Tyrant Contra God | Biblical Series: Exodus Episode 1

thank you for joining us as we journey through the Great Book of Exodus and thank you very much the DW plus crew for having the vision and generosity of spirit to make this Exodus seminar produced at no small cost and substantial risk freely available to all who are interested on YouTube perhaps you might consider a daily wire Plus subscription it's a Bastion of free speech and we have great content there with much more to come we journeyed to Athens Rome and Jerusalem to film a four-part documentary series on Western civilization and have additionally recorded specials on marriage Vision the pitfalls and opportunities for adventure and masculinity all of which are exclusively available there these join many of the Beyond order public lectures that made up my recent tour and my extensive back catalog fully uncensored onward and upward thank you foreign I have the great privilege today of opening a seminar on Exodus in eight part seminar as many of you know and some of you don't I did a lecture series on Genesis in the fall of 2017 walking through that old book and that had a reasonable impact I would say for that sort of venture it was popular publicly the theater I rented sold out 16 times in a row and then millions of people have watched it online and that's really been something and I'd had a dream after doing that well and before as well that I would be able to walk through the entire Corpus of the Bible over the course of my life and that's a very daunting challenge but the next step is Exodus and I've been looking for to that for a very long time I thought before I did the public lecture series because that's not what this is that I would find a variety of Scholars from around the world if I could and and see if I could figure out a way to bring them together to talk about Exodus in detail to help me fill in my knowledge of this book before I do a public lecture series on Exodus which I plan to do in June of 2023 and so I've brought together some of the sharpest and most interesting and deepest people that I've Had The Good Fortune to meet in the last decade or so and they've all graciously agreed to come here to Miami and to spend eight days concentrating on this book and under the auspices of the daily wire plus group who've flown them in and who are producing this and editing it and have done everything they can to make this possible and beautiful and as available as it might be so this material or much of it will be behind the daily wire paywall will have a free-flowing discussion I'm going to read the text and I'm going to say what I have to say about it and hopefully not too much for me and I'm going to let the gentleman that are with me have their say and hopefully we're all going to learn an awful lot about this ancient story and what it means and why it's significant today and um and why it's been significant for several thousand years and so I'll get everybody first of all to introduce themselves and I'm going to start with Dr Douglas Headley on my left and we'll go around this way and Dr Headley well my name is Douglas Headley and I'm a fellow at the University of Cambridge fellow of Claire college and I teach the philosophy of religion and I think there's a crisis in our culture and the crisis is linked to a certain ignorance of the very backbone of our own culture and the Bible is very much at the core of our cultural inheritage at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi there was an inscription know thyself and we're in danger of not being able to know ourselves because of the ignorance of the very foundations of our culture so that's one reason why I'm particularly fascinated by Dr Peterson's Endeavors in the last few years and intrigued by the developments um in the next few days I warmed your invitation because I was born in China and I was a seven-year-old in the Chinese Revolution and when I was later an Oxford student I had dinner with sir Isaiah Berlin the great Jewish philosopher and as it turned out he'd been a seven-year-old in the Russian Revolution and comparing notes on it we were saying what the revolutions meant but the lack of people today understanding them and for me Exodus obviously a classic in its own right politically the birth of a great nation and people but many people don't realize this is behind the English Revolution and also behind the American Revolution and to understand that throws an incredible light on the present crisis because as I say you've got a basic Clash between ideas coming down from the American Revolution 1776 which came from the Torah and ideas which come down from the French Revolution and it says and so we've got a profound crisis and many people don't understand the roots of it on either side so what you're doing I think is immensely significant Dr Orr James Orr my name is James Orr I'm assistant professor in philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge where I teach philosophy religion and moral philosophy theological ethics and much of that work focuses on what you might call the Hellenic that is to say the the Fountain of Western wisdom in Greek philosophy too often I think we neglect the hebraic that is to say the contribution to western thought of the great hebraic sources and most of all of course the Torah the pentateuch it's thrilling to be able to sit around and talk with these distinguished friends and with you Dr Peterson about about the book of Exodus um as Oz was saying it has enormous significance historically the English Revolution the American Revolution and more recently many of the sort of Liberation narratives that we're familiar with in the Contemporary from the Contemporary political landscape and contemporary debates so I'm fascinated to be talking about these issues particularly when we get talking about the decalogue The Ten Commandments the significance of this extraordinary claim almost without precedent that morality has given not and discovered and not simply invented and constructed and that's one of I think many many vital themes to our age that we'll be exploring productively in the days ahead I hope Dennis Prager welcome Dr Peterson and all of you it's a joy to be with you uh I am living my dream in my life being here and that is to spread the Torah to the world I am a religious Jew and I I'm blessed to know Biblical Hebrew I started it as the age of five I still have to translate to English whenever I think of a verse the Torah uh is this is not known to almost any non-jew the Torah is Primus interparas in the Bible first among equals I was raised and I still believe that the Torah is from God how God delivered it is his business I have no particular interest in the methodology only in the ultimate authorship and I've written three of the five volumes of a Torah commentary called the rational Bible including Exodus which interestingly was the first one that I did given that it has thy favorite document in history The Ten Commandments and as I say on my American talk show if you want to defund the police there's actually a way have everyone live by the Ten Commandments then you can defund the police so that is uh that is where I come from in this discussion and I trust you will all differ appropriately to a member of the chosen people [Laughter] Dr Stephen Blackwood thanks Jordan it's real pleasure to be here I'm Stephen Blackwood I'm the president of Ralston College in Savannah Georgia in effort to revive and reinvent the traditional University I grew up reading the Bible quite a lot the I'd say the Bible gave me the primary images through which I came to understand myself and the world then when I went to University I sort of stumbled into the discovery of philosophy and literature especially of the the Greek and Roman you might say the backdrop to to Western culture in the in the ancient sense and since Sanders spent quite a lot of time thinking about the relation between that tradition and the biblical tradition and the way in which those uh are synthesized and in a way in which that synthesis is fundamentally what gives rise to our principles and institutions in the Western World um I suppose I'm particularly excited to be here because I as others have said do profoundly think that we're living in a time in which we've lost the images through which we can make sense of ourselves and of the world in a way that's adequate to to the the longings of our own nature so uh hopefully we'll hopefully these images will come to be alive for us and for those who uh decide to listen to this afterwards great Jonathan pajo another Canadian that's right uh so I'm Jonathan Pedro I am an artist and I'm someone who for a very long time has been reading the Bible and I've been thinking about it more like an artist I would say in terms of structure in terms of rhyme and Rhythm and so I'm interested in the book of Exodus more as a mystical text and uh based in the Christian it's actually there's a small little book called The Life of Moses by Saint Gregory of Nissa which is one of the foundations of Christian mysticism and so I will be approaching the book mostly through that through how it describes a structure narrative structure which is also a geographic structure the mountain the temple uh the Tabernacle and how this uh fits with even our own perception of reality and how reality comes together how how chaos can be brought into order and so that is really the way that I'll be looking at it so I'm really looking forward to this very diverse discussion excellent so one of the things that's really fascinated me about Exodus apart from the the fundamental structure of the narrative which is escape from tyranny sojourn through the desert and then re-emergence hypothetically into the promised land it's a very classic narrative structure descent and riacent is the fact that is the manner in which God is represented as the primary spirit in the text and so I've been toying with this idea that part of what the Bible is doing is describing a up a priority a manner in which perceptions and actions might be prioritized and for a structure of priority is a pyramidal structure and something has to be at the top and I learned from Carl Jung that whatever is at the top of your hierarchy of assumptions functions as God for you whether or not you're religious and maybe you have multiple things at the top which just means that you're confused and then if Jung is correct and I believe he is then the question of what should be at the top really exists as the Paramount question and part of the way the biblical narrative represents that or addresses that is by describing God in some sense as a literary character as Northrop fry a Canadian critic pointed out and one of the things that's remarkable about the Exodus text is that the highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny and that's put forward as a prime ethical dictum so if it's the voice of God speaking to you so to speak then it's going to call you out of slavery maybe the slavery of your own mind the slavery of external conditions the slavery of the Tyranny it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and that's really something that's really something to know and I think something that's deeply true all right so having said that and introduced everybody we're going to start with the text and all as I said I'll read it and I'll make comments when they strike me and we'll have everyone jump in and Away will go so Exodus 1. now these are the names of the children of Israel which came into Egypt every man and his household came with Jacob Reuben Simeon Levi and Judah issachar zebulun and Benjamin Dan and naftali Gad and Asher and all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were 70 Souls for Joseph was in Egypt already and Joseph died and all his brethren and all that generation and the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty and the land was filled with them so Jacob and the Israelites are presented as sojourners into into Egypt so they're foreigners they're Strangers In a Strange Land you might say and they came in under the uh the guidance and patrimony of Jacob who had a good relationship with the power structure in Egypt but he dies and his the generation after him dies and relationships between the Israelites and the Egyptians become strained it is commenting while you read okay comment at any point you want so just for all of your edification in Jewish life if there are 10 best known verses in the entire Torah a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph is one of the ten it summarizes the human condition of ingratitude perfectly Joseph had saved the Egyptians from starvation and the next Pharaoh doesn't even know his name so he's forgotten the debts he has forgotten the debts he has entirely but this is as I say I The Human Condition we have forgotten our debts in America to Washington Madison Jefferson this and there arose a new generation in America who who knew not Madison you that could be a perfect verse right okay okay okay now now there arose up a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph and he said unto his people behold the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we come on let us deal wisely with them lest they multiply and it come to pass that when there falleth out any War they join also unto our enemies and fight against us and so get them up out of the land there's an accusation of a crime before it's committed right these people are just a threat and a plague and we can't trust them and that's part of this ingratitude as well and a breakdown of trust and that's definitely that definitely sets the stage for conflict the breakdown of trust therefore they did set over them task Masters to afflict them with their burdens and they build for Pharaoh treasure cities pithome and Ramses so the response to the hypothetical Crimes of the Israelites was to enslave them and one of the things we should notice very early on in this is that the the book of Exodus regards that move of enslavement as fundamentally wrong it's like an axiomatic precondition of the narrative itself and modern people I suppose don't find that surprising because we all believe that slavery is wrong but it isn't obvious that most of the countries and Nations that in the past practice slavery regarded it as wrong and so this invisible ethic that already permeates The Narrative has a revolutionary aspect in that sense but the more they Afflicted them the more they multiplied and grew and they were grieved because of the children of Israel and the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor and they made their lives better with hard bondage in mortar and in Brick and in all manner of service in the field all their service wherein they made them serve was with rigor that that reminds me that part of of what happened in the in under the Nazis with uh with work camps and in the gulags as well right this idea that you identify your enemies and then you sentence them to hard labor in your service against their will and so you see this idea echoed very early in this story and something that's definitely echoed through the 20th century yeah so but there's really this idea that the with the Pharaoh is doing is reducing wants to reduce Israel to potential for Egypt basically and you'll see it later when he he wants to get rid of the men he just wants women and so in this image and it's it repeats even the story of Abraham you know how pharah wants to take his wife it's about taking the potential of another people and try to subjugate it to you to yourself so it's a reflection of instrumental usage that's right yeah and so you know you you can see that in people's proclivity to use one another interpersonally because when you're talking to someone you can decide a priori what you want from them and then you can bend your words and your interactions so that you exploit what they have to offer for your purposes or you can engage in honest dialogue where the purpose is mutual enrichment and that that what would you call it instrumental in doesn't dominate yeah so and you can experience it like at least the mystical fathers they talk about Egypt also is representing your own passions that is you become a slave to something and then you become an instrument of that thing right so it's like you I don't know anything that you have that you'd like to eat and then then you you're there and at first when eating knows you like when your passion knows you then then you're fine it's in the right order things are in the right order but when your passion or desires or whatever Behavior you have forgets you then you become an instrument of it like think of a drug a drug addict where everything they do serves this Tyrant and so all their potential it gets it you get reduced a potential for uh behavior in some sense that might be your stomach or your lust and so that's very interesting too because the word Israel means we who struggle with God and so what that would mean psychologically is that the that which should be at the highest place which is the part of you that's struggling with the highest is then subordinated instrumentally to something that should be lower in the ethical hierarchy and that could be your own inner tyranny and it could be someone else's instrumental will or some State's instrumental will and that's that's portrayed as fundamentally inappropriate in this text and you'll see and it it it's imaged as this idea of making bricks you know and it's that's a reference to Babel as well you know it's like this idea of wanting to be higher than God or wanting to replace God and so we make civilization that's what Brits are we make civilization and then we think that Civilization replaces the highest ideal I don't know Dennis would agree with this but I know some rabbis believe that Israel was judged when they were divided because Solomon was becoming almost a second pharaoh with a convey of the people and forced labor and so on and he was bringing a kind of slavery in at the end and getting too much Israel's called to be in anti-agient constantly becoming too much for your interest uh the uh there are two tyrannies this is the overriding theme I believe of the whole Torah external tyranny to pharaohs internal tyranny to your lusts Etc to yourself and the Torah actually has a law which many Jews still observe where you count every day between Passover and Pentecost Shavuot chevalot is the seven weeks after you do this for seven weeks every day you actually count with a blessing using God's name this is the seventh day of the 49 days and so on why you can't have freedom from Pharaoh if you don't have freedom from you so Sinai is the second freedom not now you you you have to be liberated from external tyranny and now The Liberation from internal tyranny is the Ten Commandment well that begs the question too then doesn't it that that that I think the Bible in some sense is aggregated to answer which is well is there something other than various forms of tyranny and if there is an alternative to tyranny and maybe that's Freedom whatever that is or maybe it's holy freedom then that's qualitatively different than mere subjugation to one tyranny among others my students used to ask me when I was teaching my maps of meeting course how do you know that what you're teaching isn't just another ideology which is another tyranny in some sense and that's an extremely that's an extremely deep question and the postmodern types would say well it's all ideology it's all tyranny you just pick whichever tyranny you you want to abide by but it's all a matter of power or something like that there's no Transcendent orientation that pops you outside of the realm of well of tyranny in some real sense so and the biblical narrative insists that that is not the case so it's a pretty dismal view a that it's just a choice among tyrannies but to pick up Dennis's great point of the two tyrannies that Lord Acton the famous saying all power tends to corrupt you know power oppresses the weak that's the obvious one and it happens here but it corrupts the powerful right and that's what happens to Pharaoh yeah and there is such a thing as corruption right so that that's an absolute that's an absolute reality the corruption that power tends to produce of course that's partly why the pharaoh's heart is hardened as well and yeah it's a very good it's a very germane observation that slavery corrupts the slaver as much as the slave or perhaps you can say perhaps even more right because it it incites within the slaver something like as luciferian presumption and entices him for instrumental reasons into denying the Divinity of someone else and then acting in the manner of someone who devised denies Divinity per se right absolutely pernicious and and corrosive so and the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives of which the name of the one was Shipra and the name of the other Pua and he said when you do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them upon the birthing stools if it be a son then you shall kill him and that's that instrumental usage that you were talking about before there is a huge issue here the Hebrew is completely indeterminative whether the midwives were Hebrews or not and I'm not going to throw out Hebrew often methods I I feel very self-conscious at all but for those who know Hebrew they will know what I'm talking about it can be the Hebrew midwives or The Midwives of the Hebrews there is no possible way based on those two words to know which it is I am convinced and Jewish tradition doesn't agree with me I mean post-biblical Jewish tradition the Torah I think does agree with me but Celebi uh I don't I believe they were they were Egyptian I do not believe he would have ordered he Hebrew midwives to murder every Hebrew boy do you think there's a do you think there's a purposeful ambiguity there to leave it up to questions that's beautiful it may well be that's right well it certainly is the Hebrew the Hebrew is is ambiguous that is I mean if a tyranny gets corrupt enough then people turn against themselves that's right however just on logical grounds when he gets angry at them for not doing it it would be odd if you get angry at Hebrews for not killing Hebrews but my biggest proof you're coming to where they s it says that they feared God and didn't listen to Pharaoh again it's one of my favorite lines in the whole Bible you either fear humans or you fear God fear God is the root of freedom and wisdom and the [Music] the word for God is Not Jehovah or Yahweh it's Elohim so when Jews fear God it's generally feared Yahweh and in this case it's fear Elohim and the universal word for God and I'm convinced that they are Egyptians are you looking to dive deeper into the entire Bible look no further than the hollow app the number one Prayer app in the world featuring an entire category of content to help you dive deeper into prayer and meditation on the Bible by studying the Bible you'll gain a deeper appreciation for the power of Storytelling symbolism and metaphor enriching your understanding of literature across different genres go through the Bible in a year with father Mike Schmitz or hear the Bible narrated by renowned actors like Jonathan Rumi from the chosen or Jim Caviezel from the sound of Freedom hallow has over ten thousand audio guided prayers meditations and music to deepen your understanding and knowledge of the Bible the Halo app also helps you connect with a community of like-minded individuals sharing experiences insights and encouragement along your path to spiritual growth download the app for free at hallow.com Exodus you can set reminders and track your progress along the way enrich your education and nurture your mind and soul today download the Hello app at hallow.com Exodus that's hallow.com Exodus hallow.com Exodus for an exclusive three-month free trial of all six thousand plus prayers and meditations [Music] Douglas do you have any sense of what it means In this passage and more broadly that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and and an appropriate let's say precondition for Freedom why why do you think it's conceptualized as as fear well I think there's uh a proper fear that in this case I think is linked to Transcendence so um there's the the fear of the the Tyrant which is normal and natural um and which we are all subject to but there should be a greater fear I the fear of the Transcendence violating that right right um and of course this is why the uh post-modern attack on traditional Western culture is so dangerous I mean of course it goes back to the very origins of Western culture with the sophies but the idea that there is no such thing as a an objective moral order and there certainly is no Transcendent basis for that um that would make this whole narrative unintelligible it also makes the Tyrant the final Arbiter in some real sense right you know people have asked me and I'm always embarrassed by this but people have commented on my courage for speaking up so to speak and I think you don't actually understand the situation I'm not courageous in my speaking up I'm more afraid of the alternative and part of the reason for that was that when I was a clinician I spent thousands tens of thousands of hours dealing with people's serious problems one of the things I learned was and I really learned this was that you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant without and violate your conscience without cost but that is just not the case the the you will pay the piper when you pay you might not even notice the causal connection between the sin and the payment and one of the things you do in Psychotherapy is people's lives take a Twist and they go very badly wrong and when you walk back through people's lives with them you come to these Choice points where you meet the devil at the crossroads and you find out that well you went left let's say in downhill when you should have gone right and uphill and now you're paying the price for that and you don't impose that as a therapist you help people discover that or rediscovered because they often know at the time that they've made an error and then forget and then rationalize the forgetting and then you know and then multiply the lies and so but that's that's tremendously difficult to do within a secular frame I mean I think you found ways of of doing that I think Jordan I'm thinking actually of somebody like Victor Frankl and his uh his idea that that sense of the logos of a kind of a meaning is what gives you a kind of existential drive and helped him survive the the horrors of the Holocaust but more typically it's it's religion it's a sort of religious framing that it gives people this the power to resist tyranny well that that religious framing seems in part even if you think about it in a secular sense is that like when you're maybe you're making a choice to do the instrumental and easy thing but there's part of you that knows that that's wrong not always sometimes you just make a mistake because you don't know but but often you know and yet you pick the easier path let's say and the part of the manner in which God is portrayed throughout the biblical Corpus but I would say in in Traditions around the world as that phenomena phenomenon that that alerts you to your own misbehavior and it is really something again I really learned from Young Contra Freud in some real sense is that and contranisha who believe that maybe we could create our own values is that there's something within that is transcendent because it isn't only in you it's in everyone in some fundamental and real sense plus it's Eternal in some fundamental and real sense and it calls you on your misbehavior potentially in God culture is approaching and kind of Crisis point in other words the postmodernists everything's constructive truth is not there Etc no reality except what you make it but of course truth is always about something as C.S Lewis used to say and what it's about is reality well there's this insistence and people are going to hit the wall that point up to point today on the post because there is reality it's as if we're insisting that there is nothing other than towers of Babel there isn't anything they're being built against or shielding us from it's it's just one Tower of Babel after another and it can be and I can't help but see a real tyrannical demand for power in that because one of the things I've often wondered is well why are the constructivists the radical constructive is so insistent that there's no core human nature when really the evidence that there's a core human nature is pretty damn strong particularly perhaps if you think biologically so why with why this insistence and I can't help but think it's because well you want to remake people in the image of your ideology and so you have to insist that they have no intrinsic nature because otherwise the pesky realities of the Transcendent nature get in the way of your luciferian person no God no truth there is only Power right right well that that's the that's the Dostoevsky an issue in some real sense isn't it I just I want to pick up on what you said Dennis a little before and I I want to propose that there there might be a very important narrative reason why the The Midwives or or Hebrew in this case and the reason and it I think it's a good lesson for us today which is that the tyrant is empowering women to kill their men that is what the Tyrant is doing and he's doing it in order to feminize the Hebrews and uh and and I think and and I think that no wonder you get in trouble but I think I think that I think that it's important and the reason why they won't do it is because they fear God is because they're able to see beyond the power that the Pharaoh is handing them at this moment and I think that when we think that that couldn't happen like in the people it's like look around you we're seeing what happened before it's very interesting because it also implies that well it's in the best interest of the Tyrant to dispense with those figures who might pose a threat to the Tyranny and those would be tough men right because they're the ones who keep the real such an intelligent point that it it reinforces your reaction to what I said maybe the text is purposefully ambiguous about whether or not they were Hebrews or Egyptians and and you've swayed me I've seen that purposeful ambiguity the other texts so let me just say I I know I identify a bias in me and I will reveal it I I I I I'm I'm very I hope self-aware good so the first learning episode has actually occurred yeah right exactly okay the Torah goes out of its way this is one of the fundamental beliefs of my life to portray non-jews positively and Jews negatively it's one of the reasons I believe it's a Divine author if Jews had made up the Torah they would have come across much more positively they come across as awful as a general rule and non-jews from so propaganda anti-propaganda certainly uh Noah Noah is a non-jew of course there are no Jews at that time uh but Moses's father-in-law who was the the great uh adviser to Moses is a is a midianite priest the daughter of pharaoh is a non-jew she saves Moses and uh it is just a consistent pattern and I thought that the midwives was part of that pattern as I say that God is ethic centered not ethnic centered okay and this has taken as the first Civil Disobedience isn't it that's right that's the first example of someone standing against a crime against humanity and um I don't come down either way but I think you can make a strong point for Dennis's right so that it implies that the relationship with God is actually what enables people to have the strings to stand up against the Tyrant if you think of the Nuremberg Trial they didn't actually have a basis for what they were saying there's no international law right right they were reaching and maybe the same thing is intuitively they know well that's certainly what soldier knitson thought about the nurburg trials is he believed that the fact that the the Nazi atrocities were regarded as wrong independent of cultural context he thought that was a signal achievement of the 20th century because it re-established not so much the existence of good but definitely the existence of evil and that that was something I found unbelievably convincing because I thought well you're you've got a real conundrum here it's like was what the Nazis did Evil or not because those are the Alternatives and if it wasn't it's like okay well you can move ahead on that presumption or you can accept that it was evil in it in a Transcendent sense because that's what the Nuremberg trials were about and then the the terrible implication of that in some sense is that if if evil genuinely exists then it's opposite genuinely exists because it's not going to exist without its opposite and so as soon as you accept the reality of the evil of Auschwitz you're in a metaphysical World in some sense because you have to simultaneously posit the existence of a Transcendent good that's at least the opposite of that and part of what I've been striving for for 40 years I would say is to identify what is the opposite of the spirit that produced Auschwitz and some of it Soldier knits and detailed out so nicely it's the spirit of Truth and Frankel it's the spirit of meaning and uh I think you can make a strong case that it's the spirit of love and it's some amalgam of those three things and that doesn't exhaust it and that's it's the spirit of play and voluntary Association and freedom all things that are stressed in the biblical narrative and where there is no vision a people perisheth in Proverbs and I think there that's very important this notion of uh well contemplation we we cut we'll come to that in particularly chapter three but this sense of a vision of goodness as having an inspiring quality uh and yeah and it is a vision too and not just a mere verbal conceptualization right which is why the artistic Endeavor is so important and the architectural Endeavor because it's not merely propositional that Vision one of the things I learned with my students and with my clinical clients was that and I helped them do this was to help people develop a literal vision for their life it's like okay you if you could have what you wanted to arm you against the slings and arrows of Fate let's say or to at least defend you against it in principle if you could have what you needed and wanted what would that look like that's a kind of prayer it's like knocking the door will open and ask and you will receive it's like okay you could conceivably have what you wanted but you have to specify what it is and you have to have a vision of it and part of what the humanities education should do and the religious education certainly is to flesh out a vision of of a mode of being and a mode of perception that would justify suffering or maybe even more than justify it so well you could say I suppose that if theists have faced with the problem of evil atheists are confronted with the problem of good try how how to make sense of goodness how to make sense of what it is that drives their morally indignation and their great social social revolutions I think one of the most uh terrifying moments in the Nuremberg trials was when the Nazis Advanced the defense that they effectively that this was simply Victor's Justice that they had not really broken any laws they were scrupulous legislators after all and so and following orders that's right and so sort of Western Notions of justice found themselves staring into the abyss how how is it that we're going to make sense of our deep intuition that this is evil of an absolute kind and I think this is one of the great as a matter of historical fact one of the most important motivating factors behind um the emergence of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of course in 1948 and with it the entire sort of rights-based regime of um of morality that is that is with us still that is has proliferated and expanded um so the problem from The Atheist front is on what basis can these things be made can be claimed as self-evident what's the grounding for that if it's just not and the post-modern critique of that in some sense is that well all that nonsense talk about rights and freedoms is just it's just instrumental camouflage hiding a more fundamental Will To Power and desire to oppress right and the worry is that that the only answer available in that in a purely sort of secular framework would be it's that because this document tells us that this is wrong or this document tells us that this is right right so that becomes part of the social contract and in which case the problem emerges immediately again it's well that's just arbitrary effectively carries within it the the sort of replicates the very problem that it was trying to solve that's partly why I'm often interested in talking to biologists you know I've talked to France to all most recently and he's a primatologist who's worked on elucidating the principles by which chimpanzees organize their social hierarchies and the Marxist really and classic biological take on that for simple-minded biologists is that the chimps use Will To Power right the alpha champ is the most powerful most dominant meanest roughest you know boxer oppressor and dewal's work conducted over about 30 years has showed that that's not all that's not just wrong it's anti-true in some sense so it's exactly the opposite of the reality now and then you can get a chimp who rules by power but it destabilizes the troop emotionally and socially and his Reign tends to be short brutal and meet and extremely violent and murderous end it's not an effective strategy and what dewal has shown that is to stabilize the iterative interactions within a troop the alpha male who sometimes can be the smallest male in the troop has to be more reciprocal than any other individual in the troop and so the basis of chimpanzee power is peacemaking reciprocity and stable long-term social relations between males and between the more authoritative males and females but does that allow us to use the language does that analysis allow us to use the language of of goods of uh or or rather are we only licensed by by dwells the walls analysis to speak of adaptive value reproductive Fitness well I'm kind of hoping they go like this because you know the idea of the reciprocity that allows the alpha chimps to maintain their sovereignty across time is something very much like treat your neighbor as if he's yourself and so I think that there's no reason to assume that the ethic if it's Transcendent couldn't emerge out of the material and descend in some sense from the spiritual at the same without reducing goodness to a mere morality to a mere survival mechanism right well a mirror isn't it's not so mere either right if it's a survival mechanism it's pretty damn deep and we could also think if we were expanding our notion of what constitutes the biological we could also think of the the patterns of behavior that are most germane to our survival as as Transcendent they're embodied they're instinctual they're outside the propositional domain although often it's the case that we think of the highest moral act as as Extinction you know laying down one's life that is surrendering our opportunities for survival and the survival of our kin yeah well right so there are definitely times where mere proximal survival seems to contradict an even deeper Instinct I mean I would say that the willingness of tricky right because my wife was talking to I think Janice theme Engel recently about the behavior of men when the Titanic was sinking and many men sacrificed themselves to save the women and the children and in a sense that violates the purely biological impetus for self-preservation let's say but it if it's serving a higher order ethical precept that is even more fundamentally related to survival across time than maybe the contradiction could be ironed out I suppose in evolutionary terms the logical thing would would be though for the women and the children to go first on the Titanic yeah well the men are more Expendable right because you need fewer men if push comes to shove you need fewer men but to go back to the Hebrew Midwife although the Hebrew or the Egyptian midwives they're intuitively saying something against the highest power in their Universe the Pharaoh and and to their own danger well exactly which is quite extraordinary and you probably know the story of wh Jordan coming to Faith I mean he is a self-professed left-wing atheist and early in World War II coming to take refuge in New York he would follow the documentaries weekly television and one weekend he went in to see the documentary on the siege of Poland and Nazi Stormtroopers bayonetting women and children and it was in the Upper East Side a lot of Germans the war hadn't America hadn't declared war the German audience Cried Out kill them kill them egging on their own countrymen America was neutral and Orden sat there in five minutes he says I can't say this is absolutely wrong there are no episodes that's old-fashioned whatevers believe that but then he said I had to say there was an absolute if this was absolutely wrong and he said later I left the cinema the Seeker after an unconditional absolute and came to faith in God the only basis foreign because it could he's like one of the things I've come to realize about the symbol of the crucifix and I'm just speaking psychologically here and not theologically is that at the very least what that symbol is is the it's the impetus among billions of people across 2000 years to look at the worst thing they could imagine and so there's an idea that you come to understanding of transcendent good most particularly through focusing your attention intently on what is undeniably tragic and malevolent and that could be I I really think that's true psychologically because one of the things I became convinced of studying the Holocaust atrocities and the gulag atrocities in particular was the absolute reality of suffering and malevolence and then you think well because it's pain suffering and and and cruelty those are undeniable realities that's the odd and experience and they say well is there anything more real than pain suffering and cruelty and the answer would be yes that which can transcend those three things and it could easily be that you cannot make contact with what transcends those without diving deep into the nature of those as deep as possible and I certainly see the biblical narrative focusing for example on the crucifixion but not only that as as the collective attempt of mankind in some real sense to come to terms with the worst that life has to offer and to discover as a consequence something that transcends that so much do you know the story of Philip Haley you know the Jewish scholar who spent his life investigating the Nazi war crimes and all that and one time he was so depressed by what he was studying he was ready to commit suicide and sitting in his study with this wealth of literature he picked up a little pamphlet he hadn't read before and after about five minutes of reading he thought there was a flying it was a tear his heart had been hardened and he read the story of the Shambo the little Huguenot Village that rescued 5 000 Jewish children and he said it was hot cracking goodness right right yeah and that was his intuitive the woman who wrote the rape of Nan King she committed suicide and no wonder you know you look at that sort of thing and if you look at it deeply it just it just tears you into pieces and then the question is is there anything that can put you back together and that really is the question it's the question everybody faces in life in some real sense right is how can you not be torn apart into Despair and vengefulness by catastrophe and malevolence and that is the question that faces everyone so all right The Midwives feared God and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them it's a lot of wrapped up in that line as it turns out but saved the men children alive and the king of Egypt called for The Midwives and said unto them why have you done this thing and saved the men children alive and The Midwives said unto pharaoh because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women for they are Lively and are delivered before the midwives come in unto them therefore God dealt well with the midwives that's a very interesting line too because well do you want the Pharaoh on your side or do you want God on your side that's kind of the question and the people multiplied and waxed very mighty and so despite their persecution they're doing fine and it came to pass because the midwives feared God that he made them houses and Pharaoh charged all his people saying so he's getting upset here every son that is born you shall cast into the river and every daughter you shall save alive so that's echoing that that that emasculation of the people of Israel here in the most fundamental sense so that's Exodus one Exodus 2 and their wind amount of the House of Levi and took to wife a daughter of Levi that's an important verse it is my favorite part of writing with commentary over these years is to take these verses that seem like nothing and realize it's so important these are the parents of the of the savior of the Jewish people Moses but there's nothing special about them and that's what that verse says a certain Man of the House of Levi went and married a levite woman that's that's a slowly birth Motif a lowly birth both Thief uh a a he doesn't come from royalty or Divine stock or or anything just regular folks gave birth to Moses right just regular photos yes very nice very nice and the woman conceived and bear a son and when she saw him that he was a goodly child she hid him three months remember the Egyptians were going to kill the firstborn Israelite males and when she could no longer hide him she took for him an arc of bull rushes and dubbed it with slime and with pitch a little boat and put the child there in and she laid it in the flags by the river's Brink can you see the word for boat is the same as Noah's Ark oh yeah this is the the saving of the world again right okay so that's interesting so she makes a little structure right which is what you do with children is you build a structure around them but it's the word for the Noah's Ark okay okay and this is also this is also the first indicator of what becomes a very profound symbolic Motif in The Exodus story because Moses is allied with water throughout the narrative whereas the Pharaoh and Egypt are allied with stone and stone seems permanent and immovable but it's brittle and hard and and lifeless and Moses is continually represented as a master of water and transformation and so this is the first time you see that water is and water as Moses is undoing he hits the Rock and says I will get you water and not God and and kit doesn't get into Israel right well so so I guess that's when he when he misuses his relationship with his power over water and water is chaotic right except from a symbolic perspective and water is associated with what you immerse yourself in when you're baptized and water is like the pre-cosmogonic chaos that begins that exists at the beginning of time and so for Moses to be a matter master of chaos and water is also to make him procedurally the antithesis of the Tyrant because the Tyrant wants everything in stone and solid and Moses is the is the antithesis of that and there's also I think there's also the the one one thing that happens is you have an extreme you have let's say the Pharaoh and then you have water and what happens is what Moses is going to be doing between the entire story is making that mediation between what is above and what is below now you have this little image of the Ark as being a little microcosm which was what you see in Genesis little microcosm of the world that exists in this extreme right because in the in the flood what you have is a return to the beginning where now it's Heaven and Earth and there's nothing in between like it's both of them can't sustain life there has to be a hierarchy of of reality that gets pulled out of the water and that's what Moses is going to do he's going to go up the mountain and bring down the law and that is going to create that that structure that mediation between because even in the text we'll see later like God is also just God and the people doesn't seem to work because God is constantly wanting to consume them and it's like no no no no no don't consume them so we need to have this this mediation where being lays itself out and kind of falls down into the world in a way that is appropriate one of the things Jung said this is sort of relevant if you consider psychedelic experiences as well which can be far more than they then people can tolerate um Jung said part of the purpose of religious practice was to stop people from having religious experiences and and he because he was very interested in uh experiences that were extreme enough to border on psychosis for example and that if you don't have those intermediary structures between you and the absolutely Transcendent which might be reality itself in the ethical and material sense then that's just too much that and you do see that echoed in motifs like the burning bush where and where God tells Moses later not to look at him directly to at best to look at his back right because you just can't withstand that that direct contact with something that exceeds your comprehension in every Dimension simultaneously no matter how good it is no matter how no matter how complete it is it's just too much for for the Mortal soul to bear and his sister stood afar off to wit what would be done to him and the daughter of pharaoh not so interesting that she he's rescued by the daughter of the Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river and her maidens walked Along by the Riverside and when she saw the ark among the flags she sent her maid to fetch it and when she opened it she saw the child and behold The Babe wept and she had compassion on him and said this is one of the Hebrews children that's an interesting line from the jungian perspective as well because Jung would have regarded the anima the animating principle which is the feminine Spirit as part of that which is constantly antithetical to the to the stone-like patriarchal Tyrant and it's very interesting that it's the pharaoh's own daughter who actually proves her compassion her genuine compassion for a helpless infant so genuine compassion properly placed constitutes part of the power that can be used against the Tyrant and she's she's placed exactly in the same position as The Midwives were it's like here's a Hebrew child and now it's once again it's a it's a woman who says that so it's like this is the you could say that that's the role of the feminine is to nurture is to give potential is to to hold is to do all these things in order for the the person to find their independence right and is there not something of a sorry of a paradox here or if you say The Man from Nowhere the possible figure in a way and yet he's discovered by the the pharaoh's daughter uh so he has dual he has okay so you see this this Motif is replicated unbelievably commonly as say the motif of the orphan you see this with the with the comic book character Superman most particularly because Superman has ordinary parents in I think he lands in Kansas if I remember correctly and so they're just ordinary Farmers but really his parents are divine right they're Heavenly and the Superman brings both of those together and there is this Motif that each of us are the sons or Daughters of our fathers and mothers are proximal fathers and mothers but simultaneously we are the true Sons and Daughters of the Divine culture let's say and the spirit of culture and nature and the spirit of Nature and so each of us that's why when you're born lowly let's say you're actually not because regardless of where you're born you're also the child of well of everything of Nature and culture and and of the Transcendence simultaneously and indeed Christ I mean born in the stable uh Carpenter but but the davidic lineage so again you've got that that that's why the descent into Egypt is so important isn't it it's clearly sort of recapitulating that that the motif yeah but here a very obvious Point all the heroes are women yeah well it's so interesting that the proper heroic Target of the women's heroic action is in fact the helpless infant right The Compassion isn't being misplaced because compassion as far as I can tell that over arching compassion is particularly appropriate when it's directed towards that which is truly helpless but if it starts to be directed as if towards infants to those who could be competent then it starts to become destructive so it's feminine compassion in the right place here and so even even if it's the pharaoh's daughter yes true maternal virtues right which is the care of the truly helpless and and and and and well perhaps the truly oppressed then said his sister to Pharaoh's daughter shall I go and call to the nurse of the Hebrew women that she may nurse the child for thee and the pharaoh's daughter said to her go and the maid went and called the child's mother so it's very sneaky of the Hebrews and Pharaoh's daughter said unto her take this child away so she adopts him and nurse it for me and I will give thee thy wages and the woman took the child and nursed it and the child grew and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son so now he's the son of the king the grandson of the of the Pharaoh so interesting that that it's also a very powerful as an adoptive father of two two sons one biological one adoptive and this is always spoken to me profoundly that she is regarded as his mother and she's clearly not his biological mother in Jewish tradition she is act which is remarkable to me because you would think blood would be dominant but in later Jewish tradition she is called Batya the daughter of God and she is regarded as Moses's mother really interesting very interesting for those who are interested in the the Greek and have a more kind of have taken on the Greek philosophy and everything Saint Gregory of Nissa sees the relationship between the two mothers and the relationship between his allegiance to Egypt and his allegiance to his mother as the relationship that we have with the Pagan past that is that we are to learn and to be nurtured by our Pagan ancestors and the Pagan stories and the Pagan philosophers but to a degree to a limit and that ultimately when you'll see later Moses discovers or chooses his true religion uh by by ultimately killing the Egyptian but that but that he won't completely discount it you know and it's it's well it's also the problem we all have when we're being socialized because to some degree to be socialized in a time and place is to fall prey to the prevailing tyranny right to become an avatar of that culture that and the tyrannical aspects of that as well but hopefully to simultaneously unite that with you could say the spirit of Israel which is the striving towards the wrestling with God and then to make that Paramount and so Moses's lineage is representative of the lineage of all of us and we struggle with that right because now people are ashamed of their pharonic identity which is the patriarchal tyranny and the capacity that that has to produce the atrocities of the past but we have to come to terms with it and and the notion that Moses kills the Pharaoh is some something like the notion that well he overthrows potato or he kills the Egyptian is that you overthrow that Tyrant within even though you you necessarily owe Allegiance and then you follow something higher something like that it's important I mean this is quite an obvious point but I think it's just important dwelling on the point that this is It's pharah's daughter it is a this is a non-jewish moral agent who who acts in a saintly way and I think this gives us a first taste of a theme that's going to come to dominate and morality isn't Bound by ethnicity that's right this is a great gift of the Jewish people this this Insight that morality is is universal is to is is a gift to the world is something that that all all human beings as it were abound to um pull later in the New Testament makes this point again in Romans 1 and chapter 1 of and chapter two of Romans the the Gentiles as it were have the law written upon their hearts and I think this will be something that's very important when we come to look at the Ten Commandments and so on but yeah so that's another echo of that notion of a Transcendent good right exactly which in the context of ancient near Eastern religion it's difficult to uh difficult to sort of exaggerate the point too much you know it really is quite extraordinary to this idea that there is a moral code that cuts right across all tribes and All Nations it's anthropologically absurd in some sense because the anthropological evidence suggests that we're pretty damn tribal and that the fundamental human response in some sense towards people who aren't of your tribe is that they're not human yeah yeah so it's really an amazing Vision beyond the parochial confines of well tribunation it's the first real discovery that morality is a possession that that all all human beings have and it's it's a it's a you know a crucial point I mean people often say that you know the code of amarabi and that there are these sort of insights into how other peoples and other tribes are to be treated and an ethically a responsible way um but I think here it really is it's it's it's a remarkable Insight the sort of the the universalism the objectivity of of moral values and to and to Dennis's point the elevation of the Foreigner to ethical status that supersedes the ethical status of the in-group ethnic member right amazing thing that's an amazing thing it's very hard to account for that and relative to that Divine authorship it's very interesting relative to that point that we're talking about the midwives who choose not to kill the children in the case of the mother I just think this is an amazing image I mean the mother can only save her son by giving him up and not only giving him up but actually commending him to not simply the river but to to I mean the anti-ethnic character of what's going on here that that somehow she must herself must commend her own son to what you might perceive of as the enemy well that is what happens when you raise a child though and especially true if you raise the sun is because the sun has to move Beyond you into the culture and if the culture has a tyrannically patriarchal element which would be the Egyptian element let's say then in order to Foster your son's development you have to let the world take him and that would even be the case if the broader social world has that tyrannical proclivity and if you don't do that you fail as a mother though there's a deep sense in which the maternal Instinct can only be fulfilled by transcending itself and that's what you see here that you can only save the Sun by literally giving him up yeah well that's a sacrifice of the child Motif right so which is a very difficult that's a very difficult idea to come to terms with you see that in the paella in some sense that great Michelangelo statue where you see Mary offering her broken son to the world and that's what mothers do right that's what they have to do I think that's equivalent to the female crucifixion in some real sense it's like you have to allow your children you have to offer up your children to be broken by the work to the world broken by the world yeah so and it came to pass in those days when Moses was grown that he went out into his Brethren that'd be the Egypt or the Hebrews and looked upon their burdens and he spied an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew one of his brethren and he looked this way and that way and when he saw that there was no man around he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand and when he went out the second day behold two men of the Hebrews strove together and he said to him that did the wrong wherefore Smite us thou thy fellow and he said who made you a prince and a judge over us intendeth thou to kill me as thou killst the Egyptian and Moses feared and said surely this thing is known now when Pharaoh heard this thing he sought to slay Moses but Moses fled from the face of pharah and pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian and he sat down by a well so back to the water imagery there I just want to say about this little text this is actually one of my if I have a little favorite text in in Exodus it's this little text because it's a little microcosm again of what's going to happen because Moses has to do two things he has to overthrow the Tyrant and he has to he has to help the the Hebrews become become something you have to have to bring them together so that they become a nation and it's like that's right there he kills the Egyptian and then he gets into because he doesn't he's not in the right place like he does it but then he gets in trouble and then he comes to his wrong brothers and they're like who who are you like who made you King you know who made you our chief and so he has to go through the entire this whole process again to now go up the mountain have this vision of God even though he's fighting the Tyrant he doesn't in caution and he's doing the right he wants to do the right thing and then It ultimately it's all going to happen because when he sees God then he receives from God that Authority receives from God that that capacity to then bring the law and then join and create and not create but like consolidate let's say the Hebrew people into it right so the murderous impulse which is which is generated by the the moral revulsion against the slavery of his people is Manifest in that careless homicide and that just about Dooms Moses and that would have doomed the entire Enterprise yeah well it's careless in that okay that's a fine question it's careless in that he it's only he presumes it's only going to be successful if it's done in secret and it's and it turns out not to be secret it turns out to be revealed and I think that's part of your point isn't it unless I misunderstood it well I mostly see it I mostly see it that it's like a it's it's a messy version of what he's actually going to do with the proper Authority from God he doesn't yet have the authority from God so he does this thing he kills the Egyptian and it's messy and then he tries to reconcile his brothers and it's messy and he has to flee he he doesn't have what it takes to do it you know and so he has to so you can think about it like uh like in terms of your own bad habits or whatever now you you can try to take them on right you can try to change your habits you can try to consolidate your attention yeah good luck with that you have to go through the desert like there's a there's a there's a whole process of prayer and purification that you have to go through before you can attend to those things if you try to take on your own like tyrants just like that good luck like they're going to come back and and smash you down for the job not yet that's right but Dennis you said earlier though a couple of Levites you know but don't you know Traditions say that Levi was the one who you know went out and slew the people who raped his sister and he took things into his own hand and the Messiah will come from Judah and and and you know he went and got a prostitute to his own daughter-in-law the the origins of Our Heroes or or look at what David did and again to the father of the Messiah the man not only commits adultery that's pretty common unfortunately because he has the man killed to sleep with his wife uh and that's by the way I I have zero interest in in bringing any politics into this so my point is not political at all uh but that was my argument with regard to Donald Trump the idea that because he is a man who has committed many sins he is not an appropriate leader has no biblical basis we'd all be in trouble if the precondition for for Action was sinlessness that's that's clear yeah and wasn't what what what was William Blake's dictum wisdom through excess and there's also ideas that are reflected in the gospels too that there there's more treasure and some some spiritual sense heaped up by those who dare to sin and and then are then repent and are reclaimed than those who are too terrified to take any action whatsoever on the off chance that they might make a mistake Christ says the same thing in Revelation when he comes back as a judge he says that his harshest judgment isn't reserved for those who are hot or those who are cold so the good or the evil for that matter but for those who play both ends against the middle and sit and sit and never commit and so and that's really an interesting idea right is that in some real sense God how at least how God's represented in the Old Testament is definitely the spirit on the side of the adventurous for better for worse and that's quite something right because it it also I think Bears some um light shed some light on this notion of the terrifying element of the Transcendent it's not whatever God's goodness is it's not some simple harmless like all-encompassing weak compassion it's it's something terrifying in its moral breadth because it would really be something if the spirit of God is on the side of the rampantly adventurous and I think you can make a strong case for that at least from within the confines of the biblical Corpus I mean Abraham's an adventurer Moses is an adventurer Noah is an adventurer these are people who David's an adventurer they aren't people who stayed home and and tried to never cause any trouble right which is a kind of emasculation in and of itself so well faith is Adventure it's entrepreneurial I think people have faith I call it the entrepreneurs of life and so why make the entrepreneurial connection there's a vision there's a venture there's a risk there's a cost and the whole thing is wrapped up with that well I think that it's lovely to tie that in with faith too because in our culture people often denigrate Faith as belief in the unbelievable as if it's a purely if it's first of all purely propositional and second of all it's just a denial of evidence you see that in the atheist crowds constantly but to me Faith is something like the willingness to take a risk based on a presumption and maybe the presumption is well truth will set you free it's like well tell the truth and see what happens is it going to get you in a lot of trouble the evidence that Aggregates around you if you tell the truth to the degree that you can isn't that this is going to be the easy path forward you have to decide this is something Kierkegaard stressed right is that you have to decide certain things as preconditions for Action independent in some real sense of the evidence and that's the faith and this is when Abraham for example in his great adventure he goes he follows God's call out of the safety of the tent the faith is to heed the call of Adventure even though he's got everything in some sense that you need if you if you're only interested in hedonistic gratification but there's something beyond that and it's faith that allows you to make those decisions to step into the unknown future and that's coming from Moses as John was hinting I mean here he does it himself who sets you up he did and to take on Pharaoh by himself right there's also though I think as I'm going to argue I think there's a profound sense in which Moses is a very weak figure and in many respects if the text is as it were about the revelation of a kind of transcendent order in history and about ours ourselves as readers coming to understand ourselves in that I mean I don't think we should presume that somehow Moses are himself is not a figure who needs that very Revelation and to come into it himself right and I think that you know that the persistent imagery we're going to see Moses here is actually a very weak and doubtless and failing and so on so he's unable to speak yes he is himself in need of the that discovery of himself in that Transcendent Revelation as anyone else you see the transformation of Moses although he does make that mistake you see him move from a character who stands no of hitting the rock the one mistake it's like for Moses but he he goes from this character who says God I can't speak you know I I can't I can't speak in front of people and then he he he ends later as this shining figure that comes down the mountain and people can't even look on him because God says you will be God for them and he has to hide his face because he's so radiant and it's like that transformation is astounding it's such an interesting he finishes with unstoppable words at the end of Deuteronomy the man that couldn't speak his very eloquent right well and it it tells you something about what constitutes the power of of true speech and the notion there is something like if the words are from god let's say it doesn't matter how impaired you are in your utterance of them that's a secondary consideration and so it's it's despite or maybe even because of your insufficiency in some real sense if you're oriented properly the words will and I've met people like that who who are not particularly articulate but you listen to every word they say because their words are very carefully measured and chosen and often purchased at the cost of plenty of suffering and they just have that depth that's kind that's uncanny in some real sense and you call those people of genuine character and you can certainly when those people speak everyone is still and that's really something it's really something to see by the way there's a very interesting parallel since Abraham was raised we know nothing absolutely nothing about Abraham before God speaks to him but we know a lot about Moses before God chooses him and there are three stories we've just done too killing the Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew interfering in the in the fight of the two Hebrews and now he will defend these women who are not Hebrews against non-hebrew uh male bullies that's a remarkable man and in one case he killed in one case he spoke and in another case he just stood up he is a very impressive man at this point Moses and and we know no one is going to ask gee why did God choose him he's these are three impressive stories right right so that they're all elucidating different aspects of his willingness to stand up against terrorists irrespective of sex and irrespective of nationality right okay okay well and we come to that now now the priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came and Drew water and filled the troughs to water their father's flock and the Shepherds these bullies that you talked about Dennis came and drove them away and that's that's pretty low way I mean you come across a bunch of women trying to get some water and and your your your manifestation of your power is to chase them away how pathetic but Moses stood up and helped them and it does say Shepherds not Shepherd so that means he's outnumbered and watered their flock and when they came to rule their father he said how is it that you are come so soon today and they said an Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the Shepherds that's an echoing phrase right because that's another one of these fractal prodroma because the shepherds are bullying tyrants and and Moses is the delivering is the delivering Force there and they also Drew water enough for us so that's a reference to the pre-cosmogonic chaos again that revivifies in the face of tyranny and watered the flock amazing imagery in that in that line and he said unto his daughters and where is he why is it that you have left the man call him that he may eat bread seems like the right response and Moses was content to dwell with the man and he gave Moses zebra his daughter and she bear him a son and he called his name Gershon for he said I have been a Stranger in a Strange Land so that means Moses is a an obviously a compelling enough character so that a father is willing to marry his daughter to him despite the fact that he's a stranger and a foreigner so yeah and there's also in this text like this whole this whole meeting of the women at the well is super important in terms of understanding this relationship between the the woman also and the well itself as this water this this this potential which which is the the positive aspect of the the lower Waters you could say and so that's why you see the Patriarchs they always always meet their their wives at Wells and ultimately in in terms of Christianity that leads all the way to the story of the Samaritan woman at the well which is like the final version of that where he meets this strange woman and then you know she offers him water he offers her like a fountain that will go into eternity and it's like this relationship between the masculine and The Feminine this is so old like it's it's the the active Waters the the fresh water than the salt water you see it in like Mesopotamian myth like it's a super old uh uh structure but it's it's it yeah the water is revivifying right and so and so are are water like ideas if you're stuck in the desert of the tyranny of your own mind then there are certain ideas that strike you as revivaling we talked about that in relationship to the the Revelation that you said it was odd and received right and he's looking at tyranny right in the face in the movie theater and a revivifying idea strikes him and it has this it has this ability to quench a thirst that's much deeper than a mere physical thirst and a symbolic analog too thirst quenching and often provided by women with their animating Spirit right so and it came to pass in process of time that the king of Egypt died and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage that's a very useful line too because we see here too that not only is it wrong for the Egyptians to enslave the Israelites but it's correct for the Israelites to grieve because they're not free and so what we see implicit in the narrative here is this constant insistence that those who wrestle with God that's Israel should be free that that's a higher moral good and you might say well that's self-evident as we discussed earlier but it's not even the Israelites themselves when they end up in the desert and in the other terrible places they're wandering takes them to a lot of them Pine for the days of the their subjugation to tyranny and if you know anything about Nostalgia for Stalin in in the former Soviet Union for example or the or the continual current extent worship of Mao you can understand this I read a book at one point that was written by concentration camp guards who were nostalgic for the work that they did in the concentration camps in Germany and so don't be thinking that people believe without constraint that freedom and absence of slavery is a positive good they can be afraid of that that necessity for faith that that entrepreneurial Spirit demands they'd rather take the brick walls and and the certainty so it came to pass in the process of time that the king of Egypt died and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage and they cried and the Cry came up to and their Cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage so God is represented here as the superordinate spirit who responds to the cries of the unjustly enslaved and whatever else he might be that's what he is and God heard their groaning and God remembered his Covenant with Abraham with Isaac and with Jacob and God looked upon the children of Israel and God had respect unto them you as Covenant is an idea that you're very interested in and so what do you think it means here that it's such a strange line a that God remembered his Covenant why would God have to he's God why does he have to remember did he forget like what's no but this is the first time God enters the story as an agent he knows he is he remembers he cares and I love Rabbi heshel saying here he Compares Yahweh with you know the Greek understanding and the Greek understanding say Aristotle God is an unmoved mover no heshall said he is the most moved mover he hears and remembers and here he's keeping his promise that's the significance he's made the the promise to Abraham you can see that this is something that we commune with if people are grieving their enslavement even to themselves if there is the possibility that they can be freed from that there has to be the possibility that there's something that they can call on outside the tyranny of their own imagination to free them so because otherwise it's like in the scientific realm if you you have your epistemological ideas your theory about the world but you presume that there's a corrective object outside of that that can tell you when you've made an error there's something outside your theory and if you're ensconced in your own tyranny there is no Redemption from that unless there's something that transcends even your own tyranny within you that you can in some real sense call on and I do think people call them that all the time Carl Rogers when he talked about the pre preconditions for therapeutic Improvement and this has to do with the notion of humility is that if your client isn't desperate and ready to change themselves there isn't really anything you can do about that as a therapist they have to have already admitted to themselves that they're laboring under the burden of their own even unrealized tyranny and then open themselves up to the possibility that there's an alternative pathway forward and that is that is that's an action of faith and it is an opening up to Revelation and I think you can think that as a secular person it's like well if you're troubled but you can improve part of the way you improve is like the scientist who's open to New Revelations by the object is to open yourself up to the idea that there's something beyond your current solipsistic misery and I cannot see how that's not both prayer and a statement of faith no absolutely Dennis isn't their understanding though that the Jews at this time had lost much of their touch with the Lord altogether what is that we we don't know it from the text so I I agree with you that would I mean what would they remember for 400 years or whatever the time span it's not completely precise of the time in Egypt that's why Moses as we'll see obviously says well what what name do I do I give what I what I go to them and say I came in so-and-so's name so if they had remembered the name he he would not have asked that question right so they're so diverse from their tradition that he can't even speak in the name of the tradition right right which is definitely a problem that but faith has to begin when we get to the end of ourselves and reach out and obviously they got so out of touch that they needed to cry out and this cry is an incredibly important triggering moment isn't it by the way I I use this because I also wrote a commentary on the haggata the the Passover seder service and I said so there were very four famous questions children ask at the Seder so I said here's a question for adults to ask if God took the Jews out of Egypt why didn't he take them out of Europe and in some configuration I mean almost any Jew has asked that question and I just among other things I I don't have a perfect answer by any means but I there is an implied answer one could have asked the same question in Egypt why did God wait so long how many Jews were killed and beaten and tortured until God quote unquote remembered so well maybe the cry is it is it partly the possibility that like man man has to reach up to God just as much as God reaches down and then without Moses being there as the precondition for in some sense for God's intervention then it's not going to occur right but that doesn't put God off the hook I'm asking a question that puts God on the hook right right no so my my answer and it's not emotionally satisfying but I find it theologically satisfying is that God does not save the individual Jew he saves the Jewish people yeah well I wonder a because I'm not I'm not denying at all the validity of what you said but you know it's it seems to be the case in the biblical narrative that God portions out a pretty major responsibility and catastrophe for mankind and that's to live ethically despite mortality and limitation it's a really heavy burden and so then you wonder it's like well just exactly how much are we called on to be ethical actors so that God's goodness can be revealed and that's real open question and you know I mean when when when when uh in Sodom and Gomorrah when the search is on for one or two good men in the city so that it's not going to be destroyed the the idea there is that even if there's one person who's good we won't destroy the city it goes down to 10. okay no no that's important one dozen suffice okay but there isn't there is a yes there's a there's a notion there that it's the outlier that saves every civilization right it is the great lesson of our time you're an outlier it's not it's not even it's a statement of fact not even a compliment it is a compliment but it's not meant to such outliers do all the good that is done some outliers do evil but all the good that is done is done by outliers well and that's the tension between the law and the pro the law when it becomes corrupt and the prophetic tradition that Echoes through the Old Testament and then up into the New Testament too because the law from a tradition perspective turns into various shades of Egypt and then it's always a prophetic figure that comes up and shakes his fist and and right in the face of the king that happens most particularly in the case of David right when he's called on his sins because he takes Bathsheba which is a really low act right I mean he sees this woman bathing naked on the roof of a nearby house and then he sends her husband who's a great General into battle to have him killed it's like that's pretty damn twisted and pathetic and and then one of the prophets whose name I don't remember at the moment calls him on it it's Nathan is it Nathan yeah which is pretty brave right I mean he's a he's a Mideast potentate you don't just walk into his castle and tell him that he's cursed by God with without some fear for your neck and so and you see this just continually this dichotomy between the corruption of tradition and the emergence of a prophetic figure who's in principle has has this inspiration from God and and the weight of his words is what indicates that that's the case very Dennis you didn't quite say it and I would never dare say it as a Christian but I've heard Jews say that one reason for the answer question you raised was the Israel and Israel is now a nation recognized by the world I've heard it all of my life and I and I have to say that it depicts God to my way of thinking in an awful way the ends don't justify them well the ends do sometimes justify means but yes we we murdered a million Jewish babies and we tortured and humiliated and degraded five million others in order to produce Israel i i as a Jew would say I think I'm going to opt for another group yeah yeah that's not the God that I understand yeah that's Ivan's comment in the brothers karamazov too when he takes on eliosha you know he said you the the his point in some sense he talks about this girl who's frozen to death by her parents as she's screaming in an outhouse which is a story that Dostoevsky took from the news it's actually happened so she screamed all night froze to death and Ivan says he can't believe in a God that would allow that to happen even once no matter what the reason was well that that's not what I'm saying I believe in a God who allows evil to happen that's not what you were challenging God created the evil to do the good of the creation of Israel that I I don't accept that God allows evil is a given yeah well it's a it's a consequence of of Free Will yes exactly yes I think I thought about that a lot too because you can imagine a world imagine a world that's the best world possible just as a as a game in some sense not that we can really do that but then you might ask yourself is a world where you could choose evil but choose not to better than a world where you're a robot who has no choice and I think the answer to that I mean if you think about your own children you want this vast expanse of possibility for them and the vast or that expansive possibility the more real the possibility of evil choices is but what they get out of that is the benefit of the actual choice so they have a real Destiny right they're wrestling with real things and they can choose not to engage in evil so it could be not there although it's but if it's going to exist in real possibility it also has to be an actualizable possibility and so it could be that a world where evil is possible but they're not chosen is better than a world where even doesn't exist at all that's why I've always been suspicious of people saying about a dog such a good dog has he chosen his goodness yeah surely a world of which there's a possibility of doing good and bringing about generating value is is a world that is that is better than a world in which that's simply not possible at all well that that's the question isn't it that's and in some sense that's the fundamental question because it's one thing to wrestle with the reality of tragedy but it's a whole different thing to wrestle with the reality of malevolence and you might say well why would God create a world where the snake in the garden let's say uh why would God allow a world where evil existed to exist as a possibility and it could be easily that the good that is there as a consequence of the breadth of possibility supersedes the evil of the of the possibility of malevolence plus it also gives people some real thing to wrestle with right is that whatever human beings are we have a heavy load it's it's a load that in Christianity is associated in some sense with divinity right because God becomes mortal man and so it's a real what we're contending with is is real in the most fundamental sense and that means it's not trivial we can get into real trouble and of course the Holocaust that was real trouble and and so that's also it's a very peculiar idea but it's also some evidence of the I don't know respect that whatever created us has for us that we actually have a real Destiny and in the broadest possible sense I suppose you can you can say that it's simply it's just not possible to bring about a world in which benevolence is possible where there isn't a genuine risk of malevolence as well well maybe it's not possible it may be but so then you might think that the optimal solution is where great evil is possible but freely rejected and that would be the best of all possible worlds and I do believe that's the case and I certainly see this is part of the jungian idea of incorporating the shadow I suppose which is also that this capacity that we have within us which is a predatory capacity this capacity for great evil and for brutality and and for strength all of that makes us much more than we would be if we can harness that for good then we would be if we were just harmless rabbits for example you know not to denigrate rabbits they're perfectly lovely but but you get that you get the picture and the best people I know have been the people who you know have absolute capacity for Mayhem if Unleashed but choose no not to unleash in fact to harness it for purposes of the good so now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father-in-law the priest of Midian another indication of him being subservient to an ethical structure outside both Egyptian and the Hebrew structure there because he's serving this priest of Midian and tending his flock very that oh that also makes Moses a figure that transcends the parochial confines of his culture another indication of that and he led the flock to the back side of the desert and came to the Mountain of God even to Horeb and so God here is associated with the mountain and so you can Riff on that and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire this compelling and attractive phenomena fire phenomenon out of the midst of a bush and he looked and behold the bush burned with fire and the Bush was not consumed that's the symbol Jews often use for the Jewish people where I always burned but were not consumed yeah when the question is in this situation like that just exactly what's being burned away you know I mean one of the reasons that the Transcendent is terrifying and why people purified themselves for example before they engaged in psychedelic experiences historically was because if they got too close to the fire the burning that that produced was so intense that it might be of mortal danger you know if you're 95 dead wood and you get too close to the fire all that dead wood should go but it might be fatal so you were mentioning the whole heroic side of Faith or I think you were in fact um there's also this terrifying aspect of the deity linked to Transcendence and the absoluteness the mysterium tremendous as Auto described it this this um this mystery that is both repelling because it's terrifying and at the same time attractive um and I think that that that was well we get some Echoes of that I would say in in contact with things of great Beauty the European Cathedrals are like that they're I was in one in Vienna recently that had three floors of of plague bones underneath it and so it's This Magnificent structure too much really when when you walk in and it's overwhelming in its power and to see that you know people sacrificed hundreds of years of effort under conditions of extreme privation to build these magnificent buildings and then to go underneath and see the layers and layers and layers of catastrophe and death that that's been erected on it's it's too much right it's it's just too much and that's just an echo of what is too much in the most fundamentally absolute sense it's just a pointer in that direction people are terrified of Beauty for the same reason you know I've watched people respond to Art I had a lot of paintings in my house at one point they're all coming back now like 300 of them you know it was just paintings everywhere and people would come in and say well why would you want to live in a museum and I'd think well that's exactly where I want to live why would you not want to live but it was too much the paintings a lot of them were paintings of warfare scenes and like it they were beautiful but in this but they weren't nice it wasn't elevator music you know and you look at those things and and they they Shake all the weakness off of you if you look at them long enough and that's very frightening especially if there's lots of weakness and there definitely is so it's interesting they notice in our culture where you might say there's been a systematic ideological process of desecration that there's also been an aversion to Beauty yeah I mean that's not accidental the philosopher Roger scrutin generica right the spread of they are exactly the spread of these cookie cutter suburbs everywhere that have this incredibly they're efficient in some sense and they're convenient but they're just hideous and they have this very short-term element and yeah and you see this contempt for that too it's really terrifying to see it in in Europe because as a North American especially Canadian going to Europe has this element of pilgrimage to beauty and you go I saw this in Edinburgh in particular although they're fixing it Edinburgh the whole downtown core one square miles the UNESCO world heritage site and no wonder because Edinburgh like it's beautiful and then intermingled with these mostly Victorian buildings if I remember correctly were these hideous catastrophes erected in the 1970s this brutalist modernist abortion this these giant middle fingers you know to the entire context and to their credit the people of Edinburgh are tearing them down and my mentor Peter burga has a notion signals of transcendence some are positive beauty or cslow's surprised by Joy some are negative like the olden one this to me is the ultimate signal the Transcendence ever because if you look at Burning it must end in ashes can you think about look away from fire either like you can't step in the same river twice you just go that way you'd end up with a Hindu view of Maya and the world's unreal and yet no here's something burning but not burned up right that's us man well no no there's something Beyond us and and he's arrested he sees it and then he seeks for the explanation and immediately he encounters the Lord and that's why Dennis you're the Jews themselves are the ultimate because of your survival despite persecution despite you shouldn't be here some some shouldn't just forgive me forgive me I'm thinking of Trotsky and the like I just there so yeah well to jump unimpressive dudes to jump from the hip right to to the Hellenic that's not far off the way Plato uses the image of fire in his famous image of the cave in book Seven of of the Republic you know the Flames are flickering but that's not all there is there's Transcendence Beyond there's the sunlight the stable Timeless sunlight outside the cave which the sort of chaotic fire of the sensory world and the fickle world the ever-changing world is it but it's a it's a signal of transcendence as Burger puts it and it's it's an interesting interesting sort of consonance there well fire fire is also this mysterium tremendous tremendous that you described because I think biologically and I'll think about this from an evolutionary perspective we're all descendants of the first proto-human chimpanzee analog who absolutely 100 percent could not stop looking at fire right and fire is absolutely fascinating to human beings it's so interesting to watch people around the campfire for example where we feel at home we gaze into the fire and the fire seems to me to be something that escapes what's called latent inhibition is that almost everything we see after we've seen it multiple times we see as a representation of memory we don't see the thing itself but fire is one of those things that escapes that and we see fire as something that's constantly new plus it's always constantly changing and we cannot look away from it just like we can't look away from little children and we can't look away from sexual Beauty these things all escape the tyranny of our conceptualization so I just wanted to say something about these two to me when these these two texts when you weared before in this one is really one of the most a very beautiful description of reality based a little bit on what you were saying before because you have it says and God heard the groaning and remembered his Covenant with Abraham with Isaac and with Jacob first of all this is also referring to Genesis at the end of the flood because that's what the flood ends the flood ends it says God remembered Noah and when God remembers Noah the waters recede and then the the dove finds the Tree finds the structure that's that that connects Heaven and Earth that's that's what the the the dove finds and so you have this verse but right there it says he remembered his Covenant with Abraham Isaac and Jacob and for the first time you have this hierarchy again coming back saying he's God is already giving back the identity to his people he's already saying it's like there's the it's not just God and Chaos it's there's this whole story that's there and he's and he's he's going to give it back to to to his people and then when you when Moses so is that Jacob's Ladder do you think is that definitely true it's definitely Jacob's Ladder the mountain and the Tabernacle itself when we get the Tabernacle the sea it's a representation of Moses his Mountain itself or the mountain of paradise itself so then Moses right after that you have Moses what happens he comes out of the desert come to a mountain and in that mountain now he sees this flaming Bush he has to remove his sandals he enters into the Sacred Space the Sacred Space is the the the text at least I know San Gregory Nisa really insists on how the bush is a Bramble Bush it's a thorn bush and and that's the you can see that's the fullness of everything because the Thorns are the consequence of the foe the Thorns are what God gives us the consequence of sin and now here is this thorn bush which is full of light but is not consumed and that's the thing that's what God gives us it's like reality can exist in all its multiplicity knowledge Beauty and we don't as Christians and people also in the Hebrew tradition we don't have this idea that the world is an illusion that the world is just just has to be gotten rid of and we just need to get to the to Nirvana or whatever we have the sense that the world is full of of God's presence and it's a gift right it's good that's what it says at the beginning of Genesis I think that that's what we're seeing here is this this this this God is present in the world God is manifesting himself to Moses but he's not consuming it it's it's continuously continuing to exist in its even in its participation in God now I've read that the uh so Moses has to take his sandals off to go to to do this I read that that's also his and this is on commentary on the Torah that he was forgo any claim to ownership of the land on upon which he stood there were there were ancient Hebrew Traditions about taking ownership of land that had to do with being shawed and so to take off the shoes meant to approach the Transcendent in a humble way with no claim to possession and that that seems to me and the shoes of course are symbols of identity Tammy my wife she had dreams all the time where shoes represent her current identity and so all right and the angel of Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush and he looked and behold the bush burned with fire and the Bush was not consumed this is at least a great mystery and Moses said I will now turn aside and see this great sight why the bush is not burnt and when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see God called him unto him out of the midst of the Bush and said Moses Moses and Moses said here am I and he said draw not nigh hi hither put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place where the only redundancy in God's entire dialogue in the Bible is take your shoes off your feet meaningless point but I just I've always gotten a kick out of it where are else are your shoes if not on your feet is that in the Hebrew yes yes it struck me as a kid where else are his shoes well also it also it also means well it also means I think that that God is insisting that in some real sense Moses stands unprotected and naked in front of him and and because to take off your shoes is and to reveal your feet that might account for why that emphasis is there right right and so it's defeat and not the shoes and the shoes are definitely I mean they're a fundamental element of culture they Shield us from our contact with the ground but they also in some real sense Elevate us above the ground right that's the danger of shoes we're no longer in contact with the Earth there's a there's a lack of humility by putting on that those garments of skin and we feel I think the best way to understand this taxes as a Return to Eden and so in order to Return to Eden right he has to remove his garments of skin and it's like but what's crazy is the surprise is like he removes his guards the skin of the surprise is to see the thorn bush in flame it's like what a crazy mystery like what a well and it okay well that's an echo then too of the notion that in order to encounter the Transcendent in the most real sense you have to absolutely and 100 percent accept your naked vulnerability and you think well that's self-evident when you think it through because how else could you adapt to life in the most fundamental sense without simultaneously accepting the fact that you're ultimately right naked and vulnerable You're ultimately that because you're prone to Insanity you're prone to tyranny and you're prone to death that's there isn't any more ultimate on the human plane than that and so if you can't adapt to that and accept it then you can't adapt to or accept life so you think that's a big reason any of you why so many people have rejected God they're not prepared to accept their vulnerability oh I don't know I'm truly asking I I had not thought of it in this way well I think that I think that the rejection in some sense of the travails of the Saints and the prophets and the and the crucifix is definitely its rejection of the catastrophe of mortality because all of those Traditions call on us and and you see this as a clinician one of the things that clinicians learned across all the different schools of Clinical Psychology was that the more radically you accept the necessity of confronting what you're terrified of and wish to avoid the higher the probability that you'll move forward and recover and we don't know the limit to that right and the Christian question in some real sense is the limit to that it's like well how deep into the abyss do you have to look and the answer is not only into death but beyond death into hell because if death is what terrifies you the most you know nothing about hell because there are many things worse than death and so the call is to gaze into the abyss as far down as as it goes and that's all the way to the bottom about basic state of vulnerability of fragility it does conjure up a sense of finitude I think in in The Human Experience finitutes and and dependence and and a sense of a sense of lack a sense that we are not in the end Masters and captains of our soul that we require some other an orientation to something greater something on on which we do depend yeah absolutely and also I think we have a particular crisis at the moment I think we can see this in the universities with the so-called Mental Health crisis and it's linked to this assumption that human beings should be happy and if they're not there's something wrong with them and and our ancestors uh grew up with the tenet that life is extremely difficult and that the a path to happiness is is extremely demanding and also unbelievably unlikely right and you should be grateful when it comes along but by no means expect it and then they had a noble Vision too on the Roman and the Greek and the Hebrew front which was not so much hedonic happiness which is very trivial and solution says well that disappears when you first hear the boots kicking down your door at three in the morning it's like so much for happiness that's gone and then what do you have and well that was Frankel's question so Nixon's question and and part of the answer to that is in the face of privation and Terror and tragedy and malevolence you have the Great Adventure of your life and one of the things that I think is true is that you find that Adventure in truth because truth is an adventure and it might be enough of an adventure it might be enough of an adventure to justify the catastrophe and malevolence of life and I wonder whether the erosion of certain basic rituals is also generating a lot of problems I mean a trivialid about not trivial example but but uh uh uh and one that comes to my mind was a death in college about 20 years ago of a uh a brilliant young student uh who was hit by a car crossing the road uh in the college and the I I noticed that the students the 18 19 year old students were completely thrown by this and partly it emerged they hadn't been to funerals their parents hadn't taken them along to shelter them to protect them from suffering and they'd say as good parents they would not allow their children to be subjected to funerals as if the funerals might be damaging them now what I noticed was in fact that you had adults I mean young adults highly intelligent adults who were completely disorientated and distraught by death and I I think to some extent because the rituals yeah well there's no container for it well my wife remembers when she was five her grandfather died and they didn't take her to the funeral now my wife's parents by the way were very good at fostering Independence but they didn't take her to the funeral and she's she was shocked by that and never forgot it and I think the reason was is that the message there is that death itself is so terrifying that there's no way a child can apprehend it or bear up under it and that better not be the case because that's life death and so if that's the case then life is too much and so what you do is you bring the child to the funeral to show that so when my wife's mother died we were there for her death and uh it was terrible death she had a neurological disease a degenerative neurological disease a dementia so it went she deteriorated over about 15 years and first of all her husband Rose to the challenge man it was something to see because he was sort of a man about town but when the chips were down God he was there and it was something man and then I watched her family deal with this they're pretty tough my wife's sister is a palliative care nurse and other sisters a pharmacist and they've they've confronted mortality you know in a noble sense and what happened in that family was that as they mutually faced death together and this is also what you do at a funeral is the the bonds that attach them to each other grew stronger and thicker and so that well they suffered the loss of their mother which was a genuine loss they were compensated for it in a real sense by the increase in love between them and I would say their family in the aftermath of their mother's death death was much closer and tighter than it was before and you know you can't say well that made it good because that's a cheap out you know but you can bloody well say that it made it a lot less like hell than it had to be and so these containing rituals your children are a lot tougher than people think and you need to take them to a funeral so that they can see that the adults I'm going to be like Dad and look he can stand up in the face of death maybe even in the face of the death of his father and he can still move forward and God you better learn that because it's coming down the pipelines but the text is I mean the text is this text is precisely such a ritual right I mean this isn't a live stream of History right this is a text written to convey you might say the order in history or Gods the Transcendent order in history and to bring us into that history and so you know when you talk about the the ritual of the funeral for example that's a ritual to help you understand the horror of death and to in some sense redeem it at least from the point of view of your own self-consciousness to be able to understand it and so I think you know when when we're when you see these moments that refer to God remembering his Covenant and so on this is this is in a way showing us that the the text is itself a liturgical creation of our own subjectivity our own memories such that we can make sense of our lives here and now well I just want to ask Jordan a question you're it intrigued me what you said about your mother's father he really it was a volvy ball and then Rose to the challenge so I want to ask you a question prior to the challenge would be what would you have predicted his behavior would have been well I always liked him and admired him but he was a man about town you know extroverted guy so I I I had to pass the test and and you would have predicted he would have passed the test not to the degree that he did it was right so here's my question and it's really uh I I wrestled with it I don't have an answer I'm curious to hear anyone on this do we know people before they have been tested no not really so we don't know ourselves either and this is a very very interesting uh question because life in America at least from World War II to the last till 2010 even years ago was quite easy for the vast majority of its citizens by any reasonable history exactly yeah Butch is the only standard obviously so it's is it fair to say we don't know the moral caliber of most of the people living in America because the the I think people have been tested in the last two years and I think half of my fellow citizens failed dismally especially doctors I might add and uh Hemingway who said that every generation needs a war to sort out what's important and well it's a very dark thought yes well it's more maybe while William James would have said something like a war or its moral equivalent and and that was something James yeah well because you have to well that's what I'm referring to it's yeah exactly yeah exactly so it's interesting do do we even know ourselves till we're tested I don't I don't think so well I think you can make a case for this biologically here's here's a case this is quite interesting so you might ask why do you grow when you go somewhere new and there's two answers to that one is you go there and you you gather more information you talk to new people you see new things and so you can think about that as a constructivist response right your your Web of Knowledge adaptive knowledge increases because you've been more places but that's not all that happens if you go somewhere new and you expose yourself to a challenge then new genes the genes that haven't turned on to encode certain proteins turn on and they flesh out your the your psychophysiological structure and you could even imagine imagine that you decided to take on a new challenge voluntarily so that'd be part of the heroic Journey then your bio biology is going to respond to that right down to the genetic level and it's going to reveal new potential that's coded inside the genetic structure that's going to make you literally more than you are and there's this idea that Jung talked about in relationship to the um the maze in the shark Cathedral so imagine you go into this Maze and then you walk the four quadrants and then you come to the center and the four quadrants are the four corners of the world and you have to pass through all the four corners of the world before you come to the center and the idea there is that you have to hit yourself against all the sharp edges of the world before the full potential of what you are is Manifest and that well that has something to do I would say also with the idea of the harrowing of hell is that you have to face death and you have to face tyranny and you have to face malevolence and so that's hell at that point and the deeper you peer into that abyss and the more strenuously you wrestle without the more of you turns on and so and I think that's I think that's how and then you also think well how could it be any other way why would what was within you manifest itself fully in the absence of challenge nothing works that way you don't get stronger without lifting weights so then that leads to another question how many people putting aside an easy Society how many people lead a life devoid of challenges well pretty pretty small they just don't they don't acknowledge that them as challenges and therefore don't need to pass the test well or they're they're resentful and bitter about their problems and opportunities the age we live in yeah if I'm challenged it's it's the fault of someone yeah well and people are enticed to believe that but what I've been so hardened by and one of the things that people have been responding to in relationship to what I've been lecturing about as a clinician I would say is when you confront young people this is especially being true of young men with the notion that what they should do is strive to Bear up underneath the heaviest responsibility they can shoulder voluntarily they're unbelievably receptive to that idea and and and and it's so interesting to watch because it's almost as if all you have to do is introduce the idea assuming you're vaguely credible all you have to do is introduce the idea and it's like it's like a crystal in the in a supersaturated solution it just goes no one ever told me that and one of the things that's been deeply sorrowful for me is to see how much effect those ideas have on people how quickly and the reason it's sorrowful is because you simultaneously see how much of a lack there is of that idea in our current culture so but I think people are there for the call man and lots of them especially young people on that sort of cusp of Messianic development in late adolescence you know when the when the radicals can get a hold of them and make them resentful and bitter if you offer a better pathway forward which is something like bear up voluntarily under the catastrophe of life because you have something to offer right that's there's this idea and the biblical idea that in in some sense God says this I think he says it to Moses later that maybe it's in the gospels that it's required that all of the ramifications of the law manifest themselves it's like a holy requirement and the idea there is something like and this is a really terrifying metaphysical idea it's like why is there suffering in the world why is there malevolence in the world well maybe it's because we're not all we could be and maybe it's incumbent on each of us and I really mean each of us to reveal everything that is within us and if we revealed everything that was within us and that would happen as a consequence of this voluntary ethical striving if we revealed everything within us God only knows how much hell we could dispense with because we have no idea what things could be like if everyone was 100 percent aiming up this might be forgive me for I just want to say this is so important I think uh so I remember in high school I started an anti-cheebing campaign in my in my grade and I remember vividly the this is really triggering things at me the biggest reason I I did I had I had cheated on some tests in elementary school and but the biggest reason I I didn't in high school was not God was not particularly involved in my decision which he would have been more so later in moral decisions I I wanted to pass the test of not cheating right right I'm I'm just thinking literally for the first time maybe that's another good method of getting people to do what is good past tests past challenges yeah well you know there is speculation you know there's this obviously this this scene in job where God Bets with the devil which is a hell of a thing to do it's like you're gonna bet with the devil and the idea is that you can tempt job out of his moral position and what's God up to and I had a vision about that at one time about God presenting man with a with the most vicious adversary possible and you might think well why would someone do that and the answer is something like well if you know that The Entity that you're setting the forces of Hell against in some real sense can triumph over that then the positioning of the adversary is actually a call to a greater good and I think I I can't help but think that that's correct because I can't see how what is best can be called out of us without us being confronted simultaneously by what is worse worst but I hope I'm not being pasted by saying that's important but it's a kind of mid-level test of growth so you've mentioned responsibility or reaching our full potential of Who We Are you can do that in various ways but many of them are truly some self-help goes some way towards that I think what you see here the call of Moses or the call of Abraham or the call of lots of people in the scripture the highest responsibility of all is responding in faith to God's calls right by definition by definition the highest fulfillment I actually dislike my own name intensely but I was named after a writer whose most famous book is called My Utmost for His Highest right right right and that's right well that's the problem of the church that's calling right I don't think this anyhow you write a book on calling any higher version of that well and here's some here's something that's relevant to that too so I know neural pharmacologically I studied pleasure as a biological mechanism and the intense pleasure that's associated with joy and enthusiasm so enthusiasm is to be filled with God Theos and Theos it's so it's to be filled with the spirit of God you do not experience joy as a consequence of achieving a goal you experience joy as a consequence of positing a goal and then noting progress towards the goal and so a corollary of that is that the higher the goal the more intense The Joy attendant on observation of progress towards it and so then you might say if you wanted to maximize the possibility of hedonic expression not not to degenerate into a cheap Hedonism but to maximize it in the most real sense and this is a Victor Frankl idea in some fundamental senses you pick the most noble possible goal and that is that's the mountain that service to God again by definition right because it's service to the highest thing whatever that is and then that opens the door that doesn't literally open the door to the it's a precondition for the experience of joy and so these people who are depressed and anxious and miserable part of the reason for that is that their their ethic is scattered their goals are diverse and low level there's nothing beckoning in the distance and so they can't see progress because there's no progress and certainly not progress to assert superordinate goal so there's actually no positive emotion and that's technically the case because the positive a motion system is a calibration system that produces navigation orientation towards destination Point that's literally how it functions so I think you just described the whole book of Exodus just right there like that's right really what Exodus is right well that's the scattered mixed multitude that is gathered into uh and it can experience that in yourself as much as in the people or anything actually functions that way you can identify whether there's no vision of people parachutes are the cultural norms are so well it's overrated it's also the danger of dispensing with an ideal you know because the problem with ideals is that I every ideal is a judge so the ideal of beauty is a judge because who of us compares to the ideal beauty and the answer is no one and we all know it and so the ideal is the catastrophe in that sense the Raging Fire that can consume you yes exactly exactly but if there's no ideal there's no goal and if there's no well then there's no joy and so so what are we going to do we're going to dispense with our ideals so so we don't hurt anybody's feelings and what we're going to dispense well that's exactly what we're being called upon to do and so we're going to abandon joy and you do unless you have the the ultimately judgmental ideal it's so perverse unless you have the ultimately judgmental ideal there's no precondition for joy go back to Stephen's thing about the funeral and the reality which the history and I was psychology and lots of things you can throw incredible interpretive light but the highest thing here is that God is the actor in this and it happens in history so the surrounding Nations all their festivals were festivals of nature spring and so on the Jewish festivals are festivals of history and they're taught to follow them as if they were there maybe centuries later in other words we've got to keep always that history is the decisive thing here and in light of History you bring in Psychology I happen to be trained sociology bring it in but history and meeting God you're into pretty heavy philosophy yeah you see here too that what's put in the highest place which is so fascinating is the spirit that calls you to Freedom out of tyranny right as we said before even if it calls you into the desert to begin with and so it's quite the conceptualization of God is that part of whatever is to be properly put in the highest place is exactly the spirit that calls you out of tyranny and so all right well let's finish off this chapter and and he said draw not nigh hi hither this is God talking put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place where on thou standest is Holy Ground again I'm reminded of the fact that this is likely something like a call to humility I was looking at The Sermon on the Mount the other day and Christ says in The Sermon on the Mount that those who are poor in spirit are blessed there's many people who are blessed but the poor in spirit are blessed and the question is what does that mean and it means something like those who have been brought low enough to be humble enough to be ready to receive and I think that's what's being echoed here is that that's part of the reflection of Moses the explanation I ever heard well thank you thank you it took me only 40 years to think about it that that really helps because I've never thought oh the poor are so special they're yeah it's definitely a reference to Pride the poor in spirit are not prideful and narcissistic I looked in Bible Hub which is a great site you can see 50 translations simultaneously and so you get the full connotation of the phrase and if you look at all the different translations you can see that it's definitely it's definitely a call to this this particular kind of humility because one of the things I learned when I was teaching my course maps of meaning was that you could decide that you were going to be friends with what you knew or you could be friends with what you didn't know right and and so if you're friends with what you know you try to prove your point all the time and I'll fall prey to that from time to time but once you realize the depths of your ignorance and you think well what I don't know is inexhaustible and my troubles are inexhaustible so I better have an inexhaustible source to call on and I can certainly call on the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance and that such and that Sid reverses everything because all of a sudden the fact that you don't know is actually your greatest hope because there's always the possibility that if you lowered yourself Jung said Modern Men do not see God because they do not look low enough it's so brilliant and if if you can if you can make friends with your own ignorance then you open up the landscape of Revelation to everything you don't know well that's so good if you have a problem because the reason you have a problem is because you don't know something and so this is definitely an injunction there is that the place where on thou standest is Holy Ground And if you're on Holy Ground and maybe you're always on Holy Ground you should have your damn shoes off and your eyes open and yeah well that'd be a terrifying thing too to uh to apprehend all right gentlemen that was that was that was a good start well these were tough these were tough ones wait till the 10 commandments until tomorrow good thank you thank you you can imagine in some sense that what Moses is having here when he encounters the burning bush is something like an aesthetic experience right it's profoundly attractive at least perhaps it's not beautiful but perhaps it is and so that beauty is calling to him and calls him into a relationship that then transforms itself into something Transcendent but he's also prepared for that characterologically the the killing of the the Hebrew children you have to understand it almost as if they're all dead except for Moses all the males have been killed except for Moses there's just one it's a reduction that's right it means his equal it's never translated correctly right the Hebrew is a helpmate who is equal to him [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 2,928,497

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: GEASnFvLxhU

Length: 139min 24sec (8364 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023