nomadic people. And that is something that unites the Jewish people and the Aramaic people. How many people, Rabbi Adam, do we talk to that talk about their diaspora, that talk about their galut? We have so much in common. But I want to bring everybody back to the Passover Haggadah. In the Passover Haggadah at a certain place, we said Arami Oved avi that. And we’re quoting a very ancient text that’s used in the Bikurim ceremony when you bring your first fruits. It’s in Deuteronomy 26. And basically the Haggadah tries to translate it differently, but the real translation is an Aramean nomad was my father. So again, the language of Aramaic was a language that superseded borders. It superseded, transcendent ethnicity. It was. I am going to go out on a limb here. Shadi I believe that Aramaic was the first Internet. I believe it was the first meta language that enabled people of different backgrounds to talk amongst themselves for discovery. Am I going too far here or do you agree with me?

Shadi Khalloul [00:30:45]:
You are not. That’s why the Assyrian Empire adopted Aramaic. That’s why the Persian Empire adopted Aramaic. That’s why in the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, they tried to impose Hellenic or Greek on the people, while Aramaic resisted and kept being used until the 7th century, until the Arab Islamic conquest in the 7th century. The Aramaic, as you mentioned, was the Internet of those days. It was the connecting language between People, it’s a language where Jews spoke it until 7th century. Like, like those early Christians who developed from Judaism back then and from Aramaic. People who were pagans and adopted the Christianity from the first disciples who were Jews. We cannot deny this. This is a fact and history denying it. It’s denying the roots of Judaism and the roots of Christianity that developed from here, [not] from the Vatican, not from the Western civilization. It developed here in the land of Israel.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:50]:
So in the New Testament there are two, what I would call today selfies, places where we get to hear Jesus speak in his own language. He’s quoted in Mark 5:41, where he’s talking to a young girl who’s maybe rejected. Maybe people think that there’s something wrong with her, she’s a prostitute or whatever. And he says, why don’t you say. Say it in Aramaic? What does he say?

Shadi Khalloul [00:32:17]:
Talita kumi.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:20]:
Talita kumi. Which. And it’s quoting in Mark, the New Testament we only have in Greek. But it preserves language from Jesus himself. When he’s on the cross, he goes, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But in the, in, in the New Testament it says, go ahead.Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani this is the Aramaic translation of Psalms 22. In Hebrew it’s Eli Eli lama azavtani. And in the Targum of Tehillum it says Eli eli matul ma shabaktani. It uses the same word that the New Testament puts into Jesus’ mouth. We can say as Jews we need to know Aramaic. But Shadi, I think you would agree with me if you’re a Christian, the thrill of being able to learn a language that according to the New Testament itself, most probably Jesus spoke has to be extremely thrilling.

Shadi Khalloul [00:33:29]:
It is actually very emotional for me actually to think that how people connected to each other and why those wars develop, they shouldn’t be developed. We are all brothers, we all want people here. And unfortunately, this development of this region specifically during history of Middle east just make it nonsense. We are same people. We are same brothers and sister from the same forefathers. We should actually know the facts. And once we reveal this Aramaic to others, maybe, maybe we will put again and in the minds of people a little bit here of peaceful attitude. Specifically making the Arabs knowing their roots again that there were not Arabs here in this region. They were speaking Aramaic like us. And only this type of Arabism was developed in the seventh century. If they know back their roots, they maybe would better respect the Jews and the minority of Aramaic or Christians that they still exist. In this region. This is something really, I think that can make a solution and good manner for the state of Israel and for Lebanon and for Syria and for the entire region. I want to mention for you, Adam and Geoffrey, one thing about the Talita Kumi story that you need to know about this. What made me come back from United States to Israel? These two words of in the Bible. I was a student in Las Vegas my last semester. I took Bible as English literature as an easy course to earn credit and finish my degree as a bachelor degree in International Business and Finance. And I took that course and not Shakespeare as English Literature because I come from this area. I learned the Bible. It’s easy. And though we were reading the Bible and once we read this verse, one of the students, American Youth, the instructor was a professor, a Catholic professor. He said, no, don’t. Stop, stop. This is not English. This is Aramaic. That’s still written as it is, as Jesus spoke it. And you know, Jesus was a Jewish person. He spoke Aramaic language. And this is the language of the Jews back then. And he said this sentence, so it’s not English. And it kept being this. AND UNFORTUNATEL IT DIED. He said, I said, excuse me, it didn’t die. We still speak it. We still pray in this language. We still exist. He said, who you are? I said, my name is Shadi. I’m Israeli Christian. I belong to the Syriac Aramaic Maronite Church of Antioch. And this is who we are. I said, sorry, we don’t know about you. Prepare presentation next week. And I ended up preparing presentation and saying, oh my God, why I spoke. I now I need to. I prepare presentation. I already want to build my business. I have my business already and don’t have time to invest on. I wanted to have this easy course. I ended up deepening my knowledge about our roots, about our heritage, about our language, about our history. And I discovered how in common we share with the Jewish people here, how we have this beautiful heritage together and how impactful it can be on societies here in this region. And I said, wait, wait. After I gave this lecture about language and I told them the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic prayer as the only prayer actually. Jesus said, and it was in Aramaic. We still pray it in as it is. I mean, this is the Lord prayer in Aramaic, as it is in the Aramaic words and language. So I, I saw people crying. I saw people asking me how we can help your people, how we can help your language, how we can assist your community. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I ran away from my Community. I finished my military service. I came to the United States to build my American dream. These guys pushing me back to Israel to help my people and my community and build my Aramaic dream. So I ended up at the end, deciding that I will go back home and build my Aramaic dream. And that’s what I am doing. From one verse in the Bible was mentioned by you, Talitha Kumi.

Adam Mintz [00:38:30]:
That’s an amazing story. Wow!

Geoffrey Stern [00:38:33]:
So we are trapped for time because otherwise, I could continue this all day. But just as it was a thrill for your Christian brothers to hear you say the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

Shadi Khalloul [00:38:49]:
It’s a Jewish prayer. Hey, he wasn’t.

Geoffrey Stern [00:38:51]:
Of course, Adam and I. Adam and I understood 80% of what you were saying. It was amazing. I was ready to join your synagogue. So listen, I don’t know how big your screen is. Can you read the halachma Anya? Can you read it on the screen in. In your accents? I don’t. I’m putting you on the spot. What I am asking Saadi to do is we start our seder, the holiest, arguably holiest moment of a Jewish family once a year. And we don’t speak Hebrew. We speak Aramayach.

Shadi Khalloul [00:39:27]:
I would say it in my language, in my accent, because all the ha. What you say ha in Aramaic, we say ho. The A alif at the end of the word is for us translated as kamat Skatan with o. So it’s like we are Ashkenazi Jews. You remember?

Adam Mintz [00:39:46]:
You know?

Shadi Khalloul [00:39:47]:
Okay, so ha is ho lahma. Instead of saying, we say in Hebrew it’s low and not la. So we say it low. So that’s how it is. It’s pronounced for us in our Western Aramaic dialect. It’s more Galilean Direct or Jerusalem Talmud more area. So what you see here, it’s a mix of Aramaic and Hebrew, by the way, right?

Adam Mintz [00:40:45]:
Correct. Well, that’s the way it was written.

Shadi Khalloul [00:40:47]:
Aramaic and Hebrew. It’s not pure Aramaic. What I. So you have many Aramaic words and many Hebrew word mixed together.

Adam Mintz [00:40:56]:
Amazing. Shadi. I have to sneak out, but this was. Geoffrey this is absolutely amazing. The only podcast in history where we have someone who said the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic and read Halachma Anya. Jeff, we have to start that. Everyone’s going to read Halachma Anya in the original Aramaic. Thank you so much, Shadi, and we wish you well.

Geoffrey Stern [00:41:17]:
Shadi, I want to say that I teared up a little bit when you were saying that.

Geoffrey Stern [00:41:22]:
Because I felt like I was closer to the way my great, great, great, great, great grandfather would have said it. This is just so beautiful. For our listeners, I’m going to put a link to Shadi’s charities in Israel, amazing schools that he’s creating, pre military academies that he’s creating. And he’s going to be listed with PEF Israel soon. And I’ll put a link there when he has it. Shadi, you are my new brother. Aramaic has let us two people discover, rediscover ourselves all over again. And I agree with you. I think their potential here to create a new Middle East is possible. So thank you so much for joining us. I look forward next time in Israel to come visit you in person.

Shadi Khalloul [00:42:11]:
Always welcome. Thank you so much. Todah Raba.

Welcome to Matlik. 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. If you like the podcast and listen regularly, why don’t you give us a few stars and write a comment or ask a question? This week we read Parashat Toledot. Rather than excuse or explain away the troubling aspects of Jacob stealing the birthright, we ask why the Torah chose to portray the third patriarch in this manner, and what are the takeaways? Rabbi, you know, sometimes we just have to ask how much are we projecting our modern morality onto it? And also, it occurred to me, if we were reading a novel, and I’m not suggesting that the Torah is a novel, but there are plenty of pieces of art we view, listen to music, read books. There are troubling things in it. It’s called a plot. And we don’t always have to explain the dark side of some of our characters, even if there are heroes. What says you

Adam Mintz [00:02:19]:
I couldn’t agree more. I mean, as we’ll see, part of this discussion is how the commentaries explain these verses. So we have to kind of see the way the verses have traveled through history. Jacob is seen in a certain way. But I think you’re right. We need to take a modern view and to see what do we think about this trickery.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:41]:
So I’m not bringing all the verses because I think most of us are pretty aware of the storyline. It starts one day with, well, I should go back. It starts with Yaakov’s name. Yaakov means heel. He was born holding onto the heel of his brother. You could call him a heel holder. Ekev means crooked. So baked into his name was already a sense that this guy did not go straight. Maybe when his name was ultimately changed to Yisra’El, that was a change to Yashar (straight). But at this point in time, there’s definitely a kind of a cloud in the horizon that this guy is going to weave and go zigzag, as they say in the (movie) In Laws. And then we get to one day he’s cooking at home, and his brother comes in and he sells his brother’s birthright for the red porridge. And then we fast forward to this week’s part of the parsha that we’re talking about. And that is where his father, Yitzhak, is contemplating his end. And he asks for his eldest son, biologically eldest son, Esau, to go out and catch him some game. And Rivkah, his wife and Yaakov’s mother, overhears what’s going on, and she tells Yaakov, he’s giving out the blessing. You’ve gotta go and steal the blessing. And maybe Yaakov protests a little. I said in the intro that we can put some blame on Rivka herself because she is the schemer behind this. But in any case, we get to Genesis 27:18, and Yaakov, went to his father and said, father? And he said, yes. Kind of reminds you of the Akeda, doesn’t it? And he says, which of my sons are you? Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn. I have done as you have told me. Pray, sit up and eat of my game, that you may give me your innermost blessing. So there are times in the psukim where Esau even acknowledges the fact that he’s been wronged twice in his mind. He was taken advantage of at that breakfast deal, the power breakfast, where he gave up his birthright from 60,000ft. Rabbi, what’s your sense for the story?

Adam Mintz [00:05:24]:
Well, let me start like this. And he went to his father and said, father? And he said, yes, which of my sons are you? What a crazy question. You know, he sent Esau to get the food, and now the son brings the food. Obviously, it’s Esau. Why is he suspicious? And you wonder about what he’s thinking, Isaac, does he not trust his wife? Does he not Trust his sons. But that’s a very strange question. Since the son has fulfilled his request, it’s obviously Esau.

Geoffrey Stern [00:06:04]:
So I would go out on a limb here and say we have four characters. We have Esau, we have Yaakov, we have Rivka, and we have Yitzhak. And what you are just saying is that Yitzhak himself might have been eyeing on this. Because if he’s asking which of the sons are you, in a sense he’s saying to himself, you know, I started this little charade maybe, and which of my sons took the bait? Which of them is coming? So it seems like the story is very open ended. I compared it to the Akedah. I think that, yes, there’s these pregnant pauses throughout out where he says father. And he said, yes. And they go, which of my sons are you? And of course the Akeda, we had your son, your favorite son, the son that you love. And the other thing in Esau’s favor, because you could clearly argue that this is all about money. We all watch Sucession. There are hundreds of stories of children fighting over the patrimony and fighting over the inheritance. Here he says, your innermost blessing is the way it’s translated. But again, it is a very rich story and there are multiple ways that you could look at each character. You said, let’s see how the commentaries see it. I would think, if thinking back to the commentaries, definitely the first, I would say straw dummy is a Esav. The second, he walks in famished, they pounce on him. They say he was a glutton. He spent all of his time outside hunting. He was in Yiddish, we call it Prust. He was a bal basar. He was a grubba. He was the antithesis of Yaakov, who maybe spent his time in tents, according to the rabbis in the Yeshiva of Shame and Aver. But let’s talk about these two charact. They are definitely characterized, I think more by the rabbi. Very few of the rabbinic texts come down on Yaakov for stealing the blessing, to my knowledge, I mean, for sure.

Adam Mintz [00:08:32]:
You know, you get the sense that the chapter ends like this is what was supposed to happen, you know. And you said Yaakov is zig. You use the phrase zigzag. He’s a zigzag man. In next week’s power show with Laban, he’s also a zigzag man. Right. It doesn’t go straight. You know, he wants to marry Rachel and he marries Leah. But in the end it kind of works out, I think that’s the same sense you get here, that it’s zigzag. It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s that Jacob’s life is a zigzag. By the way, when he deals with his son Joseph, it’s also a zigzag. You know, he makes a mistake, he favors him, but in the end, it all works out.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:18]:
You know, funnily enough, if you look at the text itself, the only I would say moral or character I would say read is in the beginning and the end. In the beginning, it says that Esau married two Canaanite wives. And it says that, interestingly, that Yitzchak and Rivkah did not approve. Correct. So here it has. We’re seeing that Yitzchak did not approve.

Adam Mintz [00:09:49]:
Of him, even though at the beginning it says that Yitzchak favors Esau.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:55]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So again, it just shows you you can disapprove of a favored son. And that’s, I think, part of the challenge that we have where we’re trying to read the Torah as black and white. And it is pushing back, finishing up the story about the kind of ethical commentary that the Bible itself gives. At the end, it says Esau recognized that his parents didn’t like his choice of wives. And it said he married, I believe it was a Hittite, someone who was not part of the Canaanite people that are not thought well of in the text. So I think we can say that in the text itself, it does kind of lean on Esav a little bit. But again, even there, and this is kind of a direction that we’re going to pursue a little more. He evolves. He got the message. You could easily say he was spurned. He didn’t get the blessing. He walked away. He didn’t walk away. He went back to the beginning in the parsha, scratching his head is, what did I do wrong? My marriage choice is there in Pasuk 18 or whatever. And he picked another wife. But I think, again, getting back to Yaakov, I didn’t see in any of the commentaries anything that was potentially really disparaging about what he did, and especially disparaging in terms of either tricking Esav at the power breakfast to sell his birthright, or in the latter vignette, to trick his father to give him the blessing.

Adam Mintz [00:11:39]:
There’s no question about that. You know, the rabbis and that here they’re led by Rashi. There’s this idea that in the end, Jacob is right. So When Jacob says, I am, you know, you know, he says to him, who are you? And he says in verse 18 on the top, I am Asav, your firstborn. And Rashi, of course, says that you put the comma after the word I am, I am. He says, who are you? I am. And a sub is your firstborn. Now, that’s crazy, but that’s how far Rashi goes to justify what Jacob says.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:16]:
And of course, one thing that you do get is the whole kind of anti Semitic trope that the Jews are crafty, that they are Talmudic, that they’ll split a hair just the way you just did, where he says hineni, and then he says, I am, and then he says, esau is your firstborn. This kind of hair splitting, in a sense, back in the days of the Torah itself, whether it was sensitive to the potential of what others would say or not, it didn’t have any reservations about telling it like it is. So I found a scholarly study. It’s written by Yair Djokovic, who’s a professor emeritus of Bible at the Hebrew University and professor of Jewish peoplehood at IDC Herzliya. And he asks, why was this included? So he’s not asking the most basic question, which is, how could this be? He’s asking what the text of the Bible or the Torah wanted us to learn from it. And he starts by saying, and this is kind of interesting, and I think the best modality to put ourselves in, Rabbi, is the modality of Megillat Esther. We always forget that the Torah is a written work that was read publicly on a regular basis. And the crowd came in every Shabbat or during market days to hear this text read. And they knew certain history and legends. They knew that Haman was bad and you move the grager (noise maker) and they knew that Esther was in Mordechai was good. So he says the tales of Jacob’s trickery and fraud were already well known. Biblical stories were not created ex nilo from the imagination of writers. Most biblical stories represented adaptations of oral traditions, traditions that were modified in order to suit the interests of the writers. So I love the fact that he says there were expectations here. People knew who Yaakov the trickster was. So you couldn’t whitewash this story. You had to present the story that people knew from their Tzena Urena and from the past. But nonetheless, you had the authorship to position it and to place it in a way that you wanted. I hadn’t really thought of that, but I do think that we don’t think enough about this text as a text that was written and read in public and had that interaction with the audience.

Adam Mintz [00:14:53]:
Well, adaptions of oral traditions, we don’t usually think of the Torah that way, but it’s so interesting because that’s the way we do it on Madlik. Geoffrey, It’s an oral tradition. Discuss it. And what he’s saying is that’s been true for 3,000 years, that they discussed the text, and there were certain expectations. People came to the text with certain expectations.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:18]:
You know, earlier, in this week’s Parsha, it has the story of Beer Sheba about the seven wells. And in this week’s Parsha, there’s a back and forth. The local people are filling up Isaac’s Wells, and he’s having them redug. And at the end of the day, it says they call the place Beer Sheva because of the seven wells. And it’s called Beer Sheva Ad Hayom Hazeh. Those of you who remember earlier parshiot, we have Abraham in a story of wells as well. And there he makes a covenant and a peace treaty. And it says, and it’s called Beersheba because of the Shavuah of the oath that was written there, Ad Hayom Haze. And I think that’s a perfect example, Rabbi, where the listener knew that it was called Beer Seva. The listener is the Ad Hayom Haze-nick. He’s the one who knows what it’s called. And the text is filling in the blanks. And interestingly enough, it parallels this story also in the sense there are two versions. Just like Beersheva, there are two versions here. You could make the case that stealing the blessing, it was stole twice. It was stolen once over breakfast. And by that I mean that he took advantage of his famished brother. He took advantage of maybe his adolescent young brother, where he grew up faster, he was more mature, and then later on, he obviously fleeced him and took advantage of him a second time. But you don’t have to consider the two stories as part of the same narrative. You could consider them as different versions, just like the of Beer Sheva’s name of the same story.

Adam Mintz [00:17:09]:
That’s fantastic. I mean, that’s also not the way you usually think of it. But you raise an important question, Geoffrey, and that is, what’s the connection? The Torah doesn’t connect the two stories. The question is, are they the same story, what you call two versions? Are they two parts of the story? Do they just tell you about the relationship between Jacob and Esau? That basically we would say Jacob has his number, right? Jacob knows how to outsmart Esau.

Geoffrey Stern [00:17:41]:
And I think, as you always say, the version that we heard in Cheder would be that they’re part of the same story and that the first story justifies the second. It was a legal sale and therefore. But in the words of the text itself, Esav says, you have tricked me twice in his mind, and this is the narrative putting words into his mouth. They are also part of the same narrative, but they are duplicity to the power of two.

Adam Mintz [00:18:12]:
Right? Now, you know, technically it can’t be that the second story follows on the first story, because if it was true that Jacob deserved the blessing because he bought the right of the firstborn, then Rebekah should have gone to Isaac and said that Jacob deserves the blessing. Because the fact, you see, Rebecca took a huge chance. Let’s just talk about it in terms of a movie. Rebecca takes a huge chance when she tries to fool Isaac because if Isaac somehow finds out, the one he’s angry at is Rebecca. So, you know, so obviously she had no choice. So you see that the fact that he bought the first born-ship doesn’t give him the right to steal the blood blessings.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:01]:
Although maybe if Wendy was here, she would say it’s a proof that this couple didn’t talk to each other, just like Sarah didn’t talk to Abraham.

Adam Mintz [00:19:10]:
Right? That’s the old story, that she was only three years old and there was no equality there. Because you would say, in today’s world, you’re talking about how we look at it today. In today’s world, it’s ridiculous if the wife thinks the husband is making a mistake, so she goes to the husband. The idea of a wife tricking the husband this way, you would say that in the 21st century, that is a recipe for disaster.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:33]:
Although, again, and we’re gonna move on, it is pretty clear that as an ancient text, this text definitely gives a lot of power to women behind the veil. It’s like shadow theater where both Sarah last week, I will go back all the way to Eve, who controls how we live, whether we’re in paradise or in Paradise, Lost. And here we have also Rebecca controlling the narrative. So the second reason that this Professor Jackovic gives, and this is kind of fascinating, and he says the second reason for admitting Jacob’s misdeeds has to do with the character of biblical literature from the first Temple period. The literature we find avoids providing readers with perfect heroes.

Adam Mintz [00:20:26]:
What.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:27]:
What can we mortals learn from heroes who exhibit no speck of wrongdoing? On the contrary, only characters that have made mistakes, atoned for them and changed their behavior can provide models for us. Only from the experiences of such imperfect human heroes can we comprehend the moral fallibility of humans and mysterious workings of God in human affairs. This again reminds me back of reading Magillat Esther in public. It’s a passion play. The audience is on the edge of its seats. It’s seeing the different plot turns. But they’re not only plot terms, they’re changes in character. They’re challenges that the protagonists are going through. I kind of like this.

Adam Mintz [00:21:19]:
Yeah, this is fantastic. This is a great article.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:23]:
And so he says, not only do characters that transgress, make amends and learn from their sins provide more depth and interest than those who tread only the virtuous path, but flawed, complex figures give us someone to identify and emphasize with. And here’s where he goes a little bit further. And he says that while Jacob’s deceitful deed also presents his punishment. Rabbi, this is the prequel for the next two parshiot and the next two parshiot. We’re gonna see how Jacob has to flee his home because he’s done something wrong, because he’s not made a friend in his brother. His mother says, go away for a few days. Come back. When it simmers down. Guess what, Rabbi? He never sees his mother again. The father who is on his deathbed will see Jacob again, but Rebecca, who was pulling the strings of the puppets, will never see him again. He gets tricked multiple times. I’ll say he gets fleeced multiple times. He gets fleeced in marrying Rachel and he ends up with Leah. And then he has to work another seven years for Rachel. He gets fleeced by his father in law multiple times. You can talk it about Mida k’neged mida that he is punished in kind. And therefore it does become a kind of morality play. And we don’t need the rabbinic commentaries to comment on the initial story, but they definitely do comment on the aftermath.

Adam Mintz [00:23:00]:
Math, for sure. I mean, and that’s right. And again, in the end, it works out for Jacob. But you’re right, he’s fleeced. He has a very difficult time. And we always say that Jacob is the first, you know, is the first figure in the Torah who has to deal with the difficulties of life.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:18]:
And again, as long as we are looking at, as I said before, the different characters and I mentioned this, Esau is the one who’s craving meat. He’s the prosta bal habasar. He’s discredited at the beginning for his Marriage choices. And then we get to Rebecca. The blame is deflected onto Rebecca, who initiates the whole deception. And as I said before, she says, let the sin be on me. She actually actively participates in that deflection. And then, as I said before, she does get punished because of her scheming these few days that she sends away her. Her son becomes a lifetime. She never gets to see him again.

Adam Mintz [00:24:09]:
Right. It’s interesting that the Torah tells us in a couple of weeks that the maidservant that it seems to be that Rivkah remained interested in Jacob, and she sent kind of an emissary with Jacob on his travels to protect Jacob. So the special relationship between mother and son continues even when Jacob is sent away from his home.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:37]:
Yeah, and, you know, we talked a little bit before about his name. And I think, you know, if someone was to say to us, rabbi, that the story of Job or the megillah of Esther, did it really happen in that way, or was it a morality tale that was to bring in the audience? We would all say, yes. But there is also a very strong tradition that maasei avot siman lebanim, that the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs are a Siman. They’re symbolic, if you will. And so, yes, we can get back to the fact that his name was called Yaakov, which is a heel sneak. And so in chapter 27, verse 36, we hear it from Esav himself. He becomes the commentator, he becomes the myth reader. He says, is that why his name was called Yaakov, the heel sneak? He says, for now he has sneaked against me or cheated me twice. My firstborn, right? He took, and now he has taken my blessing. So in the text itself of the Torah, Esau does a little commentary and he goes. His name provided space for this in the later prophets. Rabbi, Jeremiah actually does the same thing. In Jeremiah 9, it says עָק֣וֹב יַעְקֹ֔ב Yaakove Ekev each of you, beware of your friend. He’s giving moral advice. Trust not even your kinsfolk. For every sibling takes advantage, every friend deals basely. In the Hebrew, it says. He uses the name of the heel guy as watch out for your brother. They use this as a morality tale in the later prophets. Let’s go back to other sneak or stories in the Bible where our patriarchs are using trickery. We have multiple stories of Abraham going down to Egypt, and in this week’s Parasha, Isaac going down to Gerar, where he lies about his wife, and she is my sister. So again, getting back to the professor’s point of not whitewashing our characters. In a sense, even Yaakov, or Isaac, I should say, opened him up to being tricked because he tricked Avimelech. It’s all that goes around, comes around. And you could make a case, Rabbi, that what we are learning is Avera Goreret Avera, that once you go down the slippery slope of playing with the truth, it never stops.

Adam Mintz [00:27:28]:
Well, there is a problem here though, because his father also used this trick. So here he’s following his father. Interestingly, his father got away with it, but he gets in trouble. The king sees him fondling his wife and he gets in trouble. So in a way, Isaac, Isaac is not as good as his father in all of this. And then he gets tricked by his son, not quite as sly as his father was or as astute as his father was.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:06]:
Although at the end Isaac sowed in that land and reaped a hundredfold the same year. He does get material benefits from his manipulations.

Adam Mintz [00:28:16]:
Right? Okay.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:17]:
But as you say, he was tricked himself. And maybe we need to go back and read the Akeda and other stories about Abraham and see if he also wasn’t on the wrong end of the stick at a certain point because he had manipulated the truth. Now the truth was being manipulated about him. So I want to end with something that has always fascinated me about The Guide for the Perplexed. And normally I bring it up when the Jews left Israel and they went the long route, instead of going directly into the Promised Land, they have a 40 year adventure. And Maimonides has a famous theory and he calls it the ruse, the Divine Ruse where God has to take them from one place to another place, from being lowly slaves in an idolatrous society to followers of the one God. And to do that he needs some time. And he has to build a temple as he institute mitzvot and stuff like that. The goal is very far away. And so what Maimonides brings is a theory of he has to trick them. Small little tricks along way. But what I had not noticed is he begins talking about that in a biological fashion. And he says in Guide for the Perplexed part three, on considering the divine acts or the processes of nature, we get an insight into the deity’s Willy graciousness. And in the Hebrew translation, because it was written in Arabic, it calls Aromat Ha’Eloha, the trickery of God. And what he does is he’s not presupposing Darwin by any chance, but he is saying that biologically the animals and biology develops over time, it’s fascinating because it gets very close to evolution.

Adam Mintz [00:30:15]:
Evolution.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:16]:
And he doesn’t say mutation, but he does say that things develop from one to the other. And he talks about this gradual development. The nerves are enabled to set the lens in motion. And I quote, this says Maimonides as one instance, because this is the most evident in the wonders described in the book on the use of limbs by Galen. And basically what Maimonides comes with, which is his own theory of evolution. And I will argue that what he does is by caging it in this amazing term of God’s holy trick, it gives us a sense of how we evolve. And we are, I think, privileged when we read a story like we’re reading this weekend in the weeks to come to have a first row seat on the development of our morality. And when we react to the story in a certain way. Rabbi, we are using a time honored tradition of that audience listening to the sometimes cheering and sometimes going back in absolute disgust. But here we are.

Adam Mintz [00:31:26]:
That’s fantastic. That’s a great Maimonides. Yeah, that’s good. I love it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:31]:
Okay, well, Shabbat Shalom. Thanks for joining us.

Adam Mintz [00:31:34]:
Shabbat sounds really good. Thank you very much, Geoffrey.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:36]:
We’ll see you all next week.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and on Madlik, we light a spark and shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a sort sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parashat Chayei Sara. Join us for a conversation with Professor Rabbi Wendy Zierler, a scholar dedicated to the enterprise of feminist midrash, who has recently published a book on Hebrew poetry. We’re excited to explore a feminist midrashic approach to Sarah and to get a taste of what Hebrew poetry has to teach us about our matriarchs. Wendy, thank you so much for joining us. We’re real excited.

Wendy Zierler [00:02:10]:
Such a pleasure.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:12]:
And as I said in the intro last week, we were talking about Sarah’s laugh and how God or somebody accused her. Did you laugh? And she said no. And we looked at The Torah Commentary of Women in Sefaria, and we were blown away by a totally new approach. So we’re excited to start looking at the Torah all over again through the eyes of our women who have so much to add and have been kind of behind that veil, standing by the doorway, ready to laugh, incite, and contribute. So I want to start because I kind of discovered you in a TheTorah.com article. At Madlik, we love TheTorah.com and it talks literally about our Parasha, and it asks some interesting questions. But let’s start with the parsha itself. It says, now Sarah’s life was 100 years old and 20 years and 7 years, thus years of Sarah’s life. So the interesting thing is that it talks about her death, even though the parsha itself is called Chaye Sarah (The Life of Sarah). And in your article, you says it gives us very little insight into Sarah’s internal religious life. Isn’t it kind of ironic and maybe representative of how women are represented in the Torah that we have a Parasha called Chayei Sarah and we talk about her death?

Wendy Zierler [00:03:46]:
Certainly this opening to the Parasha is a real provocation to try and tease out from whatever we do have of Sarah’s life, whatever detail we do have in the text, to find out something about her and to imagine, to fill in the gaps of her text. I will say, apropos of your teaser, where you talked about discovering Sarah’s laughter, I mean, we know that Abraham laughed and then she laughs, and she sort of gets slammed for it by God. But later, it’s as though her laugh gets approved and endorsed. She gets the last word on laughing because when Yitzchak is born, she names him and basically creates a liturgy for his birth, a celebratory liturgy. God made laughter for me. Anyone who hears will laugh along with me and then recite the poem herself. So we know that there’s a lot there to Sarah. We know there has to be more than what this kind of dismissing her off stage in Parashat Chayei Sara seems to imply. We know that there has to be more because God insists that she has to be the progenitor of the next generation. Moreover, we’ve got this loud pronouncement by God in Genesis 21. Kol asher Tomar, Elecha, Sara, shema, bekola. “Anything that Sarah says to you, listen to her”, be obedient to her. So my question is, of course, what is it about Sarah’s life that we want to emulate? Why is it that she is held out as this matriarch? And so I try to both call attention to what’s there in the biblical text, but then imagine the empty spots in different ways.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:34]:
I mean, there’s so much. Like in the Akedah last week we were kind of reading between the lines. There’s, you know, the midrash that says the Torah was written in balck ink and on white parchment. And I think the endeavor that you’re involved with, with your peers is to coax out what’s in between the lines. Sarah is the only matriarch who tells us how long she lived. Everett Fox points out. And then the next mystery that comes up is in the next verse. And Sarah died in Kiriat Abba, that is Hebron in the land of Canaan. And Abraham CAME to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. Talk to us about what is the question that all the commentaries are asking here.

Wendy Zierler [00:06:22]:
Okay, so what is glaring and calls out for comment here is the idea that at the end of the Akedah in Genesis 22, Avraham is described as going to Beersheva. And then we find out later that Sarah dies in Kiryat Arba. So it seems that at her death they’re not living together. And this is something that the commentaries can’t suffer, that idea. Whereas I actually believe, and here I think that the text is telling us something very directly that the Torah is very honest to us about what the Akedah exercise, what kind of effect it has on the family. I don’t think that it’s an accident that Genesis 22 begins with under the sign of love. And it’s the first time that the verb ahavah (love) appears in the Bible, Ahavta et Yitzhak (loved Isaac), the first time we ever hear that verb. And that by the end of that parak, at the end of that chapter, love disappears out of the text. When God says, you’ve done this thing, I now know you’re a God fearer. Kilo chasachta et bin cha et Yechibcha, that you didn’t withhold your son, your only son. And it doesn’t say Asher ahafda (that you loved). And my reading, I mean, what lurks behind my torah.com article is a kind of pre existent reading that asks the question where the rabbis ask, where was Sarah and Akeidah, why is she absent? And they supply different answers. My understanding is she’s there to represent another alternative. If Avraham shows and succeeds in a test of God, awe of God, fear, then Sarah is reserved. Her absence reserves another option, which is the option of love. And that’s why theverb Ahahve (love) . The second time the verb ahavah appears is at the end of Genesis 24, where we hear that Yitzhak took Rivkah into his mother’s tent and loved her. I see the Torah being very honest about what it means that Avram was willing so utterly to. To obey God and detach from all earthly commitments. That’s why at the end of the Akedah when it says the word yachdav (together) is not used in relation to Yitzchak and Avraham, but it’s Avraham and N’arav (the youths), that’s a very loud rhyme. So my argument is that there’s a breakdown in the relationship between Avraham and Yitzhak at the end of the Akedah. There’s a breakdown in the relationship between Avraham and Sarah at the end of the Akedah. And dare I say there’s a breakdown in the relationship between Avraham and God at the end of the Akedah, because never does God speak to Avraham directly again. In fact, at the end of Genesis 22, he only speaks to him through an angel. And in order to the next thing we know is Avraham needs to get a match for his son, and he’s doing it through the agency of somebody else, not himself. There’s a lack of that. That attachment is broke down and so broken down. And so attachment has to be reconstituted elsewhere through Sarah. And so she represents that model. Her absence is actually a very loud presence in my view.

Adam Mintz [00:09:42]:
And is that why at the end of this week’s Parusha that Rivka replaces Sara, that that’s an important piece?

Wendy Zierler [00:09:50]:
Yes, that Rebecca comes. Rebecca and Sarah are identified with one another. Now, on the one hand, Rebecca continues Abraham’s model in that she’s someone who left Haran, she is a leave taker, and yet she’s right away signaled as an object of love. And so she, in my view, marks the reinsertion of Ahava (love) into the text and in fact, the possibility of family continuity. Because if you’re going to kill your son on a mountaintop, that son is not going to be available to be your successor and your descendant on the most basic level. And so what I wrote in TheTorah.com is kind of a sequel to that, or it’s the backstory. How is it that Sarah was able to exercise some agency even though she wasn’t there on that mountaintop?

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:42]:
What I want to kind of focus on is in the rabbinical commentaries that you cite Rashi, Ramban and others, it’s almost painful to watch them try to figure out why Abraham was not with Sarah. It is so beyond them to believe that Sarah could be independently living on her own, not like Hagar, that she was exiled, she didn’t go back to her father’s house, she’s an independent woman, living by herself. Rashi says, you know what, Abraham was doing chores or something, and it was on his way home, and he got caught away from home when he got that call. Ramban. It’s a very, very long. Ramban talks about also that it must be that he was just doing some errands while he was in Hebron. It seems to me that because they couldn’t imagine that Sarah was by living by herself, it affected their commentary. And I think that the most basic, I guess, trivial level, the fact that you, a woman is willing to look at it and say they were separated, opens up, first of all to throw out a lot of kind of splitting hairs and going in the wrong direction, but also enables us to focus on why they were living alone and why Isaac was not with his father either, and why he (Abraham) was by himself. But I want to focus on Sarah and not on Abraham so much. And you spoke a little bit about this concept that love was missing, and I love that as well. But then why don’t you talk about the Midrash that we now are kind of given license to write now that we say that no, they were separated, they were living alone. What then can you understand and fill in the blanks about Sarah that we now have license to imagine?

Wendy Zierler [00:12:50]:
Yeah, yeah. So look, I think that the rabbis in the Middle Ages also, they elevated the Akedah spiritual exercise in ways that I don’t think I share that same conviction. And maybe because they were living in a world of common martyrdoms. But getting to your question, I mean, once you imagine the possibility that there was a real rift or that there was a difference of opinion, different spiritual directions, instead of imagining that Sarah got wind of the Akedah and dropped dead on the spot out of the shock of it, or instead of imagining, as the Midrash and Tanchuma does, that Abraham resorts to all kinds of stratagems to deceive her. You know, he says there’s no way that she’s ever going to agree to this Akedah exercise. I better pretend that I’m taking Yitzhak out to like an Outward Bound trip, that I’m taking him, like off to Cheder or so on, because otherwise if she hears about this, she’ll kill herself. I’m imagining that she heard about this and knowing that the initial news that she would give birth, that she would have a child, happened in Elonay Mamre, which is just a few paces away from Kiriat Arba, she went back to the place of that original prophecy, that original visitation from the three angels and waited for them to come again, because she couldn’t imagine theologically that this God who had directed their lives and brought her this beneficence, this great, like embodied laughter known as Yitzhak, that would ever ask for that, for that joy to be destroyed just for the sake of some kind of test. And that she would wait for these angels to show. She would laugh when, you know, in gratitude when they showed up. And then she would say, please do me a favor, go one of you to Har Moriah and tell him whatever you need to tell him to get him to feel that he’s still okay even if he doesn’t do this thing. In other words, that’s why we have one malach (angel). We have two. Then it repeated, stop, stop him from his sense, his conviction that unless he does this thing, he’s fallen short. And once she does that, once she knows that Yitzhak is safe and that he’s going to survive, given how old she is, she is able to meet, you know, to meet her end. And that’s why she lives in Kiryat Arba, because she’s returning to that original scene. In my Torah.com article, I talk about how Avram is perennially restless. He goes from place to place to place to place to place. And that most of the time we see Sara just being taken with, as if a passive agent. And I wanted to suggest that there has to be something more than that passivity to justify her being such a linchpin in the history of this first stage of our founding family.

Geoffrey Stern [00:16:05]:
You know, it’s interesting, one of the commentaries you bring told Toldot Yitzchak actually asked two questions. The first question is why they’re not living together. But the second question is, and this kind of relates to the book that you wrote, and we’ll get to in a second. Why did Abraham not do any long term planning? Why didn’t he buy a plot? Asks the Toldot Yitzchak. And what he answers is that Sarah knew that she had to be buried in Canaan. And when she felt that she was losing her health, she went there. But I think that’s another way of saying that Sarah determined where the Ma’arat HaMachpelah (Cave of the Patriarchs) was. Sarah determined that they were not only going to be patriarchs, they were going to be matriarchs. And in a sense, it was Sarah who determined that this was going to be the anchor of the Jewish people, that in this place, she was coming back to that place where the three angels came she was waiting for angels that never came to tell her about the Akedah. But in a sense, it wasn’t a foreseen conclusion that we were going to have three Avot and Arba Imahot, that we were going to have strong Matriarchs. And here she really determined the architecture and the geography of the Jewish people. And that’s how profound she was, both in life and in death. I mean, I just wonder. You say that, you know, she determines it. You know, Wendy, from the fact that God changes her name, also that she’s a player, that she’s part of the covenant. You know, it would have been very easy for God to change Abraham’s name, and Sarah would have remained Sarai. And the covenant is through Abraham, it’s through Isaac and through Jacob. And the wives are the wives. But the Torah from the very beginning goes out of its way to say that Sarah’s part of the covenant. I wonder how that plays out in the Chayei Sara story.

Wendy Zierler [00:18:12]:
Well, I’ll tell you how I think it plays out. I think it’s extremely important to note that Sarah has her name changed because she’s the only matriarch that we have who experiences a name change. And the next person to experience a name change is Yaakov, who goes from Yaakov to Yisrael. And I make an argument in my article and elsewhere that in effect, what that means is that Yaakov is named after Sarah because it says Kisarita em im Elohim va Adam (I struggled with God and Man). That word Sarita, is an evocation of Sarah. Right? So Yisrael has that root. And so we’re seeing in that naming that, you know, he becomes the eponymous hero of the whole of Genesis in being Yisrael. For us, that is bringing Sarah back into the center of the action. And that her struggles, whatever it is that she went through, in having to assert her position, both vis a vis Hagar, but also with Avraham, that that is something that gets echoed and developed in the personality of Yaakov turned Yisrael.

Geoffrey Stern [00:19:29]:
I love that. I mean, last week we read into her laughter. Exactly that. Arguing, struggling with God, wrestling with God that you just brought out, that was a very strong laugh. But I want to segue now into your book, which I read cover to cover in the last 24 hours. I absolutely love. You might not know this, but on Madlik, we love to go back to the Yahadut Yisraelite, the Israeli Judaism, in the kibbutzim and we look at kibbutzim, haggadot, and we just love going back because they look at Judaism totally differently. You have done the same thing with Hebrew poetry. And this book is so many things. One of it, as I alluded to before it occurred, because you lost your parents, your father tragically, then your mother, then your mother in law. You were in multiple years of mourning and teaching this Hebrew poetry was what kind of enabled you to move from the different moments and tragedies that you were. But what I’d like to do is to now go into that poetry. And what I’ve done, with your permission, is pick three poems. I don’t know whether we’ll have a chance to get to all three of them, but the first one deals with Al Shelosha Dvarim (On Three Things), and it is written by Leah Goldberg. And it’s a kind of rumination on three things. The world stands al haTorah v’al’ha’avoda v’al gemilot Hasidim. But it puts a new twist on it. Give us a sense of what Leah Golderg is doing in this poem. Teach it like you would on a Tuesday morning.

Wendy Zierler [00:21:20]:
Oh, I probably need a little bit more time, but I’ll say it over as quickly as I can. So what we know from Pirkei Avot is that there were two versions of the three cardinal things that the world stands on. There’s the Mishnah that comes in the second Mishnah. In the first parak of Pirkei Avot, which comes in the name of Simon Hazadik, one of the last elders of the Knesset, hagedola, he says the world stands on Torah avudah u’gemilut hasadim (Torah, Service and Good Deeds). Before that, that first chapter of Pirkei Avot ends. We’ve got another rendition of that in the 18th Mishnah, where Shimon Ben Gamliel rewrites it and says that the world stands on Din Emet and Shalom (Justice, Truth and Peace). Between the time of Shimon Ha Tzadik and Shimon Ben Ganliel, the Temple had been destroyed. The possibility of a kind of more parochial or particularistic list of cardinal threes was no longer possible. And so the list had to become more universalistic. And what Leah Goldberg is registering in writing her poem in 1949 as part of a series of children’s poems is the need in 1949 to recognize the epoch making event of the establishment of the State of Israel and the need to establish a new set of three. And that in every major Edan, every major epoch, we’re going to have to go through this exercise. And the rabbis have taught us it’s a traditional thing to negotiate a new list. Now, what Leah Goldberg does in the poem, it’s called Al Shalosha Devarim, and she has three different versions of workers of a sort, who assert their three important things. I will note that all of their things are work. So, like, if we were to sing the song, it would be “al HaOvoadah, Al HaAvodah, AlHaovodah” because that’s what mattered in the beginning of the state of Israel, to assert productive labor. But Leah Goldberg, as a person who understood the legacy of the spirit, first of all, she includes the artist among her workers. She has a fisherman, a farmer, and an artist. So you need the sea, the land, and also the mind, the heart, the spirit. And then she goes to the fourth principle. So she busts up the rule of three, which we can say is, you know, shalosh Avot, she says, arba imahot. She gives us the human being, the Adam, and we know from Breshit Aleph (Genesis 1) that the Adam is created. So the human being ha Adam is an egalitarian construction, and that Ha’Adam is not limited by three things, nor is that Adam limited to one sphere of activity. The Adam is interconnected and makes allusions and references to what matters to the farmer and what matters to the fisherman and what matters to the artist, and also alludes to other matters of the spirit and Jewish culture, hagim and Hulin, holidays and weekdays. That human being is Ha’ poeah Eaynav (opens the eyes), which makes us think of the brachot in the Birkota HaShahar. Now, what of course she’s noting, and we can’t ignore it, is she’s offering a secular list that is nevertheless informed and inspired by Judaism, by Jewish culture.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:58]:
And what I love, and you say this later in the book, is, as you correctly say, man was created male and female, androgynous, possibly. She almost transcends gender by being a woman. She not only can take us to look at things as a woman, but can also say, just get rid of the whole gender thing. Look at the “rainbow palette”, this is how you translate, opens it up. And I think what I think about when I think of On Three is a tripod. And there’s nothing sturdier and more set than a tripod. And we’re just giving you a taste, dear listener, of Madlik, of what’s in this book. Because every one of these poems is a gem. I read it in Kindle. And in the subnotes, there’s a hyperlink to songs where Arik Einstein is singing a poem. It just makes you so proud of our culture that we have pop singers singing poetry. But the next thing you go to is Yehuda Amichai. And he talks about men, women and children. And he talks about this tripod and how he wants to be a part of this tripod. He’s almost jealous that he’s not included with. On the one hand, he goes Jews, Christians and Muslims. But he also talks about blood, sweat and tears. He talks about. Does he say; Hersh Shotah v’Katan ( a deaf person a dumb person and a minor). He says widows, orphans and bereaved parents. There are so many threesomes there that are packed that he almost wants to be a part of this rowdy crew. But it’s kind of. There’s a tension there because he’s acknowledging that some of them are at the bottom of the pile.

Wendy Zierler [00:26:42]:
Yeah. This is a poem written from the point of view of someone who feels like such a super outsider. If only he could have belonged to some trio. And we think about triangles, this stability of the triangle. It’s the geometric metric form that has the least number of lines, yet still closed. Right. It’s that stable form. And he wishes that he could be part of some sort of stable form, even if it would mean being part of that category of the disenfranchised or the bereaved, those who actually are not considered halachically responsible or to be disabled in some manner, just to be part of something. And yet I note in my analysis of this poem that he keeps on saying ani rotze l’hiot, you know, I want to belong to something. And when you say “I” so many times, then you’re asserting that individuality, the very same idiosyncratic outsider, you know, not quite fitting into, like the square peg in a round hole sensibility that gets him into this situation to begin with, where he doesn’t feel like he belongs to anything. And, you know, and he makes clear what he’s looking for in this three is something permanent. In the same way that Al shelosha dvarim haolam omed is a sense of permanence. I note in my book that I read this as an explicit allusion to Leah Goldberg, who of course is explicitly alluding to the sages, because we know that Leah Goldberg was a major mentor for Yehudah Amichai, which is an extraordinary historical fact, because until then we do not have an example of a single woman poet who was a mentor or a model for an important male writer. It just didn’t exist in the Hebrew language.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:34]:
That’s fascinating.

Wendy Zierler [00:28:36]:
Well, look, my whole career has been dedicated to exploring this one big question, which is what happens when women enter into a Hebrew literary tradition that’s been going on since the Bible, where women have been absent since the Bible, with the exception of a few, a handful of poems, there is nothing, there is no book, full book written in the Hebrew language by a woman since the closing of the biblical canon. It isn’t until the 19th century, the end, the very end of the 19th century, that women enter into the Hebrew literary tradition. And so it has to be different if after all this time, women finally can actually represent their own lives and represent their own experiences. And this idea of a woman being the dedication page is an earth shattering, like a seismic shift. I wrote a book about the first Hebrew woman, short story writer Chava Shapiro, and she dedicated her book in 1908 to her mother, Mukdash l”imi. It’s the first time that we have a dedication by a woman to a woman of that sort. And so these are just among the many, many incredible historical shifts that we’ve been experiencing over the past century.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:55]:
I love the way you weave Yehuda Amichai and the woman that he was inspired by in that narrative. And then the book itself weaves the narrative of those two, three years you went through during Covid together with your congregation every Tuesday morning reading of these poems and making it kind of talk to our situation, your situation. I just love that what your book shows, number one. And I totally recommend it if you’re interested in Hebrew poetry. The book is just full of both the Hebrew and the English with the links to the song sung by pop stars in Israel. And then there’s the backstory. One of the earliest women who actually was writing poetry was a niece of Shmuel David Lezzatto. The Shadowlah commentary that we love that comes through weaving the stories behind it. We’re not going to get a chance to get to the third poem, but I think that’s totally in line with where we need to go from here. This is the first chapter, not the last chapter in looking at these new voices and the way that these poems who are writing in Hebrew. And I’ll finish with this. It’s the language itself that has within it the ability to carry thoughts that started 2,000 years ago and went through commentaries and through seder tables and through family histories and land here with all that baggage and all that nuance and give us totally new sense of what it is our tradition is and makes it sure that it’s going to stay alive and have the dynamism that it had at the very beginning. It’s a wonderful contribution. I hope you’ll come back.

Wendy Zierler [00:31:51]:
WENDY well, I’ll just say that part of my goal, my whole career has been to argue that modern Jewish literature can serve as an important layer of commentary on our traditional sources, that just because it doesn’t come delivered to us in that conventional form of the hardback burgundy or navy cover with the gold lettering and the marbleized leaf, that it doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of unfolding canon and a very important layer of parshanut. And in the same way that the rabbis often felt the need to fill in gaps and they used their creativity and their subjectivity to try to bridge the gap between their time and the time of the Tanakh, they taught us, they teach us how we can, through creative interpretation and through creativity, do that in our own day to day.

Adam Mintz [00:32:43]:
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Wendy .

Wendy Zierler [00:32:46]:
Thank you so much for inviting me.

Geoffrey Stern [00:32:48]:
So run out and get Going out with Knots My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry by Wendy Zierla. And truly, I hope we’ll have you back again. But thank you so much for joining us. Shabbat Shalom to everyone and enjoy Chayei Sarah thank you.

Welcome to Maudlik. My name is Jeffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a sparkler, 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 Sepharia, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read Parshad Vayera. We explore the overt and covert friction and conflict in the narratives of the prediction of a child to Sarah, the trial of Sodom, and the binding of Isaac. We view it through the lens of texts and a tradition which embraces dispute. So join us for argument’s sake.

Adam Mintz [00:02:53]:
And this is an amazing topic today, so let’s get going.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:57]:
So if I achieve nothing else, Rabbi, you’re gonna see the whole two series of Nobody wants that. A person like you who’s INV involved with conversion, you just have to see It. I can’t believe you hadn’t really. You’ve heard about it, but you hadn’t actually seen it.

Adam Mintz [00:03:13]:
I told Sharon after you mentioned it, we’re gonna see it. So you did it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:03:18]:
What’s amazing is it is won amazing awards. And the sites that rate our series, I think it’s at 95. I mean, people. It must be a broad audience is interested in its comic, its love, but it’s ethnic, It’s. It’s about religion. I just find it fascinating, not only that it was produced and got a second season, but that people are watching it and enjoying it. And so I thought, why not tie it into this week’s parsha? Now, the dialogue that I want to start with comes after Noah. The rabbi is doing his foray into couples therapy, but he’s only talking to the husband. And after a while, he stops preaching and he starts listening. And that’s where he realizes that there are no answers. So the dialogue picks up then, and he says, this is Rabbi Noah speaking: “Honestly, it was one of my proudest moments as a rabbi. We spent hours talking about marriage, examining it, re-examining it, pulling it apart and debating it.” Joanne, the girlfriend, says, “So what’s he going to do?” “I don’t know. That’s the thing about Judaism. We love to talk about things from every direction. You know, I was being too rigid in how I was looking at it before.” “I love analyzing things from every direction.” She says, “I know, it’s very Jewish of you.” He says, “A religion that encourages me to argue. Love that. Sorry, hold on. I’m just texting her mom.” And at that point, she actually was writing to herself. “I think I just moved an inch.” And that inch is towards conversion. So here is a woman who was attracted to our faith because of our embrace of dispute. Rabbi, have you ever come across that?

Adam Mintz [00:05:08]:
Of course they love the energy. You know, what you would say? The beit midrash (Study Hall) energy, the bes medrash energy. There’s nothing like it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:05:17]:
Okay. So I said, we’re going to have three little scenes here. So the first one is in Genesis 18, where the angels come. And they said to him, where is your wife Sarah? Speaking to Abraham. And he replied, they’re in the tent. Then one said, I will return to you next year, and your wife Sarah shall have a son. Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind him now. Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. Sarah had stopped having her periods. And Sarah laughed to herself, saying, now that I’ve lost the ability, am I to have enjoyment with my husband so old? Then God said to Abraham, why did Sarah laugh, saying, shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am, Is anything too wondrous for God? I will return to you at the same season next year, and Sarah shall have a son. Sarah lied, saying, I did not laugh, for she was frightened, came the reply, you did laugh. So this is great. The segue from this sitcom, if you will, is perfect because there it was, couples therapy. And here we’re talking about not necessarily a relationship between man and God, but two individuals maybe monitored by God. And there are so many amazing points here. But the first thing that struck me is that, you know, the whole book of Genesis, Rabbi, if you think about it, is the story of miraculous birth. Every one of the matriarchs has problems having a child. In the case of Sarah, she’s 90 years old. She has no right biologically to have a child. So it’s a miraculous birth. Obviously, another religion, Christianity, is born on the virgin birth. But the response that our patriarchs and matriarchs have to the idea of a miraculous birth is they fall down laughing. And I find that to be kind of amazing because it’s part and parcel of this, I wouldn’t say argumentativeness, but this ability to look at things and say that makes no sense at all. Are you kidding me? I just think that’s a wonderful way to start.

Adam Mintz [00:07:35]:
It is amazing. I would just add, isn’t it amazing that you know, that God said, you laughed and she denies it? Can you imagine denying things to God? Like, it’s one thing. We deny things to one another. Who knows what the truth is? But this is God. What does she think?

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:54]:
So here’s where we live in an amazing moment, Rabbi. We live in a moment where women are starting to write commentaries on the Torah. And so in The Woman’s Commentary, which is in the Sefaria notes, why is Sarah laughing? Some interpreters have concluded erroneously that Sarah’s laughter was divisive. When Abraham heard that he would have a child with Sarah, he fell flat on his face. A few verses before, Abraham also laughed, and he literally fell on his face and he said the same thing. So what The Women’s Commentary is saying is actually that God is testing Abraham to see if he’s going to stand up for Sarah and protect Sarah. It’s kind of like Adam and Eve. We do remember where Eve ate from the fruit. She gave it to Adam. And when God confronted Adam, he goes, I didn’t do it. She gave it to me. Here he laughed out loud. And a few verses, she laughs. But this, the next commentary, comes right to your question. Sarah was afraid. Whom does Sarah fear? Most interpreters assume that Sarah is afraid of God. I contend, says this woman commentator, that she fears Abraham. Sarah has no reason to fear God, who apparently comes to her rescue in the house of the Pharaoh, blesses her and promises her. Remember all those stories where Abraham is coming down to Egypt and he pawns off Sarah as his sister, not his wife? God saves her all of those times. God was always there. However, she does have reason for fearing Abraham. He does not seem to object. When she is taken to Pharaoh’s palace, he allows Hagar to treat her disrespectfully. And insofar as the reader knows, he has not informed her that they will be having a child. It’s a fascinating new take on it, because the verse does not say who asked the question and who she was afraid of.

Adam Mintz [00:09:57]:
Yeah, I mean, that is so interesting.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:00]:
Right?

Adam Mintz [00:10:00]:
And that’s what I’m pointing out. You know, that last verse that she laughs and she’s afraid and God says, don’t do it. It’s so. … the fancy word is it’s enigmatic. You’re just not sure what’s going on, what the Torah is trying to teach you. Now, of course, you have to know that later on, when Isaac is born, he’s called Yitzchak, after the laughter. So obviously this laughter is not just a mistake. This identifies who he is.

Geoffrey Stern [00:10:30]:
It’s not such a bad thing. Again, it shows, as you say, enigmatic. It shows that there’s no right side, there is no heroes here, and there’s no correct position. I also love the fact that we’re getting into what people and God are thinking. She says within herself, Ibn Ezra says, in her mind, God reveals Sarah’s inner thoughts. In the pasuk that talks about Abraham also, it seems to be that Abraham was thinking, this is crazy, but didn’t say it. And this is going to become very important. I think when we look at the Akeidah, this emphasis on dialogue and on disparate opinions does not only operate in the verbal universe, it also operates inside of the minds of the protagonists. And it has value. Humor has value. I was gonna say that if the girlfriend had said that this is a religion that loves dispute, she might have also said, and it loves humor and it loves laughter. Because the response that she gives her way of, I would say, going against reality, of standing up to something that made no sense, was to laugh. And so In a sense, laughter itself is a form of dispute or of taking another position and getting more involved in the questions. I just love all of the different elements that come to fore here.

Adam Mintz [00:12:04]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s fantastic. Okay, let’s go to the next story, because each one of these stories is connected to the next story. So let’s move on to the Sodom story.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:15]:
Okay, so now we have Sodom. And the angels have given Abraham this great news. And the angels go down to Sodom and God says, shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? And here the commentaries also say, God is thinking it, he’s not saying it. I just love the fact that in these stories we are giving such value to the inner mind and to the conflict and the questions that humans and gods might have. Since Abraham is to become a great populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him, for I have singled him out that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of God by doing what is just and right in order that God may bring about for Abraham what he had promised him. So he goes through a whole description of who he is to Abraham and says, I can’t hide this from him. Then God said, and now he’s talking out loud, I assume, and he’s talking to Abraham. The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin is so grave. I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether according to the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will take note. So then the angels go down and it says, while Abraham remained standing before God, Abraham came forward and said, will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? So here, I think, you know, I have a book. It’s called Arguing with God, a Jewish tradition. This is the argument of Abraham with God is, I would say, a piece of evidence #1 in this. And he stands up to God. We’re gonna see what the rabbis talk when they say he came forward, but he is making his move and he is saying, how is this possible?

Adam Mintz [00:14:15]:
Now, I just wanna tell you that’s an interesting argument. You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty. I mean, maybe the answer is that’s what God does. That if most people are guilty, then he sweeps away the innocent with the guilty. Abraham assumes that God is bound by our sense of morality. That’s a very important point, that we try to imitate God, and God, in a way, imitates us.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:47]:
And in a sense, God set this scene up because in verse 18, he says, since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation, and he goes through all the things that Abraham has projected onto him. So really the scene is being set. But you’re absolutely correct. It’s both of their perceptions of each other. So Abraham, as we all know, starts with 50. Far be it from you to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from you. Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly? Says Abraham. And then he says, after God says, yes, if there are 50, he goes, I venture to speak to my Lord. Who am I but dust and ashes? But what happens if there are less than 50? What happens if there are 40? What happens if there are 30? And as he goes down, he says, let my Lord not be angry if I go on. Let my Lord not be angry if I speak but this last time. So I think that you’re absolutely right, that what makes this story so powerful is that man speaks truth to power, so to speak. He stands up to God. But I don’t think that that’s what makes this story as historic as it is. In other words, there are foreign sources of kings doing the same thing. Even in our own text, Avimelech, a non-Jewish king, approached her and said, oh, Lord, will you slay people even though they are innocent? It’s a situation where he takes Sarah, Sarah’s not his wife, and he’s about to have calamity fall on the whole people. He says to God, will you slay people even though they are innocent? We have Hittite documents that you can find in the source sheet that also talk about, “let not the good ones perish with the evil ones”. Rabbi, what I will argue is that what makes this story so powerful is that it became more than just at that moment of do or die. It became a way of conversing with God. It became a motif, it became a genre in Judaism. And that’s why you can write a book called Arguing with God: a Jewish Tradition. And I think that comes out in the commentaries that first of all we have in Beresit Rabba, where it adds to the arguments that Abraham makes. It kind of piles on. So the rabbis didn’t kind of try to modify and minimize the arguments that Abraham has. They actually tried to maximize it it. So they said, you took an oath saying you would not bring a flood upon the world. Are you seeking to evade your oath? Says the rabbis. And you think you can get away with the fact that you’re not using water, you’re going to burn them. That doesn’t stand up. So the rabbis put words into Abraham’s mouth to make his argument even stronger. He says, if you wish to have a world, there can be no strict justice. And if you wish strict justice, there can be no world. Beautiful poetry from the Rabbis! But you seek to hold the rope at both ends. They accuse God of. You wish to have a world, and you wish to have strict justice. Choose one of them. Rabbi, you can’t make this stuff up. These are religious sages that are emphasizing, that are putting on steroids. What. What Abraham said. He says, if you do not ease up a bit, the world will be unable to endure. It’s just beautiful.

Adam Mintz [00:18:45]:
A beautiful, amazing midrash.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:47]:
Yes. So here’s where I love it. Abraham approached. I said that before he approached God in order to engage in this argument. Would you even destroy the righteous with the wicked? Abraham approached and he said, Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Nehemia, and the rabbis. Rabbi Yehuda says the term approaching means for battle. Yorav and the people who were with him approached Aram. He brings a verse. Rabbi Nehemia said, approaching means conciliation, as it says. And he quotes a verse. Rabbi Pinchas, Rabbi Levi, and Rabbi Yohanan. When one passes before the ark, meaning to say, when one begins prayer, especially when one leads the prayer, one should not say to him when inviting him to lead prayers, go and perform, Go and do battle, or go and wage the battle of the congregation, but rather go and do battle in prayer. So the rabbis took this argument of Abraham with God at Sodom, and they made it into an everyday aspect of prayer. How many religions approach prayer as battle with God? It’s just amazing.

Adam Mintz [00:20:04]:
Well, you know, it’s amazing for a couple of reasons. Number one is it looks as prayer as a battle. That’s never the way we look at prayer. We look at prayer as being something that’s kind of, you know, friendly and genteel. That’s number one. But the other thing which is amazing is the fact that he’s doing battle with God.

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:27]:
Right?

Adam Mintz [00:20:28]:
I mean, that’s really a chutzpah. What do you mean, do battle with God?

Geoffrey Stern [00:20:33]:
It’s absolutely a chutzpah. It really takes this story, and it makes it into a template. It makes it into a paradigm. And there are so many Hasidic stories. There are so many stories of rabbis getting up and, you know, the Clausenberger Rebbe, when he’s supposed to say the curses In a low voice, he says them out loud and he goes, let God hear what he’s done. I mean, these are deeply religious people.

Adam Mintz [00:21:03]:
I know who you heard that story from.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:06]:
I heard it.

Adam Mintz [00:21:06]:
The same person, Rabbi (Shlomo) Riskin, of course.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:07]:
So you know, the Hasidim, we all know, they wear a hat, they have payos, and they wear a long coat. But what you might not have noticed is when they pray, they put a gartel, a belt around them. Some people think that’s to separate the top half from the bottom half. I heard it’s to bind their loins before battle. That comes from this concept that praying is going into a debate. Prayer is going into that back and forth that you described before of the beis medrash. What’s amazing about the Sodom story, more than the story itself, is how the rabbis took it. I find that to be amazing.

Adam Mintz [00:21:50]:
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:53]:
So in the Sifre, it says what Abraham did was a paradigm shift. It says, before the advent of Father Abraham, the Lord judged the world with severity. The men of the flood sinned. He flooded them like sparks. He scattered them at the tower of Babel. But when our Father Abraham came to the world, afflictions materialized in place of destruction. So now they’re explaining why life is tough, okay, but we don’t get all destroyed. Life is tough in a sense. You know, they used to. There’s something in the Talmud that says Mikabel Isurim B’Ahava, you have to take punishment with love. The idea, I think again, Rabbi, is that it stopped being black and white and it started to be, you take a bout, you take a hit. It’s part of this conversation that God and we, as we go through life, we hit a bump, we hit a challenge. It’s part of that conversation as well. But I think that what they’re recognizing also is that that Abraham in this episode, makes a powerful paradigm shift.

Adam Mintz [00:23:05]:
No question about it, right? All these things. So battle and argument and the unique relationship that our forefathers had with God. It’s a kind of relationship that we would never imagine to have with God.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:22]:
Yep, yep. And the rabbis did everything that they could to enlarge this story, to take this story, and to make it something that can be used in all of life’s doings. So when Abraham says, far be it from you to do something like this, Rabbi Abba said, from doing “this” is not written, but rather to do something “like this”, neither it nor something similar, nor something lesser than it. In other words, he was saying, it doesn’t apply only to Sodom and Gomorrah. It applies to every little minutia of our life. We are entitled, we are empowered to say, is this fair? Is this right? And that is the position I think, that the Jews have taken typically in history and in society. Whether you call it a muckraker, whether you call it a reformer, it’s someone who doesn’t let even the smallest thing pass without questioning it, without turning it over, without evaluating it, and then speaking out.

Adam Mintz [00:24:31]:
Yeah, there’s no question about that. That’s great.

Geoffrey Stern [00:24:34]:
The Lord said, if I find in Sodom 50 righteous people within it, I will forgive the entire place. I am silent for him with his claims. God said to Abraham, for you and for the branches that emerge from you. I will be silent for Abraham who said, far be it for me to do something like this for Moses who said so. Then he goes and says, look at how this has happened in the future. Why, Lord, will your wrath be inflamed against your people? That is Moses speaking. Why did you take this people across? That’s Joshua speaking. Why do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? This is Job. The midrash traces the question that Abraham asks at Sodom through the Bible’s history up until Job and and Job’s forebears. In this book, it brings night and Elie Wiesel. It’s all part of that same tradition that questioning God and asking him how he can do this, how he can even hide himself, is legitimate and is actually the core of the relationship.

Adam Mintz [00:25:46]:
Not only legitimate, it’s part of the tradition.

Geoffrey Stern [00:25:49]:
Yes, absolutely. And what I want to do now is go to the really challenging story. Because after I looked at the first two stories the way I did, I looked at the third story differently. And of course, what I had in my mind was I had the fact that arguments can occur in your mind and arguments can occur through silence. And so now we have these events. It says God put Abraham to the test in Genesis 22, saying to him, abraham, he answered, here I am. Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you. So you can understand Abraham hearing this, God actually says, “offer him as a burnt offering”. And saying in his mind, let’s see how this all works out. How can this possibly be? Yes, in Sodom he said it outright, but in the announcement of the birth of Isaac, maybe he laughed internally. I think what we are now is we’re a little more sensitive to the silent questioning that could go on. So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering. He set out for the place for which God had told him. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his servants, you stay here with the ass. The boy and I will go up there, we will worship, and we will return to you. So now when Abraham is speaking, enunciating, he goes, don’t believe anything that you’ve heard till now. We’re both coming down. Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac. He himself took the firestone and the knife, and the two walked off together. Then Isaac said to his father, father. And he answered, yes, my son. And he said, here are the firestone and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering? And Abraham said, it is God who will see the sheep for the burnt offering. My son. Again, he’s not talking to God, but he’s making a statement that God is going to have to come through here and bring that sheep. And the two of them walked on together. And we all know how the story ended. Do not raise your hand against the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God since you have not withhold your son, your favorite son, from me. You can look at this equally as a dialogue, and you can look at it if you give Abraham a little bit of a benefit of the doubt that he is actually standing up to God. He’s waiting for that Deus Ex Machina to come down and to save his son as he knows he must, because he knows what God has to do to live up to his perception of him. It just. I think that the preparation that we have from the other stories is not so much questions why Abraham acts so differently here, but possibly gives us an insight into how he acts, what he says, what he doesn’t says when he pauses. I think it’s an interesting different read.

Adam Mintz [00:29:06]:
I think, Geoffrey, what we’re really talking about here is the fact that Abraham is the first one, and arguably with Moses, the only two people who actually have dialogues with God. You know, there are plenty of prophets, but nobody has a dialogue with God. And, you know, it’s a chutzpah. They actually challenge God and they discuss with God, and God pulls back, and that’s a remarkable thing. And I think the Torah is trying to teach us a very important lesson. And that is the fact that we learn that God actually dialogues with human beings and we learn from that dialogue.

Geoffrey Stern [00:29:44]:
And I think that our perception of God evolves as well. I won’t say God evolves, but I’ll say the point of these stories is because there is this interaction, this battle between man and God. Both of them have to change and they change in our texts and in our traditions and in our prayers more than anywhere else. So I think Nobody Wants This; I hope, I want a third season and where we get into the back and forth and we learn more about the battles. But even what we’ve seen till now, I think it’s an amazing insight into Judaism and the attraction, I think, of Judaism, that dynamism of Judaism and.

Adam Mintz [00:30:33]:
Why don’t you say Geoffrey, in the third season? They’re going to be watching Madlik together.

Geoffrey Stern [00:30:39]:
I hope so. We’re available. We are available as consultants anytime. Shabbat Shalom. Enjoy. We’ll see you all next week.

Adam Mintz [00:30:47]:
Shabbat Shalom.

Three thousand years later, other men and women make the same journey, not on Camelback, but on commercial airlines. They, too, are answering a call, not divine, but deeply personal. They land not in mythic Canaan, but in modern Israel. And like Abraham and Sarah, they find a country bustling, complicated, and endlessly in motion. A land and a people that deeply resonate. And yes, did I say complicated? This week on Madlik Disruptive Torah, we sit down with Noah Efron from the Promised Podcast. A progressive American who in the early 80s made Aliyah at the age of 24 with his future wife. He is the founding chair of the Interdisciplinary Program on Science Technology at Bar Ilan University. He raised a family, entered local politics, and hosts the Promised Podcast. We’ll explore what it means to go forth in our generation.

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern. And at Madlik, we light a spark, 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 Lech Lecha. We use the narrative of Abraham’s aliyah to Canaan as an opportunity to talk with Noah Efron, a friend and a progressive American who made aliyah to share his story and insights. Welcome, Noah. It’s great to see you.

Noah Efron [2:17 – 2:21]: I am so delighted to see you and to be here. Love this podcast.

Geoffrey Stern [2:23 – 3:26]: Thank you so much. And I love the Promised Podcast, and I will say it again later, but if you haven’t listened to it, you should listen to it. It’s amazing. But am I right? I mean, you and your cadre on the Promised Podcast all kind of made aliyah around the same time, you all Anglos. And it really is an insight into what the experiences are of progressive American Jews, passionate as you are and your experience in Israel. And so I think that’s the weight on your shoulders today, Noah, you are representing that aliyah. You know, there’s an amazing thing on YouTube you can find it, of when each aliyah used to have its own name. The first aliyah, the second aliyah, and this has Arik Einstein and what Uri Zohar is in it. And each new aliyah looks back at the new one coming. And of course, they disparage them.

Noah Efron [3:28 – 3:34]: It’s an excellent question. Yeah, what the fifth aliyah was in the 1930s. So I don’t know, the 25th aliyah.

Adam Mintz [3:34 – 3:42]: Well, we have to say 1984 is a long time ago. So you’re definitely part of Israeli culture.

Noah Efron [3:43 – 3:43]: Yes.

Geoffrey Stern [3:44 – 5:31]: Okay, so we always start by looking at a few of the verses and the rabbinic commentaries and using that as a way to segue into the subject matter. So today, as I said, is Parashat Lech Lecha. And God said to Abraham, go from your land, from your birthplace, from your father’s house to the land that I will let you see. And Rashi says, for your own benefit, for your own good. And the way I take that for today’s discussion is that every Lech Lecha is personal at the end of the day, and everybody who makes a migration in general, but certainly coming to Israel, it’s going to be your story, Noah, that we’re going to be discussing, but it is a personal journey that we all take. And he says, and in coming to this land, you will have the privilege of having children. And it is known for giving you teva haba olam, your nature, your character in the world. And my guess is that your aliyah to Israel was without children. You started a family in Israel, and then I’m sure you were who you are today when you came. But certainly, the experience has had an effect on who you are. And the last thing that I’ll say before we get into the first question is I said before that you must have come in the 73rd aliyah. But the point is you came as a group. I think that not every, I mean, different aliyot have their different characteristics. And what it does say about Rashi.

Noah Efron [5:31 – 5:31]: Says.

Geoffrey Stern [5:34 – 6:02]: And he says that Abraham and Sarai made souls in that they had made in Haran. And I take that to mean they came in a group, they were passionate, they somehow discovered themselves, made their own background. So with your permission, Noah, I’d like you to use this as a segue to really describe your story, whether it’s Young Judea, to give our listeners a sense, if you could, of your aliyah.

Noah Efron [6:02 – 6:33]: Well, thank you for that beautiful introduction. And it’s so resonant in so many ways. What you said about children, for instance, in the end, one of the reasons why I know I’m in the place where I want to be, where I feel like I’m meant to be, is because of how beautifully my children have grown up. And I think it was Aristotle who said that you cannot tell whether a man is happy until you see how his children turned out. He wrote this in the Nicomachean Ethics, and I understand that as well. I feel that way as well. And my children have turned out beautifully, and that’s how I know that I’m happy.

Noah Efron [6:33 – 7:03]: I’d also add that another thing that’s resonant is that the commandment is to, as you said, among other things, to leave the house of your father, to leave the house of your parents. And that is a very, very big part of my aliyah as well. And something that changes over time, continues to change to this day as I every month make a trip back to the United States to see my parents, who are now in their late 90s, and measure myself as a son and as a human being, in part by the distance between us. So it becomes complicated. But my aliyah story is a very happy aliyah story.

Noah Efron [7:03 – 7:34]: And it starts, like you said, in Young Judea that I joined when, I don’t know, I was 12 years old, a yeshiva bocher who was looking for something beyond just religion, just shul, through which to understand my Judaism and enact my Judaism. And my older and very beloved sister had been involved in Young Judea. And I joined that and found the people who, it turns out, are the people that I spent my life with, that I have spent my entire life with.

Noah Efron [7:34 – 8:04]: Tonight, after we record this podcast, I have a weekly Zoom with friends that I made when I was 12, 13, 14 years old in Young Judea. And one of them was, until recently, a member of the Knesset, Alon Tal. And another, my friend, Bill Slott, was the maskir, the secretary-general of Kibbutz Ketura, and other friends as well. We have, it turns out, we began our lives before we were adults together, talking about what we wanted to do, what we hoped for from our lives, what we hoped for from this place. And we came.

Noah Efron [8:04 – 9:05]: I came with what’s called a gareen, which is a group of people committed to building a settlement together. And from Young Judea, right after college, my wife was one of them and other close friends from the movement, and we went to Kibbutz Ketura. I was 21 and my wife was 20. And when we first arrived and went into the army together, and have since we’ve moved around the country and at different points in time, moved around the world.

But we have spent a life together in this remarkable place, seeing it change around us and being part of that change, which is one of the miraculous and extraordinary things about Israel.

Noah Efron [9:37 – 10:07]: How given it is to being influenced by people who decide to join their life with this place. You do that and then suddenly you have a voice, and suddenly you can make things be this way rather than that way. And you can create, as my friends and I did, your own Jewish community. It can be egalitarian. It can not have a rabbi if you don’t want. And you can build a new school, as we were involved with.

Noah Efron [10:07 – 10:38]: And you can, as I am now, you know, get elected to city government and be in charge in Tel Aviv of environmental policy and animal rights policy and pluralism policy. You can do those things. I don’t know exactly what it is about this place that makes it so amenable, that makes my friend Alon Tal somehow find his way to the Knesset because he wanted to. But it’s a feature of this place.

Noah Efron [10:38 – 11:09]: And I’m going on at great length. I just would add. Would go back to what I said about my children. There is something for someone who grew up like me, like I said, a yeshiva bachur, but very much an American football fan and a baseball fan, very much an English speaker. There’s something about seeing your children toddle around speaking their first words in Hebrew and seeing them grow up.

Noah Efron [11:09 – 11:39]: And the world of associations of theirs is a world of Hebrew association that pricks your heart. That’s so beautiful. And also seeing them grow up very different than any American kid grows up. Seeing them grow up, not exactly knowing where they end and the people around them begin, being much more porous. I remember, you know, from when the kids were in second, third, fourth grade, you’d walk into a room with a bunch of kids and they’re all over each other on the sofa, and they’re completely involved in each other’s lives.

Noah Efron [11:39 – 12:10]: And there’s no such thing as a paper that you write in school that’s your paper. It’s always done in a group. And this idea that it’s us, not me, that you see in your children in the most pedestrian ways, you see their concern for the people around them. They’re feeling that who they are is a function of who they are with. It’s really astonishingly beautiful and moving for someone like me.

Geoffrey Stern [12:22 – 13:05]: Amazing. I’m going to jump in for a second. I must say, I did mention you recently. My grandchildren go to Camp Ramah, and my oldest grandson, Adam, is 16, and he decided to go to Young Judea for the first month of the summer. And I said to his parents, do you know what Young Judea is now? I don’t know if it still has the power, but I said, you know, you better be prepared. I think my friend Noah joined Young Judea and moved to Israel. I didn’t grow up with any of that. Rabbi, were there groups around you that you had the opportunity of kind of joining? For some reason, I just wasn’t. Wasn’t in part of that.

Noah Efron [13:07 – 13:08]: Yeah.

Adam Mintz [13:08 – 13:33]: I mean, my world was a little different. I grew up in Washington, D.C. The Zionist world that I was part of was a B’nei Akiva world, B’nei Akiva and Camp Moshava. And it’s interesting that many of the people who I grew up with also moved to Israel. You know, I don’t know, Noah, you know, you have a direct line from Young Judea at 12 years old. What city were you from?

Noah Efron [13:34 – 13:38]: I’m from the Washington area as well. From Maryland, outside of Washington. And I.

Adam Mintz [13:39 – 13:41]: Did you go to Jewish Day school? You went to Hebrew Academy?

Noah Efron [13:42 – 13:43]: No, Silver Spring.

Adam Mintz [13:43 – 13:45]: And that’s amazing, Geoffrey, because I went to the Hebrew.

Noah Efron [13:45 – 13:48]: I went to the Hebrew Academy and.

Adam Mintz [13:48 – 13:54]: On 16th Street. It sure was. I’m a little older than you are.

Noah Efron [13:55 – 14:03]: But we have a WhatsApp group of my class at the Hebrew Academy, and half of us are here in Israel, in fact.

Adam Mintz [14:04 – 14:08]: Yes. So do we. And half of my class is in Israel, too. That’s fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [14:09 – 15:54]: So I just really want to jump in and say this concept of being this group. I didn’t even realize when I asked the question how powerful it is. But I really do think it’s amazing. It comes almost out of that Rashi where they came as a group and you’ve stuck together. I think that one of the other questions that I have is, and maybe I’ll just give you my personal experience, if I used to walk into a Masorti synagogue in Israel and I heard English, I would walk out because if Masorati Judaism or Liberal Judaism is gonna have a chance in Israel, it needs to be organic in Hebrew. And then I caught myself and I said, you wouldn’t do the same thing if you walked into a Moroccan synagogue or you walked into Azerbaijan synagogue. And so what I’d like to do now is talk about the impact of American Jews like you on the Greater Israel.

You know, we talk about Mizrahim, we talk about this. And certainly there’s a whole bunch of, I think maybe Anglo Americans in Yehuda and Shomron, and they have their voice. What is the voice of your cadre? Because you are, I’m not misidentifying you as a progressive American, but also a very traditional Jew. And I think the cadre of people that I hear on the Promised podcast is a strong group. And when I go to your Chavura in Tel Aviv, is your voice being heard along with the other symphony of other voices in other Aliyot in Israel?

Noah Efron [15:54 – 16:25]: It’s funny that you mentioned this. I spent last night in a long Zoom meeting planning an academic conference about the 120-year relationship between American Jews and Jews in the Yishuv and how deeply interpenetrated the histories are from the very, very beginning. So I think that American Jews have had an enormous influence here and have an enormous influence. And I used to get skittish too about hearing English in the streets and think, oh, we ought to be real Israelis.

Noah Efron [16:25 – 16:56]: And then I had the same experience that you just described of realizing, no, what we are is an Eidah. We are an ethnic group in Israel of English-speaking former Americans and Brits and Australians. In fact, in Tel Aviv today, one of every 40 people who live in this city is a native English speaker from one of those three countries between the ages of 20 and 30. Which is to say we’re a big, big, big group. And there are, like all ethnic groups, we have tended to concentrate in certain areas, so go to any university, and you know, it’s full of us.

Noah Efron [16:56 – 17:27]: But also environmentalism in Israel, and I’m an environmentalist, and that’s my political identity as well. I ran with a Green Party for city council. Environmentalism was something that was more or less brought to Israel by Americans. Also human rights NGOs. In fact, all NGOs are things that our ethnic group brought to the country in the ways that other ethnic groups brought the things that they brought.

Noah Efron [17:27 – 17:58]: And I think that there’s an enormous amount to be proud of once you get over the feeling that somehow it’s not legitimate to not speak Hebrew without an accent. Of course, once you make that psychological change yourself and you realize that it’s fine for you to have an accent, you can give a speech at the city council with an accent, and everyone will listen to you.

Noah Efron [17:58 – 18:29]: Once you realize that that’s fine, you start to notice that a lot of other people around you have accents, too. They have Russian accents, and they have Ethiopian accents, and they have Moroccan accents and all sorts of things. And that’s fantastic.

So I was just reading about the kibbutzim up north in the Galil in the 1950s, like Kibbutz Hasololim and Kibbutz Sassa. There are five or six kibbutzim that were predominantly American back then. I was reading newspaper articles about the softball league that was so popular in the 1950s in Israel. The American Marines, when they’d come to Haifa, would come and play against the

Noah Efron [18:59 – 19:05]: teams of American pioneers living on kibbutzim up north. It made me feel proud.

Geoffrey Stern [19:06 – 19:20]: Talk to me a little bit about the fact that you are a traditional Jew. You teach at Bar Ilan University. But of course, what you teach is, as far as I know, the philosophy of science. And you’re in the, what’s it called?

Noah Efron [19:20 – 19:24]: The interdisciplinary studies, where they.

Geoffrey Stern [19:25 – 20:17]: Interdisciplinary studies. But you do walk a line sometimes. On the Promised Podcast, I think in a recent episode, one of your peers said, stop with the rosy-eyed look already. I mean, sometimes when maybe the Haredim are disparaged, you seem to have a sweet spot where, yes, you understand issues like the draft and things like that, but there is a sweet spot in you for maybe the institution of the past. Maybe you just seem very middle of the road. Sometimes in the conversations, you seem to have that kind of role. Is that unique? Is that something that you own? Talk to us about that for a little bit. Maybe talk about teaching at Bar Ilan.

Noah Efron [20:17 – 20:47]: It’s funny, I don’t particularly consider myself middle of the road, though I know exactly what you mean. My grandparents, my father’s parents, when I was just a tiny kid, moved to Bnei Brak, and I grew up visiting them. Then, when I was in the army, I stayed with them when I had time off from the army in Bnei Brak and really fell in love with ultra-Orthodox society.

Noah Efron [20:47 – 21:18]: I have a different view than many people about the ultra-Orthodox in particular. To me, they seem as though they offer an alternative way to understand a great many things that would be helpful for all of us to understand. For instance, the idea that study is more valuable than making money is something that it’s true a nation could not survive if everyone decided that they were going to abandon work and study Torah or study poetry or study physics all day. I understand that. But there is something beautiful about this ideal that I think is astonishing and a great resource for all the rest of us.

Noah Efron [21:49 – 22:20]: The reason why it’s unusual is one of the infuriating and yet still beautiful and sweeping characteristics of Israel is that we are, as a society, evisceratingly critical of everything. This is not unique to Israel. This is a Jewish characteristic as well, of everything. You know the old joke about the woman

Noah Efron [22:20 – 22:51]: whose boy is swept out to sea, and she raises her hands up to heaven and says, God, God, please give me back my boy. I’ll never complain about anything again. Then a wave comes and deposits the boy right in front of her, completely dry. And she looks up and says, he has a hat. This is what this country is like, where we complain about everything. It has all sorts of implications, including implications that for

Noah Efron [22:51 – 23:22]: our international position are quite disastrous, where we are always broadcasting our flaws or each other’s flaws to everyone, all the time in the most immoderate ways. It’s a cultural matter that the ultra-Orthodox leftists are portrayed by us, to us, as malingerers, and leftists are portrayed by us, to us, as people

Noah Efron [23:22 – 23:52]: who are unpatriotic, and right-wing people are presented by us, to us, as messianists who have no concern over the feasibility of what they are insisting that all the rest of us do. They’re dragging us to our doom all the time. All of our descriptions of ourselves to ourselves, and hence to the rest of the world, are so evisceratingly critical. There’s something wonderful about that. There’s something bracing, there’s something

Noah Efron [23:52 – 24:23]: exciting, there’s something I think morally useful about always criticizing everything. But I think that it allows some of us to forget how astonishingly successful this country is. The project of this country is. It’s partly because I came from far away, because mine is a story of Lech Lecha that I

Noah Efron [24:23 – 24:53]: do not fully ever manage to forget. That is one of the great gifts of being an ole, of having a Lech Lecha story, of being an immigrant, is that you are never capable of fully forgetting how astonishing the place where you find yourself is, how surprising it is, how beautiful the beautiful things are, how profound the profound things are because you never fully get used

Noah Efron [24:53 – 25:24]: to them. Hebrew is. I don’t have the best Hebrew, and so reading poetry for me is work, and for other people, it’s natural. But I don’t know if it’s possible for anyone to love Hebrew more than I love Hebrew. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to scan the street, you know, the street I live on, Ben Yehuda, and I live on Nordau, the corner of Ben Yehuda in Tel Aviv, to scan the coffee shops.

Noah Efron [25:24 – 25:54]: I don’t think it’s possible anyone looks at the coffee shops and thinks more than I do, my God, what a beautiful people. I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that the comedy here is more surprising or funnier. That is because I come from there, and I came here, and always I am seeing things as I think I feel like quite an insider. I’m also seeing things through the eyes of someone who came from

Noah Efron [25:54 – 26:25]: somewhere else. You asked about Bar Ilan. I’ll say Bar Ilan is the Orthodox, the religious university in Israel, and it is an astonishing meeting place of ultra-Orthodox Jews and modern Orthodox Jews and completely secular Jews and Palestinians and Muslims and Christians and, you know, lesbians and just everyone that

Noah Efron [26:25 – 26:56]: you can imagine. The day-to-day life of trying to learn something about the world, about how cells work, about what the meaning of the Talmud is, or about how we ought to live our lives, or why society is the way that society is. In a group of people that looks like so many different people at once, but have this common purpose, is this astonishing gift. I get to bike over to Bar Ilan every week and meet this remarkably heterogeneous colloquy of people asking questions together, each of them bringing their own Lech Lecha stories to this endeavor.

Noah Efron [26:56 – 27:24]: You end up hearing some pretty astonishing things from these brilliant students and from my colleagues as well.

Geoffrey Stern [27:26 – 29:55]: I think you’re really emphasizing the Lech Lecha part in terms of you. I’d like to think Adam and I, when we look at the texts that we look at, we discover something new. The last thing you can do is generalize. The last thing that you can do is talk about what Rabbinic Judaism stands for when it’s so multifaceted. You do the same thing, whether it’s at Bar Ilan or at a café. It’s just a multiplicity. The fact that you came to it from outside, you have a special lens and I think that’s amazing. Every week I find some texts that kind of surprise me. This week, I want to share with you a beautiful text from the B’reishit Rabba. It says that Abraham was told to go and to go to a land that God will show him. It doesn’t say Canaan.

So Rabbi Levi said when Abraham was traveling through Aram Naharaim and Aram Nahor, he saw them eating, drinking, and reveling. He said, “Would that my portion not be in this land.” When he reached the promontory of Tyre, he saw them, the Canaanites, engaged in weeding at the time of weeding, hoeing at the time of hoeing. They were hardworking people not given to merrymaking. He would that my portion be in this land.

So first of all, it seems to be amazing that in the eyes of this rabbinic piece, the Palestinians, the Canaanites, the people that were in this land were actually inspirational, were talked about in flattering terms on the one hand, and the other part is the industry of the land. The startup nationness of this land is recognized in this Midrash. So much in here.

But let’s talk for a second in the closing minutes that we have about what your perceptions are when you came here and now through the years, and especially through these last two years of this being able to look at this land that I’m sure when you came, you had certain perceptions of how it could be a shared society, and certain perceptions of how we can resolve some of the big issues. Has that changed in the last two years? Has it changed since you’ve come here asking you to say this? Of course, Al regel echad (on one foot).

Noah Efron [29:59 – 30:29]: I don’t know if it’s changed in these wretched last two years. I guess what I have gotten from these last two years is a fuller sense of just how vexed, how difficult the challenge is, how much pain there is for so many people, and now more than there was two years ago. Even though what happened over the last two years is a product of the pain that came before. So I’m left with a greater sense of the gravity of the situation.

But I think that what hasn’t changed is my confidence that, in the fullness of time, whether it’s in my children’s lifetime and not my lifetime or just later in my lifetime, I think that we will reach a resolution. And I don’t claim to know much about the souls of Palestinian friends of Palestinians, though I’m very eager and always probing my Palestinian friends to try to understand more.

But what I have seen in my lifetime in Israel has been a single overarching narrative now that I see from the heights of my advanced age, and what it is, is that since I have come to Israel, I have seen the hearts of Israelis grow softer and gentler and more open continually.

I know that this conflicts with a lot of people who tell themselves the story of Israel as a story of decline, of how at the beginning there were socialists, it was this progressive place, and then, since then, it’s become more right-wing and more exclusive and more racist and less open-minded and less open to the world and less modern and less progressive. But what I have seen over the course of my lifetime is exactly the opposite.

I have seen, I came to a country where, for instance, if you were gay, then you had no place to be public at all. I live near Independence Park here in Tel Aviv, and that was the place that was known for being the park where gay men could meet each other and surreptitiously have sex under trees in the park because there was no place to gather.

I have seen the story of LGBTQ rights, or the position or the culture of these people. The acceptance of these people in Israel is a very, very dramatic story of having gone from being utterly unutterable, utterly unable to say that you exist, to one where people are just warmly accepted at Shabbat dinner by their Orthodox parents with their husbands if they’re men or with their wives if they’re women. So we’ve all seen that change.

That’s really simple. But what it is like to be Russian here, what it is like to be Ethiopian here, frankly, what it is like to be a Palestinian, Israeli also, in every way, there is so much more acceptance. The academic year started yesterday, and 30% of the new students in the medical schools are Palestinian Israelis. It’s an astonishing thing that would have been unthinkable.

When I came to the country, it was illegal to speak to a Palestinian who was not a citizen of Israel. And now just the degree to which people accept one another, people value one another. If it’s Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, if it’s Ethiopians, if it’s Russians, if it’s just everyone, it has changed so dramatically.

And it’s hard for me to believe. You know, Israelis are geniuses at embracing us. We’re geniuses at us. We saw that on October 8, how the entire country rose as if at once, everyone seeking ways to help everyone else. We’re geniuses at us. And what I have seen in my lifetime, the story of my life, is seeing the us in this country grow and grow and grow.

When I came here, it was, you know, kibbutznikim. It was Ashkenazi, kibbutznikim. And I’ve seen it grow to include Sfaradim and include immigrants of different sorts and include Christians and include Muslims who are citizens of the country, at the very least. And I do not see any reason to expect that that expanding notion of us has reached its limit.

So I envision, I think, that the next generation, the problem that they’re gonna be talking about on their podcast 35 years from now is gonna be the problem of assimilation. I’m worried that my Muslim child is gonna marry a Jew. I’m worried that my Jewish child is gonna marry a Christian. That’s gonna be the problem that they’re talking about on podcasts because I think that we will by then have managed to find a way to create a bigger us, like in Bereshit Rabbah, like you were talking about, to appreciate the people who are working hard and to understand that we all have a portion in this land.

Adam Mintz [35:58 – 37:27]: I’ll just say, first of all, thank you so much. And your perspective, I think Geoffrey will agree, your perspective here and on your podcast is, you know, so refreshing and so broad and so, you know, so optimistic. And I’m sure that’s true in Israel, but we know when we listen here in the United States from far away, it’s something that, you know, gives us an optimism that we don’t always hear.

And I just want to, you know, just maybe we can close with a verse that we both learned in the Hebrew Academy on 16th Street many years ago, and that is that Abraham says at the beginning of Chayei Sarah, he defines himself as being a ger v’toshav. Means that I’m both a citizen, but I’m also, you know, I’m also someone from a distance. And, you know, you’re describing yourself as being someone from a distance, but someone who’s very much part of society.

But what we just heard from you in the last few minutes is that the society is a society of ger v’toshav, of people who are there, but people who at one time didn’t quite fit in, and now they fit in exactly. And you’re talking about a situation where it’s going to be mixed up. And that’s what you said in the podcast. They’ll be talking about assimilation. We won’t know who the ger is and who the toshav is. And we’re going to, we’re not going to know exactly how they merged the two of us. So Abraham was really prophetic when he described not only himself but the Jewish personality as being that of a ger v’toshav.

Noah Efron [37:29 – 37:40]: That is beautiful. I’m gesticulating wildly for those who are just listening saying yes, yes, yes, that is a wonderful description and exactly what I believe and thank you for that.

Geoffrey Stern [37:42 – 38:11]: Okay, I don’t want to jump in on this alumni reunion here, but I do want to thank you both for being on the podcast.

This was an exceptional episode. I want to encourage every listener of Madlik to listen to the Promised Podcast. You get this refreshing, uplifting voice every week, and you get a front seat at the 73rd Aliyah.

I’m going to call you to the land of Israel by coming patriots from America. So Shabbat Shalom, thanks for joining us, Noah.

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 Noach. We are also honored to be joined by Yigal Carmon, founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Welcome to Madlik, Yigal.

Yigal Carmon [2:22 – 2:29]: Thank you. Thank you so much, Geoffrey. And thank you, Adam. Rabbi Adam, thank you.

Geoffrey Stern [2:29 – 4:07]: So I’m going to ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself, but because I’m afraid you might be a little bit humble, first I’m going to give your bio bio and then you can tell us about your personal journey. So you are the president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute called MEMRI. You combine four different areas of expertise: intelligence, counterterrorism, diplomacy, and research.

Carmon is a colonel, retired in the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. He was a counter-terrorism advisor to two Israeli prime ministers, heading governments for both Likud and Labor, overseeing the national deployment against terrorism. He participated in the 1991-92 peace talks in Madrid and Washington. As deputy head of the Israeli delegation negotiating with Syria in 1998, you founded MEMRI, which bridges the language gap between the Middle East and the West by monitoring, translating, and analyzing the media of the Arab and Muslim world in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Dari, Turkish, Russian, and Chinese media.

You have briefed Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, in addition to the FBI, the NSC, and the Library of Congress. You’ve briefed the European Union, European Parliament, the UK Parliament, OSCE, and NATO, and participated in conferences on counterterrorism and diplomacy. It is an absolute honor and pleasure to have you. And now that I’ve given the official bio, Yigal, why don’t you tell us your personal story?

Yigal Carmon [4:09 – 4:42]: Thank you so much, Geoffrey, for inviting me and for giving me the chance. In fact, and this has to do a lot with what we will be talking about. I’m a child of Holocaust victims. I’m not calling it survivors but victims, although part of the family survived from Hungary, Transylvania. And my family, my grandparents perished in Auschwitz. My aunt, who was a beautiful woman, was not killed; she was used. And later on, she came to Israel and she actually took her life.

Yigal Carmon [4:42 – 5:13]: We were three kids in a village near the sea—Givat Olga. Some ministers came from there, but anyway. It was the 50s, and there were no hospitals for mental problems. So my aunt, she grew. We grew with her at home. There was no food. So my parents sent my older brother to a kibbutz. He went to Kibbutz Gesher. He went to the army with his girlfriend. Together they were already in a home. And he was in the air force. In April 62, he crashed.

Yigal Carmon [5:44 – 6:15]: They thought about the worst idea, that whenever he’s in the air, she will be in the control tower. Including that horrible day. So this is my background. I went to the army. I studied Arabic at the university and then the history of the Middle East. And from there in the military, it was the route to intelligence. And there I occupied several positions, also partially in the territories. I was an instructor in our National Defense College, teaching about the Arab and Muslim world.

Yigal Carmon [6:15 – 6:47]: My last office job was as an advisor to Shamir and to Rabin on countering terrorism, which I can say in two words, and everybody will understand what it is. The targets of terrorists are countless and in every country, in every place, including Israel, while the number of those who are fighting it, police, military, and intelligence, everything is minuscule. And how do you bridge this huge gap? This is the story of countering terrorism. So I go back to our. This is my brief story.

Yigal Carmon [7:19 – 7:27]: If you want to ask something about it, I’m ready to answer. If not, I will move to our Parasha.

Geoffrey Stern [7:28 – 10:13]: So I think you give a wonderful background to the Parasha because we are going to talk, as I said in the introduction, about the origin myth of language. And I think when you say that the enemies against us are infinite and our tools to fight the enemies are very finite and small, I think language is ultimately the tool that you found that enables us to understand. Understanding our enemies and potential friends is more important than any weapon.

So, as we all know, the story of the Tower of Babel, what we might forget is because we focus so much on the tower that the tower is only a sideshow. The real story is language. It says “Vayehi kol ha’aretz devarim achadim,” that the whole land was one language. And “devarim achadim,” they were just single ideas, you might even say, and they were combining to create this tower because when you can pretend to be all one, you can do good, but you can also do terrible things. God felt threatened by this, and what he did, we’re not gonna get into the details, but he confused them by creating multiple languages.

And one of the commentaries that Adam and I discovered in a previous episode is the Netziv. And the Netziv writes that really what the participants wanted to do was to give the impression that they spoke in one voice and they actually wished to repress any difference of opinion and knowledge of individual ulterior motives. When I was telling you that we were going to have this discussion, you shared with me a screenshot. And the screenshot, because I said we had no video on our podcast, it says it has a talking head, maybe an anchor of an Arabic news show. And it says, “How can I say in English the same things that I say in Arabic?” And I think that’s the essence of your discovery and insight.

And maybe you can tell me the importance of piercing the veil that us outsiders believe exists, that the whole Arab world speaks in one voice. And they ultimately say what we want to hear. And how that group think can lead to all sorts of problems. In fact, the most important tool that we have is to open the hood and to give our enemies and potential friends the benefit of listening to what they really think and what they really say.

Talk to us a little bit about the power of language.

Yigal Carmon [10:15 – 13:05]: Thank you. Because you opened the door for what I wanted to say. You know, we began our long travel with the idea of breaching the language gap. The idea was that if we only provide the information that is there in the Arab world into languages that people understand, then everything will be fine. We just have to give it in that language that they know. Little did we know.

I will relate to history and to the present time. It is not enough for people to understand what is being said, and it’s said in deceiving ways. One in Arabic, one in English. But even when they get it right in their language, from the Arabic, do they listen? This is actually. It will turn to be a discussion of the limitation of language to impact people’s minds.

I want to begin with something that the late renowned authority on the Arab and Muslim world, Professor Bernard Lewis, told me once: if only MEMRI existed when Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf, things would have been different. And this sentence could be also regarding other examples. And I’ll bring them in a moment. And he was wrong. He was wrong. Even when you give it to people into their face, they don’t listen.

I want to move from our mission to history, but also to others. Four months before the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin wrote an essay himself. 4,000 words. We translated it in which he said, Ukraine is a historical fiction. There is no such thing as Ukraine. The kingdom of Russia in the 9th century was in Kyiv. So it’s nothing. Anyone in his right mind would understand what’s coming. Indeed, in four months, it came an invasion. If Ukraine is a historical fiction, this is what’s coming. No one listened, no one looked at it, no one wanted to.

Geoffrey Stern [13:06 – 13:32]: Let’s fast forward for a second. I believe that I read in the press that Hamas published their plans and actually were practicing the ultimate attack in plain sight. And I believe there was a great scholar from MEMRI who published an article a month before the attack, pretty much predicting it. His name was Yigal Carmon.

Why don’t we talk about present time? Because I don’t think we need to go back that far.

Yigal Carmon [13:33 – 15:18]: Well, because had I known the past at the time, I would have done much more. But I did issue an early warning. On August 31, 2023, I published an early warning titled Sign of Possible War. In September and October, I was faced with attacks by colleagues, former colleagues, who told me, Yigal, stop with this racism. You cannot be defended anymore.

When we did school books, we analyzed, translated, and analyzed school books in the Muslim world. People told me, is this. What nonsense are you dealing with? This is what you do in MEMRI. You know, I want to say, Geoff, we tend to think, and this is what I thought in ’98 when we began, that the only thing you need to do is to provide it. We provided for years all the information about the planning in 2018. They provided a map with the routes to the settlement—not settlement, the communities—with the number of minutes to each one of them. They showed various videos of their training and how they attack communities. And those who didn’t want to listen simply closed their eyes and their ears and wouldn’t see anything.

Geoffrey Stern [15:18 – 15:40]: So, Yigal, is there a solution? You say that sometimes we see the writing on the wall right in front of us, and even if we translate, which is what you guys do, it still doesn’t help. Or we just have to learn the lessons of history and get the word out. Or is there a solution for this?

Yigal Carmon [15:42 – 16:00]: Well, I think that the problem is political or ideological in reason and not the problem of language. In my naiveté at the time, I thought it’s a problem of language, and if only we provided.

Adam Mintz [16:00 – 16:26]: Can I ask a question? Why is it that our enemy—who will be the enemy in each of these situations, why would they give these signs? If I was preparing for October 7, I would think that I would try to keep it a secret. Why would Hamas give these signs? I know you’re saying that Israel missed them, but I want to know what was Hamas thinking?

Yigal Carmon [16:27 – 19:24]: Yes. Well, on the one hand, they thought that by doing so, they are deceiving; there was a huge deception plan. And that they are saying, well, the Israelis, the Jews, that’s the case. The Jews would think if we do that, it’s not serious, it won’t happen. That’s one idea. They had this deceptive plan, but also because this is their ideology, because this is what they believe in, because they thought that this is the time to move ahead.

And the idea that they are like anybody else, namely modern, Westernized, they would not launch something that has no hope to succeed. They don’t have an interest in it. I will quote our former head of military intelligence. On October 7, it was already in the inside. He said there is no need for signs, early signs. It’s enough to look at the interests. Well, and you were head of intelligence. Your life is signs. Early signs. But the interest.

Let’s go back to the interest because this is what you are asking about. Their interests are different than our interests. Who told you that it’s one interest for all human beings? No, it’s not the same interest. Who told you that it’s the same situation for them and for us, and that all that they want is to flourish?

You know, there is a big, huge, huge, huge line about Gaza before October 7, and we published it in abundance, that there was a humanitarian crisis. There’s hardly a bigger lie than that Gaza was flourishing. We showed it in videos, BBC, Al Jazeera, influencer. The son of Haniya said, and Gaza was the most beautiful city. You couldn’t believe this is Gaza; that’s the son of Haniya. But our people said, oh, all they want is a good life, good life, because this is what we want. Well, there is a difference. And for that, you have to take in a different ideology, a different set of beliefs. And if you don’t do that, you don’t understand that no translation will help.

Geoffrey Stern [19:24 – 22:24]: I think what you’re saying, Yigal, is it’s not enough to listen to language, even if it’s the language spoken in its original. You have to look at the context. You have to look at the contents of the culture, of the religion, the whole person. You have to look at the tics, you have to look at their expressions. And that actually is how you and I talk. We’re looking at each other now. It’s not the same as if I was reading a transcript of this conversation.

So I think it really means that we have to look deeper. We can’t say that translation by itself is worthless, but it is only the beginning of a window into the other. And I think at the end of the day, another way of saying what you’re saying is for those who will really are concerned about the Palestinians and about our neighbors, to give them due respect, you have to listen to them first. And projecting our Western values on them is the ultimate crime. You could even call it colonialism. If we project our own Western ideas, we have to listen to them.

And I was looking through your site. I want to segue into something a little bit more positive now. I saw on your website where you had recent snippets that were on TV around the Arab world, where the interviewer would say to somebody from Hamas, do you regret what happened two years ago on October 7? Do you feel that the casualties that were incurred are your fault? And you run the whole clip. In one of them, the Hamas spokesman says, this is the end of the interview. Turn off the camera. Have you no respect? In another, he mumbles something.

And I think probably the intent of these clips is to show that Hamas is really bankrupt, as if we didn’t know it. But what interested me was the way the questions were asked by the reporters.

They were saying, the Arab street is asking. We are asking, was this worth it? And I’m wondering if there is any silver lining that you can find and uncover as you listen to broadcasts and social media where the Arab world is looking at 70 years of conflict with Israel that has produced nothing except death and resources thrown away that could be spent on their own people. Do you find the beginning of a sentiment where they’re starting to ask these types of questions of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood? Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

Yigal Carmon [22:26 – 22:56]: Of course there is, Geoff. And it is with those who are moving to Westernization. Take the Emirates. The Emirates have established in Abu Dhabi a compound with a mosque and a church and a synagogue. I spoke to this synagogue. This is in total contradiction to Islam. Muhammad said, no two religions,

Yigal Carmon [22:56 – 23:27]: and then they put three, not two. There are liberals and reformists. We are exposing all the, quote, unquote, bad guys, but we are exposing all the good guys. And there are many. And they live more safely in Abu Dhabi and in Saudi Arabia than in Paris or Berlin or any country in the West. London, which is Londonistan,

Yigal Carmon [23:27 – 23:59]: which is ruled by the Islamists. So there are people, there are voices. Unfortunately, the west gives more voice, more importance, more legitimacy to those who pretend to represent the Palestinians more than they do themselves. Look, Hamas took over by force on June 2007 in

Yigal Carmon [23:59 – 24:31]: a coup. They threw people from the windows. Now I want to say something about the difficulty in accepting Israel. The problem is huge. This was our land, and this was the kingdoms and the Temple and its Temple Mount to this very day. The name and even the Mufti. Haj Amin al Husseini, in 25 did a

Yigal Carmon [24:31 – 25:01]: tourist publication and he said, this is the place of Haikal Suleiman, the Temple of Suleiman, that is Shlomo, King Solomon. So it is a situation that it was what it was. And then we went to the Diaspora and other people came, and gradually, and especially in the

Yigal Carmon [25:01 – 25:27]: last hundred years, 150 years, many came from many places. It’s obvious by their names that relate to the city or country where they came from and this became their homeland. So it’s very difficult for them, as much as it is difficult for us to give it up.

Geoffrey Stern [25:28 – 26:08]: Does it work both ways? Do our neighbors get to see Israeli TV or Israeli media? Do they get to see, with all its imperfections, our democracy in action? The debates held in the Knesset? Do they need a MEMRI as well? And is there in, but behind closed doors, do they ultimately respect the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and the only really functioning government with elections and all of the other dirty parts of being a democracy, but nonetheless a democracy, well, they.

Yigal Carmon [26:08 – 26:47]: See it and they learn it. And the Arabs in Israel, who know very well what is Israel and how it can impact their life. We have to mention that they did not take part in the big celebration of Palestine from the river to the sea. There were no demonstrations, there was no violence. There were those who are connected to the jihadis or others in the Arab world who wrote in the social media, but there were no demonstrations.

Geoffrey Stern [26:47 – 27:23]: I think that’s the story that doesn’t get told. I think we talk about translation. What didn’t happen amongst Arab Israelis during the last two years is one of the stories that does not get told. I want to close with some quick questions. Iran. We always hear that the people of Iran have a deep history of the West and of democracy. Is there any chance of regime change? Or is this just another example of us Westerners projecting our hopes and aspirations on another culture?

Yigal Carmon [27:24 – 27:56]: The story of Iran is complicated. Iran is made up of 50%, 52% of Farsis Persians and 48%, almost 50% are of different ethnic minorities. Baluchis in the east, Arabs, Ahwazis south of with all the oil resources. Then

Yigal Carmon [27:56 – 28:27]: you have the Kurds in the west, and then in the north, the Azeris. And they make up 48% or more, a little more so. And they are looking, the first three are looking for their own autonomy, even independence, even they want to have their own life as a call it minority, call it an ethnic group, especially the

Yigal Carmon [28:27 – 29:00]: Kurds that have others in Iraq and in Syria and in Turkey. Now the hope, our hope would only be if these minorities, ethnic groups are given their rights and diminish the dreams of the Persians that are now covered with Islamism, with Shia to take

Yigal Carmon [29:00 – 29:30]: over their place in the world. The way they perceive it, the Persians are the problem. You know, some Persians in America, they are for democracy in Iran, but not for those ethnic minorities. They are for freedom from the Ayatollahs. But these ethnic groups should stay with us, even if they don’t want to.

Yigal Carmon [29:30 – 30:01]: It’s very complicated, Geoff, extremely complicated. But for Israel the best and for America the best solution is to grant these ethnic group support and have the Farsis, the Persians, struggle with the status of not an empire. From the time of Cyrus, where he controlled

Yigal Carmon [30:01 – 30:32]: also Yehuda and the land of the Jews and gave them the permission which we celebrate to go back, this is over. They have to adapt to being like all the empires of the West. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, who wasn’t an empire, the Austro-Hungarian, they were all empires. They gave it up. They simply gave it up to be their

Yigal Carmon [30:32 – 30:53]: own home culture, nationality. Then they united as a the European Union, but voluntarily and with benefits. This should be the fate of Iran and only through this we will have peace.

Geoffrey Stern [30:54 – 31:22]: In terms of Lebanon, there’s obviously been a sea change there. With Hezbollah seemingly not in control and the potential for the great society that existed beforehand. It used to be Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. Are you monitoring? I’m sure you’re monitoring their media and their press too. Are they finding their old voice again or again? Am I projecting?

Yigal Carmon [31:22 – 31:53]: No. When the colonial powers left, they created an impossible political structure. In 1911, the Italians united Tripoli and Benghazi and Fezzan. You cannot unite them. You could through a dictatorship, the King, Sanusi, and then Gaddafi. It doesn’t work anymore. They are

Yigal Carmon [31:53 – 32:23]: split and nothing can unite them. In Iraq, at the time of the Ottoman Empire, there were three vilayets, three main districts, Basra for Shiites, Baghdad for Sunnis and Mosul for the Kurds. But the British united them by force. What happened? All crumbled down. Except at the time

Yigal Carmon [32:23 – 32:54]: of Saddam Hussein, he held them with fire and blood and sword, and they held as long as they could. And then it crumbled down. The Iranians helped and it became, whatever it is, a non-entity political nonentity. Now in Lebanon, they brought together Shiites and Christians and Sunnis into a mishmash of one state.

Yigal Carmon [32:54 – 33:25]: It crumbled down. There was the war in 75, and now. And of course, the Shiites got support from Iran and became the strongest power. Now, because there is an Israel that fights Hezbollah, they have to adapt somehow to a different structure where they are not the power. And it seems

Yigal Carmon [33:25 – 33:56]: to be working, but it doesn’t really work. And the American ambassador in Turkey and in Lebanon, Tom Barak, is trying his best to appease Hezbollah, just to have a situation that the President will not have to struggle with an insagration of violence. This doesn’t help.

Speaker A: Hezbollah has to be finished off. Otherwise, there will be no Lebanon, no Lebanon of the others, of the Christians, and the Shiites, the Hezbollah. The Shiites will not come together because they feel they have the support of Iran, and they will have it one way or another, back like it was in ’82. So you don’t see what you hope to see. Unfortunately, Job,

Yigal Carmon [34:27 – 34:59]: you don’t see it. It’s a situation on fire. Sometimes it blows up against Israel, sometimes against, well, the Syrian terrorist is trying to enter. Sometimes this thing that the colonialists did, the French, to bring together, like the Italians in Libya, like the British in Iraq,

Yigal Carmon [34:59 – 35:02]: it is forced on people and it cannot work.

Geoffrey Stern [35:03 – 35:41]: So you don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I guess we just live in a very bad neighborhood that was really, I guess, ruined, as you have it, by the colonialists who sliced and diced it in a way that every country almost was divided by different ethnic groups to ensure that there would be no stability. It was almost designed like the Tower of Babel to fall from the get-go. And that. That’s a very, I think, depressing picture. Is there any hope at the end?

Yigal Carmon [35:42 – 37:37]: There is hope. Europe a few centuries ago was all battling each other. Were there any better? All tribes, all empires, they were fighting each other. The Germans, the French, who didn’t fight internally and between each other. This was the face of Europe. And then after World War II, they decided that enough is enough. The culture allowed for it. The Christian situation, the role of the Pope, who at some point in the past was sending armies to the Holy Land. Armies? No, not anymore. There are soldiers there to protect, and they are assured that tourists are watching and no more. Europe was in no better situation. It was enough fighting. Look at France, all kinds of galleys. Every country, Italy, is divided between so many elements, and yet they are together. They prefer now life and good life over anything else. And the religion helps them.

In our case, the religion of Islam doesn’t help. To the contrary, it is fighting. So they have to go through a process of Westernization, of giving less importance to religion. It is tough, but it will happen. We just have to live and see 200, 300 years.

Geoffrey Stern [37:38 – 38:19]: Okay, well, at least we’ll be on record. They’ll look up the podcast and they’ll say that you were right, and please God, it’ll come sooner rather than later. But thank you for joining us and thanks for the important work that you do. You know, sometimes the truth doesn’t sound so good, but it has to be said. And I think that you, like the ancient prophets, are telling, have a message that might not be that optimistic in the short run and is sobering, but is important to hear. And thank you for sharing it with us and keep up your important work.

Yigal Carmon [38:19 – 38:20]: Thank you, Geoffrey.

Welcome to Madlik. I am praying and hoping that by the time we publish this podcast that the hostages are free. But I think if the Semel, the image of the hostage has been the guiding element of the last two years, it comes back in a very strong way to Tselem Elokim, to the image of God. And I think that we are with them. And it’s a wonderful metaphor for the whole community to be in the individual. And we hope and pray they come back. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at the 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 start the Torah all over again and read Parashat Bereshit. We are also honored to be joined by Tomer Persico, author of “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea,” published by NYU Press in July of this year. Dr. Persico is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a senior research scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Welcome, Tomer. Thanks for joining us.

Tomer Persico [2:43 – 2:44]: Thank you for having me.

Geoffrey Stern [2:45 – 3:01]: It’s wonderful to have you here and especially on the first episode of the new reading cycle of the Torah. What I would love to know is what caused you to pick this subject and write this book, and how many years did it take you to write it?

Tomer Persico [3:02 – 5:07]: Oh, Okay. I mean, I wrote it in about three years, but the research for it took me over a decade. I’ve been collecting material and researching this really for a long time. Because what I was interested in is a few questions. I’m answering a few questions first. Why do we now live in a world in which it is logical and moral for privileged or for the powerful to share their power or to give up their privilege? And a lot of contemporary voices answer that question by saying, well, privileged persons or powers will not give up their power unless you take it by force. And I thought that the answer was different. The answer was connected to morals and ethics and ideas.

Another question I wanted to answer was this super interesting but scandalous question, why the West? Why is the West today the hegemonic, most powerful cultural civilization in the world? And what I found out is that the thread that connects these two questions is connected itself with that idea, with that unbelievably revolutionary idea that happens to be mentioned in one verse in chapter I of Genesis. And that’s the idea that all persons were created in the image of God. And so I began to research it. I actually, when I began writing, I couldn’t believe such a book was not written, because you would think such an obvious, basic, fundamental idea. People must have written about it. But actually, no. And so I went to work. I wrote what I thought I wrote as an intellectual and cultural history of the West hinging on the seminal place of that idea. And the more I researched, the more I found out how much this idea is fundamental to the world we live in today.

Geoffrey Stern [5:07 – 6:26]: So, I mean, having read the book, it might be not only the most radical idea in the Torah itself. I think the knee-jerk reaction of most people would say it’s monotheism. That’s what Judaism gave to the world, that there’s one God. And here we are. This idea of the image of God, you trace in this amazing. It’s really a history of ideas book. That’s the genre. And there are too few books like that. It’s almost like a James Mitchner novel called “The Source.” You’re digging down. You’re starting at the very beginning, and you trace this idea all the way up to the present. It reads like a novel.

And I think many of the podcasts that you’ve been on or the articles written about the book focus on the ending about secularism. How do you attach secularism to a biblical text? But I enjoyed the journey so much that what we’re going to do today, with your permission, is we’re going to look at a few revelations that occur along the way that I think are as profound as the end destination. And maybe we’ll have you back, as there’s so much to talk about in this book. Rabbi, you read the book, what, in one sitting over the weekend?

Adam Mintz [6:26 – 7:11]: So it’s an amazing book. And I agree that we don’t have enough books on the history of ideas. I like the fact that you choose the image of God, which is not actually a Jewish idea. Or maybe it is. It’s something found in the Hebrew Bible. But it’s talking about the creation of humankind. And I felt that tension also. I mean, you say, Geoffrey, you said, what did Judaism give to the world? Judaism gave monotheism, but this is something that Judaism gives to the world through the Torah. Even though it’s talking not specifically about Jews versus other people.

Geoffrey Stern [7:12 – 7:13]: Absolutely.

Tomer Persico [7:13 – 7:38]: I just wanted to say, as I show in the book, Judaism or ancient Hebrew culture didn’t actually invent the actual idea of the image of God. But what the Bible does is that it implements this idea for everybody, for all people. Because until the Bible, the pharaoh was the image of God or some mythological hero was the image of God. And the Bible says everybody is the image of God. And that, of course, changes everything.

Geoffrey Stern [7:39 – 8:21]: Okay, well, what changed everything when I started reading the book. Cause I didn’t know really what to expect is this, as I said in the intro, where you make the point that actually we have no reason to believe that ancient Israelites thought that God did not have a body. Body was infinite. And all of the stuff that Greek philosophy fed us, and that it is actually very primary to the power of the concept that we take these words very literally. Could you explain that? Because I think that would be novel to a lot of people. We all think of the image of God as a metaphor. And you don’t take it as a metaphor in the eyes of the ancient Israelites that heard it for the first time?

Tomer Persico [8:22 – 10:36]: Yeah. I mean, I simply think that the Bible didn’t think it was a metaphor and that our sages Chazal didn’t think it was a metaphor. There is no place in the Bible that mentions that God doesn’t have a body or even mentions that you cannot see God. We learn from the Bible that it’s dangerous to see God. You can see God and die. It’s dangerous. But it’s actually possible to see God. And quite a few instances within the Bible, people see God, Moses on the mountain, and later, you know, in chapter 24, Moses and 70 of the elders of Israel see God, it says that and you know, in different places. So apparently God has a form that you can see. And what for the Bible and for our sages, the image of God was, was the form, the actual contours of the form of God.

Geoffrey Stern [0:00 – 10:37]: Now that has, on one hand, you know, it’s upsetting to us. We are, I would say, simply after the Maimonidean revolution. Maimonides really entrenched in Judaism the view that any thought about a body for God or a form of God is idolatry. That’s all nonsense, of course. God is infinite and totally abstract.

But before Maimonides and even in Maimonides’ time, people argued with that, didn’t think that was obvious. So we are already after that revolution. And for us, it’s strange, but what it does in a significant way is it changes the meaning of idolatry. Idolatry isn’t the foolish belief that some two foot statue of a, I don’t know, an elephant or a camel or whatever is God. Idolatry is substituting a two-foot statue as the idol of God for the real Tselem, the real presence of God, which is the human person.

That’s the idea. If you are an idolater, you’re missing out on the real presence of God which is in your interlocutor, in the person you meet in every human being. And you’re instead of that worshiping some stone or wooden statue.

Adam Mintz [10:37 – 11:07]: So Geoffrey, at the risk of, I know we’re having the conversation before we get to the sources, so obviously what you said is brilliant. I was bothered when I read the book by the following. So, we’re created in the image of God. Humans are created in the image of God. If that’s true, that if humans see God, they’re gonna die, why should there be such a, you know, a fear of seeing the image that we became?

Tomer Persico [11:10 – 12:01]: Yeah, interesting question. I think, you know, God has His wish of privacy and sort of transcendence. It’s undignified towards God if you simply are too close to Him, like a king. You know, in the past also, kings were not simply seen by commoners, right. I think it’s more of a distance thing than a metaphysical impossibility. And so, God wants us to keep our distance, except for, you know, special occasions. If there’s a prophet, sometimes He reveals Himself.

Ezekiel or Isaiah, they saw a certain, you know, a certain form of God, right? And of course Moses sees God, etc. So, it’s possible it’s simply kept for very special people in very special occasions.

Adam Mintz [12:01 – 12:29]: I’d just say one last thing, and that is, you know, in Anim Zemirot, we take that idea and we say kesher, Tefillin, hera, leannav, which means that Moses saw only the knot of God’s Tefillin on His head. He saw just the back of His head. And I always thought that’s like, you know, King Charles, that you only see King Charles when he’s dressed, you know, in his royal clothing, that God is only seen when He’s wearing His Tefillin.

Tomer Persico [12:30 – 12:30]: Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [12:31 – 13:59]: So let me jump in for a second. You know, I’m trained in the philosophy of science and when you look at theories, you weigh two theories. It seems to me that the theory that we use, we moderns, is that God has no body, He’s infinite, He’s omnipotent and all that. And those are wonderful words, but as a being governed by the four, five senses that I have, they’re really meaningless words.

Do I really know what infinite is when I live in a finite world? So there are problems with that theory and there are few benefits. Then you have Tomer’s new way of looking at it, which is God is physical and God is identical to us. And it’s equally as problematic because how could this God, universal—and I wouldn’t even say, I’m not going to say universal—how could this all-powerful God be like me? I’m mortal, He’s not.

But you look at the theory and what are the takeaways? The takeaways are, and you bring this verse, Genesis 9:6: Whoever sheds human blood, by human hand shall that one’s blood be shed. For in the image of God was human created. Now we’re not talking about idolatry anymore, we’re not talking about metaphysics anymore. We are saying that God physical and making every human being identical to God means that human rights is born. And that’s one of the messages of this book.

Tomer Persico [13:59 – 15:59]: Exactly. What I try to convey through all through this book is that the way we think about a human person influences how we organize our society and how we legislate our laws. So the Bible is explicitly arguing with other lists of laws, other systems of legislation within ancient Mesopotamia and even Greece and Rome, who for them, substituting a person to be punished for another person’s crime was something that was done matter of factly.

Sometimes it was done in a way that was a sort of a measure for measure, logical within the legislative system. So if I kill your son, you kill my son. This sort of thing. Now, my son, of course, didn’t do anything wrong, but that’s logical if you don’t think that each and every person is a world unto themselves, special, unique, and dignified with the image of God. If so, yes, you can substitute people, or sometimes my son, or my wife, et cetera, are considered simply organs of my extended body.

So if you pluck out my eye, I pluck out your eye. If you kill my son, I kill your son. Simply organs of a whole organism. The Bible explicitly argues with that and says sons will not be punished for the sins of their fathers, nor fathers for the sins of their sons. Each will be punished for their own sin. Or the verse that you read right: Whoever spills a man’s blood, by man, their blood will be spilled. Because in the image of God, man was created. Their blood will be spilled and not anyone else’s, why? Because each and every person was created in the image of God.

Geoffrey Stern [16:01 – 17:27]: And it doesn’t stop there. We’re gonna move on to other subjects in the book, but here when we talk about the physicality of God’s image, is this human being. You quote rules about when you kill a convict for murder and you have to hang his body in public; you can’t leave it overnight. Why? Because it is an insult to God. And the Talmud explains because it is God hanging there. That’s almost a line from a book by Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz where he looked at that child hanging and he said, God is there hanging.

This goes back to our midrashim It becomes very, very powerful. And I will say later in the book, you start talking about philosophers like Saint Anselm and Descartes, and they prove that God exists because of the way we think of God. And the truth is, you and I and Rabbi know all they proved is that God exists in their mind. They didn’t prove he exists outside of their mind. But that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a leap that changes the discussion from God and what’s out there to man becomes the Godhead. It’s a book by Erich Fromm, ‘You Shall Be as Gods.’ This is a very, very powerful, I think, paradigm shift.

Tomer Persico [17:28 – 17:59]: What happens is the minute Christianity is formed and basically adopts the Bible as its foundational text, of course it adds the New Testament, it also adopts the idea of the image of God. But it does something with it. Christianity has a trajectory of individualization and internalization; things become more individualized and more internalized. And the image of God also becomes internalized. It becomes for different Christian thinkers in different Christian times…

Tomer Persico [17:59 – 18:30]: It becomes the conscience or reason or the soul or the will, etc. Different things. In any way, it becomes an internal ability. So when it becomes reason, suddenly the image of God is our ability to think straight, to think in an orderly way, to think in a rational way, not to believe in anything, but to check things. And it gives us the certainty that if we think straight, we…

Tomer Persico [18:30 – 19:00]: Can actually discover what the world is about. We can actually. There’s some correspondence between what we think and the world. This is already the seeds of science.

Because if we didn’t have that understanding, why would we think that our investigation or examination of the world can discover anything real? We trust that God gave us reason. Reason is the image of God, and so we can discover the world. And what you mentioned before about secularism, what I show in the book, and this is many people are attached to that because there’s an ironic twist here.

What I show in the book is that the image of God at the end had an immense influence on the secularization process. Because if we believe that we are special, autonomous, conscious beings because we are made in the image of God, we can at first, of course, thank God, worship God, et cetera. But there is a way, there is a vector, in which that turns into our consecration of our autonomy.

We take a lot of interest and importance in our autonomy. This leads on one direction, to rights discourse. Please allow me to think what I want, to say what I want, to believe what I want. Allow me the freedom of movement and property, et cetera, et cetera. But in another trajectory, it leads to secularization because we say, my autonomy is so important to me. I don’t want anybody to interfere with it, including some divine judge or father up there.

If my autonomy is the most sacred thing, perhaps it’s even the image of God in me. I cannot have anyone boss over me, Lord over me. And so I will reject God for the sake of my autonomy. And that’s the way the image of God, in a way, twists. You know, it twists itself up and rejects God and rejects, of course, its own divinity. And we come into a secular world in which, you know, secular humanism basically posits that the most important thing for you is to, you know, protect your autonomy and your feelings and rationality and reject anything that is above you.

You know, it’s fascinating, in the Parsha, it says that God was afraid that man was going to usurp him. In Genesis 3:22, it says now that humankind has become like any of us. It was almost recognizing that the potential of making this being in the image of God was a threat to God itself. It all packed into the original idea.

I want to go back and I’m sure Rabbi Adam was as struck as I was the amount of time and pages spent on Christianity. And I thought in terms of, on the one hand, I’ve heard you in interviews, Tomer, saying that those right wingers, those religious nationalists who don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about Selim Elokim and human rights and all that, they need to know that it’s part of our tradition. And I assume the argument is based on. Because the original idea comes from us.

And you say they might argue that it’s a foreign idea, but certainly in your book itself, the fact that Christianity ran with this idea is very impressive. I think we can be chauvinistic about it and we can say like the father in Big Fat Greek Wedding, look what we created every idea, this amazing idea was invented by Jews, but we Jews didn’t run with it. Is that the implicit assumption that you make by spending so much time on Christianity?

I mean, in a way, yes. I mean, we have to admit first of all that we live today in a Christian world. We live in a world formed by Christianity. The West was formed by Christianity. And these are simple facts. I mean, the fact is that Christianity is the biggest religion in terms of numbers in the world. Obviously, it has influenced and indeed based whatever is built the West as it is.

So, of course, if my book wants to understand how the West was constructed according to a series of ideas developed from the image of God, Christianity has to play a very prominent part in it. But I will say I don’t think it’s totally a mistake to say that Judaism, first of all, of course, Judaism is at the root of this, right?

And I think Judaism not only contributed along the way, but something of its spirit is transcendent or given to Christianity. I think there really is a Jewish Christian tradition or a Judeo-Christian tradition, as sometimes it’s called. I know many people don’t like that expression and think it’s used manipulatively, etc. But I think it’s true.

There is a set of characteristics that characterizes Judaism and Christianity and differentiates them from Islam on one side and from the Eastern religions on the other. It concerns individuality, an emphasis on autonomy, it concerns a dialogical relationship with the divine. It even concerns a sort of rebelliousness against divine law and perhaps even against God itself. Remember, it’s already in the Bible that there’s fraught relations between man and God, and man sometimes rebels.

And Christianity itself, if you look at the history of Christianity, there is this dynamic, there is this spiral dynamics that always stresses more and more spirituality at the expense of divine law and institutions. So since Jesus and Paul, yeah, you know, they reject Jewish law in an effort to become more spiritual, more religious. And you can see it all through the Catholic Church’s history and of course, in the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, what are they saying?

We don’t need the Church’s hierarchy and the Pope and the councils and all the credo, and we need only to read the Bible ourselves and to be autonomous in how we interpret God’s word. That’s what they’re saying. And that also, of course, develops and culminates in secularism. Secularism basically says we don’t even need Protestant churches or institutions and we don’t even need Jesus to be really spiritual. This is the whole contemporary spirituality, new age scene. Right. That’s what they’re saying. We can be spiritual by connecting to the God within.

So, and obviously, as you show in the book, it did affect Judaism. It affected Reformed Judaism, which was very influenced. But I would argue, and I’d love to know what Adam thinks about this, that it also affected the Mussar movement in terms of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who focused on the internal life of the Jew. It focused on the Hasidic movement, where you have so many stories of arguing with God and rejecting the monopolization of our texts to the intelligentsia, that we all own it, like Luther said.

So these were ideas, I think, that reverberated throughout the culture. And I was not off put. I just noticed, and I think we live in a golden age. Many times in this podcast, we will quote a Christian scholar because they read our text and they come with it with their own insights. And if we can forget some of the baggage that we have with Christianity and Islam, we live in a golden age.

Today, people like Sy Held are writing books about Judaism as love, and they’re reclaiming ideas that Christianity ran with. And maybe part of what your book is doing is reclaiming this to its source.

Yes, yes. So, I mean, obviously I agree with Geoffrey. See what I find interesting, Tomer, to use a term that I think that the historian Jacob Katz introduced about neutral society, he said in the 1800s. So, of course, Protestantism led to secularism. Led to the reform movement. But what was interesting is once you came to that period in the 1800s, what was remarkable was that everybody interacted. Geoffrey. See, that was never true. It used to be that if you lived in. If you lived in Muncie or Bnei Brak, that you didn’t have any. You didn’t have any interaction with communities that were different than you were different religions. But starting in the 1800s, all the different religions interacted in what we call a neutral society. And I just wonder, Tomer, see, there you.

The autonomy reaches its ultimate because not only are you autonomous within your own religion, but you’re autonomous in a neutral society. You have to deal with other people from other religions who’ve chosen to be autonomous on their own for different reasons.

Tomer Persico [28:07 – 29:30]: Right? This is connected to the whole separation of church and state. At some point, Europeans realized that if they continue to force religion on each other, they’re going to exhaust themselves in wars and simply ruin themselves. This was the pragmatic reason for separating church and state. But there was also a principal reason, which was that the conscience, which became for many the image of God, needed to be free. If we are serious believers, we need to respect the image of God in others, right? In the person in front of us. Whatever they actually believe should be left to their own wishes.

We constructed this neutral society by giving importance and freedom to each and everyone’s autonomy—autonomy to believe as they wanted or not to believe. This is the process, right? And yes, because of that, of course, we live in a golden age in which we can argue and even share ideas with Christians without getting expelled or burned at a stake, et cetera.

Geoffrey Stern [29:30 – 31:47]: The last idea I want to discuss, given the time, is this idea that when we say the image of God, following your book, it’s not only the image of God, it’s also the mind of God. That, of course, affected science and discovery and curiosity. One of the thinkers, Marsilio Ficino, said worshiping the divine is as natural to men almost as neighing to horses or barking to dogs.

What he said is an idea that I’ve kind of come to on my own, where I believe—and that’s why I find religious texts, and in our case, Jewish religious texts, so fascinating—is that just as the human mind has a facility for music (and you can’t say, do I believe in music or do I not believe in music?), it’s something that we have a hush. We have an idea for the same about art. We have built into our DNA religion, and I would argue that even an atheist has the religion that he’s rejecting. Otherwise, we couldn’t “f” the ineffable.

The idea is that, as you bring it out in a whole section of the book, these thinkers started to look at this internalized mind of God that we have, and it has within it this ability, like Luther was saying, to come up with our own spiritual and religious ideas. But I will go so far as to say, Rabbi and Tomer, that as a result, there is this ability to look back at the history of religious ideas as something that is truly valid. That’s what your book is doing. What I mean to say is if we have built into our categories of our mind this concept of something transcending us, then the history of how man deals, is affected, and channels these ideas becomes a very important aspect of our humanity. That’s where the humanism of this original idea comes home.

Tomer Persico [31:48 – 33:02]: That’s amazing, Geoffrey. This is the first time we’re talking, and you use the word hush. This is exactly the word I use for the religious element in our life. I say this is a hush, like the sense of humor, like a musical sense, like an aesthetic sense. Some people have more of it than others, but everybody has some of it. You can appreciate something that is aesthetic, and in exactly that way, you can appreciate something that is holy, that has some presence. It’s there, and you just need to be sensitive enough to appreciate it.

And so, indeed, like you say, my book elaborates on different manifestations of that sense, on how people interpreted that sense at different times in different ways. It starts from Judaism to Christianity to the secular world today, even, in which we know there are instances of spirituality which is not connected to any religion, but simply as an expression of that wellspring inside us, that, like a dog barks, we do God, right?

Geoffrey Stern [33:02 – 33:02]: Yeah.

Tomer Persico [33:03 – 33:06]: And perhaps this is the real image of God inside us.

Geoffrey Stern [33:08 – 34:22]: Absolutely. Well, this has been an absolute pleasure. I am praying and hoping that by the time we publish this podcast, the hostages are free. If the Semel, the image of the hostage, has been the guiding element of the last two years, it comes back in a very strong way to Tselem Elokim, to the image of God. I think that we are with them, and it’s a wonderful metaphor for the whole community to be in the individual. We hope and pray they come back. Tomer, I hope you’ll come visit us again, and we can continue this discussion. I hope all of you will run out and buy this book. I’m going to put a link to the book in the show notes. It’s a fascinating resource. The sources in it are themselves amazing in God’s image. And as we start reading the Torah all over again, we’re really reading a book not so much about God, but about ourselves. I think that’s the takeaway. Hopefully, that makes it interesting to you as well as to Adam and I and Tomer, Shabbat Shalom.

Adam Mintz [34:22 – 34:24]: Thank you so much. Tomer, Shabbat Shalom.

Tomer Persico [34:24 – 34:26]: Thank you so much for having me. Yes, thank you.

So why bolt the Exodus onto a farm festival? Join us as we follow the breadcrumbs from Rashi’s clouds to Rashbam’s simple huts, from Deuteronomy’s tents to Isaiah’s canopy, to ask a bigger question: why does the Exodus seep into almost every Jewish practice? What happens when an event becomes the operating system of a people? 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 transition from the High Holidays to the third pilgrimage festival of Sukkot, or booths. Ancient agricultural holidays were repurposed by the Israelite religion to commemorate the Exodus, and Sukkot appears to be the most natural. The Torah itself connects the temporary booths of the fall harvest with the temporary booths of the migrating Israelite tribes. Or not. Join us as we question this common assumption and explore what Sukkot means for us.

So, Rabbi, we just finished Yom Kippur. What are you supposed to do after you break the fast? You’re supposed to take a nail and a hammer and start building your Sukkah. It never ends.

Adam Mintz [2:01 – 2:04]: It never, ever ends, from one to the next.

Geoffrey Stern [2:04 – 3:58]: So I actually was kind of thinking about this because there are two different kinds of cycles. There are the pilgrimage holidays, which start with Passover, go to Shavuot, and then to Sukkot, and they’re all linked to different agricultural milestones. And then there are the High Holidays, which have more to do with the New Year. It’s the time the world was created, maybe when man was created. Not that involved with history, but as we’re going to say and as we see today.

As I was davening, I was blown away at one point when I was reading the prayers about Rosh Hashanah, and it said zecher l’Yitziyat Mitzrayim. And I go, where did that come from? What does Rosh Hashanah have to do with Yitziyat Mitzrayim? So as I said in the introduction, Yitziyat Mitzrayim, leaving Egypt, actually became the overwhelming motif of the whole Torah. And that’s the real connection, Rabbi, to the fact that we’re finishing the Torah this week too. It’s a wonderful way to look at what’s the bumper sticker message of this whole journey that starts with Creation and ends up with Moses. So we’re gonna make a stab at it. We’re gonna try to understand how Yitziyat Mitzrayim, leaving Egypt, became so seminal.

So, first of all, let’s look at Sukkot in Shemot. In Exodus 23, it says: “And the festival, the Feast of the Harvest, of the first fruits of your work, of what you sow in the field, that’s Shavuot. And the Feast of Ingathering, Chag HaAsif, at the end of the year when you gather in the results of your work from the field.” Just a very straightforward rendering of the last two pilgrimage festivals. The same thing goes for Exodus 34.

Adam Mintz [3:58 – 4:10]: Interesting. By the way, the Chag HaAsif B’Tzeit HaShana, at the end of the year, they knew somehow that the cycle started with Rosh Hashanah. So Sukkot is the beginning of the year and the end of the year.

Geoffrey Stern [4:11 – 4:42]: They really are connected. I always thought they were kind of like ships passing in the night. But there is a reason we’re moving from the end-of-the-year or the beginning-of-the-year festival right into this Thanksgiving holiday, gathering the crop that needs to last you through the winter.

In Exodus 34, it says: “You shall observe the Feast of Weeks of the first fruits of the wheat harvest,” that is Shavuot, which later became associated with the giving of the Torah. But it never says that in the Torah itself.

Adam Mintz [4:42 – 4:43]: Correct? That’s rabbinic.

Geoffrey Stern [4:43 – 5:26]: Yeah. And the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year, again, not so much at the end of the year, KufaT HaShana, the season of the end of the year. In Deuteronomy, it says, “After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat, you shall hold the Feast of Booths for seven days. You shall rejoice in your festival with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the family of the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, living in your communities.” So, as an aside, Sukkot is a happy, very happy holiday. And the idea was that happiness should permeate for all of the citizens of Israel.

Adam Mintz [5:27 – 5:39]: And again, the happiness is because it’s the end of the agricultural cycle. So it’s a celebration of success. It’s like, you know, you went through a whole year, your investments were successful.

Geoffrey Stern [5:39 – 6:49]: Now you celebrate very naturally. No need for any embellishment or explanation. “You shall hold a festival for your God, seven days, in the place that God will choose for you,” that means where the temple was, which means this is a pilgrimage festival. God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have nothing but joy. V’Hayita ach sameach. A beautiful, beautiful holiday.

And now we get to Leviticus 23. And in Leviticus 23, it does something rather radical. “You shall live in booths seven days. All citizens in Israel shall live in the booths.” In 23:43, it says, “in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am your God.” L’ma’an yed’u doroteichem ki baSukkot hoshavti et Bene Yisrael b’hotzi otam me’eretz Mitzrayim; ani Hashem Elokeichem.

So it’s not that many times in general that the Torah goes out of its way to give, I guess, a commentary, the background, the context.

Adam Mintz [6:49 – 6:53]: It’s the only holiday where there’s an explanation like this.

Geoffrey Stern [6:54 – 9:18]: And in a sense, if we say that the agricultural holidays were, I would say, adopted or morphed into cultural historical holidays like Shavuot for the Torah, here’s an example of the Torah doing it itself. And that makes this rather interesting.

So, Rashi on that verse says, this does not mean literally booths but the Ananei haKavod, the clouds of glory. And he quotes a bunch of rabbinic sources, classic rabbinic sources. So we will see. There is one tradition that takes this metaphorically and it refers, or I wouldn’t say metaphorically, it takes it to describe not some four-wall booth with making sure that you had three complete sides and maybe a tefach on the fourth and that you have your s’chach on top. No, no, no, no, no.

In the desert, it was the Ananei haKavod, the clouds of glory. And then we, through the halacha, create a commemoration of that. So it’s not metaphorical. It just does not say that the Israelites were in tents. The Rashbam says the plain meaning of the text is in agreement with the view expressed in Sukkah 11, according to which the word sukkah is understood literally. The meaning of the verse then would be constructing for yourselves the festival of huts. When you gather in your grapes, you are to do this at the time you gather the produce of the earth, and your houses are filled with all the things the earth produces, such as grain, wine, and oil. This is to be done in order that you will remember in the desert for a period of 40 years when they neither owned land nor found themselves in a cultivated part of the earth. So, the Rashbam is doing a lot of maneuvers here, right? He’s saying if this is.

He’s thinking in the back of his head, we can hear the gears turning. If this is to commemorate the Jews leaving Egypt and being in tabernacles, why don’t we celebrate it at Passover time? Can you imagine what a wonderful seder it would be? We’d be sitting in a sukkah, we’d be having our matzah. It would be wonderful. It would also save us. We’d be able to go to work this week.

Adam Mintz [9:18 – 9:20]: We save a holiday. Correct.

Geoffrey Stern [9:21 – 10:34]: So what he says is, no, the reason why it’s this time of year, and of course, we noted that the verses, two of the verses associated with the end of the year, is because that’s actually when you gather the produce of the earth. The message from this, how does he connect it to agriculture? He says because the people neither owned land nor found themselves in a cultivated part of the earth, and still they were given all the crops. So it’s kind of a soft connection, Rabbi, but a very nice one. This is kind of like a Rorschach test. Everybody is reading something else into this. And he says, you must not fall into the trap of thinking that all this success is due to your own efforts. So at that time of year, Rabbi, that we are most inclined to say, kochi v’otzem yadi, I created my whole. Think back to the Israelites in the desert who didn’t have a harvest and were dependent on God. We need to learn the lesson that our success also comes only by depending on God.

Adam Mintz [10:34 – 11:01]: So let me just make a point, and that is, you know, today we very much connect Sukkot to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but the Rashbam is not interested in that. The Rashbam tries to locate Sukkot in the autumn, in the fall, but the fact that it comes right after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as far as the Rashbam is concerned, that’s completely by chance.

Geoffrey Stern [11:02 – 12:34]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the only connection you could make is the end of the year is the fall, and that’s when you gather the crops. But you’re absolutely correct. There’s a lot of thought that went into this. I will say something that occurred to me that I kind of liked is when he said that they neither owned land nor found themselves in the cultivated part of the earth. All of a sudden, this makes Sukkot something that can resonate and can be a profound lesson to urban dwellers, to people who are no longer involved with farming and agriculture. I kind of love that, that he is saying that the Jews or the Israelites in the desert celebrated a harvest festival without a harvest. Right. I think that’s kind of nice. People are learning lessons from this because they’re given a license by the text of the Torah that says ‘L’maan’ (in order that). In order that what? That you learn the lesson that the Israelites were somehow protected in the desert. Here we are bringing in our bounty. I think it’s a beautiful idea and it does fit in with other Thanksgiving type of holidays. It’s the time that you really have to be thankful when you are kind of gathering the produce. Hazorim Bedima, Barina Yiktzoru. You harvest in joy, you work hard, and now you could very well say, I did this. And this is a beautiful lesson.

Adam Mintz [12:34 – 12:37]: Good. So it’s about humility is really what he says.

Geoffrey Stern [12:37 – 12:42]: And Hakarat Hatov, recognizing the good God.

Adam Mintz [12:42 – 12:47]: Gratitude to God and humility are really flip sides of the same coin.

Geoffrey Stern [12:48 – 14:43]: I would go out even further, and I would say, because again, I am just infatuated with the comment that he made—that they neither owned land nor found themselves in a cultivated part of the earth—that this gives license to us today that we are not part of the supply chain, that we eat meat, we eat eggs, we eat crops, so we get them at the grocery store. And there is no connection to the growing of it. We still need to learn the lessons of the farmer. I love that. And I love the fact that he said the first people to do this were the Israelites, because guess what? They weren’t farming for 40 years in the desert, but they celebrated a harvest festival. So the Ibn Ezra says the Israelites made booths after they crossed the Sea of Reeds. This is going to be an important statement when we come to what modern academics have to say about this. But then he goes on, they certainly did so in the wilderness of Sinai. In other words, whether they created booths after they crossed the Sea of Reeds is one question, but they certainly did in the wilderness of Sinai, where they dwelt close to a year. This is the manner of all camps. This festival too, like Passover, is thus in memory of the Exodus, even though it is not observed in the month of Nisan. So Ibn Ezra again is struggling with the same question that the Rashbam was having. If this is truly recognizing or remembering, commemorating, leaving Egypt, should someone ask why is this commandment to be observed in the month of Tishrei, not the month Israel left Egypt? They can answer: God’s cloud was over the camp during the day and the sun did not strike them. However, they started to make Sukkot from the days of Tishrei onward because of the cold. So we have to look up where Ibn Ezra lived, right?

Adam Mintz [14:45 – 14:47]: He lived in Toledo, in Spain.

Geoffrey Stern [14:47 – 17:37]: It was never cold. Okay, but what he’s saying is this has more to do with the weather changing. And he is almost a hybrid approach. He is saying that whether they were protected by the clouds of Glory or actual huts depends on the time of year it was. But clearly, we can celebrate and commemorate those booths because they would make them in the fall, and that occurred in Tishrei. I said a second ago that the first line of Ibn Ezra is kind of interesting. It says the Israelite made booths after they crossed the Sea of Reeds. He breaks it up, if you recall, Rabbi, and this is based on a wonderful article in TheTorah.com but it’s really based on a commentary that was in Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible, the Torah, into German. The rabbi is named Naftali Herz Wessely, and he says he connects the Sukkot to a place called Sukkot. In Exodus 12:37 it says the Israelites journeyed from Ramses to Sukkot, about 600,000 fighting men on foot, aside from the non-combatants. In Exodus 13, it says they set out from Sukkot and encamped in Etam at the edge of the wilderness. And then finally in Numbers 33, it says the Israelites set out from Ramses and encamped at or in Sukkot. I added ‘or in’ because the Yachanu b’Sukkot literally means they, they dwelt in Sukkot. Right. So the argument that some of the academics are giving is, and by the way, Mendelssohn’s famous translation was called the Biur, which consisted of a German translation plus a Hebrew commentary. Rabbi Wessely suggests that the place was called Sukkot because God miraculously covered the Israelites with booths on the way out of Egypt. We’ve seen that many times before. Rabbi Be’er Sheva is called Beer Sheva because they made oaths there. The name is given to it because of what was done there. And so he takes this to be a more logical explanation for doing this. I don’t think that anyone will argue how the tradition took it. I think it’s pretty safe to say when our kids and grandkids go to Hebrew school and they are taught why we go into booths, they are probably told because the Israelites dwelled in booths. Absolutely. In the desert.

Adam Mintz [17:37 – 17:38]: Exactly.

Geoffrey Stern [17:38 – 18:12]: Right. But this is simply trying to understand where this all comes from. If you’re interested in exploring this further, I suggest you look at the Sefaria notes and the link to TheTorah.com. But there is another practical issue that comes up. Where did they get the supplies? And remember, Rabbi, these rabbinic scholars are looking at this. When they talk about a sukkah, they’re talking about specifications.

Geoffrey Stern [18:12 – 18:35]: It has to have four corners. It has to have live crops on the top, right?

Adam Mintz [18:12 – 18:13]: Yeah.

Geoffrey Stern [18:13 – 18:35]: So Rabbeinu Bechaya says one must suppose that they had regular commercial contact with traders from far off who brought to them the various necessities of life, including plants. So now not only are they disconnected from agriculture, but they actually are going to Whole Foods and picking up their S’Chach.

Adam Mintz [18:35 – 18:43]: You know, these comments are more a reflection of the fact that Rabbeinu Bechaya comes from Spain and he probably didn’t have access to all these things.

Geoffrey Stern [18:44 – 19:15]: Interesting. I like that context. The point is, when I post these podcasts on YouTube, I have to come up with images for the thumbnail. I go to ChatGPT and say, ChatGPT, make me an image. This week I have an image of Moses constructing a prefab sukkah. There’s a box on the side, and it says, “Family Sukkah.” And he’s looking at the instructions. It’s not that far from what Rabbeinu Bechaya and Vayechulu U’re’einu, which our grandmothers and great-grandmothers read. Their explanation is that merchants from foreign lands bought the Israelites everything they needed.

Geoffrey Stern [19:15 – 19:46]: So there really was this. We do project backward, Rabbi, into our text and imagine it’s not only the Hasidim that I assume must imagine that Moshe Rabbeinu was wearing a long black kapote and a fur hat, but we imagined if we’re building a sukkah. They must have built a sukkah too. Where’d they get it from? They must have ordered it from the local merchants who were stopping by. It is fascinating how pop-up sukkah brings these commandments and laws to life. I think it’s fascinating and a little bit humorous.

Geoffrey Stern [19:46 – 20:17]: I think what it does is it touches upon the process that is not so humorous, identifying what is important in the texts, what is important to us in our day, and how do we make it relevant now? The same academics who are saying it can’t be actual Sukkot or huts in the Bible have a very easy case to make. In Numbers 11, Moses heard the people weeping, every clan apart, at the entrance of each tent. When the miraglim, when the spies came back, everybody at the entrance of their tent. Rabbi, not at the entrance of their hut, of their sukkah.

Geoffrey Stern [20:17 – 20:47]: And when Balaam looked out at the children of Israel, he said, it’s clear that they were in tents, and they weren’t saying, we need some branches to put on the top so that we can see more. Less sun and more sky or whatever the halacha is. So I think we’re talking about the lessons that we learn. There’s no question that the sukkah itself, this kind of protective quality of it, is almost a magnet for us looking for meaning.

Geoffrey Stern [20:47 – 21:18]: If you look at Isaiah, Isaiah 4:5-6 says, God will create over the whole shrine and meeting place on Mount Zion a cloud by day and smoke with a glow of flaming fire by night. Indeed, over all the glory, a canopy shall serve as a pavilion for shade from heat by day and as a shelter for protection against drenching rain. So here we have Isaiah himself conflating the two concepts. The anane ha’kavod, these clouds of glory that protected the Israelites, and the sukkah itself. Here he mentions both.

Adam Mintz [22:15 – 22:18]: Very interesting rain, right?

Geoffrey Stern [22:18 – 24:04]: And it was the rainy season, so things are coming together, there’s no question. But he, of course, does not bring anything to talk about leaving Egypt. So I’d like to read a little bit about what this thetorah.com Rabbi Professor David Frankel writes. What he is going to say is that it didn’t have to be this way, that everything related back to Yitziyat Mitzrayim. He says the Exodus tradition was not always the central story or myth of ancient Israel concerning the formation of the nation that it eventually became. This centrality was achieved gradually as some traditions were silenced or marginalized and others became interpreted in relation to the Exodus.

Geoffrey Stern [24:04 – 24:08]: So in this verse about Sukkot, that it says, and therefore you should remember that you left Egypt, he finds the kernel of this whole strategy that we will see goes to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Everything is Zecher L’tziyat Mitzrayim.

Geoffrey Stern [24:08 – 24:32]: He talks about other types of narratives, and I will even say that we even find them in our own obvious texts. If you think of the Haggadah, Rabbi. And if you think of the Bikurim, when we hold up the crops and say that our ancestors were traveling Arameans, we don’t mention leaving Egypt at that point. There’s no question there were traditions where we were not simply coming out of Egypt, but we were people that were just stragglers, foreigners coming all together.

Adam Mintz [24:32 – 24:35]: We didn’t have a victory story necessarily.

Geoffrey Stern [24:35 – 26:40]: Absolutely, absolutely. So what I want to do is start looking at how widespread this sense of Yetziat Mitzrayim ultimately became. What started with this verse in the Torah itself proliferated into every aspect of Judaism. And I said before, I’m reading the Machzor and looking at the Kiddush, and it says, blessed are you, God, King of the universe, who chose us from among all the people, exalted us amongst all tongues. And then on Shabbos, you add: a remembrance day with love, day of holy assembly, commemorating the exodus from Egypt.

Geoffrey Stern [26:40 – 27:22]: So here we are, we say it is a day of remembrance, a sounding of the shofar. And then it says, commemorating the exodus from Mitzrayim. Rabbi, I will argue that it is no more strange than saying that the Israelites lived in Sukkot that they magically created. We are connecting everything to leaving Egypt. Even on Yom Kippur, it says, Mikra Kodesh Zecher L’tziyat Mitzrayim. And there is no connection that you or I can think of between the New Year festival and leaving Egypt.

Adam Mintz [27:22 – 27:56]: In Rosh Hashanah, the Talmud says, on Rosh Hashanah, our forefathers slavery in Egypt ceased. In Nisan, the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt. And in Tishrei, in the future, the Jewish people will be redeemed in the final redemption from the coming of the Messiah. So the rabbis were also challenged by this. What they argued was that somehow, magically, Rosh Hashanah was the day that slavery in Egypt ceased. They had to try to connect it. As the scholar said before, they were trying to make this the preeminent tradition, the origin myth of our people.

Geoffrey Stern [27:56 – 28:22]: And we have also on Shabbat. This is kind of interesting. Every Shabbos, we say, after we make the blessing over the wine, we say that Shabbos is holy, that it is a commemoration of the creation of the world. Tehila le Mikrei Kodesh, the first of our holidays. We say that every Friday night. We breathe.

Adam Mintz [28:22 – 28:56]: I just want to say, when it comes to Shabbat, the commandment of Shabbat is mentioned twice. It’s mentioned many times in the Torah, but it’s in both of the Luchot, right? It’s on both of the tablets. The tablets that are described in Exodus and the tablets that are described in Deuteronomy. In Exodus, the reason for Shabbat is because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In Deuteronomy, the reason for Shabbat is that God took us out of Egypt so that we could worship God. So actually, when it comes to Shabbat, Zecher L’tziyat Mitzrayim is actually explicit.

Geoffrey Stern [28:56 – 29:22]: I totally agree. And I think we can find it’s not as though they created this connection to the Exodus from Egypt out of nothing. There is a connection. It is the primal moment in our lives. But this concept that it is a commemoration for leaving Egypt is something that struck me.

And I might be totally off here, but even on Passover, when we say “at Yom Chag HaMatzot Hazeh,” on this day of the Matzos, “Z’man Cheruteinu,” the day of our freedom, “Mikra Kodesh,” a holy convocation. We even say about Pesach, that it’s not the holiday of leaving Egypt, Mitzrayim. I think it became a tag phrase. And it was almost stamped on pretty much everything.

Adam Mintz [28:23 – 28:24]: Everything, right?

Geoffrey Stern [28:24 – 31:17]: The Gemara in Bava Metzia says, Rabba says, why do I need the mention of the Exodus from Egypt that the Merciful wrote in the context of the Halachot, of the prohibition against interest and the mention of the Exodus from Egypt with regard to the mitzvah of wearing the Tzitziot, the fringes, and the mention of the Exodus from Egypt in the context of the prohibition concerning weights. So this is not an original question from Madlik. This is a valid question. Why are we always focused on Yetziat Mitzrayim?

And I want to end by saying that it became this orienting event which sets in motion and guides the Jewish way toward a promised land. You can draw any conclusion that you want. But basically, when we finish the Torah today, if from this lens, if you were to ask Moses, what is the narrative that goes all the way from the first page of Bereshit until the end, you would almost have to say Z. It was a narrative that started. It has exile in it, it has return in it. It defines redemption. And I think this is key as being redeemed from a place as a community, and that became very Israelite.

I think all of those lessons one cannot ignore. And we see it right here in this verse that ties the Sukkot to the booths when they left Egypt. I want to end by saying that one of the things that really surprised me this year when I went to the Yom Kippur service at Mincha and we read Jonah, I had never noticed before. We all know the story of the whale. Jonah didn’t want to save the people of Nineveh. He went on a boat from Jaffa. It got stormy. He was thrown into the water. The whale swallowed him, spit him out. At Nineveh, he had to go. He told them, do teshuvah. They did better teshuvah than Israelites have ever done. They put sackcloth on their animals. Their animals couldn’t eat for the whole day. This was a Yom Kippur to speak of.

And then it says, now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city. He made a booth there. It says “Vayas Lo Sham Sukka.” And he sat under it in the shade until he should see what happened to the city. I love this concept of him leaving the city and going into this booth and just saying, what’s going to happen? What’s going to be the end of this story?

Adam Mintz [31:18 – 31:37]: Of course, it’s temporary. That’s where you look at the city. This identifies temporary. It’s out of the city, it’s outside, it’s in our backyard. It’s temporary. That’s a great connection between Yom Kippur and Sukkot. You know, the Torah doesn’t make that connection, but clearly that connection is there to be made.

Geoffrey Stern [31:38 – 32:50]: To me, what it means is that the Sukkah, on the most organic level, when we either leave our house or we leave our non-agricultural existence, or when we finish the Torah of Moses, we go outside, outside of the base Midrash, outside of the synagogue, outside of everything. And we see how is this all going to turn out. I think it’s a wonderful picture.

I’m hoping that by the time this podcast publishes, the hostages are out of Egypt just like our forebearers, and that we can all watch how this all turns out. But that is, I think, the secret sauce that was created in these five books of Moses. This idea of being able to go out and watch how it happens as an outsider but also as an insider to understand that you are not dependent only on yourself. All of the beautiful messages that we went through that the commentary saw, it’s a wonderful thing that when you sit in that sukkah, you feel them all.

Adam Mintz [32:51 – 33:07]: It’s fantastic. What a great lesson and what a great verse from Yonah to wrap it all up. Chag Sameach everybody. Enjoy and don’t miss it. Next week we’re starting from the beginning. The book of B’reishit, the book of Genesis. Chag Sameach everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [33:08 – 33:10]: Chag Sameach. See you all next.