Welcome to Judaism Demystified, a podcast for the perplexed.
Join us as we explore some of the most fascinating Jewish and
Torah related topics with our esteemed guests.
By tackling some of the biggest questions you likely won't find
addressed elsewhere, we aim to shed light on important issues
and inspire a return to the fundamentals.
Enjoy the show. Thank you Rabbi Beasley for
joining the Judaism Demystified podcast.
Can you share a bit about your background and what inspired you
to write Joel Omadia Mika Facing the Storm as part of the
esteemed Magid Studies on Tanakh series?
So this is my second book in the Maggie series.
And first of all, thank you very much for having me.
I enjoyed listening to the podcast and interacting with the
two of you. I'm the Tanakh coordinator at Le
Vittoro, which means I do most of the Tanakh classes there and
plan the curriculum. What are the goals for what
every? What should every yeshiva
student know about Tanakh? And my own personal background
is both literally and figuratively rather unorthodox.
So I grew up in a small town in Canada, very much boondocks at
the time. Now it's just been subsumed by
the Greater Toronto Air Authority, but it used to be a
very small town with and eventually made my way to the
Jewish day school. The community of Academy of
Toronto went to Yeshiva University and I had the fortune
or misfortune of getting put into a very bad Gamara share.
I don't know if you've ever had that experience.
And my choice was that OK, I can't, it's not.
This is not working and that's fairness.
I don't want to say who or when, but let me go to these one of
the other programs and then I just said, OK, I can major and
start taking Tanaka. I'll take I took a Gamar's year,
but I took seven classes of Tanaka weekly and that just
opened my eyes to a brand new, brand new.
You know, this is a this is a, you know, everybody's just take
a couple courses graduate. But Tanaka became a love and a
passion and in 93, my wife and I made aliyah to Mivasarit to the
merits call and I started teaching in Shari Mivasarit as
well for a bit in the afternoons doing Tanakh and slowly became
exposed to what you call the Gush Tanakh method.
At that time, he was only ever a lead tag online, just sharing
his little unformatted word documents.
And you tell you, but you start to appreciate the beauty of
seeing a structure, a message that comes out of the structure.
My wife had her own connection with Gush.
She had worked as a volunteer in the late in mid 80s and she, her
goal was not to make it out Israel.
Her goal is to move to the Gush. So in 96, we moved to the Gush
and I found myself forever a league tag, 2 houses down the
street and the yeshiva across the street and all these
wonderful thinkers. And they've helped me develop my
thinking and where I agree, where I agree, where I disagree.
But this became really my passion for the past 30 years.
Presently I'm teaching in Laboratory Tanakh.
When it comes to the trasar, my kids have ordered me a hat that
I was supposed to wear today, didn't arrive yet with a nice
big mega hat. Make trasar great again.
That's become my motto. I've got this.
My first work actually was the Tor me Etzion series.
The this was actually I had spent mentioned to Rabbi Reuben
Ziegler, who is now the head of Maggie Publishing, that what we
need is a commentary on the Tanakh using all the things that
have been written by Hart Zion, his teachers, his affiliates,
and he thought it was an interesting idea.
He went to Rabbit BIC and we hashed out this have to
introduce the world to what Gushtunach is in the Tormention
series. The I don't know if you
reviewers have it. I just have a copy here.
The famous blue binding essays 4 or five essays in every partial
describe, you know, approaching the Torah portion from a what
would be the Gush view, you know, Gush Thinker's gush
approach and trying to demonstrate how this works in
the meantimes. I was working at the time I was
finished my masters in Barilan and Tanaka and I was working
towards a doctorate. We're trying to do the full 2
full time jobs, which really didn't work out well as far as
the. But I was looking for a topic
and I the advice I got was go to the library and see which books
have the smallest amount of writers on the shelf.
So you're not competing with anybody.
And all of a sudden you've got all, you know, full bookcases
and Isaiah and your Miao and your Heskel.
And then you get to Treasar and Treasar, you'll have two shelves
full. Everybody loves Hoshea.
Hoshea is a very exciting novel, almost social justice.
Let justice roll down like a mighty St.
These, you know, these are exciting.
And then you get this one shelf with Mika had this much and
Dachem had this much. And I said, that's where I'm
going to focus. And from there I'd be threw
myself into the smaller and less study books of the Tray Sr.
And when Robert Ziegler gave me the opportunity first to write
about Nachim Kabaku and Stefania, I jumped at it and
worked through it. And it was fun when you're only
working with four or five books in.
I'll just give Nachim his example on the Bar Ilan shelf.
This is a university academic shelf.
There are only 5 books on Nacham and two of which were by
feminist scholars who were using their books to vent about
Nacham's portrayal of Ninvay as a woman who is a loose woman who
is going to be humiliated. Chapter 3 of Nacham describes
that ninvea will be open like a prostitute skirt.
You know, it's a very powerful image and it's also very
degrading to to women. I understand that two books were
written by Catholic scholars who were very upset that Nafam Zinda
Tanakh because God is supposed to be love and what sort of
loving God would allow the destruction of a city, etcetera,
etcetera. And of course, the only literary
read was a feminist Catholic nun who had written this great
literary read. So I was, there's really
nothing, you know, combining both of the of the world of the
things that I was complaining about.
But she actually had read the text.
And this is, and it's very lonely because if I what are you
working on Nahum? Nobody had anything to
contribute. It was very depressing.
And these are books that don't appear in the liturgy.
Nahum is actually a Haftorah in the Triennial cycle.
I'll let you guess, it's a book about vengeance.
So what partial would go? Would be great to put Nakam's
haftar in if you had to pick up a partial said I want a haftar
about vengeance. We don't use the word vengeance
too much in our religious world. I.
Think a question is a great question.
If you had to. So I'll I'll put you over your
misery. Shimon and Levy going into Yeah,
OK, fine. And in the original New Year
cycle? You realize how simple it was,
but you can't get it when you're.
Asking nobody thinks. Like asking a comedian to tell a
joke on the spot, you know? But we don't think that.
But that in itself is a commentary how they view the
actions of Shimon and Levy. Yeah, which is very interesting.
You know, they weren't bothered by the sense, oh, vengeance is
bad, although it describes El Nokem Venota God, you know, it's
a play on the 13 meter of Rakamim.
Nacham. God is vengeful.
God holds grudges. God is coming after you.
Very different view of the God that we teach.
And Nacham doesn't make it into the liturgy.
And now the second book, the first book was released actually
beginning of January. And I was fortunate to get the
copy. I was visiting my mother, my
mother, husband at time was sick.
We'd come to visit him in North America.
And we've got a copy of the book, Went back to London, went
to the British Museum. For those who don't know, the
British Museum contains Ninvae. In one of the rooms you can find
the throne room of Santero himself.
So I got to read the book in the read Nachum in the San Harris
throne room. To me, that was a very what is a
wonderful closing of the circle. Amazing.
And then COVID hit. So the book sort of fell off the
shelves as with everything else. So the new book has come out yo
Ovadia and Mika and it's got a nice reception and very
appreciative and hopefully it adds to the discussion as you,
Ben, I think you mentioned you went to Shiran Ovadia today or?
Yeah, Yes, exactly. Yeah, we just, we just started.
Reading, I've tried to limit it to 60 pages, which some people
say, you know, how do you write 60 pages on a 21 verse book?
But we'll talk about that when we get to the body, of course.
Well, first of all, when you mentioned earlier that it was
like a kind of an idea that you came up with a we should put
this torment CEO and out into the world, teach the, you know,
the method to the world. I was just like, that must have
been, you know, first of all, this is the best decision
obviously you've all made because right now we see it's
extremely popular, all these the Magid series is extremely
popular. You see it in all those farm
stores. It's all over the place and, and
just, it's such an amazing phenomenon.
But I, I want to ask you personally, what you know, you
studied in college and then you ended up in in the goosh, but
was there like a moment where you just like you learn this and
you're like blown away? Was it love at first sight or
was it something that like you struggled with at first?
Like what is this? Or was it something that like
was Oh my gosh, this is unbelievable.
Like what was your first reaction to to the method?
I'm going to I have a close friend of mine, Rabbi Michael
Citrone. He's the director Leyva Torah.
And several years ago he wasn't feeling well and I bought him a
book. I he said I need something new
to read on parsha and I brought him out Khan and Salmon's first
set and he said something very interesting.
He read it. He'd never seen this style
before. He's always used as a
traditional open up the Mikro Kadolo.
What does what Nahama did best? You know, when we talk about,
you know, we always have to talk about what came before to
appreciate the revolutionary nature.
The traditional approach is to open a possible read a verse,
read the commentaries. And his response was, this is
such a democratic approach, meaning I don't need to go
through layers and centuries of interpretation to understand
what the verse is doing, what the text is doing.
I just have to read the text. Of course, that doesn't mean I
could he could write or I could write a book like Ralph Sammons
after you had the after one read of the chapter, But you can
start to see that's an approach I can apply that was that's an
approach that's very accessible. And when you tell students what
is the keyword, for example, one of the classic literary tools
interesting first appear and this becomes one of these little
great questions. As a side note, the first one to
use the light Fort. The word was Bouburn
Rosenstweig. But if you ask a Raviol, But no,
this is obviously what Khazal meant when they were going
through the text of many of the gusher.
Baim are very, very adamant what we're doing is not anything
revolutionary. There's a stream.
We're just applying traditional Madrassic tools to the text and
just developing them further. Whereas I like to say those of
us who are exposed, who more exposed.
Raviol hasn't studied academic, literary, biblical criticism,
and that's not to his detriment at all.
Those of us who have studied it rise.
What about this has been this wasn't found elsewhere at least
applied elsewhere as a wait for arriving at the shot of attacks
and but it still wasn't one thing that I read.
I you know, I spent a year reading Rabbi Leap Tag, who
became for many people the first voice of the gush methodology OK
way back in the 90s. And then slowly the virtual
based measures started to make it more accessible and listening
to, for several years, I sat to her next to Rabbi Jonas and
Grossman and shul until I realized that it was great
discussions, but I shouldn't be having those discussions and
shul. So I had to move for I had to
move for I put myself literally in the seat right in front of
Rabbi Ramon because I couldn't keep talking in shul.
I had to. It was a Rosh Hashanah decision.
I have to stop talking in shul. And even if we're talking about,
you know, different methodologies, you can't really
do that in the middle of Shwonas, right?
So it's still very tempting. I just want to so this go
please. No, no, you were saying how you
don't need to have like the gamut of traditional, like the
traditional commentaries in order to, to get into this
method. You it's, it's very text basic
and you can just dive right in as long as you're faithful to
the text. This, my father, he, he grew up
without, he never learned to me because he didn't have that when
he was younger. He went to a regular Tikhon in
Israel and he learned Tanakh, just Tanakh.
You know what I mean? He knew Rashi a little bit,
never knew exactly what to do with Rashi really.
But it meaning he, he didn't because Rashi would sometimes
say things that would for him. It wasn't, he didn't know
exactly where to go with some of that stuff, but he knew, he
knows Tanakh very well. He learned all of Tanakh and he
knew, he knows it fluently. And then I introduced him during
COVID actually, because there was a lot of time and, you know,
and I started taking walks with my.
Are we starting? Yeah.
Are we starting to get? Oh, I wish we were back in
COVID. I was.
No, no, no, sure, you know, but
but we, I, we, we used to take walks together.
Maybe I shouldn't have said that, but yeah, we were taking
walks together. I, I, I, it's, it's understood.
6 feet apart. Masks 6 feet.
Of a mask and I was I was basically going through term
etzion. We're going through different
things. There was there's different
books right now off the top of my head.
I don't remember I was going through it.
My dad got varianted. He loved it today and I'm not
exaggerating. He like like is on a hunt for
any possible he he's finished everything from Riako Madonna on
YouTube, anything from a from a Ilhant Sagio bin noon, Aman
Bazak. He goes through it all.
And when you said that, that's exactly the point.
Because my dad, even though he doesn't have all the traditional
knowledge, the very fact that he knows Tanakh well, he's able to
just dive into this and fully appreciate it because it it can,
he can he can jump right in. You get what I'm saying?
I'm just trying to bounce off what you said, how you know but.
We realize this is perhaps one of the critiques of the method,
right? And this is precisely the
critique. Although I would also say.
I'm worried, I'm worried we're creating a bunch of Amma artsim
who don't know rambans who don't know Spornos on one hand.
And I would say that the once we skip Khazal, the whole
discussion of Tanakhba Gove 9. How do I approach the biblical
characters you mentioned earlier?
Like who is Ovadia? Who is Asaf in the text?
In the biblical text, Asaf's not such a bad guy.
He's not great. He marries 2 wives for Kanani in
Seifer Breishi. That's not a good thing.
He then leaves the land. The two things that they're the
two, you know, the two-part, we'll give a little 10 second
background. There are two Brits that Hashem
makes with Avrah, 1 is Milad, 1 is Britta Arets.
And the two things that Asaf does wrong is he violates Bree
Mila by Marin Kananem and he violates some retards by
willingly leaving the land in chapter 36.
So he's not a he's not a hero. He but he's not the bad guy that
has all make him out to be Who when he's coming back and he's
tired, he's tired because he's murdering and raping and
blaspheming and you know, and all these and you wonder where
that Madras comes from. But on the other hand, then it
becomes the humanization of the biblical characters becomes the
challenging point for those who view biblical characters as a
well what where's the role model then?
And is that balance that, you know, the democratic nature is
precisely what leads to the challenges that the methodology
faces? Correct.
I would say, though, that most of the time in most of the
writings, Ghazal is mentioned throughout the Ghosh works,
commentaries are constantly, constantly analyzed.
It's not like it's completely left alone.
Yeah, it's not. That's not.
Yeah, but, but in another way also.
I think that through the Ghosh, and I would like for you to
elaborate on how you understand this.
But for me, I think that you can also, we can also come from a
from the opposite direction. When you jump into Ghazal
without any pretext, without any, when you just jump into it
and it becomes, let's say just everything is taken literally or
face value and there's no OMEC into understanding because all
that also is a problem. Though that's the Rambam in the
beginning of. Right.
So it's a couple. Of the right, you know, the
first group, the Hakata Miskina, I'm not a next one in Ramapira
Khelek. The rabbi quoted it yesterday
and he handed us or she said just read it.
OK, that say that they are being the Roman Khazal by taking them
literally, even their mashbilotam, you know, by look
at how foolish we appear because we take Khazal literally.
You know, it's the it's such beautiful wording worth looking
up. But he talks about the first
group of people don't understand how to approach Khazal.
There are people who take Khazal literally and say it's
ridiculous. And there are people who take
Khazal literally and say we can't question this is obviously
what happens and that's not what so there, I guess.
But I think the what's different between, say, when a gush person
approaches Tanakh, he's not looking at a Mikro Gadillo
first. Correct.
Yes. And that makes a difference.
Yeah. Yeah.
That that's enables him to find patterns, structures, repeating
words. You know, I just opened up for
fun. I wanted to, you know, just have
the Mikro Gadillo, the first verse of Yoshua here.
There's 2 lines here and everything else is commentary.
You're not going to see what the repeating word in Yeshua 1 is.
You know the 1st chapter of Yeshua is.
You're not going to see the patterns and how the text is
structured if you're only reading one sentence at a time
and interrupting it for a page. 2 pages of commentary.
On the other hand, simply solely reading a Tanakh is going to
lead to the opposite problem. So you have to finding which
where do I go first is the. Is the that's the question, what
book am I using? And whoever controls the books
I'm using. There's an interesting article
in tradition when talking about the Torah Haim that was put out
by Musharraf book which Mufarshim go on the page.
All of a sudden if I lose the Cleocarne, I lose the lose your
Haim. What have I lost, What have I
gained, and what does that say about what I understand the
message of Tanakh to be so? So I want to give our audience a
little inside information, how we met.
You reached out to us. And before we get into your
book, because that's going to be the second part of this podcast,
we wanted to just tell everybody how we met.
You emailed us after listening to our episode with JJ Kimchi on
the Gush Tanakh Method. And while you expressed that you
enjoyed the discussion, you wanted to respond to some of his
positions. And could you first tell our
audience who maybe didn't listen to that episode or are not
familiar, what exactly is the Gushanachh method?
OK, so let's start with an example.
OK, I'm going to start with a story that begins that I think
most people I hope are familiar with, and that's the story of
the spies going to Yeshua Bet is the spies going to Rakov in
Yarikov. So you can read that text and
look for OK, where do the what? Why are they going here and what
is happening at each stage. And if you go line by line,
commentator, commentator, you'll get a picture of a story.
The gush method would look and say, OK, what words repeat
themselves? Not too many here.
But then I say where have I seen these verses before?
OK, so on one hand it's democratic, but obviously if you
have a sense of the more it's not that you have under your
belt, the easier it is to make these connections and parallels.
So Rahaf's speech is lifted word for word out of Devar in this
last last week's parsha and this week's parsha where she talks
with the greatness of God, Beshmaim Alvaris Mitakhat, you
know, very flowery words for a 13th century prostitute in
Jericho. OK, it's A and you and that.
I'll leave that as a separate question.
And then you say, where have I seen this story before?
I'm I'm going to. Have with Haftarah so.
Mulberry immediately jumps and says this is the Haftarah for
Bishalaka sending spies land of Israel and he does actually
begins. This is why, you know, you can
safely say this approach is done by others.
Here's what Moshe did and here's what Yoshua did.
And here are the five differences.
Yoshua doesn't tell the entire people.
He doesn't send hands of the nation.
They report to him directly. They don't report to the entire
people. I would add one final caveat.
Moshe's spies were great spies. They got all the information
they needed. Their conclusion was wrong.
Wrath of spies are Keystone cops.
They're bumbling. They're nearly caught.
They're, you know, they're really.
And yet they come back with the opposite inclusion.
Oh, we're going to win this. We have no need to worry.
You know, it's a very interesting little switch in the
story. So I've read that story many
times. And a couple years ago, I came
with another set of parallels. Two people who are sent to by a
force that's going to destroy a city, take refuge in a house.
A mob surrounds the house or people surround the house and
close. Not meaning the.
Yeah, I think this is a reversal of the load story.
OK. And that would be the gush
method to look and say, OK, and then, then you'd look and say,
OK, if the themes are the same, what wording is the same, and
you find a set of verbal parallels along the way, I'll
let you do your homework. We don't have to, OK, which
parallels match up, including a little word play that happened
to love though, which is the two people go to Rahav and the two
angels go to before they go to love, they go to Rahul Fahir.
So if you hear the little play there, it's a fun little.
And then the question of course you have to ask, and sometimes I
think this is a legitimate Christian is a good method.
What is the point of these parallels and why is the Dome
destroyed? If you look at the text in the
middle of the text, why is the Dome destroyed?
There's sinful nature towards. Define sinful.
What is the sin that was the only sin we can see in?
There are several sins we see, but what's sin is the one that's
being gone, being highlighted. The the way they're abusing
Lot's daughters. Even before they offered,
Lodenfeld makes that strange offer to separate, you know,
discussion. But they don't take guessing.
They don't take guessing. And that is contrast with
Abraham, who in the previous chapter is taking guessing.
And then, of course, if you're a gush guy, you're looking and
saying, hear the words, and here's the words.
And right here's the parallel to the little story.
And he's playing, interpreting itself.
Rakov gets saved and. She invited.
Because she takes guests in she. Invited them.
And I would add as something perhaps a little bit dramatic,
but she's a Kanani. But that tells us the Kanani not
being destroyed for any national reasons or biological reasons.
This is a there's a moral issue if you a Kanani who can take
guests in in Madrasic terms, gets to marry Yoshua, as the
Madrasico will say at the end of the chapter 6.
You know, this is an amazing this is an amazing thing.
But I was to give that an example of how the Gush Tanaka
method works. It's anachema for Ashutosh MO.
I find words or I find a story, I've matched it up with other
stories. I find lines, I match them up
with other and you create this huge intertextual web.
That's a lot of fun. You know, it's a lot of fun to
be playful. You can look does this sometimes
how the strands may be very tenuous, you know, and this is
part of the discussion that still has to be had.
How what are the rules to these parallels?
What are the rules to is this what the author really intended?
It's hard to say the author, but you know, is this is the text
telling me look back at the story.
I think in the rough up and the low story it does sometimes you
have others, you know, that may be less convincing.
But we're looking at texts as a whole and trying to see what the
texts as a whole say. So so there.
So it's assuming it's assuming a unity to the text.
Correct. In fact, not only is it assuming
it's displaying the unity to the text, in a sense it's displaying
and it's it's it's putting it out there so I've.
Been working with Rabbi Asher Manning the past month on an
article for Raviol. Banu's 75th birthday is fresh
right? Trying to explain his
methodology in English and it discusses 2 approaches to
biblical criticism, higher source criticism and in gush you
had Robert Breuer who was famous for his He accepted the
fundamentals or different documents that have Kurdish bar
who built the Torah has different documents and wants to
contrast different ideas of each other.
Accepting at least the basis of the source criticism.
As he says, as opposed to four authors.
Hashem is the author and we have to understand why he does this.
And Raviol's approach is exactly what you said.
When you see enough of these larger patterns, it creates a
large, you know, it creates a larger picture.
OK, so this piece in and of self may not fit, but if I see it in
a larger picture, there's a unity that's created that the
question many of the questions Raviol would say all of them,
but many of the questions for Sure Start to disappear.
We had Rabbi David Foreman on while back and his whole, we had
a whole segment just dedicated to this way of responding to
biblical source criticism, which I thought was very effective.
And it's, it's precisely what you're saying right now.
There's so much, it's like overwhelming the evidence that
it's so difficult to make the argument.
Once you once you see it, you can't Unsee it.
I I personally agree with you. I know that in talking to
academics who hold by the source critical theory, they won't they
don't deny that there's a level of intertextuality that is
taking place throughout the text or a structure.
They just feel that the different wordings for large
part. I remember James Kugel told me
several years ago he was actually my one of my two
mentors on my master's thesis in Bar Ilan.
And he said to me, honestly, there are really only two
documents, the P document and everything else.
OK, that the in academia the many of the distinctions between
you know the Jed and I hope nobody's offended by me
explaining what they think have fallen away because of it.
But the P document remains a very specific and to me as a
religious Jew, that makes sense. If anybody who's ever read any
document or contract they've signed for a rental agreement
knows that the English in a legal contract is not the same
as day-to-day conversational English or even prose.
The fact that the Torah will use a different terminology for
legal terms doesn't doesn't bother me so much as it does as
others would say. Ah, here's my proof.
But but again, this comes down to the question of what are my
assumptions going into the text. I acknowledge I have my biases
and I'm not embarrassed with them.
And those people who are academic have to acknowledge
they're coming with an assumption of what the text is.
If you view it as a man made document over hundreds of years,
you'll find cracks. And if you view it as a divine
what appear to be cracks. If you use a divine document,
you'll those will disappear. I want to be fair to both sides,
but I do see a larger over to overwhelm, you know, overarching
unity to the text that's there. And it's not just even about
you. I mean, unity is, is, is the
obvious points that you can bring out.
But what's more interesting and where it gets more, where it
gets more, it's harder but also more enriching is when we try to
is when we understand that not only is there unity through the
text being shown here, but the text is speaking to each other.
The texts are, the texts are in conversation.
It's it's. That's the fun part.
That's the fun, that's the enriching part.
And that's, and that's the part where I, I feel like a lot of
people, they, they, they, they appreciate the gush method
because it shows the unity of the text.
But I don't think people realize how enriching actually getting
into it and seeing the conversation that's going on
here in the text and what it could really mean towards what
what's actually being written. Also the difficulty of, you
know, taking separate documents and combining them and still
having a coherent message is it, it's very difficult to, you
know, grasp that for me. I, I, I sympathize the answer to
me, it's, they're not different documents.
They're one document. But what you said about the
conversation, one of the IT took 20 years before somebody taught
me the first basic skill of understanding Toastwood on the
Gemara. I just wanted to bring this to
this. I'll come back to the Tanaka in
a second, which is when Toastfoods takes a text from OK,
what did I just study? OK, the first mission in the
10th chapter in Saffian, you cannot eat before, you know, the
seder. Then Tosa comes with the Gemara
and Kufzai and says you can eat mene targuma, you can eat these
different foods. So the question is, do I explain
this text in terms of this text or which text is primary?
Which text is toast Would always says this text is the one that's
correct and this text has to be reinterpreted.
Correct to make fit to to the other text.
Right, A or B, which but the implicit understanding you have
to ask which text this toast would hold to be this is the
text that I'm not going to change this text.
I'm going to you talk about conversations in the first term
at Theon 2. There are two articles on Noah
getting drunk. OK, Rabbi Hanoch Waxen wrote a
brilliant article comparing Noah getting drunk to getting drunk
of his daughters. And I wrote an article on Noah
getting drunk compared to Gun Aiden, that every step that Noah
is taking is parallel to what Adam, Adam, Mauricio is supposed
to be doing in the Garden of Eden.
So the question is, how is depending on the story I pick,
is Noah just getting drunk to avoid it all?
Just like Lote is post trauma, post really destruction, the
destruction of Saddam, the destruction of his whole world
and he's there's nothing left and he's getting drunk to avoid
that. Or is he doing what he's doing
to try to recreate, you know, the Garden of Eden after the
world has, is he starting anew or is he trying to hide?
So the picking the story did I apply to becomes very
fascinating because that then it becomes a interpretive choice.
You know, it's not just two stories, but there's this whole
web going back and forth. My next one of my next works is
going to be is a book on the Tanakh web.
I'm just trying to create one of these.
Remember how when we were kids we said these choose your own
adventure stories. So I'm I'd like to create a
thing. OK, you're at the Ikeda.
If you want to see how the Ikeda plays out in the covenant after
Matantora in chapter 24, go to this page.
If you want to see the Ikeda has echoes in something very
different, the concubine of Giva, the horrible story of the
pluggage of Giva in chapter 19 inch.
But there's all sorts of literary parallels there as
well. Go to this page.
And the story that I choose will influence how I understand
what's happening in the akada. So conversations are two ways
and people forget that. And then if I read A&B, that's
going to influence my understanding of a.
It's a challenging, it's a challenging question.
It's fun though. It's that this is part of what
the fun, you know, the enjoyment of learning is, at least in the
good way, so. It's it's truly amazing.
And regarding some of Kimchi's criticisms.
OK, so if memory stories about he had several.
He brought a very interesting criticism that I accept and I
get stuck with a So what? I'll explain what the criticism
is that we can't put ourselves into the.
Time period. My we claim to be trying to
understand shot what is the meaning of the text, but meaning
is time dependent and values dependent.
And this, you know, we can't understand what it means if a
king has a total control over subject.
He says go charge and everybody goes in charges.
Well, who's responsible for the damage they caused?
And you know, where as we now nowadays hold individual
soldiers responsible for, you know, what would be war crimes?
If somebody is committed with an atrocity, they have to be held
responsible. That's not a no.
I don't think anybody would question that.
But in ancient times you wouldn't.
I don't think that would apply because no, the idea of even
disobeying a soul, a king would be a it wouldn't be done.
It just is so far he brings, I think he brings that example and
what if in his article that writes about it and the reality
is the problem with it's it's correct.
And then So what it don't mean to be dismissive because this
isn't that's not the critique that got me out of that caused
me to lose sleep. There's one critique he had.
There are three critiques. I'm going to do the first two
that didn't cause me to lose any sleep.
The critique was, you know, that we can't fully appreciate what
it means. And that's true, but that's why
the Maggie Mishnah says in the Torah, because the Torah is
Nisrit, it doesn't try to answer every question at every time,
but it allows for the variations in human interactions and
because the values, the ultimate values are eternal.
So the recognize that you know various points as I can to fully
appreciate the text. I mean the second one was if.
We're going with the premise if we're going with the premise
that it's a divine text, if we're going with the premise
that it's a divine text, with that premise, of course, of
course, if not, that's a whole different story.
But with the premise of a of a, of a divine text, meaning
becomes I mean to to to square into what meaning is not.
Yeah, OK. That's that's a great question
and it I'll tell you where it comes up and especially in very
relevant to our lives nowadays. What are the how does this, how
do we wage war morally? OK.
If we were to go by biblical what's described in the Bible,
then we should be doing a lot more to the Palestinians.
And that is inherently moral. And I think it's issues like
this, you know, we're already we see.
I like the Rambam's explanation of Shmita.
How can you nullify a biblical mitzvah and principle
specifically, how can you nullify a biblical mitzvah give
Khazal the right to override, you know a biblical mitzvah and
the Rambam and the guide to perplex and you see it elsewhere
with says because the values are eternal, how we apply these
values has to be established by time base.
I would not want to apply biblical, the biblical standards
of morality to Modern Warfare nowadays.
I don't think we should. I don't think it's right.
I think it I think it's wrong. The rhombam describes a process
where Corbenote Corbenote was the appropriate approach.
The heat. But the tortoise is tries to
move us and wean us away from it.
And one could argue very simply slavery.
You know, how does how does the Bible have slavery?
Because everybody has slavery, and slavery is a universal
institution and only recent. But the Bible makes it very
clear it doesn't like flavor. Bible makes it very clear it
doesn't like bearing 2 wives. There's nobody marries 2 wives
gets off, nothing good happens to them.
OK 2 mother in law's cannot. Be a good deal.
It spends a good deal of time. It spends a good deal of time
with Rachel and Leia outlining that.
I mean, it's not even. It's very, very direct about.
Yeah, direct about it even. Though Pnina and Khanna, you can
go through everybody who's married Yeah.
And this becomes the and it the Rambam builds this very nuanced
and subtle idea, but it's I think it's the correct
understanding of the text. I can't outlaw everything, but I
can set up the values. I don't like slavery.
I don't like polygamy. I don't like, you know, the and
notice already you see that in Khazal there was no such thing
as have been Sora Mora. There's no such thing as Irahini
Dakhat, you know. And already there's this sense
that we aren't we, don't we? Avoiding the death penalty as
much as possible. Or correct.
Yeah. And that's saying that I'm not.
And it doesn't detract from the divine text.
It just says how it's applied has to be regulated and
moderated. And This is why we have Fazal
and This is why we have these discussions throughout our
commentators. And so the I think that's so it
is a divine text without question, because it, and it
contains divine values that are eternal values don't change how
how they're applied on a day-to-day basis.
For this, we have rabbinical guidance and you know, a
tradition of thousands of years. That would be my response to
what you're saying. Excellent.
Yep. And which criticism of kimchi
did make you lose sleep? So the second criticism was the
academic that was he, Kimchi says.
You're cherry picking from the academics.
You set some of their findings, but you don't accept their
conclusions. And again, that's I don't think
that's intellectually dishonest if I because the academics come
up with a foundational set of here's what we believe to be
true about the text or whatever we are doing, and then they
interpret what they find accordingly.
Now those findings are findings and what they find in
archaeology I have to deal with, but I don't necessarily say have
to accept their understanding. I don't believe the exodus
happened and therefore this is how what archaeology teaches.
But I can look and say, OK, I do have this interesting discovery
here at Kayaba, which shows that, wait a second, there's no
pig bones anywhere in this area and the good gates are facing
Jerusalem. There's a double gate.
And could that be the Shari mentioned in Schwalf?
And you have, I don't have to. I'm not bound by their
intellectual, you know, their assumptions.
That doesn't bother me. The one that bothered me was
these. Old because they're bringing
their own bias to the text. Right, since they're bringing my
own bias. That that's exactly what OK.
Yeah, OK, The one that did bother me was a fascinating 1
because it's, I'll tell you where it came from.
His he says what is the purpose of studying texts in general?
What is the purpose of studying texts?
And the Zohar, you know, he brought the Zohar quoted by
Ramosha Lifenstein and Bahisi Kati that the shot is the
garment. But getting close to Karish
Barkhu is the meaning of the text is the purpose.
I don't know if you remember, this is a sort of this he threw
it out. This is the it's not the
purpose. And because the Glush Derek is
so concentrated on the structure and the shot and understanding
what are the rules of the text are understanding itself,
where's the meaning to it? And I don't know if he's aware
of it. He was echoing the criticism of
Rabbi Francis Nataf in Jewish accent several years ago when
the Tormezion study finished. And they he he put a criticism
into the Jewish action. And I remember this bothering me
no end. Of course, I'm biased.
This is I view the Tormezion series as, you know, as my, you
know, as my baby. OK.
And obviously many other people, great people, worked on the
project, did much more than I did to develop it.
But I have a love for this series.
And he said it teaches structure, it shows patterns.
It's great, but it's a but it's too sophisticated and there's
nobody's trying to What is the meaning?
What is the purpose? Meaning what?
May I just. I'm just.
Trying to understand something. I'm just trying to understand
something. There's enormous amount of
meaning that's brought out from these structures all over you,
we read Tormetzion. It's like infinite amount of
meanings, that is, that is brought out from the structures.
What do we mean here by no meaning?
Well, I think he would. He was, if I recall correctly, I
haven't listened to that podcast in a long time, but what he was,
I think the point that he referenced was that, for
example, like a Subs the the the you know, descendants of Ace of
that whole section, like what what is the purpose of mention,
right? Was that what he mentioned?
Right, I would I would say it a little differently.
It's you. It's very hard to take a
tournament to an essay and make an inspiring 2 minute void at
the Shabbos table. OK.
Which is A and this comes into a lot of the questions that we ask
in yeshiva. Am I teaching the text?
Am I teaching or am I? And I don't think the dichotomy
is true or am I teaching values or goals, if that makes any.
There's this sense of many of the courses that many she would
offer, I would call Yeshiva Ted talks where they take a verse
and then they run and jump and or an idea and they developed
that idea. If you look at the most best
selling books in the Jewish world, OK, the Musser books,
nobody opens up a Navi. We'll come back to Navi soon.
Nobody opens a Navi for Musser. There's right.
The best selling books are the ones that tell me what I need to
do right now. Tell me what I need to think,
tell me what I need. You know, what are my what are
the meat out I need to have? What are the Mashkafa?
You can't get the boort with like a punch line right with
when it's. Very, it's, it's very hard.
What does it, you know, what is it?
And that becomes. So as I said, it kept me off
because it really did bother me because there is a truth to
that. Guys don't come to my class to
be inspired. I try to inspire.
I try to be, but they don't. The purpose of the class is to
actually learn something. And I don't like creating this
artificial dichotomy. But look at the shelves of if
you go into Yeshua, you look at the books that the kids put on
the they're mock home. They don't have to knock since
they will have, you know, you have if you get a fancy title,
the magic touch, you know the you remember that book on the
Ghia from so many years ago, right?
Great book, great marketing. And I'm not against, I'm not
against. You know, I'm not saying that
that's wrong, but I was. You see how that it's marketed.
I have my favorite always is Eric Frum.
You know, the former student of Rob Dessler took and turned it
into the psych great psychologist book, psychological
bestseller, the art of loving. And I always wanted to devastate
the Hafitzkaya and the art of not speaking gossip and, you
know, destroy and defaming your neighbors or finding a good
title. And but that's, that's 90% of
our Jewish bookshelf. And I think there's a reason for
that. People are looking first for
inspiration to stay connected, to stay attached.
And to what extent does the Gush methodology advance that?
I'll tell you a lot of the problems of people in Gush.
They live in Israel. They read the Tana.
They look outside the window. Yeah, I'm inspired for people
who are removed from from that milieu.
It's not as exciting. You don't walk around Teaneck,
NJ with A to knock in hand and recreate the steps of the
answer. It's a very different and so you
they don't have the sense that this is a living document as
much as it would be otherwise. It's not it's not a 2 minute
void at the Shabbos table. So that did bother me and I
thought about it some more. If I have, let me ask you a
question. How would you define Tor
Alishma? The great debate over the years.
Between Rabbahima Velajan and the.
Tor Alishma I would say would be the rush.
The rush had the rush had Lachem Tor.
I believe that's from the Rush. No, I'm a legend Games, right?
Then you have the Hasidic view. If you were to ask me just like
this on one foot, I would say just the the most basic level
Torah Lishma should mean trying to understand the Torah for the
sake of what the Torah has to say.
So you're siding with the Roche, the Haim volition?
In a sense. I think to a large.
Extent the Jewish. World has sided with Rushner
Zelman, the first libelo trebi. He says Torahly, schmaz,
whatever gets you close to the Kurdish baruch.
Yeah, OK. Yeah.
Which is essentially Torres from Torah for the purpose of.
Yeah, yeah. And that's we see it in the
spirituality I teach in the Israeli high school as well as
Leva Torah. And who wants to say it's enough
when you know you've got Rebbe Nachman stories that are all the
rage and very quick spiritual fixes and, you know, highs and
this becomes a again. So this is what JJ Kimke's
critique, you know, all these thoughts came back when I heard
this, because the gust message does not lend itself to easy
forts. I will accept that and own that
it's it's sides with the Roche, the convolution.
We're here to try to understand what the Torah is saying.
And it's a much more arduous and strenuous process.
And it appears you have to sit down and read it and appreciate
the nuances. It doesn't lend itself to quick
fixes, which I think a lot of the British world, modern world
is trying to always find today. So.
That's a that's a modern phenomenon, you know, the need
for inspiration for when it comes to like these giving these
votes. But I don't think that's really
a that's not really a valid critique on, you know,
historically. Like what?
Like what would be wrong? Why?
Why would that 'cause you not to sleep well?
And what what exactly is bothersome about that?
That's the part I don't understand.
Because every time that I go in and teach students, I have a
responsibility to them both to give over information and to
inspire them so that 20 years from now they will hopefully be
able to, you know, pass this on to their children.
And that may. I say some.
What? May I say something?
Please. When I, I'm, I'm being totally
upfront over here. When I was younger, I learned a
lot of Hasidut, a lot too much, OK, a lot.
And I got inspired a lot. Like it's like a, it was like a
tidal wave of, of inspiration. At one point I stopped.
There was a part of me that was sort of I guess inside it was
like, well, well, where am I going to get in for inspiration
from right now if I'm not going the route that I was accustomed
to going and accustomed to seeing those results?
It was actually paretsion gushetsion that actually that is
where I rekindled inspiration. But you see it's a different
type of inspiration because it's not, it's not the quick fix.
You see, inspiration could be a little bit like drug.
Sometimes it's easy. You take it boom, like you know,
you're, you know, you get the, the high from, from, from the
inspiration, but it's not something that it doesn't it,
it, it, it, it's not something that is that last.
You have to constantly be going through inspiration to be able
to keep that up. It's like it's like almost like
because it comes up and then it comes down and comes up and
down. But when you take the Tanakh and
you start to really decipher it, finding structure, keywords,
intertextuality, understanding these texts, talking to each
other and then understanding. This is why I brought up before
the enrich in part is not just in seeing the unity of the text,
but seeing how the text is informing each other and
something, something really deep is coming out of all of this.
It's not just, you know, it's not just a literary exercise.
It's it's a divine document. It's a divine text which we are
using certain tools given to us that we can then unlock it.
For me, that gave tremendous inspiration the last, and it
was, in a sense, more inspiring than anything I ever had before.
So this whole conversation, this whole time, I'm kind of binding
my lip because I get what you're saying.
I understand. But arriving at a mature
inspiration is 100 times more powerful, effective, lasting and
real. Thank.
You for the physique. No, but it's I'm just telling
you from my experience. Hashem.
Hashem is not found in the whirlwind.
He's found in the still, steady voice.
Right. So I'm I'm.
So and yet we wouldn't outlaw NTSY chapatones for our
teenagers. We understand that there's a
role in there's a place for that.
I'm not disagreeing. There's a place for tishes,
there's a place for singing, there's a place we need to be
able to find that balance. And that's why I said it.
I didn't say that JJ was right or the critique is right, OK.
But I do say it's something that I wrestle with because I
understand there's a what's the famous Madras, you know, the you
take the long path that's short or the short path that's long.
And too many people take the short path that's long into the
quick fix, the quick inspiration.
But they're always the most popular speakers in yeshiva, you
know, like this guy. They're the fun ones, right?
And those of us who are actually teaching text and teaching young
minds how to work through text seriously, you know, with
discipline, with repetition. Think this out.
Don't be I'm not going to give it to you.
It's harder. It's less popular and I embrace
that. But I'm aware of the these don't
these I don't I don't get up in class and try to be Mr.
Inspirational Mr. Ted talks every time I in front I'm trying
to do something different and. I, I actually think that I think
we're underestimating the, your, the ability to, to turn these
into warts because if you, if you like, I, I personally love
Alf. Beta, Yeah, Alf, Beta has
essentially it's 10 minutes, what you're thinking?
It's, it's basically 10 minutes and the way I mean, my, my kids
love it and they, I don't think they get it, this kind of
inspiration. Have you ever seen LF beta
before? I'm a subscribe member.
I don't think Rebbe Foreman appreciates the brilliance of
what the visual adds to our understanding of text, which
I've been fighting in this year for few years.
Please give me a bar core. You'll be the only one who uses.
I don't care. Please let me do this.
The first time I've ever talked with a smart board is in the
Yeshiva Dork. I'm in Toronto as a guest
speaker for one class and I got to move words around and all of
a sudden everybody's watching because you, we live in
engaging. This is another.
It's a separate issue that every Jewish educator deals with.
We're a reading. We're a reading.
We're people with a book in a world of smartphones and we are
having a very hard time competing nowadays.
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.
I mean, for me, I think that to that to me is like I'm, I'm so
inspired of my children. I think that that's for me the
biggest test my children are are young, they're under 12 and this
is the one thing that they like, you know, this is, and you would
think it's they need to hear these stories and meet Rashim
and all that. But actually this is the the
shot is so attractive to them because it's just the way they
it's weaved together. It's done in like 1015 minute
segments. There, it's incredible.
And there's a punch line at the end of it.
So I think that I think we have to give it a little bit more
credit. Yeah, and I and, and that that's
when it comes to children. And I think when as we become
adults, I think that really, like for me, it's almost, it's
almost, I'm dumbfounded in a way because like to me, and maybe
it's just me, maybe I don't know, maybe it's just me.
But like for me, it's, I don't understand how anything can be
more inspired than what I go through and stuff.
But maybe it's just me. Maybe it's the problems?
With me and it's and there's nothing wrong with me just being
you or myself because that every applies to gush.
Not everybody is going to apply here.
And yes, yeah, we have Shivimpa name the Torah and it's big
enough that it can encompass all of us.
I this gush there, I recognize I it's that third critique that it
doesn't speak immediately to the inspirational side.
I it hits because it's something that we all wrestle with, but we
do it anyways. So you know, what do we have?
What are our goals in it? It's as we saw this was how we
feared off. What are the goals in education?
What are we trying to accomplish?
What where does inspiration found that very critique?
You know, started that off and you have to give JJ credit.
Well, I think we're, I want to give him, I want to give him a
little bit, I want to be a little bit more fair because
it's coming back to me. What, what he was talking about
in that segment. I think he was mentioning the
fact that let's say, for example, the genealogy of like
the, the descendants of a sub right now, all that's listed and
from a kind of, you know, from the gush kind of method.
Let's just look at it that way. It's, it's kind of like, what
does this do? What do we do with this?
Right. But with with Kabbalah, for
example, there's you can decipher a lot of meaning from
from all of that. You know what seems to be kind
of. OK, right.
That's that's what he was talking about.
Yeah, what we would do with the negoti method is actually
Rebecca First class on Safer Bray Sheet, for the record,
which is that there's a clever usage of the word tolidote that
appears 11 times in Safer Bray sheet.
And Radak and Rashi have an argument whether tolidote means
generations or the happenings. And Ruby Liebtag has, in one of
his first essays ever lined up, Here's the 11 appearances of the
word Tolidote. Notice who gets genealogies?
Ishmael, Asav, Vinay, Adam. Notice who gets stories?
Todo Yakov, Todo Yitzhak. And he argues that the Tolidoth
there are a literary marker to say this is the end of Asav's
story. All he has are generations.
When it gets to the Todo Yakov, there's still more story to be
told. He's still part of the covenant.
He's still part of the breed, so I do want to give at least the
gush, you know the sure. Yeah, that's what I wanted to
address. I think that was part of what he
was saying. But again, I have to re listen
to it. It's been a while.
And is there anything else you want to, you know, kind of tie a
bow around all this about the Gushtanaf method?
We've been talking with the Gushtanaf method.
I think it'll be we spoken I think well and intelligently
about it and I don't I don't think I have anything major to
add right now. So.
That was really, that was really enjoyable and very necessary so
and we love JJ so. Yeah, JJ is the man.
JJ is the man. I'd like to get to speak to him
on today. I'm sure we'd have a one of
these people would love to sit down with a nice meal in a nice
restaurant and just talk for hours.
So yeah. He's he's fantastic.
We're going to get into your book now and for everyone, this
is this. Is the book OK with the name
screen? All right, so yoel vadia Mika
Mika. So let's let's start with in
your introduction, you speak about prophecy.
What is prophecy? And I think this is a question
that not enough people ask. Sometimes you can be in yeshiva
for 20 years and I feel like have they ever asked themselves
what exactly is a Navi? I, I don't know.
So when I saw your introduction and how you went through a very
detailed explanation of what a Navi is, I found it very
refreshing, very educational. So I wanted to bring this out.
What is the etymological meaning and functional role of a Navi?
Additionally, how do we understand prophecies that
appear to have gone unfulfilled? 2 great questions.
I'm going to do do them in order.
The first one is what is a Navvi?
So I want to start with the end. What the Navvi is not is a
prophet, meaning the Navvi in Tanakh is not somebody who is
the has a crystal ball and sees visions in the future.
The only person I think who would fit into that category in
the Tanakh would be ironically the one person that has all
debated in Magilla Gimel is not enoughy, and that is Danielle.
Anybody who's read the visions of Danielle in the chapters 7 to
12, the esoteric and the goat fighting the Ram and the, you
know, charging each other and the visions of the splits, the
north against the South and all these are and to be fair, the
second-half of Zakaria as well. OK, they're they would be what
we colloquially understand as a prophet, but the first
appearance of the word Navi is in Seifer Schmot where Hashem
tells Moshe Vayomar Hashema Mushe Rene Tatika I have made
you a Lord or in position of strength over Paro and Aran will
be your Navi and Rashi understands immediately that
this just simply means speaker in modern Hebrew we and in early
we talk about speech Nevim are you know problems or phrases
that come off and he understands the route to be nun vet Aniv is
somebody who speaks. He's a speaker, He's a
spokesperson and even Ezra prefers an understanding of nun
bet Aleph, which is to reveal that God has a message and the
Navi's job is to reveal his message in Acadian and etcetera,
they talk about the word that shorish Nabaa or Nabo is.
Speaker Somebody who announces. And I saw when when you asked me
to I found in a just recently, because you asked the question
that there's also a possibility if you remember the famous
phrase nuttering nabobs of negativism.
The Spiro Agnew and the Nixon's vice president complained the
media were nuttering nabobs. So he's just the word nabob from
the word Na'vi comes from, you know, this all this etymology,
but all that have to do is just simply giving a message over and
but they are people who God speaks to and that is important
for us. And therefore you can have
people who work within the court and David has a court Navi God
and also Natan and Shromo has Ido and everybody has their
Naveen that they that are present.
And then you have people who really are outside the court.
They're speaking directly to the people.
I think that one of the distinguishing factors between
Naveen Rishonim and Acronim, all the Naveen Macronim do not talk
to kings directly. They're talking to the people.
They're on the soapbox, whether it's Jeremy Al standing up in
the middle of the mission of the Mekdash in Chapter 7 and Chapter
26 in Jeremy Al, wherever they're giving their speeches,
it appears that they're trying to speak to the people directly
outside of the political framework that used that they
used to be kept in. But they're spokespeople.
And that leads to the question. So it almost avoids your
question, how do the propheties not become fulfilled?
If I'm not saying that they're predicting that the goal is to
predict, then that almost removes the question.
The Rambam in Hilko Yasudiya Torah Pericua Dalid has a very
has a rule though, which is it's based on Pursuku Munirmio.
If a Navi gives a prophecy of impending doom and it doesn't
happen, that doesn't impinge on his his status as a Navi.
In fact, that makes them a very good one.
Guess what, you got the job done.
Congratulations. I've scared the people are A
cause, the people to think, rethink, to return, to repent.
A Navi who says something good is going to happen, that becomes
more of a challenge if it doesn't happen, because that has
to be true. God would never give a positive
prophecy without reason. The most insightful article on
this and it's. We'll give 2 examples in Chapter
11 of Ishayo describes the birth of Mashiach and it takes place
after chapter 10 in Ishayo which describes the Assyrian invasion
of Yehuda which takes place in seven O 1 before the common era.
Now Mifarshim have two options. This nevua is completely
separate from the chapter in front of it because it didn't
happen. The Mushiyaf didn't come in
seven O 1 before the common era or the Mufar chief can say no,
this is not referring to Mushiya.
This is referring to his kyao and it's only describing him in
terms of what the later Mushiya would look like.
The Malvin comes and he says every nevua is a suspended
sentence. If you're deserving, it happens
now. If it's not deserving, it's
going to happen later. He writes his long discussion of
this meaning it his Kyao should have been Meshiach and if for
those who know Gemara Sanhedrin, the parapahelic, that's an echo
to the famous part has Kiskyo only sung Shira and he only
sung, you know, he only brought out the Vince brought out the
guitar. He only brought out, you know,
bring out the band. Had he only done that properly,
he only said hello properly, he would have been Mashiach.
That and of course is also based on the fact in chapter 12 it
describes this thing Rena Bacall Zimrat, the singing that will
occur when Mashiach comes. So that Gumar is actually also a
pirush commentary on that section in the show.
But if Mizuho should have been Meshia, it doesn't happen.
So the mobim says if it doesn't happen now, it will happen later
or we just have to wait for the next.
But that Nivua never positive Nivuot will happen.
It's just a question of when. When we're very fortunate we're
not in the Rebbe Akiva mode where we only see the foxes
coming out of the Beta Migdaj and the famous Gwarin mock out
where we only seen the and we have to rely on our muna.
Well the foxes are going to come out then things are going to can
only get better from here. And if Hashem this promise came
through, this promise came through.
We're very fortunate we live in a time where we see the land of
Israel flourish and we see so many good things happening.
And I know life is devolved here.
You know, I'm not unaware of it. I have 5 boys who just last one
gets out of the army today since I, you know.
So having said that, we, I'm well aware of what's, you know,
that is challenging, but this is so much better than it was 80
years ago. It's so things are so much
better and we see prophecies now.
The positive prophecies, the return, the rebuilding.
I'm very passionate about that. I think you'll, and I think JJ
mentioned this is part of the focus of Tanaka.
Now it becomes a living document again, 'cause you've had all
these positive prophecies that have been sitting on the shelf
for 2000 years, and now you can open it up the book up again and
say, got it, That, that, that line right there.
That's right. You know, kids playing in
Jerusalem. There you go.
OK. And you just get excited again.
And you, the Tanaka, now speaks to us again.
You know, it's funny because it's funny that you mentioned
that example because I was wondering when people who are
like, let's say anti Zionists, they'll say, or the, the
religious anti Zionists will say like, you know, the, the we're
waiting for the Navi. We're waiting for Eliano Navi to
come and to, to give us the land to give us, to give us the Beth
Hamik Dash or the Mashiach or whatever it is.
And I'm like, we don't need an another naveed to come back when
there's a prophecy being fulfilled already like this.
That prophecy has a. Prophecy sitting on the shelf.
It's sitting on the shelf already, so now it's it finally
happened. Why are you not acknowledging
that? It's right there, you know.
I'm you have to have somebody else.
I've thought about. I cannot give a fair answer for
the other side. I do try always, but at this
time I it's. Hard.
It's hard. It's hard.
It escapes me. I have to be into.
I cannot, honestly. Well, it's coming from, it's
coming from a place where the, where, where there's a lack of
acceptance for the world as it is.
Meaning the, the, the air of Meshech in, in, in their eyes is
something that is so radically different from everyday life
that it, it almost requires a it requires something drastic
because to, to, to synthesize a messianic world with the world
today doesn't compute right? That's that's what's going on.
I I think it's also in general how much let's not pretend that
midnight Israel is this. It's not wonderful bastion of,
you know, overflowing and it's very hard to reconcile the two.
It is. It's very hard to reconcile.
Here's prophecies coming true before our very eyes, and the
framework, the structure which is happening is not the what we
understand the perfect form of government to be and how things
are supposed to be happening. When was it really?
That's the even in ancient Israel.
And that's precisely the question of not knowing the NAFI
exactly. Yep, Yep, you have it.
Do not tell me that it. I'm waiting for this idealized
period, you know. Exactly.
I think I'd argue this is the best period in in the history of
Israel, even greater like the most Tor learning, the safest,
the the most. I mean, obviously the not
necessarily in terms of peace, but just like the the the amount
of success we've had in this short period of time is just
unbelievable. It's just.
I'm thinking I'm maybe five years in the time of Yoshio.
I'm going through trying to go through.
Tanaka. They're short.
There's very.
Few periods in Tanaka that you could look and say Shlomo's
reign is portrayed. It's fascinating.
It's a separate discussion, but Shlomo's reign portrayed for two
chapters is this ideal. Like, you know, and then in
chapter 1011 is all comes crashing down, but he's making
these entanglements and he's marrying women and he's getting
gold and he's got this big army and like, wait a second, that's
not we, you know, And it's that contrast between the ideal and
the reality. I think that you mentioned
Vincey is precisely the the Tanakhi is very nuanced when it
does this, it's very clever. It tells you, here's the story.
There are ideal things and we have to appreciate them and we
also have to deal with the reality as they are in front of
us people. I'm teaching giving a podcast
now on show team and one of the challenges of safer show team is
it you read show team. Oh, everybody's horrible,
everybody's rotten. And it was quiet for 40 years,
and it was quiet for 80 years. And it's quiet for 40 years,
which means that for the most part, most of the narrative
space is talking about 7-8 years, you know, and ignoring
these long periods of, you know, the Chinese have been saying
that you live in interesting times, You know, that's, but the
doc doesn't talk about the 40 years of quiet.
I'd be happy for 40 days of quiet.
Give me 40 days of nothing happening.
I think it, I think not the Piggy Bank on before, but I
think also that sometimes a little bit too much inspiration
can cause this kind of this idealism that you're, that
you're, I don't, I, I don't want to Piggy Bank off before, but
but you know, there's a, there's a, there's a cost to everything
in a way, you know, even even, you know, of course inspiration
is so needed, But when, when we're, when we're only, if we're
only focused on inspiration with yeshiva students, the problem
becomes, is that there becomes a little bit of an enchanted
Judaism and that enchanted Judaism doesn't square well with
sometimes reality. And that comes back to our
question of inspiration versus. I didn't want to do it but it
just. OK.
Yeah. All right.
Yep. OK.
So we want to know if you can delve into the three key reasons
that you've identified why modern readers struggle to
connect with the writings of the prophets.
So let me ask a question first. I answer quickly.
When's the last time you took a book of Navi out and just read
it plain? Well, I I just did it today.
Today. You did it today.
You took it to Vadya. You went to share.
You took it to Vadya. You can.
Get a. Vadya.
OK, Fancy. Over the weekend I oh I did well
eha eha 4 tissue mouth. Four tissue mouth, Yeah.
So we do have, of course, these historic, these calendarical,
you know, you have to read this now, you know, feel the need.
And we get into a brief understanding of a, you know,
Doctor Siegel's book is fascinating and amazing on it.
You didn't say I couldn't plug other people's books so.
Absolutely. We'd love to have our own.
We'd love to have we. Want to get all these?
Great. People.
So I think most people don't look at the books as they said,
as they sort of, well, they're there and they respect them too
much. But I think there are three,
three issues that prevent people from even approaching the books.
The 1st is a sense of relevance. OK, I spoke in Toronto.
I was privileged to speak in Toronto the end of June,
beginning of July in several, but taken as it I remember
saying, OK, I have this book coming out.
If I gave a sheer entitled the Naviol 10 people would show up.
If I give a sheer entitled The Naviol on October 7th, as it
turned out, I was packing the place because we look for
relevance in everything that we do.
Why is this important to us? And I remember a friend said to
me, this is what you have to write about yo avadhya Mika.
And I responded to him, and this is only two months ago.
The old describes an invasion of the land of Israel by opposing
forces. Ovadia describes betrayal of the
Jewish people by people who are supposed to be their friends and
allies. And Mika is adamant that these
invasions are taking place because of a breakdown of the
social cohesion among the people living there at the time.
How is this not relevant? You're in reality right now.
Very much the reality. So we don't see them as
relevant. 1-2 we don't know the history.
We don't. Most people's Navi learning ends
at Yoshua Shafti, maybe Shmuel. Very few people know, know and
I'm going to underline bold, repeat that word, know the
history of Saifer Mullah team where all these Navi spoke.
And that's why in both my books, both in Nacham Kabak Zafania and
then you all about me, I tried to give the historical
background. I spent 50 pages on what do you
need to know before you even approach these?
And so pulling the Naveen out of off the shelf without any
historical background is doesn't do justice to the Navidad
prevents us from understanding it.
The person who would disagree with me was Nachama Leibowitz.
The Khama Lewis had a famous saying in talking with the Book
of Yona. You don't need to know when Yona
lived ninves, the New York's the Tokyo OK as that was her phrase.
You don't need to know the historical backgrounds for how
the what the Naveen are doing. You compare and I'll say this
gently. Most people who've read
Nachama's works on the Nabi Mahfroni find that they're
they're not at the same level of Rav Unterman and others.
So if I'm Unterman and others, they talk about, they're not at
the same level of her commentary on the Torah because they she
doesn't do this. She just what does corruption
mean? We'll talk, wait to meet.
I'm going to ask that question again.
What is the word? So your worship, what does
worshiping idols mean? Don't worship idols.
Idols are bad. What does that mean?
Why did people worship by this? What was the background?
The idol worship in Yeshiao is very different than the idol
worship of Nahl. And we don't have that
historical thing. So the first is we don't feel
the relevant because we don't be, we don't have the historical
background. And see, most importantly, I
asked you about what books of now that you've read, how many
of you, how many times you've taken off a good book of
Shakespeare or Milton off the shelf?
Only when we had to in high school.
Only when we had to, and it's almost inapproachable.
The language is it's so remote to us.
It's it's so far away. We don't even appreciate the,
you know, what they were trying to say anymore.
And then you have to have teachers who have to teach you
the language and try to teach you.
You have to teach the language and then try to teach why this
is somehow relevant. I two years ago I had a harusal
with A1 of my students on Paradise Lost, which is among
other things, an interpretation of Ghanaian and how Milton
portrays what happens to Ghanaian and it was a
fascinating and as well as an understanding of the nature of
evil. Where does evil come from?
Milton has his own Protestant viewpoint, but the point of
being it took forever just to get through the lines of the of
the poetry in order to get to and then trying to understand it
before we could make a parish an understanding of what was how he
was understanding safer brace sheet.
So when he was that removed his you removed historically removed
from relevance and you removed from the language, not just the
language of the literary tools. It's poetry.
What poetic devices being used. Then you have a very challenging
task, which is what I was trying to at least trying to build the
bridge to make it easier for students to and readers to
understand. Which actually leads in to what
you did in the book was you provided a brief history of
Israel and Yehuda of Israel and Yehuda and you, you gave a
pretty, I'm not sure you'll be able to.
I mean, it's, it's a lot to to do it on a set, but if you can
just give the basic outline of that history and how you showed
how this history opens up understanding the the Naveen
better. So I'm going to start not from I
start from the beginning of the divided monarchy when the Yehuda
and Israel split. I'm going to start with year
841. OK, 841 BC.
There's a new king in Israel named Yahoo.
He's just overthrown the Akhav dynasty.
And in the South at the same time you have Italia coming to
power and she's killing off the sons of Beethoven.
But then his her, the one remaining son, the one who is
spirited away is then reassumes that the throne and that's
Yoash. And you have this 100 year
period of actual of stability between the northern and the
southern kingdoms. The Tanakh describes that the
northern Kingdom was being picked on from the side by Aram
and the southern Kingdom was slowly growing.
But by the time you get to the year 750, these are the two most
powerful kingdoms in the area. And it should have been the
golden age. In fact, Ben Gurion once that
wouldn't once asked if you could be any king in Tanakh, who would
you be? And his response was, I want to
be Uzia. He's king for 52 years, but he
builds up the Negev, he strengthens it.
There's no wars mentioned. He really is a 52 years of
stability. And when you have stability, you
can grow. And archaeologically we see
signs of this. We see a the pots are all become
standard sizes, which means that they're now involved in trade
and we see pots before the 9th century before and they're all
handmade things that you store things in the house.
But also you have these large collections of posture, exactly
the same sizes, same weight, same measure.
And you can see that we're engaged in trade.
The country's getting richer. And here's the challenge.
This is when Yesh Iowan almost first appear there at should be
at the height, the pinnacle of what we talked about an ideal
with age, right? 750 should be a great time to be
alive, whether you're in the north or the South.
And yet you have divisions. OK, And yet Jews find something
to fight about. They're divided geographically.
They're divided religiously. The north is still under
syncretic. We worship God through golden
calves. They're not quite worshipping.
It's not a pure monotheism. You see lots and lots of these
small little idols throughout the northern part.
You see very few in from this point of time, idols in the
southern, they're discovered through archaeology.
They're and most importantly, they're divided socially.
There's a social gap that's growing that is going to
threaten their the very nature of the two kings, the two
kingdoms. And you can see it actually
again through archaeology, which is fascinating.
This is, you know, we look, we see houses in Samaria in the 9th
century are all the same size houses in Samaria in the 8th
century, you have some very big mansions and some very small
hovels and that shows a social hierarchy.
Social hierarchy. You see this start to split.
You also see it and how much more so for the people in the
country as rich land owners and what we would call today,
multinational corporations take over, you know, the means of
production and the this is what the prophets describe, what we
talk about nowadays. Nowadays we talk about, you
know, multinational corporations controlling so much, but the
prophets are describing the same thing.
You have a few rich land owners who have bought up all the
fields. The Jeffersonian ideal, as it
were, of everybody has an independent piece of land, which
we see throughout the Torah emphasized, seems to have
disappeared. And then at this point in time,
the Assyrians show up. And this becomes if you deal
with the Assyrian threat correctly, you'll survive.
If you don't deal with the Etherian threat correctly,
you're going to disappear. And I date all three of the
Naveen to this period. But we'll talk about what's more
important is what, how am I supposed to deal with this
Etherian threat? And unfortunately, both in the
north and the South, in the north, they engage in this
series of assassinations. Do we make pieces here?
Do we fight these series? We make pieces here as we fight
these series, Back off gets replaced with Akaka.
But it's special. But it's based by, oh, yeah, I
didn't do that in the right order.
But you can see back and forth every couple years.
It's a very unstable situation. And the Assyrians, common,
they're picking off the northern Kingdom until Venture directs.
So in the South, the Assyrians really would have left the South
alone. You shall talk about it in
Chapters 7 and 8:00 and 9:00. The Assyrians would have left
the South alone, but the northern Kingdom threatens the
southern Kingdom and says, are you coming to fight with us, yes
or no? And the southerners do something
that they're not supposed to do. The king is Akaz.
It's described in the very Yaman Kafka.
He doesn't go instead of siding with the north, which is what
the northerners want, or staying neutral, which is what Yeshio is
begging him. There are two chapters of the
show which is saying stay neutral, you'll be fine.
The the Assyrians will pass by us, we can survive.
He brings the Assyrians in. He signs.
He surrenders to the Assyrians, says Less surrenders
religiously, but also surrenders religiously.
He brings an Assyrian altar into the bait to Mcdoch begins the
first person to do that his son Fiskel tries to clean up the
situation. But then Fiskel then says, well,
if I can get rid of the Syrians religiously, I can get rid of
them politically and he starts a I'll fated war against the
Assyrians in seven O 3 that leads to the near destruction of
the community in seven O 1. That's the history.
But what makes the our prophets special is they look and they
say this isn't bad politics, the bad external politics.
If I'd only signed this deal, if I'd only gone to war this way,
if I'd only done this are reflective of a deeper in a rot
because of the social problems you've caused yourself.
And that's precisely the point, because if we're talking
politics, I don't know that anybody could have withstood the
Assyrians. Assyrians are a tremendous
empire. They're possibly the world's
first real empire because they expand from the fertile
president venture in 671-6863. They're 1000 miles down the
Nile. That's huge in the space of the
ancient world when you're moving soldiers by foot, 10s of
thousands of soldiers by foot didn't get that far to that sort
of control. Politically.
You couldn't stop. But the that's not what we're
supposed to be focused on. And it's that tension between
the king and the prophet. The kings are worried about the
politics and the prophets are saying you're ignoring the more
deeper issues, the social injustice, the judicial
corruption, everything that the prophets are screaming about.
But what I find inspiring with that is because if you solve
those problems, the other problems go away.
OK, that really if you do the small things that the Naveen
masks be just be honest, pray sincerely.
Everything else, it disappears. And it's not an easy message to
sell because everyone, as we talked about earlier, everyone's
that quick fix. So to decide with them or to
decide with them. How do I put my armies?
Tell me about it. And God is saying those armies
are built on the backs of farmers and the tremendous cost,
you know, you raise taxes to put an army out.
These are these are the challenges that you're not
dealing with. So all these profits have these
different messages. They're coming at it in
different ways. By the way, is one of the thing
that's fascinating. 203 profits. Yoel and Mika at least are two
of the three only successful profits.
It's not one's got to give that's we don't get many
successful profits in Tanakhs. OK, They generally in your first
book I wrote, you know, the port Stefania being a prophet is not
a job for a nice Jewish boy. It's not a good you wouldn't
want your kid to be one, but they're successful.
And that's one of the questions that I try to ask in each one of
the discussions of each of the Naveen.
Excellent. So.
That's your history and that's what you have to know to, to
just come back to what you said, just to summarize, you have to
know this history when you read these books.
And because we don't have that background, I tried to do it in
10 minutes. I apologize if I went too long.
I'm, you know, the first section, it takes like 60 pages
just to we have to have the history and what's all the
forces that are at play to understand what the Naveen are
up against. And we're hoping that the
viewers will pick up the book and read it for themselves, God
willing. So the prophet UOL, we're going
to get into this story. Why?
Why do you feel that this is particularly difficult to
interpret? And what are the various
opinions about when and where he prophesied?
And what perspective does your book offer on the issue?
If I said just go through the opinions quickly, Rashi says
that he is the son of Shmuel Hanavi and he's quoting a
Midrashian, the mid Baraba. And Reddock says he takes place
in the 8th century in the time of of Yehuram and or Yehoshifat.
And you have 15 different opinions.
And I keep getting reminded of what something was saying.
My teacher of Viaco Maidan Shuja likes to repeat.
I know of 15 reasons why root is read on Shavuot.
I only know one reason why we read Estran Purt.
But the idea being when you get this multiplicity of opinions,
it's really a we don't know. Yeah.
And then in chapter 1 he
describes an invasion of locusts.
And in chapter 2 he describes an invasion by an army.
And again the Mafarshim are divided.
He's describing 2 invasions, an invasion by an army, which is
the approach of the Barbonell for example.
And the locusts are a metaphor for the for the invading army.
Or like modern scholars think the description of the army
invading is only a metaphor for the locust.
So we don't know what the problem is.
What makes you all fascinating is he spends half of his book
describing the problem. He calls the people to Chuva.
When that happens, the invader disappears, the land is restored
and then he sends spends 2 chapters discussing, I'm just
doing this on one foot, the spiritual revival among the
people and ultimately the judgement day of all the
nations. The Yom Hashem that he
describes, OK, the day of the Lord is a prophetic phrase to
describe this final judgement day.
And the book ends very happily and it's we don't get books that
end too. We don't get happy, but endings.
It's not too often. It's a wonderful thing.
And I just want to suggest 2 lessons from you all that are
the first is that he doesn't mention sin.
He's one of the few of him who doesn't say you're doing wrong.
You're not praying sincerely Ishaya al khafted your social
justice issues, ammos olivesef Rammos your problems with your
how you serve Hashem, your dishonor, your just your lack of
loyalty, fidelity. Hoshea, there's no sin
mentioned. You're, I think, is trying to
articulate a theology that this says I don't automatically have
to look to beat myself, to flagellate myself in order to
approach the show. We don't always have to beat
ourselves over the head every time something goes wrong.
And it's a comment of the of the Ron Ban who says Yol's different
than the locusts in Egypt because Yol's locusts, locusts
happen. Locusts are a part of the world
we live in. And just because you keep the
torn and developing this, just because you keep the
tournaments, so it doesn't mean it automatically life will be.
Dandy. Ideal, like and perfect and, you
know, circuses and candy canes. It doesn't.
It's not the world we live in. And Yol's described, and I
developed this idea that what Yol's trying to do is he's, you
don't have to be in this. How do I deal with the world
that I live in? We talked with this tension that
exists between we have this ideal world and this real world.
You also not be in the real world.
There are locusts. Locusts will come into this
world. If you live in the ancient Near
East, this is a tremendous threat.
Until recently, we didn't understand what locusts were and
how they appeared. They were grasshoppers.
But if under the right level of humidity, the right temperature,
they turn into these massive swarms.
Nowadays we have satellite tracking and we can deal with
them very early on in their, in the formation of the horde.
And Barack Hashem, we live in a world that has these
technological advances. I'm not.
But the first thing is that Yul's, and what makes Yul unique
is he's successful, I think because he doesn't focus on
you're doing this wrong and you're doing this wrong, you're
doing this wrong. He says we have a problem.
Here's how we pray, here's how we get together, and here's how
we approach Hashem. And we are humble and we know
that we lie in nachem. God.
Maybe God will forgive us, maybe God won't.
We don't come there. We know that there's a
possibility this prayer will not work.
And it's precisely that humility that allows them to be
successful. I also think there's one other
thing here, which is why then mention the Yomashem at the end
of the story? Because the old views the
invasion as the Yomashem at the beginning and it becomes
Yomashem. And but what Yoel's doing is we
get we all have problems, right? But those problems are easier to
deal with when we see them in the larger picture.
What Yoel does, it says this small invasion can be the
opportunity to a much if you view it as part of the larger
picture of redemption of Gula, then this small invasion that
we're facing, which for the people who live at the time was
very large. If you're threatened of lack of
food, you know, and that substance that's you're not
concerned about anything else. But by writing the book the way
it does, Y'all expands our vision and says this is a small
little bump, but it's leads toward a greater future and that
helps people deal with the problem they have now.
It's a very uplifting and happy book.
I enjoy y'all. I enjoy reading Y'all very much.
And it's for that reason I think he's thrown in as when we talk
about the Haftarot for the Yemen rhyme, we always throw in a
couple verses from you all because you all is the model for
how to do it right. That's you all.
After this podcast, I'm gonna one of the things I'm taking
upon myself is getting more into Haftarot, OK?
OK. All right.
OK, Ovadia. As an introduction, could you
discuss the prophet Ovadia? Why did he express such intense
anger towards Edom? And what are the different
scholarly views regarding the date of the book, its
authorship, and its intended audience?
Ovadia is an attack on Edom that there's no question about.
It actually is one of the few books where or Naveen where he
here's the punishment comes first and let me tell you what
he did wrong afterwards. It's almost like he can't wait
to go against Eddom. Ben, you mentioned you were the
sheer when we were talking earlier before the podcast that
once we say Eddom, this creates in the Jewish ear echoes of
Asaph, right? We go back to the long history
of the relationship between Asaph and Yaakov, and that
obviously colors our relationships with the country
of Eddom. We have Edom attacking us many
times in the Mulakhim Dereyamim. We also have actually in.
However, in Mulakhim Aleph in Udala, it describes how Yoav
goes and almost wipes out the country of Edom and rabbinic
thought is furious with him. OK, it's this is not acceptable.
Similarly in in Devere Yamim Cafe, the king at the time of
Machika takes 10,000 men of Edom and throws them off a Cliff to
which the Midrash says This is why Binesharal get a galloped
straight out. Why did Binesharal get galloped?
Because of the cruelty, sort of. But this all reflects this cycle
of violence that exists between Binesharan at home.
And it's not surprisingly that when we talk about Adam, Adam is
attacked more times by Edbund and Naveem than anyone else.
Yuhasco has a whole list. Yuhas has a whole list of Nivot
Hamim, the prophecies against nations and scholarly terms, the
oracles against nations. And everybody gets their fair
share of comeuptance near meow. But they didn't give dedicated
and that let me give another chapter to Edo.
OK, you guys gives another chapter against Edo and you
shall gives another chapter against Edo.
What if these there's small little Kingdom on the South, but
rabbinic thought blew them up. And then once you say Adam is
Christianity and the Roman Empire, then well, there's no
stopping how bad Adam can be. So there's two approaches, I
think, to understanding our dislike of Edo.
The one approach which I adopt in the book is that Adam becomes
the symbol of betrayal because we don't have to get along with
everybody, but we always hope that we get along with our
family. And we've already saw that in
the Partia that we've read recently.
We turned to the king of Adam. We're brothers, remember?
We used you should be helpful towards us.
And Edelman's behavior towards us doesn't just violate bond of
shared humanity, it violates the bond of brotherhood, of family
ties. It should not.
Those should never be sundered. And so Alvadia is like, how can
you do this to your own brother? How can you do this to your own
brother? And the crimes are actually, for
the most part, you stood by, you didn't come to our help.
You didn't you laughed while Jerusalem was being invaded.
As a side point, most modern scholars assume that this is
referring to the destruction of the Beita Migdash in 586 by
Bevelle and in fact to Helium Kuflam and Zion.
The song the part of team that we don't sing.
If you remember we you know when we get to camp and we sing all
in our out Bevelle OK, the moving soon we leave out the
last 2-3. You know, Sahor Hashem livne
don't but your Shalom remember I don't tell you when you said
there aru aru Adisaba, tear it down, tear it down.
So most scholars think this is Ovadia lives at the time of the
destruction of the Qurbat. Most scholars both Mufarshim
Rashi will play some earlier Rashi places as the student of
Akhav, this rabbinic tradition. I have a guy named Ovadia here.
I have a guy named Ovadia here as Akhav's Prime Minister, his
assistant. However you wish to define
Ovadiaus, this must be the same guise rabbinic tradition.
Again, when you have these 15 opinions, I go back to what we
said about yo when you have a lot of opinions.
The other problem is, of course, how many times is Rushlam
invaded in Tanakh? We always remember the last
time, which is the destruction, but they were invaded I think
7-8 times in the Mulakhim alone. So, and in fact the very Yamin,
I try to figure out where Ovadia lives based on the clues given
in the text. I place them again in the center
in the year 733, when the Northern Kingdom Saxons, the
Rishalaim Deverehyami Mukhafet, describes how the Edomites would
stand outside and slowly just pick off the travellers and from
the side, which is very much similar to what's described in
Ovadia. But if Bahia's first point is,
this is a betrayal of brotherly ties, and that's so much more
painful. That's why we have this.
Recently I've begun to rethink my thinking.
It's not in the book, but. And that is whenever Edom is
mentioned in Tana, it appears several times in then the vua.
It's always Edom 1st and the rest of the world second.
It's I just saw this in Ishail Lamadalid.
OK, Hashem says he's upset with the nations of the world, and I
want you to fill in the blank here of Tabishma Kirby.
I've lifted up my sword into heaven, but Shamayim ine al was
the opposite of heaven. Shamaya, man, earth, earth
should be, should be Eris or even Adama.
But therefore, I'm going to bring my sword down on Edom.
Oh, interesting. Well, it plays on Adama though.
Adama. That's exactly what Septuagint
does. It's ezun takes out ADOM and it
puts in Adama because it assumes that that must be what the text
was. OK.
But he does this, he shall does this several times and and
Ovadia does it as well. He says all of a sudden in verse
15, I'm now going to destroy all the nations of the world who
stood against you like we were talking about Adam.
When did the Adam become the nations of the world?
So Edom and the nation's world to stand against this become
synonymous in prophetic literature, which implies that
there seems to be a larger picture and what it says if this
if my first read, if the combined the two reads is God is
not going to take judgement. He's not going to render
judgement only on the Irans and the Hezbollahs and the Hamas,
but also all those people who stood by neutral and didn't
help. OK that ultimately the day there
was that this because if that's what Adam did.
This is what and this God is not God knows who the the enemies
are. But to paraphrase you know
another poet the deepest depths of power reserve for those who
maintain neutrality. That's Dante's line, right?
For those who are remained neutrality in a time of crisis,
when you when you when taught, when you're asked to choose
between what is really good and evil, you cannot sit on the
side. That's not an option.
And that was, I think that's what Adam represents.
It's a thought, but I'll let you read the book and come to, you
know, read that wrote about you. I may have read the book
incorrectly, but I'm always open for discussion.
And it's a very short, it's the shortest book in Tanakh.
So for all of you. There's no excuses.
There's no excuse. At least I'm parsha Bashallah by
Islaf because it's the haftarah for by islaf as well.
When we conclude with that list of kings of Edom, we then go
straight into the Haftarah of Edom.
Very good. So the last part we want to get
into is the prophet Mika. Oh, my favorite.
What setting apart? I'm not allowed to say that, but
if you ask me what my favorite was, Mika is always my favorite
of the the vehement now so. So first of all, I want to know
why, but also what set him apart?
What set him apart from the other prophets?
And how does his style and structure enhance our
understanding of the book? Mika's 7 short chapters again,
these are all he lives at the time when I date most of the
when the northern Kingdom is still alive.
It's on its last legs and the challenge becomes how do I you
know what lessons can we learn? What should we be learning from
this? He's mentioned as being part of
the of kings mentions the northern king did also mentions
Yotam Akhazen and Kiskyo, which is just one king short of
Yashao, which means he's a little bit after you shall and
what he does is fascinating. He looks at is the 1st chapter
is a discussion of the invasion of the South, like the Redock
and the mall. We might argue this from the
northern Kingdom and modern scholars try to date it to seven
O 1, but they have to do a little bit of violence to the
text because I think Samaria is still alive.
The 733 the northern Kingdom invades the southern Kingdom.
This is the worst. You know that civil war, do we
fight the Assyrians just to know they invade.
And he describes the suffering that is caused of people, of
themselves. And then the question is what
lessons should I be learning from this?
And he has two chapters dedicated to corruption, which I
find fascinating. In the 2nd chapter he describes
the corruption of the rich people who can are greedy.
They lie on their beds, they take people, they buy, buy up
fields they caught, they turn people into slaves.
And it's so passionate, you know, he describes his
suffering. Mika's from Morisha and
Yeshayahu is from Yushalayim. Morisha is a small farming
community and Yeshayahu is from the palace.
He's, you know, Rabinic thought he's actually a cousin to the
kings. He's from the rabbinic.
He's from the rabbinic, he's from the he's from David's
family. Just one brother off, you know,
he had his brother been older, he would have been his had his
father been older, he would have been king and not a prophet.
And Mika describes in such beautiful poetry and also so
much so many brilliant illusions to say for Yoshua and other
places what the effect of the greed of the people are.
And then he comes back in Chapter 3 and talks about
corruption again. And I always like to ask, why do
I need 2 chapters on this? Did you have a?
And the difference is the corruption of in people's
hearts, people who have money, people, people are greedy.
We all want more. That's human nature.
But what gets Mikhail going is the corruption of an established
institutionalized corruption. And I love asking students, what
does institutionalized corruption mean?
And I say one line and understand I teach 18 year old
young men a society that says you have to go to university to
make a living and in order to make a living, you have to put
yourself $200,000 in debt. What sort of society is that?
That's not A and that's an example of societal corruption,
OK, where the whole framework is rotten.
Something is very wrong with it. And it's not the individuals
anymore, but it's the people, the people who make decisions
and how they run this society. And Mika says perhaps some of
the most famous lines in the at the end of this thing, Sion
sadeh TE haresh you shy me into yet Zion will be plowed up like
a field. Your shy will be just come as
heaps. And it's such a powerful phrase
that Yermi, I was going to quote it 100 years later in his own
defense. How can you accuse me of
blasphemy? Yush Mika said Jerusalem would
be destroyed too. And then what Mika does is
brilliant. He takes Chapter 4, and Chapter
4 begins with logic. For before Kimi tiante ti Torah
devar hashemi Ushlaim. Where have we heard that before?
Every time we take out the Torah, obviously, but that's
Yeshayao. He takes the same verses as
Yeshayahu does, but Yeshayahu puts it at the beginning of his
nevula in chapter 2 when he's talking about Benezrail at their
best, which is AI want. We have the opportunity, says
Yeshayahu. We can make Jerusalem the center
of the world, the religious, moral, spiritual, capital world.
We have this opportunity. Let's not waste it because we're
in such great shape right now and what Mika's done.
He's taken these same verses and placed them after his prophecy
in chapter 3, and he says the only way we're going to get to
this is if we destroy what we have.
I'm not saying that he's advocating the destruction
bases. The system is so corrupt and we
need to tear everything down in order to rebuild, which is such
a powerful. He's taking the same words, but
they convey such different meaning in their context.
It's really fascinating. There's a chapters four or five
have a debate between him and the people, the nobles.
Do we fight a Syria to go out to war?
The end of chapter 5 we read impartial Balak that a shamel is
clear. Declare war against the enemies.
What are the enemies? The militarization of the north
of the southern Kingdom. I'll destroy your Chariots, I'll
destroy your fortresses and I'll destroy your strongholds.
And then I, Hashemel, go, go after your enemies, which is
that he doesn't want, we're not supposed to be focusing on
building up the military, supposed to be focusing on
social justice. And he concludes with two
chapters. The first one chapter, as
everybody knows, even the donos for Mika, where This is why we
read Mikan Balak. The people turn to Hashem and
say, well, what do you want from us?
More SAC corbinote. We'll give more common out.
We'll gladly give more carbinote, which is exactly what
Bilam said. If we just keep actually asking,
giving the paying God off of more carbon out, we will you
know God will answer our prayers and they have become bilam and
bikhed in fact mentions I brought you out of Egypt and you
didn't remember what bilam did and you keep asking the same
questions and you make a response.
What does God ask of man? Motto asot mishpat avarghesi
vasnehlakid be just love kindness and walk humbly.
I'm not asking for big checks, I'm asking for you be zaya
Mensch, you know, please be good people.
That's all of God ever asks and there's so and it's so powerful
and then the Chapter 7, if you get a chance to read Chapter 7
to be a cup, please read it before Rosh Hashanah.
I'll tell you why in a second. It's such a personal I'm
walking. He describes he's walking
through the destruction the of what's left behind that he's
feels like he's in the field where all the grapes are off
except for these single grapes hanging on the he's so lonely.
There's nobody there who understands what he's been
trying to do. But he didn't finishes again, I
love books of happy endings. I'm I'm a sucker for the old
Hollywood, you know, model Hashem will come and tear down
our enemies. And you'll understand why we say
this before on Rosh Hashanah, MI al kamocha nosaira bonovera al
Peshawar. So who is like God?
Who's going to forgive, including protect and you
forgive the remnant of those who remain.
He doesn't the whole stay anger for his for his mercy is what we
say on Tashley right? But yeah, sure we are coming.
Of course of Antenni will cover our compassion, but he will
throw into the depths of the sea.
Now who's been thrown into the depths of the sea before again
was play Gush Tanakh, who's been thrown into the Egyptians?
And so immediately what a good person should do is take a look.
Here's Chapter 7 in Mika and here's this Shirat Ayam.
And you see, Mika has taken verse after verse after verse
and shirat ayam and put it here. But he does it for a purpose
when we in Shirat Ayam in the Exodus and Schmut who gets run
into the to the into the sea. The Chariots of.
Our enemies, the Egyptians, so who's going to get thrown into
the sea here? But Ishwak, Muslim, Kokhatotam,
it's our own sins. They get thrown into the sea.
And if you appreciate that, what he's done with that, again, that
conversation, which is such a beautiful Pogo, the American
calm cartoon. We have seen the enemy and he is
us. You know, this is what the
message of every Navi is. We're the ones who do this to
ourselves. We have to work on and
strengthen our efforts to build social cohesion and social
justice and not tear ourselves apart.
And then when that happens, nobody can attack us and nobody
can hurt us. And we have to learn, get that
lesson through. I think that lesson still
remains as relevant today as it did, you know, 2700 years ago.
That's Mika. I have a love for Mika, passion
for Mika. They're all wonderful though,
and I strongly encourage people. So when I asked, you know,
when's the last time you took a took a book at a Navi out, you
know that everybody should be able to give your answers.
So. Amazing.
This was this was unbelievable already one of my favorite
episodes that we've done so far. So with you.
And we want to allow our audience to know, you know, know
where they can find you and also if there's anything you want to
plug besides the book. Just we've got a lot of work to
do as a people. I don't obviously you've you've
talked about the Maggie's series more than I have.
There's so many great works of scholarship just coming out.
I'm on Mazak's translation work on.
Schmalm. Now I'm waiting for this for
Part 2 to come out. Waiting for Part 2.
I went through all of it and during COVID but the online
version because I could do the Hebrew, my Hebrew is good but it
just would take a lot longer so I wanted to be able.
To I appreciate that. I appreciate that I do soon yes
HLL books on Amazon ho share coming out everything is
worthwhile and anybody who wants to reach me my my working
address as it were is why Beasley at levitora.org.
Anybody who has any questions. One of the heartening or
heartbreaking things that you can decide is that I've received
so many interesting the muggy influences not only been within
the Jewish world, but I've received letters from professors
and a Christian. There's a Baptist college that
wanted to use Nacham wrote corn. Can we use Nacham Publica
Stefania for our textbook, you know, for teaching and I'm like
on one hand he meet Siante tes Torah.
You know, that's wonderful. You know, this is Zehariah that
describes how every Jew will be grabbed by people non Jews
teaches Torah, teaches Torah. But first, you know, I want to
hear that these books are being, you know, textbooks.
And we've put Navi back in the curriculum, which is always been
my pet peeve and what I try to what I've dedicated my life to
doing, making Tresar great again.
So. Tanakh has to be the Tanakh to,
to really think as a Jew, the heart of a Jew, the heart of
being Jewish, it's really all in Tanakh.
That's that's where we that, that, that's if it's not that
the it's not that Tamara Musser, all that, that's all beautiful
and necessary and important and not in any way taking away.
But at the end of the day, Tanakh is our heartbeat, that
is. I think, I think you're correct.
One of the things I noticed this year, I had a bit of a crash
after Purim. I was six months of this.
What's been going on, you know, not just, you know, my kids, the
Army and the students, the army. And I went to a Hasidic rabbi
for consultation, a very close friend, and said, you know why
you're feeling the pain so much because you're a Tanak person.
And he said exactly. He said the Tanakh is the heart.
And this isn't saying it's the heart does not invalidate the
importance of the brain. The kidneys deliver every other.
The whole Jewish body has to have everything, you know, But
we have to go back to the heart of what you know, what the
ethics and the morals of, of what we believe and what we do
and what we're trying to accomplish.
We can't get it through. They're not.
The other books are important. They're not a substitute for
going back to the original source.
Worse. Ben, do you have anything else
said? Well, I just want to ask you
because this is a topic that's come up before, but before we we
go, how how do we kind of, you know, push people to bring the
focus back? This enough because especially
in America, here we like in the Shiva's there there's not really
a bad. Situation.
It's it's. It's almost ignored.
Girls learn it, but that's about it.
It's. So hard.
You know, I joke when I talk about safe environments.
There are two reasons why people don't ask what does Rashi say on
SHMA? OK.
And I joke to my students, you don't know what Rashi says on
SHMA for two reasons. One, it's a summer part show and
two, it's the third partial. And two, you've started learning
Gamar already. And once you started learning
Gamar, who has time for, you know, these basic, you know, for
Davar, you get the all these books of the short strip.
We have so little time and so little energy and there's a
reality. It takes a lot more effort to
learn how to learn Gamar properly than it might then.
Even I talked about the difficulty of understanding Navi
to teach young people to give them the fluency in Dumar.
Also, love is as any parent will know, knows love is infinite,
but energy is finite. You know, you love all your kids
equally and but your energy levels you have to learn to
manage and you know, and the energy that we have to invest in
if we want to raise literate generation.
I wish we had them for all day. We don't, and so we have to pick
and choose, but we do. We having said that, there's
still no excuse for the lack of Tanaf that is present.
We don't yet have, we haven't yet figured it out.
I think we're starting to, you know, first let's get teachers.
As more and more people read Maggi, they're able to teach,
you know, they're able to teach. Then they can go into the class.
And even if we don't get through all Tracer and but at least they
should start to know and they should start to be aware and
then people will be inspired to open it up on their own and
write books and argue with me. And I'm more than willing to
that's those are the people I'd like the most, you know?
You also had you mentioned that when you're in college you start
out learning Gamara, but then you really were more you wanted
something else I feel like. It was not learning again.
Had I gone to a good Gamara Shira, I don't know if this
would have. It's a strange.
The fact that the option was there to switch or to focus on
something else, I think that should be available to.
And it's difficult because obviously you have to have the
teachers for it and everything. But yeah, I think that kids
should have the the choice also to if they, if they feel more
inclined to, to study it. I think it should be made of.
I just feel like it's not made of.
I think you, what you just did was put in Gamarnavotezara, you
Tet in a dumb low, mid. And even at a high school level,
we have to balance the need to create a sense of literacy,
whether it's learning Gomara, whether it's learning Tanakh,
whether it's learning Jewish history, Jewish law and all
these things we have to talk about Ashkafa.
We haven't talked about well, you know, how many hours can we
spend? But we do have to give them
start giving them choices. The most effective summer
learning program I ever went was part of was IVA.
These really basketball associated just in the 90s under
Bobby Kaplan and privileged to work with his son, Rev Mortify
Kaplan now and it was coming to a base Meddersh.
Give an hour, pick something off the shelf or learn with us.
You have to choose, but you can't be passive.
Creating that safe, that space for people to learn on their
own, to study on their own, is what we have to be directing our
energies towards. Because when you leave the
structure, that's what you're going to do when you leave.
A lot of guys leave yeshiva. They don't have the framework,
they have the structure to tell them to do, and they don't know
what to do. They don't know how to take a
book off the shelf and do it on their own.
You, you just said passive. So I, I've been thinking about
this and I think that part of the problem is, is that the, the
way Tanak is taught is passive. What I mean by that is
ironically, I, it shouldn't be this way, but ironically, this
tendency to read Tanakh and then it's almost like the second they
read one verse and I'm guilty of it my whole life.
And I'm, I'm not like I'm not excluding myself, but the second
we read 1 pursuit immediately to the commentaries, immediately to
you know, you know, what does Ramban say?
What is? Let's be honest, even the comma
did that approach was accepted by the Israeli high schools.
And the comma, this was Nahama's approach and she hated it
because it was just memorized commentators as opposed to
asking questions, right? We need to be able, We need to
teach. Teaching active learning doesn't
matter what you're doing, it's got to be active.
It's also the attitude gone into Tanakh.
Tanakh is in a sense so revered. It is.
So it's almost like, God forbid, Khalila that I would ever have
anything to say, 'cause it's Torah like meaning meaning like
there's a reverence that's kind of working against people over
here in that in that, in that reverence is is kind of
paralyzing them because they're almost afraid to study it.
It becomes more like just tell me what I'm supposed to get out
of here because because of the pedestal and that's.
Interesting. You you get what I'm trying to
say. I did get what you're trying to
say and that's of course goes back to that conversation that
Karam Kimchi did. He was talking about the Tarah
Bhagavan. I don't want to I place it up
here and it's no longer accessible for anybody to but
and the gush Dera is to exactly open this up, you know,
democratize. I'm going to go back to our
Citroen's phrase, democratize the study of Tanakh.
You can do this is something you can't open on your own and it's.
And I think that we need, that also needs to be emphasized.
That's not in any way, God forbid, a lack of reverence.
It's the opposite. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's
showing a love and A and A and a reverence of the text that
you're willing to engage in it with everything, with every
mental ability that you can. I think that this this idea,
this the reverence that sort of and I think partly it's also the
way it's the way the the rabunim are are communicating this type
of reverence, which kind of gives a little bit of a of a
fear for people to really, really, really engage in it.
And it becomes very commentary based.
Very, you know, just, you know, take an idea, take an and and
and chaval, because because I think that you gain a deeper
reverence, a deeper love. I.
Find it ironic that we encourage Fiddush and innovation in every
other aspect of our studies. Do you have a Hiddish?
What do you know? What do you learn?
What do you have a Hiddish but we aren't allowed to do?
Although Rashi told the Rashbam that if he could do it over, he
would, he would. He would write it up.
He shot, I mean the of the Hiddushbam shot that come every
single day in the streets. I don't have the exact quote,
but I think you know what I'm talking about.
Yes, it's in the Rashbam and Zion and I remember teaching
Rush Baum in a day school in Minnesota when we were in Srihu
many years ago and the Rav was serious, serious.
Ralph, I mean Rav motion to the elite is a serious man.
He came up to me and said I appreciate what you're doing.
The kids are enjoying, but we aren't post sick like the Rush
Baum. And it's interesting because it
at the time I didn't understand the statement because how can
you be post like either A happened or B happened?
You can't give a suck on what happened.
Historically, you can't vote, you know.
But on a deeper level, many approach, many streams of
Orthodoxy have been slowly removing the Barbonells and the
rush bombs. And we talked about who's on
your micro Ocodilla's page. There's only an apostate who put
even Ezra in. And for that we are.
Totally grateful. Totally grateful.
You know, whatever complacent we have against Yaakov Bin there,
at least he kept it even as they're alive.
And you know, so we have a very broad and wide range of, you
know, thought available to us in the field is I cannot fathom or
understand why somebody would wish to remove any of it.
But I do understand how it becomes threatening, as you
mentioned, you know. And we hope that I know that
you're involved in a lot of works, and I know that you're
going to bring out a lot more for everyone to you're going to
be a lot more material for everyone to read, a lot more
books, a lot more publications. We wish you best of luck on all
of those. Thank you very much.
Yeah, and and thank you. Very much for having me.
It's just a conversation. It was only because JJ kept me
up a day. I said I had to write you guys.
I was just friendly. Yeah.
Really shook me up. And this is great.
Anytime you can spend an hour, two hours talking to Raz,
talking to. Nah, it's Barack.
Hashem. Thank you very much, Ben.
And Ben, hopefully. This gets you.
Hopefully this gets you on his podcast too.
Yeah, it's his own podcast, by the way.
That would be great. Yeah, great.
And we hope that you constantly inspire your students as you
desire to do and bring that that that happy medium.
Longs the the the long but short path is what we always try to
strive for long. Short path Shavuoto.
Thank you very much. Thank.
You thank you. Thank.
You very much OK. All the best, OK?