How Would Pharaoh Read the Haggadah? with Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman (284)

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1:00When we read the accounts of the Tanakh of the events of the past, what we need to keep in mind is that the Torah is not a photograph, it's a painting. What do I mean by that? The number of cookrights about this, he says that the stories in Tanakh might not necessarily be 100% factually told the way that they actually happened. He has no problem saying this, he says that the Torah tells us its accounts, including the Torah itself, not just Tanakh, but the Torah itself, with the purpose of inculcating a message, penetrating our hearts and souls so that we come away with the right inspiration and with the right messages. And he says, you know, if you have a documentary, something, let's say the Shalom, then you have all the facts, but that might not penetrate your heart and soul in the same way as a good movie like Schindler's List Might. And so Ruf Cook says, because the Torah's ultimate purpose is to educate and to inspire and to inculcate lessons, it has no qualms when the dry facts themselves might be just that,

2:05a bit dry, to embellish the facts and create a richer narrative that will penetrate the soul. Or as I like to say, when I say that the Torah is not a photograph, it's a painting nobody ever looked at a Rembrandt and said, nah, people don't glow like this. No, people look at a Rembrandt and they go, wow, he got the soul of man. I'm Scott Khan, and this is the Orthodox Conundrum. This is the Orthodox Conundrum on JewishCoffeeHouse.com. I'm Scott Khan. You may notice that my voice is a bit rough today. I'm unfortunately a bit under the weather, so today's introduction will be brief. In fact, I was supposed to record this episode on Thursday, but I asked my guest,

3:05Rabbi Dr. Joshua Burman, to postpone until Mote Shabbat, at which point I assumed my voice would be better, but it wasn't. So I postponed again until this morning, Sunday, March 15th. And this morning, my voice was still a mess. But today's release day, so here we are. As it turned out, the Iranians also tried to push it off with an alert going off during our recording, but that we made through just fine. But I'm very excited about this conversation. With Paisach approaching, I have the privilege of speaking with Rabbi Burman of BariLan University about his amazing Nuhagada echoes of Egypt. In this episode, we explore why the historicity of the Exodus really matters, how the Torah radically challenged the political and religious assumptions of the ancient world, and how discoveries from Egyptology can illuminate familiar parts of the Hagada in surprising ways. Rabbi Burman shows how the Torah often takes the symbols of Powro's world and turns them upside down, transforming propaganda about kings and gods

4:06into a revolutionary message about God, freedom, and the dignity of ordinary people. It's a very thought-provoking discussion that may change the way you read the Hagada this year, and we'll get to it in just a moment. First, remember to subscribe to the Orthodox Conundrum podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Please rate it and write a review. Continue the conversation on Facebook by joining the Orthodox Conundrum discussion group. Finally, the best way to promote your organization, your business, or yourself is to create a high-quality podcast, and JCH podcast productions can help you make that happen, whether you want to learn how to start your own podcast, or want to improve the podcast you already produce, we will make it happen. Write to us at Alisa at JewishCoffeeHouse.com, that's ALIZA at JewishCoffeeHouse.com, and let's get started with your high-quality, memorable, and effective podcast. Rabbi Dr. Joshua Burman is professor of Tanakh at Bariland University. A graduate of Princeton University, N.A.B. Shivat Haratzeon, Rabbi Burman is the author of Created Equal,

5:06how the Bible broke with ancient political thought, which was a national Jewish book award finalist's scholarship. He is also the author of inconsistency in the Torah, ancient literary convention, and the limits of source criticism, and Anima Amin, biblical criticism, historical truth, and the 13 principles of faith. His articles on biblical theology and contemporary society have appeared in the pages of Mosaic magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Rabbi Dr. Burman served as a member of the International Advisory Board for the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. He is host of the acclaimed new podcast, The Bible Bar. Rabbi Dr. Joshua Burman, thank you very much for joining me once again on the Orthodox Conundrum podcast. Oh, always a pleasure to be with you Scott. We're going to open up with a provocative question today. Could you please tell me and our listeners, why do you believe that the belief that the exits from Egypt was an actual historical event, why it matters? What I mean by that, if I play devil's advocate, is there not room to say that faith in the God of the Bible

6:06as the Redeemer of slaves and Redeemer of the oppressed is more important than any particular historical occurrence? Oh my goodness, okay, yeah, that's really interesting. So, yeah, I have some friends. Really, I would say Yere Shemaim and even Lundanim, who said to me, you know, it doesn't really matter to me whether it was actually an Exodus or not. I'm a Jew because my father was a Jew, and my grandfather was a Jew, and this is what we do, and this is how we relate to the Reborn of Shalom. And that's fine for me. And I'm happy that it's fine for them. It's not fine for me. And I'll say why. I believe that the foundational notion that stands behind our relationship with the Reborn of Shalom is Akara Satouv, giving thanks, giving proper appreciation for the act of Yatsiyat Mitzraim. And I derive this from the Assyrian Sadebros,

7:08from the Ten Commandments, that the way in which Akutashbar who opens up, he does not say, I am the Lord who created you, or who created the world. It's Anocha Hashem, Al-Khashahood, Saitiqah, Me'erix, Mitzraim, Ibet, Abadim. I took you. And there are things that are very distinct about this redemption. And they are before because it happened to us, and it couldn't have happened without Akutashbar, who that is the whole basis for our obligation to him. Okay, that's a very important answer. Let's talk about memory, though, because it's not just that we believe this was an historical occurrence. The entire Haggadda is predicated upon the idea that this is something that happened to us, the idea of memory. So what do you think the connection is between understanding history and treating it as a memory, as something that's personal that happened to us? Well, I don't know if this is precisely what you mean, but I think that there's the event, and then there's how we're meant to remember it, and process it. I think all of us in our own lives can, if we're old enough, as you and I are,

8:10old enough, you kind of apprehend and think about events earlier in your life in different ways as you go on in your life, and you understand the significance, you might understand parents who have departed in one way, at one time of the life, and then another way, another time of life. And so there's a kind of ongoing process of processing what has happened to us in the past, and maybe that comes through in the various accretion and instead, as we know, there is no more living document in our Missoura, than the Haggata, which constantly has things added to it. I think that what's so important here is, it's an idea that I like to teach about, is that when we read the accounts of the Tanakh, of the events of the past, what we need to keep in mind is that the Torah is not a photograph, it's a painting, it's not a photograph, it's a painting. What do I mean by that? The number of cook rights about this, he says that the stories in Tanakh might not necessarily

9:10be 100% factually told the way that they actually happened. He has no problem saying this. He says that the Torah tells us its accounts, including the Torah itself, not just Tanakh, but the Torah itself, with the purpose of inculcating a message, penetrating our hearts and souls, so that we come away with the right inspiration and with the right messages. And he says, you know, I'm paraphrasing to speak an oral language, because his language is incredibly flowery. If you have a documentation of something, a documentary, excuse me or something, let's say the Shalom, then you have all the facts, but that might not penetrate your heart and soul, the same way as a good movie like Shindler's List Might. And so Ruf Cook says, because the Torah's ultimate purpose is to educate and to inspire and to inculcate lessons, it has no qualms when the dry facts themselves might be just that, a bit dry, to embellish the facts

10:10and create a richer narrative that will penetrate the soul. Or as I'd like to say, when I say that the Torah is not a photograph, it's a painting nobody ever looked at a Rembrandt and said, nah, people don't glow like this. No, people look at a Rembrandt and they go, wow, he got the soul of man. Very interesting. So I'm actually getting ahead of myself now, but I'm going to ask this question, which was, I was observing it for later, but for example, I'm going to mention something that Rabbi Berman, you've said, you say that the description of the victory of Ramses, the Great, over the Hittites, at Kadesh, apparently we have 10 distinct copies of that. That inspired the way that the Torah describes God's victory over power and the Egyptians. So are you saying that the story didn't exactly happen in the same way, but the Torah wrote it in a different way that's somewhat similar in order to connect it to that victory over the Hittites? So there's two ways to say, let me just back up a little bit because not everybody has read the Haggadah

11:10that I've put out the way that you have Scott, but okay, let's back up a little bit. So a lot of scholars believe that the Exodus took place around the time of Ramses II, otherwise known as Ramses the Great. And he was great. He reigned longer than any Pharaoh and had more victories than any other Pharaoh and expanded the borders, perhaps more than any other Pharaoh. So he was Ramses the Great. His greatest achievement, his greatest victory, was a big battle over his arch nemesis, the Hittite Empire, in modern day, Anatolia, Turkey. And this was a huge battle at a place called Kadesh, having nothing to do with Kadesh in the Tanakh. A place on the modern day border between Syria and Lebanon. And from the descriptions, both the Egyptian and Hittite inscriptions, the scholars think that this might have been the largest chariot battle of all time. What's more important for my purposes

12:12is that when Ramses comes back to Egypt, he plasters Egypt with the counts of this. He makes it what is ultimately the most publicized event in ancient history. By that I mean just by way of comparison, think of Titus, Titus sacks Jerusalem in 70. And he goes back to Rome, and he builds the arch of Titus, many of us perhaps have visited there. One arch, one arch of Titus, one. But Ramses goes back home after the battle of Kadesh. And as you mentioned, puts it up in what we know or at least 10 different places, accounts, pictures, based reliefs, some kind of several accounts of the battle. Some of these are in Papyrus, that were apparently read out to servants and slaves. So this was the most publicized event in all of ancient history. Now, my claim is that when you read the story of Yitzitiyat Mitzrain itself, like, you know, one spin of his sailor out.

13:12I'm speaking of Exodus 14 and 15, where they go out, where they are chased by the chariots, where Hashem splits the seas, et cetera, and the Benesokal through, and they go to Shirat Hayam. When you read those two chapters together, and you read the Kadesh poem of Ramses II, where he describes the kind of the progression of the battle, the hitites, it's remarkable, because there's one by one correspondence in the unfolding of the battle. Maybe the most remarkable part of it is that in both we have in Khulgmish and what we have in the Kadesh poem, the protagonist army, that means, in our story, Benesrael. Benesrael, when they see the chariots that were chasing to them, they go to pieces. They're totally behelum, as we say here, shocked. And the same thing happens to Ramses troops when the hitites come on their chariots, and they all run away.

14:12And then it says that Ramses troops came back, and they saw all the corpses of the hitites, and they saw the great hand of Ramses, and they had faith in him, and they were awed by him, just like we have at the end of Schmult-Yudhalid, Valyarbenes, Sofenstein, Mehtel, Svatayam. They saw the corpses at the edge of the sea, and they saw Yad Hashem, and they had great oil in him. And the next thing that happens in the Qadish poem is that Ramses troops sing a shira to him. They give a big pin, a hymn of praise to him, and they say things like, they say things like, you destroy your enemies like the chaff, and who is like you, the great warrior, and then it describes how he marched them back to Egypt and arrived triumphantly in his castle, in his palace, where the gods gave him eternal rule, and this is what we have in Shira Ta'yam, that we say similar things, you know, you're Chaliml-Kakash,

15:13and you're right hands shattered them. Several others that I'm skipping over here, and Shira Ta'yam is not only about Krias Yamsuf, Shira Ta'yam then looks forward to Hashem leading his troops triumphantly into Eritis Rael, into Mikdash Hashem Kunriyadekhah, his, as it were, palace, and he's given eternal rule, Hashem Imlochle-Lamva ed, okay? So look at this, to my mind, it's unmistakable, and the question is, so what to make of it? What to make of it? So I think that this is part of a kind of strategy that we see in many, many aspects of the Torah's telling, of the story of Yatmin Shira, and what we would call cultural appropriation, that is, you take the Pharaoh's royal propaganda and invert it to use against them. This was, you know, the story, the accounts, the pictures, the base release. There were being used to indoctrinate Egyptians

16:13of all levels of society, about the greatness of the greatest Pharaoh and his greatest achievement of all of Egyptian history, then along comes the Torah and says, ah, you want to understand the Yatmin Shira, so it's just like that, but now it's the Yatmin Shira, along the place in the place of Ramses II. So now to your question, it could be, I think I can say this in two ways, okay? I can say, no, really, really the story of Kriat Yamsuf took place exactly, Kikhtavu, the Khilshonel, exactly as it's written in Khomish, and that a Khushbah who planned it out that way in order for Bin A. Israel, living through it to see, would be able to see, ah, yeah, this is like what we learned in Egyptian kindergarten about how great Ramses II was. Or it could be that, I don't know exactly what happened there, as we all know, even of great figures like Russell of H.I.G. and Robert Jonathan Sachs, St. Kriat Sa'dipi Rakhab, all kind of tried to minimize the miraculous aspect of what was going on. Maybe they were a little uncomfortable with that.

17:15Whatever the reality was, the way in which the Torah has scripted that reality, has sculpted it for our ultimate consumption, for our memory, is in a way that very much resembles the Khadish poem of Ramses II. And maybe here, this is what I, this goes back to what I was saying, the painting that the Revonational wants to keep in mind about this event, not necessarily the photograph, but the painting, the telling of it, is a telling that would remind Bin A. Israel and generations thereafter, at least the first couple of generations, of this seminal, seminal event, and seminal composition with an Egyptian history that would used to be used to describe the greatest achievement, of the greatest Pharaoh, is now used to describe the greatest accomplishment of the Mehlachmal Pachemalachin. So your answer really is, it could be either one, it could be that Hashem orchestrated the events to parallel them or wrote them that way. I was in there, I wasn't there.

18:15Okay, now, when you say that, at least for the first few generations, they would understand that, that reminds me of something that I once heard from Professor David Schatz in New York, he described it in an article, different approaches to explaining the first peric of Brazheet, the creation story, using modern discoveries of physics. And he said in that case, that there's something called bold concordism, that's what he titles it, which is associated with certain professors, like, for example, Gerald Schroeder and Nathan Aviezer, where they say that recent advances in physics can help us understand what Brazheet was saying all along. Now, there's nothing wrong with this approach, and if people like it and it works for them, that's great. However, other people don't like this approach, and one of the regular objections is that it seems strange to them, that God would hide the real meaning of these psookim for 3,000 years, and only in the 20th and 21st century, do we understand what God was saying all along? Now, I'm going to reverse that, with what you just said. When we bring Egyptology into play, we have sort of the reverse question,

19:15because it's not that it takes 3,000 years to understand it, it's the other way around, it's that you only understood what it really meant, that symbolism of Brazhees and the Hittites and showing the parallelism, if you were alive at the time, and a couple of generations later, people who had no access to that Egyptian history wouldn't know what it was talking about, unless nowadays you're an Egyptologist or a biblical scholar. So, my question really is, how do we relate to the notion that there are ideas in the Torah that we can only grasp if you're either alive at the time or soon thereafter, or if you have a degree in Egyptology? Right, that's an excellent question, and sometimes the way that it's Brazheet to me is Rabbi isn't the Torah eternal, and if it's eternal, then how can it be speaking in any register that was only available as you stay to either those who live through it or those who studied it, you know, with academic degrees? And that's really troubling because we believe that our Torah is eternal. So, the first thing that I want to say

20:15is that I'm just, I didn't make this stuff up. The Ramam made up this approach. The Ramam, not only as a religious thinker, but I would say even as a scholar, he is the first figure in history to the best of my knowledge who looks at the Torah and says, wait a minute, I got to get in touch with what was going on at the time. The more I know about the ancient reality of the world, the better I will understand the Torah. And the Ramam does this many times in the third section of the Moran of Uhrimun, he is giving the reasons for the Mitzvah, and especially when he comes to aspects of the Vagoda, the cultic aspects, sacrifice, tabernacle, things like that. The Ramam, on many occasions, differs to what he has discovered about ancient idol worship practices that he studied. And he says, he bemoans, he says, he says in one of his letters, I made an effort to get every book in the world that I could

21:15about the ancient world. And he says at the end of Moran of Uhrim, halavai that I would have more knowledge of the ancient world, because the more that I know about the ancient world, the better I understand Khumish. This is what he says. So he had no problem with this. But that just kicks the can down the road. Okay, so there's apparently a precedent, even a strong precedent, within the Masaura to do this. But Daaka, as they say, so, okay, what about the issue itself? How can it be that the Torah speaks in a way that is going to be largely indecipherable, or totally, you know, readers of the Torah will just not get it unless they were there, or unless they're here listening to this podcast for all intents and purposes. So my answer to that, and I think this is what the Rahman would have answered, is that the Torah is eternal, and its messages and ideas are eternal. But that does not necessarily mean that every job and title in the entire Tanakh

22:16is going to be immediately accessible by all members of Klay Israel across all ages. In fact, that's virtually impossible, not because of a limitation on the Rebono Shalom, but because of our own limitations as human beings. We are born in time and place, and we're born in different times and in different places, and therefore our ways of thinking, our aesthetics, change over time, and so therefore we hope that the Torah's great messages will radiate or will resonate, that's the better word, sometimes from this passage, sometimes from that passage, and that the main ideas overall will successfully be communicated over time. In fact, if precisely because we maintained the Torah is eternal, it makes sense that there will be certain passages that resonate more strongly at this time and this place with these readers listeners, and other passages that will resonate more strongly

23:16at other times, at other places with other listeners. In that case, let me ask you sort of a follow-up question or a parallel question, what would you say once you do with the Midrashik or Tarsimal-Pet understandings of what happened at C. Amit Shreim, which might not necessarily work with what you're saying, but in fact, even contradict them and say something quite different. What do you do with those particular passages just for example, the Midrashik? So, Midrashik or Kabbalah, look, they're a Shivim Panim of Torah, and I'm staking out one. All I want is one of the Shivim Panim. Yeah, I find generally that people that have a Kabbalistic orientation to how they read Komish don't know what to do with what I'm doing. I can understand that. If you say the reality that's in this text is explained exclusively by the Kabbalah, then you don't really have a place to take someone who says, well, maybe this realities that are being, that are better explained with reference to ancient Egyptian texts. And, you know, what I like to say is,

24:17I don't like to diss or to disqualify or rule out other readings. I really believe this Shivim Panim of Torah and, you know, there's many radio stations and they play many types of music and we have many types of music within our Misura. We have 70 types of music and I'm kind of playing fiddle on one of them. That's all. That's how it's good to me. So I'd like to ask you some more specific questions about what you talk about. In fact, I'm now going to quote something you said in one of your introductions in Nagada. You have a couple of them. And you wrote that against this viewpoint, meaning the common viewpoint of the ancient world, you write, the Torah takes a completely different position which rests upon two far reaching theological innovations. First, it presents a model of heavenly sovereignty, which strips earthly power structures of their sacral legitimacy. Second, it provides ideological grounding for the existence of a homogenous nation of common and noble citizens. I'd like you to expand upon that

25:18and explain what you mean by that. And what kind of power structures is the Torah talking about and how do the Torah break with this viewpoint? Yeah, so all the texts that are created in the ancient world that have come to down to us they're really all about the powerful or all historical texts are always first person autobiographical accounts by the kings themselves. I went out to battle. I did this. It is never third person. It's all about the kings, especially in Egypt. The Code of Hamarabi is all about protecting the rich. Interest rates in the Code of Hamarabi are 33% a year. And so it was always the rich and it was always especially the powerful meaning kings and temples which all go together in the ancient world with the entire focus of the civilization. And the Torah is the first blueprint for a society that takes away a lot of the power of kings and also a lot of the power of priests. I'll talk about that in a second

26:18and gives much more status and economic and political security to the common people. When I say it takes away status from the priests, you know, we have the old joke. My father was a co-head. My grandfather was a colon. I want to be a colon. The truth is, if you wanted to be a priest in the ancient world, you were looking around. Well, let's see. In which culture do I want to be a priest? Where would I get the best deal? The answer is you'd get the worst deal in Israel because elsewhere, the temples were enormous and the storehouses were enormous. And if you were a priest, you were sitting on huge amounts of economic surplus. And in the Torah, there's relatively few sacrifices and you don't get to only end if you're a colon. Everyone else gets to the only end. You don't. And so this is also a way in which the types of economic power that priests had in the ancient world are stripped down in the Torah room. Just to give you a sense of the economic cloud that some of these priests had,

27:18there's one temple that when I take, when I took groups to Egypt, we visit one temple which is surrounded by Aramee Sknotes, storehouses, exactly what the Torah says that the Bine Israel built. And the storehouses cover the size of 15 football fields. And they surround the temple. It's huge. So, you know, this is part of what the Torah is doing to kind of take away economic resources from the priests and from the temple and leaving it in the hands of the common people. In fact, I know in the Torah itself at the end of Parshat Vahegash, that's very clear. When you're safe, basically buys everybody and be tried in their land, except for the priests. The Torah makes that very clear. The priests, you don't touch the priests. Right. Right. That's right. You know, I have to say, the one of the ideas that most moved me in reading your Haggadah is when you talk about some of the unexpected aspects of the Torah's miracles. For example, you talk about the big surprise of splitting the sea

28:19given what was known in the ancient world is not so much that God split the sea. God's could do big things like that. But it's that slaves are the ones who are being freed. And similarly, you say that the big shock of the epiphany at Harsinai was not so much that God spoke from a fire. That's fine. But it's that he spoke to everybody. The common people receive the revelation along with Moshe Rebano. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can see this very vividly. I'm sure many of us have seen pictures of temples in Egypt. What is these enormous statues of the Pharaoh that built the temple out front? And I guess many of them would look at these, I mean, some of these statues are like 70-year-old time. Really big. And we would say, well, why is there a big statue of the Pharaoh that built this temple? And we might think, well, it's simply because he's, you know, instead of a donor plaque, we have a donor statue. You know, sometimes some people have a plaque. Some donors have even a bust, you know, in the lobby of the museum or the hospital or whatever it is.

29:19Okay, so the Pharaohs took it a hundred steps further and they built enormous statues of themselves, because they were the ones that built the temple. It isn't just that. They did build the temple. But it's because when you go inside these temples and you look on the walls, everything, everything is about the relationship between that Pharaoh and the various gods. He is the focus. He is the focus. And along comes the Torah and has no role for the king inside the Miktash. And it says, instead, it says, the Miktash is within the people. And then in sacred devarium, it will say, this is the Bait Miktash is a place where we rejoice with their Bonnishalan. We, you and me, all the simple people of Clio Israel, the connection is between God and the people. Can you expand upon that a little bit? You mentioned that the Torah was fundamentally challenging this idea that kings are divine or semi-divine. In the ancient world, what did that look like? What did people think the kings really were? Like, did they actually believe that the kings

30:19were divine? So I don't think that that in Egypt, for the most part, the scholars debate this to this day. They certainly believe that the kings were chosen by the gods, that the kings sometimes were given powers that maybe other humans don't have. One of my favorite images anywhere in Egypt, the Sistens and Agada. So there's this enormous temple in southern Egypt, built by Ramses II. And Ramses the Great. And inside, as I mentioned, he has endless pictures of him giving incense to this God and that God and an offering to this God and that God, getting a blessing from this God and that God. There's 39 gods that he has different relationships with. There's more gods in ancient Egypt than anywhere else. My favorite God. Can I tell you what my favorite God is? It's not in ancient Egypt. It's a picture where Ramses II is worshipping Ramses II.

31:19There's a God. Ramses II. You know, if you thought your boss worships himself, oh, this takes up an step further. I can't even wrap my head around that. What does it even mean that God Ramses II? Okay. So, yes. There's this sound at the end. I don't remember how we've reacted to that. Well, just the idea the kings are divine. Do they actually believe that the common people believe that? They believe that the divine inspiration, some divine powers. Let's leave it at that. It's a different different sources that kind of risen in different ways on that one. Okay. I'd like to ask you what you mean by the vassal treaty. You say that the revelation of Harsinai is anchored in that idea, the vassal treaty. What is that exactly? And what is the Torah trying to teach by doing the same thing with God in Israel? Right. Yeah. This is a really important point. So, my mind Harsinai depicts for us a relationship that's hard to pin it down in that. Is this something that Ben-Aisrael joined freely? Well, on the one hand, of course, they say, not 70 schmatz.

32:19Sounds like it was presented to them, and they had to accept it. On the other hand, I think that even when we're reading just comics, even before we get to the medrish, you kind of get the sense that the famous madrash that Harsinai or over Ben-Aisrael, Harsinai, you know, is like he was as a great weight that he was ready to just, you know, let go on top of them if they didn't say yes, also seems to be true. So what's going on here? And I think that there's we now know that there are many, many aspects of the relationship between Hashem and Amisrael, many, many mixed folk that become illuminated when we get in touch with what's known as the ancient Near Eastern Vassal Treaty. What does that mean? Well, what happened in the ancient world would be the following. You would have a king of some size who would suddenly find himself in dire straits. Either he's under siege from another king, or there's been a famine

33:20or plague, and he desperately needs the help of stronger power. And so he sends out an SOS to a stronger power, and that stronger king sends along troops or food or whatever it is that is necessary to bring salvation to this weaker king. When that would happen, it was understood by all parties that now this was now, it was incumbent upon the weaker king who had received salvation to become a Vassal to the sovereign the stronger king. To be a Vassal king does not need to be enslaved, and you do not lose your autonomy, but you become, to put it in our parlance, a kind of junior partner to that senior partner, that stronger king. And that stronger king would then dictate the term of the relationship now between the two parties. The senior king, what we call the sovereign king, would say, okay, you have to pay me taxes, x, y, and z, you have to send me soldiers, x, y, and z, you have to have,

34:20you have to be loyal exclusively to me. You cannot make treaties with anybody else. And that this becomes the template for the relationship between Akutashbh and Amisrael. That is, Amisrael, and after you'd see Atmet Srayim, where it says in Parik Bet, you know, the Tal Shavatam El Al-Okim Minawudah, their angst, their angst, their cries, went out, and they went up to the Rebono Shalom from the slavery, that's been so calling out. And then, the sovereign king, Akutashbh, who delivers Amisrael, and now what's understood by all parties, is that now there needs to be a treaty between the stronger sovereign king, the weaker Vassal king, to now kind of set into stone, what will be the terms of the relationship between this stronger and junior partners? But that's the main thing. They are partners, but they are unequal. So, what I find so remarkable

35:21about this, is that it raises Amisrael to be the level of a king, not in parity, not the same as their Mehlach Maulachim, but we are a kingdom. We are a Maulachim, a kingdom, and then we have this relationship with Akutashbh, that expresses itself through the tribute that we give him, which is the Shmanat Amisrael, and there are just many, many Meatsrael, that we have, that they are illuminated by this. I'll just give, I'll just give, like one example, in these treaties, routinely the sovereign king says, oh, and you, Vassal king, you shall come and appear in my court, periodically, to come and greet me. Well, this is what we have in Aliad Regdo, you know, that every so often, we have to go to do the court of the sovereign king, or where the sovereign king will say to the Vassal king, you must periodically review and hear, read out to you, the stipulations of this treaty. Well, this is what we have at Akhil,

36:21that every so often, we have to go here, all of this read to us again, and many other things that are resonant with that. That's also interesting, it explains so much, I'm now going to ask you a question, which may be unanswerable, but I'll ask it anyway, you're talking now about, what you call the dynamics of appropriation, and why do you think it's better, quote-unquote, for the Torah to have used, or for God to have used, appropriating symbols, the people, already knew, rather than to create something brand new, I would almost think that the Vassal treaty, or any other appropriation that the Torah is using, it might have been understandable to the people at the time, and we already talked about why the Torah might have done that, but at the same time, could not, so to speak, God have created a brand new idea that's even better, that might not have used, something which was obviously not perfect in its own time, why wouldn't God have created brand new symbols that would be more eternally valid? Right, so I think that actually what's happening in the Torah is a mix of the two, that is that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that,

37:21that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, and I think the whole idea of the Torah is to raise awat Masroir, and to raise the spiritual world that they are inhabiting above that which they are losing and leaving behind. And I think that this is what we see throughout the Torah, that you can see, a kind of, I would say, adapting, but adapting, things that Ashem takes from the other cultures, to bringawat Masroir upward and onward. sounds by the Beach Boys. Those are two albums that appeared, 167, 166, that radically changed pop music. And if somebody listens to them today, they often don't know why they were so great, because they sound wonderful, but nothing special. And the answer is, because you can't put yourself back into that time and understand how different they sounded from everything they came beforehand. In some ways, again, Lahab deal, I think the Torah did the same thing, that we look at the Torah

38:22now in some of the amazing innovations about democracy, about the importance of common people, about de-emphasizing kings and so on and so forth. And people look at that and don't even notice them, because the Torah has been so successful. And that sense, the Torah is a victim of its own success. We don't see those innovations anymore. Okay. Now, I'd like to go through some specific examples. Before we went on the air, you said you wanted to give a few or four examples about how this works together. It could be some of them we've already mentioned, but maybe you can give some more examples of looking at Egyptology and the history of ancient Egypt to illuminate ideas of the Haggadah. Right. Okay. So let's start with just something that, you know, I'm sure we're all familiar with on a basic level. And at the Haggadah, in the Haggadah, we say, based on say, for Divine, that a Qadish Baruch who took us out of Egypt, the Yag Khazakab, who visited Tuyah with a mighty hand in an outstretched arm. So it's interesting when you look in the Tanakh that the use of that phrase, mighty hand in an outstretched arm, that it really only appears with reference to the events of Yitziyat-Mitsrayim. When we look elsewhere in Tanakh, we do not find that this phrase is

39:26Yag Khazakab is one Tuyah is described other than with regard to the events of the Exodus. There will be a phrase Yag Khazakab, it turns out that this phrase mighty hand in outstretched arm has a prominence. And that is that when you look at the inscriptions of the pharaohs themselves, during the period at which Bene Israel were residing in Egypt. Let's say roughly 1500 to 1200 to BCE, give it take a century here or there, but during that period, everything the pharaohs do is with their mighty hand and an outstretched arm. The pharaoh defeated the Libyans, you know, his enemies to the west with a mighty hand. One day, the pharaoh was walking and discovered at his feet a diamond the size of his fist which he lifted with his outstretched arm. And on and on, hundreds and hundreds of times there's a reference to this. So here is an example of cultural appropriation that in order to depict just how great a pharaoh who was and how weak the Egyptians

40:28were or vulnerable the pharaohs were. Here Hashem is using their own terms in kind of a spiritual warfare to describe a cultural spark whose greatness. So that's a nice idea. Now, if you didn't have the degree in Egyptology or if you didn't listen to this podcast or read Burman Tagada, you'd still pretty much get the idea of Yad Khasaqav is running to you. So I'm adding a little bit. It's nice, it's a nice idea, but it's okay. You could live without it. Jews understood this phrase forever without any desigital logical stuff. Let's take another example that I think is a little bit more illuminating. So Hashem says or Moshe Rebein who says, in Sayf Rebarim, that he has seen I, Panim al Panim di Berashani Mahin, that Hashem spoke to us face to face. That's a very strange phrase because just a few weeks ago we read in Parashad Kitisah, Lawyer Anihandam Bakhai, that we're not able to see the reborn of Shastran. So how could it be that he spoke to us face to face? We stood there with blindfolds on. What does it mean? Panim al Panim.

41:32So when you look, it's actually the cover of the Haggadah and several images that I have inside, all over Egypt, you see the father following family. Every of the pharaohs and the gods are depicted together, they are exactly the same size. The gods are in fully human form, human size. In fact, you sometimes look at a picture of a god and a pharaoh, and you can't really tell which is the god and which is the pharaoh. They're often like standing literally face to face. And sometimes you can even see, and I have pictures of this in Haggadah, where the god has his arms around the pharaoh's waist and is pulling him towards him. It has erotic overtones. And they are literally, they look like they're about to kiss. I mean, they're just that parallel and that and what these images are meant to describe is just how beloved the pharaohs were to the gods. And they wanted to broadcast this in visual form to everybody. So along comes the Torah and says,

42:34forget about the pharaohs. Panim al Panim de Barashani mahan, face to face. It isn't that we were able to see the rebonus shalom at Harsinai because obviously, it couldn't, there's an Arnon, there's a cloud, there's fire and all that. But the sense that we are now the chosen ones. And not the leaders, and not the powerful. That's a beautiful idea. And I think that it has an exegetical payoff because now I understand how one pasuch says, low yirani haa dhambachai, you can't steam me and live. And another pasuch says that God spoke to us face to face. It's again, it's this cultural appropriation. So I think that the payoff there is better. Let me now let me take this thing that I think conceptually is really cool. You know, as I mentioned earlier, the Egyptians had a lot of gods and they were very religious people and they had lots of holidays. But all of the holidays that the Egyptians had, and I think this is probably true throughout the ancient world, the festivals that they had were all exclusively agricultural, you know, clowing

43:35season, the harvesting season, the rain season, et cetera. And this was true in Egypt. There's festivals for the inundation, you know, the Nile comes down and it dates, there's festivals for the harvest season, et cetera. There are never in the Egyptian calendar holidays that commemorate what any God, this God, that God, any God, what any God did for the Egyptian people. There is no historical event that is commemorated in the Egyptian calendar. So even though they would credit their gods with victories, but that it was quickly forgotten. There is no history that Egypt passed down the story that they tell themselves about themselves. There's no consciousness of that, and certainly not with not in relation to how the gods have related to them over time through events of salvation. This is all an invention of the Torah that the God would be involved in the

44:36history that we would want to recall those events that we have a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. That's something that appears only in the Torah. And I think that's a huge thing. That's a really huge thing. But then we come to what I think is really the biggest, the biggest blow away idea that I've ever come across. Not my own. This is an idea that I need you have to say, Basham al-Murau, even if the al-Murau isn't necessarily Jewish, but it deserves credit for it. A really brilliant Egyptologist with a broad theological mind named Vian Asman, Pastor William and Pastor Euroso. And he noted the following. He said, you know, and this is something, it starts with something that we all know. The Egyptians are really into the afterlife. Oh man, you know, those tombs and, I mean, King Tux tomb, when they founded, they opened it up. They found inside 5,800 artifacts. That's a lot to take with you to the next world. What does the Jew take to the next world? Stalas? You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm doing to

45:41thalas, you know? Well, not everybody even takes thalas, you know? So, Egyptians believed Scott in the afterlife the way you and I believe in tomorrow. Meaning, you know, we're certain, you know, obviously we don't know that there's going to be a tomorrow or what tomorrow will look like. But we certainly live our lives with, you know, really practically certain did it. Full consciousness that tomorrow is coming. You know, she and our calendars are full of things of what we're going to be doing tomorrow on the next day, et cetera. So it is with that same sort of to the Egyptian lived with the consciousness of the afterlife. He come to the Tanach and, you know, you know, shoul here and there. And as we all know, Chazal had to do some results in the air to try to figure out where the source of of Olamhabah is, to the extent that they find them, let's put it this way, it's, it just doesn't take the same place in the Tanach anyway, that it does for the Egyptians.

46:41The question here is, how does a human being deal with the notion of his own mortality? It's just going to end. It'll be over. What do you do with that? I can be pretty somber and, you know, kind of a downer, you know. Yeah. So for the Egyptians, yeah, yeah. So for the Egyptian was simple, there's tomorrow, just like for you and me, today's not the last day, there's tomorrow. There's the afterlife. And so that's, and they had full consciousness of that, and so that that's how they dealt with that. So mortality isn't such a big deal. There's the afterlife. What does the Torah have to say about what happens? I mean, since the Torah is clearly not putting the same emphasis on an afterlife as the Egyptians were. The answer is, it goes back to the previous point that I made, that the Torah does put front and center, that there is an eternal bond between Ami-Sona and Qatashbarah home, to the degree that you and I and listeners devote ourselves to the

47:42concept of Kali Israel, and its connection with the Reboner Shalom, that is eternal. It is through our, our, our, our progeny, our children, our continuing generations, and their subsequent connection with the Qatashbarah, that is how we are eternal. I think that's a really a powerful, powerful idea. It means yes, so it might not be, Josh might not live on, Scott might not live on, or passed 120 anyway, but that's not really what it's about, because I'm not really here just for me, and you and each of our listeners are not here really for themselves. We're all, we're all really here involved in this discussion, whether we are speaking in it or listening to it, because of our participation with Kali Israel, the more that we invest in Kali Israel, the more that we devote ourselves to Kali Israel, the more that we are eternal. Descartes said, I think, therefore I am,

48:45and we say, I am because we are such a beautiful idea. Yeah, I'm going to take this to a personal and painful place. I am aware that a couple weeks ago, in Riverdale, there was a young lady, her name was Raheli Winner, Zechwan Ali Vachah, a young mother, who perished from complications in childbirth, giving birth to her third child. I mean, it doesn't get more tragic than that, it's like shocking, really shocking, and the grief is unimaginable, and nothing can be said to mitigate that grief, but there's another truth that's alongside that, that when you consider that she perished bringing into this world, the future of Amisrael, and her life was devoted to Kali Israel the way that you and I are. So that means that alongside the terrible last, there is also

49:45eternity, and to her, I would just say, the Amalach, the Dama'i Khayi, the Dama'i Khayi, and words of condolence to the Wiener and Typing families, but that is something that I have been thinking about, how the Torah gives us eternity because of our involvement with the notion of Kali Israel, and its eternal connection with the Wiener Shulala. Thank you for mentioning that, I'm really sorry to hear that, and it's a type of the Khama, it missed everything else, the terrible tragedy you mentioned. Let me redirect in a different direction because you also talk about the connection between the Mishkan and the camp of Ramziz. Could you talk about that for a few minutes? Right, so this is back to that text that I mentioned before about Ramziz's greatest achievement, his victory over the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh, one of the really remarkable things, this is actually what got me on to thinking about this, was the discovery that archaeologists made in the 1930s, and that was the following. They noticed in the temple inscriptions of Ramziz the

50:53second about this event that there were baseless reliefs, carvings, comics, if you will, the event, and you look at all of them and you see that in the Egyptian camp, the military camp, at the center of the camp is Ramziz Throne Tent, or what we would call in Hebrew his Khama'o, that's the Khama'o Picou, this is where he led the battle from, and there's a picture in several different places of what that tent looked like, it had two chambers, and the two chambers in kind of freaky ways resemble the Mishkan, that is, there's two chambers, one is, has the dimensions of two by one, one has the dimensions of one by one, the two by one is clearly an outer chamber, that's where servants wait, and then there's the inner chamber where the king Ramziz is sitting, and although it doesn't depict him sitting, it has his name, what we call a cartouche, it says Ramziz the second, or something like that, and then surrounding that name, Ramziz the second, you have

51:57these winged horrors figures that spread their wings, you know, looking at each other, facing each other, with their wings spread towards each other, and it's not hard to see that, wow, that looks an awful lot like Kruvim, and it's clear, I mean, there's no question that Kruvim are there's a notion throughout the ancient world, that the theities have wings, that spread, you don't have to be an ove d'avodizara to say this, but Allah has said it to root, when he says you have come the first taqq nafav, you know, to take up, to take up shelter under his spread wings, okay, so this is even in Kulmish that we have, that we have or in Tanakh that we have this sort of phrase, and it's in a bunch of places in Tanakh, so taking all these things together, outer chamber two by one, inner chamber one by one, in the inner chamber that is where this king resides, surrounded by this kind of honor guard of figures that spread their wings over him, with the entrance from the east, and surrounded by a perimeter, perimeter fence, just like the Mishkan,

52:59in the center of a military camp, which after all is what the Torah wants, we get to say for a midbar, that's what it describes, the Mishkan sits in the middle of the machhaneh, right, deggil machhaneh, the four sides, okay, so so archaeologists in the 30s noticed that this is not only highly similar, but more importantly, highly distinct, what do I mean by that? You don't have any other type of tabernacle, sanctuary, temple shrine anywhere in the regionaries that looks at all, like the Mishkan, you don't have any throne tent in a military camp, in a picture that looks at all like Ramses, so these are similar and distinct, and so archaeologists thought, wow, it could be that what the Torah is doing, because after all, Bonesre couldn't see God, and they couldn't hear God, it makes it kind of hard to relate to him, and there's no statue of God, so what the Torah does, this is part of the cultural appropriation, is that it says here, look, this is now going to be the

54:03shrine, the temple, the Mishkan, that Ashem dwells in, and it's going to remind you of all those pictures you saw about Ramses' greatest achievement of the greatest period of all of all of the Egyptian history, and now you will understand that Ramses has been thrown out, and now they want to show on, is the Melachmachyan al-Akhim. Very, very cool. Ask one final example, even though obviously there are many, many more, in the plague of Kinim, Lice, the Magicians of Paro, call it Etzpa Elohim, the finger of God, you have an interesting ha'ara on that. Yeah, right, so anybody who reads that immediately recognizes nowhere else in Tanakh, do we speak about Etzpa Elohim? There are several miracles that the Torah, that the Tanakh says, Yad Hashem, the hand, but not the Etzpa, so why is it that in Kinim, we hear about the finger of God. Okay, so in my humble opinion, no, this also is not my original idea, I just get to read wonderful scholarship of people who come up with these ideas, one scholar noted the following,

55:07that you see in a number of scenes, especially people who are trying to cross the Nile on a little skiff, like a little canoe type thing. You see the depictions of the people in the little boat, you also see the depictions of the water, and in the water you see massive crocodiles, and I will tell you these crocodiles were massive, I know this because I've seen them with my own eyes in the Egyptian Museum, mummified crocodiles 19 feet long, and that's mummified, that means shriveled, 19 feet long, so these were real behemoths, and if you're on a little bit, a little itty bitty boat, it's a pachad, how am I going to get to the other side? There's this really fear that one whip of the tail and we're lunch, and so instead of saying let's feel as if they're like we might do, but they would do is they would try to cast a spell on the water, and you can see them pointing down to the water, they can't point to the crocodile because as we all know anybody's

56:09ever been on water, you can't really see into the water, so clearly what's down there? You might know more or less what's down there, we can't really see it, so they're pointing kind of obliquely to the water, not to anything in particular, and then you have a, you know, in a comic, a bubble and they make a kind of a spell in which they say okay we're now going to, you know, make the crocodile not attack us, or something along those lines, okay? But the key is that the spell happens through their finger, and through the finger and the proper abracadabra, as it were, you control nature, but what happens in Kenium? It's not that the Torah says that it was etzbaya it's the heart to meme, it's the Egyptian sorcerers who say oh this is the finger of God, sure the Egyptians are speaking like Egyptians, how do you have control over nature through a spell that you impose upon some element in nature through your finger? So this must have been the finger of God, I swear very cool, now before we conclude I just want to, and please tell me if I'm correct in

57:12this, get rid of two misconceptions based on what we've been talking about, first of all you say that sadly the pyramids in Egypt were not built by the Hebrew slaves, is that true? That's the feeling, I mean, that can't be, but it happens to be true, yeah Josephus wrote that that that's Benazel built the pyramids, I'm not sure he got that from, but it's, I'm afraid it's not so the pyramids, they stopped building pyramids even before Benazel landed in Egypt, and the reason was that pyramids, they thought pyramids would be a great idea, you know, what is a pyramid? A pyramid is a great billboard that says, come loot me, I know, I mean, everyone can see it, and then more knows than everyone tries to get in, and this is why around 1600 BCE, they moved from pyramids to what we all have heard about, the valley of the kings, you know, king tuts tomb, where it now we're doing in the most Samuel way, we're going to dig into the continent into into into into hard rock and then cover the entrance, and then hopefully no one will be able to loot it, method and work either.

58:16Yeah, so, so we did not build the, and the Torah doesn't say anything about pyramids, the Torah says that we build a remy skinned storehouses, and I have pictures of what these storehouses look like. Okay, and the second misconception, even though Ramses the Great is the parrow of the enslavement, he wasn't necessarily the parrow of the Exodus, is that correct? So look, just, just, forget about what I said, just let's look at what Khromisch says, okay? Khromisch speaks about one parrow in in in schmot parachalif, who in slaves been a Israel, right? And then at the end of parachbet, it says that that parrow died, right? Which means that the the name parrow and the subsequent chapters of say for schmot must be talking about that first parrow's son, okay? So, so I think that when we speak about the parrow of it, we have to speak about the parrow of the sheboot, the enslavement, which in my humble opinion is Ramses II, and then the parrow of the Exodus of the mackerel, if you will, and that would, that would then mean that it was, there was a parrow named Mernecta under, there are several compelling reasons

59:19that might explain that as well, leave that to the introductions. Okay, so I have two final questions before we end today, Rabbi Burman. My first question is this, and I know there's a very well-known and common question, given the historic events that took place in Egypt and the fact that so much of what we're talking about, as reflected in Egyptian ideas, why at least as far as I know, is this story not mentioned in Egyptian historiography or Egyptian artifacts? Right, right, right. So we have, we have, you know, we have quite a bit from ancient Egypt, and certainly skeptics will say, look, we were just talking, you know, something this big, you would expect that it would have, it would have some resonance in the literature that's come down to us. So, so here, we need to say a few things. Yes, there, we have many writings about ancient Egypt. We certainly have more writings that we've dug up from the ground about ancient Egypt than we do about ancient Israel, you know, obviously we have our tonach, but you know, that we haven't dug up, that we have passed down. So we need to know something about these inscriptions, about the things

1:00:23that these ancient Egyptian inscriptions tell us about the past, and the best way for me to illustrate this is with a modern example, okay? Imagine that you, you have an office, and you're looking to fill a position in your office, and you put out a call for people to send in their resumes, and you get this big pile of resumes, and you go through them, you go through 100 resumes, and you say, wow, what a talented bunch. Not a single one of them was ever fired. Now, why would you conclude that? Because you read about their, their professional history, and now one of them says that they were fired, and that's because when you read a resume, you never write that you were fired, right? You just don't do that. And ancient inscriptions were not there to be historical records. The ancient inscriptions were largely there to impress the gods, like, hey, deity, look what I've done today, or hey, subjects, look what I did today, you don't talk about your failures. So there's never any failures, there's no bad news in ancient Egypt, okay? That's what it becomes down to. So you wouldn't expect therefore

1:01:24to be a record of this sort of thing. You wouldn't expect for there to be any mention of Ephraim, or when Israel, because slaves were never referred to by where they came from. You know, just like, just like in the antebellum south in the United States, you might have had a slur word for the slaves, but you never refer, oh, this is my slave from Canterun, and this is my slave from Nigeria. You know, they were just all, whatever, they were called, you know, and so it was also with slaves in Egypt. Also, we need to remember also that in the Torah says that, that Benesah lived in Erid's Goshen, and we know where Erid's Goshen is, roughly, Erid's Goshen, right? It has pastry land. There's only one area in Egypt that has pastry land, and that's what's called the Nile Delta. It's kind of, if you look on a modern map, basically the area from Cairo north to the Mediterranean coast in a kind of a funnel shape. That whole area where the Nile separates out into tributaries is extremely lush and well irrigated.

1:02:28With the result, there has been constant habitation of that area, which is to say, constant taking down of previous structures. So there's nothing left from ancient Egypt in the area that Amisrael were residing in, and also the water table has risen. There's no almost no papyrus from that area. And so therefore, the area which was inhabited by Amisrael at that time, nothing at all is left about anything, not about Israel, not about Egypt, nothing. And I guess in terms of the first reason you mentioned, that's another way that the Torah breaks with ancient culture, and that it does speak about Israel's failures in a way that we would not find in other cultures. My final question for you, Rabbi Berman, is this, given everything we've said today, and all the wonderful ideas in the Haggadda, and of course, there are many more you mentioned. When someone sits down at the theater of this year and has your Haggadda, what do you hope they'll experience differently that might perhaps add to what they've done in the past? Well, certainly if you're listening to this podcast and you can't see it, but the Haggadda

1:03:32is visually sumptuous. It is big, and it has big beautiful pictures. And the big beautiful pictures aren't just kind of like to add color. Oh, here are pyramids. The pictures themselves are part of the explanation. And I think I would hope that people would come away with, wow, I can almost feel the reality of what was going on, of what was at stake, of what was being margued over at the time. That's really what I want people to come away with a sense. You know, just as maybe it's a new twist on the old saying of Ghazah. A person has to see themselves as if they came out of Egypt. Now, I suspect that what Ghazah really had in mind is that we have to have an appreciation of what it means to be a Ben Chorin, to be free, not all of us were born into slavery, but we have to appreciate our freedom. But perhaps also a little bit to, I think that the rhombum says this, to understand deeply, you know,

1:04:33what the nature of the oppression was and how great the salvation was. And I think that these materials allow us to gain insight and a glimpse of what that rule was like in a way that we can perhaps understand for ourselves as well. Amazing and beautiful. Probably Berman as a bonus for our paid subscribers to Orthodox Cathedral commentary. I want to ask you about the ways that you would suggest that someone teach these ideas in high school. Of course, we want to teach them armours, so are in the classic way. And we also may want to teach them some of these more innovative ideas, which I guess in some ways are not too innovative, they're ancient. But how would you balance that if you were creating some sort of high school curriculum? What would you do to hear Rabbi Berman's fascinating answer to this question, as well as to receive this episode at free and with early release. Make sure to become a paid subscriber to Orthodox Conundrum Commentary. The link is in the description of this podcast. One final question before we go. I want to ask you about your wonderful do podcast. Yeah, okay. Thank you. So I just launched a podcast.

1:05:35It's called the Bible Bar. It's the podcast of the Bible Department of Barreline University. And it's format. It's kind of like the program 929, which some of our listeners might be familiar with each week. We go through another chapter, not a parsha, but a chapter in Tanakh. We started with Brachie Parik-Alef. Second week was Brachie Parik-Bet. And in 20 years and years of Shem, we'll finish the entire Tanakh. But every week what I do is that they have on another scholar, sometimes colleagues of mine from Barreline, sometimes scholars from around the world, Jews and non-Jews, and the basic goal of the podcast is to show how biblical scholarship can be interesting and meaningful for all. So check us out at the Bible Bar. Fantastic. It's always a pleasure speaking with you, Rabbi Burman. I'm so grateful that you came on the podcast today. Thank you, Scott, and for all of Klay Israel, we should know the sort of Kavot and Akhag Kashir Visamach.

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1:07:42of this podcast to get your free subscription today. Finally, do you have a message that needs to get out? Do you want to promote your business, your organization, or your cause? The best way is by producing a podcast and Jewish Coffee House can make it happen. I have experienced producing hundreds of podcasts both for myself and for satisfied clients, whether you want to learn everything you need in one day, or relax and record and let me do the heavy lifting, Jewish Coffee House Productions will work with you to make it happen and make it even better than you imagined. Let me help you today. Write to us at Aliza at JewishCoffeeHouse.com. That's ALIZA at JewishCoffeeHouse.com and let's get started with your high quality, memorable, and effective podcast. I'm Scott Khan. This has been the Orthodox Conundrum on JewishCoffeeHouse.com.