Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 4, Why are the Laws so Important?

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 4, Why are the Laws so Important? | 06.26.24

Visuals presented throughout the presentation.

- Good morning, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are. We are back to Deuteronomy or Devarim, the repetition of the information, the history, what went on since the children of Israel leave Egypt before arriving at the land of Israel. And last week we looked at the version that Moses gives of events that happened previously with a slightly different angle. And raise the question as to, is this the word of Moses independently of what happened on Mount Sinai or is this part of the Sinai experience which incorporates everything? So there’s a big difference between historicity, the history of what happens and the theology because the theology wants to talk about a unity, about it’s all being one example of divine revelation. Even though in the history we see that at various occasions Moses turns back to God for clarification of something that theoretically he should already have known if everything was on Sinai.

So this is one of the problems that exists when we look at this book and try to understand the text. But there are also more important wider theological issues that I’d just like to spend a few moments talking about before we return to the actual text itself. So for example, memory. Now we all know how important memories are to us, but we also know how fallible our memories are, how we don’t always remember things or we remember things differently. And therefore, in one sense this is raising the question of what is more important? The memory or the history. But of course even history, you know the joke history, nowadays people call it his story because history is the opinion of the big guys who make it, so to speak. But nevertheless, there is some reliability in facts, historical facts that we don’t always have when it comes to memory. Memory is very personal. So one of them is the balance between the memory on the one hand and the history on the other.

And in fact, the Torah wants to integrate all these different elements. The difference between the rational, the logical, the legal on the one hand. Having a constitution, it’s very important, but it’s very different in language, in style to the narrative of the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the history of coming out of Egypt and going through the desert. So, those two elements exist. And then you’ve got another important dichotomy. The dichotomy between God controls everything so to speak. And we are agents and we have some decision to take and God may want us to do something, but we as humans usually don’t do that, so you have a built intention. Just as you have a built intention. And this for me is one of the most important elements of religion as it works for me, is that it is a combination of what we call the rational, on the one hand, the factual and on the other hand, the mystical, the non-rational, the emotional. And so our text here is appealing to all these different elements and trying to give each one of them an important place, but none of them has a total place.

Again, if I can give a theological way of looking at this, it’s rather like the world originally was created according to the biblical story out of chaos. And out of chaos comes some sort of order, but chaos is there, it’s there all the time. It’s there in the world, it’s there within ourselves. We are inconsistent and very often chaotic or confused. So looking at this text now, which might on the surface seem boring and unnecessary ‘cause we’ve already been through all this and we’ve had all the laws that we are going to come to and we’re going to look at them. But nevertheless, this is an important part of our tradition in the same way that all the time we spent on genealogy, who was the son of who and who married who and how many children did they have? I mean, go on going over that. And then we keep on going about a census. How many people were there? How many people came out of Egypt? Does it matter?

The numbers matter but not as much as how they are and who they are. And so all these elements are coming to play as we plough through the book of Deuteronomy. And the last chapter, which I kind of skipped over simply reiterates the details of the approach to the land of Canaan where the Israelites after 40 years are coming round from the south over into trans Jordan. They’re coming into contact for the first time in a settled way with pagans in the desert in a sense they were in their own little bubble. And now they move over into the area of trans Jordan. They’re coming into settled tribes with their settled religions. And their dominant element in all these other religions is this notion of Baal. And Baal of course has meaning in Hebrew it can be my husband, but also Baal can mean the boss, the ultimate authority. And then there is another word. And the other word that is often allied to Baal is Baal-peor. We had that the last sentence of chapter three.

Just at the top of the page, you can see meanwhile we stayed in the valley near Beth-peor. It’s Hebrew, it’s Baal-peor, although usually it is Baal-peor we’re going to come to. Now interestingly enough, when people think in terms of idolatry in the past, they think of it rather much in terms of worshipping if you like idols. And idols, iconography as in religions today plays a very important part, certainly in eastern religions, in Catholicism, this idea of the icon of the image is very important. And this was something that intentionally the Bible wanted to avoid. But there was another feature. And the other feature was this. In the pagan world, first of all the there’s a God for everything. There’s a God for the sky and there’s a God for the earth and there’s God for animals. Each animal has its own God. For plants, for seasons, for rains. Everything like this has a God that needs to be appeased. And how you appease your God varies from religion to religion across the world. Just think of the variations in Indian religions in Hinduism. And this variation of Baal-peor, of peor.

Not the word Beth here comes from a word which can either mean rubbish, baggage, stuff you throw out or it can mean excretion. Very strange that you would call a god by that name. But the reason is that one of the features of this religion was that you gave of your body to the god at regular intervals. Either you gave your body by sexually giving with the priests as a way of getting to god or actually through defecation. There were indications that defecation was a way of you giving of your body, your personal innards to god. And that also explains why human sacrifice played such an important part in their traditions. So having lived now in close proximity with these people, they’re moving in and through and in preparation for invasion, the challenge of idolatry versus monotheism, if you want to call it that, comes to the fore. And so now I want to turn to the text of chapter four.

Now Israel. Listen, which is also pay attention. There’s another word, is the ear, give ear. But shamar implies more than that. It means try to understand to listen and make sense of. All these statues and all these laws. That I’ve been teaching you, the constitution. Why, In order that you should survive, you should live as an independent culture and tradition. And, come and inherit the land. Which the Lord your God is giving to you. So this is the end product of the 40 years, but the challenge is going to be where you survive as an independent different culture. It’s this challenge. And in verse two we have a very important line and it says, Do not add on to the laws that I’ve commanded you. And I don’t want you to reduce from them. To keep the commands of your God. I command you today. And that is such an important statement and so much misunderstood. On the face of it, it says, look, you’ve got to constitution, you cannot change anything, you cannot take away from it. You cannot add to it. And yet in practise throughout the tradition from Moses onwards, we were adding new things as new situations arose.

So the question was then what can we add and what could we not add. In the culture, the Jewish culture in which we live today with the polarisation, you have one huge section of Jewish life which considers and takes this so literally which says we can’t change anything, we can’t change the law. And yet again, I come back and I repeat, there were various times certainly during the Talmudic period where the rabbis decided to stop a law not for it to function anymore. And then there were other times when they added a law like the second day of a festival and various other additions that were made throughout this period. So what then are we to understand this? Well, on a poetic level, on the sort of level when we are talking about the Torah being inspired by God, what we are saying is this inspiration is a self-sufficient and it is a foundational inspiration. And we don’t want you to hack away at the foundations and remove things. We want, keep them there, which is one of the reasons why we religiously adhere to texts, whether they’re text of the Torah or the text of the Talmud.

And it’s very, very difficult to get any change. Even if you have a theory, there ought to be a change or a change of authors because our approach is no, we’re not changing anything, but we can reinterpret things and interpret things in different ways in the same way that we might interpret, do not steal as meaning sheep and cows and pigs. And on the other hand we can apply it to computers and intellectual property. So when we say don’t add and don’t reduce the rabbis, we’re concerned about this. And basically what they said was, you can add a day to a festival but you can’t make up a new festival. And yet in fact we do, we had Purim and we had Hanukah. And in both of them we said these were commanded by God except that there is no evidence in the Torah of God commanding them. And so we are going to come back to something that we will say in a few chapters time that you have to allow people in each generation to interpret the law and to give new decisions and judgements in the context of the time.

So here we have this initial statement that this is going to define your culture. The Torah is going to be the basis of our culture, even though important as it is, it’s not rigid. And to use an appropriate term, it’s not set in stone so to speak, as the 10 Commandments were. Verse three, we go on. Your eyes have seen. How God obliterated Baal-peor. So here you’ve got Baal-peor, not Beth-peor. And we are talking about those two tribes, the two peoples there were Sihon the king of the Amorites and the Og of the Bashan and their god was Baal-peor, together with Midianites and the Ammonites. So, you saw that they were destroyed. And the purpose in destroying them was not just blood lust, it was to undermine their religious paganism. And much as we might not like this idea, and we don’t in our world of pluralism, and nevertheless we can see how over history, different religions and different peoples have obliterated others. And in the time in which this was written, it was indeed a world of dog eat dog.

They were going to eat you and capture you and torture you and enslave you and kill you and you had to fight to survive. But in this dog eat dog world, verse four. You should hold fast. Stick like the word, deveq, is glue in modern Hebrew. You should stick to God. Now this is an interesting word because it is one of the crucial words that defined mysticism as opposed to rationalism. Remember from the period of the Greeks, the world culture in the western world was rational, it was philosophical. And then to challenge that philosophical and that rational point of view, although people like Maimonides is utilised it as an important tool, nevertheless mysticism emerges. Mysticism in a way was always there under different names, but mysticism emerges. And the core term of mysticism is Or in Ashkenazi. Sticking to God, feeling close to God, feeling passionately involved. So it’s not a rational thing, it’s an emotional passionate thing. And so here you have God appealing to the passionate side of a relationship as opposed to a theological one is do believe this, do you believe that?

If you don’t believe this, you’re not in. You don’t believe that. And the way I believe it, you’re wrong. This has been one of the challenges of religions from the Greek period to this very day. And it remains so within us. We have our mystics and we have our rationalists. So now we come to the practicality, it’s verse five. Look. I have taught you, says Moses, which are civil laws and which are statutes, that is to say rules that are of a religious nature, not necessarily a functional utilitarian nature. They may have benefits, they may have purposes, but they are not in a sense the way we deal with utilitarian civil law. God commanded me. To do this. And to do this, so that you would have them in the land where you come to, so you don’t come and then start setting up laws, you’ve already got it. And now comes a phrase that I struggle with no end. Verse six. You must both keep and do. Now that in itself is strange. What’s the difference between keeping and doing? Now something can mean to adhere to, I like the idea, it’s an important idea, but I don’t always necessarily do it.

So you’ve got to in a sense understand the idea behind something as well as just the command to do it. And here’s the punch. Because this is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the other people in this world. That is to say this is what other people will understand as being wisdom and understanding. And this is the right way to behave. Because when they hear it. All these laws. They will say. Only a wise and understanding nation. This is that they hear our laws and our rules and they say, “Wow, how amazing. What rules and laws these people have.” But it’s not just the laws. Which great nation. Who has God close to them. As God is to us. Whenever we call. Two important statements and both them totally contradictory. In the world in which we live today, on the one hand you can say, “well, look, they still value the 10 Commandments.”

Nobody’s come up with a better version of the 10 commandments. And even in America, there’s contradiction and confusion about whether the commandments should be put in the state capitals or in the judicial system. So in one sense you can say it’s right, nobody has come up with a better version than the 10 Commandments, or at least not as an overall guide to life. So from one point of view you could say, “Well, that’s right. People do look at us as the people of the book.” And Korea, for example, South Korea includes Talmud in its curriculum because they think it’s a source of wisdom. And then we’ve got the other statement that comes after. “Wow, this people close to God.” Who says close to God? My God, it destroyed us, destroyed temple one, temple two, we’ve been 2,000 years in exile. We get a home of our own, we attack it, it’s attacked, it’s destroyed. We are hated around the world. Doesn’t look to us very much as though God is with us.

And yet on the other hand you could say, and yet despite the fact that everybody can’t stand us, I know I’m exaggerating of course, but we are constantly under pressure. We are constantly being attacked one way or another. And yet here we are, we’ve still survived what greater miracle or if you like, proof of God’s presence, which my initial reaction is to be thank you, but no thank you. If the cost is the Holocaust, if the cost is so much oppression, it’s an double-edged sword. But nevertheless these two statements are important because I think the first one as well as the second, but in the different ways when talking about our ritual and our way of life and when we’re talking about our relationship with God are the two things that have been with us throughout our history even though we’ve always had period where most Jews didn’t actually keep either of them or some of them at any rate.

But nevertheless that has been the consistent theme. Whether other people think so, I don’t think so when people look at some of our laws today, particularly in relation to women, divorce, areas that normally law should deal with. And there was a time when our civil law under the Talmudic period did deal with it. But now we’ve come into a state of what looks to me almost like paralysis on the part of the Haredi world when it comes to this sort of thing even though I understand. And the reason why I understand it even if I don’t agree, is going back to the beginning of what we were saying today. That is to say the children of Israel come out of a pagan Egypt. They’re alone by themselves in the wilderness of 40 years. And then on the way in, they suddenly come into contact with all these pagans who are, whose lifestyle is everything we despise in the materialism and the permissiveness of western society.

On the one hand we are grateful for the freedom to make choices. On another, we look around at the choices that most people make and we can’t identify with these choices. So once again, we find ourselves in a situation where we have to, in a sense fight for our identities. And I say identities because I certainly don’t think there’s only one identity. So there we are, the end of seven and then eight carrying on. For which great nation. Has righteous laws. And remember, the big change of the Bible from all previous areas was that in civil matters there was equality between upper class, lower class, male and female. Not in the ritual standards but in the civil standards like this Torah which God has given us. But verse nine. Be careful. And take care of your soul. I want to come back to that in a minute. Your soul.

I don’t want you ever to forget what you have seen coming out of Egypt and in the desert because I don’t want your hearts to turn away from it. And on the contrary, you have an obligation to teach it to your sons and to your daughters teaching education. This is the way to keep something going and you must teach and pass on. And pass on not just the laws but what you saw. What you saw is referring to history. You’ve got to pass on the history, otherwise our children in universities and elsewhere don’t know what to answer. And when they don’t know what to answer and when they’re outnumbered, they capitulate, which we have sadly seen. So another term that is important here 'cause it’s going to come up again and that is nefsekah. Now nephesh is sometimes translated as soul, but nephesh is also used to mean the body and the being. And in a sense it’s a combination of them both. And it’s saying take care, both of your physical and your spiritual.

Here I think we’re talking about the spiritual, but in due course we are going to come to a statement like this, which is a very important legal statement in which it says, take care of your body. Don’t do things that undermine your body, that destroy your body, put yourself in unnecessary danger or real health. Anyway, having said that, what is he referring to. He’s be talking about our way of life, our tradition. So we come to verse 10 and in verse 10 it says, remember the day when you stood before your God at Horeb. Horeb is a term that is used to describe what we sometimes called Mount Sinai. And as I mentioned last week, if you look up on the internet, the maps of where Mount Sinai might have been on the passage of the Jews out of Egypt, it is there are about seven different options coming out of Egypt, turning south, turning west, going up, going down. And we don’t know for certain which one is Horeb. But Horeb therefore in a sense is more an abstraction as the revelation as we like to use the term or the origin of Torah.

Well, all the people gathered together and I got them to listen to what the constitution was. In other words, it wasn’t just the property of the priesthood, it wasn’t something that was going to be kept only for a few. Everybody was involved. Everybody theoretically has the right to get involved in this process. All the time that you are on earth you have to teach this to the next generation. Verse 11. And at the time at Sinai. You’ll gather together. You stood under the mountain, it was on fire. Some people say it was a volcano, there was darkness and fire and everything like that. And God spoke to you. Verse 12. God spoke to you. From the fire. Words that you heard. You didn’t see any visual, any sort of picture of a person or anything. All you heard was sounds. So this is a slightly different version of what happened at Mount Sinai because when we looked in the book of Exodus of the two different versions, there was a clear indication that the people went back from the mountain, they were terrified, they saw the fire, everything, but now we are seeing, they heard every word it seems.

Verse 13. And God gave you your covenant. Which he commanded you to do. These 10 statements. And they were written down. On two tablets of stone. Now it’s interesting, it talks about the two tablets of stone and yet at the same time it’s implying that there were a lot of other, lot of laws coming with it. God commanded me at that time. To teach you. To go on teaching you laws and rules. To do. In the land. Your coming to inherit. And here we have another phrase, 15. You should take great care of your body or of your soul or body and soul together. You never saw any images of God. When he spoke to you from the fire. And therefore because of that I also want you to make sure. In verse 16, you don’t make any images, any pictures, anything at all male or female, anything, anything to do with animals on the earth, anything to do with birds, winged birds flying in the heavens. An image in verse 18 of anything creeping on the floor, any fish in the water, anything underneath. So I don’t want you to make any images. And this again reiterates the 10 commandments.

The 10 commandments starts off with God saying, “I’m your God, guys.” And then goes on to say, don’t have any other gods and don’t make any other pictures. And yet people seem to need to have pictures. Seem to have if not other gods are the God-like humans to whom they, if you like bestow almost God-like characters. So verse 19. I don’t want you to look up to the heavens. And you’ll see the sun and the moon. And the stars. And everything that’s up there. And you will be seduced. And you will bow down to them. Instead of seduced, it might be misinformed or diverted or misled. God has allowed other people to worship these things. I mean if they want to worship it, their business. And that’s another important thing because when it says. It’s almost say they’re entitled to have their own religions. And that’s one of the trademarks of Judaism. We don’t think that you have to be Jewish to be a good person or to get to heaven or an afterlife or anything like that. Anybody can if they are good spiritual or what other kinds of people they are. So the fact that there are other religions and they have their own way as far. As we’re concerned, that’s fine, don’t have a problem.

We don’t have to convert them. If they want to come, they’re welcome, but we don’t have to go out and convert them and we don’t think that they are, if you like condemned to hell if they don’t. But verse 20. God took you. And took you out of the fiery furnace which was in Egypt when you were enslaved. To be people. An inheritance. We are part of this tradition. But now there’s a personal issue. If I am the person who gave you this, God gave it to you, why am I not immortal? God could make me immortal, but I’m a human being. And as a human being I make mistakes. How different if you like from, shall we say Christian theology? Verse 21. He was angry with me because of you. It’s a bit unfair because the Torah says God was angry with Moses for what he did. But as a result. He swore. Not to let me cross the river Jordan. And not to come. To this good land. Which God is giving you. Verse 22. I’m going to die in this land. I’m not passing the river Jordan. You are. And you’ll inherit this wonderful land. But I warn you. In verse 23. I warn you, I’m warning you, I know bad things are going to happen. And this is a theme that keeps on coming time and time again ad nauseum.

I know you are going to betray me and yet God sticks with us. I’m warning you. Don’t forget the covenant between you and God. Which is made. And don’t make any idols. Which God commanded you. And just think of when the kingdom split immediately after King Solomon died and his son, Rehoboam, was not able to negotiate a peaceful deal with the 10 northern tribes, the 10 northern tribes split and they built two golden calves, had two temples in which the golden calves were crucial and they set up a pagan state. Now you might argue, if you want to argue, you might argue that in the Bible itself there’s a reference to the two cherubs which were molten gold on top of the ark. They were strange creatures, winged creatures with faces of humans.

Now surely that was an image. And in one sense the explanation is that the idea of wings was simply something supernatural because in the ancient Middle East, all the kings and the gods were shown to have wings to elevate them above everybody else. But also it could mean that this is an example of something which cannot be found on earth. You don’t find human faces interconnected with wings, and so it is that which might explain why there were these cherubs in on the tabernacle but didn’t last very long 'cause they were soon captured and melted down. And don’t make any images. 24, he once again it says. God is consuming. It’s like a consuming fire. And what kanah, means, here in the English you’ll say it is passionate, passion. Yes, it is. You can be passionate about things if you are jealous in a sense of whether your wife is faithful or not or your wife is worried if you are faithful or not. But kanah has another meaning which I prefer. And the term, kanah, is consequential. That if do do bad things, bad things are going to happen. And it’s up to you.

Verse 25. When you have lots of children and grandchildren and you are in the land for a long time and you go off the tracks and you make idols and all images, you’ll only provoke God. And therefore in verse 26. I’m giving evidence to you now, a witness. And I’m telling this with the heavens and the earth as witnesses to what I’m going to tell you. If you do that. You will disappear. So I’m warning you, this is not a guarantee you are going to survive. The guarantee of your survival is if you adhere to what makes you different. Now some people will always go off the tracks. There will always be whether it’s people who want to assimilate or people who want to leave or people who prefer something else, there will always be that. And therefore the theological argument of how do you explain that despite the fact that we often and always were influenced by other dominant cultures and we fell prey to those cultures and yet somehow we have survived.

And the answer theologically speaking is, but some of us survived. We weren’t completely destroyed and we were given a chance to rebuild and we have always come back from disaster. But again, in verse 27, God is saying. God will scatter you. You’ll be very few. I promised you you’d be as many as the stars in the sky. But I’m warning you, you go off the tracks, you’ll be scattered and your numbers will reduce and you will be numerically inferior to the nation’s that you will be led to. And there indeed you’ll serve other gods. The work of human hands, wood, stone, money. That they can’t hear or listen. In other words, you can’t have a relationship with them. They have no vibrancy. They are objects and you will end up living a materialist objecting life and that will betray the spiritual. But even in that situation, verse 29. From there in exile you will seek God and you will find God if you really look. With all your soul and with all your heart. So again, this is an amazing prediction thousands of years ago that we are going to lose it, we are going to be exiled, we are going to be reduced significantly in numbers and yet here we still are. In verse 30. When things are tough and in pain.

And they happen to, bad things happen to you. All these things. In the course of days, in the course of time. Does not mean the end of days by the way that Christianity likes to think of. It means after a period of time. You’ll return. To the Lord your God. And listen to his voice. Now this is the first term use of a word which now means something different. Shuvtah means to return in the spiritual sense and here it means, teshuvah, repentance. But repentance in itself is only half of it. Repenting needs you into something. So it doesn’t say with but towards the Lord your God, you will try to reestablish some court of spiritual connection. And that’s what repentance is. It’s not just, oh, please forgive me, or Peter’s pence or something like that. It is the process that takes you from a negative position into a positive position in relation to God. And then verse 31. 'Cause God is merciful. He will not fail you. He will not destroy or allow you to be destroyed. He will not forget the covenant you made between you and God.

Few more lines before we take a break. 32, staying still the same point but making it again and again, almost to hammer at home. If you ever look back in history at days gone by and interesting, this concept of looking back in history, there’s no term of history at this stage, but there is history in the Bible. That’s why they give this genealogy all the time, just called it a different term. It’s from the day that humans were created on earth. Through heavens on earth around the world. Has there ever been an example like this or you’ve ever heard of anything quite like this? And coming back to what happened on Mount Sinai, 33. A whole people hear something experience. And this is one of the theological arguments that are made to justify Judaism that Judah Halevi made in the book of the, “Kuzari,” in which he wrote this thousand years ago, a book in response to Christian and Islamic attempts to undermine Judaism in which he imagined a conversation between the king of Khazars.

And there really was a king of Khazars to explain why they converted to Judaism in which he brought in a Muslim and a Christian and a philosopher and to explain. And as they all somewhere went back to Judaism, he ended up talking the king to the Jew and converting. And the argument that Judah Halevi made was that in all other religions, the relationship between God and their founder is a personal private one that does not take place in public. In Judaism, it’s the only religion in which the revelation is to the whole of the people standing there together at one time. It’s not just to one person. Which is a very interesting argument. I mean rationally we can make, we can find fault with it. We can show that how often people have been, masses have been deluded and masses have been convinced, not just in the ancient times, but even in present times. The power of the masses is quite frightening.

But nevertheless, this is the argument and the argument of God appearing before them. And so that’s where I’m going to stop today, so we have time for questions and pick up again next week. And so let’s turn to the questions and see where we are.

Q&A and Comments

Why can’t I find my questions? Here we are. I can’t see what’s happened to my questions. How did I get rid of them? Oh, now we’ve got them. That’s good.

Q: Okay, so Romaine, what do you think is the conceptual cutoff for the interpretation of the Torah are given need for adjustments over time? A: Romaine, there’s never been a cutoff time. We continue to interpret and every year thousands, not thousands, hundreds of books of new interpretations of Jewish law are produced. The problem is not with the ability to interpret. And remember interpretation also includes interpreting the narratives and the stories, what we call, Midrash as well as halakha. The problem is always with the humans who interpret them and the mood that exists in interpretation. And unfortunately what happened is when the enlightenment 200 years ago began and people started undermining Judaism and abandoning Judaism nor reinterpreting it in a rather random way, the reaction of the ultra-orthodox world was to say, no, stop, we’re making no concessions whatsoever because making concessions to another intellectual tradition or spiritual tradition is a form of paganism. It’s a betrayal of our values.

So the issue is not with the law. The fact is that the law is so flexible, it allows for a tremendous amount of variety. It doesn’t necessarily scrap things so much as we word things. One thinks of lots of examples where the rabbis, for example, 2,000 years ago completely added elements to marriage and the marriage ceremony and the financial arrangements and things of this kind. So the truth is that adjustments and interpretation go on and now as much as they ever had. But there is a conservative mood just as countries change from liberal to conservative and back again and fascist and Marxist. So within Judaism there’s always debate, but the current dominant theme within, shall we say the Haredi world is very different to the theme that exists within the religious nationalists or the middle ground, or you call them the modern Orthodox where there is more flexible. But on the other hand, at the same time there’s competition between the two. But the fact is there is plenty of room for interpretation.

Rose, just to say, I wish you were exaggerating. Not much today. Who would’ve thought after the Shoah we should always know hatred is inculcated generations of hatred. Yes, Rose. Sadly it is a disease that is not going away, will not go away, whether it’s envy or whatever, it’s politics. But it is something we have to deal with. It’s something we have always had to deal with and it won’t stop. Richard, what you saw, but that generation has died. These are now the next generation that will enter the promised land and didn’t come out of Egypt and were not at Sinai.

A very good point, Richard. Very good point. So he is assuming of course, that the previous generation will be telling what happened. And of course remember there’s still a of guys around, there was Joshua and there was Kalev who were able to attest to that. And indeed there were other people who were alive at that time who that might have survived as individuals. Because in general, and this is something when it comes to the poetry of the Bible, the Bible makes a statement, but it doesn’t mean we need to take it as literally as you might think it does, whether it’s numbers or whether it’s dates or whether it’s something like this, but it’s a very good points you make.

Q: Marsha, if the saying with great power comes responsibility is true, do we therefore judge ourselves and do others judge the Jewish people by higher standards of morality? A: Maybe this explains some conflicting voices coming out of the Jewish community now. Marsha, that’s a really excellent point that you are making that the question is should we expect more of ourselves? And the answer is on some levels I think we should expect more of ourselves. But to avoid people being, if you like envious of us, we’d have to remain failures. And the answer is, no, we should and we have an obligation to try to succeed. And if trying to succeed makes people envious, which it does and if winning makes people envious, I mean as people have said, there’s book published recently about only people love Jews when they’re down and out or in trouble.

So I don’t think that it’s fair that we should be judged at a higher level. On the other hand, I think it’s right that we should. And despite what the rest of the anti-Semitic world think, Israel’s army behaves far more moral morally than it ought to. Of course there are mistakes, of course there are bad guys in it. But as a general rule, I mean think of it, why haven’t we dropped an atom bomb if you like on a lot of them and kill them all off? Of course there are very good other reasons for that. I’m not saying that too seriously, but nevertheless that’s an excellent point. And in one sense I think we should, another sense I think we rightly get upset when people show prejudice. Any kind of prejudice which doesn’t see another point of view or doesn’t see people as they really are, but as they think they are is dangerous.

Mira, thank you. I’m so nice. It’s happy that you enjoy this. And yes, thanks for Lockdown University for enabling this you. Israel, wonderful share. There are a few times when we can sense the philosophical underpinnings of Judaism in the Torah. Today you are able to clarify and elucidate some of the fundamental principles of Jewish philosophy and it was done beautifully with a lot of thought and clarity. Thank you, Israel. You are such a great fan. And indeed, thank you, all the people who are sticking with the course and listening and sometimes email me, I really appreciate it and if I don’t respond, please forgive me as just not possible, but I try my best.

And Faith says, interesting that amongst all the elements of the 10 statements of commandments, Moses mainly repeats and reiterates not worshipping idols. Why not reiterate, don’t murder, steal, deal unfairly, disrespect your parents, eat, trade. An excellent point, Faith, excellent point. But I think I would give an answer like this. I think we, all of us have idols. That is to say we all of us spend too much time worshipping ambition or money or status, whatever it is. The definition of me, of an idol is what is the determining factor or what are the things that influence you to behave the way you do? And because we are so influenced by the West. For example, even in the Haredi community which tries its hardest to avoid the influence of Western society, they have become so materialist. They’re being so influenced by money, money, money, private jets and so forth and so on that I think understanding idolatry that way rather than just putting up an idol in a church or in a temple or whatever it is. I don’t think it means that so much as that which dominates you.

Q: If God is so merciful, Israel, ask what’s the reason He is not willing to forgive? A: Well, that’s a very good point. Why doesn’t He forgive Moses and allow man to the land and demonstrate His own 13 principles? Well, straight answer is because there are exceptions. There’s been mercy in general to the people and then there is in a sense punishing those people who do something wrong. But I’ve always felt that in the case of Moses, the main reason why God did not let him go into the land of Egypt in Israel and why we don’t know where he’s buried is because God did not want people to worship Moses the way we worship Buddha or the way we worship Jesus or the way people worship Mohammed. This was something that God wanted to avoid in our tradition. And until recently we did avoid it. Nowadays we are tending to make too many people into god’s even within our own religion.

Thank you, Clara, and thank you, Romaine and Jean, thank you for an explanation and expansion on the text. I’m so glad you like, Jean, thank you. And, Carla, very interesting. Thank you, Carla. Lions’ images are okay, why? Hey, it’s good point. We have images of lions in synagogues on either side of the arc and it’s very difficult to know why we have them. And not only that, but in the Dura Europa synagogue, which was excavated, which is in Syria to this day going back thousands of years, there were images of animals, the sun and the moon on the floor. And so the question is, can we draw a distinction between a three, four-dimensional sculpture or just a two-dimensional image? And many of the images that we have now in Jewish books and in synagogues come from mediaeval sources because in mediaeval times, Jews were not allowed to join the Christian guilds and the craftsmen, they weren’t allowed to be craftsmen in the western world. And so all the decorations, even in Haggadut and others, were made by non-Jewish artists. Which is why if you look at old editions of the Haggadah, you will see that the good guy is a bishop, the bad guy is a knight, and so forth and so on. So it’s a lot to do with the history of visual arts.

Dara Horn wrote, yes, thank you, Leonard. That was the one I was thinking of, couldn’t remember. Everyone loves Dead Jews and the book is, “People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn from Israel. Thank you. In my old age I forget so much and I’m grateful for you, the audience and for this experience that we share.

Thank you.