“The process that made the eye for an eye a dead letter is exactly the same process that could be used to make the Leviticus against homosexuality a dead letter, and that's what we're called to do because that's the tradition.” - Dan Libenson
“The process that made the eye for an eye a dead letter is exactly the same process that could be used to make the Leviticus against homosexuality a dead letter, and that's what we're called to do because that's the tradition.” - Dan Libenson
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
"An eye for an eye" seems perfectly clear, until the rabbis decide it doesn't mean what it says. In this episode, Benay and Dan dive into one of the Talmud's most famous reinterpretations and ask a surprising question: Is the goal to prove that the Torah always meant monetary compensation, or to quietly teach future generations how traditions evolve?
As the conversation unfolds, a debate about personal injury becomes a much bigger story about authority, moral intuition, and religious change. Along the way, they explore why the Talmud sometimes buries its boldest ideas beneath layers of argument, what happens when our deepest convictions collide with sacred texts, and why understanding how the rabbis argued may matter even more than the conclusions they reached.
This week’s text: Bava Kamma 83b
Find an edited transcript and full show notes (references and further reading) on The Oral Talmud webpage for this episode! Access the Sefaria Source Sheet to explore key Talmud texts and find the original video of our discussion. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com. You can find a donate button on the top right corner of the website.
DAN LIBENSON: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 65: Attractive Instability
Welcome to the Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY LAPPE: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN LIBENSON: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today.
"An eye for an eye" seems perfectly clear—until the rabbis decide it doesn't mean what it says. In this episode, Benay and I dive into one of the Talmud's most famous reinterpretations and ask a surprising question: Is the goal to prove that the Torah always meant monetary compensation, or to quietly teach future generations how traditions evolve?
As the conversation unfolds, a debate about personal injury becomes a much bigger story about authority, moral intuition, and religious change. Along the way, we explore why the Talmud sometimes buries its boldest ideas beneath layers of argument, what happens when our deepest convictions collide with sacred texts, and why understanding how the rabbis argued may matter even more than the conclusions they reached.
Every episode of The Oral Talmud has a number of resources to support your learning and to share with your own study partners! If you’re using a podcast app to listen, you’ll find these links in our show notes: First, to a Source Sheet on Sefaria, where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation – there we excerpt the core Talmud texts we discuss and share a link to the original video of our learning.
In the show notes of your podcast app, you’ll also find a link to this episode on The Oral Talmud’s website, where we post an edited transcript, and where you can make a donation to keep the show going, if you feel so moved. On both the Sefaria Source Sheet and The Oral Talmud website.
And now, The Oral Talmud…
DAN LIBENSON: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Oral Talmud. I'm Dan Leventin and I'm here, as always, with Bnei Lappin. Hey,
BENAY LAPPE: Bnei. Hey, Dan. How are you?
DAN LIBENSON: I'm good. I'm still... You know, it's funny, I'm still, um, feeling our summer break a little, that I'm, I don't 100% remember how to start this show.
So sorry for our slight delay in, in starting there. Um, but, uh, it's great to be back, and, uh- Yeah ... great to see you. So, uh, we should... So last week we had a special guest visit from Professor Menachem Fish of Tel Aviv University for his second, I think, I think he's our first returning guest, and, uh, that was awesome on e- on every level.
And, uh, it was, on the one hand, a return to our previous topic because that was the one that we were talking about, uh, this, this, h- whole, um, this, this whole idea o- of, of the previous topic. Uh, and, um, th- now we've moved on to, uh, a topic, so in a way we're in a confused, uh, s- area in between. Although actually I think our conversation with Menachem Fish last week is gonna be relevant to, to this conversation, so it, it actually is secretly relevant.
In any event, let's, uh, remind people a little bit where we are, uh, which is we're in the tractate called Bava Kamma, which has to do with tort law, uh, damage i- you know, when, when, uh, peop- uh, people or property are injured by another person. It's not criminal. There's not gonna be a criminal sanction, but there's gonna be a compen- a compensation of some kind, and that's, like, the question of what kind of compensation is part of what we're talking about here.
And the Mishnah that we talked about last week was getting into the details of monetary compensation and saying if somebody injures another person, then they, they have to compensate them with money, and there were all these various ways in which the Mishnah lays out how, how you would assess those damages.
And, and that's the Mishnah that we looked at and, and today we're gonna get into the Gemara about it. But before we do, uh, do you wanna have some other relevant reminders?
BENAY LAPPE: Well, m- my brain is actually still thinking about your reference to, um, our guest, Menachem Fish, last week. And, you know, you said that what we're doing today and over the next few weeks will be similar to what we talked about with him, and I just wanted to articulate what that is exactly.
And I think the, the meta message that he was helping us understand, um, which is going to recur in passages that we learn again and again, is that, and this is something I learned, um, from my other teacher, David Kramer, the way the Talmud says something- Is actually what it means for the most sophisticated learners to clue into to understand its real message.
So it's not what it says or what it is claiming, it's how it, how it says it, which is telling you the real message. So we're at, you know, it's looking for you to pick up on the implied critique of the claim it's making or the obvious far-fetched nature of the claim that what this new radical law is actually what the Torah meant all along.
It, it wants you to pick up on the that's clearly not the case. It clearly is winking at us. It wants you to pick up on the wink. So we're always looking for the wink underneath the surface claim. And I think Menachem Fish's claim is that the Talmud speaks in To two audiences, to the more naive reader and the more naive member of the community and the more sophisticated member of the community because it wants everyone to come along into th- this new project.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: And if it really said straight out what it's about, which is Using our svara to, when we feel necessary, radically deviate from Torah, it would lose a lot of members. The project would lose those most conservative folks who are really, you know, the verse pointers. "Oh, wait a minute, God said this is what we have to do."
So just wanted to surface that.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. By the way, like, one, I mean, it's only a slightly related point, but as, you know, I've talked about the, my wife and I have been reading the, the Talmud page every day, and, um, one thing you run across more often than, well, I mean, pretty often, is how there are certain euphemisms in the Talmud, and the translation often will point out the euphemisms, which I could imagine if I didn't have that translation, I might just sort of sail over.
So for example, the other day there was something where it was referring to the enemies of the Jewish people will suffer in this way and that way if they do wrong, and the translation explains, like, "The enemies of the Jewish people" is a euphemism for the Jewish people will suffer. Right? And, um, you know, it's just kind of, like, known, like, well, this is a euphemism, right?
That, that the, the insiders know. I mean, either that or the translator is completely wrong, which I don't believe, because he's very, very scholarly. Um, so, you know, so there, there are these euphemisms in the Talmud where the exact opposite of, of the word is, is used. And by the way, we see that in the Torah, too.
Like, there, you know, there are different reasons for these euphemisms, but for example, in the Torah, any time a person's name includes the word Boshet, actually that wasn't their real name. Their real name, instead of saying, where it says Boshet, was Baal, and Baal was another god. And so it's two issues going on there.
One, the Torah doesn't like to think about, you know, Israelites who would've had the name Baal, another god, in their name, because that suggests that they worshiped another god, and they're trying to erase that history, so they're trying to kind of not have that as clear on the surface. And the other thing is that Boshet means, like, embarrassment, and so it's a way of kind of putting down Baal by saying, you know, instead of, uh, a person's whose name is Ishboshet, or sorry, a person whose name is Ish Baal, which means a man of Baal, instead they say his name is I- Ishboshet, which is a man of embarrassment.
You know, and so it sort of works on two levels, too, right? Because the n- more naive reader will just read it and say, like, "Oh, weird, his parents named him man of embarrassment," you know? And the more sophisticated reader will know, "Ah, yes, we, there's another put-down of Baal." You know? Right. And, and there's a lot of that going on throughout the tradition.
So those are smaller ways, and th- this is a much bigger way or a much more profound way. But I, I think that it's important to point out that, like, these ideas of kind of winks or euphemisms or, or ways of sending two messages at the same time, like, those are, are rampant throughout the tradition.
BENAY LAPPE: And I'm gonna guess, I'm not sure, but I, that this is a way, a, a rhetoric which was probably borrowed from the Greeks.
I don't know. Maybe one of our listeners will be able to tell us. But, um- I'm just gonna guess that the rabbis didn't invent it.
DAN LIBENSON: Interesting.
BENAY LAPPE: I don't know. I just, that's my guess.
DAN LIBENSON: Great.
BENAY LAPPE: All right. So two weeks ago when we began this text, we learned the entire Mishnah. And the Mishnah claims, as you said, that one who injures another, and it doesn't actually specify that the injury has to be physical.
It might not be physical. It might be some, might be an emotional injury. It might be an injury that has no physical manifestation, but, or permanent, um, disability, but involved embarrassment. Maybe it involved some medical expenses. Maybe it involved lost work, whatever. So one who injures another is obligated to that person in five categories.
Uh, damage, which is the diminishment of w- earning capacity over the person's lifetime, pain and suffering, medical expenses, lost wages during the recuperation period, and humiliation or embarrassment that might have occurred as a result of, you know, who knows, walking through the world now with a physical, m- you know, scar or lost limb or something.
Um, and- In typical Mishnah fashion, this is, th- this claim that this is what we should do is not justified. They don't use, they don't seem to feel the need to have any proof text or authority. They just claim this is what we do. Uh, there's no disagreement expressed. There's no argumentation. That's very typical of Mishnah.
But now the Talmud is going to bring in the Gemara, and the Gemara is the literature that was highly, highly redacted by an editor some 600 or so years after the Mishnah was closed in the year 220. And w- when you learn Gemara, y- what, what I've learned is to be attuned to what is the editor trying to say.
The editor is going to be editing together earlier traditions, earlier utterances, making a kind of pseudo-dialogue as if people are arguing with one another who maybe lived in different eras, uh, adding... I, I'm gonna, I'll say his for the editor. Adding, and over my vacation when I was reading that book, I learned that there were actually different eras of editing.
There were multiple, multiple eras of editing, some more conservative than others. Which by the way, explain, I don't know if we talked about this. You remember when we were learning in Onas B'Gittin the issue about, uh, the man who comes back after issuing a conditional get to his wife, the river stops him, blah, blah, blah.
Do you remember that?
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: And the Bavli has that really conservative ending, like- Yeah ... no, right? '
DAN LIBENSON: Cause at first, at first it says, like, you, you, you're gonna change the Torah just to protect a woman, you know, and then it says yes. Yes. And then there's like a little add-on.
BENAY LAPPE: Right. There's a little add-on that kind of reels that back, and I had this feeling that that was a more cons- well, it turned out that there was a more conservative editing force later on.
Okay. Anyway. Yeah. Getting back to where we are. Um, so that, that, that's Gemara. Gemara is in this dialogue form, so that's something to be prepared for. It's not a singular, univocal kind of text. So we're, we're about to get now a, a, an artificially constructed dialogue about the Mishnah, and the dialogue is gonna take up one of five possible surface topics.
Its real topic is always the same. The Gemara's point in all of the thousands of pages of Talmud is always how do you take your received tradition- And make it better so that the parts that no longer work, work better.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: How do you, how do you insert new values? How do you improve a tradition after a crash?
Th- that's the one and only message of the entire Talmud, as far as I'm concerned. And the Talmud will demonstrate ways to do that over a thousand different topics. Here, it's personal injuries. Okay, fine. Um, and these five possible agendas are, "Hey, who wrote that Mishnah? Whose opinion is that? Um, wait, w- what about this case?
What about that case?" So it's making... It's sort of fleshing out the
DAN LIBENSON: s- An apparent contradiction from somewhere else, you mean?
BENAY LAPPE: Uh, n- no. In this case, I'm talking about, um, application of the Mishnah. Does this Mishnah apply in the case of- Right ... accidental injury? Does it apply if the injurer's a child and not obligated at all to the mitzvot?
Does it apply if, um, you know, the injuring party is an animal? Mm-hmm.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: And I'm the owner of the animal, and I knew my animal was a goring ox, you know. Mm-hmm. It- I had an animal with a, with a bad history of biting people. Right. Am I more responsible than if that animal had never- Like, all the what ifs, um, is an agenda.
Another agenda is, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, wait a minute. Where did you get the... There's no proof here. What's the pro- How do you know this is what God wants?" Or, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. What you, what our Mishnah just said completely contradicts the Torah," or maybe another Mishnah. And, uh- Not to give too much away, that's precisely the agenda that, that our Gemara is going to, uh, begin with.
The whoa, whoa, whoa.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: And we'll see it. We'll see it as we get into it.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So let, so in, in order to jump into the, the Gemara, the, the real thing we want to remind ourselves is that this Mishnah was just talking about financial compensation for physical injuries.
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: The Torah seems very comfortable with that.
It, it's very matter-of-fact about it. Um, Rambam, when he, 1,000 years later codifies this Mishnah, he adds the word l'shalem, to pay, to make it extra, extra clear, because it's not 1,000%. It's pretty clear. But he makes it extra clear that what we're talking about is monetary compensation in these five categories.
Money for medical bills, money for lost wages, money to compensate for pain and suffering, and so on. Okay, great.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So jump into the Gemara?
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So what we see here in the Gemara is, you know, we've just looked at this Mishnah, like, like I said, about these financial compensations, these different ways to assess the financial compensation, and the Gemara starts, "Why?"
Yeah. And
BENAY LAPPE: I think- It, yeah, a- and this why, it, it would best be translated today as WTF.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: That's the feel. It's like, what the... I... It's a, it's
astonishment. Mm-hmm. The Gemara is expressing-
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh ...
BENAY LAPPE: shock and astonishment at the Mishnah.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. And, and, and the source of that shock and astonishment is that they just read the Torah. You know, I, I'm, I'm imagining it was that week's Torah portion. You know? Which, by the way, I, what we've talked about, but, like, I think that there is a really serious issue in the Talmud.
I mean, this is just complete speculation on my part. I don't have, you know, I don't have, like, scholarly bona fides here. But I just have this feeling that the Talmud really gets serious about situations where your average person can just r- read the Torah, and they wouldn't read the Torah because they were illiterate.
The, the point is is they would hear the Torah written... Uh, sorry. They would hear the Torah read at the synagogue, and, like, this is a pretty dramatic one. You know, they're, they're, you're reading the Torah, Exodus chapter 21, you know, it's relatively early in the year, an eye for an eye, right? And, and, you know, the, the person comes and he says, uh, you know, "Well, uh, this guy just poked my eye out, and you're telling me he only owes me, you know, X thousands of shekels or whatever?"
You know, it's like let that... You, I want to poke his eye out, and I just, I just heard in the synagogue that that's what we're supposed to do. You know, so then I think that the Talmud has to really get serious about explaining why that's not happening.
BENAY LAPPE: That's really interesting. It, and- You're, you're reminding me that a possible goal of the Talmud is to equip leaders with what they're gonna need to say to people when the people who only know Torah, I get it, challenge them and say, "Wait a minute."
It, and it, I, I don't know if the last time you reminded me of this I said the same thing but it reminds me of, uh, the law committee deliberations in the conservative movement. And I used to s- I used to, when I was a rabbinical student, sit in on them. I was fascinated by them. And I remember one in particular which was on the use of electricity on Shabbat.
And It, it's a complicated issue, but basically the, there wa- there's no basis for, for forbidding electricity on Shabbat.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: It's not in the category of fire, which is clearly explicitly prohibited by the Torah. You can't really analogize electricity to fire with all of the defining features of fire.
Yet, the conservative movement never wanted microphones to be used on Shabbat, and they didn't want, uh, DJs, uh, in the synagogue for bar mitzvahs. And, and the topic, and the con- the, the de- deliberation over the issue of electricity was, what are we gonna say to our people when they say, "Okay, if electricity isn't fire, why can't I have a microphone?
Why can't I have a DJ at my kid's bar mitzvah?"
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: And so maybe that is what the gemara's doing. The gemara's t- teaching rabbis how to say, "No, you can't have-"
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: Um-
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah ...
BENAY LAPPE: you know, what you think you can ha- but it's in th- it is a reverse case, but whatever.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. By the way, that, that DJ at the bar mitzvah thing is a sore subject on my part because, uh, that was the case at my synagogue, and as a result I had a magician at my bar mitzvah.
Which was good and, but, you know, I w- I would've preferred a DJ. Um, but the, uh, yeah, no, and I also think this is a good illustration of this idea that we developed early on in the, in the Judaism Unbound podcast, and that I'm thinking about again because we're working on some projects that we're gonna announce very soon about courses and learning and sort of a Judaism Unbound yeshiva.
And, um, and there's this idea that we developed called the chutzpah versus knowledge curve where, where our, our hypothesis was, or hypo- you know, sort of based on watching, you know, based on seeing what happens, is that people who don't know that much can be very creative or very, or, you know, n- even don't think of it as creative.
They're just like, they're rational and they just do the thing that makes the most sense. As they learn about Judaism, they tend to become more conservative 'cause they s- 'cause in the early days of learning you start to see a lot of rules, and that makes sense because you're l- early stage learning. It's like when you're learning the, to read, you first learn the shape of the letters and the sounds of the letters, and you don't know that G-H together could make a different sound or, right, or whatever.
Like, you know, that's advanced learning, so you just would read that as g- you know, not, right? Right. And whatever, and, and so that's normal. But it persists for a very long time in Jewish learning, and the- creativity goes down as you learn more. And I'm thinking about this as like a, a logical person. Now we're talking about a modern person, but even that.
Like, so a logical person, you say, you say to somebody, catch them on the street and say, "What do you think should happen if somebody injures another person?" They say, "Oh, well you have to pay him." Like, very few people in our society would, would say- And I, and I think even in the Middle Ages, you know, would say, "Oh, you should hurt him in return."
Uh, and then you, you, you start learning, and in this case the learning is taking place in the synagogue where you're reading the, the Torah portion, and you say, "Oh, well our tradition says that you should poke out his eye." So I guess now I'm, I'm... If you stopped me in the street and asked me what should happen to somebody who hurt- poked your eye out, well, you poke his eye out.
And, and, you know, then, but our, our thinking about this chutzpah versus knowledge curve is that a point comes in Jewish learning where you learn so much that you start to understand that actually the tradition has been to change the tradition when needed, and there's, and to reconcile the tradition with evolving human, uh, understandings of morality.
So the theory there would be like, yeah, once I've learned enough Judaism, I would know that if I live in a society where the idea of corporal punishment is now seen as, as barbaric, then that shouldn't be the Jewish law anymore. And so we're gonna have to find a way to make that not the law anymore. So we're gonna go back to that people's initial svara, right?
Their initial g- kind of moral sensibility that it should be compensation. And that's all very, very traditional. So, you know, this is a, so, so in a sense I hadn't thought of it this way before, but in a sense, like what I'm trying to say about the way that average Jews learned about Judaism back in, in through most of Jewish history was because they were sitting in the synagogue once a, once a week, and, and on Shabbat, and somebody was reading the Torah.
That was what they learned. They didn't study Talmud, they didn't study other things. And, um, th- so those are, that's an exact example, and we have it today of, of people who most of their learning is, is through, they're only learning a very limited slice. And, and they have a, a sense that what Judaism wants is, is actually very, very different from what Judaism has wanted for many thousands of years.
But, you know, that's a, that's also I think a flaw in Jewish education that, that we're hoping to contribute to the, to the change of as, as does Svara obviously.
BENAY LAPPE: Right. Exactly. And i- as you were ex- like imagining this person listening to the Torah read and what their problem is- I wonder if it's actually the opposite.
What if their problem isn't, "Hey, now I know what it says in the Torah, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: Physical retaliation. What if their reaction is not, "Hey, we should be doing that," but it's obvious that's wrong. Uh-huh. So the problem b- Right ... because we're living in a society where monetary compensation has been the law since their great-great-grandparents' age.
No one, even in the time of the Mishnah. The Mishnah's recording what already was law on the ground. We know that. We know that from historical documents. We know it from, um, early Christian documents. Everyone accepted monetary compensation. I think the problem for the person, the Jew listening to Torah was- What kind of Torah is this?
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: So it's really a theological problem. It was like, what kind of God would say that? That's obviously wrong.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: And maybe the rabbinic project was trying to restore their faith in Torah. Mm-hmm. And it kind of overshot you know? Uh-huh, uh-huh. It went, it went too far, to the point where now we have people going, "Oh, this is what it says in the Torah," you know?
I'm going to suppress my sevarah, suppress everything else. Uh-huh, uh-huh. This is what we should do. I don't know. Uh-huh. Just a thought. Well,
DAN LIBENSON: it reminds me of a story that I may have told, but once upon a time my, one of my kids was in a Jewish school, and the teacher q- raised questions about evolution in the, in a Jewish Studies class.
It wasn't like a biology class. But it was... But nevertheless, like, my son, who was young at that time, maybe like fourth grade, fifth grade, came home and said, you know, "Rabbi So-and-so said he doesn't believe in evolution." And I got really upset, and I, I called the principal and I said, "You know, what's the school's position on evolution?"
And the principal said, uh, that, "We believe in evolution. You know, we don't, we, we accept evolution and everything." And I said, "Well, you should know that Rabbi So-and-so said he didn't believe in evolution, and I, I think that that's a problem for this school." And she said, "Oh, don't worry, Dan, you know, I'm sure that your kids will believe in evolution."
And I was like, "That's not what I'm raising here. Like, I'm not concerned that my kids won't believe in evolution. I'm concerned that my kids will think Judaism is a stupid- Right ... religion that doesn't believe in evolution- Right ... and will completely reject it, and that's not why I'm sending them to a Jewish school."
So that's just the, the version of what you said.
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly. Exactly.
DAN LIBENSON: Um- I
BENAY LAPPE: don't, I never thought about that before. I need to actually s- sit with this insight. I think this is something. I think we're onto something here.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And, and, and by the way, like, lest we speculate about it, I mean, I, I think this is what's going on in our society today, you know, is that I think that a lot of pe- I mean, just take, again, I mean, we return to it for all kinds of reasons, but just take the, the line in Leviticus about homosexuality, condemning homosexuality.
Yeah. And a lot of people read it, and they say Judaism is terrible, right? Right. Because J- it has a line like this. Whereas, um, Judah- the Torah has a lot of lines, like poking out somebody's eye who poked out your eye, that have been a dead letter for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the line in Leviticus about homosexuality has not been a dead letter in the same way for thousands of years.
But the process that made the eye for an eye a dead letter is exactly the same process that could be used to make the Leviticus against homosexuality a dead letter. And, like, that's what we're called to do because that's the tradition. Right. Right? And, and, and so if you understand in a sophisticated way what's going on here and how, like you're raising, that this idea of poking out an eye would have made people disdain Judaism as a stupid, out-of-sync, old-timey, you know, whatever.
So we had to change it, because otherwise people won't accept Judaism anymore. Um, and- Like you say, as opposed to the usual way that it's taught that, that people might go around poking each other's eyes out. Which, of course, the other problem is that we do have fundamentalists who, who do, who would go around poking people's eyes out if they were able to, to do it, if they thought that that was what the Torah commanded.
So it's both problems. But we see that today. Yeah. And, and this is what opens the door for us to know how to fix it.
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly. And what you described about Leviticus and the queer question, used to be called the gay question or- ... the homosexuality issue, um It's precisely why I never teach Leviticus.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: Not because I'm avoiding it, but because a better approach isn't to deal with this one issue, it's to show how the tradition has dealt with 100 issues and say, "Connect the dots."
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah.
BENAY LAPPE: Right? L- Leviticus and the query issue is not sui generis, it's one of 1,000. And if you learn how the Talmud has dealt with other- Yeah
similar problematic iss- problematic issues in whatever era, y- you can see that this isn't unique. It's not uniquely problematic. It just hasn't been addressed yet, as you say.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, and, and that's why I think that, and we've talked about this, I think, early on in this show, that, that certain people who will sort of take on that question, just as one example, but obviously that's an important question because it's l- alive for a lot of people today, and it's, and it's clearly outside of the, um, sort of, uh, what do you call it?
Like the zeitgeist or the, the accepted morality of, of a lot of the, the Jews today. And so it's, it's, and it's damaging and painful. It's problematic for so many ways. So for, so of course that should be an important topic to deal with. But a lot of the people that deal with it only look in the, in the area of, let's say, sex or relationships.
Right. And they say like, "Well, we have to look at this, this body of work in Judaism to see if we can find ways to explain this in a different way." And they do beautiful work in doing that, and, and I praise it. But they're missing out on, in the same way that we sa- talked about last week, how maybe this, uh, Mishnah could be a source text for reparations, uh, for, you know, racism, even though it doesn't, nothing explicit about racism, but it's just clear that the logic is there.
So here too, you can look at, at what happens here to the eye for an eye text, and you know exactly what to do with the text in Leviticus. So- Exactly ... you know. It's-
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. All right. So that was- Okay ... uh, in half a line. Let's go back to- No, I
BENAY LAPPE: think it was a word.
DAN LIBENSON: A word?
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, so the- WTF?
Wait a minute. What's, what's the deal with the Mish- so the Torah clearly says an eye for an eye.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. So the Torah clearly says an eye for an eye, uh, said, said the merciful one. And, and so y- it, the merciful one's a name for God. By the way, you've pointed out before on this sh- that, that the name of God that the Talmud chooses to use is potentially significant.
I think you say it is significant. Uh, so sometimes it's the holy blessed one, sometimes it's the merciful one, and there are other names. And so in a case like this where we're about to get a kind of more merciful explanation, it's probably no accident that they refer here to God as the merciful one.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah, yeah. Um, it, it very much could be a kind of ironic-
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh ...
BENAY LAPPE: right? The merciful God clearly says we should poke out the eye of the person who poked your eye. Really? Is that merciful? Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay, so, so, so WTF, this whole thing about compensation, the Torah says an eye for an eye, meaning clearly we should poke out somebody's eye if they poked out your eye, and if they made other injuries, we should give the same injury to them.
That's the, that's the implication, uh, said the merciful one. And so now the Talmud says, "You might say an actual eye."
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. A- and I, I think this translation, I, I, I failed to tweak that word there.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: It doesn't say you might say. It says it's a command. Ama, it's the command form of say. You have to say.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: You have to say that the Torah is talking about an actual eye, meaning the Torah's clearly talking about physical retaliation. This is not poetic. It's not figurative. An eye for an eye literally means an eye for an eye. That's what the Torah says. Okay. So this first voice of the Gemara is pointing out the radical deviation of Mishnah from Torah, right?
Mm. Because our Mishnah says, "If you poke out someone's eye, you have to pay them with money in five categories," whereas the Torah clearly says, "If you poke out someone's eye- They poke out your eye. Mm-hmm. That's what the Torah says to do. So the very first thing the Gemara does is lift up what we kind of took as, yeah, understood.
I, uh, monetary compensation. Of course, that's, that's what we do. Wait a minute. That goes against the Torah. That's its first job, to point out that. And I just wanna give an overall picture of what's going to happen because it's really detailed and it's easy to lose track of the meta picture. What's going to happen in the Gemara is you're going to see a debate or argument between two voices.
The voice that we just saw that says, "What is going on with this monetary compensation for injuries? The Torah says actual retaliation, physical retaliation." We're gonna call that voice mamash. Mamash means real, actual Torah. Says we should do actual eye. The other voice is gonna say, "No, no, no, no, no. The Torah never meant that.
Eye for an eye doesn't mean m- physical retaliation. Eye for an eye actually means money, too. So our Mishnah is not in conflict with the Torah." So we're going to have 10 different arguments, 10 attempted proofs to clarify who's right.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Is the person who says the Torah says eye for an eye and it literally means eye for an eye right, which means the Mishnah is in fact a radical deviation?
Or is the person who says, "No, no, no. The Torah, when it says eye for an eye, you shouldn't understand that. It meant monetary compensation, and therefore our Mishnah is not a radical deviation," is that person right? It's slippery to understand what's really being debated because it looks like what's being debated is should we do monetary compensation or should we do physical retaliation?
That isn't the argument. Everyone does monetary compensation. No one's arguing we should go to a literal understanding of the Torah. The debate is, is our Mishnah a radical deviation, and can we make radical deviations?
DAN LIBENSON: Uh-huh.
BENAY LAPPE: And should we just teach our students that? Should we make sure- we lift up that permission so that our students know they can do it when in their era problematic tradit- various traditions come to be problematic?
Or should we
I don't know. I don't know
DAN LIBENSON: Well, it-
BENAY LAPPE: Go ahead ...
DAN LIBENSON: look like I was thinking, I was trying to think of, like, an analogous, like could we do this sort of linguistically in English, and I don't know if this really works exactly, but I mean, conceptually I think it's, it's, like imagine that something said life for a life or life for life.
We know in American law a life sentence means you're in jail for the rest of your life, and so what it might be saying in just plain English even is life sentence for life taking, right? That would be the way to read life for life. Mm-hmm. And that wouldn't actually be wrong. Like, you, you could, you could, you could understand that as, like, a, a, not, you know, especially if you're being poetic you could say, like, when, when we say in American law life for life it means a life sentence for taking a life.
And then you could say, like, later on there's, uh, an amendment that's offered or there's some interpretation that a court... And a court has two options. One, they could say, "Look, it said life for life, and that actually means life sentence for life taking," or we could say, "No, what they meant back then was take somebody's life," the death sentence, right?
Take, take life for life. And if we say that it actually meant life sentence for life taking, then we're not doing anything radical, we're just interpreting it. We're just making sure that you understood the original intent. That's not a radical act. Uh, it, it might be a surprising result, but we're claiming that it was there all along.
And so therefore if you see something in the future that says, you know, house for house, we don't have something called a house sentence. Like, that's not... So if it says house for house you have to actually burn somebody's house down because you can't... The only reason why life for life works that way is because we have this concept of the life sentence, you know, so they were able to make that poetry.
Well, you can't do that for a house for a house or arm for arm or whatever. You know, that's a less radical act. That's limiting the, the, the destructiveness of the death sentence, but it's not helping you in the case of houses or limbs or anything like that. If you, if you say, "No, no, no, it actually did mean, like they, they saw it back then, they didn't think a life, uh, a death sentence was, was, uh, a cruel and unusual punishment."
And so when it said life for life back then they did mean take a life. Now we're going to sort of do honor to the language and, you know, we're not gonna just erase it, but we're going to now interpret that as pay, as, as, uh, pay for taking a life with a life sentence in prison, and that is radical because it's not what it originally meant, and therefore you can now take that process and apply it elsewhere.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. You said it so much better, and I got lost. Yes, that's it.
DAN LIBENSON: S- and, and, you know, and, and, and I think that the, like, important point here is that, like you've set it up, is that we, I mean, you, I think you said, you said to me that you used to, you, it took you, you didn't see this all along, and I think a natural person who's reading this is saying like, "Oh, well maybe what's going on here in the Talmud, in the Gemara, is that they're trying to say like, maybe, uh, you know, maybe the, um, uh, you know, maybe we should go back to poking out people's eyes 'cause the Mishnah got it wrong."
And you're pointing out, "No, no, no, there's, that's not even on the table. Everybody's agreeing that from now on we're, we're going to monetary compensation, but the question is whether that was a radical change or that was just a interpretation even, you know, whether we're gonna hang it that way."
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly.
So let me take the clarity that you've helped us have from there. So what the Gemara ultimately is trying to do is show that what we do, which is good, which is monetary compensation, is a radical deviation.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: And that we can make radical deviations. We have a history of doing so. And it's showing us ways to calm people down-
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm
BENAY LAPPE: about that radicalness, camouflage it a little bit, sell it, and get them to keep doing it while also not thinking the Torah is- ridiculous-
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ...
BENAY LAPPE: so that they can hang on to Torah's a sacred, sacred document, God is good, God is not, I'm looking for a word other than dumb or stupid, but- I'm not sure what it is.
Um, nonsensical.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: Um, I think that's, that's the, the agenda.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, and, and by the way, I, I would now, you know, I would sort of point, I would, I would point an accusatory finger at Jewish education ever since the time of the Talmud for the masses, because I think that, like, it- it's done a very poor job of getting people to understand, laypeople, that you could read something in the Torah, but you should check to make sure...
Like, by the way, this is true in law too. There's something called, um, there's something called, uh, oh, now I'm blanking on the... There's a book in, in law, in American law. I mean, now it's a website, you know. But there's a, there's a book where if you find a case, it, you know, you're reading a, you're, you're researching for a, for a legal brief that you're writing, and you find a case and it's like, "Oh my gosh, this case is exactly what I need to support my position."
Well, you need to look up in this book whether that case is still in force. And it, right, there's this book, and they would publish, like, this case- Is that,
BENAY LAPPE: like, LexisNexis?
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah, it's on LexisNexis now, but there's a name for this- Uh-huh ... book series, which I'm now- I see ... completely blanking on, 'cause I haven't, you know, really looked at this in 20 years.
Um, but, um, it's very famous, and I'm sure all the lawyers out here are, now know how out of date I am. But, uh but anyway, it, it was a, it was a book that y- that you, y- you know, each year, i- it, maybe each month even, there would be supplements that would be written, and they would kind of tell you every case that's been overturned, every case that's been affirmed.
They would tell you the jurisdictions, like, this case has been, uh, affirmed in, in New York and California, but, but not accepted in Pennsylvania, and whatever. And if you submitted a brief to a court- And you cited a case that has been overturned. That's malpractice. Like, that is, that is legal malpractice.
Like, ev- it's the most basic thing. And now I'm pretty sure there are, like, apps that do this. You know, you run your brief through... I mean, I know there are. You run your brief through this, uh, app and, and it, and it will flag cases that have been, uh, you know, that there's something to, to look about them, you know, that they're not quite good to rely on.
Whatever. And so the point of all this is saying that, like, we should have that for the Torah, like, in the- ... in the weekly Torah reading. Like, you, you should, you should have, like, a, you know, it could be in a book, it could be like a, a, a, a jumbotron that flashes up, you know, as soon as they read a line. You could say, "Overturned in Talmud," you know?
Next page, Baba Qama, you know, whatever. Shh. Because, like, the point is, is that the people hear this and they think like, "Oh, that's Judaism." And like, yeah, in a certain way that's Judaism because at once it was Judaism, but, like, we haven't had that as a meaningful Jewish practice for 2,000 years, but for the, for, for all the people know in your typical American synagogue, like, that is, that is what the J- the practice.
So you read an eye for an eye. I mean, most people know, like, we don't go around poking people's eyes out. But I don't think that they know why we don't, you know? I don- I think they just probably think like, "Oh, well," like, "that's old s-," you know, somehow that went out of practice, as opposed to, like, the Talmud spilled many pages on this topic.
BENAY LAPPE: I love that. I love that idea. The shul I go to, my community is Mishkan here in Chicago, and our rabbi, Lizzie Hideman, um, puts up on a screen during, um, Purim the Megillah with commentary on the side. Uh-huh. Comical commentary. And I could imagine what you're saying during the Torah reading, having the slide up and saying, "No, not that anymore.
Are you kidding?" Right. "This has been gone for..." That would be fascinating.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Um-
BENAY LAPPE: And it would be very c- it would be kind of Purim-ish. It would be funny.
DAN LIBENSON: It would be funny, but it would also, it would also help people have this deeper understanding of, like, what Judaism even is, you know? Yeah. And that it's not the Torah, and it- You know, arguably never was.
That's a longer conversation, but, um-
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah ...
DAN LIBENSON: anyway. Okay. Yep.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: So, so let's go back. So, okay, so n- having all that context, let's go back into the text. So, so the, the Talmud says, uh, you know, the Torah says, "An eye for an eye," um, and you should read that as an actual eye. Uh, and that's like you said, ein mamash, actual.
Like, the, uh, you, you, you know, read that as an actual eye. And then the Talmud immediately says, "No, light year might not go there."
BENAY LAPPE: Right. Uh, right. Okay, so now we get into the other voice, the voice that's the sort of apologetic, the one that's arguing for, "No, nothing radical is going on here. Nothing to see here.
Move along. Move along. Our mission is not radical. Um, we're doing what the Torah meant all along. It w- when the Torah said, 'An eye for an eye,' it didn't mean actual physical retaliation. It also meant money, and let me show you where in the Torah the real message of God was monetary compensation." Okay, so here comes this second voice.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay, and they're gonna use as a methodology, now we're talking about, like... Okay, so, so we know what the substance is. One, the, the first one, let's actually lay this out really clearly. The first one is using what is known as, like, uh, uh, original intent or textualism, right? It's saying, "I just read something and I re- give it the most basic meaning."
We've talked about this. This is Justice Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas. This is their approach for the most part, that you just read something and, and you, you do what the most clear reading of it is. And if the legislator, in this case God, wanted it to be otherwise, they would have had to, you know, make more efforts to make it more clear.
So you write something like, "An eye for an eye," and that has a simple meaning, and you go with that. That's, that's, that's where I think it says, "Say, an actual eye." That's basically the implicit next few sentences which aren't there, which is that we- we're using a textual, straightforward reading here.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay.
Uh, I, I hate to continue to be, uh, distracting, but let- Mm. I, I wanna understand more about originalism or textualism. Okay. Tell me if I'm right, that this plain meaning, this is what it looks like it means, this is what it means, also, tell me if this is right, requires us to keep doing that.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. Okay. As long as this legislation is in force.
BENAY LAPPE: Great. Got
DAN LIBENSON: it. Or, or if we don't, if we don't, then it's, then we have to acknowledge that we've made a major deviation-
BENAY LAPPE: Okay ... to your
DAN LIBENSON: frame.
BENAY LAPPE: And the difference here, though, is this first voice of the Gemara- isn't actually claiming, "And therefore we should still do eye for an eye."
DAN LIBENSON: No. Right. But, but I think, I think an originalist, or I, I should say it's probably more of a text- textualist is the right way to say it, because originalism is slightly different.
So a textualist will say- I always
BENAY LAPPE: get those confused. But okay, we'll leave that aside
DAN LIBENSON: for now ... so that's like, so an originalist says like, "The way that we should understand the text is to look at what it, it meant in the time that it was written." Whereas a non-originalist textualist might say, "We read it the way that it's most straightforwardly understood now."
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: Uh, it's more subtle than that, but that's one way to see the distinction. Um, but- Uh, but I think it, it could often be the case that in a, a, a textualist will, will read it in the way that you were encouraging us to read it, which is to say, yeah, if I'm reading the Constitution, in this case the Torah, it says an eye for an eye.
I have to acknowledge that an eye for an eye means poke out an eye in re- return for another eye. Now, we don't do that anymore, and therefore we should recognize that what we have done is to enact a radical legislation to overturn the Constitution, which we can do. Or, you know, it, it was an amendment, whatever, you know, however you wanna put it.
Got it. But, but the simple re- the straightforward reading here is you just read the text and it, what it says. That's, and that's the first argument. It's, it's just said in a sentence, so we don't almost recognize it as an argument, but that's what we're seeing here is a textualist argument. And the alternative, the one that says, um, the one that says, uh, let your mind not go there, is going to use a technology of argumentation which I don't think that there's an analogous form in Anglo-American law.
I think it's a weird one, you know, except that if you believe it, that God's hand is in the Torah, then you, y- you basically have to understand that it hinges on a belief that God wrote the Torah and that nothing is there by accident, and you can make analogies from things that have nothing to do with one another solely because there's a word that's shared in the two places.
That's called a gezeirah shavah, or here they, uh, translate it as a verbal analogy. But a verbal analogy, to my mind, is not a very good translation 'cause that's, that's sort of like, what does that mean, really, you know? But so it, it- Yeah ... it's really this kind of weird t- way of saying because we can see the same word used in two different contexts, that we can take a principle from the one context and apply it to the second one.
BENAY LAPPE: Exactly. So what we're about to have, we talked about this past, this sugya, this Talmudic unit, being a kind of sampler. Mm-hmm. I talked about that a couple of weeks ago. Right. And we're about to learn the first stitch-
DAN LIBENSON: Right ...
BENAY LAPPE: in the sampler. We're about to learn the first-
DAN LIBENSON: Well, I'm arguing that it's the second, 'cause the first one that we learned was textualism.
BENAY LAPPE: Oh, nice. Okay.
DAN LIBENSON: Um- Okay ... and the second that we're gonna learn is gezeirah shavah.
BENAY LAPPE: Fair enough. Fair enough. But in my mind, it's the first of the techniques by which you can basically pretend that a radical innovation you're making isn't radical.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: And it's, it, and, and most of these techniques play on the- Making of meaning, substantin- substantive meaning out of stylistic elements of the language of the Torah.
Because as you said, the assumption is that God didn't merely use s- you know, a certain rhetorical style. God used every single word to say something, uh, beyond the mere grammar or the expression of the content at hand. Okay, great.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay. So the, uh, so it says it's taught in a baraita, which is a text from the same time as the Mishnah.
Uh, we, we know that there's a baraita that says, that is, that is building off the verse in Exodus, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot." And, uh, it says, "One might have thought that if one blinded the eye of another, the court bl- blinds his eye as punishment. Or if one severed the hand of another, the court severs his hand.
Or if one broke the leg of another, the court breaks his leg. And therefore, the verse-
BENAY LAPPE: Which, which by the way is pr- is precisely what the text says.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: And so it begins by saying, "You might think that the text means what it says." Right,
DAN LIBENSON: you might... And, and this is- ... quoting a baraita, right? A, an old-
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah
DAN LIBENSON: like they have a piece of text that says, "You might have thought that it, that when it says an eye for an eye, a leg for a leg of a... You know, it means that you should give that, that same damage in return." Um, so, or if one broke the leg of another, the court breaks his leg. Therefore, the verse states, "One who strikes a person," and the verse also stake- states, "And one, and one who strikes an animal," to teach that just as one who strikes an animal is liable to pay monetary compensation, so too one who strikes a person is liable to pay monetary compensation.
So let's-
BENAY LAPPE: Okay ...
DAN LIBENSON: let's, uh, understand. So there's, we're talking about two different verses here.
BENAY LAPPE: Yes. Okay. So this is actually more difficult in English, I think, than it is in Aramaic. Right. Because in Aramaic you can look, uh, at the two new verses being quoted and see that they share a similar word. Okay. So the, the first, the, the first thing that's said is, "Don't believe that what the text says is what the text means.
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, hand for a hand, foot for foot," because elsewhere in the Torah there is a teaching about one who strikes an animal. And it clearly says over there in that context, "If you strike an animal and injure the animal, you, the injurer, have to pay."
The owner of that animal for that injury. Clearly says money. Elsewhere in the Torah, in a third location now, it says, "One who strikes a person..." Dot, dot, dot. Let's not quote the rest of the verse. They're simply quoting the part that says, "Strikes a person." "Ah," they say, "God used the word strike over there for strike an animal.
God used the word strike over here for strike a man. When God used the... And, and therefore, God meant us to analogize in some way, whatever relevant way is clear, from one context to the other where the word strike is." It's like the word strike is shooting up a flare, and joining s- meaningfully somehow with every other place there's the word strike.
Okay. So just- So... Go ahead ...
DAN LIBENSON: Just to show it, I mean, we have here, um, like from Exodus 21-
BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm ...
DAN LIBENSON: we have, you know, this, this thing, like, "When men quarrel and one strikes another," you know, then it kind of goes on. Other examples then says here, you know, "The penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth," et cetera.
Um, and then here in Leviticus is this other verse where it says, "One who strikes an animal mortally shall pay its compensation, a life for life." So, so these are the two verses that, that are being kind of compared.
BENAY LAPPE: Great. Right here. These two right here. Uh, 17, uh, 18 and 19. Leviticus 24:18-19. Exactly.
DAN LIBENSON: Oh. Mm.
And then, right. And so, okay.
BENAY LAPPE: Okay. So the rabbis are saying, or the, the argument here is in verse 18 it uses the word pay. And because we can assume that verses 18 and 19 are intricately related because they both have the word strike, oddly sorry. That's not in the translation. This translation doesn't, doesn't use the word strike in the translation, but the Hebrew is the same.
It's the word maka.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. So here it's, it's, uh-
BENAY LAPPE: Should have translated it ... here it's, uh,
DAN LIBENSON: yake and here it's make, so.
BENAY LAPPE: Good. So since both verses use the same word, this interpretive technique or exegetical principle is that we can deduce that God meant us to be able to conclude that what applies to one verse applies to the other verse.
And if payment is clearly stated in one context, it's assumed that we, we can deduce that we're meant to know that payment is what is implied in the other verse Okay. Okay. So QED, this, this voice has just, quote-unquote, "proven" that the Torah really means us to do monetary compensation. And somehow eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth means money, means monetary compensation, and you shouldn't be fooled by the literal meaning of the words.
DAN LIBENSON: And it, and it-
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah.
DAN LIBENSON: And it basically goes on to say, "Well, if you don't like that one, I got another one for you."
BENAY LAPPE: Right. And, uh, y- there's this feeling that, you know, ev- everyone in the room is rolling their eyes at this proof. Right. And that, you know, we're not really convinced by it. And so this voice goes on to say, "Okay, okay.
You don't like that. You don't like my proof there. You're not convinced by that. I'll give you another proof." And we're about to have 10 to 11 proofs Proving that when God said, "Eye for an eye," God actually meant monetary compensation. And it is just a, a rule of the rabbinic jurisprudential project that if you have one good proof, you give it.
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm.
BENAY LAPPE: And if you don't have a single good proof, you give 10 So the sophisticated learner should know, "Oh, I got 10 proofs coming up." There's no real good proof-
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ...
BENAY LAPPE: for the claim that the Torah, when it says, "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," never meant that, that it actually meant money.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. And
BENAY LAPPE: that's the meta message, that, no, the Mishnah's a radical deviation from the Torah.
The Torah never meant-
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ...
BENAY LAPPE: money. And that's important to know if you're gonna carry this tradition forward and use its techniques to-
DAN LIBENSON: Mm-hmm ...
BENAY LAPPE: radically deviate from something that violates, you know, your moral intuition at any time in the future. Th- this is the toolbox that it's trying to send down the generations.
DAN LIBENSON: Right. I mean, I, you know, and I have a corollary to, I, I, with accepting everything that you said, right, I, I'm also testing my corollary that says that if it's something that somebody can easily see in the Torah, like an average person will easily see in the Torah, then you should also have a lot of proofs.
Mm-hmm. Uh, especially, but the cor- the reason why it's a corollary is because if you have a really, really great one, then you only probably need one. But if you don't have a really, really great one, you need to have a lot because the person's gonna be like, "Well, I don't really think I can..." They're like, "Well, there's another one, and another one, another
BENAY LAPPE: one."
Right.
DAN LIBENSON: And I, I kind of think, like, eventually, like, your average person is like, "Ugh, let's not even waste our..." It was what, what I said, like, the rabbi has, like, another one, another one, so like, clearly I'm wrong here. You know, there's like, I'm so wrong that there's, like- ... 10 different proofs, so like, clearly, right?
And, and, like, it's a way of kind of like beating down the, the, the reason and the savara of the average person, you know? And, and, and it's, um, and in that sense, right, it's kind of like really, I mean, I, I bring it back into conversation with what we read about, uh, you know, when Hillel didn't know what the law was and he said, "Go out and see what the people are doing.
If they're not prophets, they're sons of prophets," you know? And, and there's this idea that, like, actually there's a voice within the Talmud that says the, the gut, the savara, you know, the moral intuition of the average person is worth a lot, you know? And that we don't imagine that Judaism should be out of step with the moral sensibility of the average person.
And so here's, like, a case where the average person's moral sensibility at this time in history, right, it might not have been true a thousand years earlier when the laws of Hammurabi exist, whatever, you know. But, like, at this point in history, this, the, the intuition of the average person is that this c- it can't be right to poke out people's eyes.
And there's this kind of, um, you know, there's this kind of, um, uh- No shit, you know, and then therefore I'm going to, uh, disdain the Torah, right? You know, and hear this voice that wants to try to res- rescue the Torah, you know, and say, "Oh, we never actually even believed that," right? Is going to have to use, you know, 10 diff- to, like, beat down this person who's kind of has this, like, regular person's c- clearly correct understanding of what the Torah originally said, and we're gonna kind of exhaust him out of it because, you know, because of this agenda, and we don't want him to either disdain Judaism or to get the secret knowledge, which is the knowledge that, of the history of radical change.
And, and so, you know, the, the one thing that I, that I, that I would like to just put out there for, for our purposes on this show is, like, what happens when the average person becomes sophisticated enough to, to see that whole game? Or when there are, like, people like you or me, you know, more you, that are like, I think of it as like a magician never shares his tricks, you know, but, like, you are.
You know, like, when there's somebody who's, like, really saying, "I, I wanna share. I want everybody to see how the trick is done." Yeah. Then you say, "Oh, now maybe we could go back to a different..." Like, what would this sugya, what would this, uh, this part of the Talmud look like if we were rewriting it today in a world where we imagine that every Jew, every person could understand what's really going on here?
And I think we'd go back to, like, the one, the one proof, right? 'Cause, 'cause like- Mm-hmm ... everybody's a rabbi now. We don't need to have the, we don't need to beat people down with this kind of over, right? We just can really have something that people really can all understand. I don't know.
BENAY LAPPE: Yeah. Maybe so. You know what came up for me while you were talking?
The- I, I think this history of radical innovation has been suppressed, and the project of Jewish education has never wanted to surface it because there was the fear that, I think, I think there was the fear that that would alienate Jews, that, that would make you feel less trusting of the tradition.
DAN LIBENSON: Right.
BENAY LAPPE: And the opposite actually is what happened. Right. By suppressing that tradition-
DAN LIBENSON: Right ...
BENAY LAPPE: of radical change and the svara of the rabbis and the svara that, right, the suppression of, of the legitimacy of our own svara, that in turn has alienated people. And what, and I can tell you from, from our experience at Svara The Yeshiva, when, when you show people how it really works, they gain trust in the tradition.
They be- they become proud. They go, "Oh my God, it makes sense. I, my tradition isn't stupid."
DAN LIBENSON: Yes. "
BENAY LAPPE: My tradition is really trustworthy, and it trusts me." Yeah. Now they, now we're just pissed off, you know, that we were kept away from that knowledge for so long. But, but I think that, that fear that this is gonna be Jewish identity destroying, uh, is actually not, not the case, that it's really very finally affirming.
Because at the end of the day, people tend to trust their own svara and their, their own sense of what's true in the world. And when the tradition is being portrayed as opposite of that, they reject the tradition, right? Option two is where most people are gonna go. Um-
DAN LIBENSON: Except, except I think when they've learned to trust the tradition, and then, and then you can get to a point where you say, "Well, my svara is at odds with the tradition here, and it's not being radically changed.
So I'll, I'll give it a chance. Like, let me give it a chance to see if there's something here that speaks to me. And if not, then I'm gonna update the tradition by radically overturning it." But like, you know, but I think that people only have that level of trust once they see, m- modern people, you know, once they see that, you know, actually this is the tradition.
BENAY LAPPE: That's right. I agree.
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah. I agree with you. So, and I think that's a good place to end it for today. Okay. I think that's right on. All right. So we will, uh, pick this up again next week.
BENAY LAPPE: All right. Great.
DAN LIBENSON: All right. See you then.
BENAY LAPPE: Bye, Dan.
DAN LIBENSON: Bye.
Okay. Yeah
BENAY LAPPE: That's good
DAN LIBENSON: Yeah
BENAY LAPPE: Mm-hmm
DAN LIBENSON: Um-
BENAY LAPPE: I, I, f- I apologize. I, I have to literally run now. Um- Okay ... I have a, a team meeting.
DAN LIBENSON: Okay, great. Uh- Okay ... so I'll probably see you tonight or, you know- Okay ... I'll sort of see you. Okay.
BENAY LAPPE: All right. Great. Talk
DAN LIBENSON: to you later
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