The Oral Talmud: Episode 40: Consciousness of Guilt (Sanhedrin 71a)
SHOW NOTES
“That’s one of the reasons there's a crash because it's dealing with a new reality where everybody has the potential to know everything. And so there's no more hiding. And so what we have to do is to reinvent a Judaism that is palatable to everybody who's expected to participate.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
What happens when the crowd finally says stop? In this episode, Dan and Benay stay with the case of “wayward and rebellious son” as they unpack a charged Talmudic scene: a rabbi abuses his authority, a colleague is publicly humiliated, and the people shut the whole thing down. Not leadership. Not procedure. The community. It’s a moment of collective refusal that feels startlingly contemporary.
This conversation asks questions like: Who controls the mic? What happens when hidden reasoning becomes public? And what changes when people gain access to the inner logic of power? They connect ancient rebellion to modern deplatforming, open information, queer inclusion, and the collapse of elite gatekeeping. This episode is about the hard truth that systems don’t change themselves. People do.
This week’s text: (Sanhedrin 71a)
Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.
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DAN LIBENSON: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 40: “Consciousness of Guilt.”
Welcome to the Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY LAPPE: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN LIBENSON: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today.
What happens when the crowd finally says stop? In this episode, we stay with the case of “wayward and rebellious son” as we unpack a charged Talmudic scene: a rabbi abuses his authority, a colleague is publicly humiliated, and the people shut the whole thing down. Not leadership. Not procedure. The community. It’s a moment of collective refusal that feels startlingly contemporary.
This conversation asks questions like... Who controls the mic? What happens when hidden reasoning becomes public? And what changes when people gain access to the inner logic of power? We connect ancient rebellion to modern deplatforming, open information, queer inclusion, and the collapse of elite gatekeeping. This episode is about the hard truth that systems don’t change themselves. People do.
Every episode of The Oral Talmud has a number of resources to support your learning and to share with your own study partners! If you’re using a podcast app to listen, you’ll find these links in our show notes: First, to a Source Sheet on Sefaria, where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation – there we excerpt the core Talmud texts we discuss and share a link to the original video of our learning.
In the show notes of your podcast app, you’ll also find a link to this episode on The Oral Talmud’s website, where we post an edited transcript, and where you can make a donation to keep the show going, if you feel so moved. On both the Sefaria Source Sheet and The Oral Talmud website.
And now, The Oral Talmud…
DAN LIBENSON: Hello everybody, this is Dan Levison, and I'm here with Bene Lappe , uh, for this week's episode of the Oral Talmud. Hey Bene.
BENAY LAPPE: Hey, Dan. How are you?
DAN LIBENSON: Uh, honestly, I'm really good. No, I mean, I, I feel like this, uh, sense of relief that I didn't actually fully expect to feel, you know, I mean, not that I didn't expect to feel good, but I, I feel like, um, I feel like actually sort of, I feel relief more than anything else.
In other words, I feel relief more than positive. Uh, I feel just sort of like a, a, a sort of a weight has been lifted and now I kind of feel like, okay, well now we gotta get started. Like doing the real work.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. We should note that we're recording this one day after the inauguration.
DAN LIBENSON: Right? Right.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: So anyway, I'm also relieved that all went safely and well and, uh,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, absolutely.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Um, so, um, uh, actually that I, oh, so there was one thing that I wanted to note before we, before we start, which is that this is, I believe our 40th. Episode of the Oral Talmud, and
BENAY LAPPE: I didn't know that.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And I, when we released it as a podcast, which I know we teased a long time ago, and it's gonna happen.
It's just, uh, ran into some snags. Uh, but, um, but, uh, I don't know if this will end up episode 40 in the podcast, but it is episode 40, or it is our 40th actual, uh, recording session. So
BENAY LAPPE: that's fun.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And 40 is a very important Jewish number, so there must be some significance there.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Um, anyway, so this has been, this has been fun.
I mean, I, I, I have to say that I hope, say we
BENAY LAPPE: have 40, I hope we have 40 listeners.
DAN LIBENSON: We actually have a lot more than 40.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: Um, the, um, the, actually it's interesting because, um, there've been elements that I've said, or I've started to think recently that what we've been doing, I mean, I'm thinking here about Judaism Unbound and Jewish Life, what we've been doing during this COVID period.
We, we should be understanding and hopefully others should be understanding as like, something more like a cocoon. Like it's not actually the thing, it's the thing that will incubate the thing. And, uh, that, that I'm starting to think about like all the stuff that we've been doing over the last year. How can we start to, uh, reorganize it in ways that will actually be not just something to do during COVID, but something that will have a lasting significance and that will allow people to explore Judaism in all kinds of new ways.
And, um, one of the things though that I hope is not just a cocoon is this is this show. I'm really, I'm really enjoying it. So I hope we'll have many more than 40 left.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, you, you're reminding me how the, the classical critique of queer people is that we recruit Uhhuh. You know, it's like they were, they're gonna recruit your children.
And I actually hope, I, I think my project is really at the end of the day about recruitment. You know, as I've said many times before, I just wanna get a new team on the field. Hmm. And I won't be around when that team does most of its work. Um, and I'm, I'm so surprised and amazed and thrilled at how much work the new team is already doing in creating, you know, new Jewish communities and new practices and experimenting with new stuff.
And you're so involved in that as well. Um, but basically for me, this is a recruitment project. It's like, Hey, these are, this is cool stuff. These are cool ideas, come on board and then have fun.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. Agree. So, uh, so that was, so that's one, one thing to note the other that I wanted to pick up on a little bit, uh, I think just a little bit from last week, we were talking last week about, uh, we, we were talking somewhat about this question of.
To, to what extent are these talmud's passages that we're reading? To what extent are they directly relevant to things going on in the world and to what extent are they not? Do they need to be, not need to be, et cetera. But one thing that we talked about a little, which I have to give credit to someone who, I can't remember who it was, but somebody, uh, who was commenting or asking in a different, uh, Jewish live show about this wasn't there.
He said like, wasn't there this episode where, you know, one rabbi is, uh, haranguing another rabbi and they shut him up or something. And that was all had to do with the Twitter de platforming of Donald Trump. And, and I kind of remembered that there, that it was, and it was actually part of one of our early episodes.
And, um, you know, we talked about it a little bit and, and then I kind of went to look at the text and it was actually. Uh, slightly more interesting than I remembered in, in different ways in some linguistic ways. I don't actually necessarily have a great, uh, explanation for it yet, but I wanted to go look at them a little bit with you, um, just to see if there's anything more there, because this was actually not really a major part of the text that we focused on.
Um,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, and I think it's really interesting. I don't think we even mentioned this part. We just skipped over it, and it's really interesting what pieces become relevant, what pieces sort of jump up as, you know, the proverbial donkey stories when a new experience of life happens and you realize, oh my God, that piece of the text that I had ignored and just missed before now is, you know, prescient in some way, or, or really pregnant with meaning, or
DAN LIBENSON: can be.
Yeah, sometimes. And sometimes, like our initial reaction last week, last week, and then I think this week guys, like, can we, can we think about like what Talmud's story is out there that might be relevant to this? Situation that we're now in. And it's interesting that what we ended up with, probably partly because like we just couldn't come up with something.
But was that No, actually one of the texts that we studied, you know. Seven months ago, something like that is actually one of the more relevant ones. So we don't have to just come up with it. It was actually something that we studied before, so we could just kind of remind ourselves of it. And the other is that the text that we're studying right now actually is relevant in different ways.
So, so, you know, again, I, I put the call out there. If there's some other story that you think is really relevant, let us know. We'll, we'll talk about it. Uh, but to look at this one, so to remind you, like, this is the text, this is the, the pre-story of the story. When Rabbi Van Gamliel, the head rabbi of the Yeshiva of Yavneh during the early time of rabbinic Judaism, he was thrown out of his position relatively briefly, uh, but he was thrown out of his position for basically being too mean, uh, and other Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: And autocratic and suppressing, dissent, and yes, also being cruel to those who disagreed with him.
DAN LIBENSON: Right? And so the, the immediate or almost immediate priest story has to do with him. Interacting with one of the sort of favorite rabbis, rabbi Joshua, who's both nice and generally, and also very innovative and, uh, creative.
And he's kind of really one of these forward thinking guys. Um, I hesitate to, uh, you know, compare him to like a OC, you know, something like that. But I mean, yeah, there's something there. Um, and, um, and so anyway, you know, and, and, and, and some of his, uh, you know, people that don't like him as much are the more conservative folks, including the person who's in charge and, and also someone who's often his kind of rival, rabbi Elzer, who's defined by his memory, meaning by his sort of.
To some extent, at least focused on the past. But anyway, not so important right now. But the, but the point is, is that here's this, you know, favorite, uh, rabbi and, uh, and Robin Goleal is, is, uh, disagreeing with him about something that's so important right now, what it was. And he is, he kind of shames him.
He says, you know, stand up. And Robin
BENAY LAPPE: Gamaliel shames,
DAN LIBENSON: Robin gom, rabbi Joshua, rabbi Oshu, and he says, you know, stand up. And he, and he then kind of goes on with his lecture and he kind of, uh, just has him standing there. And, uh, so
BENAY LAPPE: that, which is, which is su understood to be super embarrassing. Right, right.
Everyone else is seated. And here's Rabbi Joshua standing there. Um, and where are we? We're in, uh, track,
DAN LIBENSON: right? 27 B.
BENAY LAPPE: 27 B. Okay, great.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And so the, so, so the, the, the key paragraph here, uh, is, is this one where in the English it says, so Robin Glia was sitting and lecturing, and Rabbi Joshua was standing on his feet.
The explanation here is 'cause he, he was told to stand and he was never told to sit. Um, this continued for some time until it aroused, well, I don't even have to do this interstitial stuff. So it, this, uh, uh, went on for a while until all of the people, and in the Hebrew it actually says. Koha, um, which mm-hmm.
More directly would be translated as the entire, the entire people meaning the entire nation. Yeah. Right. Until, until Koha. Um, this isn't, it doesn't say all the students, it says all the, doesn't say, all the people in the room. Doesn't say all the ravage. It's all the nation, all the people, uh, said they began murmuring and said to the disseminator, so this is what we talked about last time.
This is basically the Twitter of their time. This is the amplifier. This is so, right. The, the technical thing is that it's in the big lecture hall. They can't hear you from the front, and there were no microphones in those days. So you would have somebody standing in the middle who would be repeating everything that the lecturer said so that the people in the back could hear it.
And, uh,
BENAY LAPPE: and, and I should say that this murmuring, I just looked up the word murmuring. It's, uh, the root re, I just looked it up in Jas. And he, he, he says, it's not just murmuring, it's murmuring in rebellion.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm.
BENAY LAPPE: So it's not just they were like, you know, whispering, what's going on? What's going on? It, this is like the moment of, no, we we're, we, we can't remain silent anymore.
DAN LIBENSON: And, and they say to him, uh, so they begin murmuring and said to tpi, the Disseminator Stop and he stopped. Now what I found interesting here, although I can't say that I have a direct, uh, I don't have a point necessarily here because I only kind of saw this very recently and haven't thought about it too much, but the Hebrew for stand like that, he was standing on his feet.
Omi Uhhuh
BENAY LAPPE: Uhhuh
DAN LIBENSON: is the same as the Hebrew for what is being translated here as stop. And, uh, and, and then he stopped the Ahmad. So it's the same, uh, word. And, um, it's a correct translation. It's not, they weren't telling the disseminator to stand on his feet. He probably already was standing on his feet 'cause he is shouting to the back, but they, they mean stand in place.
Right. Stop.
BENAY LAPPE: You know what, I, I never made that connection. I, I mean, I know I was tripped up by this word because it looks like it means stand up, but it doesn't. But I never really connected the dots. Um, what do you, what are you making of that? I'm looking at my dictionary here under this route.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, so, well, I mean, there's one thing which, which you actually talk, pointed out a little bit before we came on, which is just this idea that it was the entire, the entire people.
Um, and right that when, when we were talking about it last week. We were talking about the idea that it's, we as we remembered it, right, this, this guy, the Turman, the, the disseminator, he, that he made the decision to stop talking. That all of a sudden he just kind of, you know, was like, this is too much. And actually had kind of misremembered it too, that, that I thought that Rabbi Goleal was continually haranguing Rabbi Joshua.
But it's not even that. It's that he had harangued him, but then he just kind of was embarrassing him by not letting him sit down. But he was going on with his lecture,
BENAY LAPPE: right?
DAN LIBENSON: And, um, and I, so I was kind of remembering it as like, hut speed, just kind of, he was haing, Haing, haing. And then KPI just kind of stopped talking.
He is just like, I don't wanna, I don't even wanna do this anymore. But actually, that's not really the story. The story is that he was, that there was a, uh, that there was a, uh, that the harm was happening. Indirectly in the sense that the, it wasn't the words of Rabbi Gle that were necessarily directly causing the harm.
It was that he was, um, it was almost his failure to, to, to resolve the previous situation is where the harm was. And t speak kind of, uh, well, ultimately the people saw that they were kind of, um, they were facilitating an ongoing wrong by not speaking up as opposed to that the wrong was, uh,
BENAY LAPPE: the speaking itself.
DAN LIBENSON: The speaking itself. Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: You, you know what, you're reminding me of it that, that maybe what the people are objecting to is merely the continuation of business as usual. Because what Robin Gamillo is doing is business as usual. Like you say, it's not his continued shaming or haranguing at ra Rabbi Joshua.
It's just that he's going, he's, he's con, he's merely moving forward in, you know, the government, in his business as usual. And that's what the people are saying we shouldn't tolerate. That's, I think that's really interesting and I'm fascinated by this, all of the people.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: I, I, I'm trying to picture it and trying to understand what they might be suggesting about the, the line of connection between what happens inside the bait me rush and the awareness of all the people like are, are.
People really seeing, or is it somehow seeping out? I, I don't know. I don't know what to make of that, but you're right. It's really interesting that it says all the people as in the entire community.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, and I, and I think that there's something about that that relates to Twitter, right? Or Facebook or any of these kind of social media, because it, it seemed, what, what's one of the things that was really interesting that people were saying after Trump lost his Twitter account was like, he is not been silenced.
He, he is the president of the United States. He can just call a press conference, but he doesn't want to for various reasons, and he's using this, this tool that he has to do to do it wrong. That he, his own, not necessarily shame because he may not have shame, but something would prevent him from doing that same wrong through the more appropriate means.
And so in a sense, he's taking advantage of this public. Public thing, right? To, to sort of facilitate a wrong, and again, it's not a direct, it's not a direct connection, but the Turman, right? The disseminator is kind of this amplification device that, that Rabbi Robin Glia wouldn't have just on his own. So he could do mean things, but they wouldn't have quite the same impact and in a sense.
The Twitter, right. Twitter did not decide to de platform Trump.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: On its own. It it did it because there was a, a murmuring. It did it because there was, there was so much there. The pressure, pressure, pressure was building from the people, maybe certain influencers, whatever it was. But here, that, that's what's fascinating to me here too, is that you also see that it's not the, the technology, right.
The, uh, you know, that, uh, that uh, chupe, the disseminator is like the technology that tends to be value neutral in the sense like, it's generally you can't rely on the technology to make the moral decision. The moral decision comes either from the leadership or from the people, which can also be making immoral decisions Of course.
And so, so it's the immoral or the moral decision is coming from, you know, and when the leader is making the, is using the technology in a immoral way. Again, it's not quite 'cause he. Like we were saying, it wasn't that he was directly using the disseminator to, to continue the haranguing, but
BENAY LAPPE: in, in the Robin Gamliel case,
DAN LIBENSON: in the Robin Gomel.
But, but nevertheless, I, I think the point there that, that, that you see that yes, it is because he was using this, this technology that gets his word amplified and maybe it gets amplified even beyond the bait Me dresh, not necessarily 'cause of, uh, chut speed's lab voice, but because then people go out to take a smoke break and they tell somebody, right.
And the, like, the word gets out. Right. And there are things, didn't we, TMA, didn't we study this a few weeks ago, that if there are two people Yeah. The word doesn't get out, but if there are three people, the word gets out. That was in one of worst, that's most worst cases rights.
BENAY LAPPE: That's
DAN LIBENSON: right. And, and so something like that.
And then, and then as, as that, as the word of that comes out to the people, they can either react by saying, oh, that's, you know, they could get mean and say, oh, that's cool. We hate that, uh, rabbi, rabbi Joshua, you know, we're happy that you suffer. Right. Or the people say, wait a second, that's not right. Like, we don't want that.
And then. That force of the people comes and that's what shuts down the technology. I
BENAY LAPPE: I, I love that. Last week when you brought this up, I was so excited about the initiative of the mat gaman, this, the, the amplifier person. And I just, I just love that, that, that, that that translator decided I'm not, I'm not gonna repeat that.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: And then when I looked back in the text, I was kind of disappointed to see that that wasn't actually what happened. The matura Gaman didn't make that decision. Twitter didn't make that decision. It was the people. But I think your read is so much more beautiful. It's it because it speaks to the responsibility and the power of the people to turn on or turn off the Matir, Gaman and I, that's, I love that.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And, and I'm not sure, like now just to talk about the, the use of the same Hebrew word for stand and stop. You know, I don't wanna like overdo it in the sense of making some mid rush that's not really there. But first of all, I would say like, it, something has to be there. Like that's not an accident.
Mm-hmm. That the same word is being used. So there, there must be some intent to have meaning there. One thing that, that I think about is just that it, it is connecting the two, the two epi, the two things. It's saying that, you know, you're doing harm by making somebody stand and that harm can be addressed by another form of standing.
Meaning, you know, meaning that there is a punishment fits the crime sort of dimension to it, even if it's just linguistic. And, and that, uh, there's at least the possibility of a message saying there that like, you know, it, it's not actually, I mean, again, it would come, I think it that's relevant to now would be that, you know, you could make First Amendment claims about.
Nobody should be de platformed. You have a right to say whatever you want, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, or you can make a moral claim that says, you know, karma, uh, right. And, and if you misuse the technology, then the technology can misuse you or some version of that. And, and that, that's, that's somehow built into this text.
I'm open to that. Like, something like that is kind of where I wanna go.
BENAY LAPPE: That's nice. And for me, I, I, I always believe, and I've been taught to ask the question, what is the language? What would the language bring up for those extraordinarily familiar with the Talmud? And to know that it's relevant, that the text chooses one word over another in order to.
Help you make connections between this text and other texts. So this word, Ahmad, especially where it says Ahad love, um, right standing up on his feet. Anyone who's, you know inside the Talmud is going to immediately think of the, um, tan the oven of where this very Ravi OA stands up on his feet against God and, you know, tells God to sit down.
So all of the places where someone stands up on their feet. I think there's some messaging in what, what's going on in that act of standing up on your feet.
DAN LIBENSON: Hmm. Well, that's a good segue to this question that we ended last week's episode talking about, and you promised us a little story. And just to remind folks that the, that what we were talking about was talking the idea that when we find things in the Talmud, that the, that the Talmud, the way we have to look at it is that the Talmud expected that the, the put, those who put together the Talmud expected that anybody who could read it.
Would, would be so well educated in Talmud, so knowledgeable that they prob that either they were a student or they were someone who more likely than not, knows everything that's written everywhere else in the Talmud or certainly in the Torah. And so there's no kind of secrets in there. So like, if there's a word being mirrored, then probably somebody who's gonna think of it.
I didn't think of the, the mirroring to the story that you just did, but likely you're my study partner. You would've, and then I do. Right? So, but there's no secrets here. Everything is known. And so when there are kind of winks humor, uh. Kind of roundabout explanations. You, you have to kind of look at that and say, well, they knew that, that they, they didn't, they aren't stupid.
They knew that that explanation was just as absurd as you do. So why did they do it that way? And, and that one of the things that we were talking about is that, that they didn't expect that the people would have known any of this. The only thing that the people would be likely to know would be anything that's in the Torah, because they go to shul, most likely hear the Torah reading each week that you read the entire Torah.
So the odds are that something like the wayward and rebellious sun, they do know about because it's written explicitly in the Torah. So you're gonna get questions about this. If it turns out that we've legislated this out of existence, that's not gonna be that easy because people are gonna come to you and say, well wait a second.
It, see right here, there's a wayward, a rebellious son, and my son is really terrible. I think I should, you know, stone him, or you know, bring him to be stoned. And there's no, no, no, we don't do that anymore. It's like, what do you mean we don't do that anymore? It's in the Torah, so you're gonna have to deal with that.
So you're gonna have to have a certain kind of response ready for the average person, whereas other things are gonna be much more obscure and they're just things that other rabbis know about. And so, uh, we're not likely to get people coming to us with, but wait a second. I know that's the wrong answer.
There's, and so we just, so that's a different kind of, uh, response. And so, uh, so, so you were going to, I think, tell, talk to us a little bit about how the conservative movement, uh, dealt with this. Not too long ago when it started to change this, this started to change where, oh, wait a second. Now all of a sudden the people are super well educated and they have access to a lot of information, and it may just, it may not be anymore that all they know about is the Torah and they're gonna start to, to wanna ask us about things that are not in the Torah.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. This story came up for me last time we was, as we were talking about this, and I wanna preface it with a response to something you just said, which is that you said the rabbis wouldn't have expected people to know what was in here. I, I wanna go beyond that. Not only would they not expect, but they went to great lengths and were extraordinarily successful over the last 15, 1600 years at preventing people from having access to this document.
Right. The people have been well, uh, sort of. Fenced off from the yeshiva where this is learned. Right. And you know, I feel, I feel very proud of our time and the work of Sava adding to the work of other people in, you know, opening up this book for people who not only weren't, weren't expected to see it, but weren't allowed to see it, and were explicitly prevented for so long.
Okay. Having said that, so the story that I was recalling, um, was that when I was in rabbinical school and I was in rabbinical school from 91 to 97, um, I attended the proceedings of the law committee. Now the, the law committee on its long name is the Conserv. Let's see, the law committee on Jewish Law and Standards or something of, of that sort is kind of the body of.
Um, really halachically expert, um, authorities in the conservative movement who decide questions of Jewish law that will be guiding potential positions for any rabbi to hold for their community. Um. And, and it was fascinating to sit in on their proceedings because you could see, you know, basically Talmud in action.
You could see them making decisions and deliberating and arguing on issues that seemed of great importance and issues of ridiculous obscurity, like the cash root of hard cheese. Okay. For some people that's obscure, not for everybody. Okay? I don't wanna knock all cash root. Okay? Um, and I remember sitting in a one particular meeting, this had to have been in 96 or 97, in which the topic at hand was, should we or should we not?
For the first time in the history of the movement of conservative Judaism, allow the people ha um. To read Arch, you vote, in other words, to read the decisions and the papers behind the decisions of the conservative movement because up until that point, they were deliberately locked up and not made accessible.
To people. You couldn't call up the conservative movement and say, Hey, can you send me a copy of that chuva on, uh, whether I can, uh, have a band at my daughter's bat mitzvah in the show on cha this morning? And that in fact was one of the examples that came up in the conversation arguing that we continue to con suppress these two votes and not let people see them.
Someone said, what am I gonna do when, you know, in our shul you can't have a microphone on Chavez? One of my congregants comes and says, Hey, but I've got the decision right here in front of me. And it actually says that electricity isn't a violation in and of itself of Shabbat. And actually there's no halachic basis to our synagogue's rule.
What am I gonna say then? It's much easier for me to just say it's forbidden. So,
DAN LIBENSON: yeah, just to clarify, uh, two things, right? One is that these, these decisions have reasoning in them. So
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, it's
DAN LIBENSON: not just that somebody can, you know, see the ruling, but they can also see what it's based on. I have a story about that I'll tell later, but that, but that, that's like, I say, wait a second, I don't, you know, this is not good reasoning or whatever.
You know, I'm a lawyer and I know this is a bad argument, you know, whatever. And then the other is that in the conservative movement, there's also a rule that if, I think it's, if three people sign on to an opinion, then it's a minority opinion that has, uh, six, some authority.
BENAY LAPPE: Six.
DAN LIBENSON: Six. So there can be a minority opinion.
That's not what they put out there as the official opinion, but it's still considered a valid. Uh, possibility for conservative Jews. So they could say, well, wait a second. The Rabbi only told me about the majority.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, exactly. I wasn't gonna get into that. That's a really a whole interesting side debate because one of the adjacent debates was, does every rabbi have to be bound to at least one of the positions?
And sometimes they approved opposing positions. And I remember very clearly Rabbi Gordon Tucker, who wrote a gorgeous, and I think still unpublished response, screaming at them that we must maintain the individual prerogative of any rabbi to. Disagree with any position of the community of the law committee.
That was, it's called the Power of the Mara dra, the authority of the place. And they begrudgingly to, to ma and the part of many agreed to preserve the individual rabbis right to rule for their own community differently than any of the opinions. But you're right. Uh, six votes out of 25 for any one position became a position of the conservative movement.
In any case, the, the vote on this question of should we let the people actually see the, um, deci the rationale and the papers behind our decisions ended up with a vote of yes, a yes, but, and the yes but was yes. We are now going to give access to. All of the decisions on all of the issues from microphones and Shabbat to kashrut, to circumcision, to conversion, to ritual, you name it, except they ruled, we are gonna hold back and continue to deny access on one and only one issue.
We are not going to let people read our opinions and our rationales behind our position on one issue. And you know what that issue was?
DAN LIBENSON: Well, I know because you told me.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. It was the gay issue, the quote unquote gay issue.
DAN LIBENSON: This was at the time when, when the gay issue, so to speak, was that we wouldn't, uh, accept gay and lesbian people to be rabbinical students.
Right?
BENAY LAPPE: That's correct. That's correct.
DAN LIBENSON: Which has changed now.
BENAY LAPPE: Has it has changed. Um, and subsequently, um, a number of years later, they eventually opened up those opinions to the public as well. And now you can go on the web. It used to be call up, but now you can go on the website and get access to those.
But, but I think it was a really poignant and telling example of what it means and what the, the danger and threat to the mm-hmm. Sort of establishment is when people actually are given access to information. Mm-hmm. It was clear what they were doing. You know, they, they wanted to, as I think as much as possible, maintain the,
the status quo of. You know, an anti-gay position as long as possible. And they knew that if people actually understood how they got there, people wouldn't tolerate it any longer.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, I mean, 'cause I was curious like how they would've, on what basis would they have made the judgment or not made the judgment, but how could they defend the judgment to say there's one issue we're not releasing?
I mean, it's like if you say there's a category of issues that we're not gonna, okay. You know, if you say like, well we're not releasing any of the opinions that have to do with anything that's contrary to what's written explicitly in the Torah. Okay. You know, then it's at least makes sense, you know? But how can you.
How can you specifically just say there's one opinion? It's almost like, um, I rather, there's a famous story, you know, in my family that my sister, uh, came home from school one day and, and told my parents not to look at the crumpled up paper in the bottom of school deck.
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly. I love that. That's great.
DAN LIBENSON: Like, nothing is gonna make cause more curiosity. Um, but yeah. You know, and, and, and that again, the, the, I think that, you know, the gay issue, so to speak is, uh, is, is an interesting connection to this wayward and rebellious sun issue because like we were talking about last week, like I, I think as, I think as I thought about it, like it really, uh, made sense to me that there's this particular category of, of legal questions that is likely to be brought to a rabbi.
I mean, in the time of the Talmud, and now, which are, which are cases where the law that we practice or, or our practice. Seems to be contradictory to something that's written explicitly in the Torah. And the reason why that's a special category is because people know what's in the Torah because they hear it once a year at least.
And they're likely to say, but wait a second. I I, we just read that, you know, a man shouldn't lie with a man as a man lies with a woman and rabbi, you're gay. How could this be? You know, like that's a, that's a question that's likely to come up. And so then you have to have a certain, well, let me explain to you how, uh, things change from the Torah versus a question of, uh, well, rabbi, you, you told me that we, we don't eat, uh, chicken and milk and I don't see that anywhere in the Torah.
Well, that's a different category.
BENAY LAPPE: That's
DAN LIBENSON: right. And yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. And that's why you have to remember the talmud's never about what it's about. This passage isn't about stubborn and rebellious children. Mm-hmm. It's about, it's about how we can move from.
From the presumed, um, sort of handcuffs of what it says in the Torah to what our tells us is a, is a much better guess at how God wants us to move through the world, regardless of what the specific is. So the, this is, you know, the, the, the meta message that here is about the move from anything in the Torah to anything different from that, not specifically about stubborn and rebellious sun.
And it's not, it's not, um, telling us the story of how the stubborn and rebellious sun moved. I think it, this is a, a kind of retro much later sampling of ways one might justify such things. Uh, I think I lost your sound.
DAN LIBENSON: No, that, that was my fault. Yeah. Um, before we jump back into the text, I, I'll just tell my story real quick on the, on the, uh, previous topic, which was that I was once on a rabbinic search committee.
And there the big question, or one question that we would raise is, uh, can a non-Jewish parent be called up to have a call called to the Torah in Aaliyah for their child's bar mitzvah or bar mitzvah And, um. And we all knew that, or I knew that the answer was no in the conservative movement, but I was curious how the rabbinical candidates would talk about it.
So this one, uh, rabbi said, no, you know, and I said, well, why, why not? And he says, well, I guess they, this was after the time when they were allowed to, to show their work, you know? So he said, well, the, the reasoning is because the blessing is a meme that we were chosen from among all the nations. And, you know, no, no, uh, insult intended to the non-Jew, but they weren't chosen, you know, I mean, they're not from the chosen people.
It's not, don't mean anything negative about them, but it's just wouldn't be accurate. And so, um, you can't have what's called the bra like a, a blessing. That's not true. Which raises a whole nother set of issues because I think most people in the congregation don't actually believe what they're saying, you know?
So that's a whole nother situation. But the, uh, he said, so we can't,
BENAY LAPPE: aside from the fact that an non-Jew is not commanded to avoid a null blessing,
DAN LIBENSON: but Okay, good point. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, that, but whatever the bottom line was that, uh, you know, well, this blessing says we've chosen from among all the nations and, and not, wouldn't be true if a non-Jew.
And so you can't make a blessing. That's false. So, um, so I'm like, okay, well I'm not hiring this rabbi, you know, but like, I didn't, you know, I was like, whatever. I understand the explanation. I just think it's kind of, you know, not, not really in keeping with our values and whatever, but, uh, so, but the rest of the, what was fascinating to me was the reaction of the rest of the people in the committee.
Who are not, we're not, you know, Hebrew, we're not fluent in Hebrew. And their reaction was, wait a second. That's what the blessing means. And, um, you know, and the rabbi said, well, yeah, I mean, what did you think it meant? And, and one of them said, well, I, I kind of thought it meant like now we're gonna read the next part of the Torah.
You know, like, that's right. You know, like, now we're, you know, blessed are you God, for giving us the Torah. Something like that, you know, because, and, and, um, you know, and, and on the one hand what you saw here was, well, I think in the rabbi's mind, they, they may, well, I can't say what the rabbi was thinking, but maybe they were thinking, oh, she's another, another experience of just how ignorant Jews are.
You know, it, but my, my experience looking at this was, wait a second, I, I think that, uh, actually the rabbis are in big trouble, you know, because, uh, if, because they're lucky that the Jews don't know. What it means. But soon they're gonna find out and as soon as they find out they're not gonna like it. You know?
And, and, and, um, and that really what it does mean, I mean, what the, what the, what the ritual means to the, everybody sitting in the pews is now we're gonna read the next part of the Torah. So that, so somehow the, the rituals or the words or something is gonna have to, the rules are gonna have to change to suit the understanding of the people, of what's actually going on here and not some elite notion of what's happening with that the rabbis might have.
And that is all new, meaning what I what? That is not a negative or positive thing necessarily. I mean, I see it as a positive, but I'm not putting it out there as a positive or negative. But it is a difference. And the meaning that a world in which you could expect that there would be this elite conversation among rabbis that the people would never find out about.
Except for those cases where they know, where they have to read it in the Torah. And then we have to deal with those as a discreet, separate set of cases where we have better arguments or more convincing arguments. But that world just doesn't exist anymore, and the digital revolution accelerates that even more.
And so now we have to expect a, a world in which most people know most of the stuff.
BENAY LAPPE: Right. And of course, this is a, the same revolution that's happening in medicine and law and education and psychology. Absolutely.
DAN LIBENSON: And, and so, you know, so, so then, so that is as, as much as anything else that we've talked about on this show, you know, that's one of the reasons why I think there's a crash and, and ultimately the hope of a new version of.
Judaism of the Talmud, et cetera, because it's dealing with a new reality where everybody knows, or everybody has the potential to know everything. And so there's no more, uh, it's not that there's no more hiding necessarily, but there's no more hiding. There's no more expectation of lack of knowledge there.
It can't work. And so what we have to do is to reinvent a Judaism that is palatable. To everybody who's expected to participate. And if you wanna make it unpalatable to a certain segment of people, for example, L-G-B-T-Q, people, you know, you have to expect that they're not gonna wanna participate. You know, or they're gonna go off and create their own version because there's no reason for, well, there's no reason, there never was a reason for people to participate in something that wasn't palatable to them, the the point.
But you, you could have prevented them from finding out that it wasn't palatable to them. You know? So that's the, that's what's changed. And it's, it's actually similar to, and I'm only making this connection right now, it's similar to what I've been saying about the economic model of Judaism. Right, right.
Which a lot of synagogues work on. I've said it's like the business model of a gym. They, they only work if people are willing to pay the dues but not show up. Because if everybody showed up, they actually wouldn't have enough space, enough attention from the rabbi, et cetera, to, to handle everybody. So it's a system that only works if people don't participate.
And I'm like, well, I, I don't want, first of all, I don't wanna be a part of a Judaism that only works if people don't participate. And I don't think it's gonna, I don't think that's gonna last for too much longer. I don't think people want to pay for something that they don't participate. So we're gonna have to reinvent a Judaism that everybody who participates pays, you know, uh, right.
And, and, and everybody who participates feels connected to it and feels that it's palatable to them. That's a, that's a very different, you can't say that that's a tweak. You know? That's a major change from what we've had.
BENAY LAPPE: Absolutely. And I think what, what's coming up for me as you're talking is that. The very notion of tradition is going to start feeling different because part of what is powerful about a tradition is its sense of sometimes illusion of stability and continuity, uh, the and familiarity.
And that only happens when there's a gap between the small changes in the tradition and the, the mindset or of the people, the, the sensibility of the people. Traditions change much more slowly than people change, I think, and it gives traditions this like really long foundational stability. Well, what's gonna happen to the power of tradition itself when traditions no longer feel.
Like they've been this way for a long time, which I think is a necessary myth that we have to uproot. Um, you know, that that central myth, that tr master stories are fixed on changing and, and immutable. When you get rid of that, there's, I don't know, I'm not, I, I'm just like trying to figure it out now, but something is going to happen.
We have to re understand where the power of a tradition is. Once those two things start coming back together,
DAN LIBENSON: I wonder, I mean, I think that's, that's a question. Like I can't, I don't, I'm mean, I'm not disagreeing with you. I, I'm not sure. I, I wonder whether you can, um, construct a myth that everybody accepts, uh, in a kind of mass way.
Uh, the Myth of America is maybe an example. I mean, there's a, like what, you know, we've made various connections to, uh, American legal work and legal tradition in law schools where there definitely has been this elite mindset where most of the people aren't gonna find out about most of this. So, so there's two different kinds of conversations happening, like you were saying in, in medicine and in psychology, and so many things that, that's breaking down also in law.
So that kind of myth seems to be unstable. But, but I wonder, and, and now we're obviously seeing a breakdown in the Myth of America in, in its larger, uh, version, but I wonder whether some kind of. Larger myth like that can still be sustained. Even in a world where everybody knows it's kind of a myth. I I, part of me feels like, I hope that it can be because I think there's something really powerful to a story and a myth that is hard to just, without it, it feels, you know, that, I don't know, like, it feels like you, it's very hard to, it's very hard to live life if you feel like you're not living it for a purpose.
But all those purposes have. Substantial mythic, you know, kind of unfactual components to them. And so it feels like there needs to be some,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, maybe if we get it more right?
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: It'll have more lasting power and more plausibility even for folks who are seeing behind the curtain.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. I now you're making me feel more hopeful.
DAN LIBENSON: Well, um, okay, well, let's, uh, spend a little bit of time back in our, uh, text.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Let's, okay, so, um, so, so all of this, I mean, while it could seem like a, uh, digression, and it is, and by the way, the Talmud, it's full of digressions. Uh, you know, I think those digressions are not just digressions, right?
They're digressions that are actually trying to bring in ideas from somewhere else. Into this conversation. And so it, it's, on the one hand, it's, uh, it's taking some, some real time to do that, but on the other hand, it's not, uh, outta nowhere and, and irrelevant. So I, I hope that that is true here too. Um, and, and just through it, like what we're really, why we went off on this digression is because we started to get to a point of this conversation, of this analysis that started to seem very winky, you know, very, uh, almost to the point of it's starting to be funny.
And, um, and we were saying that that funny is not accidental. It's not something that only we are seeing today. And they didn't think it was funny. It's that, you know, if you think it's funny, they thought it was funny. Maybe a, maybe not quite the same way, maybe a little bit less, but a little bit more. But, uh, but it's there.
And because it was meant for a small elite of people to see.
BENAY LAPPE: Absolutely.
DAN LIBENSON: And so what we're looking here is, is starting to again, get at these limitations of, of the cases and um, totally remember where, you know, how far we got. I think we, we started on, on the mishna here.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. I think we had finished the mna, we talked about the Greg Mendel four square
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, examination of the, of four different possibilities of how a pot a a about how a, a rebellious, but not necessarily officially labeled stubborn and rebellious son might behave, which would or would not put him in the eligible category of. Sanction, unsanctioned, sub and rebellious and do for stoning. So the, the two, the, the top and the bottom of the foursquare are where he from, what location he steals the money with, which he's going to purchase the wine and the meat cheaply, and in which location he consumes the required or, you know, significant meat and wine that might put him in the category of stubborn, uh, wayward and rebellious.
Okay, so the missioner says if he steal you, you could go ahead and read it just to, just to remind people. Then
DAN LIBENSON: we'll go just to remind people that basically the only way, the only situation in which somebody. Would be potentially deemed to be a stubborn, rebellious son is if he's caught or if he's somehow had done and it was known that he had taken, well here it says in the mission, it says, uh, steals something, food or something that belonged to his father and ate it on, on the property of somebody else.
BENAY LAPPE: Right, right. Okay. Then Theara is gonna go, what? What? Why, what, what's the deal there? What, what does that mean actually? What, what are we imagining that those two facts, um, indicate that would implicate this child for wayward and rebellious son status? And, uh, I'll let you read through it and then we'll,
DAN LIBENSON: yeah, no, and just that, that, uh, there was another rabbi, rabbi, yo say, Senator Rabbi Huda, who said it, it's not, it has to steal from his father and his mother, which we'll actually see later in Theara is a complicated issue because, uh, women, married women didn't necessarily understood to be, to own anything.
So what does that mean?
BENAY LAPPE: But it seems like, it seems like, uh, uh, a wild bid on the part of Rabbi Yehuda who makes that, uh, suggestion to narrow even more, like infinitely more because to steal from both your mother and your father is presumably harder. Once we really think about it, it's extraordinarily harder given the status of, of women in property much, much harder.
So he seems to be really trying to narrow the window, uh, even further for who can be deemed stone able. Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. Okay. So here the gamara is, uh, then looking at these various combinations still from your father ate on your father's property, still from someone else ate at home on your father's property, you know, why are, what's the, what are the differences between these situations such that most of three of the, the four of them don't count?
You know, don't, don't, aren't, uh, don't let you get the status of a weybridge or stubborn and rebellious son. So, uh, if he stole. Which belonged to his father and ate on his father's property. Even though this is accessible to him and easy for him to steal, he is afraid that his father will see him eating what he is stolen.
Therefore, he will not be drawn, uh, drawn on to his action to further evil. So, so if he, if he took something from his father and ate it at home, there's a sense that he's, um, he's gonna be careful not to do any more things. 'cause, you know, his father would easily catch him.
BENAY LAPPE: Right, right, right. So the GMA here is surfacing the underlying, um.
It's not principles, it's it's factors which would contribute to a boy who's, you know, mildly or, or contribute to him continually continuing along the path of wayward and rebelliousness. And those two factors, those two planes are accessibility. Does he have the possibility of continuing and, um, is there, or is there not a deterrent?
Is there fear? Is he afraid? Presumably, if he's afraid of getting caught, he won't keep doing it. But if he has no concern about getting caught, he's not afraid at all. He will continue. So they wanted, they want to, um, define the circumstance, which is both the, gives the most accessibility to this.
Potentially wayward and rebellious kid and the least amount of deterrent fear.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. Yeah. And by the way, like I'm not entirely sure that I a hundred percent agree with, uh, Stein's explanation here and may probably he's getting that from us. So, I mean, there's different ways to look at it. You could say, well, look, somebody who's just stealing from his parents and eating it at home, like they might keep stealing it from their parents.
Yeah. But like at the end of day, we're not, we're not that concerned about that. I mean, that's not, you know, it's like, so he is a bad kid, but that doesn't mean he needs to be killed.
BENAY LAPPE: Right. Because, because there's only Well, okay. But I think the issue here is. Accessibility isn't enough to pull him on this road, this bad road has, there has to be accessibility and lack of fear and stealing from his father's property.
This is, you know, I don't know. My dad, Oliver used to leave his wallet, um, on his dresser. I knew where his wallet was. I knew that there was money in his wallet. It would've been very easy for me to take money from him. Is it easy for me to steal from, you know, my friend's father's wallet? Not as easy.
Mm-hmm. I don't know where he keeps his wallet. I know where my father keeps his wallet. I'm in his room all the time. Mm-hmm. So, I don't know, I'm not really addressing your point, but I think that's what they're getting at in terms of accessibility. But if he, if he goes out and buys this wine and meat, which presumably is going to be, uh.
Known to his father as a sign, his father is gonna go, what are you doing? Right. And punish him immediately.
DAN LIBENSON: I mean, yeah, except, yeah, I mean, I think the way that I'm thinking about it is that what we're, what we're asking when we're looking at the wayward and rebellious son, based on the earlier stuff that we studied, is like, not whether the thing that this person did is worthy of punishment, but whether this is a sign that this is gonna turn into like a really horrible person, you know, almost like a, what we would think of as like a sociopath.
And so a person who's kind of just stealing their parents food or money and just, but eating it at home, meaning they're just causing trouble in the home. Uh, there's not, there's not a sense necessarily that they're on a path to become, because the fact that they're not going out elsewhere and, and stealing could be a sign that he's afraid, right.
That a sign that he's, that, that, that he's actually only stealing. You know, where he has access and that, and that we don't have to worry that he's gonna become this malefactor in society.
BENAY LAPPE: Maybe. But here's what you brought up for me. Maybe there's something about sort of the, um, the, the bald, you know, I'm doing it right here under your nose.
I don't care. The, there's a little bit of an f you on the part of this kid to be doing something that he has to know and the father has to know is one of those signs right under the father's nose. I, I think it could be the, I don't know what to call it. What is that,
DAN LIBENSON: brazenness or,
BENAY LAPPE: yeah, yeah, yeah. That, yeah.
I, I think that's what's being uncovered here. Uhhuh and, and in mere possibility. I think that the stealing for, for me makes a lot of sense. Okay,
DAN LIBENSON: let's look at the next case. Okay. If he stole that which belonged to others and ate on the property of others, even though he is not afraid, obviously he's not afraid of them because he's just eating it.
He is just doing it out in the open, right? Um,
BENAY LAPPE: no. I think that, I think that he's not afraid is there's no brazenness when you do something bad in front of someone else's father because that guy isn't, has no authority over you to discipline you. So it, it's, it, that's what he's not afraid of. He's not afraid of being caught and punished or, you know, locked in his room when he did, does something bad and his friend's father sees him.
Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: I don't know. Okay. I read it a little bit differently. I mean, I, yeah, you know, you, you probably have the, the, you know, your reading is probably more right in terms of the, the, um, commentators and stuff. I, it just, it feels to me like a person who kind of is just, is, I almost see this, like, this is a person who's very brazen, you know, who's kind of going out and, and, um, you know, taking stuff from people and just doing it out in the open is showing that there is a sort of sociopathic dimension to it that he is not afraid.
But the, the next part of it is that it's not easily accessible to him. Uh, so, so therefore, you know, he, he may be a really bad person, but he is only gonna do it. Every once in a while. Like, again, he's not, he's not a, um, he's, he's not a, so we're not seeing signs of sociopathy here. You know, he's not doing something just so shocking, uh, as we'll see later, you know, he, he is, he is kind of, he's just a bad guy.
But that's, again, that's not somebody that we kill in advance. That might be somebody that we put in jail because they did a crime, but that's different from killing them in advance because we're so afraid of who they might become.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. This kid, it, it, it reminds me of what we were talking about earlier on.
Well, if he, if he ate at a, you know, drank, ate, and drank at a wedding, or did this as a mitzvah or did it, he was eating non-kosher meat. That's just someone who's eating non, you know. Transgressing Kashrut.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Fine. It's bad, but it's not a sign.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, this is a kid who could easily be stealing from others and might, but that's not considered, uh, like you say, a sign of future or growing or even current sociopathy than actually stealing from your own parents, which is very easy to do.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Anyway.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. And so the next case is, and all the more so, uh, if he stole that which belonged to others and then ate on his father's property and brought it home to eat, in which case it is not accessible to him and he is also afraid of his father. Um, so in that case is where he's stealing from someone else, which is harder to do, so less accessible, and he is coming home to eat.
Which again, what you're saying that, or if I'm understanding here, that. It's saying that he's not gonna do that very often because he would be afraid of getting caught
BENAY LAPPE: by his father. Yeah. The first time his father catches him, he's gonna get whooped
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh.
BENAY LAPPE: Right. And he's unlikely to keep doing it because he's, the location in which he's eating this stuff is going to cause him to have a, a deterrent behavior, his father's punishment of him, uh, early on in this growing sociopathic process or something like that.
DAN LIBENSON: So, oh. So maybe what what it's saying here is like, we, we are relatively confident that something, namely his father's punishment is going to get in the way of his starting to have a habit of doing this.
BENAY LAPPE: Right.
DAN LIBENSON: And so it's gonna, it's not going to, it's not going to go to that, that place. That's,
BENAY LAPPE: I, I think so.
Mm-hmm.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. And so then the, the last case, so therefore he is not liable unless he steals that which belonged to his father and which
BENAY LAPPE: is ea, which is really easy to do.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: And takes it and eats it on the property of others. Mean meaning, you know, take, take what belongs to your father and run away somewhere
BENAY LAPPE: and go buy the meat in the wine and then go consume it, you know, smoke the joint, whatever.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, you know, in his friend's basement.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Where no one is going to spank him, catch him, spank him, punish him, lock him in his room, take away his TikTok.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. Well, there's also this like, intense, well, part of what I see here is like this, that you're seeing consciousness of guilt, right? Because if somebody, if somebody, uh, eats, you know, steals from your father and eats it right there, then you know, maybe you're just stupid.
You know, maybe you're just kind of right. Like you're, you don't, didn't realize that you did something wrong. You didn't even realize that it's stealing or it's like, it's my father. It's not stealing. He is part of the family, you know, whatever. But so this idea that you take it and then you run off somewhere else shows consciousness of guilt and you're doing it anyway.
And, and so, you know, you start to see a character trait that, that may be, uh, connected to, um. To, to sociopathy, which by the way, you also see consciousness of guilt when you steal from someone else and bring it home to eat. But I think in that case they're saying, but that's not gonna happen too often because the father's gonna whip him.
You know? And, and, and so they're, they're both signs of consciousness of guilt. But in this case, we think something else is gonna intervene to stop it. But in this other case, nothing, nothing may ever intervene. And so this seems likely to build up.
BENAY LAPPE: Right. Which, not to overly connect, but this brings up for me your point about the role of the people in the Maman Man ceasing his amplification.
In other words, this path toward stone ability actually has a number of points at which, um. People could intervene, like in this case, the, the parents to interrupt that, that path.
DAN LIBENSON: Uhhuh.
BENAY LAPPE: Uhhuh. So there's something, there's some parenting message in here.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. So it's like, it's like at least three factors and then we'll stop for today.
But it's the, the factor of of is this person doing something that's easy for him to do Because if he keeps doing that, that'll lead to more criminality. 'cause it's easy, is the person doing it in a way that makes him not likely to be caught by those who, in this case, the father, those case, who would, who would, who might stop this behavior.
And then I think there's this other cases, like, is the, are we seeing evidence of, and that's not what the Talmud says. This is an additional factor that I'm adding here, is that, is there some sense that the behavior indicates, uh, uh, acting this way with full consciousness of guilt, which you see by running away and not eating in the place where you stole.
Those two are the four cases, and you know, where, where those sort of three factors converge is where you say, well, this, this is the case that we're worried about. But again, the last thing I would say here is like, this is a, you can make sense of this, this gemara, but, and it may, it does make sense. And the, that is an important factor, and yet what we're really seeing here is a intense narrowing of the potential cases where this could have be applied.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. I, I don't know if I'm, I'm going off too much on my own, you know, process of becoming a parent of a teen, but the, the thing you worry about is what you don't know about, right?
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: It, it, it's not what your kid tells you they're doing mm-hmm. Or tells you they're thinking. Right. The, the, the fear and the danger in this situation is what you don't know your kid is up to.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, I don't know.
DAN LIBENSON: So even in the, but, but in that, even in the, so that, so I mean, a closing point I think which we can think about and, and maybe come back to is that even in what we're seeing here, that is on the one hand, this kind of funny narrowing of the cases that, that ultimately, and we've already spoiled this, that ultimately will narrow it to nothing.
Uh, you could see it just as that, but actually within, even within that, there, there is wisdom here, there is real, there is real, uh, whether it's a wisdom that's like law kind of wisdom, like consciousness of guilt or parenting wisdom, like you're worried about the cases that you don't know about. Like there's actually really, this isn't just silliness.
It's, it's funny, but serious.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: That's cool.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: All right. Well, we'll pick this up again next week.
BENAY LAPPE: So fun. Thanks, Dan.
DAN LIBENSON: All right.
BENAY LAPPE: Bye. Bye.
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