Tag Archives: culture

August 14, 2024 · 6:55 pm

What they say about us actually matters…

parshat vaetchanan – deuteronomy 4 – 6

Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on Clubhouse. The Torah proclaims that its laws are your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations. The nations of the world will say that this is a wise and understanding people. We discover the writings and biography of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner; a radical thinker and early religious Zionist. Based on this verse, he taught that if Torah does not match the most enlightened moral, ethical, cultural and aesthetic standards of the day…. it needs to evolve. We explore.

Sefaria source sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/583652

Transcript:

The Torah proclaims that its laws are our wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations. The nations of the world will say of the Israelites that this is a wise and understanding people. We explore the traditional commentaries and then we discover Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner; born at the end of the 19^th century and a radical thinker and early religious Zionist. Based on this verse, he taught that if our Torah does not match the most enlightened moral, ethical, cultural and aesthetic standards of the day…. It…. And we need to evolve. So, join us for “What they say about us actually matters…”

Well, welcome Rabbi, another week of Madlik Disruptive Torah.

We should just remember Shabbat Nachamu.

We remember your father, who was, you know, we talk about Disruptive Torah, and we talk about all these kind of forward thinking ideas.

He really taught everybody what it meant to be forward thinking and to, you know, to appreciate Jewish history, but to also appreciate what the Jewish future could be about.

So we remember him, the Shabbos, on the special Shabbos.

And you already invited everybody to Westport, to Beit Chaverim.

If you’re going to be in the Westport area, have a l’chaim and have a kiddush with Geoffrey in memory of his father.

Fantastic.

I hope to see you all there.

So this is kind of exciting to me.

You just did a shout out to Beit Chaverim.

I am going to give a shout out to 2015, where I went to my first week long learning session.

I think there was an executive seminar at Hadar.

And I heard Ethan Tucker talk about this Rabbi, Rav Moshe Shmuel Glasner, who we’re going to be introduced to.

So isn’t it wonderful when we have institutions, peoples and opportunity just to thank for influencing us and enlightening us and making our lives that much richer.

So here we are.

We’re in our Deuteronomy 4, 5 – 7.

And it says, Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that you shall act accordingly in the land whether you go to possess it.

This is Moses talking.

They’re about to go into the Promised Land.

Verse 6, keep them therefore and do them.

For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations.

And these nations shall hear all these statutes and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

For what nation is there so great that God is so near to them as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for?

So, you know, it would be a normal verse kind of encouraging us to keep the commandments, but it adds something that actually is a surprising radical and fairly unique, that not only are the laws good, not only do you have to keep them because you were commanded them and God is great and all that good stuff, but all of a sudden, out of the blue, it talks about what the world, what the Umot HaOlam, the nations of the world will say, and lo and behold, it says they will look upon you.

And of course, in the beginning, I said, Chukim u mishpatim.

Chukim, we always have said, are maybe laws that we don’t really understand that well.

Mishpatim are laws that we do.

But when it talks about this is your wisdom amongst the nation, there it says, Asher yishma’un et kol hachukim ha’eleh.

So all of these laws that are chukim, all of a sudden the nations will look upon them.

So clearly, this is a verse that stands out and requires us almost to explain.

Rabbi, you said you’re already in Connecticut.

You were in the pool today, and you were discussing this with your family.

What kind of discussions did you have?

What does this mean to you?

This is what we have.

I mean, this is, what it is, is it’s a surprising puzzle.

And I think you made that point.

You wouldn’t have expected it.

Like, you don’t need it.

But somehow, kihi kachmatchem u’binathem le’ynei ha’amim.

Ve’amru rak am chachom ve’navon ha’goy ha’gadol hazeh.

כִּ֣י הִ֤וא חׇכְמַתְכֶם֙ וּבִ֣ינַתְכֶ֔ם לְעֵינֵ֖י הָעַמִּ֑ים אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִשְׁמְע֗וּן אֵ֚ת כׇּל־הַחֻקִּ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה וְאָמְר֗וּ רַ֚ק עַם־חָכָ֣ם וְנָב֔וֹן הַגּ֥וֹי הַגָּד֖וֹל הַזֶּֽה

It matters what they say about us, right?

They need to say that we’re a smart people and navon, it’s interesting what the difference between the word chacham and navon is.

I think chacham means you’re smart.

Navon means you understand things, right?

It’s a more sophisticated level of intelligence.

We always know, havin is l’havin davar mitoch davar, binah, women are considered to have more binah than men.

But absolutely, I love that.

So we’re going to go through some of the standard commentaries first, before we get to my buddy Moshe Shmuel Glasner.

So, the Sforno says, The observance of the laws of the Torah is your true wisdom and will enable you to resist the lures and challenges by the heretics.

Ba teshavu la’apikoros b’moftim shechli’im.

בה תשיבו לאפיקורוס במופתים שכליים

So all of a sudden, this becomes a verse that enters into the world of polemics.

All of a sudden, for the first time, it’s not like we’re fighting nations, we’re conquering nations.

Now, we’re engaged through this verse for the first time in the Torah in discourse and possibly, as I said, polemics, but justification of who we are.

I think the Sforno kind of sets the stage for where a lot of the traditional commentaries go.

The Malbim talks about, and he focuses definitely on the fact that it’s emphasizing the Chukim.

It’s emphasizing the laws that don’t necessarily have a rational reason.

And he says, don’t think this is because it’s the opposite.

The fact that these laws are kind of strange, that they are a kind of different, that is not a negative, it’s a positive.

Because every nation has laws and customs that are rational that their wise men established.

Only we have the weird stuff.

So, I mean, it’s fascinating how they’re all grappling with trying to understand what exactly the polemic is.

But, you know, I said it facetiously, but it means that we have rules that defy logic, that cannot be necessarily defined by pure logic.

And in and of itself, according to the Malbim, that becomes something that people admire, that the nations of the world look to.

But again, he’s trying to struggle to understand what is the argument here.

Why would the nations of the world look at the Red Heifer Law, and the laws of kashrut, and all of the laws that seemingly don’t have a logical explanation.

The Chatam Sofer, and he is going to be part of our conversation, because Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner, I believe was his great grandson.

Something like that, right.

Something like that.

And he says that really the true value of these laws are esoteric, they’re hidden, they’re nister.

But the nigla, that which is available for all to see, even that inspires the respect of the nations.

It’s almost as though he’s coming from a perspective of we don’t really need their recognition.

We don’t need their “likes” on social media.

But this verse is saying that even still, even though the truth is much deeper, but even on the surface of it, they find something to admire.

Now, you do understand, let’s just pause for a second on that Chatam Sofer.

You see, it bothered him that we care about what the non-Jews think about us.

That bothered him.

He didn’t like that.

So, he needed to say that’s not what it means.

Even though, of course, we don’t care what they say about us, nevertheless, there’s an explanation.

But it’s just interesting the kind of perspective.

And he lives around in the early 1800s.

So, it’s already the modern period.

You know, they’re already interacting with non-Jews.

They already feel the tension of, you know, already by, let me just say it like this, by the beginning of the 1800s, the Jews were already going to university with non-Jews, which means that, you know, it mattered what they thought about us, what we thought about them.

So he needs to say, that’s not really what we’re talking about.

So there’s the Khatam Sofer and the Ketav Sofer.

I have a friend named David Sofer, who may or may not be listening.

Once in a while, he sends me a note….

But they were the poster children.

This duo were the poster children of those who really fought what is called the Haskalah.

They fought the Enlightenment.

They fought reform.

They were conservative with a capital C.

And so I think what you just said is absolutely spot on, that he, you can feel almost the resentment that we even need to explain, because in a sense that dilutes who we are.

We are who we are because we are, and we don’t need to explain.

But, icing on the cake, even so, the non-Jews will look at us and say it is our wisdom.

The Rabbeinu Bahaya takes a whole different perspective.

I would like to say that he takes the Nobel Prize argument.

He says that this relates to the fact that in the Torah, there is science.

He refers to healing.

We all know Maimonides was a great doctor.

He says that the Torah observance is preventive medicine.

Basically, he’s saying what my…

I think Rabbi Riskin once said that his grandmother told him that if you eat kosher, you’ll be healthier and stronger.

And he believed that up until the point where at Yeshiva University, he was on the debate team, and they went to debate West Point.

And the 6’5 guy who shook his hand before the debate, as he shook his hand, little Shlomo Riskin was lifted from the ground.

And he said to himself, I don’t know about this healthier, more robust business, but there definitely was a very strong tradition that if you follow our rules, it’s better for you.

It’s physically healthier.

Many people associate kosher with healthy food, no extra ingredients.

This is a tradition.

And again, it was tagged on to this verse.

And it comes actually from the Talmud in Shabbat 75a, where they focus not so much on healing, but they focus on calculating astronomical seasons.

And we did a podcast on this once, Rabbi, because Judaism is based on a lunar calendar, and because it is critical that our holidays fall within their season, namely that Passover comes in the spring, we had to generate, we had to create rather impressive, I would say, understandings of both the solar calendar and the lunar calendar, so that we could fix them from time to time, calibrate them, if you will.

The Muslim calendar doesn’t calibrate.

The word is synchronize them.

Amazing.

But to do that, you had to understand both this.

You got to understand the planets and the moon and the sun.

And so here the Talmud looked already that long ago and said, maybe, unlike what maybe the Rabbeinu Bahaya was saying, but maybe because we, as a people, have created kind of, I would say, barriers in front of ourselves.

We have become very curious and very inventive.

I mean, I think there’s a whole chapter in Startup Nation that because of the challenge that we have, maybe people attribute culinary arts to Israelis because they had to figure out how to make this with a non-milk substance or something.

But that’s what this argument is, that the constraints, I look at it almost like a sonnet, that we had to write those 14 lines and that forced us to innovate.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

It’s absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, that’s a great explanation.

Yeah, that’s good.

That’s a really good explanation.

And it’s interesting, Rabbeinu Behaya, he lives in Spain.

You know, all these things, the minute that you talk about interaction with the outside world, you have to think about where these people came from.

Rabbeinu Bahya comes from Spain.

And Spain in the 1300s, there was tremendous interaction between the Jews and the non-Jews, right?

We know the Abarbanel was a politician.

He worked for the king.

There was a lot of interaction.

So this is a real issue for these people.

So now we get to my buddy Shadal, Shmuel David Luzzatto.

We haven’t quoted him.

We haven’t studied him for a while.

No, it isn’t.

And he’s also interesting because he comes from Padua.

He comes from Italy.

And there’s a lot of interaction with the non-Jews.

Padua has a very important medical school.

So he was involved in all of this.

So he is at the cusp of higher Biblical criticism.

He’s at the cusp of people who are saying, you can’t understand Judaism unless you understand Hammurabi’s Code, Eshnunah Code, unless you understand the culture and the laws out of which it organically grew, that you have to study other languages, that the Israelite religion is not all that unique (of if it is unique, it is in reference to other law codes and cultural institutions of the ancient near east).

In fact, to understand it, you need to be a scholar in all of these other cultures and law systems.

What he takes from this verse is he said, if, in fact, the Israelite religion came out of the milieu of the ancient Near East, why are the non-Jews saying, ki hi chachmat hem?

Boy, this is different.

He is making an argument that this is proof solid, that the Israelite religion was a paradigm shift, that in a sense it came out of nowhere.

He writes, you know, if the Jewish people had stolen it from the Egyptians, like our buddy Freud says, you know, there was a religion that worshiped the sun.

It was a monotheistic religion in Egypt.

Why would they say that?

So everybody that we’re looking at heretofore is really focused on the polemical aspect of this verse.

And they’re all, as you say, coming out of their own context, of where they are in the history of ideas and in the development of the Jewish people with, whether it’s in Spain or Cordova or wherever.

It really is a wonderful Rorschach test to see as much about our commentaries and commentators as it is about the Pasuk itself.

That is, that, this Shadal is actually remarkable, because again, it’s clearly against the backdrop of people who believe that Judaism came from somewhere else.

And he felt that this was the place that he needed to defend Judaism, as like you said, being a paradigm shift.

So now we’re going to make our own paradigm shift.

Now we’re going to go in another direction.

And the other direction is, this is less polemical and more an insight into the nature of the Israelite, the Jewish religion.

So to do that, we have to quote another verse that comes up in our pasha.

And it is 6: 24, Then God commanded us to observe all these laws, to revere our God for our lasting good and for our survival, as is now the case.

Le tov lanu kol hayamim.

Here is a sense that in fact what this is saying is stop with the polemics already.

This is telling us something intrinsically powerful about our religion.

They are really seeing within our religion, our way of living, something that is beautiful because living the life of the Torah is not for some other world, it’s not for some cosmic reality, it is for a better life that anyone on the planet can realize.

Another verse that would be brought in here from Wisdom Literature, it doesn’t really, it shouldn’t really be talking about Torah, but it is universally used to talk about Torah, is Proverbs 3.17, Darcheha, darchei noam, v’chol nativa tach ha’shalom, her ways are pleasant and all her paths are peaceful, she is a tree of life, etz chayim hi l’mach ha’zikim boa, v’tom chayim ha’muushar, whoever holds her is happy.

So here is another perspective.

This isn’t about them, it’s about us.

And truly, what God is saying is that the law that I’ve given you, the commandments, the customs that I’ve given you, make you a better people, and you are better for it.

I think this is a change.

If you look at Maimonides, the great rationalist, who believed in something called Taamei Hamitzvot, that every commandment has a reason.

You know, we talk about Chukim as things that have no logic.

I don’t think that would sit well with Maimonides.

He absolutely believed that what this verse is saying, that if you understand, truly understand the Torah, you will see in it, I wouldn’t say a superior, but certainly an amazing (optimal) way of life.

And he criticizes people.

He doesn’t mention the Malbim, because the Malbim lived after him.

But he criticizes those who kind of say that the laws are, you know, for the masses, and that we should…

The argument that he brings, both here and in the Guide for the Perplexed, is actually fascinating.

It’s the Guide.

It says that these could not be human laws, because no human would come up with this stuff.

And Maimonides says, you are not raising the rabbis and raising the Torah.

You are degrading it when you say that.

You say that no man would create these laws, but God would.

So he was against the heebie-jeebies.

He was against the hidden meanings.

The fancy term they use is that the Rambam was a rationalist, right?

Everything had to make sense.

Even God’s role in the Torah had to be logical in the Rambam’s mind.

And that’s his argument.

And for those of us who study the Torah and come up against something that is a challenge to our reason, what we try to do is try to contextualize, we try to understand.

But basically, and I am guilty as charged, we believe that the Torah is an amazing document, that the Israelite rebellion/revolution was an amazing revolution.

It might be in a particular time, and then we follow the rabbis, and I’m a big fan of the rabbis, as you know, and we’ll say how they adopted it and changed it and so forth.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, we don’t just rule it out as something that’s strange and that makes it holy, or it’s beyond our understanding and that must make it holy.

So in a sense, I guess you and I are kind of rationalists.

Right.

I think that’s right.

I mean, and that’s not surprising because, you know, the world of education is the world of rationalists.

You know, the Rambam was so surprising because it wasn’t really a world of education.

Most people were not educated.

So the Rambam came as a rationalist and that was really surprising to people.

Okay.

So now, as promised, we are going to take a left turn.

Comes along Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner.

Tell us his biography.

So, you know, he passed away I believe in 1923-22.

He was born obviously in the 1800s.

He was in Hungary.

As I said, he was a relation, a grandson, a great-grandson of the Chatam and Ketav Sofer.

He called himself the Dor Revi’i.

And in a sense, that meant that he was the fourth generation of these luminaries.

But it also resonated with the fact that Abraham was told that the Jews would go down to Egypt, and the fourth generation would go into the land.

Yes, he was a Zionist also.

And there’s a picture in the source sheets, and you will look at him, and he looks as Charedi as Charedi come.

He, so we had both the provenance (Yichus) and the learning, but he was absolutely a radical thinker.

I think he made Aliyah to Israel two years before he passed away.

It was right after World War I was over, and as the crowds gathered at the train station, he said, leave as you can and when you can, because if you wait too long, you will want to leave and not be able to leave.

He saw everything coming.

As we’re going to see in a second, he also was an amazing fan of the Enlightenment, of the Hoch culture, of Europe, of human rights, and of everything that was happening.

And this is in total counter distinction to his grandfather and great grandfather.

What do you have to add, Rabbi?

No, I’m listening to you because you know more about him than I do.

So, had you heard about him before?

I know the name, yeah, but I don’t really know about him.

That’s why I was excited to read this this time.

Great.

So, as I said, I was introduced to him at an executive seminar by Ethan Tucker at Hadar.

And basically, what he says, he has a book, a commentary on the tractate of Hullin, and in it, he has a lengthy introduction.

And so you will know, Rabbi, that in addition to my Haggadah collections, I have an original of his commentary of the Dor Revi’i on Hullin in my collection, and there are pictures in the show notes.

But in any case, he turns this pasuk almost onto its head.

And he says that anything that violates the norms of enlightened human culture cannot be permitted to us, a holy nation.

Can there be anything forbidden to them, but permitted to us?

The Torah says that the nations are supposed to say, what a great nation with such just laws and statutes.

But if they are on a higher level than we, in the laws and norms, they will say about us, what a foolish and disgusting nation.

So what he does in the words of Ethan Tucker is he turns a description into a prescription.

That the fact that we are told that the world will say about us, that looking at us, we are wise, is not a description.

It is a prescription.

It means that we have to work.

We have to make sure that we are always ahead of the curve, that we in fact have rules and regulations that are equal, if not more moral, more aesthetically pleasing, more enlightened than the rest of the world.

And this turns everything unto its head.

He goes on to say, I say that anything that is revolting to enlighten Gentiles is forbidden to us, not just because of Hillul Hashem, but because of the command to be holy.

In a sense, he’s almost saying that we let culture, as it evolves…

Defines what morality is.

It’s radical.

It’s really radical.

It’s so surprising, you know, everybody moved in the other direction, like we saw in the Hatam Sofer, and, you know, everyone moved in the other direction.

And he’s willing to say that society defines what morality is.

So this is an excerpt.

And in the source sheets, you will find links to Ethan Tucker’s study of this.

And I suggest that you all take a look.

But he writes, One need not dig too much deeper to hear that the text here is necessarily making just a descriptive claim here, but a prescriptive one of as well.

The Torah and its mitzvot are supposed to evoke the sort of admiration from outsiders.

If it does not, something is wrong.

It is not a far leap from here to suggest that interpretations and applications of the Torah that evoke revulsion from the external observers are potentially suspect and in need of deeper thought and reevaluation.

Rabbi, he’s going even further.

Not only are we supposed to keep up with the times, but if we have stuff that is criticized on these higher enlightened ideals, we should be questioning our own commandments.

That’s remarkable.

I mean, I don’t know good or bad, but that’s remarkable.

It doesn’t matter if humanity considered a certain action to be neutral for most of its history.

If all enlightened, decent, intelligent people come to abhor that action, then Torah implicit implicitly tells us that Jews must abhor it as well.

So here Tucker adds something else.

This is not static.

This is dynamic, meaning to say that you could, and I’ll just take an example of Shehita (Ritual slaughter).

You could make a case that in its day, the ritual slaughter of the Jews, of animals, was the most humane way of killing an animal.

But you can make a case and then that we were ahead of the world, that we were looking at package labels (and the source of our food) a thousand years before the world started to say, it’s important what you eat.

That we were distinguishing between types of food, a thousand, two thousand years before the world discovered food that has lactose in it, Gluten-free or environmentally correct.. food that is whatever.

So yes, we were in the day, we were ahead of the curve.

But what he’s saying is that this is dynamic, that we have to keep ahead of the curve, and we have to constantly be looking at our rules.

Now, that might be the most interesting thing of all.

The idea that Judaism needs to be dynamic is a very revolutionary idea.

The idea usually is that Judaism is where it is, and we’re solid where we are.

The idea that we need to always be responding to the culture around us, that we need to be dynamic, is very, very surprising.

So we don’t have a a lot of time, so I’m going to have to talk like a New Yorker rabbi, even though we’re in Connecticut.

Basically, in his thing, he brings two examples that he wants to prove his point.

He says, you’re not allowed to wear bigdei Isha, women’s clothing, but if you’re sleeping in bed naked and a fire breaks out, do you just run out naked or do you borrow the house robe of your wife?

You are stranded on the top of a mountain, your plane crashes, there are corpses there, you are starving, you see pigs walking by.

Do you eat the pig which is forbidden by the Torah, or do you become a cannibal and eat human flesh which is not forbidden by the Torah?

And he brings these two examples as examples to show, in a sense, there’s a higher authority.,, certain things are just obviously distasteful and counter to human norms and culture…

That we all know that, and he uses the fact that Genesis begins with Adam and Eve, where there’s first our humanity and then comes the Torah, and the Torah is built upon that shared humanity.

An example that Ethan Tucker does not bring, that I think ties it all together, is the example he brings about a house that is burning on Shabbat.

Are you allowed to extinguish the flames?

And he says that those commentaries that say that you can extinguish the flames because the flames might spread and destroy non-Jewish homes and therefore it will be a Hillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s names, are absolutely crazy.

Because as a Zionist he says, what happens when we live in Tel Aviv?

Are we going to let the whole city burn down?

And he brings a proof text from a Gemorah that says that you have to serve God with all your heart, soul and all your material needs (bechol Me’odecha).

And the Talmud says that there are some people that value their life more than anything, and there are some people that value their belongings more than everything.

And from this he says that just as you can save your house to save your life, you can also save your house because of you economic well being,,,,, this is both common sense but also practiucal… you can save your house because your belongings are going to be destroyed.

And he says, and if you have constant poverty for all your days, there is an unending torment.

It’s much harsher than taking a life.

He almost sounds like those people who argue that abortion is okay because it’s a Rodef (a pursuer), because you can’t take a 17-year-old girl’s life away from her because of a mistaken pregnancy.

I mean, he is so far into the future in terms of understanding, I would say, the bigger picture, but it is absolutely fascinating.

And of course, as Tucker raises, it raises all sorts of questions about, you know, how do we deal when the world thinks differently about sexual identity?

How do we deal when the world thinks differently about circumcision?

This is an introduction to the thought of this rabbi…

Living in Israel was a time where he felt that the oral law should never have been written down because it calcified.

And he felt that when we get to Israel, it can be opened up again and we can try to update it to these moral codes.

And that’s just fascinating.

It’s a kind of a breath of fresh air from the early 1900s.

From a Hungarian rabbi, from the last place you would expect it.

That’s amazing.

Shabbat Shalom.

Thank you for that.

This was a great topic.

That was an amazing revolutionary kind of idea.

And I promise you, we will discuss it again tomorrow night around the Shabbat table.

Enjoy your Shabbat.

Enjoy your Maftir.

Everybody in Westport is very lucky this Shabbat.

And we look forward to seeing everybody next week.

Shabbat Shalom.

See you all next week.

Shabbat Shalom.

Listen to previous episodes:

Enough

Shema Yisrael and the struggle against Cheap Faith

Culture Wars

parshat matot-masei – numbers 32

Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on ClubHouse. Moses accuses the tribes of Reuben and Gad of perpetuating the defeatist attitude of the generation of the Exodus. The word Moses uses; Tarbut, has come to mean culture and we explore how culture, in contradistinction to Torah, has evolved and continues to impact Jewish thought until today.

Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/581130

Transcript:

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish Text or Tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on clubhouse every Thursday and share it as the Madlik podcast on your favorite platform. This week’s parsha is matot-masei. Moses accuses the tribes of Reuben and Gad of perpetuating the defeatist attitude of the generation of the Exodus. The word Moses uses; Tarbut, has come to mean culture and we explore how culture, in contradistinction to Torah, has evolved and continues to impact Jewish thought until today. So join us for Culture Wars.

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

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

AM: It’s really exciting.

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

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

This is a good week to go to shul.

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

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

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

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

AM: I had never realized that.

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

Pretty amazing.

AM: That is pretty amazing, yes.

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

The word is a Hapax legomenon.

GS: That sounds Greek to me.

AM: Here you go, hapex legomenon.

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

GS: Okay, we now know that.

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

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

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

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

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

And the rest is a prequel, so to speak.

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

And here’s where we get into the dialogue.

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

Why will you turn the mind of the Israelites?

Lama tnu’in et lev bnei Yisrael.

So it’s an argument within an argument.

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

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

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

This is what your fathers did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly, the rabbis were not big fans of them.

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

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

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

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

Tarbut, anashim chataim.

Breed of sinful fellows is the translation that I had.

Everett Fox says, a brood, sinning men.

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

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

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

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

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

GS: Eichah is so rich, is so rich.

AM: Yeah, fantastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He calls Rav Officers.

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

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

But this gives us a sense…

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

Tarbut ra means that you guys have a bad culture.

We talk that way also.

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

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

And it could go either way.

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

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

AM: It seems to be bad.

GS: The Ahiba yetira continues.

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

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

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

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

AM: Fascinating.

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

Note: Chibbah Yeteirah on Torah, Commentary

Author: Yehuda Herzl Henkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this he tags with the word tarbut.

AM: That is great.

I mean, that’s nice.

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

There’s a bad culture here.

That is a phrase we use.

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

AM: Hey, that’s right.

And that’s funny.

I didn’t think of that.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a dictionary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He talks about the Misraad haChinuch v’haTarbut.

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

That’s so interesting.

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

He talks about…

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

GS: So, you’re reading it as I am.

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

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

AM: Right, I know that.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

And he was a big supporter of exercise as well.

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

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

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

AM: Oh, that’s great, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

And I just love that.

AM: I love that too.

That is absolutely fantastic.

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

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

It’s called Strong’s Concordance.

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

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

It starts off with a bias for bad.

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

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

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

There is this enigma, I think, here.

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

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

Note:

Peninei Halakhah

Halakhah

Author:Eliezer Melamed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As they grow, they develop cultures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you can make a case that culture is bad.

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

AM: It’s so interesting.

I mean, and it’s true.

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

All of that stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This tarbut ra was a tag.

Tarbut would almost always be associated with the bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, that’s interesting.

I mean, you wouldn’t necessarily guess that.

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

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

Yeah, okay, that’s correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So he associates Derech Eretz with Tarbut.

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

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

He finds all wise rules and rules everywhere.

And how should he behave?

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

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

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

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

He is using it in the modern sense.

This is from the 11th century.

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

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

He’s comparing two yeshivot.

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

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

Lo-ha-yu Tarbut Ma’aliyah.

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

They came out of Milon Chadash.

AM: Oh, that’s great.

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

And so you have these two traditions.

And there is a conflict between them.

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

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

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

It had to also look at the culture.

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

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

But that was in the last few days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police did not arrive for hours.

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

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

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

AM: It’s very sad.

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

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom.

GS: Shabbat shalom.

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

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