Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 18, Ethics in the Bible

Jeremy Rosen - Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 18, Ethics in the Bible

- Good morning everybody, or at least good morning in New York time and we are turning to the question of ethics and starting with ethics, we start with a sexuality of it. Now, so far in the book of Leviticus, we have looked at the sacrificial system, the purity system, and these were all parts of society at that time and they were the way societies functioned, covering a lot of what societies deal with nowadays. That is to say the law, taking care of people, providing for education and welfare and so forth. And the ritual was important but not an end in itself. It was if you like, the structure, onto which you then added the human relationship side. And it’s human relations that we are going to deal with essentially today. The problem that we always have is when we look back at ancient cultures and the way things were written at that stage, within the context of the time, things sound strange to us, almost forbidding in a negative way. And today actually we’re going to start off with something negative then thank goodness, we’re going to move into something more positive, more to do with what we call ethics. So at the end of last week when we finished chapter 17, we moved to the question of diet. The question of eating, what you can eat, what you can’t eat, how you prepare the food. And these were, if you like, traditions that were concerned with the person, rather than the institution of the priesthood, the institution of the temple. We’ve left that behind. We’re now looking at people, how should people behave? And the first thing that actually is mentioned is this question of how you eat. What does eating say about who you are and how you eat?

What’s the difference between a cow in a field consuming food in one end and out the other and a human being who can think how the food comes from, to apply what we now call mindfulness to eating. And now we move on to this other area. And if you look at chapter 18 on your page, which is on your screen, chapter 18 starts off like this, and God speaks to Moses and he says, speak to the children of Israel and say to them, I’m your God. I’m if you like, the boss, I know what’s best for you. But the foundation of everything I’m telling you is a spiritual foundation. There is a spiritual dimension which underlies everything here. But I want, says God, to give you an indication of your options. Verse three, the way that Egyptians lived, and you lived amongst them for a long time. I don’t want you to follow their system. And similarly like what they do in Canaan, in which I am bringing you there, I don’t want you to do. And now a principle in Jewish law, according to their laws, you should not follow. Now we have mentioned before the idea, that the Torah describes Jewish legal system in a tripartite way. There is the mitzvah, there is the mishpat and there is the chok. Mitzvah, I’m telling you what to do. This is the sort of thing you have to do. In normal life, to function in a rational and an ethical way. Mishpat is the judicial system. What are the laws that determine that on society terms? And then you have a third category of chok. And chok statute sometimes called, is a law of a specific spiritual nature. And it is something that is not given an explanation. It’s almost like taking it on faith that God thinks this is good for you.

So when we are talking about chok, this doesn’t mean to say when God says don’t follow their choks, their statutes, it doesn’t need to say that if they have good laws, good ethical laws, you shouldn’t follow them. But their shall we say specific religious laws, the way they conduct themselves religiously, they are pagan and they have a pagan system which is very, very different to the monotheistic system that the Torah is now trying to amend the old system to change it to a different way of looking at life. And therefore you have to avoid the bad things that they are doing. Or when I say bad, it means primarily the idolatrous, the selfish, the uncontrolled, the completely loose values of their societies. And you will see as we go through this, that many of the things that are forbidden are things that were very common in both the Egyptian and in the Canaanite societies. So the one thing for an ethical life is don’t do what everybody else is doing and assume it’s right, but make up your own mind about what the right thing to do is. Verse four, reiterates, my civil laws you should do and my, shall we call them religious laws, you should keep, in order to follow them. And notice the difference between, to do, to perform something in a judicial sense and to keep something, in a spiritual sense. So, but you also have to keep in that sense, my laws and my rules that a person should do to live according to them, I am God. And this is probably one of the foundational ethical laws of the Torah. It’s not what it seems. Basically it says these laws you have to live according to them and the Torah goes on to say and not die by them.

So don’t die just for the sake of the laws. And this brings in certain important principles that we are going to come back to. So for example, if somebody were to say to you, I’m going to kill you unless you kill somebody else, you are not allowed to kill somebody else to save your own life. If somebody says, go and sleep with that woman or rape that woman, otherwise you will die, you must die rather than allow somebody else to suffer. So there are certain limits to this, certain limits to martyrdom. And yet martyrdom is something which at a certain stage was very common, even though in general, the feeling is, in Jewish law that you should not go for martyrdom in principle. It’s an important principle if you like in Christianity, but it’s not an important principle in Judaism. But martyrdom was quite common sometimes under the Romans and sometimes under the Greeks and the Romans and also sometimes under Christian influence during the period of the crusades. So the laws have to be lived by them. And that also brings in another famous example of ethical behaviour. The famous case of two people in a desert and there’s one bottle of water between them. If they share the water, they will both die. If one of them takes the water, he will live and the person who is in possession of the bottle should keep the bottle and not share it because that would mean they would both die. And we have a principle that no human life can be said to be more valuable than another. Who is to say that your blood is any purer or any more valuable than anybody else’s.

That is the general law. But as with all kinds of laws, there are exceptions and exceptions can be, shall we say, the difference in theory, only in theory, but not in practise, sorry, rather than practise, but not in theory. In theory, if there’s a choice between a learned spiritual great man and an ordinary working class peasant shall we say, you can’t say one life is more important than the other. But if you had to make a decision which life to save, and you know the question that doctors have all the time of who to give priority to, this is another category altogether. And this is where sometimes the personal decision trumps the letter of the law and the spirit of the law becomes very important. So this principle of you should live according to these laws. If these laws are getting in the way of your life, your life is a priority. They’re meant to enhance your life, enhance the quality of your life, not undermine it or to destroy it. And we start with what was, shall we say in a sense the most important ethical division between Judaism and Egyptian and pagan life. And that was sexual behaviour. Verse six, a person and repeating, That means any person to any relative, a flesh relative, you should not come too close in order to reveal what should be covered. Which is a nice euphemistic way of saying, having sex with, to reveal, the private parts of a person.

I’m telling you this says God, whether you think it makes logical, rational or not because both in Egyptian and in Canaanite society, incest was common and the rules we now take for granted were not taken for granted. I’m still amazed how much incest takes place in our society today, and hears about it all the time, but it does. But at that time it was a massive problem. There is no word for incest here. Incest is included in this general category of people you can’t have sex with. And so, we start with this list that we run through. Your father, your mother, you cannot, she is your mother actually, why doesn’t it also say he is your father? You must not have sex with your parents. But it’s interesting how the emphasis is on the mother here and this comes back to the society in which rape was normal. And that’s why the additional emphasis, although it starts off by saying, a person, emphasises although father and mother, he says she is your mother. That is the emphasis. She is in a special category. The wife of your father, your father may have many wives, you’ve got to keep away because that is in a sense undermining and demeaning your father, your sister, whether she’s your daughter of your father, daughter of your mother, your half sister, whether she was born in the same house or whether they came into the house later on from a second marriage or anything like that. You may not have sex with her. And then your granddaughter, whether it’s your son or your daughter, you may not do that. And again, we’re going to hear later on ‘cause these are the things that were common in Canaanite and in Egyptian society. Similarly, the daughter of your father’s wife. So this could be a half sister onto your father, she’s your sister, you may not have sex with her.

And similarly, your father’s sister, whether it’s anybody else as a result of that immediate proximity, the sister of your mother you may not have sex with. And obviously the implication is you can’t get married these are the laws that you can’t get married to. So in verse 14, remember again, to the wife of your father’s brother because, she is sister rather she is your aunt. So specifying, you can’t marry your aunt, you may not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law, the wife of your brother, your sister-in-law, you can’t. The wife of the mother and a daughter, one after the other or one before the other. You may not have sex or you may not marry no matter which side of the family it is. And there you have an interesting word at the end. So verse 17 goes like this, you may not have sex with a woman and her daughter, the daughter of her son, and the daughter of her daughter, you may not marry them, they are relatives. Now this term is a strange word. We are going to come across a series of unusual words that describe the act as being unacceptable. But there are different words for unacceptable. This is the first one, the term is used generally for sexual depravity. In other words, this is something that we do not approve of. It doesn’t talk about bad or good. It says this has a term applied to it which is specific. And similarly, you cannot marry somebody who is a sister of your wife because then you’d be setting up competition between the two of them. So this is also if you like an important psychological issue that in a situation in those days, for example, when you had several wives and you could have more than one wife, which is not the case now of course.

Making sure that you don’t set up this personal rivalry, which actually is what happened with Rachel and Leah and it was done by the forefathers at that stage before these laws were brought into effect. It shows it was common in that society and similarly, you should not have sex with a woman during her period. And this is a highly controversial one and one that people have a great deal of problems with in our society. And the question of course is, what kind of a law is this? Is this a law that may have derived from a medical taboo of some kind or is this a law which is saying one needs to recognise the nature of what a woman goes through every month? In other words, a another example of thoughtfulness, of consideration beforehand. And similarly we go on to having sex with your neighbor’s wife. What’s wrong with your neighbor’s wife? People are doing it all the time. But again, you are setting up tension and competition in a situation where you should be dealing with friendship, with support, with kindness to another person. And throwing in with this to emphasise the idea that these are all based on idolatry practises we say, and don’t pass your son through . Now was a Canaanite god of fire and just as in Greece, a newborn child was left out on in Sparta on the hill at night to see if he would survive, and otherwise not, in the Canaanite world they passed them through fire. And part of this was a situation in which somebody survived, but part of it was in which somebody died. It was a kind of a child sacrifice. And so this idea of putting one’s children in danger, which is what one did with is something which is also taboo in this category of what was forbidden because of paganism.

And this way, if you do that in verse 21 it says, you desecrate the name of God. Now this is an interesting principle which has become very important. How can you desecrate the name of God don’t desecrate the name of God. This has come to be very, very important in our society because it has come to mean don’t do anything that brings not only God, but Jews into bad odour, makes people say what horrible people, the idea of is doing something when people say, well what kind of God is your God if you are doing this sort of thing? And unfortunately this is so common and I will tell you that it is such a serious thing, desecrating God’s name, that it is the one thing according to the Talmud that day of atonement cannot forgive you for, this is the most important thing. If you bring God into disrepute, bring your people into disrepute, this is the unacceptable face of Judaism. So, is to make mundane, you are dragging him down to the lowest level of society. that’s what it is. And now we have one which is also very, very controversial in our society, don’t sleep the way you sleep with a woman, with a man. And here the word is used, is translated often as abhors. And I don’t think it is any different in its way from the term which we had before when we were talking in verse 17, about having sex between a woman and her daughter. are words that are used to say I do not approve. Now in the case of homosexuality, lesbianism, which is a very, very important part of Western culture, how do we deal with this? Now in some societies, unfortunately in parts of Islam, somebody who’s homosexual is put to death one way or another. There is no evidence that this ever happened within the Jewish tradition.

And in fact, what many of these laws are, there on the book to describe ideals as opposed to non-ideal. So for example, an ideal in Judaism is that you should get married and procreate, but if you can’t get married or don’t want to get married, it’s not as though you are punished for it. So it’s quite true that Judaism sees as an ideal heterosexual relationship that produces children and saying that, that is the foundation, if you like, of Jewish family life. And there are certain things that they understood at that time as getting in the way of this. For example, issues of adoption were not thought to be very common at that stage, although there are examples and were examples of adoption. So this represents one of the problems in modern society of this text where homosexuality was so much identified with Roman paganism, with Canaanite paganism, with Egyptian paganism. It’s the association with paganism that makes it a problem. And I think it’s very important because in orthodox life, increasingly they are faced with the issue of orthodox men and women who have different sexual orientations. And then the question is what do you do about it? And in fact, because Jewish law is not predicated on circumstantial evidence, only on clear evidence of a sexual act taking place, and since most sexual acts take place in private as a general rule, we don’t have this kind of tradition of looking for trouble and examining what goes on behind closed doors. And that plays a very important part in the practical response to certain issues such as the issue of homosexuality. So whereas you can have within the orthodox world complete tolerance of it, you will not be able to find an example in the Torah’s world in which they say this is the ideal.

You’ll say this is recognising differences but not the ideal in the same way that the ideal is to get married. But we can recognise that sometimes we can’t. So there we have the term applied in verse 22 to a male and homosexuality and similarly to in verse 23, to having sex with animals again, not an uncommon feature today and throughout the world in different parts, some places more than others. And in 24 it says, I don’t want you to do these things because don’t bring yourself down to the level of what the nations around you that I’m sending you to live amongst were doing. This is what they were doing. I don’t want you to be like them. Because if you do that, then in a sense you affect society. In verse 25, this results in the society becoming in some way infected with the lack of, shall we say, sensitivity to other people. And the result of this is you’ll be, in a sense your society will descend to a state of dissolution. And instead verse 26, you should keep these rules, these laws and don’t follow them are, not only you, but the people who live in your society, the stranger coming through, the person who’s living within you. And here you have a difference between Ezra who is described as a citizen and a in verse 26 who is a stranger passing through or spending time with you. Anybody who is not one of you but living in your society are expected to conform to your moral laws because these are the things that those societies did and that’s why they ended up being rejected. They ended up long-term of course, of collapsing under the weight of their dissolution.

And therefore in verse 29, anybody who does this is cut off, their souls are cut off. Now that can apply to a punishment called But simply means you don’t belong in this society. It doesn’t necessarily imply in it a definite punishment, it implies you are not part of this society, you don’t belong here. And now we come to chapter 19 and chapter 19 in many respects is the most important chapter in the Torah in the sense that it does cover with these ethical laws that we consider to be the foundation. How often do people say, you know, I abide, I like what the prophets say. The prophets were very ethical, I’m with them, but they were not in favour of sacrifices. Well no, that’s not true. They were not in favour of the hypocrisy of people bringing sacrifices, but at that time everybody sacrificed. But if you look carefully at what the prophets say, they say such things as you know, if you ask what God prefers sacrifices of people being good, of course he prefers people being good. Of course he can’t stand hypocrisy and people bringing sacrifices to show how religious and how good and how perfect they are. But nevertheless, this chapter, this chapter is the chapter known as and only means being better, being able to choose a better life as opposed to a bad life, a holy life rather than an unholy life. It means being different. Don’t follow what everybody else is doing elsewhere. Speak to the children of Israel, verse two, to the children of Israel tell them and say to them, I want you to be holy. I want you to be special, because I am special.

What’s that mean, God is good as opposed to bad. It’s saying the idea of God is associated with doing the right thing. I am the source of goodness. And verse three, what’s the first law? I’m sure if anybody would ask you, what is the first law in the list of the holiness category of you say something like, don’t murder, don’t steal. That’s not what it says. It says, I want you to respect your mother and your father. Now the word can sometimes mean to fear, and I don’t think it means fear, but as we mentioned when we discussed this in the 10 Commandments, the 10 commandment says, honour your father and your mother. And we say, why does the Father come first? And here it says, fear or respect your mother and your father. And as I’ve explained many times, the Torah language is limited, human language is limited. You can’t say two things at the same time. If you are going to deal with one and the other, you have to have one first and the other second. But the fact that you get laws in the Torah where they reverse the order is another way of the Torah saying, I’m not giving priority to one over the other, but I can’t mention both at the same time. So that when for example, when I said about keeping Shabbat and we used the word to keep, or in the first version of 10 commandments it says, to remember, you need to do both. You’ve got to keep it in mind, but you’ve got to carry on in practise, but you can’t say both at the same time. And so whereas in the 10 Commandments it said father first and then mother here it says keep first. And then there it said, sorry, remember first, and now it says keep first. This is another way of saying that we want to merge these statements into one to be in effect identical.

And then we go on to verse four, don’t worship idols, gods of images that that can mean molten image or can mean a wooden image. Anything made out of material you should not mention, you should not worship again, I want you to focus on me being your God. Keeps on reiterating every time. And one of the explanations that my father taught me is that what this is saying is this is not a rational law. Don’t do it because it’s rational. Do it because God said so. It is a divine instruction rather than just humans working out what they think is a good idea. And so in verse five, when you sacrifice, when you sacrifice and remember when we talked about sacrifices, we talked about those sacrifices which are part of the temple ritual, which were done for the nation and our national sacrifices that are not shared. And those that either you do because you do something wrong. But more important, the peace offerings are offerings that you give in the temple to share, to bring people together, to eat together, to come together. So when you do this, I want you to do this because you volunteer to do it, not because you feel compelled. I want you to do it because this matters and you want to contribute to society. And when you do this, I’m also saying I don’t want you to leave anything over. I want you to share it on the spot, not take it away and salt it away to keep in your ladder. The purpose of this aspect of the sacrificial system is sharing with others in society immediately. And once again, anybody who denies this, who rejects it, who wants to be selfish about it again, he is or she is cut off again, not necessarily punished, but they are betraying the values of society. And then we move on in society to charity and to welfare.

And this is a very, very fundamental issue. Now, they didn’t have the word charity that we have now, and the charity in this agricultural society was giving of your produce to other people, to the needy and others. And so the first law of what amounts to charity is the idea of the harvest in verse nine when you harvest the harvest of your land on the assumption they’re all going to be in the same land together, not scattered around, don’t, when you harvest, take the corners of your field and and anything that is dropped as you are going through the field, cutting it down, don’t gather it up again and similarly in your vineyard, when you go through picking the grapes, don’t take everything including the unright ones or the small ones or the seedlings and anything that’s left on the trees you should give to the to the poor person, the stranger that should be left for them. So these three things that are mentioned, implication here but not mentioned, mentioned actually is the the corner of the field, the the gathering, and the the leftovers, those are the three. There’s another one that we are going to come across in due course and that is what’s called anything you forgot, so you gathered in, you can’t pick up what’s left on the floor, but you gathered in the sheaths and you put them in the field to dry and before you pick them up, you left some behind, you can’t go back and pick them up again. So are the three categories of charity that you have to leave to the poor and the poor doesn’t matter who it is, including the stranger. And hence Ruth comes in to the fields of the poor immigrant, so to speak, and she can join the locals, the residents, the citizens as everybody else was poor to gather the harvest together. And so this is the important principle of charity being established here. And so at that point, I’m going to stop for the day and start looking at the questions that you have.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: And Shelly starts off by asking why does verse four start with the word et?

A: If there’s a principle of no extraneous words, now you are right. There is this idea of no extraneous words in the Torah. And so every et has to be understood as what it means. So for example, when it says et mishvata my laws, it means not just the law but the spirit of the law. When it says my holy days, it means all holy days, not just the Sabbath to include a wider range of things. Janet, the sexual injunctions seem to be directed at male behaviour only, and that’s an excellent point. They do, although the sexual laws apply to men and women equally, probably because again, you have to consider this to be a dominant male society in which the challenge was to control the male urge to take advantage of women sexually all the time. And I think for that reason they are directed at them partially because there was a prejudice at the time to think that men were more sexual animals than women. Although you could also find certainly by the time you get to the Roman era in Jewish texts, the opposite of that to be found in different areas. But nevertheless, remember they did include men and women, mothers and fathers, did include sisters and other feminine laws. So there is a mishmash in there. It’s not just directed to males.

Q: Marsha asks, did the Torah or commentaries give an explanation of why certain sexual practises were forbidden beyond the prohibition?

A: Well, no, because in general the idea was not to try to find reasons other than those stated in the Torah. And so because the Torah states with regard to sexual practise, this is the sort of behaviour that I do not approve of that everybody is doing in Egypt and in Canaan. And the reason for not doing it is because I don’t want you to follow them. We don’t have any example of saying this is for sexual reasons, you know? Now, I mean people will say they’re not having sex at certain times or being circumcised has a sexual aspect to it and it may well be the case, but that is not the prime reason for adhering to these laws. The prime reason is to set up a society with a set of values.

Q: Arlene says, asks, I know a Haredi woman who married the son of her mother’s second husband, her husband and she are not genetically related. How was the union possible in view of the laws you are discussing today?

A: Arlene, I want once thing you should know in general about the Orthodox world is that each case, each case is always treated as a separate case with separate situations, with separate circumstances. And don’t always follow the letter of the law. I can’t answer this specific question because I don’t have all the information. And if there was some information genetically as you suggest and some other circumstances that I don’t know of that might explain why an exception was made, I find it unlikely to have been as simple as the text implies. But I don’t know and I wouldn’t pass judgement on a specific case.

Q: Israel asks, am I correct in assuming that a man cannot marry the sister of his wife even if his wife has died? So why is a woman commanded to marry the brother of her husband if a husband died, she has no children. And what is the difference between the two?

A: Now these are very, very interesting issues. The law says very specifically that a man cannot marry the sister of his wife and therefore we assume in general that is regardless of whether he is married to somebody else, regardless of whether she is alive or not, she stands independently as a case that you cannot marry. But then you have what is called and this is an example of an exception where the Torah makes an exception and makes an exception for the reason that it states that the brother who dies without having a son or a child, his name is going to disappear, disappear from the roles of the tribe of the people. And therefore it was very important to keep the family name or to keep the name of the person alive if possible, through the children. Initially this was a tribal thing, but later on it became a more idea of keeping the memory of somebody alive and therefore there was the option given to marry specifically the sister to marry this person in order to keep the family name alive and the child be named after him. But there was a way out, there was also the possibility of refusing of what was called was removing the obligation. So there was, this is a perfect example of where exception is made and it is allowed for, under very, very unusual circumstances. Sometimes I do know that exceptions have also been made in other conditions, particularly I’m thinking in cases of severely handicapped, of severely handicapped men or women who have been able to find a partner to take care of them and look after them where an exception was allowed. So there you have the difference between a general rule and a specific one. But again, you know, you can find the lists laid out of every single possibility on the internet and elsewhere if you need to be reminded of what can be done and what can’t be done.

Q: Shelly, in verse 22 and 23 comes and before no sex with animals. Do you think Torah’s actually referring to pagan fertility practises in their temples?

A: Yes, I do think a lot of this had to do with temple ceremonial in which, for example, in the Canaanites of Baal religion, women were expected to turn up at the temple and have sex once a year, either with a priest or with whoever came along first and things of this kind. So there was a connection between the pagan worship and sexual libertarianism or freedom.

Shelly says, I can’t rely to the word holy, I told it means designated set aside for a purpose or relationship. Yes, I agree. I don’t like the word holy at all and I don’t like it because it’s so common in other religions. It’s so common in English society and the English translation of the King James version, holy, holy, holy, holier than thou I really find holy problematic. And that’s why the word when it’s translated as holy, I don’t like, I prefer to say, as you said, something designated for a different purpose, something different to something else and something that is calculated to raise you as a human being. But as I’ve earlier said, the word in the Torah is used negatively and positively. So a good person is called a and a prostitute is either called a if she’s a woman or a if it’s a man. And so there you have an example of meaning the opposite of holy in the holy holy sense.

Q: How do you address child abuse revering one’s parents?

A: That is a wonderful question. I mean it is something I find horrendous and it is something that is not specifically mentioned in the Torah itself. Although commentaries have taken, again the word honour your father and your mother, et sometimes to add siblings and sometimes to add abuse. But the truth of the matter is that the expectation is that no parent would dream of wanting to abuse their child, which unfortunately in this day and age is not the case and probably hasn’t been for a long time. But the idea of harming anybody, of harming or abusing anybody is reiterated so often that that incorporates the idea of child abuse.

Philip, gets around selecting one is in more important than the other. Well the idea of means literally they were said simultaneously and therefore one is not more important than the other, and therefore it does in fact get rounded. And that is a phrase that is used in in our liturgy. It’s not actually used in the Torah itself. Thank you Carla and Hannah.

Q: Do the laws of letting the poor take from the fields apply today?

A: Are they kept, yes, indeed. There are agricultural communities that run according to Jewish law and they adhere very strictly to Jewish law to this very day and all the biblical laws. And there are other ones about mixing seeds in fields and planting things together. These are adhered to by these religious settlements. There are non-religious settlements that don’t keep any of the laws. So it depends where you go. Thank you very much, Clara. Thank you if

Q: Hashem gave people their sexual orientation, how can he deny them practising homosexuality?

A: I think that is a very good question. I am not convinced, I’m not convinced that when the Torah said that it was denying their sexuality, it wasn’t saying anything about sexuality of heterosexuals either. It was just talking about the nature of what sexual activity is more ideal than another. Now when you get to the period of the Talmud, where they in fact where they explain the laws of the Torah and expand them and suggest that the laws of the Torah were not to be read at surface level, but had to be understood at a deeper level. They recognise there were different sexual orientations and genetic categories. There was the hermaphrodite for as an example, there are several categories mentioned in the Talmud of people who have different sexual orientations and they are treated as fully fledged members of the community and they are expected to have sexual relations with their own type and to marry their own type. So here you have something in the Talmud, which despite what we read today, allows homosexuals and lesbians who are genetically that way to marry each other and to be part of them. Now there is a question as to the nature of the wedding ceremony today. Can the wedding ceremony we have today be applied to these different categories and there is resistance to that on the basis that it hasn’t been done. But nevertheless there are people within the Orthodox world who are prepared to treat this as something because it is the will of God, in a sense has to be accepted as such. Ariel Sharon married the sister of his wife, so did . They probably did, but then they won’t have done it as part of Jewish religious law. 'Cause remember in Israel, if an Israeli citizen wants to marry somebody who is not permitted by Jewish law, they could always go to Cyprus or to somewhere else and to marry them there. So it’s only a matter of what religious law allows, not what can happen.

Q: With Tamar, was there a requirement of lever at law?

A: Well, good question because Tamar was married first to Judas first son, then the second son and not the third son. And although this was before the law of Leverate marriage was given in the Torah, it is clearly evidence that there was this tradition before Judaism as part of the society at that time to adhere to this law. And this is another example of where Jewish law builds on earlier laws from earlier times. Thank you Rita.

Q: Eleanor, don’t we have cases where mother dies and father marries her sister?

A: There may be exceptions, but that is technically speaking still a problem. There are exceptions that are made under lots of different circumstances and there’s also a difference between the nature of the ceremony.

Stephen, are the laws you’ve discussed in the observe by all Jewish groups, not necessarily individuals, Stephen in Toronto, Jewish groups, it’s such a general term like talking about all Christian groups, a Catholic and a Protestant and a Russian Orthodox and a Greek Orthodox. So the answer is no. The reform, the conservative, the Orthodox, the modern Orthodox, and within different Hasidic societies, within different Hasidic societies, there are different rules and different customs based on these, but not all adhere to in exactly the same way. So when you go into a community, you need to check what their rules and regulations are and whether you are happy there or not. So that I will say goodbye to you all and we will continue with the chapter of next week.