Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, welcome to another installment of Unraveling Religion. I'm your host, Joel Alessis. Today's guest is a long time teacher and friend of mine, Kadalia Gerfon. Rabbi, how are you today?
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Fine, very fine, thank you very much. And I thank you for that sweet introduction because that's correct on both fronts.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: I just wanted to see, you know, you're located in Jerusalem and I'm in Buffalo, New York.
And I know you've done some work in the tech industry, right?
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Yes, many years.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: And one of the things that you've done in the tech industry is on, on the web, on the Internet is with the people's Talmud.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Right. That was more of a, of a service of love.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: And so I'm wondering if we could give like a primer of not just about the people's Talmud, but, and why it's important, but a little bit about its relation to the five books of Moses, the writings and prophets and how it relates to Talmud and why it's important.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Today we got to go to square one. That's always a good place to be to, you know, go for. And I think, you know, people talk about Judaism and Christianity and Islam as the three major religions of the world that believe in one God. And I think that that's the most important idea of belief in one God means that if you really believe in one God, then you believe that all human beings are created by the same God. There aren't multiple Gods. You know, there's not like a Chinese God and an African God and they're fighting for market share. You know, it's really just one God who creates everybody. And God as the master artist, in the same way that God makes a violet very different than a rose, which is very different than a daisy, but they're all beautiful. So God paints some people white and some people black and some people yellow and, and these things, God forbid, instead of being the thing that separates us, should be the thing that enhances our unity. And seeing that just the divine hand of creativity and understanding that every human being is precious to God because it's not like God's making people as a side job, it's like the main focus. So when you understand that we're all created by the same God and all dear in love to the same God, then the mission critical of life down here is to learn to live with each other and to be able to see that the more that we know about each other, the less we fear each other and the more we can actually realize that everybody brings Something to the table. The concept of the people's Talmud, sort of like Levi's bread, used to run a whole advertisement. You have to be Jewish to love Levi's. So too you don't have to be Jewish to love wisdom.
We live in a world of tremendous access to information, but information is knowledge. And knowledge is not the same as wisdom because knowledge by itself can be extremely dangerous tool. But wisdom in itself is always something that generates growth and development. Every human being, regardless if they're Jewish or not, every human being, all of us, we should wake up in the morning bigger and better than we were when we went to bed. If you're the same person the next morning, what have you accomplished? But if you're growing and growing, and part of growing by the way is failing and falling.
Yeah. Without that it's not growing, it's just make believe, it's acting. But real growth is going through the 180 degree gamut of the life experience.
So the Jews have been through a tremendous life gamut experience, not exclusively, but certainly for thousands of years in an unbroken chain and have seen everything from Romans to Egyptians to, you name it. So there's a lot of wisdom in this problem. Becomes more accessibility to this wisdom.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Either because of the Aramaic language of the Talmud or because of all the false fake news out there about the negativity of the Talmud or all these other things that come from the dark side.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Because many of our listeners are English speakers and not familiar with Hebrew, it was a revelation to me to understand the depth and beauty of the Hebrew language in relation to the teachings, the depth, nuance, context, subtlety, the gematria. Could you give maybe a small example of why studying in the original Aramaic and using Hebrew is important in relation to understanding the depth of the teachings?
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I will and I'll tell you why. Because although I would agree 100% with what you said, and this was kind of the point of the people's Talmud, when you're a little kid and you go and you learn math, the first thing you learn is one plus two plus. You learn that.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: You know, by the time you get to trigonometry, that's like a joke. But had you not done that, you would never gotten the trigonometry.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: I see what you're saying.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: So the exposure to learning in the Hebrew language, the you know we call the holy language, means that it's vibrational energy stems from a divine source. You know, Shakespeare is brilliant, but it's not divine. So that definitely is a very Important level to get to. But how do you get there? You know, if you climb a ladder and you, and you jump and you miss a rung, you don't go to the last rung, you fall to the bottom. So you want to go step by step. So many, many people are very intelligent. I mean, Jews and non Jews, thank God, there are a lot of very smart people, but they lack the tool set to, let's say, access this particular body of wisdom called the Talmud. So the People's Talmud actually is all in English for that very reason. However, the dream would be, of course, that maybe some point in their own evolution. And that's a personal issue for everybody that. Yeah, of course, like in anything, if you read something in its original language, you have a much different understanding than a translation. For sure. Which is why, by the way, the People's Talmud is not a translation of the Talmud, it's a narration.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Ah, okay.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: In order to be able to narrate the idea that was expressed rather than losing the main point and trying to be adherent to an actual translation.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: What is sort of like the People's Talmud? We just talked a little bit about the People's Talmud and what it offers the Jewish people, the nation itself, like its relation to the world. Like what does it offer? What? I mean, it sort of is like one is a foundation of the other. But I'm just wondering if you could talk briefly about, especially in today's climate, what is Israel's relation to the world? What is a Jew's relation to the world?
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Great question. You know, my teacher always told me, better a good question than a bad answer. So I'm not sure about the answer, but the question's solid. I mean, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Antisemitism in America is like wacko crazy. It's off the charts.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: It's off the charts, yeah.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: But I think that's a very good thing. And I'll explain that in a minute. The Jewish people in your country aren't even 3% of the population. You could get so many visible people and driven with anti Jewish, anti Semitic, anti Israel. The problems are so overwhelming in America on so many levels, with so many issues. Okay, let's just go get the guys that if we say bad things about them, right. Maybe that's just like an easy thing. You know, the bully thinks he's somebody special when he hits the down and out person, even if that down now person happens to be, you know, tens of thousands of doctors and lawyers and politicians and scientists. And fine, I'm. This is talking for myself now that the, that this is actually a divine hand of God. Because it doesn't make sense if you're really talking to an intelligent person who's still half awake. It doesn't make sense. So therefore there's got to be something else which is going on now. You had a president called Harry S. Truman who once said, the only thing you don't know about the future is what you forgot to learn about the past. There were other situations and countries and empires that the Jews excelled in the golden years of Spain, no matter how wonderful it was and how ensconced it was. And there were Jewish soldiers and high officers ranking in the German army of World War I who thought for sure they'd be part of the World War II. Little did they know what was coming. So there's this. Ultimately, at some point in time, God's going to shake the Jews out of wherever they think they now live. And I think that antisemitism is going through an evolution like 10, 15 years ago. People say, oh no, no, I'm not an anti Semite, I'm just anti Israel, I'm anti Zionist. Right now that's like, kind of like saying a neo Nazi, well, what does that mean? He'll only wound you. He won't kill you because he's only a neo Nazi. But people are so susceptible to the spin, they don't really think through things. Well, so that's the same thing here is that now the antisemitic movement is forcing Jews to realize that the antisemites don't distinguish anymore between Israeli or Jewish, or they don't really care if you're Orthodox or not, or they don't even care if you are halakically legally Jewish. Leaving the elephant aside for a minute that in many levels, I think the antisemites are correct. And where they err is the action they take. And I'll give you an example of a quote from the Talmud. The Talmud said that had the Babylonians in those days, what we today know as the Iraqis, had the Babylonians known, how much blessing comes into the world from the temple of Jerusalem, not only would they not have destroyed it, they would have guarded it. Because again, that goes back to square one. There's only one God. Now, in an army, you have different things. You have your army of your navy, you have your air force. And people are chosen in the military for different assignments. But the reason they're chosen is because they have a mandate to go out. And what they fulfill is on behalf of the country they defend. So the Jews have been chosen, if you will. And the reason they were chosen is because their great great grandfather Abraham chose God. You know, because Judaism is not just a religion, it's a family also. So when our great great grandfather chose God, God turned around and said, okay, I'm going to choose you from there. Of course, you have the birth of Christianity and Islam and probably some of the Asian religions as well. And all of these are distributors. So God said, okay, look, I want this one little family. They're going to administer some wisdom that they're going to bring light into the world. When you have Jews who've lost all sense of their connection to godliness, the other nations of the world, they're not stupid. They have souls, they have an intuit as to what's really happening and so on. And they realize that, hey guys, you're supposed to be out there making this a better world. And when you fail in that, you're failing for all of us. So the answer would probably be maybe the American government should organize the Jews to move back to Israel. Maybe the American government should make it a mandatory for every single Jew to spend a minimal of like, instead of going into the National Guard, they have to go two years and study in a Jewish school.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: In my year that I did after college, Project Otzma was a time of tremendous introspection and exposure to not just the land of Israel, but the rich tradition of texts and teachers. Completely 180 degree changed trajectory of my life.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: You know, listen, anytime somebody's getting upset and angry, it's always very important to be able to have a look. You got to deal with the issues. And the biggest problem I think that's happening in the world today now is there's no dialogue. Guilty until proven innocent. Everyone has decided this guy's guilty. Nobody can even hear his side of the story. There's a very interesting, again, quoting Talmud law. In Jewish law there is a thing called the death penalty.
And death penalty is supposed to be a deterrent.
And the truth be told, there was one of the greatest rabbis of all time, known as Rabbi Akiva, who said that a court that put somebody to death once in a hundred years as a hanging court.
So although the death penalty is supposed to be a deterrent, it was rarely ever used. And not only that, the death penalty could not be ascribed by any one of the courts except for the great court. So that means you had not one judge sitting up there with a jury, but you rather, you had 70 people as judges, and in the days of those days, as many of these people were prophets and so on and so on. And now they're judging a murder case. If the murder case comes out and 99% of the people say he's guilty, and even one person says he's innocent, he can be put to death. But if 100% of the court says he's guilty, he's set free.
It's weird, right? 99% say he's guilty, he's killed, 100% says guilty, he's set free. And now why is that? Because if one person, nobody in that court could find a reason for this guy, meaning to understand where he's coming from and why what happened had happened, and whatever, whatever, maybe it's he went mad and so on and so on, then that means they didn't really hear what he was saying, and therefore it was not a good judgment. And I think that there's an amazing lesson to be learned from the Talmud about how discourse and dialogue can be successful. For example, in the Talmud, there are two names, famous pillars of the Talmud. One is called Hillel, and the other was Shammai. And they argued over everything. They even argued over why they argued. I mean, they just argued.
And in the end of the day, you know, you need to resolve this. So they resolved that the law would follow Hillel. The question is why? Because in one sense, in the Talmud, it's clear that Shammai was smarter than Hillel. So why then did Hillel. Why not go with the smartest? The answer was that every time they argued, Hillel always asked Shammai to speak first. Oh, he honored him. A, B. When Shammai finished, Hillel then said, let me repeat back to you everything that I have heard, and correct me if I've made a mistake. So this way, Shammai was honored. Shammai was heard and heard to the detail. And once that was done, then Hillel would present why he disagrees. Which means that now Shammai was very much in the mode of listening because he felt heard.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: And yet they didn't agree. At the end of the day, they still didn't agree despite that. But they lived in peace, side by side. And that's what's happening today. Today, nobody's interested in listening to the other side. Even though we have two ears and only one mouth, we should be listening twice as much as we talk. And we've already prejudged the person we're talking to. And if we've already judged them. We probably don't even want to talk to them because all we want to say is our little social media circles that reinforces what the choir already preaches.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: You know, we ebb and flow, people, humankind, humanity, we ebb and flow in a kind of like pendulum. We swing back and forth. And this is a time where it's a very unusual time. And I think this sort of understanding of dialogue and opening with the amount of distractions and pressures that modern day life puts on us, it seems one of the values that has been cast aside is a sort of just a basic human respect for one another.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Of course, absolutely. And the lack of it means we've lost sight that that other person was also created by God, the same God that I was created by.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: And I think in Jewish teachings that, you know, our relationship with our fellow human being is a direct connection to our relationship with our creator.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: And so, and so we are living a time of like man. Just our spirituality is, is going through a tremendous transformation. And it isn't pretty, you know, it really isn't pretty. One of the things that I wanted to ask though is that if you could speak about the people's Talmud and speak about the Talmud and speak about the, the Talmud's evolution to this point to the people's Talmud and then beyond that, I was wondering, when is the next Talmudic update? When is the next. Is there going to be a Talmudic update? Through the ages, we've updated the Talmud and I'm wondering when the next installation is coming. When you think.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: All right, well, I'll start with your first question first. The. The aspect of Judaism which differs with other religions that believe in the divinity of the Bible, and I say different in a, in a. With honor, meaning that with all due respect to everyone that have their relationships to God, is that we believe, as they believe, that while the Torah was transmitted at the Mount Sinai experience, it was part and parcel with an oral tradition.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: It was not merely the written word. And there are numerous examples of how the written word is incomprehensible without an oral tradition. Oral tradition was initially meant to remain oral, not to be committed to the written letter. The written letter was reserved for the written Torah, but the oral was to be transmitted orally. So therefore what happened was it was transmitted orally for Approximately, let's say, 2,000 years and change.
And in that course, over a certain period of time, we came up to a moment in history which was the impending invasion of the Roman Empire.
And the leaders of the generation Understood that the Jewish people were now going to go through two major changes. One would be the closing of the canon of the written Bible. There would no longer be new books admitted or submitted into the Bible because they will all have been finalized before the end of the second Temple.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: What comprises the canon itself?
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, the. The Hebrew acronym is pronounced Tanakh, which is standing for. The T is for Torah, the five books of Moses. The N is for the word navim, which means the writings of the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and so on. And then the K at the end of Tanakh is for the writings, the book of writings. That's where you'll find many of King Solomon's books, ecclesiastics, that's where you find King David's psalms and so on, or the book of Esther or the book of Daniel or the book of Job. So those three components are that canon, if you will, of the written Torah. So therefore, at that time, when the Romans were approaching, there were several factors. A, the written Torah was now coming to an end. Prophecy was now coming to an end. The leadership was going to transfer from prophets into sages, and sages introduced the concept of rabbinic law. And at the same time, there was going to be this dispersion into the four corners of the world like never before and for like, the longest time of never, because we're still in it to this day. So the dispersion happened. You have Jews in Alaska and Australia.
And now we're in another stage of one of the prophecies, which is the. In gathering of these exiles, if you will. So, but because of that, Judah, the prince known as Rebbe, he realized that in doing this, it was important to consolidate the oral Torah so that it would maintain the look and feel of Judaism as Jews would go into these four corners. For example, if you think of all the visuals that everybody, Jews and non Jews, always identify with Jews, for example, yarmulke on the Jew's head, or the Jewish macrame called sitz that comes out of the side, or Shabbat candles or fala. Many, many. These are all exclusively in the oral Torah. There's nowhere in the written Torah that talks about Shabbat candles, for example.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: So that. That the nature and fabric of the Jewish experience was encoded in this a certain point. After Rebbe, it required being written down. So it was written down in what's called the mishnayot or the single form Mishnah. Now, the Hebrew letters for this word mishnah are the same letters for the word soul. Neshama, so that this was now going to be something feeding directly into the soul of the nation. Again, we're skimming through hundreds of years, hundreds of years later, you know, hundreds of years later, the, the attempt of the Mishnah was to be as terse as possible. In other words, it was only to spark your memory so that you could basically still keep the oral. Oral, but you needed a little help there. Yeah, well, hundreds of years later, people didn't really remember what actually was the help coming from the Mishnah. So this then created what became known as the Gomorrah or the Talmud, which is an elaboration of the Mishnah.
Now, that was closed by two rabbis known as Ravenna and Ravashi. And at that point onwards, the, as you call new installments were never going to be in the actual text of the Talmud, but they would be in a ever expanding concentric circle of peripheral texts.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: I'm recognizing that that's, that's a fact that that happened.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Right? So the, the most, the closest circle after the Talmud became known as the period of the Geniuses, or in Hebrew called the Goanim, that lived a lot of them in North Africa in those, and you're talking there like 800, 900 and so on. And after they were finished, when they realized that the Jewish nation had gone weaker, the next circle would be known as the Rishonim, which means the first ones. And in there you have, let's say between the years 10 hundreds to 12, 1300s, classic names would be Rashi, would be Maimonides, Nachmanides, and many, many, many, many others. And they of course could be everywhere from Worms, Germany to Spain, or where have you then jumping into about the 1400s or 1500s. Then it became known as the Achronim circle around them, which Achron means the last ones or the ends. But in there you had the birth of Kabbalah, for example, in the writings of the Arizal, who lived in the northern city of Israel called Spot. But he sat side by side with the gentleman who wrote Jewish law called the Shochana Ruch. And so that that became the Ahronim period. And from them on there hasn't ever actually been another group per se, but there have been endless amounts of rabbinical opinions and thoughts and responses and so on. I mean, the ocean of text written is probably beyond comprehension. Within all of that, there's always become a concept that we talk about. Every Passover we say that we should, each generation should see themselves as if they came out of Egypt. Well, on the superficial level, that's really silly. What does that mean? We're supposed to get over the Passover table and walk around like little hieroglyphics. What does that mean? Right, so the answer is that the coming out of Egypt is a process that only ends with the advent of the Messiah and the third Temple.
And every generation is like another, you know, disc in the spine.
So you have to figure out in your generation, what role do you play in this process that's now 3300 years work in process, if you will, what do you fit in? And that's where people's Talmud came along. At least that was my prayer for it. That now looking at today's generation, my gosh, if you can't tweet it, you can't read it.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: So it's ridiculous. And tweet. Right. Bird brains. So bird brains. They only eat little nibble nibbles. But people sitting down and learning chaudcer and these great writings throughout the world. Yeah. What's going on here? So therefore, not that it needed to be dumbed down, but it needed to be made more accessible, which is what the people's Talmud does. And it allows people to access wisdom according to their interests or just to actually access it in the, you know, chronology in which it was written.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: What is your sort of like hope or prayer for, like Jews and non Jews? Both the exposure for people's Talmud, like, are you hopeful that beyond Jews that non Jews have access to it? Is it specifically for Jews? Like, what's the relationship?
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Ironically, we have more non Jews on the site than Jews.
And it's been fascinating, the spin off. For example, there is a tribe along the Niger river of a group of Africans called the Igbo, or Igbo, depending on how you pronounce it. About 40 million of them.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Now they have their own religion and so on, but they believe that they are part and parcel of the, of the nation of Israel and that they come from one of the 12 tribes and they have their whole traditions and so on. And they are now, let's say in the last 20, 30, 40 years, rediscovering what that means to them. So because of the nature of the Internet, there were these two groups, an urban group and a rural group in Nigeria that contacted us. Now that has now led to, I am now the rabbi of two communities in Nigeria anyhow, but, but now that what it's not, not only do we have weekly classes that I've organized for them, but we do Much more than that. We've raised money for these communities. We built them water systems, we've gotten them drones so they have a heads up on unpleasant people who come with guns to try to bother them. And we've got in the middle of building a school for them. So that's one example. And the same thing happened in China. I now have through this people's Talmud. Our number one user of the website is a woman from Beijing.
She has a huge community and now that community has monthly classes with us. And again, these are all non Jews, but they're all people, as in people's Talmud.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: So it's really for, you know, and I've asked this question, I don't know that there's really an answer, but what defines a Jewish soul? How, how are we to know like the exposure of the teachings and the adherence of the soul to the teachings? Like, I mean, I don't know what defines a Jewish soul from a non Jewish soul. I mean, what is the exact, what are the attributes and what is that definition? But I do know that there is such a thing as a Jewish soul and I know that it's not always born in a Jewish body.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Right. This gets into a very esoteric teaching, which is the teaching of the Chida, what great rabbi, quite a hundred years ago, he pointed out a very interesting observation. Maybe that's why we're observant Jews. A very interesting observation in the language, in the Hebrew language, in a verse in the Bible.
Now the translation of the verse would be. I'm going to just say whatever roughly would be when a convert converts. It's talking about a convert to Judaism.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: And the convert doesn't convert.
Right? Convert. Doesn't convert. A non Jew converts and becomes a convert. So why does the Bible say a convert converts?
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: The answer is because like, all right, another Hanukkah reference. Like oil in water. No matter how much water is poured on it, ultimately that oil will make its way to the surface.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: So therefore, in, in the deep esoteric teachings, usually the people who convert to Judaism are people, as you said, with Jewish souls that have been washed away hundreds or maybe thousands of years ago and are now finally coming back to the surface. That's why it's a convert who converts. And as you know, in Judaism it's against our law to missionize. But my point is that a person wants to come, we push them away. And guess why. Not because we're an exclusive club, the door is open to anybody, but because we want that person to realize that Once they make the jump, once you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way. And therefore from your first cigarette to your last cottage day. So that's why it's really a thing. Now, back to Jewish souls. I'd like to try to partially answer your question with a maybe a mind blowing concept. There are two ideas of Jews. One is pure family. You know, if you're born into the McCoys, you're a McCoy, right? It doesn't matter if you grow up as a criminal or you grow up as a surgeon, you're a McCoy. So if your mom's a Jew, you're a Jew. That's it. Like it or not, you're stuck. However, there's another idea of Jews, which is the concept of Jews by choice, which of course is a term that a lot of the converts use. But I want to show you a much deeper idea. In the story. In the Bible, Isaac has two sons, Jacob and Esau. We pronounce Yaakov and Esau. Esau was a great master of the commandment, which is one of the ten commandments of honoring his father. In fact, even more than Jacob, he was great at this. And really, it was sincerely. A very integral part of his whole life was the honoring of his father. One time he brought one of his wives and he said, look, I'd like you to meet my new wife. Judith, as I think he'd call it in English, he was Yehudit, but Judith in English.
Now, one of the commentators points out that her name was not Judith, because elsewhere in the Torah, when it's breaking down the lineage and they mention her name and she has another name. So the question became, what did he mean by telling his father that her name is Judith?
So Judith is the feminine form of the word Jew. He was saying to his father, she's a Jew. Why? There were no Jews. Abraham was not a Jew. Isaac was not a Jew. Jacob was not a Jew. Joseph was not a Jew. There were no Jews. Until Mount Sinai, the Jewish family was just another one of the families of the children of Noah. So where did this word Jew suddenly come from? And what did he mean when he said, she is a Jew? Hold that. Now you jump into the famous Purim story and you get Mordechai. Mordechai, who's the hero of the whole Purim story. And when he's introduced in the Bible, he is called Mordechai. Hay, I'll translate in a minute. And then it goes on with some other names.
And everyone turns around because the word Yehudi comes from the word Judah. I mean, the word Jew comes from Judah. What is Judah? He was one of the 12 tribes, and he was one of the two that survived because, remember, the 10 tribes were lost. So all that remained was predominantly Judah. So everyone in those years, which was a long period of time when he would go overseas, he people, oh, he's a Jew because he's from Judah, Judea. Right? Okay, fine. So the question they asked is, it says Mordecai, the Jew, Yehudi, meaning that, as if he was from the tribe of Judah. But he wasn't from the tribe of Judah. He was from the tribe of Benjamin. He's called Hayamini Yamini, meaning from Binyamino Benjamin. So the question is, why did he call him a Jew? Because although he was from the tribe of Benjamin, he was a Jew. But wasn't everybody a Jew? Why was he being called a Jew? And back to Asav's wife. Why was she called a Jewess? The answer is, this is the teaching of Nachmanides the Ramban, that being a Jew used to mean and literally means simply, I believe in one God, full stop. That's it. So, so Asaph was saying, look at my wife. Esau was listening, look at my wife. She doesn't worship idols. She believes in one God. Look at Mordecai. Yes, he's from the tribe of Benjamin, but he's one of the Jews that really believes in one God. So that, I think, is maybe an interesting kind of spin on what a Jewish soul is. Therefore, Jewish soul doesn't have to be occupied by a Jew.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: So back to people's Talmud. Can you talk a little bit about its organization, the organization of the Talmud, the organization of people's Talmud, and sort of some of the links and topics that are covered?
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah, the Talmud is broken into six orders.
The orders actually represent a very beautiful brushstroke of a human experience. The first order, again using roughly English translations, could be called seeds. In other words, planting food, because step one, caveman, no food, no life. So you need food. So it talks all about agricultural laws and so on. And in those agricultural laws, it actually introduced for the first time, one of the first times in history where you had social services to care for the poor. Embedded in agricultural law, that even though I owned a field, there were certain types of produce in certain situations. Even though it grew on my lawn, on my field, it's not mine. It belonged to the poor people, and I was not allowed to do anything to obstruct their entry into My private property to collect their just dues. But then after a while, okay, fine, I got food in my stomach. What's the next thing? You come to our seasons now, you kind of go scratch your head and say, well, there's day and night. There's winter, summer, and maybe even spring and fall. And you go through these seasons. That's the next second thing, the second order. So now you have time and space, or space and time.
Well, that's good, but what about transcending time and space? I would like to kind of live on. So how does a person become immortal? Well, one way, which is always kind of worked through most of the time, is children. So now you have the third order, which is all about family life, the nucleus of a society or a community or a nation. What's marriage? What's divorce? Because if you can't get divorced, you shouldn't get married because people can make mistakes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What about raising children? All of these things? That's the third order. And in fact, that that order is actually called women.
And it's interesting. Why is it named women? Why not family or something like that? Because as my wife. Cousin used to have a poster on her refrigerator. And it's. She said, it said, if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Therefore, it's. We understand that. So that's, you know, that's why it's called. Okay, fine. So that's. That's the. But now, fine, now you've got all these little atoms. How do you build molecules? How do. Okay, I have my family, you have your family. But you know what? Your car just drove on my property and smashed my car. How do we resolve that and remain friends?
How do we have laws of just justice?
And that becomes the next thing, which is actually called damages and deals with all of these ideas of how community, society, and so on and so on and so on. Real estate laws, I mean, you name it all the laws that can help a society function in a way that even if you have a gripe, you can resolve it and remain partners in a community that you build.
Now, once you have a society, you need a purpose, they say raison d'etre. You need a purpose for the society. That's the fifth order. That fifth order is called holiness. Those deal with the laws of the temple and the services of the temple, and how we can not just be only ensconced in this world, but have a life that also integrates a spiritual daily existence with God, prayer and More. And then you have the sixth one, which again, these correlate to the six days of creation. So then you have the sixth one just before you're about to leave this world and go into the Shabbat of the upper world, if you will. And that one is called Purity.
Can you return your soul as pure as you received it?
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:21] Speaker B: And that's what, that's all, that's, that's classic. In a nutshell, Talmud, the people's Talmud, works and takes all of those orders and has two portals. One portal is called Search. Search, of course, you can use word search, that's simple, but it has concept matching.
So that what you can do, let's say, for example, you're a doctor interested in medicine, science or whatever. So under search there's a section called categories, and one of them is called Doctors in Medicine. And each one of these categories, philosophy, life after death, marriage and relationships and so on, even down to cuisine, food, how to make homemade mustard. So all these things are 450 different links in this one page called Search, you go to Doctors in Medicine, you get a dropdown window with all kinds of, from alternative medicines to herbal medicines to dealing with issues of every single part of the body, et cetera. And one of those will be called Surgery and Operations. Well, if you click it, what it'll do is bring you on a hop, skip and jump through the entire Talmud every time a surgery is referred to. And within a few minutes, five minutes, if you really want to, you know, exploit it, you will have an overall understanding of the Talmudic take on surgery. And you will discover that the Talmud talks about liposuction, that the Talmud talks about pink skin grafting for heart situations, that the Talmud describes how to perform brain surgery and how to build a surgical theater and things that you would think were only in the last 150 or maybe 10 years, even in terms of microscopes that could go down the throat and reveal all of the situations in one organ.
That's one part. The other portal is called scroll. And scroll actually brings you the various books of the Talmud in their six orders and allows you to open up each one and just click through and be able to get a aerial view of what is contained inside that book.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: It's kind of obvious, but I'm wondering if you could break it down a little bit. Why is that important?
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Which part?
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Sorry, just why is the Talmud important?
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Ah, well, let's go with what the word Talmud means. It's, it's a combination of words. It can be student it can be study, right? So therefore we have a term called a Talmud which is often mistranslated to be a wise sage, but that's not the correct translation. Talmud ha means a student of wisdom.
And a person should always, always grow with their wisdom. And so therefore why is Talmud relevant is because it's a kind of time tested approach to every single aspect of life. And, and therefore to be able to explore these things will impact you because the human organism requires wisdom to thrive. And when the brain, which is a muscle, is not exercising and not wise, it becomes ugly, it becomes dark, it becomes angry and dangerous.
[00:41:53] Speaker A: I, I love that so much. If that feels very nourishing to me. And I, and I think that that's a part of the importance of Talmud. There's, there's a teaching I came across that how Torah is the condensed wisdom of the creator for human beings. This, this interface of the unseen and the physical. God's wisdom transmitted to us through Torah, right?
[00:42:20] Speaker B: I want to preface it by saying that the biggest obstacle we, we all face is not to feel for one moment that we actually understand God. We catch glimpses at best, and we try to parcel them into a picture.
But to really, really understand what is something that is beyond all, intelligence beyond all, and is infinite in every aspect and not infinite for a while, but perpetually infinite. It's so outside of our little PC brains, you know, we cannot comprehend these things. So therefore, you know, it's very important to understand. Like for example, the classic idea, how can we have free will if God knows everything? Well, the fallacy is in the question, because the question says that really God's thinking is a hundredfold my thinking. So since I, there's no way I could imagine, if I know already what you're going to do, that you're going to have free will to do it. So certainly God although bigger, but it's not like that. It's not working. God is not working on the same algorithms that we've been programmed to work on how God can or cannot, there's nothing God cannot do.
If you are God, if you are the infinity of infinities, by the definition of whatever that means, it means that quantity is insignificant to you. Remember when you were a kid, you went to school and the teacher blew your mind and he or she drew on the board a line and then draw a array, right? The ray is the one with a dot, but it goes infinite in one direction, the line goes infinite in both directions. And then they asked you which one's longer? Oh, the Line because it's infinite in both directions. And they said, no, Wrong, they're equal. No, but how could it be because this one has a dot. It doesn't go infinite that way. The answer is because it's infinite. Right. So that was one of the, you know, mind openers as little kids, I guess, in geometry or wherever, we were studying this for the focus of God. The bat iron, the, the apple of the eye is not, oh, this person has a trillion dollars and this one has $2. It doesn't mean anything. What means something to the infinite is quality. Now, once you shift to quality, so the massive universe and so on, but a little teeny human, smaller than a speck on the speck called Earth, and it's little free will and lost down here in the illusion of this world, suddenly says, daddy, I love you. That rocks the universe.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: I didn't know what I was asking when I was. But that is so that's all. I mean, it's human warmth, it's connection, it's getting out of one's own paradigm for caring for others. I mean, this is, that's what I feel you are expressing.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And I feel that you alluded to it earlier and I was going to tell you that many of the prophets, like Isaiah and others often quote God as saying, God says, better you should forget me than you should forget your fellow man. See, because believing in God can also be the ultimate mega ego trip. Because it's like, you know, people like to drop names of people, but somehow or another, if I can drop that name, then I must be somehow great in association with that person. So the ultimate name dropping is God. And therefore I must be a very holy person because I'm mentioning the name of God. Well, that's dangerous. That's why if you look at it, Moses was selected to go get the Torah. God's will, not because he was an IQ beyond numbers, because he was the humblest of all people. Because to be able to go up, you must be able to go, you must first go down. You've got to get yourself down. Ego is edging God out. And when a person's filled with himself, there's no room for God. But when a person realizes how ridiculous it is, yeah, I'm going to take on God. Let's go. God put him up right then you actually, by eradicating the ego, it doesn't destroy the pure self, it frees the pure self. This is Moses coming out of Egypt. Pharaoh was the id.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: This has been a wonderful talk.
[00:46:23] Speaker B: It's always wonderful with you.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Our friendship matters. It's very important to me.
[00:46:28] Speaker B: Yes, Mutual. It's two ways.
[00:46:31] Speaker A: And so I'm just wondering in closing if you have anything else that you'd like to offer or a prayer, a kind of anything at all. What, what to close this out. Well, what would you like to talk about?
[00:46:47] Speaker B: I would like to swing back for half a second to an left behind piece that went through my head when we're talking about the elephant in the room. Antisemitism.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: My wife who is from Finland has an older friend there who is really a prolific writer and really one of the last great philosophers. Unfortunately, one of his books are all in Finnish, so they're not available to the English speaking population, which I think is a terrible shame. But he, and he's not Jewish by the way either.
He wrote a book that basically said, without his even knowing it, very, very deep Torah teachings. And that book was how anti Semites are frustrated Jew lovers. Now I will share that thought because it's so appropriate right now based on the writings of the BAAL Shem Tov. And he says as follows, that the opposite of love is not hatred. The opposite of love is apathy.
And love and hatred are the same energy, but one is a charlie horse in the leg. And so therefore if somebody really hates somebody, it means that they're very involved with them.
If you just 99% of the people who pass you in the street, I'm sure even in Buffalo, you don't know them, you don't pay attention. I mean, they yelled out for help, I'm sure you'd run down. But otherwise they're just background.
But right when you hate somebody, you're engaged with them and you look at how much the antisemites are learning Torah. It's amazing. So the thing is that hatred consumes a person, but it'll destroy them. And that's what's very sad. That's why even in the word hate you have eight, because it eats you up. So therefore, if they could realize that this hatred is a very good thing, if it could be converted into love, then these people who are right now basically destroying the fiber of society could be the greatest builders. And I'll share you. This is my prayer slash my closing comment. Really good friend of mine made a cartoon million years ago and it was a picture of a ye old Jew in robe and he's holding a ye old scroll of Torah, minding his own business and all of a sudden he gets whipped. He's like, what and he looks, and there's an Egyptian with a whip. He's whipping him. What? And the little Jew starts to run. And the Egyptian and a few other Egyptians, they all start to run after this Jew. And he runs in this cartoon into a fictitious city which have blocks, but the blocks, each block is a different generation.
So as he runs up into, like, view of the people in one block there are all these Babylonians. There is it. And they start to run after him. Then he runs the next block and they're the Romans, and then there's the Crusaders, and then. And then the Nazis. And suddenly in the cartoon, he's running, running, running, running, with hundreds of millions of people running behind after him. He says, wait a minute. If everybody is running after me, that makes me the leader, because anywhere I'm going to run, they'll follow me. So therefore, I'm going to run back to Jerusalem to God, and I'm going to bring the whole world back to God with me. We should all run together back to our one Father in heaven, who also is very active right here on earth as well.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: What a perfect place to end. Thank you so much.
[00:50:12] Speaker B: Always, my holy brother.
