Q&A- Monarchy, Heresy & Slavery (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib) (Jewish Philosophy)

this is q a guys what's in your cart i guess i have a question and this is maybe a familiar question because it's come up a lot in my conversations that why is it that the jewish people had to have a kingdom form of government rather than constitutional monarchy democracy whatever else and if the jews were destined to have this type of government is that proof that that is the optimal form of government in general or if or is it simply you know what was right for the jews at the time or even a punishment for the jews at the time for okay so the question is since the form of government that judaism describes is is a monarchy does that mean that it's the ideal form of government for human government generally or is it something specific about the jewish people or is it a punishment because they asked for a king that's a good question that's a good question i think uh youth contrast let's say with democracy a former government carries with it an understanding of where authority lies moral authority who's in charge to make decisions that's a very very important philosophical outlook democracy rests on the idea that the authority to make decisions rests with each and every individual in the country how you administer that authority depends upon a lot of variables i'm not going to go into now i do have a whole lecture on democracy but the bottom line is that the authority belongs to the people that is an idea which is utterly utterly unjewish from our point of view authority at the very least requires expertise and people who live in democracies understand that you don't vote on what kind of operation should be done in the hospital and you don't vote directly on the military maneuvers of your army overseas when it's fighting battles but here it's worse because the only real authority is god's authority so the only authority that we can recognize in human terms is someone who represents god now you ask about monarchy that's not strictly correct after all the sanhedrin wields a gigantic amount of authority and power the king cannot violate the laws of the sanhedrin and hedron can decide whether the king has violated the laws and should be punished for it the idea of monarchy where the the monarch contains within him singly all the governmental authority is very foreign to the for the to the jewish experience and prophets also have an independent of authority independent of sanhedrin and independent of the of the king so if anything you have a system which has a an expression of division of powers which is i don't think is typical in the ancient world at all so i don't think calling it a monarchy is as helpful as the description of actually how the authority works and ultimately there's there's the authority of the torah scholars which formerly isn't invested in sahaja but continues even after the sanhedrin because the those who have total knowledge are the ones who know what god wants that's the ultimate i said before you need expertise here the expertise that you want is that this is what god wants so the the monarch in the in jewish political uh position is a function that one person folds that one fulfills for certain particular uh types of action but a great deal is totally independent of it i think it's a complex system it would require care in describing in detail what the different powers of the different ones who have authority is and how they interact with one another for one could have a sense of what the what the system requires as far as comparing jewish political organization with the rest of the world there's no no attempt in our ser sources for that idea whatsoever we have a concept the law of the non-jewish government is the law now there are certain requirements of legitimacy that they have but beyond that whether they have a democracy or whether they have a monarchy or whether it is of no interest as far as i know to the to the to jewish sources the consent of the government is a matter of interest uh an imposed power i think according to many anyway regarding just as illegitimate and having no binding force whatsoever in jewish terms for non-jews just imposed by force no we're so not being accepted plur vladimir you know putin would not be there that's as much as i can i can i can tell you this context yeah uh what does heresy look like in present day and is there a mitzvah to warn people about heretics well heresy is an english word coming from greek as i don't know why that would be a jewish concept at all there are certain violating any law of the torah is something which is you're forbidden to do and for any reason in any way any any kind of violation whether it be belief speech or or action other action other than speech some carry very serious consequences and some carry less serious consequences so if someone says that um that timna was the daughter that was the the sister of lotan wasn't written by moshe that's heresy because he's denying a a principle the torah says is true and you're not allowed to do that i i don't know what the word built this word in a little heresy are we talking about uh crimes that are worthy of death or about what the word heresy doesn't communicate much we talk about a jewish reality uh it's not a principle to violate any law or deny any jewish truth any of them just just can't do it no there was no heresy it was those heretics specific heretics some say specifically about the christians you know who were some of whom were jews who went over to christianity that sort of thing uh but it's it's uh and that's in this farty uh don't have it the word mean is not an ashkenazi uh version of the of the of the blessing but uh i don't think the english word heresy is a helpful word to describe any particular jewish reality yeah i'm just curious how uh philosophers describe evil inclination or those that do describe the female inclination that aren't jewish and how they describe it well philosophers who aren't jewish would not use the term evil inclination first of all you have to know that on any interesting subject philosophers are widely divided so how philosophers would do this is a very misleading question any question you have at least five different views in the philosophical corpus if you look at the stanford encyclopedia philosophy which is an excellent excellent resource free online run by the department of philosophy at stanford university uh every article has these are the main problems in the field here are the five different schools of thought here's where they contradict his hopes for further progress i mean so so uh but i think and and the definition of evil varies very greatly among philosophers there are those who are like utilitarians believe in the value of the outcome determining all moral considerations and those who believe in what's called the antelope the anthological theories which are where their rules become conduct independent of the outcome okay it can be the right thing to do to create an outcome that's worse in terms of the value of the outcome and it'd be forbidden to create an outcome that's better in terms of the outcome well for example you don't kill one person to take his organs to save five people's lives you don't do that you can't kill one person to save five people high and outcome of five people surviving rather than once a better outcome but you don't do that because now that they kill people for that purpose that's a standard deontological rule that is uh very powerful in moral terms so the definition of yield is going to change from from system to system so i don't think there's anything useful can be said about what philosophers do the idea of reducing motivation to two basic categories labeled in moral terms that's what i would call [Music] theological ethics and theological psychology which i think is a legitimate field i have a whole share on psychology i think there's a critique of value-laden psychology both in its terminology and in its practice and the critique is is is valid because secular psychology presents itself as if it were a science they even have this probably oxymoron social sciences you know like psychology anthropology and sociology and violence and uh you know learning theory all the rest um the the what's that how is science defined though how is science defined i will take a few minutes for a footnote here because this is this is the standard trick of the sophomore philosophy student who says define your terms and the implication is if you can't define your terms you know what you're talking about if you know what you're talking about then you should just keep quiet but that's dead wrong that's dead wrong defining your terms is not a precondition for a reasonable a reasonable discussion because if it were you couldn't have an investigation to find the definition because investigating what the definition should be is using the term and judging whether a definition is appropriate or not if you really didn't understand the term at all without a definition you couldn't look for a definition that's not correct and every philosopher knows this it's only the sophomores after the third beer who say define your terms right the the rough truth is this that any term that you you pick will have a white black and gray area there's some things which definitely doesn't apply to some things where it definitely does apply and there's some things which are difficult and difficult to come in two stripes it can either mean that it's controversial or it could mean that individuals are not sure what to say now if you're having a discussion using a term and you are careful to keep the discussion in the black and white areas not to stray into the gray area then the demand for a definition is unjustified because it's the black and white areas of the term that you're going to use to evaluate proposed definitions and then you use the definition to clarify the gray area so when a person says give me a definition the response should be show me where we have straight into the gray area if we have then you're right we can't go on because we don't really know what we're talking about but we stayed in the black and white areas then you're not right and we don't need a definition i don't think i've done anything that has strayed out of the black and white areas of the terms that i'm using by the way there is no accepted definition of truth truth is a big problem has been for thousands of years of philosophy right but when jones is on the witness stand under oath it says i saw the murder and two witnesses come in and say the murder wasn't in tucson and you were with us in shanghai he's in trouble and if he says to the judge but your honor you can't even define truth how are you going to accuse me of lying and prosecute me he's not going to win with that defense he's going to lose he's going to go to jail for perjury there's no question about it and he belongs going to jail for perjury you don't need a definition of truth to decide whether he's lying when he said he was in tucson when he was really in shanghai so the the the the raising the question of a definition is something which is it has to be justified well social sciences you it sounds like you think falls on the black part of the i would like them to explain to me what they mean by science and justify it let them tell me what they mean by science it seems like uh the are the results reproducible he said is methodology agreed upon are they describing the same subject we had a famous infamous philosopher who wrote a book called consciousness explained okay the reviewer general philosophy said a better title would have been consciousness ignored because he didn't address the subject this is a science they can't agree with the subject is come on let's be you know but i'll put it in there put it on them you tell me what you mean by science and you show me that what you're saying is true and then maybe i'll accept it meantime i don't know any definition of science any kind of science that applies to what you're doing so uh you know if you read the literature there's a there's a website called retraction watch just listing all the papers that are retracted from from journals published papers that are later retracted because turns out that didn't work right and it wasn't done correctly in the methodology it wasn't justifiable and it was reproducible and so forth and so on and they're very very heavily in this in the so-called social fields i would call them yeah so i'm sorry so where where were we at oh so so the the they're different different they're going to call different things evil oh so so the problem was with with uh with psychology is this that it presents itself as if it's a repository of objective truths when the psychologists put forth their uh what what their discipline supports we are supposed to follow the science and accept their points of view because they're the ones who are in control of information about the world that is actually realistic when you discover that a great deal of what they're doing is value laden that undermines their pretense to be objective but we talk about jewish psychology it doesn't pretend to be objective it doesn't pretend to be pseudoscientific it is an expression of a theological moral point of view and using those terms to describe psychological reality so there's no harm in having a psychology with values built in as long as it doesn't pretend to be something else the secular psychologist predent to be something else you take a concept like maturity that you have in child development right you define certain attitudes and certain and certain behaviors as matured is maturity a value neutral term i hope this is a no-brainer when you saw themselves which is it was immature is that a compliment is that a neutral description like you did it on friday i don't think so immature is a growth insult so if you say maturity is x you're recommending the value of treating this as valuable that's not recycle that's what a science is supposed to do tell you what's valuable what's more important less important than something else but by using words like mature there was a guy named thomas i don't know because his name is s-a-c-z-s wrote a book called the myth about mental illness you call something in illness you're saying it's bad well that's a value judgment and it's not obvious at all in fact in the 70s when the question was raised is homosexuality and illness and the american psychological association voted that it isn't something like 55 to 45 that means 45 said it is okay but that's a majority right so then it was accepted that you couldn't say it was an illness and all the research dried up because we're trying to help people we're trying to make people's lives better it's not an illness then there's no reason researching it we can't help people with it we look we're we're taking illnesses and making people healthy do we want to dedicate to making the world a better place okay okay but whether or not it's an illness whether or not it's a desirable or undesirable condition that's not something that a certain psychologist should say just like it's not up to a doctor to say that a certain condition is um is healthy or unhealthy or better good when that's ca and that's carried by healthy and unhealthy um if you read oliver sacks so people with tourette's syndrome and there are drugs that can control it but it also makes their lives dull and and gray and for some people what they prescribe is monday through friday take the drugs and saturday and sunday don't take the drugs are you wild at pounding the ceiling and kicking at the floor yeah but you're alive right and maybe you prefer that who says it's that the expression of the of the syndrome is bad who said so he was on an airplane flight the pilot had was a surgeon had tourette syndrome you know he's flying the plane and pounding the ceiling behind the blade and he flew the plane you know so you know who's to say okay anyway that's that's uh a pet peeve of mine yeah so what are the implications of the fact that we have the that we cannot get rid of the two mouth the dead like what are the implications that there is a level of time we can get rid of okay what are the implications of the fact that we can't get rid of the tumor of contact with the dead well there are certain kinds of of contact with things that are holy that are forbidden when you when you have the um tomb of the disqualification of having been in contact with with the dead and that applies to almost everyone on the planet um i mean if he's you on the planet anyway um so it's one of the reasons why you can't go up onto the temple mount even though some people say you can and they all have lots of excuses and so on um what else would it apply to i mean if we had tumor you would you wouldn't be able to eat tumor in fact when we take off tumor it becomes tummy right away we burn it started giving it to a cohen to eat you can't do it because it's tummy it's in stomach you can't eat it so we take off the tumor that we take off and we burn it um i'll tell you there's a wonderful definition of tumor that i heard from my first my first wife or sheldon she called two mini courage courage means being cut off from god tuma cuts you off from contact with certain types of sanctified things um so of many of the things that were sanctified and were and had those rules we don't have any way we don't use them anyway but in times when the temple was standing and the sacrifices were being offered then it was a big deal if you had any kind of tumor you were disqualified from doing that in fact i think it's in one of the cities in northern israel where they have significant archaeological digs there's a whole section of houses where there were a lot of mcvos and they opined that this is where the people were who processed olive oil to bring to us to have it in the temple for the menorah and for the monacos and it had to be pure so these people had to be pure so any kind of tumor any kind of tumor that they were subject to all tumor requires going to makeup whatever kind it is however long it is whatever else it might require requires going to makeup so they had macbooks there so to make sure that they were pure in order to be able to make the the olive oil with where we are today we couldn't do it because uh the tumor that we have is irrevocable so when the temple will be rebuilt we'll be able to take care of it yeah um so for someone who's balchuva grew up completely secular uh a modern orthodox life can seem like a good approach for slower gradual are the growth and cons of living this type of lifestyle what are the pros and cons of living no but vital roles yeah just like what are some because you know we talk about gradual growth and sometimes you know a lot of people who are growing they can jump into things too fast and experience you know burnout and some people fall away from the religion altogether okay so we're talking about the how gradual development should be as someone's coming in from the outside and whether uh i guess this is part of the question whether the modern orthodox style of jewish life would be a reasonable at least starting position because your enables you to develop more slowly more smoothly than uh perhaps being in a creative environment so i believe in the slow and steady development i agree with you and i have seen cases where people do get they overextend themselves and then there comes a crunch and some don't make it i have seen that actually happens i think that's a very realistic attitude in fact i try to communicate to students who are here you're receiving a lot of information quickly and what you need to do is have like two lists one is a list of things i must do and other lists of things i must work towards this one i'll get to in two years and so i'll get to in five years and this will get to in ten years and i would say eighty percent of what you learn has to go on the second list get sitting there in class and saying this and this and this and this okay tomorrow morning is going to be different [Laughter] you can't do that it's it's inconceivable you you have the ability to do it so that's one way to protect yourself now whether environment which which is less intense is necessary depends upon who are the people in the population there are kharadi environments where there is room for people who are on the way in this yeshiva is shiva and it is famous for making room for people to live here in the dorm and and in the beginning uh on saturdays they go to kibbutz so they go to tel aviv to go swimming and so on and so on they come back they take on shabbos gradually we create a charity environment that's user friendly for people who are on the way in and making gradual progress i can understand how many horizon environments wouldn't be user-friendly in that way and i can understand why let's say being a less intense environment would be something that would be desirable yes i think that could that could very well be desirable and i think that if the person is growth oriented his eyes his eyes open and he thinks about evaluating what he sees eventually the vast majority will come to they'll become hopefully qualified and capable and will want a more intense environment that's that's what i would hope now um that's one there's one more thing i wanted to say about this um [Music] i think the biggest barrier for for a man is the level of torah knowledge this environment is stresses total knowledge very strongly and total knowledge and understanding has a strong impact on your standing in the group how seriously you're taken in the group and discussions and decisions as well and so on many many people who become bolichuva never make it to a position of serious scholarship in creating terms that's hard that's really hard something anyway i had a student who became a professor of law never went to yeshiva and when he would be asked questions he would say let's go to the rabbit mighty the boston rabbi or go tell it to people in the school who are knowledgeable and we'll get an answer he wasn't embarrassed he didn't think he had to have all the answers someone challenged him he said look i saw what i saw and i made my decision if you want to test it go take a look for yourself and see what you see and see whether they come to my conclusion or not am i going to convince you argue with you no i'm not going to do that he's a professor of law so he always but he didn't present himself that way so he has managed to integrate into a into a very creative community without having all the knowledge some people find that very pressured and very difficult i could imagine someone saying i can't do that i can't be in a position where what are my children going to say you know and my my 11 year old comes home and says tati please help me with my homework i'm sorry i can't read your overkill i don't know i don't know the answers to the questions tonight for an eleven-year-old they find that difficult to i know someone who came about shuva and lived in a city with two schools two schools for children the one more courageous and one lesser lady and he put his children in the less way to school because he said i don't want to lose touch with my children i don't want to come to a point where they don't respect me i don't want to be able to be able to interact with them in terms of the school work i said but what about the quality of education your children will get he said i can't do that i thought that was sad i remember my oldest son took down a mistake i think he was 16. he said look what the shibura says and i was wrong i was dead wrong i thought wow i have a 16 year old son who could take down the mishna brewer and show me where i'm wrong that was a very happy day for me my own son was able to do that it was a very happy day only not everybody can take that i think what you what you suggested it makes sense in general each person has to find his own way yeah building off the idea that torah is a very important thing to strive towards especially for baltimore to kind of maybe break into the community a little bit more um and and perkins is one of the three pillars of well it's really really true too specifically to the sacrifices in the temple but phil is part of that feel as part of that my question is basically i mean i know you based on your sheer in the past you had a cheer on on this one sra but it seems that in the yeshiva system uh that there's not there doesn't seem to be much study of tafila and pursuit of trying to grow in that area and so i mean i was curious what your thoughts are on that in terms of how the system works and could it be improved or is it a problem or what should a person try to do themselves oh okay the question is one of the pillars in which the world rests is of oda um of all the can mean service in the temple and also prayer which really are very very tightly bound up with one another as i'll explain in a moment and how is it that in many yeshiva's prayer isn't studied the text of prayer the idea of prayer isn't studied so there are a lot of things that aren't studies a lot of things which really should be studied aren't studied i might say should be you know there's what philosophers call a prima facie obligation even though some philosophers on the basis of the latin say it's not appropriate john soil says not appropriate phrase that's the way it's used primary obligation means these are things which need to be done but i have limited resources time effort and rest so maybe i can't get to that one because i'm getting to other ones that need to be done tanakh you're worried about prayer what about the bible how about studying that you know even humish isn't studied carefully let along isaiah and job and and daniel what about the comprehensiveness of your knowledge as opposed to the depth of your knowledge uh there are 2 700 folios of talmud babylonian talmud how many of those do you cover in normal yeshiva education so that's gotten better that's gotten better the idea of having broad knowledge is also important different groups have different uh different approaches to it sanjay khasid if a boy is tested on a thousand daf thousand folios for his before he's married he gets to wear white socks it's called mourinho our teacher a thousand dollars is a lot to be tested on it's like forty percent of the entire talent um so they they also stress breath as well as depth so but prayer is important solomon who is the laker yeshiva was first brought there he was brought there from manchester england the first thing he did in l was to teach prayer you're coming to russian kippur those days or days of prayer the whole 10 days of first day 10 days of tishrei are days of prayer you ought to know what you're saying so he thought you thought it to them so that was a radical move that was well that's what it was about he's about a voter that's what he's about you know teaching people how to serve god so so he did it but you're right i think the point here is that there's been a selective process that we study certain things for certain purposes and one of the great purposes of the last 250 years was that the students should stay observant because they're under pressure from the undocumented which is the true description of what they call the enlightenment um and and uh study jewish studies that that are based on sophisticated analysis became very important to the the motion of everything else the gemara is quite clear but we don't study the torah the way it says in the gemara at all not at all mr says five you start mikra which is been five years just on tanach almost nobody does that today and then five more years of mishnays you start going at 15. nobody does that today not only that but first there's girsu girissa means knowing everything just knowing what it says and then uh afterwards coming to analyze and understand and answer contradictions comes after you have comprehensive knowledge of what it says that's almost not practice so when you ask it's really i think there's an overall religious need for the study of torah to produce a person who's serving god and that has changed the priorities that that we that we have in torah study there are those sources which indicate that you really ought to study applicable torah first well let's see this ox cord that ox and that ox died and something and so on well it's it's definitely practical law it's not practical for us how many people do you know that own oxen none zero so you know it could it be your car okay train the car uh one of our broncos what about shabbos what about uh bayer forever for me there are sectors that deal with practical law and they aren't emphasized they aren't prioritized so i think that it's it's more the overall um social religious need that dictates what's learned and what isn't learned yeah so this question is kind of twofold that firstly um is slavery according to the torah or the and based on that should we like as jews nowadays try to avoid merchandise that was produced from by large part through slave and or you know underpaid exploit exploitation uh labor okay so the first question is whether slavery is something which is regarded as let's say um perfectly acceptable normal behavior or whether it's something which is uh only uh what what he calls it in the hebrew but evan's second class i don't think it could be justified only because there are pressures or special needs but ideal society would not have slavery as as part of it and then if there is something second class about slavery should we avoid products that are the uh rely on slave labor and then of course in the middle of your question you realize that what we call slavery is probably very rare except for muslim countries in north africa that have black slaves which nobody ever talks about not even so-called people who are interested in justice but then exploited underpaid you know workers and so on and so on they're really two questions and each one of them is complex i couldn't give you any final answer about either question i could offer some observations um first of all there's a gigantic difference between jews being slaves to other jews versus non-jews being slaves to jews their status and their treatment is is very very different from one another a jew being a slave to another jew is bitter evid it's second class the idea is that should have never happened no question about that it can happen in two ways one is that someone owes money and he can't pay it and he wants to pay it if he sells himself let's say he sells his labor for six years he gets a payment up front he can use that to pay the one person that he owes and now he's required to work off that money for the person who bought him but this is really what they call an indentured servant and it shows in many ways for one thing if the jew who is the slave comes into money he can buy his way out immediately and the one who bought him canada can't protest he just owes money he's working off the money that he owes number two he's required to live by all but one of all the commandments and he keeps shabbos and he keeps the holidays and the the owner has to ask to provide him with that his standard of living can't be less than that of the owner so tyson says if there's one pillow in the house the slave gets it the master can't have it because he can't have more than what slave has said can't be asked to do anything the master would find degrading to do so you know there's a lot a lot of restrictions that are put on this and the normal course is six years ten or six years equals free automatically other thing wants to stay a slave which could happen and then it's all procedure that goes free in the jubilee but so it is definitely second class and the way the torah puts it is i am your master and you went and got yourself another master that's bad so it's legal but it's definitely bad the other way that can happen is if he stole a jew stole and he hasn't got the money to pay it back then the court could sell it but again it's to pay off a debt and he could always get out of the slavery condition that he's in by paying by paying the rest if he comes into money so the call to slavery is really very peculiar i think yes the torah used the word evid there's no question it does use that word but the english word slavery carries with connotations which are utterly utterly different from the uh reality of of of that kind of slave a nigerian slave is a different matter and it that was very rare that happened either because non-jews enslaved each other and sold one of their one of their slaves to us or war sometimes um that's a different a different matter i'm not going to go into it right now but yes it definitely is second class now this idea of not supporting industries that um you know it's sort of like the bds people right you use a computer your intel chip was made in israel you know you have you have a a a a a a a a climate control in your house the the ai was made it was made in israel and so on all right come on be serious don't drive a car every car has interventions that were made in israel right so at a certain point it becomes absurd to express your opposition to something by killing your own life so um and if you you as an individual are a minuscule insignificant non-functioning portion of the market that they're selling to so that you do or you don't is going to make any difference whatsoever in what they're doing so then it's a question of of a kind of general attitude i don't want to be part of that and it's over and so on but to pin it down on the person saying you're supporting them so they're making more profit so create more of these to hire more of these laborers and take your ten thousand dollars in a lifetime of buying their products and divide it up among the billion people who are making it as less than a penny per person so you're not you're not actually changing the output of that that system at all so that's a question of not you know so having a kind of pure conscience that i didn't participate in any way that's not a very strong world imperative it can be it can be something that's desirable but it's not a very strong moral imperative so i would say that each case would have to decide it on its own merits depending on what the what the terrible crime was um and some of these things you know exploited why because the workers in india aren't being paid the same salaries at workers in los angeles is that the exploitation who's exploiting them is it their own authority systems there that are forcing them to work for less right which you're not going to change right i don't know i it's complicated and and subtle i can't i don't think it's a very strong question but it could be discussed and now beyond out of my depth to explain you know what the seriousness would be in our terms yeah well i'd like to know i know my white uh question but uh what can be said about uh what can we know or understand from um the chauffeur like the voice of the chauffeur like what what is the meaning of why why do we refer it as the voice of the shop or how can like why for example there's certain techniques of why do you play one and three and nine like where or where cannot be found i mean that's a question like either there's a lot of things beyond the chauffeur i know so yeah okay there's a question the symbolism of the shofar first of all don't read into the word co voice call can just mean sound it doesn't mean somebody's talking and so on that's not part of it we have the word cold doesn't mean voice it means sound [Music] now um there are in in midrash even in the talmud uh the punctuated sounds are sounds of distress the straight sounds the sound of happiness of joy of positiveness of strength and they usually you have straight punctuated and straight because the beginning the end has to be positive and then there are things that have to be dealt with in the middle um and they it was used for many different functions but calling together the leaders of the of the of the uh of the people or signaling a march a a a trek of the people going from place to place [Music] jews in rosh hasha and the writes in the torah that the symbolism there is to wake up from your sleep uh your sleep of dogmatism your sleep of in insensitivity your sleep of um embeddedness in the physical world material world and the [Music] preoccupation with things which dull your spiritual sensitivity i will give you one more piece of symbolism which i think is very important and then i'm going to i'm going to leave it um the gemara says based on a verse in isaiah dear shoes when he's present called to him when he's close i think it says it's talking about individuals not the not the nation is always close to the nation always listening to the nation always in contact with the nation but this is talking about individuals when is god found and close to ten days from our shipper and one way in which this closeness expresses itself is this let's suppose a person does something wrong and he realizes it and he does tuber so um when he does something wrong he's taking up a step he's taking a step back away from god and god takes this corresponding step back away from him so there's a double distance set up now when he does chubby he goes back to his original position but there's still a distance that god created by separating himself will god respond by closing the distance maybe not right away maybe not right away there's no guarantee he did the transgression in january he did schumer in february maybe god won't close the distance in february there's no rule about it no guarantee about it what's unique about the first 10 days of the month of tishrei the days from rosh hashanah three of kippur is that there god comes first he closes his side of the distance before you do chuva he's waiting for you he's there with his hand out to you so when you do chuva you're connected immediately that's a gigantic advantage now the shofar is an instrument of the type that announces something and one explanation of the shofar on the morning of roshana is the arrival of the king in our midst it's signaling that he's present i think that's what could generate the rambo's response well the king is here wake up you know he's not sitting in the capital a thousand miles away he's here right in front of you how do i know that that's what it symbolizes because what is the very last thing that you do at the end of yom kippur the last action that you perform in the yom kippur service at the end of the day what's the last thing you do you blow the shofar now if you're using the right kind of sitter which means either a safari sitter or a hasidic sitter using ashkenazi too bad right it has this instruction next to the the words that you blow the shofar it says the departure of the shrine makes exactly the right reaction wow the departure of god's presence which means that just the chauffeur at the end of your kipper signals the departure of god's presence the shelf at the beginning of rosh hashanah signals the arrival of god's presence i must tell you in terms of my own personal experience i find that moment almost painfully poignant because on the one hand you've been through the 10 days the day of your kipper itself and hopefully you've gotten a grip on yourself and a new vision for your future and you have resolve and enthusiasm and building a new future that's wonderful and you but but you're losing you're losing accurate barricades closeness you're losing that so it's like the pain of saying goodbye it's an excruciatingly difficult moment with a swirl of competing emotions um so that i think is is is this i would say that's the symbolism which underlies all the other symbolisms that you hear about it's really announcing god's arrival that i missed on rosh hashanah and his disappearance at the end of uh at the end of the year that's something about the shofar there's a lot more because of back to the chauffeur of that was on the ram of yitzchak and the shofar was going to announce the mashiach all those things are tied are tied in there's a lot the big literature about it yeah uh what are some of the greatest arguments and disprovers of macroevolution so um i'm not going to do argue that disprove i'm going to share with you this in the last hour i'm going to share with you an observation which i think is the more important observation um i think it's i know what's going on but maybe maybe this could wait till after finish um what i think it's more important to realize that it is inappropriate to accept it that doesn't mean it's wrong it's just that it's inappropriate to accept it and the reason that it's inappropriate is this evolution says that life developed by a process which is uncontrolled undirected and unmanaged sometimes they call it accidental something to call it random accidental does not have a good definition random does not have a good definition [Music] but uncontrolled unfocused unmanaged now somebody wants to tell me that something happened in an uncontrolled unfocused unmanaged manner he has to give me some estimate what is the probability of that happening in the conditions that that apply if you can't give me an estimate of the probability that i can't make up my mind whether to believe that it really was uncontrolled unfocused and unmanaged or rather managed by some process that you're not you're not aware of so i would ask a person who is a believer in evolution and thinks that i ought to believe also show me your estimate of the probability that life developed by random accidental which doesn't have a good definition but unfocused unmanaged and unprogrammed um processes of mutations and changes in gene expression all the rest of it [Music] what's the probability that it happened that way as they say it's not the survival of the fitness that's the question it's the arrival of the physics fitness that's the question it could only survive once it's arrived it's only arrived because they have these variations which produce the the varieties of life some of which are better suited to survive so if you can't do that then you have no business telling me i ought to believe it my analogy is if i tell you i have an object and i painted an x on one side of the object and i threw the object into the air three times three times in a row it landed on the x by accident unfocused unmanaged uncontrolled and i asked would you believe me or not so if you think i'm talking about a coin then it's a one in eight chance twelve and a half percent of course you could accept it easily if i'm talking about a shiliagan which has a thousand sides they're talking on one in a billion shot that's the american belief with nine zeros not the british billion with twelve zeros and it was one of the billionaires so they wouldn't believe me and if i tell you well it's my object and i'm not telling you how many sides it has but i want you to believe me i think you would respond excuse me if i don't know how many sides it is how can i make up my mind whether to believe you or not if you don't tell me what the probability of arriving at this envelope of life via the process that you're talking about if you don't know what the probability is some estimate i can't make up my mind logically to believe you or not well they haven't done it and they can't do it and it's quite obvious that they can't do it and if you have doubts about it i will tell you what i have told all my students over the last 40 years write to your biology professors write to your philosophy professors uh you know write to richard dawkins get me get me the estimated public show me how they went through four and a quarter four and a half and a quarter billion years of development of life and all the mutations took place and all the physical conditions of the earth during all those periods where the mutations were taking place and what the probability is that was happening just by accident show me if you can't do that which obviously can't then you have no business telling me that i have to accept it that i think is the most important point i think there are lots of problems with it you want to read a guy who who's qualified to talk about it david gerlernter david galerter is a professor of computer science at yale so i suppose he's not dumb and he gave up darwin on the basis of a certain calculation and he wrote an article for the claremont review of books which you can google online you can get it very easily he collects there some of the standard anti-evolution arguments which he says are relevant and have weight but there's a problem of proto of protein folding where the for the percentage of functional proteins in the space of all possible proteins because all the different folds that they have is like 1 in 10 to the 70. or maybe worse than that and one in 1070 would mean that you would need quadrillions of universes for quadrillions of years to get one and we have lots more than one they said you know i mean he's a professor of computer science numbers are his home you know he understands numbers he says this is just beyond calculation beyond computation this is something which is really probability is equal to zero it's just not acceptable to uh to and he says i don't believe in artificial intelligence i'm not signing on to that i'm not he happens to be a religious jew because i'm not saying god did it but i'm telling you this what does this doesn't work this doesn't work so on the one hand they can't give you enough information to make up your mind to accept it and it is possible if you take one tiny little well-defined corner to say this corner kills it and you take a look at his paper so that would be a good uh start for someone who was serious about the subject which is now down to one tenth of one percent of the people who talk about it there's a video if you want to see it i gave a shirt criticizing dawkins somebody found dawkins giving an exposition of his basic points which is maybe like 15 minutes long and he found my sheer and he put them together in a single video you can look it up on on youtube just look up dawkins i gotta leave and you'll you'll get i think it worked out very well i mean i didn't know about his video when i did it but i do answer the points that he makes there so it's quite amusing