Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 11:26, Who is a False Prophet?

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 11:26, Who is a False Prophet?

- I said originally that we were going to talk about prophecy, and that was where the title of today’s session really focused. But I neglected to deal with a couple of small points in the chapters before that I just want to go back over if you don’t mind. And therefore, I’d be grateful if you would turn to Deuteronomy 10. And the first thing that I want to mention about this is the fact that Moses is making this speech. It’s combining a review of the history it’s also exhorting the children of Israel to stick together and to cope with whatever they’re going to have to deal with when they come into the land of Israel. And so chapter 10 is the conclusion of the history side, so to speak. And again, it adds something that wasn’t in the original Exodus story of the two tablets of stone and coming down the mountain. So I just want to revise that for a minute. And so after Moses appeals to God to give the Jews a second chance after the golden calf, and he spends a lot of time discussing it with God, and begging with God, and asking God to wipe him out if he’s not going to give him another chance, in verse 1 of 10, he says, . God turned to me and He said, “Okay, we’re going to go forward.” Cut out, carve for yourself, two new tablets of stone, as the earlier ones. And so the implication is that he carved out the original stone and then some magic came down and inscribed on them. So what has happened is then God says, you can come up the mountain, but he also says, I want you to do something that he didn’t do in the first version. I want you to make an ark, a box of wood. So this is an innovation.

He has to carve the stone, he has to make a box of wood. I don’t know if he did it or got somebody to do it for him, but that’s what it says. And so in verse two, and so I wrote on the tablets, God says, and I will write on these tablets of stone, the words that were on the first lot that you broke, which the rabbis say, I agreed with you to break. You know, why do you mention this now other than to say you calling up the past, but I agreed it was right for you to do that, to smash them, to show how furious you were and the . And then they are going to be put in this ark, in this special box. So verse three, and I did make this ark of this acacia special wood and I carved out tablets of stone like the earlier ones, and I had them with me in my hand. So this is what happened, . Moses did indeed write the tablets. So who’s speaking now? Is this Moses or is it God? This looks like a narrator like the earlier ones, the 10 ideas, principles which God had addressed to you all. So in that, now he’s talking to the children of Israel, from on the mountain, from the fire in the day when you all gather together, community, and God gave them to me. So obviously is now referring back to God again writing on the tablets. So you see how ambiguous sentences can be, you don’t know what verse or what tense or exactly who they’re referring to. Anyway, in verse five it says I went down I came off the mountain and I put these tablets . And the implication of all this is that in the ark there were two lots of stone.

There was the original broken pieces and there were also the new version that went in. So when people say what was in the ark and people say, ah, two tablets of stone, the answer is no. There were two tablets of stone. They were broken tablets of stone. And furthermore, nothing mentioned here but mentioned a great deal in the Talmud was whether there was also a safer Torah in the ark or at the side of the ark. These are issues that are not clarified here and that’s part of the additional literature that we have. So now I’m going to go on in this chapter to verse 12. Verse 12 they do a little bit of fluffing out if you like, of the discussion. And in verse 12 it says, and now Israel, what exactly does God want of you? It’s a very, very interesting issue. Haven’t we already been taught what God wants of us? Haven’t we already been given all the laws, the Ten Commandments and everything like that? But now there seems to be something more. And once again, we have in the Bible this difference between if you like, the clear written law and the understanding or the oral law of interpretation. So anyway, what does God want of you? All I ask all I ask, that’s a heck of a lot being asked so far. All I ask is that you should respect the Lord your God to walk in his path, to love, here’s the word again, cropping up love, emotion. Love doesn’t necessarily mean falling in love. It means an emotional, passionate commitment to serve the Lord your God with your heart, with your soul, physically and spiritually. So there are two different areas here. There’s adhering to God in terms of the actions that you take and referring to God in terms of the experiences that you have.

And obviously I expect you, he says, to adhere to the commandments of God, that I command you today for your benefit. I want you to understand that the whole of the universe is part of this divine plan. And therefore the whole of the universe matters. Everybody in the universe matters. Everything in the universe matters, not just you. And verse 15, the fact is it was only through the relationship that I had with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who were the first people to discover me or to understand the idea of God, that God did choose the people that came afterwards as this day to do what I’m doing today, which is to give you a constitution and to give you these rules. But the fact of the matter is that you are a hard hearted, stubborn people. And there’s a metaphor used here. I want you to circumcise the foreskin of your hearts. Now we know what the foreskin of the penis is, but this is a metaphor for saying your hearts are encased in a stubborn mindset and your necks are so stiff-necked that I don’t want you to be stiff-necked and stubborn. And so the idea of circumcising or removing the thing that prevents your hearts from doing the right thing raises the whole question of freedom of choice, which we’re going to come to shortly. 9:17. He is the God of Gods, the master of masters, the powerful mighty God. These are terms that are used in our prayers every day. God does not show favour and God doesn’t take bribes. Humans have favourites and they use bribes all the time. But God does not take bribes in the sense here that He gives preference to any individual or any group above anybody else, because what He wants and here is a very important principle in 18 if you want to know what God wants, what God wants of you in practise, it’s to care about people, to care about the orphan and the widow, to love the stranger, to give them food and clothing.

So everybody should matter. Verse 19, you should love the stranger, golly, if only that were the case in the world nowadays where the stranger is hated. You were strangers before in Egypt and so you know what it’s like to be an alien in the same way that we should know what it’s like to be an alien if only other people would like to know or be considerate of aliens or only choose which aliens they’re going to be considerate of. And so in the end, the Lord your God, you should respect Him, you should serve Him, you should adhere to Him. And if you swear, that is to say, if you use a name as being the most important thing that you take oath on, then you should swear by Him. So that is a very important principle that we have. And now I want to move on. I want to move on from that to another situation altogether. And that is if we go on to chapter 11, which actually also starts off that you should love the Lord your God. I’d like you to turn to chapter 11 and to look at verse 13. So chapter 11: 13 is the second half of the famous Shema prayer that we have. So in verse 13, this starts the second paragraph. And as I showed you last time in the mezuzah and with the tefillin the first paragraph, and there are second paragraphs of the Shema that are the mazuzah and in the tefillin, this is the second paragraph and it’s a problematic one as so much is, . If you really listen to my commandments, which I command you today, to love the word love again, Lord your God, to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul. In verse 14, I will give the rains into your land at the right time, the first rain in the autumn and the second rain in the spring you will gather your corn and you will get your wine in and your olive oil. And I will give grass in the fields for your animals. You will eat and you’ll be satisfied. Be careful unless your heart turns and you go against you serve other gods and you bow down to them. Now just one point at this moment, you can see very clearly that this is something that refers to an agricultural society.

This is a group of farmers, nomads have come out and moving into a land, but basically they’re going to be farmers. It’s an agricultural society. There’s hundreds of years before the commercial society and certainly the industrial society. So the promise is made that is relevant to them at that particular moment. But then having made a promise of the good things that are going to happen, we now have a warning about the bad things. So you’ve got one side and the other side, they always come together. Verse 17, if you ignore God, God will be angry. And that doesn’t mean to say that His temperature rises, but he’ll shut up the heavens, there won’t be any rain. The earth won’t give its fruit and you will disappear from this good land I give you. So there’s a warning, there’s no guarantee that Jews are going to survive, none whatsoever. Later on we are going to see where the Torah says, that you’ll always have a second chance to come back. But at this moment, I’m just warning you, you are going to lose it all if you don’t behave yourself. And therefore I want you to place these ideas on your heart within your mind shall bind them to you. They should be between your eyes, they should be on you, aware of them physically and visually all the time. And that’s why so many of the laws involve the visual, the practical. And not only that, you must teach them to your children and you must speak about them, show how they matter when you sit at home, when you go by the road, when you lie down, when you come up and you should write them on the doors of your house and your gates. Again, we’ve talked how often things are repeated. This is a repetition of something that’s already been said several times and certainly it’s already been said previously in the Shema about the tefillin and about the mazuza.

And whether we understand this as figuratively or not figuratively, over time they’ve been taken to be turned into something practical so that we actually do something, not just thinking. And verse 21, so that you will have long days and your children will have long days on the earth. God swears to to give to your fathers, which will remain there on the earth and on the heavens for as long as you are around. And so that is the nature of this Shema. And of course our big problem with this is that unfortunately life doesn’t work that way. People are not blessed. We can’t guarantee how the rain comes and when the rain stops and even in the most perfect societies the rain may come and it may not, we don’t know. And therefore what does this mean? In one sense it can mean just a general assertion in the way that we know. And I’ve mentioned often enough before that in that society it was common for monarchs or anybody taking charge to make a commitment to everybody in exchange for their making a commitment back for him. And so this exchange of commitments is, if you like, the inauguration of a rule of law, or in other words asserting what the conditions of government are. So in one sense this is a well-known formula that everybody around the whole of the Middle East would’ve understood at that particular time. And knowing that it is figurative and not necessarily literal. For those who take it literally you can understand it in one of two ways, you can understand it this is some kind of commitment to us as individuals or you can understand it as it some sort of commitment to us as a nation. It’s not a question of just individuals here, but we’ve got another level, the level of a particular society, of an ethical society, of a good caring society.

And this is what this may be emphasising. And that’s why it’s interesting that this is the document or these two paragraphs, there’s a third one, comes later, these paragraphs essentially are the core of our tradition so that the idea combined with what we’ve just said of caring about people, caring about those less fortunate than ourselves, all these things come together within this declared statement. Now the question of course in all of this is do we really have the freedom to make these decisions? And there was a time when it was assumed that we had freedom of choice and that everybody could choose to be good or bad. Within the world we live now with so many different scientific advances, more and more come round to the view that we are conditioned. Famous American academic Skinner conditioned animals and claimed that we are conditioned. You can predict exactly what or how people are going to be behave. And the more we know about the brain, the more we can explain how and why people behave. Famous Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner has showed how easy it is to understand what motivates people to make the wrong decisions all the time. And therefore there is no question that we are predicated on the fact that there are lots of things we can predict. Of course the fact that I was born in England means I’m likely to speak with an English accent. Once upon a time, you could say the fact that I’m born male is an indication that I’m probably going to marry a female. Of course, now we can’t say that anymore, another sign of how times have changed. But nevertheless, we can make certain predictions and it’s capable, people can do it in all kinds of different levels and layers and degrees of honesty and degrees of dishonesty. And yet it is clear that at some level we do have some control.

We can sometimes control our appetites and control our thoughts to some extent. And to some extent we can control our actions, we can improve, we can get worse, we can be more caring, we can be less caring. So to talk about free will if this is a zero gain, either you have it or you don’t, is in my view misleading and frankly not the case. There are degrees of choice we make them, many of us are making them now under the conditions in which we live and the pressures upon us. And yet we have to understand that at the same time a lot about us can be predicted and known. So having mentioned that, I now want to jump to chapter 11 and verse 26. And that also takes us to a new area. It’s an area part of this same theme of God warning us that if we don’t do things well, we’ll be in trouble and telling us that we need to be constantly reminded. And so in verse 26 of Deuteronomy 11, we have this statement I am giving you today says God, says Moses quoting God still on the east bank of the river Jordan, are translated as blessings and curses. And I would rather translate them here a good opportunity and a bad opportunity to do good things and to do bad things. We are constantly given these choices. What are the good things? That if you listen to the commandments of God, which God commands you to do, that’s the blessing. In other words, you will have a constitution, a way of life, a way of guidance, something that’s going to help you make a success of your life. But on the other hand, the the bad side of this is that if you don’t listen to these commands and if you go off the tracks that I command you to do, to go other gods that you don’t know, then you will fall off the tracks or you will be totally assimilated into society and you will lose that special gift, that special identity which the Torah offers you.

And so in order to reinforce this, we need to have something physically to remind you all the time of what your obligations are, rather like putting up Ten Commandments in a courthouse or having statues of justice on top of courts. Verse 29, when God brings you to the land which you’re coming into. So this is a command now for after I’m gone, says Moses into the land of Israel when you get there. So you’ll have your land and on that land there are going to be two mountains. There’s a mountain called harGerizm and there’s a mountain called harEbal. Exactly what these two words mean is very difficult to understand what the etymological origin of it is. Gerizim is made up of two, ge which is a stranger, a ge to live, zim on the one hand is a possibility of something going wrong. And Ebal can also mean something which is like mourning, which is negative, but one of them is positive and the other is negative. So we haven’t mentioned any specific mountains in the land of Israel, only these two harGerizim and harEbal. There is no mention of Mount Zion here, no mention of Jerusalem directly here. And we say verse 30, these are across the river on the West Bank where the sun sets in the land of the Canaanites who live in that area, which normally means the south now in Israel, but it could mean the whole area to the west is west. Opposite near this place which was one of the places where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob passed and lived. So you’ve got these two mountains, very interesting. We’ve talked before about the Samaritans, the Samaritans who lived in the northern area called Samaria after it split from Judah in the reign of after Solomon died, it was then conquered by the Assyrians some 300 years later.

And its inhabitants according to the Bible and according to in fact, Assyrian records were all sent into exile. Some apparently remained and Samaritans today claim they are the descendants. But according to the Bible, the Samaritans were people who were brought by the Assyrians from other parts of their empire to inhabit the areas they conquered to make sure their land and go to waste. And also to make sure those who were defeated wouldn’t reconstitute themselves. The Samaritans adopted the Bible, they’ve adopted the Torah of Moses. And although their document of Moses, his Bible is slightly different from ours in some ways, in many ways it is identical. Of course the script is different because our script is a script that came from Babylon. Theirs came from a previous period before the Babylonian exile. They and their religion of course don’t accept the temple in Jerusalem and they don’t accept that Mount Zion is the holy place. They always had these two mountains as part of their culture. Gerizim was where their main temple was. And Mount Gerizim is still identifiable today just to the west of Nablus. And harEbal, Mount Ebal is identified today to the north of Nablus. So harGerizim is the mountain with the blessing and harEbal is the area of the curse and the scheme was that the children of Israel would stand on the two mountains, that the priests would stand in the middle. And they would turn to one with the good news another one with the bad news, which seems rather strange ‘cause why would any of the tribes want to be on the one with the bad news? Surely they’d always want to be on the one with the good news.

And so exactly how it happened is lost to history and we can only speculate and there is a lot of speculation about it. But still the Samaritans to this day regard Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal as the holy places because they are mentioned specifically in the Torah, Jerusalem and Mount Zion are not. And so in one sense you could argue they have a point except we have our view and they have theirs. And so when you cross over on the land 31 to the land of Jordan to inherit it, I want you to have these laws and all these rules put on paper for you to see so that you will know what the rule is. And now we’re going to come to chapter 13. And this is where we begin, if a little belatedly, but we begin the issue of prophecy because everything up to that moment we’ve already heard before. And so there are certain laws, if you like about the sacrificial system and issues of that kind, which I think are not particularly interesting. There is the idea about whether you sacrifice only in Jerusalem in the temple or the tabernacle or wherever it was 'cause there was no Jerusalem at this point. Or whether you can eat meat somewhere else or whether all eating meat had to be as a result of the sacrifices. But if you lived far away, that wasn’t going to work. And the only important thing was that you had to treat the whole process with a great deal of care, concern and responsibility. And therefore I want you now to look at chapter 13:1. So let’s skip down all these other things and search to 13:1.

I want you to keep all the commandments and once again, I don’t want you to add, I don’t want you to remove. In verse two if a prophet ever arrives or emerges from here or somebody who has a dream and they give some sort of sign, some sort of magic to show that they are right and the sign they gave or the magic actually happens as they said it was going to happen, which will then reinforce their message, which is if anybody comes along and says, I want you to worship another God, there’s another God, a better God than this one, a truer God than this one, a more effective God than this one. If anybody comes, no matter how many miracles they do, no matter what signs they give. But if the end point of this is to get you to abandon your Jewish heritage and to abandon this covenant, then under no circumstances should you listen to them. You mustn’t listen to that prophet, the dreamer of dreams. God is just testing you. If you are loyal, if you genuinely love God with all your heart and all your soul only follow God. He respect his commandments adhere to listen to the voice and to Him you should adhere. So anything that in a sense appears to, if you like overtake or supersede or add in a different way to the constitution that we have or that leads you to reject the constitution that we have or say that it is out of date and it has been superseded counts as a false prophet.

And therefore anything that looks like false prophecy, to which some people will say other religions, whether it’s Christianity or Islam, we are bound not to adhere to that. And even if some of them say, no, no, no, we accept the Old Testament, but we’ve got a new deal that supersedes the old deal. This also counts as undermining the original covenant. And that explains philosophically, if you like or theologically why we have never been able to accept the whole idea of Christianity and Islam, even though in theory you might say they share a great deal. And of course they do, because they both come from us and have been based upon us, but nevertheless to us they constitute abandoning God for something else. But then the question is, what exactly do we mean by a prophet? In the Bible itself, Abraham is described as a prophet. Moses is described as a prophet. Miriam is described as a prophet. The word comes from the Hebrew word to bring some idea or to reinforce an idea. So there are many different words that are also used for what we generally call prophet, the dreamer, the . You have a message that comes to you in a dream. You have the idea of often used by the main prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, . You have this idea of a vision. Is to see, but to see there many words to see is another word. So you have these different words that are used throughout the Bible, but in all cases they are used as in the case of Bilam, the non-Jewish one, of somebody who claims that God has spoken to them.

And on the basis of God speaking to them, they have a truth that we have to adhere to. Now the fact is, that every prophet that we have had in our history has been concerned primarily with human behaviour and human behaviour being dictated by God and their criticisms and their complaints have been primarily directed to when we fail to live up to the standards the Torah sets. No prophet has ever said abandon the Torah. They’ve all said, you are not keeping it properly and if you don’t keep it properly, you’re going to end up in a mess. But this idea of the prophet is so deeply ingrained and virtually all societies have their prophets of different names, different titles and different roles. And therefore, in one sense the question of the role of the prophet is a very controversial one. It is so controversial that in the Talmud the Talmud says quite specifically that prophets have no right to institute anything new, even though sometimes they contradict that with one or two examples, they claim come from the prophets era. Nevertheless, the principle is that if you have a difference between what the constitution says and what the prophet says, the prophet comes second. It’s the constitution, the law, that always comes first. And therefore in that sense we can say quite clearly that prophecy is no longer with us. If there was prophecy at one stage, that stage is now passed, the constitution has taken over. It’s not that as some people think the rabbis have become prophets, it isn’t like that. In fact, there is famous Talmudic statement which says that since the end of the era of prophets, prophecy has only been given to children and fools. In other words, we don’t take it very seriously.

So Nostradamus may have got certain things right, but we don’t take him seriously. We don’t even know exactly what he means. And like many of these things, the wording is so obscure that can be interpreted in so many different ways that it’s impossible to know what the reality is. And in the end, we have the responsibility of deciding what we are going to do. And there again is where we rely on the constitution to be the guiding factor. Now, what I have a problem with is how we translate this whole idea of divine intervention in our lives when in fact it seems rather impossible to find this whole idea of divine intervention. I don’t actually understand how it is possible to formulate any kind of basis for making a decision about what comes to us in our dreams, in our imagination, in our ideas. We know how our dreams are such amazing revealers of what’s in our subconscious, but are we actually going to take those dreams seriously or not? And at the time, and indeed even up to this moment, because people are so uncertain and because the idea of God is so not defined or it’s not clearly defined, all we have is the statements of God wants of us. But we can’t understand the way that God works and therefore to claim that we know how God works to be able to say, I know why the Holocaust happened, I know why you’re being punished. I know why you’re not being punished. To me does not make any sense whatsoever because we cannot know to use the expression the mind of God. We can only try to understand the minds of people and we can only use those different parts of our brain, the conscious side, the analytical side, the emotional side, all of them giving us different messages that we have to find a way of putting together.

And that is the challenge of our life. How do we make sense of all of this? Now it’s such a big question that I want to spend some time going on the questions with greater depth than I normally do. But before I do, I want to say something else to all of you listening here. And that is, we are coming over the next month and a half to the end of the books of the Torah, the five books of Moses. And we have two routes to proceed. One route is to carry on chronologically with the order of the books of the Bible. So the next one will be the book of Joshua. After Joshua we’ll have the book of Judges. And after the book of Judges, we’ll have the book of Samuel. Samuel will lead us through to the Kings and we’ll have the books of the Kings. That is one route we can take and it will take quite a while. The other route we can take is to look at the prophets. Now the prophets are books primarily of poetry of complicated language, but very beautiful language. The language in Hebrew is much more beautiful than the language in English. But even so, the language in English is very, very beautiful no matter what interpretations or translations you go by. And so the question I want to ask is how should we continue after we finish the Bible? Should we continue chronologically? Would you like to move instead to the prophets or should we compromise? And in each month we will do some on the historical and some on the prophetical. If you are able somehow just to register your opinion, we’ve got time, not immediately I’ll remind you again next week too, but I’d be grateful to know. Otherwise I just have to make a decision myself, whether one way or another or a compromise. So having said that, let’s go to the first question.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: I’ve always been unclear, says Philip on the word Tosafot, what does it mean?

A: I think it does not appear elsewhere. Tosafot literally comes from the phrase to add, it’s additions. And these additions are normally referred to the additional commentaries on the Talmud. The Talmud, as I mentioned before, is made up of two fundamental elements. The six orders of the Mishnah, which were compiled by Judah ha-Nasi in the second century, and which contain the development of laws from the end of the biblical period right through to the Roman period. The Mishnah was written in Hebrew. It was a compilation of laws and randomly put together, although within in a structure. And as soon as it was published, there was a debate both in Babylon where the major Jewish community was and indeed in the land of Israel. The commentary and the argument about the Mishnah is called the Gemara and the Gemara is massive. It’s much, much more volumes and volumes you can see some of the volumes behind me on the shelf. There are volumes of volumes. And so a page of Gemara consists of a little bit of Mishnah and a lot of Gemara giving all the different opinions and arguments, sometimes decisions, sometimes not. And containing not only laws but ideas and history and all kinds of other material. Since the printing press came out, the Talmud has been published in various places, mainly in Europe in a particular format. And that format has added onto the Mishnah on the right hand side, the commentaries of Rashi, the mediaeval French German commentator, the greatest commentator. And most people need that Rashi in order to make sense of much of the Gemara. But even Rashi’s commentary was disputed.

So on the other side of the page you have what are called the Tosafot, the additional opinions mainly of Rashi’s grandchildren, but of others too. And the Tosafot, unlike Rashi, are not concerned primarily with the text, but rather more with the ideas and the contradictions and resolving these contradictions. And therefore, to this very day, the first thing you study with the Talmud is Rashi. As you get a bit more expert, you can move over to the Tosafot, but Rashi, Tosafot together with the Mishnah Gemara are really one, if you like a page of the average Gemara. And as I have the volume be behind me, I’ve shown it before, but I’ll show you another one again just to make the point. You’ll see, when you open up a page of the volume of the Gemara, you will see that in the middle there’s this little square. The little square has the first word of the Mishnah. And if you look at it, the Mishnah consists of a bit going from here all the way down to there where you see a Gema and the Gema stands for Gemara. And the Gemara will go on for pages and pages and pages and pages until you get another Mishnah. And then on this side, the right side, you have Rashi, his commentary. And on this side you have the Tosafot, their commentaries. And then you have lots of other commentaries around the side, which gives you the reference, gives you cross references, gives you biblical references. This is how you make up the Gemara. And that explains where the Tosafot come from. So I hope that was a clear enough explanation.

Q: And so I now come to Romay who says, do you think Torah response, human tendency to thoughtless behaviour shifts in the journey to Israel?

A: Well, it certainly seems that on the journey to Israel, they became more cohesive and they ended up accepting the authority of Moses. And as we’re going to see in due course, they accepted the authority of Joshua, but it didn’t last. And so it’s always been up and down and that’s what life is like at this moment. It’s constantly changing. One moment we’re up. The next moment we’re down.

Carol’s iPad, I think alternating each month could be an interesting way to proceed. Thanks for another interesting discussion.

Q: Okay. Alan Mayers says, doesn’t the word hazzan, cantor come from the word chazon, vision something attributable to someone who might lead us astray?

A: Well, I’ve never thought of that use before, but in fact, the term hazzan is used, not chazon but hazzan as an administrator or somebody who is in charge. And that may be the origin of the hazzan meaning the cantor, but this is chazon and that has a different root and a different meaning altogether. Hi Marcia, is it noteworthy that in our prayers we honour the patriarchs and matriarchs and don’t use the word prophet? I think you’re absolutely right. That’s an excellent, excellent point. Remember the prayers were composed after the prophetic area. And we say in our prayers, it’s true that we want the return of King David and we want the return of the judges. And after the judges, we talk about our advisors, but we don’t talk in the prayers about our prophets. Now, on the other hand, if you like, mystically speaking, we always talk about Elijah the prophet, and and we honour him in our songs. And of course we honour him both Pesach time and at circumcision. But apart from , no other prophet has the same role because his role is concerned about the future and about solving the issues that the future are going to bring. So that’s a special case.

Carla, thank you. And thank you. Well, Carla with a C and Karla with a K and Solomon, please compromise, okay. Opinion, compromise going forward. Very good. I’d like to know more about the prophets. I’d like you to include both. I know very little about the prophets, also fine with me, Shoshana, thank you. I prefer chronologically, but be happy with whatever you decide. Thank you. This is very helpful. And thank you Mira I hope to see you soon somewhere. And Suzanne, thank you for your instruction. Thank you. Voting you continue chronologically.

Okay, just to carry on. Very good. We’re going to do that. So I think it’s heading towards carrying on, but setting some part of each month to do the prophets as well. So we’re going to head so far to a compromise unless I hear anything else later on. And so at that point, everybody, thank you very much and we will call it a day.