https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5en8bA8YCCc
What we are experiencing, in my view, at this time in America, is the cultivation of ingratitude. And that, as I say often, you get a BA in ingratitude, you get a master’s in ingratitude, and a PhD in ingratitude. And a professorship, too. So, Dennis, the phrase that you just used, the cultivation of ingratitude, this ties in so beautifully with the text in chapter 11, specifically because what is it that the Jews do differently this time than before, when they’re asking for water, when they’re asking for food? Before, it was like, okay, they’re actually thirsty, okay, they’re actually hungry, right? The language in the Bible here is really fascinating. So it says in chapter 11, verse 4, it says, the rabble in their midst began to have strong cravings. Okay, now the actual Hebrew is that they began to hit avu ta’ava, right? It’s a doubling of the word whenever that happens, that’s an intensification in Hebrew. So the basic idea is they are cultivating a craving, right? It’s the craving that’s to blame. They’re not saying, we want meat because we’re hungry for meat. They’re saying, we are gonna cultivate ingratitude, we’re gonna cultivate a craving, right? And so that’s what makes Moses so angry. It’s kind of a consumerism. Exactly, and you actually have to cultivate in your own mind a feeling that you have a lack of something, which is basically, I mean, human beings have a tendency to do this, right? We cultivate a craving for the taboo, and so as we stretch the boundaries of society, we look for new taboos to violate in order so that we can have a craving for that. And so that’s what Moses is responding to. He’s saying, what you’re actually requesting is not something that you want, it’s something that you’ve cultivated a craving for, which is why after the plague breaks out, this place is literally named Kibrod HaTa’abat. It’s called the Graves of the Craving. So there’s a notion here too, that the suffering of the people isn’t true suffering. That’s the point you’re making. Exactly. Is that it’s cultivated suffering. This is right. And cultivated resentful suffering. And this is where Moses really begins to turn on the people in a dramatic way. Because before it was like, okay, I get it. You were slaves in Egypt, you have no sense of what it is to be a civil society, you have no sense of what it is to be a good person. And I even, I’m even willing to stand up for you to the point where when you commit an act of idolatry directly after Revelation, I’ll stand with you because I understand who you are. What he doesn’t understand, and where Moses cannot deal with it, is you guys went out of your way to cultivate a thing that you didn’t have just so that you could want the thing and then claim that you wanted to go back to Egypt for the thing. Well, that’s a kind of claiming the virtues of victimization. And so is what’s happening here something like this? So we’ve already established that the Israelites have now established a state and it’s kind of functional. And that means if it’s a functional state, your basic suffering has already been mitigated. And so then you might say one of the temptations of people in a functional state after their basic sufferings have been mitigated is to cultivate the suffering for the point of victimization and the moral demand that that victimization. Or just also the problem of satiety. And I don’t know if you said that in English, but the problem of desire itself in the King James version, it says a lust, like among them fell a lusting. And so it’s the sense that you just, for your own sake, you wanna eat that snack food, you want that extra thing. It’s a cultivation of craving. It’s a cultivation of craving. That’s right. The great medieval Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart was reputed to have said, I don’t think you can find the exact quotation, but he’s reputed to have said, if you have one prayer, then that should be gratitude. Right. Which is very good. By the way, this is also the gap between the modern discussion. Yeah, and the reason it’s a virtue is because it’s something you should practice. Like we should note this. It’s like, it’s not that easy to be grateful because life does involve pain and suffering. And so you can justify, it’s easy to rationally justify resentment. It truly is, but it’s extremely toxic. And it’s tied up in a strange way with deceit and arrogance too, which is something I won’t get into. But there is a lost notion, I would say in our culture, that we’ve lost the notion that virtue is something to cultivate. Like gratitude and courage are both difficult. There’s all sorts of reasons to be timid and ungrateful. And it’s to work against the evidence in some way that constitutes the core of the virtue. And so you might, I’ve talked to my wife about this a lot. She’s been very much trying to cultivate a sense of gratitude. And it’s a practice that she’s engaging in to try to observe in every situation what miraculous gifts she’s been given within the context of that situation. Of course, sometimes that’s extraordinarily difficult if the situation is dire. But you could ask yourself, you could abstract away from that and say, well, even if the situation is dire, is it so self-evident that the best stance to prepare yourself still wouldn’t be one of gratitude? And it seems to me that that’s a very hard argument to shake. W.H. Ordon, one of his last lines of a poem, let all your thinks be thanks. But in the Torah, isn’t it right that you’ve got a trio? You’ve got gratitude, memory, remembering, and history. Again and again, they’re told, remember, remember, remember. It’s when we forget we’re ungrateful. And the Jewish festivals are not festivals of nature like the Canaanites. They’re festivals of history. God did this for you then. Is that part of, do you suppose that remembering is associated thematically with the notion of honoring your mother and your father? Because to remember, to remember is to remember the traditions of the past. Well, yeah. One of the things that’s really struck me about our modern culture, especially the culture that we pass on to young people, is that we don’t stress the necessity of gratitude. We view the past as, well, a patriarchal tyranny, let’s say. And there are elements of the past that are both patriarchal and tyrannical. But my sense always is, well, yeah, but if you plug in your toaster in the wall, it works. When you go outside, the houses aren’t burning down and there aren’t riots everywhere. In order to cultivate a craving. So if the pagans depended on nature, we depended on technology. In order to cultivate a craving, the Bible seems to be pointing out, in order to really truly cultivate a craving, you have to rewrite history. Because, and so that’s actually what happens here. It says that they start to cultivate a craving for me. That’s what’s happening here. That’s what I’m saying. So is it because what the text actually says, right? No, I mean here in America. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, so the text. Right, exactly. So the text says that right after the people begin to cultivate a craving, listen to the way that the Bible characterizes the Israelite complaint, right? They say, who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost. And they were slaves. But the way they remember that is, it didn’t cost us anything. Because we didn’t have to buy it. Right, well the same thing happened with post-Soviet nostalgia. That’s right. Remember the good old days under Stalin. It’s like part of this to me that’s. Stalin is positively regarded by a majority of Russians to this day. For me what’s interesting is that the ingratitude leads immediately to regression. And there’s the Jungian term I always forget, which I ask you, that’s regression to a prior archetype. What’s that name? Oh yes, I’ll remember that in a moment. Retrogressive restoration of the persona. Right, it’s basically like midlife crisis in a way. It’s like you’re out, you’re in this time of change, you’re getting close to something, right? And you’re out of, I think of this image a lot in terms of like you’re a hermit crab on the bottom of the ocean and you’ve scuttled, you’ve outgrown your shell, right? And you’re scuttling out, but you’re naked and you’re vulnerable and predators swirl everywhere. And you don’t even know if there’s another shell that’s out there that you can fill. It’s very much the state right now of the Israelites. And you have to have faith to keep going that not only will you find something out there, but that it will be more capacious, that you can fill it in a greater way. And so many people seek to kind of scuttle back to the thing that they ill-fit before and kind of cram themselves back into something. Well, that was a pre-existent state of order, right? So there is a validity. There is a validity in nostalgia for the past. And the validity is, well, we weren’t dying then. And that’s the truth. And so- But it’s not a fit that you can wear again. It’s like- Right, that’s the danger. It’s the siren song of a midlife crisis, let’s say. If I just go back and do this over again, it was better. That would be the pathology of unthinking conservatism, right? But then misremembering. That worship of the past. Then misremembering, that’s the point. It’s not just, oh, we survived, or at least we’re alive back then. It was like, we had all this extraordinary food. And I think a little bit later, they actually described this kind of shocking verse to me, Egypt as the land of milk and honey, flowing with milk and honey. I think that’s right, isn’t it? It’s just an extraordinary kind of, it’s not just forgetfulness or misremembering. It’s the projection of the destination into the past. Exactly, the destination they’re journeying to, as it were, it’s just flipped around as if they’re heading back. So now the Israelites have a state, and now they’re tempted by ingratitude. And the ingratitude makes them murmur. And the murmuring is, in a sense, calling forth another tyrant. And that’s what Moses is objecting to. He’s saying, now the burden is too great on me again. And God returns to this notion of subsidiary responsibility once again, right? So to even address this issue of emergent, lustful ingratitude, it’s the same remedy. I just want to point out one thing, just for an image and people to understand the relationship of this, I keep pointing to this fractal structure because I want people to realize the Bible is so coherent, it’s crazy. This idea of they want to eat flesh, that they want to eat animals. And in the hierarchy of things, the animals are on the outside, the animals are that which is being sacrificed, they’re on the edge. And so God burns the edge of the camp. It’s almost like that’s what they want, and that’s where the fire comes. The fire that comes from to the edge of the camp kind of singes the edge. And so there’s that, because you’ll see later an image of the Miriam who is too pure. But here you have this sense in which what they want is the animality. Like they want to dive into the flesh. And the result of that is this. But the result is something like cutting off some part of the edge. A kind of circumcision, you could say. Like cutting off the flesh. And Jordan, in accordance with what you’re saying, which is this kind of attempt to, the desire for a tyrant that they want that’s born out by this, look at the language that’s used where the people are, right? So it says Moses heard the people weeping, clan by clan, each one in his tents opening. The last time you saw that language is when Moses was in the tent of meeting by himself, right before the reestablishment of the tabernacle. He’s out there, they’re each at their tents opening, and they’re looking this way. So they’re treating Moses like you’re the tyrant, give us what we want, right? We want the person who can provide us the meat. And Moses is saying, I don’t want this. Why are you giving this to me? And it’s too much for him. It’s too much for me, I can’t do this. And God says, okay, fine. So then the answer is that I’m gonna take some of your, I mean, again, more tragedy for Moses. The glory that I’ve put upon you that comes from my relationship with you, I’m now going to spread to these 70 elders who are gonna help you carry the burden. And it kind of gets worse from here, actually. The image, what’s interesting, it’s what the image ends up being is something that God promised in the curse, which is that you will eat and you will not be satisfied. And so then it’s almost God is gonna say, oh, you want meat? Oh, you’re gonna have so much meat that you’re going to, it’s gonna make, you’re gonna be disgusted of it. You’re gonna loathe it by the amount of meat that you’re going to have. Which by the way, is actually pretty good therapy. Like if you ever have a kid who really Has a craving. Has a craving, you just like, have a friend, a family friend, yeah, exactly, who did this with cigarettes and found their kid smoking and was like, okay, here’s an entire pack. You’re gonna smoke this entire pack right now. A kid never smoked again. That’s right.