Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 24:10, Curses

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 24:10, Curses

- The topic this week is, really, curses. Now, the whole concept of a curse and a blessing seems very alien to most of us rationalist, modern minds. It seems like hocus-pocus, “I’m going to curse you and something horrible is going to happen,” or, “I’m going to bless you and something wonderful is going to happen.” And yet, there is this huge divide in the world in which we live, between the rationalists who say, “There’s no such thing as a curse. It’s all in your mind,” and those who take it very, very seriously. So if I can give you a little example, the last community that I served was the Persian community in New York. Wonderful, lovely people, but with this very cabalistic, mystic, superstitious approach to life. And they were very worried about the possibility of somebody putting an evil eye on them, or a curse, or something of that kind. And no matter how much I would say to them, “Look, guys, if you’re worried, pass your curses onto me. I’m happy to take them. I’m not worried about them. Give me all your evil eyes, everything like that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s water off a duck’s back.” “Oh, no,” they would say, “we couldn’t possibly do anything terrible like that to you.” So this whole issue of curses comes up this week, both at the beginning and the end of the session. What do we mean by it? Now, in those days of course, we know that people were in tremendous fear of the gods, whether the gods were idols, or indeed, whether they were Divine gods. And the Torah, for example, talks about the idea of Yirah, which is normally translated as the fear of God.

And that’s a horrible expression which offends me actually, because I don’t think we should be frightened at all. But the word Yirah does not just mean frightened or I’m scared, rather more, it means awe or respect. And it’s important to have respect. And if you have respect for somebody or are in awe of somebody, you don’t call them names or you don’t swear at them or anything like that. And so because of this idea of respecting God, the ancient world considered this as one of the ways of finding out what happens when things go wrong. When somebody is murdered, or killed, or stolen, or there’s a conflict and we don’t have any evidence, we use the idea of an oath, “I swear by God,” and this will help us clarify the situation. And therefore, people were terrified of incurring the wrath of God if they would somehow offend Him. In fact, in the ancient world, because God was the foundation of religion, the law and order of religion, that was something fundamentally important. Now we’re going to start off this week with Leviticus 24:10, with a part of the Torah, a narrative that always has disturbed me, and it goes like this, out of the blue, verse 10. The son of an Israelite woman, , but he’s the son of an Egyptian, a non-Jewish father. He’s out in front of everybody. And there’s a fight going on, between the son of the Israelite and another Israelite. In verse 11, and the son of the Israelite mother but not father, cursed the name of God. There are two words here, le-qal-lel, which is the sixth word along, is to curse, sorry, it’s seventh, and way-yiq-qov, which literally means to bring down, to undermine. And so they brought him to Moses to see what he was going to do.

And we’ll mention here, unusually, the name of the mother, and the name of the mother is Shelomith, interestingly from the word shalom, peace, Shelomith. But the daughter of Dibri. Dibri can mean anybody, it could mean the person who talks about, so she could be the daughter of a gossip, something like that, if you wanted to say, of the tribe of Dan. And we mention she’s the tribe of Dan. So with that information now, of these two verses, what are we discovering? Well, first of all, we’re discovering that people argue, that the idea of defining Judaism through who’s a Jew through the mother is a late arrival on the scene. And this proves very clearly, that it is the mother who defines the Jewish identity because the son is still called an Israelite through the mother. As you know, there was at a later stage, the question of whether you could define the father as the… Define Jewish identity going through the father, which has become now, if you like, accepted within reformed Judaism. But in the ancient world, at the time when the Torah was written, you had a dual system. You had the system of who defines being part of the Israelite community, but the Israelite community was then divided between tribes, different tribes, and your tribal identity went through the father. So this dual system existed clearly here. So the mother was Jewish, the son is Jewish, married an Egyptian, and therefore he does not belong to one of the 12 tribes. So he’s in a kind of a state of limbo, he’s in, but not quite in, which sadly is a phenomenon that we have in Israel today, quite significantly to those who are Israeli citizens and serving in the army, but might not be Jewish.

There are Christians serving in the army in Israel, and Jews, and other non-Jews, and there are Christians, but what happens when you are not a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim? What’s your identity? So identity politics was an issue then, and is an issue now. And so these two guys are having a fight, and the question is what are they fighting about? Because it seems that the fact that in verse 11 we mentioned the tribe, it was over a tribal issue. And so it seems that this young man is Jewish but he doesn’t belong to a tribe. He thought he would belong to his mother’s tribe, the tribe of Dan, which is in verse 11, but he’s being told, “No, you’re not in the tribe of Dan, you’re not here. Piss off, go somewhere else.” So this is the problem of identity, the problem of insecurity, the problem of somebody in a sense, feeling prejudice against that person. And if that is the reason, and we don’t know, this is speculation, this is rabbinic interpretation, we don’t know, we can feel a lot of sympathy for him. There might have been some other reason, but what whatever the reason was, the byproduct of it is he then turns on God, and in cursing God is basically saying, “To hell with the lot of you. I don’t identify with you, with your God, with your people. And if you tell me I shouldn’t curse, get lost, I’m going to curse ‘cause I feel like cursing.” So this was seen as a massive offence. Before we go on to the next stage, I want to point out that in the rabbinic interpretation, the rabbinic interpretation is that this coupling between the Israelite woman and the Egyptian was rape. She was raped by the Egyptian task master who could do whatever he wanted.

And therefore, in that sense, her relationship to her son was a disturbed relationship because he reminded her of the trauma she went through. But as always, as always, there were different rabbinic interpretations. And another rabbinic interpretation is in her name. Her name was Shelomith, but Dibri. In other words, she went around saying, “Hi, everybody. Shalom, Shalom.” Dibri, she gossiped and she chatted, and she chatted up the Egyptian, and she mixed with everybody, and that got her into trouble. She didn’t have constraint, which is rather unfair and implies, might imply, that she brought this upon itself, but that’s certainly not the issue in the Torah at all. Never is rape defended in the Torah, even if there might be some suggestion that the woman concerned was not as controlled as she should have been. So you have this situation where there is a problem of identity, there’s a problem of alienation, and the result of this is a curse. Well, by and large, one would sympathise I think, with the poor guy, and one would want to do something to make him feel a bit better. And what happens is, in verse 12, they put him into mis-mar, from lis-mo, to guard, to protect, or to hold. It’s not actually a jail, although it can be a jail, but jail as we have it, was not a biblical punishment. There’s no record of somebody being sentenced to a period in jail. Instead, they had a system of cities of refuge where you held somebody until trial. And during that time, they were a free agent within the city and they could be there with their family, they were not cut off from everybody.

So you didn’t have this penal system that we have now today, which causes such terrible side effects in denying families, the father or mother, whoever it is, while they are being living through their sentence. But mis-mar means a kind of a holding pen, “We’ll put you in custody until we sort out what we’re going to do,” because they didn’t know what the rule was. Now this is also interesting because according to many traditions, all the rules were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, every single one of them, and so he must have known the law. And yet, here’s an example of something that Moses didn’t know and that Moses did need to have clarification on, which underpins the idea that the process of revelation, in a sense, was an ongoing one. And that’s behind, of course, the idea of the oral law as well as the written law. So Moses does not know how to deal with this situation, maybe because he feels a great deal of sympathy for the poor guy. But anyway, in verse 13, God then speaks to Moses and comes out with this horrible verdict. Take out the guy who curses. Out of the camp. So, you know, we don’t want him here amongst us, take him out. And everybody who actually heard the curse has to put their hands on his head and say, “We heard it. This man is guilty.” Now that also seems a very strange issue. You might remember that when we were talking about sacrifices, we talked about the idea that when you brought an animal for a sacrifice, you would have to place your hands on the animal and say, in other words, “There but for the grace of God go I, you are replacing me. I should die, but you are going to die instead of me.”

Placing the hands has a lot of significance traditionally in Judaism. So for example, when you appoint a rabbi in the ancient days, the current system is slightly different now, but in the ancient days, semikha, putting your hand on somebody, was passing on the tradition and giving them a very important position. So placing hands was something positive. Here, placing hands is another way of involving the people who heard it, in a sense, atoning for having heard God’s name cursed, but also involves them in the process, saying the last thing we want is randomly blaming people. If you are going to blame somebody, you’ve got to be involved. You’ve got to face them face-to-face, and somehow touch them and sense that there’s a human being here. So this is a very, very serious matter. Anyway, they place their hands and the poor guy is put to death, stoned to death. Not quite in the way that in Monty Python they throw stones at him like that, but there is a form of death which is technically known as stoning, just as there’s a form of death called burning which doesn’t actually mean burning them at the stake in the way that we understand now. And this was all part of the rabbinic attempt to clarify what is seen in the Torah as brute and blunt, and ameliorate the aspects of it that we find a little offensive. But anyway, having said that, we then come with a new law, a law that was not mentioned in the Torah, a law which says, “Speak to the children of Israel, in verse 15, "And say if anybody, any person, curses their God, they are going to be guilty.” Cursing God is not acceptable.

And not only do they use the word ye-qal-lel, that we used upstairs for cursing, also uses the word nokhev, which as I said, is another word for curse, but it also means demeans. So any form of disrespect to the idea of God, which is the foundation of the Torah and the foundation of the Jewish religious tradition, mot-yu-mat, he’s end up dead and he has to be stoned, and this applies not only to the citizens, but to any stranger who is coming into the community who disrespects the community. So if you live in this community, you have to respect its rules, respect its foundation, which is God. And if you undermine God, you are undermining the rules and the foundation of the culture, of the religion, of the community, and therefore it is, like in a sense, the equivalent of heresy in the Catholic church. Something of that kind. So here you have an example where the term cursing is applied to God as a form of rejection, and that’s the incident that we have here that I’m going to come back to at a later date, later on today. But then the text goes on to say, in verse 17, and if somebody kills or strikes and produces the death, results in the death of a person, if you are killing an animal, you must pay, naphesh ta-hat naphesh, a soul against a soul. Is that an animal or a human?

And if a person then, somehow damages the body of another human being, causes an injury, then what he did should be done back to him. And now we come to this famous law, a restatement of something we had in Exodus, a break against a break. This is a new one. Normally we say, the next part, ayin ta-hat ayin, an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth, here we have a break for a break. So we’ve clarified, gone a bit further. In whatever way you have affected another person, such a thing should be done back to him. When it comes to an animal, it is financial compensation. . But when it’s a human being, it is death. Now, why are we simply constantly putting in, twice, that the animal, you don’t kill the animal, you pay? So surely, that indicates that payment is the compensation. But then it says, nephesh ta-hat nephesh, a soul for a soul, but yes, we just said the soul of an animal. And the soul of an animal therefore, in a sense, it’s a soul as much as anybody else’s, but we’re not saying they should be put to death. And so this is an example of rabbinic interpretation which says when you have a general rule and then that’s followed by a more specific rule, it is the specific rule that determines the general rule. So the specific rule here of financial compensation, according to them in the Talmud and their rationality, determines the same thing with regard to the general rule of a person. The constant mention of death and the constant mention of not offending God is part of the same principle. We are trying to say there are certain things that are so serious that in one sense, you stop being a normal member of the community, you are an, if you like, an exile or you are an outcast, and it’s more to do with that than actually killing somebody.

And again, if you look at the text of the Torah, you will see that the Torah stipulates that before you can do anything in a punitive sense, a person has to be warned in advance by two witnesses, and then the event has to be seen by two witnesses. And even then, when it comes to the court, you have to look for every possible way of letting this person off the serious crime. And so this terrible… Oh, I thought I turned my phone off. Obviously not. Now I have. And so therefore, the obvious implication is that these terms are used rather more to indicate seriousness rather than to be intended to be carried out as it sounds. But nevertheless, here you have the idea that we are talking about financial compensation and fair equivalent. The truth of the matter is, as we know very well, practically speaking, how do you determine a fair break to breaks? Who’s going to be the expert in knowing some bones break more than others? Or some eyes are not as good as others? And what’s the difference when somebody loses the… Puts out the eye of a guy with one eye, then they make him completely blind, does the other guy get to be completely blind as well? And tooth for a tooth, which tooth, how many teeth? A wisdom teeth, an teeth? Can you trade it with one that’s already been pulled out or not? All these things are examples of legalese. And remember that the Torah does include an element of legalese in addition to the great grand moral ethical issues that we were talking about before, and which the prophets emphasised not to the exclusion of the practical, but seeing the practical as a way to remind us of what we call the ethical.

So this also, he says, in verse 22, this rule has to apply fairly to everybody, rich or poor, strong or weak, because I am God, because God is saying, “This is part of my system.” And finally, having made this declaration and this warning to everybody, the conclusion in verse 23 is that God speaks to the children of Israel, they take the curser out of the camp, they stone him with stones, and the sons of Israels do as they were commanded by God, even if some of them might not have wanted to. And that’s why you have to say there is a superior ethical standard, we can feel sympathy for somebody, but the law is the law. And then just then, charity and being kind follows on that. And there we end chapter 24. And God then, in the next chapter, is giving a new series of laws that are applying now to coming into the land of Israel, which indicates that this is all in the first phase of the exile. When they go through coming out of Egypt, they get to Sinai where they have the law, they’ve been given the laws, we’ve expanded the laws to include both laws of religious ritual, laws of health and citizenship and the role of the priest, and then the ethical laws of what we call being a good person. Even though as, again, I mentioned before, great minds like Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz say, you can’t divide the Torah into ethical, civil law, different kinds of law. It doesn’t make sense. It’s all part of one integrated, holistic, total system. And that’s why the term Torah, the teaching, is this generic term, first of all for the five books of Moses, then for the Bible, and then for the oral law and the tradition that comes after it. And so nowadays we say, a Ben-Torah or But-Torah, somebody who is committed to Torah is committed to the Jewish way of life.

So, now we have an interesting series of laws. The first law, not surprisingly, talks about the land, we’re heading towards the promised land. And so God spoke to Moses, and it says on Mount Sinai, so that, people take to mean, this was given on Mount Sinai. And maybe it was, but you can’t say all laws were given on Sinai because the law we just learned about the curser came afterwards. So this is, if you like, implicit. Speak to the children of Israel and say, kita-bon, verse 2 of chapter 25, when you come to the land of Israel, , I give you, , and you, in a sense, rest the land. Shabbat ladunai, this is God commanding you to have a Shabbat for the land. So here we have an agricultural law, a Shabbat for the land. Just as Shabbat for people begins in Genesis and goes on from there, now we’re having something which is ordained by God for the land. You may plough your fields for six years. And for six years you can prune and take care of your vineyards. And gather in all the produce. But in the seventh year, , it’s going to be a sabbath. And again, this term Shabbat Shabbaton, as we had when we talked about the festivals and it talked about Shabbat itself, a Shabbat of Shabbats. So in other words, a real Shabbat. La-ha-res to the earth, the earth has to rest, so to speak. Don’t plant your fields. And don’t make sure that your vineyard is properly tended. So whether this is similar to the mediaeval concept of the rotation of crops, that you move around the crops so that they don’t exhaust the land. And here, instead of being a triennial, every three years, rotation, it’s a kind of a six year break. But it doesn’t say this is to the benefit, it just describes what it is and we have to interpret what the function of this was.

And so anything, in verse five, anything that’s left over, anything that’s on the tree or in the field, yeah? That is something that you may have, but nothing else. And you leave the earth to rest. And whatever the earth produces automatically without your effort, that is what you may eat. So if the fruit goes on producing fruit, you can take what’s gone on from a previous year. And this has to go to you, to your servants, to your maid servants, to your hired workers, and even to the strangers and the other people who are passing through the land. So this constant emphasis of including people who are not citizens, including people who are passing through, who are needy, and you have to provide for them. In addition to the fact that every year during the six year cycle, you have to leave for the poor and enable them to take advantage, this is now the seventh year, which it goes on, regardless of harvest or not for the whole of the year. And this is what is later known as shmita. Shmita literally means a release. It applies to slaves under a period of servitude, and it applies to the land. Shmita, release. You’re freeing the land from having to work for you or for you to work for it. And not only that every seven years, but in verse eight, , you should count , seven lots of seven years.

Seven years, seven times. And so there’s gain every 50 years, on the 49th year, you’re going to have a double year of shmita. This is something that we’re going to call the yovel, the jubilee. So you have the shmita the seventh year, and then you have the jubilee. Now, how they could manage for two years without the crops, a very difficult question, and it’s a debated issue that’s debated throughout the Torah, throughout the oral law, as to whether there ever actually was a yovel, whether there actually was a jubilee. But we don’t know, we have no proof, and this is all an expression of an ideal, so we need to look at the ideals. Now for thousands of years, the law of the shmita, of the seventh year release, was in abeyance because we were not settled on the land of Israel. And this was specifically for the land of Israel, not outside. But when agriculture started up again in the 19th century, this became an issue. Do we actually have to adhere to this idea of shmita? And there were two different opinions, which exists to this day in Israel. The Zionist rabbinate starting with those like Rav Kook, but even before that, before Rav Kook, believed that it was important to support agriculture in the land of Israel.

The farmers were poor, they could not afford to take a year off and leave the land fallow and not benefit from its produce, and so they found a way around the law. And there are many examples in Judaism of finding a way around the law. Now some people say this is cheating. And I remember once hearing a lecture that my father gave, in which he tried to give an analogy which I thought was rather cute, but it didn’t quite answer the question, in which he gave an analogy to a taxi driver in London during the war. And a taxi driver is driving his car when all of a sudden a bomb falls, a Nazi bomb falls on the road and blocks off the road. What does he do? Does he just carry on driving into the hole? Does he turn and give up the attempt to reach a destination? Or does he back down a bit and go round and find another way around the law? So he looked at going around the law not as something negative and derogatory, but rather a way of maintaining the idea of the law, 'cause the idea of the law is a great idea, that we should rest the land, and yet it’s impractical. So instead of scrapping the law, we keep the law and go round it. Nowadays, it’s fashionable to scrap a law. But remember, the tradition in Judaism is to preserve the ancient customs as, in a sense, as a symbol of the ideal, to retain the ideal. And this has been applied in areas such as commerce, where you are not allowed to lend money for interest. Can you find a way around this?

And there is, in this day and age, a way of finding a way around that. In the case of shmita, there was what was called Heter Mechira, that you could in a sense sell the land as we sell chametz on Pesach, sell the land notionally to a non-Jew for a year, on condition at the end of the year, if the sum isn’t paid up, the the sale is annulled. And this was what some rabbis, particularly the more Zionist ones, applied, and still apply to this day in Israel during the shmita year. The Haredi world in general, tends not to take this way out and they would rather buy, if you like, their food from the Arab farmers direct, or bring imported food into the country. So this idea of the seventh year release as well as the jubilee, are very important symbols of how one should respond to an agricultural life and combine it with a religious life. And there, as we say in verse six, there’s going to be this break for everybody, and in addition to that, everybody can take advantage of what comes naturally from the ground. And in verse nine, in this jubilee year, the jubilee year is going to start in the year of the jubilee, in the seventh month, the same month as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, they are sola khodash, on the 10th of the month, it is Yom Kippur. And , you should sound the sound of the shofar throughout your land in order to announce this extra year off. It’s interesting, this term, , to move the sound of the shofar, is used of Rosh Hashanah, although the term Rosh Hashanah is not applied, and it’s also used with regard to Shabbat, in terms of moving out of the area where you are on Shabbat, stay at home or in the local area, don’t go on a long road trip. And in verse 10, you should sanctify the 50th year, and you should call it, this is now the seventh word, der-ore.

Now this is an unusual word, it’s only used here, der-ore, it’s a very, very common Israeli name today, and a very lovely name. But least literally, der-ore in one sense, can and is translated as a kind of a release which is a negative. But there are ways of taking this word as meaning der-ore, a generation to continue into the future. So this way of taking the time off is to ensure that you have a great future. And so der-ore then, is a wonderful name to give to a Jewish child in Hebrew. That is, then goes back to say, “Ah, yes, we call it a der-ore, a release, but it’s yovel, it’s still a jubilee.” So one is if you like the primary name, and the other is the more looser, wider, general name. So the 50th year is going to be that lo-tizra'u again, no planting, lo-tiq-seru, no reaping, that’s , the produce, , and don'ts try to deal with the vines or anything like that. Ki yovel, it is a jubilee. You can only eat what grows naturally. And , everybody goes back to where they came from. Now, what does that mean? Everybody should go back to where they came from. Well, if you remember, initially, when they moved into the land of Israel, they did it in stages. Tribes conquered certain areas and settled there, and other tribes had to go on until they got theirs. But in the Torah, as we’re going to see later on, before he dies, Moses describes how we’re going to divide the land of Israel up into tribes.

So this tribal division was very important, and it’s going to come up again and again as to how you make a fair division between tribes. But what the bible at this early stage said was we’re going to make this division, each tribe has to be confined to its own tribal area. But what happens when for example, either you move away from one tribe, out of the country, or to another tribe? Or land gets stolen? Or land gets, in a sense, sold to somebody else? You can sell out of your area. But as we are going to see, there are certain laws that allow for tribes to redeem their land. And what we are saying here is that end of this period of the jubilee, all land goes back to where it originally was designed to be according to Moses and then Joshua carrying it out. Now the issue of do we know exactly where it was, how it was, when it worked, did it work, is not the point. The point here is that we should not think in terms of selling land forever, permanently, of not allowing people who are rich to accumulate vast amounts of property at the expense of other people. And this is a very, very important principle, and it goes on to clarify this in verse 15. According to the year of the jubilee, you may sell and buy as much as you particularly want. So in other words, to use the English expression, this is leasehold as opposed to freehold. You are always selling land for a period of time, but never absolutely permanently. Which is why English law on this issue, in fact, borrows from the original laws of the Torah about not selling perfectly. In verse 16, according to the numbers of years, to this period of the shmita or to this period of the yovel, you reduce the amount you have to pay to buy it back. And according to the number of years, you always sell with a limit. Verse 17.

And here’s a very important issue. This is a separate law. You should not cheat, deceive, oppress your neighbour in matters of commerce. Whether it’s acquiring land, acquiring it under pressure, whether it is deceitful language, this word tow-nu in verse 17, the second one, means oppressing in any form possible, including words, or , oppressing by calling people names, insulting them, affecting them, demeaning them. Any form of oppression, verbal or physical, is forbidden. You should respect God. In other words, do this because this is the Divine will, and you don’t want to offend God, certainly not in those days, and ideally not now. And , I’m the Lord your God, and I’ve given you my laws, and my rules, and my commandments. And notice all, again, these different words, choq, which is a statute, normally without an explanation, or without logic. Mishvat, which is sometimes translated as civil law. And of course the mitzvot, the ritual laws. And if you do this, the , an important principle, 18, you will live in safety on the land. In other words, if you are living an ethical life and you are caring about each other, you are not oppressing each other, you are not allowing rich to become too rich or the poor to become too poor, you want a fair, just, equal society, then you will live on the land in safety. And the land, in verse 19, will give its fruit, and you will eat to be satisfied, and you will live safely on the land. In the context of where we are today, this is a frightening statement.

Basically, it is why we say we lost the first state, the first temple. We lost the second state, the second temple. One was 2,500 years ago, the other one was 2,000 years ago. We were driven off our land, and we were driven off our land, according to the prophets, because we were not ethical, we were not caring about the nature of our society. And here we are in a situation now, where we live under threat and we are a divided society, and in many respects, an unfair society, and people are not working together sufficiently. And the question is, is this something that could happen again? And the very thought terrifies me. So, live on the land. And so then, the Torah asks a good question. This is all very good, it sounds fine in theory, but in verse 20, , if you are going to say, , then what are we going to eat in the seventh year? If we don’t cultivate the land and gather it in. And God says, , “I will bless you.” So we’ve got the opposite of a curse, we’ve got the bless. I will bless you in the sixth year. Don’t worry, the sixth year has always been a very good year. You’re going to have a surplus. A bit like Joseph, remember, in the land of Egypt when he talks about the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine? That you’ve got gather in when there’s plenty for the years when there isn’t, and gathering enough for three years, the years when you stop, beforehand, the years when there’s food, then the years when it stops, and then you’ve got the third year when you have a double year in 50 years, and I’ll bless everything in those three years.

And then when you seed in the eighth year or the year after, you will still have enough leftover from the previous and from, . 22 has this important line, you will seed, plant the fruit, the produce in the eighth year, and you will eat from the te-bu-ah ya-san, from old produce that will be stored up from before, , until you come to the ninth year when you’ll finally get this extra produce in. It seems a long way to go, a long way to trust. But here we have, in verse 23, a very important principle. You must not sell the land permanently, forever, permanently. Because you are visitors on my earth, and therefore it’s my earth and it comes back to me, and I want you to realise the temporariness of your position. And this is a way of equalising the earth and your society, by going back to remove all injustice and excess of materialism, and not to think you own the land. You are, in a sense, custodians of the land.

And this is important also, in terms of our concern at this moment with ecology, and what our attitude to the land is, to say that we are custodians. Now, whether this is a practical solution or not is open to debate. And when we live as we do in a life, in a world in which agriculture is not as fundamental to each country as another because food is transported from other places all the time, and whereas once in the early days of the state of Israel, it depended absolutely on the kibbutzim and on agriculture, nowadays not so much, although agriculture still plays a very, very important part in Jewish life and life in Israel commercially, with all the innovations around water and, again, agriculture in different ways that take place there. So it’s very, very important. But on the other sense, we are not as dependent as we once were. So that then talks about the land and the land taking a break. And at that moment, we’ll take a break and continue with this, please God, next week, and I will turn now to questions and answers.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Lindy asked who the violinist was in the Bruch Adagio that I was playing before.

A: It was a man called Salvatore Accardo, and it was with the Leipzig Orchestra.

Susan, “The fight might have been a result of a racial slur, half cast. To this day, Asian and India people disdain those of mixed race.” Yes, they do, and and I think that is horrific and it should not be. And the fact of the matter is that even though we do draw a distinction between people born Jewish, it’s not a racial distinction. So anybody can change, and anybody no matter what race or religion, can become a full and absolute equal member of the Jewish people. So we are not racial, but we do want membership of people who join us, who are committed.

Q: Philip asks, “Unrelated to today’s , why is there a pay or summagh after several verses in the Chumash?”

A: That’s a very good question. When you look at the Hebrew text of the Torah, you will see that there is a difference between, let me get this for you, if I can find… Where did I put my handy text? I thought I had it here somewhere. I thought I had it handed. I seem to have mislaid it. When you look at the Hebrew text of the Torah, it has no vowels, it has no paragraph ends or beginnings. It’s all a solid block of text. But some cases, there is a gap, and in some cases, there is no gap. When there is a gap, there is a letter pay, which means patuage, to indicate to the scribe that we leave a gap here. And when there is a summagh, this means it’s closed. It means that even though you might think there ought to be a gap here because of the subject, in fact, the tradition is that it is closed. And these are all marks that come from the Masoretic texts from the Masorites, who then standardised not only the text of the Torah, but how it was actually written.

Q: Graham asks, “The text seems clear that someone who kills a human being should be put to death. Do people who try to live a Torah way of life want to use the death penalty?”

A: Graham, if you go back 2,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, you have rabbis like Rabbi Akiva, who said if ever a court of law puts somebody to death, they would be called a bloody court of law. If I were in charge, I would never put anybody to death. There were other rabbis at the time, who disagreed and said, yes, we should retain the death penalty, but we make it as difficult as possible to ever carry it out. And so as I mentioned before, you cannot, according to the Torah, carry out a death penalty if the person hasn’t been warned, if there isn’t actual evidence, you can’t use circumstantial evidence. And even so, you look for every opportunity not to, and therefore it was not practical as such, but rather more an indication of the seriousness of the crime.

Q: So Susan asked, “What did people do for all these years?”

A: Well, the Torah says they stored up the food, they prepared in advance, they knew what they were doing, and they would spend the time off either studying or maybe doing some other kind of business that didn’t involve agriculture. So it’s a purely agricultural thing. Maybe they opened pubs, or bars, or restaurants, or something.

Q: Shelly asked two questions, “Isn’t there a midrash that Dinah, the daughter of Leah, gets raped by Shechem because she left her family and went out to see the daughters of the land?” Second, “Some children of Etrog convert and go with the children of Israel to Canaan. Where do they live if land inheritance goes through the father’s tribe?”

A: Well, Shelly, that’s a very, very good question. First of all, you are right, there is a midrash which says that Dinah almost brought it upon herself by going out into the public arena as a tourist and shouldn’t have done that. But, you know, that is just one midrash, and there are others that wouldn’t accept that point of view. But then you go on to ask about what other people come into the land Canaan, where do they live? And remember, we’ve been talking all the time about the stranger living in the land, and so there’s no question that the stranger can’t buy land. And when those who did convert, and there’s a debate as to whether they did or not and to what extent, they were able, when they moved into the land, to take possession of their plot of land. And there was areas that you could still, how we say, the specific area of the land of Israel where the Israelites settled when they came from Egypt included areas, for example, trans Jordan where two and a half tribes settled, and others who could not find or could not agree with other tribes where to go and settle that moved to different parts of the land from place to place. So where did they live? Did they buy land? Did they rent land? Well, as in our day, different ways of finding accommodation when you move into another land, but they had to be treated equally according to the law.

Carla, “Every week I learn something new.” Every week I learn something new. Thank you, too.

Shelly, “As per Joseph and the family in Egypt, to get food stored in the years of plenty during the famine years of Egypt, they had to sell to Pharaoh and basically become his serfs.” Yes, but you wouldn’t have to do that. That wasn’t the only way. You could gather food in without necessarily making a slave of yourself. Yuthrow, wonderful. Thank you, I’m so glad you appreciate it. You are very important part of my audience.

Q: Richard, “What’s the meaning of pronounce the name of Lord? Does that mean the Tetragrammaton?”

A: It means two things. You are right, there is the name of God which is Yud, Hey, and Vav Hey, which in English sometimes like to say is Jehovah, but there’s no “J” sound in Judaism, just the “Y”. And we don’t know for certain what it was, the one that was only pronounced once by the high priest on Yomki Day of Atonement in the Holy of Holies. And so, yes, the implication is you are using this personal name of God. There are other names like Elohim, Eal, Elohi, which are generic terms for God, the gods of other nations. But Yud, Hey, Vav Hey, the so-called Tetragrammaton, the word of the tetra of the numbers of the letters in the name could not be pronounced, that’s why we say Adonai when we pronounce it. And don’t even say Adonai, we say Hashem. And that is the name that you are punished for, not any of the other ones. That’s a debate. So thank you, everybody. End of the day. We’ll see you next week.