Q&A Brisk, Astrology, and Bad Thoughts ( Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb )

i'm an outsider so i i i don't i can only tell you what i've heard about it i haven't practiced it i've never learned the brisk um so what i say is just you know just hearsay about it um the last 400 years has seen a tremendous emphasis on defining central concepts one thing which was always done but a tremendous emphasis on defining concepts testing out different definitions to see how they fit the way in which the mother's discussions go and thank you very much and particularly building definitions out of theories which are based on very abstract concepts where the distance between the theory itself and the concepts on the ground is quite great which means you need long chains of intricate reasoning in order to get from the theories essential concepts to the actual data on the page which offers the promise a very deep explanation of what's going on on the page now if you're looking for depth looking with organization [Music] it's very it's very attractive some people are disturbed by the distance between the theory and the data on the page i think it leaves room for a lot of um distorted thinking which doesn't show up because it can be it can be disguised by clever deductions which protect yourself from from uh from uh refutation so there's a certain amount of of controversy about it i spent the year zolewski who was the automator of nakhon of the mir who kept very close to the text that's my preference also to be very close to the text i'll give you one example of where uh rafsky had a principle which i think the briskers would ignore not to say that they're wrong just as it was a different approach let's say you have a difficult rashi rashi says something it's not clear what he means and someone suggests that rashi means q if c would tell us you must find q explicitly in some ratio otherwise it's not acceptable to say that rashi means q because if you don't find the idea of q somewhere in the corpus of the rishonim then you have no reason to think that in the whole corpus of the rashoni everybody anybody ever thought of those terms if you have no evidence that anyone in the corpus leveson thought of those terms and it's wrong to attribute it to rashi you're pushing too much of yourself into rashi recreating rashi in your own image no reason to think that's what rashi really meant this would be a principle in history of ideas i'm sure i'd make tensions with that philosophy but i think that it's it's a sign of caution and it's a sign of of responsibility to the meanings in the minds of the people who authored the texts that you're that you're dealing with another one they have for breakfast that's a stupid prejudice of certain academics but i'm talking about their published works so um brisk is accused by the non-briskers of building castles in the air and the christians will say back you're avoiding difficult issues you're avoiding deep issues and you're uh you're not uh you know dealing with them in a way that gives you a satisfying explanation i heard shia from abnormalism himself was his later years when he was still it was unwell i heard uh he had a saturday night i said it was a shabba sheer but he did rashi particularly and there are a number of times when some may have suggested what this is means and he said i would rather blibe i would rather remain in doubt and difficulty than accept your answer because your answer is just too far from what rashi says too far from the words too far from the intellectual context for me to take seriously so i i i think that there's room for different types of scholarships there's room for different types of analysis and uh risk is like on that that side of the the issue that's the best i can do but you really should ask somebody who's learned that method in their schools to uh you know together thank you very much could you talk a little bit about um the jewish conception or relationship with how the months and the year corresponds with like astrological i i know very little about the astrological material in jewish sources i will tell you my wife and i last week eight days ago ten days ago we're in mitzvah ramon for shabbos and we had the wonderful experience of being given a star course by they have a institution there that gives lectures in very dark places with a nice telescope and we sat out in the cold for two hours and he was explaining to us the orbits and the constellations and some of which i knew already but it was very good explaining it and this beauty of the studies was just astonishing and he said made one remark about the uh zodiac about the about the constellation of the month of which i was totally unaware um as viewed from the earth the the this um constellations of which there are twelve one for each tribe make a circuit around the around the earth once a month [Music] the constellation of the month is the one which is in the same place of the sky as the sun which means you can't see it it's blocked out by the sun the one that is the constellation of the month is the one that's invisible that month i thought that was fascinating that was fascinating i would have thought since they had they they rotate maybe it's the first one to come up at night you know the first one makes appearance or something but no no it's the one you know or the one closest to the horizon notice the ones invisible and i my wife and i both took from that and i asked somebody else about it he confirmed it that the influence of the of the constellation comes through the sun to us now the son is the great organizer of the natural world and that means the the sign of the zodiac influences us by doing it through nature not as apart from nature not from modifying nature but sort of propelling nature to a certain way or infusing nature with a certain with a certain energy that from learning learning that piece of astronomy opened up a very interesting idea as to as to what the jewish concept means but what it means is detail i i've never studied i don't know i wish i could tell you more yeah um are there are there guiding principles from the torah that that you know of that could help a jew like find the right hashikarpa the right jewish outlook to have there are different like movements within the orthodox judaism like different there are different groups and there's different ideas and what principles from the torah could i use to kind of guide me okay you've asked a profoundly ambiguous question sorry no don't be sorry i'm just pointing out this is part of the investigation just to clarify your question you passed a profoundly ambiguous question you asked what procedures what guiding guidance can you get from the torah to find the correct ashkafa now maybe you meant the correct test offer for me maybe you meant that or maybe you meant the correct scuffle full stop if you meant the latter then the question is dead wrong there's no such thing as the right there'll be many different philosophical angles for understanding torah and each one will be incomplete and each one will have some some places of criticism and will have some places of insight so there is no such thing as the right hush coffin when you have a difference of opinion between great scholars what we say is that each is a genuine part of the tradition and each reveals an important part of the truth and each will have certain limitations and we would be greatly impoverished if we lost one of them we have to have all of them we study even the ones that were outvoted in the sanhedrin we studied them also so to talk about the right histogram is just a mistake i think part of what i meant is like i think certain hush kaffirs sort of lead to either being more stringent or more lenient and i want to know like does the torah want me to be more strange and more lenient and like which because there's different groups of jews some jews are much more lenient some of you are much more stringent so i think that's also a mistake i remember when i early on when i was because i was very close to living for 47 years and he was acidic as i have become and i remember i heard in his name a legal decision that was lenient so i i came to them and said wow i discovered something i'm always making here yeah i don't expression so there's a lenient no one has a program of being stringent no this thing is a program of being stringent nor of being lenient it's a program of finding the truth it could be for some people the way they and the particular issues they choose to analyze and the particular sources that they that they uh that they use and their particular bent of mind that they're 70 of their decisions are stringent but there'll be another thirty percent that are lenient it's no such thing it would be anti-torah because it's anti-truth to look always to be stringent the truth isn't always with a stringent opinion that's not the same as saying i choose to be strict with myself that's something else i can be truly strictly myself on the grounds that although the strict law is lenient i want to add to my service of god by doing something above and beyond what the strict law requires not talking about that talking about analyzing what the strict law is i'll give you an example this is an unbelievable situation somebody wanted to know a person a rob's opinion on certain questions of acceptable marital religions based on the way a type of bleeding the one has right so he was told go and ask the rabbi's wife what he told her to do because if you ask him what to do he may give you a lenient opinion on the grounds that he thinks you're not capable of doing what would be ideal if you ask her you'll find out what he really does and that way you'll find out whether he's more stringent with himself right but that has nothing to do with the actual law i'll give you another example here's another thing that people often ask i heard that there's a rabbi who gives akshay he gives a bit of certification on a restaurant and he won't eat there he won't eat at his own restaurant what a hypocrite that's dead wrong that's dead wrong there are different standards of conscience nothing wrong in many cases with having a more lenient standard for other people other than yourself myrabi's brother only ate a meat that he personally supervised that does not mean that he thought there were no kosher restaurants he chose to always supervise the meat that he ate so you have to distinguish between a a program a personal program of spiritual development which leads you to always want to do take to remove remove any tiny semblance of doubt from what you do for example here's something else that i know it's a fairly widespread practice some people say any meat on which a question was asked i don't need a question was asked that's the lifeblood of judaism you go to the rabbi and he is a scholar and he looks at the situation and he tells you what the is and he tells you that his mutual you won't need it the answer is he's not saying there's anything wrong with the procedure he's not saying there's anything wrong with the person who does it i don't do it i don't do anything that was questionable i don't want to touch anything that was once questionable even though the law requires it so when you talk about wanting to know from the third point of view what is it better to be stringent to you know in terms of the law which ashkaf is right which philosophy is right the stringent of scuffer the lenient dutch kafir both if you have a hash to be stringent to be lenient in law it's both wrong they're both wrong because they're both they're not taking into account the truth of the matter can a leniency be like of course of course because the stringency costs something and it might be right to to uh to to accept that cause and then some of the students they were in our house they were eating a meal there so aslanta had a way of washing his hands that was apparently quite elaborate and here he washed his hands in the simplest possible way sat down to eat so this time his disciples said to him why did you wash your hands that way so i'm not going to wash my hands this rigid manner on the back of the servant girl who draws from the well she's drawing the water i'm going to use it i'll use more water because make another trip to the well i don't do that so he's taking the lenient position about how to wash your hands to save the servant girl from extra effort that's the hatred so life is is complex there are lots of dimensions to life it's a case-by-case basis a case-by-case basis and and you have to distinguish the law on the one hand from what you're doing for your personal development there were some and i've been shown in the rokyak for example and others who practiced sigufin segupim is self-torture rolling in the snow in the winter and that sort of thing no one says that requires that no one says that anybody who doesn't do it is is missing in spirituality anyway he was in a situation where it's important for him that's all these are very important things yeah um what can one do to control bad thoughts or negative thoughts or inappropriate thoughts it's very very important i'll tell you that the story goes that when the basham tuff was dying they asked him how when you're gone we'll be able to recognize someone who should be a rebbe we could follow he said if you you should ask him what's the secret for controlling bad thoughts and if he tells you that he knows don't follow him so it's a tough problem it's a well-known tough problem but i think in a certain way it's made out to be too tough there is an attitude that thoughts happened to you you didn't ask for them you didn't generate them so they have to be something which brought who sent you your job is to deal with it my question is how you deal with it appropriately when the thought is one that needs to be replaced that's not quite right there is a way to prevent bad thoughts from coming to your mind and that is to fill your mind with good thoughts and i think you've probably already experienced a way to do that if you're learning torah with a javooza i think it's it's very very unlikely that you'll be distracted and distracted by bad thoughts for one thing on the lowest possible level is exquisitely competitive you see one day i read and i explained he shoots me down and the next day he reads and he explains and i shoot him down and when i'm reading explaining my mind is racing if i say this what will he say could he catch me over there i'm going to say it that way i'll leave that one out because that's kind of question why go this way it's all it's all defensive and and preparing for the next attack it's very hard to become distracted by uh someone you know a woman in probably dressed selling a car when you're thinking about where the next attack is coming from it's very absorbing now that shows you it's possible to block unwanted thoughts by filling your mind with the right thoughts okay you're using let's say a fairly low psychological trick of competition but if it works it works and if you can use other psychological techniques to fill your mind with the right thoughts then that's a tremendous aid in blocking bad thoughts were coming in the thought thoughts attack an empty mind an attacker they can't attack a mind that's full so now for great scholars for example when they walk from place to place is recite mishnais from memory well you started remember you gotta hold hold in your mind where are you up to what is this what does it mean and you of course you'll try to avoid the cars on the street but in the meantime your mind is going along with the science you know this mission and then the next chapter and that's a way of avoiding those things so there definitely are techniques which can help you avoid uh bad thoughts being in a certain environment there's no question of being in the shiva environment itself is has a tremendous difference between being in a public environment to being the garcia environment especially in a loose environment like current western environments which is the so the animalistic the the beast now what happens when a bad thought does occur here i think you should ask this question of many people because it's a psychological question um there is a famous paradox here so i'm going to push it out of my mind and push it i'm going to force it out of my mind of course the whole time you're pushing it you're involved in it and you're thinking about it aren't you so that could be counterproductive um valshamf had a different approach he was asked by a lumber merchant who said that when he's dominating he finds his mind drifting to the lumber in the warehouse and when the river thaws from its ice in the spring floating the shipments downstream and hiring the people to go with the laws his mind is filled with this lumber business and he's trying to adopt and it's definitely a bad distraction so how can i get rid of my thoughts of the lumber that's what he asked about something i said don't get rid of them don't get rid of them just ask yourself where do you get the lumber from that's why i get the lumber from the forest uh-huh and where does the forest come from oh forest comes from god so instead of thinking this thought is bad i have to push it out think this thought is like the lowest rung on a ladder and my job is to construct some higher rungs and climb back up to where i'm supposed to be don't don't dismiss the thought but use the thought as a stepping stone this is real spiritual creativity a spiritual life is a very creative life you're solving deep and call them psychologicals that trivialize them psychology has become so basic trivial in general but the psychologi psychology is the veneer and the inner substance is a is a spiritual challenge spiritual situation and to use your ingenuity to turn it around our principle is that everything has its root in something holy and the question is tracing it back to the to its root and i found if you keep your eyes and ears open this is what people say you can find echoes of your own philosophy in many different places i i as you know i'm hasidic but i found a number of places where the khasanesh said exquisitely hasidic ideas but we would say that movement has had an effect on the general jewish population on the general jewish way of serving god and then it shows it shows up at certain times i heard this orally i didn't see it written inside asked things split yeshiva split into several different different yeshivas and um community split what's behind the split what what what's driving the split sometimes at least on the surface the spirit will be accompanied by feelings each one will be saying to the others making some kind of terrible mistake he said that what's driving it is this you're living a torah life not even living it but you believe in it and you're sacrificing for it and you're making a strain to be able to live it to the greatest of your ability that requires tremendous motivation you may need to believe it's true really true exclusively true and anybody else you know the right hedgehog i heard someone say about 15 minutes ago and that means that if i'm pushing myself to 18-hour days because i want to support the right to scuffer if you disagree with me you have to be wrong you have to be wrong otherwise if there are several different ways and each one's equally valid why am i fighting so hard for this one why am i pushing myself so hard now this is a false thought it's not a correct thought but it's it's it's tracing the the split which could be expressed in political terms and social terms over the so on and you get people from horizon who make it you know make as animalistic as possible right because they think we're all animals and they're trying to prove it by their behavior um you you you uh he he traces back to something that's really holy i'm dedicated to god i want to do the best i can with my life for god i want to express god in the world to bring out into the world and then as you apply it it ends up with a political war so tracing it back to its source is a way of enabling you to step up from the immediacy of it and to try to connect it back to a source and find a purer expression of it so this is one way to deal with the thoughts after their after they arrive i think it's also very important to to try to find ways to preoccupy yourself with the good thoughts i have a very close friend with whom i've been learning for more than 50 years and many years ago he he himself made tapes of mishnais he recorded his own voice saying mishnais when he traveled he would have that in his ears and traveling by by playing to various places right and he'd be listening to his own voice saying over the missionaries so that he would be reviewing messiahs as he was going that's a tremendous help you know you're sitting in a plane you have the voice of your ears you close your eyes much much less likely that fine thoughts are going to enter your mind than if you're not occupied nothing so that i think is is some something to say about it as i said there's a psychological question and uh i always tell people ask other people other people have different experience different strategies it's a good and important question yeah so as someone i think a lot of people here as well personally as well coming to become more let's say religious and learning about judaism in a deeper way there's a lot of things that you learn that you never knew before much like a child would learn that maybe obligate you at least from an intellectual standpoint to do certain things and it it can be a challenge sometimes if you take on too many of these things at once absolutely um and you can get into dangerous identity territory and crises and just psychological warfare with yourself i guess if you do things too fast whereas a child maybe that's just what they know and they learn and how their parents bring it up so um how do you balance or determine what might be okay to take on or at least how you conceptualize not doing certain things that you know now that you didn't know before that obligate you to do something but you're not ready to do that so you feel kind of bad that you're not doing it was there a clear question 100 clear how you used to talk about this all the time yeah you have done very well your question is completely on the money and it's it's it is a problem you've expressed that i think extremely well um i tried i used to have groups come in and try to orient them i would say you think of yourself like an anthropologist you're visiting a new culture now you're doing this not just to write a paper or a book you're genuinely exploring the world for insights and how to live you're going to spend three weeks with this new culture and you're going to go back home what you do when you're together with a culture is to make observations to note them down to try to understand what you're seeing and then when you get back home you have to ask yourself well what if this is applicable to my life what will it do for my life how can i what procedures can i use to adopt it for my life um when you i told people to hear and you're taking notes from the showroom especially oh there's a smithsonian and so on this is a book of desiderata or a a book of projects i'm making a list of important projects because the project is something that i might get to next month or next year and i'm going to put the projects in order of relevance not an order of importance or value or of relevance to me to what i where i'm from where i'm standing so it's to set out a program of development but not well the torah says this i must do this now no one expects that including the creator of the universe because he knows the limitations that you're that you're operating under and he knows that it's not practical to make sudden ideal uh transformations and this is built into into i would say so i say even the phraseology of the richoning when that's not their main subject i'll give you two examples from the rumble you asked how should i think about it especially when i feel bad about not doing the right thing i know that would be the right thing so in chapter 5 of the laws of repentance talking about free will and he says for the very beginning of the chapter every person has the power he uses the word resource but the doesn't mean permission he has the power to choose to uh walk on what the hell is how does he describe it uh let me get the exact exact words and get the exact ribs right here yes i'll put it back up okay has the power if he wants to incline himself to a good path and be attack righteous he has the power and he wants to incline himself to an evil path and be evil he has the power so remission asked me what's the path doing over here who needs a path just tell me that's the free will to be attacked or if we will to be a russia but you don't have that you have the free will to incline incline not climb on run through race through you know 100 meter dash no no you can climb yourself to a good path and become attack a path is a gradual process it's not an immediate decision rama's talking about the power of free will he says he's exclusive explicitly refusing to say that you have the power to be a tonic the power to incline yourself to a path to become a tzadi also he says deos which is the laws of character traits we have responsibilities for our character and the character trades us as unlike a continuum where there's too much too little and some kind of middle area that's really the best so some people as you probably know can't spend any money at all they can't spend a dollar when they die they die in terribly impoverished circumstances and in the mattress you find a quarter of a million dollars in cash that's that's a sickness there are other people who spend everything they can't hold on to any money they don't make any any discriminations they just throw the money away and suppose the person finds himself in one of course the ideals will be somewhere in the middle to make judicious decisions about what the money is worth spending on he says if you find yourself incapable of spending any money at all you can't let go of any money the therapy is first move to the other extreme first move to the other extreme so as to break the hold of the first extreme on you when you've broken that hold then gravitate gradually to the middle no one's telling you you don't have the ability to go from the extreme to the middle you can't do that so you start at one extreme that's bad your first move is to go someplace else that's bad and then go to the middle that's good that's what your capabilities are so this is the exact same thing i would say in general when you have you become aware of a whole set of responsibilities you didn't know about and they're all valid they're all legally binding but you're not able to satisfy all of them at once so then you have to set priorities and the priorities are set in personal terms and psychological terms and you need to have counsel in making these decisions it's not just legal it's not just not to say well i have to work on a and b but a is legally much more prominent than b is that does not control the decision because it may be that a will you psychologically and just eliminate any any process of further growth whereas b will reinforce you and and uh inspire you and then you'll come to 83 months from now and you'll be able to do it in a way that will foster your growth you have to have a long-term perspective so i think in the end you have to sort of keep a split a split consciousness on the one hand you shouldn't feel guilty for not doing these things now but in the other hand you have to keep it and it's probably not too difficult you have to keep in your mind but i'm not in an ideal situation because i'm not doing these things now and i have to grow into it like for example for you with your health suppose somebody told you well for your health you need a complete overhaul of your diet you need a whole exercise regimen you need to put air purifiers on your house and you know and that sort of thing you need to read certain types of books to improve your psychological state you need all those things you think well okay let's see to do that in six months would require about 42 hours a day just doing that it's not going to happen right so then you have to make priorities and do it gradually yeah um who was chase and kai and various was it animals or who's what's a well after kind killed havo um kyan was being chased by something no he says that anyone who finds me will kill me that's what he complained to god called mozilla he got like a sign no so then god gave him a sign god gave him a sign now i know i know the whole perhaps between tommy and tummy christians have the mark of cain you know but ramban has a very very interesting shot and mine says that when he went on a journey that's where he was worried that he would be exposed he would be endangered on a journey god would do a miracle for him to encourage him to let him know that god was protecting him he said if i if i'm going to be a vagrant a wanderer on the earth someone's going to find me and kill me someone yeah call me says anybody i'll be because i because i committed murder because i did yeah what other people were alive listen adam lived 930 years and he had sons and daughters it says in chapter five of genesis that every one of them had sons and daughters sons and daughters sons and daughters right and if you have if you're a mature age you can have a new child every year so if you live 900 years you can have you know 900 children so then that's not the population and then they also have children and hope so the population grows and there's no shortage of living space there's no shortage of natural resources just as there is today no such shortage don't believe the nonsense they teach you that we're running out of stuff that's absolutely nonsense um so the population was growing tremendously right and uh so at any rate that's what that's what he said and here people have the idea that kind is this this criminal and evil walking evil you know the torah doesn't take that that point of view indeed indeed if you look if you pay careful attention to the text which nobody does except our people but you know that's the people who just do their politics god says to cain he put the pronouncement of his sentences november not to be arts no means moving all the time and not means having no fixed place roughly that means wandering vagabond right and kane says can you not forgive my sin and then there's a discussion back and forth and then it says he took up residence in eretz node commentators point out the the sentence was no and not and he took up uh residents and eric's note node nod node node right so the node is left out so the old tradition says god forgave half his sentence he made a compromise with him so the whole synthesis wasn't carried out so we'll look at him as this hopeless criminal who you know has to be destroyed and so on and so on nope no god was willing to make a compromise with him and he told him that i'll protect you from being randomly killed you know when you're when you're in defense in defense uh in a non-defensible position and that was the mir that was the sign of cain silent game was to protect him not to mark him so other people would kill him or shun him or or despise him and stuff and so on yeah um i was uh in a sheer and um the rebbe just quickly uh mentioned something like as a side note and it sounded very interesting to me i was wondering if you could elaborate it was on the the four qualities of uh redemption in litigious you mean the four statements yeah something like that yeah for the show notes the four languages of uh redemption we had it last week's partial yeah well that's it that's what you want to okay so this is here oh no or any comments thank you very much okay this is there i have something very interesting to say about this is the siva show says something very very fascinating so god says to to abra to moses tell the jewish people that i have observed their sufferings and i've resolved i've i remember the my covenant with the patriarchs and tell them that i'm hashem i will take you out from under the sufferings of egypt i will save you from their service and i will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments and i will take you to me as a people and i will be a god to you so there's four languages here now the first question that arises is what's the difference between the first and the second the first is i will take you out from under the sufferings of egypt and the second is i will save you from their service isn't it the service the slavery to the egyptians that they're suffering isn't that what they're suffering so why isn't that the same thing twice then it says redeem be interesting we'll talk about what the regime is different from those two and i will take you to be my people and then it finishes you will know that i am hashem your god who takes you out from under the sufferings of egypt god says i'm going to do a b c and d and then you'll know that it's i who did a i don't know and you wouldn't know at the beginning and why is a so important a somehow the most important of all of them that's why it's important that i did a not b c and d why does it take time and like it's like uh so the deceiver shalom was the previous sonoma rebbe a famous series of books says the first one i take you out from the sufferings of egypt is i enabled you to redefine your selves instead of defining yourselves as slaves you redefine yourself as a free person this is very important how you define yourself is not dependent on the circumstances in which you find yourself uh there's a difference between a person who's forced to work and whose mentality is a slave versus a person who's forced to work and whose mentality is free i'll give you a a a simple illustration of this you probably all know about this there are cases where people do crimes and they get put in the in jail and then spend years in jail and when they finally have done their time and they're freed take the first opportunity to do another crime to get back into jail they don't want to be free they can't handle being free they're not recidivists in terms of crime it's not that they love crimes so much they can't stop doing the crime and they end up back in jail they want to be in jail there was a 20 20th century psychologist named eric from who wrote a very famous book called escape from freedom because freedom puts stress on your decision making on your on your self-development your self-creativity for some people it's just too much to handle they like to have it dictated to them they want the structure given to them there are no serious questions about what's going to be i'm just going to do the best i can to to to survive so this first move the torah says god says i'm going to redefine you you'll be free people facing power that that that stops you from exercising your freedom rather than slaves who are who's whose whose work is being taken advantage of now that's before removing the work this transformation taking place while they're still working that's very difficult to redefine yourself in a new way i'll give you an example i wasn't i wasn't happy studying history because i don't just remember memorize facts i had to figure things out i had a teacher in college who made two very interesting remarks about history and one was that in france the feudal system which was overthrown in the french revolution in the 18th century the feudal system was in in position in france for 500 years under essentially the same circumstances so he asked even that was the question historians asked what was different about the 18th century that the revolution took place in the 18th century rather than the 16th century or the 15th century he said because beginning 18th century there were certain philosophers who conceived of a different way of organizing society until that time the feudal system was like the sun if it's august in southern france and it's very hot and humid and you're very uncomfortable you don't wish that the sun would go out because the sun goes out it's death it's okay it's hot i'll have to live with the heart that's the attitude towards the fuel system if you eliminate the feel of the system it'll be chaos as bad as the feudalism feudalism was was better than chaos but then new ideas arose that you could organize system into society in a different way with that alternate option of reorganizing society within a few decades the the field system was gone so this is the idea even under the feudal system they were able to redefine their identities no it doesn't have to be this way it could be different here this i think is the way that steve shaw explains here first move is to redefine your identity then i take you out of the uh the actual servitude then i redeem you redemption in hebrew always means going back to a prior reality redemption is never new it's always a return i think that by the way english word redemption means that also to redeem means to put it back where it was before that that means in a certain relationship with god that wasn't was not possessed before and then i'll take you to be my to my nation and then when i take you to be my nation you'll understand what it meant to redefine yourselves as free people because this is what the freedom is for this is what the freedom is leading to you couldn't have understood that from the first step alone of just redefining yourself as a free person so that's just a little bit about the four languages of every day do you know much about the censorship of the gomorrah and this vatican that i've heard about versus what we might have today there was a safer it was well known called the missing things from the from the talmud and was passed down through the generations we always had it we always knew what it said and uh later editions of the 20th century all those things were replaced into the gemara we knew that things were were censored uh we know where the rambam was censored we just kept it on the slide so that the authorities wouldn't wouldn't be aware that we hadn't lost the information right are there any implications on the way that things were interpreted as a result no no not as far as i know so i say we had we had this effort called it was available scholars who were doing the interpretation were aware of these things i'm sorry what did you say that was written didn't buy but yeah i think it was compiled over the generations when these things happen and by the way um i remember when i was a student and some of the people who were in our group gravitated to the conservative movement instead of being orthodox and one of them said did you know that there are problems with the talmudic text did you know that there have been differences in perhaps corruptions of the text are you aware of this deep scholarship so every page of the talmud has at least four commentaries that correct the text every page so they give me a break and then in the back there are other commentaries that have other other ques these things in the text there are often quotes that we don't have and and the and the commentators say his text was different from uh from us other other resharing quote commerce and my joshua that we don't have we were always aware of this indeed the gemara itself talks about this because you'll have a record of a mishna and the royal will analyze the mishna and they'll say this this mission is open to obvious objection and the governor's conclusion will be misha bashter if you look it up in the dictionary which is a wrong move we'll say it's mixed up and what misha basha means is the transmission has been corrupted and that's why it says something that's impossible to extend to to accept and then they try to to speculate where did the corruption occur and what was the original and there are even debates about the kinds of mistakes it's plausible to attribute to mistakes of an uh of transmission and what kinds of corrections are plausible rav and abaya have different standards for that all this is already in the gemara's text itself not surprises to anybody there's a revolutionary the blind the orthodox aren't blind simpletons you know that's just do you know what this concept of corruption or not having the right things in certain places from the outside perspective do you think that that's used as an argument against judaism ever i i'm not quite hearing the words the argument that what it's used as an argument against judaism ever that i've heard that you mean the argument would be that judaism is not perfect that's corrupt well yeah corrupt that's right that's like when you have a one percent impurity it's impure right now you know i'm someone a friend of mine who lives in new york was dealing with someone who had tremendous um complaints about the educational system in the in the creative world this was like 20 years ago and you know this is bad that's bad and this leads students over strains over and so on so you ask the guy okay have you done any study or what percentage of the students are being lost yes i've done a study two percent of the students are being lost so you have really let me tell you it's 98 successful is that really a failure system of failure failed system because it's 98 successful not 100 successful excuse me that sounds to me like a tremendous success with weaknesses which would be good to correct so you say it's corrupt that means it's not 100 pure uh-huh gotcha right we know that we're aware of that the the textual and then some uh some are quite dramatic in the yoshami where it was much worse the gold rewrote whole adopt him of gomorrah hold up him come on destroy him right we're quite aware of this it's not not a surprise to us if someone thought you're going to have a hundred percent purity yeah but you know we have something like 15 letters of the more the 300 000 letters in the homeless we have about 15 letters that are are questionable between different between different texts the christian scriptures have thousands i saw one christian scholar who said we have thousands of variations of the text but only about 50 touch matters of central dogma thank you right none of the letters touch any substantive thing at all none zero so we're pretty good at this yeah but you got 15 letters missing oh that's corrupt give me a break yeah give me a break it's not serious uh um does one have to bring in ashan for uh it seems kind of like a weird thing half servant half free and then she's betrothed and then you violate her i don't know it seems kind of weird let's see now i'm trying to remember to see i i'm not quite sure you know what contacts to place the question one one way to ask it and and this way of asking it i won't really be able to answer and that is that 99.9 percent of the time sacrifices cannot help you for a deliberate transgression maybe that's not a new kipper but in terms of personal sacrifices they're always for things which were done by accident culpable culpable ignorance comfortable accident it was done by done on purpose sacrifice won't help you so you ask well why is this thing which could be done on purpose why why would this qualify for a for a sacrifice that would be an interesting question but to answer that you'd have to take like the 10 or 12 out of 16 000 and look at all of them together and try to find the common thread and see what what made them available to be handled by a sacrifice and i don't know how to do that and for us i know the responsibility is only on the man usually with sexual crimes it's equal crime of the man and the woman together and he spares responsibility individually for the crime but here i think because she's a shift she's not a free agent um she i think she's regarded as a victim but i i don't know i don't know why this would and then usually it's a hattus and this is an asham hashem is not the same as the khatus i think it's always for shoghi don't you ever bring a hot dish or something instead of amazing this is an ocean can be done it can be i don't know so it's a nice question i really have no idea yeah all right that's it okay we have to go and teach you this very good