Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 19:11, Ethics

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 19:11, Ethics

- Good morning, everybody, from a freezing minus eight degrees in New York. I hope I can warm you up or cheer you up a little bit. And recommend a good book on Canaanite Egyptian Mesopotamian religious practise at the time of Exodus. That’s a good question. I have some, but I’m going to have to look it up. I’ll get back to you on that one. Anyway. We are Leviticus chapter 19 and verse 11. And dealing with what I’ve called ethics. But the truth of the matter is there is no word for ethics in the Torah or indeed in the Bible in general. The terms that have applied have been obligations, to do or not to do. And these obligations can range from what we call ethical issues to practical, even military and political issues. But because the world in general talks about ethics, that’s why I entitled this particular session one of ethics because it deals with the sorts of issues that ethics raise. Remember, in the Ten Commandments, we had a list of what we might call ethical issues. There was a division between the first five, which was supposed to be between humans and God, except honouring your mother and your father is the fifth. And then you’ve got the last five which start with, Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, and so forth, which are, if you like, more ethical issues. But now those general principles are going to be tackled more specifically. You will notice, for example, if you look at the Ten Commandments, there’s no reference to lying.

And so that is one of the points we’re going to have to deal with now. And also the question of exactly what does it mean in the Ten Commandments when it talks about not stealing? Is it not stealing an object or is it not stealing a person? And the fact is it can involve removing something that you shouldn’t have in your possession or something you shouldn’t have done. And this is where we start today in verse 11. Verse 11 starts off , don’t steal. But notice, instead of in the singular, now we have it in the plural, , you should, in plural, not steal. So then it goes on to say, , and don’t tell lies or be deceitful. is the more common use to lie. And so we want to look at what the difference is between them. A person, and remember this applies to women as much as men, you should not do it to your , your , your people, the people around you. This is another extra word that the Torah includes to describe one’s relationship with others. That is the , the neighbour, we’re going to come to that one. There is the , there is the shaver, the tribe, there is the family, all these different interrelationships which also are going to include the external ones, the stranger. So what’s the difference between the first word to deny normally and and not to lie. To deny is if you like the negative one, denying the truth, denying evidence, telling a lie is to say something which is simply not true. And then there’s a question of intent. Is there an intent to deceive? Is it done with malice or is it done because you are frightened or insecure? And the fact that you have these different words indicates that there’s a very, very broad subject here that comes under this category of lying, white lies.

Is it permissible to make a white lie? Now in general you would argue a lie is a lie is a lie. But the Talmud gives examples of where you are allowed to lie. You are allowed to tell a bride that she’s beautiful on her wedding day, even if, if you’ll forgive the expression, she might look like the back of the bus. And so there are things that you may lie for if they are going to improve or help or make somebody feel better in a way, particularly relevant when you are dealing with people who are insecure. So we do not take the view, therefore, that all lying under any conditions whatsoever must always be wrong. We are reluctant to be absolutists, we’d rather prefer to deal with specific situations but deal with them against a background of a general ethical principle. So not to steal means not only to steal objects but also in a sense to steal the mind of somebody, to deceive somebody. It all comes into this general category. And then we move on to number 12, which is connected only in this sense. Number 12 says, don’t swear by My name to tell a lie. I swear by God, I swear to truth, tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You have brought in now the idea of lying before God. Now this was very important in those days when you needed to find ways of determining what the truth was when you had no evidence and were only relying on circumstantial evidence which is not accepted within Judaism, then you have to, oh sorry, that’s a bit of an extreme.

It’s not ideally accepted in Judaism. There could be exceptions when it is, but in general the oath was very important because people were in a sense frightened as they are today of the evil eye, very, very superstitious, worried about curses and therefore you had to use some tool to, shall we say, frighten them into telling the truth. And this is what the oath was. And we see still signs of it left over in our courts today when we in some countries swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. But swearing by God goes on to say, is . This desecrates it, demeans the name of God. And we’ve mentioned this idea of doing the sort of thing that brings disrepute, either to other people or to God. And one has therefore to be very careful about how one behaves and what one says. If you swear falsely, you are basically saying, I don’t care about God. God means nothing to me. And most people when they say, oh my God, are not treating God in a view like a respectful way, it’s now become common and trivial. And the Torah is very concerned that we should have this sense of respect. And it’s also linked to the idea of having respect for one’s parents and respect for other human beings. And that’s why we move on to 13 which says, do not oppress your neighbour. Now what is to oppress? Is it in language, swearing at him? Is it making decisions that make life difficult for him? And here instead of in verse 11, you have your neighbour. That means anybody you come into contact with. You always assume and should assume that they are your friend until you find out otherwise. So here we have the use of which is going to come back time and time again.

So the phrase , do not oppress your neighbour then moves on to . Now the 10 Commandments says , do not steal. is also a form of stealing. But the rabbis, expand this idea, develop this idea to say, look, there’s a difference between stealing when nobody’s looking and stealing bare faced robbery in front of somebody and they are both wrong. And you shouldn’t say, well look, I’m doing this in the open and therefore you know sort of I’m not hiding the fact that I’m stealing as opposed to stealing when nobody knows what’s going on. And so you have two sides to this. You have the side of the person doing the act and the impact this has on other people. In the same way that this constant repetition of God’s name in these ethical, so to speak, Commandments is another way of saying, look, you should not be doing this just because you have worked out that it is morally right or wrong, you should do it because God says so. Because sometimes human beings can persuade themselves all the time that this is not wrong, this can be justified, he’s doing it anyway, everybody’s fiddling the taxi so why shouldn’t I? And things of this kind. Whereas if you have an objective standard which is not determined by what humans decide, is not determined by democracy or by public opinion, or by the internet, then you have an external objective standard that you have to abide by.

And this is one of the interesting debates we have in the Talmud as to is there such a thing as natural ethics, as natural goodness that everybody can agree on? And in one sense the 10 Commandments is supposed to be that kind of basic general ethical set of principles. But in fact that was regarded as, if you like, part of the specific Jewish religious tradition. The Talmud discusses whether the non-Jews have certain ethical standards and this is the basis of the seven Noahide laws, the laws which say you mustn’t murder, steal, commit adultery, you mustn’t be cruel to animals, you must have a legal system. Of course it also includes the idea of God, which until relatively recently was it universal that most people accepted however they defined their God or named it or him or her. So we continue with this constant expansion. It’s like having a roll of wool and pulling it out or sort of spreading out some chewing gum of developing what are these standards. So the first thing here is in verse 13, don’t oppress your neighbour, don’t steal. And here’s another thing in the same category and don’t hold back the wages of your hired workers until the morning overnight. And here we’ve brought in your whole attitude of the employer to the employee. If you pay somebody, and here we’re dealing at a time when people were paid by the hour but they are paid by the hour now too. And if you owe somebody wages and you are supposed to pay them by the day, per diem, by the day, then you must pay them by the day. Now in those times this was a very important thing because they didn’t have the protections of employees we have nowadays. And nowadays we can make contracts to agree to pay at the end of the week, at the end of the month, the end of the year.

And then the employee knows when the money’s going to come in and can account for it. But when you are living in a very primitive society, when you may rely on that food to get your evening meal when you come home from work to feed your family, then you have to abide by that rule. And basically this is a law of employment, of respecting the rights of the employee, making sure that they are taken care of and you don’t do what is common in this country. And that is to say, ah, I don’t need to pay this now, I’ll pay it much later or I’ll delay it as long as I possibly can. So here in this one sentence in verse 13, you have the idea of stealing, of oppressing and of not doing your duty to another person in the employment range. All of them are interconnected and therefore all of them are indicating a different aspect of the same issue of respect to people and property. Verse 14, one of the most difficult ones to understand, don’t curse a deaf person or put something in the way of somebody who is blind. Now what can that possibly be? Literally does it mean putting a cursing a deaf person? He can’t hear you, so what’s the problem? But you are taking advantage, you are taking advantage of his, if you like, innocence or handicap. In the same way a blind person, if you put something in the way, he’s going to fall over it. Now the rabbis are very, very clear that this does not just mean physically a block in the road and it doesn’t mean just physically cursing, it means taking advantage of another person’s either ignorance or innocence.

And in one sense, one of the examples we would take in this day and age is in the company of somebody else speaking a language to your friend that that third person doesn’t understand. That is a modern example of cursing a deaf person. And unfortunately it happens too often. I see it all the time, happening that people do this sort of thing. Now you may argue that parents sometimes do that because they don’t want their children to understand, that’s a different matter. But when you are doing it in such a way that you don’t want the other person to understand or the other person might mind about it, then I think it is what we would call bad manners at the very least. So we now move from these personal interactions to the judicial system. The judicial system, , don’t do something nasty, unfair, evil when you are dealing with justice, don’t distort it. How do we distort it? Well one way of course is going to be through bribery. Another is giving preference to somebody and yet it goes both ways. And so on the one hand it says, just because a guy is poor, this doesn’t mean to say you should tilt the law in his favour. And similarly , just because a man is rich, you shouldn’t think you have to tilt the law in his direction. You shouldn’t be taking into consideration any external circumstances other than the actual letter of the law in regard to this particular case, no kinds of favouritism. The law is the law. And the famous example that the Talmud gives is that if before you have a man who is accused of stealing bread to feed his family, do you say he’s not guilty? The answer is no. You say he is guilty, however, you as the judge or the jury or whoever it is, has the responsibility to see he’s taken care of and his family is taken care of.

And if you can’t afford to pay the fine, maybe you should help pay the fine for him. So here we have this important principle that the law is the law, but what Judaism allows for is that the circumstances may require you as an individual, as a law abiding citizen, to do more than the law. And that’s why it says going on in verse 15 after it says don’t give favour to the poor or don’t give advantage to the rich, it says, , you should judge with and once again the term as opposed to , members of your family, members of your people, but it means anybody. The question therefore is what does mean? literally means the righteous thing, is a righteous person. is what we now call charity, but it’s not used to mean charity here or there. And not only that, but there are two other words that we’re going to come across in the future in this, in the book, in a later book. The term of just having a blank for a minute I’ll get it in a in in a tick, , what is good and what is right. is straight, it is right. So you’ve got and here we have and they are all interconnected and overlapping. It essentially means to have this sensitivity, this sensitivity to human relations, that human relations are, in a sense, after the relationship with God, the most fundamental principle in Jewish law, in Jewish religion, in Jewish life.

The division between what is called being between a human being and , the Talmudic term for God, which is a term I like because it implies that God is everywhere, not necessarily confined to one place is not male or female, it is a neutral term for the omnipresent in a sense that that is between God and man and and between man and his , also a term that you don’t find in that sense here in the Torah, but very commonly in the Gemara, in the Talmud, , all Israel are friends or connected in some way or at least should be, alas it’s not always that way. So we have , always judge people not just with with the law, but also with . Now that has two meanings. It has the meaning of trying to find, within the law, a way of ameliorating a problem, but also outside of the law, beyond the letter of the law, taking measures to correct something that’s either wrong or unfair within society. Now we come, I would say to the most ignored of all biblical laws, verse 16 of chapter 19. Now the term comes from the same word as a merchant, which means going around hawking your goods. Notice how the English in here in the Sefaria says to deal basically with members of your people and do not profit by the blood of your fellow. , don’t stand by, , when your neighbour is bleeding. , I am God.

So once again, we have this expression of God coming in after an ethical statement. is taken throughout Jewish law to mean don’t tell tales about other people. Don’t go round gossiping. Whether the gossip is true or not, you should not be telling other people things that they don’t need to know. Now there can be situations where you may need to, where you may need to protect somebody from a crooked businessman who has a record of crime and deceit and your neighbour is about to invest in his scheme. You may very well need to say something and much more controversially, but what’s more problematic nowadays is this whole issue of the , of the arranged marriage which dominates, completely dominates and most of orthodox Jewish life. Setting up an arranged marriage, not in the sense of a forced marriage, but an arranged marriage in which you look into the background of the other party, see if they are suitable for various reasons. And this way, raise the question of what do you do if you have knowledge that a potential partner either may have a serious medical or psychological problem or indeed a record? Are you obligated in some way to let the other party know? This is a very, very difficult issue and it’s not easy to come to an overall decision about what should be told and what should not be told. And in principle, there’s no question that we have to judge the person as that person is and not hold against that person things that other members of the family might have done.

And yet, particularly in the ultra Orthodox world, there is this very, very strict rule of what is called , of holy seed, that you are coming from a family of great scholars, pious people, and that matters more than anything else. And of course, in fact we know it doesn’t always work that way. And plenty of people have come from the holiest of families have behaved in ways that are totally unethical and immoral. And unfortunately marriages fall apart when information appears on the scene that wasn’t there beforehand in the holiest of families. So this is a very, very difficult principle. And in fact it’s a principle that although cannot really be defined has been expanded. And the most famous expansion of this is the work of a man called the , “The Man Who Delighted in Life,” that was the name of his book. And he was known by that book in which he wrote a book called “Guarding Your Tongue, Guard Your Language.” And that is based on a statement later on in the Bible, who is the person who desires life and wants to have a good long life the person if you can control your tongue from saying the wrong thing. And so this principle of you must not tell tales is here, part of that biblical obligation not.

And yet in our society, keeping conversation going, tailing gossip, all kinds of things like that is so endemic and so deeply rooted and is found in every level, virtually every level of Jewish society as well as any other one is, as I say, the law that is most ignored of these biblical ethical laws. And the connection is , which literally means don’t stand by the blood of your neighbour, which in the context here literally means don’t stand by when your neighbour is suffering, when he is bleeding. But this is a law that is a text which is understood in many different ways in the Talmud as to how far you go. But when you see somebody suffering, you should not ignore it. And so here you have the famous issue of whether in a society, if you ignore the cries of somebody who is suffering or being attacked and you don’t intervene, is that a punishable offence or not? And in that sense, this says very clearly it should be. If you could help and you couldn’t help, you are committing a crime. But now something which is much more difficult. Verse 17, do not hate your neighbour in your heart secretly. Having hatred is a terribly destructive emotion. And having hatred is when something eats you up inside and therefore you should always tell your people, the person you come into contact with if you are unhappy about him, if he or she is doing something wrong.

Now then it goes on to say, , and otherwise you are guilty in some sense as a result of this hatred because by not trying to put it right, the hatred is festering and it’s festering at your, because of you, because you are not trying to put something right. So it’s festering in the person who is hating somebody and not getting out of the system. It’s damaging the system because the other person doesn’t know what you’ve got against him, is not aware of what’s going on. And so in a sense you are in one way punishing him too. So there are two sides here, again, to the ethical responsibility of not keeping your anger or your hatred to yourself and getting it all out. No doubt in modern psychological terms, one would say that is a very important fundamental of good healthy relationships. Verse 18, some people say this is the most important line in the whole of the Torah. , do not take vengeance and do not bear a grudge against your people. So if somebody has done something wrong, don’t let it eat you up. Don’t try and avenge it and don’t allow it to fester in a way that it damages you, but rather which is normally translated, you should love your neighbour as yourself, which does not make sense. Let’s look at the words here. First word is and you should love, that is used of loving God. But how can you command somebody to love? How can you command an emotion? It’s almost impossible to. And not only that, your neighbour as much as you love yourself, surely that can’t be.

Surely you can’t, if you like, you’ve got two people, you are one of them, not want to protect yourself first. It’s your life at stake. And that is contradicted by the fact that Jewish law says that you shouldn’t value one life more than another life. In fact, if you look at the actual words in Hebrew carefully, it does not mean love your neighbour as yourself. And although it says in brackets, an Israelite, that is not what actually the text says. And we are going to see later on in this text a contradiction of this where we are told to love the non-Jew and the stranger. But anyway, what does this mean? can mean not that you should love only, but it means you should show love. And if it would be love your neighbour as yourself, it would be . You should love, et, the object, is your neighbour, but it says “la”, which means “to” your neighbour. And therefore it says literally, if you look at the words, you should show love to your neighbour. You should show kindness. You should show consideration to your neighbour. not as much as to yourself, but he or she is the same as you. She is or he is a human being. And as a human being, you must show them your love or concern. Now obviously what happens if they’re trying to kill you, it’s a different matter. What happens if they hate you and undermine you and so forth. But as a general rule, be nice to people, show you care, show that nice face, or as the rabbis of the Talmud say, always show , nice faces.

And indeed, when I first came to Israel in the fifties, the ministry of Tourism had posters displayed all around the place, in hotels, elsewhere, saying , literally means explain your face, show your face, show a nice face to the tourists. Because at that stage, tourism was an early industry. Most people didn’t think about it, they didn’t like the strangers anyway, invading their territory. And it was an important principle because as you know in those early years, the Subra had a reputation of being standoffish and arrogant. And so the tourism minister said, well, we have to try and get them to change their minds. Well, it just tended to happen over time by itself. So here we are now in a sense ending this kind of obvious ethical human interrelationship series of laws. Very, very important and fundamental. And so you know when people say that the book of Leviticus is just a book of priestly laws, a book of strange rules of purity and impurity. What in fact this is showing is that all these earlier laws about setting up a sanctuary, having a cast of people who are going to be responsible for the community, having to take care of one’s health and one’s wellbeing are all leading up to the most important principle, which is being a good person. And that’s what holiness means and that’s what means. That’s why this opens up as saying you should be holy. is the name of this section. But then, in a sense, we move on to a broader, if you like, principle of ethics, dealing with agriculture. And this is going to intersperse the coming sentences and the coming rules because of course, agriculture was the main subsistence occupation that provided food and employment for people. And it obviously determined a great deal about human life and human interaction. But we start off with a very, very weird, difficult law. It says, , I want you to adhere to my laws.

And these are not the mitzvah, although it is a mitzvah. But the term , as I’ve mentioned before, is a ruling that has no obvious rational explanation, but it is in a sense a test both of one’s faith and of certain broad principles, concepts rather than actions. I want you to keep my , my the kinds of injunctions. Now the term means to mix, to intermix and by intermixing in a sense, watering down or changing. So I don’t want you to, with your cattles, with your animals inter-mate between species, I want you to keep species separate. Don’t make lion-tigers or things of that kind. Now of course the whole of the ancient world was full of these, the asses, donkeys, different kinds of animals that were intermixed with each other. And so there was a concept, if you like, of just as purity of humanity. So purity of animals. And this is interesting because it comes against background in evolution of constant interaction and intermingling. And yet at the same time preservation of certain biological strains. So don’t mix animals. And similarly don’t mix products. Seeds, , don’t mix seeds. Now again, this doesn’t mean you can’t improve species, you can’t improve crops and wheat and so forth and so on. But they are not supposed to be planted close to each other. They have to be kept separate as clearly identical differences. Now interestingly enough, although we are not allowed to interbreed between species, that doesn’t mean to say we can’t benefit from something that’s been done by others, but it does mean that we should try to think in terms of trying to preserve the integrity of species.

Now this is an area in which I have no expertise whatsoever scientifically, and I can’t speak to that. But what it seems to me that this is saying is that you should try to recognise differences and validate differences and not blur the lines between. And so the law ends , a garment that is made up of different species, wool and flax, is a strange term. It’s only used in this context and we are not even clear what it means and what its origin is but it obviously means something that is made up of a combination. But is this a combination only wool and flax or maybe it’s something else. And that again, is a matter of great debate as to what defines and what defines having a garment on you. And does it also apply to sitting on a sofa that may be made up of this combination. And in for example, many suits, it was fashionable once, much less so now, to have the lining made out of flax, which is the combination with wool that is specifically forbidden here. That doesn’t mean to say you can’t have wool and silk and other combinations of that sort. Now that’s where I will stop at that controversial part for today and go to the questions and see where we go from there.

Q&A and Comments:

So R. Cage, thank you very much.

And Shelly, I will get back to you on the idea of the book. And oopsie, I just lost you and…

Q: Romaine, does the Torah guide us through misuse or interpretation or is that left to the scholars?

A: That’s an excellent question, Romaine. The answer is that we have always used, if you like, the judicial system, that is to say interpretation of the law. The interpretation of the law was handed from Moses down to Aaron, the priest and Aaron together with the judges is specifically mentioned in the Torah in the last book of Deuteronomy as being responsible for interpreting the law, clarifying the law, and dealing with new situations that crop up. So that is what became known later on as the oral law. But of course the oral law must have been in some form there right at the very beginning because when these terms are mentioned, as you can see, we don’t often know what they mean. We have to interpret them, we have to explain them. And so explanation, clarification has always been part of our tradition. They call it a legal tradition, but it’s just as much a religious tradition. And scholars disagree, all the time they disagree. That’s the beauty of the Talmud. In the Talmud, it is full of disagreement and different opinions. Sometimes you have to come to a decision and sometimes a decision has to be made. But very often there are parallel decisions going on. So in the famous case of the schools of Hillel and the schools of Shamai, they had different opinions on many things. Sometimes they voted on them and on other times people kept parallel traditions, which is what we have today. A lot of parallel traditions in different communities.

Shelly, verse 14 could be an indictment of eugenics. It shows that deaf and blind people have rights. Oh, absolutely. Eugenics is absolutely forbidden in Jewish law. You cannot in any way, how can I say, remove or make handicapped people suffer. You have to deal with them as they are with charity and kindness, even though they may have certain handicaps that prevent them from doing certain things. When they can be shown to be able to overcome these handicaps, they are capable of everything, almost everything except in certain ritual laws that many of us are not. That’s anyway to do with the temple and not to do with where we are today.

Marsha says, I recently heard someone say in the context of the recent abortion laws in the US that we must consider only what is legal, but not only what is legal, but what is moral. Oh, absolutely. And that’s why in Judaism, the legal and the moral are intertwined, are interconnected, are placed in the text in almost the same place to underline this. Yes indeed the law is one thing and doing what is right is another thing. And sometimes the right , kindness, , good. These other factors have to be brought into consideration, which is why the tradition is if you have a problem in law, you don’t just go to what the book says, you go to somebody, a scholar who knows more and can interpret to suit a specific situation and situation.

Rabbi RK, talking about gossip. Yes, it is very, very important and much ignored.

Q: Shelly in verse 17, not hating your brother, in reaction to Cain and Abel brothers Joseph?

A: Yes, I mean I think what the Torah, the narratives of the Torah are showing us from the beginning as of how detrimental hatred is and how one shouldn’t do the things that some of the earlier people did. The purpose of the narrative, rather like fairy stories if you like, is to convey the good behaviour over the bad behaviour.

Q: Ruth says, do commandments apply to relations only amongst Jews or also to dealing with non-Jews as well? For example, is it right to revenge the other God commanded Jews to destroy Amalek because they attacked the Jews who are coming in the desert? Does it apply today as well?

A: Well, there are two issues there. First of all, yes, of course we have an obligation in the Torah to be kind and good and treat the neighbour and the stranger according to the same laws that apply to us. And there are principles that are emphasised in the Torah, in the Talmud that expand on this. There’s the principle in the Talmud which says that you should not do anything, that you should not do anything that is going to bring about ill feeling. , it’s called. Don’t do this because of ill feeling. So for example, as a Jew, I have to keep Shabbat, I see a house on fire in my neighbor’s building and he’s not Jewish. Am I obliged to break Shabbat in order to help put up the fire? Technically, you may argue, no, you have to keep the law of Shabbat, but , because of ill feeling or because of other ethical considerations, you may, which explains why doctors may have to heal and do heal a non-Jew on Shabbat. So there are plenty of discussions in the Talmud about how we do indeed have to apply these rules to everybody, even though they are directed initially only to those who are part of this specific legal community, which is no different in one way to what happens in the world today, because laws apply to somebody in one country, it doesn’t mean they apply in another country. And one country can have a totally different set of rules. And sometimes if you are a citizen of a country, you can benefit from that country. And if you are not a citizen of that country, you can’t benefit from that country. And there are lots of areas in between like immigrants and so forth and so on. So yes, the commandment is to really consider all human beings as being the children of God. We are all the children of God, but there are some people who betray that. And sometimes in self-defense, we have to defend ourselves by killing people who are coming to kill us.

Now let me deal with the question of Amalek. First of all, because the laws of Amalek and the laws of killing the Canaanites do not apply at all nowadays because we can’t identify who they are. And so if people have tried to identify whether it will have been Hitler or whether it’s going to be Haman as Amalek, we don’t know and we can’t. But secondly, even during the period when the children of Israel came into Canaan and they were commanded to get rid of the Canaanites and the Amalekites, they didn’t. In fact, they went on coexisting right through till the period of the Sennacherib or the Assyrian destruction when all the tribes of that country would, that part of the world were taken away and were intermingled with others. So the laws that are mentioned in the Torah do not apply. And we’ve been saying that for 2000 years, and yet still today on the internet, you will have idiotic, ignorant assholes, if I can use that expression, who say, look what the Jews did. You killed the Canaanites and you killed the Amalekites. Well, everybody killed everybody. I suppose you could say a 2000 years ago. But this hasn’t been on our books for the last two and a half thousand years. So raking up something that I can rake up the same thing about every other person in this world if I want to go back to the caves, so that does not apply.

Anyway, I believe that what that law meant was that these represent if you like, existential threats to you ethically, and therefore you should keep as far away from and avoid as much contact with them as you possibly can. And so just as the laws of the Bible sometimes say, this is the death penalty, but the death penalty can never be carried out because there are so many limitations on it and so many conditions that it becomes impossible. But it’s a way of saying this is an important law, an important principle, a fundamental one. It’s much more important than dropping litter. So saying get rid of them. They are just a, a terrible threat is another way of saying this is an existential danger and you have to beware. We can feign being nice. Yes we can. And sometimes this is an argument we often have, I used to have in Israel. Let me just say what I have on my mind. I’m a straightforward, I’m a subra. You in English are so polite. You are so hypocritical, you’re so terrible. We don’t want to be like you. And yet I think there is an advantage of being nice rather than being, shall we say, absolutely truthful, you are an ugly person or something of that kind. So I do value kindness, and kindness is important, and if it involves a certain amount of acting, then I don’t see why not. But where it might lead to some consequences, that’s a different matter.

And so Shelly asks about mules, yes, indeed. I mean we ride mules and other animals like that. And they’re mentioned in the Torah and they are mentioned as having, the Jewish people owned them and had them. And so clearly it meant the obligation to not proactively involve in that process.

Susan says, if you are using Safari online, you may press down on a Hebrew word, an extensive dictionary will pop up. The different meaning citations are given. To close the dictionary, just click back every time. Thank you Susan. Yes, that’s very helpful. And I think, you know, we can all take advantage of that particular point and tool, which is a very important one.

Carla, , strong lecture. Thank you Carla, nice to hear from you.

Q: Armain, the example of not mixing seeds, could it lead to xenophobia? Which addresses my confusion in terms of the first question.

A: Well, you know, xenophobia is forbidden in the Torah. We’re going to come to it many times as even a special law which says, don’t hate the Egyptians despite what they all did to you. So you know, xenophobia is not a term that I think you can apply to the Torah. You can talk about distinctions between different groups of people. And mixed species obviously does not apply to humans who do and should intermarry not based on any racial consideration, but entirely on personal consideration. Who is this human being?

Q: Janet, agriculture nowadays must be kosher or forbidden?

A: No, it’s not forbidden to take advantage of it. Absolutely not. And on the contrary, I believe that a lot of the arguments against GM plants or foods are not legitimate and, but this is a debatable issue. But we are allowed to take advantage of anything that has been done. So don’t worry about your cereals.

Philip, when the Torah says and should it go together with ? Yes, indeed. This is what the Talmud defines it as. The making a person’s face go white. Anybody who makes somebody’s face go white, humiliate them in public is guilty of offending Torah law. Absolutely. But if you are telling somebody off, you should do that in private. You shouldn’t embarrass them in public. And that’s another feature. Also, you know, there’s a question of respecting your parents by not telling them off in public. If you’ve got anything, if you think they’re wrong or made a mistake, do it privately. What’s difference between a . Normally a is somebody who steals surreptitiously and a who does it openly, who shoplift. So a shoplifter would be a . And somebody who steals your money by stealing your password would be a .

Avram, thank you Rabbi. My pleasure.

Elizabeth, repeat your translation. Love your neighbour as yourself. Sorry. And you should show love to your neighbour because he or she is like you. So not saying love your neighbour as yourself, but show love to your neighbour because your neighbour is the same as you. Thank you very much. I glad that I am striking the right level with you and contributing to you because you already have a very good basis.

Francine, as we’re talking, I couldn’t help think about today’s worldwide antisemitism and hatred towards Israel, the US for aiding Israel, as well as the hatred and political scene towards elder’s opinions. That is unfortunately proof of the disease of antisemitism. It is not only irrational, it’s only illogical. It is not simply hatred. It is a cancer. And unfortunately it is now spread throughout the world. But the sad fact is we have always had to cope with antisemitism of one form or another, even in the most civilised societies. It has never gone away. It never will. This is our fate, but it is our challenge. It is our privilege because it makes us and helps us survive. So on that note, goodbye everybody, see you next week.