Tag Archives: opinion polling

Well, Rabbi, welcome to another exciting week of Madlik. Glad we could make this happen as a lunch and learn. And as always, it’s great to have you for another parsha. This one can be a little bit hard to find something to talk about, eh?

1:06 – Adam Mintz

It sure is. If we can do this one, we can do any parsha.

1:11 – GS

Okay, you’re setting the bar very high. As I said, we are going to talk about something that is an enigma. It’s always intrigued me, and I love to take these weeks as an opportunity to dive into something that I hadn’t really explored before. So we’re in Exodus and it’s talking about the clothing that the kohanim, the priests, are to wear. Last week we did the accessories, the menorah, the aron (ark), and now we’re talking about the fashion of the mishkan. It says, inside the breastpiece of decision, it calls it el choshen ha-mishpat, you shall place the urim and tumim.

1:58 – GS

We’ll get to what that might mean in a second. So that they are over Aaron’s heart when he comes before God. Thus Aaron shall carry the instrument of decision on his heart before God at all time. So, we have the choshen ha’mishpat and we have et ha’mishpat. So really this is, I talked about the sorcery, divination, but this is something, if you take the words at their face value, it’s something to help provide justice, to help decide justice. In Numbers 27-21, it again comes at this, so let’s try to kind of aggregate all the various times and places that it’s described.

2:53 – GS

It says, but he shall present himself as Eleazar the priest, who shall on his behalf seek the decision of the Orim before God. By such instruction they shall go out, and by such instruction they shall come in, he and all the Israelite,” in my translation it says militia, and the whole community. So now it’s not so much adjudicating legal decisions, but it’s actually decisions that relate to actions. Shall we go? Shall we not go? And maybe if you take the translation of my text, which I believe is the Jewish Publication Society, it has a bearing on military decisions.

3:42 – GS

And in Exodus it says, 28.12, Attach the two stones to the shoulder pieces of the ephod. So we have both Urim and Tumim and this ephod as stones for remembrance of the Israelite people whose names Aaron shall carry upon his two shoulder pieces for remembrance before God. So, in these two accessories, fashion accessories, I will say. There is this sense of these devices, these platforms, I don’t know, I’d love to know how you see them at face value, that help make certain decisions.

4:21 – GS

What’s your read?

4:22 – AM

I mean, it’s kind of the, you know, it’s the supernatural piece of a very natural kind of situation. You have the clothing of the Kohen, of the high priest, but there’s something supernatural there that allows him to always make the right decision.

4:42 – GS

You know, from you just saying that made me think for a second that nowhere in here does it talk about the supernatural. We kind of project that onto it. It really, if you think about it, and I agree with you, that’s probably how all tradition has always taken it. A type of Ouija board or some sort of way of casting lots we’ll see, but if you just read it, it’s kind of interesting. It doesn’t really say what’s going to happen. It talks about the focus, the focus to make a decision.

5:18 – AM

Right, that’s correct. It doesn’t talk about how it works is what it doesn’t talk about, right? The mechanics doesn’t talk about it. And that’s actually the most interesting piece of it. So, the Torah doesn’t talk about what’s most interesting in the whole thing.

5:35 – GS

If you go to another text that I quoted, maybe the focus needs to be somewhere else. It says in Numbers 27: 18 And God answered Moses, Single out Joshua, son of Nun, an inspired man, Ish asher ruach bo and lay your hand upon him, have him stand before Eliezer the priest and before the whole community, invest him with your authority, and then it says in verse 21 but he shall present himself to Eliezer the priest who shall, on his behalf, seek the decision of the Urim. V’sho’al lo b’mishpat ha’urim.

6:14 – GS

By such instruction they shall go out and by such instruction they shall come in, He and all the Israelite community or militia, again my translation says, and the whole community. So here it introduces the guy who wears the urim v’tumim or the guy who’s asking for some sort of divination. It says about Joshua, the spirit that was within him. So again, maybe, and just talking out loud now, maybe our focus is too much on the device and less on the process and the people who use it.

6:59 – AM

Well, what’s interesting here is that Joshua seems to need the urim v’tumim, right? It says that v’lefnei Elazar hakohein ya’abod v’sha’al lo v’mishpat ha’urim v’lefnei Hashem alpiv yeitu v’alpiv yavo, that Joshua is going to have the Spirit of God, but that’s not enough.

7:21 – GS

He’s got to be validated somehow by it.

7:23 – AM

Right? I mean, isn’t that interesting?

7:25 – Multiple Speakers

Yep, yep.

7:26 – GS

So there’s no question that it’s part of—it does do something. It does do something, but what it does, who knows? So, the only thing that we can do at this point is look into the meaning maybe of the words. Maybe the words will give it away. In the Talmud, in Yoma 73b, it says, why is it called urim v’tumim? Orim, which is based on the word or, light, is so called because it illuminates and explains its words. Tumim, which is based on the word tam, complete, is because it fulfills its words which always come true.

8:09 – GS

So it’s not either/or, it sounds like the light illuminates and the Tumim somehow shows that, and you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to act on what is illuminated. But it is interesting that they’re trying to guess what it is that it does based on the wording, what it’s trying to say.

8:37 – AM

Fascinating, yeah, absolutely fascinating.

8:40 – GS

So, the Gemora in Yuma actually dwells on this a little bit, and why not look at the rabbinic version of this before we go to modern academics and maybe think on our own. It says, continuing in Yuma 73b, and if you say, in the battles following the incidents of Geba of Benjamin, and why did the Urim V’tumim not fulfill its words. The Jewish people consulted the Urim V’tumim three times with regard to their decision to attack the tribe of Benjamin, and each time they were instructed to go to battle.

9:16 – GS

However, the first two times they were defeated, and only on the third attempt were they successful. Is this not proof that the Urim V’tumim does not always fulfill its words is what implicitly the Talmud is asking? The Gemora answers, the first two times they did not check with the Urim V’tumim whether they would be victorious or be defeated, but only inquired how and whether they should go to battle. Had they asked, they indeed would have been told that they would not succeed.

9:46 – GS

But on the last time when they did check and inquire whether they would be successful, the Urim V’tumim agreed with them that they should go to battle and that they would succeed. So, this kind of gets to cutting to the chase. It’s kind of like opinion polling. It’s all about the question that you ask. You ask the right question. So, what did they do? They said, should we go to battle? They didn’t know that they were being sent to battle to be defeated. They should have asked, if we go to battle, will we be defeated?

10:21 – GS

But it’s all the question, isn’t it?

10:23 – AM

It’s fantastic, isn’t it? So, it gives you the impression, it kind of moves away from the hocus pocus piece of it, doesn’t it? It kind of makes it seem more realistic.

10:36 – GS

Well, it certainly also puts the onus less on the device and more on you because when you have to think very carefully about how you frame the question, It frames the answer to a degree, it frames your state of mind, how you’re going to use this device, all sorts of things that we are all too aware of when we see polling results or we look at a comment that’s getting all sorts of approval on social media. It’s really kind of fascinating. I’ll just finish in terms of the Talmud because we’ve been shying away from the magic of it.

11:23 – GS

The Talmud says, how is it done? How does the Urim VeTummim provide an answer? The names of the tribes were engraved upon the stones of the breastplate. These letters allowed for the answer to be received. Rabbi Yochanan said the letters of the answer protrude, and the priest then combines these letters to form words in order to ascertain the meaning. Reish Lakish says the letters rearrange themselves and join together to form words. So, I’m not an expert on a Ouija board, but it sounds a lot to me as though, again, it’s clearly based a little bit on—a lot on interpretation of what you’re getting.

12:06 – GS

But I know the Talmud even continues, and it starts looking at all the letters in all the names of the tribes, making sure to see that every letter is represented, because what we’re really doing is having a board that has all the letters of the alphabet, and either they rearrange themselves or they light up, and you’re supposed to elicit and pull an answer or direction from them. So, it does sound a little bit like magic.

12:38 – AM

Yeah, no, there’s no question. But it makes it more stipulated somehow.

12:46 – GS

It’s trying to connect the fact that there are buttons cavities 12 that hold parchments in them, 12-something which are clearly associated with the 12 tribes, with this ability to provide some sort of answer. Now there are, in the scholarly treatment of this, some of them say that yes, they were cavities, they had in each one of them maybe the boundaries of where the tribes were supposed to settle, and maybe its most basic function was to act as kind of a place to define boundaries.

13:31 – GS

You come to the city council, you pull out the map, and there’s an argument between one tribe and another. That’s clearly not how the rest of the texts use them. But they’re trying to somehow navigate between the buttons, the tribes, 12 and coming up with an answer that will answer your question as to whether to go to war, whether to go forward, whether to stay. Clearly, there’s not a real sense of how this worked.

14:06 – AM

I think that that last point is a very important point, that the rabbis are not sure how it worked either.

14:23 – GS

Because it had to do—and we came across this a little bit last week with the menorah—since this was part of the temple, and the temple was ultimately destroyed, and this was possibly lost, there was no uninterrupted tradition about this. So unlike tefillin, that you could go home and grab a pair and come back and say, well, this is how my grandfather wore it, here you didn’t have that. So, they’re just suppositioning and theorizing. The last part of the Yoma Gemora I find the most interesting.

15:00 – GS

And it says, the Gemora raises an objection from a Beretah. It says in the Baraita, any priest who does not speak with divine spirit and upon whom the divine presence does not rest is not consulted to inquire of the Urim V’tumim. As Zadok inquired of the Urim V’tumim and it was effective for him and he received an answer, Ebiathar inquired and was not affected. So again, this gets back to—we focused on it’s the question, it’s how you format the question, and with Joshua a little bit, but here specifically it says it’s who asks the question, and on whose behalf is the question asked.

15:41 – AM

How do you understand that? Why does that make sense?

15:45 – GS

Well, again, just as you can say it’s important how you frame the question, and no question doesn’t carry baggage and isn’t a loaded question, I think the same thing reflects on the person asking it. I mean, at the end of the day, I think my takeaway from our study today will be that whether it’s divination, sorcery, or polling, at the end of the day, without leadership, They’re nothing. And with leadership, maybe these devices become a little bit of a ritual. And I should say that that is the way one of the scholars that I will discuss takes this.

16:31 – GS

If you remember when we discussed Exodus and it talked about the ephod, it ended up by saying, attach the two stones, pieces of the ephod, or stones, for remembrance of the Israelite people. Avnei zichron lefnei Yisrael. And then it says, whose names Aaron shall carry upon his two shoulder pieces for remembrance before God. Lezikaron. And this scholar, he’s from theTorah.com, of course, he is saying that he senses that the rabbis, and we’re going to get in a second to all of the verses in the Torah that actually are against divination, are against this kind of magical sorcery.

17:24 – GS

He says that the Torah is clearly taking something that existed and moving it from something that is a utility and something that actually directs and impacts our lives to a zikaron. He calls it a ritual. You go through the motions, but again, If you take away all the magic from the Urim V’turim, what you have left is how you frame the questions and who frames the questions. And from that perspective, the ritual still might have some validity to it, even though, as they say in the Talmud, ha-ikar hasar min ha-sefer (the main point is missing from the book), you’re taking out the magic and you’re creating a ritual around it.

18:12 – AM

That is interesting. Now, that’s a really interesting idea that we’re talking here about a ritual. We’re not talking about magic. We’re talking about a ritual.

18:23 – GS

Maybe it impacts on other rituals as well, but clearly in this one, if you follow that lead and it is actually a zikaron, just a ritual, then the most important thing is what you do around it, the process and what is important. So, let’s go on. The other interesting thing about it is in one of the prior verses that I quoted, it talked about the fact that there are two stones. There is a way of thinking about this as though the Urim V’tumim can answer only yes or no questions. It’s binary. (like drawing of Lots).

19:14 – GS

Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s binary. That is interesting. And from that perspective, of course, it puts even more emphasis on how you frame the question. So what’s one of the situations or instances where they use it is in Samuel. And believe it or not, and this is something that I really discovered through looking at TheTorah.com, and of course there is a source sheet attached to this podcast. There were a few articles on it, but one of them was from a scholar called Yoel S.

19:57 – GS

Didn’t give his full name, didn’t say anything about him. I’m going to get to him in a second. But what he did was when you look at 1 He explains that the Hebrew is actually deficient. It’s missing a lot of words. And to get the original writing, you have to go to our old friend the Septuagint. And in this, if you add, reconstruct the verse, it says, Saul then said to the Lord, the God of Israel, Why have you not responded to your servant today? If this iniquity was due to my son Jonathan or to me, O Lord God of Israel, show Urim the curse, and if you say it was due to your people, show Tumim.

20:44 – GS

So here, if you follow the higher scholarship who believes that something happened when they transcribed this verse, and they went from one mention of Yisrael to the next, and they skipped all the letters in between, but if you look at it this way, Urim V’turim is A or B. Urim Orurr is cursed, probably, and then Tam is based on perfect. So Saul wanted to see is who is at fault, if the Urim will result or not. Now the interesting thing is if you look into the Torah.com link that I gave and you look into Yoel S, believe it or not, and I tried to contact him, Yoel S is a Satmar Chassid who discovered higher biblical criticism.

21:30 – GS

And he doesn’t believe there’s any conflict between the two, but he still lives in the Satmar community, so he doesn’t give his name, which is kind of fascinating also, because again, it falls into a little bit of kind of a concept that we’re dealing here, which is just going with the flow or going with the majority. So, let’s continue a little bit. We’ve now gotten to the point where it might very well be a yes or no. So, if you look at Samuel it says, And David said, O Lord God of Israel, your servant has heard that Saul intends to come to Keilah and destroy the town because of me.

22:26 – GS

He asks the ephod, will the citizens of Keilah deliver me into his hands? I put the word or Saul come down to your servant was heard. O Lord God, tell your servant. So he wants to know if he will fall to the citizens of Kelah, and the Lord said he will. David continued, will the citizens of Kelah deliver me and my men into Saul’s hands? And the Lord answered, they will. So David and his men, about 600 in number, left Kelah at once and moved about whatever they could. So, here’s the fascinating part of this discussion.

23:09 – GS

In this instance, he asks whether this king will attack him and whether he will be successful, and when the answer is yes, he doesn’t go into the battle. So, in a sense, if the ephod is giving prophecy, the prophecy is not correct because the prophecy said you’re going to go and you’re going to be destroyed. He’s using this insight to change destiny. So, this too is kind of fascinating because now we’re getting into how do you use the knowledge that you get from this decision-making process.

23:56 – AM

That’s interesting. It doesn’t tell you how it works. It just tells you what you do with the knowledge. Isn’t that interesting?

24:08 – GS

It says the most important thing is what you do with the knowledge, not what it tells you. Well, and it’s not predicting the future, it is giving you a sense of what would happen if you pursued a certain decision.

24:21 – AM

It doesn’t matter how it happens, exactly.

24:23 – GS

Getting back to kind of decision theory. So, it is more complex than I think one would imagine looking at it just as kind of hocus pocus. But what I would like to focus on a little bit is what is explicit in the Torah. And what is explicit in the Torah is that you are not; excluding the present Urim, B’tumim, and the Efod, so to speak, you’re really not supposed to ask these kinds of questions. You’re not supposed to try to figure out what lies in the future. In Leviticus it says, you shall not eat anything with its blood, and then it says, you shall not practice divination or soothsaying.

25:15 – GS

Lo t’nachesh, v’lo to’a nmnenu. In Numbers it says, There is no magic in Israel. In Deuteronomy it says, Let no one be found among you who consigns a son or a daughter to fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, or a sorcerer, one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts, or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. You know, the only rules that we have of mourning that are actually in the Torah are not what you should do, but what you should not do. And all of them have to do with this necrophilia and this worshiping of the dead and all of that.

26:09 – GS

The Torah comes down very strongly. On all of this magic. It’s profound, would you not say?

26:18 – AM

Profound. I mean, the Torah’s view of magic, we just have to say, the Torah’s against magic. You know, magic is very anti-religious. Right? Obviously, because magic says that it’s magic. It’s not from God. This is not magic. This is from God.  God has set this into motion.

26:42 – GS

But again, this would seem to support those academics who kind of say that like many other things in the Torah, or at least many other philosophies of the Torah, that the Torah incorporates certain rituals in order to minimize them, in order to limit them. And from that perspective, when it talks about that, that’s paradigm shift from this is an actual way of getting an insight into the future to a zikaron. Maybe there’s something there that in fact there are so many instances that some of which we’ve mentioned where the Urim V’Thumim don’t actually provide any value add.

27:35 – GS

Where either they give the wrong information because the wrong person is asking, or they give the wrong information because the wrong type of question was asked. But certainly, there’s a way of kind of incorporating these amulets, if you will, into the rites and the traditions of the Israelites. But in a way doing it as a zikaron, as a memorialization and a way of limiting them. I think that becomes kind of fascinating.

28:08 – AM

Yeah. I mean, it gives room for them, but it limits them, which shows the potential of using them, but at the same time, the risks.

Yeah.

28:21 – GS

There’s a book that we quoted, and that I’m almost finished, but I’m getting there, by Jacob Wright, Why the Bible Began. And he has many interesting theories in it, but one of the fascinating things that I just kind of came across this week is he talks about the kingdom of priests. And really what he’s talking about is the democratization of knowledge. And what he’s saying is, while you find many of these rituals inside of other rites and traditions and cults of the ancient Near East, he claims that what makes Leviticus in particular, but anywhere in the Bible that we’re talking about priestly items, is the fact that it’s written out in the open It democratizes it, and one of the examples that he gives is all the laws of the leprosy and all that, which was really the heebie-jeebies, where you would need to go to this priest, and the priest would go into a room and come out.

29:27 – GS

It was all hidden. And into that, you can easily also put the Urim V’tumim, that again, it was limited, but one of the ways that it was limited was it was democratized, that this was to be done out in the open. And this is what the Urim V’tumim looks like, This is how many buttons it has on it. This is how it works. This is how it’s supposed to be consulted. So again, it’s taking something that was common, amongst the cultures and religions of that time, but it brings it out into the open, which again is a way of kind of limiting it.

30:07 – AM

Yeah, no, no, no. That’s really interesting. Now, it’s also interesting that the Torah itself doesn’t give all of these descriptions of how it works, right? They only seem to come later in Jewish history. What do you make of that?

30:27 – GS

Well, I definitely think that the superstitions that revolved around things like this didn’t go away with the ancient Torah. They were alive and well. I mean, if you go to synagogues in the upper Galilee, you can see on the floor the signs of the zodiac, what in Hebrew is called the mazalot. Nowadays, when someone has a wonderful event, we say mazal tov, which really means that you should be under the right star, which is superstition and astrology and all that, and the rabbis confronted that head on.

31:10 – GS

They have a very famous phrase, it says, Ein Mazal L’Yisrael. (There’s no zodiac for Israel) They kind of recognize that these powers exist in the world, whether in reality or in perception, but they say that Israel is not ruled by these mazalot. And I think in a sense, they did the same thing with the Urim, the Tumim. They explained how they worked. But then they limited them to how they would work, what kinds of questions you could ask. But there is no question that this is not something that we can afford to say existed many, many years ago.

31:51 – GS

This sense of whether it’s finding one’s destiny or looking into the stars for the right sign and all that, that lives with us up until today. So it’s not surprising that the rabbis, I think, were intrigued by it. But again, I think what I always look for is how the treatment is slightly different, how they took an existing piece of culture and how they modulated it and modified it.

32:21 – AM

I’ll just tell you that the rabbis in Babylonia were very, very superstitious. The Talmud all over the place talks about weird superstitions. They believed in the craziest things. So it’s not surprising that the rabbis were superstitious.

32:40 – GS

Yeah, there’s all about Ruach Ra’a and all that stuff. Right, correct.

32:43 – AM

Absolutely. Shadim, these demons, all of this weird stuff.

32:49 – GS

So, this was part and parcel of their conversation, and I would say today, you know, you can go—there are many Jews whose connection with Judaism leans towards—I wouldn’t even say the mystical. Superstition. I would say the magical. You’ve got the mystical, the—

33:05 – Multiple Speakers

right, right  .. supernatural.

33:20 – GS

polling of opinions, and that is also a phrase in the Torah that has been interpreted almost as if it’s too powerful, and that is the famous one of Aharei L’Rabim, following the multitudes, in Exodus 23, and this is what polling is all about, right? You stick your finger up and you see where is the multitude today, and how will that determine my next action? So in Exodus it says, you shall neither side with the mighty, the multitude, to do wrong. You shall not give perverse testimony in a dispute.

33:57 – GS

Again, it seems to focus on adjudicating, and the Talmud, as you know, goes in a whole different direction with this about a Sanhedrin that has a consensus about a death penalty, but the simple meaning of the verse is you don’t follow the multitude in terms of action, but certainly wrong action. The Ibn Ezra says, if you see many people testifying concerning something that you know nothing of, do not say to yourself, all of these people could not be lying. How does that ring true in today’s society?

34:36 – GS

It’s in terms of polling. We all assume, if you look, if I googled polling and the Middle East, you have polls about Democrats, Republicans, age demographics, You have Arabs, you have Israelis, you have Arabs in Gaza, Arabs in the West Bank, before October 7th, after October 7th. I think that if we have any chance of getting out of this, the answer is not going to be in polling, it’s going to be on leadership. And it’s in the types of questions that are asked. And that’s really my biggest takeaway.

35:11 – GS

From all of the commentaries and angles that I’ve seen on the Urim V’turim that ring so true today, that at the end of the day, it comes down to leadership, and it comes down to how we phrase our questions, and then how we act as a result of those questions and our leadership.

35:33 – AM

Fantastic. This was a great topic today. We started by saying this is a hard parsha, but you really got to the bottom of what the Urim and Tumim and what superstition is really and leadership is all about. Shabbat Shalom. Enjoy your trip next week and we look forward to have a bi-coastal clubhouse next Thursday evening. Be well. Shabbat Shalom.

35:54 – GS

Shabbat Shalom and thank you all for joining. See you all next week. Make sure to listen to the podcast on your favorite platform and why not give us a star or two and a friendly review? It wouldn’t hurt as they say so to all of you have a Shabbat Shalom. Remember, I don’t listen to every poll and We too can create the facts and we have to ask the right questions and do the right thing, and that ultimately will be the light. And if you look at the notes, you can find out what the main theories are of why Yale University has the Urim V’tumim as their logo.

36:38 – GS

And as a giveaway, I will just tell you that for them, Urim v’Tumim probably stood a lot more like the traditional sense of Torah im derecheretz (Torah and Science/Nature) . Urim was the New Testament laws from their Savior, and Tumim was supposed to be combined with actual knowledge. So, who knew? But anyway, see you all next week. Shabbat shalom.