Rabbi Sam Spector Wonder of Scripture Lecture
Transcript
Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to share with you a little bit about how Jewish people how we read text, and give you a couple of biblical examples that helps you understand a little bit about how we see things. So what I want to talk to you about is Pardes. Pardes, I'll teach you a Hebrew word, it means orchard, okay, and so we are going to discover the fruits of the in the orchard of studying Jewish texts here, in Jewish scripture. All right, come on. All right.
All right. So PaRDeS is an acronym here, and it comes from Kabbalism maybe you've heard about this. Kabbalism is not the thing that Madonna does and stuff like that. Traditionally, Kabbalism is a form of Jewish mysticism that really developed a lot of prominence in the 16th century in a place in Israel called Tzfat. It is my favorite town in Israel. If you ever go to Israel, make it up to Tzfat is one of the four holy cities of Judaism, and it is on top of a hill. It's the highest elevated town in Israel. And the whole town is painted blue, by the way, because that, according to the Kabbalists, is the color of heaven. And so it is this town where mysticism, this form of Jewish mysticism, was developed. And just so you kind of understand what that is. It's like, I could tell you. So I actually spoke at BYU last week at the at the law school, and the law school is right next to the BYU Creamery on Ninth, and a lot of you all are familiar, and I had never been in my seven years in Utah to the BYU Creamery, and I'm getting hungry just thinking about it, but everyone had told me about it. Everybody had told me about the Grand Canyon and all the other flavors, and described them to me and said this is the best ice cream you'll ever have.
But and so I heard about the ice cream, but then last week I went and I got to try it, and wow, what a difference it is in experience of somebody describing the ice cream to me versus me getting to eat it. And anyways, that is kind of the idea of kabbalism is not that we are teaching about God, but rather, can we experience God through the study of Jewish texts and PaRDeS, this idea of Jewish of Kabbalistic study of text is actually a concept that we took from the Christians. Now, before you get upset, Christians have taken one or two things from Judaism.
In Christianity, there's a four fold method in the Middle Ages of understanding biblical texts, and that was literal, allegorical (exegesis), moral, and anagogical (talking about afterlife). And for Judaism, though, so Judaism developed a fourfold method also of understanding biblical texts, which was literal elusive, allegorical, and mystical. And the word PaRDeS, by the way, I forget the Arabic word, but Arabic is a Semitic language like Hebrew. Maybe, if any any Arabic speakers are in the room, they could tell me what the word for orchard is, but it this inspired the word paradise in English. But like I said, it's an acronym for Pshat, Remez, Derash. I forgot to put the Hebrew for that last one. The last one is sod and so anyways, sorry, it's hard to put something well together organized while Peppa Pig is on very loudly in the background, because to keep my three year old entertained.
So Peshat literally means simple. That is the simple understanding of the text. And then we have Remez, which means a hint or a clue. Okay, this is the elusive form of the text. What is there something hidden here that is is? Is there something hidden here that the text is revealing to us about deeper meaning? Then we have Drosh, which is the exegesis, the expounding, the allegorical meaning of the text. What can we learn from this, and draw out from this? And then finally, we have Sod, which means secret and, and this is, is there a hidden secret meaning of the text?
So I'm going to tell you an abridged story from the Talmud. The Rabbis taught that four men entered the PaRDeS the orchard, and they were Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Archer, and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva is one of our all time great rabbis. Ben Azzai gazed at God and died. Ben Zoma gazed and was harmed. It's also translated that he went mad. Archer cut down the plantings, which means he became a heretic. And Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and left in peace. And so, according to our tradition, these four rabbis were the four who understood the whole Torah truly, but they did so at different levels. So nobody else got to enter the orchard. They were the only ones privileged in this story to enter the orchard, but Ben Azzai, who understood the Torah only at its simple level. He was the he entered the orchard and he died. The, Ben Zoma, who understood it at a deeper level, the Remez level, entered the orchard, and he didn't die, but he kind of went mad. Then Acher entered the orchard. He was at that next level, the Drash level, and he was able to leave, still healthy, but had lost Judaism in a way. But Rabbi Akiva was the who understood the Torah deepest level, was able to go into the orchard and in peace, come out in peace and have the fullest level of peace and completion.
And by the way, in Kabbalism, there the the holy book in kabbalism is called the Zohar. Now I am 37 years old, and under Kabbalistic law, I am not allowed to read the Zohar. Why not? Because I am not mature enough, which a lot of people could tell you getting to know me, but according to the Zohar, according to Kabbalists, you need to be a 40 year old married man in order to study this text, otherwise you will go insane and stuff. Yeah, I'm not a Kabbalist, though, so maybe I'll take a crack at it.
So how about though, to understand this Pardes, let's look at the very first verse of the Torah, okay, of our shared Bible. Maybe you've heard this one Genesis, chapter one, verse one, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Okay, so let's look at the shot meaning of this. “In the beginning, God created.”
Rashi, who's like the goat of Torah commentators, 11th century French, French Torah commentator. And he is our greatest Torah commentator of all time when we are when we are debating between different Torah commentators, we look at Rashi as kind of like the ultimate authority. Rashi is always when he is studying Jewish texts, he asks questions. He and the question that we always asked when studying Rashi, is what is bothering Rashi? Rashi must have been difficult guy be around, because everything bothered him. And so, like for instance, he has a whole thing, the very first letter of the Torah is a bet and which is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And he goes, why does the first letter, what's bothering me is that the first letter of the Torah is the second letter of the alphabet. Why is that? And then he gives a whole Drash as to why that is the case.
So we read, “In the beginning, God created,” and Rashi asked the question, “In the beginning of what?” And he says, the simple meaning here is in the beginning of creation, God created. In the beginning of when God started creation. Because. We could be asking, was it in the beginning of the day? Well, there wasn't a day yet. Is it in the beginning of all of time? Well, God proceeds all of time. So is this in the beginning of God's beginning? But when did God come into beginning? And Rashi says, No, what this is saying is what the literal meaning of this is the word of create. The words of creation is implied, and the literal meaning of this verse is in the beginning of creation. God created the heavens and earth first.
Okay, now let's look at Remez. So in the 18th century, the world's leading Talmud scholar was a guy by the name of the Vilna Gaon in Vilnius Lithuania, what today is Vilnius Lithuania. And in the Torah, we have 613 commandments, 613 mitzvah. I will never forget that number. I could tell you a quick story when I was when I was your age, I was a religious school teacher, and the rabbi, I was teaching second grade on Sunday school, and the rabbi came and visited our class, and she asked the students, does anybody know how Many laws there are in the Torah. And one kid raised his hand and said,”10?”
She said, “Well, there's 10 big ones, but there's more than 10.”
And another kid said, “100?”
She said, “More than 100.”
And another kid’s like, “A million?”
She said, “Not quite a million.”
And this one little boy named Ben, I'll never forget this, raised his hand.
She said, “Yes Ben?”
And he said, “613.” She was very impressed.
She said, “Ben, how did you remember that?”
And this boy looked at the rabbi and said, “It's easy. I just remembered there's 316 backwards.”
So if you are have an exam and you are asked how many laws are in the Torah, just remember it is 316 backwards, and you'll get there. Anyways, I wonder where that kid is now, anyway. So the Vilna Gao said that since God created the Torah, and God created all of these mitzvot, these laws, you can find all 613 Mitzvoth, in that first verse hidden somewhere. Like the Kabbalists even say that you can find anything, if you look hard enough, anything in the Torah that will reveal that you will, that will reveal the future in the Torah. So somewhere in the Torah, they would say, on the 24th of January, 2025, Rabbi Sam Spector spoke at BYU only days before he had his first son who would grow up to be the greatest Jewish quarterback in the history of BYU. So it says that somewhere in the Torah, if you look hard enough, according to these folks now. But an example of this is –speaking of having a first son– there is an ancient Jewish law about redeeming your firstborn son in, after 30 days of his birth. And so it says, a first son after 30 days should be redeemed. And in Hebrew, that is […]. And if you take, we read from right to left, if you take the first letter of each of those words, it spells out Bereshit, which is the first word of the Torah, “In the beginning.” And so that might be the Remez piece is there's a hint in that first word that connects to this mitzvah, this commandment, and reveals to us that this is setting up the entire rest of the Torah.
Now let's talk about Derash. So in Jeremiah, chapter two, verse three, what we read is in Hebrew it’s, […]. Which translates as, “Israel, is the gods, is God's sacred portion, his first fruits of the increase.” And so the words here for first fruit, his first fruits of the increase are […]. Reishit means first. And going back, like I said, cover this up right here, you have Reishit. You have that same word. So in the beginning literally means “ at first” in Hebrew. And so you see here that the people of Israel are referred to as God's first people, and Rashi is saying that with chapter one, verse one, the reason that we see that Bereshit is the first word is because this is setting up for the Torah, that this torah will be a special relationship with the Jewish people, and that the in that the world was created for the Torah to be fulfilled, and the Torah and the Jewish people, as God's first people, were created to in order to receive the Torah. And so this is a teaching, a Derash and expanding by Rashi of this verse.
Now let's get to the Sod, to the secret of this. This is where I'm gonna blow your mind. So here is the verse in Hebrew. All right, better stop the recording, because, like I said, it's a secret. So here is the verse in Hebrew, […]. Let me ask you, What day is today? Friday. You know what you just did by answering that question, you affirmed that you believe in God. Let me explain. So how do we know that it's winter right now in Utah? It's cold. There's snow on the ground. And so the year is dictated by nature. Okay, we know that January in Provo is going to be cold, and we know that August in Provo is probably going to be pretty hot, so the year this is about our rotation around the sun, and every that determines the year that's based on nature. Why are we meeting right now instead of at 2am? Well, 2am it's dark, it's night, all that. That's because our 24 hour day is determined again by nature. The sun set yesterday around five o'clock. It's going probably set at like 5:02, today. All right, that's determined by nature. Our month is based off of, particularly in the Hebrew calendar, also the cycle of the moon, determined by nature. What in nature determines that it's Friday, nothing. There is nothing in nature that determines a seven day work week, a seven day week, rather, excuse me, there's nothing in nature to determine a seven day week. Where does this come from? This comes strictly from the Bible. This was created by God. And I mean, you say all of nature was created by God, but this was explicitly created by God. So when you say today is Friday, or three days from now, it's Monday or whatever, that is a testament to acknowledging God's role in creation.
So seven has a particularly meaningful, typical, a very strong meaning in Judaism, because it is an acknowledgement of God's existence. Now let's look at this entire first verse in Hebrew. How many words are there? There's seven, okay. How many letters are there in this very first verse, there's 28 letters, which is divisible by seven. How many letters are in the words in the beginning God created there's 14 that's divisible by seven. What about how many letters are there in the middle word? The very middle word et, an untranslated word signaling a direct object coming and the word right to its right, God, there are seven letters. What about et in the word right to its left? Seven letters. And what about if we combine the number of letters also in the fifth word there with the sixth word, okay, that is I messed up on the thing. I mean to say fifth and sixth, that is, or wait, sorry, no, I messed up, just right now with the sixth and seventh. I wrote it correctly there. If we look at the last two words of the verse income, how many letters are there? There are seven. And so we see seven come up over and over and over again. And if we look and by the way, in Hebrew, every letter is assigned a numerical value in what's called Gematria. So that very first letter over there bet is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It its numerical value is two. In the first 10 letters are valued at one through 10, then after that, the 11th letter is valued at 20 and so on. And then the 12th letters valued at 30, so on so forth, till you get to 100 and then after that, each letter is valued at 100 200 300 400 and so if you combine the value of those letters, you get of that first word, you get 913. So when We look at the numerical value of God, plus created, plus the heaven plus the earth, you get 980. 980 is divisible by seven, which is 140 which is further divisible by seven, there's 20. And I could do a million more of these with this. And so what the secret meaning of all this is is that in this first verse where we are revealing God's creation, we are seeing that God exists because there's all these connections to seven, which is the number of days of creation, and when we study this hard enough, we see God's existence.
All right, so the verse I really want to impact today my remaining time, is Exodus, chapter 21 verses 23 through 24, which says, “But if there is a serious injury, you are to take a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A hand for a hand, a foot for a foot.” All right, so how is this interpreted in Iran? In Iran, they have this law, and they take it literally. They take it at its simple level, Pshat, so this picture here is of a woman who a very tragic story. What happened to her. This is a picture of her before she. A man who was in love with her, proposed to her, and she rejected his proposal. He was very upset, and he, he took acid and threw it on her face, and he not only permanently disfigured her, but he blinded her as well, and so she's completely blind now, because of this assault. The Iranian courts deemed as his sentence, since he took her vision, he medically was blinded as well. He was chemically blinded as well, so that he would be permanently blind going forward. Because, again, in the Hebrew, we read […]. An eye for an eye. And so that is, in Iran takes that at simple meaning. Or in Iran, if I murder somebody. The automatic sentence for me is execution, unless that family of my victim is able to come to an agreement with me and then excuse him. Then pardon me. Otherwise, it's automatic execution. The government of Iran, the Iranian court system, takes this at its very Pshat simple meaning.
But what about remez? So according to the Talmud Baba Metzia, 90 B, page 90 B, moving your lips is considered to be an action, and let me read Exodus, chapter 21 verse 24 in Hebrew. And I want you to watch my lips while I'm talking. […] I was able to say that while barely moving my lips, I can say that without having to close my lips. Even saying the word lips, I have to close my lips to say lips. But […] I can say that with my mouth open the whole time without having to close my mouth. And so what the what the remez is teaching here is, is wait a second, maybe since this verse you can say without having to move your lips. It is not calling for actual action. It's talking about something else. Now I'm going to ask maybe, maybe you guys know this next person here. You recognize him? Is he? He's not here? Is he? Oh, he had something better to do, I guess. All right, I'll give him a pass. He's probably heard spent a lot more time sitting in a chair listening to rabbis than all of you have in his life.
So anyhow, who we have here? Jake Retzlaff, yes, quarterback, BYU, nice Jewish boy, and I'm the one on the right, by the way, Jake's the one on the left. So let's talk about derash here, and what Baba Kamma from Talmud, has as an interpretation of this. So let's say here that Jake cuts off my right hand. Okay? And so with the literal meaning of this verse, […] a hand for a hand, I get cut off Jake's right hand now. And so that is the literal punishment. However, we have to look, the Talmud says, no, this is a teaching about a greater matter, and we need to look further into this. So let me ask a few questions. Let's pretend I'm left handed for the sake of this. Okay, so let's pretend I'm left handed. Jake, as you can see, is right handed. Now, if, if Jake cuts off my right hand and I'm left handed and so I get to cut off Jake's right hand. Is that fair? (no) Why not? I can still write with my left hand. He can't write with his left hand. He has to relearn how to write and do a lot of stuff. Also, I haven't checked but well, do you think I can still do my job without my right hand? Would I have been able to do everything I've done so far today if I was missing my right hand? Yeah, you know, could Jake still be a quarterback if he misses his loses his right hand? No. Now this Jake Retzlaff guy, he's pretty good at football, I understand, and there's a chance he might be going to the NFL one day. So I haven't checked, but who do you think makes more money, a lowly rabbi in Utah, or a, or an NFL quarterback. I think NFL quarterback makes a little bit more money than then a rabbi, so and I can still do my job, he can't do his job, so he's going to have much more monetary loss than than I. Now, Jake has chosen to go into a line of work where massive dudes tackle him multiple times a day and stuff. I'm guessing that he has built up a pretty high pain tolerance, as my wife can tell you, for when I get a bad case of man flu, I do not have as high of tolerance for pain. So if Jake were to cut off my right hand, I might be in agony, in horrible, horrible, horrible pain, but if I cut off Jake's hand and Jake has in a, in Jake has a very high pain tolerance, it might not be as painful for him as it is for me. Now, like I said, I am married to a woman who is hopefully not going into labor in the next 30 minutes, and I'm married and I have kids. Jay Gratz, love, to my knowledge, is one of the BYU students who is not yet married. And by the way, the young Jewish women of my congregation told me to say to the beautiful women here today, stay away. He's ours. But Jake, Jake is not married. I am married with three kids. I hope that at this point, if I lost my hand, that my wife loves me enough that she'd say, hey, that's all right. We're married. We're together. I will stand by you even with a missing hand. But for Jake, you know he's already at a disadvantage because he's not as good looking as me or as in good of shape as I am. Why are you laughing, anyway? So, but Jake, also as a bachelor, do you think that him missing a hand might affect his dating life? Yeah, there's somebody said it very fast, nope. Call me Jake, so, but for some people out there, they prefer maybe a two handed date as opposed to a one handed date. Some people are shallow, like that, and so this might affect him socially. So the question then is, what the Derash teaches us is, if we look only at the simple meaning a hand for a hand that might sound equal and fair, but is It truly equal and fair? No.
So what the, what the Talmud teaches here is that we have to assess a bunch of things. What is lost to my income? What is the emotional damage to me? What is the social damage for to me? How much is my pain valued at? It's kind of like an injury attorney today would say these things, and what do I have for my pain suffering? But also a question for Jake would be, Jake, how much would you pay not to lose your hand? And asking me, how much would you pay to lose your hand in negotiating a settlement? And so hand is kind of an extreme example. Let's take a pinky. Okay, if somebody offered you $10 billion to have your pinky amputated, would you do it? Yeah, I would too. I'd be like, bye Pinky. I can be very happy with nine digits and $10 billion. All right. Now, let me ask those same people who said yes, if somebody said, Hey, would you let me cut off your pinky for $100. No way. Okay, so your pinky is valued somewhere between $100 and $10 billion. Let's find what that number is, where you would say, Okay, I this is the minimum amount I would take to lose my pinky, or this case, my right hand. And what is the maximum amount that that Jake would pay to keep his right hand? And let's find a settlement. So there you go. That is kind of what the derosh level is, is we've learned from the simple meaning it says a hand for a hand, but from the remez meaning we are seeing maybe it's not actually about action. And from the Derash meaning, we have a we have an expanded interpretation.
Now, what's the sod meaning? I don't actually know. The sod meaning, but some thoughts is that when we go back to those rabbis in the orchard, they all, in a way, experienced God. Now in your church, you have a prophet, a living prophet, and we don't have living prophets in our tradition anymore, not for last couple 1000 years. But in the time of the temple there was a high priest who was a prophet as well, who could hear God speak. And there was, and this was an inherited line, and the high priest for the time of the second century, CE, BCE, excuse me, in first century, BCE was both the king and the high priest. Well, an imposter to the throne named Herod, maybe you've heard of Herod. He was put onto the throne by the Romans as a puppet, and he had no legitimacy whatsoever to be the king, and he felt very, very intimidated in a lot of imposter syndrome, because he knew this, he to the degree he even had his own sons executed, as well as all of his male in laws and even his wife, because he got so paranoid, because they were all more entitled to the throne than he was. But what he did, also to the high priest who was more entitled than him, was he had his ears cut off. Why? Because if he couldn't hear, then if he had no ears, he was blemished. And also his hearing was affected, and he couldn't be a prophet to God. So perhaps we use our senses to experience the divine. When I was driving down here, I saw the beautiful snow capped mountains behind Utah Lake and or lake Utah for it, which was called, but anyways, I was like, that is gorgeous. That is proof to me that God exists, seeing something so wonderful. But how could those rabbis in the orchard have seen what is holy had they lost their vision? And so perhaps by eliminating their eyes, we would be eliminating their ability to experience God, and perhaps that is what the secret meaning is of Exodus 21 verses 23 through 24 is with we eliminate life or somebody's vision or something like their hand or whatever, or their ability to taste or whatever, we are eliminating their senses where they are, where we are eliminating their ability to experience God in the highest form, and therefore their ability to fulfill God's commandments on this earth. And we learn in one of our books, Pirkei Avot, chapter four, verse two, it says […]. Which means one Mitzvah, or one good deed, leads us to fulfill another good deed, like so walking into the library, I opened the door for somebody who was holding a whole bunch of books, and he was like, thank you so much. Maybe later he's going to see somebody else who is walking out of the library with a whole bunch of books say, Oh, I'll open the door for that person. But also […], which means a transgression leads to another transgression. And we see that sometimes too, if I slam the door in that guy holding all the books face, and then he tries to open door, he drops all of his books and he's flustered and frustrated and everything, he might be in a bad mood. And then he shows up to return his books, and he's a complete jerk to the person who is working at the front desk of library, puts that person in a bad mood. They come home to their spouse and they their spouse says, How was your day? And they just rip into their spouse because they had a terrible day. Well, one transgression leads to another, and so perhaps, Gandhi was the one who said, An eye for an eye leads leaves the entire world blind. If we are creating the blindness of one person, it will lead to the blindness of another person, metaphorically, where we are by eliminating other people's ability to experience God, we are eliminating our own ability of experiencing God in the highest form and, and then, if I often think about that saying, if a tree falls in the forest doesn't make a sound. Well, we exist because God created us. We wouldn't exist without God. But also if there's nothing in this universe, part of why we exist is to acknowledge God's existence. If there is nothing in this world to acknowledge God's existence, Can God exist? And so eliminating people's ability to experience God is, is therefore a way of causing God to cease to exist, and can lead to […] and that perhaps is the secret meaning. So with that, that is a Jewish way of interpreting texts. Sorry that Jake couldn't make it today for me to pick on him, but last week, I actually talked about something similar. Give this same example. I was talking law school, so probably he's like, Who is this Rabbi that keeps showing up talking about cutting my hand off? But anyhow, we don't want you to lose your hand, Jake, so but happy to take you know for the next six, seven minutes, any questions you might have and stick around for a few minutes afterwards. All right, that summed it up. No more questions? All right. Thank you so much for having me.