https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9SThZd3-WZc
If you obey me faithfully and keep my covenant, you will be my treasured possession. So one of the most controversial things I have said in my career is that I don’t believe in unconditional love. This is one of my biblical bases. If you keep my covenant, you are my treasured people. If you don’t, you’re not. That’s conditional. Well, you know, one of the things we could investigate on that front is whether or not love in any real sense can be unconditional, right? Because if the love is unconditional, it doesn’t have an element of encouragement towards an ideal. There’s nothing that’s discriminating and judgmental in the way that’s elevating, because everything you do is instantly, well, it’s all loved. And it seems to me that there’s a tension there between what you might describe as the archetype of feminine love and the archetype of masculine love. And feminine love is love for an infant. It’s all encompassing. And masculine love, you could say, is, well, it’s got that conditional element whose design is to further growth in some sense. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel. Right? Banging home that point. And Moses came and called for the elders of the people and laid before their faces all these words which the Lord commanded him. And all the people answered together and said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do. And Moses returned the words of the people unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud that the people may hear when I speak with thee and believe thee forever. And Moses told the words of the people unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Moses, go unto the people and sanctify them today and tomorrow and let them wash their clothes and be ready against the third day. For the third day, the Lord will come down in the sight of all the people upon Mount Sinai. And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about saying, take heed to yourself that ye not go up into the mount or touch the border of it. Whosoever touches the mount shall surely be put to death. There shall not a hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through. Whether it be beast or man, it shall not live. When the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount. And people went down from the mount unto the people and sanctified the people and they washed their clothes. And he said unto the people, be ready against the third day. Come not at your wives. And it came to pass on the third day in the morning that there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the mount and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God. And they stood at the nether part of the mount. And Mount Sinai was all together on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire. And the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake and God answered him by a voice. And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai on the top of the mount. And the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount and Moses went up. And the Lord said unto Moses, go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze and many of them perish. What do you think of that issue of perishing there, Jonathan? So it’s repeated multiple times in this part of the story. And it reminds me also of other sections that talk about, I think God only allows Moses to see his back and not his face because it would be too destructive. And there are later references to the potential for death to occur if people touch the Ark of the Covenant. It’s something like, beware of touching anything that’s deep and sacred because it’s so, what would you say? It’s dangerous to too carelessly approach that. Which is most fundamental? I mean, that’s certainly the case in life. So. Yeah, I think so. But I think there’s also something else going on. We talked about this a little bit last time, which is that in some ways, many of the iterations of the story until now show us that God is in some ways too high at this point. That is God has forgotten Israel, Israel are scattered, they’re all, they don’t have cohesion, they’re not a nation, they’re not coming together. And so now we come to the mountain and you have a dramatic representation of that. God is up above, up in the mountain, the trumpet, the music of the spheres, you hear that he’s the pattern of everything, he’s the source of all things. And then he says, put a boundary around the mountain, nobody should come in because until there is mediation between God and the world, God will swallow up the world. And you can understand it at a lower level. Obviously this is talking about all of reality, but you can understand that if you have a goal and you don’t have mediations towards that goal, it actually will just be a judge that will break everything. So if I tell you, jump a thousand feet, that’s it, that’s the goal for you. And then it’ll just crush you because you can’t. But if I give you a bunch of ways to do it and I put mediations between the ideal and how it manifests itself in the world, then it can exist. But this is the ultimate version of that. This is obviously- Okay, well you see this in psychotherapy. I mean, one of the signal contributions of behaviorists to the practice of psychotherapy was the notion of, what would you call them, incremental strategies. So a behaviorist principle is imagine that we were jointly, we had jointly strategized so that you were aiming at something, maybe you’re unemployed and you’re aiming at getting your CV together to get a job. And what we do then is, so the ideal is for you to be fully employed. And now you’ve even bought into that ideal. So it’s an ideal that you’re willing to accept as an orienting structure. And then you find that you don’t do it and you come back the next week to therapy and you say, I’m so ashamed. You know, I was supposed to submit my CV to like 10 potential employers this week and I did nothing at all. And so the first thing you do in that situation is you say, well, we should lower the goal posts. We should lower the goal. We say, well, you couldn’t submit your CV to 10 employers. Could you even open it on your computer? Because people are often afraid to even do that because you know, your CV contains, well, maybe the record of your successes but also the record of your failures. And so you scale down the goal until it no longer has that face of the harsh judge that will destroy. And that’s part of building those intermediary structures. And it seems to me that that’s part of what’s signaled in the idea of subsidiarity and the building of these. And that’s the, I think you made reference earlier in one of the other sessions to the idea that that subsidiary structure was like Jacob’s ladder. It’s a hierarchy that reaches up to the heavens to the highest point that puts incremental layers in place so that that’s not a judge that’s so harsh that you just die when you’re judged.