Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb - Jewish Philosophy: Reliability of Transmission

Now, last time we started to talk about the oral tradition and I um told you about its relationship to the to the written that it the oral came first and written came afterwards the written about the the verse says like notes on the oral doesn't stand on its own you can't understand one without the other. And then we started to talk about the reliability of transmission. After all, it's a vast body of material. And the first official text said that last time I'm saying it again. First official text was the Mishnah which is 1,500 years after the transmission to Moses. And the Talmud which is much more complete was written 50 years after that. What reason do we have to think that the tradition was accurate? So I gave you two points last time. First point was just to fend off the telephone game or the Chinese whispers idea which is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's a party game you play it after the third martini and you whisper and you can't talk and you can't ask questions that has nothing to do with the way we transmit information. And then I said the single most important point which I got from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov is the is the fact that we're talking about a tradition of laws that people are living by. Is that academic information, the history of China or you know, the possibility of um planets in the universe that that has life or something we're talking about laws that people live by. To get foggy on this to misinterpret it uh in a lazy trivial fashion means you're going to lose money. You're going to lose your shirt. You're going to condemn yourself to all sorts of irritations and and mistakes and so forth and so on. People aren't going to do that. Could a mistake creep in here and there? Yes. Were laws forgotten? Yes. No one denies that. But to think of 60 or 70% be lost over time and misinterpreted and becoming a vague hodgepodge of uh of arbitrary ideas, that doesn't fit with the idea that it is actually being practiced. Now, as a extension of that idea let's consider the fact that in the end the Mishnah was written down. Composed at least composed some say it was written down as well. You have an official text. That's done because the tradition has a certain escape hatch whereby if things get bad you can do that. And things were getting bad. The Mishnah was written down about 107 years after the temple was destroyed about and the vast majority of people were in exile and a lot of the Torah was not in practice anymore. All the laws of the temple were not in practice. Agricultural laws to a great extent were not in practice the vast majority of people lived outside of the land of Israel. Laws of of purity were widely not practiced because there was no practical application for them. And forgetting started to set in. So writing down the Mishnah composing writing down the Mishnah was a step to oppose to to to deal with the beginning of significant forgetting. Now I want to try a move. Did I talk to you about the contrapositive? Did I talk to then I talked about the contrapositive. You can flip the game. Yeah, I I I talked to you about it. No. No, I talked to him at night time. It's something logical the contrapositive. Let's let's go through it step by step. When the forgetting started they composed the Mishnah. So if I go back before that when they didn't compose the Mishnah what do I have to conclude? They didn't That they weren't Whatever your first point was they didn't They weren't forgetting. Yeah. Because if they had been forgetting earlier then they would have composed the Mishnah earlier. Mhm. When did the sprinklers go on? 4:60 you know 4:16 in the afternoon. Why didn't they go on at 4:15 in the afternoon? Because it wasn't hot enough to trigger the sprinklers. The sprinklers are triggered by the temperature. So if they went on at 4:16 then I know before they went on it wasn't that hot. If they composed the Mishnah to combat forgetting at a certain time if you ask why didn't they compose the Mishnah earlier the answer is they weren't forgetting. Because if they had been forgetting earlier then they would have composed it earlier. So that's another indication. Again, some things were forgot everybody agrees to that. But was it serious? Was it undermining the foundations? Was it vast? No, it was not. Of course if it had been then they would have composed it earlier. That's the third point. Now, I hedged my words over and over again because my mind he says that from the time of Moses every scholar could keep his own private written notes. There's no prohibition against a scholar writing down his own notes and they did so. And in either Talmud on several occasions says discussing certain law and say well, we found a hidden scroll. And that scroll it says so and so holds this position so and so holds that position and they say oh, you found the scroll? How about that? So now we know that so and so holds this position. What is this hidden scroll? It was the private notes of a scholar. He didn't publicize it didn't have people copy it over and distribute it. It was his own private notes but they did keep private notes. If they did keep private notes then the idea that it's vast oral information with no written record is not correct either. So that's another point in favor of the idea that the transmission was very largely accurate. Very largely not perfect but very largely. Are we good so far? Okay. Now you have two features of the content of Jewish law which I think are very important. Um if you I would hopefully say when you open the Talmud and decide to study it and and and read through it you'll find there are lots of controversies. Lots and lots of controversies. One could form the impression that everything's in dispute. There's almost nothing that they agree upon. But that would be a mistake. I'll give you an analogy. There are actually books which compile Supreme Court decisions. There are books that have a history of Supreme Court decisions. Now suppose your only introduction to American law was a book of Supreme Court decisions. How many Supreme Court decisions are unanimous? Zero. They're all contested. You have the argument of the majority minority. If that were your intro introduction to to American law you might say golly, this whole legal system is in controversy. There's nothing they agree upon. Why? Because you're investigating controversial cases. You're investigating the ones that came to the Supreme Court. What do you have in the Talmud? The Talmud is largely discussions and debate about controversial issues. That's why they're recorded. They're recorded because we want to know how to handle these controversial issues. So that being the case the fact that there's so much controversy in the Talmud doesn't indicate that a majority of Jewish law is under under dispute. It just means that these are the disputable cases because they're the ones that are interesting to learn about so you know how to handle them and know what their implications are. And furthermore if you'll take any particular dispute and ask yourself okay, they're disagreeing about X. How much agreed upon material stands behind this dispute? You'll find that the agreed upon material far far outweighs the dispute. I'll give you a few examples. There is a dispute about when Shabbos ends. 42 minutes after sundown or an hour or 72 minutes after sundown or 90 minutes after sundown. Golly. They can't pin down when Shabbos ends. Correct. It's a matter of dispute. But let's not forget that one of the world's great religions celebrates the biblical Sabbath on Friday. And another one of the world's great religions celebrates the biblical Sabbath on Sunday. And if you are looking for a convenient way to start the day nightfall isn't obvious way to do it. Sunrise is also a possibility. Noon where on any day other than a foggy day you have a sundial you can tell exactly when it's noon. Or midnight like modern societies do in the middle of the night cuz nothing legal's happening at midnight so it doesn't matter. It's a very convenient time to change the day. You got lots of choices when to change the day. The fact that we have let's say an 80 or 90 minute period of of um controversy when there's a potential 72 hour gap and then a 24 hour gap means that the amount of controversy is really quite small. Uh let's take the esrog which we mentioned yesterday, the pri etz hadar, the one on Tuesday. The fruit of a beautiful tree, a beautiful fruit from a tree, the citron. There is a dispute. One of the tanoim says that you could use a lemon. Too bad we don't accept this opinion cuz that would break the market. You know, they'd become cheap and easy to easy to get and so on and so on. Now, no one ever said a pomegranate, a peach, a plum, an orange, a pear, an apple, grapes, um, olives. There are lots and lots of fruits of trees. He held that the lemon and the and the and the citron are one species, one botanical species. And everybody else said, "No." And we try to pass against him. But look at the scope of possible disagreement with only three words in the Torah, which are very, very vague and ambiguous. And no one ever recorded a dispute except for maybe a lemon is a citron. So, when you look at the scope of possible disagreement and then compare it with the scope of actual disagreement, what you find is that the the amount of the disagreement is very, very small. Now, together with that is the the point that I mentioned to you at the beginning, but now it's I'm bringing this same point in for a different application. We said at the beginning that much of the written is impossible to interpret without the oral. So, let's ask, how stable is the oral information? If you thought that people forget and misinterpret and especially if you think we should talk about this we have time. If you think we're subject to external influences, cultures among whom we live influence the way we think, the way we perceive, the way we interpret and understand, then you should expect, especially the oral material, stuff that isn't written down anyplace, to be very malleable and change largely over time. Let's take a look at a few examples. Tefillin. Phylacteries. Bind these words for a sign on your hand and for something or other between your eyes, totalfos, whatever they are. Can't put words on your hand. Words are abstract. So, it means some representation of the words. Maybe I should tattoo them? Put the words on my arm. I could tattoo them on my arm. Or, etch them in stone or in metal. Who says it's got to be leather? Who says the leather has to come from animals that are kosher? What about horse skin or pig skin or kangaroo skin or something else? And these four paragraphs, and there are four separate parchments in four compartments in the head in the head box, and all four are written on a single parchment with a single chamber in the arm box, and they're cubicle. Why aren't there various different types of tefillin, various different types of materials, wood or or or metal or on a long strap and wind the strap around your arm? If it's really just fluid and subject to forgetting and reinterpretating and interpreting and and cultural influences, why is it so uniform? We don't have any record of anyone ever using tefillin of any of those of those other types. Are there disagreements about tefillin? Yes. There's disagreement about the the third and fourth paragraph, whether they should be in the order that we have or the opposite order. There's a whole long discussion but think of the scope of available disagreement and consider that the information is extremely stable, just like the citron is extremely stable. We even had some archaeological confirmation of this. The Talmud says that a synagogue should face the next holiest place. If you're outside the land of Israel, you should face the land of Israel. If you're in the land of Israel, you should face Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, you should face the Temple. That means synagogues don't face east. Synagogues in Russia face south. In Johannesburg, they face north. In the Golan, they face south. They face Jerusalem. Okay, that is first codified in the Talmud. That means around 550 CE. We have synagogues in this country that have been dug up archaeologically going back 500 years before that, they all face Jerusalem. All of them. No exception. So, that information was oral for at least 500 years. It was there. It was stable. It was universal and it was kept. You've heard of Masada. Did you go to Masada? Um, uh, okay. So, you know there's a mikveh there. I was here in '65 when that when the mikveh was discovered. '64, '65. And they they they uncovered it in the in the archaeological dig. And the question was, would that mikveh be kosher according to Jewish halachic standards? After all, that mikveh was constructed about 150 years before the Mishnah. Let alone the Gemara, which has vast, vast deliberation on the laws of mikvahs. Two experts from Mea Shearim climbed up. There was only the snake path in those days, no cable car in the back for lazy people. And it was August and they had the long coats and those pancake hats. And they fasted that day because they felt it was a very important, uh, religious moment. And of course it was perfectly kosher according to all the later standards. Which means that the laws of the later standards were derived from an earlier time when it was all oral and all correct, all the same as what we had later. It wasn't things changing and being reinterpreted and adapted to the times and everything else, in which case you would see some kind of loss of that of that kind. So, when we have the opportunity to confirm things archaeologically, so then then we, uh, we are able to confirm them. There's a the place in the old city called Burnt House. Cuz when it was destroyed, the whole thing was burnt. And the archaeology archaeologists have have re- reconstructed it. And it was a a house that belonged to Kohanim and they used stone vessels because the Mishnah says and the and the Talmud codifies that stone vessels don't contract any kind of defilement. Okay, the Mishnah was written almost 200 years after those people lived there. And the Talmud 350 years after that. But you see there that they were operating according to those rules. Now, uh, if you do go to Burnt House, it's nice nice thing to do, and you get a a guide, be very skeptical of the guides that you get. Even if the guy is wearing a yarmulke, be very skeptical. Friend of mine went on this tour and the guide said that the stone vessels and they were clearly, uh, Kohanim and they found other identifications of the way Kohanim lived at that time. But, we also found vessels with wine from Cyprus. Now, there are Jewish laws against using wine produced by non-Jews. But I guess he said that they weren't so careful about that. You know? Maligning people dead who can't fight back. You know? They weren't so careful about that, you know? So, my friend who happens to be a rabbi said, "Gee, isn't it possible that there were Jews on Cyprus producing kosher wine?" We today have kosher wine from California and from France. Why is the fact that it came from Cyprus mean that it couldn't be kosher wine? Indeed, one of the ingredients for the incense is Yayin Kafrisin, wine from Cyprus. Do you think they used treif wine from Cyprus for the ingredient for that? I told this over to somebody recently and he said, "You don't know the history of Cyprus. At that time, half the inhabitants OF CYPRUS WERE JEWISH. THERE WAS A GIGANTIC JEWISH community there. Only later there was some kind of uprising and the Jews were chased out, killed and chased out." So, so what is this guy doing? Why is he saying something like that? Okay. But you see that there's no reason to doubt that the same laws were in force and being kept at that time. So, if if someone tell me tells you differently, then put on your skeptical thinking cap and say, "Okay, I'll check it out with people who know what's going on." At any rate, it seems to me at this point we have very considerable evidence that the transmission of the oral of the, uh, oral tradition was very accurate. Not 100% but very accurate. If someone says, "Yeah, okay. Okay, I hear your evidence. But isn't it still possible that there were displacements and and, uh, influences and there was a lot of information lost or filled in and and changed later?" I don't see if you can think back to 2 weeks ago when we started this series. What's the right answer to, "Isn't it possible?" The answer is always, "Yes. Of course it's possible. So a leprechaun's possible. So is anything possible. Possibility is uninteresting. Whenever anybody asks you, "Isn't it possible?" just tell them, "Yes, of course it's possible. But I want to know what's probable, not possible. We don't live our lives on possibility. We live our lives on probability. Have you any evidence that there was distortion? Have you any evidence that there was change? Have you any evidence of large-scale forgetting? No? Then the right thing to do is to go with all the evidence that we have, which is that the transmission was very good. Don't ever be stymied by a challenge, "Isn't it possible you're wrong?" Give it away. It's always possible that I'm wrong. Are we good so far? Yeah. Okay, now I want to introduce a subject that I mentioned about 10 minutes ago and then elaborate on it in certain ways. If you study Jewish history in some secular environment university you will see that there is a major axiom and then a minor application of it to Jewish history. The major axiom is all human groups are the same. We treat them the same. We use the same methodology because human beings are human beings. One corollary is cultures interact with one another and are influenced by one another. Especially when culture is majority culture and the other is a minority culture. Especially when the members of the minority culture are scattered. Then you have large-scale impact of the majority culture on the minority culture. The minority culture bends and changes and adapts often without even being aware that it's doing so. So that over a couple hundred years, 200 years it's very significantly affected by the impact of the majority culture. That's a rule that they will apply to the Chinese, to the Eskimos, to the Nigerians even to the British. And certainly to Jews because we know they're different from anybody else. And there are people who have made a an a a uh a living out of ch- tracing Greek influences on on the development of Judaism and in- influences as far afield from India on development of Judaism. Now I have two things to say about that. I think they're both very important. Number one let's imagine that they're right. Imagine that Jewish history is no different from anybody else's history. And that we live among the different cultures, the cultures have an effect on how we develop. Well, if that's true then when you have a large Jewish community living in one area and another large Jewish community living in another area and the areas are separated culturally very significantly. And they've lived there for a long time. Let's say a thousand years. They don't have a gigantic impact on the development of the Jewish community and its culture and its religion and its values and its modes of expression based on the majority cultures in the two places. And then it seems to me after a thousand years they ought to have very little if anything in common anymore. So let's test this method. A method is nothing more than a way of dealing with information and it has to prove itself in being accurate vis-a-vis the information. Let's test it. Jews lived in Yemen till recently for 1500 years. That's what the secular historians say. Some of our sources go back further. Let's go back 1500 years. Jews lived in Poland for a thousand years. So they were separated for at least that thousand years that the Jews were in Poland. The Jews in Yemen are living in a land that is mostly desert and has a large seacoast and 1500 years ago was Arab barbarian. That was before Islam. And then was taken over by Islam. Jews in Poland were living in north-central Europe no access to seacoast but heavily forested plains and and some gentle mountains and a northern climate snow lots of water and Catholic Christianity. If they're right if those secular pundits are right that every human group is the same, we're all affected by the societies around us what would you predict after a thousand years of Jews living in Yemen and Jews living in Poland, what would you predict they would have left in common? I think you'd have to predict very little. But as a matter of fact, they had almost everything left in common. Same literature, same expression, same Some differences, yes. Yes, there were some differences. But if you give a round figure for how much they had left in common, 90% would be an underestimate. That's not what the model predicts. So that being the case it doesn't look like that's a good model. So thinking that we have been strongly influenced from the outside is just belied by the facts. Now um there's a fellow named Jacob Neusner taught at Brown University. Um he wrote I think an infinity of books or close to. He wrote a lot of books on Jewish subjects, a lot of them. History and and the Jerusalem Talmud and all sorts of things. And he among others, the whole school of them thought of vast vast external cultural influence on the Jewish religion. And just one of the standard challenges I used to get. Nobody remembers who he was anymore. But 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I was doing this material so I wrote up some of his observations. But I'll give you an example of one. Uh and it's just it's just typical of all of them. Um in the synagogues that have been excavated in Israel going back let's say 1700 years, 1800 years, you have mosaics. And the mosaics often depict the signs of the zodiac. The star constellations associated with the months. So says Neusner, obviously the Torah prohibits making images. And furthermore, these are images of things that were used in Greek religion. So here I obviously have a case of Greek influence on Jewish development. They're coming on uh they're coming to the synagogue to pray to God and they're surrounded by Greek religious images. So it's obviously a you know, it's a modification, a breakdown, an insertion of Greek ideas into the Okay, um let's see. Is there really a prohibition against images? Flat images? Isn't even a blanket prohibition against statues? Didn't Solomon make statues in the temple? For example, he had three giant basins holding water and each of them was situated on the backs of four bronze bulls. STATUES! Of bulls. No one ever said he did anything wrong. And he made statues of angels. And the the paroches, the cloth divider between the holy and the holy of holies, going back to Moses had woven in it into it pictures of various animals. Did he prohibit it? Poor Jacob doesn't know that. He doesn't mention them. Furthermore, as one archaeologist points out, I did some work on this. One archaeologist points out, when you look at these mosaics in the in the synagogues with the pictures of the zodiac they're labeled. Each one is labeled by name. And some of the labels are wrong. They have the wrong names. Now if you think this is an infiltration of Greek worship into Jewish into into the Jewish synagogue then they're going to get the names wrong. This was a decoration. It was Greek decoration and they put these things up. Is it the right name? Is it the Doesn't matter cuz it doesn't mean anything. It's just art. That's all. The the pillars in the in the synagogues from that period are Greek pillars. Having all the shapes of Greek pillars. That's because architects who wanted to make pleasing work used Greek style because it was the best style. That be an indication of an infiltration of Greek religion into into Jewish religion? It's absolutely absurd. Um Mysticism says Neusner. Mysticism came from the Greeks. We had no such thing as mysticism. And uh mystical understanding of the sac- sacrifices, the moral understanding of sacrifices. Well, um what about Ezekiel who does predate the Greeks? That's not mystical. Take out the first five chapters and read about chariots and wheels and creatures with with four heads and and and eyes all over them and so forth and so on. Those are arch mystical visions. And you have mystical elements in the Torah itself going back to Moses. The princes of Israel saw God even though you can't see God. They had some kind of vision. So certainly uh they didn't they didn't invent these things. Um and so it goes. What Yeah, sorry. Um I also read an interesting thing one time on the um from like archaeological news. Uh I don't know if you heard of this, but when they were digging up some of the pyramids, they found um baby-like uh car- um babies' bodies inside like where like the bricks were and it just reminds you of the story of um when we were in Egypt and when uh the Jews wouldn't finish the pyramids on time, they put babies as bricks. So that was like an interesting thing that I saw, but no one associated that with Judaism or with the story of Egypt. They just were like, "Oh, this is kind of unusual that there's babies inside the pyramid." So, I think I think this case, maybe they're right. Because the Torah does not say that we built the pyramids. Torah does not say that. It says we built treasure cities for Pharaoh and it names them. Pithom and Ramses, neither of which are pyramids. The idea that Jews built the pyramids has no foundation whatsoever in our sources. Really? No foundation whatsoever. Number one. And number two, walling up babies or people in in cities was a way of creating good luck for them for those cities, and that was something which was done widely. It was not something that was limited to to our case. is it that always in the story that we built pyramids? It isn't. Nowhere does it say No no Hebrew texts say that they built the pyramids. our story. It doesn't say it. It's quoting the verses from from Exodus, and there it says we built treasure houses for for Pharaoh, Pithom and Ramses. It never says pyramids. What are these treasure houses you would think? Places where you store treasures. You know what the pyramids were? They were the place where you buried Pharaohs. Like towers. They're only storehouses. What does the Disney movie say so? All right. Why does Disney movie say so? You know, we we we lived through The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille. Oh, gigantic production, but full of mistakes. Oh, I can't expect, you know, that they could look up the traditional sources. Now, there's another example of this. Um there was a fellow at the Hebrew University named Gershom Scholem who specialized in Jewish mysticism. He published unpublished texts of Jewish mysticism, wrote commentaries, and so on and so on. Totally secular. And I'm not saying therefore I could say therefore, but I'm not saying it. And he made lots of mistakes. And he claimed that the mystical ideas of Judaism came from India through Greece to the Roman Empire and were adopted by the Neoplatonists. Plato had a comeback about a thousand years after he died. Something called Neoplatonism. And it is documented that there were rabbis who had contact with Neoplatonic scholars. And that's how these mystical ideas became absorbed into Judaism. That would be another example of vast external influence. Well, one of his students, his name will come to me, wrote a a book called New Perspectives on Kabbalah, which was widely celebrated. And he's not religious, so therefore everything he writes is fair and objective and reasonable and precise and well documented and everything else. If he were religious, it would just be propaganda. But he wasn't religious, so you can take him at his word. Um And he points out the following. When the Zohar was published in the 14th century by Moses de León, there was some discussion. There was some debate. Is it a genuine document or not? The document says that it is the record of the yeshiva of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Don't let anybody tell you that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai wrote the Zohar. That's not true. Moses de León. Sorry? Moses de León. it before, right? No, I I let's go step by step. The the Zohar is a record of discussions in Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's yeshiva. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai assigned one of his students, Rabbi Abba, to make a record of it. It was written down by Rabbi Abba, and there are many speakers in the in the in the Zohar. Rabbi Shimon is not the only speaker. There are many speakers. He's the chief speaker. He was the greatest of the scholars, but he he certainly didn't write it as a book. Now, it was not published publicized in existence as a as a text until Moses de León in the 14th century. That's like 1,200 years later. Published it. He wrote it down and made it available for copyists who could then make copies and give it to other people. So, there was some discussion. Is this a real book that goes back to the time of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai or did Moses de León write it himself and just posted it? Create fictitious discussions that went back to the time of the Tanaim, 1,200 years before, to give the book certain authenticity. That discussion went on for some decades. Finally, it was closed, and it was accepted that it is an accurate text that goes back all the way all the way to the time of the Tanaim. But um the author, whose name I will remember, says, "Compare that, for example, with the reception of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed got a vicious aggressive reception to the extent that the rabbis of Paris burnt it in public as heresy. They burnt the the Guide of the Perplexed in Paris as heresy. Nachmanides, well over a hundred years later, spent a lot of his life trying to convince the world that it's not heresy. You don't have to accept it. You can have disagreements with it. And he succeeded. He succeeded. The idea of heresy dropped out. So, now the author asks, "Why was the reception of the Zohar much less um much less um rejectionist, much less critical, much Nobody said it was heresy. Nobody burnt it as heresy. Question is whether it was was really historically accurate or not." He answers, "Because the ideas in the Zohar aren't that new. They aren't that new. You can trace them back to the Talmud and to the Midrash. Okay, the Talmud and the Midrash spoke sometimes in code. They didn't want to say things clearly and openly. But if you have the ideas of the Zohar in front of you and you look back and see what was written there, you can see a very clear continuity. That's why nobody challenged the ideas as heresy because they were fairly familiar ideas." Nachmanides, who precedes the Zohar by 200 years, wrote a number of these ideas down. And he said over and over again, "There's hidden material. I can't be going to more detail, but there's this and this." So, "if that's the case," says the author, whose name I will remember, Guide of the Perplexed? Huh? No no, the this the New Perspectives on Kabbalah. He said, "I think you could make a case for the opposite. That these ideas go back at least to Talmudic Judaism, which is hundreds of years before the Neoplatonists. And the contact that we have recorded between rabbis and Neoplatonists meant the rabbis were teaching the Neoplatonists, not the other way around. Who told you that they were learning from the Neoplatonists? Maybe they were teaching the Neoplatonists. And that's why there's a correspondence of ideas." Now, that argument has a lot of fundamental features. Number one, the argument that the influence came from them to us just didn't take into account the old literature. Just didn't take it into account at all. Scholem was not expert in the old old literature. Number two, was based on the assumption that every culture is affected by other cultures. If you're a minority culture and the majority culture, they're going to affect you. You're not going to affect them. They took that as a as an assumption, which as I showed you would lead to dreadfully wrong predictions about how Judaism developed. So, he says, "There's there is no historical proof for it. There's no historical evidence directly who took from whom. No rabbi writes, 'Oh, I met this Christian scholar. Boy, was he smart. Boy, did he have anything Let me tell you what I learned from him.' Simply not so. Simply not so. So, when you hear people talk about influence coming from the outside, you have to you have to be very thick-skinned and and skeptical. Because if we really did accept accept things from the outside, then the the religion would be in pieces. Now, someone will say, 'But look at your shoes.' Jews didn't make those shoes. Aren't you wearing non-Jewish shoes and shirts and so on and so on? Aren't you speaking a non-Jewish language and so on and so on? Yeah, that's true. No one's denying that non-Jewish culture had effects on us. We're only denying that it had religious effects on us. That's what we're denying. I saw someone write that the fervent joyous prayer of Hasidim was stimulated by certain Christian cults that were practicing that kind of worship in Europe at the time. Golly. The Kuzari, written a thousand years ago, says, "A true servant of God, from time to time, will feel so emotionally intense that he will spontaneously break break into song and dance in the service of God." That was written 500 years before that Christian worship. We don't have to go back to some sects of Christianity in Europe to trace why there would be a group of Jews who would practice their their worship this way? It's in our own sources. Yes, our practice undergoes shifts of priorities in different times, and sometimes there's a throwback to an earlier stage where something was more important. There's no reason to say that we took it from from a from a Christian source. Had we been open to that kind of influence, then um there would have been there would have been nothing left of us. So, this is very very important to talk about continuity of Jewish information, Jewish practice, Jewish ideas. The continuity is is very very strong. What I would like to do now, I'll do a little bit now and then we'll carry it out again on on Sunday, is to show you a couple of examples, a few examples, when you have rabbinic comments about verses in the Torah. And often they just seem to come out of nowhere. They they seem to be free and maybe they're interesting in their own right, but they don't seem to be connected to the text at all. I want to show you how much logic went into these things. Unrecorded, they don't spell out their logic to you, but if you think about it, use your own head, and more important, see the commentators, you'll see how much logic is in is involved. Let's Let's take the blue books and take a take a couple a look at a few things. Right at the beginning, on the very first page, I think it's called page three here. Now, let's just look at verse five. The first half of verse five. God called to the light day, and to the darkness called, there's no he in the Hebrew. There's no he in the Hebrew. The English does that because it's awkward otherwise, but there's no he in the Hebrew. And to the darkness called night. The Talmudic comment here is God associates his name with good and not with evil. God associates his name with good and not with evil. And the reader says, "What?" "Where are you coming from? Where are you coming from? It's talking about light and day and darkness and night. Maybe you are have some kind of spiritual association that day and light are good and night and and and night and and evil are night and evil I'm sorry and and darkness and night are bad. But look, it's a compound sentence. God called the day to light day and called and to darkness called night. It's a subject with a compound predicate. Obviously, the subject performed both of the actions equally. John went to the store and BOUGHT MILK. WHO BOUGHT MILK? John bought milk. John went to the store and bought milk. Would you say that his name was associated with going to the store and not with buying milk? It's a compound sentence with a single subject. This is what is going on here. Okay, let's go piece by piece. Let's now take a look at verse four. God saw that the light was good, and God separated between the light and the darkness. Hmm. Compound sentence. Same subject. But in four, the subject is repeated. God is written twice. And in five, God is written only once. So, the careful reader should say, "I wonder why the text changes its style here." Why is it written twice in four and only once in five? That needs to be explained. Furthermore, let's ask this. Could you interpret five on the basis of economy? You know why I didn't repeat God? Cuz just not necessary. Leave four out. Forget four for a minute. That would that would make cause a problem with four, but leave four out for a minute. He just didn't write God because it's cheaper that way. It's one less word. That can't be right. Why? Now, look at five carefully and see if you can figure out why that can't be right. Cuz he could have just left out the he called in the first place. Ah, because the verb is repeated. It's the same verb. You didn't have to repeat the verb, either. You could have written, "God called to the light day and to the darkness night." No, you repeat the verb, you don't repeat the subject. Isn't the text waving a flag here? Guess what? G O D is missing in the second half of the sentence. So, there is something in the text, on the basis of logic, which tells you that that G O D is missing and that all of it means something. You got it so far? Yeah. Okay. Now, let's see about good and evil for light and dark, day and night. Look at verse three. God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. God saw that the light was good. Hmm. So, the light being good isn't just my spiritual associations or just my imagination, it's right there on the page that the light is good. Right? Now, one more step. When God saw that the light was good, what else was on stage? Go back to verse two. When the earth was astonishingly empty and with darkness upon the surface of the deep, divine presence having the surface of the waters, and now, with all that on stage, God saw that the light was good. Doesn't that indicate that the other things weren't good? I think it does. So, at the very least, you could say the light is good and the darkness isn't good. And now, where you have G O D attached to the light and not attached to the darkness, the Talmud says, "You see that God attaches his name to the good and not to the evil." That's pretty clearly on the text. In the text. Is that just fanciful or clearly. Huh? I mean, if you didn't if you read this without the Talmud, it would be a little bit more complex to figure that out. Correct. Correct. But it's like math, you know, once you see the proof, you say, "Oh, so there it is." Now, when I told this to my son, part of this I had to get to my own on my own. Told my older son, he said, "Abba, turn to the next page." Okay, okay, we're happy to do that. And look at verse 10. God called to the dry land earth, and to the gathering of waters called, there's no he, called seas. Same thing. Isn't that exactly the same as five? Yeah. Are you going to say, my son asked me, "Are you going to say that the earth is good and the seas are bad?" Do you know what I said? I said, "That's a good question. I'm going to think about it." And after a while, I thought to myself, "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to say." And I said it for a few years, then somebody showed me a transcript of a sheer give my Shapiro shlita who says it in spades, and he uses the examples that I used and other examples. So, I'll show I'll tell you what what what's going on. Let's see. When the earth was created, what was its status? What did it look like? It was covered all over with water. Then the waters had to be drawn back to allow the dry land to appear so there'd be a place for people to live. It looks like the waters prevent human life. Okay, now, when there was a punishment for the world and almost all the entire population was wiped out, it was done by flood, waters. And when the Jews wanted to leave Egypt, the Red Sea was in the way and had to split. I mean, they wanted to go in Okay, ready I can't stand that. And when they wanted to go into land of Israel, they were blocked by the Jordan River, which had to stop flowing so they could go across. Doesn't it look like water is an obstacle? Seas. Not water falling from heaven, but seas. And indeed, verses in Psalms tell us that the seas still want to conquer the land. Maybe that's the background for tsunamis. And that being the case, yes, gatherings of water into seas have a negative connotation. So, weeks later, I called my son up and I said, "You know what? What you suggested to me? Yes, I do want to say that." Why is it in quotations? Like, is that because is that rather or at least in the English it's in quotation. Earth is in quotation. Because it's a speech. It's a speech. When you When somebody says words, you put them in quotations, right? Right. Okay, it says Peter said to John, "Be there at six." Aren't the words be there at six in quotation marks? Okay, so that's how we knew. Okay, I didn't know if there was like more implication to it to like say that like gatherings of water is what considered a seas and that's why it's in No, no, no, no, no, because you have it in on verse five, also. It's the same quotation marks in verse five. So, that's how we knew to call earth earth and that's how we knew to call the seas seas. Because it's in quotation, that's word for word. No, no, no, no, no. These are God's words. It's a speech. Do you know maybe you're missing out one word? You look at 10. God called to the dry land. Is that giving it a name? Giving it the name earth? He called to it. Hmm, great. To assign it a a role, a function, a status. He spoke to it. And the word he spoke was eretz. Right. So, this is a quotation. This is innocent. This is you know, in in textual terms, it's trivial. It's just that's the word that he spoke. In the first in the first part, it said that the light was good. Yeah. It explicitly said the light was good. Yes. And there it says that God God saw that it was good. Yes, good. So, now Um let's just let's just do that. So, now let start verse 9. God said let the waters be the heaven be gathered to one area. Let the dry earth land appear and was so. God called to the dry land earth. God is what he called seas. And God saw that it was good. What could the it be? Could it be the combination of the two? Sure, the whole situation. Everything that was accomplished is designated as good. Return. Yeah, the end of 10. Right? So, the whole situation now, a situation in which there is a bad element could be a good situation. Human beings created with an evil inclination. The sum total of human beings is good. With that evil element. Sometimes evil elements play good roles in a larger context. That's certainly true. Something that Josephus He talks about a lot. God does create evil and how he could do that, what it means, so on and so on. Anyway, that's this little piece of text. Next time we'll pick up a few more pieces.