All language subtitles for 01-05

Hi, my
name is Shai Cherry, and I'm presenting

the introduction to Judaism course
for the teaching company.

An introduction to Judaism is not as easy
as it sounds

because Judaism itself
is more than just a religion.

Judaism incorporates in ethnicity,
a culture, a lifestyle.

Some people talk about Judaism
as a civilization.

What we're going to be doing in this
course is looking

at the specific religious
aspects of Judaism as they have changed

and unfolded over a 3000 year period

from the Hebrew Bible or Torah to today.

But we can't totally ignore
the historical changes

that serve as the backdrop
for some of these political,

theological and religious changes
that also track on

to the way
that Judaism has unfolded through time.

The Hebrew Bible is Judaism's
Foundation text,

but knowing the Hebrew Bible will tell you
surprisingly little

about how Judaism is expressed
in the modern period.

So we'll begin our course
by taking a look at the relationship

between the Hebrew Bible, the Torah,
the Old Testament and contemporary

Judaism, what the relationship
is between those terms and modern Judaism

will then begin to describe
the early varieties of Judaism.

And by early I mean about
the time of Jesus about 2000 years ago.

Although Jewish history is not one long

tale of travails,
there have been several catastrophes

that powerfully shaped
the Jewish consciousness.

So in the second lecture,
we'll talk about the history as presented

in the Hebrew Bible from the destruction
of the first temple in 586

to the destruction

of the second Temple by the Romans
in the year 70 of the Common Era.

That 586 was before the common era.

And we'll talk about
why we're not using B.C in AD.

Also, at that point,

in the

wake of the destruction
of the second Temple by the Romans,

there were several groups
that had been competing for power

for hegemony within that Jewish community.

And the winner was rabbinic Judaism.

So in general, for the rest of this class,
for the rest of the course

where I talk about Judaism,
I'm really talking about rabbinic Judaism,

unless I specify otherwise.

And so after discussing what we know
about those power struggles to assume

leadership in the Jewish world, we'll look
at some of the core values and practices

of rabbinic Judaism,
specifically Torah, study,

repentance, worship
and deeds of loving kindness.

We're going to keep our eyes on
how those ideas and values are expressed

in the Hebrew Bible,
but also to get a feel for the innovative,

daring ness of the rabbis
to see how the rabbis developed

those ideas
in a world that no longer had the central

religious institution that characterized
biblical Judaism, namely the temple.

Not everything changes
once the temple is destroyed,

but many, many things change as a result
of the destruction of the temple.

And so we want to be sensitive

to how the changes
in the political fortunes of Israel affect

changes in religious practice,
as well as the ology.

With the destruction of the

second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70,
holy space

in terms of the temple
becomes less important

and holy time or holiness
in time becomes more important.

It's promoted.

So we're going to spend several lectures
looking at

specific holidays
in Judaism that shaped the Jewish calendar

and that really give punctuation
to the Jewish year and to Jewish life.

So we'll be looking at the Sabbath

and the high holidays, the New Year
and the Day of Atonement, Passover

and Pentecost,
as well as some minor holidays.

And we'll be sensitive to the fact
that many of these holidays in the Bible

were rooted in the land of Israel

and agricultural holidays
in the land of Israel.

But once the Jews were no longer
living in the land of Israel,

other aspects of those holidays
had to be accentuated

at that point.

We'll take a look.

We'll move into the Middle Ages
and take a look

at some of the new expressions of Judaism
that we see in the Middle Ages,

specifically Jewish philosophy and Jewish

mysticism
starting in the 11th and 12th centuries.

We'll take, as our case studies,
the problem of evil,

the creation of the world prayer
and the reasons for the commandments,

and see how Jewish philosophy and Jewish
mysticism have very different responses

to what
the underlying conditions are for creation

or evil or prayer.

Our next five sessions

will be devoted to Judaism
as it makes the transition into modernity.

And so we'll be looking at the emergence
of the Jewish community

from its insulated medieval corporations,
as they were called, how

they lived and govern themselves
to emancipation and emancipation.

Everything changed, right?

You can't find an expression of Judaism
today

that's just like Jews lived 300 years ago.

Emancipation changed everything.

So we'll be taking a look at ultra
orthodoxy and modern orthodoxy and reform

and conservative and reconstructionist
Judaism's as a way of understanding

how some of those groups
200 years ago, 100 years ago,

adopted

themselves to the new conditions
in Western Europe

and then later on in Eastern
Europe of emancipation.

And really for the first time
in 2000 years,

we have the opportunity of people
identifying themselves with either

the land of Israel, namely
this phenomenon of Zionism

that hadn't been possible for 2000 years,

or people identifying themselves
with the people of Israel,

people who were cultural Jews
and may very well be atheists, right?

You can be a Jewish atheist,

although it's a contradiction in terms
to be a Christian atheist.

The reason why you can be a Jewish
atheist is precisely because

Judaism incorporates
more than just religion.

So you can identify today
with the land of Israel,

the people of Israel
or the Torah of Israel,

and really relate to Judaism
primarily as a religion.

Our last few sessions will take a look
at how some sensitive

and controversial topics have unfolded

from the biblical period to today.

Specifically, we'll be looking at the role
and status of women in the Jewish world.

We'll also be looking
at how Judaism understands Christianity.

Is it an expression of idolatry
because of the divine zation of Jesus,

or is it another path to the one guide?

And finally, we'll talk about

the vexing question of Jews
as the chosen people.

Were we chosen, if so, by whom,
and for what purpose?

In general, this course could just
as easily be called an introduction

to Judaism's because we'll see that
for every topic we cover,

we have a multiplicity of responses
and a multiplicity of answers.

So on the one hand, the course
could be an introduction to Judaism.

On the other hand, we want to be sensitive
to what is common and what

unites all of the different
Judaism's that we discuss.

Okay, so

let's now move into our first topic,
which is the relationship

between the Torah,
the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament

and Judaism over here.

Now, the terminology affects how you
understand and what we're talking about,

how one designates that corpus of books,

variously known as the Old Testament
or the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh,

often involves ideological assumptions
about how the text is to be understood.

The word Tanakh is the Hebrew acronym
for Torah,

which in this sense means the five books
are the Pentateuch, Genesis,

Exodus, Leviticus, numbers in Deuteronomy,
Tanakh that end stands for Nivi,

which is the Hebrew word for prophets
and K-2, the team car.

Tanakh The heart in the car in Hebrew
have the same letter is the writings.

So the books in the prophetic section
we have the historical

the historical books of the prophets like

Joshua and Judges and Samuel L and Kings.

And then we have the big prophets
like Ezekiel and Jeremiah

and Isaiah, as well as the minor prophets
and the to name the writings.

We have Song of songs and proverbs
and Psalms

and Ruth and Esther and Daniel up
until Chronicles.

Right?
That's the Tanakh, the Old Testament.

It is how some early Christians
referred to this text

since it had been superseded in their eyes
by the New Testament.

Jews generally don't refer to this book

as the Old Testament
because they don't have a New Testament.

So Jews often call the entire book Torah
the word Torah

literally means a teaching
or an instruction in Hebrew.

The way we say teacher is more or mora.

And in the wisdom of the Hebrew language,
the way to say parents is who rhyme,

which has the same roots as Torah,
because according to biblical Judaism

anyway, it's your parents who should be
the primary teachers in the family, right?

Not shipping them off to to the public
or private schools.

So maybe the folks that do homeschooling
know this truth about that language,

but the word Torah can mean
just an individual teaching.

It can refer to the entire five books.

Torah can also refer to the entire Tanakh
and Torah, can also refer to

what happens later
and including the whole warehouse

of Jewish thought and expression,
including what we do in this room today.

Some contemporary

scholars, in an effort
to maintain religious neutrality,

they opt to describe this text
by its language, the Hebrew Bible.

Now, it's true
that some of the later books like Daniel

also have Aramaic, so the entire book
doesn't have Hebrew in it.

But the vast
majority of words in the Hebrew

Bible are indeed in Hebrew, even though
we've got some Aramaic as well.

But the problem with describing it
as the Hebrew Bible

is that faith communities
have a very different reading

of the Hebrew Bible, whether we're talking
about the Christian faith community

or the Jewish faith community, than do
academic scholars of the Hebrew Bible.

I tell my students at Vanderbilt,
where I teach,

that I don't know very much
about the Hebrew Bible. Why?

Because I didn't get my Ph.D.

in Bible where I would have had to learn
Akkadian and UGA, Riddick and

Mesopotamian myths

in order to compare the Hebrew Bible
to the other contemporary languages

and literatures that were
that were going on at the time.

The authors of the Hebrew Bible
composed those texts.

If they want to know
something about the Torah, about Jewish

interpretations of the Hebrew Bible,
know, I'm happy to try to help.

I know something about that,
but that there's a disjunction

between what the academics will tell us
about the meaning of the Hebrew Bible

and how Jews and Christians
relate to that, to that text.

Furthermore, the assumptions

about the authorship of the text,

often very dramatically
between the academic community

and Jews and Christians.

So we're going to talk about
some of the differences,

not just in terminology,
but the differences in meetings

and the assumptions
about the text with case studies

from the creation stories of Genesis
one through three,

and that law that appears
three different times in the Hebrew Bible

or in the Torah, as I will now
refer to it, about not saving a kid.

LAMB Or a baby goat.

In this case, it's mother's milk.

Okay.

So let's talk
about the assumptions of the text

before we actually get to these case
studies.

Up until about the 17 century,

both Christians and Jews
related to the Torah as a divine document,

whether it's divine dictation or whether
it's channeling from God to Moses.

But the traditional assumption
was that God presented

what is in the Torah
to Moses at Mount Sinai.

Additional assumptions
about the Hebrew Bible.

Traditional assumptions
include that the text was cryptic.

It meant more than it said on the surface.

So you need to read deeply

in order to understand
what God had intended in that text.

After all,

if the Torah was written by God,
then it should be read differently

than if the Torah was written
by human beings.

If it's instruction
manual by human beings, you want to follow

the text literally, because human beings
don't know how to write

in a kind of encrypted way
for an audience.

But both early Christian and early Jewish
interpreters of the Torah understood that

the the Torah was cryptic.

It was also perfect.

Now, what does that mean?

That the text was perfect?

It was not filled with contradictions.

It was not filled with misspellings

or with a abnormalities
between the gender of the noun

and the gender of the verb,
which you have to have consonants

in Hebrew, between the gender of the noun
and the gender of the verb.

And that it would be good, right?

It's perfect. It's good, right?

Modern scholars
don't share that assumption,

but we'll talk about modern assumptions
in a moment.

And finally, the text of the Torah
or the Hebrew Bible is relevant.

It's not just an old, dusty history book
filled with genealogies with people's

names who you can't pronounce,
but it says something to you

and is meaningful to your life today.

And it will be that case
for every subsequent generation.

Right?

Because why would God waste God's breath,
as it were, on writing history

when we're more concerned

about the present reality than about
what happened in hoary antiquity

beginning in the 17th century,

a few Europeans, most notably Baruch
Spinoza, who was eventually excommunicated

by the Jewish synagogue in Holland,
in the Netherlands, they begin to take

tentative steps
towards understanding the Torah

as they might any other text,

So they don't want to project

any of their assumptions about the text

or assumptions in terms of what
this text must mean onto the text.

But they want to read the text
to see what it says for itself

and not assume anything about the text
by the mid-19th century,

biblical criticism
was established in Germany and slowly

and painfully made its way to England
and the United States.

The assumption of biblical criticism
is that the Torah was written by men.

It's got to be men.

Although one author suggests that it may
that there may have been

a woman involved in one particular
strand of the Hebrew Bible.

But generally the scholarly assumption
is that a group of men wrote

the texts that make up the Hebrew Bible
over a period of hundreds of years,

and these men didn't always agree.

And if you know anything about synagogue
politics or about church politics,

the idea that men don't always agree
shouldn't come as a great shock.

And you see these differences of opinion

reflected in the text themselves.

So the idea that the Torah,

the traditional assumption
that the Torah was divine,

no, maybe there was a divine element
to it, but it was human authorship,

the traditional assumption
that the Torah was perfect

and there weren't any contradictions.

No biblical criticism thrives
on the contradictions between different

authors or different schools
that the scholars tell us

made up the edited text or the redacted

text of the tenor of the Hebrew Bible,
and the idea that the traditional idea

that the Bible was cryptic
also goes by the wayside

in terms of modern assumptions
about the text.

The text means what it says No more,
no less.

Okay, so much for our assumptions
of modern biblical critics.

Now let's take a look at two episodes
in the Torah

and see how different the Old Testament
Tanakh Hebrew Bible can be,

especially from contemporary Judaism
and also contemporary Christianity.

So let's start by looking at the creation
stories in Genesis one, two, three.

The first thing to note is that I said

the creation stories in Genesis one,
two, three.

There are two different stories
of how God created the heavens

and the earth and everything
that is in it.

The seam between these two stories

is Genesis chapter two, verse four,

and many Bibles actually will show you
by splitting the verse in half

that the first half of Genesis
two four is the coda,

or the conclusion
to the first creation story.

And the second
half of the verse of Genesis two four

is the Prolog to the second creation
story.

Now, these stories are totally different.

They have different names of God
and the first creation

story, Elohim, which is usually translated
as God, is the actor.

In the second creation story,
Adonai Elohim

is the actor,
Adonai is the tetra graviton.

That four letter name of God
that was usually pronounced

only once a year

by the High priest in the Holy of Holies
on the Day of Atonement on Yom Kippur.

It is usually spoken as the low.

It is usually spoken as auto
and we don't pronounce that name.

And then the translation is usually Lord.

So the Lord God is the actor.

In the second creation story, the first
creation story happens in seven days.

There we go, seven days.

The second creation
story happens in one day.

The first creation story in Genesis one

has human beings created very last.

The second creation story has Adam
the human being created first.

The first creation story actually

has everything
created as an entire species,

including human beings,
including human beings,

so that when God creates
Adam, the Hebrew word is.

Adam. God creates
humanity, male and female.

He created humanity
right in the divine image.

It's only when Genesis one gets put before
Genesis two

that we get this idea
that God created one human being,

and how that one
human being can be both male and female.

Perplexed some of the early commentators
who suggested that the first human

being might be
might have been a hermaphrodite,

because in the second creation story,
we have only one human being created.

Adam a man.

And then later

on, a woman is created from his rib
or in some understandings from his side.

So the meaning of these stories changes
radically

depending on
how the editor places them together.

Another thing that's

interesting about the creation stories
is that

they're relatively insignificant

in the Hebrew Bible,
especially the Garden of Eden story.

The Garden of Eden story
gets a couple of mentions and the prophets

not even mentions, but allusions to
that first creation story becomes,

All right, prominent in the Decalogue
because we're supposed

to keep the Sabbath or keep Shabbat
and rest on the seventh day.

According to the Decalogue,

as it is iterated in Exodus,
it's reiterated in Deuteronomy.

Why are we supposed to keep the Sabbath
on the seventh day?

Because God created the heavens
and the earth opens in six days.

And on the seventh day God rested.

Of course, Shabbat becomes much, much,
much more important

to rabbinic Judaism
than it does to the Bible.

So right, the creation stories
are there at the beginning, Right?

It's a good way to begin a story, right.

Especially if you understand
or if the editors understand

that this God that we're talking about
is the universal God of all humanity.

So you start off with creation,
but the importance of the creation stories

is much more important to Pauline.

Christianity and rabbinic Judaism
than it was to the redact

or the authors of those stories
in the Torah themselves.

So although

Judaism and Christianity
read the creation narratives differently,

their readings are deeply influential
for both faith communities.

For example, you've got six mentions.

This is the refrain there was evening,
there was mourning Day one,

there was evening,
there was mourning day two.

Rabbinic Judaism understands that
because it says

there was evening, there was mourning day
one, that the day begins in the evening.

And this causes much confusion
when you're looking at a calendar

that has the Jewish holidays,

because it'll tell you
when the first day of the holiday is.

But you start celebrating that holiday
on the previous evening

because that's how the rabbis understood
the Hebrew Bible.

Well, that's
probably not what the Hebrew Bible meant.

And indeed, there was a Jewish scholar
in the 13th century

in France whose name
whose rabbinic name is Rosh Bom.

Rabbi Shmuel Ben May ear.

The rabbis are very

interested in acronyms.

So everybody,

if you've made it in the Jewish world,
you know

you've made it
because you have your own acronym.

So Rosh Baum is Rabbi Shmuel.

Ben, My ear

turns out to be Rosh, his grandson,
and we'll talk much more about Rashi

in the future.

He should know that the text in Genesis
one tells you what God did during the day.

God punches the time clock at 5 a.m.

then it's morning.

I'm sorry. Then it's evening, right?

God doesn't work in the evening.

He keeps regular hours and at the door.

And when there's morning,
that's the conclusion of day one.

And now we're going to start
to tell you what happened in day two.

So a day is a kind of commonsensical day
when the sun rises.

He says that
that's what biblical scholars agree with.

But nevertheless, in Judaism,
in rabbinic Judaism, you light candles

on Friday night to start the Sabbath
night on Saturday morning,

did Rosh Böhm want to light
candles on Saturday morning?

No, absolutely not.

But he said, look, let's be honest
about what the Hebrew Bible means

and then let's do
what the rabbis tell us to do

in Christianity.

Pauline Christianity from Saint Paul
understands that the human disobedience

in the Garden of Eden
by eating from the fruit of the tree,

of knowledge of good and evil,
which God had specifically commanded.

Adam not not so explicitly.

Eve, but specifically commanded Adam
not to eat from that.

That's sustained
all future generations of human beings.

That's the idea of original sin.

Well, you don't get that idea
from the Hebrew Bible itself.

Indeed, in Genesis four,
you've got the story of Cain and Abel,

where God specifically says
to Cain, Right, you've got this tendency

to do evil, this psychological tendency,
but you can master it.

Human beings are not depraved
and committed to a life of sinning

and transgressing.

You can overcome that
through your own free will.

But Pauline, Christianity emphasized
this idea of original sin

as a way to explain
what Jesus came to atone for.

So Judaism doesn't understand
that there is original sin.

Neither do contemporary scholars
from the Hebrew Bible itself.

That original sin is something that was
an interpretation of the Hebrew Bible

by early Christian communities,
just like the day starting in the evening

was an interpretation of the Hebrew Bible
or of the Torah by early

rabbinic communities. Right?

So what scholars say about this
text is often very much at odds with what

the faith communities of Judaism and
Christianity have to say about this text.

Okay.

The next element in the Hebrew Bible
we're going to take a look at

is the prohibition
of seeding a kid in its mother's milk.

One of my colleagues at Vanderbilt,
Professor

Jack Sasson,
recently wrote an article saying,

Yeah, we got it wrong.

One of the interesting things
about Hebrew in the Torah

is that it doesn't have any vowels,

it doesn't have any punctuation,
it doesn't have any capital letters.

So you really have to have
an interpretive stance toward

the Torah to know where one word begins
and one word ends.

And if it should be read as a declarative
or an interrogative

in this case, Load two Vacillated
did the IMO,

which is the prohibition
against seeding a kitten's mother's milk.

Professor Sasson suggests was misread

that it really should say not collards

in its mother's milk but tentative

right same letters, but different
punctuation, different vowels.

So you shouldn't
see the kid in its mother's fat.

you didn't see the kid
and its mother's fat.

What does that mean?

That you shouldn't kill two generations
in one day Because the only way

you can see the kidneys mother's fat is
if you kill the mother to get the fat.

And indeed, there's another verse
in the Hebrew Bible that says,

You shouldn't kill two generations
of an of a species of animal in one day.

So it makes perfect sense.

And then Professor Qassim goes on to cite

other ancient Near
Eastern parallels to this idea.

But that's not how the rabbis read it.

The rabbis
read that prohibition as you shouldn't

see the kid and it's mother's milk.

Now, I would argue, or at least suggest
argue might be a little too strong.

But the reason why the rabbis read
the verse that way is

because of their assumption
that the Bible was perfect.

The by being perfect,
the Bible doesn't repeat itself.

God assumes that people are going to be
listening closely and reading closely.

And so you don't need to have two verses
that say,

don't kill two generations of species
on the same day.

So you've got one verse that says,
Don't kill two generations of species

on the same day.

You've got another verse that you read
is milk instead of fat, right?

And it gives you a different law.

The problem with this law
is that it's repeated three times.

But what about the assumption
of perfection

that God doesn't repeat himself?

So the rabbis here assume that each time

the verse is repeated,
it's coming to teach us something new.

That's the language of yeshiva, right?

Or Jewish seminary, Right.

And sometimes they use their thumbs
in order to illustrate.

So the first time the Bible tells us,
do not see the kid and it's mother's

milk, it means do not cook
milk and meat together.

Right.

It's a specific example

of that general prohibition
of cooking milk and meat together.

The second where I'm on this stuff

the second time, the Bible says,
do not see the kid and its mother's milk.

It means that you shouldn't eat

milk and meat together, even if it's cold.

Even if it's cold, right.

That's something
it does it say that in the Hebrew Bible

is that the plain contextual
meaning of the Hebrew Bible?

Is that what modern scholars say?

The Hebrew Bible means?

No, But with this rabbinic assumption
of the perfection

and the fact that the Torah is cryptic,
right?

Meaning
that you have to read deeply into it.

That's
how the rabbis understood the repetition.

Now I'm back on this
them and the third instance of

Do not see the kid and it's mother's milk
means that you're forbidden

from financially benefiting
from the combination of milk and meat.

In other words.

Well, this is a question now, can a Jew
that's committed to traditional Jewish law

work at McDonald's where you're selling
Big Macs and not Whoppers with cheese?

That's right. Cheeseburgers.

So when I was in yeshiva in Jerusalem

seminary,
my teacher asked us that question

and we said, you know,
we just learn this line.

No, because if you can't benefit,
you're getting paid

for serving milk and meat together.

But it was a trick question
because the meat

that McDonald's serves is not kosher meat.

And these laws only apply to kosher meat.

So you can't serve kosher meat
and milk together

and you can't benefit from them
being served together.

Okay, fair enough.

So we see here that these three rabbinic

re readings or two rabbinic
re readings of the second and third

repetitions of that verse vary
greatly from what

the Hebrew Bible or scholars of the Hebrew
Bible will tell you.

Those verses mean in context.

That's an example of how Judaism
often interprets the Hebrew Bible in ways

that are very much intentioned or at odds
or in disjunction

with the plain sense of the Hebrew Bible
and what we're going to be looking at

for the rest of this
course is how Judaism creatively rereads

or creatively misreads, as
some people might say, that Hebrew Bible,

in order to keep Judaism current
with the needs of the community.

So we'll start next time by taking a look

at Israelite history
as presented in the Tenaa.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Shai Cherry,

and we're continuing with our introduction
to Judaism here at the teaching company.

This lecture is entitled
From Israelite to Jew.

What we hope to do in this lecture

is to outline the history
of the Israelite people.

According to the Tanakh,
according to the Hebrew Bible.

I want to emphasize that that the history
that we're going to be talking

about for the next 30 minutes
is the history or the historiography,

the story of the Israelites

existence and dedication
to God, and problems

with keeping dedicated to God
and their experiences

in the land of Israel
from their own perspective.

For many of these historical events,
we don't have external corroboration.

So what I'm not doing here
is presenting Jewish history.

I'm presenting the history
of the Israelite people

from their own perspective.

And we start at the beginning,
as we talked about

in lecture one,
with the creation of the world.

That was the point
of the creation of human beings.

The rabbis recognized early on

that those first six days of creation
really couldn't be technical days

of creation, because for the first
three days, the sun wasn't around, right?

The sun wasn't created until day four.

And we generally mark

the passage of a day by the sun,
whether the sun goes around us

or we go around the sun,
the sun is involved.

So the rabbis started counting time,

not from day one,
but from the existence of human beings.

Day six Therefore, there's no problem
in Judaism with accepting an age of

the earth is 4.5 billion years old,
which is what the scientists tell us.

And also, incidentally,

there's also no problem
accepting the transmutation of species,

which is widely accepted
within the Jewish community.

From the creation we go to

Cain and Abel and what we call primeval
myth or primeval history,

the Tower of Babel stories
that try to get at this very complicated

relationship between God and early human
beings that seem to keep going downhill.

With Cain and Abel.

We have Cain killing his brother Abel.

Then we've got God wiping out
all of humanity in the flood of Noah.

And what is God, say?

This very sad line from Genesis six
five that the devising of a human being's

heart are only evil from his youth,
this psychological propensity

to commit evil notice it's
a psychological propensity to commit evil

and not a kind of ontological
which is that big Greek word

that means, in your essence,
a necessity to be evil.

But certainly the characters

in the early chapters
in Genesis did not act very righteously.

But excuse me, the history
then continues with no in his family.

And again, things go downhill
with the building of the tower of Babel.

Finally, God decides to select one person
and from that one person

to establish a covenant and to see
if by having a specific covenant

with a specific person,
he can build a righteous society.

And this, of course, is Avram.

His name doesn't become Abraham
until a few chapters later.

God tells Abraham or Avram

to leave Iran where he was from,

and to head out toward the land of Israel
because he doesn't want to be encumbered

with the baggage of his parents

and his high school buddies
and his community.

He really needs to start thinking
out of the box and start worshiping

God one God as opposed
to a multiplicity of gods

in a new way
that will best be done on a solo journey.

Not quite solo.

He takes his wife
and he takes his nephew light right?

And they head as long as
well as his father actually

Terra

And they
head west toward the land of Israel,

which at that point is called
the land of Canaan.

Maybe that happened about 2000 B.C.E.,
something like that.

What is this?

This these initials BCE before the Common

Era is as opposed to before Christ

and then after

the next side of the of the divide
is not ad Anno Domini

the year of our Lord because Jews don't
recognize Jesus as being the Lord.

So they say the common era.

So on the one hand
they're using more academics and Jews

both tend to use this terminology of BCE
before the Common era

and see the common era
as a way to be more neutral.

On the other hand,
they're still using the birth of Jesus

as that which demarcates
what came before and what came after.

So that years that I'm going to be
talking about are still the same years.

If you just need to convert in your head
from BCE to be to BCE or from sea to A.D.

So again,

Abraham, the Patriarchs, Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, that probably happened

around 2000 BCE if it happened again,
scholars don't have any evidence outside

of the Hebrew Bible that there were
such people as the patriarchs.

This is Jewish history
from within the Biblical corpus.

Then we've got the book of Exodus.

It begins with well,
it begins with the Israelites

becoming very fruitful
and multiplying greatly.

And there seems to be a change of regime,
a new pharaoh who doesn't recognize

or who doesn't like
perhaps Joseph and his clan.

And so we have this
we have this trick really to kill.

It's not a trick. It's a contract.

A contract to kill the male babies
and keep the female babies alive.

Because there's a concern that there's
going to be some kind of revolt

eventually. The Hebrews,

the Israelites, they're called Hebrews
at this point are made slaves.

And Moses, around the year
1250 BCE, succeeds

in letting my people go in
freeing the Israelite slaves

from the house of bondage,
taking them through the Sea of Reeds.

The Red Sea is actually a mistranslation.

It's not red, it's reed.

There were reeds in those seas,
John Suf the sea of reeds,

and then eventually 49 days
after the liberation from Egypt,

they get to Mount Sinai
and they have a revelatory experience

of God giving the Decalogue,
Do you say Decalogue, by the way?

Not the Ten Commandments,
because Jews have 613 commandments

and there are actually more than ten
that are included in the Decalogue.

For instance, on six days
you shall work, on

the seventh day
shall be a Sabbath to you. Well,

usually you can't one, that you should
have a Sabbath on the seventh day.

But there's also one six days
you shall work.

People forget about working for six days,
especially in this country.

But it's one of the commandments.

So we say the Decalogue or the ten
utterances, the ten words of God.

There's a 40 year sojourn in the desert,

and then finally Moses dies
and that whole generation dies.

The only two people from that generation,
from the Exodus that actually lived

to make it into the promised land,
the land of Canaan at this point

are Joshua and Caleb and Joshua.

Ben One assumes leadership from Moses
and he leads the Israelites

across the Jordan River,

and the Jordan River splits
just like Moses split the Sea of Reeds.

If we were to make a sequel
to the Ten Commandments,

they'd probably use the same set at
Universal Studios brings the Israelites,

or at least the Vanguard Storm Troopers,
to Jericho conquers Jericho,

and that begins this period of conquest
that probably lasts

about 200 years.

And finally, we have

in the 11th century BCE

is a loose confederation
of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Jacob, whose name gets changed

to Israel, has 12 sons

and not exactly each of those sons,
but basically each of those sons.

And then there are two tribes
from Joseph Menashe in a frame.

But Levi, one of the sons, doesn't
get a tribal inheritance.

So there are 12 tribes
that get land in the land of Israel.

And also in what today is Jordan, just
on the other side of the Jordan River.

And they existed in a loose confederacy
for about 200 years until around

they would mobilize and get together
for external threats,

but otherwise they would conduct
their own business, their own governmental

affairs, their own judicial needs
as a confederation, sort of the federalist

system, rather than having a strong
centralized government.

Around the year ten, 20 BCE,
the Israelites demanded a king.

Let us have a king and the prophet Samuel
anoints Saul

Saul as the first king of Israel.

But it doesn't go so well
for the first 20 years.

Finally,
David takes over the kingship from Sol.

David is not king.

Sol's son
David becomes the second king of Israel

and at that point
the monarchy becomes hereditary

so that any legitimate king of Israel

has to be able to claim Davidic ancestry,

which is why the genealogies
in the gospels

of the New Testament,
Matthew and Luke all trace

the genius of Jesus who is understood

to be the Messiah or the King of Israel.

Back to David.

Right,
because that's how you claim authentic,

authentic entitlement to the crown.

David had many, many, many sons.

And one particular son through Batsheva,

which is an interesting story
all by itself.

Solomon assumes the crown around 961

and his reign is marked
by internal rebellion.

One of the things about Solomon's reign
is that he is successful

in building the temple in Jerusalem,

and here we have

a quote from First Kings
eight that describes

that moment of the dedication
of the first temple,

then Solomon stood
before the altar of the Lord

in the presence
of the whole community of Israel.

He spread the palms of his hands
toward heaven and said,

Lord God of Israel, in the heavens above
and on the earth below,

there is no God like you
who keep your gracious covenants

with your servants when they walk
before you in wholehearted devotion. I

notice

that Solomon says there is no God like you

at this point in the Israelite religion.

It's not pure monotheism.

The Israelites may only have one God,
but that's not to say

that they don't recognize the existence
of other gods for other people.

They only have one God.

This is
this is either called Hanno theism, right?

Worship of one God
or Monogatari worship of one God.

Right. Two words to get at the same idea.

So at this point, the Israelites only
worshiped one God, at least officially.

They were only supposed to worship
one God.

We see some backsliding periodically
in the prophetic books

of the Hebrew Bible, but they recognize
the existence and reality

of other gods
for the other surrounding peoples.

When King Solomon dies in 1922,

the Kingdom of Israel splits.

You've got the ten northern tribes.

That's called Israel, and you've got two
tribes in the south that's called Judah.

So you've got the Kingdom of Israel.

In the Kingdom of Judah,
Jerusalem is in Judah.

It's actually in the
tribal allotment of Benjamin.

The ten
northern tribes were ruled by Jeroboam,

and the southern tribes were ruled
by Solomon's son, Rehoboam.

Now, in 1721, you've got the great power
at that point of the ancient

near East Assyria coming in
and destroying the Northern Kingdom.

The Israelites are exhausted.

The Israelites in the North,
the northern kingdom of Israel,

they're exiled that at that point
and they're decimated.

So one out of every ten was killed.

That's what decimated means, right?

Decimal and the other nine were spread out
all over the Assyrian

kingdom, which was quite,
quite extensive at that point.

Those are the ten lost tribes of Israel.

It's not that they were lost.

They didn't know where they were,
but they lost their national identity

or their corporate identity
because they weren't exiled in mass.

So they assimilated and acculturated
into the surrounding regions.

That happened in 721 BCE.

The Kingdom of Judah
fared a little bit better,

and so they actually didn't experience
the wrath

of the leading power of the day
until 150 years or so later.

At that point, the way power politics
works, the Assyrians were no longer

the hegemonic in the region,
but the Babylonians were and in 597

the Babylonians conquered Judah,
the two southern tribes

in that southern kingdom,
and they exiled its leaders.

And then in 586, the final blow came the
temple in Jerusalem that King Solomon had.

That that King Solomon had built
was destroyed by the Babylonians

and the Judaea in the Judaea in population

was exiled to Babylonia in Mass.

So they maintained
their corporate identity.

So they were Judeans outside of Judah.

This is the first time in Jewish history
where people that later become called Jews

have to deal
with having this kind of identity

that's linked to the land
that they're no longer living on,

that they're no longer living on.

Let me read to you
one of the Psalms, some 137

that gets it, this feeling
of being displaced and disoriented

by the river is of Babylon.

There we sat,
sat and wept as we thought of Zion.

There on the poplars,
we hunger liars for our captors

asked us there for songs,
our tormentors for amusement.

Sing this one of the songs of Zion.

How can we sing a song of the Lord
on alien soil If I forget you Jerusalem.

Let my right hand wither,
Let my tongue stick to my palate.

If I cease to think of you,
If I do not keep Jerusalem in my memory,

even at my happiest hour,

they were tormented
by their Babylonian captors.

And one of the things
that the Jordanians respond is

how can we sing
a song of the Lord on alien soil?

Perhaps what's going on here

is that their understanding,
even in the sixth century BCE,

is that the God of Israel only works
when they're in the land of Israel

and that when they're on alien soil, God
either can't hear or God is not powerful.

But there seems to be a suggestion
anyway that we haven't yet

reached,
which we will in the next century.

This idea of there being one God
for all the world that is powerful

all over the world, that can hear people's
prayers all over the world.

And that is the one God
for all the peoples in the world.

So we see stages
in development of Israelite theology.

Again,

we have a switch in the power
politics of the region.

Babylon goes down and Persia comes up.

The Persians under King Cyrus.

The second conquered Babylon in 539,

and they allow the Jordanians to return to
what is now called Yehud.

The way to say Jew in Hebrew is Yehuda,
someone who comes from Yehud,

right from Judea
is a Jew day in or in English.

We now say a Jew, right?

We think of Judah ism as a religion,
but it was certainly attached

intrinsically to this geology

geography of place in the land of Israel.

Judah,

the Jew Dayan's who return,
which is only about 10%

of the exiled population to Babylonia.

They engage
in the rebuilding of the temple.

This now becomes the second temple,
which was dedicated in 516.

So 516 is when they dedicated it.

586 is when it was destroyed.

There was a 70 year span
when the temple didn't exist.

Keep that 70 years in mind.

We will come back to it 70 years after
the second Temple is destroyed.

It's a preview of coming attractions.

The next major

movement in Israelite history
is when Alexander the Great conquers

the ancient Near East goes very, very,
very far East.

Alexander the Great, He's
he brings Hellenism.

He was a student,
legend has it, of Aristotle,

and he brings Hellenistic culture,
philosophy, literature, drama

into the regions under his occupation,

the empire that he has conquered
upon his death.

That Kingdom of Alexander
the Great was divided into three parts,

and the land of Israel was controlled
initially

by the ptolemies of Egypt
and the Ptolemies of Egypt.

They encouraged Hellenism, but they didn't
aggressively push Hellenism

so that those people living in Judea
who wanted to maintain their ancestral

ways, their ancestral religions,

could do so without harassment,
without interference.

That changed in the year 200,
when the land of Israel changed

hands from the Ptolemies
from Egypt to the solutions of Syria

and the Seleucids began spreading
Hellenistic ideas and philosophy

and religion more aggressively
throughout the land of Israel.

This is where the history might become
a little more familiar

to some of you, because around the year
168, we have the first war

for religious freedom recorded in history,

and that was initiated by Judah
and his sons, The Maccabees.

Right. Otherwise known as the Hasmonean is

the name

Maccabee, by the way,
means Hammer in Hebrew.

And that might be why they got their name,
because they hammered the Syrians.

Or it might be an acronym for verse
that we have in Exodus chapter 15.

It says Mika Moka by Hélene Adonai.

If you take the first letters of those
four words, Meek Homolka, the Alien,

and then Otto Knight is begins with a good
or the Y that spells out Maccabee.

And what do those four words mean?

Who is like you? Lord, amongst the gods

or amongst the mighty
is how it's traditionally translated.

And that may have been what
the Maccabees put on their shields

as they went to war against the Syrian
Greeks or the Syrian Seleucids.

So we're not sure exactly
what Maccabees refers to

this war that we

celebrate today as the holiday of Hanukkah

was certainly a war against the Hellenism
of the Syrian Greeks.

But you also have to remember that
it was a civil war.

It was a civil war between those Jews
who were less Hellenistic

and those Jews who were more Hellenistic
and the Maccabees represent tradition,

the customs of the ancestors
is their right.

They were Hellenism to a degree, but
they didn't want to become as Helen ized,

as many other people
in the land of Israel did, who thought,

Great, We can be cosmopolitan,
we can be like Alexander the Great.

Why maintain these particular mystic
distinctions?

Let's join the world culture of Hellenism.

Let's start
engaging in traditional Jewish law.

Let's stop circumcising our kids.

Let's stop this allegiance to the Torah
and let's become good Hellenistic

citizens, right?

That was too much for the Maccabees
and a whole group

of more traditional conservative
conservative with a small C Jews

that really went to war
against those more Hellenistic elements.

The reign of the Hasmonean has expanded
the territory

of the Kingdom of Israel,
but the dynasty quickly became corrupt.

About 100 years later,
there was a struggle between two brothers

within the Hasmonean dynasty,
and one brother actually invited Rome.

That was now the new power, right?

The Greeks had been the the power.

Now Rome takes over as the great power.

And one of the brothers invited
Rome in to the land of Israel in 63 BCE.

And once Rome had a toehold in the land,

they slowly established
control of the land.

First they had native born rulers
to represent them and to collect taxes.

And finally
they appointed their own pro curators

in order to
control the masses and collect taxes.

One of the things that they're
particularly interested in

was the collection of taxes.

At this point, things were

bad for the people
living in the land of Israel.

Taxation was burdensome.

They didn't have political freedom.

They didn't have the religious freedom
that they had experienced under

under the Hasmonean dynasty.

And so apocalyptic visions
of the end of time start to proliferate

and people begin suggesting,
maybe he's the one to fight the Romans

and to kick them out of the land
and to be the messiah.

Right?
We'll have a whole session on the Messiah.

But the fundamental idea of the Messiah
is the idea of a Jewish king

related to king David, who reestablishes
Jewish political sovereignty

for Jews in the land of Israel.

So there began to be messianic speculation
at this point.

And finally, in the year
66, this tinderbox explodes.

And we have what's called the Great Revolt
from 66 to 70,

The Great Revolt is started
by Jewish zealots, sort of right wing

nationalists

who want who believe that only Jews
should be

in political control of the land of Israel
and of the temple.

So they initiate the great revolt
against the Romans.

The occasion for the revolt

was when the Roman Procurator,
Jesse Floris, expropriated

gold from the temple treasury,
which could only be used for holy things.

And so this provided
a pretext for the war.

So although it took several years,
the Great Revolt is eventually quashed

and the second Temple is destroyed
by the Romans in the year 70,

according to rabbinic sources.

Rabbinic Legend One member
who represents the

accommodationist party in Judaism,
the Doves, the Liberals,

Rabbi
Yohanan Ben Zaki during the Great Revolt

before the temple is destroyed,
he is spirited out of Jerusalem

in a coffin by his disciples
and is allowed by the Roman War,

by the Roman General
who was prosecuting the war to establish

what becomes the seed of rabbinic Judaism.

An Academy of rabbinic sages at Yavne.

Some scholars suggest
this was really a P.O.W.

camp for some of the people captured.

We don't really know

historically what Yoav note was,
but what the rabbinic sources tell us

is that it was the seed of rabbinic
Judaism founded by Rabbi Yohanan.

Ben Zaki.

What happened to these zealots,
by the way?

The zealots that started the Great Revolt
to begin with in 66,

they managed to escape the Old City before
it was destroyed.

And Josephus,
who is a historian of this period,

he started out as a Jewish soldier
and then surrendered

to Roman forces in the north of Israel

and sort of bargained his way
into a nice villa and pension in Rome.

And he would agree
to write the history of the Jews

during this period, which he did in Greek.

He describes lives

how sanguinary this revolts end was
that blood was flowing through

the streets of Israel, blood
was flowing through

the streets of Jerusalem.

At that point,
the zealots figured out that the writing,

the blood was on the wall.

They managed to escape from Jerusalem
and they went up to one of the

one of the last king of Israel's
mountain fortresses

at Masada and were able to survive there
until around the year 74,

when the Romans finally succeeded
in breaching the walls of Masada.

There's a great miniseries
that describes those events.

The Jews on the mountain
decided to commit suicide

rather than to be captured
and enslaved by the Romans.

Okay, on one foot, as we say,
that's the history of the Jews.

For about 2000 years, from the patriarchs
to the destruction of the second Temple.

Now what I want to do is outline
what some of the Jewish sects

were at the eve of the destruction
of the temple.

One group that we know about
from from the New Testament

and from Josephus, as well as from
rabbinic literature, are the Sadducees.

The sadnesses
didn't have an oral tradition

that interpreted
the Torah that we have the Pentateuch.

Therefore, they denied resurrection
of the dead because resurrection

isn't mentioned at all
in the Torah, In the Pentateuch,

we have references
to resurrection in later books, but

because it doesn't appear in the Torah,
the subjects rejected it.

They also denied divine omniscience.

Since free will
is a necessary assumption of the Torah,

God lays out all kinds of laws
and commands and says Choose life.

Choose to follow the commandments.

That didn't make sense to the sad disease.

If God knew ahead of time
what the Jews were going to decide to do.

The sandwiches were also connected
with the aristocracy in the priesthood.

They tended to be the more Helen
ized members of society.

Another group in Second Temple
Judaism were called The Scenes,

and the scenes were widely associated
with a group living around the Dead

Sea and are held to be responsible
for the Dead Sea Scrolls,

which were found in 1947
by a little Bedouin boy.

The scenes were in a set a community

with an apocalyptic theology
that was also dualistic,

so they understood
the world was coming to an end.

And how would that world come to an end?

The Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness
would battle each other with the sons

of light prevailing.

The seams
reject freewill totally and claim

that divine providence
controls everything.

Another group were followers,
early followers

of Jesus outside the land of Israel.

They're called Christians.

Inside the land of Israel.

They're called Nazarene
because Jesus lived for them

for the majority of his life.

In Nazareth,
they claimed that Jesus was the Messiah,

although Jewish sovereignty had not yet
been restored to Israel.

Thus there was the prophecy of an imminent
second coming in order to fulfill those

earlier expectations of what a messiah
would do outside the land of Israel.

We have Saint Paul, who is known
as the Apostle to the Gentiles,

and he spreads the good news the Gospel

throughout the Roman Empire
and was incredibly successful in doing so.

The last group that really

had the most Israelites of that time

affectionate toward were the Pharisees.

The Pharisees have gotten
a terrible reputation, a tragic reputation

from the New Testament.

But the Pharisees were the most
popular group amongst all these groups.

Before the temple was destroyed
in the year 70,

they claimed an oral tradition
which interpreted the Torah.

So unlike the Sadducees,
the Pharisees believed in resurrection,

and they also believed
in the world to come that people would get

rewarded
or punished in the next world upon death,

depending
on what their actions were in this world.

The Pharisees promoted

the priestly purity laws
that were only obligatory for the priests

as a way for all of Israel
to attain holiness.

They really were interested
in democratizing Judaism,

in taking the Temple Judaism
that's described in the Bible

and making it accessible
and obligatory for all of Israel.

The Pharisees
can be viewed as the spiritual descendants

of the spiritual ancestors of the rabbis.

Whenever the rabbis talk about a dispute
between the Pharisees and the say this is

without exception,
they always agree with the Pharisees

that oral tradition of the Pharisees

becomes the oral Torah of the rabbis,
so that by the time

we get to our next lecture
that talks about the value

of the preeminent value of town,
the Torah, it's actually in two lectures.

The oral traditions have become an oral
Torah

that have the same authority
and the same origin as the written Torah.

So that, according to the rabbis at Mt.

Sinai, God gave to Moses,
not just the written tours

that we have in the Pentateuch,
but also the oral Torah.

That includes all of the interpretations
for those parts of the Torah

that aren't so clear
or weren't included in any case.

So we'll talk about more about
the oral Torah in the future

when the
destruction happens in the year 70,

we see that two of those four groups
lose their

lose their existence.

The Sadducees had been associated
with the temple, and so once

the temple is destroyed,
they lose their institutional power base

and the scenes were wiped out.

They were physically killed
during the Great Revolt.

So the only two groups left
from Second Temple Judaism

were the Nazarene slash Christians,
and it took a couple of hundred years.

But the Jewish Christians
who still maintain fidelity to Jewish law

and thought that Jesus was the Messiah,
they eventually sort of fell

by the wayside.

But Gentile Christianity that no longer
felt obligated to the commandments.

That was an incredible success story
for Christianity.

And then the Pharisees
morphing into rabbinic Judaism,

then become the one kind of Judaism
for hundreds of years that dominates

the Jewish world, and they achieve
hegemony within the Jewish world.

Now, the next lecture that we're going
to look at focuses on what the central

religious concept of these rabbinic Jews
was in the post Temple Reality.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is
Shai Cherry, and this is the third lecture

in the teaching company's
introduction to Judaism on repentance.

Or I will be using the Hebrew tissue.

So let us talk about what
that word tissue means.

Literally,
it means to return or to respond.

You can understand perhaps both meanings

to return to a place that you had been to
or to respond to someone

who had been speaking to you
and you return that person's words.

In rabbinic Judaism,
the idea of repentance or to Shiva

is the central concept of rabbinic
Judaism, because rabbinic Judaism emerges

after the second Temple has been destroyed
by the Romans in the year

70 of the Common Era,
one of the primary functions of the temple

was to achieve atonement for one's sins

by usually bringing an animal sacrifice
to the priests, and the priest would serve

as an intermediary
and would slit the throat of the animal.

Usually,
and you would theoretically pledge

not to do whatever you had done before.

But it was that animal sacrifice
that effected atonement.

Well, once the temple has been destroyed,
your address for atonement disappears.

So how do you get clean?

How do you get pure before
God from those transgression ones

that we all through the course of living,
most of us anyway commit.

So the idea of tissue var

although it appears in the Bible
and we'll take a look at those instances,

becomes absolutely central in the rabbinic
mind and in rabbinic religion

tissue. The

the return

or responding the idea
of returning to be in right

relationship with God
and responding to God's call

for us to heed the divine commandments
that were revealed at Mt.

Sinai and that subsequently
went through a process of interpretation.

We'll talk more about that process
of interpretation in the next lecture.

But a process of interpretation
with the Pharisees,

with the scribes before that,
and then finally with the rabbis.

So now that we have a definition,
a working definition of tissue, var

let's begin
chronologically unpacking the concept.

So let's start at the beginning.

The rabbis say that tissue that preceded
creation,

tissue that preceded creation,

in other words, the world couldn't exist

without some way for the people
that inhabit this world

to rectify their transgressions
or to feel as though

they're now back again
in right relationship with God.

So before even creation again,
this is according to the rabbis

in a midrash, a text,

a midrash is a rabbinic idea
that's connected to a biblical verse.

And we'll explain
more about midrash in the next lecture.

But in the midrash imagination
of the rabbis, the world couldn't exist

without the Shiva.

So it preceded creation

because whenever we inevitably falter

or stumble,
we need a way to write ourselves

and we need the possibility
of writing ourselves.

And here, of course, the assumption is
that God wants us to write ourselves

to do tissue VA
and we have the ability to do tissue VA

So those are the presuppositions
of this idea of tissue. But

when we think about the

biblical paradigms of tissue, VA
although the word itself, tissue VA

doesn't appear in the Hebrew Bible,
the verb does.

But I would say that
the primary biblical character

to exhibit the characteristics of a

all tissue VA of someone who engages
in this act of tissue.

VA is King David.

King David.

King David,
as I mentioned in previous classes,

had a dalliance with Batsheva.

He sees her from his rooftop.

He's got a nice a nice roof garden

on his in his castle
in the old city of Jerusalem.

He sees Batsheva takes a liking to her,
but she hears husband is away at war.

Has Batsheva came
in, brought into his house

where they engage in sexual relations,
which is a capital a capital crime, right?

Because that is adultery,
because she is a married woman

and they have a child or

she gets pregnant,
the child actually ends up dying

as a punishment
for both by his act of adultery,

although how much say she had
in the matter

when the king wants you to do something,
she probably didn't

have that much to say about it,
but also as a punishment to King David.

But when King David is faced with what

he's done by Nathan, his prophet, Right.

All the kings had prophets.

One of my teachers at Brandeis,
where I received my Dr.

Reuben Kimmelman,
he said that the prophets in the biblical

period served the same function
as today's free press.

Right?

They tell the King

what the king needs to hear in order
to keep him on the straight and narrow.

So when Nathan challenges King, David's

despicable behavior
with Bite Shiver, King David immediately

confesses,
I stand guilty before the Lord, right?

He doesn't say using that
Mel Brooks line, It's good to be the king,

and I can do whatever I want to do
because I'm

the king and who's to tell me otherwise?

He said, I stand guilty before the Lord.

He took responsibility. He cut to it.

He regretted his action.

He never did anything like that again.

He is
the model of the Shiva and King David.

You also need to remember,
in the span of biblical

history,
he is the ancestor of the Messiah.

The Messiah is going to be part
of that Davidic line.

So already in the Hebrew Bible,
there's this connection between two Shiva

and redemption, the redemption
that the other only the Messiah can bring.

I mentioned that the word itself,
the shoe doesn't appear in the Tanakh,

but the root, the shoe to return
or to respond does appear.

And in one case in First Kings
chapter eight,

verse 48,
it talks about the person return,

the person who has transgressed,
returning directly to God.

So it's this sense of return to God
being in right relationship to God

attendant to that return an

was also the animal sacrifice
that when the temple stood

was a necessary condition
in order to effect that atonement.

Leviticus four and Leviticus
five have lots of examples

of different kinds of sacrifices
that the person who realizes

they've transgressed is responsible
for bringing to the priest and Leviticus.

It's not the temple that the sacrifices
are brought to, but the tabernacle,

the prototype of the temple,
the tabernacle is kind of a portable

temple in the desert.

But then later on one
would go to the temple in Jerusalem

and bring an animal sacrifice
to have that final if

effecting moment of atonement.

Already in the prophetic books,

there is what is called
a prophetic critique of the priesthood

that involved emphasizing
that just behavior,

righteous behavior was a required element
to be in right relationship to God.

It wasn't enough
to just bring the animal sacrifices,

but if you brought them with dirty hands,
then that wasn't good to Shiva, right?

You had to.

You had to still

bring the animal sacrifice,
but you also had to change your evil ways.

When we move in to the

rabbinic period,
the question then becomes, what do we do?

We can change our evil ways,
but we can't bring that animal sacrifice.

The early Jewish Christians answered
that problem of not having the temple

anymore
through the vicarious atonement of Christ

who died on behalf of our sins.

That wasn't
the option that the Rabbinic Jews took.

Let me read to you from Moses
my mind at ease.

My mind at ease is someone

that will spend a whole session
on when we get into the medieval period.

But he's summarizing
rabbinic Judaism's approach

toward tissue VA, he says as follows

At the present time,
when the temple no longer exists

and we have no altar for atonement,
nothing is left but to Shiva.

To Shiva atones for all transgressions

to shuba atones for old transgressions.

One of the distinctions
that we find in the Bible

but is made much clearer within
rabbinic Judaism

is this idea that you've got two different
kinds of transgressions.

You've got transgressions between myself
and other human beings,

and you've got transgressions
that happened between myself and God

where other human beings aren't involved.

The next section that I want to read
is from the first product,

the first literary product of Rabbinic
Judaism, a codex of Jewish law.

I called the Mishnah again
in the very next section.

I know I keep saying that,

but in the very next section
we'll talk about what the missioner is.

But this comes from the first,
second, third century of the Common era.

Certainly post the temple,

the one who

says, I will stray,
I will transgress and I will return.

I will do Tuva,
I will transgress, and I will do to Shiva

that is insufficient int to effect tissue
Shuba the one who says I will straight.

You're

the one who says I will stray

and Yom Kippur will atone
for my transgressions.

Yom Kippur
God will not atone transgressions

by humans against God
for those transgressions.

Yom Kippur will atone,

but transgressions by humans
against their fellow human beings.

Yom Kippur does not atone
until he appeases his fellow.

Just like in the Bible,
when you harm someone,

you need to make restitution
in order to effect tissue via

that involved transgression
with another person.

You can't just say that
you're going to do to Shiva and that's it.

Or go through Yom Kippur,
the Day of Atonement, and that's it.

If you've wronged someone,
you need to apologize.

If you stolen from one,
you need to restore their lost property.

In other words, you need to
you need to get closure

on the issue so that no one else
is holding onto bad feelings.

The rabbis develop this idea of tissue VA

and it has incredible power
for the rabbis.

The rabbis distinguished
to shove off from fear,

which is on a relatively low level,
and to Shiva

through love, love of God
and wanting to do right

as opposed to fear of punishment
that in the afterlife, if we don't do too

shiva in this world,
we are going to be punished.

What the idea of the Shiva is for the
rabbis is not necessarily

or not primarily a return to God,
as we saw in the Hebrew Bible,

but a return to God's
will as expressed through Jewish law,

so that there are specific lists of things
that we're not supposed

to do and specific lists of things
that we are supposed to do.

And when we violate either of those lists,
whether it refers to God

or refers to other human beings
in order to do to Shiva,

we don't return to God,
but we write our ways.

It's about deeds
rather than devotional posture or piety.

Being in the presence of God
once the temple is

destroyed, it's
no longer about being in God's presence.

The temple was God's address,

but for rabbinic Judaism, it's
more about following God's ways

or following God's will as it is mediated
no longer through a priest,

but through Jewish law,
which is called Halacha.

Halacha literally means the way

like the door,
the path, the way in which we walk.

And it emphasizes the idea of deeds
and what people should be doing

to maintain themselves in being right
in right relationship with God.

One of the statements in the Talmud

about the power of the Shiva is as follows

We're able to shuba
one who is engaged in tissue by stands

a totally righteous person,
by which they mean

one who is never transgressed
cannot stand right.

So I can't stand there because what
the bulk Shiva has gone through,

someone who's never succumbed
to temptation, can't possibly know.

I don't know about her. Right.

That the person that is completely
righteous and who has never transgressed

doesn't know the exhilarating thrill

of giving in, whether it's to women or

men or drugs or fill in the blank,
whatever someone might

be committing their transgression with,
there is a kind of zip to it.

And if the person
that is completely righteous

hasn't experienced that draw
or that temptation,

they according to the Talmud,
they're on a lower level.

The person that has experienced
that temptation and is strong enough

to know that zip that exhilaration
and to overcome it, to manifest

self-restraint and self-control
for the rabbis there at a higher level.

Another statement in the Talmud

by racial quiche

is that tissue that is so great

that pre-meditated
transgressions are accounted

in the great ledger of your deeds

as though they were merits

that premeditated sins in the past,
once that person has done to Shiva,

are counted as though they were merits.

In other words, this is transformative
to Shiva is transformative

because now as someone that has gone
through the process of tissue, VA,

I can benefit from that experience.

And not only am I stronger,
but I can help other people

who haven't yet gone
through the process of tissue.

VA I can shepherd them through the process
because I've got more credibility

in their eyes
than the person who is never transgressed.

And in that process of, you know,
I committed a premeditated sin,

but I also
then realized the error of my ways

and now through to Shiva,
I'm using that experience in order to

right the
wrongs that other people are committing.

It's sort of like someone
who was arrested for breaking into a car.

He goes through the prison system
and he repents, he atones,

and then he becomes a locksmith. Right.

And he helps the industry figure out ways
to make more ingenious locks

that can't be picked.

And he's helping other people
in a roundabout sort of way avoid that

profession.

So the idea of the Shiva is both

transformative and creative.

One of the great religious thinkers
of the 20th century,

one of the great Jewish Talmudic figures
in the 20th century, Robert Joseph Baer

Soloveitchik, said that repentance
is an act of creation

of self creation.

Right.

Jean-Paul Sartre,
a French existentialist, said

a similar thing
that your future is virgin,

your future deeds shouldn't be predicated
on your past deeds.

You always have an opportunity
to recreate yourself.

I went to school in San Mateo, California,

the same little private school
from fourth grade to eighth grade.

There were 13 to 18 kids in my class.

All the kids in my eighth grade class
when they graduated from this junior

high school,

they went to other private schools
or Catholic schools that I didn't go to,

but I was the only one
that went to my public high school,

and it was a chance
for me to reinvent myself.

Nobody knew what kind of kid I had been.

From fourth to eighth grade,
I had a blank slate.

My future was virgin,
and it was this incredibly powerful moment

where I didn't have any baggage
and I could make my future

fresh from the ground up. Right?

That's the idea of recreating yourself
and the liturgy.

Jewish liturgy every morning says
that God recreates nature every day anew.

So just like God recreates the world
on a daily basis, we have that power.

So often we get stuck in inertia

and in our same patterns
and in a rut rather than in a groove.

And we don't take advantage
of that opportunity to recreate ourselves.

But the Jewish tradition and the emphasis
on tissue emphasizes that as an ideal.

An ideal possibility.

Okay, now let's move into

the medieval period
and we have a code of law by Moses.

My mind at ease.

He wrote this in 1180 and he asks
the question, what defines tissue?

But his answer, when the string one leaves
his error.

Right, you've got it right.

Stop doing it
and removes it from his thoughts.

You don't even think about doing it
and resolves

in his heart never to repeat it

resolves in his heart. Right?

I'm not going to do this ever, ever again.

He needs to make all confession

and say that these matters are finished
from his heart.

It's important that it's oral.

We need to hear ourselves
say it to have maximum impact.

It's not just about thinking it,
but it's saying it out loud.

Does it have to be to somebody
else? Oral confession.

No, You can say it out
loud to yourself in a sealed room,

but you have to hear yourself articulate
the words because words have power.

God created the world
through words, through speech.

According to Genesis one

and for the rabbinic tradition,
words are very powerful.

We need to hear those words
that we are leaving this forever.

He needs to make

oral confession and say that these matters
are finished from his heart.

So we've got those conditions
that let you know that right.

That person has done tissue.

But then there's a second condition.

My mind at ease goes on to say, One knows
that one has successfully accomplished

tissue by when he's in the same situation
where he'd previously transgressed

and there is no fear of being caught

or lack of power
to commit the transgression.

And he refrains from transgressing. Right.

When you're in the same situation
that you had previously gone astray

and you're not worried
about getting caught,

and you're not worried that
that you don't have the power,

you might not be able
to go through with it

and you still refrain from doing it,
then you know that you are successful

penitent or tissue of someone
who has gone through that process

in the modern period.

The idea of the Shiva of return
gets additional ideas.

It's no longer only about returning
to God's will, as expressed

through Jewish law,
through the Halacha, for instance,

there is a Zionist pioneer
by the name of all of Adi

Gordon, all of Dullard Gordon,
who left Eastern Europe

when he was a mature man
in his late forties or early fifties

and went to Palestine in order
to help rebuild the land of Israel

in the early 20th century
and he also was very concerned

about the Jewish alienation from the soil
because of the way

Jewish history unfolded in certain church
laws and certain

prudent vocations the Jews went into.

Jews tended not to be farmers
or agronomists,

but Adi Gordon felt as though the Jews
needed to return to nature, right,

Not only in terms
of returning to those occupations

that the biblical patriarchs
engaged in shepherds and farmers,

but also in terms of having
that sense of linkage to the earth

and to another one of God's creations,

that that needed to be healed,
that rupture of alienation

between the individual and nature
in the soil needed to be healed.

He did that in the land of Israel,
and he talks about the tissue

or the sense of returning to nature.

Other were all affected.

Gordon wasn't particularly religious,
but there were other early

religious Zionists who folded
in the notion of return to Shiva

to the land of Israel as part of Discover.

So it's now not only about returning to
God's will, but it's returning to nature.

It's returning to the land of Israel,
which at that point was called Palestine.

All of these ideas get conflated
in the concept or the term of tissue.

Var By the beginning of the 20th century

there is a relat, tively

long quote by Roth Avraham Cooke.

Roth Cooke was the first Chief Rabbi

of Palestine, the first Ashkenazi
Chief Rabbi of Palestine.

He wrote this actually during World War
One, when he was trapped in Switzerland.

Not a bad place to be trapped, actually,
if you're going to be trapped.

But he was traveling away

from the land of Israel during World
War One and he couldn't get back.

So he spent the years of World
War One in Switzerland,

and he wrote a kind of mystical diary.

Ron Cooke is known
for very poetic, mystical language.

He writes as follows

When one forgets the essence of one soul,

when one distracts his mind
from attending to the substantive

content of his own inner life,
everything becomes dark and uncertain.

The primary role of the Shiva,

which at once sheds light on the darkened
zone, is for the person

to return to himself,
to the root of his soul.

Then he will at once return to God

the soul of all souls.

It is only through the great truth
of returning to one's self

that the person and the people

community, so the whole society,

the world and all the worlds,
the whole of existence

will return to their creator
to be illumined by the light of life.

This is the mystical
meaning of the light of the Messiah,

the manifestation
of the soul of the universe

by whose illumination the world
will return to the source of its being

in very beautiful language.

What Robb Cooke has done is wrapped
in all those

previously historical sensitive
to Shiva in a mystical way.

So not only are we returning to our self
and to God, going back to that biblical

idea of returning to God, the soul
of all souls, once we return to our soul.

But the hope the person and the people,
the people return

to the land of Israel
and then all of creation returns.

We have to return to creation, to nature,
all of the old Gordon's idea

and then all of that.

This is the mystical innovation.

All of that returns to God, right.

In recognition that all of us are part
and parcel of the divine reality.

And once we change our consciousness

by changing our deeds, doing too

Shiva is just the the first step in

having a different kind of view of reality

so that we expand our consciousness,

expand our consciousness
to perceive the divinity in all reality.

That's what defines redemption

or the messianic light,
the Messianic era for Rav Cooke.

So what has he done?

He's gone back to this biblical idea
of linking to Shiva and redemption.

We start with King David in the Bible,
and what I've cooked now takes

3000 years of Jewish thought
and Jewish history,

including Zionism, and wraps
it back into his understanding

of the power,
the transformative force of tissue of

Rabbi Joni Mitchell

said, We are stardust, we are golden,

and we have to get ourselves
back to the garden.

We are stardust,

we are golden, and we have to get
ourselves back to the garden, right?

I don't know if she was reading
Roth Cooke, but perhaps he was.

Perhaps he is translated into English.

We are stardust.

We are connected to the world, to nature,

and we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.

Right? Is it the garden of goodness?

Is it the Garden of Eden?

We need to get back to being in right?

Relationship to God.

Okay, so as a 30 something

Jewish studies person, right?

I hear Joni Mitchell
when I read the Garden of Eden story,

but because I'm a Jewish studies person,
I also hear the Garden of Eden story.

And in the Garden of Eden story,
it says in Genesis chapter three, verse 24

that God drove

the man out from the Garden of Eden
as a result of the transgression

and stationed east of the Garden of Eden,
the cherubim, these angels

and the fiery ever turning sword
all right,

going back and forth
to guard the way to the Tree of Life.

So I would say that my academic colleagues
at Vanderbilt

Bible studies, people would say that
the cherubim, those angels

that have that fiery ever turning sword,
are there in order to prevent human beings

from getting back to the garden
and eating from the tree of life.

Because then we will have eaten
from the tree of life

and from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil.

And God, for some reason,
doesn't want us to taste both of those.

So that was apparently the reason

why we were exiled
from the Garden of Eden to begin with.

But there is a rabbinic interpretation
that those fiery, ever returning swords

aren't there
to protect the tree from us returning.

But they're to alert us, right?

The verse says,
to guard the way to the Tree of Life.

Well, it doesn't have to be about
preventing human beings from getting back,

but letting people know
that this is where the tree of life is.

Right?

This is the sign, this is the flag,
this is the symbol.

So perhaps
that is not the contextual meaning,

but it is one rabbinic understanding
of of

how we know where to look for the garden,
that fiery every turning sword

and the light of that flaming sword.

I would suggest that's always present
to lead us back to the garden

is to Shiva to return us to that garden.

So we've taken an opportunity
now to look at one of the central

values and virtues and ideals
of rabbinic Judaism, namely to Shiva.

This idea of return.

In our next lecture, we're going to look
at the central activity

of rabbinic Judaism,
which is Talmud Torah.

One way to actually help you engage
in the process of tissue

by to know what to do and what not to do
is tell mature the study of Torah.

So that's where
we will be turning to next.

Thank you.

Welcome back to lecture
four of the Introductory Judaism course,

which is on Talmud Torah or studying
learning.

Actually,
the definition of Talmud Torah is very

cute because Talmud

means learning or studying,
and Torah means teaching.

So tell me Torah, it can be translated
as learning teaching, right?

But it's the idea of study

and it turns out to be
the central commandment or mitzvah.

In rabbinic Judaism,

we already have the idea within the Torah
itself, within the Pentateuch itself,

of speaking about these words day
and night that is familiar to some Jews,

because it is enshrined
in the liturgy of the Shamma.

Schmear comes from the first word
of Deuteronomy six four here

Israel smile means listen up, hearken
here it is real.

The Lord, our God, the Lord is one

You shall love the Lord
our God with all of our heart, soul,

and it should probably be translated
as property.

It's usually translated as might.

And you shall speak about these words,
probably referring back to the Decalogue

that had been given in Deuteronomy
Chapter five.

But rabbinic tradition accepts
those those words as all of the Torah.

You shall speak about those words

all the time
when you're walking along the way,

when you're sitting in your house,

when you lie down at night,
when you rise up in the morning.

So the idea of speaking of the words,
the going over the repetition

of God's words or God's ways, God's midst
votes, the plural of mitzvot,

God's commandments
is already enshrined in the Torah itself,

at least according to the rabbinic
rereading of the Torah.

We also have some 119, which is a pean

to the idea of loving Torah,
of talking about Torah all the time.

What do we have here?

From verse 97 to 98,
somewhere 19 is a very long psalm.

how I love your teaching.

Teaching is Torah.

how I love your teaching.

It is my study all day long.

Your commandments
make me wiser than my enemies.

They always stand by me.

They always stand by me.

So all of Psalm 119, all hundred
and however many verses

it is, it's actually the in acrostic,
the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters

and it repeats that Hebrew alphabet
four times going A through Z,

all of three Toth four times.

And so you've got this big long psalm
that's all about how wonderful

the Torah is.

So even within the two, not itself,
the Torah and studying the Torah,

relating to it as a source of wisdom
and commandments to guide

your life, are promoted.

By the time we get to the rabbinic period

after the temple has been destroyed,
the value of Talmud Torah shoots up

because so many other values
drop off the radar screen.

Because once the temple
has been destroyed,

all of those priestly functions
are no longer obtainable.

And anything that you would do
in the temple, you can no longer do so.

The value of studying the Torah
as a way of communicating, communing

with God and knowing the divine mind

is characteristic of rabbinic Judaism.

That one of the

statements
that gets at the central city of Talmud

Torah, is by Shimon the Righteous,

Shimon Hassidic,
who says that the world stands on

three things on Torah, on worship,
and on acts of love and kindness.

So I took that statement by Shimon
the Righteous

for this lecture
and our next two lectures.

So this lecture is dedicated to the world
standing on Torah

that does he mean that the world
really stands, that it's that the world

is resting on a pillar, a tripod,
and that one leg of that tripod is Torah.

And if people were to stop
studying Torah, then

the world could no longer
be held up or maintained.

I think there's a sense in which he does
mean that we have a rabbinic statement

that says without Torah,

the world would sink back

into the watery chaos of the beginning,

the watery chaos of the beginning,

and the first verses of the Hebrew Bible

in the King James translation
say something like In the beginning,

God created the heaven and the earth
and the Earth looked like this.

The earth was formless and void.

The idea,
the picture that you get from the King

James translation is
when the curtain goes up on the

on the stage of creation,
there's the stage is black.

There's nothing there.

Boom.

God creates

heaven and earth and heaven and earth
are in this inchoate, incipient form.

And God orders the creation. God orders.

God takes chaos and moves it
towards cosmos chaos to order.

But the Hebrews suggests something else.

And so the new Jewish Publication Society
translation of the Tanakh has as follows

When God began creating the heavens
and the Earth,

the Earth was formless and void.

What's the difference when the curtain
goes up on the screen of creation there

on the screen, on that stage of creation,

what you're seeing is this kind of watery,
chaotic swirl already there.

And God takes those elements that existed

before
the curtain went up and orders that.

So what the rabbis here are saying
and the rabbis were okay with that idea

that God took pre existent matter

and made a kind of divine order

out of that pre existent chaos.

By the time we get to the Middle Ages,
they have problems with that idea.

But the rabbis in the rabbinic period
from the first century

to the seventh century
say they were fine with that idea.

But, but what they say about Torah
is that without Torah

the world would revert to this watery,
primeval chaos.

I think the idea there
is actually fairly easy to understand,

namely
that without laws to govern our society,

we would revert to a state of nature
that the rabbis understand,

much like Thomas Hobbes
understood was nasty, short and brutish,

and that things would become complete
anarchy and complete chaos

without the laws that the Torah gives us
to organize our societies and our lives.

It's more,

though, Talmud Torah,
than about ordering your life.

It's also where to find God.

God's exclusive address in the post
Temple Reality

Divine Access is now available
only through the study of God's Word.

For my undergraduates, I do a little skit
called Theocracy Geography.

B My wife doesn't like the term
because she thinks

it should be about theology
and writing graffiti.

But the way I'm using the term geography,
it's about theology and geography.

So the question is where to find God.

If you think about the early books
of the Hebrew Bible in this

Theia graphic skit
that I'm going to now lay out for you,

the way you find God,
the place you find God is in nature.

Walking through the Garden of Eden in
the breezy time of the day and in history,

God appears to Abraham, God appears
to Moses in the form of a burning bush.

Right?

That's where you encounter God
in this world, in nature or in history.

God leads the Israelites out of eat,
out of Egypt with a strong hand.

By the time we get into the middle
books of the Hebrew Bible,

God's presence is accessed no longer

in nature, in history,
but in the tabernacle,

which then becomes the prototype
for the temple in Jerusalem.

So once we get into the land of Israel,
the place that you go

to access the divine
presence is the temple in Jerusalem.

Once the temple is destroyed,
where do you go to get God's presence?

How do you access that?

So the rabbinic answer was the only
the closest thing to God that we have is

God's will as represented in the Torah,
in the five books of Moses.

And what is so nice about the Torah is
that God can be access to the Torah.

24 seven It's
not like you need a priestly intermediary

anymore at the temple to get to God.

Anybody

in this kind of democratization of piety,

anyone can access the Torah.

Moreover, it doesn't matter
who your momma was or who your daddy was.

In order to be a priest,
you had to be of the priestly line,

which was one of Aaron's grandsons,
like Phineas or Pinchas,

in order to have that position of power
and prestige

and influence in the community,
it was pedigree.

But now anyone in this move
toward democratization

who has the intellectual power
of mastering the traditions of the Torah,

they can establish themselves
as the pious, as the leaders,

and also as the ones that represent
a kind of purity,

both in terms of ritual purity
that the Pharisees

emphasized and moral purity
that the rabbis emphasized.

So we see this democratization process
of the leadership in the Jewish community

as a result of the destruction
of the temple right.

Some Jews say,
thank God the Romans destroyed the temple

because it allowed rabbinic Judaism
to emerge in ways that are much more in

keeping with modern Jewish sensibilities
of a more egalitarian access.

Women could study Torah,
but we don't have too many.

We have a few, but we don't have too many.

We don't have too many examples
in rabbinic history of women actually

being literate at all
or mastering the traditions of the Torah.

One statement by

the rabbis in the Talmud is as follows

Rabbi here

Barber says, I'm sorry, Rabbi, here on me.

The son of Ami said,

Since the day the temple was destroyed,
the Holy one has in this world

nothing other than the four cubits or arm

lengths of the Halacha of Jewish law.

In other words, you access God.

Now that the temple is destroyed,
you access God through the Halacha.

I view this statement personally

as sad, but the way you access
God is through Jewish law.

And there were Jewish

there were

people that disagreed with that statement
when it was said in the rabbinic period.

And there were movements in Judaism
in the Middle Ages

and in the early modern period
and in the modern period

that were dedicated to finding God
outside of the Halacha as well.

But we see that one prominent posture

of how to get to God is through
not just Torah

and all the stories that we have,
but the Halacha through Jewish law.

So telling the Torah

is a function of intelligence
and discipline that's open to everyone.

And some of the rabbis
anyway, emphasized the halachic

or the legal aspects of Torah as the way

to commune with God and translate

God's will into the realities
of the present political

and social structure
of the Jewish community.

Now, there's also an aspect

of Talmud Torah that is very erotic,

and many rabbis talk about wishing
they had two mouths

so that they could talk
Torah all day long with one mouth

and then with the other mouth
when they needed to conduct their business

affairs, their private affairs,
their personal affairs,

they would still have access to that.

There's something about Talmud Torah,
and I speak from personal experience

here, having been in the Shiva world
for a few years in Jerusalem,

in the seminar

in the world of Jewish seminary,
there's something that's addicting and

obsessive about

it, where
once you get into this mode, into this

not right,
but into this groove of studying Torah,

you just want to keep doing it
and keep doing it and keep doing it

at the exclusion of all the other things
that we should be doing.

The Rabbinic Judaism
commands us to be doing.

So one of the
we know that this was a problem

for the early rabbis
because so many rabbinic statements

are dedicated to saying don't neglect
your other responsibilities.

Well, they wouldn't need to say
don't neglect your other responsibilities

unless people were neglecting
their other responsibilities.

So for instance,
there's a statement in Pakeha votes,

which is part of the mission.

It's an appendix of the missioner,
which we'll talk about in the next section

that says Talmud Torah
should be combined with worldly concerns

and that someone that just does study
but doesn't translate that into practice.

It's as if they have no God.

Harsh words. The rabbi is very

hyperbolic.

They used exaggeration
whenever they wrote a God like statements.

I get duh.

We talked about halacha as Jewish law
and God is everything else I get.

That literally means
telling or recounting,

and the exotic sections
of rabbinic literature

can deal with theology
or folklore is or magic what we would call

superstition stories about the rabbis
and the disciples.

Anything that doesn't specifically have to
do with the Jewish law is called agenda.

And in the agenda,
the rabbis were very freewheeling about,

you know, someone that just studies Torah
and doesn't engage in worldly pursuits

is as if they have no God's sight,
very dramatic

and bold in their language.

So there was this kind of passionate
love affair

that many of the rabbis had to the Torah,

and they had to be reminded
not to neglect worldly concerns.

But there was also a sense
that the goal of Talmud Torah wasn't

just to commune with God,
but should also be transformative.

There's a lovely passage

that says

that the Torah has 613 commandments.

We mention that number 613, which is
divided into 365 negative commandments.

You shall not commit murder,
you shall not commit adultery

and 248 positive commandments.

Remember the Sabbath day

or eat Mott's unleavened
bread on Passover.

And in the Talmud itself,
it links those numbers.

365 and 248

to the 365 days of the solar year

and the 248

parts of the human body.

Now, there are about 365 days
in a solar year.

I've asked my medical friends
if they know of the number 248,

and they said, you know, that's a stretch.

But the idea behind the midrash
of 365 days

and 248 parts of the body,

is that what studying Torah should be

is this transformative experience
of making our entire body

reflect the will of God

all the time, every moment of every day.

We should be walking pause
with our entire body all of the time.

This may be and I say this speculatively,

this may be a little bit of a polemic
with Christianity, where in Christianity

you've got Jesus
who is the embodiment of God, one person.

Whereas the ideal for rabbinic Judaism
is that all Jews,

all rabbinic Jews,
should not be the embodiment of God,

but the embodiment of God's will,
as expressed through the Torah.

Okay, now we're going to move
from talking about the central

leaning importance of the mitzva of Talmud
Torah to a brief

description of some of the books
on the rabbinic bookshelf.

Again, rabbinic literature.

Let's let's push it way back.

The source is for rabbinic
literature may start

in the first or even second century BCE

and probably go till the seventh
eighth century of the common Era.

The books themselves
begin in the third century,

but a third century book
that was redacted and edited

and didn't really have two covers,
but it was sealed.

It has a beginning and an end.

A third century book may have traditions

that are several centuries
older than the book itself.

The first literary production

of rabbinic Judaism
that I want to talk about is the Mishnah.

The Mishnah literally means repetition
because you repeat when you learn

something, you do it by repeating it over
and over, through memorization, right?

You have to remember that
we're talking about 2000 years ago

when they didn't have computer
texts, computers at all.

And the process of learning in an oral
culture was through the repetition.

The mission is a codex of Jewish law
that was compiled by Yehuda

Hennessy or due to the prince
around the year 220 of the Common Era.

Judah, the Prince,
the person who redacted this text

was the leader, both in a religious sense
and in a political sense

of that community of Jews
that was still in the land of Israel.

The mission is a codex of Jewish law,
and it's not a law book.

What's the difference?

A law book has The law
is it tells you what to do X, Y, and Z.

What's distinctive about the Mishnah
is that it retains

minority opinions and dissenting opinions
every once in a while.

It also throws in some stories,
but very infrequently

the mission is much more halachic
than a gothic.

Okay, the Mishnah

retains

these minority opinions
and dissenting opinions

because it says explicitly
that maybe sometime in the future

there may arise a court whose justices are

intelligent and have greater intelligence
than they are

and of greater number than they are,
perhaps, And they'll want to rely

on the minority opinions
or even on the dissenting opinions,

because as tradition, as historic,
will circumstances change?

Sometimes laws also need to change

in order to address
the needs of that present population.

The mission itself is arranged
conceptually,

unlike the appearance of many of the laws
throughout the Torah,

so that you've got six
orders of the Mishnah,

There's a song that is sung
after the Passover Seder, one who knows,

and it goes through one, two, three, four,
all the way up to 13,

apparently this started out
as a wedding song, as a drinking song.

And so people would go around the table
and say, okay, I've got the number one.

There's one guy, okay,
the next person has two.

Okay, There are two tablets, right?

In the Decalogue, you've got two tablets.

And the person that couldn't think of
the next number would have to drink.

So when they got

to six,
it was the six orders of the Mishnah.

They have to do with sacrificial issues
in the temple.

Purity issues,
criminal law laws related to women,

what laws related to agriculture and laws
related to the holidays.

So those are the six general divisions
of the Mishnah when the law is

in, the Mishnah are recorded,
they're not usually recorded

with the biblical verse
that justifies the law.

So we call this unjustified ID
law doesn't mean that there is no reason.

It just means that there is no reason
that is attached to the mission itself.

The mission just tells you what to do
and what it tells you what to do,

and then it tells you what the other rabbi
who disagrees with the first rabbi,

which is very common,
right, suggests you should do instead

around 250.

There was an appendix to the Mishnah
that was

put at the end of the fourth Division,
which was about criminal law torts.

If the very conclusion you've got
this section called a vote

or the father is the founders,
Abba is father in Hebrew,

in Aramaic, actually,
and a vote in Hebrew is fathers.

That section called fathers or founders

is exclusively agnostic.

That statement that I started
with at the beginning, that's.

SIMON Shimon, the righteous
one said that the world stands on

three things on Torah, on worship,
and on acts of loving kindness.

That is, again, dot found in, per quote,
the chapters of our Fathers

that served a vote served

as a kind of introduction to the Mishnah,
the mission that just presents the laws.

But it doesn't give you any justification

for the authority of the rabbis
to be promoting those laws.

So the way that a vote opens up

is by saying
that Moses received the Torah.

And here they mean the oral Torah,
what's being included in the Mishnah.

So Moses received that Torah at Mt.

Sinai, and Moses
transmitted it to Joshua and Joshua

transmitted it to Pallone, and Pallone
transmitted it to our Moni, Right.

Joe Schmo.

Pallone Moni is Joe Schmo in Hebrew?

And eventually it came down to site

Shimon the righteous one,
and then to Hillel,

who will talk about at some point in our
in our lecture and Ramban

Shimon Ben Gamliel and the rabbis
who make up rabbinic Judaism.

So there is an unbroken chain of tradition
from Sinai

all the way down to rabbinic Jews
that provides the authority

for their interpretation of the Torah

about things that seem to not sit
quite so well with a plain sense

reading of the Torah, as well as issues
that the Torah doesn't even talk about.

For instance, the Torah doesn't talk about
how to kill an animal

according
to the laws of keeping kosher or kashrut.

So if you need to write,
we know that we're only supposed

to eat certain kinds of animals.

Well,
you have to eat them once they're dead

and once the blood
has been drained out to them.

How do you do it?

That information is found in the Mishnah.

It fills in the spaces
where the Bible doesn't

seem to be so interested in giving you,

in fleshing out the details, fleshing out,
so to speak.

Okay,
so the Hebrew Bible is relatively small.

The mission is much bigger, much bigger.

And what the function of for a vote
is, is to link this idea of the oral

Torah back to the same source
and divine authority as the written Torah

in hoary antiquity at Mt.

Sinai.

When the Israelites left Egypt,

the Mishnah,

the mission is that first layer,
and it was the curriculum

that students who were studying to become
masters of the tradition first learned.

But in the process of learning
the mission, new questions came up,

new ways of looking at the law
or looking at the text came up,

and those conversations
about how to understand the mission

and why this law

is authoritative and what biblical verse
does this law stemmed from.

Those conversations were recorded
and later

edited into what is called the Gomorrah.

The Gomorrah is an Aramaic word
that means learning.

Mishnah is a Hebrew word.
That means learning.

Gomorrah is an Aramaic word,
which was the common language

of the land of Israel for hundreds
and hundreds of years during this period.

It also means learning The mission
of plus the Gomorrah equals the Talmud.

The Talmud is a big bookshelf
of the Mishnah at its base,

and then conversations
that start about the Mishnah,

but then go off in a kind of stream
of consciousness, stream of consciousness

way to all kinds of different ideas
and different topics.

For instance,
if we have a law in the Mishnah

about how to slit an animal from the front

so that it bleeds quickly
and not from the back, you can then go

the Gomorrah might then ask, okay, well,
what biblical verse does this come from?

So Rabbi Yossi says, It comes from
the biblical verse, such and such.

but Rabbi Yehuda disagrees.

Okay. And then we'll resolve that problem.

And since we introduced Rabbi Yehuda,
you know what, Rabbi Yehuda was known

for wearing pink and purple
on the Sabbath for these reasons.

So then we'll go into a whole series
of traditions

about what these individual rabbis
did on the Sabbath.

That's totally idiosyncratic
and has nothing to do with the laws

of where to slice an animal's throat
in order for kosher butchering.

So it's this kind of stream
of consciousness, unique literature,

and that's part of the reason
why it's so engrossing.

It pulls you in because you want to know
where it's going to go

because you can't ever see
around the corner in a Talmudic

suja or Talmudic passage.

There are two guimaras

There were two

sets of conversations
that happened around the Mishna.

One set of conversations
happened in the land of Israel,

probably in Tiberius
and in northern Israel,

but that Gomorrah is called,
or that Talmud is called that.

You show me the Jerusalem Talmud
and it's called the Jerusalem Talmud

because of the centrality and importance

and holiness of Jerusalem
to the entire Jewish people.

So there's the Jerusalem Talmud.

But the more authoritative Talmud,
for purposes of deciding

the halacha was created in Babylonia

after the Great Revolt in 78.

There were many Jews
that left the land of Israel,

and even more so 70 years later.

When we talk about messianism, we're
going to talk about the bar Kokhba Revolt.

The Bar Kokhba revolt happened.

It started in 132, about 62 years
after the destruction

of the second temple,
because about 60 years after

there was this notion
that just like 70 years after

the first temple had been destroyed,
it was rebuilt.

So to God will somehow create a situation

where 70 years after the second temple,
the third Temple will be rebuilt.

And so one

a few

rabbis, but one particularly prominent
rabbi, Rabbi Akiba, supported Bar Kokhba

as as a messiah,
as the person to militarily lead

the Jews against the Roman occupation
didn't work out so well,

and as a result of this failed revolt,
the bar

kokhba revolt from 132 to 135,
even more Jews left the land of Israel

and emigrated to the Jewish community
in Babylonia that had been there

since the destruction of the first temple
and the exile,

the Babylonian exile
already back in the sixth century BCE.

So there was a long Babylonian, a long
standing Babylonian community, by the way.

It was at that point during the bar Kokhba
revolt that the Romans got so fed up

with the Jews that they decided
to change the name of the land of Israel

in Judea to echo the Israelites,
ancient enemies, the Philistines.

That's how that landmass
got the name Palestine.

City of Palestina is
what the Romans called it, just to upset,

to erase any trace of a Jewish presence
and to kind of dig it into the Jews.

They were naming it

after the biblical Israelites,
ancient enemies, the Philistines.

So you've got the Jerusalem Talmud

and the Babylonian Talmud.

In terms of quantity,

my thumbnail represents
the amount of quality

of the amount of quantity of the Mishnah
and the rest of my wingspan is Gomorrah.

There's much, much, much, much, much more
Gomorrah than there is to the Mishnah.

The mission I can hold in my hand.

Okay, it's bigger than the Hebrew Bible,
but I can still hold it in my hand.

I'm not nearly big enough or strong enough
to hold the entire Talmud.

There's one final genre of literature
that typifies

what the rabbis were doing in this period,
and that is called midrash.

The word midrash means to seek or inquire
the first person in the Hebrew Bible

to engage in this process of seeking
or inquiring or drawing is Rebecca

Isaac's wife, Rebecca Desroches. God.

And the rabbis subsequently dropped
God's word.

They no longer can go to the temple
or can go to Oracles,

as perhaps Rebecca did,
and go immediately to the source to God.

So the rabbis take this activity
and apply it not to God, but to gods.

Text the Torah.

A midrash is an idea
linked to a biblical verse.

Actually, my own theory is that midrash
also relates to the word to weave.

In the last chapter of proverbs,
we have the the phrase Darkseid,

Samuel fish, Tim the righteous woman, the
the the wife of valor.

She weaves together
or she draws wool and flax.

And I think what a midrash is, is weaving
the text of the Torah

to in up to a current idea
that you want to

then communicate to your own
to your own congregation.

Midrash compilations are usually
categorized as either halachic or exotic.

The earliest halachic compilations

come from the land of Israel
in the third century.

The exotic compilations
also come from the land of Israel,

but they're dated to the fifth century
Midrash compilations.

Unlike the Mishna, they're arranged
according to the biblical verses

upon which they comment.

So if you're trying to do a sermon
on a particular chapter

of the Torah, it's easy
to find it in midrash because it goes

according to what comes before
and what comes after in the Tanakh.

It's very difficult
to find anything in the Mishnah.

You have to know
conceptually where it falls.

We will

continue with our next lecture
on the second of the tripod of Shimon,

of Shimon, the Righteous tripod
of the things that the world stands on.

On worship.

Thank you.

Hi. Welcome back.

We are now going to be looking
at the second of Shimoni,

the righteous tripod of what
the world stands on.

The first leg of the tripod was Torah.

And so we talked about how the Torah,
the study of Torah.

Last session Now
we're going to be talking about Alvo Dah,

which should properly be translated
as worship or service.

But we're really going to be talking
about prayer and the development of prayer

from the biblical period
to the rabbinic period.

Looking at some modern reformulations

of prayers
in the 19th and 20th century as well.

And in between, we'll talk about the rise
of the prayer house or the synagogue.

The reason why I

said the prayer that Abu
Dei should really be translated

as worship or service
is because in the Bible, Aboagye

is almost
always referring to animal sacrifice.

The animal sacrifices
that happened either in the tabernacle,

according to the first

five books of the Bible
or later on in the temple in Jerusalem.

But there is one verse in Deuteronomy

that talks about the worship of the heart.

So we're not talking about open
heart surgery here.

So the rabbi is understand
that worship of the heart must be talking

about something
other than animal sacrifice.

Therefore, it's talking about prayer.

So although there's that one portion
of the Torah that talks

that seems to be referring
to worship of the heart

as opposed to sacrificial worship
generally in the Hebrew Bible,

that term of Adar refers
to worship, sacrificial worship.

But that doesn't mean that the idea
of prayer isn't widespread in the Torah.

Indeed,
it is. Very frequently in the Bible

we have prayer that involves a request
or a petition.

For instance, we have a motif
throughout the Hebrew Bible of the women

being barren and needing to pray to God
in order to open up their womb.

In the first instance that I'm going to
mention, Isaac, who's married to Rebecca,

sees that Rebecca is barren and pleads

with God to open up his wife's
womb, a nice thing for a husband to do.

He steps up to the plate
and praise to God for his wife.

We also see that Moses prays
for his sister

Miriam, when she is afflicted
with some kind of strange,

strange disease,
and he prays for her full healing.

I don't want to give you the impression
that only men

in the Hebrew Bible pray hand in first.

Samuel also prays
she's another barren woman

to continue this motif,
and she prays for a child.

And she says that if she gets this child,
she will dedicate it to the Lord

and hand his child
actually becomes the first prophet.

Samuel.

Other prayers in the

Hebrew Bible
aren't specifically about petition,

but they're about praising God and God's
work.

For instance, some 92 begins.

It is good to praise the Lord
to sing hymns to your name almost high.

So it's a song of celebration.

Many of the Psalms
originally were set to music

and they still have
musical notations in them, like Sela.

Sela is a popular word.

It's also a not uncommon name

for girls that usually not stellar.

Sela And the idea of the musical notation
has been lost.

We know that it had something to do
with conducting the music,

but we don't know exactly what it means.

Other songs are for individual worship,

like,

I am in distress,
or what is good for me to praise you

and your works
and the mountain should sing and the hills

should leap in order to acclaim
God's greatness.

Other songs seem to clearly be communal,
where it's the entire community

like Psalm 105, for instance,
that is singing God's praises.

There's also a series

of Psalms Psalm 122 134
that begins with the Super Scripture,

and it begins with the first few words
Share a lot, a song of a sense.

Now, this is very interesting
because what scholars speculate

is that the Levites would stand
on the steps of the temple

and there were 15 steps
and you have 15 psalms

that begin with that super scripture
in a song of a sense.

So they would stand on the steps,
not exactly like the Mormon

Tabernacle Choir, but sort of
like the Israelite temple Choir.

And they would sing.

And in many cases the singing would be
communal or antiphonal.

So they would sing a verse.

And then the congregants in the courtyard,
the Israelites in the courtyard,

would then sing back, a
reframe, a refrain.

And so we see this in, say, Psalm 136,
where you've got different verses,

and then the refrain is for God's kili
olam hasto for God's mercy is everlasting.

One of

the interesting things about the rise of
synagogue's synagogue is a Greek word

that means a house of worship or a house,
not a house of worship.

A house of assembly, house of gathering

is that
we see the rise of the first synagogues

already in Egypt in the third century BCE,
that these buildings seem to have been

more prevalent in the diaspora
outside of the land of Israel

than inside the land of Israel
until about the third century.

By the third century, you have synagogues
all over the land of Israel as well.

The earliest synagogues were communal,
communal

meeting houses
in addition to prayer houses.

So they filled all kinds of community
needs.

Now, this is important
because as synagogues develop

before the temple is destroyed,
they're not necessarily challenging

the exclusive centralization of worship
in Jerusalem, at least those synagogues

that we see in the land of Israel,
outside the land of Israel.

You certainly have more prayers
happening in the synagogues

because they simply don't have the kind of

convenient access
to the temple in Jerusalem

that the folks who were living
in the land of Israel have.

One of the things that's also interesting
about the synagogues

is that we have pretty good evidence
that the Pharisees who, as I said before,

were the most popular of the sects of late
Second Temple Judaism,

weren't involved
in the leadership of the synagogues.

And then after the temple was destroyed,
the rabbis also were not involved

in the leadership of the early synagogues.

Why do we know this?

Because contemporary archeologists
in their digs, in these sites,

both in the land of Israel

and outside the land of Israel, have found
gorgeous mosaics

of representational art in the synagogues,

including depictions of biblical scenes
like Abraham

sacrificing his son, Isaac,
not quite sacrificing, but

excuse
me, but having the knife in his hand,

as well as constellations

and different kinds
of astrological representations.

In the synagogue itself,
we know that the Pharisees and the rabbis

would have been uncomfortable
with that because of their commitment

to a rather strict interpretation
of one of the commandments

in the Decalogue,
which prohibits representational art.

So whoever was the leadership
of these synagogues

in the land of Israel and outside
the land of Israel must have been

at least strong enough
to override that Pharisee a concern.

One interesting note is that also that

the constructions of the synagogue

don't suggest that there was any separate
seating for women.

And we have names of women

who were actually leaders
of their congregations.

Now, we know from the Talmud
that the rabbis had some problems

with women leading services, although
technically there there isn't a problem.

But on the practical level,
there would be some problems.

And that has continued into orthodoxy
under this day where women don't

participate in the leadership roles
during the prayer service itself.

But we find

in the earliest synagogues that women.

There certainly
isn't a separate women's section.

So one piece of speculation is that
women might not have been there at all.

I doubt that,
but it's always a possibility.

And certainly there were some women

who were leaders
within their own synagogue communities

as the temple is destroyed.

What we have at Job and I remember
Yavne is where Rabbi and Yohanan Ben

Zaki was spirited out
from the burning city of Jerusalem, too,

and he established
that first academy at Yavne.

What they did it
yavne was to create a kind of template

of what each prayer service
should contain. Up

until that point, prayer was spontaneous
and it was individual,

and it had to do with whatever spoke

to the individual, pray or at that moment,
whether it was praise

or whether it was petition
or whether it was Thanksgiving.

Right after having done really
well on an exam.

You want to give thanks to the Lord
because after all, you would pray to do

really well in your petition
to prepare before you took the exam.

So what

the sages of Yavne it did was to fix
a general order for the central prayer,

which is called the Amida,
the only literally means of standing up.

And Jews
say this prayer in in a standing posture.

And the first prayer book

that we really know about comes
at the earliest in the eighth century,

probably
the ninth century of the common era.

So what the prayer book has
are not just a fixed order of the prayers,

but actually fixed words for each blessing

in the in the Army in that central prayer.

There are 19 different blessings.

And we'll talk about what some of those
blessings are in just a moment.

But at the very earliest stage of prayer
development in Yavne,

if there wasn't that fixed formula
for each blessing,

but just a general sequence
of how the prayers should unfold, how

about

DAH worship had generally been performed

through the sacrificial system
during temple times, as I mentioned,

but worship of the heart was interpreted
by the rabbis to mean prayer.

Now, the rabbis in the Talmud dispute
whether or not

the prayer services
were instituted by the patriarch

or as a replacement
to the now defunct sacrificial system.

Right.

And there they present arguments
on both sides.

Abraham instituted
the morning service and Isaac instituted

the afternoon service,
and Jacob instituted the evening service.

And they say no note.

Or the other side of the argument
says, No, no, no, no, no.

There's a morning service and an afternoon
service that involved animal sacrifices.

And prayer
is just coming to substitute for that.

Their conclusion is very interesting
because what

they're not really arguing about history.

The rabbis in the Talmud, right.

They're not so plugged into history.

That's not what motivates them.

They're arguing about
whether or not prayer

is personal, individual and spontaneous.

Right.

Coming from the patriarchs
or whether like the sacrifices

their communal and institutionalized

their answer in a way, is both.

But they claim that prayer was originated
by the patriarchs.

So the ideal for prayer is to be personal,
spontaneous, individual.

But then it was instituted,
nationalized in order

to correspond to the sacrifices
in the temple

as a memory, as a reminder of those
sacrifices in the temple.

So it's

important
as we move into that medieval period,

in the modern period,
to remember that the ideal kind of prayer

for the rabbis was indeed
coming from the pray or his heart,

rather than something that was found to be

in a fixed text in the prayer book.

Okay.

If we open up the traditional Orthodox
prayer book today

that goes back to the eighth century, that
first prayer book that we talked about.

And those ideas themselves
go back to the Talmud.

One of the first things

that we see in the morning
service is a description of creation.

And there is a repeated line

that God daily renews creation.

God daily renews creation.

Now, if you think back to Genesis one,
Genesis

one presents the creation of the world
as a fait accompli.

God created the world in six days.

On the seventh day, God rested
and that was it.

Creation was historical.

But for the rabbis,
for the poets of the liturgy,

creation is ongoing
because what the poet is trying to get

the creator to buy into

is this idea that God's providence
and activity in the world

is not merely historical,
but it's ongoing.

And so by saying that God daily renews
creation, we're supposed to see the sun

rising in the morning
and reflect on God's creation of the sun

at that moment in order to feel closer
to God's activity on a daily basis.

There's another section of the morning
prayer service

that alludes to Isaiah

chapter 45, verse seven.

The liturgy just takes
that verse and tweaks it a little bit.

What the verse actually says is that God

forms light and creates darkness,

makes peace and creates
evil, creates evil.

Now, why would second Isaiah say this?

Right.

There are two or three different
people's books that went into Isaiah.

Isaiah was writing the second

Isaiah due to Isaiah
was writing during the Babylonian exile

when the Jewish community in Babylonia
was coming into contact for the first time

with these dualistic myths
of a God of good and a God of evil.

And so this later stage of Jewish
development

understands that no, there's
only one God for everything.

And this guide creates the good stuff
or God creates the good stuff.

And creates the bad stuff.

This now we see we are moving
into a kind of universal monotheism.

Unlike the head of Theism or Monogatari
that we discussed several lectures ago.

So that verse is

taken by the poet of the liturgy,
and it is slightly adjusted

to not emphasize the evilness,
but emphasize God's creation of the light.

So the way the prayer service adopts
the line is God forms

light and creates darkness,
makes peace and creates everything.

They change the word evil to everything
so that you don't have to

dwell on the negative.

But again, it's this idea
that God is continually making light.

It's not something that happened
in the remote past.

Now, in the Hebrew Bible,
as well as in the liturgy,

there are polemics against
other religious systems.

And we see this in the evening service
as well.

The evening service says that God arranges

the stars in their heavenly rotations,
according to his will.

So it's nighttime.

When you say the evening service,

you see the stars and God arranges them
all according to the divine will.

What is this?

A polemic against Babylonian astrology?

The Babylonians understood that the stars
were gods and they controlled our fate.

So the rabbis in the Talmud
were willing to say, okay,

maybe the stars do control your fate,
but who controls the stars?

God controls the stars. Right.

You also see this in the opening
chapter of Genesis,

where you have light created on day one

and the sun isn't created until day four.

Well, for the Babylonians,
the sun was a god.

But when the creation story gets reworked
in its Jewish version or its Israelite

version, the sun is just another
one of God's creations.

And indeed, our God can create light
even without a sun.

So you see these subtle or not
so subtle with the time

polemics against other religious systems
and religious ideologies.

Okay, let's move into the central prayer

that Jews
say three times a day in the morning

service, the afternoon service
and the evening service.

We're going to focus
specifically on the daily amid

that daily central prayer
as opposed to the other

amid don't plural for
me does the plural for ami dah

that are recited either on the Sabbath
or on holidays.

So the prayer begins.

The only begins by praising God.

It's a good way to.

It's a good way to butter somebody up.

Before you ask a series of
ask for a series of requests

and invoking the notion
of the merit of our ancestors.

Now, if you remember Tom Wolfe's
book, Bonfire of the Vanities,

he had something called a favor bank,
so that if I do somebody a favor,

if I do somebody a favor in 1980,
I can wait even until the year

2000 to cash in my favor,
and that person owes me one.

Well, what the merit of our fathers
does is to make that intergenerational.

Abraham and Isaac and Jacob
and in the modern movement of reform

and conservative and reconstruction ism,
we say, and their wives, Sarah, Rebecca,

Leah and Rachel,
they did such great things.

They were such righteous people.

God, you owe them one.

but you know what? They're not around.

So we're their descendants.

So we'll be happy to take the pay back
ourselves.

Right.
It's an intergenerational favor bank.

The second blessing in the Army.

It praises God's power and includes
the power to resurrect the dead.

Remember that?

Something to distinguish
the Pharisees from the sad disease.

And we'll have a session
coming up on the world to come.

And resurrection of the dead.

But it becomes a central component
of rabbinic Judaism,

even though it's a late and marginal idea
within the Hebrew Bible itself.

The third blessing of the Amida has Israel
imitating the angelic choir

and coordinating God is king. Right.

This is what we can do for God.

We can coronate God
because there is no king without a people.

Right.

You can't be a king of a kingdom
if your kingdom has no population.

So we're willing to recognize,
as we're happy to recognize,

we sing in joy, to recognize
God as our king.

And then we go into the petition requests.

The middle section of the daily
on B contains the petitions

which some scholars understand
to be a road map to redemption.

The very first petitioner in prayer

begins with a request for the wisdom

to know the wisdom for knowledge.

Right.

It might be part of this intellectual,
elite wisdom

that promotes Talmud
Torah over all other commandments.

But more likely, it's a request to know
God's will, because changing our ways

to reflect God's will will then prompt God

to forgive our past transgressions.

And redemption will naturally ensue.

And those indeed, are the subsequent
blessings.

What redemption will then look like
as outlined in the remaining blessings.

Pain and suffering will cease.

Economic prosperity will prevail.

And there will be an ingathering
of the exiles to the land of Israel.

Justice will flow like a mighty river

with punishment meted out to heretics
and reward for the righteous.

Jerusalem and the temple will be rebuilt.

And finally, the icing on the cake
is that the Messiah will come.

The concluding blessings

of this section serve as an exclamation
point, asking God to hear our prayers.

That's actually the concluding blessing
of that middle petitioner section.

It's important
and we'll come back to this idea

that all the work of

this road map to redemption happens.

All the work happens
before we ask for the Messiah to come.

All right.

So the Messiah culminates
the process of redemption

rather than initiates
the process of redemption.

And that's very important
to understand the psychology

of rabbinic Judaism,

that redemption

involves
Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.

So the role of the Messiah is relegated
to the end of that process.

All the work has been done
prior to his appearance,

and that reflects the rabbinic discomfort
with messianic speculation

because the rabbis are creating
the sequence of these blessings

where in Yavne,
after the destruction of the second temple

and probably the final

sequence doesn't happen
until after the failed bar Kokhba revolt.

And so the rabbis were burned
on messianic speculation

because every time
they think that they're about to regain

political sovereignty from Rome,
it turns out very, very bad for them.

So they
they retain the idea of the Messiah,

but they relegate it to the distant
future, to the very end of the process

of redemption, to try to quash
contemporary messianic speculation

and not get into trouble in the future
like they had in their very recent past.

The final three blessings
of all of the Army does

serve as a conclusion,
asking God to accept our prayer

and thanking God for the miracles
that are daily with us.

That's actually my favorite
blessing of the Army day,

because miracles are understood
by the rabbis,

not only to be those supernatural
occurrences of the parting

of the Red Sea
and the plagues and all the other

lights

and bells and
whistles that we see in the Hebrew Bible.

But the sun coming up and the lightning
and the formation

of mountains, all of those things
that are daily with us.

They're also evidence of God's providence
shall activity in this world,

and they're considered by the rabbis
to be miracles as well.

The final blessing, of course,

has to be beseeching
God to bless us with peace.

Peace
is the ultimate hallmark of redemption

as we jump 1500 years.

There are certain modern reformulations

of the traditional prayer
that I want to mention here.

The reform movement
that begins in the early 19th century.

Say by 1818, you have the beginnings
of the reform movement in Germany.

They rejected the idea
of the resurrection of the dead,

and specifically in their 1885
Pittsburgh platform when they got here

to the United States, they said
that the immortality of the soul.

That's that's fine. We totally buy that.

But they rejected the idea

of a resurrection of the dead
as not being Jewish in origin.

And they really thought that it was

not in

keeping with modern sensibilities
to talk about this kind

of zombie action of folks
being resurrected from the dead.

So they changed that word dead

in most of their prayers to God.

God resurrect God creates

all life, the quickening of all life.

So God enlivens everything,

not just resurrecting the dead,
not just giving life to the dead.

Also, reform prayer books in a way
that is very much

in keeping with the flow
of the sequence of the blessings.

They reject the idea
of an individual messiah

so no longer for the reform movement.

Is the Messiah going to be a male.

It's not egalitarian, all right?

It's not gender inclusive.

Nor will the Messiah necessarily
be from the Davidic line.

That's also about your pedigree
rather than about your personal status.

And so just like the blessings,
the sequence of the blessings

and the traditional prayer build up
to a messianic era, that the Messiah just

caps off, what the reform movement does
is they cap off the Messiah, right.

And bracket him.

Once you've got the Messianic era, that's
all the reform movement is looking for.

So they change their sensitive
to the Hebrew, although there's far

less Hebrew in traditional
in classic reform services

than in traditional services.

But they change the word
redeemer to redemption,

or they change the word in Hebrew.

Go L to Geula.

Right.

A subtle change,
but it gets at a theological conviction.

Reform

and conservative prayer books
have generally been uncomfortable

with praying for the reestablishment
of animal sacrifices

in the traditional prayer book.

You pray to rebuild the temple
and the fires of Israel.

Well, those fires of Israel refer
to the fires of the animal sacrifices.

So even in the conservative movement,
which is far more conservative

with a small
say than reform or reconstruction

or the Reconstructionist movement,
they've been uncomfortable.

And so they've modified the language
to talk about the

animal sacrifices in the past,
and that it's not necessarily

going to be resurrected or it's not going
to be continued in the future.

So the temple may very well be rebuilt,
but there will be different

ways of worshiping
than had been the case in the past.

Among the many

reforms that

the reconstructionists have made,
and in this case reform and conservative

Judaism as well, is to make the liturgy
more gender inclusive, as I mentioned.

So in general,
when the patriarchs are mentioned,

the matriarchs are also invoked
a further modification

that Reconstructionist
Judaism has made in its prayer book.

Colonna Shamar is to not exclusively

refer to God in the male gender
so very frequently,

and it's somewhat

unsettling for the traditional prayer
that's not used to this kind of language,

but it's not.

It doesn't take you so long to get used to
either.

God is referred to as the source

of all being or as the womb of all life.

And then the pronoun
because Hebrew requires gendered pronouns.

Hebrew doesn't have the neutered pronoun
it the way English does.

So God is referred to in the feminine.

And again,
that's something that is very modern,

very new, and has not crossed
the denominational lines

into mainstream reform
or mainstream conservative Judaism.

I want to finish that lecture

with a quote from the Talmud

that gets at

perhaps a justification
for liturgical modification.

A prayer that doesn't innovate

is not a prayer of supplication.

Now, the rabbis and the Halacha
Jewish law,

they have problems with changing
the fixed text of the blessings.

But we also see a voice that says, Look,
if there's no innovation,

if it doesn't mean something new or say
something new, then it's not a genuine

prayer of supplication.

And so perhaps this is the motivation
for contemporary denominations

within Judaism to experiment
with new forms of the liturgy.

Okay.

So we will next examine
the third leg of Shimon, the righteous

tripod of what the world stands
on, Deeds of loving kindness.