Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 23, Festivals

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 23, Festivals

- So today we are on Chapter 23 and we are dealing with festivals. Now, you won’t be surprised to learn that there are four different variations of texts in the Bible, in the Torah rather, that deal with the festivals. And rather like the situation that exists today, there are three very different themes that essentially underline and run through all the different festivals. But the festivals themselves are divided. There are three that are called the , the three legs. And these were three of the festivals, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, when people were encouraged to come up to Jerusalem, to the temple, to get everybody to be together in the community. Remember, people were living spread out in different tribal areas. They had not a lot to do with each other actually and when they did, it was usually not very pleasant, but coming together on a national level, this is what the three were. And then there were the two others, what became known as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And of course, Rosh Hashanah is not called Rosh Hashanah in the Torah. So there are five altogether. The common themes that run through them are rather similar to the themes that divide us today as a people or as a nation. On the one hand, you have the historical. Why and what does this festival record in the historical development of the people? And just as today, some people are Jewish through history, not through the religion. Then you have the element of the sanctuary.

The sanctuary was the place where people came together, rather like the synagogue today. So it was in that sense the community coming together socially and the religion, if you like, was the excuse for getting them together. And then finally, you had nature, agriculture and agriculture wasn’t just the issue of farming and providing food, it was also to be aware of the change of seasons and to be aware of the world. And of course, running through this was the intervention of God. God took you out of Egypt, God is the centre of the tabernacle and the temple. And similarly, it’s God that makes sure that the seasons go normally and run that way. So nowadays, the divisions are a bit wider than that because they have to include those people who have no interest in religion at all, and certainly no interest in God. And I personally believe that that is not a bar to being a productive, important member of the Jewish world, whether in Israel or anywhere else. But nevertheless, the Torah, remember, is giving us a constitution for everybody. A constitution that defines the culture, and in certain ways defines the people. So this is an eternal issue of what the festivals do. And the festivals have two names. One of them is , the time in the year. And that tends to be the calendrical time of the year, and . is the Hebrew term for a festival. And has again, these different elements.

It’s a period of time when the , the community, the comes together, when we, if you like, testify, our commitment and our loyalty. And so on the one hand, you have this dual role, the role of God in the world and the role of humans in the world, which relates all the time to the constitution of the law, which is by and large divided into two categories, , between God and between the people, humans and God, and between humans and each other. The human side and the divine side. Just one sideline on this, you know in the Torah, there are seven different names for God. There is Adonai, which is if you like, the primary name, your first name, your identifying, that’s Adonai. Then you’ve got Elohim, which is God in the general term, all kinds of Elohims around. You have Ehyeh which is a variation on that. And you have also terms like Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and others. Ehyeh, separate to Eloah and Elohim. But there’s always a problem people have with the idea that usually people refer to God in the male. And that was normal in those days, but of course I’ve also pointed out, those of you who remember from Genesis, that the Bible applies female verbs to God and God has as much a female presence as a non-female presence.

But unfortunately, until recently, humans tended to think males were either more powerful or better, and of course now we know that’s not the case. But it was. So roundabout the time of the Romans, roundabout the time of the oral law, it seems that the Rabbis felt the need to find another name for God. And the name for God they chose was Makom. And Makom literally means a place. Now in one sense, now that they have been driven out of the land of Israel, the temple isn’t there anymore. Whereas previously, the Makom might have been the temple, now the Makom is everywhere. And in the mystical tradition, God goes into exile and wanders around wherever we are. And so Makom became the name for God in the diaspora, and then it was absorbed by everybody else. And so for example, when somebody dies, we say, , “May God, Makom, may He comfort you, or she comfort you or it comfort you,” however you want to choose the way of describing God. So I like this because it’s not sexist in any way. It’s not male, it’s not female, it’s totally neutral, and it means we take our God with us wherever we may be. So with that introduction, I now turn to the actual text of Chapter 23. So God says to Moses, “I want you to speak to the children of Israel and I want you to tell them about , the times, the period of time in the year, , which they shall declare as . is to call, and to call everybody together. And , as you know, means to make a difference between the mundane and the special. So this is a spiritual occasion.

And , and these are my special festivals. And look, the first festival is not , it’s Shabbat! And so in verse three, you have , six days, , you can do whatever you have to do on the seventh day. Shabbat Shabbaton. It is a Shabbat or what? A Shabbat Shabbaton, a Shabbat of Shabbaton? Or is it a real Shabbat Shabbat? Because often the Torah repeats things like for your benefit or something like that. So what does Shabbat Shabbaton mean? And we’re going to have to come back to this because apart from Shabbat being called Shabbat Shabbaton, there’s only one other festival that’s going to be described in the course of time as Shabbat Shabbaton and that is Yom Kippur. And people very often ask me, you know what’s more important, Shabbat or Yom Kippur? And the straight answer is you can’t say one is more important than the other. If anything, it would have to be Shabbat because Shabbat is mentioned Shabbaton first. But nevertheless, this is an interesting issue. Shabbat is the important foundation. The others come up occasionally. But if you want a regularity in your life, you have to go through this weekly recurring regularity of Shabbat. And then having mentioned Shabbat as the introduction, cause it is a holy day, verse four, . So once again, we’re using the here, not , but you should declare them at the right time.

And this was a very, very important principle that you might not notice it, but it is that because calendars as we have them really go back in their different ways a long, long time. There were seven different calendars in Babylon. We have the Julian calendar that goes back to Caesar, then they came the Gregorian calendar. And there have been various other variations of it and every religion has its own different calendars. But the question was what kind of calendar? Some calendars were based on the moon, lunar, some calendars were based on the sun, solar. And so how did they fix them? They didn’t have clocks. And so by and large they fix them by observation. Of course later on observation become things like sundials and so forth and so on. But if observation is very subjective and deciding when the new moon is going to be is difficult because sometimes there are clouds, sometimes you can’t see when it is, you have a rough idea, but you’re never certain. And so throughout the early period of the Jewish people, festivals were announced, declared by initially the priests in the temple and they were declared on the basis of visual evidence. And by the time you get to the Talmud, they have all this detailed law about witnesses coming up to the to the court to declare what they saw, where the moon was, where the sun was.

And they had little models there to say, did it look like this, did it look like that? And sometimes there were contradictory witnesses and their arguments about it. And therefore festivals had to be publicly declared and so they were declared. And then lighting bonfires the day was transmitted from Jerusalem up through to Syria, from Syria across and down into Babylonia and the Tigris and Euphrates where the other Jewish big community was. And that’s all documented in the Talmud. So calling and declaring when the festivals would be was rather difficult. And that’s for example, why we had two days of Rosh Hashanah because they were never certain exactly if the witnesses came in time to tell you which day it was, it might be at the last minute. And if it came at the last minute, then how the people in Babylonia know when it was going to be if the bonfires took time to get there. And that’s where the two day originated. Of course by the time we had fixed calendars, which happened in the Byzantine period, second and third century, there were then fixed calendars. But until that time, all festivals were declared. From that time onwards, we knew when the dates were, in which case you say, "Well then why do we still with two have two days?” And there were two answers to that. One of the answers is, “Well we’ve done it this way for a long time, we’re going to keep on doing it and why bother to change it?” The other more controversial one was that this meant that the Jews in the diaspora, by and large, had two days the day they calculated it was and then it didn’t happen and then the new day they had, that’s why they had the second day.

And in a sense, this was a kind of a tax, a kind of a penalty for the diaspora Jews. You want to live in the diaspora, you don’t live in Israel, fair enough? Then you need reinforcement and we insist on reinforcing it by giving you a double day on all festivals. And then you’ll turn around and say to me, “Well then since we don’t need it anymore and since most people find two days impossibly impossible, then why just don’t we let it slip?” And a lot of people do let it slip, but as always happens when you have a tradition, it’s very, very difficult to draw it to a close. And it’s all very well for people, like shall we say, rabbis and teachers and others who live in a Jewish environment and two days festivals can come and sometimes there are three days if it’s the Shabbat, and it’s very difficult, particularly in the autumn time when you’ve got Rosh Hashanah and you’ve got Yom Kippur and then you’ve got the first days of Sukkot and the second day of Sukkot, it’s terribly difficult, not everybody can do that. And that’s why by and large Jews have preferred to be self-employed if they were able to in order to carry this out. But as was all things, individuals make up their own minds as to how much they’re going to do and how much they’re not going to do, and you can never please everybody.

So having gone to all this, we then go reiterate this fact that this happens, Shabbat happens in verse three, wherever you happen to live. So this is not just the temple Judaism, this is wherever you happen to be. But nevertheless these days have to be called and declared at the right time. So we come to number five, the first month. on the 14th, , era of evening, that is dusk time, to God, hold on, isn’t it to us? Interestingly enough, there are two names for . There’s and there’s . And the tradition is that is because God passed over our homes and didn’t kill us when the firstborn were on the chop and therefore it’s God passing over. Whereas is what we had to make, we had to do. And so there’s the human element and the divine element and here we are focusing on . This is what God wants. So it’s on the 15th day. So we’ve got for seven days you have to eat matzot. And sometimes there is an interesting contradiction because later on we’re going to talk about six days eating matzot. On the first day, verse seven, this gathering everybody together, it’s a day off, it’s a holy day, a holiday. Interesting because in many European societies and elsewhere, the ordinary poor peasant never had a day off and the only day off later came was a holy day and that’s where holidays come from.

And now on that time we’re going to have sacrifices. Now, you know I’ve said it before, I’m not a big fan of sacrifices, but you have a burnt offering to God. But this is for God, the recognition of God seven days. And then on the seventh day there’s a kind of a farewell celebration and that’s why we have this division on the festivals. So the first day, the last day, and what is called which means it a , it’s a time, but it’s , it’s a normal working day. Although there are people who don’t work on either unless it’s an emergency or necessary. So . In verse nine, we know onto something else. Now this is initially of God declaring to Moses what God wants. God wants the Shabbat and God wants the because that was fundamental to mention of course in the 10 Commandments and repeated time and time again throughout the Torah. So now we have, having mentioned that particular festival, that of the Passover seven days, we come on to another one in verse 10. Verse 10, now it’s Moses being told Israel, you should speak the children of Israel and you should tell them, when you come eventually to the land I give you, you will harvest the harvest. The first sheath of your father’s harvest you should bring to the . So obviously agriculture is the centre of Jewish-Israelite life in its early form.

That was how they lived based on agriculture. And there was the harvest and you had to dedicate the first of the harvest to the priest. Now there are two harvests. There’s the barley harvest, which is the earlier one and the wheat harvest, which is the later one. But interestingly, all three festivals in their way have a harvest dimension. They talk about nature and the seasons as well as anything else. And so this idea of taking the omer, the sheaf, not necessarily the town in the Negev, taking the sheaf and waving it, waving it before God. And this is now this is a very, very strange phrase, is to your benefit, this is to your benefit. Your benefit is if you dedicate this sheaf to God by implication, God in a sense will then protect you. But it’s also linked to the idea of dedicating the firstborn, of dedicating lots of new produce, new things that happen each year. And there are many, many ways in the Torah of recognising change, of recognising something new and valuing it. So this is what the priests should do. And then when you lift up sheaf on 12 and you waive the omer, you should then also offer another burnt offering again to God as a thank you for the harvest.

And then in addition to that, you are going to offer a sacrifices that are not to do with killing animals or anything like that but are to do with food, with flour and with oil and with wine. And so people who think that sacrifices were only animals should notice that there were alternatives, either alternatives for the poor people or alternatives simply out of choice. I’m a vegetarian, I don’t want to slaughter a poor little animal and this should be eaten together with parched corn, which was like, I suppose in a way, the equivalent of chocolate and cookies and goodies but anything that is made out of this bread or this parched corn, anything like that, you can’t eat from the new harvest until you bring the first to dedicate to God. This is going to be a . That is to say a law, a general principle. It’s not a social law, it’s not a civil law, it’s just an act of commitment. And then once that’s over, 15, Shabbat, you should count from the day after the Shabbat from the day when you bring the sheaf that you’re going to wave seven complete full weeks and you are going to count from Shabbat, 16, from the end of that Shabbat to 50 days. And then there’s going to be another grain offering. And that is the origin of the Days of the Omer that go from the first day we start the second night of and we count through to Shavuot. Now what this was, was purely a harvest issue. There’s no mention as we have today of the idea of a period of mourning when people don’t get married and people don’t shave, some people don’t. And where does that come from?

Well that is not going to be mentioned ‘til much, much later. In fact, it’s not even mentioned directly in the Talmud. It doesn’t emerge until the geonic period after the talmudic period. But counting the between these days was very important. But there’s an interesting little sideline here and that is according to the traditional Jewish point of view, religious point of view since first of all it’s also a Shabbat and it says Shabbat, you bring this omer after the Shabbat and as we do it, we take the first day of Pesach to be Shabbat, a Shabbat or it’s also a Pesach. The Samaritans, but not only the Samaritans, but also the Sadducees, that’s to say the priestly class and the priestly class, they had it good during the first temple period. They were the only people in charge of everything. By the time you come to the second temple period, there’s a split between the Sadducees who are the tzedukim from the house of Zadok. They are the priests and they very strictly adhere to what they say is the literality of the Torah. We don’t want any of this rabbinic innovation. This rabbinic innovation twists the meaning, it doesn’t make sense and we do not accept it. That was both the Samaritans and the Sadducees.

It was the Pharisees or the rabbinic school who had this oral law which gave them the right to interpret the Torah as they saw fit. Now in this situation you have those people, the Sadducees and the Samaritans who say in fact, it’s not the day after the first day Pesach, it’s the Shabbat before the Shabbat It says Shabbat from the Shabbat. If it would mean the following day that Pesach, it would say but it doesn’t, it says Shabbat. And so they kept the Shabbat before Pesach as the day when the omer had to be brought. And that is one of the explanations given as to why the Shabbat before Pesach is always called Shabbat . Why is it the big Shabbat? It’s the same as any other Shabbat, but because of its history that’s one interpretation. The other is it’s Pesach is a big event and that’s why we call it Shabbat . So we say that we offer up this sacrifice in the temple. There are cows, we’ve mentioned vegetarians, but then we’ve got the cows and the bulls and the goats and the goat always was a symbol of atonement. So we think of the two goats on the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, But there were two goats to atone on Pesach too. And in fact there were goats that were atoned every week, every month, every there was a a goat that was offered up as an atonement.

We’re keeping on atoning for the things we do wrong because we keep on doing wrong things, so it makes sense. So anyway, this is what the priest does. He waves it and he sacrifices and he offers up everything. And then on the 50th day, it’s 21 on this very day, is another big festival. You don’t do any work. It’s a divine law for every great event. And interesting, nobody says it’s called Shavuot. It is a Festival of Weeks, but it doesn’t say that’s what you should call it. But then what we go on to say is something very interesting. 22, . Now we’re going through these festivals to do with the harvest and I want you to know that when you harvest, don’t just think of yourselves, you’ve got to think of society and the needs of society. Don’t go and harvest everything, leave the corners free. Doesn’t stipulate how much, it’s up to you and and anything you drop on the way as you’re harvesting, don’t go back and gather it again. Let to the poor people and to the stranger, to the non-Jew too to leave them for the poor. I’m your God and I’m telling you, you’ve got to look after the poor. And don’t just think of yourselves and don’t just think of the temple and don’t just think of the synagogue, think of what’s going on, the people. What do the people need and how can we help them? So this is the first reference in a sense to . , the term that we use now to mean charity isn’t mentioned directly here, but giving of the produce to the poor, helping them, allowing them to come into your fields.

This was a fundamental principle so that this again reiterates another theme that runs through the festivals. Don’t just think of yourselves, have a good time, but don’t just keep it to yourselves. Get everybody else to rejoice with you too. And so we come on to the next one. 24, speak to the children of Israel, in the seventh month, on the first day of the month. It’s another Shabbat, it’s another festival but a Shabbat. It doesn’t say it’s now the Shabbat. That’s why Shabbat’s so important. “So what is this Shabbat?” says the Torah And you think “Ah, Rosh Hashanah, yeah.” Nothing about Rosh Hashanah here. It says two words, to remember, to remember. And to make a noise on the shofar, to blow the shofar and it doesn’t actually mention the word shofar here, it just mentions to remember and to blow and to make a noise without any clarification of what that is. Of course the question is how do we come to the new year? And particularly given the fact that previously we’ve already learned that Nisan is the first day of the month and Nisan obviously underlies the lunar calendar. So is this evidence of the need for a solar calendar because that’s when the new year began and there’s obviously a difference between them and we combine the two.

And the reason why we combine the two is because if we only had a lunar calendar the way the Muslims do then as with the Muslims, as with the Ramadan, Ramadan moves throughout the year. Whereas we’ve got to make sure that Pesach is always in the springtime harvest time. So that incorporates the solar system which goes by the seasons as opposed to the lunar system which goes by the month, so the moon. S don’t do any work on this day. So this also comes into the same category as the other festivals, no work. So it’s an extra one. And that’s all it tells us. Where do we get the idea that we want God to remember us or is it for us to remember God? And we start the 10 days of penitence when we come up to the next one and the next one in verse 27 is and whether you have it always means bad news. So you might have had a good time with Rosh Hashanah, but you’re not going to eat so much now. On the 10th of the month, the seventh day, the day of atonement. And so it’s interesting, it talks about this day of of atonement and it is for you to atone for your sins to God. And that’s why it’s not to human beings. You have to atone to human beings all year round. Whenever you do something wrong, you’ve got to atone and try and make up. But when it comes to God, you’ve also got to do it all the time. But God has a special day, but this is God’s day of atonement not to do with your neighbour. And that’s why the custom is developed of trying to confess to one’s neighbours. And before we get into Yom Kippur, because Yom Kippur doesn’t help with that lot, that’s between us and them. in verse 29, any person, any soul, that is to say, so we’re talking about in the soul sense, spiritually who does not in a sense suffer in some way on this day, they are more or less cutting themselves off from the Jewish people.

They’re cutting themselves off. They’re not prepared to join in this national day of atonement, then clearly they’re cutting themselves off. But what’s it mean self-denial. It doesn’t actually specify anything here about not eating. And yet that is how we’ve understood this. And that is a perfect example again of what we call the oral law. Because if you look at the written law, it doesn’t tell you anything about fasting. The oral law understands or to suffer as through fasting. Why? I don’t know, but it always has. And so and anybody who does work on that day, also, he’s losing his place in the people. I’m not interested in him anymore in terms of the people, so to speak. Don’t do any work. This is something that you should have in all your generations. And again, because of Yom Kippur. Now in verse 27 it says Shabbat . Some people say, “Right, that means Yom Kippur is more important than Shabbat.” But no Shabbat itself is called Shabbat Shabbaton as we saw right at the beginning of the chapter. So that can’t be it. It’s just a very important day. And you should up suppress your souls on the ninth of the month of the evening and right through that particular day from the evening onto the evening, from one sundown to the next sundown, now we add a little old more at the end, that is Yom Kippur. And so we now come to the last one. That God speaks to and he says, “Speak to the children of Israel and on the 15th day of this month, this is the month of Tishrei, but we haven’t actually mentioned a month because interestingly enough in the Torah, only a couple of months are given names, but most of the months are not. And the months basically are Babylonian-made names.

And so they come in much later. Another example of the oral law modifying the written law. So on this day is a Festival of Sukkot. First of all of little huts for seven days. Verse 35, on the first day Don’t do any work. Seven days you should offer up sacrifices to God. And this is a very interesting issue because uniquely on Sukkot we have a system of sacrifices that vary over the seven-day period and are in fact 70. And they come to this total conclusion that these sacrifices are being made on behalf of the whole of the community, the whole of the world. In other words, it’s not just a prayer for us, but the sacrifices on Sukkot are for everybody. And so verse 36, it says, "Seven days you shall offer up sacrifices and on the eighth day there’s going to be another sacrifice at the end of this period when you are going to offer a gathering to God. And it’ll be what’s called a gathering, which is where comes from the last day of Sukkot. The eighth day is a gathering when you gather everybody together before everybody disperses and goes back to the four corners of the earth. But it is interesting, elsewhere, the Festival of Shavuot is going to be called the too. So there are interesting variations here. And so that’s what they say in verse 37, these are the festivals of God. a time when you offer sacrifices to God, sacrifices and pouring out wine and other things like that according to each day, apart from the fact that you do any Shabbat. So these are in addition to the normal Shabbat. Verse 39.

On the 15th day of the month, limiting what a qualification is, on the seventh month when you gather all the produce. So it is also the harvest gathering of this time. It’s mainly the fruits but any leftover harvest. So we’ve got the Festival of Harvesting, We’ve got the Festival of First Fruits, we’ve got the festival here of gathering everything in. So it’s another harvest festival. And to celebrate the harvest in verse 40, you should take on the first day, the fruit of a very nice tree. basically a bunch of dates but we don’t know what that means. and the leaves of a thick tree or a big tree the and leaves of a willow and you should be happy for seven days. So happiness is very, very important. Now what is the fruit of a nice tree? We assume it’s an etrog. It doesn’t say that. Again . So we have one palm branch, but that doesn’t clarify it. And besides what’s a thick tree? Is it an oak? Oh okay, we can get what willows of the brook are. That’s about the only one we have a definition. Look, they must have known what they were at the time, but when Moses says take the fruit of an nice tree and we start waving it and people did it, they must have known what to do. So Moses must have told them, "No, it’s not a kumquat, it’s not a pear or an apple. It’s got to be an etrog.” And there again is proof that there must have been a kind of a parallel oral law of tradition with the written law that helps explain those things that are not at all obvious. And so for seven days in verse 41, you are going to celebrate everything, a generational obligation to do and a new thing I want you to do, I want you to go and live in these little huts for seven days. All citizens in Israel should be Sukkot.

Why? In other words, your generations should know that I made the children of Israel dwell in temporary dwellings. But when I took them out the land of Egypt I the Lord your God and Moses reiterates these festivals of God to the children of Israel. Now in the Talmud there’s a debate as what does it mean Why do we sit in the ? So one answer is, because it says that people should know, they should be aware of their history, be aware of where they are sitting, which the say this means it shouldn’t be too big and high a building 'cause then you won’t be realising you’re in a building and then it’s God gave you this booth as a protection while you are in the wilderness so that you should be aware of the fact that you are being protected by God. And then you should know another thing, the temporariness of life. This was temporary. And so the fact that it’s temporary means that you should make it a temporary construction, not make it, I suppose you could say, as many people do, a prebuilt even brick wall structure, which you just move the bit of the ceiling because the fact of the matter is that the Talmud decides that what really defines a is the is having this temporary cover because that’s what they had in the wilderness. They had these little huts as very often shepherds did to protect themselves from the heat or agricultural workers did in the field in the summer. And these huts were made basically from leaves and and branches on poles to keep the sun away from the people sitting outside. So you have these different ways of understanding what the significance of Pesach of Sukkot was with how and why we have the . And this is where I will stop for today. Now I don’t have a lot of time because I have an important appointment I have to get to. So I’m going to run quickly through the questions as possible.

Q&A and Comments:

Lindy asked, the Comforter is . Yes, the comfort is comforting.

Q: Is it acceptable to eat matzoh when it isn’t Pesach?

A: Yes, you could eat matzoh any time of the year. It’s just that on Pesach as a tradition to have a particular strict kind of matzoh which has no additives, no salt, nothing added to it, just pure basic flour. If it says you’d eat matzoh six or seven days, what’s the reason the rabbinical authorities seemed to have decide we only required matzoh the first night, the day. This is a part of typical Talmudic debate as to what do we mean when we are told to eat matzoh? Does it mean all the time? Does it mean only once? Is there a minimum? Is there a maximum? This is a whole casuistic debate in the Torah, in the Gemera which goes on for pages and pages.

Susan, perhaps there are no weddings in Pesach because everybody’s too busy in the fields to get the first harvest. That’s a perfectly possible possibility. I wouldn’t argue with that at all, it’s possible. But also we have this famous myth of the pupils of Rabbi Akiva who were murdered or died, depends, different ways of interpreting it. And that’s why we have the period of mourning. And that was something that obviously came during the Roman period when the Roman oppression after Bar Kokhba was really oppressive.

Carla, it’s a difficult issue. Shabbat and Yom Kippur, very interesting. Thank you.

Thank you Gene. I understand I shouldn’t eat matzoh for a month before Pesach. These are different customs. The Gemera, the Talmud only says you should not eat matzoh the day before Pesach. So this is an example of cabalistic edition, of addition. Many Hasidim group and every different group has a different time, but it’s not written in the Torah and it’s not written in the Talmud. Why refer to God as God or not Lord, the Torah seems to do the Lord. Well, the Lord in English translation, we use the Hebrew word Adonai is in fact God’s name and that’s why very often we don’t pronounce Adonai.

And so there everybody, I will say goodbye. Thank you very much and hope to see you next week.