The Oral Talmud Episode 52: Raw Material (Tanna Debei Eliyahu Zuta 2)

SHOW NOTES

“ God only gave you raw materials. God always wanted you to mess with this. The story of the wise servant who turns the flour into bread, you could equally imagine him turning it into pita or challah or donuts or pancakes. I don't think any of those would've been the wrong answer. Anything that is healthy and nutritious and useful that you make out of it is okay. [This story] should shape how we view Torah. It gives a lot of permission to innovators at a time like now, when I think we've got to roll up our sleeves and really start messing with this thing.” - Benay Lappe

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. 

This episode starts with a heretic on the side of the road — and turns into a radical argument about what Torah actually is. Benay and Dan unpack a strange rabbinic parable where God gives two servants raw wheat and flax. One preserves it exactly as he received it. The other grinds, kneads, bakes, weaves, and transforms it. And according to the rabbis, only one of them understood what God really wanted.

From there, the conversation spirals into some of the biggest questions imaginable: Was Judaism always meant to evolve? Did the rabbis secretly know Torah was human interpretation all the way down? And what happens when the myths that once held a tradition together start breaking under the weight of history, archeology, and modern consciousness? This episode isn’t just about oral Torah versus written Torah. It’s about whether faithfulness means protecting the inherited details or protecting the timeless purpose.

This week’s text: Tanna Debei Eliyahu Zuta 2

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.

• Transcript

  DAN LIBENSON: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 52: Raw Material.

  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. 

  This episode starts with a heretic on the side of the road — and turns into a radical argument about what Torah actually is. Benay and I unpack a strange rabbinic parable where God gives two servants raw wheat and flax. One preserves it exactly as he received it. The other grinds, kneads, bakes, weaves, and transforms it. And according to the rabbis, only one of them understood what God really wanted.

  From there, the conversation spirals into some of the biggest questions imaginable: Was Judaism always meant to evolve? Did the rabbis secretly know Torah was human interpretation all the way down? And what happens when the myths that once held a tradition together start breaking under the weight of history, archeology, and modern consciousness? This episode isn’t just about oral Torah versus written Torah. It’s about whether faithfulness means protecting the inherited details or protecting the timeless purpose.

  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, everyone. I'm Dan Liebensohn, and I am here, as always, with Benay Lappe for this week's episode of The Oral Talmud. Hey, Benay. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Hey, Dan. How are you? 

  DAN LIBENSON: Good. Good to see you. I, the weather has turned, and we're back in our T-shirts. Really, I don't remember- Yes. ... if we, if we have been, but, uh, I have been cold, and now I'm not, so it's very exciting.

  BENAY LAPPE: Exactly. 

  DAN LIBENSON: And I'm glad to be able to represent SVAR. I real- if we, if we continue, you know, for another year, I'm gonna need a long-sleeve SVAR swag, so. Ooh, 

  BENAY LAPPE: okay. Now I'm excited to pick out some more swag. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Um, I'll, I'll, I'll give you the specs. I ha- I have some thoughts. Oh. Um, no. Oh, okay, good. All right, well- You know, I started, 

  BENAY LAPPE: I started SVAR for the swag.

  Of course. I just, I just wanted to make the swag. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Of course. Well, I'm really excited because we, we, we're just, uh, sort of settling on a redesigned Judaism Unbound, uh, logo, and now we're gonna make all kinds of swag. We never did, 'cause I didn't feel the logo really worked for swag. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Very exciting.

  Fun. Um, all right, so, so today we are, uh, looking at a text that is not from the Talmud, but it's, uh, probably, probably, I mean, most probably, uh, even definitely, uh, composed post the composition of the Talmud. The question is just how long post. It, as much as maybe 300 or 400 years. Um, but it, it, uh, connects to, or at least it, it sort of imagines itself back in the good old days of the early days of the rabbis, right?

  Um- Yeah ... and do you wanna tell us a little bit more about it, what, what it's called exactly and? 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, so it, it feels very much like Talmud, but like you said, it's not in the Talmud, and it's not, uh, technically Talmud at all. Um, but it's from, uh, a collection of Midrashim called Eliyahu Zuta, and- There are lots of collections of Midrash, and, uh, we should probably say what Midrash is.

  So a lot of us are familiar with the term Midrash, and, and we think of things like the story of Abraham breaking his father's idols, and we know that's a Midrash, even though maybe when we were kids we thought it was actually in the Torah. But when we discovered it wasn't in the Torah, we g- we got, "Oh, that's Midrash."

  Okay, the Midrash is something like some story that's not actually in the Torah. But Midrash- I think a lot of 

  DAN LIBENSON: people think those stories are in the Torah. I- Right ... I've disabused many people of that 

  BENAY LAPPE: notion. Yes. But actually, Midrash is outside of the Torah. It happened after Torah, and it, it should be understood as much more sophisticated than just nicey-nice stories.

  Because all the m- m- some Midrashim are stories. There are two categories of Midrash. Midrash Aggadah, those are stories. Midrash Halakha, those are legal, uh, reworkings of verses in the Torah to yield law. But even the stories aren't just nicey-nice fairytales. Midrash is, has to be understood as a response to a crash.

  And anytime you read a Midrash, you have to ask yourself what crash preceded this Midrash, this story or this reworking, to make it necessary or important or a fix to some existential angst created by some prior historical event, um, or, you know, crash that made the tradition problematic. Okay. So this is squarely one of those stories, um, and we're, it's gonna be screamingly obvious what the crash is that it's responding to.

  Um, and nobody knows for sure when exactly this collection, uh, was written or came about. It's somewhere between, it seems, the 3rd and the 10th century. Later is probably more likely. Um, but like you say, it's, it pretends to be a story set in the time of the post-destruction, early Option Three Judaism. 

  DAN LIBENSON: And, and that question about the crash and, uh, what it's responding to, I mean, we'll get into that, I think, as we explore this.

  'Cause it, it does, uh, I guess, you know, in a way that I wasn't really thinking about so much, the, the time that it's composed does matter in the sense that it, um, it, if we knew exactly when it was composed, we might better understand what crash it's responding to. Or, a- and I would say, like, um, depending on who's writing a Midrash- It may be, I mean, this is where just to, just to supplement what you said a little, it may be a response to a crash, and it may be an attempt to stave off a crash.

  You could imagine that as well, and that you, you would call potentially an option one move, you know, an attempt to defend against some kind of threat. And, um, you know, and, and, and so that's, that's also possible here. I, I think a lot about the, um, the stories in the Bible that talk about that the Jews or Israelites shouldn't worship an Asherah, which was like a, a, a goddess figure.

  And, uh, you know, it, and, and there's been so many Midrash layers upon layer upon layer about an Asherah, what is an Asherah, that, um, you know, it's, it's, uh, you know, now translated as like a holy tree or whatever. You know, it's not ... I mean, it may, there may have been a, a tree or a, or a pole that was the symbol of it, but really n- we all know now from archeology and from, from other sources that Asherah was the name of a feminine goddess in the area, and that

  And, and it, or it wasn't the name I think of the feminine goddess, it was the title of a feminine goddess. So the way that we could say that somebody is a god, you could say somebody is an Asherah. And there is actually, uh, findings, archeological findings that talk about Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, God, Yahweh, and his Asherah.

  You know, so there was this idea that God was married, you know, had a, had a, a female consort. And, um, anyway, the point here is that when you see stories about how, how we shouldn't worship Asherahs, like that immediately makes me now think, "Well, oh, that must mean that most people were worshiping Asherahs," and the people in power didn't like that.

  I, I agree. So that is, that's sort of a Midrash that says, "Hey, hey, hey, something's happening here that we don't like that's threatening our power here, and let's, uh, let's push it away, uh, by putting this story into the Tor- into the Bible, into some-" That says like, "Oh, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, God actually commanded us not to worship Asherah.

  So you, you folks who are worshiping Asherahs, like you're doing some horrible ..." By the way, the other ... Sorry to get off on a tangent, but I think it's interesting to, to listeners I hope, that the other major story about that from the Bible is the golden calf. Because the, the, um, the symbol of kind of, you know, God's chariot basically in the southern kingdom was the cherubim, and some people have heard of them.

  They're kind of angelic figures. They're not really. They're more like sphinx-y kind of mixed animal type figures. And the, the equivalent symbol of the God's chariot in the northern kingdom of Israel was, uh, uh, a ca- was calves, golden calves. And so when the, when the northern kingdom is read by the southern kingdom as evil, this is what archeologists and Biblical- Mm-hmm

  scholars think today, they say, um, "Oh, you know, their symbol is the golden calf, and we don't like these people, so we're gonna put a story that h- hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago the Jews made a golden calf at Sinai. God, at Sinai, the most horrible thing. And God, you know, Moses destroyed them and God was very angry.

  And now these p- northern people have made it their symbol. What, what horrible people." But that, but the- Wow ... the story is in reverse, that actually, you know, the story of the golden calf from, from the Bible, again, according to Biblical scholars, came after that, that whole situation that the north- It, it, 

  BENAY LAPPE: it was retrojected back into the, into the Torah to give it- Right, specifically designed-

  DAN LIBENSON: weight ... to, to, specifically designed to sort of push away a, a perceived threat. Probably, my guess- Wow ... I mean, it could be that it, that it was already when the kingdom was still around, but it could also be when the, uh, this makes a little bit more sense to me as a theory, that when the northern kingdom was destroyed, all these refugees came to the south, uh, with perhaps their, uh, idea that, "Hey, we should, we should build a golden calf.

  Uh, like, we're getting our people together. You know, we're merging now. Let's, let's add the golden calves into the temple with the cherubs. You know, then we'll have both of our people's symbols here." You know, and the, uh, the southern priests are like, "No, no, no, no. They, that's, you know, let's, uh, let's, uh, the, the, act- we can't do that.

  You know, there's that story." Uh, "What story? Never heard that story. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a story about when they, they made a golden ca-," you know, right? Then et cetera, et cetera. So, so that- That's so cool. I never knew that. Yeah. So, um, so that's, that's, that's a lot of fun. Wow. Uh, okay, so let's look at this, uh, story.

  Uh, anything else before we actually jump into the story? 

  BENAY LAPPE: Um, no, I don't think so. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So let's look at it. Um, and, uh, and I guess we'll start there. Um, okay. So this is c- again called, uh, the, the name of the book is Tanna Eliyahu Zuta, right? To say that- Yeah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. It, it, there are actually two parts to this collection.

  The collective name for the two parts is Tanna D'vai Eliyahu. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh. 

  BENAY LAPPE: And there's big part and little part. And the word Zuta means little. 

  DAN LIBENSON: In 

  BENAY LAPPE: Aramaic. So this particular, uh, midrash that we're gonna learn comes from the littler collection inside this larger collection. And the bigger collection, which precedes it in a, a bound volume like this, uh, is called Eliyahu Rabbah.

  DAN LIBENSON: Hmm. Okay. So, um, so the narrator here is, is talking and he says, "One time I was walking on the way. A man found me and came to me on his way to heresy." Now, let's stop here just to note that if you look at the Hebrew, and this is why we actually put it in columns today, it's not ... usually we don't. But this word here, mitzvot, is the word that's being translated as heresy.

  Now, for those who know Hebrew, mitzvot means the opposite of heresy. It means the commandments. He was on ... So, uh, so we'll see in the, in the rest of the story that it doesn't make sense that it would say, "A man w- came up to me on his way to doing mitzvot, and here's what happened." So that already doesn't make sense, and the understanding is that this is either an unintentional or an intentional scribal error.

  And if you look carefully here at the tz- the letter tsadi, which is the only difference between the word mitzvot and another word called minut, which means heresy, a tsadi looks like a nun with a yud next to it. In exactly the same way that it would be in minut, it would mem, yud, nun, vav, taf. And in, and in mitzvot it's mem, tsadi, vav, taf.

  And you can see how you could intentionally or unintentionally see something that says minut and just kind of com- uh, make a little connection between the yud and the nun, and it'll look more like a tsadi. And then the next person who copies the text will just write it as a ... They thought, you know, maybe, uh, the handwriting wasn't so good, and they'll, they'll fix it up and make it mitzvot, and then forevermore it's, it's mitzvot.

  But it's, it's a, a ... But it, it also, it, it could be intentional in the sense that, you know, people who ... I mean, there's, like, a midrash on a midrash in a way because it could be that somebody was reading this and said, "I don't like the idea that somebody was on his way to heresy. I don't want a, I don't want a story like that, so I'd rather correct it."

  And, 

  BENAY LAPPE: and ... Yeah. And we don't want, uh, those guys out there, probably Christians, to look at our story. We don't wanna hang out our dirty laundry, right? Uh-huh. A Jew on his way to heresy, that's dirty laundry- Uh-huh ... as far as the rabbis were concerned. And I think it's a v- uh, it's a possibility that they didn't want others

  Th- this kind of self-censorship in anticipation of either Christian censorship or, you know, a violent reaction or some sort of negative reaction, is very common. We see it all over the Talmud. It's, it's been done to Rashi. So- Uh-huh ... I, I think that's the most likely, but you're right, the letters are very similar 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, a- and again, people should know that there's a lot of this, uh, in the Bible also.

  A- again, intentional or unintentional, there's a lot of notes in a translated Bible, or actually I guess in the Hebrew Bible, that would say, you know, it, it's probable that this word was actually mis-copied by a translator and actually should have... Or by a, by a, a scribe, and it should be X. Then there's intentional ones li- that, that, like for example, any time somebody's name is something Boshet.

  Um, Boshet was like a, a, a bad, you know, insulting nickname for the god Baal. So if you read that somebody's name is Ishboshet, his name was really Ishbaal, and they didn't... And either, either they were trying to make an insult by calling him Ishboshet, or they actually at a later point didn't wanna say Baal anymore, so they changed it to Boshet.

  You know, there's all kinds of reasons and, and scholars dispute why, but this is not an uncommon situation. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. And, um, depending on which printing of this midrash you have, you'll either get minut, heresy, or mitzvot. Um, and I have a critical edition with notes at the bottom that, uh, indicate the various manuscripts that have heresy as opposed to mitzvot.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm. Which is cool. Okay. But so we- for the rest of today, we'll, we'll read it as heresy. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, 

  DAN LIBENSON: I think so. Yes. So, so one time I was walking on the way. A man found me, and he came to me on his way to heresy. And he had, and he- 

  BENAY LAPPE: But wait, I, I think we oughta, we oughta think, what, what does that mean, or at least raise the question, what does it mean to be on your way to heresy?

  And I think what heresy means is different depending on what point in history someone is naming you as a heretic. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right? So we have to ask ourselves, we don't have to answer the question quite yet, but let's be aware of the question, what is the narrator representing? Who is this narrator, and which sort of orthodoxy or, uh, mainstream-ness is he representing?

  And in his eyes, what does heresy mean? 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right? Because th- this happens all the time. You know, what one sect, uh, today or in the past, will point to another sect and say, "We're legitimate, you're illegitimate." And, and the one being pointed to is like, "What are you talking about? You're the one who's illegitimate."

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. Right? Right. And when, and I think we'll talk about this, but when the needle, uh, flips in the other direction and the heretic, the one who used to be the majority, is now the heretic, that's a sign of, of, uh, of a real shift in power. That's right. And that's happy, happy news for the, uh, former heretics, and it's, uh, very upsetting to the previous, uh, what do you, what's the opposite of a heretic?

  You know, the orthodox, I guess. You know, and, and those folks are like, "Uh, wait a second." 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right. Orthodox, not in the- "I'm not a heretic" Right. Not in the ter- not in the sense of today's- Yeah, yeah ... orthodox movement, but yeah. Small o. Right. Mm-hmm. Right. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Small O, yeah. So, uh, so, so this particular heretic- Uh, it's described as he had, he had mikra, or, uh, maybe a better translation is he had in him mikra, and but he, but no, but he did not have in him Mishnah.

  I love that. And so... Right. And so, uh, w- one could say either he didn't, he believed in, he believed in mikra, only the written Torah, uh, and didn't believe in the oral Torah, or I guess another way you could read it is he, he hadn't learned, he'd only learned the, the written Torah and hadn't learned Mishnah, the oral Torah.

  So he, he just thought, and his heresy is that he only thought, well, we'll, we'll see it in a second, but he only thought the oral- the written Torah was legitimate. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I had never thought about that he hadn't yet learned. My, my sense is that he had in him really implies, you know, he was down with.

  DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh. He was 

  BENAY LAPPE: down with Torah as the word of God. He wasn't down with this new-fangled thing called the Mishnah. And I think that is the story, or I think that's the story of most Jews, um, post-destruction. They were not going along with this new myth that, oh, this new-fangled way of doing Judaism. Now you don't have to go to a temple.

  Now all you have to do is utter these magic words, you know, Baruch atah Adonai. Uh, it feels a little bit like Jack and the Beanstalk and the magic beans. Like, uh, who's believing the magic beans? Nobody. Very few people, right? This thing that the rabbis made up and all these new ways to encounter God, and that used to be done in the temp- Ugh.

  I think most people were like, "No, I'm not down with that." And we know that historically, most Jews went to minut, meaning they left and assimilated into the pagan surrounding culture. Mm-hmm. Because that's what people do. Mm-hmm. When you have an enormous crash and it looks like it's over, most people are like, "It's over.

  I'm out of here." 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, and, and I'll just sort of note now, we can talk about it more later, that if this, just, just so that folks, uh, who know a little bit more about this, like if this book wa- it was written in the closer to the 10th century, then there was another split which was going on in the Jewish community at that time, which was, uh, the split of the Karaites, uh, with the, uh, with the Rabbanites or the, the, the Jews sort of that became the dominant, uh, form of Judaism, of Rabbinic Judaism.

  And the Karaites is the same root as Mikra. Kra means the, the, the, the written, the written word or, or the, or the read, reading. So the idea is you can only read what is written. And, and so Kra is another word we've talked about, I think, on the show. Kra is another word for the Torah. And so the Karaites are the people who believe only in the written Torah, and they don't believe that the oral Torah is, is, uh, was given at Sinai and is to be given, uh, authority.

  And there are still very, a small number of Karaites around. We actually had an interview with, uh, somebody, Sean Leesha from the Karaite community recently on Judaism Unbound, which was fascinating. And, uh, and, uh, so there was this... But, but at that time, the, the Karaites were hu- a very large movement. Uh, you know, uh, certainly in comparison to the Rabbanites, they were, uh, similar magnitude, I think.

  And so there was a real concern on the part of the, uh, the, the folks writing this, this midrash, the, the Rabbanites, uh, that, oh, the, there's this, uh, there's this counter, uh, movement which is saying, uh, that actually we were wrong back then in those early days and, right? And so it, it, in a way it's the same, uh, idea whether you see this as being written in the 10th century versus wr- being written in the, in, you know, the first century, but, or the second century, let's say.

  But the, um, but the, the, the, you know, but, but the, the, the q- the question may be a little bit more are we responding to a crash or are we defending ourselves against an attack? But I think the ideas are, are the same. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. That's r- it's really interesting. And y- what you're raising for me is the possibility that your, your framework isn't clear at the time that you're sort of most in the midst of it.

  You know, you can only maybe, maybe, I'm not sure, look back and say, "This is, this is how it happened." And, and, and maybe at the time of the crash, they weren't able to really articulate option one, option two, option three. I, I'm not sure. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. 

  DAN LIBENSON: So, so we can imagine this person who's about, who's, who's on his way to heresy.

  We can imagine this person as a Karaite in the 9th or 10th century, and we can imagine this person as a kind of, uh, person in like, let's say, the 3rd century that is- Uh, still kind of imagining that, uh, the right way to do it was the way that we did it before the destruction of the temple, and all this stuff that the rabbis have been doing, it's not, it's, it's made up, it's not right, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's not, it's not the, the real Judaism.

  Um- Right, it's 

  BENAY LAPPE: not the word of God. Mm-hmm. You, you made this up, yeah. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. So he comes up to me, to this rabbi, and he says, "Rabbi, Mikra was given to us from Mount Sinai. Torah, the written Torah, was given to us M- from Mount Sinai. Mishnah was not given to us from Mount Sinai." And the oral Torah, right, the oral Torah was not given at Mount Sinai.

  And I said to him, "My son, Mikra and Mishnah both came from the mouth of the greatness." 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right. So th- that's, that's the myth. That's the myth that we developed, at, at least in my theology. I think that was the genius myth the rabbis developed after the destruction to keep some Jews who would go along with it, uh, Jewish, when being Jewish looked radically different from the way it looked last week.

  Mm-hmm. Previous week. Um, it was, it w- I just think it's genius. Oh, okay, the way you did it before, that's, that wasn't the only authentic Judaism. That was half the authentic Judaism. But there's this other authentic Judaism that I know looks unrecognizable to you. You think we made it up, but we didn't. God also gave that.

  So I know some people believe that is truth, and that's beautiful and great. I think it was just a divine, um, invention of the rabbis. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and, and when, it's interesting. So, well, I guess we can come back and explore this. When he says, uh, you know, Mikra and Mishnah both came from the mouth of the greatness, uh, I think what is trying to be said here is that they both came from Sinai, you know, that they were both given from the mouth of God at Sinai.

  Yeah. But what does that mean exactly is, is open for, for debate, and actually I think it comes out, it comes through in, in this, in this, uh, parable what, what did we really mean? I mean, I, I know that I used to really struggle with this as a child when I was told that the oral Torah was given at Sinai, and then I would kind of read the Talmud and every- there would be all these, like, debates and disagreements and whatever, and I was like, "That was God saying, you know, Rabbi So-and-So said this, but Rabbi So-and-So said that?

  Like, that doesn't make any sense." You know, and like, so what does it mean when you say that the oral Torah was given at Sinai? So that's, that's something to, to think 

  BENAY LAPPE: about. Yeah, I like that. It, y- we're always talking about how we're much more pietistic now than we probably think the rabbis were then, and it could be that they didn't actually mean the way we caricaturize- Right

  this idea of oral law as verbally spoken from God to Moses, and he wrote it down. Maybe they really had a much more- Modern, quote-unquote, notion of Sinai as what we figure out, and we know there are stories in the Talmud. There, there, there are a lot of voices in the tradition that say, for example, what any student in the Beit Midrash comes up with was given at Mount Sinai.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Meaning, was that actually given? No, I think what they mean is, is a legitimate expression of Torah. 

  DAN LIBENSON: I think we'll, I think we'll see that in this, in this story. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, okay. So, so then the story goes on to say, "What is the difference between mikra and Mishnah?" Rather, he told them a parable.

  So here's the parable. To what is this matter similar? To a king of flesh and blood who had two servants, and he loved them with a great love, and he gave to one a kav, which is a measure, a certain measure of wheat, and to the other a kav of, and to the other a kav of wheat. And he also gave to each of them a bundle of flax.

  The wise one took the flax and wove a beautiful cloth, and took the wheat and made it into fine flour, and sifted it, and ground it, and kneaded it, and baked it, and set it on the table, and spread the beautiful cloth over it, and left it there until the king should come. And the fool of them did nothing. 

  BENAY LAPPE: I love this.

  I love this. Okay, so as soon as you see a parable with a king, you know who the king is. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: God's always the king. Okay, so this is God, and the servants are, are us. And I, I, I don't know. For me, what, what, what's going on is God gave us raw materials, right? Mm-hmm. Wheat and flax, it's, it's raw materials.

  Mm-hmm. And I think it's really interesting that the Midrash right away identifies the one who took the raw materials and manipulated them out of recognition as the wise one, right? Mm-hmm. From the get-go, you know what the right thing to do is with the, right- Right ... with the raw materials. And I love that, like, the multiplicity of verbs of manipulation.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: It, it doesn't just say, "He took the wheat and made bread." 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. I 

  BENAY LAPPE: mean, ultimately, that's what he did, but the text goes out of its way to say, "He made fine flour out of it, and then he sifted it, and then he ground it, and then he kneaded it, and he baked it." It's like he could- the, the narrator couldn't make it any clearer that the, this wise person is taking what God gave him and doing all sorts of things to it.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Lots of things, each of which also requires other ingredients, right? I mean, when you make bread, you have, you need more than just flour. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Also, you need salt, and a little oil, and water, and who knows what else. So he's taking what God gave him, adding other stuff to it, manipulating, manipulating in half a dozen different ways, and coming out with something- That, that's nutritious, right?

  That you can eat. Sure. Uh, and he does the same thing to the flax. And, and for me, the fool... Okay, the other one, he did nothing. I always imagined in the, in the white space after this line, the fool, if he read the story about him, would go, "Oh, oh, what do, what do you mean I did nothing? I didn't do nothing. I did what I thought I was supposed to do.

  I guarded it. I took care of it. I watched it. I made sure nothing happened to it." I mean, God- when God gives you something, you're gonna be like, you're gonna put it in glass, you're gonna lock it up, you're gonna make sure that it stays just the way God gave it to you because when God wants it back, you're gonna wanna say, "Here it is.

  I, I took really good care of it." 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, I mean, the story could have easily ended up as, like, you know, the king comes back and he yells at the wise one, like, "What did you do? I, I-" "... wanted, I wanted to make the bread. I was just giving you that to hold onto," or, you know- Yeah ... "I just wanted to do something else with it."

  Exactly. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm. So I, I don't know. If I, if God had given me wheat and flax, I, I would think- Okay ... I think it's pretty chutzpadik- 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, 

  BENAY LAPPE: I agree ... for the, the wise 

  DAN LIBENSON: one to do what he did. Yeah, I, I don't think I would, uh... Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking, like, Joe Biden shows up at my house, you know, gives me some, some stuff, and I would be like, "Uh, okay."

  And he's like, "No..." Especially if he said, like, "Well, I'm coming back." Well, by the way, like, I don't even... You know, did, did the king say, uh, that he was coming back? You know- He, 

  BENAY LAPPE: he didn't say. He didn't, right? No, he didn't say. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh. So I guess- But I 

  BENAY LAPPE: don't know. The, yeah, the president gives you something. Like, he gives you this document.

  He gives you the, uh, Declaration of Independence, and you get out your Mod Podge, and you get out your scissors, right? Yeah. And you make, and you cut it up. You make a, a sculpture out of it. You know, I don't know. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: I don't think we'd be doing 

  DAN LIBENSON: that. Yeah. Um, so okay. So let's read on. Okay. Um, so, "After some time, the king came into his house and said to them," to his two servants, "My sons, bring me what I gave you.

  One of them brought out the bre- the bread and fine flour on the table with the beautiful c- cloth spread over it, and the other of them brought out the wheat in a pile and the bundle of flax upon it. Oy, what an embarrassment." "Oy, what a shame. Which one is more favored? It is the one who brought out the bread on the table with the beautiful cloth spread over it."

  BENAY LAPPE: So my favorite part of this section is that actually the original text does say oy. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: So oy is very old. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. Yeah. I think, I think that they, the... I, you know, I made some adjustments to the translation, and I think the translation said something like, something else like, uh, you know, uh, like, how shame, how embarrassing, how shameful, you know, whatever, and I was like, "No, it says 

  BENAY LAPPE: oy."

  DAN LIBENSON: It says 

  BENAY LAPPE: oy. There it is. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Yeah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Um, so- It's interesting that the king's statement to the two servants is, "Bring me what I gave you." And- Uh-huh ... and when we, you know, it says which one was more favored. The one who totally manipulated what God gave him out of recognition and cr- used it to create something, by the way, something that not only could be enjoyed, but that would be used up, right?

  Mm-hmm. That bread's gonna be eaten. There's gonna be no more bread. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm. Mm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: I never thought about that before until just now. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm. Yeah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: And- But may- it may- but maybe, maybe you keep the starter. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well- Wh- which reminds me of your, your insight about Pesach. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, no, I got that from somewhere else, but yeah.

  You know, this idea that, that, uh, yeah, that they would just take, uh, you know, the bread, bread was used up, but you would also preserve the, a little pinch of it as the, as the yeast starter for the next loaf of bread, so it didn't actually completely go away. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Well, or, or was it that you needed to get rid of your starter and then s- have the faith that you could start a new starter and teach the next generation how to do the starter?

  I don't 

  DAN LIBENSON: know. That you would do that once a year for Pesach. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful idea. That's cool. Um- 

  BENAY LAPPE: Anyway, so the king loves the one who manipulated the shit out of their stuff. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yep. Yep. Uh, and so then, so now we go back to the, the r- the, the narrator of the story, the rabbi, and he says- Right, so we're out of 

  BENAY LAPPE: the, out of the parable

  DAN LIBENSON: right, out of the parable, and he says, "And then I said to him," to the person who was on his way to heresy, "My son, if I find within you the mission of the sages," would that put the lie to your 

  BENAY LAPPE: words? Oh, n- not if I find within you, if I f- if I find you within. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh. Oh, if I find you within- Yeah ... the mission of the sages.

  The mission. Sorry. Yeah. "If I find you within the mission of the sages, would that put the lie to your words? He told me, 'Yes.'" In other words, if I, if I find that you're actually living your life based on the Mishnah, then would you agree that, that actually the Mishnah is the word of God, something like that, right?

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. Agreed. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Um, so he told me, "Yeah." So I said to him, "My son, when you go down before the Ark on Shabbat, how many prayers do you say?" This basically means how many, how many, in the Amidah prayer, the, how many prayers, how many different blessings do you say? And, and, uh, there is a different Amidah prayer for Shabbat as for a weekday, and this man says, you know, "How many do you say on Shabbat?"

  He says, "Seven." And I said to him, "And on other days, how many do you say?" And he told me, "18." And in fact, that's the difference between the Shabbat and the weekday Amid- actually, it's 19, but that's a whole nother story. Um- 

  BENAY LAPPE: Which, by the way, that wh- the whole story of why it's 18 and not 19 also has to do with- People g- the, the mention of people going off into heresy, but we'll leave that aside 

  DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.

  Right, right 

  BENAY LAPPE: Okay Great. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Okay, so, um, so then, uh, he told, "So then I said to him, 'My son, how many blessings do you make for the morning Shema, Hear O Israel, prayer?' And he told me two before and one after. And I said to him, 'And how many do you say in the evening?' And he told me two before and two after." Again, this is the, this is the sort of rabbinic rules.

  Uh, and he- But this guy, 

  BENAY LAPPE: this guy clearly thinks, "Oh, that's what it says in the Torah." 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. That's it. Like... 

  BENAY LAPPE: Of course. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, I mean, that's what we do. That's what we do, right? Um- Right ... and I said to him, "My son, how many people read from the Torah on Shabbat?" And he told me, "Seven." And I said to him, "And, uh, and on Mondays and Thursdays in the afternoon prayer on Shabbat, how many?"

  And he told me, "Three." So again, same story. It's- 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right, how many Aliyas are there? Oh, of, we all know. It's from the Torah. God said so, right? 

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. So there's some more examples that are given. We didn't include them. And then he says, "And I said to him, 'My son, and don't you have these practices from Mount Sinai?

  And isn't it the case that they are none other than the mission of the sages?'" So I guess, the, I guess maybe we should look at those questions one at a time, because he says, you know, "My son, and don't you have these practices from Mount Sinai?" In other words, isn't the story that you're telling yourself, that this is, like you, like you just said, Bené, like that, like this is what we do because it's in the Torah, or it's somehow, like this is, this is not, like, a practice.

  This is not a minhag. You know, this is not just a, this is the law. This is the law, and, and all the laws must come from Sinai. So if you're doing this in this kind of religious way, uh, then of course you must believe that it's from Sinai, right? 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right, and, and th- this speaks to the, um, effectiveness of the myth that the rabbis told, and that, and that we tell generally.

  When we tell a, a myth that, like when we do a wink, one of the dangers of the wink is that people will really miss it. Mm-hmm. The purpose is for people to miss it, but the danger is that people will miss it- Mm-hmm ... and people will think that what they're doing, which was actually geniusly made up, was actually from Sinai, which tells them that only things that they've been convinced are from Sinai- 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm

  BENAY LAPPE: are real and legitimate, and things which they see are in creation are not legitimate. That's the downside of the wink. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: You know, it's, it's like what we talk about in the Talmud. It's like the Talmud, in the end, failed in a way- Mm-hmm ... because people are no longer able to see the wink. They're no longer able to see the- Process being demonstrated as a deliberate way to purposely read n- bigger truth out of smaller truth.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Um, anyway, so I'm, I just, I, I love that it notes that this g- this guy's certain what he does is from Torah, and that's precisely why he's leaving. Because he thinks that the new stuff that's being created is somehow qualitatively different from all of these practices that he does. You know what I'm saying?

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, and, and I mean, I think that, like, it does make a lot of sense that this is referring, to me, it makes a lot of sense that this is really, uh, sort of a polemic against the Karaites, because from the perspective of the Rabbinites, they've been doing it this way for a long time now, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

  And, and now there's this group of people that are saying, "Hey, you know, actually, when you think about it, this didn't really come from Sinai." You know, and by the way, it's interesting to think about that as maybe happening after the writing down of the Gemara of the Talmud, because you're like, look- Mm ... I mean, maybe it's the same thing that I was saying as, you know, as a child, confused me.

  You know, that I was like, "Wait a second. I, I don't think God said, and Rabbi so-and-so said this, and Rabbi so-and-so said that. Like, that, what do you mean the oral Torah was given at Sinai, and the Talmud is the oral Torah, and now it's written down?" It's like, that's not what ... I, I don't believe what God said.

  So it starts to say, like, "Well, maybe you've, you've actually sort of proven too much at this point, and, and by writing down the oral Torah, you've kind of r- raised serious questions about this whole myth." And here along come these people, the Karaites. By the way, this is not the Karaites' own story. Like, their own story is that they were around all the time.

  But the, but here come these people, and they're saying that, uh, this stuff, that's, uh, that's bogus, and that what's really true from Sinai is the written Torah. And this other stuff is just made up. And, and so, so, you know, that, that kind of makes sense, uh, as something that's going on, and that's, that's raising an alarm among the, the rabbis who are saying, "Hey, you know, like, we better shut this down."

  I mean, this is, 'cause, 'cause there are ways in which this sort of makes sense. So, so then anyway, so then he, he comes to him with, with this. But let's look at your own practice. And by the way, like, I had the same questions when we, wh- uh, when we interviewed our, a Karaite recently on, on the podcast, where, where we didn't get into all of them.

  But I mean, I do have these questions of, like, look, I mean, you're not, you're not sacrificing animals at holidays. So where, where are the Karaite practices coming from? You know? And- Uh-huh I, I, I think, I think the Karaites- And, and those, option three as well. Yeah, I think they, they have an- I mean, I think there's all kinds of answers that are g- like, they, you know, there are answers that are good ones that they have.

  But, but I mean, like, you can see where the, the questions arise from. They're like, "Well, you know, you don't, you're not living biblically, really." Uh, and so, so and I think they would say, you know, "Yeah, that's right. Like, we do interpret, but we don't, we don't, uh, claim that the, that there was this another Torah given at Sinai."

  And by the way, like, I think it's interesting, and maybe part of what we can talk about here, whether they're, they actually- This parable, to me, suggests that the rabbis didn't quite believe that either. You know, that in other words, that the, the, the notion that we all, I think even to this day, have that there were two different Torahs given at Sinai, a written Torah and an oral Torah, like that's not actually what the rabbis believed.

  BENAY LAPPE: I agree. That's what- I mean, 

  DAN LIBENSON: first of all, it's not what they believed. It's, it's, it's not what they were even saying. You know, what they were saying is something more like, "No, no, no there was one- it was only one thing that was given at, at Sinai, and it was these raw materials. And the raw materials are then reshaped and made at different times into, into different things.

  So that's what it means that there was an oral Torah and a written Torah. It's not, it's not two different things. It's actually it was just one thing. And that, you know, we talked about that on this show a few weeks ago. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. And you're bringing to mind Heschel's understanding of what happened at Sinai.

  And if I'm understanding Heschel right, his idea was that there was, there was a Sinai, there was a Moshe, there was Moses. He had some kind of epiphany. He had some- Mm-hmm ... experience of God. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: And then he wrote down his best attempt to, to get, you know, the, the insights from that experience of how we should live.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: And that's Midrash. Mm-hmm. What we call written Torah, what the rabbis call written Torah, Heschel calls Midrash. Yes. That everything after that experience is Midrash. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yes. 

  BENAY LAPPE: And I think that's, that's beautiful. 

  DAN LIBENSON: I mean, we, we had a, our conversation on, on, uh, Judaism Unbound, uh, last week or two weeks ago, where it was just Lex and me talking.

  The episode's called We Are Torah. And it, it w- we got to a very similar place, where actually Lex was talking about how, uh, we shouldn't actually call Midrash Midrash. In other words, when, when somebody writes a mo- what we call a modern Midrash, like The Red Tent or the Book of V, which is about the story of Esther, or anything that we might say or write, we shouldn't call that M- Midrash.

  We should call that Torah. And that, that, that that, that that is... And so it's not only that all Torah is Midrash, it's that all Midrash is Torah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right. We either have to call everything Torah or we have to call nothing Torah. Right. Right? Like, Heschel would say everything's Midrash. Right. But it, it is more powerful to say everything is Torah, to call that Midrash which is now, you know, lives in a book- Right

  or a scroll, to call that Torah, fine. If you wanna call that Torah, you have to call everything else Torah. Right. Because it's not quali- nothing after that is qualitatively different. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. I mean, that, that's again, I- I don't remember if we said this explicitly on, on that episode. I think we called it Svara All The Way Down.

  But the, uh, but the idea that, that, um- That the only, the only difference between, you know, let's say the written Torah and the Talmud and, and, you know, the red tent, is when did it get, when did it get written down? You know, so, and, and now then the question arises, does something that got written down earlier deserve a higher level of deference?

  And the answer may be, I don't know, you're shaking your head. I mean, it may be that maybe. It may be maybe because since it's been written, since it's been around longer in a defined form, more people have connected with it and taken it seriously, and it's become more ingrained in our culture in some way.

  So you could say like, yeah, there is a little bit of extra oomph to it. But that's different from saying we should, you know, we should worship it to the, to the, uh, just de- detriment of the other. You know, I mean, I'm not saying that, but, you know, th- you could make some kind of an argument. 

  BENAY LAPPE: For sure. For sure.

  Absolutely. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Um, I, I, I'm a little worried that we're on the way to heresy here, but no. 

  BENAY LAPPE: I think we've already gotten there. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Well, let, let's just finish, let's finish the text, and then we can, we can talk- Okay ... more. Um, so the, um, so the, so he says, uh, "So my son, don't you have this, these practices from Mount Sinai?

  And isn't, isn't your own belief that these things that you do are, are the, the law?" And basically he says, yes. And, "Isn't, isn't it the case though that these are none other than the mission of the sages?" In other words, that it's in the Mishnah where these laws are written. It's a, you might've thought it was the Torah, but actually you're wrong.

  Uh, by the way, that connects to that idea that I, I didn't, I wasn't thinking this at the time, but w- if you read the beginning to say, you know, that he had in him kra, but he didn't have, he had in him mikra, but he didn't have in him Mishnah. It does, um, can, it does, uh, uh, accord with that idea that it means he hadn't learned Mishnah.

  Like, he, he only knew, or he'd only heard of the... Like, he didn't, ob- obviously didn't know the Torah very well either because he thought that these rules were, were in the written Torah, but he certainly hadn't learned the Mishnah. Um- Because 

  BENAY LAPPE: if he had, he'd realize that his practices 

  DAN LIBENSON: were- Were in one but not the other.

  BENAY LAPPE: Oh, that's interesting. Okay. I get that. I 

  DAN LIBENSON: mean, you know, not a big deal. Yeah. Um- That's interesting ... eh, so, so isn't it the case that these practices that we just went through are, are in the mission of the sages? And, you know, again, the answer is yes. So rather, when the Holy Blessed One gave the Torah to Israel, he gave nothing other than the wheat from which to make, from which to make fine flour, and the flax from which to weave clothing all through the interpretive process.

  The, that's in square brackets because there's a particular set of words used to, you know, to symbolize the in- interpretive process called klalu prat- Yeah ... meaning using from the general to the specific, the specific to general, but it's basically the interpretation 

  BENAY LAPPE: process. Right. E- even though it's complicated to put this into the translation, I think we should talk about it for a minute because- Okay

  it, the Midrash actually names with a shorthand term one of those interpretive tools One of those kind of exegetical, um, mechanisms 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm 

  BENAY LAPPE: But everyone who read it would certainly have understood that to signify the whole set- Mm-hmm ... of tools you can use to go from Torah to something that the Torah doesn't say at all.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: And those are the tools, Rabbi Yishmael had 13 of them. Rabbi Akiva had an infinite number of them. And those are the tools which the Talmud is recording examples of being played out on specific cases, one after the other. So, um, the, I think the end of the, of this story is also suggesting that God gave us those tools- 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm

  BENAY LAPPE: that we're supposed to use to take the, the raw material that God gave us, and that's a gigantic statement all by itself. The idea that God only gave you raw materials- 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ... 

  BENAY LAPPE: says so much. What it says is, God always wanted you to mess with this. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: God always wanted... You know, it, it, the, the story of the, the wise servant who turns the flour into bread, you could equally imagine him turning it into pita.

  Probably was pita, right? Pita, yeah. Or, or a challah or donuts- Yeah ... or pancakes. I, I don't think any of those would've been the wrong answer- Mm-hmm ... which means that- 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ... 

  BENAY LAPPE: inherent in the story is the suggestion that anything that is healthy, and nutritious, and useful that you make out of it is okay. It doesn't matter whether it's, it turns out to be this, this, or that.

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Um, it, it, I think it's just a, a, such a powerful story, uh, and it, I, I think it should shape how we view Torah. I think it gives a lot of permission to innovators at a time like now, when I think we've gotta roll up our sleeves and really start messing with this thing. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. And, and what's interesting about it, I mean, one piece that's, that I think is interesting about it is it's not really saying exactly.

  I mean, I think it's trying to say, and m- this may be even, like, an error on the part of the person who wrote this midrash, but he ends up not saying, I, like, put this out there for my, you know, Karaite friends. Like, he's not really saying the Karaites are wrong and the Rabbinites are right. What he's really saying is they're actually not different.

  They're, they're actually, they're actually... In, in other words, like, Karaites, you actually are misunderstanding what we believe, and probably most Rabbinites are misunderstanding what we believe. And so this is kind of a, you know, this is kind of a, uh, um, what's the word? Uh, where, where it's a, um, a, a red herring.

  You know, that, that, you know, you're setting this up as, uh, you know, we believe in two Torahs and you only believe in one Torah. No, no, no. Just in the way that you guys, you don't just do literally what the Torah says. You in- you call that interpretation to, for, for, because obviously there's certain things that we can't do quite the way it says.

  And, or it doesn't say exactly what to do, and you say, "It's interpretation. It doesn't have the same weight of authority," et cetera. Right? And we say, also it's, it's interpretation. We, I guess, give it a little more weight of authority in that we're saying that once the re- the, a certain rabbinical council or whatever declares that this is the right way, then it has a certain weight.

  So maybe that's a difference between Rabbanites and Karaites. But really what we're saying the same, the same thing, uh, or at least we think we are, you know, Rabbanites, that something was given at Sinai, and it was just one thing. And everything that we've been doing ever since then is, is a process of, of interpretation.

  Mm. So I, I'm not saying that a Karaite would sign on to that, but I, but I think that there's something here where it starts to say like, well, actually it's, it's not quite as different as we thought it was. And, um, and, and, and to me, like looking at this, it's like I, I, I imagine, okay, so what is the takeaway from here?

  You know, there, there's at least like three possibilities in my mind. One, the written Torah was given at Sinai, plus, uh, some interpretive rules. So, you know, so that, that's the, the raw material plus some, you know, here's how you can interpret it like, like Rabbi Ishmael's 13 principles. Mm-hmm. Another possibility is there was, I guess a, a, a, a, a written Torah was given, plus some raw materials orally, plus these rules.

  You know, so, so in other words, the, there was, there was an addition, but it wasn't like 2,000 pages of Talmud. It was, you know, a couple of extra ideas, you know, plus some interpretive principles. The third possibility is that there was no written Torah given at all, that there was only one thing given, which was, you know, some version of a few ideas and some rules.

  You know, some- something like that, right? And, and, and, uh, I mean, I, I put my cards on the table. I mean, I already have, you know, that... I mean, again, it, within the context that I don't believe anything literally happened. But to the, to the extent that like what are we kind of imagining here, it's really just, just the third, third case, you know, that, that there actually was no written Torah given at all in the sense that Moses came down carrying a scroll.

  I, I mean, even just on the archeological sense, uh, there was no, there was no, uh, wr- wr- writing. You know, there was no widespread, uh, reading and writing at that time in Israel. So, like, who was reading this scroll? You know, like, like in other words, it, it doesn't quite, it doesn't quite accord with the whole, uh, history as we know it that there would've even ever been a written...

  I mean, it's just not po- right? So whatever. It's, it's pretty- Y- you know 

  BENAY LAPPE: what's coming up for me? That

  myths inevitably trip you up If they're successful Uh-huh So this story is, is a snapshot of a moment in history, and, and, and I'm just gonna say for a moment that it happened at the time at which it was set, right? Mm-hmm. So post-destruction. It, it, it speaks to the fact that the myth of God handed us a Torah at Mount Sinai at all became problematic when we needed, you know, to seriously upgrade that myth- Uh-huh

  in that material. Uh-huh. You know, do you, do you see what I'm getting at? That, that the narrator is only in a bind here to, to convince this Jew who's about to leave- Uh-huh ... that this, that, that his practices are actually from Mount Sinai because we've already very effectively convinced- Uh-huh ... people that there was- Right

  a Torah from Mount Sinai- Right ... that for sure was the word of God, and now that myth is getting in our way. Right. I don't 

  DAN LIBENSON: know, this is coming to me- Right ... i- in a new way. No, no, no, that's very... Yeah, I mean, because, because it's like, I mean, to my mind, the, the, um, the story that the writ- a written Torah was given at Mount Sinai, based on what we know now about the history of when that could possibly have been, if it happened at all, right, which is I think somewhere, I, if I get it, if I have it right, between 1200 and 1500 BCE.

  So that's like a 300-year period. But because if it was anywhere after that, we already know some of the characters, right? And if it's anywhere before that, it, it wouldn't make sense with the timeline. So that's the general principle th- of, of when we're talking about. And what we know about that time period is that there was no writing in Israel during that period of time, or, you know, and, and certainly not on, you know, parchment.

  So like, where was this written on? Uh, if it was written on, you know, clay tablets, it would be a lot of clay tablet. You know, Moses wouldn't have been able to carry them, right? So I mean like, the, the, the, the whole thing kind of breaks down from a historical standpoint. Now, they didn't, they didn't know history that well back then, or they didn't have those records, so somebody writing in the, in the 8th century didn't know that there was no writing in the, you know, 12th or 13th century.

  So, so it would be like as if we said- BCE. BCE BCE. BCE, yeah. So it would be like as if we today were writing a story about the Founding Fathers of America and said like, they checked their, they, they, they checked their i- their iPad, you know? That's right. That's right. Or they, they, they, they made the adjustments on an iPad or something like that.

  Now, at the point at which somebody finds that story and knows that they didn't have iPads back in the, uh, 1700s, then they immediately know this story is, it's wrong. Uh, could not have happened because they didn't have iPads then. So, so, so that's what's, that's what we now know about, about the story. But the, and, and like if I'm understanding what you're saying prop- Like it's like, but if you built a whole society based on this idea that the Constitution was written on an iPad, and it was accepted for hundreds and hundreds of years, and then, uh, you, you, and it was still accepted.

  Like you, we never, they never discovered that it was an iPad. But what, what happened down the road was, was they, they came to understand that, uh, you know, there was something, some new development- Right ... right, that had to get kind of, uh, that, that, that made that whole, uh, story, you know, sort of not work. Uh, then, then, you know, there was like some, some, uh...

  I, I don't know. I mean, I'm, it's breaking down for me because I'm trying to think about like what that would be in the case of an iPad. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, but you know, they're, they're saying, yeah, there was the electronic Torah, and then there was the quantum Torah, you know? Right, right. Now we know that messages can be sent through quantum, uh, stuff.

  And, and of course God would've been able to do that because God could do anything. So why would Moses have been limited to an iPad? Or you know, why would the Founding Fathers have been limited to an iPad Constitution? They would also have the quantum Constitution, you know, whatever it was. And you're like, you, you have to do all these me- mechanics 'cause you're tripped up by the whole idea that everybody accepted that it was an iPad- That's right

  when in fact it wasn't actually an iPad. Exactly. You know? Like, and the, and that's, we, we, so we get stuck there. And um, you know, and, and you can also say like, "Look, why am I, am I so stuck on the idea that it had to have been an iPad?" Like actually, that's now a distractor, you know? The iPad isn't the point.

  The point is that they wrote a constitution, right? You know? Uh, and so, so the point isn't that the Torah was written. The point is that, that they had a, you know, there was a pract- or there was a, there was a set of beliefs. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Um- That's right. Yeah. It, it, and that's why maybe the new myth we need is to go way back to the Torah my- myth, I would say, and undo that story of Torah and say, "It, Torah was a product of our savara from the get-go."

  Right. Right. And not we can add savara to the Torah and the oral Torah, and now sa- No. Let, let's turn it around to say what actually did happen, which is, you know, like you and I are, are enjoying saying it's savara all the way down. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. 

  BENAY LAPPE: The, the- That's right ... it has always stood on savara. It was a product of that, yeah.

  DAN LIBENSON: Right. And, and maybe it's easier to do that in stages where, where you say like, "Look, before we get to savara, let's just talk about the oral Torah," because all our evidence suggests, right, that there was no written Torah as we understand it until the, until the return from the Babylonian exile, meaning the Second Temple period.

  So- And, and actually, like Bible scholars, uh, uh, you, you, uh, sent me an article by, uh, Christine Hayes, who's a Bible scholar and a rabbinic scholar, and she and other people have said this about the Biblical period. Like, one of the most important factors to understand about the Biblical period is that there was no Bible during the Bib- Biblical period.

  That, that's what- That's great. That's great ... that's what defines the Biblical period, that there was no Bible. The Bible is the book that was written in the post-Biblical period about the Biblical period, right? So- That's great ... so we know that, that, um, that there was no written Torah during that time, the First Temple period, the period of the monarchy and whatever.

  So once we know that from a historical standpoint, and this is where you talk about option one, right? Option, option one move i- is to say we're not gonna believe that, right? So we're gonna push that knowledge away and we're gonna say, "No, no, there was an o- there was a written Torah. You know, archeologists are wrong," and the, so, you know, not a lot of people couldn't read, but some people could, and there was a written Torah, and there

  Right? Uh, the other option is to say, um, "Okay, let me accept that. There wa- okay, so there was no written Torah. Now let me see if I can..." Uh, you know, I've been thinking about that lately as, like, steering into the skid, which, like, I don't quite know what that means, but, you know, I know that it means don't fight it, right?

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, like, what, what, what would that look like if we said actually there was no written Torah during the First Temple period? What that means is that, well, what was there? Nothing? No, nobody says there was nothing. It was, like, nihilism, everybody did what they want. I mean, it does say that in the Book of Judges that, you know, everybody did what was right in his own eyes, you know?

  But that was a very limited period. But there was, there were, there were bases for societal, you know, organization. They just weren't written. So if they weren't written, what were they? They were oral. So now we can start to say- Yes ... okay, so what we do know is that there was an oral Torah from the beginning.

  What that means exactly, right, but there was oral, it was, it was only oral. There, there was either an oral Torah or there was nothing. Right. And the answer, there might've been nothing, but there was certainly oral, right? And then, and then, so that's stage one. If we can all wrap our minds around that and say that actually if anything was given at Sinai, it was only an oral Torah, okay, then now we can go to the next stage, which is to say, okay, now let's think about, now what do we mean by an oral Torah?

  Like, do you think that there was a fixed set of practices and rules and ideas that everybody agreed about, it's just that they were oral? No, that's not what we really believe, right? What we really believe is that there were people sometimes in power, sometimes not in power, there were good people, bad people.

  There was a lot of, just like we have today. You know, there, and there was, like, and, and people were kinda doing their best or not their best to try to, you know, figure out how to run a society. You wanna call that savra, you know, that, that, that comes from people's, like, best efforts to live a good life.

  Like, that's probably what there was, right? You know. 

  BENAY LAPPE: I love that. I love that. You know, I've given the crash talk to different groups five times in the last week. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm. Wow. So it's really 

  BENAY LAPPE: given yeah, it's given me a chance to work on it a lot, and I've been- Like conceptually dancing around this realization, like it's come and left my mind, but you, you just brought it into focus, which is it isn't, tell me if I got this right, it isn't so much that the early rabbis had to convince people that there's this new myth of a, of an oral Torah.

  That's precisely when they had to start convincing people that the myth was that there was a written Torah. That the, the, the new story was that stuff we used to do, that, that's where the, the, the, I don't know. The, the, the rabbinic story is not so much, "Oh, now we have an oral Torah." The rabbinic story was that stuff was written.

  I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm I'm still not quite there. I have to- But it has 

  DAN LIBENSON: to do with what you're saying. I have to think that part through a little more, but like, I think that, I think that what it is, like what some of the move is, is understanding is that first of all, there, there must have been a time, once we, we, once we understand all this, right, it, it, what it means is that there was a time probably in the early second temple period where somebody, maybe Ezra, had to convince the people that there was a written Torah.

  That's, that's what I'm saying. Okay. That's what I'm saying. Okay. That's it. Yeah. And, and, and then, a- and, and, and he was so successful, this is I think what you're saying too, he was so successful that 500 years later, more than 500 years later, somebody else had to come along and say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second.

  This is a problem because if we- ... if we believe that only the written Torah and mo- so much of the written Torah is all about sacrifices and this and that, and that's all God wants, and now we can't do that anymore, we're screwed." So we better- That's right ... find a way to say that there was... But we don't wanna say that there wasn't a written Torah because first of all, nobody's gonna believe us-

  because everybody is sure there was a written Torah. And second of all, like, we, you know, we, like then what's our basis? So, so we're gonna have to come up with so- Right? And so then they, they, they say- That's it ... right? So but the, but the genius of it, I think, is that the, the story that they come up with to supplement the written Torah hypothesis or myth is actually more true.

  It's actually even, it's not, like you, you hear it a little bit as like a wink. Like right, you know, "Oh, there was also this oral Torah." Mm-hmm. But in a way, the, the wink is on the also. Right. Right. Because the truth is that it was only an oral Torah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Right. And 

  DAN LIBENSON: that, you know, and then as you, as you kind of now, now we find ourselves needing to supplement that myth because people don't quite believe that there was a true event at Sinai with an oral Torah.

  So now we're saying a, a wink, there was also a Torah of Sefarah. That's 

  BENAY LAPPE: right. Right? I, I, yes, that's right. But, 

  DAN LIBENSON: but the, but the real truth is that like it was all Sefarah, and- Yeah Didn't necessarily happen at Sinai, although I'm fine with saying that Moses was a guy who once went up on Mount Sinai and had a revelation.

  You know, it like, right? That's okay, you know. I mean- 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that fixes it for me. It's that the new myth isn't an undermining of the old myth or the old myths. It's an addition. You let people hang on to- 

  DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ... 

  BENAY LAPPE: the myths that they think are for sure non-negotiable, and you add another piece that allows them to have that.

  But now they have this as well as a sa- a new sacred piece, as opposed to what I was saying earlier today, inserting Sefarah back at the beginning- Mm-hmm ... and making the new myth that it was Sefarah all the way down. Mm-hmm. That's the truth- Mm-hmm ... but you're right, that doesn't work as myth. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Well, and, and my, and, and, and I think the challenge for us now, but also the opportunity, is like anybody watching this show now knows like, for example, like I'll speak for you.

  Like when they know, they know what I really believe, you know? Uh, so when I say, "Oh, there was actually, uh, the Torah of Sefarah," you know, whatever, like they know, "Dan, you don't really believe that anything happened at Sinai exactly." And I'm like, so at some- like, so I would say yes, and I do believe in the story.

  Like, I do believe in the power of the story. So somehow we're gonna have to find a way to continue storytelling and myth-making while at the same time understanding ourselves and, and allowing others to understand that it is a myth. But, but a myth doesn't, uh, uh, just because you know that the story's not factually true doesn't mean that there's not value to telling the story.

  And I think we have to work that out a little bit more, because I, I think that our tendency is to believe that- Mm-hmm ... that, that once you know the story is, is false then i- it's, it's a, it's a power mo- you know, it's, it's, so it's all about power and, you know, the opiate of the masses and whatever to, to sort of keep telling that story, and I don't think that's quite true.

  I, I know that smart, educated people, they still would rather hear it in the form of a story, and that's not because they wanna hear a lie or a second . It's because they, there's just something, there's just something powerful, and there's a way to tell a story and a myth without, with, with where everybody hearing it knows it's not sort of factual in that sense.

  Yeah. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, absolutely. 

  DAN LIBENSON: So, uh, we'll keep doing that. You got them kind of sticky there. Yeah. Yep. So we'll keep doing that, and, uh, we'll be back next week. 

  BENAY LAPPE: Amazing. See you then. Thanks. Thanks, Dan. 

  DAN LIBENSON: Bye, Vinnie. Bye.

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