MindFlex - Rabbi Tzvi Gluckin - The Truth of Rabbinic Authority

and just waiting for harry in the sink and we have we have sunk oh there you go all right i want to welcome everybody to project inspire everything everyone know about the url law my name is steve glocken hang on a second they uh they advertise me as a musician [Music] right [Music] oh sorry i gotta read blown out on my my armada worst things can happen i guess right anyways i'm steve glucken coming to you live from uh boston massachusetts we're gonna be speaking about some deep ideas that should shake you to the core of your being i'll be speaking about the oral law and uh that's that do you mind if i show a slideshow is that fine everybody's cool with that i guess you're going to have to be ah manga here we go who's in my shot that's me i'm city glocken and uh any questions that doesn't really matter all right i'm steve glucken i'm in boston massachusetts if you want to find out more about me especially the the music writing i do and the freelance journalism i do check it out at my website guacam.com also you can follow me at the ingathering.substance.com which is a weekly newsletter dedicated to everything you ever want to know about jewish music and spirituality we have features and interviews with jewish artists people are currently active on the scene today historical pieces about things that you want to know about um in terms of jewish music throughout the ages uh what else roundups of great music you need to hear particularly new stuff and cool stuff and finally uh short essays and debrie torah about the spiritual the inherent spiritual nature of music and how those different things work together it's actually fascinating and fabulous and you will totally love it and um because i'm cool so this the music that we feature is cool music nothing cheesy nothing sappy i hope unless of course the spirit moves me and i'm feeling cheesy and sappy but it hasn't happened yet anyway so check that out i'll give you all these things again at the end but today we're not talking about music or spiritual well everything's spiritual i guess today we're going to be speaking about the oral law understanding the oral law understanding what it is how it functions how it works and um hopefully answer some obvious questions that people have the most basic and obvious question which is what it really is the focus of today's lengthy dissertation or not so lengthy depending on our feelings um but the fights like this let's pretend you know god exists god runs the world god gave his torah to the jewish people we know the jewish the torah is unchanged wonderful okay what about that doesn't mean anything necessarily because just because we have a torah the same torah that we have and we use as the jewish people as the basis for our belief and the basis for how we see the world and interact with the world lots of other people use that same torah and use the verses to prove what they want to believe as well and what's interesting is that if you just read the verses and you take them at face value with no additional explanation nobody filling in the blanks nobody explaining the obvious inconsistencies or grammatical issues or juxtapositions or areas that are particularly terse versus areas that are particularly lengthy yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda it always explains it to you how do you you can't really make head or tails of it and so you can interpret it to say whatever you want it to say the torah is poetic enough vague enough and allegorical enough that you can twist it and make it say anything and lots of people do everything from mainstream religious religions and belief systems in our world today to very fringe uh outsider belief systems and everything in between they're all using the same torah torah to prove and to give a scriptural basis for the beliefs how do we know we're right we have our beliefs we have our way of reading the torah how did how do we know the jewish belief system or the jewish understanding i don't want to say interpretation it's kind of not really accurate but the jewish understanding of the verses how do we know that it's uh that it's uh that it's the right one maybe we're not i don't know we'll explore that a better question though and uh even if i could prove to you even if i could demonstrate that our torah is the torah that you know our oral law rather is the correct interpretation and it's a correct understanding what the verses are saying still been around a long time i mean the oral law was written down i used that in quotes because we wrote the url a lot which interesting paradox yeah interesting usage of language but uh the aura laws two thousand years fifteen hundred years ago is the conclusion of the talmud i mean it's been around a long time how did it didn't change just because we could say it's true or it's right how do you know it didn't change over all these years how do you know that the oral law we are using today is basically the one we started out with so that's what we're going to be dealing with and discussing today in our talk um first thing i want to demonstrate though before we even get into the oral law and how we know it hasn't changed realize that the oral law is with us whether you like it or not and whether you grew up in a religious home or you've never been or you've been holy had a very uh what's the word i'm looking for a very limited experience with judaism if you interacted with jewish jewish experienced jewish life jewish lifestyle events in any way shape or form you've interacted with the oral law it's everywhere it's prevalent it's unavoidable so for example if you've ever been to a passover seder and i have a picture here of a seder that's not my family's theater well okay whatever anyways if you've been to a peso theater a passover center you've interacted in europe with your law what's a torah say torah tells you about the exodus from egypt it says that the people in the story slaughtered a lamb put blood on the doorposts of their houses uh they sat in their house with the staff of their hands sitting straight up at the teeth table eating lamb and matzo while the angel of death flew over the house and was smoting the egyptians um is that what we do today are there any egyptians being smoked while we're having our passover center no but not only that we recline and we ask the four questions we read from a haggadah where does all this stuff come from the only thing it says in the torah is tell it to your children tell what to your children okay so this is how we tell it it's the oral law the oral law fills in all those blanks and tells you how to tell it to your children so you're telling your children uh what happened to us and that night and the basis for our belief system okay the bar mitzvah do you ever what's it saying torah about a bar mitzvah nothing bub kiss chum davar klum gornish ain't no thing it's not there right it's not there there's some hints that we can maybe get into if anybody wants to get go wade into the weeds of uh tommy the claw but generally speaking barbate mitzvah barbasomets was not mentioned uh in the torah at all even the name bar mitzvah is not a hebrew word bar is aramaic and it just means that somebody becomes obligated in the midst so if you've interacted with that if you turn 13 or 12 if you're a girl and you've had a bar by missus so you've interacted with oral law as well not to mention all the rabbinical things that we have throughout our history like hanukkah and purim and all these things so anyway so oral law is something that is intrinsic to the jewish experience and if you've experienced judaism you've experienced the oral law more than that the torah seems to assume that there's an oral law this is the mystery of mezuzah if you've ever gone to a jewish home or maybe in your jewish home you have a mezuzah on the doorpost okay here's what it says in the torah it says this is deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 9 write them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates and that's it right what that's all it says it's actually referring to the verse before verse two before it says write these words right what words write one word that's all it says the unfortunate torah the written the written torah makes the mistake of giving us a pronoun without actually first telling us the proper noun so right what so um and it's actually fascinating there's a heretical sex called the karates they still exist on some level uh they have they believed the written law not the oral law so okay they had to deal with these verb this verse as well so what did they do so they write the ten commandments on their door post how do they know that right them is referring to the ten commandments i don't know it's an interpretation it's an oral law whether they believe it or not um there's a book that was funny for like the first five pages it's not really that good called the year of living biblically a guy who decides to live every verse of the torah literally and same thing he gets his verse doesn't know what to do so he writes the ten commandments on his doorposts i don't know why people choose the ten commandments but okay it's not for me anyways bottom line though is that the written law here seems to assume that there's some type of explanation someone's going to tell you what that pronoun is and you'll come to us you'll come to see that it's actually misusably low enough to know and love today you look at a torah scroll there's no dots okay so tell us about the holiday of sukhoi sukkot how do you know it doesn't say and we should all lie on beds of nails i don't know okay the best one is this one here though uh slaughter the torus says uh this is deuteronomy chapter 12 verse 21 where it says you may slaughter your animals in the manner that i have commanded you and that's it if you've ever learned to learn the laws of snorting animals that you'll know that the laws of slaughtering animals are actually relatively complex there's uh five different ways they have to you know the large animals the majority of the trachea and the esophagus smaller animals all of those things there's five ways that you could render that slaughter invalid you have concerns about the animal so you need to um if you have concerns about the animal so you need to um you need to uh electronically you need to examine 70 different organs 70 types of blemishes that could render the animal and edible what does it say in the torah it's a whole complex law it wasn't saying the torah this sort of the animals the manner that i've commanded you obviously it's implicit in the language here that there is some type of uh some type of oral explanation so that's the bottom line the taurus seems to be assuming there's an oral explanation that goes along to explain what these written verses are talking about let's take this a step further because oral laws are actually normal to all societies for example if you want to learn how to read these letters it's impossible to do without somebody explaining it to you true once you learn one language you can at least in theory you can figure out all the rest it's actually a little harder than you than you would think but in theory you could figure out all the last rest but someone has to explain what these letters mean someone has to show you a is ah b is ba c is sub or depending on context d is da and that's it sometimes to show it to you there's a famous story in the talmud about the great sage hillel a non-jew comes to hildo and he says hello i'm going to convert to judaism if you can teach me the whole torah but i don't want the written torah not the oral law so hill says great okay i'll give you that he does the same thing he says you have to learn to read you want to learn the written law of the lineup here's an olive come back tomorrow i'll give you more letters the guy comes back the next day he's tells hillary the letters he was like what do you think about that's not the letters that i showed you the first letter is is uh is top and then sha and then rough and cook the guys well flabbergasted hill says if you can't trust me for the for the pronunciation of the letters how are you going to know how to put those letters together to make words and what those words mean and how the grammar works and how they work in context and ultimately what what the torah is teaching you what you're supposed to glean from in other words without some type of oral explanation it's impossible to make heads or tales of the torah and to have any understanding of what it's speaking about and more than that you know that's how you learn language that's how we understand things and when you hear things orally when someone speaks incorrectly it sounds wrong and you know that okay how do you know and we transmit this stuff obviously from parent to child and also in school so how do you know your kindergarten teacher didn't lie to you so that you trust your teacher and the reason you trust your teacher is because it's easy to corroborate and there's no secret information so if you go to school and your teacher is that rebel teacher teaching the wrong math or teaching the wrong pronunciation of the letter so what's going to happen you'll be with your friends on the playground and you'll say something wrong and everybody will make fun of you you go home to do your homework with your parents or siblings or an uncle or whatever and it's the new math everybody it's not going to last because it's so it's it's common knowledge what your teacher's teaching you is not this secret information your teacher is teaching you this common knowledge that you can corroborate very easily in the world around you so you can trust your kindergarten teacher because of that steve martin the comedian used to have this joke that if you really want to play if you want to play a joke on little kids what you do is whenever you're around them you talk wrong so when they go to their first day in school they have to go to the bathroom they raise their hand male mama dog face the banana patch get that kid out of here you know anyways that's a joke because it's ridiculous obviously uh the way we learn and the way we're able to understand what someone is saying and the way we're able to transmit our knowledge is because it's done orally more than that it's not just things like math and language it's how we function in society as well for example the way you behave on a date or the way you act at a job interview these are lessons that you pick up and learn in society if you don't behave correctly or properly in these situations no one will go out with you or you'll never get any work because i saw i heard once a story on npr so it's got to be true right i heard it on npr there was uh you know the gang problem in la and so they had convinced these local businesses not like stores i think it was more executive you know more office type work they had convinced these these businesses to hire kids from the gangs for the summer to get them off the street and so the kids would work in the businesses instead of getting up to trouble uh over the summer and so everybody agreed fine the one catch was the businesses didn't want to just hire these kids they wanted they had to go they were going to give them jobs but they had to go through the application process and go to interviews as the summer wore on none of the kids got hired how come because the way they didn't know they never had this transmission of how to behave on a job interview the way you act on the street what's cool on the street how you dress how you hold yourself how you speak on the street is very different than the way you behave in a job interview and so all these people conducted the interviews were terrified and didn't hire any of these kids needless to say these are things that you pick up and you learn orally it's true that there may be books about how to act on a date or a job interview but generally speaking those types of books look at behavior look at how people interact in the real world and um and then write books based on best practices but the actual behaviors themselves are things that are transmitted orally the final thing i want to say about the oral law is that oral law not only is oral law something which is everywhere and how we learn and how we behave but it's binding as well so i'll give you an example i have here a picture of somebody driving so um if you learn to drive there are certain laws that are on the books that everybody knows and they're on the books and they're enforceable as laws for example don't pass on a double yellow line double yellow line obey the speed limit uh stop come to a full stop at a stop sign here in boston people do the boston coast you get to the stop sign you slow down and coast through the okay you get a ticket for that though of cop catches it because a stop sign means come to a full stop look both ways and then go double line you try to pass on a double yellow line you're gonna get a ticket because those are laws that are on the book great all right what about oral though so anybody know answer this to yourself anybody know what's considered keeping a safe distance when you're driving on the highway safe distance i have been shocked i used to think this was common knowledge uh but it's apparently only common knowledge if you're from new jersey i actually i grew up in new jersey so people in new jersey are obviously the best drivers because they know this rule the rest of the country you're a bunch of bums get off the road but uh a safe distance when you're driving is one car length for every 10 miles an hour i hope everybody knows that one car length for every 10 miles an hour so if you're going 60 miles an hour you should keep six car lengths between you and the car in front of you why is that because it gives you enough time to react so for example you're on the highway and there's a car in front of you and you're going 60 you're keeping six car lengths car in front of you slams on his brakes you have enough time to put down your phone stop texting notice what's going on i'm joking by the way knows what's going on slam on the brakes and not hit the car in front of you okay that's an idea of an oral law now here's the thing about that the cop catches you going four car lengths instead of six when you're going 60 miles an hour you're gonna get a ticket very unlikely i mean if you write up the person's butt so you might get a ticket for reckless driving but generally speaking you won't get a ticket if you're not exactly one calling for every 10 miles an hour but why do god forbid what if god forbid you get into an accident the insurance company may not cover you how come because if you rear-end somebody it's your fault why is it your fault you weren't keeping a safe distance had you been keeping a safe distance you would have been able to react on time and stop at the right time and you wouldn't have gotten in the accident and then incredible incredible so it's an oral law it's not on the books but everybody knows it and it's binding it's legally binding and it could mess you up so anyways that's uh basically what oral laws are and how we deal with them okay so what's the genesis of the oral law in judaism here is a picture of moses up on mount sinai it's not really moses it's mel brooks dressed as moses sorry about that anyways so uh i'm on sunday so when we we oftentimes when we hang out in the jewish world we'll talk about how moses got the torah at mount sinai obviously what did moses really get at mount sinai he couldn't have gotten the five books of moses that we have today how come because the mount saudi experience at mount sinai that first shivuas was at the beginning right here it was those 50 days after getting out of egypt it was right at the beginning of the 40 years of wandering in the desert half the tour is about the 40 years of wandering in the desert including moses getting punished what's the most going to be like i don't want to go to israel but the thing says i hit the rock but i don't want it to rock i'm going to go to israeli hear what i'm saying you would read the book if you got it so what did he get at mount sinai matter of fact we have tradition if you want to look people out there who are talmudic scholars or biblical scholars you look in the great commentator rashi look at his commentary on some of the verses before mansani at the uh bitter waters it seems that we already got a chunk of the torah already what did we get at mount sinai what did we have by the time we finished mount sinai probably had the book of genesis the book of exodus which is the story of how they got to mount sinai probably most of the book of leviticus which is just lists of laws is very little narrative but the books of deuteron numbers and deuteronomy numbers being the wandering for 40 years in the desert and deuteronomy moses's last speech the last 40 days of his life so um unlikely they got that at mount sinai so when we say we got the torah at mount sinai what is it that we got can't be the whole five books of moses what'd we get the oral law the oral law judaism is the oral law judaism is the oral law what's the written law the written law is an outline a beautiful amazing powerful outline but it's an outline to guarantee you don't forget the essence of judaism which is the oral law and that explains so much about the written torah why it is so terse in this language someplace but needlessly repetitive and redone in other places why some weird things are juxtaposed the way they are why there's grammatical inconsistencies or unusual ways of using words that aren't used normally in language and on and on and on because it reads like an outline if you read it like an outline it's just cueing you turning you on to the ideas in the oral law that you're supposed to know wow so we have a written law we have an oral law what is the joy of studying the torah the joy and take this out check this out everybody knows written well we have it we have the outline everybody knows the oral law because that's what you do that's how you live judaism the joy of studying the torah is finding the source seeing where the oral law is in the outline in the written law i'll give you some examples famous famous example is in the talmud i believe it is in monaco so somebody wants to look it up um so the torah says that if you look in the torah all the holidays have dates rosh hashanah is the first of the month yom kippur is the 10th passover is the 15th except or as we say in english pentecost so schwarz doesn't have a date what's the torah say you start counting from the day after passover you count 50 days and 50 days after you after passover is when you have the holidays for us and that's when we celebrate fantastic okay what's the problem the written torah doesn't actually say count from the day after passover it says start counting from shabbos shabbos okay we know through the oral law that when the torah says shabbos it means passover and that's when you start counting there's a lot of beautiful mystical reasons why that's the fact but it doesn't say anything else how do you know that when the torah said shabbos it means passover maybe any shabbos may give you the shabbos after passover so how passive will always be on a sunday maybe it's the shabbos after sukkas and it's in the middle of the winter maybe just some random shabbos in the year when you feel the spirit moves you and then 50 days is going to be schloss how do you know when it says shop as it's specifically referring to uh pat the day after passover passover shabbos was the passover is referred to as ashama so the answer is you're a law and when you look in the town load in minajos you'll see it's a five-way debate everybody knows that when the torah says shabbos it means schwa and everybody knows that you count 50 days from passover and that's how you get to schluis what don't we know how we source that and show that shabbos means passover and so one rabbi says i have this verse that's the proof another rabbi says no it can't be that first because i use that first for this so it must be this verse another rabbi says you're crazy both those verses are used for this other thing it must be this verse we'll put them all together five-way debate because everybody knows the oral law everybody knows the written law it's just sourcing the oral law in the written law are they incredible we have another example like this by the holiday of sukkas or sukkot it says the torah says that everybody knows on sukkah she shake four species an esrog and you know a palm frond and a hadassah branch a myrtle branch and uh and a willow you take those bring them together so in the estrogen the uh funky lemon the very pithy lemon that would be the uh that would be the beautiful fruit the problem is it's a stroke taurus has a beautiful fruit so i think kumquats are beautiful or bananas or watermelon can you imagine shaking a watermelon on silkus would be great how do you know the torah says beautiful fruit that it's referring to the same things five-way debate everybody knows that you use a esro a citron on sukkas everybody knows what the torah says beautiful fruit it means asteroid but how do you know that beautiful fruit really means that so one rabbi says it's this verse no one says that person says how can you use those verses because i use those verses for this it must be this verse over here in other words we know the oral law we know the written law the joy is putting the pieces together isn't that beautiful all right so great fantastic but how do we know that this is right and it didn't change so here's where we get amazing the first point that i want to make this is similar to how you know your kindergarten teacher didn't lie to you torah is not secret keep that in mind the torah is not secret so for example if you show up in synagogue and you're wearing to phil and wrong somebody is going to say something more than that let's say you're praying and you're praying wrong somebody will say something i'll tell you an amazing story actually it's not such an amazing story but it illustrates this point very well so in the orthodox community as as you may know or may not know the orthodox community the rabbi doesn't leave the services every day who leads the services some sucker who got stuck leading the services that day and years depending on this community they either just pull random people out or they have a rotation or whatever it is but it's regular members of the community who lead the services every day and on the holidays etc and so forth there's a custom in many communities that if a person is in mourning for a parent so god forbid somebody loses a parent so you leave the services for the whole year the whole year 11 months you know after your parent passes away there's different customs blah blah blah okay fine so i remember the year that my mother passed away about five years ago so i lived the services the whole the whole year and um i thought i knew how to pray i'd been praying at that point i didn't grow up religious but by the time my mother passed away i've been religious over 20 years at that point i sort of knew what i thought i knew what i was doing and um but and i led the services many times it wasn't like my first time ever leading service but so all of a sudden people because they were hearing me do it every day if you're saying you know you said ah over there you know it's really all you know like the hearts really more of a kind of stuff yeah in other words the people there the people are correcting me we're not thinking oh i have to care about the integrity of the transmission and the oral law and i have to preserve this no it's i was praying and it sounded wrong to them and they were motivated to say something that's the bottom line people are going to say something because it's not secret the observance the way you practice it is in public so people are just busy bodies and nosy and they're going to stick their nose into your business to solve the problems and okay they're going to fix you more than that there's sometimes economic incentives and tied to this as well so for example if you slaughter animals and people and word gets up you're not slaughtering the animals correctly people are going to stop buying your meat and it's going to destroy your business and because the community is religious people who care about this stuff they want the meat to be slaughtered properly so you have an economic incentive to make sure you're preserving the integrity of the oral law that you're learning the laws correctly and you're slaughtering properly because you don't want your reputation damaged because you're going to lose your business and that's the same thing for people who write bazooza's or taurus scrolls or to fill in or any of the other judaica that's part of our make matzah is any part about the things that become part of our life there's an economic incentive tied to the ritual practice or the way to observe to maintain the consistency and the veracity of the oral law more than that and this is something that illustrates this point beautifully is that it's not the exclusive property of a group of elite scholars sitting in ivy towers where what's the the what's the basis of the oral law the way it's observed by the masses so i'm going to tell you a story from the time this is from uh possessing page 65a the laws of passover page 65 a in the in the babylonian talmud and what's fascinating that this story is going to tell a great story you don't necessarily have to believe the literal words of the story it's going to teach you a powerful lesson which is this lesson i'm telling you so hillel who we mentioned earlier hillel wasn't actually from israel hillel was what we today called an iraqi he came from back then it was called babylon i guess probably the persian empire that part but at that point but we always call it bubble in in talmudic language the hill came from there by the time hillel moved to israel he was an established scholar and a famous person known and so when he moved to israel the sages there decided that when hillary shows up we're going to make him the head of the court that he's going to become the nasty the president of the sanhedrin and he's going to be the leader of the jewish people but now when he moves to israel so very exciting they also had a problem what was the problem the problem was that passover that year seder night was a saturday night and so when passover is on a saturday night see what normally happens is you slaughter your passover lamb the afternoon before passover that night while you're having your seder you barbecue the lamb and so by the time you get to the point where you're ready to eat the lamb it's cooked and you can go on with your seder um when it's on a saturday so what happens is you can still slaughter the animal but you have to sit there with the carcass on the temple mount until the sun goes down so you can then take it home and uh and begin the barbecue and start your seder okay fat that's all everybody knows that that was fantastic the problem was and this was a big problem was that getting the knife to slaughter the animal you were trying you're going from one domain to another so how were the people going to bring their knives up onto the temple mount to slaughter their animals so the sages didn't know so i figured well that's him when hillary gets there and he'll explain the problems about so sure enough hill comes and they say oh great hello we've got a problem passover is on a saturday night so how are the people going to get their lot their their knives up with the sheep onto the temple mount so they can slaughter the sheep so they can have the animals ready for uh say tonight hill says i don't know that's a great question here's what we'll do let's watch and see what the people do and we'll know from that what the laws okay so that's what they do so they watch and the p and sure enough passover comes it's saturday at shabbos afternoon before passover and what the people do they apparently i'm not a farmer so i'm not 100 sure that's what solomon says sheep have a big thick tough hair or wool in the back of the neck the people stuck the knives into the wall the animal carried it up onto the temple mount that's how they got the knives up there to slaughter the animals and everybody oh that's the law hello see that's the law there's joy in mudville what's the problem with that story probably that story is what the sages forgot but the common people knew and the answer is don't lose the forest of the trees don't look at the literal message of the torah look at the figurative message what's the talmud trying to teach us it's trying to teach us that the preservation like i said the preservation of our tradition is not due to a group of elite scholars sitting in their ivory top towers dictating the laws to the masses and that uh if it was because of that the laws would get corrupted and everything would be broken how what's the veracity of our oral law what's guarantees the preservation of our judaism how the people observe it the way it's observed in the masses amongst the people that's how it could it's not secret it's public information everybody knows it and that's how you know you can trust it now obviously the people in the robbery towers have a perp of a point they have to be able to know master the gray areas they have to be able to figure things out remember areas of wisdom that may get muddied a little bit because they're not necessarily so common they're obviously there as well to decide in cases where you have a bias so for example if there's a lot of money involved so you're going to obviously have some kind of bias you need an impartial third party to come and uh decide those things for you but the point being that the uh the the preservation of the system is not because of the elite scholars because everybody knows it everybody does it um there are secret things in judaism as well and there are secret practices that are not known to the masses but what's amazing is those are not binding in jewish law you can do them and they're cool but if the daily law contradicts the mystical idea you go to the daily law you don't go with the mystical idea anyways capiche tom brende hey vantam panimaez rashid all right good let's move on a little bit more and then we'll tie this point up because it's a beautiful point but i want to go on the side tangent for just a second because this concept of uh your wisdom not being secret information but being something that's common to everybody it's not exclusive to the jewish people lots of cultures and societies have this for example there's a picture of alex haley alex haley is a famous author he was actually the person who malcolm x dictated his biography to autobiography of malcolm x was edited and written basically by alex haley and um alex haley in the 70s had put out a work called roots it also was the first television miniseries and it was a story he's an african-american man and it's the story of his family tracing his lineage back to the uh village in africa where the family originally came from in the family if you've watched the show or read the book you'll know in the family they had a tradition the name of the original slave who was brought over from africa his name was kunta kente mouse passed down father to daughter aunt uncle whatever it was to cousins and so the family knew this name kunta kinte that was the name of the original the original slave brought over from africa okay fantastic alex hell is doing this research and he uh had a hunched he found an area in gambia in modern day west africa north west africa where the family might be and he went to go check it out in north africa if you ever study ethnic musicology and learn about the musics that go on in that part of the world so they have a tradition called the griot tradition griot i think it is g-r-i-o-t rio de grio's the name of the instrument that's played as well as the person who plays an instrument mcgregor is kind of like a guitar the person who plays it the griot plays that also sings and the function of the griot the person who plays it is as the tribe historian how do you become a griot you can only be aggrio if your father was agreeable father the son and um you have to train for years before you can finally perform in public but what's fascinating is that you're singing over the history of the tribe and um when you do it in public if you mess up how do you know how it got corrected so you don't mess up and it doesn't get a corruption in the transmission everybody's heard these stories already this is the trap history people have gone old people been going to these ceremonies for years so you mess up you give over the wrong version of the story you say the wrong name of the king or whatever there'll be some elderly person in the back saying that's not the name of the king this is the name of the king so the thing gets preserved anyways alex haley makes his way over to this part of africa and they take him to one of these ceremonies where there's the griot playing and it goes on for hours in the show he falls asleep what i read is it goes on for hours and hours and he's there with the guy playing the instrument and singing the history and another guy translating into english eventually they get to this point it's about three hundred years ago and uh the chief son kunta kente goes off into the woods to get some wood to make a drum and never came home and alex said he goes what say that again they go the tree the cheap sun kunta contains my family and everybody gets up and they hug and it's very beautiful what's the point the point is that a large body of information can be transmitted accurately within a given society because it's not secret information it's public knowledge everybody knows it already that's beautiful and that's not just true in other cultures it's true in judaism as well one thing that's amazing is that we live in a magical time now and in gathering of the exiles where you go to the modern state of israel so you'll find communities people have been living isolated in places like poland or lithuania or wherever for hundreds of years and they're now living on a blo on the same block as people from yemen or iraq or syria or wherever and they're basically keeping the same judaism it's okay they have different pronunciation different songs there's other customs that may have creeped in but at the end of the day it's the same religion they're doing the same thing their kids can marry each other they'll eat in each other's kitchens unbelievable isn't that it's kind of a beautiful proof because this stuff is preserved accurate because of certain stuff is preserved in public by people who care about it and there's economic incentives that's attached to it we see that over thousands of years even like a community like yemen was separated from the rest of the community for over two thousand years you come together it's the same judaism unbelievable okay why was it kept oro so it's kept oro for many reasons and i won't go into it 100 but number one keeping it oral why first of all it wasn't oral be this massive body of information which we now have that was written down but originally if it wasn't kept oral uh by keeping it all you keep it relevant you keep it relevant it used to be that when you'd explain nowadays you want to explain to somebody what happens after you dies how do you explain you give a relevant example you say they sit in a room you watch a movie of your life okay how would they say that 100 years ago it wouldn't be a movie it'd be something else more than that though but you have an example that's relevant to your generation you can explain the concepts more than that once we set things in stone and we use ancient examples you first have to understand the example to understand the principle and it becomes archaic which is problematic makes it challenging and difficult to truly understand the law i'll give an example for example we have a case in jewish tort law that if your animal causes damage to my my inanimate object my property in the public domain so there's a way to adjudicate that situation and to um and to understand that law so okay so it used to be so in the old days it used to be in the old days that we'd explain like this i have my earthenware vessel which i have placed on the street to sell and you're walking your cow through the market and it crushes my earth and wear a vessel so you start yelling hey i start yelling hey watch where you go with your cow and you say hey don't be leaving your earth to wear vessels lying in the street okay but nowadays we don't relate to earthworm vessels and cows so how do we adjudicate that law how do we determine what the values that you have to pay so i tell you now we're standing in the streets talking you've got your dog i've got my dry cleaning and while we're speaking your dog makes an accident on my dry cleaning so i said hey watch your dog and you say hey what's up it's public area you should be careful with your dry clinic get it same exact situation same way that you determine payment but completely different given the um given the analogy of the example so we have to keep it oral it makes it much more relevant also as new technologies are developed and new things happen so we have to be able to apply those if we have principles that are oral it's much easier to apply them to the changing times once upon a time jews were slaves in egypt so they wrote on papyrus then they moved to mesopotamia where writing was now on uniform tablets or cuneiform tablets are the tablets in mesopotamia is that still considered writing the same way as papyrus we have a principle it's all we can figure it out when electricity was invented and came became common usage computers they begin how do these things apply within our system or our corpus of wall by keeping it oral you're able to uh keep it in there and stick it in there more than that by keeping it oral you can't just know it on your own it's something which has to be studied discussed and debated to be remembered which takes us to our next point which is why is it oral keeping it oral forces you to have a teacher by having a teacher like we said with learning the language anything it's impossible to really understand the oral law i understand judaism without a teacher to show you how to do it if you were to just pick up an english translation of the talmud and read and never go to a class and never have a teacher there's a good chance you'll never really figure it out you'll know what the words mean but to understand the style of learning and what the function words mean and how the things flow it's impossible without a teacher i don't i think if somebody's new to judaism you still need a good two years in yeshiva of study to be able to learn with an english translation you have to have that student-teacher relationship it's impossible without it tell me a fascinating story when i was uh many many years ago i ended up in egypt and so i was new to judaism just learning about judaism and so i was fascinated with religion so i met a muslim religious muslim and i said teach you in islam so he taught me two things first thing he told me were the five pillars of islam which i won't tell you now i still remember them orally transmitted it's telling me the five pillars of islam and then the other thing he told me was the following he says you're gonna you have to learn the quran with a god meant the teacher but his english wasn't great so he said you have to have a guide when you learn the quran why because you're gonna read the quran it's gonna say the word white and you think it means white that means black and if you don't have someone to teach you to show you that in context when it says white it really means black you'll end up completely misunderstanding the quran and come up with all these crazy kakanemi ideas you ever read like you know what uh you know uh scholars and intellectuals who aren't religious like the way they interpret torah on their own without a teacher it's crazy what are you saying we're academics where are you getting this from you know it's because you know i'm a guy i don't have a teacher to show you when i was in college i have a degree in music like we mentioned earlier when i was in college if somebody was playing a solo and played a great solo the greatest compliment you could pay that person to say that solo was bad that was bad now if you didn't understand contacts you'd be like why did you just insult him that was a great solo i just said it was bad you get it you have to understand contact you have to have a teacher who's going to show this to you to show you how to do it even when they started writing down the oral law which we'll explain in a second why they did that they wrote it down in a way that it's really impossible to study and understand without a teacher you have the principles but you need a teacher to show you the way in order to understand the things properly i want you to show me the way every day all right anyways final thing i want to keep in mind is what about all the debates what about all the debates that are in the comments so we can go on and on and on about debates and why they debate and everything like that bottom line with the debates and the talmud is the following the people who wrote the talmud knew the answers and the conclusions up to the the conclusions of the debates before they wrote them down obviously the debates were like oh my gosh we're writing this book and there's an argument what's going on obviously they encoded it that way on purpose it's a pedagogical device am i pronouncing that correctly since nobody's here are able to come in the chat let's just say yeah it's a pedagogical device pedagogy done that way on purpose how come because when you write something in the style of an argument and decided in a way of debates you'll find as you read it naturally you take sides if you're learning it with or studying it with somebody else naturally if you take one side your contrarian partner will probably take the other side you'll find yourself arguing it out by taking sides and arguing it out it keeps it vibrant it keeps it alive it keeps it relevant it helps you remember it enables you to inculcate these concepts in your kishkas so you'll know them and live with them and that's really the whole point you want to be able to understand and know these things and live these things so you debate them and discuss them and that's how you get your hand and your head wrapped around these things so they become uh inside all right good i won't do any more with the debate so final thing is where and when was it written down so at some point they realized if we don't write this thing down it's going to get lost so generally speaking the first 1500 years of jewish history you had a written law in oral law and you grew up in your village wherever in israel and your teacher who was teaching you how to read the aleph base was teaching you some of the more difficult concepts eventually if you're one of the better students they sent you off to one of the main academies you come back home now and that's the way these things were learned um in the days of the roman empire the later days after the destruction of the second temple after the questioning of the barakafa rebellion where you had you're starting to have the beginnings of a jewish diaspora and a significant diaspora so the sages of that day realize that if we don't start right and they're starting to get some debates in there again on the periphery on gray areas the major principles of what judaism is everybody basically agreed on but the uh the proof the fringe ideas are starting to get lost they realize we don't encode this and write it down it's going to get lost forever so that's what they did i won't go to the whole store because this is the class and of itself how they put together this work but the first work they put together was the mishnah the mission are just the principles of the oral law the legal principles of the oral law you can learn the entire mishna and still not know what to do it's not know anything but you will know all the principles it's written in a way that's easy to memorize actually questionable they wrote it or they just organized it but it's written a way that's easy to memorize there's a cadence to it there's sometimes phrases in there that are just there for the rhyme or not the rhythm that really rhyme but for the rhythm and it's designed a way that you can't learn it understand it without a teacher so that's the first chunk the mishna then came the gomorrah the gomorrah is the explanation of the mission it's not an interpretation it's an explanation and so it'll tell you gomorrah the gomorrah there's two but the main gamora we saw today was about 300 years later finalized in the year 474 with the death of ravino ravina the two people compiled the uh the talmud probably but anyways the gamora it'll look at a mishka and it will uh establish authorship of that mystery it'll establish the sources define the terms ask obvious contradictions from logic with internally contradictions from other sources contemporary sources logical questions and it explained both sides and sometimes a little frustrating because i'll explain one side explain the other side and then change the subject it's not going to give you a conclusion it's just going to explain what the mission is saying then it moves on a gamora is an explanation of a mishnah you can have a mishna without a gemura but you can't have a gamora without a mishna put the mission and gomorrah together and you have the talmud that's what the talmud is midrash is learning things by implication mishna is learning things midwest's doing things by implications and this and generally speaking the great collections we have of midrashim of uh these explanations of things by implication follow the difference between them and the talmud the talmud follows its own system its own structure the madras follows the verses of the torah and the books of the bible and it goes in order as they appear most madras is not the crazy stories that people tell so that's a big part of it but most badgers says wordplay it's just showing this word's used here it's used in context three other places in the rest of the the written law so how do we put it together how do we have a definitive understanding what this word really means the file final area is what we call kabbalists the mystical teachings telling the depths and the deep understandings of what the uh time has given you a deeper appreciation understanding of what's going on beyond just the surface and beyond just the letter of the law finally and this is the point like we said the oral law is the essence of judaism what moses got in man is the oral law it's how you live and practice the religion the written law is a very specific outline to guarantee you don't forget the essence of judaism which is the oral law but when you understand this like i said it makes sense because they're in law oh it's written like an outline so all that vague missing info hints weird juxtapositions grammatical oddities all those things they make sense when you look at as an outline if you look at it as a book a little bit weird you look at it as an album not weird but difficult to understand and get your head around you look as an outline makes perfect sense what's fascinating is great rabbis at the end of their lives after they spent their entire lives internalizing the totality of their own law what are they studying they just study the five books of moses the comments they study the outline because they read through the outline and that triggers all the depth and all they are alone all the essence of what judaism is and it's fantastic it's amazing they tell the famous story of the ville nagon the great rabbi from vilna who died just before 18 i think 1797 or so that's an as as an older man he was a prodigy as a child who mastered the tired of talmud and mystical teachings and spends his entire life immersed in studying at the end of his life he just studied hamish the five books of moses because he just had to go through the outline to remind himself of uh the totality of judaism the rest of us we study the oral law till we die okay and that's the bottom line that's what judaism is so how do we know our law is right because it's a living body that we've practiced as a people the entirety of our of our history it's not secret and uh it's not secret there's financial incentives and connected to it and we see when the jewish people get back together after all our years of exile and wandering we're still practicing the same thing in the same way with some you know differences discrepancies for custom pronunciation songs you know and spicy food that's basically it so i hope that was informative like i said my name is steve glocken i want you to stay in touch with me you can follow me on twitter i am the realty there's fakes fees out there don't follow them i'm the real city i spell speed the proper way tzvi you can also follow me on instagram if that floats your boat facebook i have a professional page which is facebook.com my name if you friend me i probably won't add you because i've got issues but if you follow my professional page to be welcome then we can be hooked up that way and if you're into music and judaism go to my site the dot ingathering.substack.com that's the in gathering by kibbu scolios the ingathering.substack.com new issue coming out every tuesday it's free who doesn't like free so that's that check it out everybody i hope this was informative interesting understanding uh and life life-changing and uh people have questions reach out to me in social media one of those places and until then have an amazing night stay out of trouble i think you're special