Dennis Prager Show - Timeless Wisdom: Weekend Torah Teaching - Genesis 4:11-6:9

Jan. 24, 2026 - Dennis Prager Show

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Timeless Wisdom: Weekend Torah Teaching - Genesis 4:11-6:9

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Cain's Conscience 00:10:19
	Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
	Hear thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
	And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
	The story of the creation, as you will see today, is a story of successive frustrations on the part of God.
	Most people don't feel sorry for God, but if you read the first chapters of Genesis, you have to.
	God was all enthused about what he created, and every time, human beings seem to have thwarted it.
	But that's for a little later, when God actually comments on humanity.
	I ended last week with Cain and Abel.
	Cain killed his brother Abel.
	Cain was jealous, or Cain was suspected that he was somewhat less sincere in his offering, and so he went out, and because he was angry at what Abel did better than he, killed Abel.
	God then asked, where is Abel?
	Cain answered, am I my brother's keeper?
	Or better, I didn't know I was my brother's keeper.
	As I pointed out at the end of last week, there are many ways to read that verse.
	Cain saying, A, I didn't know I'm my brother's keeper.
	I didn't know I'm my brother's keeper.
	You're supposed to be my brother's keeper.
	And many other ways of reading that.
	But for that, if you weren't here, you can get the tape.
	So I would like to move on.
	I am now at chapter 4, verse 11.
	If you happen to have a Bible, if you don't, I will read it to you anyway.
	We now have Cain's punishment.
	The first thing you will note in 4.11, therefore you shall be more accursed than the ground, which opens its mouth, and so on.
	And you will have this mark, which I'll talk about in a minute.
	What is interesting is that God does not kill Cain because it is established in Genesis, and it is one of the only laws in the book of Genesis, that if you murder someone, you should be put to death.
	It is in the bases of the creation of the world, capital punishment.
	Many of you are probably opposed to capital punishment, and it's not the time for me to get into that discussion.
	But you would have to confront, if you did take the Bible seriously, that God himself is attributed with asking that people who murder be put to death.
	Because, and God added, because human beings are created in God's image, you have actually, by murder, destroyed something that is in God's, in my own image.
	And the only way, therefore, to balance this, to redress it, it is so heinous to murder that the person who did it has to be put to death.
	But Cain murdered Abel and he wasn't put to death.
	How come?
	Is God violating his own policy?
	Well, the answer would have to be that what Abel committed, what Cain committed, was not premeditated murder.
	Remember, Cain didn't see human beings die.
	He didn't know if he got up and he did whatever he did, and we don't know what he did.
	All it says is he killed his brother Abel.
	So perhaps, for all we know, he took a stone and threw it at his head.
	How would he know that that would kill him?
	Maybe it was simply anger.
	threw the stone and it caused him to die.
	I think we can infer that from the text because God's punishment is semi-leniant given the fact that it seems to have been murder.
	Also, it wasn't premeditated murder.
	It was murder out of an impulse at that moment.
	So it would seem.
	Be that as it may, whatever it was, it was not a normal act of murder.
	And again, he did not know of the punishment perhaps for murder, Cain.
	This comes later, at least as far as law is concerned.
	I pointed out last week, though, a very important thing.
	Why didn't Cain say that God, I didn't know that it was wrong to kill.
	I didn't know it was wrong to murder.
	And that to me is the proof of an extremely important concept, to review this for a moment, that the Hebrew Bible holds.
	The Torah holds that people are born with a conscience.
	However, what Genesis points to is, obviously, conscience alone won't make a good world.
	For those of you who think that you don't need God and don't need law and don't need revelation to make a good world, Genesis is here to say to you, on conscience alone, we will fail.
	For those who believe, well, we don't need that, it's just enough to know that something is wrong.
	I'll give you a Prager house example.
	During the rioting, I asked my nine-year-old son, who attends a Jewish day school, I asked him, would you loot?
	Would you loot?
	And his answer was, no.
	I said, why not?
	He said, because I'd get caught.
	Which filled me with great joy.
	But at least you will grant the credibility of the rest of the story, having given you that part.
	So of course I immediately added, well, what if you knew you wouldn't get caught?
	What if you were absolutely certain you couldn't get caught and you can loot anything you want?
	He said, I still wouldn't.
	Which gave me a sigh of relief.
	And I said, why not?
	Because that was really what I wanted to get at.
	Why not?
	And he said, because it's in the Ten Commandments not to steal.
	A humanist parent would want to hear from the child a different answer.
	Would want to hear from their child.
	They'd also want to hear that the child would say no.
	But they would want to hear because it's wrong.
	I didn't want to hear because it's wrong.
	I don't trust people as much as humanists trust people, trust people.
	Humanists believe in humans.
	Deists believe in a deity.
	I'm a deist.
	I'm a religious humanist, if you want a technical term.
	I believe that how we treat each other is the most important thing in the world, but I believe that God is the one who said that that's so.
	You see, I believe that when push comes to shove, and this is what Genesis is teaching, and it will go through and through.
	You will see it as we go to Noah today, that it is not enough to think something is wrong.
	That reliance merely on human reason, on human conscience, is not enough.
	That humans need a conscience clearly.
	Conscience is critical.
	But the conscience itself needs to feel a responsibility to something higher than it.
	You can't just say, I think it's wrong.
	It may work.
	You may not loot if you think it's wrong, and that's a nice thing.
	But the Torah is extremely skeptical, skeptical to the point where it simply knows it wouldn't work if people were to say, that's the reason that I don't do something.
	I am listening to my conscience.
	Conscience isn't enough.
	In his conscience, Cain knew that what he did to Abel was wrong, but it didn't stop him.
	Remember, we are in the period pre-revelation of laws.
	There is no divine revelation of moral law.
	It is all inbred in our conscience.
	That is why you can hold responsible, you can hold morally responsible people who never read the Bible.
	Even they are responsible not to murder, not to torture, and so on.
	But it doesn't work.
	It's not enough.
	That's the critical lesson that I derive from the whole story of humanity in early Genesis.
	Why does God need to reveal things?
	After all, you would say, and you should say, why are these stories in Genesis?
	Why is it there?
	And I repeat what I have said each week.
	Torah is not history.
	It doesn't mean history.
	It doesn't teach history.
	If you want history or science, you go to historians and scientists.
	If you want to learn about the human condition, read the Torah.
	That is all it attempts to do.
	That's why Torah means teacher.
	That's not my reading.
	That's exactly what it means.
	For those of you who even know a little Hebrew, you know that the word for a female teacher is morah.
	The same exact root as Torah.
	It means teacher.
	And by the way, to make things a little tough on those of you raising kids, that is exactly the word for parent.
	Parent comes from the same verb.
	It's horah or hore.
	Parent, teacher, and Torah are the same verb in Hebrew.
	That's what a parent is for.
	We don't think in those ways.
	I think we much more think today is that a parent is there to give love and tuition for Stanford.
	But as a rule, that is not the way Judaism basically saw it.
	It saw the parent, the parental role as the moral teaching role.
	That's the best thing we can do for our kids, aside from love.
	This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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God's Presence and Protection 00:05:14
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	Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
	Okay.
	Cain is punished in his own way.
	In a sense, he just wanders the earth.
	4.14.
	Since you have banished me this day from the soil and I must avoid your presence, this is Cain speaking, and become a restless wanderer on earth.
	Anyone who meets me may kill me.
	This is what he is worried about, Cain.
	I'll get killed.
	I've been banished.
	Now notice the words, though.
	You have banished me and I must avoid your presence.
	Again, one of the seminal ideas of the Torah is that if you hurt people, God is angry at you.
	You will not find an example, to the best of my knowledge, in Genesis of God getting angry for mistreating God.
	This is one of the greatest ideas that Judaism has ever brought forth.
	God gets angry when you mistreat people.
	You cannot mistreat God.
	God isn't treatable.
	God is God.
	You cannot hurt God.
	You cannot torture God.
	You cannot rape God.
	You cannot speak Lushan Hura about God.
	In other words, bad gossip behind God's back.
	None of those things, but you can do all of those things to people.
	This is what, again, is basic.
	Cain hurts Abel, God is angry, and Cain is therefore outside of God's presence.
	And there is no one in the world, which I rarely do homiletic for a moment, there is no more greater insurance of being outside of God's presence than doing evil.
	So as, by the way, there is no greater assurance of being in God's presence as doing good.
	You know, a lot of people in this regard ask, how can I believe in God after the Holocaust?
	To anybody who says that, I have many answers.
	I've written on this and I have a lot of thoughts on it.
	But one obvious response is this.
	You've got to be fair in your trial.
	If you put God on trial and you say, God, I'll believe in you or won't believe in you based on the following.
	Well, if you say, I don't believe in you based on the Auschwitz, well, then you have to at least be honest enough to say, but then while evil argues against you, good argues for you.
	But I never hear that from anybody.
	You never hear that a person who argues that evil argues against God will be fair enough to say, but the opposite argues for God, so that they stack all the evidence against belief in God, and it's just, it's intellectually unsound.
	And the fact is, you resonate to what I'm saying, because there's no time you feel God's presence more than when people are particularly good and kind.
	That is exactly the point.
	If I were to say to you, and I've tried this with youngsters, I've tried this with college kids.
	Jose I'm moving up there, I think of college kids as youngsters.
	But I've tried this with college kids a number of times.
	I'd say, do you remember any particularly pious relative that you can recall at all in your life?
	And all those who did, always, without exception, remember the word I used, pious.
	Pious is a religious term.
	Every single time I used the term, they would cite someone who was good.
	Whenever I asked for somebody pious, in other words, who radiated, I said, who radiated a sense of God about them.
	They didn't mention somebody who prayed consistently, though the person may have.
	What they always mentioned was someone who was particularly good.
	That argues for God's presence.
	He's outside of God's presence.
	That's what happens when you murder.
	You have created this almost unbridgeable gap.
	Maybe repentance is possible, though, of course, if you're put to death, it certainly, in the final analysis, isn't possible.
	4.15 speaks of the mark of Cain.
	Remember, Cain said to God in 4.14, hey, you know, they'll kill me if I wander the world.
	People will kill me.
	So God says, no, no, no, this won't happen because I will give a sign so that nobody will hurt you.
	This is one of the greatest puzzles I know of.
	That the mark of Cain, which you've all heard the term, signifies to people a negative mark.
	But it's not true at all.
	The mark of Cain was a lifesaver.
	The mark of Cain that God gave Cain was, you'll have this mark and nobody will touch you.
Biblical Incest and Stranger Love 00:05:29
	It's very bizarre.
	You would all like the mark of Cain.
	And yet somehow or other it has a pejorative meaning to us today.
	Just people don't know where it came from.
	I guess because Cain himself is a bad guy, so they think the mark of Cain is a bad mark.
	But it was God's way of protecting him against revenge or against being killed and so on.
	And so Cain goes out of God's presence.
	And then in 4.17, Cain knows his wife.
	We spoke about the biblical word no as sexual knowledge.
	And Cain knew his wife.
	And she gave birth to Chanuch.
	Now, Enoch in English.
	And here is where, you know, you have all of these first-time reader or even tenth-time reader questions, who did he marry?
	He's Adam and Eve's kid.
	He killed Abel.
	Who did he marry?
	Now, it is somewhat problematic.
	And to be honest to the text, I think we have to answer that there are unspoken of daughters to Adam and Eve, and he married a sister.
	But the Bible's not pleased with that, so it shuts up.
	That is the way I would read it.
	The Bible is not pleased.
	It doesn't like incest.
	But after all, I mean, it was either that or bestiality.
	Between the two, I guess incest is a notch above.
	And so, really, there was no choice.
	That is the only way to have procreated at that time.
	But the Bible is opposed to incest, and it is an interesting thing.
	The most intelligent reason I ever heard for the biblical opposition to incest was actually, I heard it from an Orthodox rabbi.
	I always like to give credit where it's due, and if I remembered his name, I would certainly tell you I just don't remember.
	I remember he was Orthodox and a rabbi.
	And he had a brilliant observation, I thought, on the biblical prohibition of incest.
	After all, think about it for a minute.
	Forget health for a minute.
	Forget health considerations.
	Because the Bible is not interested in health considerations in that area.
	It's moral, or at least value-laden.
	What is so terrible about a brother and a sister marrying?
	Think about it.
	You know, we all take it as a given taboo, is one of the most unmovable, unshakable.
	I mean, we live in a country.
	We live in a Western world that has shattered virtually every taboo.
	But one basically that hasn't been is incest.
	Why not?
	What is it?
	What is it that caused this revulsion in the Torah and ultimately in the Judeo-Christian tradition?
	Why was it opposed?
	This rabbi had a very fascinating idea.
	He said, the ideal in life, the Jewish biblical ideal, and you can certainly go beyond Jewish to say this to anyone who would hold this, is to learn to love the other.
	To learn to love another.
	We are all, in a sense, narcissistic.
	We all start out loving ourselves.
	The trick in life is to love someone different.
	The first area of difference, biblically, should be sexual.
	Hence, I am convinced that a major part of the biblical antipathy to homosexuality is that you're not loving the other.
	You should love the opposite sex, the ideal being to love the different.
	But the different isn't different if she's your sister or he's your brother.
	You must learn to love a different one you didn't grow up and have familiarity with.
	A stranger.
	And that's why, by the way, there is a biblical injunction to love the stranger.
	You shall love the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
	To be able to love a stranger is a major biblical ideal.
	It's easy to love your own.
	The trick is to love the stranger.
	And the rabbi gave a simple, homey example.
	He said, when he goes to his sister's house, he absolutely feels, you know, totally at home.
	He goes to the refrigerator as soon as he walks in.
	I remember the way he explained it.
	Takes out any food he wants, takes off his shoes, puts his feet up.
	It's his sister.
	But that's not the way he first went out with his wife.
	Anybody dating does not immediately go into the woman's home they're dating or the man's home they're dating, take off their shoes, open up the fridge, and take out food.
	You don't feel that comfort, and you shouldn't feel that comfort.
	It is something that you would earn and learn over the course of time with a stranger.
	So it's a fascinating issue.
	It's something you probably never thought of asking.
	What's wrong with incest?
	And there, I think, is the biblical and Judaic ideal of what is wrong with it.
	That we are on this earth to learn to love the different, not just our own, like family.
	So then, Cain, and you figure it would end up Cain, ends up marrying a sister.
Lamech's Vengeful Song 00:15:33
	That's my inference.
	If somebody can come up with a different resolution to the problem, whom the child of Adam and Eve married, I'd be very happy to know of it.
	But I couldn't come up with any other, and I suspect that's it.
	And I found, by the way, in one of the traditional commentaries a vindication of that, that it probably was a sister, and that's why the Torah doesn't say any more about it.
	It's a little embarrassed, but what's it going to do?
	It's going to give you, it's going to tell you the truth.
	Otherwise, what is it going to say?
	Well, somehow or other, incredibly, a cousin showed up.
	This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
	Popular, happy, well-rounded kids across America are being exploited online through a sinister scheme that leaves them broken, defeated, or worse.
	January is National Human Trafficking Prevention Month in the U.S.
	And to raise awareness, SalemNow.com is offering Sexploited in America, the poor part talkie series from AGA Media, at 50% off.
	Sexploited in America, now just 499 at salemnow.com.
	Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
	Okay.
	Now, hold on.
	Do me a favor, write it down.
	I want to take every question possible, but I feel a moral need to get through it.
	But don't forget, please don't forget to make the point.
	Now, a very interesting thing happens.
	The Torah goes through the generations of Cain and his wife.
	Who then are born to whom, and so on, but it ends.
	It's interesting.
	It starts in 417, but by 421, by 424, excuse me, it just ends, and we hear no more about the generations of Cain.
	They seem to have ended, perhaps in violence.
	And then we will go back right after that to the generations of Adam, not through Cain, just through another child that Adam has later, Seth, which is a very interesting thing.
	You ask most people who were Adam's children, and they will always say Cain and Abel, and Seth will have been forgotten.
	Be that as it may, let's continue here.
	We have the Torah tries to explain the development of society.
	In 417, we have the development of the city.
	Urban life is described.
	It says, Let's see, in the English, Cain knew his wife, she conceived bore Enoch or Chanoch.
	And then he founded a city and named the city after his son Enoch.
	Okay?
	So that was how cities began, according to this.
	Then next, 420, animal husbandry and tent dwelling develops.
	Remember, this is the biblical way of saying how these things happen.
	In 421, this is to me particularly fascinating.
	What do you have here?
	The most basic things in human history.
	The city, taking care of animals, living in tents.
	And what's the third thing?
	Music.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	In 421, you have, and the name of his brother was Yuval, or Jubal, for those of you just with the English.
	He was the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe organ.
	There you are, the ultimate ancestor of your flute, it doesn't matter, but it's instruments.
	In modern Hebrew, it says pipe.
	It says pipe.
	Kinor vi'ugav.
	Okay?
	Kinor in modern Hebrews violin.
	And so who knows what it was.
	But whatever it is, it was the father of musical instruments.
	And that's what is fascinating how basic music is to human development.
	That it is considered so primeval.
	Okay?
	What happens is interesting, though.
	423.
	One of the descendants is Lamech.
	Poor guy.
	I always, whenever I see it, I think Lamach, which is Yiddish for nerd, shlum, clod.
	But anyway, Lamech is the last of these descendants here of Cain.
	And it's very interesting, right?
	Oh, and then, excuse me, and then the final development is copper and iron.
	So that, it shows that the next child developed copper and iron.
	So we have city, animal husbandry, music, copper and iron.
	And then in 423, we have Lamech saying to his wives, he then has a big, the first poetry in the Bible is Lamech's little song about how he killed and how, and, well, I'll read it to you.
	And Lamech said to his wives, Ada and Silah, hear my voice.
	Oh, wives of Lamech, give ear to my speech.
	I have killed a man for wounding me.
	All the man did was wound him.
	He is bragging about revenge.
	It's a fascinating thing that is described here.
	A song of boast about killing.
	He makes the point.
	All he did was wound me, but I killed him.
	A lad, a young man, for bruising me.
	If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech is 77fold.
	This is a very interesting little song here of Lamech getting up and speaking about his love of vengeance and his love of violence.
	This is critical stuff.
	A few things need to be said.
	First of all, I do not consider it coincidental that the Torah describes the development of civilization and the arts, and then the very next sentence shows the development of bloodshed, of loving of violence.
	It's a lesson of massive profundity.
	Never, ever, ever confuse the development of civilization, of technical and artistic civilization, with the development of morality.
	The two are simply independent.
	To put it in modern terms, if you ask, how did the country that gave us Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller give us the Holocaust, you have confused artistic development with moral development.
	The two have nothing to do with each other.
	Which should come as a very sobering piece of data to a lot of Americans who really worship the arts, who think that America is great or deficient based on how many museums it has.
	My friends, the number of museums tells you nothing, nothing about the morality of a civilization.
	And I love museums.
	But it has nothing to do with it.
	And that is undoubtedly, I am not reading into it.
	These are all the commentaries that I read too, make this point.
	Where does this Lamech come from?
	He is the child of the people who developed civilization.
	And look at him.
	He gets up and he loves to kill.
	If you touch me, I'll kill 77 of you.
	There's another thing about Lamech's song.
	The idea of vengeance, clan vengeance.
	The idea that if you hurt my group, I'll smash your group.
	This idea of clan vengeance is very common in the Middle East, where you had nomadic clans, where you think in terms, you saw it in Beirut.
	You kill a member of my extended family, will kill five members of your extended family.
	You killed five in mine, will kill 25 in yours.
	You kill 25 in mine, and then it goes on.
	That is clan vengeance.
	And that is what Lamech is singing about.
	The first poem in the Bible is a poem about a man who is just intoxicated with killing people.
	Depressing, isn't it?
	Well, it is, but it's also extremely realistic, and I give the Torah great credit for it.
	Judaism is the most unromantic religion ever created.
	That I can say.
	There are many areas where religions blend into one another in certain similarities, and I am a very big believer that we can speak of a Judeo-Christian morality and so on.
	But in this regard, in the way it acknowledges humanity, Judaism is, I believe, uniquely un-romantic.
	This is the way we are.
	This is the way we were from the beginning.
	And it's a very long, uphill battle to make people decent.
	That's the story of Genesis.
	It's a long, uphill battle.
	So this Lamech sings this song.
	Now, one final point.
	You will now understand why I for an eye, tooth for a tooth, was one of the greatest achievements in the history of legal morality.
	That which is frequently knocked today in our hyper-sophisticated society, oh, that's disgusting, that's revenge, eye for an eye, Old Testament morality.
	I subscribe to it totally.
	Because what an eye for an eye did was say, all of this clan vengeance is gone.
	If one man murders one man, that man is killed.
	If I take out one tooth from you, you take out one tooth from me.
	You don't kill me.
	You don't blind me.
	You take one tooth.
	Now, of course, it was never enacted.
	It can't be.
	It's not physically possible.
	How can I do the exact amount of damage to you that you did to someone else?
	It's not possible.
	It was a principle, however.
	The principle is that your eye is worth my eye.
	In all the ancient world, if you were a nobleman and I knocked out your eye, I got killed.
	Because a nobleman's eye was worth more than my eye.
	So I got killed because I wasn't a nobleman.
	The Torah came along and said, no, everybody's eye is equal.
	It undoes vengeance.
	And it substitutes for vengeance justice, which is what the Hebrew Bible is intoxicated with.
	Now you see how a lot of things make sense that otherwise seem to have been very confusing.
	What is I for an eye?
	It's primitive.
	It was the greatest advance in morality in the world.
	And I say that.
	It's not hyperbole.
	It was the greatest advance in morality, in legal morality.
	It said that we are all equal and that I have to pay exactly what I did, no more.
	I don't consider it an advance of American society that if I do something terrible to you, I pay less.
	Today it's considered sophisticated if your punishment is far less than that which you did.
	I don't think so.
	I think you should be punished exactly appropriately.
	That is what the ideal there was.
	But not in Lamech and not in clan vengeance.
	It's a very important little song that he sang to his two wives.
	425.
	That is the end.
	Oh, by the way, again, the Torah's silences are all...
	We end with Lamedch.
	Lamech, the vengeance seeker, is the last descendant of Cain.
	In other words, it seems to have burned itself out, this vengeance-seeking killer.
	For all we know, the guy got killed, all his children got killed, and that was the end.
	But that was the end.
	We now immediately go to, in 425, Adam, back to Adam.
	And it says, Adam knew his wife again.
	God bless him.
	And she gave birth to a son, and his name was Seth.
	Which really, it always cracks me up when the English makes no sense.
	And named him Seth because God provided me with another offspring.
	That clear?
	Everybody who gets another offspring names their kid Seth.
	Obviously, you can't do it because the Hebrew does mean it.
	The Hebrew means given.
	His real name, as it were, were given.
	So they were given another offspring, and Seth means given, and Seth is, or Shit is yet another child of Adam.
	He has a son, Enosh, which really means humanity.
	So we have really a name symbolizing humanity with this child, Enosh, the grandson of Adam.
	And it says, very interesting, as opposed to Cain's generations, the generations through Seth are different.
	Remember Lamech and his vengeance?
	Now look at the way these generations go in 426.
	It says, and to Seth in turn, a son was born, and he named him Enosh.
	It was then that men began to invoke God by name.
	Now this too is important.
	First of all, it's the opposite of Cain's descendants.
	Clearly, the Bible had a belief.
	The Torah clearly had a belief that if you were rotten, there was a good chance your kids would be rotten.
	It just did.
	It seemed, by the way, there's some truth to it.
	You just generally don't expect that Al Capone's kids will be running St. Mary's orphanage.
	It's just generally speaking, you know, the Mar Barker clan and so on.
	By the way, obviously, it doesn't mean it has to be that way.
	It's just describing what seemed to have been.
	If you raise a generation with miserable values, it will probably raise its generation with miserable values, and vice versa.
	At any rate, we have a generation that begins to invoke God's name.
	And what we have here is the Torah's statement that monotheism preceded polytheism.
	The Torah's view is that in the very beginnings, people did believe in one God, and polytheism was the perversion of that.
	We, of course, historically think that polytheism was first, and monotheism was the great Jewish revolution.
	But the Torah's view is that in the beginning, and it makes sense, Adam knew God, so obviously didn't believe in polytheism in many gods.
	But that's what the idea is at the beginning.
	These children began, Enosh's children began to speak in the name of God.
The Genesis of Likeness 00:09:25
	Chapter 5.
	Chapter 5 is till 6.8 is a book of genealogies.
	I'm not going to go through all of it, but selected verses.
	But it is a very interesting thing.
	5.1 says, This is the record of Adam's line.
	When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God, male and female.
	He created them.
	And God blessed them and named them Adam on the day that he created them.
	Well, one point which has been recurring is, in case there are any skeptics left, you cannot speak of a 24-hour day based on the word yom, day, in Genesis.
	And for those who believe that there were 24-hour periods described in the six 24-hour yoms, or Yamim, it is clear again, it says here, these are the generations of Adam on the day God created, on the day that God created Adam in his image he created him.
	It speaks of generations.
	So it speaks of a longer period of time than a day.
	The verse itself is speaking.
	And that's why, by the way, the modern translation doesn't even say on the day, it says when, which is a more appropriate translation than the word day.
	At any rate, it merely resumes what we had in Genesis 1.
	One other thing, it speaks of a very interesting thing here.
	It says, let's see.
	It speaks about all of us emanating from Adam.
	And it says, yeah, it begins.
	These are the generations, these are the records of Adam's line.
	There is a debate in the Talmud, a very touching debate, by two rabbis in the second century.
	What is the most important statement or principle in the whole Torah?
	Rabbi Akiva said, love your neighbor as yourself, is the most important principle in the Torah.
	Another rabbi, and that's very well known, there's even a song about it.
	But there's a rabbi who says, I don't agree with Akiva, the most important principle in the Torah is Genesis 5, 1, not Leviticus 19, 18.
	Leviticus 19, 18 is love your neighbor as yourself.
	What's Genesis 5, 1?
	These are the records of Adam's line.
	These are the generations of Adam, however you have it translated in your thing.
	So you'll say, that's bizarre.
	Who goes around saying, these are the generations of Adam, and that can compete with love your neighbor as yourself?
	But Ben-Azai had a brilliant, brilliant point.
	Said, first of all, you will never love your neighbor as yourself.
	unless you recognize that you both come from the same parent.
	And this, he said, is the most important statement in the whole Torah.
	Something we'd all ignore.
	But the fact that all of us come from one person, black, white, yellow, red, male, female, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, all come from Adam.
	Ben-Azai says that is the single most important principle in the Torah.
	Because it proceeds in importance.
	Love your neighbor as yourself.
	Because if you walk around thinking your race, your religion, your group, your family is more important than others because you have greater ancestry.
	You'll never love your neighbor as yourself.
	You must first understand that every human being is identical in worth.
	And you'll only believe that if you believe you have the same ancestor.
	It's the only possible way.
	And that's why Ben-Azai takes debates with Akiva on what the most important principle in the Torah is and argues that this statement, that we all come from Adam, is the most important principle in the Torah.
	I find that very touching, and I suspect you do as well.
	Okay, one other thing is, the word Toldot is used, which means record or really generations.
	If you look, if you have a Torah with you, if you look on Genesis 2.4, you will see the exact same wording in a very different way.
	Genesis 2.4 says, these are the generations of the heaven and the earth when God created them.
	The exact same word, Toldot, the generations of, is used to describe the creation of the world and one person's life.
	And this too teaches one of the most important lessons of Judaism and of the Torah.
	We are all, every one of us is a whole world.
	You can use the same word to describe you as to describe the universe.
	Because every single one of us is an entire world.
	Isn't it true?
	That's why if you, anyone who knows that, the moment you know that, it becomes almost impossible to hurt people intentionally.
	The moment you recognize that every other person is a whole world just like you are, it becomes, first certainly becomes impossible to murder.
	But it even becomes very difficult to hurt people then.
	If you just really, really reflect on the fact that everybody is a whole world and you are too.
	And that is the truth.
	We are.
	Every one of us is a whole world.
	A unique universe unto ourselves and ought to be.
	And that's the way we should look at our lives.
	And so the same word is used to describe the history of Adam as the history of the creation of the world.
	It's not my point, by the way.
	Don't give me credit.
	This is a traditional, basic Jewish point on the reading of that sentence.
	5.2.
	Male and female, God created them.
	It's a restatement.
	In case you were wondering, after the punishments of Adam and Eve, and particularly Eve, the Torah restates, men and women are equal.
	I created the human being in two groups, male and female.
	Just want to remind you, I already said that in chapter 1.
	I just want to make the point again here in chapter 5 as we continue.
	And God names man.
	Now it's interesting.
	Seth, his child, it says, was born in the image and likeness of Adam.
	Now, if you look at 126, Genesis 1.26, the exact same words almost are used to describe that we were created in the image and likeness of God.
	So that presents a very real problem, at least to a Jew.
	Is God physical?
	If the same word, selim and demut, likeness and image, are used to describe Seth in Adam's likeness and image as we in God's likeness and image, well, maybe either God is physical.
	Mormons, in fact, use this as one of their texts to prove a physical God.
	This is a Mormon proof text.
	Or the writer implied it or believed it.
	Or we don't know what to make of it.
	What I saw, however, was that there is a slight difference in the wording, and I think it was deliberate.
	We are in God's image, but not exactly as Seth is in his father's image.
	How do I know?
	It'll help if you know Hebrew, but even if you don't, it'll be clear.
	In Genesis 1.26, when it says, let us make man in our image, that man is created in the image and likeness of God, it says, bidselem and kidmut.
	Bir means in, kir means as in Hebrew.
	You attach it to any word, right?
	In the likeness and so on, and as the image.
	They're reversed in the case of Seth and Adam.
	It's kitzelem and bidemut.
	If you don't know Hebrew, it doesn't matter.
	What I'm saying is it reversed the, what is it, not prepositions.
	It reversed the prepositions before the terms.
	It had to have been deliberate.
	In other words, don't confuse this likeness and image with the likeness and image of God.
	There are similarities, but they are different because God is not physical.
God's Sadness in Creation 00:15:18
	That is how I would read it.
	The generations are mentioned, and everybody lives a very long time in those days.
	500 years, 600 years, 700 years.
	In other words, you were middle-aged at 423.
	That's about when you got to be middle-aged.
	You would very frequently have a kid when you were 140, so you could really wait to get married.
	It was a really good thing.
	You could do a lot of dating in those days.
	I think I'll date for the next 94 years and see who I really want.
	It was a very different way to lead a life.
	If you ask me, what do I make of all of those years lived?
	I don't have a clue.
	All right?
	I just don't know what to tell you.
	Is it literal?
	Is it figurative?
	Is it simply what was believed?
	I don't know.
	I could tell you this.
	I wouldn't want to live 853 years.
	I like the way it is.
	It's good, nice round numbers.
	You know, we have average age today of 80, whatever it is, 90, when I'll be older, 100, it's quite enough.
	862 is not my dream.
	You can get a lot of reading done, that I'll admit.
	I mean, you could really, you know, then you could really take your time.
	You know, there's no rush.
	What are you waiting for?
	You could do it the next century.
	That's what you would say.
	I mean, think about it.
	All the possibilities there.
	I'll do it in 2106.
	Okay, no problem.
	So it's a very different way of life they had.
	Maybe they just had very, you know, there wasn't much to worry about in those days.
	I don't know what, you know, this is very different.
	There was no congestion, no traffic.
	There were no papers to tell you bad news.
	There were probably no diseases because there was nobody to contract the disease from.
	And so who knows?
	But I don't know if it was interesting.
	It was certainly probably slower.
	And they probably ate a lot of yogurt according to one Dan and Old commercial that they had.
	Be that as it may, that's all that's there, so I'm not going to go over that much more.
	Go to chapter 6.
	Chapter 6.
	Okay, we have the generations coming from Adam.
	The world is getting a little more populated.
	And guess what? When men began to increase on earth, oh, excuse me, 6-1 is not going to tell you exactly what happened.
	6-1 to 6-4 is probably the greatest mystery in the Torah.
	If any of you could figure out how to explain it, I would be deeply appreciative.
	I'll tell you what it says.
	When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them.
	The Lord said, my breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh, and so on.
	And then, later too, the Nephilim appeared on earth, and the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men who bore them offspring.
	They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
	That's it.
	There's nothing more said about it.
	I have read every commentary on Genesis I could get my hands on, and basically people don't know what to make of it, to be very honest with you, traditional or modern.
	The general consensus of the scholarly community as opposed to the religious community is that this was a throwback to ancient thinking that meant a lot when the Jews knew what this meant.
	Remember, this book is thousands of years old.
	These stories are thousands of years old.
	People understood things then that we don't understand now, obviously, so it meant something.
	But clearly there was a belief.
	Remember, in the ancient world, and those of you who've taken the course with me from number one, know that this is a recurring theme.
	In the ancient world, the belief in semi-godly, semi-divine human beings was very deep.
	The Pharaoh was half God, half man, as an example.
	This is probably a way to get rid of it.
	There were these beings, but don't take them seriously, Jews.
	We just want to mention them because that's what people believed in, but we don't believe in that stuff.
	And anybody who thought that they were a demigod got in trouble and God stopped it.
	That is the way I read it.
	A way of the Torah saying, don't believe in that stuff, Jews.
	Other people believe in half God, half people, because that's what it really says.
	That the children of God took human wives and cohabited with them.
	So, but they came to naught.
	Meaning, people who think that they're half gods are going to come to naught.
	There are only people and God, but there aren't half gods.
	That's Prager's reading of these difficult verses.
	I'm certainly open to alternative ones.
	Okay, I just wanted to go over it because I don't want to skip anything.
	I want you to know we'll deal with the hard parts too.
	And so we then go to 6-5.
	Okay?
	People are on earth.
	People have populated the earth.
	This is what I was driving to earlier.
	And then what happens?
	The Lord saw how great was man's wickedness on earth and how every plan devised by man's mind was nothing but evil all the time.
	And the Lord regretted that he had made man on earth, and his heart was saddened.
	This, I must tell you, these are two of my favorite sentences in the Torah.
	One of the reasons is, and I thank Gunther Plout for this insight.
	Gunther Plout, I believe it was, got up once.
	He is the writer of the commentary, the Reform Movement's commentary on the Torah.
	I heard him lecture once, and he got up in front of the audience.
	He said, ladies and gentlemen, who's the most tragic figure in the Bible?
	And people threw out area.
	Moses didn't get into Israel and David for all of the tragedy that happened to him.
	And people threw out Joseph.
	Everybody threw out something.
	He said, wrong, wrong, wrong, God.
	God is the most tragic figure of the Hebrew Bible.
	And I have to tell you, it has always stayed with me, and he was absolutely right.
	Constantly saddened by what he had done.
	You read chapter one, and those of you who went over with me remember, God was so pleased with what he did.
	And God saw what he did, it was good.
	God saw what he did, it was good.
	So we're good, good.
	After created human beings, very good.
	And he was so happy, and he rested on the seventh day.
	He gave a beautiful place for them to live in.
	And as soon as we had a chance, we screwed up.
	The second we had a chance, as I point that out, it's amazing.
	They had one law to keep.
	One.
	They were living in Shangri-La.
	All God said was, don't eat from one tree.
	I'll give you all the food you want.
	No pain.
	Everything's wonderful.
	You'll love each other.
	The animals will love you.
	Everybody's nice.
	Just don't eat from that tree.
	They eat from that tree.
	So there is a deep sense of like God said.
	Then he creates human beings.
	He tries again with the human beings.
	So Cain's progeny fade out.
	Do you think Adam's progeny will do all right?
	And sure enough, what does God find out?
	And the Lord saw, 6.5, how great man's wickedness on earth.
	And it is really extraordinary, the words then.
	Number 6, verse 6.
	And God regretted that he made people.
	And then the Hebrew is just so powerful.
	Vayit at sev Alibo.
	Which literally means, and he got sad to himself in his heart.
	Isn't it a sad picture of God?
	It really is.
	It's a very moving picture.
	And I think it's Sarna who points out, which I think is very powerful.
	Who points it out?
	I always like to give them credit.
	Yeah, Sarna.
	He points out, it doesn't say God got angry.
	It just says he got sad.
	He got sad and then decided to destroy the world.
	But not out of anger.
	No, no, no.
	That's Sarna's point.
	That God did it out of sadness, out of regret.
	It does say, and God got very angry.
	It speaks of God getting angry at other times in the Bible.
	But not here.
	He just got sad.
	It's as if God was saying, I don't understand.
	I give you this gorgeous world.
	Why do you mess it up?
	Why do you hurt each other?
	I don't understand.
	That's really the picture of God you have here.
	And I have, I must say, I totally relate to God on this.
	We were given a beautiful world.
	Why do people mess it up?
	It's a great question.
	And by the way, what does mess it up mean?
	Again, it has nothing to do with how they treated God.
	There's no implication of mistreating God.
	It's that people hurt each other.
	They did bad to each other.
	That's what God said.
	It's almost as if he didn't anticipate it.
	By the way, there are people who ask that.
	How could God regret?
	Didn't he know?
	Isn't God omniscient?
	Doesn't God know what people will do?
	Well, there are two possible answers to that.
	A, God isn't omniscient.
	B, God is omniscient, and we're just speaking to teach about God's reaction, but of course God knew what would happen.
	By the way, this thing about God knowing the future, it is a traditional monotheistic belief that God knows the future, but I will tell you that I believe that a traditional monotheist can live with the view that God does not know the human future.
	That God knows animal future, stars future, planets future, but not necessarily human future, because unlike the stars and animals, we do what we want, not what God wants.
	Everything else is programmed by God except us.
	So there is, I believe there is a leeway.
	I admit that this is somewhat non-traditional.
	And I'm not advocating it.
	I'm merely saying, though, that you can live with it.
	Maybe the implication is God didn't know exactly what would happen.
	I don't know if I accept that.
	I think it's a possible reading.
	The clear reading is, though, that God reacts to what we do.
	And can God get sad?
	I think God can get sad.
	Otherwise, you'd have to say we can get sad, but God can't get sad.
	Can God create a creature that can do things that God can't do?
	Interesting, right?
	I think God can get sad.
	In fact, I think he's sad most of the time.
	This is an extraordinary place he made for us, and we hurt each other.
	Now, I will say this, though, that I do believe that the Torah engages in a drop of hyperbole here.
	Even with my very non-romantic view of human nature, I think that the words chosen here are a little too much.
	Because it says, I'll translate literally.
	And all of the desire or will of the thoughts of man's heart are only bad all day.
	I think it's a drop too much.
	I mean, you've got to grant that most people have a good thought once a day.
	All right?
	I wish it would have said most of the time or mostly bad, but it gives two hyperbolic statements.
	Rachra, only bad.
	Does it have it in your English that it says only?
	I'm curious.
	Yeah, nothing but evil.
	Right, nothing but evil.
	I mean, most people have, even bad people, I suspect, on occasion have a good thought.
	They'll treat their dog nicely.
	Something.
	But anyway, it was, this is the way it was written, and I find it very, very powerful.
	By the way, this is where you get the word Yetzer, which is very deeply, deeply evolved in Jewish thought, that we have a Yeitzer, which is really the forerunner of the id.
	It is a subject unto itself, but let me just say very quickly, whoever would have developed psychoanalysis had to have been a Jew.
	It is not at all coincidental that Freud and every founder except Jung of psychoanalysis were Jews.
	And it had to be for many reasons.
	One of them is that Judaism always made peace with the miserable parts of the human psyche.
	It doesn't make peace with miserable actions, but it does acknowledge that you have a bad part.
	It acknowledges it, and it doesn't demand that you feel guilty over bad thoughts.
	It's one of my favorite parts of Judaism.
	Now, here you have that word yitzer, and if you substitute id for will, it would work out fine.
	One other thing, it says the thoughts of his heart.
	But in biblical Hebrew, the heart is not the seat of emotions.
	This is not well known to lay people.
	Scholars all know this, but it is very important.
	The heart is the seat of emotions to us.
	In Biblical Hebrew, it is the seat of thought.
	It is the mind.
	You know what the seat of emotions in ancient Hebrew is?
	Anybody know?
	The kidneys.
	It's why on Yom Kippur there is a statement in one of the liturgical poems, Bocheim Klayot Beom Din, that God judges or examines, better examines, not just God examines your kidneys on the day of judgment.
	And he's not a urologist.
	That's not the implication.
	It is that God examines your emotions on the day of judgment.
	So really, the translation here is that, and God saw that people think bad things all day.
	That's what it is.
	It's about the thought, not about the heart.
	Just wanted to, in case you saw the word heart there, make that clear.
	So poor God gets quite upset over what he sees humanity has developed.
	I just want to emphasize again, God's hurt is over how we treat each other, not how we treat God.
	That's what ethical monotheism is, where God's greatest concern is how we treat other human beings.
	It is so powerful, it can make you cry.
	I mean, the description of God's sadness over the way people treat each other.
	This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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	January is National Human Trafficking Prevention Month in the U.S.
Noah's Walk with God 00:15:23
	And to raise awareness, SalemNow.com is offering Sexploited in America, the poor part talkie series from AGA Media, at 50% off.
	Sexploited in America.
	Now, just 499 at salemnow.com.
	Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
	6-7.
	God decides as a result, I'll read it to you, the Lord said, I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created, men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky, for I regret that I made them.
	The most obvious question is, if man sins, why did God kill the animals?
	The answer I think I spoke of, I think I alluded to in part in chapter 1, the Jewish view is that the world was created for people.
	No people, the world has no purpose.
	There is no purpose to sea otters life except that we enjoy them.
	I'm sorry, this runs against a lot of animal rights thinking of our time, that we are a bane on nature or just another member of nature with equal rights to the planet along with sea otters and porpoises and dolphins and so on.
	I deeply believe in taking care.
	We are custodians of the earth.
	I deeply believe in taking care of this planet so that we can enjoy it and so that our grandchildren can enjoy it.
	But the purpose of life on this planet is for the human being to enjoy, for the human being to appreciate.
	Sea otters don't build anything.
	There is no sea otter or dog civilization.
	The dogs in our home, whom we love deeply, are identical in their nature to the dogs of 50,000 years ago.
	They didn't build anything.
	They don't pass anything to the next generation.
	There's no dog wisdom or dog culture.
	We are to build something and pass it on to the next generation.
	We can build.
	Also, unlike animals, we have freedom of choice.
	We can do good and evil.
	An animal is programmed, as it were.
	You can program it, or God programs it, but it's programmed.
	We have free choice.
	We are in God's image.
	Animals are not.
	Doesn't mean you can abuse animals.
	According to Judaism, it's so wrong to abuse an animal.
	One of the seven laws it demands of all humanity is not to eat the limb of a living animal.
	So, Judaism, certainly, and you'll see that when we go on with Genesis, but it is important that you understand that's why God destroys the world, because it was created for us.
	And if we're no more, it is no more.
	So, God decides to destroy the world.
	By the way, there are people who feel apologetic about this or who feel that it doesn't show God in good form.
	What kind of God is that?
	We've graduated from that view of God.
	I don't believe so.
	I think it makes a lot of sense.
	It touches me greatly.
	God sees we hurt each other all the time and says, I want to start again with a good person.
	Vengeful, miserable, or low-life God.
	I like that God who says, I'm going to try again.
	But of course, as you know later, God says, I won't do it again.
	If you destroy the world after Noah, you did it, not I.
	And we can do it, as you well know.
	Now, the next sentence is very powerful.
	God says he's going to destroy the world because I regret what I made.
	But Noah found favor in God's eyes.
	But God liked one person, Noah.
	Now, as you know, there are flood stories in almost every tradition in the world, which leads one to the very un-Sherlock Holmesian conclusion that there must have been a big flood in the history of the world.
	If every culture has a flood story, there must have been a flood.
	In the ancient Near East, they all had flood stories.
	The world was destroyed by a flood.
	But there are differences between Noah's flood story and the other flood stories.
	Let me give you a few of them.
	First of all, God chooses to save Noah because he was good.
	Others are chosen because they are half God or because they are handsome or because the God had a capricious liking for the person.
	Not in this case.
	The entire story is based on ethics.
	That's all that matters.
	Noah's good, I'll save Noah.
	People are bad, they're destroyed.
	The entire story, I am destroying the world because they hurt each other, and I'm saving Noah because he's good.
	Now, let me give you a I'll read you a little tiny story of a contemporaneous account from, I think it's a Mesopotamian or Babylonian legend of the time.
	Are you ready?
	This is why the gods destroyed the world according to their flood story.
	The land became wide.
	The people became numerous.
	The land bellowed like wild oxen.
	The God was disturbed by their uproar.
	Enlil heard their clamor and said to the great gods, oppressive has become the clamor of mankind.
	By their uproar, they prevent sleep.
	Now that's a good reason, isn't it?
	They are.
	They're not letting us sleep.
	I mean, do you realize?
	I mean, when you compare that at the same time as the Noah story, a moral man, an ethical man in a bad world, and here the story, let's destroy the world because they don't let us gods sleep.
	They make too much noise because there were too many of them.
	I mean, you realize the unbridgeable gap.
	It's part of the reason I believe in the divinity of the Torah.
	Because it's so unlike anything at its time.
	I don't believe in supermen, so I have to believe there was a divine element in something so different.
	That was one of the sophisticated stories going around at the time.
	And here, the whole thing is ethics.
	It's all different.
	It's just all different.
	Noah is a mere man, not a half-divinity.
	He's solely saved because of his decency, not because of his beauty or devotion to the gods in some other way.
	And Sarna, Nachum Sarna, has another thing to say.
	I'll read it to you.
	Perhaps the most significant of all the distinctive features of the Torah account is that only Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives enter the ark.
	Whereas in the other accounts, the builders of the vessel, the builders, get it?
	The boatman, relatives, and friends are passengers with the hero and his family.
	This means that only in Genesis is the concept of a single family of man possible.
	Indeed, it is a major theme.
	The centrality of the family is being made a point here, and that it is a durable unit.
	It's an interesting point that Sarna makes that I had never come across before.
	Notice there are no, he doesn't take a crew along.
	In all the other flood stories, the hero who was saved takes along a crew.
	No crew.
	And by the way, in that regard, is a very touching thing, as you will see later, which I don't think we'll get to tonight, but it's a very touching thing where you have God closes the door when they all go in the ark.
	It says, and God closed the door.
	It's again, remember those of you with me since chapter one?
	A refutation.
	Genesis is there to refute polytheism.
	In those cases, it was done by the people on the boat saving themselves, as it were.
	The crew doing the thing.
	Here it is purely God.
	God runs the show.
	He even closes the door on the ark for them.
	Now comes one of the most fascinating debates that I know of in all of the rabbinic literature.
	Why is Noah chosen?
	We are now on verse 9 in chapter 6.
	And these were the generations back to that word again, or this is the line of Noah.
	Noah was a righteous man.
	He was blameless in his age.
	Noah walked with God.
	Okay.
	The $64,000 question, and I've made this point on a number of occasions.
	I am profoundly grateful for my religious Jewish education because it taught me how to have one incredibly important way to read.
	Always, always ask, why did the text use these words and not others?
	I use that to this day.
	For those of you who don't know, I do a radio talk show here in Los Angeles, and I've been doing it for 10 years.
	And when a caller calls, my mind is trained always to think why is the person using that word and not another word.
	People do use deliberate words, whether they're conscious of it or not.
	And if you ever read text like that, you even make up the question.
	Just make it up.
	Well, why did it use hello instead of hi?
	Silly, right?
	But there's a reason.
	People do things for reasons.
	People use words for reasons.
	Here is the best example of it in the entire Torah.
	And I wonder if on your own you could figure out what the question is.
	I will read you the verse again.
	These are the generations of Noah, or this is the line of Noah.
	Noah was a righteous man.
	He was a righteous man in his generations.
	Noah walked with God.
	What words seem to just jump out at you as saying something additional?
	Anybody have an idea?
	Exactly.
	That was it.
	Y'all got it.
	In his generations.
	And what did the rabbis have a debate over?
	It's a great question and one I want to go over with you in detail.
	It could have simply said, Noah was a good man, Noah walked with God.
	But it says Noah was a good man in his generations.
	What's the implication?
	There are two possible implications, and both can have a good argument for them.
	One, that, well, in such a miserable generation, sure he was good.
	He stuck out because they were all miserable.
	But he wasn't such a great guy.
	The other one is equally plausible.
	If he was good in a generation where everybody around him was rotten, can you imagine how good he'd be in a good generation?
	You get the debate?
	He wasn't so terrific because in his generation, to be terrific, all you had to do was be better than the rotten.
	Which do you think is true?
	I will take a vote.
	I'm very curious.
	I will say them once again.
	You vote A or B.
	A, he wasn't that impressive.
	That's what the Torah is trying to say.
	But given his generation of miserable people, he was good.
	Or, it adds the words in his generation, B, vote B, to tell you how wonderful he was, that even in a bad generation, the man was good.
	Okay?
	It's all clear.
	Who votes for A?
	Okay, who votes for B?
	It is almost, it's almost 50-50.
	Maybe it was 55-45B.
	And your vote reflects exactly my own inner debate.
	You know that I learned this in third grade.
	I have never resolved it.
	Every time I hear one of the points, I go, yeah, that's right.
	Then I hear the other one, I go, yeah, that's right.
	Listen, I'll put it to you in a different way.
	All right, I'm going to take another vote.
	Here's my question to you.
	Do you think it is easier to be good when people around you are all good or when people around you are all bad?
	Well, let's vote, guys.
	Let's vote.
	That did not help, okay?
	Not at help at all.
	All right, if you believe that it is easier to be good if the people around you are good, raise your hand.
	All right, if you believe that it's easy to be good if the people around you are bad, raise your hand.
	Overwhelmingly, you voted on number one, that it's easier to be good if the people around you are good.
	Now, now you realize something.
	A lot of you voted for A, when in the other case, you shouldn't have voted for A. You see that?
	Isn't that interesting?
	You voted against Noah, but then voted when it came to you that, in fact, it would be much harder for you to be good when the people are bad.
	So maybe Noah should get more credit.
	Maybe you want to revote.
	I won't take a third vote.
	I do want to point out to you, though, that that's really what the question is about.
	Where would you stick out?
	And I think that about myself.
	I don't know.
	Frankly, I think and I think and I think my own suspicion is that if everybody around me were good, I don't think I would want to excel beyond that.
	I would be very happy to be as good as everybody else and take a lot of pictures and listen to a lot of Haydn.
	That's how I think about it.
	But if people around me are bad, I feel a very great mission to make the world better because I don't want people to be bad.
	So I, oddly enough, therefore, I would vote opposite in many ways.
	I think it's easier for me to be good around bad people than around good people.
	I would be as good as them, but I wouldn't be good enough to excel.
	That's my own sense of my own nature.
	That good?
	Eh, I'm not that good.
	But around bad people, I'm never going to sink to their level, so I'll stand out as being good.
	I'm not going to do what they did.
	It's an interesting question.
	By the way, in this regard, it's fascinating because this issue of why people are good and bad preoccupies me.
Goodness Around Bad People 00:12:50
	I have interviewed on a number of occasions rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.
	Now, their goodness is monumental, right?
	I mean, there's just, there are no words, correct?
	I mean, that is about the epitome.
	As I point out, it is more than the man who jumps in the freezing lake to save a drowning person from an airplane.
	That's a great act.
	Don't get me wrong.
	It's a magnificent act.
	It was done once.
	A non-Jew who hid Jews during World War II jumped into freezing lakes every single day.
	You understand the point?
	Because on any given day, they could have been caught, and in the case of Poles, unlike other countries, but in the case of Poles, executed.
	In the case of other countries, punished, but not necessarily executed.
	When I have asked these people, why did you do it?
	Or do you know?
	I asked them, do you recognize how good you are now that you know what life is about and in perspective?
	Not one ever said yes.
	And they are not being unduly humble or modest.
	They truly believe that they are normal human beings who just did what you're supposed to do.
	Somebody is going to be murdered.
	You put them in your basement.
	And it is interesting.
	It would be very interesting to know if these people in a normally decent society would stand out as exceptionally good.
	There's a very good chance that they wouldn't.
	Yet every one of us considers them, and I among them, as magnificent.
	So I got to tell you, I give Noah more credit in that debate when push comes to shove.
	I give him more credit than we would tend to based on your vote earlier and based on a lot of what the rabbis who raised this issue were thinking.
	Well, he wouldn't have excelled.
	But the truth is to excel in the time of bad is more important than to excel in the time of good.
	That's when goodness is rarest and when we need it most.
	However, the ones who vote against Noah have some good, they do have some good points.
	And their chief good point, which is the one that I will end with and then take your questions, their chief good point is this.
	And it really is funny, I have to tell you.
	God tells Noah, Noah, go and build an ark.
	I'm going to destroy the whole world, but you and Ms. Noah and the kids, I'm going to save.
	And what does Noah do?
	Builds an ark.
	The rabbis were not impressed with that.
	What did Abraham do later when God said he was going to destroy Sidon?
	He said, wait a minute.
	If God, hold on a minute, God, what if there are 50 good people there?
	Wouldn't you save the city?
	And Sidom was really rotten.
	God says, yes, for 50, I'll save him.
	And then he keeps bargaining with God.
	Keeps bargaining.
	Well, what about 40?
	What about 30?
	What about, and keeps going down?
	It's very interesting.
	What does Noah say?
	where's the lumber where do i where do i get the long That is a dramatic difference.
	There isn't a word uttered by Noah in, oh, you know, why don't you rethink it?
	Maybe I could bring people a message.
	Also, you have this sense.
	This is one of, you know, one of those times I wish I could go back in history.
	Guy's building this huge ark.
	All the animals of the universe are climbing in.
	What did the neighbors think?
	My whole life, I have always wondered, what did Noah's neighbors think?
	Hey, going for a cruise there, no?
	Heading to the Caribbean?
	No, I'm serious.
	The man builds an ark.
	He had to have a discussion with somebody.
	You'd think he'd say, you know, the world's going to be destroyed, so I'm building an ark.
	Something like that.
	You know, why don't you repent?
	Maybe God will put you on the ark.
	You're not a bad neighbor.
	Who knows?
	Who knows?
	But it's fascinating.
	Noah says nothing.
	Somewhat like Adam getting the fruit from Eve.
	Just, he ate.
	That's all it says.
	And he ate.
	And so too here, and he built.
	Not Abraham.
	Abraham says, wait, you're going to destroy human beings?
	That bothers me.
	I don't like that idea.
	And that's why the rabbis have this contrast between him and Abraham, and where it says, and that's where they point out, look, he wasn't a giant.
	Compared to the people in his day, he was a giant, but he wasn't really a giant.
	It's a terrific question to ask yourselves.
	What constitutes a moral giant?
	Which is a greater challenge?
	And you know, the answer might be that for some of us, one is a bigger challenge than another.
	That some of us could rise to our best among good people.
	Some of us could rise to our best when the world was tough and bad.
	You know, I'm serious.
	Is it less heroic in some ways in the middle of affluence to take time out of your day every single day and record for the blind?
	Is that less heroic?
	It's difficult, but I don't know if the person who records for the blind would risk his or her life to save a stranger in a Holocaust.
	And I don't know if the Holocaust ones are recording for the blind every day since the Holocaust.
	Maybe we have different tendencies towards the way we can express whatever goodness we have.
	And it's an interesting, that's why I said it is truly one of the most fascinating questions.
	One final, final word.
	I said that was the final word.
	God tells Noah to build an ark.
	Just a little point that you'll find of interest.
	The word for ark in Hebrew is Teva.
	And it is used later as well.
	It is exactly the word used for what Moses' mother builds to put Moses in.
	But it's too bad.
	See, that's where it's good to know Hebrew, because I don't think they use, and Moses' mother built an ark, because it would have confused a lot of readers.
	An ark, you know, Noah's Ark.
	The point, though, is, and there is a point, what is an ark?
	How does an ark differ from a boat?
	Well, I gave you the answer earlier.
	Remember I said there was no crew?
	Who then steers an ark?
	God.
	God is the steerer of an ark.
	All arks do is sit on water.
	Where they end up has nothing to do with the people on it.
	And that is exactly what happened with Moses' little ark.
	God pushed it into the hands of Pharaoh's daughter.
	God moved it along.
	There was no crew in Moses' little ark.
	These are just some of the beautiful little insights when you study this in the original that is not always available in the English.
	And so when I continue with Genesis this summer, we will find out what happens when the world is destroyed, meet Abraham, and a lot of other fascinating things.
	What I'd like to do now is take any questions that any of you have from today or the four sessions.
	Yes, please.
	Maybe Noah was truly aware of how evil the people around him were.
	Whereas Abraham what?
	Yeah, that's the point.
	Where is Abraham what?
	There were some good people.
	But there weren't.
	Yes.
	Oh, you mean he knew he knew good people outside of Sidome?
	Oh, I see.
	That's interesting.
	Well, it is an interesting argument.
	I have to say this.
	It's a tough issue.
	If you're really surrounded by rotten people, what are you going to do?
	First of all, there's a very good chance that if you tell them what you're doing, they'll kill you.
	I mean, you know, I was, you know, making light of Noah saying nothing to his neighbors, but how would bad people react if you were building some sort of rescue vehicle for yourself?
	And tell them, well, I'll tell you why, because you really stink.
	And because the creator of the universe is about to drown you.
	Have a nice day.
	So, no, I really think, I think there is a defense for Noah in that regard.
	You're right.
	What is he going to say to them?
	You know, he probably said, oh, it's my hobby.
	I collect animals.
	And, you know.
	I'll tell you this.
	There's no question I would love to do a screenplay on Noah.
	I mean, it is truly one of the richest stories in the text for what could be handled in any direction.
	And your defense is a good one.
	Yes.
	You did it before bomb shelters.
	Balbom shelters, yes.
	except nobody built them thinking that all their neighbors deserve to die.
	So it's a difference.
	They thought their neighbors were innocent.
	Yes.
	In the beginning of this night's discussion, Cain's concern that he would be killed when he was down.
	In case this is not clear to everybody, including those of you in videoland, the question was, who is Cain afraid would kill him?
	Where were these other people who might kill him coming from?
	And the answer that this woman received from one teacher was that God created other people at that time.
	The problem with that is it defies then the very powerful teaching of the text that we all come from one ancestor.
	The text goes out of its way to say we all come from one person.
	So, for God to have made parallel people at the time strikes me as undermining the whole gist of the story.
	So, I rather live with a difficulty than resolve it unsatisfactorily.
	I don't have an answer to your question.
	Maybe he would be killed, for all we know, maybe he would be killed by a brother or sister.
	Possibly.
	Yes.
	Right, you're right.
	That's why I live with that difficulty.
	All right, I'll move over.
	Yes, please.
	Where are you from?
	Shing is that God created us to be good.
	If we're not going to be good, there's no purpose to life.
	That is exactly what's being taught here.
	Just as there's no purpose to animal life if there are no people, there's no purpose to human life if we're going to be evil.
	Makes perfect sense to me.
	God didn't create us in order to procreate.
	We're not animals.
	God created us in order to live a good life.
	If we're going to be despicable, forget it.
	He'll just do it over again.
	Makes total sense to me.
	I would be happily God's defender on his decision at that time.
	Yes, I would have known what Cain did.
	It's a good question.
	If the world was as bad news travels fast as the answer in row one.
	It especially travels fast when there are only eight people in the world.
	It gets real speedy.
	Yes.
	Implication of the Torah text is that God did not complete creation, and it is our task to complete it.
	I made that point.
	It's a traditional point.
	And the Hebrew makes it clear that God created an unfinished world.
	We are here to finish it.
	One would have liked that God maybe worked another 10 minutes.
	I think that's true in light of what you were saying.
	Let me take five more, and that's it.
	Because it's better to leave before the audience does.
	And so, you know, you seem to be leaving like Haydn's farewell symphony.
	So I, let me, let me just take a couple.
	Yeah, yes, please.
	Yep.
	Yes, the lady back there.
	I think that's excellent.
	I think that that may very well be true.
	Just as Cain didn't know what act might lead to killing, so nobody else did.
	And they may do an act to him which would lead to his being killed.
	And now he's afraid of that because now he knows you can get killed by people.
Belief in Moral Balance 00:02:39
	That's a very, very interesting point.
	And he's therefore fearful, as you point out, because there's nothing more frightening than knowledge of what can happen.
	It's a very interesting and good point.
	And I thank you.
	Yes, please.
	Oh, that's interesting.
	So as history moved on, the gap between good people and bad people increased.
	Well, in light of Abraham, the description of Abraham as so wonderful and Sodoma so miserable, my own suspicion is that that's been pretty universal.
	That generally speaking, every society, in a very powerful way, he said they were monsters disguised as humans.
	That's a very powerful way, and it's true.
	When you know what they did to people, we all have crazy fantasies, we all have bad streaks, but I know that for the vast majority of us, there's a cuddle point.
	You just can't, you know, just things you couldn't do.
	And or so, maybe there are those who say I'm wrong.
	There are those who say that under any circumstance, almost anybody can do any atrocity.
	Well, that's an interesting, you know, it's an interesting thing to work out.
	I don't know, and I don't believe it, frankly.
	But I do believe that there are, there always were, certain rottens and certain goods.
	That's why I always feel that the battle is for that very large part of humanity in the middle.
	The ones who aren't going to risk their lives to save Jews in the Holocaust, but the ones who also aren't going to be concentration camp guards or those who round them up.
	Most people didn't either.
	Most people in Europe didn't save Jews and didn't round up Jews.
	Most people did nothing.
	And they can go in either direction, and that's where the moral battles of life are, to get those in the middle to be better.
	But I really believe that there is a certain group and that it's balanced almost.
	You know, there's a Jewish tradition that there were 36 righteous people at all times in history, thanks to whom the world continues.
	They're called Mamed Vovniks, because Lamed Vov in Hebrew means 36.
	You can read, there's a book on this, is one of the most powerful novels written.
	It's called The Last of the Just.
	You might want to read that.
	You can get it in paperback.
	I think it's a Frenchman, a French Jew who wrote it.
36 Righteous People 00:06:56
	Andre Schwarzbart, yeah.
	So anyway, that's a good and interesting point.
	These are more than five, so let me please forgive me.
	Yes.
	Question, and I have no answer.
	Did God create specific individuals to do specifically good things?
	Of course, the opposite is also, did God create Hitler?
	Did God create, and so on.
	Stalin, the story of Moses implies that Moses was a great human being, and therefore God picked him to take the Jews out of Egypt, and it shows you why.
	On the other hand, maybe I should have said fate steered Moses' little ark, and it would have been a little better.
	But in the biblical mind, fate and God are more or less identical.
	And these are all the $64,000 questions.
	What can I do?
	I'll take two more.
	Who should I take?
	If you voted that Noah was really right, I'll call on you.
	I'm getting, yes.
	Most of my education is despite school.
	I'll tell you that.
	Very early in my life, I adopted Mark Twain's motto, I never let school interfere with my education.
	But officially, certainly Judaic, I have to give credit to all the yeshivas I went to.
	I went to yeshivas till I was 18.
	That's how I know Hebrew so well and learned the Bible and the original.
	I went after that to Brooklyn College and then Columbia University to do graduate work in Marxism.
	I was always interested in religion.
	And left after two years of graduate school, I had a choice, either to write a thesis on some totally irrelevant facet of Lenin or write a book on Judaism that would actually touch people's lives.
	So I wrote when I was 26, Eight Questions People Ask About Judaism, which eventually became the nine questions people ask about Judaism.
	And you can still get it outside.
	And I'm proud to tell you, it's the most widely used introduction to Judaism.
	And that's it.
	Does that answer your question?
	Okay, so we still have two more.
	Well, let's get this woman right here.
	You're very patient and kind.
	Cain is taken as pejorative today, whereas the mark of Cain in the Torah was a positive mark.
	Don't touch him.
	If I had to tell you that this guy has the mark of Cain, you'd probably think it was a bad mark.
	It's a bad guy, but it's a good mark.
	I think that's what got people confused.
	Okay?
	And the last one will be here.
	Oh, that's interesting.
	Yes.
	Yes, yes, I will repeat it.
	What verse is that?
	It's not 1.14.
	4.14.
	It's okay.
	Yes, I know.
	Thank you.
	4.14.
	It says, Cain is speaking to God.
	My punishment is too great to bear.
	14.
	You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth.
	Anyone who meets me may kill me.
	Why does he say I must avoid your presence when God didn't say you have to avoid my presence?
	That's your question.
	Well, I'll read to you what Sarna writes here.
	I must avoid your presence.
	A crime against another human being is simultaneously a sin against God.
	The spiritual ties that unite man to his Maker have become severely strained.
	Cain fears that he can no longer receive God's providential care.
	I think that the sense, the primal sense of bonding with God that the very first generation of people had, at least speaking in Torah talk, was so great, and the severity of what he did was so bad that he was too embarrassed to remain in God's presence.
	It's like you could all relate to that, where you've done something so shameful, you can't stay in the presence of something holy.
	In other words, it's clear that he knows that he did a lot of bad.
	It's a very interesting thing, his reaction, actually.
	In 13, it's very interesting.
	It says, my punishment is too great to bear.
	But do you know that the Hebrew can be translated, my sin is too great to bear?
	Does anybody have my sin?
	You have my sin.
	I think, frankly, that it's incorrect to say my punishment is too great.
	The Hebrew word is avon, which generally means sin.
	That's a very powerful thing for him to say.
	My sin is too great to bear.
	And if he says that, it becomes clear to you why he would think he can no longer be in God's presence.
	God, the Holy of Holies, I just killed a man.
	I can't stay in your presence.
	Well, there are some words that are the fancy solution for hell that we use in absence of God.
	not in Hebrew the Hebrew okay the question of this last She sneaked in another question.
	She's saying that there are words for hell that really mean absence from God.
	Not in Hebrew.
	That's what my answer is when I said not in Hebrew.
	First of all, we don't have a word for Hebrew.
	The closest we have is Gehenna, Gehinom.
	But that's just a place.
	Or Sheol, which is just the netherworld.
	But we don't have a word for hell.
	Maybe it's true in Greek and would apply to the New Testament.
	But in Hebrew, we don't have that term, so it wouldn't mean that.
	For those of you, two final words for me.
	Three final words.
Two Final Words 00:00:52
	One, if you would like to continue this great adventure in Genesis, stay in touch with my office through outside.
	Either you have the number or give us your number right out there at the table.
	Number two, if you are leaving Los Angeles and would like, or live in Los Angeles for that matter, wish to continue to enjoy any of what I do, please help yourself.
	Well, please buy.
	That's really stupid of me.
	There are tapes out there.
	You may enjoy this or to give this to somebody else.
	And number three, for those of you who have taken the whole four with me, I am deeply grateful to you coming out on weeknights when there are 10,000 other options to learn the book of Genesis.
	I hope you enjoyed it.
	This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

Chapters

00:00:00 Cain's Conscience
00:10:20 God's Presence and Protection
00:15:34 Biblical Incest and Stranger Love
00:21:04 Lamech's Vengeful Song
00:36:38 The Genesis of Likeness
00:46:04 God's Sadness in Creation
01:01:22 Noah's Walk with God
01:16:45 Goodness Around Bad People
01:29:36 Belief in Moral Balance
01:32:15 36 Righteous People
01:39:11 Two Final Words