On Tuesday June 25th, 2024, a group of Intellectuals gathered at the home of Marlene and Dan Arbess to explore the genius of Talmudic thought. The event was opened by Shabtai member Matt Beck and moderated by Dan Arbess. Rabbi Shmully Hecht and Liel Leibovitz led the discussion on the Talmud.
Liel Leibovitz is an Israeli journalist, author, media critic, and video game scholar. He earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. In 2014, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Leibovitz serves as editor-at-large for the online American Jewish publication Tablet magazine.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht is the founder of Shabtai, the global Jewish leadership Society based at Yale University. In 1996, he was ordained as a Chabad Rabbi in Melbourne Australia and has taught a Talmud reading group at Yale Law School.
In celebration of the upcoming festival of Shavuot 5786, the historic day of the Revelation at Sinai, Gutnick Academy is honored to release this film.
Talmudic Genius Film
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Matt Beck: Hi everybody. My name is Matt Beck. I am a rising third year at the Yale Law School and going to be a member of Shabtai this coming year. My last year in university. Before I start kind of diving into just the beginning of the evening, I would like to ask if everybody could turn their phone off. It's a custom of ours at Shabtai events to make sure that everybody is fully engaged. But, yeah, I just wanted to quickly say, Shabtai was one of the first communities, actually, that I got to know when I came to law school. There was a dinner one night with Judge Boggs from the Sixth Circuit and I had the pleasure, of course, to meet Shmully and Toby that evening. And it's really been, I think, my favorite home at Yale University since I've been there. It's certainly one of the only places on campus, I think, where folks can speak freely and openly and exchange ideas in good faith, which is so vital for any student, but especially an aspiring lawyer. And I'm so excited to be joining the community as a member this coming year, to be able to hopefully give back and help coordinate some of the dinners that we host. But this evening, I really wanted to thank Dan and Marlene for hosting us.
Matt Beck: So graciously, one of the things that, I think is most amazing about Shabtai is the fact that not only do we host events with such interesting speakers in New Haven, at the Anderson Mansion, with students at the university on any given Tuesday or Friday night, but we also host events across the country and world, from New York to Boston to Israel and everywhere else in between. So thank you both so much for having us. And this evening, I'm very excited for the conversation that we're going to be having between Shmully and our guest, Liel Leibovitz. They're going to be speaking about the Talmud, and I had the pleasure to participate in a crash course on Judaism with Shmully this past semester over bagel and Lox every Sunday morning. And one of the things that I asked him about every week was if we could really dig into the text, which again, as a law student, you love to do. And I see that he's brought along quite a lot of flyers to pass out tonight, so we'll all get the chance to do a little bit of interpretive reading, I guess, of the text as well. I'll pass over to Dan really quickly just to say a few remarks. But again, thank you all so much for being here with us this evening.
Dan Arbess: Thank you very much, Matt. It's a real privilege for us, first of all, to meet all of you, all of you are exceptional- all of you are exceptional in different ways. I want to start by thanking my wife, of course, for hosting all of us. And I want to give a special thanks to my three kids, Ethan, Matthew and Sophia, because this is my Father's Day gift. They said, what would you like for Father's Day? I said, I want you to come. Please come to this event with Rabbi Shmully and with Liel Leibovitz because it will be great. Okay. So my task here, I mean, Shmully invited me to, you know, to do the honors of interviewing Liel, but I thought it made a lot more sense for Shmully to interview Liel. What I want to do is simply say how much I respect and appreciate Toby and Shmully and Shabtai, which I've come to know relatively recently. And when I think about Shabtai, what I think about is courage. You guys have the courage to speak the truth, to speak to people who don't agree with you and have the impact of being able to convert them on campuses and in cities in private events like this one. That's really in short supply. Too many people in our society, are in their own corner talking to their own people who already agree with them. I personally can't think of any endeavor that's more useless than that. What we have to do is reach out to people who have a different perspective, a different set of views, a different set of experiences. Okay, in that regard, I want to take a moment to introduce our guest of honor tonight. And my kids know that I'm not really much of a groupie, but I am a massive groupie for Liel Leibovitz. I mean, I'm like Alana Newhouse, the founder of Tablet Magazine, basically says that I'm sweet because I'm so effusive about Tablet and Liel and.
And what we've done to you.
Dan Arbess: But, okay, I'm in that phase of my life, right? So Liel, I'm not going to give you his whole fascinating background, but I strongly encourage you to talk to him about it and to look it up, because he is truly a fascinating individual. And I would say certainly one of, if not the most interesting, erudite public Jewish intellectual on the scene anywhere in the world right now. And he skips between US, Israel, Europe interchangeably. You know, in my mind, for my I don't want to age myself overly here, but okay, he's some mash up improvement on Leon Wieseltier, Charles Krauthammer and Ruth Weiss. Okay. Who were big thinkers of our generation. Liel's official position is that he's the editor at large of Tablet magazine. If you haven't read Tablet, I suggest you just read it once and you'll never stop reading it. I mean, I can't wait to get it, you know, every day. Liel-.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Pitching for the book?
Dan Arbess: Yeah, we're going to do that. We're going to get there. I was just about to get there. Okay. Liel does multiple things. Okay, he writes, he runs the unorthodox podcast and recently has started writing D'varim Torah in English in a very sophisticated, accessible way for Tablet magazine every week. Just to give you a sense of the breadth of his intellectual activities, just a couple of things that I read in the last kind of year and a half from Liel. Right before the war, maybe two or three months before the war, he wrote a brilliant piece arguing that Israel had to begin to wean itself off U.S. assistance that is tied to the sale of US weaponry and become independent for its defense needs. We're right in the middle of the absolute necessity of doing that right now. And I'm talking this was it must have been last summer. It was well before the war started. Then, Liel wrote, Marlene and I are from Montreal, so excuse me, but he wrote a tremendous piece on Jewish Montreal, which is really very interesting because we as Jews from Montreal were sort of minorities within minorities, right? We grew up at a time of real French nationalistic fervor. So did Max's uncle, who lived down the street from me. Okay. I was best friends with Max's uncle. We were partners in the DJ business. We did everyone's bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteens. But being an anglophone Jew in Montreal in the 1970s was a unique experience and gave you a unique, let's call it, understanding of outsiderness that has stayed with us. Apart from the bagels which were highlighted in Liel's article also.
Which are the best.
Dan Arbess: Which are, of course, the best. Okay, Liel, I remember the podcast that he did recently on a Netflix series, which I highly recommend called Abnormal, starring the grandson of Moshe Dayan as a sort of neurotic, frustrated journalist who can't quite put out a fake book. That's how I feel about trying to write a book, which I've been talking about doing for the last 25 years. And finally, the latest article, at least the latest article that I've read, which Liel published last week, was maybe the best demonstration of all, where he, in a book review of a book called Knife about the attack on Salman Rushdie, opened with several paragraphs referring to Rabbi Elazar, who we all know from the Passover Haggadah, because the Rabbi Elazar, as you remember from the story of Passover, is sitting around with a bunch of other rabbis. These are all guys from the Second Temple era, and they're debating and talking about the story of Passover. And then a young student comes in and says, well, hold on a second, guys. It's time to say the Sh'ma. So then there was a whole debate over what takes precedence. And I'll leave to you guys to find the answer to that. Or maybe Ruby will tell us, but we, you know, I think if I recall correctly, the sh'ma takes precedence over the story of Passover at the Seder. Correct.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The Sh'ma includes the story of Passover.
Dan Arbess: It does, but it's time to say the Sh'ma. So you have to stop telling the story after staying up all night.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: There's actually a Talmudic debate about whether you can say the Sh'ma and fulfill a part of the Mitzvah.
Dan Arbess: Okay, so. So so we're going to get there and we're getting closer to the topic of tonight. Okay.
Liel Leibovitz: It's all about losing yourself.
Dan Arbess: Yeah. So this article that Liel wrote for this week's edition of Tablet Magazine was basically, I mean, it talked it had some tremendous disclosures about the redemption of this rabbi, who it turns out was, I don't know how to describe it, I mean, he liked women. And, you know, he died seeking forgiveness. It was about being human, Liel's article was, and it tied the human frailties and shortcomings of this rabbi to the recovery of Salman Rushdie and his finding out what it meant to be human by nearly dying in this attack, and by helping, being helped to recover by his wife. So Liel Leibowitz wrote this book, How Talmud Can Change Your Life. I am, okay, I've been- I was raised in a secular family and I've been on a journey for many, many, many years. Not sort of crazy over the top Ba'al Teshuvah, but steadily learning more. And, you know, I'm there with Torah. I'm there with Mishnah. Where I start to find resistance is in Gemara. So we're going to learn tonight, I hope, from Rabbi Shmully and from Liel what's what. Where the lines are drawn? You know, we have the the ten statements, okay, which we know referred to as the Ten Commandments, but they're not really ten commandments. We have the Oral Torah that was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. And then we have the rabbinical interpretation over the years. We have two Talmuds, the Babylonian era Talmud and the Jerusalem era Talmud. And then we have rabbis that have been going for thousands of years arguing over interpretations of those. Where do you draw the line? How far do you go because there's no end to how much you can learn. And it's all really interesting. And I have to tell you as an amateur student, it's all really fascinating. And what we're going to learn is it's all very much relevant. So I'm sorry for that lengthy introduction, Shmully, but I'm going to turn it back over to you now. And now we're going to listen.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm actually Liel, thank you so much, Marlene and Dan and the rest of the family. Thank you all for welcoming us to your home. I'm going to let you start, but I do want to open with, if possible. Is that a candle, in that glass cup?
Toby Hecht: Shmully, I think your mic'd.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Oh I'm mic'd correct. Thank you, Toby. So I got a text message on my way here. Toby was driving from New Haven, and I got a text message from a dear friend who happens to be sitting to my left, who's Jack Boger and it said- and Jack also came down from New Haven. Jack is at the Yale Divinity School at Yale, and a dear friend of ours, and he said, today is the yahrtzeit, the anniversary of the passing of my Jewish grandfather Milton Pascaner?
Jack Boger: Pascaner.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Pascaner. Known as Micha'el. Micha'el to our people. Could we please light a candle for him together at some point tonight in his memory? And so I thought it would be a great Z'chus (merit) to open the evening by, actually. Is that okay?
Dan Arbess: Yeah. Do you want to say Kaddish, too?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Maybe we could do that at the end of the evening? You're supposed to say Kaddish after learning.
Toby Hecht: First you learn, by the way.
Dan Arbess: That's the Rabanan (version of Kaddish).
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So, we're just going to light the candle, in memory.
Dan Arbess: Shmully, you say the Rabanan after you learn.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.
Dan Arbess: Do you want to say Kaddish?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We can do it.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Okay.
Toby Hecht: Liel, do you want a top up?
Liel Leibovitz: Sure. Thank you.
Toby Hecht: I'm going to just bring you a new one.
Dan Arbess: By the way, today is the 15th anniversary, literally today, of the establishment of Tablet. We're celebrating that, too.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I would just introduce Liel by saying that I actually was forwarded that article that you mentioned tonight about Israel weaning itself off American support by someone. And it was actually the context of a very dear friend of mine, Vivek Ramaswamy, who's a Yale alum of Shabtai who believes the same thing and actually advocates for it, which raised a lot of controversy. And after having read so many of your pieces, Liel, it was that one I believe that triggered me to call our office, Holly, and say, we got to get Liel up here. And you did come up so kindly, schlepped up to New Haven, as we say, and delivered a fantastic talk over Shabbat dinner for our students. And as you reminded me tonight, didn't get served dinner until 2:00 in the morning. But that's sort of a compliment. That's how you know it's a good event.
Dan Arbess: Did you eat anything?
Liel Leibovitz: I didn't need to. I was nurtured by, you know, the energy and it was fantastic.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And the only regret I had about the evening was that we didn't have a recording of it. So that's one of the wonderful things about Shabbos. It lives on in your mind and heart and soul. And for those who were in the room. But I said, we have to do this. We have to have you again. And you were kind enough again to agree to talk here. And thanks to Dan and Marlene and the family, we are here tonight. So thank you very much. It's all yours.
Liel Leibovitz: It is a great pleasure. Though I feel that with such effusive introductions, I am absolutely bound to disappoint. So I apologize in advance. But traditionally, Dan, thank you so much. It is not often in dark times like these that you could actually be in a room with people and feel truly inspired, truly moved by just a company of people who are here for all the right reasons. And this is not a minor thing. It's not a trifle because things are indeed very grim. And so I wish to start by doing the thing that I think our people have always done when things got dark, which is tell you one of my favorite jokes. So right outside Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome, the Vatican, there were these two beggars. One of them looks a lot like me, with a big, scraggly beard and payos (side curls) and a big black hat. He's dressed exactly like a Chasidic Jew. And next to him sits a gentleman with his head shaved just so, with a big wooden cross on his chest. And they each have a tin cup in front of them. And as the day goes on, people walk by. And this being Vatican City, you could imagine, you know, what happens. And so it's now 5:30 p.m., and one of the bishops on his way home from the office, walks by and sees these two gentlemen, and he sees the one with his head shaved and the big cross sitting there with a cup filled with coins and bills, and he sees the guy with the beard and the black hat and the payos, and his cup is empty, and he feels the bishop does a sort of surge of good Christian charity.
Liel Leibovitz: And he walks over to the man with a black hat and a beard, and he puts his hand on his shoulder and he says, son, this is the Vatican. You may know we are Christians here, my boy. And, you know, as you can see, the person sitting next to you, the Christian has his cross and that is why he is receiving more money. So if I may suggest that tomorrow you may pick a different place to ply your fare. And the beggar says nothing, and the bishop walks away, and when he's just out of earshot, the beggar with the beard and the black hat, looks at the other one and says, Ha! Look who's telling the Goldberg brothers how to run their business! I love this joke, because it seems to me to capture a profound essence of what it is that we do when the world seems to rise and crush us. And for so long, this has been exactly the story of the Jewish people tucked away in some dusty corner of the Middle East under the thumb of a succession of empires that sometimes were indifferent, often were, you know, malicious and very rarely were benevolent. We had to come up with some sort of way with some, to quote my Rebbe, Elazar HaKohen, better known to some as Leonard Cohen, another fine Montreal Jew.
Liel Leibovitz: We had to come up with a manual for living with defeat, a way of being in the world specifically and precisely when things got crushing. And what we did was deliver onto humanity the greatest self-help book ever written, the Talmud, which is a ridiculous thing to say about a work that is 2,147 pages long in 63 volumes. It is now late June. If you're looking for a perfect beach summer read, may I suggest not the topic. Terrible. Also not very comfortable to travel with. I did it once. The overhead and you know, extra pay are intense. This is a book that, at first glance, was not really designed to give any real comfort to real humans. But once you stop and consider what it does and the circumstances under which it was conceived, you understand just what a great, quoting Leonard again, engine for survival this thing truly is. And so let us since Dan suggested or brought up that great moment in the Passover Seder. Let us look like every good superhero at the origin story of the Talmud, because it begins right there in the scene that you describe. Most of us, if you're anything like me, rush through these bits in the Passover Seder because we know there's a brisket awaiting.
Liel Leibovitz: And so we want to read as fast as we humanly can to get to the meat and then maybe call it a night. But when you look at this moment, you see these rabbis and they're sitting there and it's Elazar Ben Azaryeh and all these guys are sitting there in Bnei Brak and they're discussing. All night, they're talking. And at some point you have to wonder if you're even a little bit curious. And again, the Haggadah, like the Talmud, does everything in its power to be impenetrable for reasons that will soon become clear. Who are these guys? What are they talking about? And when you stop to contemplate who they were, you realize that they were men living in the darkest moment in Jewish history. Because for 538 years, the temple stood in Jerusalem. In fact, the temple was Judaism. You were Jewish if you went to the temple on the occasions that were prescribed. If you offered the sacrifices like you should do, that was the element, the basis of Temple based Judaism. And anyone who has not read the greatest masterpiece of Hebrew literature in the last 50 years, the, what is it in English? It's hard for me.
The Ruined house.
Liel Leibovitz: The Ruined House. I know it, Habyit Shenech'rav, in Hebrew. Ruby's book, which has a lot to do with temple work, this is Ruby Namdar. You should absolutely read it. But the point is that you couldn't be culturally Jewish. Back then, you could say, well, you know.
Dan Arbess: Just to be clear. That's Ruby, the author.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: That is the author of the book.
Liel Leibovitz: Back then, you could not say, well, you know, I like bagels and Seinfeld, so I guess I'm Jewish. You had temple life, and then the temple was destroyed. And it's an extinction level event that I think even those of us who have had a very hard time grappling with the aftermath of October 7th need to kind of stop and look at a perspective, because that was a moment in which Jews said, okay, well, what now? For five centuries, we did the thing that we no longer physically can do. And then these amazing rabbis, these five guys and some other, you know, help, assist from some other geniuses, came up to two incredible conclusions. The first is that you could take Judaism and put it all in a book, which if we're here tonight, I think it is a very appealing idea for a lot of us nerds, because how often is it that we read a book that feels so much more real and lifelike to us than the reality we happen to be experiencing outside? That alone would have been a great insight, Dayainu (it is sufficient for us). But then it's a question. Okay, well, then how do you do it? If you tasked a minor mind like myself with, okay, well, go ahead and put all of Judaism in the book, I would say, okay. well, I guess I'm going to write down the rules, I suppose. So here's a list of foods that we don't eat. Here's a list of food we totally eat. Here's a list of food we only not eat on one week of the year, and this would have been my guide.
Liel Leibovitz: All the things that we're supposed to do. But the rabbis were truly men of great insight into the human psyche, and they understood precisely what human beings would do if you just gave them a list of laws and rules and regulations. They would say, ehm, maybe that bit did about electricity was really true then when electricity was, you know, when you had to start a fire and it was a lot of work, you had to rub sticks together or whatever. But nowadays it's like a flick of a switch. That doesn't apply to me. I don't, I'm not sure about this rule. I don't like that one. And before you know it, none of these rules are kept. So they came up with a second and even more profound insight, which is instead of writing down rules, they wrote down arguments, which is what this amazing book is. It is a collection of cantankerous Jews screaming at each other. It's like the greatest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that goes on for thousands of pages. And my favorite thing to do is when someone would come and say, well, it looks really interesting, what are you learning? And I'd say, I'm learning this, this issue. And I would share the question and they would say, oh, it's a really interesting question. What's the answer? The answer? What a profoundly un-Jewish thing to say.
Liel Leibovitz: We do not care for the answer. And here is the amazing thing not caring for the answer is actually a deeply philosophical superpower. Look at my beard. I'm old enough to remember that getting fast delivery on the internet meant you got your stuff within a week. Then it was two days, two day delivery, then next day delivery, then same day delivery. Now we have services that you know deliver stuff like 15 minutes to your door. And I think it's only a matter of time before Amazon basically ships you the things that you want before you buy them, because they know already what you're going to do. And look, it's great. I'm guilty of, you know, this convenience addiction as much as the next guy. But there is something about this fast, shallow and or fast, flat and facile life that really robs the world of extra layers of truth and beauty. Because the thing that really makes us special and great is that we stop and ask, wait a minute, what is the question? What is it that we're really asking? What is the essence? Which is something that the Talmud does exceedingly well. So what's in this book? We will soon have an amazing taste. And so I won't spoil any of the pleasures of actually reading and learning by Rabbi Shmully. But the answer is, quite frankly, everything. Because it is a book about humanity, and nothing human is foreign to it. One of my favorite anecdotes, for example, deals very much with the body, which is a subject that occurs repeatedly in the Talmud and really differentiates us from a lot of other religious texts.
Liel Leibovitz: It's a great story in the midrash about Rabbi Hillel the Elder. You may remember him from such aphorisms as if I'm not for myself, etc. truly the GOAT greatest of all time. And one day he gets up in the Bet Midrash, and he says to his Talmidim, to his students, behold for I'm now going to- I'm now going to do a mitzvah, and the students are blown away. And it's not every day that the master says, I'm going to teach you some new trick. And he gets up and they get up, and he walks around and they follow him, and he walks into the bathroom and disclaimer, this is the Talmud. I'm not being gross. He goes number two. Students stand outside the door, completely stunned, and he comes out. One of them gets the courage to speak and says, Rabbi, you said something about a mitzvah, what's going on? And Hillel looks at him and says, do you think that if I had not done what I just did in there, do you think I could stand here before you and teach you Torah? A body that cannot poop, cannot pray. And that is such an amazing insight, especially for those of us who try all the time to, you know, get, get above the body, Get out of this, you know, corporeal shell.
Liel Leibovitz: Be holy. Be pure. Be kind of at one with the universe. Here's the Talmud saying we're people. We should enjoy everything. There's a reason why my book about the Talmud starts with a fart joke from the Talmud, because it has that, and it's important that it has that. But I want to share one anecdote that I thought was very meaningful because, you know, I knew that we're going to be here today. And I know that the question that seems to be first and foremost in a lot of people's minds is like, okay, well, then if it's such a great guide, such a great self-help book. We could kind of use some self-help book about now. These are not easy times, tell us. What does the Talmud have to teach us in the aftermath of October 7th? And there's an amazing account, because the Talmud is many things. It is, by the way, preposterous to refer to it as a book. My friend Jonathan Rosen wrote a great book called The Talmud and the Internet, and he called it a drift net for catching God, which I think is about as good a definition as I've ever heard. But there's one anecdote in it about another very great Rabbi, Yohanan Ben Zakkai, the leader of the Jewish community in the time of the destruction of the temple. And I'm going to share this out a little bit with you because I think it teaches us three really, really important lessons on how to live right now in this moment of profound brokenness.
Liel Leibovitz: And so the Romans are laying siege to Jerusalem and through a truly cinematic, Indiana Jones like sequence of events, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai manages to escape. He hides himself in a coffin. He covers himself in rotting materials, so he smells like a corpse. And there's a lot of action packed sequences going on, and he manages to come in front of the then Roman general, soon to be Roman Emperor Vespasian. And the Emperor looks at this wise old man whose reputation is indeed great, and he says, okay, because you are the great Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, ask me, what is it that you want? Now again, a lesser mind such as myself would have said, dude, one thing. Please don't destroy Jerusalem. End of story. Goodbye. But Yohanan Ben Zakkai, thankfully, is smarter. He knows you cannot ask a Roman to not be the Roman. You cannot ask the world to stop turning. And so he asks Vespasian for three things. And there are three things that I think we should really take to heart today. The first thing was this. He says, look, I understand you're going to destroy Jerusalem. Fine. I would like to take a few Torah scholars and move them to the city in central Israel called Yavneh, so that we can build the Bet Midrash there and can continue our studies. How many of us these days find ourselves absolutely stricken by what has happened to the schools we used to go to? The political parties we used to support? The newspapers we used to read?
Liel Leibovitz: Could you believe the New York Times? Oh my God, look at Columbia. There's Hamas and Hezbollah flags. Oh, wow. Like New York City streets are like violent demonstrations. I don't recognize this place anymore. We have this moment of complete heartbreak because so many of the institutions that used to mean everything to us, in fact, institutions that used to define us are collapsing. And here's Yohanan ben Zakkai saying institutions sometimes collapse. In fact, here's Bet Hamikdash, here's the temple, here's the physical home of God on earth, and it is breaking down. And you know what? That's fine. Because the thing that we want, it's not the institution, it's the practice. It's not the university, it's the education. It's not the New York Times, it's the journalism. And we can continue to do that anywhere, let's continue in Yavneh, which for my money, pretty great fricking insight. But that was only getting started. The second thing he asked for is, okay, I would like for you to save the family of Rabban Gamaliel, Hillel's grandson. Kind of the Talmudic Kennedy's, the kind of royal family, because, again, Yohanan Ben Zakkai was very smart. He knew that if he simply moved the Jews from Jerusalem to Yavneh, the Jews would do what we always do, would be like, you know, I like the old place better.
Liel Leibovitz: It had better atmosphere, the food. It's not the same here somehow. It's not the same since they moved, which is what we always do. He understood how important it was to root us in tradition so that people understand, hey, look, it's the same family. It's the same Rabban Gamaliel, whose father was this guy and whose grandfather was this guy doing the same thing. It's the same people keeping the same customs and practices. And this invitation to root ourselves in tradition is so incredibly important, and I find personally has been one of the most meaningful things, if not the most meaningful to me in not just the aftermath of October 7th, but these last couple of years, which have not been very easy in America to know that for an hour a day, I am doing something that would have been completely recognizable to my great great great great great great great great grandfather is a sense that maybe my great great great great great grandson will will be okay and will do just the same thing. Again, wow, what a stellar insight. I would have I would have stopped it too. That would have been terrific. But Yohanan Ben Zakkai was saving the best for last because he looked at the space and said, one more thing. I want you to send a doctor to my friend Rabbi Tzadok. He's old. He's very upset about this business with the temple. He stopped eating. He's very sick. And you could look at it and say, are you for real? The city is under siege.
Liel Leibovitz: War is coming. They're going to be hundreds of thousands of people dead very soon. You care about some old dude who's sad and doesn't eat, like, what's wrong with you? But that, I think, is the greatest teaching of all. How many of us wake up every morning and say we have to save Israel? We have to save America. We have to save the Democratic Party. We have to save the Republican Party. We have to save Columbia University. We have to save the Jews. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is telling us, stop. It's not your job to save the Jews, or to save Israel, or to save the Democrats or the Republicans or anything. It is your job to look across the street, find one old guy who's not doing very well, and say, you know what? How are you today? Can I offer you some support? Can I send a doctor? Can I give you some soup? Can I be there for you? Because there's this great book of ours teaches us, Kol ha'matzil nefesh achat be'yisoel, ke'ilu hitzil olam b'maloh. You save one soul in Israel it's as if you've saved a world entire. And I want to conclude my remarks and pass it over to Rabbi Shmully. But I'm contractually obligated to tell a Chasidic story whenever I speak. It's not negotiable, and it's going to happen right now. It's obviously not a Talmudic story, but it's a story that I think captures the spirit of the Talmud better than any I've ever heard.
Liel Leibovitz: And it's a story about the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. So one day, the richest man in town walks into the Baal Shem Tov's office, sits down in the chair, puts his muddy boots on the table, and says, Rabbi, do you know the prophet Elijah? Baal Shem Tov says, I believe I am familiar with his work. Yes. The rich guy says, great. So here's the deal. Every Passover there comes a point in the Seder where we open the door and we leave a cup of wine, and we, supposedly, the prophet Elijah comes into every Jewish home in the Seder. But here's the thing I've never met the guy, and I have money and I'm interested. Can you arrange a meeting? Baal Shem Tov says sure. The rich guy says really? Baal Shem Tov says no problem. He takes out a piece of paper, writes down an address, gives it to the guy, says, be there tonight 7:00. The guy says, that's it. Baal Shem Tov says, yeah, but you know, it's the prophet Elijah. Kind of a big deal in the Bible. So stop at the Whole Foods, get some chicken, some pies, some fruit, like, make it nice for the prophet, you know. Rich guy says, no problem. Goes shopping, takes heavy bags, walks around. He looks at the address, and he's a little bit surprised because the address is not in the nicest part of town. It's like whatever Baal Shem Tov said so. It must be true.
Liel Leibovitz: Knocks on the door of this small building, and this woman opens the door and she looks, you know, tired. She has four kids. A guy walks in and sits down, at seven, 7:30, 7:45 and eight and nothing happens. He says, you know, it must have been some misunderstanding, but I'm already here. I already, you know, have this food. Let's just eat, worry about it later. The next morning, he goes back to the Baal Shem Tov's office, says, Rabbi, what's the deal. I came to the address you gave me. No prophet Elijah. Baal Shem Tov says, oh, I'm sorry. There's been some misunderstanding. Here. Writes down another address. Rich guy's like, are you sure about this? Baal Shem Tov was like, yeah, yedon't worry. 7 p.m. tonight. Rich guy gets up to leave, Baal Shem Tov says, don't forget the Whole Foods. Rich guy says, I got you. Goes, shops, chicken, pie, the whole thing. And he's walking. And this time the address is in an even less well-to-do part of town. And this time the house is even smaller, and this time the woman who opens the door looks even more tired and she has six kids. And again, the guy sits and waits, and again at 7:00, 7:30 and eight and again nothing happens. And again he says, well, you know, might as well just eat the food. And again he goes home. The third morning, he storms into the Baal Shem Tov's office, slams his fist on the table and says, do not mess with me. I am a very rich, influential person.
Liel Leibovitz: I'm asking you yes or no question. Can I meet the prophet Elijah tonight? The Baal Shem Tov says tonight. The guy says okay. He gets up to leave before the Baal Shem Tov even has a chance to say, yeah, yeah, I know the Whole Foods, the chicken. Again, he goes shopping, takes the address that the Baal Shem Tov gave him, starts walking, and this time it's in the absolute poorest part of town. This time the house isn't even a house. It's just a hut. Barely has a bed. The man is about to knock on the door. But then he thinks, what am I, stupid? Prophet Elijah is not going to come. It's going to be the same thing. The Baal Shem Tov probably hates me because you know I'm not a learned rabbi like he is. He's probably just messing with me. I'm just going to go home. This is a waste of time. And as he's turning away, he hears a voice coming from inside the house. And it's a small girl crying, and she says, mommy, I'm so hungry. We haven't had anything to eat in two days. And the mother says, don't worry, my love. The Baal Shem Tov promised me that any minute now there'll be a knock on this door, and the prophet Elijah will bring us dinner. And this is the answer to what we should be doing right now. We should be knocking on every door, but not before we study some Talmud.
Dan Arbess: And that is why they hate us. Everything that you just said is the reason why they hate us. And the more we do, the more envious they are going to be. But if we stick to where we are going, we will see the third temple in our lifetime. I mean, if you look at the if you look at the things that have actually happened here and you look beyond the drama and the things that we're sick about, think about the miracles that are taking place every day in the unity of our people. The disunity is damaging, unity of our people, when have you seen an untested international alliance of former enemies and untested military technology work 100%. You saw that several weeks ago in the attack from Iran. The president of Iran's airplane slams into the side of a mountain, maybe the IDF was involved in that. I don't think so. Okay, that's I mean, nobody wants to see anybody die. But, you know, the disruption, the things that are happening that are outside of our control, you know, I believe we're living in times of redemption. But let me just, before I turn it over to Shmully, to bring this down, so you guys really understand and read this book. This is not a book. A lecture about the Talmud. I mean, Shmully is going to talk to us, I'm sure, more formally and rabbinically about what is the Talmud and how would we interpret the Talmud? But let me just read you the context of this book.
Dan Arbess: You know, because you may not open it otherwise. Okay. The introduction says How and Why to Read the Talmud—okay, that's what you would expect. Chapter One: Our Bodies, Ourselves, where having a snack, taking a bath and pooping can save your soul. We talked about that. Chapter Two: All Together Now or how to play well with others. Chapter Three: Holding Out for a Hero, or how to be yourself. Chapter Four: Romance in the Dark or How to Win in Love and Marriage. Chapter Five: Everything in Order, how to Make Sense of the world. Chapter Six: Thank You for Being a Friend or how fighting can bring you closer—like me and Alana today. Okay, Chapter Seven: The Stories We Tell or how to find your voice. This is what's in this book. I haven't read it, but I promise you I'm going to read it and it's going to be really interesting. And I without even reading it—just knowing the man a little bit and following his thinking for a while—this book is going to be worth your while to read this summer.
Speaker6: Amazing.
Dan Arbess: Thank you. Okay.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So again, thank you. In light of this being a discussion about Talmud, I thought I'd open up with critiquing Liel's opening remarks. And I'm going to respect everyone's time. We called this tonight, and Liel was kind enough to be here tonight on a night that he actually has to fly to Rome this evening, so he has a departure.
Oh.
Liel Leibovitz: I'm going to retrieve some objects that the Vatican may or may not have taken from said temple. Just saying.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And so I may speak a little bit quickly. And it's, it's unfair to critique someone and not give them an opportunity to have a rebuttal. So we're going to have to do this weekly at your home next time you come back and I'll start with the caveat that I'm not sure that what Liel said is actually what he meant or what was perhaps inferred by his remarks about the question is what's important, not necessarily the answers. And we can argue about how how specific you meant about that. But I would.
Dan Arbess: The search for the answers.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah. And so the search for the answers. So, you know, how important, you know, what's the answer? And, well, you know, do we negate that question to begin with? Of course, Liel.
Dan Arbess: We do have the Shulchan Aruch.
Liel Leibovitz: Yeah. And we have Chabad.
Liel Leibovitz: So of course, the answer's do better.
Toby Hecht: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So of course Liel, of course, Liel agrees that we're all in search of the answers. And that's why we study Talmud. The reason the Talmud is so important, then, is because the only way to actually find the answer to anything is to argue. Because if you don't argue about something, you make a lot of assumptions. And so you can read a ruling. But if you haven't read both sides and the dissenting opinion on that, on that particular ruling, you don't really have an answer. You have a very vague, peripheral, almost superficial ruling. You can only indulge into the depth of the answer or the ruling or the law on anything by understanding all the arguments that went into it and the intricacies of those arguments, and then the answer, the answer shines. And that is perhaps why the Talmud is so important. The Shulchan Aruch, as you mentioned, is the code of Jewish law, which was written later in the 1500s and 1600s, 1000 years after the Talmud. The Talmud is really the bread and butter of the argument. And as Jews who are people of the law, people of the land. But we are people of the law, and very good at- I'm sitting next to an Harvard Law School alum and so many and so many and so many Yale Law School people here that we know that law can only can only rise and can only shine and enlighten us when we understand what stands behind the arguments and that's, that's what the Talmud is.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So that's one thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that, thank you, obviously, Liel, for writing the book. I think it's so critical that we have something like this that we can give to people. But I think considering the mature intellectual level of the people that are sitting in this room, I think we have to go- We have to go a little further so we can read Liel's book, which is so critical for the masses, I would say. But to write a book like that, you have to actually study Talmud. And for those of you who are going to pick up the book and read it, you can't stop with a book like this. And Liel will tell you that. You have to become Liel. You have to become a master of the Talmud, and to become a master of the Talmud means that when you're done with that, you go into the intricacies and the complexity of studying Talmud. Now, for most of us, it's very difficult.
Dan Arbess: So you can't even do the shortcut of reading the Rambam's Mishneh Torah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You should read the Rambam's Mishneh Torah, but you want to know how the Rambam wrote the Mishneh Torah. And so to understand how the Rambam wrote the Mishneh Torah, which is, the Rambam, was a 12th century who compiled his set of laws, 14 books. And he said that after you read the Bible, you can skip the Talmud essentially, and read the Rambam. But the Rambam was kind. Liel's kind. I'm not very kind. I'm going to I'm going to. Yeah, I'm going to push a little bit. And I know Liel's with me on this journey and it's about Talmud. Now when you study Talmud, first of all, I want you to know that in most seminaries, you sit across from a partner, and I'll open up. I don't want to tell stories outside of the Talmud story, but I'm reminded of something that Stephen Greenblatt, the great Shakespeare professor at Harvard, said, recorded, I'll paraphrase was that he was taken to he was on a tour of Israel. And Moshe Halbertal, one of the great Jewish philosophers who actually wrote the code of ethics for the IDF. And he teaches at NYU Law School, and he's a philosopher and teaches at Yale Law School, schlepped the great Stephen Greenblatt, who has written so many books on Shakespeare at midnight to a Talmudic seminary in the heart of Jerusalem.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: It must have been the Mir Yeshiva. Mir Yeshiva is a big building with a thousand students who study Talmud-men in their ages 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, even to the older years. And what they do is they open up the text and we pore over the Talmud and we argue and we, the dialectic, the debate, the discussion. And Stephen Greenblatt says, and this is going back at least 20 years because the recording is in 2001, so 24 years, it was prior to that, that he who had gone to, I believe, Berkeley and Yale and now is tenured at Harvard and a university professor. It doesn't get much better than that in the academic world. Has published so many fantastic books and I believe has tens of millions of views on the Shakespeare classes, at Harvard Online, said that he walked into this room of a thousand young men poring over this, thousands of pages of this, a page of the Talmud of which Liel introduced us to in his book. And he said it was the greatest, greatest intellectual experience of his life. Twenty-four years later, I was lucky enough to, with Toby and the Shabtai community in Boston to have an event with Stephen Greenblatt where he spoke about anti-Semitism and Shakespeare and Shylock and The Merchant of Venice.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And we had a discussion and I handed him- I said, you know, you write about literature. There are two parts of the Talmud. There is literature of the Talmud which you speak about. And then there are the arguments, the legal discussions that go on in the Talmud. They're very different. As I said, Liel's kind. He'll throw you Talmudic stories and with implications, of course, morals and how we deal with anything and any event in history. And those stories are very, very deep. And then there's obviously the more intricate mind boggling arguments of the Talmud, which the great legal scholars and rabbis and students, frankly, delve into. But I sense you'll agree, being that you are a great literature, a man of literature. There was a man in the same time as Shakespeare, actually, in the 1500s, who took all the stories in the Talmud and culled them from the 2000 plus pages, compiled just the stories, just the literature, just the parables, just the allegorical narratives, just the poetry. And said to the person who wasn't ready yet for the complex argumentative part of the Talmud, the discourse and the legal arguments, called it a book called Ein Yaakov, and published it so that people who couldn't access the more intricate parts of the Talmud could study at least the literature and start with that.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And for hundreds of years now, Jews around the world study the Ein Yaakov. And so I gifted Stephen Greenblatt the first volume of the book of Ein Yaakov, the book, which was about 500 pages long. And that story is- That speech that I gave and I connected it to his name because he happened to have the same name as the author of the Ein Yaakov, together with his father's name. But here's what I what's not on the internet. What's not on the internet is that for weeks, Stephen Greenblatt would email me the things he was reading and how fascinated he was. And then after a few months, he said, Shmully, I'm done with volume one and I thought that was really fascinating. This is a man who's probably read, you know, just about everything. But he found it important to read the Einn Yaakov, to read the stories of the Talmud. He loves it. And I just got up, went out and bought volume two, and I'm going to send it to him. And my message with that to all of us in the room is that start a Talmud class, join a Talmud class, get online and download a Talmud class. It is the most intellectual experience.
Liel Leibovitz: Listen to our Daf Yomi podcast six minutes every day of pretty accessible introduction to whatever page we're reading.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Thank you. On Tablet's website. Mhm.
Dan Arbess: But this is why for those if you haven't been exposed to it, this explains what use it is to you.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The second anecdote that I should mention before I move to the actual Talmud is that during Covid, Toby and I were taking a walk in the summertime through New Haven, and the town was a ghost town. We bumped into Peter Salovey, the president of Yale. We stopped to talk and we started to chat about everything and anything. There was nobody around. It's the president with the rabbi. And so, you know, great conspiracy. What are you going to do next? What are we gonna do about it? And we talked and he says, I have to show you something. I have to show you something on my phone Shmully. And I said, Peter, he's Jewish. I said, Peter, you can't turn your phone on. It's Shabbos. And he says, well, how much time do we have? And we looked up at the sky and I said, we've got some time. They said, well, how are you going to know what time? I don't have a watch on Shabbos. And he said, I can't turn my phone on. How am I going to know when Shabbos is out? And I said, well, three stars in the sky is night, according to the Talmud. And so when the three stars come out, we'll, you'll be able to turn your phone on and show me what you want to show me. So we talked about everything from Hemingway to bullfighting in Spain to kosher caterers to the future of New Haven and Yale and what the next semester was going to look like.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And there we were and Toby at some point had to get back to the kids. And she said, I'm going to go and leave it to you guys. And then three stars appeared in the sky. He turns his phone on and he says, I want you to know that I study Talmud every day. And he pointed to, I believe I don't know what this is, but there must be somebody who puts out a one page summary every day of the Daf. So the Daf being the page of the Talmud. If you want to finish the Talmud, you can do it in seven plus years by studying one page a day. And people do this around the world. And you talk about it in the book. Tens of thousands of people that come to the big stadiums. So here you have the, you know, the great Shakespeare professor at Harvard and the great president of Yale University and so many like them that are actually delving in and reading the original text. So with that, I'll open by saying this is what a page of Talmud looks like. It's a fifth century. It's based on the Mishnah, which is the second century. There are various tractates, 63. This is the tractate of Shabbos.
Dan Arbess: Which Talmud is that?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So this is the Babylonian Talmud, which is generally what we study. This is where most of the arguments are, the Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud is a little bit more definitive. This is much more argumentative. The center of the page is the actual text of the Talmud. It's written in Aramaic, which is the language of that time. This was fifth century Iraq, modern day Iraq. And on the side you have Rashi, who's the 11th century, and he's French. And he understands that most people in France in the 11th century don't read Aramaic, just like we don't read Aramaic. And so- some of us. And so he translates it into a modern Hebrew and an old French. At times, he'll bring down the Old French. Now, when we in Yeshiva study the Rashi and we don't understand the Old French, we open up the back of the Talmud and we'll find a translation of the Old French to Yiddish, and then from Yiddish to English. So you start off and then in the Talmud, you are actually often going to have quotes, because everything that Talmud is based on the Bible, which is the Old Testament, which is Hebrew. And so you're starting off with Hebrew, you're moving to Aramaic, you're going to French, to Modern Hebrew, to Old French, to Yiddish, to English. And so the average guy that you see in Yeshiva, or the guy with the black hat who's sitting outside the Vatican with his payos and his beard, is mastering 5 to 7 languages at the age of 13 years old, at the age of 13 years old, some even earlier.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: He's studying 5 to 6 languages, most of which are not spoken today. In the Western world, people don't speak Aramaic. A different form of Hebrew, an Old French and then a Yiddish and then back to an English. That's the inside of the page. Rashi, on the outside of every page of Talmud, you'll find Tosafos, and they are commentaries that live through the 11th, 12th, 13th century. And they argue with Rashi. Rashi, you read the Talmud and translate it so and so. And I want to argue that the translation of the Talmud is different. Or there's another place in the Talmud where there seems to be something that contradicts what we just read and so he argues. And then on the side we have footnotes, indexes, bibliographies where they are telling us where we will find the summary of the ruling of this argument that they're arguing about in the code of Jewish law. Because, as Liel says, we have questions, we have the answers, we have the argument, we have the dissenting opinions. But how do you actually practice? And that's going on over here. And then the same on the side, you'll have other texts, there were censors in different periods of history, Christians didn't allow us to publish the Talmud exactly a certain way. And so there's different texts that come up, Bodleian and different libraries at Oxford, etc. and so you'll find different footnotes and guidance as to where to find things in later centuries.
Liel Leibovitz: Long before Silicon Valley gave us hyperlinks. Here they are on this amazing page, teaching you to think in this connected way.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And going from the story to the law. So I think today we should introduce everybody to one piece of each, and I'll try to do it as fast as I can. I think it would actually be better if we did it together. So why don't we pass these around? Okay. And we'll start, of course, with the story. And we are on page, top right of the page of Talmud. How many in this room read Hebrew? Anybody in this room? One, two, three, four, five, six, so we have about five out of 25, 20% of us read in actual Hebrew. So what does it say? Amir?
Amir: Yes.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What does it say? There's two letters on the top right side of the Hebrew page. I'm on page one. What does that say? Pa'ch. So and two dots. Pa'ch and two dots. Everybody see that? So the top right side right here you see Pa'ch. And do you know what that means? Do you know what that is? What?
Amir: Basket.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: A basket. So he thinks it's a basket. Pa'ch, Pa'ch.
Aleksa Milojevic: In modern Hebrew tin.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Tin, thank you. Tin, a basket. Thank you very much. It's neither. So it could mean, it's translated as tin or a basket. But what those two letters actually are telling us what page we're on. Every letter has a numerical value. In the Hebrew alphabet, Pay is 80, Ches is 8. We're on page 88. Why two dots? What? Did I do charades? We haven't even started.
Aleksa Milojevic: Why not two dots?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Two dots because we're on side B. So every page of Talmud is the pagination is side one of the page. Side two of the page. We're on page 88. Two dots means side two. And we turn to the next page. And on the top left you will see, Pay Tes. Pay Tes means we are now 89. One dot. Why is it one dot? Because we're on side one. Now, we only have five Hebrew readers here, so we're going to move to the English. As much as I would absolutely love to read this for you in Hebrew- I'll actually read just the first paragraph in Hebrew, because you have to invoke the sacred language, the holy language, the holy tongue of the great sages. I'm on the bottom of Pa'ch two, page 88, 2. The Talmud says as follows, ve'omar Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi, be'sha'ah she'alah Moshe le'marom, omru malachei hashareis lifnei Hakadosh Baruch Hu, Ribono Shel Olam, mah l'yelud ishah beineinu? Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi said, and this is the story part of the Talmud that we're going to do tonight. When Moses went up to heaven, he said to the angels, excuse me, the angels turned to God, and they said to God, he went up to receive the Torah. Moses goes up to God to receive the Torah, and the sages say, the angels say to God, Ribono Shel Olam, Master of the universe, mah l'yelud ishah beineinu, what is a mortal doing here in heaven? Omar la'hem le'kabel Torah ba. And then God says he came to receive the Torah. Omru lefanav, and the angels now start to argue with God. So this is an argument between three parties: the Lord, the angels, and Moses. And what is the argument? So go.
Toby Hecht: What page are we on?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So we're going to turn to page 88 B, which is what we're reading. We're going to do it in English. Yeah. Now it's a little bit- I cut and pasted this today. I'm sorry. So the numbers are footnotes. There's no footnotes. So skip the numbers and just read as best as you can. When Moses ascended on high.
Jack Boger: When Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels spake before the Holy One, blessed be He, saying, Sovereign of the universe, what business has one born of woman amongst us? He has come to receive the Torah answered He to them. Said they to Him, that secret treasure which has been hidden by Thee for 974 generations before the world was created. Should I keep going?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.
Jack Boger: Thou desirest to give to flesh and blood. What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him? O Lord our God, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth who has set Thy glory, the Torah, upon the heavens.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Stop. The angels want to know why are you giving the Torah to man? The angels claim we should get the Torah. The Torah is great, intellectual, spiritual, transcendental wisdom, genius of the Lord. It should go to the angels. Okay. Return them an answer. Whoever's reading. Yeah.
Jack Boger: Sorry, I lost this.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: 31.
Jack Boger: Return them an answer, bade the Holy One, blessed be He to Moses, Sovereign of the universe. Sovereign of the universe, replied he, I fear lest they consume me with the fiery breath of their mouths. Hold on to the Throne of Glory, said He to him, and return them an answer, as it is said, He maketh him to hold on to the face of His throne, and spreadeth His cloud over him. Whereon.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Rabbi Nachman.
Jack Boger: Rabbi Nachman.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Just skip the numbers. Sorry.
Jack Boger: Observed. This teaches the Almighty.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You can skip the skip the parentheses.
Jack Boger: It teaches the Almighty spread the luster of His.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: She'chinah. That's the omnipresence.
Jack Boger: And cast it as a protection over him. He then spake before Him, Sovereign of the universe, the Torah, which Thou givest me, what is written therein? I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Said he to them the angels, did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why then should the Torah be yours?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Stop. So God is being challenged by the angels as to why the Torah goes to mankind and not to the angels. And God turns to Moses and says, Moses, give them an answer. And Moses says, well, let's look at what the Torah says. I got a manual here for a fridge. If you don't own the fridge, right. You don't bother. You don't have the manual. So this is a manual for questions like it says, I'm the Lord thy God who brought you out of Egypt. Well, the angels, did you go to Egypt? Did God take you out of Egypt? No you didn't. So why should you get the Torah? Want to read? Well, let's move on. Pass it around. Again, what is written, two lines before the end of the first paragraph.
Speaker9: Again, what is written therein? Thou shalt have none other gods. 37.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We're going to skip numbers.
Speaker9: Okay. Do ye dwell among peoples that engage in.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Idol worship. We're going to skip. That's the next page we're on 89a now.
Speaker9: Idol worship. Idol worship. Again, what is written therein? Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Do ye then perform work? What ye needs a rest. Again, what is written therein? Thou shalt not take, Tisa, the Name (of God) in vain. Is there any business, Masa (u'matan), dealings, among you? Again, what is written therein. Honor thy mother. Honor thy father and mother. Have ye fathers and mothers? Again, what is written therein? Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not steal. Is there jealousy among you? Is there evil among you?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Stop. So Moses basically responds to God, to the angels, that everything that the Torah tells us to do or not to do is totally irrelevant to a world of angels. It's only relevant to mankind. Hence, the Torah has to descend from heaven to earth.
Liel Leibovitz: Now that's a lawyer.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: That's a lawyer.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Aleksa.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Straight away.
Aleksa Milojevic: Straight away they conceded to the Holy One, blessed be He, for it is said, 'O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name, etc. whereas 'Who has set Thy glory upon the heavens' is not written. Immediately each one was moved to love him and transmitted something to him. For it is said, Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast taken spoils (the Torah), Thou hast received gifts on account of man: as a recompense for their calling thee man, thou didst receive gifts. The Angel of Death too confided his secret to him, for it is said, and he put on the incense, and made atonement for the people. And it is said, and he stood between the dead and the living. Had he not told him, whence had he known it? Said the Holy One, blessed be He to Moses. Moses, since thou hast (humbly) disparaged thyself, it shall be called by thy name, as it is said, Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The Torah is called Toras (Moshe), zichru toras Moshe avdi, remember the Torah of Moshe. Moshe is called Adam. He disparages himself by accepting that he's not. He's not quite an angel. He is just man. He represents mankind. And he says to the Creator that the wisdom, the intellect, the genius, the rules, the laws do not pertain to heavenly bodies. They don't pertain to angelic universes. They pertain very specifically to here. As Liel said, the last thing was go out and feed the old man across the street, Rabbi Tzadok, who's dying at the time of the destruction of the temple. And if we lose that, we've forgotten. We've forgotten it all. The big mega questions are answered by literally going across the street and helping that person. So that's the first piece, page of Talmud, and that's a story. And it's a story about Moses receiving the Torah and arguing for it. Now there's another tractate of the Talmud called Bava Metzia. Bava Metzia, here. If we look at the next page on the top right hand corner, I just hope, you've got to concentrate now, because we're going to move a little faster. Kuf Ches. Kuf Ches is 108, 108, two dots. 108, 2. Okay, let's talk real estate for a minute. Real estate development. The number one deal in real estate. The smart guys in the real estate are the assemblers. What does it mean to assemble? Larry Wohl, good friend of mine, lives in Manhattan, dad had a real estate business. Bought up townhouses on Second Avenue.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Took him 25 years, townhouse after townhouse after townhouse. And then the bank comes along and says, you know, Mr. Wohl, you own all of 40, all of Second Avenue between 40th and 41st? I'm not sure exactly where the building is, on 41st or 42nd. Why don't we tear the brownstones down and put up a tower and we'll give you the money. The bank will give you the money to finance the tower. And lo and behold, they go and they build a 40 story glass class A office building. So the assemblage is very important, right? The corner property is always very important. And the assemblage is important because the sum of the parts of the assemblage, right, is often worth more. The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. Buildable square footage. Right? How many? How many square feet can you build based on the floor plate? So you have an acre piece of land and the zoning says acre is 42,000ft² and you've got an acre of land. And the zoning says 100ft/ft², right? 100ft² as you can go up. So can you go up 50 stories? Can you go 100 stories? Well, logic tells you the wider the piece of land, the bigger you can go. Different towns have different zoning. Toby and I were just in Charleston, South Carolina. Fascinating. They preserved the entire city. The skyscraper is six stories high because the people in Charleston love their city.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: 17th, 18th, and 19th century architecture. The greatest piece of America. For those of you who haven't been, you should go. And the genius is that nothing, nothing is built up. But then you come to New York, or you go to Hong Kong, or you go to the Middle East today and to so many cities around the world, and they're building storied buildings in 1,500 years. The Talmud comes along and the Talmud says that there's an interesting verse in the Bible that says, Ve'assisa hayashar ve'hatov be'einay Hashem. Ve'assisa, you shall do, hayashar, the righteous thing, ve'hatov, and the good thing, be'einay Hashem, in the eyes of God. Now, the Talmud, the Bible could have said, ve'assisa hayashar ve'hatov, do the good thing. Do the good thing. Be a good man. Be kind like Liel, like Dan, like Marlene, like all of us. Right? What's be'einay Hashem, in the eyes of God. Ah. So the Talmud says that if you want a piece of land at 57th and fifth and you want to sell it. And I live in Chicago, and I want to buy it. And so I come along and I buy your land. And you own the land next door. And you have the right to force me to avoid the purchase. And if I buy it, you can actually force me to sell it back to you. You'd have to give me back my money. You'd have to...
Toby Hecht: Refund.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Refund me my money. But you have the right to that land. Why do you have the right to that land? It's a free market. We're capitalists. Price is price. I'm from Chicago. I'm Sam Zell. I started buying New York. I want to put up a tower. And you're some developer in New York City. Won't mention any names. And you say no, I own the piece of land next door. So in a free market in New York City, it's price rules. The Jew is taught in the Bible that when we are doing business with each other, don't buy that piece of land. The prohibition is not on the seller of you, not to sell me the piece of land and to call you. I am prohibited from buying the land because by buying that land, I am-think about this-I am going to potentially, theoretically hurt you because you own the piece of land, and I have to at least give you a chance first to look at it, to know about it and to buy it. That derivative from the verse Ve'assisa hayashar ve'hatov be'einay Hashem, you should do the righteous thing in the eyes of God is called, in Talmudic terms, the law of bar metzra, the law of the neighbor, the law of the one who is the adjacent property. It's the law of the adjacent. The adjacent property owner has the right to the land first, simply because the enhancement of his investment is greater by virtue of the scale of having that piece of land.
Dan Arbess: Oh my God, I wish I knew that when we tried to buy that building next door.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: There you go. There you go.
Dan Arbess: And our friend, who's now our friend, bought it and wouldn't let us buy it.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Are you serious?
Dan Arbess: Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Okay. There you go.
Speaker10: So it's exact.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Toby. Toby! Now, wait, wait, wait. We're starting. I'm only going five more minutes because I want you to close. But here's the problem. Here's the problem with this. So two things I should say. It's funny you say that because when we moved to New Haven and we bought a brownstone for Shabtai, we were very, very lucky. It was in the mid 90s and we assembled a few brownstones, our old building, and we missed the corner for $225,000. I mean, unbelievable. And Toby and I always say, oh my God, can you imagine? It's all these years later. We never got the corner. It would have been great just for Shabtai as an endowment. And I said, you know what? When we need it, we're not building anyway. But, the point is, there's always that that sort of regret. Now, there are exceptions to this rule of the bar metzra, and you can spend your, i would say you can spend at least six months to a year studying this page of Talmud. I'm not exaggerating. Go into any Davis Polk, Paul Weiss, Wachtell and sit down with a real estate lawyer who does zoning law and development law and financing and municipal law. Go into any city plan person in any city in America today and start talking to them about what I'm talking about and study this piece of Talmud with them. I assure you, I don't want to make a promise, you'll blow their minds, because the intricacies of this law get very complex.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So I want to introduce you very quickly to the exceptions to the bar metzra. Now, you talked about the property next door. This law is very specific to agriculture. In agriculture, if my cow has to walk 50ft, if my bull has to pull the yoke 50ft, right, to plow the field, and I can pick up another 50ft, right. It does a lot for me versus me having to buy 50ft here, and then get my bull on the back of a wagon and move him to the other side of town and to make him plow another piece of field. So the extension here that we're talking about, the scale that we're talking generally speaking, when it comes to the bar metzra is not actually residential development. It's not even actually commercial development. It's more specific to the laws of agriculture, because in the laws of agriculture, the scale, especially in ancient times. But even today, we drove across Oregon for tens of miles and you see what scale does right, with irrigation, with transportation. I stopped, I said to the cop, I said, who is buying all this corn? He said, the Chinese. They're moving it from Oregon to the coast, putting it on ships, and it's going to China.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We're literally feeding the Chinese with our corn. So the location, the scale for the water system, irrigation systems, etc., because weather patterns, weather patterns, of course, are very specific to where you are and location, etc.. Okay, I'm going to have to do this because if we do it around the table, it'll make it a little complicated. So I'm just going to go through real quick. We're on page 108 B. We are now in another tractate of the Talmud. And then I'm going to try to connect the two pieces. And then I'm going to stop. A gift is not subject to the law of pre-emption. So if I'm gifting you the land, the neighbor has no right to it. Said (the sage) Amaymar: but if the donor promised security of tenure, it's subject thereto. Okay, I don't want to kill your night. But I'm just going to give you a little bit of Talmud here. If I give you the land as opposed to selling it, the other, the guy next door can't say he has a right to it. I can give a gift to whoever I want. If I'm selling it, your $50, and his $50, it's the same $50. So take it from the guy who lives next door because it's equal sum. But if I'm gifting it, you can't stop me from giving a gift. If I give you a gift, however, and I put a subject-
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Security of tenure means that I'm actually guaranteeing the gift. That's not going to be clawed back by a prior owner to the gift, which means it's totally guaranteed. Then it's like a sale, somewhat like a sale and therefore there's an exception. One sells all his property to one person, the law of pre-emption does not apply. I have a portfolio of real estate all over Manhattan. I want to sell it to one guy versus breaking it up because one guy is going to pay more if he buys the whole portfolio. Then the law of the bar metzra doesn't apply. It doesn't apply because this guy's going to come along and say, I want that piece next door to you. Well, dude, I'm not just selling this little piece of land. I'm selling 50 pieces of land, and that guy's buying the whole 50. You just want to buy one. I don't want to take it out of the portfolio. He wants all or nothing, exempt. Next. Likewise, if it is sold to its original owner, it is not subject to the law of pre-emption. I own a piece of property next door. I want to sell it to its original owner. I'm redeeming the land, giving it back to the original owner. The neighbor wants it. The neighbor doesn't have a right to request it because I'm doing something which is also Tov Ve'yashar, really kind. I'm giving the original owner whose grandfather lived in that house.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I want it back. Give it to him. Okay. If one purchase from one sells to a heathen, there is no law of pre-emption. He translates it as heathen. The actual word in the Talmud is Akum, which is (an acronym for) Avodas Kochavim Umazalos, idol worshippers. We separated ourselves from idol worshippers and idol worshippers are not- they're not obligated to follow our law. We don't have to be kind to the idol worshiper. In fact, the idol worshiper may be a problem. I know in our neighborhood, you think very carefully about the people that you live next door to. Okay? And if the guys worshiping idols and you don't want your kid, you know, having a voodoo thing outside your house so you can make an exception to that. If one purchases from a heathen (there is no law of pre-emption), because the purchaser can say to him, I have driven a lion away from your boundaries. I'm actually going to stop the idol worshipper from being in the neighborhood and so it's exempt. If he sells to a heathen, (the neighbor cannot claim the land) because the heathen is certainly not subject to the exhortation. And you can't obligate an idol worshipper or heathen from following the Bible. It's not his Bible, it's a law between Jews. Nevertheless, the vendor is placed under a ban until he accepts responsibility for any injury that might ensue him through the heathen. A mortgage is not subject to the law of pre-emption.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I have collateral and the lender wants to come along and say, I want to pull that collateral, I want to pull the collateral and sell it because you didn't pay your loan back. Right? I don't have to give it to the I don't have to give it to the neighbor because I'm in a tight situation. I'm trying to collect the loan, etcetera, etcetera. Okay, I'll stop there. And I'll end by saying this. The law of the bar metzra continues, and it gets very, very complicated. The commentaries say that the reason why God didn't give the book, the Bible, the reason that the angels had a claim on the Bible was because they were the neighbor. They were closer. They were spiritual. And they said, before you go and give it to the mortal down on earth, before you give the law to human beings, we have the first right. We have the first right. And that's what the commentaries explain. And the commentaries, so they connect these two pieces of Talmud of a story about the angels arguing with God and Moses, about who should get the Bible and its law about the abutting neighbor. That's right. That's the Gemara. And so it's like, oh, so you're the neighbor and so you have the right to it. And God says, no, I'm going to give it to-
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm going to give it to human beings. People need law. People need structure. People need do, don't. As Toby says, people need values. We don't have any values today. People need right and wrong. We need to frame our lives. Each one can define that for ourselves. What is the exemption here? Why did God give it ultimately to mankind? So one of the exemptions and this is something that the Rebbe, the late Rebbe teaches us. One of the exemptions is that if I own the land, Daniel and I want to sell it to somebody who wants to build a home and I have somebody else who wants to have a farm. The guy from Oklahoma who shows up in New Haven and wants to have a home is more important than your agricultural business because the home is primary. God says to Moses, respond to the angels. The response is that God wants a home, a Dirah Be'tachtonim, we refer to, in Chasidic terminology, starting from a Medrash. God wants a home. For God to be in a home, there has to be good and there has to be bad. There has to be do and there has to be don't. There has to be temptation, and there has to be all the things that we enjoy in life. The essence of God, the essence of bringing this divine spirit into our lives. How do you make a home for God? A home is the place that you are yourself. How is the where is the essence of godliness manifested in a very physical, mundane world where don't kill. Don't steal. Don't commit adultery. Be good to your wife.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Be good to your children. Be good to your neighbors. Visit the sick. Bury the dead. That is the essence of God. Going to Rabbi Tazdok and giving a hungry man, that third part of the story that Liel recited the Talmudic story is the essence of God. God is not some spiritual foreign monk in a monastery. That's not the Jewish God. The Jewish God is the way we do business. It's the way we live our lives. It's the way we have sex. It's the way we behave with our friends. It's the way we eat. It's the way we sleep. It's the way we walk around. And it's the way we behave as civil people in a universe. And when we do the right thing and we don't do the wrong thing, and we live a higher form of existence, we are creating the home for God. The angel can't do it. The angel can't do it, doesn't have the challenges and doesn't have the difficulties and the perplexities. The angel was created. It has a mission. It does its mission. It comes back. Whether it's a good angel and bad angel. The human being has free choice. And the human being, that free choice is the divine spirit that is in us.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Only God has free choice and only the human being has free choice. Animals don't have it. Animal and plants don't have it. And inanimate things in the world definitely don't have it. So the free choice of the human being and the free choice of God is our divinity. It is how we connect with the divine. It is how we make the world a great place. It is the way we create a dwelling place for God. So God says, I'm going to give the law specifically to mankind, not to the angel, because that is how a home is going to be built. And so they are actually closer to the divine. We are closer to the divine than the angels, and that's why we have our first right on it. So my suggestion tonight is that we not only think Talmudically, to think Talmudically, and to be a real smart ass, and to be a genius, and to know all the arguments and to be able to quote and to be able to think we know what that's doing to the world. But as you mentioned before, the universities are crumbling. They're so smart. They're so smart. Aren't they so smart these guys with tenure? They're so smart. Maybe they need a little wisdom. Maybe all those double PhD tenured people running our universities need a little wisdom. And the same thing with our politicians. When I say our I mean our American politicians, our leaders in this country, our country, in Israel, we need wisdom.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And we need not just to be so smart, but to actually live the Talmud. And if we live the Talmud, we are going to live a greater form. It starts with learning because educated, informed people like to understand. We have to argue, and we have to cull over every little page of the Talmud, every line of the Talmud and work through it so that we can distill the essence of what the law is and really understand the other perspective, as you said, the other person's perspective, the courage that we need to understand somebody who disagrees with us and then live in our highest form, not just by being Talmudic by the way we think, but by actually living it. And that's my blessing to all of us that your home should be blessed, should always be a place where people kibbitz and even argue in a healthy way, in a spiritual way and a divine way, the way you and I argue and Liel, the way you and I kibbitz and laugh. And hopefully we'll continue to argue in a sacred form, and then take the result, the ramification of that argument and bring it into our lives in the way we practice it, that we live a higher form of living. And that's my thought for the night. So thank you everybody for sharing this topic.
Dan Arbess: 15 minutes of Liel's time left.
Liel Leibovitz: I'm so sorry.
Dan Arbess: How about hearing from some other people? I mean, people have questions for Liel or Rabbi. I mean, I have a question. What is the Torah, the Talmud, exactly? Like the Babylonian Talmud and then the aisles on the side are rabbinic interpretations, but the Talmud itself is an interpretation of the oral law given to Moses at Mount Sinai. Correct?
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Who's the question for? Liel, do you want to take it?
Liel Leibovitz: Sure. I'll do the brief brief, so the thing that we got atop the mountain is a double gift. There is the written Torah, which is five books of Moses that we all know and love. And then there's the Oral Torah, the best way I've ever been introduced to think about it. Imagine you attend an amazing, amazing, amazing lecture. And you take furious notes because it's some of the most brilliant things you've ever heard in your life. The Torah is the notes. Do they make sense without the lecture that Moses heard there for 40 nights and 40 days? No not really. And so God gave that too and Moses delivered it onwards. And we have a pretty clear chain of transmission in the very beginning of Pirkei Avos, of the Ethics of Our Fathers, which is a part of the Mishnah. It says very deliberately Moses gave it, you know, to Aaron. Aaron gave it et cetera, et cetera. All the way, we could trace it to our day. And so when it became clear that the Oral Torah is in danger of being misinterpreted or forgotten or misremembered, Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, so powerful and great that he was referred to simply as Rabbi because you knew who you were talking about, around the year 250 or so. Said, okay, we're going to redact it.
Liel Leibovitz: We're going to take all this Mishnah, which is the oral Torah that we've been passing on from generation to generation to generation and put it in a book called the Mishnah. And then for 300 years, rabbis, good Jews, said, wait a minute. Did we really understand? Not sure. Let's debate and discuss. And their debates and discussions were redacted in the second book called the Gemara. When you're reading quote unquote Talmud, what you're really reading is Gemara, just bits and pieces of Mishnah, and it is expected that you've already opened the Mishnah and read all of it, which is a separate set of books. And it is, of course, expected that you already also are somewhat familiar with the Torah and Nevi'im and Ketuvim, the whole the whole entirety of the Hebrew Bible. And to make it even more complicated, because I know what you're thinking, it's easy, man. It's only 3 or 4 books to remember. There are also two Talmuds. There's one written or compiled in Babylonia in Exile, and one in Yerushalayim in Eretz Yisra'el, the land of Israel. They are very different. The Rebbe has a great teaching on why they're different, and they're different because one was written by people in exile and one was written by people sitting at home. It's a very big spiritual distinction. But again, doesn't matter. Just jump into it. You see it. This is like the greatest thing in the world.
Dan Arbess: Questions for Liel or the Rabbi?
Jack Boger: So I've always really appreciated. Thank you so much. Also, this has been incredible. I've always really appreciated the- I think I was pretty young when I first knew there was a prayer for defecation, urination, and there's been a lot of times where I'm like Boruch Hashem, Oy Vey. And just to find moments of gratitude with little things that we do, like literally every day, hopefully. And so are there any other examples like that that are just, for the last few minutes, that are just really practical, kind of bodied ways that we can maybe bring forward, like literally tonight or tomorrow or something like that.
Liel Leibovitz: I'll answer it in two ways, and I'm sure the rabbi would have many more. Just one way in which is great. So there's a great discussion. Right in the beginning of the Talmud, in Tractate Brachot, between the two great frenemies, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai. Hillel was sort of more, this is very shorthand, but more accepting, more lenient, more kind of open and Shammai was more of a stickler for rules. And Shammai said, okay, well, look, it says that we have to honor Shabbat. I'm going to go through the entire week, and every time I find a nice piece of chicken say, I'm going to buy this chicken. And then if I find a nicer piece of chicken, I'll eat the first chicken and reserve the second chicken for Shabbat. And if I find a nicer chicken, I'll eat the second chicken and reserve the third chicken until I can be sure that I got the nicest piece of chicken that I could have for that special celebration. And Rabbi Hillel said that's right. We of course, have to honor Shabbat, but we also have to honor Wednesday and Monday and Sunday because the miracle of creation is every day. Why don't you treat every day like it was a great celebration of creation and twice as much as Shabbat? Don't say okay, well, I've got to really kind of be very nervous until the one day that I can relax. Wake up every morning and, you know, carpe diem, which I believe is Aramaic. Yeah. Right. Just have this feeling of joy and gratitude, which I think is an amazing, amazing way to go. So I feel like, why should I be so happy for this amazing meal that hopefully I'm going to have in Rome tomorrow? Just because it's Wednesday?
Aleksa Milojevic: Question. A very speculative question. So suppose in five years, seven years, ten years, when there's Rashi GPT, version 9.0 or something, and it's no longer just a chat interface, but it's actually specialized agents, each, you know, trained on the entire corpus and much more sophisticated in their intelligence. And when there are not just, you know, a couple, but millions or even hundreds of millions sort of arguing with one another, trying to simulate a kind of interpretation. Do you think that if that were to actually come to be that there will always be sort of an element that will never be sort of captured in the sort of virtual space or in the agential space or how would you just approach that sort of a prospect.
Liel Leibovitz: I would approach it pretty easily as my PhD is in human machine interaction and this is a question I feel very, very comfortable answering. A ChatGPT type thing could absolutely master the entirety of the corpus of existing responsa and discussions of every piece of, you know, religious argumentation ever recorded. However, the most amazing task that we receive, and it seems tremendously daunting and yet it is the most exciting thing intellectually and spiritually in my life is to come up with Chiddushei Torah, new things to say, like new things to say about the Torah? Like, there have been much smarter people than me that have been doing this for like, you know, some thousands of years now, and you expect me to sit here and come up with a new thing to say? And that's exactly the thing. The point isn't. Oh, well, how well do you know Torah? Of course it is. Of course you need to learn and study. The point is, how does it go through you? Right. There's a great, there's a great little Chasidic aphorism that I will share again, contractually obligated, to I think answer this question well, which is a student who's so excited and he goes to his rabbi, and he says you know rabbi, I've been through the Talmud twice already. And the rabbi says, yeah? How many times has the Talmud been through you?
Speaker6: Where does Rabbi Shimon fit into the Talmud and the studies of the Talmud?
Liel Leibovitz: Fantastic question.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai? Mishneh? You mean chronologically?
Speaker6: Yeah. How does that fit in-
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Well, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was the, was a Tanna. So the Tanna is the second- The end of the second temple and then the first and second century, culminating in the writing of the Mishnah, which precedes the Talmud by 300 years, as Liel mentioned before. So Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was a Tanna, so he lived in a prior generation and he was one of the opinions in the Mishnah, but is often quoted in the Talmud. The Talmud will often quote. He's also traditionally believed to be the writer, the author of the Zohar, which is the esoteric Kabbalah, the Kabbalah, which is the hidden secrets of the Torah. If you noticed, Liel doesn't let a piece of Talmud go by without introducing a Hasidic story or a joke every time he does that. That reminds me of the dean of the Yale Law School, who with whom I used to study Talmud when his father died, and he had never studied Talmud before. Robert Post, former dean, and we use to study Talmud together. And then at one point he said to me, Shmully, it's just another set of laws, you know, it's like it was, you know, we were getting into really argument, very complex laws about actually his father died, so we studied the laws about when somebody's father dies, how it changes his obligations to do other things, whether a person can be obligated to do two things at one time. And if you can, which one? Which one? The prioritization of what your obligations are. But he wanted more than Talmud. What he was looking for was kind of the esoteric, just only because you asked about Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, he wanted the soul of the Talmud.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And you mentioned the Baal Shem Tov. And I didn't- Liel mentioned the Baal Shem Tov, who was a Hasidic master who lived in the, was born in 1698. Lived in the 18th century. He was the founder of Hasidism, which is the Hasidic writings based on Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's writings of the Zohar, which is in the second century. So he's writing with the 1800 year somewhat of a gap, although it was Kabbalah. But I just want to say one thing about, maybe we should even end on this note because it's invoking Robert Post, a great story about the Baal Shem Tov of-. And he says. And so, Robert, so the dean of the law school, I thought for sure he'd study Talmud. So he studied week after week after week. And he said, no, I want, I want Chassidus, I want mysticism, I want the the deeper esoteric parts. So we started to study the writings of the Baal Shem Tov and he enjoyed it a lot more. And he was he's a, he's, you know, they say he was the smartest guy in California. That was, it was a joke. And I used to joke he was the second smartest guy in New Haven. But that was another joke. But and he loved the Talmud. And so, you like that joke, right? I'm not sure which one's a better joke, but anyway, the point is that he wanted to study mysticism and he wanted to study the Baal Shem Tov.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So we started to study the Baal Shem Tov. A long time after that, I asked him why Talmud wasn't enough. Why did you want to study the BeShT? Why do you want to study Chassidus? Why do you want mysticism? Why did you want this emergence of Hasidic philosophy based on Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai's writings of the Zohar. And he said, you know, my grandmother, ultimately, we found the picture of his grandmother that's now in our mansion at Yale. And he said my grandmother was, would get on the - she lived in Brooklyn - and she would get on the tram on Pitkin Avenue. So he mentioned the BeShT, which is an acronym for the Baal Shem Tov. Rabbi Yisroel Baal Shem Tov. You should read his, after you finished mastering the Talmud you should, at the same time, you should be studying the Baal Shem Tov's writings, and he says his grandmother would get on a tram on Pitkin Avenue, and he says people would come over to her and say to her, give me a blessing. Give me a blessing. Robert Post's grandmother. And, because you come from Mezibuzh. Mezibuzh was a tiny little town where the Baal Shem Tov came from. The impression was that the town was such a holy town, a town that could have borne a Baal Shem Tov. It was such a holy place that if you're an old lady sitting on a tram at Pitkin Avenue, 300 years after the Baal Shem Tov-
Toby Hecht: That's where he was buried.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Where he lived and he was buried, there must be something sacred. So there is another whole component of Judaism, and obviously they're both very important. That's Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai for you.
Liel Leibovitz: So as I'm getting the note here, I want to- I want to just leave with an observation of, I think refers to how you said so eloquently we should really live the Talmud rather than just read it and study it. So the Talmud forces you, in its very inscrutable way, to ask a lot of questions. Why? And here's one question that I asked right away. There are orders in the Mishnah. There are six orders in the Mishnah. And one of them, you know, the third one, is about, it's about family. Now, if you tasked me with writing the rules of family. I'd say, okay, well, you know, we start when a family starts. So maybe with the rules of dating or the rules of marriage or the rules of having children, like, that's when a family starts. The Talmud starts this order with a Tractate called Yevamos, which is the rules of levirate marriage, which is what happens if a man, God forbid, passes away and he has a marriageable brother, they are obligated to offer his wife to marry her. The idea being that you don't want to leave a woman living her life, you know, despondent and with especially back then in patriarchal society, with no one to care for her. Now you would think, why on earth would you start with something so archaic? And if I may, so freaking depressing. This is not how to sell the sort of look, family law, it's cool, love. And my friend and teacher, Rabbi David Bashevkin, gave me a beautiful, he was like, think about what the Talmud is actually saying here. Ask the question. The question is just what you asked, what is family? And here's the Talmud's answer. It's not, hey man, we're having a destination wedding and it's in Maui. And we'll all have like, you know, linen suits. It'll be great. Come hang out. Hey man, come sit on the deck and drink beers, it'll be fantastic. Family is what happens when, God forbid, there is tragedy.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Liel Leibovitz: Who's going to be there for you? Who's going to stand up? Who's going to really say, you know what, I meant what I said when I said, we're blood now. So here, I'm going to do this very difficult thing. And it's a reminder for us to be there for each other. At which point I want to say, I am so sorry for this silly timing. I am so grateful. I will be flying in more ways than one.