https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GEASnFvLxhU
Thank you for joining us as we journey through the great book of Exodus. And thank you very much to the DW Plus crew for having the vision and generosity of spirit to make this Exodus seminar produced at no small cost and substantial risk freely available to all who are interested on YouTube. Perhaps you might consider a Daily Wire Plus subscription. It’s a bastion of free speech, and we have great content there with much more to come. We journeyed to Athens, Rome and Jerusalem to film a four-part documentary series on Western civilization and have additionally recorded specials on marriage, vision, the pitfalls and opportunities for adventure and masculinity, all of which are exclusively available there. These join many of the beyond-order public lectures that made up my recent tour and my extensive back catalogue fully uncensored. Onward and upward. Music Hello everyone. I have the great privilege today of opening a seminar on Exodus, an eight-part seminar. As many of you know, and some of you don’t, I did a lecture series on Genesis in the fall of 2017, walking through that old book, and that had a reasonable impact, I would say, for that sort of venture. It was popular publicly. The theatre I rented sold out 16 times in a row, and then millions of people have watched it online, and that’s really been something. I’d had a dream after doing that, well, and before as well, that I would be able to walk through the entire corpus of the Bible over the course of my life, and that’s a very daunting challenge. But the next step is Exodus, and I’ve been looking forward to that for a very long time. I thought before I did the public lecture series, because that’s not what this is, that I would find a variety of scholars from around the world, if I could, and see if I could figure out a way to bring them together to talk about Exodus in detail, to help me fill in my knowledge of this book before I do a public lecture series on Exodus, which I plan to do in June of 2023. And so I’ve brought together some of the sharpest and most interesting and deepest people that I’ve had the good fortune to meet in the last decade or so, and they’ve all graciously agreed to come here to Miami and to spend eight days concentrating on this book and under the auspices of the Daily Wire Plus group, who’ve flown them in and who are producing this and editing it and have done everything they can to make this possible and beautiful and as available as it might be. So this material, or much of it, will be behind the Daily Wire paywall. We’ll have a free-flowing discussion. I’m going to read the text, and I’m going to say what I have to say about it, and hopefully not too much for me, and I’m going to let the gentlemen that are with me have their say, and hopefully we’re all going to learn an awful lot about this ancient story. And what it means and why it’s significant today and why it’s been significant for several thousand years. And so I’ll get everybody, first of all, to introduce themselves, and I’m going to start with Dr. Douglas Headley on my left, and we’ll go around this way. Dr. Headley? Well, my name is Douglas Headley, and I’m a fellow at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Clare College, and I teach the philosophy of religion. And I think there’s a crisis in our culture, and the crisis is linked to a certain ignorance of the very backbone of our own culture, and the Bible is very much at the core of our cultural inheritance. And so, in the past, I’ve been very much at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. There was an inscription, know thyself, and we’re in danger of not being able to know ourselves because of the ignorance of the very foundations of our culture. I’m particularly fascinated by Dr. Peterson’s endeavors in the last few years and intrigued by the developments in the next few days. I warm to your invitation because I was born in China, and I was a seven-year-old in the Chinese Revolution. And when I was later an Oxford student, I had dinner with Sir Isaiah Berlin, the great Jewish philosopher, and as it turned out, he’d been a seven-year-old in the Russian Revolution. And comparing notes on it, we were saying what the revolutions meant, but the lack of people today understanding them. And for me, Exodus, obviously a classic in its own right politically, the birth of a great nation and people. But many people don’t realize this is behind the English Revolution and also behind the American Revolution. And to understand that throws an incredible light on the present crisis, because as I see, you’ve got a basic clash between ideas coming down from the American Revolution, 1776, which came from the Torah and ideas which come down from the French Revolution and it says. And so we’ve got a profound crisis, and many people don’t understand the roots of it on either side. So what you’re doing, I think, is immensely significant. Dr. Orr, James Orr. My name is James Orr. I’m an assistant professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, where I teach philosophy of religion and moral philosophy, theological ethics. And much of that work focuses on what you might call the Hellenic, that is to say, the fountain of Western wisdom in Greek philosophy. But too often, I think we neglect the Hebraic, that is to say, the contribution to Western thought of the great Hebraic sources. And most of all, of course, the Torah, the Pentateuch. It’s thrilling to be able to sit around and talk with these distinguished friends and with you, Dr. Peterson, about the Book of Exodus. As Oz was saying, it has enormous significance historically, the English Revolution, the American Revolution, and more recently, many of the sort of liberation narratives that we’re familiar with in the contemporary, from the contemporary political landscape and contemporary debates. So I’m fascinated to be talking about these issues, particularly when we get talking about the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, the significance of this extraordinary claim, almost without precedent, that morality is given, not, and discovered, and not simply invented and constructed. And that’s one of, I think, many, many vital themes to our age that we’ll be exploring productively in the days ahead, I hope. Dennis Prager, welcome. Dr. Peterson, and all of you, it’s a joy to be with you. I am living my dream in my life, being here, and that is to spread the Torah to the world. I am a religious Jew, and I’m blessed to know Biblical Hebrew. I started at the age of five. I still have to translate to English whenever I think of a verse. The Torah is, this is not known to almost any non-Jew. The Torah is primus inter paris in the Bible, first among equals. I was raised, and I still believe that the Torah is from God. How God delivered it is His business. I have no particular interest in the methodology, only in the ultimate authorship. And I’ve written three of the five volumes of a Torah commentary called The Rational Bible, including Exodus, which, interestingly, was the first one that I did, given that it has my favorite document in history, The Ten Commandments. And as I say on my American talk show, if you want to defund the police, there is actually a way. Have everyone live by the Ten Commandments. Then you can defund the police. So that is where I come from in this discussion, and I trust you will all defer appropriately to a member of the chosen people. Dr. Stephen Blackwood. Thanks, Jordan. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’m Stephen Blackwood. I’m the president of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, an effort to revive and reinvent the traditional university. I grew up reading the Bible quite a lot. I’d say the Bible gave me the primary images through which I came to understand myself and the world. Then when I went to university, I sort of stumbled into the discovery of philosophy and literature, especially of the Greek and Roman, you might say the backdrop to Western culture in the ancient sense. And since then, I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about the relation between that tradition and the biblical tradition and the way in which those are synthesized and in a way in which that synthesis is fundamentally what gives rise to our principles and institutions in the Western world. I suppose I’m particularly excited to be here because I, as others have said, do profoundly think that we’re living in a time in which we’ve lost the images through which we can make sense of ourselves and of the world in a way that’s adequate to the longings of our own nature. So hopefully these images will come to be alive for us and for those who decide to listen to this afterwards. Great. Jonathan Pagio, another Canadian. That’s right. So I’m Jonathan Pagio. I am an artist and I’m someone who for a very long time has been reading the Bible and I’ve been thinking about it more like an artist, I would say, in terms of structure, in terms of rhyme and rhythm. And so I’m interested in the Book of Exodus more as a mystical text and based in the Christian. It’s actually there’s a small little book called The Life of Moses by St. Gregory of Nyssa, which is one of the foundations of Christian mysticism. And so I will be approaching the book mostly through that, through how it describes a structure, a narrative structure, which is also a geographic structure, the mountain, the temple, the tabernacle, and how this fits with even our own perception of reality and how reality comes together, how chaos can be brought into order. And so that is really the way that I’ll be looking at it. So I’m really looking forward to this very diverse discussion. Excellent. So one of the things that’s really fascinated me about Exodus, apart from the fundamental structure of the narrative, which is escape from tyranny, sojourn through the desert, and then reemergence hypothetically into the promised land, it’s a very classic narrative structure, descent and reassent, is the fact that is the manner in which God is represented as the primary spirit in the text. And so I’ve been toying with this idea that part of what the Bible is doing is describing a priority, a manner in which perceptions and actions might be prioritized. And a structure of priority is a pyramidal structure and something has to be at the top. And I learned from Carl Jung that whatever is at the top of your hierarchy of assumptions functions as God for you, whether or not you’re religious and maybe you have multiple things at the top, which just means that you’re confused. And then if Jung is correct, and I believe he is, then the question of what should be at the top really exists as the paramount question. And part of the way the biblical narrative represents that or addresses that is by describing God in some sense as a literary character, as Northrop Frye, a Canadian critic, pointed out. And one of the things that’s remarkable about the Exodus text is that the highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. And that’s put forward as a prime ethical dictum. So if it’s the voice of God speaking to you, so to speak, then it’s going to call you out of slavery, maybe the slavery of your own mind, the slavery of external conditions, the slavery of the tyranny. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And that’s really something that’s really something to know. And I think something that’s deeply true. All right. So having said that and introduced everybody, we’re going to start with the text and all. As I said, I’ll read it and I’ll make comments when they strike me and we’ll have everyone jump in and away we’ll go. So Exodus one. Now, these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt. Every man and his household came with Jacob. And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were 70 souls, for Joseph was in Egypt already. And Joseph died and all his brethren and all that generation and the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty. And the land was filled with them. So Jacob and the Israelites are presented as sojourners into Egypt. So they’re foreigners. They’re strangers in a strange land, you might say. And they came in under the guidance and patrimony of Jacob, who had a good relationship with the power structure in Egypt. But he dies and his the generation after him dies and relationships between the Israelites and the Egyptians become strained. Is commenting while you read OK? Comment at any point you want. So just for all of your edification in Jewish life, if there are 10 best known verses in the entire Torah, A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph is one of the 10. It summarizes the human condition of ingratitude perfectly. Joseph had saved the Egyptians from starvation and the next Pharaoh doesn’t even know his name. So he’s forgotten the debts. He has forgotten the debts. He has entirely. But this is, as I say, the human condition. We have forgotten our debts in America to Washington, Madison, Jefferson. And there arose a new generation in America who knew not Madison. That could be a perfect verse. Right. OK, OK, OK. Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply. And it come to pass that when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies and fight against us. And so get them up out of the land. There’s an accusation of a crime before it’s committed, right? These people are just a threat and a plague and we can’t trust them. And that’s part of this ingratitude as well. And that definitely sets the stage for conflict, the breakdown of trust. Therefore they did set over them task masters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Ramses. So the response to the hypothetical crimes of the Israelites was to enslave them. And one of the things we should notice very early on in this is that the people of Israel were not as good as they were. And one of the things we should notice early on in this is that the book of Exodus regards that move of enslavement as fundamentally wrong. It’s like an axiomatic precondition of the narrative itself. And modern people, I suppose, don’t find that surprising because we all believe that slavery is wrong. But it isn’t obvious that most of the countries and nations that in the past practiced slavery regarded it as wrong. The visible ethic that already permeates the narrative has a revolutionary aspect in that sense. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel. And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor. And they made their lives better with hard bondage in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in the field. All their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor. That reminds me that part of what happened under the Nazis with the work camps and in the Gulegs as well. This idea that you identify your enemies and then you sentence them to hard labor in your service against their will. And so you see this idea echoed very early in this story and something that’s definitely echoed through the 20th century. But there’s really this idea that what the Pharaoh is doing is reducing, wants to reduce Israel to potential for Egypt basically. And you’ll see it later when he wants to get rid of the men, he just wants women. And so in this image, and it repeats even the story of Abraham, how the Pharaoh wants to take his wife. It’s about taking the potential of another people and try to subjugate it to yourself. So it’s a reflection of instrumental usage. That’s right. Yeah. And so, you know, you can see that in people’s proclivity to use one another interpersonally, because when you’re talking to someone, you can decide a priori what you want from them. And then you can bend your words and your interactions so that you exploit what they have to offer for your purposes. Or you can engage in honest dialogue where the purpose is mutual enrichment and that, what would you call it, instrumental end doesn’t dominate. And you can experience it, like at least the mystical fathers, they talk about Egypt also as representing your own passions. That is, you become a slave to something and then you become an instrument of that thing. So it’s like, I don’t know, anything that you have that you’d like to eat. And then you’re there. And at first, when eating knows you, like when your passion knows you, then you’re fine. It’s in the right order. Things are in the right order. But when your passion or desires or whatever behavior you have forgets you, then you become an instrument of it. Like think of a drug addict where everything they do serves this tyrant. And so all their potential gets, you get reduced to a potential for behavior. And that can be seen politically too. And so that’s for a subordinate deity in some sense. That might be your stomach or your lust. So that’s very interesting too, because the word Israel means we who struggle with God. And so what that would mean psychologically is that that which should be at the highest place, which is the part of you that’s struggling with the highest, is then subordinated instrumentally to something that should be lower in the ethical hierarchy. And that could be your own inner tyranny. And it could be someone else’s instrumental will or some state’s instrumental will. And that’s portrayed as fundamentally inappropriate in this text. And it’s imaged as this idea of making bricks. And that’s a reference to Babel as well. It’s like this idea of wanting to be higher than God or wanting to replace God. And so we make civilization. That’s what bricks are. We make civilization and then we think that civilization replaces the highest ideal. I don’t know if Dennis would agree with this, but I know some rabbis believe that Israel was judged when they were divided because Solomon was becoming almost a second pharaoh with a corvée of the people and forced labor and so on. And he was bringing a kind of slavery in at the end and getting too much. Israel is called to be an anti-Egypt. And he’s becoming too much. For your interest, there are two tyrannies. This is the overriding theme, I believe, of the whole Torah. External tyranny to pharaohs, internal tyranny to your lusts, etc., to yourself. And the Torah actually has a law, which many Jews still observe, where you count every day between Passover and Pentecost Shavuot. Shavuot is the seven weeks after. You do this for seven weeks. Every day you actually count with a blessing using God’s name. This is the seventh day of the 49 days and so on. Why? You can’t have freedom from pharaoh if you don’t have freedom from you. So Sinai is the second freedom. Now you have to be liberated from external tyranny. And now the liberation from internal tyranny is the Ten Commandments. Well, that begs the question too, then, doesn’t it? That I think the Bible in some sense is aggregated to answer, which is, well, is there something other than various forms of tyranny? And if there is an alternative to tyranny, and maybe that’s freedom, whatever that is, or maybe it’s holy freedom, then that’s qualitatively different than mere subjugation to one tyranny among others. My students used to ask me when I was teaching my Mipma of Semitic course, how do you know that what you’re teaching isn’t just another ideology, which is another tyranny in some sense? And that’s an extremely deep question. And the postmodern types would say, well, it’s all ideology. It’s all tyranny. You just pick whichever tyranny you want to abide by, but it’s all a matter of power or something like that. There’s no transcendent orientation that pops you outside of the realm of tyranny in some real sense. And the biblical narrative insists that that is not the case. So it’s a pretty dismal view, eh, that it’s just a choice among tyrannies. But to pick up Dennis’s great point of the two tyrannies, that Lord Acton, the famous saying, all power tends to corrupt. Power oppresses the weak. That’s the obvious one, and it happens here. But it corrupts the powerful. And that’s what happens to Pharaoh. Yeah, and there is such a thing as corruption, right? So that’s an absolute reality, the corruption that power tends to produce. Of course, that’s partly why the Pharaoh’s heart is hardened as well. And yeah, it’s a very good, it’s a very germane observation that slavery corrupts the slaver as much as the slave, or perhaps you could say perhaps even more, right? Because it incites within the slaver something like a Luciferian presumption. And it entices him for instrumental reasons into denying the divinity of someone else, and then acting in the manner of someone who denies divinity per se, right? Absolutely pernicious and corrosive. And the King of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of the one was Shipra, and the name of the other Pua. And he said, when you do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them upon the birthing stools, if it be a son, then you shall kill him. And that’s that instrumental usage that you were talking about before. There is a huge issue here. The Hebrew is completely indeterminative whether the midwives were Hebrews or not. I’m not going to throw out Hebrew often, I feel very self-conscious at all. But for those who know Hebrew, they will know what I’m talking about. It can be the Hebrew midwives or the midwives of the Hebrews. There is no possible way based on those two words to know which it is. I am convinced, and Jewish tradition doesn’t agree with me, I mean post-biblical Jewish tradition, the Torah I think does agree with me, but Selavi, I believe they were Egyptian. I do not believe he would have ordered Hebrew midwives to murder every Hebrew boy. Do you think there’s a purposeful ambiguity there to leave it up to question? That’s beautiful. It may well be. That’s right. Well, it certainly is. The Hebrew is ambiguous. That is correct. Because if a tyranny gets corrupt enough, then people turn against themselves. That’s right. However, just on logical grounds, when he gets angry at them for not doing it, it would be odd if he would get angry at Hebrews for not killing Hebrews. But my biggest proof you’re coming to, where it says that they feared God and didn’t listen to Pharaoh, again, that’s one of my favorite lines in the whole Bible. You either fear humans or you fear God. Fear God is the root of freedom and wisdom. And the word for God is not Jehovah or Yahweh, it’s Elohim. So when Jews fear God, it’s generally feared Yahweh. And in this case, it’s fear Elohim, the universal word for God, and I’m convinced that they are Egyptians. Are you looking to dive deeper into the entire Bible? 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Enrich your education and nurture your mind and soul today. Download the Halo app at halo.com slash Exodus. That’s halo.com slash Exodus. Halo.com slash Exodus for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 6,000 plus prayers and meditations. Douglas, do you have any sense of what it means in this passage and more broadly that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and an appropriate, let’s say, precondition for freedom? Why do you think it’s conceptualized as fear? Well, I think there’s a proper fear that in this case I think is linked to transcendence. So there’s the fear of the tyrant, which is normal and natural and which we are all subject to. But there should be a greater fear, the fear of the transcendent principle, violating that. And of course, this is why the postmodern attack on traditional Western culture is so dangerous. I mean, of course, it goes back to the very origins of Western culture with the Sophists. But the idea that there is no such thing as an objective moral order, and there certainly is no transcendent basis for that, that would make this whole narrative unintelligible. It also makes the tyrant the final arbiter in some real sense, right? You know, people have asked me, and I’m always embarrassed by this, but people have commented on my courage for speaking up, so to speak. And I think you don’t actually understand the situation. I’m not courageous in my speaking up. I’m more afraid of the alternative. And part of the reason for that was that when I was a clinician, I spent thousands, tens of thousands of hours dealing with people’s serious problems. One of the things I learned was, and I really learned this, was that you don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost, but that is just not the case. You will pay the piper. When you pay, you might not even notice the causal connection between the sin and the payment. And one of the things you do in psychotherapy is people’s lives take a twist and they go very badly wrong. And when you walk back through people’s lives with them, you come to these choice points where you meet the devil at the crossroads and you find out that while you went left, let’s say, and downhill when you should have gone right and uphill, and now you’re paying the price for that. And you don’t impose that as a therapist. You help people discover that or rediscover it because they often know at the time that they’ve made an error and then forget and then rationalize the forgetting and then, you know, and then multiply the lies. But that’s tremendously difficult to do within a secular frame. I mean, I think you found ways of doing that. I think Jordan, I’m thinking actually of somebody like Victor Frankl and his idea that that sense of the logos of a kind of a meaning is what gives you a kind of existential drive and helped him survive the horrors of the Holocaust. But more typically, it’s religion. It’s a sort of religious framing that it gives people this, the power to resist tyranny. Well, that religious framing seems in part, even if you think about it in a secular sense, is that when you’re maybe you’re making a choice to do the instrumental and easy thing, but there’s part of you that knows that that’s wrong. Not always. Sometimes you just make a mistake because you don’t know. But often, you know, and yet you pick the easier path, let’s say, and the part of the manner in which God is portrayed throughout the biblical corpus, but I would say in traditions around the world as that phenomena, phenomenon that alerts you to your own misbehavior. And it is really something, again, I really learned from Jung, Contra Freud in some real sense, and Contra Nietzsche, who believed that maybe we could create our own values, is that there’s something within that is transcendent because it isn’t only in you, it’s in everyone in some fundamental and real sense, plus it’s eternal in some fundamental and real sense, and it calls you on your misbehavior. But don’t you think our culture is approaching a kind of crisis point? In other words, the postmodernist, everything’s constructive, truth is not there, etc., etc. There’s no reality except what you make it. But of course, truth is always about something, as C.S. Lewis used to say, and what it’s about is reality. Well, there’s this insistence on the postmodern… And people are going to hit the wall at point after point today because there is reality. It’s as if we’re insisting that there is nothing other than towers of Babel. There isn’t anything they’re being built against or shielding us from. It’s just one tower of Babel after another, and it can be… And I can’t help but see a real tyrannical demand for power in that because one of the things I’ve often wondered is, well, why are the constructivists, the radical constructivists, so insistent that there’s no core human nature when really the evidence that there’s a core human nature is pretty damn strong, particularly perhaps if you think biologically. So why this insistence? And I can’t help but think it’s because, well, you want to remake people in the image of your ideology, and so you have to insist that they have no intrinsic nature because otherwise the pesky realities of the transcendent nature get in the way of your Luciferian presumptions. Well, there’s no God, no truth. There is only power. Right, right. Well, that’s the Dostoevskyian issue in some real sense, isn’t it? I want to pick up on what you said, Dennis, a little before, and I want to propose that there might be a very important narrative reason why the midwives are Hebrew in this case. And the reason, and I think it’s a good lesson for us today, which is that the tyrant is empowering women to kill their men. That is what the tyrant is doing, and he’s doing it in order to feminize the Hebrews. Fascinating. Fascinating. And I think that… No wonder you get in trouble. But I think that it’s important, and the reason why they won’t do it is because they fear God, is because they’re able to see beyond the power that the pharaoh is handing them at this moment. And I think that when we think that that couldn’t happen, like in a people, it’s like, look around you. We’re seeing it happen before… That is so interesting, because it also implies that while it’s in the best interest of the tyrant to dispense with those figures who might pose a threat to the tyranny, and those would be tough men, right? Because they are the ones who keep the real tyrants at bay. It’s such an intelligent point that it reinforces your reaction to what I said. Maybe the text is purposefully ambiguous about whether or not they were Hebrews or Egyptians. And you’ve swayed me. Well, I’ve seen that purposeful ambiguity in other texts. So let me just say, I know, I identify a bias in me, and I will reveal it. I’m very, I hope, self-aware. Good. So the first learning episode has actually occurred. Yeah, exactly. The Torah goes out of its way. It’s one of the fundamental beliefs of my life to portray non-Jews positively and Jews negatively. It’s one of the reasons I believe it’s a divine author. If Jews had made up the Torah, they would have come across much more positively. They come across as awful, as a general rule. And non-Jews from… So it’s anti-propaganda. Anti-propaganda, certainly. Noah is a non-Jew. Of course, there were no Jews at that time. But Moses’s father-in-law, who is the great advisor to Moses, is a Midianite priest. The daughter of Pharaoh is a non-Jew. She saves Moses. And it is just a consistent pattern. And I thought that the midwives was part of that pattern. As I say, God is ethic-centered, not ethnic-centered. And this is taken as the first civil disobedience, isn’t it? That’s right. The first example of someone standing against a crime against humanity. I don’t come down either way, but I think you can make a strong point for Dennis’. Right, so that it implies that the relationship with God is actually what enables people to have the strength to stand up against the tyrant. If you think of the Nuremberg trial, they didn’t actually have a basis for what they were saying. There’s no international law. They were reaching, and maybe the same thing, intuitively they know. Well, that’s certainly what Solzhenitsyn thought about the Nuremberg trials, is he believed that the fact that the Nazi atrocities were regarded as wrong, independent of cultural context. He thought that was a signal achievement of the 20th century, because it reestablished not so much the existence of good, but definitely the existence of evil. And that was something I found unbelievably convincing, because I thought, well, you’ve got a real conundrum here. It’s like, was what the Nazis did evil? Or not? Because those are the alternatives. And if it wasn’t, it’s like, okay, well, you can move ahead on that presumption, or you can accept that it was evil in a transcendent sense, because that’s what the Nuremberg trials were about. And then the terrible implication of that, in some sense, is that if evil genuinely exists, then its opposite genuinely exists, because it’s not going to exist without its opposite. And so, as soon as you accept the reality of the evil of Auschwitz, you’re in a metaphysical world in some sense, because you have to simultaneously posit the existence of a transcendent good. That’s at least the opposite of that. And part of what I’ve been striving for for 40 years, I would say, is to identify what is the opposite of the spirit that produced Auschwitz. And some of it Solzhenitsyn detailed out so nicely. It’s the spirit of truth and, frankly, it’s the spirit of meaning. And I think you can make a strong case that it’s the spirit of love, and it’s some amalgam of those three things, and that doesn’t exhaust it. And that’s the spirit of play and voluntary association and freedom, all things that are stressed in the biblical narrative. Where there is no vision, people perisheth in Proverbs. And I think there, that’s very important, this notion of contemplation. We will come to that in particularly chapter three, but this sense of a vision of goodness as having an inspiring quality. Yeah, and it is a vision, too, and not just a mere verbal conceptualization, right? Which is why the artistic endeavor is so important and the architectural endeavor, because it’s not merely propositional, that vision. And one of the things I learned with my students and with my clinical clients was that, and I helped them do this, was to help people develop a literal vision for their life. It’s like, okay, if you could have what you wanted to arm you against the slings and arrows of fate, let’s say, or to at least defend you against it, in principle, if you could have what you needed and wanted, what would that look like? That’s a kind of prayer. It’s like knock and the door will open and ask and you will receive. It’s like, okay, you could conceivably have what you wanted, but you have to specify what it is and you have to have a vision of it. And part of what the humanities education should do and the religious education certainly is to flesh out a vision of a mode of being and a mode of perception that would justify suffering or maybe even more than justify it. Well, you could say, I suppose, that if theists are faced with the problem of evil, atheists are confronted with the problem of good, trying to how to make sense of goodness, how to make sense of what it is that drives their moral indignation and their great social revolutions. One of the most terrifying moments in the Nuremborg trials was when the Nazis advanced the defense, that they effectively, that this was simply Victor’s justice, that they had not really broken any laws. They were scrupulous legislators after all. And so, and following orders. That’s right. And so sort of Western notions of justice found themselves staring into the abyss. How is it that we’re going to make sense of our deep intuition that this is evil of an absolute kind? And I think this is one of the great as a matter of historical fact, one of the most important motivating factors behind the emergence of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, of course, in 1948. And with it, the entire sort of rights based regime of morality that is with us still, that has proliferated and expanded. So the problem on the atheist front is on what basis can these things be made, can be claimed as self-evident? What’s the grounding for that? If it’s just not, and the postmodern critique of that in some sense is that, well, all that nonsense talk about rights and freedoms is just, it’s just instrumental camouflage, hiding a more fundamental will to power and desire to oppress. And the worry is that the only answer available in that, in a purely sort of secular framework would be it’s because this document tells us that this is wrong or this document tells us that this is right. Right. So that becomes part of the social contract, in which case the problem emerges immediately again. That’s right. So the solution effectively carries within it, the sort of replicates the very problem that it was trying to solve. That’s partly why I’m often interested in talking to biologists. You know, I’ve talked to Franz De Waal most recently, and he’s a primatologist who’s worked on elucidating the principles by which chimpanzees organize their social hierarchies. And the Marxist, really, and classic biological take on that for simple minded biologists is that the chimps use will to power, right? The alpha chimp is the most powerful, most dominant, meanest, roughest, you know, boxer, oppressor. And De Waal’s work conducted over about 30 years has showed that that’s not just wrong, it’s anti-true in some sense. So it’s exactly the opposite of the reality. Now and then you can get a chimp who rules by power, but it destabilizes the troop emotionally and socially. And his reign tends to be short, brutal and meet an extremely violent and murderous end. It’s not an effective strategy. And what De Waal has shown that is to stabilize the iterative interactions within a troop. The alpha male, who sometimes can be the smallest male in the troop, has to be more reciprocal than any other individual in the troop. And so the basis of chimpanzee power is peacemaking, reciprocity and stable long term social relations between males and between the more authoritative males and females. But does that allow us to use the language, does that analysis allow us to use the language of good, of… Or rather, are we only licensed by De Waal’s analysis to speak of adaptive value, reproductive fitness? Well, I’m kind of hoping they go like this, because the idea of the reciprocity that allows the alpha chimps to maintain their sovereignty across time is something very much like treat your neighbor as if he’s yourself. And so I think that there’s no reason to assume that the ethic, if it’s transcendent, couldn’t emerge out of the material and descend in some sense from the spiritual at the same… Without reducing goodness to a mere morality, to a mere survival mechanism. Right. Well, and mere isn’t… it’s not so mere either, right? If it’s a survival mechanism, it’s pretty damn deep. And we could also think, if we were expanding our notion of what constitutes the biological, we could also think of the patterns of behavior that are most germane to our survival as transcendent. They’re embodied, they’re instinctual, they’re outside the propositional domain. Although often it’s the case that we think of the highest moral act as extinction, you know, laying down one’s life, that is, surrendering our opportunities for survival and the survival of our kin. Yeah, right. So there are definitely times where mere proximal survival seems to contradict an even deeper instinct. I mean, I would say that the willingness of… it’s tricky, right? Because my wife was talking to, I think, Janice Fee Mingle recently about the behavior of men when the Titanic was sinking, and many men sacrificed themselves to save the women and the children. In a sense, that violates the purely biological impetus for self-preservation, let’s say. But if it’s serving a higher order ethical precept that is even more fundamentally related to survival across time, then maybe the contradiction could be ironed out. I suppose in evolutionary terms, the logical thing would be, though, for the women and the children to go first on the Titanic. Yeah, well, the men are more expendable, right? Because you need fewer men. If push comes to shove, you need fewer men. But to go back to the Hebrew Midwai, or the Hebrew or the Egyptian Midwais, they’re intuitively saying something against the highest power in their universe, the pharaoh. And to their own danger. Well, exactly, which is quite extraordinary. You probably know the story of W.H. Auden coming to faith. I mean, he was a self-professed left-wing atheist. And early in World War II, coming to take refuge in New York, he would follow the documentaries, the television, and one weekend he went in to see the documentary on the siege of Poland, and Nazi stormtroopers bayoneting women and children. And it was in the Upper East Side, a lot of Germans, the war hadn’t, America hadn’t declared war. The German audience cried out, kill them, kill them, egging on their own countrymen. America was neutral. And Auden sat there in five minutes. He says, I can’t say this is absolutely wrong. There are no absolutes. That’s old fashioned, whatever’s believe that. But then he said, I had to say there was an absolute if this was absolutely wrong. And he said later, I left the cinema, a seeker after an unconditional absolute, and came to faith in God. The only basis for it is the intuition. There’s something very deep about that too, because it could ease, like one of the things I’ve come to realize about the symbol of the crucifix, and I’m just speaking psychologically here and not theologically, is that at the very least, what that symbol is, is the impetus among billions of people across 2,000 years to look at the worst thing they could imagine. And so there’s an idea that you come to understanding of transcendent good, most particularly through focusing your attention intently on what is undeniably tragic and malevolent. And that could be, I really think that’s true psychologically, because one of the things I became convinced of studying the Holocaust atrocities and the Gulag atrocities in particular was the absolute reality of suffering and malevolence. And then you think, well, because it’s pain, suffering and cruelty, those are undeniable realities, that’s the Auden experience. And you say, well, is there anything more real than pain, suffering and cruelty? And the answer would be, yes, that which can transcend those three things. And it could easily be that you cannot make contact with what transcends those without diving deep into the nature of those as deep as possible. And I certainly see the biblical narrative focusing, for example, on the crucifixion, but not only that, as the collective attempt of mankind in some real sense to come to terms with the worst that life has to offer and to discover as a consequence something that transcends that. Well, do you know the story of Philip Halley, you know, the Jewish scholar who spent his life investigating the Nazi war crimes and all that. And one time he was so depressed by what he was studying, he was ready to commit suicide and sitting in his study with this wealth of literature, picked up a little pamphlet he hadn’t read before. And after about five minutes of reading, he thought there was a fly in it. It was a tear. His heart had been hardened and he read the story of the Shambon, the little Huguenot village that rescued 5000 Jewish children. And he said it was heart cracking goodness. Right, right. Yeah. And that was his intuitive. The woman who wrote the rape of Nan King, she committed suicide. And no wonder, you know, you look at that sort of thing. And if you look at it deeply, it just tears you into pieces. And then the question is, is there anything that can put you back together? And that really is the question. It’s the question everybody faces in life in some real sense, right? How can you not be torn apart into despair and vengefulness by catastrophe and malevolence? And that is the question that faces everyone. So, all right. The midwives feared God and did not, as the King of Egypt commanded them. There’s a lot of wrapped up in that line, as it turns out. That’s a very interesting line too, because, well, do you want the Pharaoh on your side or do you want God on your side? That’s kind of the question. And the people multiplied and waxed very mighty. And so despite their persecution, they’re doing fine. And it came to pass because the midwives feared God that he made them houses. And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, so he’s getting upset here, Every son that is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive. So that’s echoing that, that emasculation of the people of Israel here in the most fundamental sense. So that’s Exodus 1, Exodus 2. And there went a man of the house of Levi and took to wife a daughter of Levi. That’s an important verse. Okay, have at it. And it is. My favorite part of writing the commentary over these years is to take these verses that seem like nothing and realize it’s so important. These are the parents of the savior of the Jewish people, Moses, but there’s nothing special about them. And that’s what that verse says. A certain man of the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman. That’s it. So it’s a lowly birth motif. He doesn’t come from royalty or divine stock or anything. Just regular folks gave birth to Moses. Right, just regular folks. Very nice, very nice. And the woman conceived and bear a son. And when she saw him, that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. Remember, the Egyptians are going to kill the firstborn Israelite males. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes and daubed it with slime and with pitch, a little boat, and put the child therein. And she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. Forgive me, the word for boat is the same as Noah’s ark. Oh, yeah. This is the saving of the world again. Right, okay, so that’s interesting. So she makes a little structure, which is what you do with children is you build a structure around the… But it’s the word for Noah’s ark. Okay, okay. And this is also the first indicator of what becomes a very profound symbolic motif in the Exodus story, because Moses is allied with water throughout the narrative, whereas the Pharaoh and Egypt are allied with stone. And stone seems permanent and immovable, but it’s brittle and hard and lifeless. And Moses is continually represented as a master of water and transformation. And so this is the first time you see that. And water, as Moses is undoing, he hits the rock and says, I will get you water and not God, and doesn’t get into Israel. Right, well, so I guess that’s when he misuses his relationship with his power over water. And water is chaotic, right, from a symbolic perspective, and water is associated with what you immerse yourself in when you’re baptized. And water is like the pre-cosmogonic chaos that exists at the beginning of time. And so for Moses to be a master of chaos and water is also to make him procedurally the antithesis of the tyrant, because the tyrant wants everything in stone and solid, and Moses is the antithesis of that. And there’s also, I think there’s also… One thing that happens is you have an extreme. You have, let’s say, the Pharaoh, and then you have water. And what happens is what Moses is going to be doing through the entire story is making that mediation between what is above and what is below. And now you have this little image of the ark as being a little microcosm, which is what you see in Genesis, a little microcosm of the world that exists in this extreme, right, because in the flood, what you have is a return to the beginning, where now it’s heaven and earth and there’s nothing in between. Both of them can’t sustain life. There has to be a hierarchy of reality that gets pulled out of the water. And that’s what Moses is going to do. He’s going to go up the mountain and bring down the law, and that is going to create that structure, that mediation between… Because even in the text, we’ll see later, like God is also… Just God and the people doesn’t seem to work because God is constantly wanting to consume them. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, don’t consume them. So we need to have this mediation where being lays itself out and kind of falls down into the world in a way that is appropriate. One of the things Jung said, and this is sort of relevant if you consider psychedelic experiences as well, which can be far more than people can tolerate. Jung said part of the purpose of religious practice was to stop people from having religious experiences. And he, because he was very interested in experiences that were extreme enough to border on psychosis, for example, and that if you don’t have those intermediary structures between you and the absolutely transcendent, which might be reality itself in the ethical and material sense, then that’s just too much. And you do see that echoed in motifs like the burning bush where God tells Moses later not to look at him directly, to at best to look at his back, right? Because you just can’t withstand that direct contact with something that exceeds your comprehension in every dimension simultaneously, no matter how good it is, no matter how complete it is, it’s just too much for the mortal soul to bear. And his sister stood afar off to wit what would be done to him. And the daughter of Pharaoh, that’s so interesting that he’s rescued by the daughter of the Pharaoh, came down to wash herself at the river and her maidens walked along by the riverside. And when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when she opened it, she saw the child. And behold, the babe wept and she had compassion on him and said, this is one of the Hebrew’s children. That’s an interesting line from the Jungian perspective as well, because Jung would have regarded the anima, the animating principle, which is the feminine spirit as part of that, which is constantly antithetical to the stone like patriarchal tyrant. And it’s very interesting that it’s the Pharaoh’s own daughter who actually proves her compassion, her genuine compassion for a helpless infant. So genuine compassion properly placed constitutes part of the power that can be used against the tyrant. And she’s placed exactly in the same position as the midwives, where it’s like, here’s a Hebrew child. And now it’s once again, it’s a woman who saves the… So it’s like, this is the… you could say that that’s the role of the feminine is to nurture, is to give potential, is to hold, is to do all these things in order for the person to find their independence. And is there not something of a, sorry, of a paradox here of you say the man from nowhere, the Parsifal figure in a way, and yet he’s discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter. So he has dual… he has… okay, so you see this motif is replicated unbelievably commonly as say the motif of the orphan. You see this with the comic book character Superman most particularly, because Superman has ordinary parents. I think he lands in Kansas, if I remember correctly. And so they’re just ordinary farmers, but really his parents are divine, right? They’re heavenly. And the Superman brings both of those together and there is this motif that each of us are the sons or daughters of our fathers and mothers, our proximal fathers and mothers, but simultaneously we are the true sons and daughters of the divine culture, let’s say, and the spirit of culture and nature and the spirit of nature. And so each of us, that’s why when you’re born lowly, let’s say you’re actually not, because regardless of where you’re born, you’re also the child of, well, of everything, of nature and culture and of the transcendent simultaneously. And indeed Christ, I mean, born in the stable, you know, carpenter, but the Davidic lineage. So again, you’ve got that mix. That’s why the descent into Egypt is so important, isn’t it? It’s clearly sort of recapitulating that motif, yeah. But here a very obvious point, all the heroes are women. Yeah, well, it’s so interesting that the proper heroic target of the women’s heroic action is in fact the helpless infant, right? The compassion isn’t being misplaced because compassion, as far as I can tell, that overarching compassion is particularly appropriate when it’s directed towards that which is truly helpless. But if it starts to be directed as if towards infants to those who could be competent, then it starts to become destructive. So it’s feminine compassion in the right place here. And so even if it’s the Pharaoh’s daughter, yes, true maternal virtues, right, which is the care of the truly helpless and well, perhaps the truly oppressed. Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? And the Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child’s mother. Very sneaky of the Hebrews. And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, so she adopts him, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child and nursed it. And the child grew. And she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. So now he’s the son of the king, the grandson of the Pharaoh. So interesting that… It’s also a very powerful, as an adoptive father of two sons, one biological, one adoptive. And this has always spoken to me profoundly, that she is regarded as his mother, and she’s clearly not his biological mother. In Jewish tradition, she is act…which is remarkable to me, because you would think blood would be dominant, but in later Jewish tradition, she is called Batya, the daughter of God, and she is regarded as Moses’ mother. Really interesting. Very interesting. For those who are interested in the Greek and have a more kind of…have taken on the Greek philosophy and everything, St. Gregory of Nyssa sees the relationship between the two mothers and the relationship between his allegiance to Egypt and his allegiance to his mother as the relationship that we have with the pagan past. That is, that we are to learn and to be nurtured by our pagan ancestors and the pagan stories and the pagan philosophers, but to a degree, to a limit, and that ultimately, when you’ll see later, Moses discovers or chooses his true allegiance by ultimately killing the Egyptian, but that he won’t completely discount it. Well, it’s also the problem we all have when we’re being socialized, because to some degree, to be socialized in a time and place is to fall prey to the prevailing tyranny, right, to become an avatar of that culture, and the tyrannical aspects of that as well, but hopefully to simultaneously unite that with, you could say, the spirit of Israel, which is the striving towards the wrestling with God, and then to make that paramount. And so Moses’ lineage is representative of the lineage of all of us, and we struggle with that, right, because now people are ashamed of their pharaonic identity, which is the patriarchal tyranny and the capacity that that has to produce the atrocities of the past, but we have to come to terms with it, and the notion that Moses kills the pharaoh is something like the notion that, well, he kills the Egyptian, is that you overthrow that tyrant within, even though you necessarily owe allegiance, and then you follow something higher, something like that. This is quite an obvious point, but I think it’s just important dwelling on the point that it’s pharaoh’s daughter, it is a non-Jewish moral agent who acts in a saintly way, and I think this gives us a first taste of a theme that’s going to come to dominate. Morality isn’t bound by ethnicity. That’s right. This is the great gift of the Jewish people, this insight that morality is universal. It’s a gift to the world, it’s something that all human beings, as it were, are bound to. Paul, later in the New Testament, makes this point again in Romans 1 and chapter 2 of Romans, that the Gentiles, as it were, have the law written upon their hearts, and I think this will be something that’s very important when we come to look at the Ten Commandments and so on. So that’s another echo of that notion of a transcendent good, right? Yeah, exactly, which in the context of ancient Near Eastern religion, it’s difficult to exaggerate the point too much. It really is quite extraordinary, this idea that there is a moral code that cuts right across all tribes and all nations. Well, it’s anthropologically absurd in some sense, because the anthropological evidence suggests that we’re pretty damn tribal, and that the fundamental human response, in some sense, towards people who aren’t of your tribe is that they’re not human. So it’s really an amazing vision beyond the parochial confines of, well, tribe and nation. It’s the first real discovery that morality is a possession that all human beings have, and it’s a crucial point. People often say that the code of Hammurabi and that there are these sort of insights into how other peoples and other tribes are to be treated in an ethically responsible way. But I think here it really is a remarkable insight, the universalism, the objectivity of moral values. And to Dennis’s point, the elevation of the foreigner to an ethical status that supersedes the ethical status of the in-group ethnic member. Amazing thing. That’s an amazing thing. It’s very hard to account for that. Relative to that point. Divine ownership. It’s very interesting relative to that point that we were talking about the midwives who choose not to kill the children. In the case of the mother, I just think this is an amazing image. I mean, the mother can only save her son by giving him up and not only giving him up, but actually commending him to not simply the river, but to the anti-ethnic character of what’s going on here, that somehow she must commend her own son to what you might perceive as the enemy. Well, that is what happens when you raise a child, though, and especially true if you raise a son, is because the son has to move beyond you into the culture. And if the culture has a tyrannically patriarchal element, which would be the Egyptian element, let’s say, then in order to foster your son’s development, you have to let the world take him. And that would even be the case if the broader social world has that tyrannical proclivity. And if you don’t do that, you fail as a mother. Though there’s a deep sense in which the maternal instinct can only be fulfilled by transcending itself. And that’s what you see here, that you can only save the son by literally giving him up. Yeah, well, that’s a sacrifice of the child motif, right? So which is a very difficult. That’s a very difficult idea to come to terms with. You see that in the paella in some sense, that great Michelangelo statue where you see Mary offering her broken son to the world. And that’s what mothers do, right? That’s what they have to do. I think that’s equivalent to the female crucifixion in some real sense. It’s like you have to allow your children, you have to offer up your children to be broken by the world, broken by the world. Yeah, so. And it came to pass in those days when Moses was grown, that he went out into his brethren, that would be the Hebrews, and looked upon their burdens. And he spied an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way. And when he saw that there was no man around, he slew the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. And when he went out the second day, behold, two men of the Hebrews strove together. And he said to him that did the wrong, wherefore smitest thou thy fellow? And he said, who made you a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me as thou killest the Egyptian? And Moses feared and said, surely this thing is known. Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses. But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well. So back to the water imagery there. I just want to say about this little text. This is actually one of my, if I have a little favorite text in Exodus, it’s this little text because it’s a little microcosm, again, of what’s going to happen. Because Moses has to do two things. He has to overthrow the tyrant and he has to help the Hebrews become something. They have to bring them together so that they become a nation. And it’s like that’s right there. He kills the Egyptian and he gets in, because he’s not in the right place. He does it, but then he gets in trouble and then he comes to his wrong brothers and they’re like, who are you? Like, who made you king? Who made you our chief? And so he has to go through this whole process again to now go up the mountain, have this vision of God. Possibly. Even though he’s fighting the tyrant, he does it in caution. And he’s doing the right, he wants to do the right thing. And then ultimately it’s all going to happen because when he sees God, then he receives from God that authority, receives from God that capacity to then bring the law and then join and create, not create, but like consolidate, let’s say, the Hebrew people into it. Right. So the murderous impulse, which is generated by the moral revulsion against the slavery of his people is manifest in that careless homicide. And that just about dooms Moses and that would have doomed the entire enterprise. Why do you feel it’s careless? Well, it’s careless in that, okay, that’s a fine question. It’s careless in that he, it’s only, he presumes it’s only going to be successful if it’s done in secret. And it turns out not to be secret. It turns out to be revealed. And I think that’s part of your point, isn’t it? Unless I misunderstood it. Well, I mostly see it. I mostly see it that it’s like a, it’s a messy version of what he’s actually going to do with the proper authority from God. He doesn’t yet have the authority from God. So he does this thing. He kills the Egyptian and it’s messy. And then he tries to reconcile his brothers and it’s messy. And he has to flee. He doesn’t have what it takes to do it. You know, and so he has to, so you can think about it like, like in terms of your own bad habits or whatever. You can try to take them on, right? You can try to change your habits. You can try to consolidate your attention. Yeah, good luck with that. You have to go through the desert. There’s a whole process of prayer and purification that you have to go through before you can attend to those things. If you try to take on your own, like tyrants, just like that, good luck. They’re going to come back and smack you down. You’re not the man for the job yet. That’s right. Not yet. That’s right. But Dennis, you said earlier though, a couple of Levites, you know, but don’t your traditions say that Levi was the one who, you know, went out and slew the people who raped his sister and he took things into his own hand? The Messiah will come from Judah. And, you know, he went and got a prostitute to his own daughter-in-law. The origins of our heroes are, look at what David did, again, the father of the Messiah. The man not only commits adultery, that’s pretty common, unfortunately, but he has the man killed to sleep with his wife. That’s, by the way, I have zero interest in bringing any politics into this, so my point is not political at all. But that was my argument with regard to Donald Trump. The idea that because he is a man who has committed many sins, he is not an appropriate leader has no biblical basis. Well, we’d all be in trouble if the precondition for action was sinlessness. That’s clear. Yeah. And what was William Blake’s dictum? Wisdom through excess. And there’s also ideas that are reflected in the Gospels too, that there’s more treasure in some spiritual sense, heaped up by those who dare to sin and then repent and are reclaimed than those who are too terrified to take any action whatsoever on the off chance that they might make a mistake. Christ says the same thing in Revelation when he comes back as a judge. He says that his harshest judgment isn’t reserved for those who are hot or those who are cold, so the good or the evil for that matter, but for those who play both ends against the middle and sit and never commit. And so, and that’s really an interesting idea, right, is that in some real sense, God, at least how God’s represented in the Old Testament is definitely the spirit on the side of the adventurous, for better or for worse. And that’s quite something, right, because it also, I think, bears some light, sheds some light on this notion of the terrifying element of the transcendent. It’s not whatever God’s goodness is, it’s not some simple, harmless, like all-encompassing, weak compassion. It’s something terrifying in its moral breadth, because it would really be something if the spirit of God is on the side of the rampantly adventurous. And I think you can make a strong case for that, at least from within the confines of the biblical corpus. I mean, Abraham’s an adventurer, Moses is an adventurer, Noah’s an adventurer, these are people who, David’s an adventurer, they aren’t people who stayed home and tried to never cause any trouble, right, which is a kind of emasculation in and of itself. Well, faith is a venture. It’s entrepreneurial. I think people of faith, I call it the entrepreneurs of life. And so why make the entrepreneurial connection? Well, there’s a vision, there’s a venture, there’s a risk, there’s a cost, you know, the whole thing is wrapped up with that. Well, I think that’s lovely to tie that in with faith, too, because in our culture, people often denigrate faith as belief in the unbelievable, as if it’s a purely, if it’s first of all purely propositional, and second of all, it’s just a denial of evidence. You see that in the atheist crowds constantly. But to me, faith is something like the willingness to take a risk based on a presumption. And maybe the presumption is, well, truth will set you free. It’s like, well, tell the truth and see what happens. Is it going to get you in a lot of trouble? The evidence that aggregates around you, if you tell the truth to the degree that you can, isn’t that this is going to be the easy path forward. You have to decide, this is something Kierkegaard stressed, right, is that you have to decide certain things as preconditions for action, independent in some real sense of the evidence. And that’s the faith. And this is when Abraham, for example, in his great adventure, he goes, he follows God’s call out of the safety of the tent. The faith is to heed the call of adventure, even though he’s got everything in some sense that you need, if you if you’re only interested in hedonistic gratification. But there’s something beyond that. And it’s faith that allows you to make those decisions, to step into the unknown future. And that’s coming from Moses, as John was hinting. I mean, here he does it himself. Who set you up? He did. And to take on Pharaoh by himself. Right. There’s also, though, I think, as I’m going to argue, I think there’s a profound sense in which Moses is a very weak figure. And in many respects, if the text is, as it were, about the revelation of a kind of transcendent order in history and about ourselves as readers coming to understand ourselves in that, I mean, I think we should presume that somehow Moses himself is not a figure who needs that very revelation and to come into it himself. And I think that, you know, the persistent imagery we’re going to see of Moses here is actually very weak and doubtless and failing and so on. He’s unable to speak. Yes, he is himself in need of that discovery of himself in that transcendent revelation as anyone else. You see the transformation of Moses, although he does make that mistake. You see him move from a character who stands for God. What mistake? No, hitting the rock. Like that’s the one mistake for Moses. But he goes from this character who says, God, I can’t speak. You know, I can’t speak in front of people. And then he ends later as this shining figure that comes down the mountain. People can’t even look on him because God says, you will be God for them. And he has to hide his face because he’s so radiant. And it’s like that transformation is astounding. It’s such an astounding thing. And he finishes with unstoppable words at the end of Deuteronomy. The man who couldn’t speak is very eloquent. Right. Well, and it tells you something about what constitutes the power of true speech. And the notion there is something like if the words are from God, let’s say it doesn’t matter how impaired you are in your utterance of them. That’s a secondary consideration. And so it’s despite or maybe even because of your insufficiency in some real sense, if you’re oriented properly, the words will. And I’ve met people like that who who are not particularly articulate. But you listen to every word they say because their words are very carefully measured and chosen and often purchased at the cost of plenty of suffering. And they just have that depth that’s kind of that’s uncanny in some real sense. And you call those people of genuine character and you can certainly when those people speak, everyone is still. And that’s really something. It’s really something to see. By the way, there is a very interesting parallel since Abraham was raised. We know nothing, absolutely nothing about Abraham before God speaks to him. But we know a lot about Moses before God chooses him. And there are three stories we’ve just done to killing the Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew interfering in the fight of the two Hebrews. And now he will defend these women who are not Hebrews against non-Hebrew male bullies. That’s a remarkable man. And in one case he killed, in one case he spoke, and in another case he just stood up. He is a very impressive man at this point, Moses. And we know no one is going to ask, gee, why did God choose him? These are three impressive stories. Right, right. So they’re all elucidating different aspects of his willingness to stand up against tyranny. That’s right. Irrespective of sex and irrespective of nationality. Right. OK, OK. Well, and we come to that now. Now, the priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. And the shepherds, these bullies that you talked about, Dennis came and drove them away. And that’s pretty low way. I mean, you come across a bunch of women trying to get some water and your manifestation of your power is to chase them away. How pathetic. But Moses stood up and helped them. And it does say shepherds, not shepherds, so that means he’s outnumbered and watered their flock. And when they came to rule their father, he said, How is it that you are come so soon today? And they said, an Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds. That’s an echoing phrase, right, because that’s another one of these fractal prodroma, because the shepherds are bullying tyrants and Moses is the delivering is the delivering force there. And he also drew water enough for us. So that’s a reference to the pre-cosmogonic chaos again that revivifies in the face of tyranny and watered the flock. Amazing imagery in that in that line. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? Why is it that you have left the man? Call him that he may eat bread. Seems like the right response. And Moses was content to dwell with the man. And he gave Moses Zipporah, his daughter, and she bear him a son. And he called his name Gershom, for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land. So that means Moses is an obviously a compelling enough character so that a father is willing to marry his daughter to him, despite the fact that he’s a stranger and a foreigner. So there’s also in this text like this whole this whole meeting of the women at the well is super important in terms of understanding this relationship between the woman also and the well itself. As this water, this potential, which is the positive aspect of the lower waters, you could say. And so that’s why you see the patriarchs, they always meet their wives at wells. And ultimately, in terms of Christianity, that leads all the way to the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, which is like the final version of that where he meets this strange woman. And then, you know, she offers him water. He offers her like a fountain that will go into eternity. And it’s like this relationship between the masculine and the feminine. This is so old, like it’s the active waters, the fresh water than the salt water. You see it in the like Mesopotamian myth, like it’s a super old structure. But it’s it’s it. Yeah, the water is revivifying. Right. And so and so are our water like ideas. If you’re stuck in the desert of the tyranny of your own mind, then there are certain ideas that strike you as revivifying. We talked about that in relationship to the the revelation that you said it was odd and received. Right. And he’s looking at tyranny right in the face in the movie theater and a revivifying idea strikes him. And it has this it has this ability to quench a thirst that’s much deeper than a mere physical thirst and a symbolic analog to thirst quenching and often provided by women with their animating spirit. Right. So and it came to pass in process of time that the king of Egypt died and the children of Israel side by reason of the bondage. That’s a very useful line, too, because we see here, too, that not only is it wrong for the Egyptians to enslave the Israelites, but it’s correct for the Israelites to grieve because they’re not free. And so what we see implicit in the narrative here is this constant insistence that those who wrestle with God, that’s Israel, should be free, that that’s a higher moral good. And you might say, well, that’s self-evident, as we discussed earlier, but it’s not even the Israelites themselves when they end up in the desert and in the other terrible places they’re wandering takes them to. A lot of them pine for the days of the their subjugation to tyranny. And if you know anything about nostalgia for Stalin in in the former Soviet Union, for example, or the or the continual current extent, worship of Mao, you can understand this. I read a book at one point that was written by concentration camp guards who were nostalgic for the work that they did in the concentration camps in Germany. And so don’t be thinking that people believe without. Constraint that freedom and absence of slavery is a positive good. They can be afraid of that, that necessity for faith that that entrepreneurial spirit demands. They’d rather take the brick walls and and the certainty. So it came to pass in the process of time that the king of Egypt died and the children of Israel side by reason of the bondage and they cried. And their cry came up to. And their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. So God is represented here as the superordinate spirit who responds to the cries of the unjustly enslaved and whatever else he might be. That’s what he is. And God heard their groaning. And God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel and God had respect unto them. You covenant is an idea that you’re very interested in. And so what do you think it means here that it’s such a strange line that God remembered his covenant? Why would God have to? He’s God. Why does he have to remember? Did he forget? No, but this is the first time God enters the story as an agent. He knows he hears he remembers he cares. And I love Rabbi Heschel saying here he compares Yahweh with the Greek understanding and the Greek understanding say Aristotle. God is an unmoved mover. No, Heschel said he is the most moved mover. He hears and remembers and here he’s keeping his promise. That’s the significance. He’s made the promise to Abraham. You can see that this is something that we commune with if people are grieving their enslavement even to themselves. If there is the possibility that they can be freed from that, there has to be the possibility that there’s something that they can call on outside the tyranny of their own imagination to free them. So because otherwise it’s like in the scientific realm, if you you have your epistemological ideas, your theory about the world, but you presume that there’s a corrective object outside of that that can tell you when you’ve made an error. There’s something outside your theory. If you’re ensconced in your own tyranny, there is no redemption from that unless there’s something that transcends even your own tyranny within you that you can in some real sense call on. And I do think people call on that all the time. Carl Rogers, when he talked about the preconditions for therapeutic improvement, and this has to do with the notion of humility, is that if your client isn’t desperate and ready to change themselves, there isn’t really anything you can do about that as a therapist. They have to have already admitted to themselves that they’re laboring under the burden of their own even unrealized tyranny and then open themselves up to the possibility that there’s an alternative pathway forward. And that is that is that’s an action of faith and it is an opening up to revelation. And I think you can think that as a secular person. It’s like, well, if you’re troubled, but you can improve part of the way you improve is like the scientist who’s open to new revelations by the object is to open yourself up to the idea that there’s something beyond your current solipsistic misery. And I cannot see how that’s not both prayer and a statement of faith. No, absolutely. Dennis, isn’t there an understanding, though, that the Jews at this time had lost much of their touch with the Lord altogether? We don’t know it from the text. So I agree with you. That would. What would they remember for 400 years or whatever the time span? It’s not completely precise of the time in Egypt. That’s why Moses, as we’ll see, obviously says, well, what what name do I do I give? What do I go to them and say I came in so and so’s name? So if they had remembered the name, he would not have asked that question. Right. So they’re so divorced from their tradition that he can’t even speak in the name of the tradition. Right. Right. Which is definitely a problem. But faith has to begin when we get to the end of ourselves and reach out. And obviously, they got so out of touch that they needed to cry out. And this cries an incredibly important, triggering moment, doesn’t it? By the way, I use this because I also wrote a commentary on the Haggadah, the Passover Seder service. And I said so there were very four famous questions children ask at the Seder. So I said, here’s a question for adults to ask. If God took the Jews out of Egypt, why didn’t he take them out of Europe? And in some configuration, almost any Jew has asked that question. And I just, among other things, I don’t have a perfect answer by any means, but there is an implied answer. One could have asked the same question in Egypt. Why did God wait so long? How many Jews were killed and beaten and tortured until God, quote unquote, remembered? So, well, maybe the cry is it is it partly the possibility that like man, man has to reach up to God just as much as God reaches down. And then without Moses being there as the precondition for in some sense for God’s intervention, then it’s not going to occur. Right. But that doesn’t put God off the hook. I’m asking a question that puts God on the hook. Right, right. No, I understand. So my answer, and it’s not emotionally satisfying, but I find it theologically satisfying, is that God does not save the individual Jew. He saves the Jewish people. Yeah, well, I wonder, Abe, because I’m not denying at all the validity of what you said. But, you know, it seems to be the case in the biblical narrative that God portions out a pretty major responsibility and catastrophe for mankind. And that’s to live ethically despite mortality and limitation. It’s a really heavy burden. And so then you wonder, it’s like, well, just exactly how much are we called on to be ethical actors so that God’s goodness can be revealed? And that’s a real open question. And, you know, I mean, when in Sodom and Gomorrah, when the search is on for one or two good men in the city so that it’s not going to be destroyed, the idea there is that even if there’s one person who’s good, we won’t destroy the city. No, it goes down to ten. Okay, ten. No, no, that’s important. Sorry, ten. One doesn’t suffice. Okay, that’s why we get him out and then everything falls apart. Okay, but there is a notion there that… It’s the outlier that saves every civilization. Right. It is the great lesson of our time. You’re an outlier. It’s a statement of fact, not even a compliment. It is a compliment, but it’s not meant as such. Outliers do all the good that is done. Some outliers do evil. But all the good that is done is done by outliers. Well, and that’s the tension between the law when it becomes corrupt and the prophetic tradition that echoes through the Old Testament and then up into the New Testament too, because the law, from a tradition perspective, turns into various shades of Egypt, and then it’s always a prophetic figure that comes up and shakes his fist. And right in the face of the king, that happens most particularly in the case of David, right, when he’s called on his sins because he takes Bathsheba, which is a really low act, right? I mean, he sees this woman bathing naked on the roof of a nearby house, and then he sends her husband, who’s a great general, into battle to have him killed. It’s like, that’s pretty damn twisted and pathetic. And then one of the prophets, whose name I don’t remember at the moment, calls him on it. It’s… Nathan. Is it Nathan? Yeah, which is pretty brave, right? I mean, he’s a mid-east potentate. You don’t just walk into his castle and tell him that he’s cursed by God without some fear for your neck. So, and you see this just continually, this dichotomy between the corruption of tradition and the emergence of a prophetic figure, who’s in principle has this inspiration from God, and the weight of his words is what indicates that that’s the case. Dennis, you didn’t quite say it, and I would never dare say it as a Christian, but I’ve heard Jews say that one reason for the answer, the question you raised, was the Israel. And Israel’s now a nation recognized by the world. Oh, I’ve heard it all of my life, and I have to say that it depicts God to my way of thinking in an awful way. The ends don’t justify the means. Well, the ends do sometimes justify means, but yes, we murdered a million Jewish babies, and we tortured and humiliated and degraded five million others in order to produce Israel. I, as a Jew, would say, I think I’m going to opt for another group. Yeah, yeah. That was Ivan’s comment. That is not the God that I understand. That’s Ivan’s comment in the Brothers Karamazov, too, when he takes on Alyosha. You know, he said, his point in some sense, he talks about this girl who’s frozen to death by her parents as she’s screaming in an outhouse, which is a story that Dostoevsky took from the news. This actually happened, so she screamed all night, froze to death, and Ivan says he can’t believe in a God that would allow that to happen even once, no matter what the reason was. Well, that’s not what I’m saying. I believe in a God who allows evil to happen. That’s not what you were challenging. God created the evil to do the good of the creation of Israel. That I don’t accept, that God allows evil as a given. Yeah, well, it’s a consequence of free will in some sense. Yes, exactly. I think I thought about that a lot, too, because you could imagine a world that’s the best world possible, just as a game in some sense, not that we can really do that. But then you might ask yourself, is a world where you could choose evil but choose not to do better than a world where you’re a robot who has no choice? And I think the answer to that, I mean, if you think about your own children, you want this vast expanse of possibility for them, and the vast or that expanse of possibility, the more real the possibility of evil choices is. But what they get out of that is the benefit of the actual choice. So they have a real destiny, right? They’re wrestling with real things, and they can choose not to engage in evil. It could be not there, although it’s, but if it’s going to exist in real possibility, it also has to be an actualizable possibility. And so it could be that a world where evil is possible, but then not chosen, is better than a world where evil doesn’t exist at all. That’s why I’ve always been suspicious of people saying about a dog, such a good dog. Has he chosen his goodness? Yeah, surely a world in which there’s a possibility of doing good and bringing about generating value is a world that is better than a world in which that’s simply not possible at all. Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? And in some sense, that’s the fundamental question, because it’s one thing to wrestle with the reality of tragedy, but it’s a whole different thing to wrestle with the reality of malevolence. And you might say, well, why would God create a world where the snake in the garden, let’s say, why would God allow a world where evil existed to exist as a possibility? And it could be easily that the good that is there as a consequence of the breadth of possibility supersedes the evil of the possibility of malevolence. Plus, it also gives people some real thing to wrestle with, right? Is that whatever human beings are, we have a heavy load. It’s a load that in Christianity is associated in some sense with divinity, right? Because God becomes mortal man. And so it’s a real, what we’re contending with is real in the most fundamental sense. And that means it’s not trivial. We can get into real trouble. And of course, the Holocaust, that was real trouble. And so that’s also, it’s a very peculiar idea, but it’s also some evidence of the, I don’t know, respect that whatever created us has for us that we actually have a real destiny and in the broadest possible sense. I suppose you can say that it’s simply, it’s just not possible to bring about a world in which benevolence is possible where there isn’t a genuine risk of malevolence as well. Well, maybe it’s not possible. It may be. But so then you might think that the optimal solution is where great evil is possible, but freely rejected. And that would be the best of all possible worlds. And I do believe that’s the case. And I certainly see this as part of the Jungian idea of incorporating the shadow, I suppose, which is also that this capacity that we have within us, which is a predatory capacity, this capacity for great evil and for brutality and for strength, all of that makes us much more than we would be if we can harness that for good, than we would be if we were just harmless rabbits, for example. Not to denigrate rabbits, they’re perfectly lovely, but you get the picture. The best people I know have been the people who you know have absolute capacity for mayhem if unleashed, but choose not to unleash it, in fact, to harness it for purposes of the good. Now, Moses kept the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. Another indication of him being subservient to an ethical structure outside both the Egyptian and the Hebrew structure there, because he’s serving this priest of Midian and tending his flock very, that also makes Moses a figure that transcends the parochial confines of his culture, another indication of that. And he led the flock to the backside of the desert and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And so God here is associated with the mountain, and so you could riff on that. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire, this compelling and attractive fire phenomenon, out of the midst of a bush. And he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. That’s the symbol Jews often use for the Jewish people, where all is burned but not consumed. Yeah, and the question is, in a situation like that, just exactly what’s being burned away? You know, I mean, one of the reasons that the transcendent is terrifying and why people purified themselves, for example, before they engaged in psychedelic experiences historically, was because if they got too close to the fire, the burning that that produced was so intense that it might be of mortal danger. You know, if you’re 95% dead wood and you get too close to the fire, all that dead wood should go, but it might be fatal. You were mentioning the whole heroic side of faith, I think you were, in fact. There’s also this terrifying aspect of the deity linked to transcendence and the absoluteness, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as Otto described it, this mystery that is both repelling, because it’s terrifying, and at the same time attractive. And I think that that was… Well, we get some echoes of that, I would say, in contact with things of great beauty. The European cathedrals are like that. I was in one in Vienna recently that had three floors of plague bones underneath it. And so it’s this magnificent structure, too much really, when you walk in, and it’s overwhelming in its power. And to see that people sacrificed hundreds of years of effort under conditions of extreme privation to build these magnificent buildings, and then to go underneath and see the layers and layers and layers of catastrophe and death that that’s been erected on, it’s too much, right? It’s just too much. And that’s just an echo of what is too much in the most fundamentally absolute sense. It’s just a pointer in that direction. People are terrified of beauty for the same reason. I’ve watched people respond to art. I had a lot of paintings in my house at one point. They’re all coming back now. Like 300 of them, you know, it was just paintings everywhere. And people would come in and say, well, why would you want to live in a museum? And I’d think, well, that’s exactly where I want to live. Why would you not want to live? It’s too much. The paintings, a lot of them were paintings of warfare scenes and like they were beautiful. But in this, but they weren’t nice. It wasn’t elevator music, you know, and you look at those things and they they shake all the weakness off of you if you look at them long enough. And that’s very frightening, especially if there’s lots of weakness and there definitely is. It’s interesting, is it not, that in our culture where you might say there’s been a systematic ideological process of desecration, that there’s also been an aversion to beauty. Yeah, that’s not accidental. The philosopher Roger Scruton. Generica, right? The spread of, yeah, exactly. The spread of these cookie cutter suburbs everywhere that have this incredibly they’re efficient in some sense and they’re convenient, but they’re just hideous. And they have this very short term element. And you see this contempt for that, too. It’s really terrifying to see it in Europe because as a North American, especially Canadian going to Europe has this element of pilgrimage to beauty. And you go, I saw this in Edinburgh in particular, although they’re fixing it. Edinburgh, the whole downtown core, one square miles of UNESCO World Heritage Site. And no wonder, because Edinburgh is like it’s beautiful. And then intermingled with these mostly Victorian buildings, if I remember correctly, where these hideous catastrophes erected in the 1970s, this brutalist, modernist abortion, these giant middle fingers, you know, to the entire context. And to their credit, the people of Edinburgh are tearing them down. And yeah. My mentor Peter Berger has a notion, signals of transcendence. Some are positive beauty or CSLO surprised by joy. Some are negative, like the Auden one. This to me is the ultimate signal of transcendence ever. Because if you look at burning, it must end in ashes. Anything you can’t look away from fire either. Like we are the apes who couldn’t look away from fire. You can’t step in the same river twice. You just go that way, you’d end up with a Hindu view of Maya, and the world’s unreal. And yet, no, here’s something burning, but not burned up. Right, that’s us, man. Well, no, there’s something beyond us. And he’s arrested. He sees it, and then he seeks for the explanation, and immediately he encounters the Lord. And that’s why, Dennis, the Jews themselves are the ultimate, because of your survival. Despite persecution, despite, you shouldn’t be here. Some shouldn’t. You know what I’m saying. Just forgive me, forgive me. Now you’re in trouble. I’m thinking of Trotsky and the like. There are some unimpressive Jews. To jump from the Hebraic to the Hellenic, that’s not far off the way Plato uses the image of fire in his famous image of the cave in Book 7 of the Republic. The flames are flickering, but that’s not all there is. There’s transcendence beyond. There’s the sunlight, the stable, timeless sunlight outside the cave, which the sort of chaotic fire of the sensory world and the fickle world, the ever-changing world, it’s a signal of transcendence, as Berger puts it. And it’s an interesting sort of consonance there. Fire is also this mysterium, tremendous and fascinance that you described, because I think biologically, and I’ll think about this from an evolutionary perspective, we’re all descendants of the first proto-human chimpanzee analog who absolutely 100% could not stop looking at fire. And fire is absolutely fascinating to human beings. It’s so interesting to watch people around a campfire, for example, where we feel at home, we gaze into the fire, and the fire seems to me to be something that escapes what’s called latent inhibition, is that almost everything we see after we’ve seen it multiple times, we see as a representation of memory. We don’t see the thing itself, but fire is one of those things that escapes that, and we see fire as something that’s constantly new, plus it’s always constantly changing, and we cannot look away from it, just like we can’t look away from little children, and we can’t look away from sexual beauty. These things all escape the tyranny of our conceptualization. I just wanted to say something about these two. To me, these two texts, the one you’ve read before and this one, is really one of the most, a very beautiful description of reality, based a little bit on what you were saying before, because you have, it says, And God heard their groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. First of all, this is also referring to Genesis at the end of the flood, because that’s where the flood ends. The flood ends, it says, God remembered Noah. And when God remembers Noah, the waters recede, and then the dove finds the tree, finds the structure. That connects heaven and earth. That’s what the dove finds. And so you have this verse, but right there it says, He remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And for the first time, you have this hierarchy again coming back, saying God is already giving back the identity to his people. He’s already saying, it’s like, there’s the, it’s not just God and chaos. There’s this whole story that’s there, and he’s going to give it back to his people. And then when you, when Moses, Is that Jacob’s ladder? Do you think, is that the same tree? Definitely. It’s definitely Jacob’s ladder, the mountain, and the tabernacle itself. When we get the tabernacle, we’ll see it’s a representation of Moses’ mountain itself, or the mountain of paradise itself. So then Moses, right after that, you have Moses, what happens? He comes out of the desert, come to a mountain, and in that mountain, now he sees this flaming bush. He has to remove his sandals, he enters into the sacred space. The sacred space is, the text, at least I know St. Gregory of Nyssa really insists on how the bush is a bramble bush. It’s a thorn bush. And that’s the, you can see that’s the fullness of everything, because the thorns are the consequence of the fall. The thorns are what God gives as a consequence of sin. And now here is this thorn bush, which is full of light, but is not consumed. And that’s the thing, that’s what God gives us. It’s like reality can exist in all its multiplicity, in all its beauty, and we don’t, as Christians and people also in the Hebrew tradition, we don’t have this idea that the world is an illusion, that the world just has to be gotten rid of, and we just need to get to Nirvana or whatever. We have this sense that the world is full of God’s presence, and it’s a gift, right? It’s good, that’s what it says at the beginning of Genesis. I think that that’s what we’re seeing here, is this, God is present in the world, and he’s manifesting himself to Moses, but he’s not consuming it. It’s continuously continuing to exist in its, even in its participation in God. And I read that the, so Moses has to take his sandals off to go to do this. I read that that’s also his, and this is on commentary on the Torah, that he was forgoing any claim to ownership of the land upon which he stood. There were ancient Hebrew traditions about taking ownership of land that had to do with being shod, and so to take off the shoes meant to approach the transcendent in a humble way with no claim to possession, and that seems to me, and the shoes of course are symbols of identity. Tammy, my wife, she had dreams all the time where shoes represented her current identity. So, alright. And the bush was not consumed. This is at least a great mystery. And Moses said, And Moses said, And he said, By the way, the only redundancy in God’s entire dialogue in the Bible. Is? Take your shoes off your feet. Hmm. And so why? Just a cute, meaningless point, but I just, I’ve always gotten a kick out of it. Where else are your shoes if not on your feet? Like where else is the shoe? Just take off your shoes would have sufficed. Is that in the Hebrew? Yes. Yes. It struck me as a kid, where else are his shoes? Well, it also means, I think that God is insisting that in some real sense, Moses stands unprotected and naked in front of him, and because to take off your shoes and to reveal your feet, that might account for why that emphasis is there, right? Right. And so it’s the feet and not the shoes. And the shoes are definitely, I mean, they’re a fundamental element of culture. They shield us from our contact with the ground, but they also in some real sense elevate us above the ground, right? That’s the danger of shoes. We’re no longer in contact with the earth. There’s a lack of humility by putting on that, those garments of skin, and we feel invulnerable in a way that we really want. That’s what they are. I think the best way to understand this text is as a return to Eden. And so in order to return to Eden, he has to remove his garments of skin. But what’s crazy is the surprise. It’s like he removes his garments of skin, and the surprise is to see the thorn bush in flame. It’s like, what a crazy mystery. Well, okay, well, that’s an echo then too of the notion that in order to encounter the transcendent in the most real sense, you have to absolutely at 100% accept your naked vulnerability. And you think, well, that’s self-evident when you think it through, because how else could you adapt to life in the most fundamental sense without simultaneously accepting the fact that you’re ultimately, right, naked and vulnerable. You’re ultimately that because you’re prone to insanity, you’re prone to tyranny, and you’re prone to death. There isn’t any more ultimate on the human plane than that. And so if you can’t adapt to that and accept it, then you can’t adapt to or accept life. You think that’s a big reason, any of you, why so many people have rejected God, they’re not prepared to accept their vulnerability? Oh, yes. I don’t know, I’m truly asking. I had not thought of it in this way. Well, I think that the rejection in some sense of the travails of the saints and the prophets and the crucifix is definitely rejection of the catastrophe of mortality. Because all of those traditions call on us and you see this as a clinician. One of the things that clinicians learned across all the different schools of clinical psychology was that the more radically you accept the necessity of confronting what you’re terrified of and wish to avoid, the higher the probability that you’ll move forward and recover. And we don’t know the limit to that. Right. And the Christian question in some real sense is the limit to that. It’s like, well, how deep into the abyss do you have to look? And the answer is not only into death, but beyond death, into hell. Because if death is what terrifies you the most, you know nothing about hell, because there are many things worse than death. And so the call is to gaze into the abyss as far down as it goes. And that’s all the way to the bottom. But that basic state of vulnerability, of fragility, it does conjure up a sense of finitude, I think, in the human experience. Finitude and dependence and a sense of lack, a sense that we are not in the end masters of the abyss. In the end, masters and captains of our soul, that we require some other orientation to something greater, something on which we do depend. To bear the finite weight. Yeah, absolutely. And also, I think we have a particular crisis at the moment. I think we can see this in the universities with the so-called mental health crisis. And it’s linked to this assumption that human beings should be happy. And if they’re not, there’s something wrong with them. And our ancestors grew up with the tenet that life is extremely difficult and that a path to happiness is extremely demanding. And also unbelievably unlikely, right? And you should be grateful when it comes along, but by no means expect it. And then they had a noble vision, too, on the Roman and the Greek and the Hebrew front, which was not so much hedonic happiness, which is very trivial. And Solzhenitsyn says, well, that disappears when you first hear the boots kicking down your door at three in the morning. It’s like so much for happiness. That’s gone. And then what do you have? And well, that was Frankl’s question and Solzhenitsyn’s question. And part of the answer to that is in the face of privation and terror and tragedy and malevolence, you have the great adventure of your life. And one of the things that I think is true is that you find that adventure in truth, because truth is an adventure. And it might be enough of an adventure. It might be enough of an adventure to justify the catastrophe and malevolence of life. And I wonder whether the erosion of certain basic rituals is also generating a lot of problems. I mean, a trivial, not trivial example, but one that comes to my mind was a death in college about 20 years ago of a brilliant young student who was hit by a car crossing the road in college. And I noticed that the students, the 18, 19 year old students, were completely thrown by this and partly it emerged they hadn’t been to funerals. Their parents hadn’t taken them along to funerals. To shelter them. To protect them. And so I think that’s a very important example of how we can actually see the impact of the And they’d say as good parents, they would not allow their children to be subjected to funerals as if the funerals might be damaging them. Now, what I noticed was, in fact, that you had adults, young adults, highly intelligent adults who were, you know, they were very, very intelligent. And I think to some extent because the ritual of funerals have not been kept. Well, there’s no container for it. Well, my wife remembers when she was five, her grandfather died and they didn’t take her to the funeral. Now, my wife’s parents, by the way, were very good at fostering children. And they were very, very intelligent. And I think that’s a very important example of how we can actually see the impact of the funerals. And I think the reason was is that the message there is that death itself is so terrifying that there’s no way a child can apprehend it or bear up under it. And that better not be the case because that’s life, death. And so if that’s the case, then that’s life. And so I think that’s a very important example of how we can actually see the impact of funerals. And so what you do is you bring the child to the funeral to show that. So when my wife’s mother died, we were there for her death. And it was terrible death. She had a neurological disease, a degenerative neurological disease, dementia. So it went. She deteriorated over about 15 years. And first of all, her husband wrote a letter to her mother. And so it went. She deteriorated over about 15 years. And first of all, her husband rose to the challenge, man, it was something to see because he was sort of a man about town. But when the chips were down, God, he was there. And it was something, man. And then I watched her family deal with this. They’re pretty tough. My wife’s sister is a palliative care nurse and her other sister is a pharmacist. And they’ve they’ve confronted mortality, you know, in a noble sense. And what happened in that family was that as they mutually faced death together. And this is also what you do at a funeral is the the bonds that attached them to each other grew stronger and thicker. And so that while they suffered the loss of their mother, which was a genuine loss, they were compensated for it in a real sense by the increase in love between them. And I would say their family in the aftermath of their mother’s death, death was much closer and tighter than it was before. And, you know, you can’t say, well, that made it good because that’s a cheap out, you know. But you can bloody well say that it made it a lot less like hell than it had to be. And so these containing rituals, your children are a lot tougher than people think. And you need to take them to a funeral so that they can see that the adults. I’m going to be like dad and look, he can stand up in the face of death, maybe even in the face of the death of his father, and he can still move forward. And God, you better learn that because it’s coming down the pipelines. But the text is I mean, the text is this text is precisely such a ritual. Right. I mean, this isn’t a live stream of history. Right. This is a text written to convey, you might say, the order in history or God’s the transcendent order in history and to bring us into that. History. And so, you know, when you talk about the the ritual of the funeral, for example, that’s a ritual to help you understand the horror of death and to in some sense redeem it, at least from the point of view of your own self-consciousness to be able to understand it. And so I think, you know, when we’re when you see these moments that refer to God remembering his covenant and so on, this is this is in a way showing us that the text is very much a part of the ritual. It’s that the text is itself a liturgical creation of our own subjectivity, our own memories such that we can make sense of our lives here and now. I just want to ask Jordan a question. You’re it intrigued me what you said about your mother’s father. He really it was a bon vivant and then rose to the challenge. So I want to ask you a question. If you were to compare to the challenge, what would you have predicted his behavior would have been? Well, I always liked him and admired him. But he was a man about town, you know, extroverted guy. So I had no idea. He passed the test and you would have predicted he would have passed the test. Not to the degree that he did. It was really quite stunning. So here’s my question. And it’s really I wrestle with it. I don’t have an answer. I’m curious to hear anyone on this. Do we know people before they have been tested? No, not really. So then this is a very, very interesting question because life in America, at least from World War II to the last till 2010, even years ago, was quite easy for the vast majority of its citizens. So it’s not a reasonable historical standard. Exactly. Which is the only standard, obviously. So is it fair to say we don’t know the moral caliber of most of the people living in America? Because I think people have been tested in the last two years and I think half of my fellow citizens failed. Dismally, especially doctors, I might add. Isn’t it Hemingway who said that every generation needs a war to sort out what’s important? Well, it’s a very dark thought. Yes. Well, it’s maybe, well, William James would have said something like a war or its moral equivalent. And that was something James would say. Right, or its moral equivalent. Yeah, well, because you have. Well, that’s what I’m referring to. It’s moral equivalent. Exactly. So it’s interesting. Do we even know ourselves till we’re tested? I don’t think so. Well, I think you can make a case for this biologically. Here’s a case. This is quite interesting. So you might ask, why do you grow when you go somewhere new? And there’s two answers to that. One is you go there and you gather more information. You talk to new people. You see new things. And so you can think about that as a constructivist response, right? Your web of knowledge, adaptive knowledge increases because you’ve been more places. But that’s not all that happens. If you go somewhere new and you expose yourself to a challenge, then new genes, the genes that haven’t turned on to encode certain proteins turn on and they flesh out your your psychophysiological structure. And you could even imagine imagine that you decided to take on a new challenge voluntarily. So that’d be part of the heroic journey. Then your biology is going to respond to that right down to the genetic level. And it’s going to reveal new potential that’s coded inside the genetic structure that’s going to make you literally more than you are. And there’s this idea that Jung talked about in relationship to the the maze in the Shart Cathedral. So imagine you go into this maze and then you walk the four quadrants and then you come to the center and the four quadrants are the four corners of the world. And you have to pass through all the four corners of the world before you come to the center. And the idea there is that you have to hit yourself against all the sharp edges of the world before the full potential of what you are is manifest. And that well that has something to do I would say also with the idea of the harrowing of hell is that you have to face death and you have to face tyranny and you have to face malevolence. And so that’s hell at that point. And the deeper you peer into that abyss and the more strenuously you wrestle with that, the more of you turns on. And so and I think that’s I think that’s how. And then you also think, well, how could it be any other way? Why would what was within you manifest itself fully in the absence of challenge? Nothing works that way. You don’t get stronger without lifting weights. So then that leads to another question. How many people putting aside an easy society? How many people lead a life devoid of challenges? Well, pretty pretty small. They just don’t they don’t acknowledge that them as challenges and therefore don’t need to pass the test. Well, or they’re they’re resentful and bitter about their problems. That’s right. That’s the age we live in. If I’m challenged, it’s it’s the fault of someone. Yeah. Well, and people are enticed to believe that. But what I’ve been so heartened by and one of the things that people have been responding to in relationship to what I’ve been lecturing about as a clinician, I would say, is when you confront young people, this is especially being true of young men, with the notion that what they should do is strive to bear up underneath the heaviest responsibility they can shoulder voluntarily. They’re unbelievably receptive to that idea. And and and and it’s so interesting to watch because it’s almost as if all you have to do is introduce the idea. Assuming you’re vaguely credible, all you have to do is introduce the idea. And it’s like it’s like a crystal in a super saturated solution. It just goes no one ever told me that. And one of the things that’s been deeply sorrowful for me is to see how much effect those ideas have on people, how quickly. And the reason it’s sorrowful is because you simultaneously see how much of a lack there is of that idea in our current culture. So but I think people are there for the call, man, and lots of them, especially young people on that sort of cusp of messianic development in late adolescence, you know, when the when the radicals can get a hold of them and make them resentful and bitter. If you offer a better pathway forward, which is something like bear up voluntarily under the catastrophe of life because you have something to offer. Right. That’s there’s this idea in the biblical idea that in some sense, God says this, I think he says it to Moses later that maybe it’s in the Gospels that it’s required that all of the ramifications of the law manifest themselves. It’s like a holy requirement. And the idea there is something like and this is a really terrifying metaphysical idea. It’s like why is there suffering in the world? Why is there malevolence in the world? Well, maybe it’s because we’re not all we could be. And maybe it’s incumbent on each of us. And I really mean each of us to reveal everything that is within us. And if we revealed everything that was within us, and that would happen as a consequence of this voluntary ethical striving, if we revealed everything within us, God only knows how much hell we could dispense with because we have no idea what things could be like if everyone was 100 percent aiming up. This might be forgive me for I just want to say this is so important. I think so. I remember in high school, I started an anti cheating campaign in my in my grade. And I remember vividly the this is really triggering things in me. The biggest reason I did I had I had cheated on some tests in elementary school. And but the biggest reason I didn’t in high school was not God was not particularly involved in my decision, which he would have been more so later in moral decisions. I wanted to pass the test of not cheating. Right, right. I’m just thinking literally for the first time, maybe that’s another good method of getting people to do what is good. Pass tests, pass challenges. Yeah, well, you know, there is speculation, you know, there’s this, obviously, this this scene in Job where God bets with the devil, which is a hell of a thing to do. It’s like you’re going to bet with the devil. And the idea is that you can tempt Job out of his moral position. And what’s God up to? And I had a vision about that at one time about God presenting man with a with the most vicious adversary possible. And you might think, well, why would someone do that? And the answer is something like, well, if you know that the entity that you’re setting the forces of hell against in some real sense can triumph over that, then the positioning of the adversary is actually a call to a greater good. And I think I can’t help but think that that’s correct, because I can’t see how what is best can be called out of us without us being confronted simultaneously by what is worse. But I hope I’m not being pious, Dan, by saying that’s important, but it’s a kind of mid-level test of growth. So you’ve mentioned responsibility or reaching our full potential of who we are. You can do that in various ways, but many of them are truly some self-help goes some way towards that. I think what you see here, the call of Moses or the call of Abraham or the call of lots of people in the scripture, the highest responsibility of all is responding in faith to God’s call. Right. By definition. By definition, the highest fulfillment. I actually dislike my own name intensely, but I was named after a writer whose most famous book is called My Utmost for His Highest. Right, right, right. And that’s what you’re saying. Right, well, that’s the proper call of the Church. That’s calling. That’s calling. Right. I don’t think there’s any higher version of that. Well, and here’s something that’s relevant to that too. So I know neuropharmacologically, I studied pleasure as a biological mechanism and the intense pleasure that’s associated with joy and enthusiasm. So enthusiasm is to be filled with God, Theos, and Theos, so it’s to be filled with the Spirit of God. You do not experience joy as a consequence of achieving a goal. You experience joy as a consequence of positing a goal and then noting progress towards the goal. And so a corollary of that is that the higher the goal, the more intense the joy attendant on observation of progress towards it. And so then you might say if you wanted to maximize the possibility of hedonic expression, not to degenerate into a cheap hedonism, but to maximize it in the most real sense. And this is a Viktor Frankl idea in some fundamental senses. You pick the most noble possible goal. And that is that’s the mountain that’s service to God again by definition, right? Because it’s service to the highest thing, whatever that is. And then that opens the door that does in literally open the door to the it’s a precondition for the experience of joy. And so these people who are depressed and anxious and miserable, part of the reason for that is that their their ethic is scattered. Their goals are diverse and low level. There’s nothing beckoning in the distance. And so they can’t see progress because there’s no progress and certainly not progress to a certain superordinate goal. So there’s actually no positive emotion. And that’s technically the case because the positive emotion system is a calibration system that produces navigation orientation towards destination point. That’s literally how it functions. So I think you just described the whole book of Exodus just right there. Like that’s really what Exodus is. Well, that’s like the scattered mixed multitude that is gathered into and they can experience that in yourself as much as in the people or anything actually functions that way. And that is where there is no vision of people perish. Where are the cultural norms are so degraded. It’s also the danger of dispensing with an ideal, you know, because the problem with ideals is that every ideal is a judge. So the ideal of beauty is a judge because who of us compares to the ideal beauty? And the answer is no one. And we all know it. And so the ideal is a catastrophe in that sense. The raging fire that can consume you. Yes, exactly, exactly. But if there’s no ideal, there’s no goal. And if there’s no goal, then there’s no joy. And so what are we going to do? We’re going to dispense with our ideals so we don’t hurt anybody’s feelings. And what we’re going to dispense? Well, that’s exactly what we’re being called upon to do. And so we’re going to abandon joy. And unless you have the ultimately judgmental ideal, it’s so perverse. Unless you have the ultimately judgmental ideal, there’s no precondition for joy. But back to Stephen’s thing about the funeral and the reality, the history. In other words, psychology and lots of things, you can throw incredible interpretive light. But the highest thing here is that God is the actor in this, and it happens in history. So the surrounding nations, all their festivals were festivals of nature, spring and so on. The Jewish festivals are festivals of history. And they’re taught to follow them as if they were there, maybe centuries later. In other words, you’ve got to keep always that history is the decisive thing here. And in light of history, you bring in psychology. I happen to be trained in sociology, bring it in. But history and meeting God, you’re into pretty heavy philosophy. You see here too that what’s put in the highest place, which is so fascinating, is the spirit that calls you to freedom out of tyranny, right, as we said before, even if it calls you into the desert to begin with. And so it’s quite the conceptualization of God, is that part of whatever is to be properly put in the highest place is exactly the spirit that calls you out of tyranny. And so, all right, well, let’s finish off this chapter. And he said, draw not nigh hither. This is God talking, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Again, I’m reminded of the fact that this is likely something like a call to humility. I was looking at the Sermon on the Mount the other day, and Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount that those who are poor in spirit are blessed. There’s many people who are blessed, but the poor in spirit are blessed. And the question is, what does that mean? And it means something like those who have been brought low enough to be humble enough to be ready to receive. And I think that’s what’s being echoed here, is that that’s part of the reflection of Moses’ nakedness. That’s the best explanation I ever heard. Well, thank you. Thank you. It took me only 40 years to think of that. That really helps. Because I’ve never thought, oh, the poor are so special. They’re wonderful poor and lousy poor. No, it’s definitely a reference to pride. The poor in spirit are not prideful and narcissistic. I looked in Bible Hub, which is a great site. You can see 50 translations simultaneously. And so you get the full connotation of the phrase. And if you look at all the different translations, you can see that it’s definitely a call to this particular kind of humility. Because one of the things I learned when I was teaching my course Maps of Meaning was that you could decide that you were going to be friends with what you knew or you could be friends with what you didn’t know. Right. And so if you’re friends with what you know, you try to prove your point all the time. And I’ll fall prey to that from time to time. But once you realize the depths of your ignorance and you think, well, what I don’t know is inexhaustible and my troubles are inexhaustible. So I better have an inexhaustible source to call on. And I can certainly call on the inexhaustibility of my own ignorance. And that’s it. And it reverses everything, because all of a sudden the fact that you don’t know is actually your greatest hope, because there’s always the possibility that if you lowered yourself, Jung said, modern men do not see God because they do not look low enough. It’s so brilliant. And if you can if you can make friends with your own ignorance, then you open up the landscape of revelation to everything you don’t know. Well, that’s so good if you have a problem, because the reason you have a problem is because you don’t know something. And so this is definitely an injunction there is that the place where on thou standest is holy ground. And if you’re on holy ground, and maybe you’re always on holy ground, you should have your damn shoes off and your eyes open. And yeah, well, that’d be a terrifying thing to to to apprehend. All right, gentlemen, that was that was that was a good start. These were tough. These were tough ones. You’re right. Wait till the 10th of May. Yeah, until tomorrow. Good. You can imagine in some sense that what Moses is having here when he encounters the burning bush is something like an aesthetic experience, right? It’s profoundly attractive, at least perhaps it’s not beautiful, but perhaps it is. And so that beauty is calling to him and calls him into a relationship that then transforms itself into something transcendent. But he’s also prepared for that character logically. The killing of the Hebrew children, you have to understand it almost as if they’re all dead. Except for Moses, all the males have been killed except for Moses. There’s just one. It’s a reduction. That’s right. It means his equal. It’s never translated correctly. Right. Right. The Hebrew is a health mate who is equal to him. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.