In this episode of Hebrew Voices #230 - A Deeply Human Jewish God, Nehemia talks with Dr. Avi Kadish, a Medieval Jewish Philosophy expert and a Modern Day Masorete, discussing his work on producing an extremely accurate Tanakh text, the human-like character of Elohim versus the Aristotelian Greek view of some past Rabbis, and the part Christian texts played in one scholar's deeper understanding of Torah.

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Hebrew Voices #230 – A Deeply Human Jewish God

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Avi Kadish: What it means is that God does have corporeal aspects. That God is found, in some way, within a physical group; not born in a human body but dwelling amongst the people of Israel. It means that this is an extraordinarily human god with a very complex personality.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Avi Kadish, who I am going to term a modern-day Masorete. Shalom, Avi.

Avi: Shalom.

Nehemia: Avi works on a project which, I’m probably going to mispronounce the name, or misstate the name: Miqra al pi ha-Mesorah; no, I think I got that right, which is also known as M.A.M. It is the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, of what Christians call the Old Testament, that you will get when you go to Wikitext. And I’ve known about this for a long time, but didn’t think it was very serious because, you know, Wikipedia, right? Who takes that seriously? But I found out a little bit more about it, and I was blown away, that this might be one of the most accurate renditions of the Hebrew text of the Tanakh in digital format in the world. So, Avi, shalom.

Avi: Shalom, good to be with you, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Avi, so this isn’t your day job. What do you do as your profession, that, I think, in a sense prepared you to be able to do this as sort of a side project?

Avi: My profession is somewhat related but didn’t really prepare me to do this. I was a school teacher. And around the year 2000, or 2001, actually, I was invited to do a doctorate with Menachem Kellner in medieval Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa. And for the past dozen or so years I’ve been teaching at Miklhelet Oranim, which is a teacher’s college in Kiryat Tiv’on in the north of Israel. It’s south of Haifa. I teach there in the History Department and in the Bible Department. In the Bible Department, I teach medieval Jewish exegesis. In the History Department, I teach Jewish thought, Jewish history, and even sometimes areas of general history.

Nehemia: What was the subject of your PhD?

Avi: What was the subject of my PhD? I’ll give you the formal subject and what it means. The formal subject was Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, who was an exile from Spain to North Africa in 1391. And he is a central figure in the world of halakha, but also in the world of Jewish philosophy.

Nehemia: He was from Mallorca, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he…

Avi: His family…

Nehemia: He was from one of those islands.

Avi: He himself was not.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Avi: And so, he wrote a book of Jewish philosophy that’s less well known. A lot of the works of Jewish philosophy were what you might call books of principles. Meaning, it’s philosophy, but the topics are organized according to a system of dogma, or principles of the Torah. And he wrote the least well known of the books of that genre.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: And that’s what I did. That’s the specific topic. The actual topic, which I do believe has a connection to Bible and to Mesorah, to some degree, or to at least to why the Bible is important, is that I believe that medieval Jewish philosophy is really a conflict or a debate between the god of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. Or, to put it differently, between a view of the world which is about relationships and meaning and goals, versus a view of the world which is about nature and causation and science, in modern terms.

Nehemia: Wow. So, you’re saying Aristotle had a god of science. Or maybe science was his god, in a sense?

Avi: Or best to say that Aristotle’s god works according to its nature.

Nehemia: What does that mean?

Avi: It has no will.

Nehemia: Okay, so, I don’t want to use big words here, but basically, this idea of the apathetic god; is that what we’re talking about? In other words, like, it’s a god who doesn’t really love, because that would mean it would change. And it’s not really angry because that would mean it would change, because a second ago it wasn’t angry. Is that kind of what we’re talking about?

Avi: Yeah, and that’s not the god of the…

Nehemia: That’s Maimonides’s god too, though, isn’t it?

Avi: It’s either Maimonides’s god, or Maimonides perhaps had some sort of revision of that god. In either case, even the moderate… there’s a radical Maimonides and a moderate Maimonides. Even the moderate Maimonides wasn’t so moderate.

Nehemia: Okay. Maybe we’ll do a different episode about Jewish philosophy, because that is fascinating. But how did that prepare you for working on the Hebrew text of the Tanakh?

Avi: It did not.

Nehemia: Oh, it didn’t? Okay.

Avi: It did not prepare me for working on the text, but it made the topic important. Okay?

Nehemia: Why? Why did it make it important?

Avi: Why? Well, I’ll put it this way. You have a wide range of viewers, I understand. So, I really do believe that Jews and Christians can learn a lot about their own traditions and their own faiths by meeting the other faith. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: And I think a prime example of that for me is a lesser-known Jewish philosopher by the name of Rabbi Prof. Michael Wyschogrod. He was actually active at Yeshiva University. I was a student of a student of Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, I had that blessing, and so was Michael Wyschogrod. He was a student of Rabbi Soloveitchik, and in his books, he writes about how he understood the Torah from a traditional perspective much better after confronting Christianity…

Nehemia: Really?

Avi: … for precisely the reasons that we just talked about. In other words, when you get a feel for Christianity, it can help you understand that the God of the Bible and the God of the rabbis, the Midrash and the Talmud, was not the God of Maimonides.

Nehemia: That’s interesting. Wow! So, we’re getting off topic, but I think it’s important…

Avi: We’re totally off topic.

Nehemia: No, but you know what? We’ll have to do another program, maybe, and get to the topic, because this is too important to jump past this. That’s really interesting. I once wrote a book, many years ago, which was sort of like an interfaith dialog, and my father read the book. He was an Orthodox rabbi, and he said, “Look, we have our thing, they have their thing. Leave it alone. Interfaith dialog is not productive and it’s not a good thing. Right? We’re happy with our thing. We know our thing is true, and they have their thing. They think it’s true. And unlike Christianity, Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion, so we don’t have to convince them. We’re convinced.”

So, you seem to be bringing a very different perspective that we can learn more about Judaism from studying Christianity. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that from an Orthodox Jew, so run with that.

Avi: Well, it’s not me who invented it. It’s…

Nehemia: What’s that?

Avi: It’s not me who invented it, it’s Michael Wyschogrod.

Nehemia: But you mentioned Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik; wasn’t he famously against Jewish-Christian interfaith dialog?

Avi: He was, yes…

Nehemia: Like, interfaith dialog is avoided by modern Orthodox Jews because he was against it.

Avi: Yeah…

Nehemia: They do it, but they call it something else.

Avi: He wasn’t against cooperation, and he wasn’t even against friendships or anything like that. What he opposed was trying to understand the truth of the other, and he didn’t believe that that was possible.

Nehemia: Is that what interfaith dialog is; trying to understand the truth of the other? I don’t know that I’ve heard it described that way.

Avi: I agree with you, and I think Michael Wyschogrod is an example of this. Michael Wyschogrod, you know, did take this path. He didn’t take…

Nehemia: No, but…

Avi: Yeah?

Nehemia: No, what I said is, I don’t know that I’ve heard interfaith dialog as trying to understand the truth of the other. I mean, the way I’ve always heard it explained was “to try to explain the other ‘my truth’”. I mean, maybe it’s six of one, one-half dozen of the other. Maybe it’s the same thing. But I’ve never heard it presented that way. It’s very interesting.

Avi: To be quite frank, just so I don’t give the wrong impression, I mean, I have here and there been involved in interfaith discussions or meetings, but it’s been very minor. It’s not something central in my life, it’s not something that…

Nehemia: So, Rabbi, and I hope I’m not going to say…

Avi: What?

Nehemia: Rabbi Wyschingrod… is that what his name is?

Avi: Michael Wyschogrod.

Nehemia: Wyschingrod. So, Rabbi Wyschingrod… so what was his…

Avi: Wyschogrod… W-Y-C-H, etc. Wyschogrod.

Nehemia: You’ll have to send it in an email with the spelling so my editor can put it up on the screen.

Avi: I’ll send it to you. Anyways, he wrote a book called The Body of Faith, and I think the title can explain to you how Christianity helped him rediscover… In other words, you said with your father, you know, “We know what we know.” Do we know what we know? That’s the question. And Michael Wyschogrod discovered that he didn’t know what he thought he knew. So… All right, all right.

Nehemia: I want to give an example of that. So, I once asked my father what hashgacha pratit was, and he said, “The truth is, I don’t really know.” And he didn’t study philosophy, he studied Gemara and halakha, but mostly Gemara. That was his focus.

Avi: Of course.

Nehemia: So, for those who don’t know, hashgacha pratit is… and you’re a philosophy guy, you’ll explain better than me. In fact, why don’t you explain what hashgacha pratit is?

Avi: Oh. [Laughter]

Nehemia: No, al regel achat, meaning…

Avi: Al regel achat, I mean the…

Nehemia: What we call…

Avi: The term means that God personally supervises individuals.

Nehemia: Right. Okay. So, my father understood that, but obviously God supervises individuals, so what does it really mean? And I didn’t really come to understand what it meant until I studied medieval philosophy, which was, “Well, the deists say, ‘No, God, He’s in charge of the, you know, of the giraffes. And He makes sure giraffes survive. He’s in charge of elephants; He makes sure His elephants survive. He doesn’t care about an individual giraffe or elephant or human.’” Right? So, there’s hashgacha klalit, which is “general providence.” And even, you know, Benjamin Franklin believed in general providence, as a deist, but individual providence… He’s not the God who hears your prayers because He doesn’t care about that kind of thing. Right? So, my father understood in general the idea, no pun intended, he understood it’s that God individually cares about you. But that’s one of the principles of faith of Maimonides. Why do we need that as a principle of faith? It’s kind of like, “No duh, Sherlock. Of course, that’s what God is,” right? But that’s not what everybody’s God is, so understanding the other person’s concept of God helps you understand what is it that the Torah really teaches.

So, that’s profound. I love what you’re saying. I want to run with this, because I feel like we can return to the Masoretic thing. So, Shimon Ben Zemach Duran… and I feel like I wrote about him in a paper somewhere. Did he have, like, a relative who was from Mallorca who was also a refugee? Is that the one I worked on?

Avi: The truth is, it’s been years…

Nehemia: Rabbi Nissim Duran is…

Avi: I remember in the first chapter of my dissertation about a relative from Mallorca or something like that.

Nehemia: All right, so, it’s not fair that I’m putting you on the spot on something from 20-plus years ago. So, I don’t remember it from six years ago, so, you know… or not the specifics, right? All right. So, in any event, how is he so different? Well, no, I want to go back to Rabbi Wyschin… whoever.

Avi: Wyschogrod.

Nehemia: So, you said it should be obvious from the title of his book that he understood Judaism better from Christianity. I think I know what you mean but, say what you mean. Meaning, like, is this coming from…

Avi: Well, what I mean is that it’s very easy in traditional circles, you know, to take like the 13 principles of Maimonides and to know that Maimonides says, you know, that God has no physical aspects. Which really means that He has no human aspects, no emotions either, okay? And to accept that. Okay? And that’s what many, many people are taught and think, and that’s what Wyschogrod taught and thought. But when he came up hard against the Christian god, who is so human that he’s even born in a human body, right?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: That clarified for him what the Bible means, in his opinion, at least, what the Bible means by “God dwelling amongst the people of Israel”.

Nehemia: So, what does it mean?

Avi: What it means is that God does have corporeal aspects; that God is found, in some way, within a physical group. Not born in a human body but dwelling amongst the people of Israel. It means that this is an extraordinarily human God with a very complex personality. And, I think also from at least the original version of his book, a very male personality, whereas Israel is very female. And it’s a very different outlook than the Maimonidean one.

And my claim, and stuff that came out of the doctorate, after the doctorate, is… is that that’s really what was being argued about in the Middle Ages as well. That all of the systems of dogma that were offered in place of Maimonides’s 13 principles… it’s not just, you know, picking and choosing different details or different foundations… you know, you could have picked those, and instead I pick these, but everybody agrees on the same ones. Anyways, it’s not semantics; rather, it’s substance. That when you build a different vision of dogma, what you’re really trying to do is tell a different story.

Nehemia: Let me ask you this question. So, Maimonides’s god… and just… guys, background… Maimonides was from Cordoba in Spain. Eventually, as a refugee, ended up in Cairo. He died in the year 1204. And when we talk about modern Judaism, in a sense, it’s the Judaism of Maimonides. Rabbi Akiva wouldn’t necessarily recognize what he read in a modern-day prayer book. Some of it he would, right? But the part about, certainly the 13 principles of faith… is that in the prayer book? I feel like that Chabad recites it…

Avi: There’s a version of it in the…

Nehemia: Okay, right. It’s not the one from Pirush Lemishnayot, but it’s a kind of a dumbed down version, maybe. Okay. So, a lot of those things would be like, maybe not recognizable to the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud. And some of them would be, no doubt.

Avi: In some ways, Maimonides would be very recognizable to the rabbis of the Mishnah.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Avi: In other ways, very much not.

Nehemia: So, but the idea…

Avi: You say that… I don’t know, the Torah today is the Torah of Maimonides, that’s not necessarily the case. Maimonides had a very profound influence…

Nehemia: So, there’s been a lot of development since the 13th century.

Avi: What?

Nehemia: There’s been a lot of development since 1204, is what you’re saying.

Avi: Not just development. Maimonides, in many ways, failed, because the vision that Maimonides opposed overcame his influence; the mystical vision, the Kabbalah.

Nehemia: So, Kabbalah, in a sense, was a response to Maimonides, right? It was…

Avi: It was an attempt to do what Maimonides did even better and more powerfully, with a completely different outlook.

Nehemia: So, the God of Maimonides; when he reads in the Torah that God is angry, what does Maimonides say about that? What does it mean? Is God really angry?

Avi: Okay, I see that we’re going to be doing Jewish philosophy. [Laughter]

Nehemia: No, this is too important to gloss over.

Avi: Okay. So, in Mishnaic times, in the times of the rabbis around, I don’t know, the 1st century…

Nehemia: Let’s be more controversial. When it says, “God loves”, what is Maimonides… When it said “God loves…”

Avi: For all of these things, you have to understand what Maimonides did. There was a rabbi, a contemporary of Rabbi Akiva, 2nd century, Rabbi Yishmael. Okay? And they had debates about how to do midrash. And Rabbi Akiva’s midrash was very radical, and he could…

Nehemia: What is midrash for the audience who’s not familiar with it?

Avi: How to define midrash? Midrash is to take a verse in the Bible and find, at least for Rabbi Akiva, to find infinite meaning in it. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: It’s a divine verse, so it has infinite meaning. But Rabbi Yishmael, who was his contemporary, thought he was going too far. He says, “Look, you know, there’s a text here. You have to remain connected to the words, and you can’t do all this crazy stuff,” said Rabbi Yishmael. He said, “You have to remain close to the text because dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam.” “The Torah speaks the language of man.” Even if the Torah is divine, it is speaking to human beings, so it has to speak in human language. And you can’t find meanings in it that are utterly divorced from what these words would mean in human language.

So, Rabbi Yishmael said, “If this is what the verse says, ‘Dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam,’ ‘the Torah speaks in the language of man,’ then that’s how you have to understand it.” You understand it maybe not in a way that’s completely literal, but it’s close to the literal meaning of the verse. A thousand years later, comes along Maimonides, and he quotes Rabbi Yishmael, but he turns it on its head.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: And he says, “‘Dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam’ ‘the Torah says that God loves. The Torah says that God is angry.’ ‘Dibra Torah kilshon bnei adam,’ ‘the Torah is speaking in the language of human beings.’ Don’t understand it that way.”

Nehemia: So, in other words, Maimonides understands it sort of like a metaphor; God doesn’t really love. Can you explain the basic idea of God?

Avi: God causes the universe to operate in ways which seem to us like love or like anger or what have you.

Nehemia: Ah. But God doesn’t actually have a feeling, or an emotion, called love.

Avi: God is utterly…

Nehemia: According to Maimonides.

Avi: According to Maimonides, yes.

Nehemia: He’s what?

Avi: Utterly not human.

Nehemia: Okay. Explain the thing about God changing, and how that ties… like from the Greek… Like this idea that if God loves right at this moment, that means a minute ago He didn’t love in response to your prayer, so God changed. Explain that philosophy.

Avi: Okay. So, there’s lots of Greek ideas.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: Lots of Greek concepts that are foreign to the Tanakh, okay? One of them, for instance, is perfection. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: So many people talk about God being perfect, but the Tanakh never says that God is perfect. And I don’t even think Chazal… maybe, I don’t know. But in general, Chazal do not say that…

Nehemia: And who are Chazal, for the audience who are not familiar?

Avi: Chazal, meaning the rabbis of the Midrash and the Talmud, they do not speak about God in general as being perfect in a Greek sense, okay? Greek perfection means that if it’s perfect, then it lacks nothing and it needs no change. Would it change, then it would not be perfection.

Nehemia: Or was it perfect a second ago, before it changed, right? Meaning…

Avi: All right. So, the God of the Bible is very human. The God of the Bible learns. The God of the Bible acts in very different ways, in very different circumstances.

Nehemia: Okay. So, let’s… wow! That actually brings up a really interesting question. So, you explain that interestingly. So, it’s not that God actually experiences love, we experience something from God’s actions, according to Maimonides…

Avi: That’s Maimonides.

Nehemia: That’s Maimonides, okay.

Avi: My claim is that the rest of the books of dogma were trying to tell a different story, that this is a God of relationship and not a God of causation.

Nehemia: What would Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael have understood from a verse that says God loves?

Avi: All right. So, I’ll use the 80/20. The 80/20 means this: when you look at the Midrash and the Talmud, at first glance it feels very, very different than the Bible. Extraordinarily different. You could take hours telling all the differences between the world of the rabbis and the world of the Bible. And yet, despite that…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: …the world of Chazal, of the rabbis of the Midrash and the Talmud, their God, their Israel, is eighty percent, let’s say, a rough continuation of biblical ideas, okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: There are some things which seem completely new, but there are other things… In other words, the God of the Bible is human. The God of the rabbis is human. The covenant of the Bible is human.

Nehemia: What do you mean by human?

Avi: The covenant of the rabbis is human.

Nehemia: What do you mean by human? Explain what you mean by that. In contrast to Maimonides…

Avi: By human, I mean that you can have a relationship with this God in human terms.

Nehemia: Whoa! So that’s really big. So, in Maimonides’s God, you could not have a relationship with that God.

Avi: Correct. Maimonides’s God is not relatable.

Nehemia: Wow! And… wow! So, when Maimonides prayed, why would he pray if God can’t hear him?

Avi: There! You ask all the big…

Nehemia: No, isn’t that the 64-thousand-dollar question? Why would I keep Shabbat if God doesn’t know or care?

Avi: Okay.

Nehemia: Is it only just for me?

Avi: So, if you pray to the god of Aristotle, it’s like banging your head on a wall. Not only does he not hear you and not only does he not care, he doesn’t even know that you exist. The God of Maimonides seems to know that you exist, and maybe even know that you’re praying, and yet the God of Israel… the God of Maimonides, excuse me, is not moved by prayer. And that begs your question; so why pray? Right?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: Why pray? And, well, I would argue again that Maimonides’s critics wanted to go back to a more traditional view of prayer. But if we’re taking Maimonides himself… so, there’s two ways to do it, okay? One way to do it is to say that, even in the Maimonidean conception, there can be a mechanism for prayers to be answered. In other words, God can cause the universe to work, to operate, in a way that allows prayers to be answered. Okay?

The person who best expressed this was Rabbi Yosef Albo, okay? But he’s expressing something which could be Maimonidean, even though Maimonides doesn’t say it explicitly; that when you pray, you change yourself. So, if you didn’t deserve it before you prayed, then you pray and you change yourself, and then you deserve it after you pray, such that prayer is effective, even if God is not moved.

Nehemia: That’s a sad universe to live in.

Avi: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Wow. I want to read you a verse here. I just plucked out a verse here, Deuteronomy 28:63. This is the JPS translation. It says, “And as the LORD once delighted in making you prosperous and many, so will the LORD now delight,” and in Hebrew it’s Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, “so will the LORD now delight in causing you to perish and wiping you out.” This is the blessing and the curse. So, according to Maimonides, that’s just a metaphor. God doesn’t really delight.

Avi: God is not delighted. God is not angry. But the actions of Israel can have effects that, you know, look like a blessing…

Nehemia: Wow. That’s really interesting. I once heard somebody say that, you know, you perceive your dog as loving you, but the dog doesn’t really love you. The dog’s hungry, the dog’s reacting to certain instincts, and it knows that if it behaves in a certain way, it gets a treat. And you’re projecting your own human understanding onto the dog. And boy, d-o-g and G-o-d, you switch the letters… So, in a sense, God’s actions are perceived, according to Maimonides, as love or anger. What does Rabbi Shimon Ben Duran, who you wrote your dissertation… where does he go with that?

Avi: Where does he go with that? So, there’s different ways that Maimonides could be reacted to. He’s an example of reacting to Maimonides in a way which accepts Maimonides’s framework and then plugs something into it which seems utterly alien to it. Okay? What he does is, he accepts Maimonides’s 13 principles. He does that even though he himself knows… he writes this explicitly, he himself knows that Maimonides’s 13 principles could be describing the Aristotelian god. Okay? He writes explicitly, “it gives you a heart attack when you read Maimonides 13 principles and you realize that they may be describing the Aristotelian god.” He nonetheless accepts them, and he says, “Well, Maimonides wrote his 13 principles standing on two pillars that he didn’t even need to name.” And those two pillars are creation and providence. They’re the understood pillars underlying the 13 principles.

Nehemia: Isn’t providence one of the 13 principles? Am I wrong about that? Ha’hashgacha pratit?

Avi: Not exactly. Close, but not exactly.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: You have God’s knowledge of human beings, and you have that God rewards and punishes, but…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: …reward and punish can be understood in a Maimonidean fashion.

Nehemia: Ah.

Avi: I’ll give you a simple example. Let’s say you badmouth people all the time.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: What’s going to end up happening?

Nehemia: People won’t trust me, and someone’s going to start badmouthing me.

Avi: Yeah. In other words…

Nehemia: Someone gives me a bunch of gossip, I ask the question, “What are they saying about me?”

Avi: Very nice. In other words, human society has a certain nature and built into that nature are certain kinds of reward and punishment that don’t require divine intervention.

Nehemia: Ah. So, it’s almost like the necessary consequences of bad actions are bad results. Rather than God saying, “I didn’t like that. I’m going to punish you for it.”

Avi: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: And by the way, what that sort of does is, it negates mercy. Because there’s no God to say, you know, “You’ve repented and now I’m going to forgive you.” No. Your bad actions still have consequences. Am I wrong?

Avi: Yeah. This was just an example…

Nehemia: According to who, I guess, right?

Avi: What? What?

Nehemia: I said, “Am I wrong?” But I guess according to who, right? Am I wrong according to Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, is the question, right?

Avi: Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran says that there is hashgacha, meaning that God has volition, God has will, and that God does respond, based on His will, to human action.

Nehemia: Okay. So, he pays lip service to Maimonides, but in practice…

Avi: It’s more than lip service, it’s immense admiration, and it’s also a bit of awe. But what he does is… he does this in many different ways in his writings, even in his halakhic writings he does this; he finds it very easy to combine unlike things.

Nehemia: Is there anyone today, and I know that’s probably too broad of a question; is there any major movement in Judaism today that teaches, like, let’s say, a hyper-Maimonides version of God, that God has no emotion?

Avi: Absolutely.

Nehemia: There is?

Avi: There’s the whole Rambam movement.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: Okay. My teacher, Menachem Kellner, he likes to joke that a generation ago, or so, there were two prominent leaders who each saw himself as the representative of Maimonides in the generation. The first was the Rebbe of Lubavitch, the rabbi of Chabad. He was a Maimonidean!

Nehemia: Really?

Avi: He’s the one who created a study schedule for Maimonides Mishneh Torah, a cycle of study of it. He viewed everything he did as an embodiment of the Maimonidean outlook, as he understood Maimonides. And then, the other one was, this is the joke; the Rebbe of Leibowitz. This is Isaiah Leibowitz, okay?

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Avi: Who was a guru of secular Israelis, even though he himself was an observant Jew. He saw himself as a Maimonidean. And the funny thing about it is that the Rebbe of Lubavitch and Isaiah Leibowtiz, both of them of blessed memory, they were so completely unlike each other in every aspect of their outlook that it’s unbelievable to think that they each saw themselves as representatives of Maimonides. In other words, Maimonides is like a mirror, right? The Rebbe of Lubavitch looks at Maimonides and sees Chabad. The… Isaiah Leibowitz looks at Maimonides and sees Isaiah Leibowitz. Maimonides can be taken in almost any direction.

Nehemia: Okay. Let’s now circle back to Rabbi Wysch… Wyschno… What was his name?

Avi: Rabbi Michael Wyschogrod. Who, by the way, I’m not an expert in. I just…

Nehemia: No, but you brought him up. So, I think you were saying, if I’m not mistaken, that he thinks… well, what was his view of God? Let’s ask that question. Or if you want…

Avi: His view of God was far, far more human. His view of God…

Nehemia: So, this was my question: how did studying Christianity bring him to a non-Maimonidean…

Avi: Because the Christian god is so human to the extent of being embodied in flesh, he asked himself, “Okay, so when the rabbis of the Talmud, right, were debating the early Christians, let’s say, or when you look at the Bible itself, and you know that in some way, right, Christianity is growing out of it, okay, what does this teach me? It doesn’t necessarily teach me that God will become embodied in flesh, as the Christians believe. Instead, what it can teach me is that the God of Israel is very, very deeply human and very, very involved in the physical world.” Okay? To give you an example, you asked about emotions, okay?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: Well, the rabbis of the Talmud, and Christianity, okay, they both deepened the human God of the Bible. It’s a continuation. The God of the Bible is very human. The God of the rabbis is even more human. For example, there’s lots of emotions of God, or experiences of God, that you can find in the Bible, but it’s hard to locate the God of the Bible suffering.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: I can’t think of a passage, okay, where the God of the Bible suffers. Now, the god of the Christians, we all know, suffers, is capable of suffering, is capable of that aspect of humanity too, right?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Avi: How about the God of the rabbis?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: The God of the rabbis suffers. When Israel is in exile, the God of the rabbis suffers together with Israel. The God of the rabbis is empathetic and feels the pain of the other.

Nehemia: So, what comes to mind here is, in the Haggadah there’s the part where… and you can probably tell it better than I could, where the Israelites see the dead Egyptians on the shore of the sea, and God is, you know, “Those are My creations.” So, He’s suffering, in a sense.

Avi: Okay. That’s a midrash.

Nehemia: Right, it’s a midrash. But it’s drawn from the story of Jonah, where Jonah’s kikayon, which I heard that in daily speech recently. I don’t even know how to translate. It’s the little bush, or shrub, or whatever. It’s a shrubbery of sorts, as they say in Monty Python.

Avi: It’s something that gives shade.

Nehemia: Right. So, the kikayon dies, and he’s so sad. And God says to him, basically, “How do you think I feel? You’re embarrassed that your prophecy didn’t come true because they repented,” right? “How would you think I would feel if 400,000 people died, who I created?”

Avi: Maybe you’ve thought upon an example!

Nehemia: Right. There’s an example, but think; I had to really stretch to find that example. And it’s interesting; God there is expressing “I would have been sad if they died,” in a sense. The way you feel about your shrubbery is how I would have felt many, many fold about the death of all these people. And so, how would Maimonides explain that? “That’s just a metaphor. He doesn’t really feel it.”

Avi: Well, what Maimonides did, and this is the incredible achievement, and the achievement that the Kabbalah tried to do even better; Maimonides succeeded in taking the entire body of both the written Torah, the Tanakh, and the Oral Torah, meaning the traditions of the rabbis, and reinterpreting them globally. Or at least giving keys, or methods, and examples, for interpreting them globally in a rationalistic direction. Okay? The Kabbalah had to reproduce that and to say, “We’ll reinterpret the entire Torah globally in a mystical direction.”

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. So, there’s another verse that comes to mind, which is a very famous verse, Exodus 24:10, which it says, “Va’yer’u et Elohei Yisrael,” “And they saw the God of Israel.” So, I think most Jews, and correct me if I’m wrong here, maybe I’m wrong, but I think, even in Talmudic times they would have said, “That’s a mashal. It’s a metaphor.” Or, “That would be dibra Torah be’lshon bnei adam,” “Torah spoken in the language of men.”

Avi: Well, first of all, you have “ki lo yirani ha’adam vechai,” “For a human…”

Nehemia: Right. So, you have two verses that contradict so you have to reconcile them. Okay?

Avi: Okay.

Nehemia: So, according to Rabbi Ishmael, what does it mean, “They saw the God of Israel,” in Exodus 24:10?

Avi: I honestly don’t… I…

Nehemia: What would you think he would say? If you were Rabbi Ishmael, what would you say?

Avi: I don’t remember. I don’t know, I don’t remember offhand the midrashim on that verse.

Nehemia: That’s fine, but how could you apply…

Avi: Okay.

Nehemia: …a Rabbi Ishmael approach to that? Let me ask you that. I mean, if you don’t know, it’s fine, but…

Avi: Well, you could say, first of all, that the plain meaning of the verses seems to be that it is possible to see God, but that it’s very, very dangerous.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Avi: Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: It’s very dangerous. You’ll die.

Nehemia: So, in other words there’s a verse that says, “A man cannot see Me and live,” and in the same book, if I’m not mistaken, Exodus…

Avi: Correct. Right. And then it…

Nehemia: It says, “they saw the God of Israel.”

Avi: But in some sense, they did see, okay? What you clearly have here is a God that has some sort of physical semblance, whether it’s that they saw or whether that it’s if you see and then you’ll die.

Nehemia: So, now I want to bring in what I will call the historical critical approach, which is what I was taught at Hebrew University by people who say… So, here’s the way I had one professor who explained it. He said, “When a believer,” and believer here means someone who believes in Scripture, not in the Christian sense. A Jew who believes in Judaism. “When a believer sees contradictions, they want to reconcile the contradictions. When a Bible critic,” that’s the term they use, “sees contradictions, they want to amplify the contradictions.” And so, how would he amplify if I’m going to put myself in his shoes? He would say, “One author in Exodus believed you can’t see God, and the other author thought you could…”

Avi: You’re frozen Nehemia.

—

Nehemia: All right. So, I was talking about… we just had an interruption of the internet. I think Maimonides’s God was upset with us that we were talking about Him so much, but… So, all right. So, when they saw the God of Israel in Exodus… and what were you saying? I feel like you were…

Avi: You were beginning to ask me about source criticism, that the two contradictory verses, if…

Nehemia: If you didn’t believe in the divine authorship of the Torah or that it was divinely inspired, let’s put it that way, then you would say, “Oh, okay. Exodus 24:10 was written by one author who believed the people literally saw God, that there was a physical manifestation of God, or God was physical, and the other one where it says you can’t see Him, man, and live. That’s a later idea, or a different idea from a different author. Right? But if you believe they’re both divinely inspired, then what we want to do is we want to reconcile them. And the way to reconcile them is many different ways, and for Maimonides, I guess you would say the way is that…

So, I’ll tell you that the classic exegetical explanation I’ve heard was, like… Yaakov Qirqisani was a Karaite in the 10th century. He brings it as an example. He says something like this: “You have to interpret everything literally, unless there’s a good reason not to.” And here’s an example of how it would be forbidden to interpret this literally, because then you have another verse that it contradicts. So, it means “and they perceived the God of Israel”, or maybe now I’m putting words in his mouth. “They were in a vision. They weren’t awake.” Right? Meaning, people see God in visions. That’s not controversial, right? Like, Ezekiel and Isaiah saw Him sitting on a throne, right? Is He literally on a throne, or is that just something that they perceived, right? So, Rabbi… and I keep getting the name wrong. The one at Yeshiva University. How would he explain this, if you had to guess, right? I mean, maybe…

Avi: First of all, first of all, I cannot tell you how Michael Wyschogrod of blessed memory would have done that. He wrote a couple of books. I read a couple of his books. I don’t know what he did or what he thought as a…

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Avi: I do know that Maimonides homes in on this particular area, but it’s not something that I’ve looked at recently.

Nehemia: okay.

Avi: He does deal with Moses, and with seeing God, and this whole business.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: But I think what you’re asking is a little broader. You’re asking, you know, “If you have two verses which seem to contradict,” okay? How they contradict, meaning, in my opinion, the plain meaning of both verses, is that God can be seen, but maybe it’s too dangerous, right?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: But God has physicality enough, okay, to be seen. And yet, there still is a contradiction between the two verses, and what do you do with that? So, source criticism says, “Okay, this is one school, and this is another school.” I’m not well enough prepared to answer…

Nehemia: No, that’s fair, okay.

Avi: …this particular example, but I can tell you my approach in general.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: I’m not a professional Bible scholar, okay?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: Even the biblical exegesis that I teach, it’s more as Middle Ages than as Bible. And yet, I would say the following, okay? And I think that this would fit in with both the medieval thinkers that we’ve talked about and with Michael Wyschogrod. And that is the following: that human beings simultaneously can be shallow and deep. Human beings can be refreshingly simple and, at the same time, can be devastatingly complex. That’s how human beings are.

And the God of the Bible, and after that, the God of the rabbis, is a very, very deeply human God, okay? What does that mean? What does that mean? For our discussion, what does it mean? Is that, if in the Bible you get, in different places, very different images of God, that actually fits the idea, okay? First of all, the text, okay? First of all, the text. Good literature, for that reason, is both simple and complex, okay? The Bible, I think, unlike the classic source critics, is very good literature, okay? But not in a Western secular sense, necessarily. Okay? Very good literature, because it’s dealing on both sides, meaning with humanity and God, with very complex beings that change. Okay?

Nehemia: So, wait, you’re saying that the God of the Bible changes.

Avi: Because the God of the Bible is not perfect in the Greek sense.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Avi: The God of the Bible is an organism. If an organism doesn’t change, it means it’s dead.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: Okay? Greek perfection is static.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Avi: But beauty and goodness and, I don’t know, and life, okay, relationships; they’re alive, and they’re constantly changing. And if the Bible didn’t reflect that, it would not only not be good literature, okay, it also, in that case, would not be divine. In other words, the simple way of looking at it is that if God is perfect, he can’t contradict Himself. So, if there’s contradictions, then, you know, it cannot be divine. But, if a human being produces something living and reflects life and doesn’t contain contradictions, then it’s not a reflection of life.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Avi: With the same business, maybe it’s dangerous to see the king. And yet, maybe on another occasion, the king allows himself to be seen.

Nehemia: And it’s interesting, and I’m just thinking out loud here, so this is very poorly formulated perhaps… so, you’re saying that God is very human, but we have the verse that says that He made man in His image. So maybe, in a sense, we’re very divine, and divine doesn’t mean what the Greeks said. If we look at humans, we get a reflection of what God…

I had a friend who once explained… and he got in a lot of trouble because it was misunderstood. But he said, “If you look at the different ethnic groups, each of them has certain things they emphasize. And if you put them all together, that’s this beautiful rainbow that’s a reflection of God. Because God made this group, and He made that group, and He made the other group, and each of them maybe emphasizes certain aspects in their culture. If you take them all together, you get this beautiful picture of God.” He was called a racist for that, but it sounds so beautiful. How is that racist? It’s the opposite of racism!

So, maybe it’s pretending all human cultures are the same. But obviously they’re not the same, or anthropologists wouldn’t have jobs, right? You know, they study the differences in human cultures, right?

Avi: If we’re all the same, then life would be meaningless.

Nehemia: Yeah, well… and we’re all the same biologically, but then there are certain things that we culturally choose to emphasize in our different cultures, and then not everybody fits in with that culture, right? There’s outcasts like me, even in my own culture, but there are certain things I recognize… those are the standard values in the culture, and in a sense, our humanity. It’s not that God is a reflection of us, we’re a reflection of Him, if we take the verse in Genesis. So, I think that’s a wonderful place to end. I want to talk about your M.A.M. text! So, let’s just do a teaser…

Avi: We didn’t talk about Mesorah, but maybe we did talk about why the books that the Masoretes transmitted are important.

Nehemia: And so, let me ask you this question. So, when you were working on your doctorate on Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, were you dealing with manuscripts and the differences in the manuscripts? Or was there like a good critical edition so you didn’t really need to get into that?

Avi: There wasn’t a good critical edition. But by taking a decent version and comparing it when there seemed to be a problem with manuscripts, that was enough.

Nehemia: So, that laid the foundations for you working on the Tanakh, on the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, which we will get to in the next episode that we have.

Avi: I’ll actually tell you who did that for me. It wasn’t that, it was Rabbi Dr. Mitchell Orlian at Yeshiva University…

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: …who taught a course on biblical exegesis. And he told all the guys in the class, he said, “What you’re going to do is, you’re going to go to the library and you’re going to ask them for a manuscript of an unpublished commentary of the Tosafists on the Torah.” The Tosafists didn’t just work on the Talmud, they also worked on the Torah. And so, I sat there. You just had to take one verse, one comment on one verse, you know, figure out what all the letters were and make sense out of the text. And that’s what got me started on manuscripts.

Nehemia: So, again, it’s just a quick teaser for what we’re going to talk about next time. So, you have this WikiText, which is the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, and it’s called Al Pi Ha’mesorah, “according to the Mesorah.” And people might be familiar with the term, I hope, Masoretic Text, which is the transmitted text. But that’s not exactly what Mesorah means.

If I open up different printings of the Tanakh in Hebrew… because I’ll hear people say, “Well, you know, my English is different from this other English, and the third English, but what does it say in the Hebrew?” And, are there differences in the Hebrew text? If we look at different Hebrew manuscripts, or even Hebrew printings, the manuscripts that… we’ll get to that. If I look at different printings of the Hebrew, will I see differences… if I know what I’m looking at, right? I mean…

Avi: Okay, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you will not find many differences at all. Maybe none. The differences are only evident to the people who know what to look for. And to be quite honest and quite frank, the differences, almost all of them, are irrelevant to anyone who is not publishing a text. If you publish a text and you do it right, then you have to justify, why did I publish it this way? But if you’re not publishing a text, you’re just using a text, then almost any printed Tanakh that you might use will be good enough.

Nehemia: So, the example I like to give is, we have differences in our Tanakh manuscripts, but there’s no manuscript where Ishmael was bound rather than Isaac. Right? Meaning, like that would be a profound difference.

Avi: The Quran, by the way, does not say that…

Nehemia: No, I didn’t say it did. I’m just saying… We don’t have a version of the Torah where Aaron went up to Mount Sinai instead of Moses and received the Torah, right?

Avi: Okay.

Nehemia: Meaning, like, what we have is, the difference is, is that word spelled with a Vav or without a Vav? Is it spelled with a Yud… And you’re actually dealing with even finer differences, which is… we probably won’t talk about gayot, or maybe we’ll mention them, but the little dots and dashes that even the scribes in some cases considered, you could put that in or not, it doesn’t make a difference; it’s good if you do it, but you don’t have to. And that’s some of the level that you’re dealing… like really precise level of information. But still, and maybe this is a beautiful way to end, because if you believe God is perfect, maybe not in a Greek sense, but in a… And it’s interesting; you say there’s no verse…

Avi: In an organic living sense.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Avi: In an organic living sense.

Nehemia: So, He is a living God, that it says. We don’t have to, you know, we know it says He’s Elohim chayim. So, wow. So, that’s an interesting idea. In other words, if there’s one manuscript with a Vav and one manuscript without a Vav… and this is a theological question, right, outside of the academic realm, would you say, elu ve’elu divrei Elohim chayim, that this is the text we’ve received, and both of those are the words of God? I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud here.

Avi: I don’t quite know how to answer that. Not just for the Masoretes, but also in the centuries, you know, right after the Masoretes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: There were details that they considered to be representatives of different traditions…

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: …and there were details that they thought to be just mistakes. In other words, sometimes you might find a text that differs by a Vav, and it’s just because one of the two masoretes was sloppy. But sometimes you’ll find the very same thing, and neither of the Masoretes is being sloppy. Rather, both of these Masoretes are following, either a recorded Masoretic note, or something which appears in many, many, many, many manuscripts and appears to be something, a tradition that was alive among some of the scribes.

Nehemia: So, this is the bigger question of, how do we distinguish between a scribal error, what I’ll call an ad hoc, like, just at the moment the scribe made a mistake, and no, there’s actually a separate tradition that’s a recorded, known, documented tradition where he’s writing something different… We’ll save that for next time. This has been an amazing conversation. Not where I thought it would go, but what a great conversation! I want to call it a deeply human Jewish God. I think that’ll be the name of this episode.

Avi: Oh, and the correction for your listeners. I looked up my own dissertation. It begins with him being young in Mallorca and then studying in Aragon.

Nehemia: Okay. And then he becomes a refugee in North Africa. Was he persecuted by the Catholic Church, or by the Muslim fanatics? I don’t remember, who…

Avi: This is 1391. This is Christian Spain.

Nehemia: It’s the Christian persecution, okay.

Avi: This is what’s called in Hebrew, Gzerot Quf-Nun-Aleph, the Persecutions of 1391, almost exactly a century before 1492, which is the final expulsion.

Nehemia: Right. People think that the Jewish persecutions in Spain started in 1492. That’s not… It’s not… all right.

Avi: Many were murdered, many were forcibly converted, and many fled. And he was one of the ones who fled to North Africa.

Nehemia: Wasn’t there a rumor that he converted and then fled, or is that a different rabbi?

Avi: Yeah. It’s not a rumor. You’re talking first of all about Maimonides.

Nehemia: No, I’m talking about somebody from Mallorca. I know about Maimonides; that’s a different thing.

Avi: There probably were all of these things with people from Mallorca.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: With Maimonides, there’s a debate. It’s not just a scholarly debate today, it’s even a debate amongst sources from the Middle Ages.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avi: Did Maimonides family actually do what he describes in Igeret Ha’shmad, in the Epistle on Persecution?

Nehemia: Of the apostasy… I think you translate it apostasy.

Avi: Oh, apostacy. So, he says that, you know, you should live, become a Muslim, and then, as soon as you can, flee to a land where you can be part of the people of Israel again.

Nehemia: Meaning, if they say, “We’re going to kill you if you don’t convert,” you convert and you pretend, and then you try to get away.

Avi: Yeah. So, he never says that he himself did it, but there are Islamic sources which claim that he did it, and then other Islamic sources which cast doubt upon that. Okay? So, the scholars are divided as to whether…

Nehemia: Well, I’m looking forward to our next conversation, where we’re going to talk about one of the most accurate, and maybe you would say the most accurate, Hebrew text of the Bible. It’s actually used by printers who want to print the Bible in Hebrew, and they go and they take your text, am I right?

Avi: Yes. It’s…

Nehemia: All right. So that’s not every printer, but some of them. All right. Thank you, Avi. Shalom.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Deuteronomy 28:63
Jonah 4
Exodus 24:10
Exodus 33:20
Genesis 1:26-27
Talmud Eruvin 13b:10-13

BOOKS MENTIONED
The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel: Wyschogrod, Michael: 9781568219103: 

Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations (Radical Traditions) (Radical Traditions (RT)): Michael Wyschogrod, R. Kendall Soulen: 9780802813558

OTHER LINKS
מקרא על פי המסורה – ויקיטקסט

Miqra al-pi haMasorah

https://journal.libraries.wm.edu/jtr/article/view/243

Ḥasdai Crescas and Simeon ben Ẓemah Duran on Tradition versus Rational Inquiry by Seth (Avi) Kadish

The post Hebrew Voices #230 – A Deeply Human Jewish God appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of Support Team Study - The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 4, where Nehemia and Biblical scholar Dr. Idan Dershowitz conclude their examination of the Shapira scrolls with the story of the conquest of Sichon, how it subverts the common academic theory regarding which parts of Deuteronomy are “oldest,” and why Idan thinks his approach to the text does not require anyone to surrender their faith.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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The post SNEAK PEEK! – Support Team Study – The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 4 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this Support Team Study - The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 3, where Nehemia and Biblical scholar Dr. Idan Dershowitz return to the missing story of the spies in the Shapira scrolls to discuss how Deuteronomy relies on the book of Numbers and why the discrepancies don’t seem to support the theory that the scrolls are a late forgery.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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The post SNEAK PEEK! Support Team Study – The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 3 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of The Hero’s Journey Toward Recovery: Part 2, where Nehemia continues discussing “The Hero’s Journey” with Dr. Michael Cowl Gordon. They further discuss its steps and parallels with Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as how a person who recovers from addiction impacts society.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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The post SNEAK PEEK! Support Team Study – The Hero’s Journey Toward Recovery: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #224 – "The Hero’s Journey Toward Recovery": Part 1, Nehemia is joined by his uncle, addiction medicine specialist Dr. Michael Cowl Gordon, as they walk through the steps of The Hero’s Journey to find insights on overcoming addiction, which trace back to both scripture and other ancient cultures.

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BOOKS MENTIONED
The Twelve Step Pathway: A Heroic Journey of Recovery
by Michael Cowl Gordon

Seeking a Higher Power: A Guide to the Second Step
by Michael Cowl Gordon

The Hero with a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell

The Big Book | Alcoholics Anonymous

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #25 – A Sober Purim in Jerusalem

OTHER LINKS
Michael Cowl Gordon

The post Hebrew Voices #224 – The Hero’s Journey Toward Recovery: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #233 - The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 2, Biblical scholar Dr. Idan Dershowitz returns to show Nehemia the contents of the lost Shapira scrolls, how the 10 Commandments differ from the Deuteronomy 5 account, and why he thinks the text cannot simply be a shortened version of Deuteronomy.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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VERSES MENTIONED
Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 5
Deuteronomy 1:19-44
Deuteronomy 33
Psalm 50:7
Genesis 1
Genesis 28:16
Genesis 32:30
2 Samuel 5:20
Hosea 2:16
2 Samuel 4; 1 Chronicles 8-9
Genesis 22:13
Leviticus 19
Jeremiah 4:2, 5:2, 7:9

BOOKS MENTIONED
The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book
by Idan Dershowitz

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #161 – The Moses Scroll
Support Team Study – The Shapira Scrolls
HGP PLUS Tricks of Translation – Name in Vain: Part 1
HGP PLUS Tricks of Translation – Name in Vain: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #80 – Fake Dead Sea Scrolls Explained

OTHER LINKS
The Forgotten Meaning of אוֹת

The post Hebrew Voices #233 – The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #231 - The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 1, Nehemia brings on Biblical scholar Dr. Idan Dershowitz to discuss the lineage of the infamous Shapira manuscripts - were they real or forgeries - and how a well-known 19th century Jewish Christian scholar eventually reversed his belief in their authenticity.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Joshua 1:7

BOOKS MENTIONED
The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book
by Idan Dershowitz

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #161 – The Moses Scroll
Support Team Study – The Shapira Scrolls
HGP PLUS Tricks of Translation – Name in Vain: Part 1
HGP PLUS Tricks of Translation – Name in Vain: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #80 – Fake Dead Sea Scrolls Explained

The post Hebrew Voices #231 – The Lost Scroll of Moses (Shapira): Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #229 - Rightly Dividing the Word of Yehovah, Nehemia appears on The Shannon Davis Show to answer questions regarding the quest for God’s name, the rapidly developing field of Hebrew manuscript research, and the unique benefits of King James English.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio TranscriptCOMING SOON

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Mishnah Sanhedrin 10
Numbers 6:27
Deuteronomy 30
2 Kings 22-23; 2 Chronicles 34-35
Luke 12:48
Leviticus 10:3
Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32
Genesis 15
Exodus 4:15
Exodus 15:2
Exodus 17:16
Isaiah 12:2
Psalm 68:5 (verse 4 in English)
Jeremiah 38:11
Psalm 104:35
Proverbs 30:4
Isaiah 40:12-16
Exodus 4:22-23; Hosea 11
Exodus 3:14
Revelation 1:4; 4:8
Isaiah 44:6; 48:12
Ezra 1
2 Chronicles 36:23
Mishnah Chagigah 1:8
Luke 4
Leviticus 15:19-30, 18:19, 20:18
Ezekiel 18
Jeremiah 2:20; Jeremiah 17:2; Deuteronomy 12:2-3; Ezekiel 6:13; 1 Kings 14:23; 2 Kings 17:10; 2 Chronicles 28:4
Acts 21:25
Leviticus 20:18
Proverbs 26:2
Exodus 20:5; Exodus 34:6-7; Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9
Galatians 3:13
Deuteronomy 17:9
Numbers 6:22-27

BOOKS MENTIONED
Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose
by Derek Prince

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #94 – God is a Zionist
Hebrew Voices #108 – My Search for Hebrew New Testament Manuscripts
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 4
Hebrew Voices #158 – Sassoon Codex Under a Microscope
Hebrew Voices #174 – How We Got Our Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Voices #147 – What is the Sacred Name of God?

OTHER LINKS
Institute for Hebrew Bible Manscript Research – Dedicated to researching the Hebrew Bible

Manuscripts – Institute for Hebrew Bible Manscript Research

The post Hebrew Voices #229 – Rightly Dividing the Word of Yehovah appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #228 - Shemini Atzeret: The Grand Finale?, Nehemia and Lynell discuss the dual significance of Atzeret as well as its deeper Biblical meaning.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #228 – Shemini Atzeret: The Grand Finale?

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: He says, “I reviewed all the matters of the appointed times in the Bible, and I did not find Shavuot called Atzeret.” Right? So, this is a big discovery for him, because imagine… think about this for a second; imagine if I told you that in the entire Tanakh, Passover is never called Passover, it’s called Chag Hamatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. If I told that to any Jew, they’d be shocked. “Of course, it’s called Passover, that’s the name of the holiday!” No, it’s not. That’s a later development.

—

Nehemia: All right. Chag sameach, everybody. I am going to talk today about Shemini Atzeret. Shemini Atzeret is… I think that’s probably a hard Hebrew word for some people to say. That is the name of the festival that I’m observing today, and many of us are. Shemini Atzeret is the eighth day of Sukkot, and it’s a bit strange because it’s actually not part of Sukkot. Sukkot’s seven days, and then there’s an eighth day on which there’s an atzeret. Well, what is atzeret? Atzeret is usually translated in English as a solemn assembly. It’s a day of very serious solemnity.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: But is that what it says in the Hebrew? And that’s interesting, because it implies the other holidays, the other biblical appointed times, would be just assemblies, and Shemini Atzeret is the solemn assembly. So, let’s see what it actually says in the Tanakh. So… oh, I’m going to have Lynell read.

Lynell: So, are you saying it’s a solemn assembly, Nehemia?

Nehemia: No, I’m saying that’s how it’s usually translated.

Lynell: Right. That’s what I thought you were saying.

Nehemia: But I looked up one translation, and it had “a joyous assembly”. Well, which one is it? We’re going to look in the Hebrew, and we’re going to find out. And this is actually a really interesting study for me, because I love how words evolve over time and their meanings change. We have what’s called a semantic shift, right? Where, like… I actually heard this the other day, that if you go back to English from like 500 years ago, they would say there’s like, you know, “five beef out in the field,” because beef could refer to the animal and the food. But today, it only refers to the food. You wouldn’t say, “I have a herd of beef in the field.” Right? I don’t think you would, or in the pasture.

So, atzeret is an example of that. We’re going to see what it meant in Tanakh times; we’re going to see what it meant later, to try to get an understanding of… okay, what does this word actually mean? All right, so, babe, can you, and you actually have the verses. I’m going to ask you to read Leviticus 23:36, and I’m going to make some comments about the Hebrew there.

Lynell: “Seven days you shall bring offerings by fire to Yehovah. On the eighth day, you shall observe a sacred occasion.”

Nehemia: Which translation is that?

Lynell: That’s the JPS Tanakh.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh, that’s Mikra Kodesh, that’s the holy convocation in the King James. That’s a separate study. All right, go on.

Lynell: “…and bring an offering by fire to Yehovah. It is a solemn gathering.”

Nehemia: Okay. And the word in Hebrew that they translate… Right? There’s two words in English: solemn, gathering. In Hebrew it’s atzeret. Ayin-Tzadi-Reish-Tav. Okay. So, it is an atzeret. You shall do no manner of labor.

Lynell: It doesn’t say “solemn”?

Nehemia: No, it says atzeret, whatever atzeret means. Maybe it does mean solemn, right? We have to find out.

Lynell: We’ll find out.

Nehemia: So, there’s a very similar statement which we don’t have to read, but, guys, go do your own study afterwards. Numbers 29:35, my favorite one, Nehemiah 8:18, and then 2 Chronicles 7:8-10. Now, there’s a list of sacrifices in Numbers 28 and 29, so you’ll find all the biblical feasts there, all the biblical holidays in Numbers 28 and 29, along with a lot of sacrifices. Nehemiah 8 is when they came back and they read the Torah, and they said, “Oh, there’s this thing called Sukkot. We didn’t know that. We better celebrate that.” And they end up celebrating Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret, and so it’s mentioned there.

And then, in 2 Chronicles 7:8-10 you have Solomon dedicating the Temple during Sukkot. And there it’s interesting; Sukkot is called the Ha’chag, the feast. It’s like, THE feast. Right? So, I think we talked about that; Sukkot is THE holiday in the ancient Israelite mind. It’s the most, maybe, celebratorious; is that a word? It’s the one you celebrate the most on, and partly because you’re done harvesting all your crops. Right? And you’ve taken all your crops in, and you’ve processed them and everything, and now you can really celebrate the joy of your bounty, or the bounty of your labor, maybe.

Anyway, so that’s in 2 Chronicles. So, he dedicates the Temple and he celebrates Sukkot, and then it talks about the eighth day.

Lynell: And I forgot to say; at the end of the verse it says, “You shall not work at your occupations.”

Nehemia: Right. All right, so, that’s atzeret of Sukkot, whatever atzeret means. We haven’t defined it yet. So, the atzeret of Sukkot is the eighth day, but there’s also an atzeret of Passover, and most people don’t know that. Most Jews don’t know there’s an atzeret of Passover, because that’s not something we’re really told. The atzeret of Passover is mentioned in Deuteronomy 16:8. Can you read that, my love?

Lynell: “After eating unleavened bread six days, you shall hold a solemn gathering for Yehovah your God. On the seventh day, you shall do no work.”

Nehemia: Okay. So…

Lynell: So, this is after Passover, right?

Nehemia: This is the atzeret of Passover, which is the seventh day of Passover. So, in Exodus, it says that the seventh day of Passover is the day you’re not allowed to work on. It’s a holy day, but it doesn’t call it atzeret. It only calls it atzeret here in Deuteronomy 16. So, we have this, you know, “solemn assembly”, or whatever it means. Right?

So, I want to look now at the Targum. The Targum is an ancient Aramaic translation, or really translations; there’s more than one Targum. We have both Targum Onkelos, which was… It’s a good question when these are from. And let’s call them 2nd century CE, roughly, give or take. And then Targum Jonathan. So, Jonathan is on the prophets, and Onkelos is on the Torah. And Onkelos has been attributed… according to the legend, it was a someone who converted to Judaism, and he said, “You know, I don’t really know Hebrew as my native language. I’d like to have this in Aramaic.” So, he eventually had to translate it himself into Aramaic. That’s the legend, I’m not sure that’s true. It seems it’s probably not true. But anyway, it’s attributed to Onkelos.

So, they both translated atzeret as gathering. And it’s interesting; they used the Aramaic word kanash. And kanash is a cognate, meaning, it’s the same word in a different language as the Hebrew word knesset. Like in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, we have the National Assembly, which is equivalent to the US House of Representatives, and it is called Knesset. And it comes from an ancient name of an assembly that existed in the early Second Temple period. When they returned from Babylon, the province of Judah in the Persian Empire was run by what’s called Anshei Knesset Hagdola, the men of the Great Assembly. And that’s where the modern Israeli Knesset got its name. It’s also where we get the name for a synagogue in Hebrew, which is called beit knesset, “house of assembly.” Right? And even in Greek, synagogue means assembly, right? Like, when it talks about the waters gathered in Genesis, in Greek it uses a word based on the word synagogue, right? Like, the Greek form of that, right?

All right, so, we have both Targum Onkelos and Targum Jonathan, sometime around the 1st or 2nd century CE they’re translating atzeret as “assembly.” Which is a hundred percent correct; that’s what it means, I’ll just give you the end.

Lynell: There you go.

Nehemia: Atzeret means assembly; that’s literally what it means. It has nothing to do with solemn. They just made that up because… They made that up because… let’s be honest here, I’m almost certain that the King James translators made that up. I have to investigate it more, but probably they made it up. Or they liked it, even if somebody else made it up, because they wanted you to go to church every Sunday, right? And they understood Shabbat was now replaced with Sunday in their church, and so, they couldn’t just say, “Well, it’s the eighth day of assembly.” “Well, then why do I have to get together the other seven days?” Right? “And come to church?” Right? For whatever my feasts are, right? So, they had a special thing, which is a solemn assembly. I think that’s probably where it came from. They probably got it from, you know, some translation, like, I don’t know, maybe in the Vulgate. But I’m not sure.

All right, anyway, so, we have one ancient translation of atzeret which is assembly, which is correct. But there’s another ancient translation which is really interesting, and that’s in the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the ancient Greek translation, originally, of the Torah. Later, Septuagint was applied to the entire Tanakh. But originally it’s the legend about 70 or 72 rabbis coming together and translating for King Ptolemy in Egypt. It’s a famous story. That only referred to the Five Books of Moses. Later, it was the rest of the Tanakh.

But in any event, in Leviticus 23:36 atzeret is translated in the Septuagint, the Greek translation, as exodion. And if you listen to that word, exodion, you’ll notice the word exodus. And what is exodion? Exodion is the Greek word that means “the finale of a play”, usually a Greek tragedy. Right? So, like, you know, when we go on the 4th of July in America and we see the fireworks, and at the end of the fireworks they just send up all these massive fireworks and we call that the grand finale, right? Or music, you have a grand finale. So, exodion is the grand finale of a Greek play.

So, why would atzeret be called exodion? Ah! So, first of all, it’s the end of the holiday, or the holidays. We’ll get to that. Which isn’t wrong, but they’re also noticing that the word atzeret in Hebrew comes from a three-letter root, Ayin-Tzadi-Reish, which means stop. And so, they’re like, “Okay, this is the stop, the end, the cessation of the feast.” And therefore, it’s just like the end of a Greek tragedy. It’s the grand finale of the festival, right? That’s how the Greeks were trying to explain it, right?

And they didn’t have a word in Greek for what they thought atzeret meant, and so the Greek translators said, “All right, well, we have this word that applies to Greek plays.” And exodion, as far as I know, only applies to the end of a feast in Judaism. And it’s really interesting; the definitive dictionary of ancient Greek is called Little Scott Jones, LSJ. And their definition, definition number 3 of exodion, is, “Among the Jews, a feast to commemorate the Exodus,” which is one hundred percent wrong. In other words, that the people who made the definitive Modern Greek English dictionary misunderstood the word exodion in ancient Jewish Greek sources. It doesn’t appear in non-Jewish Greek sources, as far as I know. It appears in ancient Jewish Greek sources, the Septuagint, and we’ll see another one in a minute. And it means “the end of a festal season.” Right? That’s what it means, right? Just like the end of a Greek play or Greek tragedy. And so, they misunderstood it, and they thought it had something to do with the Exodus. Which it absolutely does not, even in Greek, right? They’re wrong. As far as I know, they’re wrong. If somebody can prove differently, please show me.

So, Philo, was a Jew who lived in the 1st century CE in Alexandria, in Egypt. And so, he was a Jew who really didn’t know Hebrew; not well. And he’s talking about Sukkot, and he says in the book called Laws, section two, 211, he says, “And after the festival,” of Sukkot, that is, “has lasted seven days,” he adds an eighth as a seal, calling it “a crowning feast.” Now, crowning feast isn’t my translation; that’s the translation I have in my Bible software and ancient text software. And that’s wrong, because the Greek word there is exodion, right? So, there’s this finale, right? So that’s really the better translation, calling it a kind of exodion. And he says, “a kind of”, right? He knows this is a term that comes from Greek plays and doesn’t organically belong to the Shemini Atzeret. He says, “Not only as it would seem to this festival,” that it’s the exodion, the finale, “but also to all the feasts of the year which we have enumerated, for it is the last feast of the year.” Right? “And it is a very stable and holy sort of conclusion befitting men who have now received all the produce from the land.” What does he mean there? All the produce of the land? Well, Sukkot is called Chag Ha’asif, the Feast of Ingathering.

So, Philo is explaining that Shemini Atzeret isn’t just the end of Sukkot, and it isn’t just the end of the 22 days of feasts in the seventh month, starting with Yom Teruah, it’s the grand finale of all the feasts of the entire year, starting with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Passover, in the first month. And then the third month you have Shavuot, and then you have Yom Teruah, and then you have Yom Kippur, and then you have seven days of Sukkot. And now we have the grand finale, where we throw up all of our fireworks, and all of our penguins, and all of our hedgehogs come and they visit us, and this is the grand finale of it all. That’s how Philo explains it in the 1st century.

And where he’s getting that is the word atzeret, meaning secession, right? It’s the end of something. Right? Because it means to stop. And so, it’s the exodion, the ending feast of the entire year, according to Philo in the 1st century. Now, I mentioned before at the beginning how there’s this thing called semantic shift, where a word means one thing and then it takes on a different meaning over time. And I find that fascinating. I want to see what words mean in different periods.

So, for example, today we’ll talk about the Feast of Passover. In the Tanakh, Passover is only a sacrifice; you eat a passover, you do a Passover. Meaning, you cut its throat, and you spill out the blood and burn the fat, and you eat it; but you don’t celebrate Passover. But in Second Temple times, and today, the holiday is called Passover. And if you told somebody in Israel today, “The holiday is called Chag Hamatzot,” it’s kind of like referring to Christmas as Yuletide, right? It’s… “Yeah, I knew that. It’s kind of this archaic thing.” Right? Pesach is the name of the holiday. So, that’s semantic shift, right? Nobody is disputing what it meant in the Torah, but over time it takes on a different meaning. And in the New Testament Pesach is also the feast, talks about the feast. It has both meanings in the New Testament; it has the sacrifice and the Feast of Passover.

Okay. So, atzeret, right, because we’re in Shemini Atzeret here, and so we have atzeret of Sukkot and we have atzeret of Passover in later times. In Second Temple times, atzeret has a different meaning; it takes on a new meaning, and that is Shavuot. It’s very surprising. Shavuot’s the Feast of Weeks, right? It’s also called Chag Hakatzir, the Feast of Harvest, and it’s called Chag Ktzir Chitim, the Feast of the Harvest of Wheat. So, it’s never in the Tanakh called Atzeret. But in Second Temple times, that’s the primary name for Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, is Atzeret.

And so, for example, when the Torah says in Numbers 28:26, it says, “on your Shavuot”, which is “on your weeks”, that is, your Feast of Weeks, the Targum… remember, we said Targum Onkelos is sometime in the, maybe the 2nd century CE, maybe a little earlier, he translates, “your Shavuot” as “your atzarta.” Which is in Aramaic, the Aramaic version of atzeret. Right? Which is really interesting. So, that’s his name for it in the time of Onkelos, whenever that is, exactly.

In the Mishnah, the standard name for Shavuot is Atzeret, right? They know the word Shavuot, but they don’t use it very often. They more normally use the word atzeret, which is strange. We have Shemini Atzeret for Sukkot and Shvi’i Atzeret, seventh of assembly, for Passover. We never have atzeret referring to Shavuot. But Atzeret is a standard name in the Mishna, because over time the word took on a different meaning. And I bring a passage here which is really interesting. They talk about when Atzeret falls on Friday, and if it falls on Shabbat. They’re saying basically that if it falls on Shabbat you shouldn’t bring your personal sacrifices on Shabbat, you should wait till the next day. And they say, “Wait, but there’s people who say Shavuot’s always on Sunday, and we don’t want to kind of, like, give them a win, a W, as the young people say, so we don’t bring our personal sacrifices on that Sunday, so we don’t, you know, acknowledge that their Sunday observance of Atzeret, that is Shavuot.” So that’s really interesting. Okay.

So, Josephus, in Antiquities, 3.252 or 3.106, he says, “When a week of weeks has passed.” And Josephus was a Jewish historian in the 1st century. He was… actually, he claims, earlier he had been a Jewish general fighting the Romans. And he was captured by the Romans, and so, then he ends up as a prisoner in Rome, writing a book about the history of the Jews called, Antiquities of the Jews. And he says, “When a week of…” So, remember, he’s explaining this to non-Jews. “When a week of weeks has passed over after this sacrifice,” and he’s talking about the Omer sacrifice, “which weeks contain 40 and nine days, on the 50th day, which is called by the Hebrews,” and he says in Greek, asartha, right? So, asartha is the Greek transcription of the Aramaic atzarta, which is the Aramaic form of atzeret, right? Remember, this is Shemini Atzeret, eighth of assembly. But he’s talking about Shavuot is atzarta, is atzeret, which signifies Pentecost. Right? And I put here, or the translator put here, “Pentecost”, which… I didn’t translate this, but Pentecost with a capital P. But that’s not really right. When he says it signifies Pentecost, he means it signifies in Greek “50th.” Right? Pentékosté is the Greek word for 50th. So, it signifies 50th; they bring to God a loaf, et cetera.

So, Atzarta is just the name, in Second Temple times, of Shavuot. It’s very strange. And this is beautiful. Peskita DeRav Kahana, which is in the 5th or 6th century, says you… and this is really interesting. It says, “You find that just like the atzeret of Passover…” Remember, what’s the atzeret Passover in the Torah? Atzeret of Passover in the Torah is the seventh day of Passover. But they say, “Just like the atzeret of Passover is 50 days apart from Passover, so too here, Shemini Atzeret should have been 50 days apart from Sukkot.” In other words, why is Shavuot called Atzeret? Because the way they thought about Shavuot in the Second Temple period was, Shavuot was the grand finale of Passover. And then, these rabbis and Peskita DeRav Kahana in the 5th, 6th century, they’re asking this question, “Okay. If Shavuot is the grand finale of Passover 50 days later, shouldn’t Shemini Atzeret be, not on the eighth day of Sukkot, but on the 50th day? It’s the grand finale; you wait 50 days and then you come back.”

And what they explain there is, “Well, in Israel you don’t have rain in the summer, and so you can travel.” And remember, the roads were made of mud, despite the Roman… you know, maybe some roads were paved, but most roads were still mud, frankly, until Jews started returning to Israel in the 1880s. So, if it rains in Israel, you can’t travel on the roads.

So, Shavuot, 50 days after Passover, there’s no rain, you can come. But 50 days after Sukkot, there’s going to be rain, and you’re not going to come back. And they say it’s like a king who has a son who lives far away and a son who lives nearby. The son who lives nearby… this is what they say in Peskita DeRav Kahana, the king may say to the son who lives nearby, “Come visit me in 50 days,” because he can come whenever he wants. To the son who lives far away, if he comes to visit, he holds him an extra day. Right? That’s how they’re explaining Shemini Atzeret. That’s really fascinating, right? This is the grand finale of Sukkot, is the way they’re thinking of it. But it explains how Shavuot came to mean, came to be called Atzeret, because atzeret is the grand finale, in a sense. And so, atzeret was originally in the Torah applied to Passover, but then later, they’re like, “Wait a minute. We have an even greater grand finale, which is Shavuot.” And that was called Atzeret. So, and it comes again from the word atzar, which means “to stop”.

Now, in the Tanakh… and remember, this is Hebrew changing over time, in the Tanakh atzeret simply means assembly. It may have some connotation of grand finale. Oh, here’s another one, by the way, Lekach Tov, which was written around the year 1108, so it’s pretty late. He says, “I reviewed all the matters of the appointed times in the Bible, and I did not find Shavuot called atzeret.” Right? So, this is a big discovery for him, because imagine, like, think about this for a second. Imagine if I told you that in the entire Tanakh, Passover is never called Passover, it’s called Chag Hamatzot, Feast of Unleavened Bread. If I told that to any Jew, they’d be shocked! Of course it’s called Passover, that’s the name of the holiday! No, it’s not. That’s a later development.

So, this rabbi in the 12th century, he’s probably living in Greece or somewhere in Byzantium. He says, “I reviewed all the matters of the appointed times in the Bible.” Right? He didn’t have a Concordance. He didn’t have Strong’s Concordance or some software. He had to read the whole Bible looking for the word atzeret, meaning Shavuot. And he was sure he was going to find it. And he didn’t. And he said, “I did not find Shavuot called atzeret. But our rabbis of blessed memory…” And when he says, “rabbis of blessed memory”, that’s a technical term that refers specifically to the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud. He said, “The rabbis of blessed memory everywhere called the feast of Shavuot ‘Atzeret’. That is also the language of the Targum,” what we just brought in Onkelos before, right?

So, that’s like, no duh, right? But that was discovery for him in the year 1108, right? What I said to you is, you know, just, “Oh, this is obvious, right?” Somebody had to spend probably months researching that in the 12th century, maybe longer than months, maybe years before he came to the conclusion, “Wait, atzeret isn’t Biblical Hebrew referring to Shavuot. In Biblical Hebrew, Shavuot means something…” Or excuse me, “…in Biblical Hebrew, atzeret means something else. Let’s see what it means.” So, Isaiah 1:13. Here I’m going to ask Lynell to read that.

Lynell: “No more. Bringing oblations is futile. Incense is offensive to me. New moon and Sabbath proclaiming of solemi…” Solemininies?

Nehemia: Solemnities.

Lynell: Solemnities.

Nehemia: Yeah. Go ahead, sorry. No, no, go ahead.

Lynell: “Assemblies with iniquity I cannot abide.”

Nehemia: So, assemblies they translate as atzeret there. Interesting!

Lynell: It means gatherings, though, right?

Nehemia: Yeah. It means assembly. Assembling. Right? Any kind of gathering, assembling. Now, here, we’ve got to read a little bit of a longer story. 2 Kings 10:18-25. So, I’ll set the background while you flip to 2 Kings, chapter 10. So, the background here is, Yehu was a general in the army of the king of Israel. And he was visited by a prophet who proclaimed him king, and then he went and assassinated the king of Israel. And while he was at it, he also killed the king of Judah, who was visiting, and he became king. Now Yehu is king, and one of the things Yehu is commanded to do is wipe out the worship of Baal. So, he says, “How do I find out who all the worshipers of Baal are, versus the worshipers of Yehovah?”

Now, what’s interesting here is that, through most of the history of ancient Israel they worshiped Yehovah together with Baal, or Yehovah as Baal. But we had a queen of Israel who was named Jezebel, Izevel, and Izevel was a Sidonian princess. And when she came and married Ahab, she brought the worship of Baal exclusively, right? So, she’s saying, “You can’t worship Yehovah.” And she killed the prophets of Yehovah.

Now, think about this; she’s killing the false prophets. Up until then, the false prophet says, “Yes, Yehovah is our Lord. He is Baal. It’s the same God.” And that’s the false prophets. And Jezebel comes along and says, “No, Baal is the only true God. You must worship him, not this Yehovah of Israel.” And so, she kills the prophets of Baal. Elijah has this thing on Mount Carmel, but there are still people who worship Baal. Baal exclusively, and so now we enter into 2 Kings 10:18.

Lynell: “Jehu assembled all the people and said to them: Ahab served Baal little. Jehu shall serve him much. Therefore, summon to me all the prophets of Baal, all his worshipers, and all his priests, and let no one fail to come, for I am going to hold a great sacrifice for Baal. Whoever fails to come shall forfeit his life. Jehu was acting with guile in order to exterminate the worshipers of Baal. Jehu gave the orders to convoke a solemn assembly for Baal, and one was proclaimed.”

Nehemia: So, it’s an Atzeret; he’s proclaiming an atzeret. And the significance of the atzeret is you gather, you come together. And if you want to get all the worshipers of Baal in one place, you can’t have a mikra kodesh, a holy convocation, because not everybody may gather. But if you have an atzeret, everybody comes together. So, he proclaims an Atzeret… and this isn’t a grand finale, right? So, a grand finale is a beautiful, cute idea, but that’s not the Tanakh meaning. The Tanakh meaning… I know, after all that. Atzeret is, in the Tanakh, a gathering. And it’s a gathering where you come together. And now, all the worshipers of Baal are told, “Well, you’re going to die if you don’t come.”

All right, let’s read. So, he’s sanctified an atzeret, or an atzara, is the form here, for Baal. It says, “Vayikra’u”, “and they gathered”, which is interesting. That’s a different thing. Okay. Now, verse 21.

Lynell: “Jehu sent word throughout Israel, and all the…”

Nehemia: Actually, vayikra’u there is “they responded to the call”, is what it means. That’s what it is, right? Sorry. Verse 21.

Lynell: “And all the worshipers of Baal came. Not a single one remained behind. They came into the temple of Baal, and the temple of Baal was filled from end to end. He said to the man in charge of the wardrobe, bring out the vestments for all the worshipers of Baal. And he brought vestments out for them. Then Jehu…”

Nehemia: So, that’s interesting; when they came to the temple of Baal, they had some special clothing they put on. And only a true worshiper of Baal will put on that clothing. We don’t know what the clothing was, right? Maybe it was an apron or something. I have no idea. But it was some kind of special vestments they would put on, and only a true worshiper of Baal will put that on. And this is interesting; he’s like, “Wait a minute. Maybe some worshipers of Yehovah came who don’t worship Baal, and they’re just going to stand there with their arms folded.”

There’s this famous photo of, during the Nazi times, where there’s this massive gathering, and there’s, I don’t know, thousands of people doing the Heil Hitler salute. And there’s this one man standing in the crowd like this. So, Yehu wants to make sure we don’t kill this guy. So, okay, now, they didn’t just gather and show up at some place and think, “Well, you know, Baal’s not a real God anyway, but I don’t want to be killed.” Because if you don’t come, you think you’re going to die. You’re told that.

So, all right, so, now they’re putting on the garments to show that they are… So, it’s now the second thing. First, they gather. Now they put on the garments to prove they’re worshipers of Baal. Now verse 23.

Lynell: “Then Jehu and Jehonadab, son of Rahab, came into the temple of Baal, and they said to the worshipers of Baal: Search and make sure there are no worshipers of Yehovah among you, but only worshipers of Baal.”

Nehemia: So, now it’s the third thing, right? “Let’s make sure there’s nobody here who we know isn’t who, you know, who posted on social media: Don’t worship Baal. He’s a false god! Let’s make sure those guys didn’t sneak in because he knows because we don’t want to kill… Yehu knows that we don’t want to kill those people.” All right, go on.

Lynell: “So, they went…”

Nehemia: And by the way, Yehonadab ben Rahav, who it kind of just mentions in passing, he’s a famous… he comes from a famous clan, a famous family of ancient Judah who’s mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah. These were people who were converts and so didn’t have any ancestral land. And so, they didn’t drink wine because they don’t have grape vines. And they don’t have to buy wine, and they lived in tents. So, that’s who Yehonadab ben Rahav is. All right, let’s go on.

Lynell: “So, they went in to offer sacrifices and burnt offerings. But Jehu had stationed 80 of his men outside and had said: Whoever permits the escape of a single one of the men I commit to your charge shall forfeit life for life. When Jehu had finished presenting the burnt offering, he said to the guards and to the officers: Come in and strike them down; let no man get away. The guards and the officers struck them down with a sword and left them lying where they were. Then they proceeded to the interior of the temple of Baal. They brought…”

Nehemia: So, anyway, so, here… the story goes on, guys, go study it. It’s a very important story; it’s a fascinating story. So, here Yehu is trying to eliminate this, at least the exclusive worship of Baal. There were still people who continue to worship Baal, and he’s actually… in 2 Kings, he’s called to task for not fully getting rid of the high places and everything. But at least the people who worship Baal and not Yehovah, those he’s getting rid of. He’s stamping that out. And what does he do? How does he do that? He calls an atzeret. Which simply means assembly, right? There’s nothing… no grand finale here. It’s a one-day thing, right?

And you think, “Well, Shavuot’s a one-day thing.” No, but Shavuot was thought of as the grand finale of Passover. That’s why they called it atzeret, right? So, this is a one-day thing. It’s a one-day assembly, just like today, Shemini Atzeret, right? And of course, you know, a thing of Baal is different. But linguistically, we’re saying the word atzeret is just an assembly. That’s the significance of this. The atzeret of Yehovah is completely different than the atzeret of Baal, but it’s a one-day assembly.

Now, Joel, 1:14, I think we can understand a little bit better now that we understand it just means “assembly”. And I love the idea of the grand finale. You know, when I was a kid, I loved those fireworks. They always hurt my ears, though. But that is not the Tanakh meaning of it. That’s a later development.

Lynell: “Solemnize a fast, proclaim an assembly. Gather the elders…”

Nehemia: It’s proclaim… So, this isn’t any fixed biblical feast they’re talking about. What he’s talking about is, “Bad stuff’s about to happen. Sanctify a fast. Proclaim an assembly.” All right? You got to get all the people together in prayer. That’s what this means. And that’s an atzeret. It’s an assembly where you all get together. In this case, the fast. It says, “Gather the elders, all the inhabitants of the earth, to the house of Yehovah, your God, and cry out to Yehovah!” So, here, an Atzeret; the purpose is to gather in prayer and fasting. And it’s not any fixed biblical day, right? This is what we would call a voluntary fast day, right? It’s time to, you know, call a day of prayer and a day of fasting, and that’s called an atzeret, right? So, it just means assembly. And it’s also not something specific to Shemini Atzeret or the atzeret of Passover, it’s a word that literally means assembly, and therefore the eighth day is the day that you assemble. And yes, it is a grand finale in a sense of all the feasts of the year and of the 22 days of holidays… not all feasting, in the seventh month, but literally, what it means is “assembly.” And we have one for Passover as well.

Then Joel 2:15-16 has a similar thing, if you want to look at that.

Lynell: It says, “Blow a horn in Zion, solemnize a fast, proclaim an assembly.”

Nehemia: Right, and so, it’s the same language here. They’re gathering… And then it says… what does it say? Next words…

Lynell: “Gather the people.”

Nehemia: “Gather the people.” That’s what you do in an assembly. Sanctify the congregation. What does that mean, “sanctify the congregation”? Right? That’s a good question, what it means. But basically, it means you need them all to come together for the purpose of prayer and fasting, in this case. And then it says, “Gather the elders, gather the babes and the sucklings.” Right? So, everybody! The chatan who is in his room, and the kala who is in her chupa, get everybody! Even the people who have their own business going on right now, they’re getting married… no, no, no, stop what you’re doing, and everybody get together because we have to pray to Yehovah. And that gathering is an atzeret.

And the last one we’ll look at is… Jeremiah 9:1 is my favorite, right? This for me is the grand finale, the crescendo of this teaching, because this really shows me the meaning of atzeret. So, I’ll read it… or you can read it, and then I’ll comment. Go ahead.

Lynell: “Oh, to be in the desert at an encampment for wayfarers. Oh, to leave my people to go away from them, for they are all adulterers, a band of rogues.” Whaaat?

Nehemia: And “band of rogues” in Hebrew is atzeret bogdim. It’s in atzeret of, actually, cheaters is the word. Of traitors, cheaters. And the context here is, he said, “they’re all adulterers”, meaning they’re adulterers worshiping idols. In the Tanakh, idolatry is metaphorically described as adultery, right? We have this covenant relationship of a wife, with God as the husband, metaphorically. And even in, like, the passage we referred to as the Shema, one of the three passages, it talks about your eyes prostituting after other gods, right? So, the metaphor there is that you’re cheating on God by going and worshiping. You’re cheating on Yehovah by going and worshiping other gods.

So, here he’s saying, “All of these people that I’m among, they are all adulterers. They are a band of cheaters, an assembly of cheaters.” They are an atzeret of cheaters. So, atzeret simply means assembly, right? You can’t say it’s a grand finale of cheaters; that doesn’t even make any sense. And you can’t say it’s a solemn assembly of cheaters! That really doesn’t make any sense, right? Atzeret is simply assembly.

And today is Shemini Atzeret, and we are all gathered together on Shemini Atzeret, Lynell and Nehemia and Gwennie Penguin, and Sedgwick. And who else might be with us?

Lynell: We have… you guys asked for this. We bought Penguin shark, and Penguin Shark always… Penguin Shark only says a couple of things. Penguin Shark says…

Nehemia: Three things.

Lynell: You go ahead. You say what…

Nehemia: So, first of all, he says, “Penguin Shark”. Like, he knows how to say his name. And then he says, “Me me me me me me me me me me.”

Lynell: He says that a lot; he’s very narcissistic. But he also knows one more.

Nehemia: He got a necklace when he was in the shuk in Jerusalem.

Lynell: He did.

Nehemia: And it says on it, “Shema Israel.” And he learned to say another word.

Lynell: He says, “Shma!”

Nehemia: Shma!

Nehemia: Like, out of nowhere, suddenly, “Shma!” That’s Penguin Shark.

Lynell: [Laughter] This is Penny Penguin. She is our first penguin, and she is my penguin. Nehemia got Penny for me when we were first married.

Nehemia: What happened? Why did I get her for you?

Lynell: I had fallen. We were hiking, we were doing some stuff, whatever, and I had fallen, and I had torn my rotator cuff. And I didn’t know that, so I was just waiting for it to heal. And I went to a doctor one day, soon after we were married. It wasn’t long, it was during right after, you know, Covid was going on, and the doctor said, “We have to get you in next week for surgery.” So, I went in for surgery, and they did whatever to my rotator cuff, and Nehemia got me…

Nehemia: And so, she’s sitting in this chair. She can’t lay down. She’s got her arm in a sling and she can’t move, and I’ve got to brush her hair. And I would say, “Come here, Barbie.” And so, I got her Penny Penguin to cheer her up, and about a year later, she got a sister named Gwenny.

Lynell: So, they travel with us. They’re just fun; fun things that we do to travel with. So, anyway, it’s just a blessing.

Nehemia: Now, Gwenny Penguin isn’t just a pet. She actually has a special status, and it’s official and legal.

Lynell: Nehemia did this to entertain people as we travel. You know, we travel a lot.

Nehemia: Yeah, this is very serious. She has a card: Registered Emotional Support Animal.

Lynell: She is!

Nehemia: And this is the same one they get for, like, dogs that are registered emotional support animals. And it’s got a birthday…

Lynell: He entertains people with that when we travel. He makes so many people laugh as we go through TSA, as we… normally, when we go and we check our luggage in, he says to the lady, “Ma’am, I have an emotional support animal that we have to take with us.” And they’re like, “Well, I’m sorry. You can’t do that.” Nehemia’s like, “Well, would you just…”

Nehemia: And we’ll get a supervisor.

Lynell: Just take a… would you take a look? And he hands her the card, and they end up taking the card and passing it around the whole… they remember him. Like, in the airports we normally use, they want to see the penguins…

Nehemia: I was passing through Charlotte, and the woman at the check in said, “Aren’t you the guy with the penguin?” Like, six months after I made this joke! And I was in a hurry, so I didn’t make the joke again. But “Aren’t you the guy with the penguin?”

Lynell: So, Nehemia, do you want to pray before we start taking Q&A?

Nehemia: Yeah, we are assembled today…

Lynell: So why? Tell me why.

Nehemia: The bottom line is, yes, this is a grand finale. It’s a beautiful idea, but that’s not from the Tanakh. What the Tanakh idea is: this is a day that God commanded us to assemble. And why did He command us to assemble on this day and not, you know, 40 days from now? Probably because it was going to rain in Israel, and it’s impractical to gather, you know, 50 days from Sukkot. But really, the pattern is pretty clear; the seventh day of Passover, which is the end of Passover, and the eighth day of Sukkot, which is actually after Sukkot, because Sukkot is seven days, we’re commanded seven days to sit in the sukkah. Yesterday, I told Lynell, “It’s time to take down the sukkah.” Actually, I told Heath, “It’s time to take down the sukkah.” And Lynell says, “But can’t we eat tonight in the sukkah?” I said, “We can, but the commandment is to dwell in the sukkah seven days.”

Lynell: I meant before sunset.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Lynell: I was going to eat before sunset.

Nehemia: Okay. Anyway, so, we took down our sukkah yesterday. And although sometimes, you know… there’s this guy who was my neighbor in Jerusalem who put up his sukkah outside, in the public area, and then he didn’t take it down. And then he left it, and people were like, “Oh!” A month later, the sukkah’s still there, and two months later, the sukkah’s still there. And what they realize is that he’s taken over that part of the public area. And he did it by putting up a sukkah. So, I don’t want to be the guy who leaves with the sukkah all year, although some people do that.

Lynell: But we do want to pray for everyone before we leave, and I do want to say that I really appreciate you guys coming to the gathering. I love the fact that we are doing things that are commanded and that we can do them a lot easier, that, you know, we don’t have to get in our car and we don’t have to get on an airplane. That we can gather together and worship Yehovah together at the appointed times that He’s given to us. And to me, that’s such a beautiful, beautiful thing. So, I’m so happy that we did this.

Nehemia: Amen. All right, guys, I don’t want to just pray for you, I want to pray with you. So, everybody bow your heads, raise your wings in prayer.

Yehovah, Avinu shebashamayim, Father in heaven, I ask You to hear our prayers. We come to You with contrite hearts. We know we’ve sinned. We’ve fallen short every day. There is no man who does not sin, it says. Solomon, in his prayer to You, when he dedicated the Temple, he said, “There is no man who does not sin.” Yehovah, none of us are Solomon. We’re doing our best… and it says, “If you guard iniquity, oh Yah, who could stand?” None of us could stand and be before You if you did not forgive. Father, forgive us. Father, bless us on this day. Father, in ancient Israel, on Shemini Atzeret, the people were celebrating on this assembly, the end of the feast of Sukkot, where they gathered in their produce and whatever they had. That was the blessing for the year. Father, let our blessings be stored up, and bless us during this time as we’re dealing with a lot of difficulties, and economically around the world, and with war around the world. Father, bless us and bless all those who come to You and turn to You, and turn to the place where You put Your name forever in Jerusalem to address You, Father, who is in heaven, and bless us with the bounty of ingathering. Amen.

Lynell: Amen. We do have questions, and I would like to answer questions about today. “Good morning. Based on the original Hebrew language, is Shemini Atzeret a separate feast from the feast of Sukkot?”

Nehemia: I feel like we answered that. Ooh, can we put up a… Oh, let’s put up a quiz. Can you put up a quiz?

Lynell: I will have to create one…

Nehemia: And ask that question in the quiz. I’ll read the next question while you make a quiz. Let’s see what everybody says. “What does the eighth day represent to Nehemia? And is there a way you keep this day in addition to gathering together?” Yeah, there’s no work on this day. It happens to be Shabbat, but if it was during the weekdays as well, there’d be no work. And no, you do not sit in the sukkah.

Kabedyahu ben Yehohanan, “So, it is only this week…” He’s asking about simchat beit hasho’eva, which, I have a teaching on that somewhere. And which was this thing they did in Second Temple times where they would draw water out of a certain spring, and they had a major celebration. And I’m quite sure that came from one of the high places, because there is no such thing as a water libation in the Tanakh, or in the Torah.

“This might be a weird question…” Okay, I’ll skip it then. “What to use as a program or website to read in English, a translation side-by-side by Hebrew?” So, I wouldn’t be the best person to answer that, because I’m reading it usually just in the Hebrew. But there is software; there’s free things online where you can see the Hebrew, usually broken out. I think they’ll have word-by-word with the English. That doesn’t mean the English is right. It’s really interesting; you’ll sometimes see the Hebrew on one side of a page in a printing, and… I’ll see the English on the other side, and there’ll be a note that the English isn’t a translation of what it says in Hebrew, it’s a translation of what it says in the Greek Septuagint. So, why put the Hebrew there? All right. Did you get that, babe?

Lynell: Give me just a minute. I have to create it…

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Someone says, “Since you brought up Baal, do you think the concept of Torah She’be’alpeh has a hidden related little nudge-nudge-wink-wink?” In other words, so, the Oral Law is called Torah She’be’alpeh, and that has absolutely nothing to do with Baal, right? The be’al is “by”. Be’al peh means “by heart”, it has nothing to do with it. It’s not related; that’s just a coincidence. That’s only a coincidence that really, even… I don’t know. I’ve never thought of that in all of my 50-plus years. Even looking for critiques of Rabbinical Judaism, that never even occurred to me, because in Hebrew it… no. Be’al is two different words. Meaning there’s what’s called an attached preposition.

Ooh! We have a quiz. This is fun. Can the penguin take the quiz?

Lynell: [Quack]

Nehemia: But Sedgwick doesn’t say, “Me, me, me, me, me,” so you would think he’s not as selfish and self-centered and narcissistic as Penguin Shark, but here’s what he’ll do… Oh, I can’t see it, because this… hold on one second. So, Gwennie will be, like, cuddling here, and Sedgwick will just come and push her out of the way. It’s just what he does.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: He won’t even say anything, he’ll just do it. He’s like, “Yeah, it’s me.”

Lynell: So, we’re going to go ahead and… when you guys finish, let us know.

Nehemia: Yeah. Someone says, “Have you ever heard of atzeret meaning ‘a proclamation’ instead of ‘a convocation?’ Or is convocation a different word?” I think convocation in English… someone can look this up and make sure I’m right, means a gathering. I’ve never heard of atzeret meaning a proclamation. You could argue, based on Syriac, that atzeret has something to do with sacrifice, but I think that’s a secondary meaning. Like, atzeret meaning Shavuot or grand finale.

“I’ve heard the word translated convocation is actually proclamation.” No, no, no. So, the word for… okay, I see what you’re asking. So, the word “convocation” doesn’t apply to atzeret. Convocation is the English translation in the King James of mikra kodesh, and mikra means proclamation. But that’s… we’ll do a separate study on that someday.

“So, when you call someone a yahu… are they referring to the one you are talking…” I don’t even know what that means.

Lynell: Nehemia, is Shemini Atzeret a separate occasion from the Feast of Sukkot?

Nehemia: Yes and no.

Lynell: See there! I knew he was going to go there!

Nehemia: No, but definitely yes. It’s yes, right?

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Meaning, it’s yes, because it says to dwell in the sukkah for seven days. It’s a separate occasion, therefore, meaning it’s… there’s no commandment to be in a sukkah on Sukkot, and what we said yesterday to ourselves is… and like I said, you could leave up your sukkah all year if you want, but what makes it special for me and for my family is that we’re doing it on these seven days. So, Shemini Atzeret is not part of Sukkot. At the same time, it’s called the eighth of assembly. Count eighth of what? It’s the eighth day counted from the first day of Sukkot. So, it’s a bit of a paradox. So… were we done with… Do you want to share those results?

Lynell: I did already, and I closed the portal…

Nehemia: Okay, beautiful.

Lynell: But everybody won. I mean, it was yes and no.

Nehemia: Everybody got it right?

Lynell: Of course!

Nehemia: Wait, was there anybody who said… Okay, let’s see, let’s… got a bunch of questions over here. Okay… Some… Okay… All right. Some of these I’m just going to skip.

Lynell: “…do you understand the verse to be a metaphor?”

Nehemia: Okay, I’m going to answer this question. Somebody says, “Why is the name Yeshua not mentioned after a prayer? I was taught by a Messianic Jew to say his name.” I’m not a Messianic Jew. So, maybe that is something a Messianic Jew or a Christian would do. I’m neither a Messianic Jew nor a Christian. Possibly You don’t know who I am. You can look up in hundreds of hours where I’ve explained ad nauseam, written whole books about it, but…

Someone says, “Are there any prophecies that seem connected to this day?” I’ll leave that for some future discussion.

So, someone asked, “When is Simchat Torah?” So, Simchat Torah, which literally means “the celebration of the Torah”, is not a biblical holiday. And it’s interesting; when is this holiday? It’s a Rabbinical holiday, so we’ve got to back up.

So, in ancient times, even in Rabbinical Judaism, they would begin every Hebrew month with the sighting of the new moon in the Land of Israel. And what happened is, people would come to Jerusalem, and they’d testify that they saw the new moon. And if they had witnesses that were reliable and they trusted, they would announce that the new moon had been sighted, and now it’s the beginning of the month. And what they would do is, they would light signal fires. And we’ll sometimes call these bonfires, but they’re actually signal fires. It was a giant pole with a bunch of… basically it was a giant torch, and they would move it up and down, and people would see, “Oh, it’s not just a field that caught fire, this is a deliberate signal.”

So, there were signal fires that went all the way to what today is Syria, where there were Jews living. And the people who lived beyond where the signal fires would reach, they didn’t know which day the new moon was sighted. Okay, they would send out messengers. Well, the messengers couldn’t reach everywhere in time. So, if you live beyond where the messengers could reach, you would celebrate each holy day, with the exception of Yom Kippur, for two days. That’s what was done in ancient… many ancient Jews did that. And Rabbinical Jews said, “Well, just because our calendar now is calculated and we no longer have to wait for the sighting of the new moon, because we’ve just made up a day, we’re still going to do two days in the Diaspora.” And so, in the Diaspora there was this tradition, and specifically, it’s the Babylonian tradition. There were two traditions of how to read the Torah; one was three-and-a-half years, and one was one year. And the one-year tradition was from Babylonia. And in Babylonia, when they finished reading the Torah one portion every week, they celebrated the completion of the reading cycle at the end of Sukkot. And they didn’t do it on the eighth day of Sukkot, on Shemini Atzeret, because they celebrated Shemini Atzeret for two days. And they waited till the second day of Shemini Atzeret, which is a bit strange, because shemini means eighth.

So, there was a second day of the eighth of assembly, which means the ninth day. And they said, “Well, this is awkward. We have a holiday called Eighth of Assembly, and we’re celebrating it both on the eighth and the ninth.” So, what they did is, they said, “You know what? Let’s celebrate the end of our reading cycle on the second day of the Eighth of Assembly so that we have some purpose for this day,” and they called that Simchat Torah, the celebration of the Torah.

So, it’s a completely artificial holiday that came from Jews in Babylon who were looking for some purpose for the second day of Shemini Atzeret, because of its name, Eighth of Assembly, and they ended up celebrating the Simchat Torah. Now, Jews return to the Land of Israel with this Babylonian tradition, and… “now” meaning like in the 10th century or something like that, or probably 9th century, and they say, “Okay, well, we can’t do it on the ninth day because we don’t celebrate two days of Shemini Atzeret.” So, they combine it with Shemini Atzeret.

So, to this day, Orthodox Jews in Israel will celebrate Simchat Torah on the eighth day of Sukkot, and in the Diaspora, Orthodox Jews will celebrate it on the ninth day. And that’s why, when we were attacked on October 7th, in Israel some people wanted to call it the Simchat Torah War, because it happened on… And think about it… and here’s really the interesting thing: it’s now become such a dominant part of the holiday in Israel, the celebration of the completion of the reading cycle, if you tell someone it’s Shemini Atzeret, it’s kind of like, “Oh, that’s like Christmas is Yuletide.” It’s like some… they don’t even remember that, it’s like some almost a side point from history. In America, they’ll know it… or in the Diaspora, Jews will know it, because Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah are two different days. I hope that made sense. I know it’s a bit complicated.

Lynell: So, I want to answer a question.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: Someone asked. Oh, Darlene, “What do you and Lynell do on this day?” Yeah, well, we gather together with people. And that’s why I was so excited to be able to do a bigger gathering; we can all gather here together, and it’s a Shabbat, so we keep it like a Shabbat. Helen asks…

Nehemia: When you say it’s a Shabbat, meaning, today we’re commanded not to work.

Lynell: Right. So, we don’t work on this day, and… I mean…

Nehemia: So, the word Shabbat isn’t applied to Shemini Atzeret. It actually calls it a shabbaton, but that’s a separate study. But it’s not Shabbat, technically.

Lynell: That’s right. “Can we cook on this day since it’s celebratory? What are the commands on this special day?” That is a…

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s a whole…

Lynell: That’s a whole study.

Nehemia: In Rabbinical Judaism, if Shemini Atzeret is not on Shabbat, then the rabbis would say you’re allowed to cook. Because the cooking prohibition, they say, is only specific to Shabbat and not the other days in which work is forbidden. But that’s a separate study. Let’s do that…

Lynell: And James London… I’m glad you asked this, James, because James is like… he said, “But aren’t you working on… Aren’t you working, doing the study?”

Nehemia: So, in a sense, yes, but I feel like I’ve been called to teach Torah. And if you can’t teach Torah on Shabbat, then you’re doing something wrong. And we definitely have biblical precedents for that. People in the Temple, the priests in the Temple, one of their busiest days of work was Shabbat, where they had extra sacrifices, number one. And then you see that they gathered together to hear the Torah on Yom Teruah; it’s in Nehemiah chapter 8. It says there were people… it says, “And the Levites were explaining to the people,” it says maskilim; they were causing them to understand. Now, how were they causing them to understand? The Levites were giving some kind of explanation, because the Hebrew language had evolved over time. Meaning, the Torah was written around 1450 BCE, give or take, and Nehemiah chapter 8 is taking place in the time of Ezra, which is around 450 BCE, so it’s a thousand years later. The language changed over time, and the people are like, “Okay, I don’t know what this means.” And the Levites were saying, “Okay, well, in the Torah, when it uses this term, that’s what we call today X, Y, Z,” right? So, they were giving them some kind of explanation, and they were doing that on a holy day. And it’s interesting, because then it says, “The people were crying,” and they say, “No, today is a holy day.” So, in that sense…

Lynell: Don’t cry.

Nehemia: If you’re teaching… right, don’t cry. And go eat fat foods and drink sweet drinks.

Lynell: Celebrate!

Nehemia: That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to eat sweet fat foods. I don’t know if I’ll have too many sweet drinks for me, but most people can. And so, the point is that, yes, it’s work to teach the Torah, but that’s the work that you’re supposed to do on Shabbat and holy days. And we see that’s what they were doing in the Temple, and even outside the Temple, on the holy day. But no, that’s a completely… Look, I’ve been criticized… by Karaite Jews, I’ve been criticized. I don’t know that I’ve been criticized by Orthodox Jews, because they just think I’m a heretic anyway. But by Karaite Jews, I’ve been criticized for doing a speaking event on Shabbat. And they say, you know, “You’re violating Shabbat.” Wait. I’m speaking in a synagogue. Literally. I was speaking in a synagogue, in that particular incident, the one that I’m thinking of; what are you doing on Shabbat? Who are you teaching on Shabbat? And if you’re not, why not? If you can teach, why aren’t you teaching?

Lynell: I mean, I’m not working. Like, I’m not going to be doing any of the… I do a lot of the financial aspects of the ministry, try to help that. I don’t do any of that type of work. But when it comes to teaching, when it comes to ministering, or it comes to, you know, gathering together… to create the webinar is work, but I believe that’s what Yehovah has called me to do. So…

The study on not cooking on Shabbat; I want Nehemia to do that study. I really do, because that was one of the first things that… one of the first things that was really important to me to learn about when I started keeping Torah, and I would love for us to do a study on that.

Nehemia: Tell them the story about how you thought Jews fasted on Shabbat.

Lynell: [Laughter] So, when Nehemia and I first started dating, I knew nothing. Guys, I didn’t… I knew nothing, literally nothing. And so, anytime we were going on a date, it was usually on a Shabbat night, a Saturday night. And so, Nehemia would always say, “Okay, I’ll meet you right after sunset,” or “I’ll pick you up after sunset.” You know, “We’ll do this after sunset.” And I thought, “Okay, well, he doesn’t eat until after sunset on Shabbat.”

Nehemia: Because then we’d go to a restaurant.

Lynell: Yeah, but that’s because…

Nehemia: So, she thought I fasted every Shabbat. Now, I could do with a fast once a week, don’t get me wrong, but it wouldn’t be on Shabbat.

Lynell: Yeah, I knew so nothing. And Bridget, I would love to do that. David, I really would love to do a study about cooking, because when you know nothing about… Gwenny knew a lot more than I did. But when you know nothing about the Torah, and, you know, about how to keep the commandments that you’ve been taught your whole life, that they were done away with, there’s a lot of study. I’ve learned a lot in the last five years.

Nehemia: I follow this young lady on TikTok…

Lynell: Tithing; that’s important, Jessica.

Nehemia: And she posted something really interesting about how she has a friend who was just criticized by their Christian pastor for keeping the feast, and he said, “You’re putting yourself under the law. That was done away with. We’re New Testament believers.” And I thought that was such a fascinating story, that someone who is a New Testament believer is being criticized for keeping these Old Testament feasts.

And that’s particularly funny, because in Colossians 2:16 it says, “Judge nobody in matters concerning the observances.” I forget what the exact term is, “new moons and feasts” or something like that. And here, the Christian pastor was criticizing this person for exactly what Colossians 2:16 says. How interesting. Maybe that was off the topic.

Lynell: Okay, this is a really good question. “Dr. Gordon, you made a good point that sometimes the English is not the correct translation.” Most of the time. Can I just say? Most of the time.

Nehemia: I wouldn’t say it’s most of the time. Most of the time it’s okay.

Lynell: It’s okay. It’s okay. I didn’t say it wasn’t okay. I said “correct”. “How can we trust any translations then?” That’s a good question.

Nehemia: So, you shouldn’t trust any translations. Translation is an art, not a science. There’s an ancient… well I don’t know if it’s ancient. There’s an old Italian saying that the translator is a traitor, which is a play on words, because translator and traitor sound similar. And they sound even more similar in Italian. And what it means is that there is no way to perfectly translate something from one language to another. Every translation is an interpretation. And so, when you’re reading five different translations, you’re really reading five different interpretations. Now, when I read it in Hebrew, I’m also interpreting it. It’s an implicit interpretation, in a sense, or if you’re more self-aware, it’s not so implicit.

And the famous story, or the famous example, given in the 20th century by this woman, Nehama Leibowitz; she was a Bible commentator in Israel, and she said, “Every reading of a text is an interpretation.” She said, you know, “When we read thou shalt not murder,” it says in Hebrew “lo tirtzach.” So, you could read it, “Thou shalt not murder?” And, at least in the Jewish Israeli intonation, that means, “You’re not going to murder? Of course you’re going to murder! What? Please go murder!” Right? So, in other words, you could read it as a rhetorical question, right? So, imagine if you see someone, I don’t know, coming out of the bathroom, and you say, “You’re not going to wash your hands?” That means go wash your hands!

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: So, you could read in Hebrew lo tirztach. You’re not going to murder, right? Meaning, go murder. Now, nobody in their right mind would read it that way. You’d be an idiot to read it that way. But by not reading it that way, you’re actually applying a principle. And the principle is; when I read the text, it’s got to make sense. Doesn’t make sense that God’s telling me to murder, because first of all, that would be an unethical god. But also, there’s other places where it says, if you murder, you’re executed. So why would He be telling me to murder? But the point is, when I read lo tirtzach, “you shall not murder”, I don’t read it as, “You shall not murder?” And why don’t I do that? Because it doesn’t make sense to read it that way. So, that’s an important principle; the Bible needs to make sense. It’s the word of God, and we’re told… you know, he says in Isaiah, “Come, let us reason.” So, reason is a principle that you are allowed and must use when you read the Tanakh, and I think when you read any ancient text.

Now, there are ancient texts that aren’t reasonable, right? If I’m reading the Zohar, the main book of Kabbalah, there will be things that the author meant in an irrational way. I don’t think those are… that that’s the case in the Tanakh. So, the point is, everything’s an interpretation. Every reading of a text is an interpretation. I’d rather interpret the text myself rather than rely on somebody else. And so, what I would recommend for those who can’t read it in Hebrew is to look at multiple English translations. And when they differ, ask the question, “What’s going on here? Why are they differing?”

Lynell: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: And try to find an answer.

Lynell: Mm-hmm. And that’s why I always had all the concordances out in front of me. Todd Korder said something that I think is really important. He said, “Some translations say no servile labor. I take that as to cease from my paying job. It doesn’t prevent me from serving in the preservation of life. So, it might be different for doctors, firefighters, police officers. Theirs is intrinsic to the preservation of life.” What are your thoughts on that?

Nehemia: So, I’ll give you the short answer. So, first of all, there’s a principle in the Torah that says, “God gives us these commandments, and we will live by them.” And if someone’s going to die, with maybe a few exceptions, then you’ve got to go save their life. There’s another commandment, “You shall not stand by the blood of your fellow.” It’s in Leviticus 19. It’s alongside, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” and “Don’t hate your fellow in your heart.” And what it means is, if you see someone who is dying, you’re required to go save them. And we see that the army of Israel went out against the Philistines in 1 Samuel, it says for 40 days, every day. So, that means on Shabbat they went out to war. They were standing in their battle array with their full armor, right? So, they were working in the heat, right? In the summer heat. How do I know it was summer? Because in winter, it rains, and people don’t go out to war in ancient Israel, because the roads are muddy. Same reason you don’t come 50 days after Sukkot to Jerusalem, in ancient Israel, that is.

So, the point is that they didn’t stop for Shabbat and say, “Okay, Philistines, we hope you don’t attack us, but we’re not going to go fight because it’s Shabbat.” In fact, you’re required to defend people and save lives on Shabbat, and if you’re a doctor… now, you shouldn’t be scheduling routine visits on Shabbat. But if you’re a doctor working in an ER, somebody’s got to work in the ER on Shabbat or people will die. That doesn’t mean you need to do, like I said, routine stuff, but you should save lives on Shabbat, absolutely.

Lynell: And Dan…

Nehemia: And for a policeman as well. I think we’ve seen what can happen if you defund the police and you have no police on Shabbat. That wouldn’t be good.

Lynell: And Dan Eynon said, the word work is one of those imperfectly translated words. And he’s saying that we need a good study and discussion. Yes, I love that discussion. I agree. “Is there anything in the Torah about the day to build or to take down the sukkah, Nehemia?”

Nehemia: In a sense, it says to do it on the first day, to build it. It doesn’t say about taking it down, but then that might also mean by the first day. Someone had a comment here, which I think is worth addressing. They said, “You all need to stop putting down us Rabbinic Jews.”

Lynell: Oh…

Nehemia: And I try not to put down Rabbinical… I definitely hope I don’t put down Rabbinic Jews. I will definitely express… you know, I have different views on certain things in the Bible, and look, in a sense, Rabbinical Judaism, because it is the dominant form of Judaism out there in the world today, has to be the starting point. For me, at least. If I’m talking about coming… and also being raised as a Rabbinical Jew, my starting point is, “Okay, here’s what I was raised with, and I want to peel away the layers of the onion.” Right? And some of those layers go back 2,000 years, right? I’m talking about Targum Onkelos, where he says he’s using the second… And Josephus, right, who was also a Pharisee, by the way, a Rabbinical Jew. And I’m saying, “Okay, let’s peel away those layers of the onion, and here’s how it evolved over time, and can we learn anything from that?” And often we can.

So, for me that’s a frame of reference. But number one, because I came from that, and my ancestors, maybe for 2,000 years were part of that, and I hope that doesn’t come across as polemical, but rather as: this is a Jewish context. I’m trying to understand the Tanakh within its historical and Jewish context, and to also distinguish between different layers of that context. I love it that this rabbi in 1108 says, “I looked through the Tanakh and I couldn’t find Shavuot called Atzeret, but our rabbis call it that everywhere,” right? He’s doing exactly what I’m trying to do. What does it mean now? And what did it originally mean? And what did it mean in different periods?

Lynell: “Is it also that outside of Israel we have to feast eight days and in Israel, seven?”

Nehemia: You lost me on that one.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: No, the point is that Orthodox Jews… I don’t think Reform Jews do this. I don’t actually know about Conservative Jews. Orthodox Jews outside of Israel keep nine days. And in Israel, Orthodox Jews keep eight days. Reform Jews, I believe, keep eight days everywhere because they don’t accept the idea of the negation of the Diaspora. Meaning, there’s this idea in Orthodox Judaism, and I would say in the Tanakh, that it’s not ideal to be outside of the Land of Israel. That’s called negation of the Diaspora. And Reform Jews say, “No, you know, I’m a German,” because it started in Germany, “I’m an American, and I’m not a fish out of water, I’m just in a different sea. I’m in a different lake. And I’m not going to do something different than what’s done in Israel, because I’m not in a lesser status place, I’m just in a different place.” And so, they do eight days outside of Israel as well.

Lynell: Eric, I would love for your words to be… send it to everyone, because you’re talking about what conservatives follow. Would you do that to everyone, so that people can see your answers?

Nehemia: Oh, he says Conservatives follow nine days. So, I actually didn’t know that. So, that’s interesting.

Lynell: Yeah. “Some of my associates associate the word atzeret with tarrying, extending or waiting.” Did you address that?

Nehemia: Tarrying?

Lynell: Tarry. T-A-R-R-Y. Tarrying. Extending or waiting. I have… did we see that in our study?

Nehemia: No.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, that actually we did in a sense. That was, there was a rabbi who brought the parable of you keep the son an extra day.

Lynell: Okay, all right.

Nehemia: The son who lives far away, you tell him, “Stay an extra day with me.” That’s, I guess, where it comes from. But it also comes from atzar, which is “to stop”. And in that sense, you could say it’s the stop… you know, “stop leaving and stay here an extra day”. Meaning that maybe that’s where they get it from. But it just means assembly in the Tanakh. Why does it mean assembly is an interesting question. How do you get from the word “stop” to “assembly” isn’t obvious, and it’s a complicated question. And here’s where it really gets complicated, and maybe this is too complicated for this kind of setting, with over 250 people, but in Hebrew we have 22 letters. But actually, in Ancient Hebrew, there were more than 22 linguistic letters. And what I mean is, there were 22 graphic symbols, but obviously there’s more than 22 letters, because we have Shin and Sin which are two different letters. So, that’s already 23. And it turns out that there’s more than one Ayin in ancient Hebrew, and there’s more than one Tzadi in ancient Hebrew. And we see that when we compare Hebrew to other Semitic languages. And I won’t go into more than that, because that’s very complicated.

But what that means is, although the word “stop” and the word “assemble” have the same three-letter root, they might actually be different roots in ancient Hebrew. And we don’t have enough information to prove it one way or another, but we have to assume that that could be the case here. And maybe that’s why “assemble” and “stop” have nothing to do with each other.

Lynell: “The difference between the Last Great Day and shining atzeret…”

Nehemia: It’s auto correct. Shemini Atzeret.

Lynell: Shemini Atzeret.

Nehemia: I presume that that’s autocorrect. I don’t know. So, “Last Great Day” is not a term that I’m familiar with from historical sources. I know there’s some, you know, people who refer to it as the Last Great Day, where I think it has eschatological connotations. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Shemini Atzeret probably is a little bit hard for some people to say. It’s got that “tzuh”. I never have a problem with a “tzuh”. I understand that people have, but I understand, you know… I have a friend who, instead of tzitzit, says the zitzit. So, I guess in some English pronunciations that’s difficult to pronounce.

Someone asked a really good question: “Will this feast always land on a Sabbath for the eighth day?” So, no, it’s a… on average… I don’t know that this is actually true but presumably, on average it will be once every seven years. Meaning, I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t on average be once every seven years, but statistics are kind of a funny thing. It could be any day of the week.

Lynell: Riva asked, “Is the water libation a historical part of the eighth day of celebration?”

Nehemia: It’s an historical part; it’s just not a biblical part.

Lynell: Well, there you go.

Nehemia: Meaning, of Sukkot in general. Someone asked a really interesting question that’s for you, Lynell, and it’s so much fun, so let’s go do it. It says, “If you grew up on the King James, do you see the Mandela Effect changes?” Dun, dun, dun!

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: I know that in the original Bible, that was stolen from us by the devil…

Lynell: Why don’t you explain the Mandela Effect…

Nehemia: There were penguins…

Lynell: Explain the Mandela Effect in just a few words…

Nehemia: And hedgehogs… So, the Mandela Effect is this idea that there are certain things we all… Well, first of all, it’s a real thing, in the sense that there are things that we all remember that are not the case. So, everybody remembers, from my generation, that Darth Vader said to Luke, “Luke, I am your father.” And you go back to look at the movie, what was it, Star Wars, or Empire Strikes Back? I don’t remember which movie. Whichever movie it was. And he doesn’t say that. He says “Luke,” and then he says a whole long spiel, and then he says, “I am your father.” Right? So, he never says the words in that sequence, “Luke, I am your father.” So, why do we remember it wrong? So, that’s what the Mandela Effect theory is, right? That first thing, that we remember things that are not the case, that’s a fact you can’t really dispute. And it’s in all kinds of ways that happens. So, what is the reason for it? Well, there’s one theory. Do you want to explain it?

Lynell: I’m going to let you explain the theory. I’m going to tell you what I think about growing up on the King James Version versus the way that we study now. The biggest thing that I have found is that a lot of the verses that I memorized from the New Testament are actually verses that are in the Old Testament, and they may be translated a little differently in the New Testament than they were in the Old Testament, and sometimes they mean completely different things. So, to me, that’s been the biggest light bulb about really studying… because I didn’t study the Old Testament, guys. I didn’t… I knew the New Testament front to back, but I didn’t study Old Testament. And then, when I began to look at it, I was like, “Oh, that’s from the New Testament… no, no, no, it’s the other way around. That’s from the Old Testament.” Well, what did it mean in the Old Testament? What did it actually mean? And does it mean the same thing today? And so, yes, sure, there is definitely the Mandela Effect, and…

Nehemia: Well, I’m not sure that’s what it is. But anyway, so, one theory says that CERN in Switzerland opened up a… it’s hard to say this without laughing, I’m sorry. If it’s someone in this group here who believes that I don’t mean any disrespect, but I don’t personally ascribe to this, but… So, the theory is that CERN, with their Large Hadron Collider, opened up a portal to another universe because they’re in league with some demonic force. And if you don’t believe it, look, they have at the front… they have a statue of Shiva, which is demonic… the front of CERN in Switzerland… and I hope I’m getting this right. And so, some of us have shifted from one universe to another, and in our universe, Darth Vader really did say, “Luke, I am your father.” And we remember that, even though in this universe he didn’t. So, that’s one possibility. Or we just don’t remember it right. Which is more likely? You decide.

Lynell: [Laughter] “The New Testament quotations from the Old Testament are often better matched to the… as opposed to the Masoretic Text.” I don’t… maybe?

Nehemia: So, people have written whole dissertations on that. In other words, sometimes the New Testament quotation matches the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. Sometimes it matches the Masoretic Text against the Septuagint, and sometimes it matches neither. So, there’s a hypothesis that, when the New Testament was written, they had a third version that they were quoting from that we don’t have anymore. Is that possible? Sure. Or maybe they were paraphrasing, right? There’s all kinds of explanations.

Lynell: The Smith family asks something. We answered this, actually, at the last…

Nehemia: Somebody said, “Nelson, I am your father.”

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Oh, maybe it’s somebody named Nelson. Maybe it’s not our Nelson.

Lynell: That’s hilarious.

Nehemia: Because it looks like their name is Nelson.

Lynell: “Since it’s the traditional end of the yearly Torah cycle, the Torah begins with Bereshit, and it ends with kol Yisrael. Is this significant?”

Nehemia: That’s an interesting observation. It actually ends with le’einei kol Yisrael, “before the eyes of all of Israel.” Which is… it’s significant in the sense that the Torah begins in the beginning, where there aren’t even humans, and then God chooses… Well, first He actually gives all mankind a test, and they fail. So, then He chooses Noah and his descendants. And then within Noah and his descendants, He chooses Abraham. And then, among the descendants of Abraham, He chooses Isaac. And then among the descendants of Isaac, He chooses Jacob. And He does that to give this message for all mankind, right?

In other words… so, He first started out with all mankind, and it didn’t work out that way. So, He said, “Okay, I’m going to choose this one particular family to then be My representatives and be an example.” And they could be a bad example. But the world’s going to see that God interacts with the universe, and he’s not just a passive God who sits back and does nothing. And if He can’t get all mankind to obey Him, He’ll show the universe, “Here’s people who obey Me. Or here’s people who disobey Me if they so choose. And here’s how I interact with the universe.” So, in that sense, absolutely, it has a significance. Meaning, it’s part of the theme. Or you could call it “the Torah Plan of Salvation”, in a sense, right? To borrow a term from somewhere else.

Lynell: “Is mental health work in a jail setting against the Shabbat or holy days?”

Nehemia: I guess it depends if you’re… I don’t know enough about mental health work. In other words, are you doing something that’s emergency work? Or are you doing something that can wait until Sunday? Right? And there’s definitely, you know, if somebody is having a, you know, schizophrenic break or whatever, and they’re, you know, stabbing themself in the eye and they need some kind of treatment, well, definitely give them treatment. If they’re, you know, they need to have a chat because they don’t like being in jail, then probably that can wait until Sunday. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.

Lynell: This was interesting. “If for some reason we missed Sukkot, would it be okay to do what the Maccabees did?”

Nehemia: Which is that they celebrated in Kislev on the 25th, which was also that… Well, they did it as soon as they could, which was on the anniversary of when the Temple had been taken over by the pagans. The Torah doesn’t have that institution. In other words, in the Torah, you would just do it next year, I think. For Passover, for the sacrifice, it has. Not for the Feast of Unleavened Bread. But no, it doesn’t have that. There’s no Sukkot Sheni, a second Sukkot, in the Torah, or in the Tanakh.

Lynell: “I’ve always wanted to know why people say the Jewish people in biblical terms, when it’s not just the Jewish people, but the 12 tribes of the House of Israel.” Why do people say, “the Jewish people”?

Nehemia: So, it’s interesting. We don’t. Meaning, in traditional Jewish sources, you don’t usually find the term ha’am ha’yehudi, the Jewish people. That’s not a thing. That’s something that comes about in the 19th century, really, when they’re translating from European languages. In traditional Jewish sources, you actually have three categories of people, like in the synagogue, who come to read from the Torah. You have Levi… the first one who reads is Kohen, who’s descendent from Aaron. And the second one is Levi, who’s a Levite, and the third one isn’t Jew; the third one is Israel. Right? So, and if you look in traditional Jewish sources, they’ll talk about Am Yisrael, literally “the people of Israel.” And that will be translated into English as “the Jewish people”, which is, you’re right, inaccurate. I agree with you. But what this person is probably talking about is the ten lost tribe theory, which I think is beyond the scope of today’s discussion.

Lynell: “Why does the Torah cycle reading begin…” Let’s take this as our last question, I guess. “Why does the Torah…”

Nehemia: What was the question?

Lynell: “Why does the Torah reading cycle begin and end after Sukkot, rather than right after Passover?”

Nehemia: As the man sang: “Tradition! Tradition!” But the real answer is that, in the Torah, in Deuteronomy, it talks about gathering every seven years on Sukkot and reading the entire Torah during that seven-day period. And so, they say, “Well, we’re not going to read the whole Torah on a seven-day period, but we’ll read it throughout the course of the year, and we’ll end it on Sukkot.” Right? That’s really where the tradition comes.

Lynell: So, Brett had…

Nehemia: Presumably. Maybe there’s some other source of it.

Lynell: During your teaching, Brett had a question, and he’s very, very… this is really important to him. And he wants to know how he can find out about whether he is part of the Lost Tribes, or whether he’s actually…

Nehemia: Is that what he’s asking, the Lost Tribes…

Lynell: Ancestrally. Brett, what are you asking? Ask the question. He asked a whole bunch of questions. What is the question you want to know about becoming… He doesn’t want to know about becoming a part of, or joining yourself to Israel, which is a really great teaching, and I think that that might be helpful for you to know that teaching. “I’m asking if I’m partial…”

Nehemia: So, that’s a teaching that’s currently on Nehemia’s Wall. I think it’s called something like Conversion…

Lynell: Yeah. Somebody already gave him that, actually. The question…

Nehemia: Oh, great. All right.

Lynell: Yeah. I’m asking if I’m…

Nehemia: That’s my answer.

Lynell: “If I’m descended from one of the tribes.” Like, he’s looking at DNA. He doesn’t have paperwork, but he wants to know.

Nehemia: Oh.

Lynell: Guys, do you have any idea about how to find your ancestor?

Nehemia: The real answer is, we don’t currently have a way of doing that, and anybody who tells you that we do either knows more than I do or they are wrong. Probably the latter, but I, you know… So, basically at this point, you know, DNA, it’s really interesting how it works. People say, “You know, I’m 3% Native American,” and what do they really mean by that? That means there are people who self-reported that they’re Native American, and then your DNA is now being compared to that person, or that group of people. So, is that correct? I don’t know. Maybe they were wrong, and they’re not really Native American, you know, or maybe they’re partially something else.

So, somebody asked, is Ashkenazi any tribe in particular? So, the answer to that is no. They have done DNA tests and found that most Jews all over the world have some DNA in common. Ashkenazim do have a very specific set of DNA markers, and that’s because there’s something called the bottleneck. The bottleneck is believed to have happened in the 4th century, where most Jews in Europe died from the Black Plague or from massacres that happened all over northern Europe. And there’s about 10 million Jews today who are descended from those survivors, and it’s not clear how many survivors there were. It might have been 10,000. It might have been 350, depending on who you believe. And that bottleneck means that everybody’s kind of like cousins. Not to mention, my great-grandparents were first cousins, and that was extremely common.

Lynell: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: And still is common for many Jews today, both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to marry first cousins. But if you compare Ashkenazic DNA to Sephardic DNA, for example, they have a lot in common. And in fact, one of the common names for Sephardic Jews is: Ashkenazi! Because there were Jews from Europe who moved to the Sephardic countries.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Leviticus 23:36
Numbers 29:35; Nehemiah 8:18; 2 Chronicles 7:8-10
Deuteronomy 16:8
Genesis 1:10
Philo, On The Special Laws 2.211
Numbers 28:26
Mishnah Chagigah 2:4; Babylonian Talmud 17a:2-4, 18a:10; Jerusalem Talmud Chagigah 2:4:1
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 3.252 (3.10.6)
Peskita DeRav Kahana 28
Isaiah 1:13
2 Kings 9-10
Jeremiah 35
Joel 1:14
Joel 2:15-16
Jeremiah 9:1
Numbers 15:39
Nehemia 8
Colossians 2:16
Isaiah 1:18
Leviticus 18:5
Leviticus 19:16
1 Samuel 17
Deuteronomy 31:9-13

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The post Hebrew Voices #228 – Shemini Atzeret: The Grand Finale? appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #227 - Sukkot: Tests of Faith, Nehemia hosts a special Sukkot webinar to unpack the question of what the Israelites dwelled in for 40 years, the historical context of the Rabbinic mandates for the holiday, and how Moses’ words in Deuteronomy are the key to understanding the spirit of the Feast.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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Hebrew Voices # 227 – Sukkot: Tests of Faith

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: But in verse 2, “To know that which is in your heart,” right? Well, what do you mean? I thought… well, how do you… And then he says, “Whether you will keep His commandments or not.” But doesn’t He just look in my heart and know everything, and I don’t have to do anything because He just knows my heart? But if your heart doesn’t translate into action, then it’s not really in your heart. That’s what he’s telling us. Or maybe, let’s put it this way: maybe it is in your heart, but it doesn’t mean anything. For God, your heart has to translate into action. That’s what He says, not me.

—

Nehemia: All right, guys, chag sameach, thank you for joining us. This again was kind of like just one of the morning Bible studies I did with Lynell. This was several morning Bible studies, actually. I’m going to try to condense them into one and see if I can do it in somewhere between 30 minutes and three… hours…

Lynell: [Laughter] You can do it up close.

Nehemia: Okay. “Houuuurs.” That’s actually an inside joke that Keith and I have. There was this gentleman who had, like, a theory he had come up with, and he asked if he could present it to me. And I said, “Well, how long would it take?” Right? “Do you want to tell me your five-minute theory? Okay.” He said, “Houuuurs.” And he said it like that.

Lynell: Did he really?

Nehemia: I’m like… he really did. No, he literally did. I still remember it. Anyway. Alright, yalla. So, Sukkot. What’s Sukkot about? So, what I love about Sukkot is… well, I love a lot of things about Sukkot. It’s very experiential. So, when I was a kid, Sukkot was a really big deal for me because… So, the first place I grew up… we later moved to an apartment building. But we originally grew up… in my younger years I grew up in a condominium, a 17-story condominium. I guess it was actually 16, because there was no floor 13, but whatever. And it had, I don’t know, 500 apartments, or condos, or whatever. I don’t know the exact number. And most of the people there were Jewish, but they weren’t observant Jews. So, my father wanted to build a sukkah, and there was all this green grass. Giant… you couldn’t even call it a lawn, it was like, you know, it was huge. And they said, “No, you can’t build the sukkah there.” And so, he said, “Can I build it in my parking place? Because you’re saying those are public spaces. I own the parking place.” They said, “No, you can’t.”

So, he noticed people had boats, and they were parking their boats, you know, or the boat carrier, whatever you call that thing, they were parking that in their parking place. So, he said, “Can I put a U-Haul trailer in my parking spot?” And they said, “Yes.” Now, my father, of blessed memory, was a lawyer, so he said, “Can I have that in writing, please?” They gave it in writing. And then he pulled into his parking space with a sukkah built in the back of a U-Haul trailer. And this made national Jewish media in the US. It was in Jewish newspapers. And they were irate, the board of the condominium building. But, you know, he had gone through such an effort, so it was like a really big deal.

Later, we lived in an apartment building, and I used to sleep in the sukkah. And I remember waking up one day, covered in… I actually was using a tarp as a blanket, because it was so cold in Chicago. And I woke up and there was a layer of snow, like probably this thick, covering the tarp. It actually probably saved my life, because it was insulating. But those are my childhood memories.

Lynell: Your dad was really smart, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Yeah, well…

Lynell: That was brilliant.

Nehemia: He knew how to work the system. He was, you know, he was a Jewish lawyer, so. Alright. So, let’s look at what the Bible says. What I love is, it’s in the Torah. It tells you exactly what Sukkot’s about. So, I’m going to have Lynell read Leviticus 23, and what we want to get is to verse 40. But I don’t know that we’ll get to that today. We might just skim through it. So, start in 33, and you guys have the notes here. We’ll read 33 to 36, then 39 to 43, and I’ll pop in with my clever comments every once in a while.

Lynell: Your clever comments. That is so cute.

“Yehovah spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Say to the Israelite people, On the 15th day of the seventh month there shall be a feast of booths to Yehovah to last seven days. The first day shall be a sacred occasion. You shall not work at your occupations. Seven days, you shall bring offerings by fire to Yehovah, and on the eighth day you shall observe a sacred occasion and bring an offering by fire to Yehovah. It is a gathering. You shall not work at your occupations.’”

Nehemia: All right. So, that’s interesting. So, now, verse 37 through 38 then shifts to a summary of… it’s kind of like a parenthetic statement, which is a summary of the entire 36 verses that came before it. Right? Like, it almost ended, and then in 39… You remember that… there was a cop show, I forget what it was called, but the police detective would say, “Oh, and one more thing.” Right? Remember that? You know what I’m talking about?

Lynell: Oh yeah! That was, that was…

Nehemia: I want to say it’s Matlock…

Lynell: Columbo. It was Columbo.

Nehemia: Columbo! Okay. So, Columbo would say, “Oh, one more thing!”

Lynell: I loved that show!

Nehemia: I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it, but I’ve been told I’m like Columbo. So, the Torah is kind of like Colombo here, and it says, akh bechamisha-asar yom la’chodesh, “But on the 15th day of the month,” of the seventh month. Right? So, 39 is like, “Well, one more thing I want to tell you.” And this is the moneyball, as Keith would say. It’s the key thing. Right? So, let’s now read verse 39. So, he’s making a general statement. “All these are the appointed times with the sacrifices,” et cetera, “but on the 15th day of the of the seventh month…”

Lynell: “On the 15th day of the seventh month, when you’ve gathered in the yield of your land, you shall observe the festival of Yehovah seven days, a complete rest on the first day.” Does it say that?

Nehemia: No, it says “a time of rest,” shabbaton. We’ll do a separate study on that someday.

Lynell: All right. “And a shabbaton on the eighth day. On the first day, you shall take the fruit of hadar trees,” which are olive trees.

Nehemia: Well, let’s not define it here.

Lynell: Oh, “Product of hadar trees…”

Nehemia: So, hadar actually means majestic. “The fruit of a majestic tree,” whatever that is.

Lynell: “…branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before Yehovah your God seven days. You shall observe it as a festival of Yehovah for seven days in the year. You shall observe it in the seventh month as a law for all time throughout the ages. You shall live in booths seven days. All citizens in Israel shall live in booths…” Does it say citizen?

Nehemia: Citizen there in Hebrew is ezrach, which means native-born. So, meaning, there’s two types of people in the congregation of Israel in the Torah. There’s the ezrach, the native-born, meaning someone who’s a physical descendant of Jacob. And then there is ger, or G-E-R in English, I suppose. Gimel-Reish. Ger is someone who is a sojourner. So, wait; this doesn’t apply to the sojourner? What’s that about? Well, let’s come back to that. Ask me that question later, once we understand what a sukkah is.

Lynell: What about those who have joined themselves to Yehovah?

Nehemia: That ger. That’s what that means. A sojourner is someone who has joined himself to Yehovah.

Lynell: All right. “Shall…”

Nehemia: Who isn’t a native born, like genetically, but who has joined himself. And then somebody says, “What about nekhar?” Nekhar is a foreigner, right? Someone who hasn’t joined himself to the God of Israel and the people of Israel. All right. So, um…

Lynell: “In order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I, Yehovah, am your God.”

Nehemia: All right. So, He tells you the purpose. The purpose of the festival of Sukkot is to remember that God caused us to dwell in booths when we left Egypt. Well, what’s the significance of that, right? And what I like to do is, you know, people come up with all kinds of theories. I want to be really careful not to say, “Well, you know, the numerical value of the word sukkah is such and such, and the numerical value of this other word has the same gematria,” the same numerical… “and therefore the purpose of Sukkot…” I mean that, okay, who knows? That’s very subjective, and anything’s possible.

So, what does God say about it? That’s what I always ask. So, let’s start with this question. So, there’s a mystery here in this verse, and the mystery is something that’s sort of so obvious you might not notice it. It’s kind of like in the Book of Esther; it never mentions the name of God or even the word Elohim. Even the word “God”. But people often don’t realize that until somebody points it out to them, right? Something so obvious staring you in the face that you don’t realize it until somebody points it out. They’re just staring you in the face.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: What? Why are you laughing? This is very serious.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: So… and what is this obvious point that you wouldn’t notice until somebody points it out? So, He says, “In order that the generations will know that I caused the children of Israel in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.” Where does it say that? So, nowhere in the Torah, other than this verse, does it say God caused Israel to dwell in sukkot using the word sukkot. So, that’s interesting. So, let’s keep that in the back of our mind when we ask the question, “What is a sukkah?” So, we have a reference to sukkot, not the feast, but the physical structure, which in English we call it “booths” or “tabernacles.” Interesting that we use the word tabernacles in English, right? Well, that’s kind of strange, right? What even is a tabernacle? Right? When I think of tabernacle, I think of the mishkan, which is the Tabernacle, right? And mishkan literally means “the dwelling place”. Right? That’s what… Right? It’s like the same word as shekhina glory. Right? Shkhina, Mishkan, the place of the dwelling of Yehovah’s name. Right? And he says, “And I dwelt in your midst,” that’s why it’s called mishkan.

So, let’s look at Genesis 33:17. Can you read us that first, my darling?

Lynell: “But Jacob journeyed on to Sukkot and built a house for himself and made stalls for his cattle. That is why the place was called Sukkot.”

Nehemia: So, it says in Hebrew, “And Ya’akov traveled to Sukkot, and he built for himself a bayit.” Bayit is house, “And for his flocks he made sukkot, therefore, the name of the place was called Sukkot.” Right? So, there’s a geographical location in Transjordan called Sukkot, and here we have to ask a question; was it really called Sukkot because Jacob built sukkot? Or maybe it originally had that name. This happens in the Tanakh, and then it was sort of reinvested with that name after Jacob built sukkot for his animals.

So, he has some kind of structure called the sukkah, which we translate in English as booths. Which is contrasted with a bayit, a house. And what we can already take away from this is, sukkah is some sort of a temporary structure, which is contrasted with a bayit, which is a permanent structure. And then when we think about the Temple, when David wants to build a temple to God… There is no word “temple” in Hebrew. I guess there is, mikdash, right? But the Temple isn’t normally called Mikdash. What it’s normally called in the Tanakh is Beit Yehovah, the House of Yehovah.

And God says to David, “When did I ever ask for you to build a house for Me? I’ve always been in a Mishkan.” And a Mishkan is just a dwelling place which is not a permanent structure; it’s actually a mobile structure. It’s really interesting; in modern terms we could call it a modular, mobile structure. Right? Meaning it’s modular in that you take it apart and then you put it back together, basically at a moment’s notice, and it moves from place to place.

And then we see in Exodus, He talks… we read this in the, I think in the last study, He talks about, “Every place I cause My name to be mentioned.” And throughout Deuteronomy, He talks about, “The place where I will cause My name to be mentioned,” and it uses there, in Hebrew, what’s called the imperfect, which is a continuous action. Right? So, in Deuteronomy it talks about the place Yehovah will cause His name to be mentioned, which we say is the Temple in Jerusalem. So, the more accurate answer is that, eventually, it became the Temple in Jerusalem. But originally it was wherever the Tabernacle was set up. Which was a temporary location which could be for a day, or it could be somewhere for hundreds of years. Right? Like in Shiloh.

So, the point here is that sukkah is a temporary structure, and it’s contrasted to bayit, house. Just like in the Temple, we have the Tabernacle, which is then contrasted to the house, the House of Yehovah. Right? So, there’s the contrast. And it’s interesting that in English we call a sukkah… we use the same word for both sukkah and mishkan, for both sukkah and tabernacle. Right? We call them both tabernacles when we say Feast of Tabernacles. So, that’s not accurate, but it’s actually not wrong in a way. Right? So, the Tabernacle is also called… we’ll get to that I’m jumping ahead.

Let’s look at Exodus 12:37. And the reason we’re looking at that… I’ll read that, is that it says, “And the children of Israel traveled from Ramses,” Ramses, the name of the city where they were slaves, “to Sukkot.” Sukkot here is the name of a place in Exodus 12:37, “about 600,000 men.” So, maybe that’s what it means in Leviticus 23:40. “I caused the children of Israel to dwell in Sukkot.” Maybe He doesn’t mean booths, maybe He means just that geographical location. Right? But they didn’t actually dwell there; they were there for a very short period of time as they were fleeing, and they’re actually still in Egypt. Right? So, in Leviticus 23 it says, “When I took you out of Egypt,” but in Exodus 12:37, they actually haven’t left Egypt yet. Right?

And how do I know that? Because it goes on and it mentions the city of Sukkot again. And I’m looking for that… and they haven’t left the border of Egypt when they’re in Sukkot. So, let’s look here. So, it’s Exodus 13:20, “And they traveled from Sukkot, and they camped in Etam at the edge of the desert.” So, they haven’t reached the wilderness yet. And by the way, when we say desert, it’s not really desert. Midbar is anywhere which isn’t inhabited. Right? So, I think the Australians would call that the outback, and… Right? So, it’s any area that’s… I mean, look, in modern terms… Well, no, “country” is an area where you have agriculture. Right? So, we’re talking about a place that’s beyond where you’re growing crops, and midbar literally means the place where you lead… that is, what we say, desert, is midbar, is the place where you lead animals to graze. Right? It’s not good for anything else except for grazing. Right? So, it’s like most of Texas.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: No, really. So, I mean, Texas is a lot of open space where you’re not going to grow corn, because maybe there’s not enough water or something like that. So, they’re traveling from Sukkot to Etam, which is at the edge of the desert. So, Sukkot is in Egypt. Right? So, that’s not what it’s referring to in Leviticus; it happens to be that there’s a town called Sukkot. But think about that; the only place that mentions Sukkot outside of the Feast of Sukkot that He caused us to dwell in booths is someplace in Egypt, which is mentioned again in numbers 33. But it’s not what He’s talking about. He’s talking about something in the desert. So, this is a bit mysterious, right? And the Torah does this; it’ll be… you know, “Remember that I told you Gwennie penguin is the cutest penguin of all time.” And imagine if I never said that until now. No offense, Penny.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: So, that’s how the Torah will often tell us something. You know, “Remember X,Y,Z, something I’ve never mentioned before.” But they knew it. How did they know it if He hadn’t mentioned it before? Because they were doing it, right? Meaning, they had been doing it for, you know, some number of years at the time Leviticus 23 was revealed. Actually, it might have been just for a year. I don’t know because the Torah is not in chronological order. So, we don’t know exactly when that took place, but it was sometime in the desert.

So, what did they dwell in for 40 years? That’s the question we have to ask, right? What were they dwelling in in the desert? And so, there we’re going to look at Exodus 33:8-10. And this is a famous passage that… it’s not the only passage, it’s just like a really good illustration of what they were dwelling in. If you can read it…

Lynell: Okay. And I’m going to put up our poll about… we have a quiz about that. Okay. So, a sukkah, Nehemia, what is a sukkah? Is it a tent?

Nehemia: You have to wait for the teaching.

Lynell: Oh, yes! Tent? Yes. Is it a house? I’m going to give them…

Nehemia: Well, no, that we already said, right? There’s the contrast… there’s what we call a semantic contrast linguistically in the verse in Genesis between bayit, house, and sukkot, booths. Right? Or whatever sukkot are, right?

Lynell: And it’s a booth covered in branches too, guys. It’s everything but a house that we have up there. So, it should say, “a booth covered in branches.” Where did that answer come from?

Nehemia: So, almost all the answers are correct.

Lynell: Yeah, except for a house.

Nehemia: All right, let’s look at our Bible verse.

Lynell: All right. 33?

Nehemia: Exodus 33:8-10. And look, so, let’s put the context back, because we just had the, you know, poll. So, the context here is that God said, “I caused you to dwell in booths when I took you out of Egypt, and that’s why you should build these booths, or whatever they are, sukkot, in the future.” What do they actually dwell in? Let’s read it.

Lynell: All right. “Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent…”

Nehemia: Mmm… so they were dwelling in tents. So, this is interesting. Let’s finish reading those verses.

Lynell: “…and gaze after Moses until he had entered the tent. And when Moses…”

Nehemia: That’s the Tent of Meeting, which was the precursor of the Tabernacle. In other words, there was a tent Moses would pitch, and he would go inside, and he would talk to Yehovah face-to-face. And really, like, really cool thing is, it says Joshua never left the tent. Joshua was in there hearing, and it makes me think whenever it says, “And Yehovah spoke to Moses, saying,” that’s Joshua sitting there with his reed and a piece of leather and writing down what he heard.

Lynell: Wow!

Nehemia: Yeah. Alright, go on.

Lynell: Oh, wow. “And when Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent while he spoke with Moses. All the people saw the pillar of cloud poised at the entrance of the tent. All the people would rise and bow low, each at the entrance of his tent. Yehovah would speak to Moses face-to-face as one man speaks to another, and then he would return to the camp. But his attendant, Joshua, son of Nun, a youth, would not stir out of the tent.”

Nehemia: Mmm. Wow! So, the Israelites dwelt in tents when they left Egypt for 40 years, and so, why is this important? So, Rabbinical Judaism has what I think I can call a legalistic definition of a sukkah, right? And it’s actually one of their key arguments, literally, in why do we need the Oral Law. Because the Oral Law gives us the specific specifications that are required for a sukkah to be valid. So, in other words, you can build a sukkah on the back of a U-Haul, you can build a sukkah on the back of a camel. But if you take a vine that’s growing out of the ground and it grows around, like, poles that you have set up, in a lattice, and it creates sort of a natural sukkah, that’s not valid. And how would you ever know that without the Oral Law? So therefore, you need the Oral Law, which is a bit interesting. We make up a bunch of rules, and say, “You need our rules, because otherwise you wouldn’t know our rules that we made up.”

Okay, so… And the image you would get from Rabbinical Judaism, and I’m not trying to be funny here, is that each Israelite had two structures. He had a tent made of some kind of cloth, or goatskin, or something like that. Right? Remember that… So, the Tabernacle is called the Tent of Meeting, and what’s the Tabernacle made of, the Mishkan? It’s made of these wooden slats that are covered in gold, and they interlock with little pieces, and then they’re covered in goat skin. Right? And that’s called the Tent of Meeting. So, a tent isn’t necessarily what we think of today. Right? A tent today has a very narrow definition as well, right? If I throw up, literally the Tabernacle, nobody in English would call that a tent. But in Hebrew, that’s called a tent, right? Meaning, tent has a broader meaning in ancient times than it did today… or in Hebrew at least. Let’s say in ancient Hebrew.

Lynell: So, Nehemia, Paul had the same question I did. So, Rabbinically speaking, when the gourd thing grew over Jonah, that wasn’t a sukkah. But was it a sukkah?

Nehemia: Well, let’s not get into the gourd. Let’s… I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. So, we’ll answer that by looking at what a sukkah is biblically, by the biblical definition. So, let’s go back. So, in the Rabbinical thinking, there must have been two structures for every Israelite in the desert. They had a tent, and then they had a sukkah next to the tent. So, like, maybe they slept in the tent, and during the day, when it was hot, they went out into the sukkah. Right? That seems to be the image that you would get from the Rabbinical definition.

But when you read in the Torah, there is nowhere in the Torah that it says they dwelt in sukkot. It always has them dwelling in tents. And my takeaway from that is that a tent is a type of sukkah. Like just linguistically. Unless Leviticus 23 is making it up and lying, which I don’t believe it is, then when it says, “I caused you to dwell in booths when you left the land of Egypt,” it meant the type of booth they were dwelling in, or sukkah they were dwelling in, was an ohel, a tent. Now, again, ohel in Hebrew, Alef-Hey-
Lamed, is a much broader definition than in modern English. Right? Because the Tent of Meeting, which is a modular structure covered in goat skin, and various, you know… according to one translation, it’s not goat, it’s seal skin, which is obviously ridiculous.

So, the point is that sukkah includes tent. And so, what did he actually make for the animals? Probably some kind of, you know, pens, right? Maybe with coverings, and therefore it was called a sukkah. And we’ll see in a little bit what that has to do with it. Now, this is an important thing; tent can also be metaphorical in the Tanakh. So, for example, 1 Samuel 4:10 has an expression that appears numerous times, and it says, “Each man fled to his tent.” This is when they were defeated in war, and they flee to their tents. Sometimes they were victorious in war, and everybody returns to his tent. And there, it doesn’t literally mean tent, it means your house. Right? Like, kind of in English, we say “every man is the lord of his castle”, or the… what do they say? Some expression like that, right? Well, I don’t actually have a castle, I have… you know, in Jerusalem I had a tiny little apartment.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Okay. So, let’s look at 2 Samuel 7:6.

Lynell: “From the day that I brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, to this day, I have not dwelt in a house.” This is God speaking, right?

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Lynell: “…but have moved about in tent and tabernacle. As I moved about…” Yeah.

Nehemia: So, yeah, so, God is walking about, traveling about, in tent and tabernacle, and we would say, “Oh, those are two different things.” But really, in Hebrew we have this structure that you have in a lot of languages where you say the same thing twice in different ways, and they are either two different things or, or two ways of saying the same thing, right? That’s called hendiadys. It’s this linguistic concept. So, tent and tabernacle here may be two different things, but they’re really the same thing. Right? And that makes sense, because the Tabernacle is called “the Tent of Meeting,” ohel mo’ed.

So, God is dwelling in a tent and tabernacle, right? And then in 2 Samuel 6:17, it talks about them bringing the Ark into Jerusalem and setting it up on what later would become… what we would call later the Temple Mount. Before the Temple was built, right? Remember, temple in Hebrew is House of Yehovah. And it says, “and they brought the Ark of Yehovah, and they placed it in its place in the midst of the tent which David had stretched out,” is what it says. So, this is a literal tent, with some kind of sheets or cloth, or probably animal skins that are covering it. That’s how they would make tents. Right? But he says, “he stretched it out”, so it’s a literal tent.

So, the Ark is in a tent before the Temple was built on the Temple Mount. And why is that important? Well, so Amos 9:11 is a really interesting verse. Let’s read Amos 9:11. And Amos, you’ll remember, is one of the 12 Minor Prophets. It is, in the Hebrew Bible, between Ezekiel and Psalms. You have the 12 minor prophets which began Hosea, Joel, Amos. And, you know, Amos made really good cookies.

Lynell: You are so funny.

Nehemia: They’re famous.

Lynell: You’re hilarious. Okay, so we’re in Amos 9:11.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: “In that day, I will set up again the fallen booth of David.”

Nehemia: And the Hebrew says, “the sukkah”.

Lynell: “I will mend its breaches and set up its ruins anew. I will build it firm, as in the days of old.” So, He called it a sukkah here.

Nehemia: Right. And it’s interesting; the King James has, “I’ll raise up the Tabernacle of David.” Now, what is that? Is that the house of David, metaphorically? It might be, right? Or maybe it’s referring to the Temple, which, before it was a permanent structure built by Solomon, it was a tent which had the Tent of Meeting, right? And so, maybe that’s why it’s called “the Sukkah of David” and not “the Temple of Solomon.” Right. That precursor of the Temple. But God is dwelling in a sukkah, which is called a tent, which is called a tabernacle. Wow!

Okay, so you’ve got a bunch of connections there. Let’s look at Numbers 9:15-23. And here it’s talking about God establishing the Tabernacle, or they dedicated the Tabernacle, rather.

Lynell: “On the day that the Tabernacle was set up, the cloud covered the Tabernacle, the Tent of the Testimony, and in the evening, it rested over the Tabernacle in the likeness of fire until morning. It was always so. The cloud covered it, appearing as fire by night. And whenever the cloud lifted from the tent, the Israelites would set out accordingly, and at the spot where the cloud settled, the Israelites would make camp. At a command of Yehovah, the Israelites broke camp, and at a command of Yehovah, they made camp. They encamped as long as the cloud stayed over the Tabernacle. When the cloud lingered over the Tabernacle many days, the Israelites observed the Lord’s mandate and did not journey on. At such times as the cloud rested over the Tabernacle but for a few days, they remained encamped at the command of Yehovah, and broke camp at a command of Yehovah.”

Nehemia: It’s interesting whenever they’re translating “broke camp” there in the JPS, it’s yisa’u, they traveled, right? If you remember from your ulpan; nosea, nosa’at, nos’im, nos’ot.

Lynell: Nos’im, nos’ot.

Nehemia: Right? So, you’re trav… So, it doesn’t say “broke camp.” They would travel, right? Which involves first breaking the camp, packing it up on the back of the mules, or whatever… donkeys, and then traveling. Right? So, you have two things: camping and traveling. And whenever you see the cloud rise up, then you travel. First you have to break camp. And then whenever you see it stop, then you set up camp; you encamp. Right? So, let’s read verse 21… And why is this important? Because He said, “Remember that I caused you to dwell in the booth, in the sukkot, for 40 years,” which evidently referred to their tents. What’s the significance of that? Okay, we dwelt in booths. Okay. We have better housing now. Or maybe some of us have worse housing, I don’t know. So, no, there’s a significance to that, right? Which was obvious to them because they had done it for 40 years. So, what does the Torah say about it? Right? We could speculate, but what does the Torah say about it? It says it right here. Go on.

Lynell: “And at such times as the cloud stayed from evening until morning, they broke camp as soon as the cloud lifted in the morning, day, or night. Whenever the cloud lifted, they would break camp. Whenever it was two days or a month or a year, however long the cloud lingered over the Tabernacle, the Israelites remained in camp and did not set out. Only when it lifted did they travel. On a sign from Yehovah, they made a camp.”

Nehemia: Ooh, wow! The Hebrew says, al pi Yehovah yachanu. “Based on the mouth of Yehovah, they camped,” ve’al pi Yehovah yisa’u, “And upon the mouth of Yehovah,” meaning, the word that came out of the mouth of Yehovah, “they traveled.” Et mishmeret Yehovah shamaru, “They kept the charge of Yehovah,” meaning, literally they guarded the thing of Yehovah that required being guarded. And it says, al pi Yehovah, be’yad moshe, “By the mouth of Yehovah through the hand of Moses.” Right?

In other words, the 40 years of dwelling in these tents and traveling from place to place, and you don’t know if you’re there a day, or several days, or just a single night, or for years, that is them walking in faith and obedience to Yehovah. Right? That’s not my theory; it says it right there. “By the mouth of Yehovah they traveled, by the mouth of Yehovah they camped.” Right? They’re guarding the charge of Yehovah, meaning, that which they need to guard. And that word for charge, mishmeret, that refers to commandments as well, right? The commandments in general are referred to… He says, “Guard My charge,” which is “My set of commandments,” right?

So, this is an expression of walking in faith and obedience to Yehovah. You don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know when you’re going there, and you’re just following. You don’t know when you’re stopping, right? You’re literally “literally”, right? Not like the young people say; they say literally but mean metaphorically. You’re literally walking in obedience to Yehovah, following wherever He takes you, and stopping wherever He tells you to stop. Going wherever He tells you to go, and you have no idea where you’re going, when you’re going to get there, how long it’s going to take, how long you’re going to stay.

So, when He tells us to remember walking, when He tells us to remember dwelling in booths for 40 years, this is the significance of that. It’s walking in faith by the Word of Yehovah, by the mouth of Yehovah, whatever comes out of His mouth, expressed through the hand of Moses, expressed through the cloud. But it’s the Word of Yehovah expressed in those different ways. That’s the significance of Sukkot, according to the Torah, of dwelling in booths, in tents for 40 years.

Lynell: So, I have a quiz here. Now you can see, when you get to this quiz, that I didn’t write all the questions. Nehemia really helped me with this quiz.

Nehemia: No, it was actually Sedgewick. He did some of them.

Lynell: It was Sedgewick that did this. And we just spoke about this. So, it says, “Why not build houses? Why didn’t they build houses out in the desert?” And, you know, I think this is a huge significance of Sukkot, and what we’re supposed to remember here. The property taxes were too high, just like they are in Texas. They couldn’t get a mortgage. I’m sorry, I just…

Nehemia: That one was Gwenny Penguin.

Lynell: I think he is the funniest person on this planet, because that’s just how he thinks. So, I’m going to give you just a moment here to finish. Why not build? Why didn’t they build houses when they left Egypt? And this is such a significant part of the teaching that Nehemia is doing, and it’s because the cloud could move. They were literally living by the Word of Yehovah, and we’re doing the same thing today, guys. That’s why we remember it; because He wants us to remember, that’s how He leads us. That just blew my mind. I don’t know about anybody else, but I gotta tell you. There’s a verse we’re going to next in Deuteronomy, right Nehemia?

Nehemia: Right. And everybody has the sheet, so they can see what our next verses are. It’s a surprise, what comes next?

Lynell: Good. [Laughter]

Nehemia: Deuteronomy 8:2-6. And it looks like we’re probably not going to get through everything, so you guys can look this up and do your own studies afterwards.

Lynell: This is where I got, where… this Scripture just blew my mind. This is where I said something, and Nehemia said to me… what did you say, baby? You said…

Nehemia: I think that was obvious.

Lynell: “I thought that was obvious.” Not to me it wasn’t!

Nehemia: When He says, “I caused you to dwell in booths,” what’s the significance of a booth? Well, I mean, to me, that part was obvious. You know, it’s interesting; when something’s obvious, that’s when you should question it. That’s what I’ve learned as a scholar. When something’s obvious, that’s where you need to question and say, “Well, you think it’s obvious, which means maybe you’re accepting without evidence.” And so, that’s why this is important. I’m not just going to tell you. You know, Lynell always says, you know, “What’s the answer?” And I say, “Let’s see what the Tanakh says.”

Lynell: I never ask that anymore. I don’t.

Nehemia: I’ve trained her.

Lynell: So, verse 2 says, “Remember the long way that Yehovah your God made you travel in the wilderness these past 40 years, that He might test you…”

Nehemia: Say “test”.

Lynell: Test…

Nehemia: Quack.

Nehemia: “…test you by hardships, to learn what was in your hearts, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives on the word that Yehovah decrees.”

Nehemia: We’ve got to dwell on that for a second. So, of course, here, Deuteronomy is quoting the New Testament.

Lynell: No, it’s not. No, because the New Testament wasn’t written…

Nehemia: Yeshua quoting Deuteronomy. And he says, “As it is written…”

Lynell: Yes.

Nehemia: Or something like that.

Lynell: That’s right.

Nehemia: Right. And what does it say here? “In order to inform you,” or “to make you make it known to you, that not upon bread alone will a man live, but upon everything that comes out of the mouth of Yehovah shall a man live.” So, what came out of the mouth of Yehovah? Boy, I don’t think we’ll have time to get to that. But guys, go read Exodus 16. The manna from the very beginning was intended as a test.

It’s a really complicated situation, right? So, you have this substance that, if you collect too much or too little, you’re still satisfied. If you leave it over to a morning, six days of the week, it rots. But if you leave it over on Friday till Saturday morning, it doesn’t rot. And if you look for it on Saturday morning, it’s not there. Right? So, it’s a substance that has a lot of rules, and I think we have to look at it as a supernatural substance. Meaning, like, there’s no natural substance that behaves according to those rules, right? There aren’t atoms in the universe that know when it… maybe there are, but not that I’m aware of, that know when it’s Saturday versus Friday, right? But the man, or manna, in English, did. And by the way, man means “what” in ancient Hebrew. So, manna is something like “whatchamacallit”, because they didn’t know what it was. That’s what it says in Exodus 16. So, it has these rules, and it says from the very beginning that the purpose of the man was to test Israel to see if they’d be obedient concerning the Shabbat.

So, this is really interesting. So, God sets up a system for 40 years to test Israel, every week, every day, and… Right? So, you’re supposed to take a double portion on Friday, only take a single portion on the first day through the fifth day, which, you know, today we call Sunday through Thursday, and then don’t take any on Saturday; there won’t be any there. Don’t even look for it on Saturday, right? So, God’s testing them with time and food. That’s incredible! Time and food. Now, the first test for humankind was food, right? Because I have people say, “God doesn’t care what you eat, He just cares about your heart.” Well, I don’t want to speculate about what God cares about. I know what He said, what God said… I can’t read God’s mind. He can read mine, but I can’t read His. What He does tell us is that food and time are important, and food and time are expressions of showing your obedience. And what does showing your obedience demonstrate? This is so beautiful. Right? And here it’s about food and time. The man is about food and time. Deuteronomy 8:2… you just read it.

Lynell: 2 to 6.

Nehemia: Right. But in verse 2, “To know that which is in your heart.” Right? Well, what do you mean? I thought… well, how do you… And then He says, “Whether you will keep His commandments or not.” But doesn’t He just look in my heart and know everything, and I don’t have to do anything because He just knows my heart? But if your heart doesn’t translate into action, then it’s not really in your heart; that’s what He’s telling us. Or maybe, let’s put it this way… Maybe it is in your heart, but it doesn’t mean anything. For God, your heart has to translate into action. That’s what He says, not me. Right? That’s what His test is, right? And you might think, “What a silly thing. Why can’t we eat pig?” Well, because God said so. Well, what’s the significance of that? He’s testing us. He tells you that! Food and time are a test! Right? So, it seems arbitrary, maybe it is arbitrary, in a sense. Right? He’s testing you. All right, where were we?

Lynell: “The clothes upon you did not wear out, nor did your feet swell those 40 years.” How awesome would that be? Does that say that in Hebrew? “They didn’t swell”? What does it say in Hebrew?

Nehemia: It said they didn’t… lo batzeka, which literally means… they didn’t turn into dough. Meaning you didn’t get athlete’s foot, that’s really what it means, right? Batzek is dough, which ferments and has a certain smell because it has fungus. Right? Because… what do you call that? Yeast is a fungus. So, your feet didn’t stink like dough.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: Like, you didn’t get athlete’s foot. Right? They didn’t rot, and you didn’t get foot rot; that’s what it means.

Lynell: “Bear in mind that Yehovah your God disciplines you, just as a man disciplines his son. Therefore, keep the commandments of Yehovah your God, walk in His ways and fear Him.”

Nehemia: That’s what it says.

Lynell: Is that what it says? Okay.

Nehemia: That’s exactly what it says.

Lynell: All right.

Nehemia: All right. So, we’ve got another one here. Deuteronomy 29:4-5. It says a very similar thing.

Lynell: It says, “I led you through the wilderness 40 years. The clothes on your back did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet. You had no bread to eat and no wine.” Does it say, “you had no wine”?

Nehemia: “No wine or strong drink,” and strong drink in the in the Tanakh means beer. Right?

Lynell: So…

Nehemia: Wine in the Tanakh is anything that’s sweet that’s fermented; it doesn’t have to be from grapes. It could be from pomegranate, it could be from dates. There’s date wine in ancient world. And then shekhar, which literally is “intoxicant”, is basically anything that’s not sweet, that may be a sour even. Now, what about whiskey? They didn’t have distilled spirits until the Middle Ages, right? The technology didn’t exist, as far as I know. So, shekhar is probably something like beer or…

Lynell: So, they didn’t have bread, like they had in Egypt.

Nehemia: Right, they had man. They had the man.

Lynell: They had man. And they didn’t have wine…

Nehemia: …which they sick and tired of because it tasted delicious, but over time, if you eat the same delicious thing repeatedly, you get sick of it. And so, you didn’t have bread, you had to rely on the manna. You didn’t have wine. Why didn’t they have wine? Because they were traveling in tents, and you have to grow grapes in order to produce wine, right? They couldn’t go to the wine store; it didn’t exist. Right? So, where would you get wine from if you can’t grow it? That’s the blessing of the Land of Israel, is, every man under his fig and under his vine. Right? So, you can make your own wine, because you have vines, or you buy it from your neighbors, right? But if you have 600,000 people and they don’t have any vines, then there’s no wine, right? It’d be a pretty rare thing.

“In order that you would know that I am Yehovah your God.” So, how does that tell you that He is our God? Because despite that we don’t have vines, we weren’t dying of thirst. Despite that we couldn’t grow grain, we weren’t dying of hunger. Despite that we’re walking around for 40 years, our shoes aren’t decaying. And despite that, you know, I don’t have the ability to grow flax and make linen, my clothes are still intact. So, this was a walk of faith for 40 years, and God was showing His providence, His protection. And why was he doing this? So that you would know that He is Yehovah. And why is this significant? Because He said in Leviticus, “The purpose of Sukkot is so you’ll know that I caused you to dwell in sukkot,” which includes tents, we saw. Well, what’s the significance of that? The significance of that is that for those 40 years we were in this temporary structure, and we were subject to the elements. And at any moment we would have to break camp and move to somewhere else or stay there for years, all based on al pi yehovah, on the mouth of Yehovah.

And so, that’s what the message of Sukkot is; to remember that in Egypt, or in the desert, when we came out of Egypt, we dwelt in booths for 40 years. And at any moment we could be told, “You have to leave. You have to move.” We were walking in faith, literally, trusting in Yehovah to provide for us, trusting in Yehovah to protect us. And even our clothes and our shoes He was protecting. And that’s what the message of Sukkot is.

Why do we have to remember that? Because life today is walking in faith in a temporary structure, right? This world we’re living in is temporary. My sister in Israel, Ariella, who’s a scientist, she sent me this really funny little cartoon. And it says, “100% of the people who confuse causation and correlation eventually die.” Right? So, if you confuse causation and correlation, you might think, “Oh, if I confuse those, and everybody who confuses them dies, it’s my confusing them that causes me to die.” Right? But no; everybody dies. Right? This world, we’re in a sukkah. Right? Now, metaphorically, we’re in a sukkah. We’re in a temporary structure. That’s what a sukkah is, it’s a temporary structure. Versus a bayit, a house, which is permanent, right? That’s a structure that might be broken apart and travel at any moment. You might have to pull up stakes, as we say in English, and move it any moment based on the cloud. And this life we’re in is temporary. Any one of us could die in the next second, and we don’t know. Right? Or you could live for years. Right?

So, it’s walking in faith. It’s a demonstration of your faith in Yehovah. And it’s a reminder that we’re walking in a temporary situation here in the world, just like our ancestors did in the desert when they left Egypt. You’re walking in faith in Yehovah, whether you acknowledge it or not. Right? This is temporary. A hundred percent of people are going to die. Right? Might take longer, hopefully, it might take shorter, but everybody eventually. Right? That’s the other thing medical scientists say, that if, based on a certain timeframe, 100% of the people in a study will die. Right? A hundred years later, everyone will probably be dead.

So, that’s what Sukkot is about. We are in a temporary situation. We’re in a temporary dwelling. This body is a temporary dwelling, right? And at any moment, it might be over. And that’s what Sukkot is to remind you of; that while you’re in this temporary sukkah, this temporary dwelling, you are to walk in faith with Yehovah and realize He’s the one that provides. He’s the one that gives you the instruction. He’s the one that leads and guides you in your walk of faith and your walk of life.

Lynell: Amen!

Nehemia: That’s what Sukkot is about.

Lynell: Amen. That is beautiful.

Nehemia: Yeah, there’s a bunch more notes. Guys, go do your own study.

Lynell: Let’s do some Q&A. So, I want to show you guys something. I showed you guys at the very beginning, but this is really important. When you have questions… I’m going to share my screen, because I want you to see where you can go to do some searching on nehemiaswall.com. Let me show you real quick. And then we’re going to talk with each other. Give me just a minute. I think this is important.

Dev said, “I’ve tried to tell people for years how to do this.” Right here, on the right-hand side, underneath nehemiaswall, right here, you can look up anything you want to know. So, we do have a Scholar Club that is going to be starting, I think, next month. And if I can spell it properly… If you’re interested, it’s not published yet, so only you guys here know. This is on the back end. We’re still working on the page; we’re working on a video. Andrew, thank you so much, who’s working on it. It brings up articles for whatever you search on. You can click on it, and it will bring things up. Like if I wanted to know more about Sukkot, eventually this will be up on the website, and I don’t know where exactly it will be, but if I want to know more about Sukkot, I can just click here and I can see Sukkot. If I want to know something about covering… it doesn’t matter what you put here, guys, it’s a really good search. Discovering common ground. There’s a bunch of things here, but you can search there.

Nehemia: And can I point out… One of the reasons you can search so thoroughly is that we have spent huge sums of time, money and resources on transcribing the podcasts. And we actually did something really interesting… So, I mean, because you could do it automatically… like, I watch videos all the time where there’s like these subtitles popping up, and it’s not what the guy says. And so… we make mistakes, but we spent a lot of resources on getting people who are native Hebrew speakers to transcribe what I say at a mile a minute so that it’s as accurate as possible. So, you can search it, and, you know, is it 100%? No. There’s definitely… I’ve even found some mistakes, but I don’t have time to go over everything. But the main reason for the transcription has been to make it searchable, so we could find stuff ourselves. Right? It’ll be like, “I think I said something some years ago.” Okay, well, now we can actually look for it and find it… usually. So, it’s a very powerful search tool.

Lynell: All right. So, we’re going to do some questions, some Q&A. Real quick. Nehemia, what happens if a holiday falls on Shabbat? Are the commanded observances combined, or are there distinct requirements?

Nehemia: So, this is kind of a broader question of, what are the requirements of Shabbat? And I’ll be honest; this is something that… my view has changed over the years. But let’s save this for a separate study on what are the requirements of Shabbat. I would just point people to Exodus… let’s see… chapter 12. And I think the big…

So, here… let’s back up. So, in Rabbinical Judaism, you are not allowed to cook on Shabbat, but you’re allowed to cook on what he calls the “the high feasts.” Right? Meaning the moadim, or the mikra kodesh, the appointed times. The holy proclamations. Right? In other words, if the first day of Sukkot is on a Tuesday, in Rabbinical Judaism you can cook food, whereas if it’s on a Saturday, you can’t. It’s a really interesting thing in Rabbinical Judaism. So, you’re allowed to cook on the holiday, but only for that day. So, if I’m making bread for the week in Rabbinical Judaism, I’m not allowed to do it on the first day of Sukkot, even if it’s on a Tuesday. I can only make it for that day. So, what do you do in Rabbinical Judaism if the first day of Sukkot falls on a Friday? And what’s the problem? So, I can cook for Friday, no problem, but how do I cook for Shabbat? So, they have this thing called an eruv tavshilin, which is… remember the eruv, which is the string around the neighborhood? Remember that, babe?

Lynell: Yeah, I do.

Nehemia: Right. So, this is an eruv for food. And what it does is, it’s basically a giant loophole you can jump through that allows you to cook food on Friday for Saturday.

Lynell: Now, Nehemia, do you follow that?

Nehemia: No, not at all.

Lynell: Okay, just letting you know. He is explaining it…

Nehemia: I’m explaining that… but the question was based on this idea, “how do we implement these rabbinical rules?” I mean, even if they don’t know that that’s what they’re asking, that’s really what they’re asking, right?

Lynell: Yeah. We’re not following Rabbinical rules. Just so you know. I just want that really clear.

Nehemia: So, Exodus 12:16 is talking about Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Chag HaMatzot, it says, “In the first day is a mikra Kodesh,” a holy proclamation, “and the seventh day is a mikra kodesh it shall be for you. You shall do no manner of work, except,” say, “Except.”

Lynell: Except.

Nehemia: Quack. “Except…” I don’t actually know what noises hedgehogs make. Somebody can tell me in the comments, perhaps. And, “Except that which every soul alone will eat, it shall be made for you.” Right? So, you’re allowed to cook on the feasts, on the mikra kodesh, certainly on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, right? But the word there is mikra kodesh, which is exactly what we have in Leviticus 23. So, cooking is the exception. It is work, but it’s the exception of the type of work that you’re allowed to do on the feast. What about Shabbat? Let’s leave that for a Shabbat discussion.

Lynell: Okay, here’s another Shabbat question. I’m just going to say something. The Torah says not to start a fire on Shabbat. What about those who live in very cold, freezing areas? Snow, freezing temperatures? I… we don’t follow the um…

Nehemia: So, again, that…

Lynell: We don’t follow the Rabbinical…

Nehemia: Well, that’s not just Rabbinical, right? It’s much more complicated than that, right? Because I used to teach that you’re not allowed to have a fire on Shabbat under any circumstances, based on Exodus 35: Lo tiv’ar esh bekhol moshvoteikhem beyom haShabbat. “Do not kindle a fire in all your habitation on the Sabbath day.” I’ve changed my view on that over time. But we should do a separate teaching on that. But…

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: But the real answer here is, you should work it out for yourself in fear and trembling with prayer and study before the Creator of the universe. You certainly shouldn’t put yourself in a situation where you’re going to die, right? The Torah says that these commandments are so that you should live by them. And so, if this is literally a matter of life and death, which it can be, in like, Alaska, or places like that, then you should not die.

Lynell: Okay. Lighting candles on Shabbat; is it a commandment or is it tradition?

Nehemia: Obviously not commanded. I almost feel like that’s a facetious question, but I’m suspecting it’s not.

Lynell: No, it’s not.

Nehemia: No, there’s no commandment anywhere in the Torah to light candles. In fact, what’s really interesting about lighting candles is that it’s not commanded in the Talmud either, right? So, whenever it came into Judaism, it’s post-Talmudic. Now, that’s a really interesting piece of information historically, because the Talmud was completed around the year 500. Some people will say even as late as 550. Traditionally it was closed around the year 500. So, let’s say lighting candles as a commandment wasn’t even part of Rabbinical Judaism until after the year 500. Well, that’s pretty late in Judaism.

Lynell: You have a bunch of questions to get to, and I’m going to… and Nehemia knows a lot about a lot of everything, so I’m just going to stop him and say: We’ll do a study on Shabbat at some point. I’m just going to walk through these questions; you can answer the ones you want today…

Nehemia: Oh, somebody asked about the ger. That’s an important question.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: The sojourner. Okay. So, why does it say that only the native-born has to build a sukkah? So, now we know the answer. Or… let me back up. In ancient Israel, all land was inherited. You could purchase land, but it was only for up to 49 years, so you were leasing it. You could lease land for 49 years; there really wasn’t purchasing land. And all houses were built on land. So, sojourners anyway lived in tents, right? A sojourner is, by definition, living in a temporary structure because they don’t own land and have nowhere to build a house. So, they don’t need to build a sukkah, because they live in a sukkah 353 days out of the year, right? The Hebrew year is 354 days. The rest of the year, they’re living in a tent anyway. That’s why it says the native-born. Now, if you’re a sojourner who happens to live in a house, then yes, you should be building a sukkah.

Lynell: Okay. Did the average Israelite have a family tent before they left Egypt? If not, where did they get the material to build them?

Nehemia: They had lots of goats, and there are… So, we didn’t get to this part of the study. So, a sukkah could be made out of branches and reeds and various pieces of vegetation. Now, you need some kind of a framework, which will probably, in ancient times, be branches as well. So, there are branches even in the Sinai. So, the Sinai desert, even if it’s in Saudi Arabia, wherever it actually was, those areas are semi-arid. They’re not like the… Actually, the Sahara isn’t even like the Sahara, right? When we think of desert, we think of just like, you know, miles and miles of sand dunes. Most deserts are not like that. Yeah.

Lynell: At what point do you think the pilgrimage will resume for keeping Sukkot?

Nehemia: So, the pilgrimage has never ended. If you’re able to go to Jerusalem for Sukkot, I think that’s a wonderful, beautiful thing. We definitely want the Temple to be rebuilt. So… Because ultimately, it says, “Don’t appear before Yehovah empty handed.” That means going to the Temple with the sacrifice, right?

Lynell: Is it…

Nehemia: I can’t do that literally today. Maybe I can do it metaphorically.

Lynell: Is a teepee a sukkah?

Nehemia: It’s a type of sukkah, for sure, absolutely.

Lynell: Do we read Deuteronomy during Sukkot, or all Five Books of Moshe?

Nehemia: So, that’s talking about the gathering, the Hak’hel, which is done once every seven years, in the sabbatical year, and that’s the full Torah. There’s actually an interesting passage in Nehemiah 8 which we didn’t get to, but it talks about… they celebrated Sukkot, and they spent, I think it says, a quarter of the day, every day for 7 or 8 days, reading from the Torah. Which we are about to do now, so we will be spending the next four hours reading the Torah. No, you can do that yourself, though.

Lynell: In Deuteronomy 8:3…

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Lynell: JPS says that…

Nehemia: What does it say?

Lynell: “Test you by hardship to learn what was in your hearts.” What? What does the Hebrew say in Deuteronomy 8:3? JPS says in order to teach you… Oh, “He subjected you… in order to teach that man does not live…”

Nehemia: So, here’s what it says.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: “And He afflicted you and starved you and fed you the man which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, in order to make it known to you that not upon bread alone will a man live, but upon everything that comes out of the mouth of Yehovah shall a man live.” That’s exactly what it says.

Lynell: Is the Talmud the only place to find the dimensions for a sukkah? Well, you read…

Nehemia: So, the Talmud doesn’t exactly have dimensions. It has minimum dimensions and minimum specifications. Right? And maximum specifications and maximum dimensions…

Lynell: Did this come from the Bible?

Nehemia: No.

Lynell: That’s the answer, in my opinion.

Nehemia: So, in other words, you have made-up rules, and you need the made-up rules to know the made-up rules. And therefore, the made-up rules must be true, otherwise you wouldn’t know the made-up rules.

Lynell: Okay. We were asked, “Will this be available later?” Yes, if it records properly, then yes, we’ll have it available. There’s… let’s see. I’m looking for ones that are pertaining to Sukkot. Just saying… Remember that the children of Israel lived in booths, they didn’t believe Yehovah, but rather the bad… Okay, that’s not a question, that’s a statement. All right. Please comment on the eighth day, Shemini Atzeret, they’re asking about… comment on it.

Nehemia: So, Sukkot’s a really interesting holiday. It’s only seven days, but there’s an eighth day, which is a day of rest. And it’s interesting, because it’s specifically said to be an atzeret, and atzeret in Hebrew means “a gathering”. So, this is a question I mentioned in a previous session about the phrase mikra kodesh, which is translated in the King James as holy convocation, meaning holy gathering. But then there are two days that are specifically gatherings, the seventh day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the eighth day of Sukkot, even though it’s not part of Sukkot. Right? So, those are actual gatherings, right? The word there is atzeret, which apparently means something like gathering.

Lynell: Timothy had a question, but I think Timothy, you’ll find the answer in the notes. If you email Dev, or myself, at nehemiaswall.com. He said to sum it up, in Exodus 33:22, and it’s in Hebrew, do you see it?

Nehemia: No, I don’t, I have no idea what you’re reading.

Lynell: Okay…

Nehemia: What are you reading?

Lynell: I’m reading the question. Let me put it in general chat. It’s in the Q&A towards the bottom. It’s like four up.

Nehemia: Oh, Exodus 33, ve’sakoti khapi aleikha. Right, that’s actually not in the notes. We didn’t cover that, but we covered related things.

Lynell: Yeah, it seems to be significant to think of his palm over the sukkah. He does talk in these notes about God shielding us.

Nehemia: Right, so, the meaning of sukkah is from the word sokhekh, which means to cover over and to shield over by covering something. So, it’s a shelter, right? So, in that sense, it’s protecting you. And it’s used metaphorically of God protecting, and it talks of Him putting His wing over you to protect you, like a bird covers her young, right, with a wing. And, so, yeah. So, the sukkah is God protecting us. Yes.

Lynell: So, Elizabeth asked about the lulav and etrog. We didn’t read about that this morning, because it’s not… is that in the Bible?

Nehemia: Well, yes, but it’s not… It’s a very important part that we didn’t get to because we didn’t have time, but it’s in the notes. So, here’s the “standing on one leg answer”. So, Leviticus 23:40 describes different vegetation that you should take and celebrate Sukkot. And then, when they read this in the book of Nehemiah chapter 8, they understood it, that Leviticus 23:40, and specifically it’s in the notes here, Nehemiah 8:15. And I have a study on my website about it as well, on Sukkot. So, they read it, and they understood that as instructions for how to build the sukkah, for the materials that you use to make a booth.

And so, it’s really interesting. It’d be like if I said to you, “Take a bunch of two-by-fours and nails and celebrate the Feast of Picture Frames.” And so, you could do two things with those nails, the two-by-fours and the nails. You can make picture frames, or you could take them and shake them around and say, “God didn’t say what to do with them, but the Oral Law tells me to shake around the two-by-fours and the nails.” So, at least in the time of Nehemiah, they understood this as the materials from which to build the sukkah.

Now, where did the rabbis get the idea of taking this cluster of vegetation and shaking it around? So, there’s a hint in 2 Maccabees 10:5-8, which talks about when they liberated the Temple. And guys, this is the very brief version; go read it yourself. Talks about where they liberated the Temple and they celebrated Sukkot, which they had missed. So yes, Hanukkah, the celebration of Hanukkah, was originally the Sukkot which had been missed while the Jews were being hunted down by the Greeks. Right? They were in the wilderness, and they couldn’t build booths because they were living in caves and holes in the ground, and so, they celebrated Sukkot in Jerusalem on Hanukkah, and they took these celebratory bundles, and it uses the Greek word there. So, this is something that comes from the Greek culture in the rituals of Dionysus, that you take this bundle of vegetation and you carry it around in a celebration. So, there seems to be a connection there. Like, in other words, this is Greek influence, in my opinion. But maybe it’s not; maybe it’s something that goes back to the Canaanite religion or the high places. I can tell you it’s not from the Torah, or it’s a misinterpretation of what it says in the Torah.

So, someone asks the question here: were etrogs, that’s a citron that looks like a lemon, were they around in the time of the Maccabees? So, yes. They come from the Persian… so, this is really interesting. So, I did an interview… guys, go… Nelson, can you post the link? I think it’s in the notes as well. I did an interview with Dr. David Moster, who wrote a book about the etrog. And the etrog actually comes originally from either India or China, and it wasn’t around in Israel in the time of the Torah, in the time of Moses. But in the Persian period, it was cultivated, this citron, this lemon-looking thing, it was cultivated in imperial groves by the Persian emperor, or the house of the Persian emperor, and so it was considered a royal fruit.

So, that’s interesting, because the Torah says pri etz hadar, and hadar is a term that means something like majestic, meaning royal. So, what happened is somebody in the Persian period read, in the Torah, “Oh, a majestic fruit, fruit of majestic tree. Well, we know what that is, we know it from the Persians, right?” Like, imagine if you read today, you never heard anything, and there was a thing in the Torah that says, “Set up a holiday tree in your living room.” And I didn’t know what that meant. Imagine. It’s not in the Torah, but imagine it said, “Set up a holiday tree in your living room,” and I said, “Oh, okay, I know what holiday trees are. Those are the Christmas trees, right?” Because I see that in the culture around me. So, that’s what happened with the etrog. They saw in the culture around them that there was this royal fruit called a citron today, or an etrog, and it was royal because it was considered royal by the Persian emperor.

Lynell: So, I will tell you guys what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be doing a Scholar Club. I’ll tell you just a little bit about that. That club is going to be a much smaller group. It’s going to be… hopefully we’ll be able to do meetings, and not webinars, so that we can all see each other. With this type of venue, there are like, you know, 500 people. It’s really hard for everybody to be able to see somebody else. In order for that to happen, we… it just doesn’t work for that, especially for a teaching.

And so, this group, you can look it up, we’re going to be sending some information out. I know that a lot of you have expressed that you’d like to have events that are like… more Karaite events so that, you know, people of like faith can get together. I hope that this is some of that. In the chat, you guys can chat with each other too, as to where you’re going and, you know, talking to each other. I love when you tell where you’re from and other people can see that, because they’re like, “Oh, I’m there too,” you know? And it gives them access to you this way.

Do you want to say anything about that, Nehemia? These are a group of people that will support what Nehemia is doing in his research and actually be able to help spread the Word of God to the whole world in that way.

Nehemia: So, I will say this, off the record, just between you and me.

Lynell: Just between you and 300 people.

Nehemia: Right. Well… how do I put this? So, there’s a lot of ministries out there, and they’re really effective at communicating. And you know… and some of them I think are wonderful; some of them maybe aren’t, right? You know. But what we’re doing is a little bit different in the sense that we want to communicate the Word of God, but also there are things where we have to do original research. You know, there’s this idea in Wikipedia; people will come and write something, and it’ll be rejected because they’ll say, “That’s original research.” You know, you might be stating some things that are facts, but that hasn’t been published anywhere, right? And they want to just rehash what’s considered maybe like common wisdom.

And common wisdom is great, but there are things in common wisdom that are wrong. And so, it’s important, from my perspective… like, what my calling really is, I feel, is to uncover the truth. Right? We’ve got this onion. And at the core of the onion is the truth, and we’ve got to peel away the layers. And there’s people out there who will say, “What a beautiful onion with 14 layers. Look how layer five has this, you know, deep spiritual meaning.” Yeah, but there’s something under that. What’s the truth behind that? That’s what I’m trying to get to, right? And that requires a lot of time and effort and resources, and you know… It’s funny, people think, “Oh Nehemia, you’re on vacation with Lynell.” No, we were waiting for our flight somewhere for 14 hours and couldn’t afford a hotel.

Lynell: Ha!

Nehemia: And we went to that place because we were researching manuscripts that nobody’s looked at, nobody even knows about, except for, like, you know, two or three people. And we were asked to come and look at them, or in some cases, we asked to come and look at them. And we’re uncovering things that, things that I didn’t know, right? Things that I thought… I thought the answer was something else. And I found and looked in the original sources, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, well, learned something new. It’s wonderful.”

One of the most beautiful things for me is to find out when I’m wrong, because then I have the truth. And that’s what you can be a part of in the Scholar Club, is to, number one, like I’ve always said for years, empower people with information. But we’ve got to find out what the information is, in some cases. We don’t even always know… I don’t always know! I don’t have all the answers, but I know how to find the answers… sometimes they can’t be found, by the way. There are things that I’ve tried, you know? I’ve uncovered every rock, and dug, and I can’t get the answer, right? But I know at least how to approach it and how to try and answer that. That’s where God has blessed me.

And so, you can be part of that, right? Not everybody can be a scholar. We have this metaphor, traditionally, in Judaism with the two brothers, Issachar and Zebulun. And it says one of them was a merchant, and the other sat in tents. And here it’s interesting; in the Jewish mind, sitting in tents means he sits in these studies. And so, the one who was the merchant, he supported the one who sat in the tents and studied. Because the one who was the merchant, he didn’t have the time. Maybe he didn’t have the aptitude for it. Maybe he wished he could do it, but, you know, he had other things that God had called him to do. But he could be part of studying the Word of God and investigating the Word of God by supporting the one who sat in the tent. So, I’m a sitter of tents. That is what I do. You know, Lynell has said to me, “You’re good at everything, except for fixing stuff.”

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Yeah. That’s not me. Right?

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: So, you’re right. I’m a dweller of tents. If you need to know about an ancient Hebrew manuscript, I’m kind of good at that. If you need to, you know, fix the water heater, I don’t know how to use a wrench.

Lynell: He knows how to use a telephone.

Nehemia: I do.

Lynell: That counts. Can I just say, that counts?

Nehemia: And a credit card.

Lynell: Nehemia is like a hound dog. It is true, he is, no question. The scholar club…

Nehemia: I’m like a hedgehog. I’m going to dig through that hole and find those little grubs.

Lynell: It’s true. I mean, when he answers a question… Israel asks something off topic; do you have any comments on the name of Yehovah forming on the Western Wall of the Temple Mount? I haven’t seen that. Have you seen that?

Nehemia: Yes.

Lynell: Have you seen the name of Yehovah being formed on the Temple wall?

Nehemia: A few years ago, it was something like vegetation, and then there’s the name of Yehovah in the mountains, and around Shiloh.

Lynell: I didn’t remember that when we were there. You’ll have to show me.

Nehemia: Yeah, you have to use your imagination when you look at the satellite photo.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: Right.

Lynell: In the command for the nations to attend the feast of Sukkot in the future, in order for the world to get to the same lesson as Israelites in the desert, is the command for nations…

Nehemia: I didn’t follow. Say it again.

Lynell: Is the command for the nations to attend the feast of Sukkot in the future?

Nehemia: Yes! Zachariah, chapter 8. We didn’t get to that. Guys, go read it. It’s beautiful.

Lynell: All right.

Nehemia: And who said anything about the future? Why isn’t the future now? It says in the future they’ll be punished if they don’t do it. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it now.

Lynell: Am I in sin if I don’t set up a sukkah?

Nehemia: I wouldn’t say you’re in sin; I would say that today we are in exile, and you should do the best you can with the resources that you have. You know, when I was 20 years old, the first time I had my own sukkah… I didn’t have any sukkah at all. And I lived in the hood in Chicago. And I realized, “If I build a sukkah outside, I’m going to be murdered in my sleep.” And so, I’m like, “Okay, I’m supposed to live by the commandments.” Right? When I was a teenager, we lived in, you know, a nice middle-class neighborhood. It was probably a little bit dangerous sleeping outside in the sukkah in the backyard, but not quite as living in the hood, where… well, I won’t say certain things. Anyway.

Lynell: Is the eighth day a great feast with food selection and puddings?

Nehemia: I don’t know about pudding, but yes.

Lynell: I think we’re talking about Shemini Atzeret, yeah.

Nehemia: Right, right, right. And I don’t know what you mean by puddings. Like, that might be something in a different dialect.

Lynell: Maybe desserts. Sweet things.

Nehemia: Oh, yeah. Well, in Nehemiah 8 is where we go back to… we’re first talking about Yom Teruah, where he tells you one of the characteristics of a holy day is, “don’t be sad, be happy”. Even though they were legitimately sad. Do everything you can to… you can delay your morning until the next day, which they did. They eventually fasted after the whole feast season was over on the 24th day of the month, meaning the two days after Shemini Atzeret, in Nehemiah 8. But they say there, “Don’t be sad. It’s a holy day to Yehovah. Eat…” it says, “sweet…” What does it say there? Let’s bring it up. Nehemiah 8. Yeah, we had a whole thing on Nehemiah 8 which we didn’t get to, but…

Lynell: Is the eighth day a high Sabbath? While we’re on this subject.

Nehemia: Yes. That’s not a biblical term, not a Tanakh term…

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: …but yes, it is a mikra Kodesh, which is a day on which work is forbidden. So, they say here in Nehemiah 8… So, they read the Torah and they were upset. He says in verse 10, “Eat fatty foods and drink sweet drinks,” and sweet drinks probably meant something like wine. And how do I know it’s wine? Because anything sweet is naturally going to ferment after three days. They didn’t have refrigeration. So, “Eat fatty foods and drink sweet drinks, and send portions to those who don’t have anything prepared, for today is holy to our Lord. Do not be sad, for the joy of Yehovah is your strength, is your stronghold.” Wow! Intense.

Lynell: Peter asks, “Can one fast during Sukkot?”

Nehemia: I mean, you just read what we read.

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: Right? So, work it out for yourself from fear and trembling and prayer and study before the Creator of the universe. Sounds like “no”.

Lynell: How do you two observe your time in the sukkah? We pray, we eat, we put a big air mattress out there.

Nehemia: Well, we tried sleeping there, which I have done many years in the past, but in Texas, you have a problem with mosquitoes and bugs.

Lynell: No mosquitoes this year…

Nehemia: So, we set up a bug zapper, and it was like every 30 seconds while we were trying to sleep; Zzzz. Zzzz. Zzzz. Zzzz. And I’m like, “Okay, the Torah was given for Jerusalem, Land of Israel. It might not be practical in Texas, where there’s West Nile virus.”

Lynell: Yeah, yeah. No kidding.

Nehemia: I want to look at Amos 5:26.

Lynell: Okay. We’re going to we’re going to Amos 5:26. I’m there. Okay. Let’s go. Amos 5:26.

Nehemia: Hold on, let me look… So, do you want to read that, please?

Lynell: I’m going to look for it. I never… almost there. Yes. Amos 5:26 says… “And…” am I right? 5:26?

Nehemia: Yeah. You’ll think, what does that have to do with it, Nehemia?

Lynell: “And you shall carry off your king, Sikkut, and Kiyun, the images you’ve made for yourself of your astral deity.”

Nehemia: All right, so, these are some kind of gods, deities, something like that. So, he’s talking about how they’re going to go out into exile. They’re going to be exiled. And you’re going to carry with you into exile, right? You loved your gods so much, you’re going to take them with you in exile.

Lynell: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: You’re going to carry Sikkut, your king, literally, and Kiyun, your image, kokhav eloheikhem, “the star of your god, which you made for yourself”. Now, what are the gods Sikkut and Kiyun? We don’t really know. But what makes this a little bit complicated is that this is then quoted… Well, actually first let’s see what’s in the Greek. So, the King James has, “But you have born the tabernacle of your Moloch.” Moloch? Did you have that in the JPS? Moloch?

Lynell: No.

Nehemia: Okay. And Moloch, of course, is the Ammonite god that they would sacrifice children to.

Lynell: That’s horrible, yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah. It was in the valley of Hinnom, which is Gehinnom, which is where we get Gehenna. Right? Because they would hear the screaming of children in Gehinnom, in the Valley of Hinnom, and that became a symbol for hell, for suffering. “You have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch, and Kiyun, your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.” That’s the King James. So, where did the King James get Moloch? Well, they read malkechem, “your king”, which is melech, as molech, which could be right.

In other words, it could be that “your king” is a euphemism; you have euphemisms in the Tanakh. The euphemism is where I say something in a nice way, or there are certain words I don’t want to say. That’s a sort of euphemism, at least in the biblical sense. So, instead of Baal, sometimes it says boshet, which means shame, right? So, melech could be a euphemism for molech. Meaning Kiyun your Moloch, right? Kiyun might have been a specific manifestation or specific type of statue of the deity Moloch, who they burned children to, right?

So, where does the King James get… maybe this should be a whole separate teaching. Long story short, guys, I won’t get into it. But look at Acts 7:43 and the Greek, of, I mean, the Septuagint, which is the ancient Greek translation of Amos 5:26, which has Moloch. That’s where the King James got it from. In other words, the translators of the Septuagint said, “Oh, malkekhem, your king, is a euphemism for Molech. Let’s just write Molech, because in Greek they won’t understand it otherwise.” Right? In Hebrew it’s obvious, or it can be obvious, if you see it. “Oh, okay. That’s the same letters.”

Anyway, so it’s interesting. So, some people say that’s the Star of David, which is utter nonsense. The Star of David had nothing to do with the star of your god, of Kiyun or Sikkut. The Star of David actually comes from Prague, where… I think we saw it when we were there, if I remember correctly, or at least we were there; I don’t know if we saw it. We have a photo. I have to check the photos. So, we were…

So, what happened is, in Europe, if you were important enough, you would have what’s called a shield of arms, or a coat of arms, rather, that you would put on your shield or in front of your house. A coat of arms, and the Jews of Prague in the 13th century or thereabouts, were given permission by the Holy Roman Emperor to have a coat of arms. And eventually, the whole Jewish world said, “Oh, we have a coat of arms, even though I’m not from Prague,” and that coat of arms has a Star of David on it. Which, by the way, the center of the Star of David is a Jew hat, which is a hat Jews were forced to wear to humiliate them. Probably the precursor of the kippah. Or certainly the precursor of the shtreimel, if you know what that is, that Hasidic Jews wear.

So, this coat of arms… it’s kind of like I’m Gordon from Lithuania, and I go online. I say, “Oh, the coat of arms of Gordon.” I find something from like, you know, Scotland, which has nothing to do with me, right, and I say, “I have a coat of arms.” Right? So, Jews around the world eventually adopted the Star of David from Prague as their symbol, because they’re like, “Okay, there is a coat of arms for Jews, it’s the Star of David.”

Now, what did it mean to the Jews of Prague? That’s the question. And it had nothing to do with the god Remphan, right? For the Jews of Prague, it was a symbol of… probably a kabbalistic symbol of protection, although it could also represent the name of Yehovah. But that’s a whole separate study. Let’s leave that alone for now.

Lynell: Can you build a sukkah on Shabbat? Bless you. You’re muted now.

Nehemia: And that wasn’t me, it was the penguin.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Achoo! Choo! Choo!

So, can you build a sukkah on Shabbat? That’s an interesting question. The short answer is no, the long answer is yes. So, it actually says in Leviticus 23:40 that you should do it on the first day of the feast even though it’s a rest day. It’s telling you to build the sukkah on the first day or take the materials on the first day. Probably “on” means “by”, right? Because we do have this thing in Biblical Hebrew that “on a certain day” can mean “by a first day”. So, the long answer would be, “No, you can’t, if you understand linguistically that ‘on’ there means by the first day.”

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, Nelson posted here that there’s a place I talk about tithing, in Torah Pearls. And he probably found that because there’s a transcript. See how important it was that we had a transcript?

Lynell: The transcripts, that’s really important, guys. They send those…

Nehemia: Originally, we were asked by a deaf person to make transcripts. And I’m like, “Okay, but that will cost tens of thousands of dollars. You don’t realize how complicated that will be, because I talk really fast and I use a very specific set of terminology.” Right? In other words, I’m using Hebrew words, but I’m not a Rabbinical Jew. So, the natural person to transcribe this for us would be someone who was raised in Rabbinical Judaism and is fluent in English. We try to hire those people. They’re like, “Wait, no way, you’re a Karaite and you’re talking about Christianity and Jesus. We want nothing to do with it.” So, it’s very complicated to get this transcribed. We had to find just the perfect people to do it.

Lynell: Do you think the Sukkot Genesis 33:17 is the same geographical location as the Sukkot of Exodus 12:37?

Nehemia: No, obviously it’s not. Meaning, one of them is in Transjordan, and it’s believed today to be the site of Deir Alla, which is interesting, because it… but anyway, that’s a separate thing in Transjordan. And then the other one is within the borders of Egypt, so they are hundreds of miles apart. And probably Sukkot was any… In other words, you have a bunch of places in the Tanakh that are called Gat, which means a press, like an olive press. Right? So, why do you have so many places called Gat? Because there were a lot of olive presses. You probably have a bunch of places called Sukkot, because there were a lot of places where they built sukkot for their animals, I would guess.

Lynell: You said the step-by-step ritualistic waving of the lulav and the etrog in the hand is not in the Torah, correct? Correct.

Nehemia: Definitely it’s not in the Torah.

Lynell: You’re correct.

Nehemia: What’s beautiful about it is that Rabbinical Jews don’t claim that’s in the Torah. They say it’s in the Oral Torah, and there’s no way you could ever know to do that if you didn’t have the Oral Torah. And therefore, you need the Oral Torah. Right? You could never understand the Torah by itself, the written Torah, without the Oral Torah, because you wouldn’t know to wave the lulav and the etrog. I agree.

Lynell: Could the cloud fire be the chuppah, and the chuppah is the sukkah the Israelites dwelt under?

Nehemia: Chuppah.

Lynell: I don’t know what the… Chuppah? Oh chuppah, oh sorry.

Nehemia: So, they’re talking about, like, in other words, the sukkah is something to do with the metaphor of God being married to Israel. That’s a wonderful idea; it’s not what it says in Leviticus. Leviticus tells you it’s about that He caused us to dwell in booths. So, it was a 40-year marriage, is what you’re trying to say.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Meaning, the marriage ceremony lasted 40 years. When I thought, you know, some weddings I’ve been to were long. I don’t know.

Lynell: Psalm 7:9 in the ESV says, “You who test the minds and hearts.” The footnote says: “In Hebrew, hearts and kidneys.” Why does it say “kidneys”? What does Psalm 7:9 say in Hebrew?

Nehemia: There are… I’m looking at the… yeah, it is kidneys in Hebrew. So, in English, we’ll say, or in modern times, let’s say, you know, “I had this idea in my head.” So, that assumes a certain understanding of human physiology, which is, you know, a very modern understanding. In the ancient world, the heart and the kidneys and the liver, those three specifically, were thought of as the place where thoughts take place.

Now, does the thought really take place in your head? That’s an interesting question, right? Or maybe it takes place in your soul, which isn’t a physical place, right? So, yeah. But in the ancient world, they thought of it as your heart and your kidneys and your liver. So, that’s the answer to that. So, kidneys is not what you think of… meaning, it’s the physical part, the kidneys, but it’s where thoughts took place in the… Right? So, some translations will say, “Okay, well what is that equivalent to today?” And they’ll translate kidneys as mind, which isn’t wrong either, right? The mind isn’t a physical thing. There’s no physical part of your body that you can ask a doctor and say, “Can you cut out my mind?” That’s not a thing.

Lynell: Is it okay to wear a pendant with a Shield of David? I think you’re saying the Star of David…

Nehemia: Yeah. Shield of David / Star of David. In Hebrew, it’s called Magen David, “the Shield of David”. So, my answer would be yes. Other people would say no. I say work it out for yourself in fear and trembling appearing before the Creator of the universe. There is a theory and scholarship which has never been proved, that the origin of the Shield of David is that there was a messianic claimant, meaning someone who said he was the Messiah and actually led an armed insurrection against Muslim oppressors, whose name was David Alroy. And so, the claim was that the Shield of David was his emblem. I’ve never seen any evidence of that whatsoever. So… yeah. I have an explanation of the Shield of David, which admittedly, you know, is… look, these are symbolisms and they’re medieval symbolisms, right, and it maybe meant different things to different people. But I have one medieval explanation in my book Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence.

Lynell: Many camp out in tents for Sukkot. Does a tent work instead of something built with branches? Remember the quiz we did? What’s a sukkah? Yes.

Nehemia: Yeah, no, no, no. I’m trying to be cute here, but… No, yeah. So literally, the sukkah that they dwelt in for 40 years was a tent.

Lynell: Nehemia, the Tabernacle and the Tent of Meeting; are they the same physical structure?

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, that’s complicated. Because there were two different things known as the Tent of Meeting. There was the Tent of Meeting, which was a tent, we actually read that verse. And then later, that was replaced by the Tabernacle, which was then called the Tent of Meeting. Once the Ark was built, and in the Ark there was the Ark of the Covenant, the Aron Ha’Brit, which on top of it had the kruvim, the cherubs, and that was the Place of Meeting. Right? But before the Ark was built, and the Tabernacle was dedicated for the Ark, there was an actual tent.

Lynell: Elizabeth asked, “Did I understand correctly that I don’t have to feel guilty if I’m not sleeping currently in my sukkah?”

Nehemia: Well, I can’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t feel guilty about, but I don’t feel guilty for not sleeping in my sukkah.

Lynell: I don’t feel guilty about it either. Yeah, so, that’s a question. Is there going to be a Third Temple, Nehemia?

Nehemia: Yes. According to the Book of Ezekiel, and other verses as well.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Leviticus 23:33-36, 39-43
Genesis 33:17
Exodus 12:37
Exodus 13:20
Exodus 33:8-11
1 Samuel 4:10
2 Samuel 7:6
2 Samuel 6:17
Amos 9:11
Numbers 9:15-23
Deuteronomy 8:2–6
Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4
Exodus 16
Deuteronomy 29:4–5
Exodus 12:16
Exodus 35:3
Leviticus 18:5
Nehemiah 8
Exodus 33:22
2 Maccabees 10:5-8
Zechariah 8
Amos 5:26
Acts 7:43
Psalm 7:9

BOOKS MENTIONED
Etrog: How A Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol by David Moster
Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence by Nehemia Gordon

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
The Sukkot Collection
Hebrew Voices #78 – Chinese Origin of the Sukkot Etrog
Regarding Tithing:
Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17
Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8

The post Hebrew Voices # 227 – Sukkot: Tests of Faith appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #226 - Yom Kippur: Afflicting Your Soul for Repentance, Nehemia hosts a webinar on Yom Kippur to explain the reason for the name of the holy day, and how prayer and fasting could be an abomination to Yehovah, all while exposing the so-called “ingenious” Rabbis.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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Hebrew Voices #226 – Yom Kippur: Afflicting Your Soul for Repentance

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: There is this profound message in Isaiah 58, which is, in some ancient and even modern cultures, this idea that true righteousness is fasting, and constant prayer, and what’s called asceticism. You deny yourself, and that’s what is true righteousness. You’re up on a mountaintop, you don’t participate in the world, and that’s true righteousness. And the Torah teaches us, and the Tanakh reiterates this, is righteousness is to interact with the world in a righteous way.

—

Nehemia: Shalom, everybody, and I hope you’re having a productive and easy fast, for those who are fasting. And so, someone asked here, during the kind of pre-session chat, “Why are you celebrating Yom Kippur today, when in the Rabbinic calendar it was,” you know, in the Jewish count, the Hillel calendar, “it was celebrated two days ago?” So, that has to do with the way the calendar functioned in ancient Israel. And I have a lot of teachings on my website about that, so I’m going to refer people to that.

So, the short answer is that, observing Yom Kippur today, the Day of Atonement, is based on the sighting of the new moon in Israel, and determining when the year begins is based on the aviv barley. So, there’s a whole bunch of teachings on that. I used to do that quite a bit, and I’ve stepped back from that, let other people handle that, and… but yeah, I’m observing it today. And I have friends who observed it a month ago. So, you know, and a lot of family who observed it two days ago. So, I just want to do the best I can with the information that I have.

All right, so, there was a request: “After Yom Teruah, come back and do something for Yom Kippur.” I’m going to do it a little bit different today; I’m not going to do the PowerPoint thing. And so, you’re going to have to jot down verses and look them up yourself, although we’ll read some of them. And, because I don’t have any water today, because I am fasting… I’m doing a food and water fast, not eating or drinking. They also call this a dry fast in English. In Hebrew, it’s just called it a tzom, a fast. So, I’m going to have Lynell read some of the verses, which is what we do in our morning Bible study.

Alright, Yom Kippur. So, what is Yom Kippur all about? And if I had to answer it in, like, one sentence, or sentence fragment, I would say, “Fasting, repentance, prayer, confession, asking for forgiveness, and resolving not to do it again.” That’s what they call… the young people call that TLDR; too long, didn’t read. So, now for some more details. So, Yom Kippur is first mentioned, although not by name, in Exodus chapter 30 verse 10. It talks there about chatat hakipurim, the sin offering of atonement, which is brought once a year. Doesn’t say the date; doesn’t really tell you too much about what it’s about, but it tells you there is such a thing.

And then Exodus 30:15-16, a few verses later, has the half-shekel for atonement. Which is the way in ancient Israel… they were commanded not to take a census and count people. But rather, they were commanded to give the half-shekel, which would go to the Tabernacle, and later the Temple, and be used for the service there. The sacrifices and everything, and that was an atonement. So, that also is related.

So, we have two references, essentially, to Yom Kippur, and then we have the big one. And all of this is before the phrase “Yom Kippur” ever appears in the Torah. The really big one is Leviticus 16. I’ve done teachings on that before, but that’s not the direction we’re going to go today. Maybe during the Q&A we can discuss it a bit.

But Leviticus 16, the entire chapter, is the ceremony for Yom Kippur. But it never uses the phrase, it talks about… It’s really interesting; Lynell and I were reading over this yesterday. It has the root… Hebrew, or all Semitic languages, are based on three-letter roots, and the three-letter root for Kippur means atonement. And we were reading the JPS translation, the 1995 New JPS in Leviticus 16. We read through the whole chapter. It took us about three hours, for some reason. We had a lot of sidetracks, or what I call “rabbi trails”.

So, we noticed that it has three different translations for the word… for the root Kaf-Pei-Reish, atonement. It has purge, expiate, or expiation, and atonement. So, the same root, within a span of a couple of verses, two or three verses, it was three different translations. And that kind of tells you that this word doesn’t have a perfect correspondence to English. You know, people who only speak one language, they think, “Well, there’s one word in, let’s say in English, and that has an exact word in Spanish, and one word in English, and that has an exact word in German.” But once you learn some languages, you realize that that doesn’t always work that way. That you might have something that… there’s one word, let’s say in English, and there’s, you know, three words in Hebrew, or there’s three words in English and one word in Hebrew.

And it’s a bit misleading in Western culture, because the European languages were in such constant contact with each other that they developed a lot of words to correspond to the word in another language. Right? So, you will be able to have the words line up really nicely in European languages, but that doesn’t really work in ancient Hebrew as well. In Modern Hebrew it works great, because if we don’t have the word for it in Modern Hebrew, we generally will translate it and invent a word. Or famously, the Germans have a word, schadenfreude, which means the pleasure of watching somebody else… I don’t remember exactly what it means. Is it watching somebody else fall or something, or fail? I don’t know exactly. But I just had to say a whole sentence in English for that, right?

All right. So, all that’s to say kippur means something like atonement, purification, purging. The phrase that we often will have in Leviticus is, there’s atonement, which leads to forgiveness. I’m going to focus today on the forgiveness. Leviticus 23:27 is the first time we have the word, or the actual name of the holiday, Yom Hakippurim. So, everybody in English knows it as Yom Kippur. It is not called Yom Kippur in the Tanakh, or the Torah, it’s called Yom Hakippurim. Let me read it: Ach be’asor lachodesh hashevi’i hazzeh, “But on the tenth day of this seventh month,” yom hakkippurim hu, “it is a day of atonement,” Yom Hakippurim. And I’ll talk about that “im” ending in a second. Mikra-kodesh ihiyeh lachem, “It will be a holy convocation for you,” or a holy proclamation, a holy gathering. Different explanations of that. Ve’innitem et-nafshoteichem, “And you shall, you shall…” Why can’t I remember the word? “You shall afflict your souls.” This is what happens when I don’t have my coffee. Vehikravtem isheh la’Adonai,
“And you’ll bring a fire offering to Yehovah.” So, why is it Yom Hakippurim and not Yom Kippur? So “ha” just means “the”, right? So, it’s the day of Yom Kippurim, is “ha”.

So, in Hebrew, this is the short answer, we have three kinds of plural. See, there’s an example, we have something in Hebrew we don’t have in English. Not that I’m aware of, in English, at least. So, the three types of plural in Hebrew are: there is a quantitative plural, a qualitative plural, and an abstract plural. So, quantitative plural, that’s just like the plural in English. You have one penguin, and you have multiple penguins.

Lynell: Pinguin–im.

Nehemia: Right? So, in Hebrew that would be pingvin and pingvinim.

Lynell: Pingvinim.

Nehemia: Or kelev and klavim, which is more of a native Hebrew word. And notice it’s kelev, klavim, not “kelavim” right? The vowels actually change once you add that ending. The qualitative plural is something like Elohim, right? So, it expresses something like greatness. Adonim, which is an owner, could be the owner of an ox, is called adonim with the “im” ending, and it functions differently than the quantitative plural grammatically. I’m not going to get into it unless somebody asks in the Q&A.

Sometimes Elohim is plural, right? When it says “don’t worship other gods” in the Ten Commandments, it’s elohim acherim, which is other gods, not other god. And then the third type, which is what’s relevant to us today, is that abstract plural, which is something like rachamim, is mercy. And sometimes they’ll translate that in English as mercies, which is technically true, but it’s actually wrong, because it’s referring to an abstract concept. So, rachamim is mercies, or mercy rather, but literally it’s mercies, and kippurim is literally atonements, but it’s the abstract concept of atonement. All right. In other words, you have a verb, “to atone”, lekhaper, and then you have kippurim, which is the name of the holiday. Yom Hakippurim is the Day of Atonement.

Leviticus 23:32 says Shabbat shabbaton hu lakhem. “It is a Sabbath of rest to you.” Ve’innitem et-nafshoteichem, “And you shall afflict your souls.” Betish’a lachodesh ba’erev, “In the ninth of the month, at evening,” mi’erev ad erev, “From evening to evening,” tishbetu shabatkhem, “You shall rest your Sabbath.”

So, here it’s telling us very clearly, in case you had any doubt, this fast is from evening to evening, meaning from sunset to sunset. And what’s interesting is that this is the only place in the Tanakh where something is referred to as “your Sabbath”. When he refers to the weekly Sabbath, he calls it “my Sabbath”, and here he calls it all y’all’s Sabbath. Shabatkhem is the plural “you”. So, that’s interesting.

So, you can see this reference to “afflicting your souls.” That’s what we’re going to talk about a little bit. And I have a whole study on nehemiaswall.com about that. I’m just going to give a tip of the iceberg here.

Leviticus 16:29 and verse 31 mentioned that, Numbers 29:7 as well. We’re not going to read those today. Isaiah 58:3. And here I’m going to ask Lynell to pull up her Bible. Lynell, which Bible are you using?

Lynell: I have the JPS.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. And, you know, people can find online the 1917 JPS, which it’s really just the King James Version with some Jewish modifications. So, instead of “behold the Virgin” it’s “behold the young woman”. Right? That’s literally what they did; they took the King James and they corrected, from the Jewish perspective, some of the translations.

Lynell: Where do you want me in Isaiah?

Nehemia: So, this is the 1985 JPS, which isn’t based on the King James. It’s actually a new translation. Isaiah 58, I want to read, but first let’s start with verse 3. I’ll read that, and then I’ll have you read the whole chapter from the beginning. See, while we’re reading this…

So, they say, “Why did we fast, and did You not see? We afflicted our soul, and You did not know?” And what we can see there is, this is what we call biblical parallelism, where the Bible says the same thing twice in the same or very similar words. And the parallel to “we fasted” is “we afflicted our souls”. So, people might think, “Oh, afflicted our souls; that’s when you take a switch and you whip yourself on the back,” like some people did that in the Middle Ages. No. Afflict the soul means to fast, to refrain from food and water. We’ll talk about a little bit more nuance later.

And the reason that “afflict our soul” means to fast is that the word nefesh, which is literally soul… Actually, it’s not literally soul… nefesh means soul, but literally it’s this part of the body. And why do I point to this part of the body? Here is an example where we have a word in Hebrew that doesn’t exist in English. And we have a word in English, by the way, that doesn’t exist in Hebrew. In English we have the word neck. So, this is a neck, but this is also a neck. But in Hebrew this is a completely different word than this. This is a tzavar, and this is an oref. Completely different word. And if you say tzavar, you don’t mean this. I guess you could be inaccurate. But no; normally, this is oref and this is tzavar, or this and not this… I don’t know that I can show it here because… this is his tzavar and this is his oref, I guess.

So, that’s a word you’ll see in Modern Hebrew, where they talk about pikud ha’oref, which is the Rear Command, or the Home Command they call it now. Right? So, if you’re in Israel, and there’s a Hezbollah attack and you have to run to your shelter, it’s the Oref Command that tells you there’s an air raid siren, or an attack siren, that you have to go run to your bomb shelter. And why is it called oref? Because it’s the back of the neck, right? So, it’s the back of the military, the… and actually the vulnerable back is kind of the implication there. Okay.

Ah… so, why did I mention that? Because nefesh is this on the outside, but also on the inside. Right? So, both the neck and the esophagus… is it esophagus? What’s the one you eat with? Yeah, that’s esophagus. All right… Oh, but then also the… what’s the other one called? We’ve got esophagus and air… air pipe? I don’t know, whatever it’s called.

So, all three of those are nefesh in Hebrew. So, when I eat something, it goes into my nefesh. But there’s this beautiful phrase in Psalms, and elsewhere, where it says, “The water has reached my nefesh.” So, he’s standing in the water and it’s up to here…

Lynell: Trachea. Troy gave us the word.

Nehemia: Trachea! Wow.

Lynell: That was the word you were looking for.

Nehemia: Okay, so the trachea and the esophagus, and the front of the neck are all called nefesh in Hebrew, and that’s why “soul” is nefesh. Because when I breathe, it comes out of my nefesh. And it says in Genesis, “God finished creating the world,” va’yinafash, and we translate that, “and He rested”. But what it really means is that He went [exhaling sound]. He exhaled from His nefesh, from His trachea. Is it trachea? Yeah, okay; trachea. Nice.

Okay. So, to afflict your nefesh means to deprive yourself. I guess it could mean you hold your breath for 24 hours. But no, it means to fast, because you’re depriving your throat of food and water. And boy, do I feel that right now. My throat is parched.

All right. Let’s start from verse 1. Isaiah 58. Lynell, you’re up.

Lynell: “Cry with full…”

Nehemia: And Isaiah 58 is a really interesting chapter because the last two verses are about Shabbat, and the first 12, I believe it’s 12 verses, are about fasting, a fast day. And some scholars have said, “Oh, this is about Yom Kippur,” because it’s a fast day, which is also Shabbat. Now, I don’t know that it’s about Yom Kippur, but it applies to Yom Kippur as well. So, go ahead, read verse 1, please, and I’ll jump in and comment from time to time.

Lynell: All right. “Cry with full throat without restraint. Raise your voice like a shofar. Declare to My people their transgression, to the house of Yaakov their sin. To be sure they seek Me daily, eager to learn My ways. Like a nation that does what is right, that does not abandon the laws of its God. They ask Me for the right way. They are eager for the nearness of God.”

Nehemia: So, they want a relationship with God, but they’re sinning. And sinning alienates you from God.

Lynell: “Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we afflicted our souls, did You pay no heed? Because on your fast day you see to your business and oppress all your laborers, because you fast and strive in contention, and you strike with a wicked fist. Your fasting today is not such as to make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies?”

Nehemia: Oh, yeah, there we have to stop. So, “a day for men to starve their bodies” in the JPS, but the Hebrew says, “a day for a man to afflict his soul”. Right? Which, again, means afflict your appetite; don’t eat, don’t drink. And you can see the function here of what they were trying to accomplish with fasting. Fasting is a form of prayer, and you accompany it with prayer. And if you’re sinning, then, you know, we have this really… I would say it’s a scary verse.

There is this verse in… let me find it here, I hadn’t written it down in my notes, so, we’re kind of ad libbing it here. So, or… going as we’re led, I guess is a better way to say it. So, we have these series of things in Proverbs. I won’t do this whole teaching, but this is a whole interesting teaching. Wherever it says in Proverbs, “Something is an abomination,” that’s something you should pay attention to. And it talks about the prayer of the wicked. Ooh, this is beautiful. So, it actually… Proverbs 15:8, “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to Yehovah, but the prayer of the yesharim (of those who walk in the straight path) is His will (is acceptable).”

And then Proverbs 28:9 says, “Mesir ozno mi’shmoa Torah,” “He who turns his ear from hearing the Torah,” “gam tfilato to’eva,” “His prayer is also an abomination.” In other words, if you turn your ear away from God, He will turn His ear away from you. That means if you say, “I’m not going to listen to you, God.” Oh, that’s… I guess it’s more like this… then, He’s saying it’s an abomination, your prayer. And so that’s what’s going on here. He’s saying, “You guys are praying, praying with your words and in the form of fasting, and I’m ignoring you because you are continuing to sin.” Right? This is one of the classic issues of the prophets of ancient Israel, is sacrifice and ritual without repentance. You know, as Samuel put it, he says to Saul, “God wants obedience, not sacrifice.” So, alright, let’s continue.

Lynell: “Is such the fast I desire? A day for men to starve their bodies? Is it the bowing of the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast? A day when Yehovah is favorable? No. This is the fast I desire. To unlock fetters of wickedness and untie cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry and to take the wretched poor into your home. When you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to ignore your own kin. Then shall your light burst through like the dawn, and your healing spring up quickly. Your vindicator shall march before you. The presence of Yehovah shall be your rear guard. Then, when you call, Yehovah will answer. When you cry, He will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you banish the yoke from your midst, the menacing hand and the evil speech, and you offer your compassion to the hungry and satisfy the famished creature…”

Nehemia: It’s… it’s, “satisfy the afflicted soul.”

Lynell: Okay! It’s like… what?

Nehemia: Right. So, they obviously, the JPS translators, don’t like what it says in Hebrew, so they’re looking for a bunch of different English idioms to translate it.

Lynell: Gotcha.

Nehemia: And look, they have a point. “To afflict the soul” doesn’t make sense in English unless you explain it. But there are other phrases in the Bible that don’t make sense. Did you know that “to find favor in his eyes” didn’t exist in the English language until they translated the Bible into English? And they said, “There’s no way to translate this. We’re just going to translate it very literally, and people will learn the expression.” And today, I think certainly people who are biblically literate know, more or less, what it means. “He found favor in his eyes.” Right? Because before that was translated, if you said to, you know, an English speaker, I don’t know, 600 years ago, “I found favor in your eyes.” He’d be like, “Were you looking in my eyes?”

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Right? It’s like you’re looking in this little eye, and you see favor, right? Which is actually kind of what it means, but that’s a different discussion. I mean, it does have a literal meaning. So, right. So, “afflict the soul” is a Hebrew idiom that comes from soul, meaning, actually this part of the body, the inside and the outside. Which it doesn’t in English, and therefore it’s “to afflict your esophagus”. So, your appetite.

And I love it; there’s a verse… because I’m really a dog person. I know there’s a penguin and a hedgehog here, but I’m primarily, you know, a dog person. One of my favorite verses about afflicting the soul, or about the meaning of soul in the sense of… and this I think I… have here, is in Isaiah 56. Which is a passage I love for other reasons, but we’re going to jump to verse 11. So, it’s talking about the watchers, right? The watchers who are the leaders of Israel; they’re supposed to warn Israel when they sin. It says they’re all blind. They don’t know anything. They’re silent dogs, right? A dog that can’t bark is a, believe it or not, a worthless dog.

And then it says, “The dogs,” referring to the leaders of Israel, “are mighty of nefesh. They know no satisfaction.” They’re insatiable. Right? Anybody who’s ever had dogs, or been around dogs, dogs are always hungry. No matter how much you feed them, they’re always going to be hungry. So, maybe there’s some dogs that are not, but generally dogs, no matter how much they eat, they’re always hungry. Their attitude is… “This might be the last food I ever eat; I better eat it.” I think that’s how dogs are wired. And so, when it says, “the leaders of Israel are dogs”, “azei nefesh”, they have a “mighty nefesh”, right? This part of the body knows no satisfaction. Right? So, nefesh there is the appetite.

All right. So, we’re back in Isaiah 58, we’re reading from the New JPS, with my commentary. And I think we’re in verse… are we in verse 11? Yeah.

Lynell: We’re at the end of verse 10. See, this is what we do, guys, in Bible study, like in our mornings. And I’ll say, “What does it really say?” So, we’ll read it, and I’ll say, “What does it really say?” So, that’s why when I get to something that I notice it makes sense, he’s going to stop and he’s going to say, “Well, this is what it means.”

And then, so, after we just talked about… if you do all these good things, “Then shall your light shine in darkness and your gloom be like noonday. Yehovah will guide you always. He will slake your thirst in parched places and give strength to your bones. You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters do not fail. Men from your midst shall rebuild ancient ruins. You shall restore foundations laid long ago. And you shall be called repairer of fallen walls, restorer of paths for habitation.”

Nehemia: There’s this profound message in Isaiah 58, which is… in some ancient and even modern cultures, there’s this idea that true righteousness is fasting, and constant prayer, and what’s called asceticism. You deny yourself, and that’s what is true righteousness. You’re up on a mountaintop, you don’t participate in the world, and that’s true righteousness. And the Torah teaches us, and the Tanakh reiterates this, is that righteousness is to interact with the world in a righteous way. Right? I don’t cut myself off from society and spend my days in fasting and prayer, I interact with society, and I do so fairly and justly.

What people were doing in the time of Isaiah is, the people who could were taking advantage of others in a financial way. They were, you know… it talks about the yoke. Yoke is slavery, right? There’s somebody who you’re forcing to work for you, and you’re not paying them, and they have no other source of income. So, you’re taking advantage of them, and they have no choice. That is what Isaiah is speaking against, and he’s saying, “If you come to me praying and fasting while you do that, I’m not going to hear your prayers.”

And so, the purpose… you know, we’re commanded in the Torah to afflict our souls. By the way, it doesn’t say “fast”. We’ll talk some more nuance there in a minute. But that means to deny your gullet, I think we would say in English, water and food, and so, we are commanded to do that. He’s not saying don’t do that, but don’t do that and also not repent. You need to repent. The prayer and the fasting without repentance is, as we saw in Psalms, or in Proverbs, is an abomination to Yehovah. He wants repentance, and He wants it all. He wants repentance, and He wants you to be righteous and walk a righteous lifestyle and not cut off from society.

So, let’s read those last two verses, then we’ll talk a little bit more about afflicting the soul. And then we’ll go to the Q&A.

Lynell: “If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing your affairs on My holy day, if you call the Sabbath delight and Yehovah’s holy day honored, and if you honor it and go not your ways, then you can seek the favor of Yehovah. I will set you astride the heights of the earth, and let you enjoy the heritage of your father, Yaakov. For the mouth of Yehovah has spoken.”

Nehemia: It’s so unfortunate they don’t translate what it says. I just don’t understand why! So, I mean, some of that was okay. It says, “If you turn back your leg from Shabbat doing your desire on My holy day…” and I understand desire there to be that which is forbidden that you desire to do. Which, if you’re a farmer, you want to plow your field, or you certainly want to harvest your field before, you know, something bad happens to your crop. And you have to stop; you have to refrain from doing that. And hold back your leg… that’s what it talks about in Exodus 16. They were going out into the fields to collect the mana, even though he told them there was going to be no mana. So, you want to walk out to the field and plow your field. He says, hold back your leg from doing your desire on My holy day, “and you will call Shabbat oneg.”

I know there’s a lot of people out there who will get together for a fellowship meal, and they’ll call it Oneg Shabbat; that’s where this comes from. “You will call Shabbat pleasure for the Holy One of Yehovah is honorable,” or is honored. “And you will honor it from doing your ways, from finding your desire, and speaking your matter.” So, what it’s saying here is: don’t go to do your own business, things that are forbidden on Shabbat. Right? It’s not saying here don’t do things you enjoy. This isn’t a commandment or a verse against pleasure. Your desire here is things you enjoy that are forbidden. That’s what that means.

And then, the next verse is… so, here’s the part that it completely lost the nuance of. It says, “Then you will take pleasure in Yehovah.” Right? So, if you deny something you desire to do that God has forbidden, you’re going to get your pleasure, it just won’t be from doing the forbidden thing. It says, “Then you will take pleasure in Yehovah, and I will cause you to ride on the high places of the earth.” Meaning, you’re going to be, like, successful. “And I will cause you to eat from the inherited portion of Jacob, your father.” Right? So, if you fast on Yom Kippur and don’t go to do your business that’s forbidden; even “speaking about business”, it says there, “speaking the matters”, is what says. That means speaking about business. If you refrain from doing that, then God’s going to make you successful, and He Himself will feed you. He’ll feed you from the inherited portion that you’re entitled to, that you’re supposed to have if you’re righteous. If you sin, you’re not going to get it. You’re going to be cast into exile, and when you repent, then you’ll come back and rebuild, right?

So, we have this… what we might call today, the Zionist Settler verse. Right? I mean, literally, it’s talking about “and they will build from among you”, verse 12, “they’ll build from among you the ancient ruins.” Right? So, that’s talking about the ingathering of the exiles, where Israel, the Land of Israel, the inherited portion of Jacob, our father, will be rebuilt, and then we’ll enjoy the fruits of our labor. And so, what it’s saying is, if you hold back from doing your business, you won’t have to worry about business, right? So, people think, “Well, if I don’t carry out my business today, I’m going to be destitute.” And God’s saying He’s going to bless you if hold back and you observe His Shabbat.

So… all right. I want to talk. We’ll go to questions in a minute. Oh, no. I have, like, another four pages of notes. I won’t bring it all. All right. So… I do want to jump to… well, I do want to… here’s one really important verse: Psalm 35:13. He says, “And I, when they entreat Me,” meaning they pray to me, “dressed in sackcloth.” Let’s see, can you read that, Psalm 35:13?

Lynell: Sure. It says, “Yet when they were ill…”

Nehemia: Sorry, I’m reading the wrong thing. Va’ani  ba’chalotam levushei sak, “And I when they were sick.” Yeah. Go ahead.

Lynell: “My dress was sackcloth. I kept it fast. May what I prayed happen.”

Nehemia: And it says, “I afflicted my soul with fasting,” or “with the fast.” Right? There, it combines the two in a single phrase.

Lynell: “May what I prayed for happen to me.”

Nehemia: Right. So, here we have, linguistically, “to afflict your soul” is to fast. All right. So, that verse we actually brought. Ah… so, this is interesting. Daniel 10:3. So, why doesn’t the Torah just say “fast”? Why does it say, “to afflict the soul”? And in ancient Hebrew, fasting generally was not eating or drinking, but not necessarily. It’s surprising; when you look into the details, look at Daniel chapter 10, and can you read verse 3?

Lynell: “I ate no tasty food, nor did any meat or wine enter my mouth. I did not anoint myself until three weeks were over.”

Nehemia: So, he does a three-week fast. Now, he hasn’t used the word “fast” yet. He just says, “I didn’t eat any…” it says, “hamudot”, “precious food”, or “pleasant food”. “Meat and wine did not enter my mouth.” I lost my place here. Ah. “And I didn’t anoint myself for three weeks.” Right? So, we know he didn’t not eat food or drink water. You could actually probably go three weeks. I could definitely go three weeks without eating food if I needed to. But I would be dead if I went three weeks without water, and you need salt as well.

And then verse 10: “And he said to me, ‘Do not fear, Daniel, for the first day that you gave your heart to understand and to afflict yourself.’” Right? So, it doesn’t say “to afflict your soul”, says “to afflict yourself”. So, maybe you think there’s a difference there. Could be. “And to afflict yourself before God, your words were heard, and I came because of your words.” So, this angel came to him because he afflicted himself, which is a later Hebrew word for fasting. And how do I know that? Because Ezra 8:21, he says, “I called there a fast on the River Ahava to afflict ourselves before our God.” So, fast equals “afflict oneself”, and then fasting is to afflict your soul, right?

So, those are three things that are equivalents, just “afflict the soul” is an earlier Hebrew phrase which was later replaced with “to afflict oneself”. Right? They understood, by that time, which part of yourself you’re afflicting, right? Your appetite. And so, you could fast by refraining, not from all food and water, but according to Daniel… now, he did it for three weeks, so that was quite afflictive, I think, or afflicting. So, somebody asked here, I saw a question pop up: “What do you do if you’re diabetic and you’ll die if you go into diabetic shock?” Well, God didn’t give you a command to kill yourself. He gave you a command to afflict your appetite. And for you, that might just mean that you, instead of, you know, cake, you eat crackers. Right? It might mean that. Right? I know that for me, it’s don’t eat and don’t drink water, and I’ve been doing that since I was a small child. It doesn’t seem to have had a very big effect, but I’m still doing it.

Anyway, so… So, there’s no specific commandment actually to starve yourself to death. It says to afflict your soul, to afflict your appetite. And that could mean different things for different people. And for Daniel, that meant going three weeks on probably just water and bread. Probably bread without salt.

All right. So, Jeremiah 14:12 is really interesting. “When they fast, I do not hear their prayer.” And what the Hebrew says is, “I do not hear their shouting,” which could also mean a song. And He says, “When they bring a burnt offering and flour offering, I do not accept them.” So, prayer and fasting are intertwined. Prayer itself is essentially a form of fasting in the Tanakh. So, I have a bunch more verses here. I’ll read this one. Isaiah 1:15… and guys, go after this study and go read Isaiah chapter 1. Maybe we’ll read it anyway, and then we’ll end with that. There’s so many interesting verses I have here that I wanted to read that I guess we’re not going to get to.

Psalm 50. No… Isaiah 1:15. “When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you. Even when you multiply prayer, I do not hear, because your hands are filled with blood.” So, here He’s saying that if you don’t repent, doesn’t matter if you pray all day long. And boy, do I connect with that. Because, when I was a kid, in the Orthodox synagogue we would start at eight in the morning, and it would go until an hour after sunset. And I remember going to my mother…

So, let me paint the picture here of the synagogue I went to growing up. We went to two synagogues. The one we went to more often was this huge synagogue. It had room for, I don’t know, 300 to 500 people. And most of the year, on Shabbat there were 30 people there. On Yom Kippur, it was full to the brim from, you know, everybody came and… and they actually charged. Most synagogues outside of Israel charge money to go to the synagogue. And some synagogues charge thousands of dollars. You have to be a member, and then you get a free ticket. But you have to be a member, which costs, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, it could be. So, they would come to our synagogue, where it only cost a few hundred dollars. People who we’d never see all year, they would show up on Yom Kippur and the other what are called High Holidays.

Well, so, the synagogue felt like they had to put on a show, and they hired an actual, an actual opera singer. And I called it yodeling. He would do the thing where he would sing. Laaa… You’d probably do it better than I do. And it was painful for me as a child. It actually… and I think, probably, in retrospect, it was like an autistic thing, like that was like nails on the chalkboard for me. And I would go to my mother, I’d say, “Mommy, I’m so bored.” And you would literally be sitting there for h-o-u-r-s. So, it could be whoever set up that kind of format, they thought “afflicting the soul” meant afflicting your ears, maybe? I don’t know. Or your boredom. It would be for hours, hour after hour, and I was so bored, and I would say, “Mommy, I’m bored and I want to go home.” And she would say, “Well, if God likes opera, we’re all going to be blessed.” That’s what she would say. And it was a joke, but it kind of wasn’t, because he was literally an opera singer.

And so, I read this verse, and I really connect with it. “When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you. Even when you multiply prayer, I don’t hear because your hands are full of blood.” And so, what He’s saying there is, “Prayer is great. I’m not against prayer; I’m not against fasting. I’m against doing that when you haven’t repented. It should be a path to repentance. It should be part of repentance.”

And there’s a very famous verse that’s repeated in the synagogues on Yom Kippur. It’s Proverbs 28:13 Mekhasseh pesha’av lo yatzliach, “He who covers his transgressions will not succeed.” U’modeh ve’ozev yerucham, “but he who confesses and abandons his transgressions will be given mercy.”

So, the point here is, don’t just fast, but also you have to have repentance. And what is repentance? You have to confess to God. I don’t have to confess, you know, to any man, but I have to confess to God what my sins are. And we see that in prayers. Like, Daniel has his prayer where he says, “We’ve done wicked. We’ve done evil.” Or, in the Tanakh, you see that a number of places. And then you ask God for forgiveness. So, you have to confess to God, “I’ve sinned,” and what you’ve done, and then abandon it. Don’t do it again, and then God will have mercy.

And I’ll just end with this, before we go to the Q&A, which is… So, the other famous verse in synagogues on Shabbat, two verses, is Exodus 34:6-7, which I happen to know is my wife’s favorite passage. Because Moses asked God, you know, “Reveal to me your nature.” And God says, in verses 6 to 7 of Exodus 34, it says, “Yehovah passed over his face, and he called out,” Yehovah called out, “Yehovah, Yehovah,” which could also be translated, “Yehovah is Yehovah.” It’s called the nominal sentence. “Yehovah is Yehovah, a God who is merciful and gracious, abundantly patient, and has great chesed and truth.” Chesed is something like lovingkindness. It’s a whole study, a series of studies of chesed. “He guards chesed for the thousandth,” I can’t say that, “the thousandth generation.” And then it says, “noseh avon vafesha ve’chata’a. “He forgives iniquity, transgression and sin.” And what it literally says is not “forgive.” The word forgive there is “to carry”. He bears it. So, if we repent, He’ll take it off our shoulders and carry it for us. That’s the literal meaning of the Hebrew word there.

Now, the next phrase is ve’nakeh lo yenakeh, “And he will surely not make clean,” but literally it’s “and make clean, He will not make clean.” And when you put those together, it means, “He will surely not make clean.” Hebrew likes to repeat things with two forms of a verb, which means surely or indeed, if it’s a conditional.

So, what’s really interesting here is, Lynell and I were discussing this, and I was trying to tell her the Rabbinical interpretation. Or, not Rabbinical interpretation so much, but the way this verse is used in the synagogue is, it says, “And make clean He will not make clean,” meaning He will definitely not make clean. And when they recite this verse numerous times on Yom Kippur, they end with the word, “and make clean”. Right? So, if you don’t repent, God’s not going to make you clean. And in fact, if you don’t repent, God’s going to punish you not only for your own sins, but the sins of your ancestors. That’s what it says there.

But the rabbis, when they formulated their prayers, they stopped after “make clean”. It’s kind of like how, you know, you want to always end on a high note. But I think if we don’t acknowledge the other half of the verse, the rest of the verse, well, that could be problematic, because “Why would I repent,” you might think, if there’s no consequences. Right? So, there’s reward and punishment.

And we actually found this really interesting website; do you remember that one, Lynell? I’m trying to look for it now, and I don’t… it was…. oh, it was My Jewish Learning talking about that verse. And it was so interesting, especially because, like, this isn’t meant for Jewish intellectuals, it’s meant for people who don’t know a lot about Judaism. And it said it better than I could say it, meaning the Rabbinical position. Here it is. So, we’ll post the link on nehemiaswall.com… or why don’t we post the link here in the chat? That’s a great idea, because I don’t know if we’re going to… hopefully we’ll be able to edit this and share it with people, but you never know.

So, how do I do the chat? Myjewishlearning.com. So, they’re talking about Exodus 34:6-7, which in tradition are called the 13 Midot or 13 Attributes of God. And they explain the biblical origins, et cetera… and there’s something about Kabbalists that we’ll skip… Here. They say, “The Hebrew phrase ve’nake lo yenake, and he who cleanses but does not cleanse,” but grammatically that means ‘he will certainly not make clean’, “is a common biblical grammatical form that uses repetition to stress the action.” This is myjewishlearning.com. That’s more or less correct. “The rabbis ingeniously cut off the verse after ve’nake, thus changing the meaning to indicate that God does forgive all sins. This remarkable midrashic transformation has become the standard format whenever this Torah verse is used in a synagogue service.”

Lynell: Ingenious.

Nehemia: Ingenious. “Although it may go beyond the plain meaning of the biblical text.” Ya think? “The change is consistent with the general concept of the passage, ‘the merciful and forgiving nature of God’.” So, when I strip out half the verse and take part of the verse out of context, that’s consistent with the message of the verse. Umm… by definition, it’s not! God does forgive all sin, only if you repent. If you don’t repent, there’s a consequence. And they say it’s ingenious that they’ve stripped out the consequences. Wow!

Lynell: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s…

Lynell: It’s sad. It’s very, very sad that they’re not teaching that you have to…

Nehemia: Well, they’re teaching you have to repent, but they’re teaching… that there’s always forgive… It’s kind of like this idea, “God is all love”. Hey, guys, read the Tanakh. It says in Isaiah 45, he says, “He creates good and He creates evil.” It’s the same God; there aren’t two gods. Or it’s not that there’s… I mean, there’s this idea that people have that God is all love, and if there’s anything that’s evil in the universe, that’s outside of God. No! That’s Zoroastrianism, that’s not what the Tanakh teaches.

Lynell: Daniel said, “It smells a lot like, ‘Once saved, always saved’.” It’s exactly what it smells like to me, too!

Nehemia: Okay. Well, that’s not what they’re saying, though. What they’re saying is, the way they’re using the verse “ingeniously” is to emphasize only the reward and not the potential punishment if you don’t repent.

Lynell: Mmm.

Nehemia: Well, why does God tell you about the punishment? The central message of the prophets is, “Repent, and if you don’t repent, here’s all the bad things that are going to happen. And if you do repent, here’s good things that’re going to happen. If your sins are as scarlet, they’ll be made white as snow.” Right? It’s in Isaiah 1; we skipped that verse because I think I used up too much time.

But let’s do some Q&A here. All right, somebody asked about, how do you recognize the new moon when it begins in the morning in America?

So, that’s not what new moon is. New moon is… and I have a study on my website, nehemiaswall.com. The new moon is the last moon that you see, usually just after sunset; technically, in some instances just before sunset, in the early evening after it’s not been visible between one-and-a-half and three-and-a-half days.

My question is on the Asean calendar versus the Jewish calendar, and which is more accurate.

So, Jewish calendar is a very broad statement. Which one do you mean? The Asean calendar was a Jewish calendar. The Hillel calendar is a Jewish calendar. I try to follow what was the original biblical calendar to the best of my ability. It’s based on the sighting of the new moon and the finding of the aviv barley in the Land of Israel.

George asks, “What is your understanding of the Hebrew word azazel?”

Ooh! We did some studies on that yesterday. So, azazel… So, there’s one goat which is to Yehovah and one goat to azazel. So azazel might be a geographical location. That’s my opinion. There are other people who interpret azazel, based on the Dead Sea Scrolls and various other things, as being some sort of a spiritual entity or demon. Which, I mean, I find that ridiculous, but there are people who interpret it that way. Meaning, why would you send one goat out for a demon? Right? That doesn’t make any sense. That seems demonic to me.

What were the three English words for the Hebrew word kippur?

So, what we saw in the JPS was it has different words, the New JPS, in Leviticus 16: purge, expiation, atonement.

How does the Hebrew word ana spelled the same but listed and translated differently, meaning answered, related to afflict?

So, they’re two completely different roots that have… I don’t want to get into complicated linguistic matters, but we would call those homographs; they look identical. And maybe they’re even homonyms, although it’s not obvious that they were homonyms in ancient Israel. Homonyms are words that are pronounced the same; homographs are words that are spelled the same but maybe pronounced differently. English has a lot of homographs, like perf-ect and per-fect. Right?

Somebody says, “Should we begin Yom Kippur based on sunset in Israel?

No, it should be based on your local sunset.

Lynell: Hey, Nehemia, just wanted to say, Natan’s here.

Nehemia: Oh. Hey, Natan!

Lynell: Natan, you have to answer everyone. It just says, “host and panelist”. Hey, Natan, we love you.

Nehemia: Hey, Natan. My nephew Natan is here. Should we bring him on?

Lynell: Yes, I can do that.

Nehemia: Let’s bring on Natan.

Nehemia: This is my nephew, Natan.

Lynell: He is wonderful.

Nehemia: He lives in Israel; he was born and raised in Israel.

Concerning nefesh, wasn’t the description of creation for Adam and Eve that they became a living soul?

Yes. Nefesh chaya. Right, because nefesh means soul, it also means life. You could also say, like, you know, “70 nefesh”, which means 70 people.

Natan: Hello!

Nehemia: Natan, where’s your video?

Lynell: Hey, Natan!

Natan: Yep. There it is. I’m actually outside right now.

Nehemia: I don’t see your video. Oh, there you are! Okay. Oh, it’s nighttime in Israel. Alright.

Natan: Yeah. So, Yom Kippur would have gone out by now.

Nehemia: Okay.

Lynell: Yes. One day.

Natan: Yeah. So, I won’t spoil to you what happens, since I am in the future.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Okay. Everyone can see that he got all the hair in the family, and I didn’t. Um…

Natan: Yeah, it’s not fair.

Lynell: I think you had plenty of hair at that age.

Nehemia: Not like that I didn’t.

So, Natan, why don’t you tell people what you… because they don’t know anything about you. How do you observe Yom Kippur?

Natan: Oh, so, I fast. I don’t eat; I don’t work. I think that pretty much covers the bases.

Nehemia: Do you drink?

Natan: No.

Nehemia: Okay. Because there’s some people who think a fast is not to… or it is, for them, maybe, a fast might be they only don’t eat, but they do drink.

Natan: Oh, interesting. What is that based on?

Nehemia: Right. I think that’s more of like a health thing, right? There’s something called like intermittent fasting, where people will do like a five-day fast, where they only have water and salt, which is more like the fast that Daniel did, perhaps. Although I think he had a little bit more than that. He did it for 21 days, in the Tanakh… Daniel. So… okay, cool!

Natan: I mean…

Nehemia: Did you go to synagogue this year?

Natan: Um, I did not, no, but you’re talking about fasting.

Nehemia: Right.

Natan: Moshe, Moses, was on Har Sinai for, like, 40 days fasting, and he ended up glowing in the end. So, I think there might be something to it.

Lynell: [Laughter]

Nehemia: Right. Well, I think we have to take that to be a miracle, because he didn’t eat or drink for 40 days and 40 nights, so…

Natan: Yeah.

Nehemia: All right, well thanks for joining us.

Natan: My pleasure.

Nehemia: All right. I got some more questions for you.

Natan: Thank you for this webinar.

Lynell: We love you, Natan.

Nehemia: Isaiah 1… yeah, I love you.

Somebody says… this a great question; is it permitted to watch sports on television during Shabbat? Peter asks. “The reason I’m asking this is because the ones partaking in sports are doing some form of labor. They’re getting paid to do so.” I guess, unless it’s prerecorded. “However, I would be at home keeping Shabbat and taking a break from my study by watching television.”

So, it’s interesting. The rabbis have a whole lot of rules about things you’re not allowed to do, and I was given all these explanations, when I was younger, about why you’re not allowed to turn on and off a light switch. You can leave it on, but you can’t turn it on and off. And I said, “Okay, so can we leave the television on?” “No, that’s not appropriate for Shabbat.” Right?

So, what the rabbis did is, they said, “This is a picture of what our Shabbat experience looks like, and now let’s create a bunch of rules around it to make that experience.” And you know, to me, that’s adding to the Torah. Now, look, I don’t read or answer emails on Shabbat, because I get work emails. I get financial emails, right? So, I think you have to work it out for yourself with fear and trembling and prayer and study before the Creator of the universe. But be very careful not to add commandments to the Torah. Okay.

Lynell: Are we supposed to wear white on Yom Kippur?

Nehemia: No, that’s just a made-up tradition. You can wear white if you want. The advantage of wearing white is that whenever I wear white, I spill food on it. But there’s no danger of that on Yom Kippur.

Lynell: How many times did the High Priest enter the Most Holy Place at the Temple on Yom Kippur?

Nehemia: Wait. I’m reading… I’m reading the questions in order.

Natan: If I recall correctly, that TV thing was about to marit ha’ayin, isn’t it? Like, somebody might think it’s okay to watch TV?

Nehemia: But why isn’t it? That’s the question.

Natan: No, because I might think you turned it on on Shabbat now.

Nehemia: Right. But why aren’t you allowed to turn it on on Shabbat? Like I said, because they wanted to perpetuate, essentially, a medieval experience, let’s just be really honest here, in the modern world. Because they felt, “Look, this is what our ancestors did for thousands of years.” But our ancestors also used outhouses. Why don’t you use an outhouse on Shabbat? Because it’s not pleasant.

Is this holy day just for men?

No. Some of these are easy questions.

Ooh! 2 Chronicles 7:14! We had a whole half hour on 2 Chronicles 7:14 that we had to forego; we literally had a whole section in my notes on 2 Chronicles 7:14. So, here’s the question… ooh, we should have done a survey on this. So, guys, I’m not going to answer it, but without looking it up…

Lynell: Do you want me to do a survey?

Nehemia: Can you do a survey?

Lynell: Yeah, just give me a second.

Nehemia: No, we’d have to spill the beans. But guys, in the chat, post “what is the context of 2 Chronicles 7:14?” In other words, who is God speaking to? And on what occasion?

Lynell: What is the verse you’re talking about? Do you want to quote it?

Nehemia: 2 Chronicles 7:14. Oh, you want to read that verse?

Lynell: Yes.

Nehemia: That’s the most famous verse in the Christian world, from the Tanakh, at least. Well, that and pay your tithe to the church, to the Temple, right?

Lynell: Do you want me to read that?

Nehemia: Yeah. 2 Chronicles 7:14.

Lynell: “When My people who bear My name humble themselves, pray and seek My face and turn from their evil ways, I will hear from My heavenly abode and forgive their sins and heal their land.” And what was your question?

Nehemia: So, my question is: who is God speaking to? And on what occasion? So, somebody says, “self-explanatory”. Nothing self-explanatory about it. Oh, maybe they’re answering somebody. Wow! So, people actually know the context. I’m impressed.

Oh wait, somebody says here… “He’s speaking to all the people who accept, follow and love His name.” That’s true, but originally there’s a context, and if you just read a few verses before, you’ll see that. So, 2 Chronicles 7:14… and a lot of people got it here is, Solomon prays a prayer when he inaugurates the Temple. And it’s this long, beautiful prayer that talks about God forgiving when we turn towards the Temple in Jerusalem and we pray. “Even if you’re a foreigner in a far-off land and you come to that place, God will hear the prayer from heaven through the Temple where He puts His name forever, even though He may destroy it.” Right? That’s all there in 1 Kings 8, and then 2 Chronicles chapter 6, which repeats it with some more details.

And then in 2 Chronicles 7, God answers the prayer, right? That’s Solomon praying. I don’t know if God’s going to do that. But that is the answer. And the answer is: “Yes, if My people call My name and they humble themselves.” And what does it mean to humble yourself? So, this is like a great excuse for me to bring that part of my notes. Like, we literally had all of this, because like, if you look at 1 Kings 8 verse 30 verses 34, 36, 39, 50, all of those speak about God forgiving and having mercy, and/or having mercy. I’ll post those in here.

And then the answer is… and then it says, you know, they translate it as… I think they often translate it “if.” Right? It says, “And My people will humble themselves, who My name is called upon them, and they will pray, and they will seek My face, and they will return from their evil ways. And I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin, and I will heal their land.” And that’s a really important phrase; for God to heal something often means He accepts your ritual even when it’s not done right. That’s what it means. Or He accepts your repentance.

So, Hosea chapter 2 talks about… we can’t bring bulls, right? We’re living in the northern kingdom in the time of Hosea, and we can’t bring bulls to the Temple. The Temple is not accessible to us. He says, “Turn to God in prayer, and then God will answer the prayer, and he’ll heal their backsliding,” their rebelliousness.

What does it mean, “He’ll heal their rebelliousness?” He will forgive their rebelliousness even though they didn’t bring the required sacrifice. That’s what it means. You didn’t do the ritual exactly right, because you couldn’t for some reason, or you just didn’t know how to, and God will heal. He will accept that. Essentially, you could translate that as “God will reconcile.” Right? He’ll accept that despite it not being done exactly right. Yeah, that’s a beautiful verse.

Do women have to wear head coverings?

Not based on the Tanakh. But go and ask your priest or your rabbi and, you know, work that out with him and whatever. And also, whatever they decide in your church or synagogue or fellowship. You can either choose not to go to that fellowship, or you can follow the rules.

Somebody says, “A fast is up to us to decide what is afflicting our appetite.” I’m following the biblical pattern, which is not to eat and drink. If you have some medical issue where, you know, that’s a problem, then you should not kill yourself. You should not, you know, harm yourself either, right? If you’re a pregnant woman, you shouldn’t be fasting.

By the way, a lot of women in Israel… I just heard this yesterday from my sister, a lot of women in Israel go into labor on Yom Kippur because fasting can trigger labor. And so, there’s a lot of people whose birthday is Yom Kippur. Hey, Natan, isn’t your birthday Yom Kippur?

What is the Tanakh definition of a prophet?

Okay, that’s beyond the scope of today.

Natan: Hello?

Nehemia: Yeah. Is your birthday Yom Kippur?

Natan: So, my birthday was a day… like, I was born the day after Yom Kippur, by the Rabbinic calendar.

Nehemia: Did your mother go into labor on that day? On Yom Kippur?

Natan: I’m not sure.

Lynell: We’ll have to ask Ayala…

Nehemia: Um [laughter] okay.

Natan: Not yet. I was almost there. Just missed it.

Nehemia: He wasn’t paying attention. So, somebody asked how my nephews are doing. I have two nephews who are in combat units. I won’t say more than that, but please pray for them.

Is candle-lighting a must on Shabbat?

No, candle lighting is some Rabbinical tradition that was made up, based on somebody else’s interpretation that you weren’t allowed to have fire on Shabbat. So, they did what we call in Hebrew davka. They were saying, “Okay, we’re going to require it, if the other people say you’re not allowed to have it.” So, if that’s how you want to worship God, go for it. That seems kind of a strange way to worship God.

Jesse asks, “Can you explain what you believe mikra kodesh means? Is it more about proclaiming or a commanded gathering?

So, those are the two interpretations, that mikra either means “to gather” or it means “to proclaim”, a day that you proclaim to be holy, mikra kodesh, “holy convocation” in the King James. I think it means to proclaim, but if you want to interpret it the other way, there could be some justification for that. The reason I don’t interpret it as gathering is that the eighth day of Sukkot, and the seventh day of Passover, of Chag Hamatzot, are referred to as atzeret, and atzeret actually does mean an assembly. So, if every day is an assembly, then why would He say assemble on those days, have an atzeret, an assembly, when every holy day is an assembly? Right? So, that would indicate that mikra kodesh is just a holy proclamation. It also says, “and you will proclaim” using the same verb, proclaim the mikra kodesh, so…

Someone says, “Is there a flow or connection between Yom Teruah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, a larger theme, if you will?

So, definitely throughout history, people have tied them together. I don’t find that in the Tanakh. In other words, the idea in Rabbinical Judaism, and many Karaites accept this, is that Yom Teruah is when you begin your repentance process towards Yom Kippur. And there’s ten days of terror, of awe, they’re called; the Ten Days of Awe, which is ten days where I’m terrified God’s going to, you know, strike me down and punish me. And if He hasn’t decided by the end of Yom Kippur that I’m going to be forgiven, then I won’t be won’t be written into the Book of Life. That’s reading a lot into the Torah that’s not there.

Lynell: Concerning nefesh, wasn’t the description at creation for Adam and the animals that they become a living soul?

Nehemia: Yeah, yeah, I think I answered that question. They were called nefesh chaya. They became a living nefesh. And nefesh can also mean, in that sense, person, right? Meaning, like, when Jacob and his family went down to Egypt, it says they went down with 70 nefesh, 70 living people.

Lynell: There was a question here that said, “Yom Kippur is the only feast in which we are not to bring an offering. Is that true?”

Nehemia: So, I think you mean a personal offering. The Torah actually doesn’t say that. So, it doesn’t say you’re not allowed to bring a personal offering on Yom Kippur.

Lynell: Um…

Nehemia: Now, if you want to be nice to the priest, maybe don’t do it. Maybe do it the next day. But the natural time for most people to bring sacrifices, you know, individual sacrifices, would have been on the feast days. Unless you lived in Jerusalem, or in Shiloh, earlier. So…

All right, I think we should wrap it up. I really appreciate everybody. Thank you for joining us, especially on what… for most people today is a weekday. I know this wasn’t easy for some people, and so, I really appreciate everybody joining us. You’ve really blessed Lynell and me, and Heath. I feel that we got to observe Yom Kippur with you guys, and that means a lot to me.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Exodus 30:10, 15-16
Leviticus 16
Leviticus 23:27, 32
Numbers 29:7
Isaiah 58:3
Psalm 69:2 (verse 1 in English)
Exodus 31:17
Isaiah 58:1-5
1 Samuel 15:22
Proverbs 15:8
Proverbs 28:9
1 Samuel 15:22
Isaiah 58:5-10
Isaiah 56:11
Isaiah 58:10-12
Isaiah 58:13-14
Exodus 16
Psalm 35:13
Daniel 10:3, 10
Ezra 8:21
Jeremiah 14:12
Isaiah 1
Isaiah 1:15
Proverbs 28:13
Exodus 34:6-7
Isaiah 45:7
2 Chronicles 6-7; 1 Kings 8
Hosea 2
Genesis 46:25-27

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OTHER LINKS
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-13-attributes-of-mercy/

The post Hebrew Voices #226 – Yom Kippur: Afflicting Your Soul for Repentance appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.