The Oral Talmud Episode 66: Rules of Interpretation (Bava Kamma 83b)
SHOW NOTES
“ This is a really great text to be learning because it shows that something as clear as day in the Torah doesn't mean what the words purport to mean. That doesn't stop the rabbis from legislating it out of existence and ultimately claiming that they didn't, that it always meant that all along.” - 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 do you do when your sacred text is clear and you think it’s wrong? In this episode, Benay and Dan return to “an eye for an eye” and discover something more radical than a clever reinterpretation. The rabbis aren’t just changing the law. They’re building an entire toolkit for changing the law, while insisting that the Torah meant the new thing all along.
That raises a much bigger question: What if Jewish tradition isn’t ultimately about preserving the Torah’s answers, but preserving its trajectory? Through some ingenious, and sometimes hilariously unconvincing rabbinic arguments, Benay and Dan explore a Judaism that treats sacred text not as the end of the moral conversation, but as the beginning of an ongoing attempt to move, generation after generation, toward greater justice.
This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b
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: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 66: Rules of Interpretation
Welcome to the Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN: 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 do you do when your sacred text is clear and you think it’s wrong? In this episode, Benay and I return to “an eye for an eye” and discover something more radical than a clever reinterpretation. The rabbis aren’t just changing the law. They’re building an entire toolkit for changing the law, while insisting that the Torah meant the new thing all along.
That raises a much bigger question: What if Jewish tradition isn’t ultimately about preserving the Torah’s answers, but preserving its trajectory? Through some ingenious, and sometimes hilariously unconvincing rabbinic arguments, Benay and I explore a Judaism that treats sacred text not as the end of the moral conversation, but as the beginning of an ongoing attempt to move, generation after generation, toward greater justice.
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. I'm Dan Liebensohn and I am back here with Benay Lappe for this week's episode of The Oral Talmud. Hi, Benay. Hey, Dan. How are you? I'm good. Sorry we got a little late starting the stream; had a little tech, uh, issue here. Um, before we get started, I just wanna, uh, give a shout-out to the lawyers who watch this show because one of them helpfully got in touch with me between last week and this week, and reminded me the name of the company that I was talking about where you send
Where you, you put cases through and it checks to see if the case is still valid law or if it's been overturned by some court. That's called Shepard's Citations. And so, in the ... Uh, you know, and, and as soon as he said it I was like, "Oh, of course," you know? So that, that- ... In the legal practice, you know, you have to quote shepherdize every case, uh, that you use.
And if you submit a, a case to a court and say, uh, you know, the, the case should be decided this way because of this precedent, and that precedent has been overturned by another court, that's terrible. That's malpractice. That's a, a bad thing to do. Wow. Okay. So you learn that very early on in your legal career.
BENAY LAPPE: Uh- That's so interesting. Yeah. And I, and I ... Just to remind people of the context that we were talking about that is just that, um, so here we're talking about this whole concept of an eye for an eye which is in the Torah. And I've been floating this theory that a lot of times when you see the Talmud really putting a lot of effort into making sure that you understand something differently from how it would be understood on its face, that the, the most effort will go into these cases where it's something quite straightforward that a person would be likely, an average person would be likely to know about because they actually heard it read in the synagogue in the weekly Torah portion.
DAN LIBENSON: And they're like, “Well, I, I know. I h- just heard in the Torah reading that if somebody pokes out your eye, you poke out their eye,” or, “I just heard in the Torah portion that if I have a son who's misbehaving, I should kill him.” You know, so what are you, what are you saying that that's not the way that Judaism is?
And, and, and I think that's not a silly ca- I mean, I think we hear all the time today from people who are sitting in the synagogue and hear something terrible in the Torah, and they're very upset about Judaism. How could Judaism be for th-... You know, and, and, and Judi- ... That, that's a, a situation, like, um, you know, a terrible
And it's not to say that there aren't terrible precedents in, in American law, for example, but, you know, a lotta times you could say, "But that was overturned by the Supreme Court in the '50s." You know, we haven't had that law on the books for, for 70 years, and, uh, that's definitely true of, of many Torah laws as well.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. Y- y- i- y- Last week you talked about what a bad job of Jewish education we've done to – I think, I think you were saying that last week, right? To, to- Yep. I know I say it a lot, so yeah. I think I did. Yeah. To, to continue to gi- Like, it – I think in an effort to shore up the Torah, uh, we overstate its role- Mm-hmm
in our lives and in the evolution of Jewish law, and we sort of cut out everything in the middle. Um I don't, I'm not... It's, it, it's really a bad strategy. We need to get over it. And I also think we need to get over what we do in synagogue as a result. Like, why do we parade the Torah around? Why do we put the Torah in the ark?
I think we should be putting the Talmud in the ark, and we should be parading around the Talmud. Or at least both. I dunno. Well, it, tha- that's interesting. I, I don't disagree with that. I mean, I think that would be very, very interesting, uh, thought. Um, you know, how to really kind of make this point in, in the, in the synagogue.
DAN LIBENSON: But it, it seems like, for example, it seems like it should be like standard operating procedure for rabbinical schools today when you're talking about the practical rabbinics. Like how, you know, a lot of times rabbinical school is like, you know, studying, studying things for the sake of studying so that people are learned, et cetera.
But when you're talking about like practical rabbinics, like I know that there's a class in rabbinical school, for example, on pastoral care. You know, how do you care for somebody who's sick in the hospital or somebody who's had a death in the family, et cetera. They, I know there are classes for homiletics, which is like how do you give a good sermon.
But there should be a practical ex- expectation in rabbinical school that when you t- when, when the week's Torah reading has something that's no longer quote "good law" in Judaism, that you should have to tell the people that before the Torah reading, otherwise you've kind of committed a kind of rabbinic malpractice by allowing people- ....to believe that there's a certain law or a certain practice that's quote "Jewish", but it hasn't really been operative Jewish practice for literally thousands of years.
And, and I think that even today, eh, maybe more so today, people are walking around believing that Judaism has various, uh, you know, various, uh, principles that they are offended by, and they should be offended by them. They're offensive, uh, for our time, and they've been overturned 2,000 years ago. That's the point that I think is just tragic that people don't hear in the synagogue.
And I, I am submitting that that was true back then as well. I, I love that. And you're reminding me of one of the scenarios that we are explicitly taught to address, which is in the context of pastoral counseling, when a congregant or a student or someone comes to you as a rabbi having experienced a tragic death in the family and says, you know, something along the lines of, “How could God have done this?”
BENAY LAPPE: We're taught how to deal with, with that very common and natural response. And you're right, w- w- rabbinical students should be taught to respond to, "How could God say this in the Torah?" You're right Yeah, so, so I think that when we look at a, at a case like this, we are seeing may- maybe a version of that or, you know, what, what we're seeing is that this is a, this is an example, you know, as was, uh, Ben Sorer Umoreh, the stubborn and rebellious son, the wayward and rebellious son, was an example of how this...
DAN LIBENSON: What it, what it looks like to shepherdize a case in, in Judaism, you know? And, and in a sense, the rabbis here, the future rabbis, to the extent, you, you know, you've talked about the Talmud as like a, a, a law, uh, casebook for r- for rabbinical school, uh, that the rabbis here are being taught, the rabbinical students are being taught specifically how to address, uh, a case of a rather simple Torah command, and, uh, where, where we don't do that anymore, and where people are not going to accept that s- just because on y- on your say-so.
And, and that's again where, where I think we can see, you know, in the various conspiracy th- theories and political polarizations and things that we see today, you know, we understand. We see, like, you can't just come to somebody and say, "Oh, here, uh, here's a CDC study that shows that you should get vaccinated."
You know, if it's a person who is profoundly committed to some view of the world in which they shouldn't get vaccinated, your one piece of evidence isn't gonna be enough. You know, you have to break them of, of a whole way of thinking, and that's going to be a, a number of interactions, i- i- if it's even possible.
BENAY LAPPE: I, I am more and more convinced of, of your theory. Um You know, I have this journal. I may have referenced it before. It- it's a, an amazing, amazing journal called S'vara, S apostrophe V-A-R-A. Um- Not, not created by you? Not created by S'vara the yeshiva, um, but created by many of, of my teachers and the folks who kind of think along the same lines.
It was a short-lived journal. I think maybe it lived for, for two or three years, maybe four issues. And there i- one issue is devoted to this passage, HaChovel. And it's a s- it has a series of articles, and one of which is a dialogue, and it's called something like A Conversation Between a Talmudist and a Philosopher.
And it's a dialogue between someone who knows the text, this text well, and a student, a pretend student. And reading that dialogue, it surfaced and addressed so many of the issues that I haven't... And that, along with your idea about maybe the way the Talmud is constructed is to equip rabbis with the ability to deal amcha, not each other It real- it's making me think I, I...
You may be onto something. I, I... That, that the back and forth between the position that the Torah clearly says eye for an eye, it means physical retaliation, versus the position which comes back over, and over, and over again in 10 different ways to say, "No, the Torah always meant monetary compensation," may just be a sample dialogue- Uh-huh
for rabbis to deal with the everyday person who's gonna say, "But the Torah clearly says this." And- Right ..."Try this, try that, try this other way." I'm really liking this new idea. All right. Yeah, so what- New for me. New for me So maybe, maybe we should just l-... I, I realize, like, we didn't do this. We didn't really look at the Torah source, the original Torah source for the eye for an eye.
DAN LIBENSON: We kind of glanced at it, I think, last time. But let's really look at it just so that people really know what we're talking about. So here we're in the book of Exodus, uh, ch- Chapter 21, and there's all this stuff about, you know, basically if you fatally strike a man, you know, should be put to death, blah, blah, blah.
Um, and all kinds of other things, like if you insult your father and mother you should be put to death, so, uh, you know, maybe, uh, I should, I should make some apologies here. Um, but the, um ... but then, then we have here when men quarrel and one strikes another with a stone or a fist and he does not die but takes to his bed, and then we have various, well, if he gets up, then it would be on...
But, you know, so there's various things that, that happen. And then we get to this verse 23, but- which says, "But if other damage ensues, damage other than death ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
So, so this is the, this is the source that we're looking at and saying, "But wait a second, it says right here in the Torah that, that if there's damages you should just basically exact the, the parallel damage onto that person." And we just read this whole thing in the Mishnah about these various forms of monetary damages.
We don't see anything about that in the Torah, so this is where the, the contradiction is coming from. Right? Exactly. And W- I don't think we're, we're gonna go there, but let's acknowledge that the phrase life for life is a little odd- Yeah ... in this verse because clearly this verse is introduced with the caveat that we're not talking about a case of death.
BENAY LAPPE: But if other, just as you said, non-fatal damage ensued. So what would the phrase life for life mean in that case? Uh. I'm not, I'm not sure. Yeah, I, I had the same sort of initial feeling. But yeah, that's not what our- Yeah ... w- it's an important conversation, but it's not what our text is about, so moving forward or whatever.
Right. Leaving that aside, just noting it. Um, yeah. And, and so, so basically, you know, again, like th- this is the kind of thing that, like, there's a lot of stuff in the Torah that's kinda hard to understand or, you know, that's, that feels like it's outside of our experience, like all kinds of sacrifices and the design of the tabernacle, and all kinds of things like that.
DAN LIBENSON: But this is one that I just sort of imagine a person, you know, sitting there reading his, you know, comic book in, inside of the Sukkah. You know, and all of sudden they start talking about, you know, when a person harms another person. You kinda look up, "Oh, I understand that." You know, you start listening, and, and you hear, you know, it's pretty clear.
So an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, limb for a limb, right? And you're like, okay. I mean that, that's, that's the, that's our, that's our tradition is to be, is to be, uh ... It's, what's the word? Is to take, you know, s- is to exact, exact the, uh, parallel injury. Right. And even though it's very familiar to r- to us, eye for eye an eye, tooth for a tooth, we also know that we don't do that.
BENAY LAPPE: And w- sorry, my dog's barking. And, and w- so, and we also don't, I think if someone doesn't learn Talmud or hasn't been explained how that verse play, has played out historically, folks don't typically know why we don't do that, but it's very familiar. Okay. Hmm. I, o- one thing that I, I just wanna get out on the table is that as archaic as we might think eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, hand for a hand, foot for a foot is now, I think it's important to contextualize the Torah, to u- to look backwards from that to note that that was an upgrade on a prior law of the ancient Near East.
The Torah was trying to do a more just kind of law, because the previous laws we know from Hammurabi was depending on, on the social standing of the assailant with respect to the victim. If, for example, the assailant was of a lower class and injured someone of a higher class, the law was, and everyone ... It used to be seen as just was a life for an eye.
Mm-hmm. Right? And d- I could kill you if you poked out my eye, eye out and I was of a higher status. And the Torah's coming to say, "No, that's, that's wrong. We have a better idea of what justice is." It's just a li- it's just an eye for an eye- Mm-hmm ... no matter your social standing. So that was a real upgrade in improvement, and I'm sure that that was like wow, that's God's justice.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm. Just an eye for an eye. Uh-huh. Just a hand for any hand. Mm-hmm. And then you get 1500 years later um, and, and that seems s- not adequate yet. Yeah, and, and that's where I, you know, we can abstract from this. I think we'll talk about it. That, that, that, th- You, you ... Again, it's question of when you look at the Talmud or the Torah and you would say what is the Jewish tradition?
The impulse of m- many people is to be very concrete about it and to say oh well y- the Jewish tradition is take an eye for an eye as opposed to saying though the Jewish tradition is to ratchet towards justice or something like that right? Is to say that as society's understanding of justice changes, we always want to be a little bit more just than
Right? And, and we, no we can't necessarily be a lot more just. I mean this, we could debate this but you know uh, because somehow the society, it's too much. Y- the society won't accept it. It'll, it'll be too, you know, it'll, it'll be kind of um, you know, when you're too uh, outside of the, the, the norm you know?
Then it's kind of like it's hard for people to go along with it. But if you are a little bit- But what i-, wha- what is it, what is it the hit says? 5% of ahead of your people? Something like that That's actually what history and Drake says that yeah sometimes, right Because yo- you cannot be more ahead than that.
Also I reckon follow them Right. And, and f- and you wish you could. I mean I, you know, right? I mean there, there's so, so many things that people out there are saying who are committed to social justice, who are committed to environmental uh eco- ecological, you know causes climate change et cetera who, you know they're right.
I mean we sh- of course we should stop using all greenhouse gases immediately but that's not going to happen. So it kinda feels like well okay but there's n- there's another approach that says well let's, let's start to wind it down and maybe it will take 50 years and people say, "50 years! That's not, that's gonna be 50, that's gonna cause a thousand years of degradation to the climate," a- and they're right but sometimes it's just not, not feasible.
So it, it might seem like maybe you don't like thi- s- element of the Jewish tradition. Maybe one thinks that the Jewish tradition is too cautious in this regard but I think it's relatively fair to say that perhaps When we really look at what the Jewish tradition is, it's to try to be a little bit ahead of our time.
Right? And, um, and so if we get to a point t- uh, back during the time of the Talmud where we say, "You know what? Uh, taking, taking an eye for a, an eye physically is, is wrong," you know, we should change that to monetary compensation even though other nations in the world might not have gotten there yet; maybe they pre- got there before us.
We should change it, and that is th- that is, that's w- actually what the Torah meant all along which by the way goes to this question of... That we talked about last week: The, the mamash voice or the mamon voice. Uh, do, do... Mamash meaning do we really take an eye? Do, do we read it literally? And mamon, which means money, do we, do we understand that what the Torah meant all along was money, was the money for an eye fo- in compensation for an eye?
Th- th- that's related to this, to this, uh, i- idea of what, when we look at what is the Jewish tradition, do we, do we mean the, the, the literal case and the exact scenario, or do we go a level of abstraction and say, "What is this really trying to be?" So for example, tha- that actually opens me to the mammon case, the case that the Torah always meant money, right, more than I was last week, right?
Because, because I – It makes me say well look, I don't think the author of the Torah really meant money. I think the author of the Torah really meant take an eye but I also think based on what you said about comparing to Hammurabi that the, that the author of the Torah wanted to be more just than the social norms.
And so if you say while the social norms have changed and now actually taking an eye for an eye is unjust then there's a way in which I think it's right to say that the author of the Torah actually meant for our time money, you know, because they– the, the author of the Torah meant that we should be more just than the societal norms of, of any given time.
That's a stretch but I also like thinking through it. That's nice But we should remind people, though, that, that when we... So go- going back to that whole idea of the, the people in the synagogue hearing and whatever, right? It's not, it's not that, like you, you said this last week, I just wanna remind everyone.
It's not that anybody is sitting around saying, "We should go back to taking an eye for an eye." They, they might, they might ask the rabbi, "But wait a second, why, why did we stop doing that? That it seems like we're now doing something that's not in the Torah." And if the rabbi says, "Ah, yes, the, the what, i- the Torah actually did mean an eye for an eye, uh, lit- physically, and we stopped doing that because we came to see that was unjust, and we do have the power as rabbis to, uh, overturn the Torah in certain limited cases," et cetera, that is potentially kind of a scary thing for the society, because it makes the people kind of feel like, "Oh, well what else in the Torah can I, you know, say that I object to?"
And, and, and, you know, they, it creates kind of a lot of lobbying for, for change. Whereas if you can tell the people that the Torah always meant money, it's just that you don't know how to read the Torah the right way, uh, then they're kinda like, um, okay, well eventually they, they might be convinced, and they might still try to go elsewhere in the Torah and say, "Can I read that in a different way as well?"
But it's a little bit less, uh, sort of, uh, d-, uh, it's a little bit less, um, destabilizing to society to basically say, "Oh, the Torah meant money all along." Yeah. And for me, it's like a, a biblical theodicy question. It, you know, just like we have the dilemma of how can you have both a good God and an all-powerful God when horrible things happen, you either have to say God is actually not that powerful, God is impotent to change this, or God's not good.
BENAY LAPPE: That's a problem. Uh-huh. Right? And so you have to explain bad things. Why do bad things happen? The, the problem with the rabbis, I think, is to keep the idea that the Torah is the word of God, and I suppose they have to keep that, or they're invested in keeping that because it helps people conform to- Mm-hmm
the norms of the Torah And trust the community. And also, uh, like all wisdom documents, we get smarter faster than the document does, and it has to both keep up with us but also remain sacred. And how do you handle something that's sacred, which presumably means perfect from God as is, as its plain meaning looks, and its evolution?
So I think that's the juggle that, um, creates the challenge. We have a little bit less of that problem in America because we don't think that God wrote the Constitution. But still- Some people are pretty close. Uh-huh, yeah. The ... Right. So, so just, so as we go through this, what you've called a sampler of, of, uh, techniques to try to demonstrate that this, that the Torah meant money all along basically is the, is the agenda, what's important to understand is that the...
DAN LIBENSON: In, if we see this, first of all, no average Jew is going to be reading this in their- Sure ... in their experience. So this is a, this is a rabbinical school text meant to tell rabbis what you should tell the regular people, and also to tell rabbis kind of what you should wink, wink know. And when we see the voice of Mammon, the voice that says, "The Torah meant money all along," that's basically the training to say, "Here's how, how you can tell the regular people that no, no, no, don't worry about it, the Torah meant money all along."
And when we see the voice of Mamosh, the eye for an eye voice, the one says, "It really is an eye", that in a way the, the text here is telling the rabbis, “And this where you should understand that probably actually the Torah really did mean.” Uh, but and, and that we do have the power to, to overturn the Torah in, in particular cases.
And when we do it in, in a case where it's a ri- really straightforward one where the people are gonna, gonna catch us, you know, then we al- It's not only enough to just tell you how d- how we can do it, we also have to tell you how you can talk to the people after we've done it. I love that. I love that.
All right, so- Okay. So okay, so, so just to, so to jump back into it, last week we, we, uh, you looked at the first technique, which was the gzerah shavah, the what's, what gets translated here as a verbal analogy. But we, we talked about it last week. It's when you find two verses; sometimes they could be one right next to the other, sometimes they can be in totally different places in the Torah, and they sh- have a word in common in the two verses, and based on that common word, you can say, well, we can under-...
We can't really understand v- the first verse that we're looking at. We, we aren't sure what it means. But we do understand the second verse really well, and so we can take the principle from the second verse and bring it over to the first verse. A- and, and the basis is not that it's on, on the same topic, the basis is that there's a word in common.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. That's right. So okay, so let's, uh, just sort of look again in the, in the Talmud text, and then we can look at the actual Torah versus just to see this in action. So, um
DAN LIBENSON: So the, so the, the... So this is a verse that we, we have, uh, we just looked at Exodus 21:24. "One might've thought that if one blinded the eye of another, the court blinds his eye as punishment; if one severed the hand or the leg," et cetera. Uh, therefore the verse states, "one who strikes a person." And the verse also states, "And one who strikes an animal."
So, so that, so the, the, the word- so, so the idea here is that we have the word strikes in two different verses, right? And I, I'm just, uh, getting to that, um
So I, I think it's, I think it's this, it's verse, uh, Leviticus 24:17-21, right? We have one who kills or str- or strikes a beast shall make restitution for it. Uh, but, you know, but is not really there. This is a translation issue. But one, one who kills a human being shall be put to death Okay. I just, I want to point out a couple things.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. The, the first thing is, um, it's actually more difficult to learn this in English- Mm-hmm ... than in the Aramaic. Right. Because, uh, the language loses, it, it's mor- it's more difficult. The explanation sort of obscures, um, the moves. But the f- the first thing that this voice is saying is, "Hey, folks, you might have thought," and this is a, a standard technique that's used over and over in the Talmud in argumentation.
You might have thought the following, and it then introduces what's called a hava amina, the thing which you would have believed but you'd be wrong if you did believe it. And that thing is not just something you'd be wrong to believe, it's actually what was true yesterday. You would have been right to believe it yesterday because that was the understanding yester- yesterday, 100 years ago, whatever.
And we want you to know you shouldn't any m- longer believe it. I mean, we're saying don't any longer believe it, but the way we're saying it is, "You should never h- That, that isn't right. You'd be wrong to think that." Right? Yesterday it actually was true, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Okay? But no, that
You shouldn't think that But I like the fact that it's naming the thing that the person naturally would think. Of course, the everyday person is gonna have read the Torah and think eye for an eye tooth for tooth means eye for an eye tooth for a tooth. So this, this technique begins with you might have thought to read it just the way you're reading it.
But no, that's not really what it means because... Okay, here's s- here's technique number two. I like your idea that the straight textualist read is sampler stitch number one. Uh-huh. Here comes sampler stich-stitch number two. There is this notion, and I'm, uh, just going to think it, say it out, I'm r- just repeating what you said, that there's sort of a magicalness of how God wrote the Torah- Mm-hmm
quote, unquote. And one of the features of that magicalness is that if God put a certain word in one context and a certain word, that exact same word in another context, that which is true for one context is true for the other context. You know, they're sort of the transitive property. And the word we're looking at that exists in two different places, even though in this case it's the same verse but that's immaterial, is the word strike.
Unfortunately, in our translation, our translation has been an interesting f-... It has come out of a flattening of- Right ... the legislative history by translating the word strike as kill. Right. And, and that's unfortunately misleading. It's sort of a pietistic translation. The actual word is strike. So if we go back to the translation that's up there s- Or do you want to go back to the translation or to look at it in the Hebrew?
DAN LIBENSON: Just so that- Okay, great. Let- Just so that we can see. Great. Let's look at- There's mokeh. Yeah. Yeah. Which, which is, means to hit or to strike. Yes. If, if we look at it here in the translation, it's one who kills. This is the translation on Sefaria. Right. But it should be one who strikes. Right. And I'll, and I'll, I'll explain why it's kill, why there's this pietistic translation of kill, which is quite common.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. But- So, so here, here it says: "In one whose mokeh, one who strikes an animal will pay for her." Right. So in other words if I, I don't know, you punch the horse, right? I think that was an issue in the Olympics. I don't know. They're... I just saw something. Oh yeah. They're, right, there is something about that.
There is something. Okay, I don't know. Right. Well i- if, if somehow you hurt someone else's animal, you need to pay for it. That's clearly what it says. Yishomena means pay for it with money. Great. Comma. Comma. And, and here comes the same word again. And here's the same word, mokeh. Right. Mokeh. Strike. Right.
DAN LIBENSON: Oops. Oh, I just messed it up here. Um- "And one who strikes a man." One who strikes a man t- will be killed, will be put to death. Good. Okay. First of all, why the word kill? The translator is looking at that last word of this verse, "That person shall be killed," and thinking, oh, no one ever imagined that the Torah meant that if someone non-fatally strikes another they should be killed.
BENAY LAPPE: Therefore, the word strike in that context can't possibly mean a- just strike. It must mean, you know, smite as in fatally. And then they translate the other occurrence of that word as kill as well to solve the problem of the second phrase. But it doesn't mean kill, it just means strike. Pr- probably in the second phrase, one who makes a man shall be killed, there it does mean fatally strike.
But to make all, all the words strike kill, um
I don't know. Now I've lost my train of thought Well, I, I think, I, I fi- I'm not sure if you were saying this but like I think that if you are not thinking about this particular Talmud passage- Yeah ... and you're just trying to translate the Torah straight, then you look at this verse and you say, "Okay, we have this word makkah."
DAN LIBENSON: I, I thought makkah meant to strike, right? It ... When I looked it up in my Hebrew-English dictionary, right? I'm ta- I'm saying I'm the translator. When I looked it up on Google Translate, uh, you know, it says makkah is to strike. So I started to translate one who strikes a beast shall make restitution for it.
Okay, that ma-... And then I went on, but one who strikes, or, you know, one who strikes a human being shall be put to d- oh, that seems very, that seems very harsh. Right? So, so in this case makkah can't mean strike, it must mean kill, right? Because that's the only case where a human being shall be killed. Uh, and so then since it's the same verse and the same word, I, I must imagine that it, it had the same meaning in both parts, so I'll, I'll go back and fix this translation to be one who kills the beast shall be, shall make restitution for it.
The problem is, is that when you then come to this Talmud passage that's trying to, uh, that's talking about not killing, but that's talking about, that's trying to use the, f- figure out what the word makkah means, uh, you, you, that translation doesn't work because the Talmud, uh, writers didn't have this English translation.
They were going off the original Hebrew, and they just see the word makkah there and the word makkah here, and that's a whole different analysis. It doesn't work with this particular translation. Right. And the Talmud is perfectly comfortable addressing a phrase in a sentence without regard to what another word in that sentence must be implying or af- how it may be affecting the meaning of that phrase you're looking at.
BENAY LAPPE: So when the rabbis look at verse 21, they c- they're not looking at the f- the word yumat, shal- shall be put to death. So they k- take that
off completely. Mm-hmm. And they're pretending that one who strikes a person, wha- We're not sure ... th- th- th- they're not sure what the punishment is. I mean, that's a little bit of the wink of the gezeirah shavah technique, that the context your word is in doesn't need to be taken into consideration. It, it's what- So what the rabbis are sa-...
Go ahead. Is it something like they're reading, they're, they're basically doing what I just described the translator doing, right? And they're saying, " Well, we know that makkah means to, just to strike, not to kill here," and we n- and so it says here if you strike an animal you pay for the damage. I mean, that's, that's clear.
DAN LIBENSON: And you strike a man and you should be killed. Well, that can't be because that, because we know we don't kill people for just striking someone, so therefore we now don't know what this means and, and we look back to this other one? I like, I never thought of it exactly that way. Maybe. Maybe. I like that a lot.
BENAY LAPPE: But then they have to answer the question, what's this word you're not doing? But yeah, I don't know. Okay. But, but at least they're saying The Torah's pshat, the simple plain meaning doesn't tell us what should happen when someone strikes a person. And the only way we can learn out, to use a Yeshivish phrase, is to make an analogy based on the commonality of the word strike to a context where it's explicitly clear what you do when a striking happens, and that's the context of striking an animal.
And what's explicit there is pay. Right. Okay, if paying is for sure what God wanted us to do when striking of an animal happens, we can deduce that paying is what God wants us to do when the striking of a man happens based on the commonality of the word strike. A person could make an objection and say, "Wait, why are you learning anything about human interactions based on interactions of people with animals?"
And in fact, the Gemara later is gonna object in that way. But at this moment, the argument of we can learn what we do for p- people who injure people based on what we know that people have to do when they injure animals is not, is accepted at face value. Yep. And so then- So let's go- Here back in the Talmud we see what you said, so the hava amina that, you know, might have thought that the Torah says, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," et cetera, so we should blind somebody if he blinds the other person, and we should sever their hand if they sever hi- Right?
DAN LIBENSON: We should just give that, it's in Latin called the lex talionis, the- the- the law of- of, uh, weights, right? I think. Uh, the lo-... The same for same. Uh, and um, and therefore the verse states, so this verse that we just looked at, and, right, and so that therefore, right? I mean, that's not, this is in the, in the, uh, translation.
It's not actually in the Talm- But the idea is that, that for that reason we have this other verse to come to explain to us that your- your surface reading is not the right reading. There's another- Yeah ... verse that sa- y- the verse we just looked at from Leviticus, right? The original verse was in Exodus.
Now, there's this other verse in Leviticus which we just looked at that says, "One who strikes a person," and it uses the same word one who strikes an animal, and that's where you should learn from one to the other, parentheses even though it says you should be killed, so weird. You know, like, it's but nevertheless they're saying that just as one who strikes an animal is liable to pay monetary compensation, so too one who strikes a person is liable to pay monetary compensation.
BENAY LAPPE: Great. Great. And PS, later on in the Gemara, the- the- the Gemara is going to voice that very objection of maybe in- in y- this philosophy that you're building that I'm loving and jumping onto, that the average person is gonna come back and say, "But wait a minute, that verse in the Torah that you're talking about is clearly a case of fatal injuries."
Because the perso- the perpetrator's being put to death. So you can't learn anything about non-fatal injuries from that ca-. And that's accepted as a good challenge. But it isn't yet surfaced. Yep. Okay, so- so now the Talmud comes along and says, uh, hold on one second. Uh, so now the Talmud comes along and says, okay, so we just went through, we just went through this, uh, this part.
DAN LIBENSON: Um, and And if it is your wish to say, and that there's an objection to this. In other words, if you don't like that one, if y- And maybe the objection is what, what we were looking at there. But it... But wait a second, this verse does say you should be killed. You know? Like, you can't. That's not a good, that's not a good proof text to use.
So th- th- the Talmud says, well, so if you, if you object to that, uh, there's another verse. So, so there's a different verse that we can, we can look at. And now that verse is in the Book of Numbers. So, right, so, so remember the, the main, uh, thing is in the Book of Leviticus. The, um, the, the - then we looked at something from- Well, th- just, just- I'm sorry.
The main one is in Exodus. That's it. Then, then we, we looked at a verse from Leviticus to try to use it to explain the verse in Exodus. And now here we are coming to the next book, Numbers, uh, in order to find a, maybe a better, a better way Yeah. And, and something it took me, it took me years to realize is the verse that is problematic for us, an eye for an eye, which is in Exodus.
BENAY LAPPE: And it's problematic because we know that the law is monetary compensation. The Mishnah records that and codifies it. That problematic verse, eye for an eye, is never directly critiqued or reinterpreted out of its pshat. Th- It's addressed only by saying or implying God couldn't have meant really an eye for an eye there because God clearly, with a lot of winks and a lot of manipulation, God clearly said elsewhere something that we understand to mean money.
So if God said elsewhere in the Torah money, whether it's because of strike and strike or what we're about to see or 10 others, if God meant money there, God couldn't have meant money when God said eye for an eye. I, I don't... I'm not sure if I'm, if there's anything to be made of that, but it's just important, I think, to clarify that eye for an eye is never dismantled directly.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh. None of the attempts at claiming the Torah means money is an attempt to say the exact words eye for an eye don't mean eye for an eye. Uh-huh. And, and it could be because there's ... I, and I'm not sure why. There are other places in the Talmud where they actually take a section of the Torah that is irrefutably what it says, and undermine it, say, "No, it means the opposite."
BENAY LAPPE: They don't do that here. They leave eye for an eye alone, and they say, “Eye for an eye can't mean what it says,” not because it itself means something different becau- but because God elsewhere said money as proven by this or that forced proof, and therefore this can't mean money. It, it, it's just something to note, I guess.
DAN LIBENSON: Hm. Right? Yeah. It, it- I dunno. Do you make anything of that? Let me th- give it more thought. I mean, I, I ... Let's look at the... Uh, not, not right away. I think it's an interesting thing to note, and then to keep... I mean, I think it's a, it's a hard one to... It's, it's a hard one. You know, and by the way, that's why this is a really great text to be learning because i- in, in a way it shows that, that something as clear as day in the Torah, that you really can't find another way to say that the words don't mean what the words purport to mean.
That doesn't stop the rabbis from legislating it out of existence. Yeah. Or, and f- and not only from legislating it out of existence, from legislating out of existence and ultimately claiming that they didn't, that it, that it- Yeah ... always meant that all along. Yeah. So. Yeah. All right. So let's look at, at the, the next proof text, which is b- from the Book of Numbers, and this is a whole section where we're talking about something called the, the cities of refuge, and these are the...
If you accidentally kill somebody, uh, technically they might, the family can do a, a blood vengeance on you. Um, but, m- you know, not, not, like, if it was you were negligent or whatever. And, um, and you c- But you can run away to one of these cities to, uh, make it... And, and if you make it to one of those cities, they can't kill you.
And that's also, there's certain things, like y- if there's also, we see in, in the book of Kings I think, that if you, like, hold onto the altar at the temple, y- they can't kill you. You know, there's all kinds of, like, safe bases where you can, where you can go. That's what this section is really about. And then, but then la- As part of it, it, it, it says, uh, in verse 31, "You may not accept a ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of a capital crime.
He must be put to death." So the idea is that you, that you can't... Somebody, somebody who, who actually i- is a murderer, you can't, he can't come and say, like, «If you agree to drop the charges, I'll pay you a lot of money.» That's just not acce- That's not something that, that can be done. Right. And again, to put the Torah in its legislative history context, that's precisely what the law in the ancient Near East in the time- Uh-huh
of the Torah was. Uh-huh. If the family of the murdered person wanted to, they could let the murderer off by taking an amount of money. Oh, you wanna give us a million dollars? Okay. Give us a million dollars, and we won't press charges, and you won't be put to death. That was okay. And I think what the rabbis are doing here is upgrading justice, and they're saying, "No, no, no.
BENAY LAPPE: Uh, the, the family of the murderer doesn't have that choice. The murderer doesn't have the choice to pay some amount of money to get himself off of the death penalty." Um, we're gonna flatten the social economic disparity factor that played into justice, and now someone who murders someone else is going to be put to death.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay, and just to look at the- No matter what your social status. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and, and just to look at the Hebrew, just so if we wanna come back to any of the words here, it says lo tikchu, no taking, don't take kof- chofo? Yeah. It w-... No, you know... You... I like that you're going into the original because the, the...
BENAY LAPPE: This is second person plural. You all shall not take ransom. In other words, you shouldn't accept money. It's being directed to the families- Uh-huh ... of murdered people. Uh-huh. Okay. So you, you may not take- It's not we don't, it's y- yeah, you, you can't do this. Mm-hmm. Right. Uh, right. Y- 'cause y- ... Yeah, it's because in some way you could say, "Well, that sounds like justice," because it allows the family to, um, have mercy.
DAN LIBENSON: And, and like you said, you can also read it as that o-, that older rule is not just because it allows r- rich people to get off and poor people have, are p- put to death, right? So the, the command, “You shall not take a ransom, uh, for the soul of a murderer,” uh, who is rashah lamut, is like he's, he's, uh, sentenced to death, uh, because of his evil.
Uh, right? Uh, because mot yumat. He, he killed, he must be killed. It's, it's a strong form of he's liable to be killed. He has to be killed. He surely must be put to death. Uh-huh. Yep. Okay. So then back to the Talmud. Um, whoops. Sorry, I have, uh, it's a... We have a very long, uh, a very long source sheet here, and, uh, it requires a lot of scrolling.
Um, I think there's a, there's another way to, uh, to do this on Sefaria that I need to learn. Um, okay. So, so here we, we then have, "If you..." Back to the Talmud. If it is your wish to say that there's an objection to this derivation, there's an alternative derivation. The verse that we just saw says, "And you shall not take ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, for he shall die."
That's what we just saw. This indicates that it is only for the life of the murderer that you shall not take ransom, but you shall take ransom for, uh, one who s- severed another's extremities, which is analogous to the death of a limb, as severed limbs do not regenerate. Okay. So again, s- so much easier in the original because going back to the Hebrew, the verse says, "You shall not take money-" For the life of a murderer, that person must die.
BENAY LAPPE: Now the rabbis are doing sampler technique number three. The first one was straight textualism. I like that being on the list. The second one was the Gezeirah Shavah. And now they're pulling another tool out of their exegetical tool belt, and they're saying, "Here is a new tool we're gonna show you how to use," you rabbinical students reading this text.
And that is what's called a diyuk. Uh-huh. A Diyuk is a hyper literal read of the text which allows you to say that the text being looked at applies only to the specified case, and to the exclusion of any other case other than that one specified one. Right. So adiyuk would ... It, sometimes a diyuk makes sense, sometimes a diyuk is, gives you, um, ridiculous results.
Here's an example in real life. Okay, you must stop at a red light That's a true statement. You must stop at a red light. If you do a dyuk on that sentence, you could conclude but any other kind of traffic signal other than a red light- Mm-hmm ... you do not stop. Mm-hmm. Which PS, is actually not true because a stop sign you have to stop at.
DAN LIBENSON: Or I was thinking like a yellow light. You know, there's some people who like speed up and try to like zoom through, and there's some people like me that slow down and, and try to ... And, and might stop while it's still yellow 'cause it's about to turn re- red. Right. Or here, I make it even sharper. A s- a solid red light.
BENAY LAPPE: When there's a red, you know, solid red light you must stop. Oh, I can deduce from that, that any other kind of light, maybe a flashing red light, I don't have to stop at. It's actually not true. You also have to stop at a flashing red light, blah, blah, blah. Yep. So the dyuk technique is useful, but doesn't always give logical results and- A- and can I just note that I, I think we might have seen an implicit dyuk.
DAN LIBENSON: I, I tend to be, uh, dismissive of this, but in the oven of Achnai story where it says you shall follow the majority, the ... If we look at the, at the actual Torah text it says actually do not follow the majority to do evil. And you could read that in a dyuk and say and therefore that means you should follow the majority to do anything but evil.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. And, uh, I tend to give that short shrift because I, I think that's j- just an interpretive technique and it's not, you know, it's ... It does- they don't really mean it anyway. Uh, and it's, and it doe- it just doesn't say in the Torah you should follow the majority at all. It just doesn't say that. Mm-hmm. You could claim it implicitly says it because it only says do not follow the majority to do evil.
Yeah. I don't think they make a dyuk on that verse. No, they, they don't there- Yeah ... but I'm saying one could. And, and when I've taught that said- One could. Yeah. When I've taught that text and said, "This is an obvious misreading of the Torah," I have had cases where people have said They haven't used the term dyuk, but they've ex- implicitly said- I see
DAN LIBENSON: you know, well y- But maybe since it says, uh, you shouldn't follow the majority to do evil, uh, it, it means you should follow the majority to do good. But I'm always like, “But it doesn't say that,” and they're actually quoting the Torah here. They're not saying that they're doing a dyuk or something. So i- it's, it-- I don't think that's a right interpretation, but I think one could make that argument.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. I, I, I agree. I agree. Okay. So the dyuk here is since the, the phrase or the Um, explicit context here is for the life of a murderer. You shouldn't take money for the life of a murderer. We can deduce based on the diyuk that for anyone other than a murderer, for any injuring that an injurer does that doesn't make him a murderer, you may take money, i.e.,
that person can pay damages. So this verse is being read through the diyuk manipulation to imply that for a non-murderer, i.e., someone who merely, let's say, cuts off someone else's limb, that person may pay money. Ah, QED, we've just proven that over here in Bamidbar God says monetary compensation for Non-fatal injuries Mm-hmm.
The translation that we've, are using from Safaria, I think is making a further claim about this
proof, which is that Something about the life of the limb. I, I kinda do- uh, th- that, that one isn't sitting with me is really what's going on here but Well, let, let's just show people where that is in the translation 'cause I think, I think that's right. So if you look the, in this Steinsaltz translation that's on Sefaria.
DAN LIBENSON: Some- by the way, sometimes we, we change it and, and, uh, to, to make sure that we're catching something important. Sometimes we don't change it for various reasons. Some of them good- ... some of them not good. Um, but here we're looking at, uh, where it says, so if we just re- But the bold, if you look at the bold in the Steinsaltz tradition, like, that's actually a, a more or less straight translation of the text of the Talmud, and what you see in the non-bold is kind of an, uh, kind of an interpretive translation.
Like, they're trying to explain something that's a little unclear. So here if we look at the, the bold part, what they're saying is, you say, you say that y- We read this verse, "You shall not take ransom from the life of a murderer who's guilty of death," f- from Numbers. For the life of a murderer you shall not take ransom, but you take ransom for extremities as, as they do not regenerate.
So the, the question is the, as they do not regenerate, i- is they're saying well why, I think Steinsaltz is impli- implicitly saying, Why does it have to add that, "'Cause they do not regenerate" here? And he's, he's saying, Well, I guess it's, it's because we have to ... You, you could argue that limbs are a form of the death of that limb.
As oppos- Right? There are certain things that if you cut off, they don't regenerate, and there are certain injuries that… Like, you could imagine a world in which we, we broke up injuries into two classes of injuries, right? One is if I punch you or, you know, like you said, punch the horse, but there's no lasting- You know, there's no, there's n- no damage that, that can't- Poor horse.
You know, yeah. You, you get a, a contusion or a blister or whatever, you know, but, but y- y- you recover from that. That's one category of injuries, and there's another category of injuries where you actually sever a limb or put out an eye, and we know that those don't grow back. And you could, you could argue that, that, um, that falls into some category of injuries that's like death because you've actually killed a part of the person, and therefore, you know, uh, uh, there should be different law that applies.
And, and I think that, that Steinsaltz is, is kind of trying to, to say that part of what they're saying by mentioning they do not regenerate is that, you know, even when they don't regenerate, you still can take a ransom for them. They're, Even though it's a kind of death, you c- y- It's not a full death, so you can take a, a ransom for them.
BENAY LAPPE: I like that. I, Yeah, the way I've always understood this phrase about the limbs that don't grow back is, But you may take ransom; you may do money compensation even when the injury is a limb that doesn't grow back, and it's a super severe injury. I never associated the not growing back with the death in which, death of the limb which needed to be Kind of explained away so that you didn't think that an injurer of a limb is like a rot- sa- is like a murderer.
But, uh, it's interesting. I, I never thought of that way of understanding him. Okay. Okay, so we- So... Go ahead. So two back to back proofs or arguments for ayin tachat ayin, eye for an eye can't mean actual physical retaliation because in these two other places in the Torah read in these very forced ways, which we're saying are really what God meant all along to imply, uh, God clearly said money.
So we have these two arguments for God meant money in the Torah. And, and they're both like extremely bad arguments . You know, like i- in other words— They're, they're ... Right? Because in the first one we saw that if you actually look at it, it, it actually says death, you know? Right? And, and they just s- sort of came up with some way to sort of ignore that which w- they don't even mention how so it's very confusing.
DAN LIBENSON: And then second one it's, it's really one of these readings that said well, it said that you shouldn't take, uh, it sheds that you shouldn't take a, a ransom or a payment for, to compensate for death; and because it didn't say anything else, it therefore means not only that you can but it seems to suggest even that you should take ransom for any other kind of, take a monetary payment for any other kind of, of damage.
They're, they're, you know, you could see the argument but it's not really a very good one. Yeah. In, I, I'm guessing that in secular law You would say the text is silent on the case of ransom in the context of injuries, right? Yeah. I mean, look, I, I would say that this is why, this is why, um, congressional committees have lawyers on their staffs.
You know, part of the job of the council on these various committees is to oversee the process of writing the laws, knowing how judges can use various interpretive techniques to widen or narrow the scope of the law as they want or as they think is right or for whatever reason motivates them. We know...
You know, we've now in the US had hundreds of years of experience, and in Anglo-American law many hundreds of years of experience, of knowing what's in the grab bag of judges, right? Unlike the, the situation here where we're interpreting a text that's, that, that, that is not being added onto, the Torah. You know, so it's like the text is, is much more like the Constitution.
The text is the same and so, but the interpretive techniques can change over time. But in writing legislation, you, you know, y- you know, it's kind of like, uh, in evolution where there's th- like a co-evolution of a parasite, you know, where when the, there, there's a, a fungus that grows on a plant and the plant evolves some poison to kill the fungus, but then the fungus evolves an antipoi- an antivenom to stay...
You know, or think about the, the COVID virus, you know? And that, so that's how it works. And, and so y- y- as a, as a lawyer on a congressional committee trying to write new laws, you're trying to stay a few steps ahead of the, of the judges so that you can at least take everything that you know about how things get interpreted and try to write the law in a way that is going to stay what the Congress really wanted, or what, what you think the Congress really wanted, for at least a while before the judges figure out some way to interpret around it.
And, and you have to, you have to be a master of all these kinds of techniques which, which they do exist in, in Anglo-American law. They're analogous. Not, not a- I don't think that it... Like I don't think that a judge would... Like I, I think that these particular arguments wouldn't go anywhere in, in American court.
I could be wrong about that, but it seems like they're so strained. But you certainly see a lot of strained arguments out there- That's really int- ..that do succeed Really interesting. You reminded me that these techniques, by the way, live in a list. Yes. There's a list of them, and Rabbi Ishmael in the first century came up with them, and there are 13 of them.
Yep. And this is the fascinating thing. Do you know where you would find this list In the Siddur Yeah, it's in the siddur. Yeah. I, I, I think that's just an amazing thing- Yes ... that it's part of the everyday Jew's learning/prayer experience every single morning in the Shacharit service to read the 13 principles of interpreting the Torah out of its plain meaning.
Yeah, and, and- Like why would they do that? Why would they want to empower people to do that if they also want to be winking? I don't know. Maybe they don't- Yeah, that, that's a good question. Mm-hmm. We should, we should look at that. Yeah. Um, there, there is a, uh ... Just in closing, I'll just note, uh, because I think it's a blessing or, you know, it's a commandment to give, give, uh, to acknowledge one's teachers.
I, I had a great blessing to have studied in my last year in law school with a professor named Philip Fricke, who is one of the authors with Bill Eskridge, who's n- now at Yale. Uh, th- they, they wrote a case book and, and they written a number of articles about statutory and, and also constitutional, but really statutory interpretation.
And, uh, Phil Fricke unfortunately passed away. He was a wonderful man and, um, a wonderful teacher, and I did very well in his course. And, um- There was a list. There was a list. You know, he –there’s also a list of, of, uh, of these tools. A lot of them have Latin names. You know, they end up with Latin names, I guess 'cause it sounds kind of cooler and, you know, they probably do some source in Rome or something.
But, but, um, uh, and we, we, we could p- potentially look at m- Actually, you know, maybe w- at one point what we should do is get out the various lists that we have from, from Jewish law and get out Eskridge and Fricke's list, and, and we can have some fun comparing them. Le- I would love to do that, because the last time you mentioned this I went and I bought those books, and it's hard, it's hard, it's difficult material, and I kinda got a taste of one of them, but I'm not sure I understood it.
BENAY LAPPE: Well, I'd love to look at that list again. Okay. Maybe when we're done with the sampler, we'll, we'll have a, an episode where we do that. I actually, I think I recently found my old notebooks so I can dig them out and- Oh, that would be amazing And may- and then I can explain to my wife why I, I actually should keep my old stuff and not throw everything out.
DAN LIBENSON: All right. So Benay, we will see you next week for, to keep going on this simpler. All right. Great. Great. Take care. Thanks Dan.
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