Messages From the Dead Sea Scrolls

good evening everyone I'm rabbi Barry Schwartz the director of the Jewish publication society I've been asked to make the introduction this evening on behalf of the Jewish publication society and the Skirball Institute for adult Jewish Studies this is the third in our new partnership between JPS and the Skirball Center we're very very delighted at this partnership and I have to tell you it's been a wonderful two weeks for us because the Jewish publication society is concluding now at the end of the year 2013 our one hundred and twenty-fifth year we are the oldest Jewish publisher in the United States and we're doing so in a big way with a ten year seventy scholar project that has culminated in what we're about to talk about this evening outside the Bible ancient Jewish writings related to Scripture I don't exaggerate in telling you that this was more than a decade-long project with world-class scholars from all over the planet contributing to this first compilation of Second Temple writings from a Jewish perspective we were delighted two weeks ago this evening to recognize and have speak here professor James kugel one of the three editors for outside the Bible and this evening we are very very fortunate to have professor Lawrence Schiffman speaking to us after this program you are welcome to take a look at the three volumes 3,300 pages of outside the Bible I wanted to make you aware that there is also a study guide that is a course syllabus for enhancing Torah study with outside the Bible a discount that we're offering on this project and it might make a wonderful gift not only to yourselves but to your library synagogue institutions as well professor Lawrence Shipman was a guiding light in this project without his enthusiasm and his support this project would not have been possible as Professor kugel explained and professor Shipman will elaborate we're speaking about the literature of the Jewish people over a four to five century period from the close of the biblical era to the beginning of the Mishnah period we're speaking about literature that has been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls what is called the Apocrypha the pseudepigrapha Philo and Josephus this compilation is opening up a window to a world that is responsible for both the birth of rabbinic Judaism and the birth of early Christianity as well more than two decades ago professor Shipman published a book with JPS called reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls it was a landmark book in as the title suggests reclaiming the heritage of the scrolls for the Jewish people and I think the same can be said this is reclaiming the second temporal literature as ancient Jewish writings written by Jews for Jews and of Jews rabbi Lawrence Shipman is one of the world's foremost scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls and taught at New York University for just short of four decades is presently both professor and vice provost at Yeshiva University also here in Manhattan is great honor and privilege for me to welcome professor Loren shipment [Applause] thank you very much I'm glad to be here I want to explain at the outset that our project actually involved a lot of different types of literature that we sought to present as a kind of uniform library the problem is that generally when we speak of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Apocrypha which are books that were found in the Greek Bibles and hence are in the Catholic Bibles or various other terms that we use for this literature we're dividing the literature according to where and how we got it as opposed to what it's really like and so what we did in this project was to create a new classification system according to the literary types of the material and that will help very much in understanding it as a corpus of the library that would have been there so to speak if you were a Second Temple Jew despite the fact that we unified it in that manner I've chosen for this evening to just speak in particular about the issue of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and of course this is because this is my particular specialty and I never claimed that what I do is more important than what other people do but I do claim that I'm more interested in what I do than what they do I'll just point out that this cover is actually a beautiful invitation for a wonderful event that took place about a month ago for at the Bible lands Museum in Jerusalem where we opened up an exhibit on the history as I jokingly call it of their Bible and our Bible and the dissemination of the Bible that is of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament throughout the world and Western civilization so if anyone is in Jerusalem from now through pestsof please go to see this thing of the Bible lands Museum it's just a wonderful wonderful exhibit but in order to actually discuss the subject that we are discussing I have to say here can't be right can't be laughs no more buttons left nobody works here well someone's gonna have to figure out what to do with this thing over here yours truly just figured out it wasn't on oh yeah okay alright they owe me for the video man or whatever he is not the video man the AV man worked out okay I don't have to tell the story runs I once was at a lecture a man was brought all the way to Melbourne Australia from London to give a lecture and the thing didn't work the sound and it was garbled you couldn't hear a thing because with two microphones going at once so I tried to be a nice guy and go find the guy who's being paid to take care of it I finally found some janitor he told me he left so he collected the money and no one heard the lecture after a guy had flown all the way to Melbourne and he went home the next day so at least that didn't happen now see so I want to begin by pointing out to you that there are representative the Dead Sea Scrolls all of what we call the Hebrew Scriptures except the book of Esther there are different opinions about why that is some think that Esther wasn't there simply because of the fact that it was lost by accident others feel that since poems not in their calendars maybe they rejected the festival of Purim also as it's a basically what we call the rabbinic ordinance to observe forum now another possibility is the famous question of how come God isn't mentioned in the Megillah etc but I show you this so you understand why it is that there's so much biblical interpretation in the scrolls now we have to understand that the Bible text in the Dead Sea Scrolls is not exactly the same as the ones we're used to because whereas any hummus you're going to open up any five books of Moses or any prophets or writings no matter what kind of sinner guy you go to it's all the same for us except there are a few spelling differences but it's all to say there isn't any difference that wasn't the case in Second Temple times now having said that you shouldn't think that the Bible would have any things like thou shalt steal or thou shalt commit adultery of course not the Bible is the Bible but even though the Bible is the bar there are a lot of various minor differences some of which have to do with language or just substitute expressions or even what we call textual corruptions but some of which represent interpretations now in the Dead Sea Scrolls we used to say that there were three different types of Bibles the proto master retik which is the one that represents what became our Torah second of all the proto Samaritan which is a version that is similar to what the Samaritan is that ancient sect that still exists of people who remain from the northern tribes in the first Temple period what they had and then the third one is the one that was used by the translators of the Greek Bible the Septuagint now this turns out to be Prince to present for us a kind of picture of the history the Bible you see in front of you where basically are according to this claim our Bibles come from this recension which somehow or another is Babylonian whereas the Palestinian one gives us the Samaritan Pentateuch and this Egyptian is the type of Torah that was used in ancient Egypt now this was the theory don't write it down as if it's true this was the theory before they really understood all the Bible's of the scrolls once you understand all the Bibles of the scrolls you discover that it's not so simple first of all we have a problem of statistics but which they need to say that when you actually look at the numbers you find out that the proto mathematic is the largest group and that makes sense that's the Bible that we received and that we use missile Masoretic if you remember Fiddler on the Roof consent of tradition they sang in Hebrew miss hora and in Yiddish Messiah so one way or another this word means traditional and that's our traditional Hebrew text and then we have what they call vulgar texts vulgar texts it's not what you think it is don't worry vulgar tax mean common texts common texts are written into a dialect of Hebrew that everybody can understand they would write the Torah into a dialect it that they that they used and then we find out that we have so-called sectarian texts which have a special dialect of Hebrew and then we have proto master etic which we already mentioned and you have to understand I just took it on stuck it down here in the bottom by the way that no new Testament was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls because the New Testament was written after the Dead Sea Scrolls were copied Jesus had John the Baptist no matter what you hear on some TV show or read in the National Enquirer some other place like that do not appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls now it turns out that the statistics if you actually look at them are that the proto master addict or is 48 percent produce Samaritan 11 you'll see these numbers and when you look at these numbers the biggest thing is what we call non-aligned then it works that way for the prophets and writings it means to say the Masoretic is main text and the other texts are effectively derivative from it and that's the point which gets us to our question of interpretation just what I mentioned also that a lot of Bible texts were found at Masada and it's about Kafka caves they are all protomatter etic so from a chronological point of view the discussion of these variant Bibles that existed in the Dead Sea Scrolls that's a discussion of the period from about 200 and something BCE up through a little bit before the destruction of the temple once you're getting up close to the destruction of the temple in 70 once you're in the first century CE II all you have is proto Masoretic Bible text and the Jewish people has taken that as the most authoritative type of text and the one they're going to use now we have texts for example this Leviticus scroll which are virtually letter for letter exactly the same as ours in the proto Masoretic but we also have some types that have in them interpretations and these texts that have in them interpretations have these little variations and the little variations often to explain the text this for example is a numbers manuscript now you know that there are certain everybody should know that deuteronomy repeats many of the things that in the torah before because moses giving a speech and he's telling his whole history and machen if you had to listen to that speech in one day talk about sermons that are too long right it sounds like he spoke de force Uno's - how many days right so le on though in Deuteronomy he repeats a lot of stories - imagine you have a numbers manuscript and you don't know all the details but guess what they're in Deuteronomy so what do you do you copied it between the verses that is one of the earliest forms of biblical interpretation that is shown in the Dead Sea Scrolls which is to add material from another book now if you look at the so-called Samaritan Pentateuch remember again the Samaritans are those leftovers of the North Israelite exiles who stayed in the land they exist by the way until today there are some of the material the Samaritan Pentateuch does this all over the place so if they're telling the story of the Exodus in the book of Exodus they bring in details from Deuteronomy if in Deuteronomy they have that quick summary that we read it to Hagana write that they cried out on to our fathers and you heard their voice and you took them out of Egypt etc etc you fill in the details they're from the book of Exodus which in case you forgot is what we do with the Haggadah because if you looked at the state or how the Haggadah you'll see what we do is we quote a verse from Deuteronomy you say I don't we know true we closed the verse from Exodus next part of the verse in Deuteronomy how do we know it's true because the verse from Exodus that is exactly what's going on in some of these manuscripts on the other hand you can have the great Isaiah scroll this is in the rotunda at the shrine of the book unfortunately it's the only piece of plastic that's there because the real text was rotting they had to take it away everything else in the shrine of the book is real Dead Sea scroll now this lies a scroll is written into a whole different dialect of Hebrew and so they've just rewritten the whole thing it's for example if somebody would take as we do every day actually Shakespeare and write it in modern English so the kids can read it in school and that's what seems to have happened with Isaiah we call that a vulgar text now when you start to proceed a little bit further you start to get as an example of this Book of Psalms completely Masoretic texts and they look look exactly like what we expect the text is the same as the one we have and as we could see we're proceeding towards having only our Bible here just as an example from the of Daniel which is basically or Daniel now before you can really talk about interpretation so we've just talked about text and what we've learned is that text and interpretation in the ancient Jewish manuscripts are not separate sometimes interpretation is literally inside what you call a biblical text now by the way that's true in our Bible too because there are texts like chronicles that rewrite kings and and judge the rites and rewrite Samuel kings and fill in the information that's not there they interpret it's not a bad thing it's not a fake it makes the text understandable to us but in any case what you need to know is that when it comes to the Bible we have to talk about text don't we have about Haman what's in the collection because in the case of tannin since one of the most important things about biblical interpretation is that we interpret the Bible in light of its own self so to speak it's part for us as Jews of an overall set of concepts so if I say to you here always with water God's laws 1 and we're gonna say well what do you mean by the Lord is one well I'm gonna immediately tell you let's go look at what the prophets say the prophets tell us we can't worship other gods the prophets say they're phony that they're not real the prophets say that our God has real power there we go through we use the Bible to understand the Bible it's by the way not so clear to you today because these things we take a second nature because they're only second nature to us because we're living after certain interpretations became basic to Judaism but the third ingredient so to speak or the second meaning I'm sorry besides Bible and text the other enemies also I'm sorry besides text the other ingredient that's important I started early this morning right is can and what's in the collection now here we have a scholarly debate I have some colleagues were convinced that there's an open Canon at Qumran and anything could be in the Bible now I personally believe that there is a limited number of texts that they divide up as we're used to the Torah the prophets of the writings and that there may have been a few extra books there but there is a closed collection why is this so important because if I have to deter what's a Bible test and what's an interpretation I often have to know is this part of the standard thing that we call the Bible because interpretations presume that they is a fixed text that they are going to interpret and in the case of these Bible translations so this is or Bible commentaries I have to understand that it doesn't think it's the Bible so that's a very important question sometimes by the way to tell the truth it's not what they think it's what we think so I don't know whether the author of chronicles thought that he was writing Bible or interpreting earlier biblical tests we consider Chronicles to be the Bible I'm sure knowing he's read Chronicles I know it's a different question I'm not going to ask people to raise their raise their hand right I'm sure nobody has read Chronicles but maybe some one person but the bottom line is these books that we have in our Bible they are presumed by us to be in some way sanctified and holy and we need to know in antiquity what they thought from my opinion there was such a thing and there's evidence that certain works but dear I listed two works Jubilees and the Aramaic Lavy document that may actually have been in the Canon of the Dead Sea Scrolls sectarians because they quote them as if they're part of the biblical text and one of the most important items here is this three-part thing the MMT text as we call it 4q MMP which is that document which is so important for the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls the sect and who they are and how they separated and why this document mentions the Torah and the words of the prophets does the Book of Moses the words of the prophets and David which I say that the prophets of the second group and then David and the Chronicles of each and every generation is what we call the writings so from my point of view there's the Torah the the prophets and the writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls as in our Bible now also there are in the Dead Sea Scrolls certain books that we call Apocrypha now Apocrypha are books that got into the Greek Bible but that may have been written too late to get into the Hebrew Bible as we call it and they got into the Greek Bible and they are until they in the Catholic Bible even the Jewish text so I got to tell you one or two Maccabees we just finished Annika would you believe this funny fact one in two Maccabees the most important books for understanding the story of Chanukah are in a Catholic Bible and they're not in the Jewish Bible his Bazaar could you imagine of the Christmas story was in our Bible and not in theirs that's what you're talking about that isn't an accident a funny accident of history that the Apocrypha this is the book of Tobit which you may know from the Apocrypha and this is a book called enoch now we're getting to the point when sometimes a book could be written as if it's Scripture but it's really all interpretation so you know there it says the Torah about Enoch I know that he was not because the Lord because God took him up now if anything says please tell me a story what do you mean he was not God took him up magic even bet one of your friends and they said oh you've seen so-and-so lately he's the oh no stone so God took him up so they would assume maybe they is dead I don't know but this guy was taken up he had no grave no nothing right so they began to speculate about him and they speculated about him being in heaven and being one of God's assistance and for this came forth a whole literature which seeks to explain the ways in which this Enoch functioned in heaven and it tells us all kinds of things about the heavens and it tells us about astronomy or all kinds of information the causes of evil in the world it expands on all kinds of biblical stories in the process and this begins to move us towards something that we call rewritten Bible which is where the interpretation of the Bible is not just in a little gloss in the biblical text but actually is in a retelling of additional stories not in our Bible but partly like our Bible now another kind of interpretation that takes place is to sew together biblical text this is a photo of the earliest they always say Ten Commandments when we had the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which was held in Times Square I know if I could tell this joke but people said to me did when I was in the movie did you ever think you'd be in a movie playing in Time Square so anyhow the when we had that exhibit at the Discovery Center so what we saw there was there during Christmas New Year's period they brought this piece and you couldn't get into the building it was absolutely impossible there were people waiting an hour and half just to see this because they're always time commitment so I got a little secret it's not a ten commandments like the way you expect you figure let's get me the book of Exodus get me the book of Deuteronomy I'll look up the Ten Commandments it appears twice for the Torah great guess what what's the biggest problem the Ten Commandments in the Ten Commandments the first time it tells you you have to observe the Sabbath because God created the world in seven days this is the whole idea we say okay we don't do labor we recognize that God is the creator and then in Deuteronomy it tells you you have to keep the Sabbath for social reason namely of social meetings social justice reason that you have to remember your slaves in Egypt and you have to give the opportunity to everyone else to rest yourself for your family your animals your employees your slaves whatever it is if they give them all to rest you know what these guys did they smush them together and may one text remember the sabbath because if seven days god four years and you were slaves in Egypt now the point I want to make about this is therefore the only thing they did here because they took Deuteronomy 8 which requires you to say grace after meals and you should eat and be satisfied and bless the Lord your God and they put it on a little piece with the Shema in some kind of expert now I can't tell you why somebody wanted these particular passages in his could be her even pocket but this is interpretation because someone has said these are important passages and the decision that the two versions of the Ten Commandments are one is something we say every Friday night no hado D we say suhoor Bashar orbitty boric had that the two versions of the Ten Commandments the one that says remember the one that says says be careful these are the two versions with Amba were said at once by God now how that happened the Midrash tries to explain some miracle but whether it's thought what that's telling us is that the Ten Commandments are speaking about the same Sabbath and both meanings really to be understood together because in others we understand that because God is the creator is why we have obligations to other people we're all created by the same God etc we understand all those concepts I don't I think explain that here but the point is by putting them together this way it represents a fundamentally important interpretation and here you could read the text which I probably should have shown you earlier but you can see how it works God suit you add a video now so share this for the Lord your God has commanded you to observe for in six days God made the two of them together where else are they together Friday night kiddush but carefully defining that Kennish you'll see it's exactly that God creating it and he took you out of Egypt event and created the world and remembrance of Egypt now this is a scroll of the Psalms and this scroll of the songs has all kinds of really interesting things in it and one of the things that it has is a discussion of the nature of David's divine inspiration when he composed sobs and actually they discussed a whole lot of different texts that could have been written by David here but the key point is always he spoke through prophecy because the concept of the Bible is that the Bible has some kind of divine inspiration the total being big divine inspiration the prophets being a little less and the writings being again even less descending order of inspiration and there were those people in the Quran sectarian group who are convinced that some modicum of prophecy remained even with them and their leadership and that's something about certain Second Temple texts that differs from the way the rabbi's understood this matter because as far as they was concerned prophecy had ended now interpretation in the scrolls comes in a whole variety of texts therefore first of all translations we have Aramaic translations what we call targum we have pieces of the Septuagint because apparently some Greek speaking group Jews on the out at Qumran where they found the scrolls or must have been there at some point left some fragments then we have simple sense commentary which is like what you would expect if you open a Bible commentary in the synagogue and then we have the retellings now the question is why did the rabbis object to a lot of this stuff so they objected to the retelling of the Bible because in the retelling human things are basically provar as if they're divine because what it means is this if I take the story of Moses and I decide to add my own details I've taken something that the Jewish tradition understands to be given by God and I put in my own words my own ideas so this was considered to be inappropriate by the rabbi's of the Talmud but these Second Temple Jews were doing it all the time and furthermore there's another type of interpretation for harmonization it can be a textural harmonization so one place says that you shall do good in the eyes of the Lord and another place says something about good and upright so you add the two together and you get a verse thou shall do good and be upright in the eyes of the Lord and now you've expanded attached and made a new interpretation then we have harmonization of Jewish law with coha logic that happens in the scrolls when you see this in some example somebody wants to make a holiday you know we have a new year on what we could call seven one that is to say the first two Tishrei which is our Rosh Hashanah the seventh months of the year but Nisan is the first there's a scroll called the temple scroll which rewrites much of the Torah and they decided they won't have a new year on Nisan one Nisan one is what you can call one one because the Torah tells us that Nissan is the first in the counting of the months so how do you get the information for sacrifices to be done on one one if you have a seven one new year I hope every one that stands these numbers 1 1 & 7 1 right not January 1st right 1 1 means lease on one in the spring and in the in the fall Tishrei 1 which is our Rosh Hashanah anyway what you do is you take that the sacrifices the toe requires on Rosh Hashanah and you slap them to two weeks before pestsof and you put them down and Nisan on the first day as we called it before 1 1 and now you harmonize the two days you harmonize the beginning of the first half of the year for which we had no total rules we're going to get any of the second half of the year and that's a form of biblical interpretation and I just point out that some of these mess were followed despite rabbinic objection by the medieval tights the sect of literalist jews who got some ideas somehow from some of these sectarian groups that we saw before now this is a piece of what we call simple sense interpretation because if you look this at this text he wants to add answer a very simple form very simple question because tom was involved in this business of covering or uncovering of Noah when he was drunk after the flood nobody really knows what this story means there all kinds of interpretations but Noah curses his son come while he actually doesn't he Karstens canang who's the son of calm right after he wakes up and finds out what happened and look what happens over there right so it says in that text that he didn't curse him because God blessed the sons of Noah once God blessed you there's nothing to do about it so instead of blessing instead of cursing the guy who made trouble saying he instead curses his son now you could say you don't like that interpretation frankly that's all we're talking about I may not like it either but it's an attempt to give a simple interpretation for why the Torah says what it says and this other thing having to do with the question of why was Jacob were reproving Reuben and it doesn't exactly said what he does it's all he says some that he's that he's he's quick to do things and you know this kind of stuff and he gets excited quickly and he's like Cleo he's talking about so actually answer is as he says over here the interpretation is that he Jacob reproved him Reuben because he had sexual relations with Bilhah he's Jacob's concubine now that's an interpretation that is found in a lot of rabbinic sources at all also however the point I'm making is that we have such interpretations in the scrolls biblical interpretation as this is a very interesting book it's called the Genesis apocryphon if we had the whole book it was a retelling and Aramaic of much of the book of Genesis unfortunately a lot of it right or for some reason was not preserved but we want to take a look at one interesting story everybody wants to know how could I've ROM lie that his wife just imagine this if you were introduced to someone and this woman is the guy's wife and he says oh this is my stitches my name is my sister right I mean just imagine it's so bizarre right and he did this and in the end it had exactly the effect I guess the worst possible effect you could expect that somebody decides to be interested in her and you can't even blame him does he know that he's mad that that she's married woman he hid it is that it was a system so why would he do such an anything answer God came to me to dream and told him to do it and you can quickly look at this and the point is that God told him listen you have to protect yourself because there are people who are going to want now this is the irony seek to kill me and spare you in the end that's what almost happened because of his actions but nonetheless the text wants to say that God actually gave this inspiration so here you had the typical example of the rewriting of a story of the Torah to answer the questions that the Torah leaves you this is the kind of work by the way which professor Google does so much of that he works a lot with these questions of as they call them orphan interstices in the text but that's what the Genesis apocryphon is doing here now another type of interpretation is her logic Jewish law made rosh which we have and it relates very carefully through bennett literature and you have to understand that this form of interpretation is based often on a concept that they have in the scrolls of a revealed and a hidden law the revealed laws of text anybody could read you say what it means the hidden is the sectarian tradition which is passed on only to those who are the initiatives in this sectarian group which as you know many scholars identified with the Essenes I've had some question about that I've tried to show that they originated with the sect of the Sadducees but it really matters what we're talking about tonight we're we talking about how to interpret the Bible and of course as I noted the idea of two terrorists are revealed and a hidden is similar in certain ways to the rabbinic oral law and the written law the oil law which of course is a major part of Judaism the sectarians also believed in continuous revelation pay share is a very particular type of interpretation in which the Bible specifically by the way that the twelve minor prophets Isaiah and Psalms from what we have are interpreted as contemporized so you read them as if they're not speaking about the time of the ancient prophets they're speaking about us today and that interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls has given us a lot of historical information because they tell through the mouths of the prophets sometimes their own story and so you can see in this example from the rule of the community this is the interpretation of the Torah which ëgod cabañas Ramos's to observe according to everything is revealed from time to time the sectarians get these revelations over time and according to the words of the prophets of what they have told us by His Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit is the spirit of prophecy so what happens is that they believe basically that there's an ongoing process of Revelation which isn't going to stop now this is actually my favorite scroll the temple scroll I have published ready two books on the scroll there let's call them because the bet over $200 for one volume unlike the three lines right here for one volume is in there it's a it's a phenomenal scroll it's a rewrite of the entire Torah from the end of Exodus to the entire time most of the teller from the end of Exodus through the middle of Deuteronomy all the legal material but it's all organized about sacrifice and temple and worship but there's a lot of other interesting stuff and here's the idea your laws are stated in the style of the Bible the author is speaking in God's name now this is sort of if someone took the Mishnah and wanted to rewrite the terrorist so when it said write and you shall love the Lord your God etc and then it said you shall speak of them when you get up it would add and read the three paragraphs here o Israel you see I'm saying that's what's happening in this role they're writing laws into the text orphan by using madrasah interpretation harmonization etc so I gave you this example this is the one we discussed before and it's the example of having a sacrifice for the extra New Year Festival on the 1st of Nisan now the another really interesting place to find out about biblical interpretation is a document that's called by two names Damascus document or satellite fragments let's skip why you have two names many Scrolls have two names it's a kind of a problem but in any case this document was first found then you actually see it here in a manuscript in the Cairo Genizah in the 1890s by Solomon chapter and it was published in 1911 because the first Dead Sea scroll was actually found in the Cairo Genizah and later on ten manuscripts of this document were found with the scrolls and I want to take you through an amazingly complex example of a logic to Jewish law interpretation which does it says put it this way it would make anybody proud in the times of the mission and Gomorrah as to that which he God said you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinfolk that's the commandment the Torah so we want to fulfill that so what does it refer to any man from among those who have entered the convent means a sectarians you have to know these people believe that all who matter are in their group it's another discussion but they don't have our concepts of Jewish unity forget about what you read the Jewish newspapers I mean these guys they know no Jewish newspaper reports about non unity in the Jewish community could ever compete with the attitude of these people to outsiders and that's really the truth they believe the Messianic gear is only for them everybody else is not really the true Israel it's a very negative concept but nonetheless let's go with their interpretation so any any man who head to the confident means those guys who shall bring a charge against his neighbor which is not with reproof before witnesses now you have to know they have a law let's say you see someone doing a violation of law you must come with witnesses two witnesses and reprove him before the sectarian official only if a person is reproved in that manner can he later be convicted of a crime now it goes on if he does that without reproof and now accuses him of another violation he's taking vengeance and bearing the grudge now how do we know he's not allowed to take avenges and bear a grudge because is it not written only in the book of Nahum he god takes vengeance and bears a grudge you're not allowed to do it but what happens if the guy kept silent about it BTW he saw somebody violate the law and he didn't do anything he didn't do reproof in front of the reaping and now he comes any accused in any out here's the accused guilty upon him and others you accuse the guy of committing crime X thing it says if you did it because you should have reproved them the first time and that's why he's doing it now so therefore he did not fulfill the commandment of God what do you mean if I don't reprove the person who violated the law what commandment did I not fulfill its the commandment if sister's over here you shall reprove your neighbor lest you bear guilt because of him now in rabbinic tradition we have all kinds of problems about how do you reprove a person and should you reprove a person and what happens if they're not gonna listen it I do the opposite thing and where do we not worry about that because the guy's doing something is so terrible and somebody's about to shoot someone we don't sit around discuss whether we should retrieve them right ok however here's what you have to understand the whole reproof process in the Qumran Jewish law system is designed to solve a problem that the rabbi's also had how do we know someone's in an intentional violator of a crime the answer is we have to say in rabbinic tradition that were warning you before you do it and unless the person let's say a person commits murder unless two witnesses say to him do you know if you do this crime the punishment is death unless he then says yes I know before he does the murder you can't convict him of a capital offense now that's astounding but they require absolute certainty before an execution would take place which is why the rabbi's said any court then executed anybody is a bloody Court so what you can see here is they had the same problem how could we be totally certain that the person understands the crime and knows what he's doing the answer they give us will be proven from a previous violation of the same crime and without that reproof if you accuse them it's as if you're guilty why had you accused in the first time he would have understood he shouldn't be doing this but what I quoted this for you is not to understand this details that I just gave you which I hope everyone found is to show you the detailed interpretation of halacha Jewish law matters which is as they say would make any crowd so now we want to talk a little bit about this pace your interpretation first of all it comes in different forms it can be continuous like a patient on the book of habakkuk Sabah kook it just goes verse verse verse verse like that look what you use through Bible commentary sometimes we have anthology sometimes a little paycheck is put into something else remember patient's a contemporized interpretation that understands the text as if it's talking about now now also there's a theology to this because apparently they believe that the prophets words are really relevant to today not to the time of the prophets I have to explain how that difference from regular Judaism because you go to synagogue in the Regal Torah and maybe even in the sermon dimension it and basically the message is these things are relevant to us so let's take an obvious case if the haftorah says that people are mistreating the poor and you read it you're supposed to know we're not supposed to mistreat the poor that's what we mean by relevant to us but we're not supposed to assume what they assume then it's not talking for someone in the 8th century BCE and that the prophecy could not be understood until it was interpreted by our teacher called by the sectarians teacher of righteousness and then it has no relevance to the past it's only relevant to me today that's what they believed we never take a verse out of its original context and would ever understand no matter what great sermon the rabbi is about to give based on this text no matter how meaningful the message may be to us in whether a general situation as part of a larger community or as individuals we never take away and we certainly don't believe that you need an intermediary of another divinely inspired figure to tell you what Isaiah means and that's what they believed that's the two-step prophecy with

Channel: Temple Emanu-El NYC

Views: 363,634

Rating: 4.3205695 out of 5

Keywords: Jewish, Judaism, education, innovation, school, learning, youth, synagogue, temple, congregation, nyc, new york

Id: 5TMeyFU_M-M

Length: 41min 43sec (2503 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2013