Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 16:18, The Legal and Political System in Ancient Israel

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 16:18

- So I’m going to spend this week discussing politics. This is Deuteronomy chapter 16, and once again I apologized that last week, I advertised as dealing with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, which is the foundation, symbolic foundation of much of Jewish law. Leading up to it, this week I’m going to deal with politics, because the Torah actually doesn’t have a clear political agenda. It doesn’t say, this is how you should be run politically. The Torah’s concerned on two levels. One of them is on how we as individuals should live in the most ethical good way that we possibly can. And how we combine that with a spiritual religious relationship which provides, or provided at the biblical time, certain, how can I say, facilities to enable religious ceremony, and to establish through the priesthood a system of social welfare. That’s really what it was. But the social welfare didn’t come from the state so much as from the priesthood. But how do you run a state? The example we have from Moses is he’s a God appointed person who is both the spiritual leader and the political leader. He is the boss. He is, if you like, the dictator, the autocrat. And he passes that on in due course to Joshua. But then after Joshua, things begin to fall apart. And this is something that in due course we’re going to look at when we come to the Books of Judges and the Books of Samuel. But as far as the five books of Moses are concerned, we don’t have the same definitive instruction of this is how you should run the state as we do for lots of other things. So I’m going to start with verse 18, and verse 18 of chapter 16 starts off like this. Now Shofet is a judge. Shoter in modern Hebrew is a policeman.

So on the one hand you have the judiciary, the Shoftim, and on the other hand you have the people who have to carry out the rules and make sure that there is law and order. And so what we are told is that You should place these in all your gates. I just want to make a little side comment here. You know that there is a fashion for what is called Gematria. And Gematria is the numerical value of words and of letters. And because they have a numerical value, you can add up certain letters and see this indicates a certain date, a certain time, a certain event. And people have used Gematria, and comparing words to predict all things, like Nostradamus does or did, or like those people who say that I can tell you that Torah predicted the death of Rabin and things of this kind. Now, I enjoy Gematria when it’s fun, because with Gematria, you could almost find anything you want. I’ve even seen a Gematria that says that you can work out from these letters of the names that Donald Trump is the Messiah. And my response to this is to say it’s fun, it’s interesting, but you mustn’t take it too seriously. And my text for supporting this is that the Hebrew word for a judge, Shofeṭ, is exactly the same numerical value as Tepesh, a fool, just juxtapose the words around. So if you think that the numerical value is going to determine something, it can determine the opposite. So that’s little sideline reminding when I talk about Shoftim and Shofrim. So back to the text. You should have these wherever you live. So in every Jewish settlement, there has to be a judge and there has to be somebody who’s going to enforce both his judgment and indeed the system.

Which God is going to give you dividing up your tribes. So there will be subdivisions of tribes, something that was essential in that early section state of Jewish history, and now by and large is defunct other than symbolically. And their job is to judge the people. A judgment that has got to be Sedek. It’s got to be the right thing, it’s got to be correct. Now of course, the question is what is correct? And that’s where, again, the Constitution comes in. Where Torah comes in as the basis of judgments that are going to be given. Verse 19. It is absolutely essential that you don’t distort or corrupt justice, ‘cause if you corrupt justice, you undermine the relationship between people, people and the state, people and the judiciary, and individuals. Don’t recognize faces, don’t say, ah, he’s an important guy, I better give him judgment. Or he’s a strong guy, he’s going to scare me, or something like that. You have got to be absolutely fair. And so , never take a bribe. Nobody should take a bribe. Is this only referring to the judge or could we say this refers to politicians as well? Why? Because bribery can distort the eyes of the wisest of men. And distort even the most just claim. So bribery is the worst thing. And yet here we are thousands of years later, when you know and I know, judiciary is subject to bribery and corruption in almost every place in this world, Sedek, in verse 20, Always pursue justice. Pursue justice. You should live, , and inherit land, , which God gives you. So this is a very interesting issue, because what it is saying in essence is your right to the land that you’re going to inherit is dependent on you being good people. It’s dependent on justice and on fair, honest justice.

Now the fact is we are humans and we make mistakes and we allow all kinds of things to influence us. But this idea of justice being the primary ethical, moral guide for how we run our states is laid out absolutely, definitely here. And then surprisingly it goes on from there to say this, which seems out of place. You should not plant a grove. Now asherah is one of those groves of trees, those of you who know about ancient British history and the Druids would know they worship trees and groves. It was universal. That actually is the origin of Christmas trees. It’s part of a pagan cult. Not that everybody thinks it that way, but it is historically. And so this sort of alternative idolatrous structure should not be planted next to the altar of God. Now what does that mean next to the altar of God? So the altars were places where people used to sacrifice to God. The asherah was a place where you turned to magic. And we are going to come back again to this competition between magic, superstition and religion, which theoretically ought to contrast a superstition. In the case of superstition, you never know what you might be asked to do. But here in the case of religion, you know in advance everything that is demanded of you. There shouldn’t be any surprises. If you choose to rely on something superstitious, then you are deviating from the original design. So here’s a reference to both an asherah, and in verse 22, . And don’t establish any idolatrous building or structure or sculpture, , which God hates. Now it’s a different issue as to whether that includes sculpture as art, but clearly it’s referring here to sculpture as idolatry.

And then we have a warning, and a warning that there are always going to be people who do not do what you should be doing. And therefore what happens when people try to undermine authority or do something that they shouldn’t do? In verse two of chapter 17. If you find in your gates, , which God gives you. That a person, male or female, who rejects the covenant of God, and goes in verse three to serve and worship other gods, whether it’s the sun or the moon, or anything in the heavens. In verse four, . And you hear about this. And you go into it very, very carefully. So charges should not ever be accepted at face value within a judicial system, but you have an obligation, the obligation of the judiciary, of the judges , to go into it to get the evidence, not jump to conclusions. There’s no, for example, room in Judaism for circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be used in one sense to protect society, but it can’t be used to convict. And then , and behold. . It is true. This matter is correct. This bad behavior, that’s what Toevah means in Israel. So bad behavior, incorrect behavior, going off the tracks, that’s what the word Toevah means. People like to say it’s abomination. That’s a not correct word. Toevah is to go basically off the tracks. But there’s an interesting use of the wordm Emet. Because the word, Emet, truth, plays a very important, and I would say a distorted role within Judaism and indeed within most religions, because Emet is normally supposed to translate truth.

Is it true? Do you believe something that is true? But the word Emet here is not used religiously, it’s used empirically. It’s used about facts, about trying to verify facts. Is this empirically true? Not an absolute truth that can’t be denied as many religious claimers, indeed as ours, after the Shamar. The Shamar doesn’t use this term truth, but immediately after Shamar, the first word we use is Emet. It’s true. This is correct. And there, this is correct, is clearly being used in a theological sense. But the Torah does not ask us to define Emet as a concept, but merely as a process. It’s our responsibility to clarify, to clarify the facts. And therefore when somebody says, do I have to believe? Belief goes into a different zone altogether. And as I’ve mentioned before in the 10 Commandments, there’s no command to believe, there’s a command to explore, to understand and make sense of. And then the Torah, coming to what do you do? It says, . In verse five, you take this person, this man or this woman, , who have done this thing within your gates, , and you should stone them and put them to death. Now of course, I hate it. I really can’t stand when the Torah talks about stoning people and putting them to death. First of all, we don’t exactly know what stoning them means and we can’t rely on the Life of Brian to tell us what a stoning ceremony was like. But the Torah is going to hedge it around with so many qualifications and limitations, that in fact the rabbis of the Talmud said very clearly that even if you do put somebody to death, this is a slur and a scar on the Beth din and Rabbi Akiva’s famous statement that any Beth din that puts somebody to death once in 70 years is a bloody Beth din. And I would never put anybody to death at all. But nevertheless, it remains there, and it remains on the books as an indication of what is the most important crime.

And so in the same way that if somebody came from Mars to New York or London, or Tel Aviv with no idea of what the law was or the law is, and looks around, that person would not be able to tell a difference if you just take the law separately as between a major crime and a minor. But he would soon learn that if you are arrested for revealing yourself in a park as opposed to killing somebody, there’s a huge difference in what the punishment is going to be. So punishments generally indicate priority. But verse six goes on to clarify this and says, , you can only put somebody to death or convict them if there are two witnesses or three witnesses. Now two or three, why say two or three? Why just don’t say two witnesses? And the rabbis understand it’s the same. Well first of all, because it means you don’t only have to have two, you must have more if there are other people who knew. So other people who knew also have to come forward. Of course they’re going to exclude relatives or family, but they want other separate people to come forward. And so without that you can’t convict. Now you might decide, the judges might decide this person is a danger to society, I’d better put that person away. But you can’t carry out the law of the death penalty. And therefore, , nobody should be convicted or sentenced to death on the basis of one opinion of one witness. So isn’t it amazing? If you actually have one witness, and I saw it happen, and I was there, you still cannot convict. So people who look to the Bible is very, very primitive. I would say in certain respects it’s much more advanced in an ethical sense than much of our society today. Verse seven.

It’s the responsibility of the witnesses to be part of the process of carrying out this punishment. And if other people are going to be involved, then they come later. And you’ll get rid of this evil from your nation. Once again, the question of what is the difference and why should people who are involved in the court case actually physically have to help carry out a sentence? Because the answer is unless they realize how serious it’s going to be for them, they’re actually going to have to be involved in this, not just give evidence and then walk away. They’d think twice about giving any kind of evidence if they know they’re going to actually help carrying it out. But there’s a debate as to whether it’s a question of carrying it out, which should be left to the police, Shoftrim, or whether it was carried out by other people helping them. And now we come to probably what is the most important sentence in the, or sentences in the Torah regarding how we interpret the Constitution, because so much of the text in itself needs to be interpreted. And so the best example of this is the famous statement which is mentioned twice previously in Exodus, mentioned again in the coming chapter, that injustice, you follow an eye for an eye and a tooth through tooth. And as in Exodus, it’s clear that the context is financial reparation because that’s the law before it and the law after it and not taken literally. And because in practice, it’s impossible to make this a fair judgment. What happens if a one-eyed person puts out the eye of a normal person? If you take his eye, he’ll be completely blind. And besides, it’s all very well to talk about a bruise for a bruise. But different people bruise differently.

Different people’s limbs are longer and shorter, and it’s very difficult to turn that into a literal statement. And yet you’d be surprised how many people still think that Judaism requires literally a tooth for a tooth. Now it’s quite true in some religions based on their understanding of the Torah, they chop off hands for stealing and do take it literally. But thank goodness we haven’t done it for thousands of years and it’s arguable about how it was carried out and at what stage. But there is qualification I’m going to come to when it comes to the nature of the king. But we’re not there yet. Before we get to the root law of the king, we start with verse eight of chapter 17. If there is anything that is beyond you, you are uncertain about how to deal with it. Whether this is a matter of life and death, , whether it is a matter of civil law, financial, , whether it is a result of somebody hitting or bruising somebody else, but there is a dispute. These are matters that were being disputed in your gates. You should go to the place which God has chosen. Now what does that mean? Does that mean the temple? There’s no indication in the Torah that you have to build a temple. There is an indication that you have a tabernacle, which is a collapsible movable center which may go from place to place. So maybe it’s a reference to wherever the judgment is being given. Wherever the courts of law are, not necessarily the temple, but throughout the Middle East, the Ancient Middle East at the time, the temple of worship and justice were always adjacent to each other.

Initially it was the priests, particularly in Egypt who carried out justice. In Mesopotamia, there were judges, and in Israel, there were judges who had a separate role from the priesthood. But these are the people who were designated to have the right to interpret the law. And you should go to the place which God has chosen, or which is your religious center. And you should go to, now we don’t know if it’s either or whether it is both if they are available. You should come, in verse nine. To the priests and the Levites. So it’s interesting, but there were divisions between the priesthood who actually serviced the temple and the Levian, sorry, the Levian functioned around the temple and didn’t always live in the same place. And the Karnim whose job was to be always there in the temple and available. So Karnim, Levian, and Shofet. And so when the Karnim and the Levian are not there anymore, you turn to the judge. So the judge is there, and in certain respects, rabbis today are the heirs of the Shofet, of the judge. Who will be around there at that time. And the question is what does that mean at that time? And what, again, the rabbis understand this to mean is, look, they’re going to be good judges and bad judges, intelligent ones and not so intelligent ones. And therefore whoever is the judge at the time, even if he isn’t the brightest penny should still be authority. Whoever is the appointed or the accepted judge, no matter whether he is a big one or a little one, he is the authority that you turn to. Which again is another way of saying, the courts.

The courts, you might say that court was better, or Beit Hillel was better than Beit Shammai, but you accept whoever is the judge of that time. And so there’s a famous phrase which says Yiftah. Yiftah Jephthah was not a judge of great stature. He was the one who was prepared to offer up his daughter as a sacrifice if he won the battle, which is not a very Yiftah Jewish or religious position. And again, there’s a lot of discussion that we’ll come to when we discuss this in due course as to whether it happened or didn’t. But Yiftah, Jephthah this ordinary guy who was a judge in his time, , was to have the same power as Samuel, who was the great spiritual leader who never put a foot wrong, who was a perfect example. And when you go there to the courts, you inquire, you put your case, you go before the Supreme Court. , and they will decide and tell you, , what the law is. Verse 10. And you must do whatever they tell you. , in that place so long as it’s part of the judicial system. God chosen, , and you have to do whatever they teach you to do. But it’s not whatever they just think. It has to be according to the rules of the Torah, the Constitution. And that’s the basis of what you do. You cannot vary or deviate from what they tell you right or left. That is rabbinic authority. Verse 12. And if somebody acts intentionally, presumptuously, , not to listen to the priest or the judge, , this person should die, , and you should get rid of this danger from Israel, , and all the people, , will listen and pay attention, , and not go on to do bad things. Okay, we now start another chapter, and this is a very important interesting one to do with the monarchy.

So the Torah is talking about the possibility of being ruled over by priests and by judges who are defined and limited by the Torah, by the Constitution. They can’t take the law into their own hands. This is not the same thing when we come to a king. It is and it isn’t. Verse 14 of chapter 17. When you come into the land of Israel, , which God gives you, , and you inherit it via and you live in it, , and you would say, . I want to appoint a king, , like all the other nations around me. Now, more times than any other idea is that in the Book of Deuteronomy which says, whatever you do, don’t imitate the non-Jews. The pagans, don’t imitate them. And here all of a sudden you have the Torah saying, well if they’ve got kings and you want to be kings like them, you can have kings, you can. So can’t the Torah make up its mind? And when the Torah says you can, does it mean you have to or does it mean you may? So in response to this question of whether the monarchy is a good idea or not, in verse 15 it says, . You should appoint a king, , who God chooses. But God has to choose who the king is going to be, which is where you get the idea of anointing a king just as you anoint the priests and you anointed the altar. You can only appoint a king from amongst your brothers, which was one of the big problems with King Herod and the Herod dynasty, because Herod was descended from a convert. The convert was a force convert, and therefore his status as a genuine Jew, so to speak, was challenged all the time, which is probably one of the reasons why, like Maduro of Venezuela, if you authorities had challenged, you get more and more brutal to suppress anybody who stands up to you.

So, you can’t have a non-Jewish king, who’s not from your brothers. So you can appoint a king. Verse 60, but, here’s the big but. But number one. He shouldn’t have lots of horses. What do you mean lots of horses? Can’t go horse racing, he can’t be in sort of have his horse in Ascot. But horses basically led chariots, and chariots meant armor, and therefore basically saying he shouldn’t amass a massive amount of armor. And he shouldn’t take the people down to Egypt. The man had a but source in order to acquire many horses. He should not go back that way you came from. So he’s saying that although the king has power, he does not have the power to decide I’m going to move from Israel back to Egypt because there are better horses, or because it’s stronger or because business is better. You cannot do that. So there’s a limit to the power of the king. Then, , verse 17. He should not have lots of wives. Because they will only distract him. And he shouldn’t amass huge amounts of gold and silver. Verse 18. And when he sits on his throne, , he should write, seems he himself should write, a copy of this Torah, , honored document, or actually not a book 'cause they didn’t have books at that time. It was on our parchment, , making sure that he is supervised by this, by the Karnim and the Levian. So he has to have a copy of the Torah next to him. 19, , this Torah should be with him. He should read it every day of his life. Go on repeating and reading it. , so that he should learn, , to have respect for and to revere the God, , to keep this Torah, , to do them. So the king is not above the law. It says this absolutely black and white. The king is not above the law. He should have this Torah next to him and be bound by the Torah. Verse 20, .

He should never think he can be better than anybody else. He doesn’t need to keep the laws. And if he does and keeps the laws, he’ll have long days on his kingdom, , amongst Israel, which is a nice thought. We’ve had this about keeping the mitzvah in general. You’ll have long lives and everything do well. And yet we know that even good kings get killed ahead of time. Bad kings live longer, and humans, good humans sometimes suffer and bad humans sometimes do well. So this is a kind of a promise that no guarantees, but as a general rule, this is more likely to make your life better and your kingdom better. Now, you will obviously comment on the fact that King Solomon, who was regarded as the wisest of men, according to the Bible, was guilty of betraying many of these laws. He had massive amounts of wives, he had 700 wives, 300 concubines. He built homes for them, but he also allowed them to have their pagan temples to the pagan gods. These wives very often were treaties when you conquered somebody or you wanted to make a treaty with somebody, then to seal the treaty, you took a wife, you gave one of your family to them, they gave one of their family to you and you didn’t necessarily expect them to convert. They were there as wives as treaty trophies. And as the Torah says, these treaty trophies turned Solomon’s heart. They turned his mind. He had a good mind, a brilliant mind, and they were able to corrupt him. And similarly, he spent too much time on gold and silver and on increasing his territory and going for power and not being satisfied. So from this, the rabbis deduce a very interesting moral. The moral they deduce is this. This is the only example that the Torah gives of an explanation for a law. That the reason for this law is that he should not turn his heart and his mind and go off the tracks.

And yet that is precisely what King Solomon did. The wisest of men was so easily distracted because he thought he was intelligent enough not to let it get to him. He was wise enough not to be corrupted. He had such confidence in his strength that he did not fear that he was going to be seduced in some way. And that, says the rabbis, is why you should never look for reasons. Because if you look for reasons, you can say, oh, I don’t need to do this. This doesn’t affect me. And therefore they’re saying, stick to the Constitution. If you stick to the Constitution, you won’t go off the tracks. But if you only do things because you think it’s appropriate or you can find the right reason, then liking Solomon, you’ll be distracted. And who knows where that’s going to end up. Now in the part that we’ve just done, the reason why I said this is so significant is because it gives a range of different options. And if you look at Jewish history, you can see that at different times we’ve had different kinds of leadership. You had the Moses autocratic, if you like, religious leadership combined with a political. You then had the judges. And the judges by and large were purely political leaders, not necessarily religious leaders, although some of 'em like Deborah was, and similarly Samuel was. And then you have the kings, you have the first King Saul, and he is killed but deposed in a sense and followed by the House of David. And the House of David had good kings and bad kings. On balance, you might say the good influence has outlast the bad influence, because David and Solomon have had a far bigger impact on Jewish history and life than have some of the other kings. But then the northern kingdom of Samaria was idolatrous from the beginning right through to the end.

And that I think is why the Torah does not stipulate a particular political system as being necessary. It mentions the king if you want to have one, although some rabbis afterwards took this as an obligation to a point. You can see not only from the opinion of others, but also because when Samuel was asked by the people to appoint a king, he said, you are crazy. Don’t you are rebelling against God. And if he said that, did he not know about this option given here or did he think that it was an option but not one that you ought to take? People talk about what a theocracy is, and they accuse, for example, the Beth Din or the Supreme Court, or the rabbinical court in Israel of being a theocracy, or the danger of turning to a theocracy. But the question of course is what is a theocracy? There are so many different versions of it. So theocracy, let’s say in Iran means the Ayatollahs have an absolute say of what should be done and how it should be done. Now Judaism does not give anybody that authority. So a theocracy in Judaism would not be like the Ayatollahs. When you look at the first example, the Sanhedrin of a body that combined, that was essentially run by religious leaders. The religious leaders had an advisory role, which was to filter out something which went against Jewish law. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t going to take advice from somebody else. So what you can say is that the idea within Judaism is that although there may be different kinds of secular rulers, there might be different kinds of government.

No one can be said to be the one. You can adapt and change depending on the time. And therefore it’s theoretically possible that a communist party, if it were not anti-religious as much as a capitalist party, could be in accordance with Jewish law and not necessarily automatically against it. So you can’t say Judaism opposes communism or opposes capitalism. It does oppose abuse of both of those systems. So we do have choices. The idea of how we are going to govern ourselves is something that in essence emerges out of the circumstance of the time. And so, I for example, think that this Torah is telling us you can choose different forms of government by all mean, so long as you have a constitution, so long as you have a constitution that defines how you should be run. Now there are people in Israel who want to claim that the only constitution is Torah. But clearly that’s not the case. And to support my position, the rabbis of the Talmudic era made two changes which are not here, not in the Torah itself, but have a bearing on how to govern. One of them I consider to be dangerous. And that is, that over and above the laws of the Torah, the king has the right to execute opponents that if they challenge his authority, if they are betraying his authority, he had that right. He couldn’t use any of the punishments laid down in the Torah, 'cause those were specific and they depended on certain safeguards. But he could choose to chop off his head if he decided that that’s what the state needed. So that was one very important addition. The other addition that they had was to allow, during the period, particularly the Greek and the Roman period, for the rabbis to take on the leadership of the community. But that leadership of the community was only relevant when you ran your community. So in Babylon for example, there were heads of the community, but they had a principle that you have to obey the law of the land.

So the law of the land, , plays a very important part, that the law of the land can act therefore as a break, as a limitation on what rabbinic courts can do and what they can say and how far they can extend the law. And so you have this development of, on the one hand, a leniency, on the other hand, a strictness, which means in effect, that today living where we are, we have to balance the idea of state law and the idea of religious law. But it does mean that nothing is going to be like the model of theocracy that we see around us in certain parts of the world. So I hope that’s some degree of comfort. And with that, I will go to the questions that we have. Let me see where I get them up. Bum bum. I can’t see any questions on my screen. Does that mean nobody has answered my questions? Where are we? Let me see here. I shut this down and I open up. I do, now I found it.

Q&A and Comments:

So, question number one. Rest in peace, beautiful Afra Hazari. Yes, Afra Hazari was wonderful. She was badly treated by her management. Such a common, common, common story of how managers take over great artists. And she lost. I am sort of so sad. She was wonderful.

Q: If bribery applies to administrators well as judges, wouldn’t campaign contribution be a form of bribery?

A: Yes, I would think so. I think there is an argument that says the state should allocate funds for elections, should be by the state, and it should not be by individuals who can bribe. The only comfort, if you like, is the other side can bribe too. But I think that is a terrible failure of electoral systems to allow for campaign contributions.

Q: The interacts as romaine with the people, the more rules are created. Thoughts?

A: Well, yes. I mean, unfortunately one see this at the moment, I don’t just think it’s God interacting because God keeps on saying, don’t add to what I’m saying. But we religious humans like to add, and look how many laws we’ve added over the years. So many and constantly adding new refinements and new strictness and new modifications. And I think we’ve gone far too far. We’ve gone to the point of, to use the Latin, reductio ad absurdum. To reduce to the point of absurdity, the additions that we’ve added.

Q: Susan, a stone pillar. If you were standing at a war memorial or Remembrance Day, would you bow your head?

A: Well, yes, because nowadays we don’t consider that as idolatry. That is just a symbol. And a symbol, nothing wrong with that. And nothing wrong with having sculptures, which are stone models of different things. There’s an argument of whether you should have a whole one or a half one. But nevertheless, I do think that we have to redefine what is idolatry in the terms of the famous Rabbi, Menachem HaMeiri, who lived in Provence in the 14th century. And he said, we should define idolatry as having no moral code. But if you have a religion or a state that has a moral code, that does not count as idolatry.

Ruth, thank you. This process and thinking about government. Rose, David had many wives and so did Solomon, who had chariots, one of his wives, princess’s daughter of Pharaohs, and they were our best. They were indeed. And you just show how powerful sex is. On the other hand, the Torah does not say that David’s mind was seduced. It did no record of David building pagan temples for his wives. But he was seduced sexually. And that’s a common failure of lots of human beings, including monarchs. In fact, usually it’s worse with monarchs. As the famous line goes, it’s good to be a king.

Shelly, Solomon got punished. Too many wives, horses money, 10 tribes were taken away from his son dynasty for what was supposed to be a limited time and turned out for good. Well, yes, that’s exactly what happened. He was, he lost the kingdom after he died.

Q: What’s your thought about justice?

A: Justice mentioned twice. Whenever the Torah refers to Sedek Sedek, or , or anything doubled is an emphasis. This is so very, very important. It’s more important than anything else, this real emphasis. I think that’s what it’s about.

Shelly says, would you say that prohibition against king accumulating too much gold and silver means the king should be careful of taxing people too much or taking the labor of building projects, those would be ways the king would get all the money. Yes, Shelly. I mean that’s going back to the history. After King Solomon, he put taxes on everybody to build the temple and his wives. People came to his son and said, look, these taxes are too heavy. We’d like you to reduce them. Please reduce them. King Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, Roboam, reacted by saying, look, let me go and consult my wise men. And he went and he consulted two groups of opinion. Those are the wise men, the elders who said, sure, you should make concessions. It’s not a good thing to overtax. You should reduce them. You should keep people together in one place. But then he went to ask the young men, or the jet setting young bloods who were driving around Jerusalem in their Mercedes and having wild parties all night long. And they turned around and said, no, don’t give in. If you give in, you’ll show you’re weak. And so, Rehoboam, maybe he was one of that lot, his buddies decided to take that line. And in the famous line he said, if my father lashed you with swatches, with whips, I will lash you with scorpions. And my little finger will be as thick as my father’s thigh. And the result was, the 10 tribes said, to your tense, Israel, we have no more interest in being part of your kingdom and split the kingdom. So, yep, that’s correct. Taxing is not a good thing.

Q: Thank you Carla, How do you understand those We do not accept , Becomes of the countries they live in, laws of the state of Israel. What’s the basis for behavior?

A: Well, they don’t have basis for behavior. And if they disobey the law, then theoretically the state should punish them. The state chooses not to punish them because relatively speaking, the number of people who actually don’t accept the law is relatively small. But in fact, the truth is that if they disobey the law of the land, they should get out or face the consequences. What is the name, Clara asks, of this soul touching song, . It’s called . You can find it, the song itself is called . So if you look up and the song , then you’ll be able to find it online and Apple Music and everywhere else.

Q: Comment on an eye for an eye, says Faith. Does that mean wisdom teeth are not exempt in?

A: In fact, it’s a good point. And that’s one of the reasons why. What happens when a toothless man takes out the tooth of an ordinary human being? I mean, how are you going to take a tooth if he doesn’t have a tooth? Rita, thank you. And Mira, thank you. Why don’t we invite Simha Rotweiler to your lectures? He needs to brush up his Torah. I don’t know who Simha Rotweiler is, but I’ll have to look him up. Thank you.

So thank you everybody. Bye-bye. And we continue in this vein next week.