The 10 Plagues of Egypt | Biblical Series: Exodus Episode 4

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 [Music] hello everyone watching and listening we're on day four of the Exodus seminar I brought a number of people together to walk through Exodus partly in preparation for a series of public lectures I want to give next year I'll just briefly introduce everyone and we'll jump into Exodus 7 because that's where we closed off yesterday on my right it's Jonathan pajo Stephen Blackwood Dennis Prager Greg hurwitz James Orr Oz Guinness and Douglas Headley a very good collection of thinkers and and rat Contours and uh we'll jump right into the to the text again Exodus 7. and the Lord said unto Moses see I have made thee a God to pharaoh and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet Thou shalt speak all that I command thee and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh that he sent the children of Israel out of his land and a mysterious part of the text I will harden Pharaoh's heart and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt but Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you that I may lay my hand upon Egypt and bring forth mine armies and my people the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by great judgments so God in some sense here is revealing a an overarching plan that's going to cause a fair bit of trouble for both the Israelites and the fair and the Egyptians while certainly in the Pharaoh in the meantime and the Egyptian shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them and Moses and Aaron did as the Lord commanded them so did they and Moses was four score years old and Aaron Four score and three years old when they spake unto pharaoh and the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron saying when Pharaoh shall speak unto you she's saying show a miracle for you then Thou shalt say unto Aaron take thy rod and cast it before pharaoh and she'll become a serpent and Moses and Aaron went in unto pharaoh and they did so as the Lord had commanded and Aaron cast down his Rod before pharaoh and before his servants and it became a serpent then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers Now The Magicians of Egypt they also did so in like manner with their enchantments for they cast down every man his rod and they became serpents but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods now there's an echo there I want to talk about the hardening of the heart issue but there's an echo there in 712. Aaron's Rod is the staff of there and the tradition of Aaron it's it's it's it's power and state in some sense handed down from God through Moses to Aaron and the idea that that rod devoured all the serpents and rods that the Egyptians could produce is an indication that that tradition and power is superordinate yes yes and so and what do you so what do you make of that Jonathan what do you make of the again of the hardening of the heart because it's a tricky part of the text right it's like why would God make the Pharaoh even more tyrannical than he otherwise would when he could do the opposite in principle well I think first of all you've got it right I think that that's exactly what hardening of the heart is because we have to understand the idea of the heart the notion of the heart is the center the center of the person remember when Moses put his hand out and then brought it back to the middle and bringing it back to the Middle with the healing of the hand and so the idea of hardening of the heart is very interesting because turning the center it's right that's right exactly we tend to think of the center as being good and many we're right but there's a manner in which the center the the identity of something can become tyrannical so in hardening of the heart then we see the Pharaoh become more to radical it helps us see that that's what it is it's actually it's so the the what the the Pharaoh would need would actually be of some water would be a bit of snake a bit of flexibility for his for to be able to see the change that's coming but because his heart is so hard he can't see what's going on right right so he won't change that is very reminiscent of a totalitarian threat exactly so that the borders that there's another uh do you want to say something all right so the uh yeah there's another different uh read on on the hardening which by the way is all alternates with strengthening the both verbs are used he strengthened Pharaoh's heart and hardened Pharaoh's heart and I accept the following explanation which I think was first given by maimonides not by me I would like credit for it but I can't take it by doing this God gave Pharaoh freedom of choice if I twist your arm and then you do what I asked you to do you didn't do it willingly right so even the Tyrant is allowed by God to have his freedom of you absolutely so God strengthened his heart and did did not make the plagues the reason that Pharaoh did what he did he made him strong enough to withstand the plagues and do what he really wanted to do which is not allow the Israelites to leave that makes so much more sense doesn't it it makes sense because the heart is the seat of the will in in Hebrew thinking is that his seat of the mind as well so that that fits nicely it goes with the center ideas right so it's not as if God is overriding pharah's will but guaranteeing it right right so he's going to let the Tyrant play out the role of tyrant fully some Rabbi say he's a top pharise at the top of his game until the end right okay Cosmic elements and the full contest right so okay so then John's point you also have I mean the Pharaoh hardens his heart in the first five plagues it only says the Lord does it in the last five not in the first five none was by that stage he needed help to have a yeah have a strengthened them it's partly people being left to the consequence of their own choices I think Augustine says something similar doesn't he he says you know I I the god hardens Pharaoh's heart just means God shows how hard Pharaoh's heart really is what it Reveals His True will it also makes sense that if this story is going to have an archetypal role in some sense the Tyrant has to be the real thing right and so he's really tyrannical to begin with and then like tyrants he actually doubles down which is exactly what they do and so if he wasn't like super Tyrant this wouldn't be the ultimate story of of of freedom from tyranny and so from a certain narrative perspective it's not that interesting if he's you know immediately won over by frogs right it's like there has to be a process right given the course right I mean given given the the degree and extent of his sort of deprivations or his his dehumanization uh of the Israelites there has to be a process it can't it can't be easy right right I have a very quick question does anyone know and I imagine this is a dentist question why why are some of the verbs italicized and the nouns I mean just specific words or italicized in the text and others aren't and it seems somewhat arbitrary does anyone have an explanation for that show me that would be in the King James yeah I don't I'm I'm using so give me an example of an italicized Pharaoh's heart is hard end the is is italicized that's very uh there must be a reason yeah foreign italicization it really has no Rhyme or Reason to it I mean that's that's that's the best answer possible I don't know it looks like an overwrought screenplay like if you're an amateur screenwriter and they put everything in caps like to make the action verbs or a YouTube commenter you can tell this is important because it's in caps and it's bold plus they're excellent exclamation points right exactly the Emojis are also puzzling but we can deal with that there's also a sense I think in which you know in in the largest sense here the hardening of the heart in verse 3 uh heart fails heart and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt so it's it's Pharaoh's hardening of his heart that you might say allows for the glory of God to be shown forth and in a certain sense of what's being revealed to the Israelites is is is God as the the fundamental principles of the real itself what it means it's not resisting that I mean it's of course we know that our hearts are hard now this is we're just talking about covet a second ago in the insane covet regulation the ramping up of these things if it's not as though those things happen without consequence right I mean those things as those things are themselves subject to the re to the deeper order According to which you know we will judge them whether we're shutter to the theaters or the economy tanks or whatever so yes you can Harden the heart and double down and ramp up the regulations but not also be immune from the deeper structures to which your subjects go ahead verse 7 before we pass on I I love the Hebrew sense of time and here you have this wonderful Moses was 80. no John could tell us the significance of 80 but what's significant for me is that in the scriptures the heroes are often introduced with their age at the very moment they do the thing they're called to do so Joseph is described as 30 when he stands before the Pharaoh and everything is built up to that and here's Moses now he's before the pharaoh he's 80. now you could tell us the thing I'm not sure what the symbolism of 80 is but I know for sure there's an interesting many of the characters are quite old and it's pretty astounding to have Abraham be so old when the story is happening oh you almost have to remind yourself of how old they are when you're reading the story because you know what Moses is doing is not with that imagine 80 years is it better late than never is it something like that well I think in the case of of Moses there has there's that whole process of of of escaping Egypt he you can understand that in a way Moses goes through a process personally of what then Israel will go through later he's like a little microcosm of the whole story but the one thing that I want to point out in terms of the hardening of the heart as well which interesting enough because one of the structures that I've been seeing in this in this in this text is also related to the Tower of Babel because the the plagues are an undoing of creation well look at it there are other aspects to it but one of them is definitely an undoing of creation but before for that there comes the The Tyranny there comes the and there's something about the fact that in the Tower of Babel you know God comes down and says like they're going to do their will and then God undoes it and that you see that something like that it's like the Pharaoh will do his will but it's not going to succeed because his will is so tyrannical that it actually calls upon it's brittle it becomes brittle ultimately the other thing for me that's so interesting with the rod swallowing the other rods right of showing the the dominance of the of of the Israelite God but the plagues themselves are like from a narrative structural perspective what's so amazing is is they individually decimate all the Egyptian gods symbolically right because all of the plagues are tied to an Egyptian god of one sort or another so like the rod slowing the other rods right it's it's he comes in and it's another reason why the heart has to be strengthened or hardened because it has to go through and clean out all the other gods right one by one it's a great it's a great sort of so it's a re-representation of the idea of the Battle of Gods in heaven and the emergence of the of the of the dominant God so to speak a movement towards monotheism so and you get this this it's uh foreshadowing here again that um even though the Pharaoh can call on his wise men like God has called on Moses and Aaron and even though the wise men and the sorcerers and The Magicians can bring out the rods and turn them into serpents which in some sense means Pharaoh can call in a power that's equivalent to the power God can call on then God trumps him with the victory of Aaron's Rod over it's a deliberate parallelism it just illuminates by contrast the strength and Glory of of God right well also not demeaning the Pharaoh it's like he's got some tricks too and they're not trivial yeah yeah and that'll go on all through the plagues you see the same structure where The Magicians actually perform the same plague so it it's definitely in there but only in the first two yeah and then after that it's like they run out of steam that's right and what's interesting would jump ahead of it but they drop out with the Nets and the fleas Egypt is Monumental gigantic statues incredible pyramids what they're beaten by is a flea um there's a great joke coming up and I'm like okay okay good I just want to make one point about uh I didn't want to interrupt while you were reading uh very very important in my opinion it says and and Aaron will be your Prophet right you just read that so I don't know why it happened but it was a terrible mistake and I love King James version I'm glad you're using it I love it and that is the Hebrew does not mean Prophet the Hebrew means spokesman and I don't know why Prophet was used Prophet conjures up person who tells the future that's the last role basically of prophets they're all God spokesmen and that's exactly here he's not going to be a prophet he's going to be the spokesman so just know that it's that Navi is the Hebrew word and it doesn't mean one who tells the future it means spokesman yeah but I think in most Christian traditions we we there's a more subtle understanding of what a prophet is as well because even we know that the judges are prophets that that it's just basically people who manifest the will of God in the world vernacular right but that spokesman been used always rather than prosperous [Music] I think means to literally just speak out to Proclaim yeah and so maybe that was that's interesting yeah oh fantastic it doesn't just mean a predictor but one who declares speaks out became predictor but it wasn't original that's good I'm glad to know that yeah okay and he hardened Pharaoh's heart that he hearkened not unto them as the Lord had said and the Lord said unto Moses Pharaoh's heart is hardened he refusth to let the people go get the unto Pharaoh in the morning Lo he goeth out unto the water so that's Moses domain again the water and thou shalt stand by the river's Brink against he come and the rod which was turned to a serpent shalt though taken thine hand and thou shalt say unto him the Lord God of the Hebrews hath sent me unto thee saying let my people go that they may serve me in the wilderness and so we get that parallelism we talked about yesterday too it's not just let my people go it's not into freedom in inordinate abstract sense they they're going because Israelites are the people that wrestle with God that's what the word means and let my people go that day maybe serve me in the wilderness to find their proper place in the in the structure of being which is not under your tyranny and behold hitherto thou wouldest not hear thus saith the Lord in this Thou shalt know that I am the Lord behold I will Smite with the rod that is in my hand upon the waters which are on the river and they shall be turned to blood and the fish that is in the river shall die and the river shall stink and the Egyptians shall lose to drink of the water of the river and the Lord spake unto Moses say unto Aaron take thy rod and stretch out thine hand upon the waters of Egypt upon their streams upon their rivers and upon their pawns and upon all their pools of water that they may become blood and that there may be blood throughout all the land of Egypt both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone and Moses and Aaron did so as the Lord commanded and he lifted up the rod and smote the waters that were in the river in the sight of pharaoh and in the sight of his servants and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood and the fish that was in the river died and the river stank and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt I have a brief comment there one of the things I learned from from reading the union thinkers was that and merchia eliada was particularly powerful on this Motif was that you can't really distinguish the the Revenge of nature from the tyranny of the king because what happens when your state becomes corrupt and overbearing is that your ability to regulate nature deteriorates in a manner that's commensurate and so nature Rebels so here's an example with the when the hurricane hit New Orleans you could say well that's you could say well that's a natural disaster right it's an act of God but then you could say well wait a second the Dutch built their dikes to withstand one storm the worst storm in ten thousand years so when the storm hits the Netherlands there's no natural disaster whereas the Army Corps of Engineers built the dikes to withstand one storm in a century and so once every hundred years there's a natural disaster and then because the state that surrounds New Orleans is corrupt in many ways not only is the infrastructure not built properly but it's degenerated because of corruption and so the rebellion of Nature and the corrupt tyranny of the state are in some sense Inseparable and so it seems to me that that's part of the reason why here it's the very water that Rebels is that if the state becomes tyrannical and corrupt enough then everything is allowed to become polluted in some real sense so well I suppose the river and the the Nile is as close as you can get to Egypt or the symbol of Egypt it's the it's the water of Egypt's life it's like the Water of Life right and so and now it's it's become corrupted you know it's turned to blood to remind them of the the Hebrew babies that were drowned there right right yeah and isn't each each of the plagues is specifically targeting one of the Egyptian gods yeah right except is the river god is it there's a river god of finale yeah yeah and and fraud how did you find that out I didn't know that at all I just remembered this vaguely from like you know freshman year of Jesuit High School princess with high school those Jesuits well one of the things that they're doing the Jesuits one of the important aspects as well that we we might miss is the use of the rod that is the use of the rod as a symbol of authority this is a universal thing even the scepter of the rod all of this as a manifestation of Authority and you see it in the in the story as well it's the primordial tool right a stick it's the primordial tool and it and it and it does represent that vertical power like the manner in which authority descends into the world is through this kind of vertical descent so the rod represents that you can imagine you know striking the waters and then and you'll see use it yeah it is it is in many ways magic wand there are even images of early images of Christ where they show Christ's Miracle where he's holding uh staff and he he he does his miracles with the staff because it's so ingrained in people's understanding well why do you need a wand if you're a wizard you just point out your hand and do your tricks but no you have to have a magic wand and so and that's a derivative it's an externalization of your Authority and that's what the miracle is also is an externalization of authority and so the one becomes the proxy for it's like I'm going to act and then that want already is an externalization well you know when if you use a stick human nervous systems are extremely extendable and so in some sense like when you're in an automobile or on an airplane if you're flying it then your body your brain remaps the whole tool to be part of your body and so we're tool using in the deepest possible sense and it is definitely the case that the stick is the primordial tool it's the first spare it's the first it's the first Club it's certainly thing that you can smack snakes with and I'm sure you know our tree dwelling relatives cotton onto that at some point in the extremely distant past and so the notion that the rod is Magic is the same as the notion that the tool is Magic and it's definitely magic there's in anything you move on to the Roman what is it called fascis the rugs of authority and then you get fascism right authoritarianism those are when the rod can't turn into a snake anymore or or maybe turns into too many snakes it's interesting to me how the icon Carver's brain works because you know you need something if God's moving through a person it's like well how do you portray that if you're making the action figure what does he look like right and it's there's this amazing conversation not to get us too far derailed between Lucas um kazden and Spielberg when they were developing Indiana Jones and the conversation you can find and they're like well he needs a different kind of web what's a weapon no one's had like how about a web right and we need him to have a hat but the Hat should have a personality he should have a life of its own and so part of when we're trying to substantiate when we're trying to make literal the symbolism it can't just be that God like if a wizard just points at somebody well what's a wizard look like they need we need props we need the Pharaoh has a right and so this is of course something that you are dealing with in your depictions or else everyone would just look like a like a Ken doll right everyone would look the same yeah but I think modern fiction has actually been very good like something like fantasy like token the way they illustrate it has been very good at making the costumes and the representation of the person as an extension of what they are so that you see it immediately Gandalf is such a striking figure with his staff and uh and and that you can he can thrust it into the ground with force and cause that's how I imagine expand your adventure Through the Bible and in your faith Beyond Exodus with conversations with God you no longer need a burning bush or to climb to Mount Sinai to hear him find his peace Direction and purpose for your life through prayer and meditation don't know where to start download hallow the number one Prayer app in the world to dive deeper into the Bible traditional prayers and your own spiritual walk with God Halo has over ten thousand prayers and meditations to choose from including Bible in a year Daily Reflections and even prayers with Mark Wahlberg and Jim Caviezel the hollow app is the best first step in creating a lasting daily discipline of prayer download the app for free at hallow.com Exodus you can set reminders and track your progress along the way so what are you waiting for download the Hallow app at hallow.com Exodus that's hello.com Exodus hallow.com Exodus for an exclusive three-month free trial of all ten thousand plus prayers and meditations one of the questions I'm trying to ask myself is to read this is like what's happened in my own life when I've heard my own heart and it's just very powerful image here because the river as James just pointed out is that's the kind of iconic thing about Egypt that the life is the source of Life denial and and and it just what's clearly what's going on here is that you know Pharaoh hardening his heart is into a disordered you might say in a wrong relation to to that to what really is it turns even what is good and beautiful and life-giving into a source of death and it does seem to me that that that that that that happens in our own lives you know when you you know when you're out of when you're badly Out Of Tune and willful you know things start to collapse when you start to die from the water yes from lack of the Water of Life there's a famous Grimm's brother fairy tale that's called The Water of Life and it's about a king who's old and anachronistic and he's dying because he doesn't have the water of life and that's associated mythologically with Notions of the search for the Holy Grail to or the or the pool in the middle of the forest that revivifies and and and Waters often used as a it's the antithesis of stone it's the antidote to Stone it's the antithesis to thirst you thirst in the desert where there's no water obviously and so there's a sense what you're saying in which what Pharaoh's actually doing is he's already cutting himself off from the water in a profound sense and this is the same yeah I remember Moses is a master of water I mean fundamentally right he's he's symbolized by water all the time his relationship before later on he opens up the Waters of life from the from the rock right which people drink that's exactly what he's doing with Egypt in some sense he's releasing the Water of Life from from the rock that contains it yeah yeah may I just note what you mentioned about Freedom you know in verse 16 uh where let my people go that they may serve me in the wilderness so this link between freedom and service or even obedience because the next line is thus says the Lord in this Thou shalt know that I am the Lord so uh you know to to use the distinction of Isaiah Berlin between negative and positive Freedom this is definitely positive freedom I mean this is not just freedom from the oppression of the Pharaoh this is also uh of a life of Freedom that is fulfilled in the sense that it is the realization of a particular role the highest particular exactly yeah so true freedom is construed here as service to what is highest it's not anarchic or chaotic and the negative with Berlin is basically the genus Joplin definition right like Freedom's just another word for Nothing Left to Lose it's when you just don't have anything as opposed to and it's interesting you said Freedom's never used that word's never used which is very interesting the same word for working as slaves is the word for serving the lord and worship it's the same word right so the question then you know said the Lord is so desperate and they've shifted from one desperate to another but those you know the Anglican prayer book your service is perfect Freedom right incredible the wrong kind of worship to the right kind of worship yeah Yeah well yeah it is unbelievably important part of that text Douglas for bringing to reiterate that because we don't ever want to confuse Freedom with chaos they're not the same thing you know if you're playing a chess game you're free to do an almost infinite number of things on the chess game board but you have to abide by the rules and you have to attempt to win in the proper manner and and so and if if you I used to play a game with my students in my class and I'd go up to someone when we were talking about such things and say okay do you want to play a game some random student and they'd say yes and I'd say okay you move first and then they had no idea what to do it's like well and I said well you could do anything you wanted it's like well I'm lost it's like yeah that's exactly when you can do anything you want you think that's Freedom it's you better not ask the wrong student that yeah I wouldn't ask you all right and The Magicians are now hitting what I consider the funniest verse in the Torah all right all right and The Magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments okay why do I why is that so funny because there's no more water to turn into blood doing the what Moses yes they're saying hey we can ruin our water supply too I have always found this to be hilarious doesn't pharaoh go any morons right right he ruins the water and you can do it too thank you thank you then they did the same later with the gnats or the guys he says just to add to it yeah well they also say it's all the water in the land is already turned so it's like where do they like their head yeah they had some some water apparently and The Magicians of Egypt Egypt did so with their enchantments and Pharaoh's heart was hardened neither did he hearken unto them as the Lord had said Pharaoh turned and went into his house neither did he set his heart to this also and all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink for they could not drink of the water of the river and seven days were fulfilled after that the Lord had smitten the river Exodus 8. the Lord spake unto Moses going to pharaoh and say unto him thus saith the Lord let my people go that they may serve me and if thou refused to let them go behold I will Smite all thy borders with frogs and the river shall bring fourth frogs abundantly which shall go up and come into thine house into thy bed chamber and upon thy bed and into the house of thy servants and upon thy people and into thine ovens and into thy needing troughs and the frogs shall come up both on thee and upon thy people and upon all thy servants and the Lord spake unto Moses say unto Aaron stretch forth thine hand with thy rod over the streams over the rivers and over the ponds and cause frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt and Aaron stretched out his hand over the Waters of Egypt and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt and The Magicians kids in Jewish life sing The Following song there were one morning when Pharaoh woke in his bed there were frogs on his head and frogs in his bed frogs on his nose and frogs on his toes frogs hear frogs there frogs were jumping everywhere well there this is a kind of comical plague oh exactly but well certainly but the point that I love about that is the only reason these kids know about Pharaoh is because of the frogs the king the demigod of Egypt is known to Jewish children thousands of years later because of frogs do you think there's a transition here so we have water first but then frogs live halfway on water and halfway on land right there this mediating creature and you know the the tribe of Native Canadians that I am associated with they regard the Frog as a Weather Vein of nature in some sense too because frogs are extremely sensitive to environmental degrade degradation and so they're like they're the amphibian be an equivalent of canaries in the coal mine so what you'll see now in the in the plagues is you're going to see something like this you're going to see something like death coming from below and getting higher and higher and so it starts with just the water which is turned into blood and now from the water come these frogs and then later you'll see from the dust comes the lice and then the livestock and then it's going to continue we'll talk about it when we get there so what you're seeing is basically the undoing of creation you can understand it that way that is creation is this Union of Heaven and Earth and now there's like a there's there's going to be an undoing where at first you're going to see the revolution of the Earth from above and then you're going to see a kind of Oppression and hostility in aerial phenomena okay so Oz's point that was very interesting is that this great land of monuments were undone by gnats and also it's like what's the what's the animal most associated with the Pharaoh right is a snake right and snakes eat frogs and so like there's something that's very music with this you know Mel Brooks said nothing can stand up to humor that's why he made fun of Hitler right nothing stands up to humor it's a very funny image to have this Pharaoh with his Grand like Cobra Decor being undone with frogs that a children's nursery can Mock and there's also uh there's the Egyptian god who's associated with frogs which I think you should know of all people I have a little statue right yeah yeah cat well yeah it's cat that's right Keck yeah and so it's another came up with the whole Pappy thing too yeah so the Pepe thing is is funny in this context in the sense of the amphibian for for sure the Church Father Saint Gregory of Nisa who I'm going to keep praying I'm sorry so he really talks about the amphibious nature of the frogs as being important because it has to do with the undoing so the undoing in that which has a hybrid identity and that which has an ambiguous identity and so the frogs appear as they really are monsters because they live both above and below so so they they kind of set the image of the frogs become like an image of this undoing where identities are are breaking down right right because there are there are there are they're like a psycho pump in some sense they inhabit both places and it the frogs are fine if there's not too many of them but when the confused identity frogs are everywhere then you have real troops they're not supposed to have frogs in your house they're in the water and in the on the on the on the front but if they have frogs in their house frogs in your in your bread yeah that's right there's too many frogs that's a lot of ambiguity too much ambiguity important point to add you're right about the anti-creation and the destruction but only the Lord can restore and he does every time and it's the same thing with tyrants can destroy and they do but they can't rebuild and that's very clear from that I like this theme of negative creation it's got the unraveling of creation Jonathan D creation and I think actually we're licensed to get take draw that interpretation if you look at uh is it verse 25 is just the last verse and seven days were fulfilled after that the Lord transmitting the reverse so it's as if they're done that doesn't come elsewhere in any of the other plagues it's almost as if we're being invited to to understand it in relationship to the creation yeah is a very common mythological Motif that when order falls apart what you do see is a reversion to the potential that existed at the beginning of time those are the same thing right when order deteriorates then you get a return an undoing and a return to pre-cosmogonic chaos it's out of that that New Order can emerge you cannot you always have to be careful even during the flood we tend to think of the flood just as the water but that's not what's going on there's the water and the heavens and it's the separation of the two which undoes the world so we think of the flag just as the water but you can think of the image of just water and just heaven and nothing alive in between and so I think this is what we're going to see as we notice the first plagues going like this and then all of a sudden it moves up and then everything goes crazy above so is the construction of the Tabernacle as a place where Heaven and Earth meet and yeah of course yeah yeah and so the Tabernacle is the proper resting place of God and also in some sense that which Shields God from the careless view of human beings the two careless view of human beings and the Tabernacles is a encapsulation of Croatia that's right it's a microcosm of the world okay and the Lord spake unto Moses say unto Aaron stretch forth thine hand with thyroid over the streams over the rivers and over the ponds it caused frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt and Aaron did so and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt and The Magicians did so with their enchantments and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt here's some more frogs we can do it too then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron and said I guess he's he's he he's had it because he's up to his naked frogs it's like entreat the Lord that he may take away the frogs from me and from my people and I will let the people go that they may do sacrifice unto the Lord and Moses said unto pharaoh Glory over me When shall I entreat for thee and for thy servants and for thy people to destroy the frogs from the in the houses that they may remain in the river only and he said tomorrow and he said be it according to Thy word that thou may know us that there are none like unto the Lord or God and the frogs shall depart from thee and from the houses back to order yeah and from thy servant so as soon as the Tyrant bows to the will of God then the ambivalent monsters depart and from thy people they shall remain in the river only and Moses and Aaron went out from pharaoh and Moses Cried unto the Lord because of the frogs which he had brought against pharaoh and the Lord did according to the word of Moses and the frogs died out of the houses out of the villages and out of the fields and they gathered them together upon heaps and the land stank but when Pharaoh saw that there was respite he hardened his heart and hearkened not unto them as the Lord had said that's another place Stephen where you can think about how that works in your own life it's like you repent you get away with it you think ha I thought it would have said I can do it again it's like and the Lord said unto Moses say unto Aaron stretch out thy rod and smite the dust of the land so that may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt and so then they're longing for the days of frogs his third plague of each set of three forgetting the tenth is totally separate they don't warn Pharaoh ah just just the pattern that it that it did that well the first ones in the morning that's also that's right from the palace third one no one there are a lot of patterns in the plagues very cathly constructed I wonder why it's the third time there's no warning well I guess you've been warned twice right you're worn twice right exactly and then we'll start it over again it's what's established to create a pattern that one can anticipate right you need that's how jokes work right you need the first two and you anticipate the pattern then you subvert it so it's it's in some ways it's giving the Pharaoh fair chance right too right but it also but it also adds an anomalous twist to the new threat because it's not predictable because now you think well I'm going to be warned about this it's like no yeah false sense of security but there's another point in what you read and that is the educational purpose of the plagues in other words there are obviously a question of power and there are obviously a question of judgment as you were saying by the river of blood then you know that you may know that there's no one like the Lord and the whole ten is to show Pharaoh he's not God right right there's no point there too is demonstrative Pharaoh's such a tyrant that it takes 10 plagues before he can get it to him yeah it's to show the Israelites too oh forgive me I just it's a very big uh theme Here the the uh and it's written in I don't like to read into text it's written in that that it will be known that I am I am God by I have defeated all the gods of Egypt but it is as much a message to the Israelites as it is to Pharaoh yeah yeah it's saying that that not just that Pharaoh is is no longer is is not not God but also that he's no longer Pharaoh but he's no longer a king over Egypt that God has total control over all of the Gods of Egypt and everything that gives Egypt life that makes it take did you ever read the fine print before you went browsing in incognito mode it says your activity might still be visible to your employer your school or your internet service provider private browsing isn't as private as you think to really stop people from seeing the sites you visit you need to do what we do and use expressvpn think about all the times you've used Wi-Fi at a coffee shop at work or in a family member's home without expressvpn every site you visit could be logged by the Admin of that Network that's still true even when you're in incognito mode do you really want your boss or your family to see your entire browsing history without expressvpn your home internet provider can also see record your browsing data in the US they're legally allowed to sell that data to advertisers expressvpn is an app that encrypts all of your network data and reroutes it through a network of secure servers so that your private online activity stays just that private expressvpn works on all your devices it is super easy to use the app has one button you tap it to connect and your browsing activity is secure from prying eyes so stop letting strangers invade your online privacy user trusted privacy partner and protect yourself at expressvpn.com Exodus that's exp r e s s vpn.com Exodus to get three months free visit expressvpn.com Exodus to learn more and it's a it's an it's continually emphasizing the principle of reality itself right is that even if you're tyrannical and even if you have all the power there is if you violate the Heavenly order yeah everything will go to hell yeah and go to Genesis that's right you've got this the god of Genesis as it were re-revealing himself but in more in negative terms of control over the natural order and transcending it completely him and Israel right from that's Jacob's name right is Israel um meaning those who struggle with God what's interesting is it's not a tyrannical rule despite the power you're allowed to struggle you're allowed if you're Moses free will too well Moses goes back and forth with God a lot as we've been observing there's a lot of there's a lot of movement and negotiation with their faith to come to understand God to come and understand their role to not want to heed the calling there's room that's built in that is in evidence so that's the qualitative distinction in some sense between servitude and Egypt and the servitude of God in the wilderness is that although there it's both subordination in some sense to a structure of power the the manner in which the power manifests itself is completely different from what happens when you negotiate with Pharaoh he says no now get your own straw to make it right right he just goes down he just doubles down right right whereas God's pretty patient with Moses he's like all right we'll give you Aaron like I'll explain I'll be there right and he wants well the other thing too is that God wants voluntary Ascent right which is right the opposite of the time yeah yeah yeah I love the Jewish notion of argument on behalf of heaven and it's A Great Notion you can argue with the Lord Abraham that Sodom or job you can argue with the Lord if you're arguing on behalf of his creation that's a magnificent tradition I think yes we learned that early on that's right by the way it's a in life I feel silly commenting on my own comments but in in light of of this notion of that this will make an impression on the on Israel as well as on Egypt I've I've smitten all their gods and the pharaoh the one of the great lessons in my opinion is that Miracles don't work people people think I know this from Decades of talking to people on the radio and in speeches that uh oh if only God did X Y or Z as Woody Allen said if he just sneezed I I would be I would believe in him but it's not true no miracles do not produce Faith No it's one of the most important things for everyone every modern person to know there are many reasons to believe in God but a miracle won't change your mind and and if like many of us you believe that all of life is a miracle our talking here the birth of of the not just the human child the birth of an ant if you don't see that as a miracle then why will you see split season is a miracle well in Moses is obviously capable of seeing a miracle because he turns to look at the burning bush that's right that's right that's why that was an important part that's right well well said yes knock-on effects both ways right I mean in Moses's case the let's say the incipient moral principle of slain the Egyptian even if he's kind of cowardly about it to having the sensitivity of heart to turn away to see the bush which then the burning bushes then leads to the encounter with God that then leads so too with Pharaoh you know he hardens his heart the first time he hardens the second time I think this happens in our own lives like it's not just the things you've been warned about that that that your Hardness of Heart causes you trouble on but they have knock-on effects too and so then you do this wrong and then oh gosh then that too and so I think that it was this third thing of not being warned it's this that says that you get into the train of this it's like no no no no it's way worse than you right right you've already said something in motion yes yeah yeah well and there's also there's also a gospel story that I can't bring to mind right now where Christ says to there's a servant who's been warned not to misbehave and knows not to and misbehaves anyways and there's another servant who does the same thing but in ignorance and Christ says to him that because you knew your punishment is going to be much harsher and so this is you've been warned twice and you didn't listen and so now something else is going to happen to you and that's deserved because you were in fact warned and you didn't listen and I saw this in my clinical practice very very frequently that you know my clients would be ignorant about something and be punished for it but then when they woke up and realized what they were doing and still did it the punishment was redoubled so that's like in Catholic Catholic Absolution writing confession you're not allowed to sin with the notion you can absolve yourself of it later right you can't premeditatedly sin and know you have an out right that's not an escape No in fact that's that's worse yeah which is jumping ahead a bit but he does I think a difference between Pharaoh recognizing that he's you know the the the god of the Hebrews is is against him and then wanting to try and remedy that and then genuine a genuine show of penitence later on I think this is just before I think it's just before the the killing of the firstborn where he actually repents he says he expresses sorrow um and it's almost as if the the you know that 10th plague which is just the probably the most horrific of them all is a sort of is is such a serious punishment because his sorrow his his awareness his conscience is really awakened at that point I mean it's beginning to be here but it's still quite instrumental he's realizes something wrong or something's wrong he knows plague it's just too late right even if you do repent at that point it's like yeah but still the process has been set in motion and so and that's what it needs to say you might think you're done with the past but that doesn't mean the past thinks it's done with you and that's like by the way you've made me rethink nature I just wanted you to know I he had a lot of profound things to say oh yeah yeah yeah he's he's something I assume he has such a bad name because the the Nazis liked him I mean why did he have such a bad name his sister warped a lot of his writing and and then there are derivatives of it that were used by the Nazis to justify their actions but Nature's philosophy is he he had an absolute horror of absolutist states and that's crystal clear and so no the consequences of the death of God oh yes and he there's no one more prophetic about that except maybe Dostoevsky and he always spoke very highly of you Dennis thank you I I didn't want to say I didn't want to say I I agree with you totally and Jesus makes roughly the same point you know when in the parable someone says you know send someone down to my relatives and he says no even if they see a resurrection they're dead they won't believe right you're absolutely exactly yeah yeah what you have here you have words and there's a lot of words but words are vital but not enough and then you have those power wonders and the two together and they're not enough and eventually has to be the tenth one that does it but I wanted to raise the question for all of us at the end maybe what are the lessons for this for our confronting what's today a system and a spirit that is all embracing and others so often we are just words and clearly words alone for Moses not enough or for the Pharaoh no well and there's a negative Miracle aspect here too it might be that people are less convinced about positive Miracles but if something negative enough happens to you you know that's outside your realm of expectation sometimes that can actually wake you up you have an example just um death or or uh or a catastrophe in your life but the people see that as a miracle though well you see that's a good question you know we tend to think of a miracle as always miracles that's right I like that that's fascinating and it's a lot more difficult yes right I've never thought of that am I happy I came yeah there's nothing happier than a negative Miracle Man I always think about I think about sultaniza in that regard of like where where he was to have his Epiphany right he was like the least empowered human being I mean he had what testicular cancer in a gulag like there was you can't yeah I mean and that's where he had an Awakening we're thinking about two Mandela right I think the negative Miracle problem I'm really if you've really transfixed me here the if if it re leads to a different issue for me God's existence to me is so rationally compelling that I I don't I don't even understand atheism but I think God's goodness is a leap of faith not God's existence right but I think it's the leap of faith because it is you decide that things are good and you're going to act in the service of the good in many ways despite the evidence yes right right so that's why it's an Act of Faith it's like well yeah you know you could so you can understand Arguments for nihilism and despair especially if you meet people who've been brutalized beyond belief but then now and then you meet someone who's been brutalized beyond belief and instead of being corrupt and nihilistic they've pulled out of that a goodness that's so deep that it's it's miraculous and you meet people like that pretty damn often and so and they've decided and really they've decided despite all this and it's sometimes that's so brutal you can't even listen to it despite all this I do believe that things are good and I will serve the good and that's Faith yes but they're they're not in those cases they're rarely doing so without their own evidence I mean they're they're they're precisely the people who are able to to to illuminate to you you know the the abiding underlying goodness because they're actually connected with it it's not yeah people usually while it's moving associated with the burning bush idea I mean I'm thinking of an artist that I've worked with for a long time and was brutalized beyond belief when he was young and he he found his salvation through Beauty and so it was like the burning bush he noticed that despite how catastrophic his life had been and how tyrannized he was in the most fundamental sense Beauty beckoned him and he and he and he hated the call and it completely transformed his life and his his character his career everything right so it's not as if it's simply against the evidence I mean there is right right but he was he was yeah that's so interesting too because he was still despite all that it was still open to the possibility that that there might be something beyond the catastrophe right but isn't part of the answer we were saying yesterday in the nature of God you don't come to discover him abstractly he's I will be who I will be in my actions delivering you caring for you you come to know he's good there is evidence as Stephen is saying isn't that the answer Dennis to what you're saying we didn't say he's good because it's theology principle number 15 or whatever but because but because finish because we've seen the goodness of God in his actions in history or in our own individual lives or whatever well it it it would seem to be a hard argument to make to a concentration camp Survivor that the that he has seen predominantly the goodness of God however having said that there is an interesting book written long ago about the Theology of concentration camp survivors and it found that and I I don't I don't claim that this is absolutely correct but I'm just telling you what it reported and it seemed to me to make sense that the percentage of Jews who went through the death camps and I specifically mentioned death camps who came out the proportions of atheists and Believers was the same many switched atheists became Believers and Believers became it but the proportion remained virtually identical so there is and there were people who have only good in their life relatively speaking who don't believe in God so I'm challenging my own question because I've wrestled with this because I I think the the hardest law in the 613 laws of the Torah is to love God with all your heart and all your soul I I long believe that's the hardest I have no problem trying to control yourself into existence fully as if it's good yes and that's a rough one look at it that's really rough that's right that's right was struck in the concentration camps by goodness though constantly and it was out of that seed of the observation of goodness that the whole Gulag archipelago emerged and therefore in some nose in no small Park shelter Nissan is a prophet and he said well he said that he he really noticed particularly and he was atheistic when he went into the camps that The Devout religious Believers were able to maintain their moral Integrity in Camp and physical yes yeah not always because he said no let's not push this sometimes people just got shot yeah but he saw people and he tells very compelling stories of people who thrived and became healthier in the face of the privation under the ultimate moral authority of their own Shining Soul and the stories in the gulag especially in volume two are they're unbelievably compelling and Frankel said similar things and souljahnitzen was particularly careful not to say that doesn't mean I'm saying that everyone who failed failed because of their moral flaws or that purity of heart would necessarily save you you know he's a complex thinker but that's one of the Miracles I think he saw when I was talking about him earlier because he it was you know he he talked about how some people were Hardy and and robust and he was careful to say it's like you can secret your way to Health in a gulag right he wasn't being flippant about it but he was noticing that some people who had and they wouldn't resources they wouldn't cooperate right yeah they would never become trustees and they tell the it was Cool Hand Luke yeah yeah yeah yeah it's also the epistemic the epistemic humility though the difference between the presumption that you know all there is and it's bad and you're saying I don't have it all I mean you think those last words that job says at the very end of of of of the Book of Job therefore have I uttered that I understood not things too wonderful me which I knew not right that at the end of it all saying I didn't actually understand the whole picture well it's also hoping that you know because one of the things is that if you're suffering terribly there's two options in front of you in some sense one is you're suffering terribly and it's unjust and you're suffering terribly because the cosmos itself is flawed in its fundamental structure and that's really Kane's complaint against God the other possibility is you're suffering at least in part because you're not everything you could be and that's a terrible burden to take on to yourself because it's the burden of your own suffering but it's also unbelievably hopeful because it could be that I think maybe Frankel recounts that story I don't remember where I read it a woman who who visited a psychiatrist and who said to the psychiatrist I really hope there's something wrong with me and the psychiatrist said why she said well if there's something wrong with me there's hope because I might be able to fix it but if there's something wrong with the structure of existence so I'm fated to suffer in this way then why everything's Despair and the people that I have seen who've transcended their tragedy and malevolence that have pursued them they did have that that sense of their own ignorance even with regards to the conclusions they drew about they're suffering and so Frankel himself has this very odd story at the end of the book where after this this array of unspeakable Horrors he then talks about this particularly sadistic brutal figure whom he'd known from some Clinic the Stein whatever in Indiana or something and then he says that he heard a story that this man this concentration camp figure had been sent off to a Russian camp at the end of the war and then heard from another colleague that this brutal figure um had actually been extremely Humane and supportive as an inmate of a Soviet camp and and it's that very enigmatic ending of Frankel's book where it's almost as if to say even where you're convinced that there's evil that's irredeemable that maybe there's this yeah for Redemption I know that's a bit it seems like a bit but it is no it's very important why is that idea considered so dangerous what idea this idea that because you know even when we want it to be well we want it to be it immediately goes into blaming the victim like even you even went to pains to say he wasn't saying that anybody could write through the Inner Light of their soul come out positively in a gulag but there's such a resistance against this notion it's like it's almost outside the Overton window to say you can alleviate some of your own suffering by your orientation towards the world it's almost considered a dangerous proposition now and and we have to go to pains to make caveats about it when we even mention it yeah well it's a tricky business when my daughter was young and she was really ill I told her when she was very young I said to her don't you use your illness as an excuse ever because you'll confuse yourself then you won't know what you can do you're going to have a hard time doing things but if you use your illness as an excuse if you corrupt yourself morally which you have in some sense every right to do because of the depth of your suffering and which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances it will do nothing at all but make the situation far worse yeah it's true the the the boundary between sin and syndrome has got more more blood uh the idea that you know Moral Moral failure can become so easily pathologized and in pathologizing it we we risk fixing it it becomes a sort of part of who we are as opposed to something that we can be redeemed from that we can we can confess and repent from we also it also moves to possession Jonathan and I were discussing this a little bit with this you know mental health pandemic that we're seeing all around us but particularly in teenagers where it's you have depression you have anxiety rather than urine healing crisis right there's a beginning of middle and end it doesn't mean you won't have another one and another one but you're at least oriented in some ritualistic meaning to integrate into some agents the illness isn't an ingredient in your identity it's it's something that you can do and you're going to blow out at your weak points always you know it could happen again and again life is a series of hero quests and healing crises but we tend to talk about we we must remove this right well you can degenerate I suppose into what happens to job as he gets he's cursed by God in some real sense or by Satan at least and then he's sick to death and scraping his wounds with pot shards by the fire and then his friends come along and say well you know obviously you did something to deserve this which is often the case for sick people right it's not only are they sick but everybody thinks well if you would have just behaved better it's like and so that's part of the problem right is that is that and I guess that's why it's so important to so carefully separate the wheat from the chaff it's like well we found this a lot when dealing with my daughter when she was so sick because for example if she wouldn't get out of bed in the morning it's like well what do you do about that do you attribute to the illness do you blame it to the illness do you let Her Off The Hook and the answer is you pay as much attention as you possibly can so she moves ahead as much as she can but no more and and that judgment is so it's so difficult to make especially with someone who's ill and maybe that's part of our scattered attention and focus right now right I mean if everything moved from you know texts to blogs to posts to tweets to Instagram right like our attention is so focused that maybe that's part of the process part of the process of collapsing the space you said between sin and syndrome because it requires it's not that complicated in some ways you know to have that sort of conversation with somebody like the conversation is going to be personal right now well you have to really slow down and take time in the morning to say okay what's going on yeah exactly right like okay you can't get out of bed great we'll try tomorrow or you know it's it's a very delicate proposition because you're dealing with people's vulnerabilities and if you get it wrong and you also have to help them test it so I remember one time we were she had we were going to buy our scooter so she could get around so she had to go and take motorcycle lessons and somebody crashed the motorcycle a bit at one of the lessons and she woke up in the morning and she was afraid to go and no wonder she just had a hip replacement so she and so she was on like a motorbike three weeks later and so it was risky but we thought man this kid's got to be able to move around and she was afraid to go and so her mother said to her why don't you just get out of bed and come with me in the car and then when you get there you can see if if you can do this or not and maybe you can't and then well when she got there and so that was that judicious pushing is it sinner syndrome it's no wonder you're afraid and so we think we're crazy in some sense like you just had your hip replaced now we're putting you on a motorbike that's a big risk maybe it's wrong maybe you're right to be afraid and so then you test it right that's collaborative empiricism that's what the behaviorists call it it's like well maybe this is the right way forward why don't we go out and test it a little bit it takes an incredible amount of empathy without falling into complete empathy right because you have to be aware of someone says no I have different limitations than you Dad right I actually can't do that and maybe you could now or when you were my age but it's being incredibly attuned to the differences without falling into the ease of a of a 100 empathy solves all problems but also there's no I think we need to be careful not to confuse these things there's no there's no there's no we don't have to deny that there are victims and injustices or anything else to say that it's always good to be open to what you don't understand or what is beyond you or to be open to the burning bush in your own life especially then they're not they don't have to be in any way confused I mean that it's an absolute no matter what you're going through that yeah there's more than you see and rigidity is the enemy always but that's especially the case with God that we're so tempted to think in anthropomorphic terms about God as a moral agent that is to say as a member of our moral community and to evaluate him as as if we would evaluate the Pharaoh I think that's why you know Stephen citing the quoting the last verse that's a brilliant observation I think that that God is the source of all goodness in the classical theistic tradition he's identical with goodness well then what is that in virtue of which any good action is a good action well it also means that if the victim is only construing himself or herself as a victim and everyone else is doing that you're also in some sense saying to them that there is no pathway forward that's right through this right there is no possibility of the miraculous Revelation and that the miraculous Revelation might not even be a cure it might be that if you could see what's beckoning properly at least while you're dying you'd have this love and support around you that you need so that isn't utter hell right well it's also the shame Motif we're talking about Moses hid his face it's Adam and Eve because if you can get to the place that you're not a hapless victim in the face of the injustices of the universe objectively and there is a part that has to do with you right that's going to produce shame and you have to be strong enough to get through shame to see and confront the burning bush and be transformational it's it's such a I was struck so much in Reading Exodus how much how much of that is a recurring Motif I just want to add the um when I explained to people the difference fundamental difference between a religious education Jewish or a Christian and the secular education in our time I say it this way I was raised the biggest problem in Dennis prager's life is Dennis Prager right and secular schools in our time the greatest problem in your life is America racism sexism homophobia your parents never you always something outside of you and that dichotomy destroys your agency totally it totally yeah and that's the point it's an incredible thing because it destroys you and the society right right it's disempowering to coin us right yeah yeah yeah yeah right that's cool you're right all right so and The Magicians did so with their enchantments to bring forth lice but they could not so they're lies upon man and upon Beast then the magician said unto Pharaoh this is the Finger of God but Pharaoh's heart was hardened and he hearkened not unto them as the Lord had said and the Lord said unto Moses rise up early in the morning and stand before Pharaoh Lo he cometh forth to the water so we're in the next cycle right the beginning of the next cycle and say unto him thus saith the Lord let my people go that they may serve me else if thou Wilt not let my people go behold I will send swarms of flies upon thee and upon thy servants and upon thy people and into thy houses it's another humiliation real humiliation there of the Pharaoh and the houses of Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies and also the ground whereon they are and I will sever in that day the land of gaussian in which my people dwell that no swarms of flies shall be there to the end thou May knowest that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth and I will put a division between my people and thy people tomorrow shall this sign be and the Lord did so and there came a grievous swarm of flies into the house of pharaoh and into his servants houses and into all of the land of Egypt the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies and Pharaoh called for Moses and for Aaron and said go ye sacrifice to your God in the land and Moses said it is not meat it is not right so to do for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God Lo shall we sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes and will they not Stone us we will go three Journeys Into the Wilderness and sacrifice to the Lord Our God as he shall command us and Pharaoh said I will let you go that ye may sacrifice to the Lord your God in the wilderness Only You shall not go very far away and treat for me now the abomination of the Egyptians if I remember correctly Egyptians held Cows as sacred it's something like that the Hebrews were going to sacrifice something that the Egyptians would regard as of hauling to sacrifice right that's sacred exactly and so Moses basically objects when the Pharaoh says well you can do it here in Egypt Moses says no we can't do it because the Egyptians will be very upset with us we have to go away from them to do this so that's what that abomination of the Egyptians means um the Paschal sacrifice is a god of Egypt right okay okay so that's really the crucial issue there right okay so they're sacrificing the god of the Egyptians it's no wonder the Egyptians are upset about that so and Pharaoh said I will let you go that you may sacrifice to the Lord your God in the wilderness Only You shall not go very far away for obvious reasons in treat for me and Moses said behold I go out from thee and I will entreat the Lord that the Swarms of flies May depart from Pharaoh from his servants and from his people tomorrow but let not Pharaoh deal deceitfully anymore in not letting the people go to sacrifice to the Lord and Moses went out from pharaoh and he treated the Lord and the Lord did according to the word of Moses and he removed the Swarms of flies from Pharaoh from his servants and from his people there remained not one and Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also neither would he let the people go great we're cruising today Exodus 9 anything to say about the Flies specifically it's it's yeah so I think you'll see so it's moving up right so you have got the Frog this ambiguous and you've got the lice and you've got the Flies and then the next plague you're going to see a transition which actually is kind of a it's actually the anti uh an anti-burning Bush by the way where we'll read it and then we can talk about it later okay so we're moving up the Heavenly hierarchy in some sense right but it's like a weird upside down like a breaking apart of the of the of creation through this it's also interesting to know the way these this just you know in a way just to fly right there's a lot of them there's something there's something about the there's something the quantity has to do with the Earth that's what the Earth is right so you have quality above and you have quantity below and so when quantity invades right when think about it like you have a you could think about it like you have a a nation and then you have the Swarms of Barbarians that come in and the quantity just overruns the quality right there's always more outside than there is so is that the multiplicity also writing them the unity that's what it is and that's why it's multiple it's like it's you know it's you're drowning in frogs you're drowning in lice you've got swarms of flies it's it's it's quantity that is overtaking the identity of the Egyptian and it's a small thing right and it's a lot of these little lives you know our sins are like that you know but a lot of the little ones that adds up but I just want to quickly draw to verse 28 where I'll let you go you may sacrifice the Lord your God the Wilderness only shall not go very far and creating for me and there's this whole sense that you were talking about Jonathan about the instrumentally instrumental realization of the of the Hebrews and there's a sense like well okay I'll let you sort of pay attention to the Transcendent but only on my terms so there's it's this it's this sense of of he's refusing to relinquish even the relinquishing is on terms that are not relinquishing and I think that's a that's a there's a there's a there's a profound sense in which he's not he's absolutely not bowing right to the principle even when he says he is he's like well not really yeah yeah when we talk about this this kind of divine balance it's interesting Jordan I talk a lot about the Big Five personality traits as they equate to political orientation right High trade openness right tends to be more liberal right and it's very interesting because when either one is unchecked right if it's if it's conservatism on check tends to go to tyranny that's specific and Encompass in one person liberalism on check turns into a swarm that like hits like death by a thousand paper cuts and it's very interesting it is definitely the danger of openness that's right because openness let more in right and the dangers of Multiplicity contamination and the diff yeah right and the pro right in group favoritism right but the difficulty of of let's call it tyrannical closedness right taken to the wrong extreme is new ideas and people don't get in and you stop it also the kingdom of stone yes is everything set in stone and and so yeah yeah it's it's okay Exodus nine then the Lord said unto Moses go in unto for pharaoh and tell him thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews let my people go that they may serve me for if thou refuse to let them go and will hold them still behold the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in thy field on the horses upon the asses on the camels upon the oxen and upon the Sheep there shall be a very Grievous Moraine and the Lord shall sever between the cattle of Israel and the cattle of Egypt and that that Motif is established in this second cycle of plagues so now it's just the Egyptians that are that are clearly that are suffering from this and so the the Lord is marking off his people as immune from the from the coming plagues and they show nothing die of all that is the children's of Israel and the Lord appointed a set time saying tomorrow the Lord shall do this thing in the land and the Lord did that thing on the moral and all the cattle of Egypt died but of the cattle of the children of Israel died not one and Pharaoh sent and behold there was not one of the cattle of the Israelites dead and the Heart of pharaoh was hardened and he did not let the people go and the Lord said unto Moses and unto Aaron take to you handfuls of Ashes of the furnace and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of pharaoh now you had some people this is this is the transition like there's a now as you really see this transition up into heaven and it happens in a very strange way which is almost like an anti-burning Bush which is he's taking soot is the remainder it's the residue right it's the lowest thing it's the remainder of a burning process and so he's he takes it and he he brings it up into the heaven and then from this moment you'll see something all the the the the following plagues will have to do with wind you'll see the wind that blows the Locust and then the darkness in the sky the hail and the fire that comes from above uh and so it's but it's very interesting because it's almost like taking the remainder taking the residue and lifting it up as a as a kind of principle it's a very strong amphibious it's the role that the frog has played out of water on to land out of land in heaven so it's yeah and its shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt so it's blowing around and shall be a boil breaking forth with blanes upon man and upon beasts throughout all the land of Egypt yeah these are getting pretty serious these plagues and they took ashes of the furnace and stood before pharaoh and Moses sprinkled it up toward heaven and it became a boil breaking forth with blames upon man it's like the Bubonic plague and upon Beast by the way a lot of people raise the question why are all the Egyptians suffering and so that raises the huge issue of is there such a thing as collective guilt there doesn't have to be Dennis I don't I don't believe that one of the things I really learned from social netsun in particular and Roger has just written about this as well it's like you can think of the totalitarian state as the people laboring under the burden of pharaoh that's sort of the top-down crimes of obedience Theory right it's authoritarian leaders the people are basically innocent and they they work for the Tyrant under compulsion or you can think and I was just in Albania talking to people about this and I went to the Museum of the House of leaves which was the central museum for their KGB equivalent and they spied on everyone all the albanians I talked to left and right they all said the same thing under the Soviets everyone lied about everything to everyone all the time and so the Tyranny is distributed through the entire city that was my point actually yeah so I I say that Torah does believe in Collective guilt and and by the way there's a there's a verse which I didn't comment on earlier where it says and and Pharaoh spoke to all his people all the people participated in the killing of of the of the Jewish Children of the Hebrew children now so I I I totally agree with what you said clearly there are individuals who resist right but that is rare spared sometimes mean you get that story with with uh with Sodom and Gomorrah you don't need that many good individuals right to be spared but I don't think it's called the thing is I think it's important it's not Collective guilt it's that everybody in a community has the guilt but it's because they did something wrong they're lying that's right yes yes so soldiernitzen said famously you know one man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny and well and we've seen examples of that I would say Gandhi did that to some degree Martin Luther King did that to some degree soldiernitzen certainly did that to a great and remarkable degree and so these things clearly happened and one word of truth will outweigh the whole world it's like well how can it not because the truth is immutable censor truth but it's also the case that in unjust ruler can cause enormous destruction to innocent people so I mean I don't think we have to conclude that their own right not just his point is right I mean there can still be innocent victims within the collective which is why it shouldn't be because I don't believe there would have been a holocaust without Hitler I believe many Germans are guilty not all but many but I I do believe that Hitler made the Holocaust possible I think they would have called forth another Hitler with regard to a holocaust or with regard to World War II they're not the same things it wouldn't have been the same Holocaust right I mean they so one of the things I really learned from Jung because he studied Hitler in great detail and what he accomplished let's say so Hitler was a very powerful orator but he was also a very powerful listener and Hitler was resentful for a variety of reasons and he was also obsessed with order and disgust he's a very strange person so he had his particular idiosyncrasies that made the Holocaust what it was but then when he spoke to people he was like a comedian in the negative sense so I think I told you guys this story the other day Jimmy Carr the comedian before he goes out on his world tours he goes and does 50 shows and he tries out his new material and all comedians do this and he tells jokes and some people some jokes no one laughs at so he gets rid of those but the jokes that people laugh at he keeps and so Hitler spoke spontaneously and he watched the crowds and every time the crowd went Roar he'd think yes one and then the crowd would Roar about something else he think too and soon everything he said made the crowd Roar and the crowd is a conscienceless mob and so he that the conscious conscious less mob called out the devil in Hitler why while the Germans were angry well why well World War One there were brutalized men everywhere the Versailles treaty the absolute collapse of the economy their wounded Pride they had reasons to be bitter and nihilistic and so there was a deep longing for a target a target a reason an external reason it was the Jews it was the gypsies it was the people who were different they're responsible for this and so and Hitler could he could he gave voice to that he gave voice and emotion to that and so maybe without Hitler it wouldn't have happened but maybe another populist would have come along and done something equivalent you know in a slightly different direction didn't young also make the point that it was only possible in Germany because Germany was the the most evolved I'm using the term not literally well they were the furthest away from their uh archetypal Roots right it was the most philosophical doctors right only at the peak of civilization can you be so far removed from the shadow that the shadow can overtake you well he certainly believed Jung believed that part of what drove the Nazi Spirit forward was the re-sacralization of the political you know so Germany had collapsed into a Godless materialist Atheism in some real sense and so that brought forth a deep longing for the archetypal gods and Hitler provided that Orwell knew that I mean when Orwell started to warn about the Nazis one of the things he warned about he was so courageous he said you underestimate these people they've harnessed these primordial forces of spectacle and blood and fire and Beauty they've rekindled the ancient gods and Jung thought it was Odin on the war path again in some fundamental sense and so the the reason Germany was prone to that I suppose is because they were the farthest along the technocratic materialist atheist path and that set up this longing for a return to the in some real sense to the pagan gods well you know those who were those who um who don't remember history or doomed to be possessed by it again right right the Nazis knew this it's not like they didn't play with Pagan imagery constants very clear but it doesn't work if you're close to to real Pagan industry if it's still interwoven in your life if you still have you know your your roots go all the way down into archetypes and rituals I suppose the Germans in some sense would have been most prone to The Temptations of the luciferian intellect too because they were extremely successful in their in their towers of Babel the figure of Faust Loom is very large in German art and literature from obviously from character onwards but the mephistopically unpacked it's just uh really uh fundamental to to German culture and the German cultures you sell your soul to the devil not so much for knowledge in some sense but for power right and that can be technological power but it's not knowledge it's not all the other things that were being promised in the late 20s and early 30s in Germany absolutely yeah but artistic power and it was it was the power and the elites the Arts it was in philosophy it was in in music composition you could also see that given that Germany in some sense was at the Pinnacle of that Civilization the fact that they were so profoundly defeated and then humiliated was also a what that produces a wounded pride in narcissism and and that's certainly part that's certainly part of the luciferian spirit so but that that idea look here's a here's a good example of that so when when police were interviewing children when they were investigating the satanic daycare accusations back in the 1980s the children would come up with absolutely hair raising Tales of Satanic ritual abuse like young children think well where do they get that well often what would happen was that a child with a mother who is a paranoid schizophrenic or bordering on it would start to get delusional about what people might have been doing to her child when she left them in the daycare now she was guilty because she left them in the daycare and not and now she's wondering oh I left my children with strangers what could they be up to and then because she was ordering on psychosis she'd have these incredible delusional fantasies and then being disturbed she started to bother her children it's like wait does anybody do anything to you and children partly construct the way that they react to the World by looking at whether what they say grasps the attention of adults and so the child would be struggling to find the words that would satisfy satisfy the mother's curiosity and struggling with that and then they'd go to sleep at night have a dream and the dream would get nightmarish and that's because the dream dream was trying to model what it is that the mother was calling forth out of them and then you could run that for a couple of weeks and the child would be telling all sorts of horrific stories and then the police would come in and they'd investigate in relationship to the children and they'd get even more grotesque and catastrophic fantasies out of the kids and then they think well the kids couldn't be inventing this but they weren't they were co-inventing it and this is what happened in some sense to Hitler under the sway of the German people it's like he was willing he was already he had his flaws many of them right many many wounded narcissism being not Paramount among them because he was also very orderly and disgust sensitive which is funny because you had separating gums so it's like poor guy yeah yeah well right right right well he's like you know vile in certain senses and then overcoming it and scouring homelessness exactly with this his own like disdain for his you know Twisted psyche and for his own mortality yeah and he was a worshiper of the will he was perfectly proud that he could stand like this for hours and land in the back of a car he regarded that as a signal signal evidence of his discipline and conscientiousness you know and so and so but in in any case you know Hitler was willing to go exactly where the mob took him and was already motivated to go in a very dark Direction he'd been rejected was it by the Vienna School of Art three times he was a struggling street artist he'd been brutalized by World War one he was a decorated war hero I think he was the only Survivor of part of his platoon because a grenade blew up all of his friends when he was off doing something peripheral and and so he had a survivor's complex as well and an idea that he had a destiny because of that then he was homeless as you pointed out and of course the Communists were threatening Germany at the time and there were reason to be paranoid about that and it was all set up for a perfect storm but Hitler definitely allowed the mob to call forth the darkest fantasies possible out of the recesses in light of that I'd like to read to you what Heinrich Heine the great German poet wrote exactly a hundred years before Hitler came to power and this is so relevant to our themes of of the need for God and religion so this is a secular Jew writing this the great German poet Heine Heinrich Heine Christianity and this is its greatest Merit has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of War but it could not destroy it should that subduing Talisman The Cross be shattered the frenzied Madness of the ancient warriors that insane berserk Rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sunk so often will once more burst into flame this Talisman The Cross is fragile and the day will come when it will collapse miserably then a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent walk in the park isn't that unbelievable when was that written 1834 wow wow the prophetic voice is a very important building for German Consciousness because it was where Luther hid away as when he was um uh obviously in danger and he and it was in the vodmore that he threw the ink Port of the devil um you can still see the bit of Ink on the uh in Luther's in Luther's cell um and apparently the in 1933 the Nazis tried to replace the cross because in the vatborg there's always a cross um fly a flag of the the flag of the Cross flying and in 1933 when the Nazis took power they they replaced the cross with the swastika she's an anti-cross that's swastikas and the the locals wouldn't have it they had to take the swastika down which is which is quite interesting in terms of this tension between the Christian inheritance and of course this was particularly associated with with Luther and then the attempts to as well repress that Christian inheritance that you found you know among the Nazis um Jordan one of my favorite observations you've had is when you said you know if you're if you're scared of strong men you should be terrified of what weak men can do and I always think about that with Hitler such a great example of that right right absolutely yeah that bitterness and that resentment that that feeling of that you know lack of positive masculinity let's say right of of integration well and also and also in some sense also no clear pathway forward it wasn't like it was a picnic for ex-soldiers in Germany in the 1920s so you know we always have to remember that a fair bit of his suffering in some sense was come by honestly was no joke to be in the trenches it's no joke to have all your friends die it's no joke to be homeless and rejected you know and so I'm not obviously justifying any of that because people can come out of that not being Hitler let's say but with the power of a resentful populism yeah that's for sure in in every way yeah resentment I never saw anything among my clinical clients that was more destructive than resentment and that's the spirit of Cain right that not only am I resentful but it's justifiable I can shake my fist at God and I have the right on my side you know it's it's really it's really really not good maybe it's worse than pride and competes with it is betrayal yeah yeah yeah and you can't appeal to betrayal the way you can appeal to resentment right you can suffer from betrayal but you can appeal to resentment so has that been justifies anything yes yes yeah and that's also the underground motivation for resentment like if you're if you're possessed by the desire for power you can certainly capitalize on your resentment so Dennis can I ask very quickly you just started this fascinating phase of our discussion by talking about the way in which you think the Torah endorses some kind of notion of collective guilt in in the way that that was talking about yeah so I just think there are two kinds there's one that's sort of you know Collective guilt in the present but the the debate that's really haunting the political landscape at the moment is kind of right whether there's a kind of diacronic oh that has an also God bless you that is a great distinction and the Torah has an antidote there is a law in the Torah law it's a commandment from God himself you may not hate the Egyptians okay right right so that ends that whole issue Egypt is no longer guilty whites are no longer guilty if that's what you had in mind and that's symbolized in ceremonially with the drops of wine that yeah right did I mention that on it yeah I didn't no okay at the Passover seder and as I noted it's Universal it's not it was not at all specific to my family or community when the ten plagues are listed at the Passover sailor the the Jew puts the pinky into the cup of wine we drink four cups of wine those who can handle it I can't and and you you remove some wine with each plague as your way of saying I'm not going to increase but decrease my happiness over their suffering so there's no schadenfreude there right um the tradition is better than me if I did 10 plagues over Germany I I I'm not sure I would dip my finger in when I read about the bombings I'm very torn if you don't have sympathy for that it's very difficult to understand it you know meaning one of the things I tried to do when I was reading about the Nazi atrocities is I tried to imagine myself as an Auschwitz guard who enjoyed it and that takes sympathy it's a very dangerous thing to do you know and no one wants to do that because when people read about the Holocaust they want to think while they'd be a victim or they'd be a hero a redeeming hero it's like statistically well maybe you'd be a victim but the probability you'd be a redeeming hero in the face of the hilarious nightmares the only inoculation that one would have to not do that to say I'd be the one who'd get out of line and stand with the Jews and be executed is if I believe as if you know that you in all likelihood would not be that person right right then you have a chance a screenplay I was adapted a wonderful book called Black Flags uh one of the Pulitzer by Joby work it's spectacular it's about Sir hallway and dark hallway was in many regards incredibly flawed horrifying monstrous genius right he revolutionized uh Terror terrorism basically he had a big plan for to drop a chemical bomb on almond and it was the mukubara got ahead of it and so he figured he could kidnap one American Tourist and saw his head off right Nick Berg and in doing so he made sure it was recorded in a particular way that Broadband was just becoming accessible in the U.S and he made sure it was exactly released in a format that it could go the most widely to the US to have the biggest impact and it's the lowest resources he personalized Terror and one of my thesis when I was writing about him was that you know he's like Steve Jobs right Steve Jobs looked at a phone long enough until it was no longer a phone he was transformative there's something that was god-like in his ability to figure out exactly the most excruciating forms of terrorism he was so bad that that Bin Laden apologized for him and every two weeks because when you're writing a character you have to inhabit them the goal is to pull on their mask and see the world through their eye holes and every two weeks I would watch again when I was writing this the beheading and it was horrifying I mean my whole it's like that full body yeah and it's it's horrifying and the sound of it but it was like I'm not gonna lose myself in moral relativism right but I'm writing from him I have to write from his position of where he came from and how he was radicalized and what about him was brilliant right in what campaign and what his grievances were but I I had I kept Mooring myself and that I you go back and watch that again and it's like it's inconceivable almost to witness once let alone but I think that's part of what you're saying about trying I think it's also part of that motif of taking the world's sins upon yourself it's like well people did this and you're a person and you think well no I couldn't it's like don't be so sure about that and then maybe there's something even worse which is if you're so sure you couldn't do it you might be so sure you couldn't do it in precise proportion to the degree that you would be vulnerable to do it if the situation was right but Germany in the 1930s so evolved right right exactly so wondrously evolved it's the last place something like that could happen it's like nope it's the only place that's going to happen yeah that's what they always ask how could the country that produced Beethoven good and chill or produce Auschwitz i i i resonate to the question and I don't resonate to the question because I would say of the 10 saddest Revelations of my life and this was one of the first it because I'm crazy about classical music it's it's deeply important to my life and I had to make peace with the fact that you could love Mozart and build Auschwitz it hurt me terribly I really thought it makes you better to love Bach yeah well that's the whole Realm Of The Human Experience though isn't it that that spans the entire range and you know part of that that Christian idea that the savior of the world takes the sins upon himself that really means to Encompass that entire span and then to try to reconcile it and the span is stretches what does Jung say a tree that wants to reach up into heaven has to grow its roots all the way into hell and I think that's really true because how how can you defeat the Devil Without understanding him and if the devil's in your heart then you have to understand that in your heart it's your only inoculation it's your only inoculation you mean to see yourself going there and then decide not to or see how many people to engage with it in a way that doesn't make it holy other alien right right right the inoculation is to try to engage with it in some Manner and so in the process of the writing is this is very intimate when you're when I'm writing something I'm in it 24 7. and so if I'm writing this story The inoculation it's like going in and trying to understand and your books have got better and better and I would say more and more successful as your villains have got more and more human not that they're any they're not they're not better villains in the moral sense they're worse and worse right they're also more and more understandable and human and that makes them much more terrifying strangely enough I think I had to grow up enough to realize that that antagonists and protagonists are much more compelling than villains and heroes your reflection about um Mozart and and Gerta for that matter and by the way was it was a um an anti-nationalist I mean he's I think gutter was was at a time where German nationalism was very important he was very hostile to the to the idea and I think one has to remember the extent of German resentment going through the centuries and this was partially to do with the the Holy Roman Empire and and what they call the kleinstatler high the the uh very divided nature of the uh the German regions and for that reason their sense of vulnerability and you had that um that sense that the Reformation Germany had been divided then you have Germany at the mercy of very powerful neighboring Nation particularly France so the humiliation by France under under Louis the the 14th then Napoleon um many of those who died in in Napoleon's Russian campaign were Germans um the bavarians in particular but the large numbers so the Germans had this long-standing feeling that they were weak that they were humiliated so the first world war comes on the back of this long centuries sense of being humiliated abused and a deep sense of resentment the idea that French is the cultured language that Frederick the German aristocracy they would they they would speak French to each other you know French was the language of of the a Court Frederick the Great's Castle was called Source he thought German the greatest you know the King of Prussia thought German was a pretty nasty language really so I think I think your point about resentment resentment in the soul as being this deeply poisonous and transformative power uh is is so unbelievably powerful because so it's not just how does this amazingly sophisticated scientifically brilliant poetic the landed on denka the land of poets and thinkers how did it suddenly become so satanic it's also a long history of resentment and and feeling of being humiliated and we need to take our place well resentment also it's resentments a real rough one too because it's it's really easy to confuse with the desire for justice right and there is a desire fire for justice and a need for it and but resentment perverts the the sense of justice it it perverts it to your own hands because it perverts Justice to the what the designs of Revenge essentially and that Revenge can become really it becomes Cosmic I mean I've read a lot about I've read a lot about the thinking and and writing of serial killers and people who shot up high schools and that kind of thing and what you see is that the deeper the crime the more Cosmic the resentment and it's really the case it gets to the point where the only language you can use to describe the motivation is satanic and often the perpetrators themselves use that language right impersonal your anger has to be how Cosmic it has to be to slaughter a school full of people who you hardly know Stephen I feel like has been our Jiminy Cricket of conscience pointing out the the choice the constant choice and with the Pharaoh and the strengthening and one other things I'm thinking about so much as we're regarding this text which is no matter it's a holy text right no matter whether that's a capital H or lowercase H depending on how people go to it one of the ways to engage with any text of meaning we were talking yesterday about rogerian listening right where you engage at the nervous system and part of it is is when we're reading this part of what we're doing is practicing the question I think Dennis that you're raising because we we all also have to be the Pharaoh in some regards if you're going to engage with a text right one of the jobs of of writing or carving right or creating any kind of art is like I think about Caravaggio all the time where some minor player in the background has is fully three-dimensionalized um we're not just meant to be the role of Moses when we're reading this we're meant to also Embrace and engage and see the Pharaoh in ourselves and that's something like you keep bringing that back to the personal and psychological also and I think that that's that notion of the inoculating factor is why are we spending so much time with somebody who's so stubborn that he keeps hurting his heart and people are dying and all this happens it's like that's us also right and just like in and it's also the thing in us that keeps us from from claiming the freedom that allows us to serve God properly so he's really the antithetical enemy and you can say well that what the biblical Corpus does in large part is walk you through all the domains of mankind it's right here's the whole panoply of the possible Right Human Experience embody them all listen to them they're you like yeah as Rogers did you soften yourself to the vulnerability of encountering it also lets the text speak to you you know I think part of the reason that the first biblical series I did was serious was because I approached the text as if it might have something to teach me that was the a priority presumption what it does is what you have to do if you read a text that's written by great thinkers too it's like well while Nietzsche is a good example it's like well that was Nietzsche you know you might give some Credence to the notion that there's something in there to learn and maybe you don't take all of it you can take what the right spoils from the Egyptians in the service of the right thing and maybe you leave some of of what's there behind and so and so but but that that in the in the passion story which what it's doing in part is it's taking you through all of that all at once right because you're you're a pilot who says what is truth and you're the tyrannical Roman and you're the mob that calls for the death of the innocent and you're washing your hands you bet you bet and you have to be as well as being the suffering person who's taking all of this on and all of that has to be equally real and maybe then you decide which of those characters you'd rather be aligned with you know well the practice of this right now part of what like you were talking about Dennis earlier that everything's a miracle the birth of an ant is a miracle like us being or having this discussion we're increasingly in a culture where our engagement with things is so bifurcated we're not allowed to even engage with with the there's no conceivable notion to engage with the full perspective of of the other side and there's a hundred ways to Define that Beyond just the obviously red and blue and it's like we keep and and so much of what if you legionize the other you don't have to embody it that's right that's convenient dehumanized it's not a party you and so much of what the study of text is what the study of story is is it is is that form of an inoculation for your own individuation we're doing here that's right well that's what should happen in the humanities education is that no no you have to embody all these characters right so well gentlemen that's probably that seems like a neat place to stop I would say we've run out our two hours and so and we got through a lot of material and I was wondering at the beginning of this well we'll probably just zip through the plagues because there's this repetition and it turns out well just as you'd expect that if you pay enough attention to the text there's nothing to run through quickly all right so thank you everyone for who's watching and listening and thank you once again to the Daily wire crew for setting this up and to all of you for taking the time and effort necessary in this really miraculous occurrence I would say and I really do view it that way it's unbelievably unlikely that we've been able to assemble ourselves like this and to be able to talk like this and to be able to bring this to the attention of many many people and it you know it's it's very appropriate not to underestimate the likelihood of something like that occurring and being appreciative of it as I think we all are in a very deep sense and also to the people who the technical people and everyone whose faith in this unlikely venture has made it possible and it's not the Gratitude part of the genuinely religious mind and the way that resents the opposite it's the opposite of gratitude is the opposite of resentment yes what's why you want to practice it as a virtue it's like what do I have to be grateful for look at my suffering it's like well it's incumbent upon you to discover that which you should be grateful for yeah it's especially if you're suffering you know especially if you're suffering we really learned that with with Michaela is to try to find this like in all that pain to try to find what you can hold on to that's real in the midst of that and that's certainly that's an orientation towards gratitude you move towards where you put your attention I mean that's exactly what we're right right right right right discussing that gratitude is also maybe Note 10 done because I think this is Douglas's last uh session with us this time around yes yes I do believe that we're going to rekindle this this is no this is August right now our end of July and I do believe we plan to rekindle this in January because we won't get through the whole book and yes it's been absolutely wonderful having you here and a real privilege to have you come here and it's also been for all of you who are listening it's been ridiculously fun we've been jet skiing around on the ocean in Miami and so when we're not studying the Book of Exodus and eating steaks and drinking bourbon not me even though I'd like to anyways Douglas thank you very much for coming and uh it's been it's been great to have you here and look forward to having you here again for sure so [Music] all all the gods have been all the Egyptian gods have been vanquished and now the firstborn that's an encapsulation of tradition of Egypt is is being killed right while the Israelites are being spared so it's the ultimate decimation of the tradition of the Egyptians and so it's like right in the text a few verses from each other you see that people have compassion for the Israelites and then it says no but their children are going to die too that's why I feel like there's a there is a sense in which we're meant to have compassion even for the Egyptians in the narrative much of this calls for the radical really the radical acceptance of that you certainly see that Christianity with the idea of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God but obviously that idea stems from from this idea this practice [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 240,913

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: ybkyraDi7Qs

Length: 115min 3sec (6903 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023