Dennis Prager Show - Timeless Wisdom: Weekend Torah Teaching - Genesis 19:27-20:11
Aired: 2026-03-14
Duration: 01:32:04


=== Missing The Early Shift (14:41) ===

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[00:00:30]  Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
[00:00:34]  Here are thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
[00:00:38]  And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
[00:00:48]  Two pillars of salt.
[00:00:52]  That was our last adventure.
[00:00:54]  And the, what was it, remember the Lot's wife's syndrome I spoke about for those of you going into what is it called?
[00:01:03]  The golden years.
[00:01:04]  Don't you love the euphemisms for getting old?
[00:01:06]  Isn't it a joke?
[00:01:07]  They have a million euphemism, senior citizen, golden years.
[00:01:11]  What else?
[00:01:12]  Twilight, autumn of life.
[00:01:16]  It's just nobody likes using the word old.
[00:01:18]  There's not really anything wrong with it.
[00:01:20]  Now they don't say old, it's elderly.
[00:01:23]  Now they don't say middle-ee or youngly, but they do say elderly.
[00:01:28]  Be that as it may, that was the last thing we did, correct?
[00:01:32]  Lote's wife turned into a pillar of salt.
[00:01:34]  So let's, since there are no questions, there are.
[00:01:37]  Sir.
[00:02:02]  Maybe she tried to go on, but she knew what the consequence would be.
[00:02:08]  And I'll choose in very brief meetings.
[00:02:14]  You made some references to the side of the war story tossing.
[00:02:19]  And there are, of course, many stories of people who survived the horror, the bomb show, but couldn't bear to go on afterwards.
[00:02:35]  So I just thought that actually.
[00:02:38]  I have to tell you that you have persuaded me.
[00:02:46]  Yes, and given, I just right now looked in the text, and your reading is 100% possible.
[00:02:57]  I don't think it's in any way reading into it.
[00:03:00]  His argument is that Lote's wife deliberately looked back and knew what would happen.
[00:03:06]  That it wasn't, well, she couldn't control herself, which is the way we'd normally read it.
[00:03:12]  Well, she made a mistake.
[00:03:13]  She couldn't control herself.
[00:03:14]  She dawdled and got consumed in the salt eruption, as it were.
[00:03:22]  He's arguing that she knew what she was doing, and that there are people, after all, she has two daughters back there, and there are people who don't want to go forward, who don't want to leave, if we're going to use the homily part, who don't want to leave the past, who will allow themselves to be consumed by their past deliberately, not inadvertently, not by mistake.
[00:03:46]  But even not reading a homily into it, she didn't want to leave.
[00:03:51]  She didn't want to go.
[00:03:52]  What would be, what's next?
[00:03:55]  The unknown, that's right.
[00:03:58]  Not a place where a lot of people want to go the unknown.
[00:04:01]  I think that it's a very powerful argument and I tell you, the way it has it in Hebrew is very it does seem deliberate on her part and his wife looked back behind them, behind him.
[00:04:19]  It it?
[00:04:20]  It wasn't you.
[00:04:22]  There would have been a way for the text to have said, well, she dawdled or she, you know, she couldn't control herself.
[00:04:28]  There are terms for that in Biblical Hebrew.
[00:04:31]  She couldn't control herself and there's none of that.
[00:04:33]  It was a, it is.
[00:04:34]  It's a deliberate act which adds to the to the point I was making.
[00:04:38]  The lot's wife syndrome is one that people will do deliberately.
[00:04:41]  I don't want to go to the unknown, I don't want to go forward, I don't want to leave the misery of the past for the unknown future and and he points out the holocaust survivors who understandably uh, will feel guilty.
[00:04:55]  It's there, there is a guilt for survivors.
[00:04:58]  Imagine you lived in a place where the whole place is being destroyed.
[00:05:02]  Are you definitely going to move forward ahead and not turn back and not dawdle?
[00:05:07]  That's tough stuff, especially if you have two kids back there.
[00:05:11]  It's very understandable and there is a very, a very deep desire, obviously here to look forward.
[00:05:17]  The whole point of the Abraham story is what will come in the future.
[00:05:21]  Indeed, in that sense, Judaism is a profoundly optimistic religion.
[00:05:26]  No people has had more reason to be pessimistic yet.
[00:05:29]  Judaism is a very optimistic religion.
[00:05:32]  We're here to make the world better.
[00:05:34]  By optimistic I don't mean that it it that Judaism holds, oh, the world is definitely going to get better.
[00:05:41]  There's no such belief in that.
[00:05:43]  Anybody who has that belief should read a newspaper.
[00:05:46]  You think Nazism is vanquished, then you have communism and now you have resurgence of it.
[00:05:52]  And i'm I don't want to press the panic button about Germany, but but i'm speaking on a day where people living in Germany of Turkish descent were burned alive, firebombed by, by people screaming Heil Hitler.
[00:06:08]  Now i'm not saying I don't.
[00:06:10]  Not only am I not saying I would.
[00:06:11]  I would hold it to be foolish to hold that Germany is being vanquished by Nazism.
[00:06:16]  All i'm saying is that anybody who believes that evil ends once and for all is a fool.
[00:06:22]  That's, that's not optimism, that's silliness.
[00:06:25]  This is what I mean.
[00:06:26]  By saying Judaism is optimistic, I will contrast it with Eastern religion.
[00:06:32]  Eastern religion is not optimistic.
[00:06:34]  In Eastern religion, the ideal is to leave this world is to enter Nibuta Nirvana, a state of higher consciousness, so high that you ultimately leave this world and never return in any other way.
[00:06:50]  That's the, that's the Buddhist ideal, which has profoundly affected Eastern religion.
[00:06:56]  Judaism doesn't hold that the ideal is to leave the world.
[00:06:59]  It holds that the ideal is to transform the world, that there is, if we, if we work at it, a brighter day ahead.
[00:07:07]  Do you get the difference?
[00:07:09]  The non-thinking optimist, the feeling optimist is, oh, there's a brighter day ahead.
[00:07:17]  The Torah-centered optimist says, if you work at it, there's a brighter day ahead.
[00:07:24]  Whereas the Eastern religionist will say, if you work at it, there are no days ahead.
[00:07:32]  If you really work at it, you just leave this mess.
[00:07:36]  Okay, that's what I mean by optimistic.
[00:07:39]  So there are those who, like Lot's wife, don't want to move ahead.
[00:07:46]  They are mired in the past, and it's understandable, but it's not what is wanted here.
[00:07:53]  Okay, were there any other questions or comments, please?
[00:07:57]  Actually, the Hebrew is grammatically very difficult.
[00:08:00]  The Hebrew literally is, Vatabet Ishto.
[00:08:03]  Vatabet is to look.
[00:08:05]  Ishto, his wife.
[00:08:07]  I'll do it literally with you, the literal translation.
[00:08:09]  And in Hebrew, the verb precedes the subject.
[00:08:12]  Okay, at least in Biblical Hebrew, not in modern Hebrew.
[00:08:16]  Vatabet Ishto, and she looked back, his wife.
[00:08:22]  Me Acharav.
[00:08:24]  Now, it should be Me Achareha behind her.
[00:08:29]  But it says behind him.
[00:08:32]  So if that's what you're pointing out, it is an interesting thing.
[00:08:36]  So that she was behind him when she looked back.
[00:08:40]  If that's the point you wish to make, that is grammatically, it seems to be confirmed by the grammar.
[00:08:46]  So the point then being what?
[00:08:47]  That she's behind him.
[00:08:48]  In other words, he didn't know she was dallying.
[00:08:54]  I understand.
[00:08:55]  But exactly, she didn't think that he was that far behind him.
[00:09:03]  Ah, well, the Praukay.
[00:09:05]  Well, now I've got to do the grammar even more deliberately.
[00:09:08]  The Hebrew is, and she looked back his wife from behind him.
[00:09:16]  Okay, Me Acharav, May is from.
[00:09:20]  You see?
[00:09:20]  So the literal, that's why I heard there is one.
[00:09:24]  I have never seen it.
[00:09:26]  But if any of you are truly interested in studying and don't know Hebrew, the best thing you can do is have all the translations you want, but get one that's literal, so that you know what is said in the original as close as possible without knowing Hebrew.
[00:09:41]  And that would be an example.
[00:09:42]  So she looked back from behind him is what the literal Hebrew is.
[00:09:48]  So your argument is that if she were in front of him and looked back, he would have also looked back.
[00:09:52]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:09:56]  Right.
[00:09:56]  Oh, yeah, there is no implication that he witnessed her turning into stone.
[00:10:00]  It's a good point.
[00:10:01]  I think that that's two points already that are, I think, confirmed by the text.
[00:10:06]  Yes?
[00:10:08]  I think what he's doing is that she's doing it in the sense that she really didn't want to go with him all along.
[00:10:19]  She didn't have the guts of just telling him, I'm not going to go to the same year.
[00:10:24]  Because I'm in trouble knowing that he doesn't see her, at that point she turned around.
[00:10:31]  I think it's a very good point, too, which is Mayacharav from behind him, that she really, which is, of course, his point, she really didn't want to go to begin with.
[00:10:40]  And remember, she's got two daughters there.
[00:10:42]  I think that that's a critical point here.
[00:10:44]  And that's a mother.
[00:10:46]  This is a mother doing this.
[00:10:49]  The father is prepared to trudge on.
[00:10:51]  Not that fathers love their kids less, but the bond may be different.
[00:10:57]  And so it's an interesting point to be made, and it would verify what I believe deeply about the text, that there is something deep in almost every word.
[00:11:07]  Just take two more because I want to go on.
[00:11:09]  Yeah.
[00:11:24]  Yeah, well, it isn't suicide because she didn't want to die, she didn't want to go forward.
[00:11:32]  If she didn't commit suicide, she allowed herself to get killed is not the same as committing suicide.
[00:11:39]  I mean, I'm not splitting hairs on that one.
[00:11:41]  It really is different.
[00:11:43]  Also, you're asking, well, if that's what the Bible says, why doesn't it say it?
[00:11:47]  If the Bible were to reveal every single possible intent of all of its ideas, you'd have to, chapter 19 would take up the whole Torah.
[00:11:56]  No, you have to understand that.
[00:11:58]  And then you'd have to do that.
[00:11:59]  You'd have to go on from that.
[00:12:00]  Well, what does it mean in those words?
[00:12:03]  It's very terse.
[00:12:08]  Oh, you will constantly.
[00:12:09]  Listen, oh, no, yeah, I understand.
[00:12:17]  I don't think the point is that, well, let's make people thousands of years from now think.
[00:12:23]  The truth is, in this case, it's actually pretty literal.
[00:12:30]  From behind him, I'm surprised that the translation doesn't say it, because that's what the Hebrew says, and it should have said it.
[00:12:39]  Yeah, on why she turned around.
[00:12:41]  Yeah, no, I understand.
[00:12:41]  All right, let me take a final.
[00:12:42]  I'm going to come to you afterwards, okay?
[00:12:44]  Thanks a lot.
[00:12:45]  Yes.
[00:12:58]  And on which episode?
[00:13:00]  This is the part where he says, Oh, yeah, what about the hills, right?
[00:13:15]  I think it's just a matter of he still himself doesn't have all faith in this, and it's basically saying, basically saying that it's too far.
[00:13:30]  And he doesn't trust that he can make it that far without this disaster overtaking him on his way.
[00:13:36]  He doesn't have the faith that God really will spare him, and he wants to go to this town that's closer.
[00:13:43]  But wouldn't you think that a closer town to destruction is more likely to be destroyed than a further town?
[00:13:49]  I would, except that perhaps in his mind.
[00:13:53]  Oh, wait a minute.
[00:13:53]  Maybe you're right, though, in the faith part in this way.
[00:13:56]  The mountains are desolate.
[00:13:58]  He'd rather flee to civilization than to barrenness.
[00:14:02]  I don't think the issue is distance.
[00:14:04]  The issue is mountains versus a city.
[00:14:08]  And maybe in— Right, that's correct.
[00:14:17]  On 19.
[00:14:20]  And what are you saying there?
[00:14:21]  Yes, because he could more easily die, perhaps, in the mountains.
[00:14:38]  I see that God will leave the little places alone.

=== God Spares Small Places (03:47) ===

[00:14:41]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:14:42]  Well, I think he did think that.
[00:14:44]  I think there's somewhere along those lines like that.
[00:14:46]  Right, God only destroys big places, the world, Sadome, etc.
[00:14:52]  I got you.
[00:14:53]  All right, that's something I'm going to think about, too.
[00:14:55]  All right, let me continue on 27, 1927, the year Bay Ruth hit 60 home runs.
[00:15:03]  That's how I remember a lot of these things.
[00:15:06]  I have no memory for numbers.
[00:15:07]  I have to attach them to things.
[00:15:09]  For example, love your neighbor as yourself is Leviticus 19, 18.
[00:15:13]  I just think of when World War I ended, and that's how I remember, love your neighbor as yourself.
[00:15:18]  Is that bizarre?
[00:15:19]  Yeah, looking at your faces, it's clearly bizarre.
[00:15:21]  Why don't you forget that?
[00:15:24]  Okay, 27.
[00:15:29]  Oh, Kadok.
[00:15:32]  So Abraham got up early in the morning.
[00:15:35]  It's interesting how many got up earlies there are.
[00:15:37]  You'll see it later, too, in the thing we're all leading to, which is Genesis 22 and the binding of Isaac.
[00:15:45]  But he got up early in the morning, and he went to the place where he had been standing before God.
[00:15:53]  And he looked over Sidom and Gomorrah and on all the land of the plain.
[00:16:03]  By the way, it's almost as if he had a divine look.
[00:16:07]  That's a verb that would be attached to God, the way he oversaw everything, overlooked everything.
[00:16:13]  And he saw that there came a smoke from the land rising like the smoke from an oven, from a kiln.
[00:16:23]  Okay, these are some self-explanatory sentences, so I'll just continue with the narrative.
[00:16:29]  And it was that when God had destroyed the cities of the plain, God remembered Abraham.
[00:16:38]  Now, you have to know, because this will come up frequently, about God remembering.
[00:16:43]  God doesn't forget.
[00:16:45]  God, it is truly human language that's being used here.
[00:16:51]  It's very important you understand that because it says later when the Jews are in Egypt and they're suffering, that God remembered his covenant with their forefathers and remembered them.
[00:17:02]  Did he forget them for all those hundreds of years?
[00:17:05]  You know, what kind of God is that?
[00:17:06]  Oh, I see you're suffering.
[00:17:08]  God, oh, now I remember God.
[00:17:10]  Me, now I remember.
[00:17:12]  So clearly when God remembers, it's our lingo, not God's.
[00:17:20]  God is simply acknowledging or reasserting something.
[00:17:25]  And so he sends Lot from the midst of the upheaval upon upheaving in destroying the cities in which Lot had settled.
[00:17:41]  30.
[00:17:42]  And Lot arose from Soar and he settled in the mountain, and the two daughters are with him because he was afraid to settle in Soar.
[00:17:54]  Does anybody have a theory as to why he was afraid to dwell in Soar?
[00:17:59]  I guess the most obvious couple of points that would come is, one, he might have been afraid of the people.
[00:18:06]  He does not seem to have brought good luck to Sidom.
[00:18:10]  And the word might have gotten around that this guy brings destruction with him.
[00:18:15]  And the other possibility is that he thought Soar would be destroyed.
[00:18:19]  Those are two possibilities.
[00:18:21]  The second one is the point that I was making to you, that he thought a city would be a better place to stay, but the mountains are deserted.

=== Men Come To Women (07:12) ===

[00:18:29]  So he goes to the mountains, and where he goes, actually where he goes, is to a cave.
[00:18:37]  He and his two daughters go into a cave.
[00:18:41]  This is a fascinating segment.
[00:18:43]  Those of you who have been with me from the beginning will recall that this happened to a previous survivor and children, different sex.
[00:18:52]  You will recall Noah and what happened with his children and what happened with wine.
[00:18:58]  Wine does not have a good name, apparently.
[00:19:01]  The biblical fear of what happens when you get drunk apparently goes so far back in Jewish history that it's never really stopped among committed Jews.
[00:19:13]  Judaism, interestingly, is the only religion of which I am aware that makes it a sin never to drink.
[00:19:21]  For example, in Mormonism and Islam, you are not permitted to drink wine.
[00:19:27]  In Judaism, you must drink wine.
[00:19:30]  There are times when there is an actual obligation.
[00:19:33]  You are to make kiddush on holidays and the Shabbat over wine.
[00:19:37]  You are to drink four cups of wine at the Passover Seder.
[00:19:41]  And the tradition is to drink so much on Purim that you so lose touch of reality that you can't tell the difference between Mordecai the hero and Haman the villain.
[00:19:53]  That's actually the way the tradition holds it.
[00:19:57]  So what Judaism has done with drinking is it's very, it has an attitude.
[00:20:02]  In Hebrew they say about some people, Chashdehu Vikabdehu.
[00:20:07]  Suspect him and respect him.
[00:20:10]  That's what Judaism has towards wine.
[00:20:14]  Be very suspicious of wine and respect it.
[00:20:18]  But respect it means it has its uses.
[00:20:22]  There are times when it is purposeful.
[00:20:25]  However, obviously within the Torah, it is clearly shown when it is used for non-sacramental reasons that it does not have very good effects.
[00:20:35]  Be that as it may, it's a fascinating story, and I will read it through more or less.
[00:20:42]  Another, I will read it through, but I may interrupt in the middle.
[00:20:45]  It goes to the end of chapter 19, and you will see one of the most brilliant parts of all of Genesis.
[00:20:53]  The concept of measure for measure.
[00:20:57]  The older one said to the younger, this is the daughter speaking, our father is old.
[00:21:03]  In other words, we better start moving here.
[00:21:05]  He's getting old.
[00:21:06]  He may die soon.
[00:21:08]  And there is not a man on earth to consort with us in the way of all the world.
[00:21:14]  In Hebrew, there is not a man on earth to come to us, as is the way of all the world.
[00:21:22]  In other words, in all the world, men come to women.
[00:21:26]  That's part of what is understood here.
[00:21:28]  There are a few meanings here.
[00:21:30]  One, in all of the world, men and women copulate.
[00:21:34]  Also, in all the world, men are the ones who initiate sex.
[00:21:41]  As you will see here, in what I think is unique, at least in consummating the act with Potiphar's wife, you have the attempted seduction.
[00:21:49]  It doesn't work with Joseph.
[00:21:51]  But I think you have the only time where it is the woman literally laying, as you will see, the man.
[00:22:01]  The terminology is fascinating in the Hebrew.
[00:22:04]  So, in other words, what happens on all the earth isn't happening to us.
[00:22:10]  A man isn't coming to us.
[00:22:13]  So, let's go.
[00:22:16]  Lecha, let's go or go.
[00:22:24]  It's so interesting the way it's put, let's make him, you see in English there is no word, There's no verbal form.
[00:22:35]  Let's make him drink.
[00:22:36]  Let's drink him almost.
[00:22:39]  And wine.
[00:22:41]  And we will sleep with him.
[00:22:44]  And we will make alive.
[00:22:46]  I'm trying to do literally.
[00:22:47]  You all have the figurative and more poetic translations with you, or most of you have.
[00:22:52]  And we will make life and we will make seed to live from our father.
[00:22:59]  So they gave their father to drink wine at night that night, and the older one came and she laid her father.
[00:23:11]  That is literally what the Hebrew would be.
[00:23:13]  It's not meant in a gross sense, as we have it in English, go get laid, but it literally is that.
[00:23:18]  She laid him, Vatish Kav.
[00:23:20]  She made him to lay, if you will.
[00:23:23]  So she laid her father, and he didn't know when she lied down or when she got up.
[00:23:30]  That's very intoxicated, my friends.
[00:23:33]  You have to acknowledge.
[00:23:33]  It's amazing he could do anything under those circumstances when you think about it.
[00:23:38]  But it really shows, in case women have not made peace with the fact, what men are sexually, that they don't even know what's happening and they can do it.
[00:23:49]  And, you know, they just, you know, under any circumstance.
[00:23:53]  Oh, you put his daughter on him.
[00:23:54]  He does it.
[00:23:55]  Doesn't know what happened.
[00:23:56]  It's really a remarkable story when you think of it.
[00:24:00]  And again, one of the things I love about the Torah is it's not a prudish book.
[00:24:04]  Boy, you don't know what problems the rabbis had when I was a kid in yeshiva trying to teach these sections.
[00:24:11]  Half the time they go, and let's go now to chapter 21, which is the only time I woke up.
[00:24:17]  That was it.
[00:24:18]  What?
[00:24:18]  What?
[00:24:19]  I would look at Michael Schwartz and go, what did we skip?
[00:24:22]  And that's the part that I would immediately turn to.
[00:24:25]  This was a very tough part.
[00:24:27]  I mean, this is very salty stuff.
[00:24:30]  This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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[00:25:38]  Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless.

=== Gold As A Hedge (08:57) ===

[00:25:41]  It's got incest.
[00:25:42]  It's got female rape.
[00:25:44]  I mean, this is not your, you know, this is not your typical biblical type of literature as people might think of it.
[00:25:52]  It's fascinating, though, on many levels, and I'll come to it in a moment.
[00:25:55]  Let's just finish with the story.
[00:25:57]  34, and it came to pass the next day, and the older one said to the younger one, the older daughter said to the younger daughter, hey, I slept, not slept, I lied my father, or I laid him last night.
[00:26:16]  Let's feed him wine again tonight, and you'll go and sleep with him, and we will make seed come alive from our father.
[00:26:27]  So, 35, they gave to drink that night too, wine to their father, and the younger one, the younger daughter came up, and she slept with him.
[00:26:42]  It's interesting that the language is different on what the two daughters did.
[00:26:47]  I don't know if the English is different.
[00:26:49]  Do you have a different?
[00:26:50]  It's between 33 and 35.
[00:26:53]  The younger one went and lay with him.
[00:26:55]  You see, that's the beauty of seeing the original.
[00:26:58]  here the English is the same.
[00:27:00]  The first daughter laid him, the second daughter lied with him or lay with him.
[00:27:07]  There's a difference.
[00:27:08]  Maybe she was gentler.
[00:27:09]  But it is, it's actually very different.
[00:27:12]  He's the object of the verb in the first daughter's case.
[00:27:17]  And he is the object of the preposition with in the second daughter's case.
[00:27:21]  He doesn't think it matters at all.
[00:27:22]  Well, it's just poetry, but Vatishkav is not the same as, well, oh, yes, they're both Vatishkav.
[00:27:33]  All right, so you hold that it means the same.
[00:27:35]  If it meant the same, I would assume they'd use the same language, but maybe you're right.
[00:27:39]  I'm not going to read more into it because there's no more reason to read into it.
[00:27:44]  And again, here, you notice, though, here that does use the identical language, and he didn't know in her lying down or in her getting up.
[00:27:55]  And the two daughters became pregnant.
[00:27:59]  The two daughters of Lot became pregnant from their father.
[00:28:03]  Just in case you had any doubt from whom, it makes clear from their father.
[00:28:09]  And the older daughter gave birth to a son.
[00:28:13]  His name was Moav, and he is the father of Moav up to today.
[00:28:19]  It's a concept in the Torah, meaning this exists as you read this.
[00:28:25]  Whatever time that would be, there is a people, Moav, and he is the father of Moav, which is the nation you know today.
[00:28:34]  That's how Moav came about.
[00:28:37]  Now, you might say, given that Moav had problems with Israel, that this was a way of really digging into Moav, right?
[00:28:45]  Look at your origins, Moav.
[00:28:48]  It was Lot laid by his daughter.
[00:28:53]  And the young one, she too gave birth to a son, and his name was Ben-Ami, son of my nation, literally.
[00:29:02]  And he is the father of the children of Amon until today.
[00:29:08]  This notion that maybe it is because of hostility or whatever that an ignoble beginning is given over to Moav and Amon is not true.
[00:29:20]  And here is a point that I would like to make.
[00:29:26]  How many of you think what the daughters did, and don't try to give me what you think I want the answer to.
[00:29:33]  How many do you think that what the daughters did was pretty much ignoble?
[00:29:38]  Ignoble, non-noble.
[00:29:42]  Yeah, I am.
[00:29:42]  I'm trying to put it in an understated way.
[00:29:44]  Okay, almost, just about half of you.
[00:29:47]  I understand.
[00:29:47]  Well, let me put it the other way.
[00:29:49]  How many of you think it was noble?
[00:29:53]  Well, all right, not many, and the others are in the middle, I assume, maybe five.
[00:29:57]  Why do you think it was noble?
[00:30:02]  Is that all your reason?
[00:30:03]  Anybody who voted have another reason?
[00:30:05]  They thought that they were the only people left, yes?
[00:30:12]  Yes.
[00:30:13]  I agree.
[00:30:15]  I agree.
[00:30:15]  I think it was noble.
[00:30:17]  The Jewish tradition holds that it was noble too, I will tell you.
[00:30:21]  They thought they were the only people left in the world.
[00:30:24]  God had destroyed the world once, and you had this problem.
[00:30:27]  Maybe he did it again.
[00:30:28]  They looked around them.
[00:30:29]  All was desolate.
[00:30:30]  And they had said, remember, there's no man on earth to come to us.
[00:30:34]  It proceeds.
[00:30:35]  They give the reason.
[00:30:36]  It's not, gee, wouldn't it be nice to lay our father?
[00:30:40]  That's not what they said.
[00:30:41]  They said, there is no man on earth to come to us.
[00:30:44]  More than that, they also got him drunk, which in this case is a favor.
[00:30:51]  He wouldn't have done it sober.
[00:30:56]  Which is a question now, is that noble or non-noble?
[00:30:59]  If you and your daughters are the only people left on earth, is it noble for you to say, hey, incest is bad?
[00:31:08]  Context determines acts, my friends.
[00:31:12]  If you and your daughters, you're a male and you have daughters left and you're the only ones on earth, is it a bigger mitzvah to have life and human beings go on or to say, sorry, I'm prepared to see the world end because I am not permitted to commit incest.
[00:31:30]  Yes.
[00:31:37]  Well, first of all, it doesn't say that they didn't have other kids.
[00:31:39]  The world started with incest to begin with.
[00:31:41]  I mean, there's no way around that.
[00:31:43]  I mean, theoretically.
[00:31:45]  Obviously, if you started with one couple, clearly the second couple had to commit incest.
[00:31:50]  It's either with a parent or a sibling.
[00:31:53]  So presumably you had that here.
[00:31:54]  I mean, they weren't the only people in the world left, though.
[00:31:57]  So it answers your question.
[00:32:01]  That's right.
[00:32:01]  So presumably they'd even have more kids.
[00:32:03]  They were probably very unhappy that the younger one also had a boy, for all we know.
[00:32:08]  Oh, God, now we have to go back to daddy.
[00:32:11]  You know, oh, boy, look at him.
[00:32:12]  Jesus.
[00:32:13]  Got any more wine, honey?
[00:32:16]  Yes.
[00:32:23]  You think that their motivation was for their pleasure?
[00:32:27]  You mean physical pleasure of sex?
[00:32:30]  A drunk father?
[00:32:33]  There certainly was no foreplay.
[00:32:35]  He says that it was for their own pleasure to have their own children rather than procreate to the world.
[00:32:39]  Normally, you know, I don't take breaks in the middle, but I know that my argument that what they did is noble goes against what you're most thinking, so I'm handling a few questions.
[00:32:47]  My answer to you is again clear.
[00:32:49]  Their words, and we can only use the text that we've given, not reading into it.
[00:32:53]  They did not say so that we can have a child.
[00:32:56]  They said so that we can create, so that we can make life from his seed.
[00:33:02]  It was a very macro, as it were, ideal.
[00:33:06]  Not, hey, boy, I really want a kid.
[00:33:09]  No, it was.
[00:33:10]  We have to make life here, and there's no man to make life with us.
[00:33:14]  Now, by the way, there is another argument.
[00:33:21]  I'm thinking, are they, do they truly believe that they are the only ones left in the world or that there is no man who's going to simply come to them, but there are men elsewhere?
[00:33:32]  In other words, is it really a belief that they are the last ones?
[00:33:36]  And again, I have to think, given their language that there's no man on earth to come to us and us the last women on earth, mother died, I think that, again, it is this noble idea.
[00:33:48]  Let me take one or two more because I do want to move on, yeah?
[00:33:51]  Two parts of this.
[00:33:52]  Are they thinking that they're being fruitful, you know, and multiplying, and they are doing their part in that commandment?
[00:33:59]  Yes, they are thinking.
[00:34:02]  No, no, no, no.
[00:34:03]  I think that it's not merely that they are following...
[00:34:06]  No, no, you can't follow the mitzvah of be fruitful and multiply through incest.
[00:34:11]  The ban on incest is greater than the mitzvah to be fruitful and multiply.
[00:34:17]  But that they think that if they don't, it's the end of the human race.
[00:34:22]  No, because one is me being fruitful and multiplying.
[00:34:27]  The other is me keeping the world alive.
[00:34:29]  There's a big difference.
[00:34:33]  This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

=== Incest Versus Multiplying (06:17) ===

[00:34:39]  Gold and silver recently soared to record highs, then pulled back.
[00:34:44]  So are precious metals still a goodbye?
[00:34:46]  Many Wall Street experts predict higher prices ahead.
[00:34:49]  Why?
[00:34:50]  Because we still have trillions in national debt, a declining dollar, and inflation that keeps shrinking our savings.
[00:34:56]  Even with corrections along the way, gold remains a historical hedge for wealth protection.
[00:35:00]  That's why Morgan Stanley's chief investment officer ditched the 60-40 stock and bonds portfolio and recommended up to 20% in precious metals.
[00:35:09]  They're getting educated, and you should too.
[00:35:11]  Call Lear Capital at 800-992-2255 for your free gold investment kit and learn how you could qualify for up to $20,000 in bonus gold.
[00:35:23]  Lear Capital has over $3 billion in transactions and thousands of five-star reviews.
[00:35:28]  Call 800-992-2255.
[00:35:32]  That's 800-992-2255 or visit LearAlex.com.
[00:35:41]  Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
[00:35:47]  I think that he would, I don't think that he would have done it.
[00:35:50]  There's a point that I want to make about Lot, and then I'll take the last one.
[00:35:53]  I'll be with you later.
[00:35:54]  Yes?
[00:35:56]  Yes.
[00:35:57]  It is presumed this is one of the seven laws of the children of Noah.
[00:36:02]  Here is what I want to tell you about Lot.
[00:36:04]  Lot, just like Noah, is staggeringly passive.
[00:36:12]  Everything happens to Lot.
[00:36:13]  Remember, I went through the routine with you, and they picked him up and they set him down.
[00:36:18]  Remember the angels?
[00:36:19]  And they took him out.
[00:36:20]  They told him to leave.
[00:36:21]  They told him where to go.
[00:36:22]  They told him to move.
[00:36:23]  They picked him up.
[00:36:24]  They set him down.
[00:36:25]  He does nothing.
[00:36:26]  He does nothing here, too.
[00:36:29]  He gets laid.
[00:36:30]  He is actually, he, his daughters make sex on him.
[00:36:35]  And he doesn't even know it happened.
[00:36:38]  This is a giant Lot, a real giant.
[00:36:41]  That's what I, that's very important that you realize this Lot is in some ways representative of very many people.
[00:36:50]  He's not the evil of the people of Sudome.
[00:36:54]  But he's not great either.
[00:36:58]  He doesn't do anything much.
[00:37:01]  He's there.
[00:37:02]  Lot is there.
[00:37:03]  At least his wife dallied.
[00:37:05]  She did something in a sense.
[00:37:09]  But he does nothing even in this regard.
[00:37:14]  He's really one of the most developed, non-important characters in the Torah when you think about it, right?
[00:37:20]  There's a lot about him.
[00:37:23]  There's more about him in some ways than about Isaac, the second of the patriarchs, who is a real enigma.
[00:37:29]  What is Isaac's greatness?
[00:37:31]  It's one of the biggest enigmas in the Torah, which we'll obviously come to later.
[00:37:35]  But anyway, Lot is just a very passive creature whom everything is done to him.
[00:37:43]  Okay, the other thing that I wanted to tell you about was the measure for measure idea.
[00:37:52]  Remember, he had offered his daughters to the men of Sodom.
[00:37:57]  Isn't that fascinating?
[00:37:59]  He had offered his daughters to the men of Sudom, and he ends up sleeping with them.
[00:38:07]  It's really, it's extraordinary.
[00:38:10]  I mean, you know, this is what happened to him.
[00:38:13]  I mean, such a reverse of what you would have expected.
[00:38:19]  And this is a theme that as we live through Genesis will be the one overwhelmingly most recurring theme.
[00:38:28]  That things come back to you.
[00:38:31]  That what you do to X will be done to you.
[00:38:34]  It's not karma, but it is, and it is generally true in life that in some ways what we do comes back to us.
[00:38:44]  It doesn't in the case of unbelievable horror or unbelievable good.
[00:38:50]  Okay?
[00:38:51]  Generally, it doesn't.
[00:38:53]  We're talking about normal people and their effect on them.
[00:38:56]  I mean, obviously, Dr. Mengele, who committed heinous experiments on unanesthetized human beings as if they were rats, did not have that happen to him.
[00:39:09]  But we are not Dr. Mengele's, nor are we Raul Wallenberg's.
[00:39:15]  We are in that vast category of middle, which goes from, you know, pretty bad to pretty good, but not the giants of evil or of good.
[00:39:25]  And most of the time, that is the way Torah sees the Torah sees life happening.
[00:39:31]  That somehow or other, what you put out does seem to come back to you.
[00:39:35]  If you lie, you'll be lied to.
[00:39:38]  That certainly happens later with Jacob, as you will see, as you probably know anyway.
[00:39:43]  It's fascinating how it works there.
[00:39:45]  And it worked here.
[00:39:47]  These are the daughters he offered, and look at what happens.
[00:39:52]  Anyway, that is the theme that ends chapter 19.
[00:40:00]  It's a fascinating story, and it mirrors the one with Noah and his sons when he was drunk, though it's not clear there what exactly happened, if you recall.
[00:40:09]  I've got to hold you.
[00:40:09]  Please write it down.
[00:40:10]  I will take it.
[00:40:11]  I want to develop one final theme before I go to chapter 20 that I have been talking about just briefly in the last two sessions.
[00:40:25]  One of the most important themes here is treatment of the stranger, is love of the stranger.
[00:40:35]  The real greatness of Abraham and the real sin of Saddome is what?
[00:40:43]  How do you know Abraham is a great person?
[00:40:46]  We have met one episode of true greatness for Abraham, correct?
[00:40:52]  What was it?
[00:40:53]  His pleading on behalf of Saddome, correct?

=== Loving The Stranger (08:18) ===

[00:40:57]  Sadome is composed of people who are utterly different from him.
[00:41:03]  In other words, he reveals his deep love of strangers.
[00:41:09]  What is the ultimate sin of Sadome?
[00:41:13]  The Sodomites didn't apparently kill each other.
[00:41:17]  They killed any stranger who came.
[00:41:20]  Bring us the strangers who came to you last night, they tell Lot.
[00:41:25]  And I'm telling you, and this is a theme that is truly new in my own understanding of both life and of the Torah.
[00:41:34]  The concept of being able to love the other, the different, is the single most important moral theme in life.
[00:41:44]  The Japanese in World War II were known for good treatment of fellow Japanese.
[00:41:52]  They would die for fellow Japanese.
[00:41:54]  They would sacrifice themselves for the emperor, right, as in kamikaze flights.
[00:42:00]  Their treatment, however, of the stranger, forget Westerners, Asians, the rape of China, what they did in China.
[00:42:09]  You now know, it is now finally acknowledged by the Japanese government what the Japanese did to Koreans, where they took tens and tens of thousands of Korean women as forced prostitutes for the Japanese army, as if they were serviceable like toilets.
[00:42:25]  That's how they were treated.
[00:42:26]  Tens of thousands by 10, 15 Japanese soldiers a day, just used.
[00:42:33]  It's the Asians, by the way, who fear the Japanese the most.
[00:42:36]  My point is not anti-Japanese.
[00:42:39]  My point is to give you an example of a particularly cohesive, homogeneous society that Japan didn't have interaction with non-Japanese till the 19th century, to the best of our knowledge.
[00:42:52]  It was an enclosed, hermetically sealed island.
[00:42:57]  Where did civilization that affected the world come from?
[00:43:01]  The Middle East.
[00:43:03]  The Middle East is the place where people most met strangers.
[00:43:08]  Because of economic roots and because of the geographical location, the Middle East, the birthplace of Judaism, is the place where people most met strangers.
[00:43:19]  It is not coincidental.
[00:43:21]  It is not coincidental that the United States of America became the most important country of the 20th century, became the cultural beacon, and I say that both for bad and good.
[00:43:32]  It's true.
[00:43:32]  It's just as true for garbage movies as it is for the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
[00:43:39]  But the United States of America is the country that is most filled with strangers.
[00:43:46]  It has become a political cliché to say that diversity is America's strength.
[00:43:53]  But it happens to be true.
[00:43:56]  It comes with vast problems.
[00:43:59]  We're all aware of that.
[00:44:02]  But the problems derive from the fact that it's difficult to love the other, to love the different.
[00:44:10]  It is extraordinary that it is one of the biggest laws of the Torah, repeated, actually repeated in the Torah, not stated once.
[00:44:22]  You will love the stranger.
[00:44:23]  You know what it is.
[00:44:24]  You were a stranger in the land of Egypt.
[00:44:29]  Abraham loves strangers.
[00:44:31]  The people who show up in the middle of the day in the desert are strangers, and look at what he does for them.
[00:44:37]  The people of Sidome and Gomorrah are strangers, and look at what he does for them.
[00:44:42]  Look, on the other hand, how Sidome people treat strangers.
[00:44:47]  They are the quintessence of evil.
[00:44:50]  There is no hint that Sodomites hurt each other.
[00:44:53]  Isn't that interesting?
[00:44:55]  Right?
[00:44:57]  It would have undermined in some ways my theory if the sin of Sidom was they all hurt each other all the time.
[00:45:04]  It doesn't speak of that.
[00:45:05]  The example it gives is the way they treat the non-Sodomite.
[00:45:11]  This is the trick in life, the ultimate difficulty, to go beyond the family.
[00:45:16]  I've talked to you about this book by Lawrence Harrison, this American, he's been both a professor at Harvard and most of his life in U.S. Diplomatic Corps in U.S. aid.
[00:45:27]  And he wrote this book, Whose Values, and he taught me, I mean, thanks to interviewing on my radio show, I learned about this.
[00:45:34]  He calls familism.
[00:45:35]  I told you about it, right?
[00:45:38]  They didn't?
[00:45:39]  Oh, God.
[00:45:40]  Then that's great.
[00:45:42]  You're in for a terrific notion.
[00:45:44]  And how it's so beautiful.
[00:45:46]  I love when some ideas, you know, it's like you learn a new word, and all of a sudden you see it all over the place.
[00:45:51]  This new concept of loving the stranger comes into my life, and then all of a sudden things start falling in.
[00:45:56]  This guy, Lawrence Harrison, asks a question in a book called, I think it's called Whose Values.
[00:46:03]  Is that?
[00:46:04]  Oh, darn, what's the name?
[00:46:06]  I actually have it in my, huh?
[00:46:08]  Who prospers?
[00:46:09]  Thank you very much.
[00:46:10]  Thank you.
[00:46:10]  Who prospers?
[00:46:12]  And his question is very simple.
[00:46:15]  Why do some ethnic national groups, cultures prosper, and others don't?
[00:46:20]  It's a very good question, I think.
[00:46:22]  Why did North America prosper and South America didn't?
[00:46:25]  As a sample question.
[00:46:27]  Okay, why did Protestant Europe prosper more than Catholic Europe?
[00:46:31]  And so on and so forth.
[00:46:32]  And he has many answers, but one of them is germane to our situation.
[00:46:37]  He said, in the civilizations that don't prosper, you have what is traditional throughout the world, and he calls it familism, where you only believe in your family.
[00:46:49]  The only people you ultimately can trust are your family members, even extended family, brothers-in-law, and so on, but still your family.
[00:46:57]  Those civilizations never progressed.
[00:47:02]  The civilizations rooted in the belief that you trust people on the basis of their achievement and their values, not being family members, are the ones that prospered.
[00:47:12]  And he said there were two, Jewish and Protestant.
[00:47:17]  Fascinating.
[00:47:18]  And it's understandable.
[00:47:21]  He said, in South America, it was, and he shows the description from Brazilian anthropologists and so on.
[00:47:28]  He shows that that was it.
[00:47:29]  That is where the kinship, if there's no kinship, there's no trust.
[00:47:34]  And the same happened elsewhere.
[00:47:37]  But in Protestant and Jewish society, the issue was, what did the person achieve?
[00:47:43]  Not is the person a family member.
[00:47:46]  I mean, you know, it's almost a joke.
[00:47:47]  Well, do you trust your brother-in-law?
[00:47:49]  In our society, it's a joke, right?
[00:47:51]  You tell brother-in-law jokes.
[00:47:52]  Oh, he's coming for another loan.
[00:47:54]  You hear that in ads.
[00:47:55]  In South America, you'd never have such an ad about the brother-in-law.
[00:47:59]  The brother-in-law is exactly who you trusted because he now joined the Klan.
[00:48:03]  This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
[00:48:10]  Gold and silver recently soared to record highs, then pulled back.
[00:48:14]  So are precious metals still a good buy?
[00:48:17]  Many Wall Street experts predict higher prices ahead.
[00:48:20]  Why?
[00:48:21]  Because we still have trillions in national debt, a declining dollar, and inflation that keeps shrinking our savings.
[00:48:26]  Even with corrections along the way, gold remains a historical hedge for wealth protection.
[00:48:31]  That's why Morgan Stanley's chief investment officer ditched the 60-40 stock and bonds portfolio and recommended up to 20% in precious metals.
[00:48:40]  They're getting educated, and you should too.
[00:48:42]  Call Lear Capital at 800-992-2255 for your free gold investment kit and learn how you could qualify for up to $20,000 in bonus gold.
[00:48:53]  Lear Capital has over $3 billion in transactions and thousands of five-star reviews.
[00:48:59]  Call 800-992-2255.
[00:49:03]  That's 800-992-2255 or visit LearAlex.com.
[00:49:11]  Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.

=== Investing In Precious Metals (13:55) ===

[00:49:16]  The idea that you transcended family trust out into the world is what makes progress possible.
[00:49:23]  I go further.
[00:49:24]  It is what makes civilization possible.
[00:49:27]  Nothing grows without meeting the different.
[00:49:31]  When it went into the diaspora, it's a painful statement from within Judaism because it's considered a tragedy, the destruction of the first Jewish state and the temple and so on in Jewish history.
[00:49:45]  But the fact is, we have two Talmuds in Judaism.
[00:49:48]  Two.
[00:49:49]  The Talmud is the most important thing in Judaism after the Torah.
[00:49:53]  We have a Jerusalem Talmud and a Babylonian Talmud.
[00:49:56]  We only use one, the Babylonian.
[00:49:59]  Isn't that fascinating?
[00:50:01]  The Talmud written by the rabbis, written by the Jews in intercourse with non-Jews, is the Talmud we use, not the one written in the more or less ethnocentric or homogeneous Israel.
[00:50:20]  Culture progresses from meeting different people.
[00:50:26]  It's painful, but my friends, it's painful to grow.
[00:50:30]  Growth is painful individually and in civilization.
[00:50:33]  United States of America today is undergoing growth pains of the first multiracial democracy in the history of humanity.
[00:50:44]  That is the way we can look at it.
[00:50:47]  It's too painful because we see what's going on in the middle.
[00:50:51]  The Afrocentric movement is like the last gasp of those who don't want to relate to the stranger in the black world, like white supremacy was for the white people.
[00:51:04]  Ironically, in this regard, whites have made more peace after their evils of slavery and segregation.
[00:51:11]  Whites have said, okay, you know what?
[00:51:13]  It is a multiracial world, and that's the way it ought to be.
[00:51:17]  Now others have to acknowledge that.
[00:51:21]  And you're having deep, deep anxiety about that.
[00:51:25]  At Duke University, black students are creating a black center only for blacks.
[00:51:31]  This will last, I predict, one generation.
[00:51:35]  It is a last trust the family only gasp within segments of the black community, just as you had that within the white community, and you'll have that, and you have that in the Jewish community.
[00:51:47]  My God, I remember I was raised, vote for Jews.
[00:51:51]  I remember that.
[00:51:52]  In New York, it didn't matter.
[00:51:54]  What?
[00:51:55]  Party was irrelevant.
[00:51:56]  It was a Jewish name.
[00:51:57]  You checked it off.
[00:51:59]  Jews today laugh at that.
[00:52:01]  Three out of the four candidates for Senate in this state in 1992 were Jews, and the amount that it meant to Jews was virtually zero.
[00:52:13]  By and large, the average Jew couldn't care less if it had been Christensen or Boxer or Herschensen or Feinstein.
[00:52:23]  It didn't matter.
[00:52:25]  It mattered, I'll bet, to many perhaps in the older generations for whom Jewish names meant a lot.
[00:52:29]  By and large, though, in Jewish life, it didn't mean anything.
[00:52:32]  What did they stand for was the question.
[00:52:34]  It will get that way.
[00:52:36]  The newly enfranchised groups, women blacks, some of them, not all, still think in the ways that my parents' generation used to think, vote Jewish.
[00:52:47]  Year of the woman.
[00:52:48]  I asked on the radio, why don't they be more accurate?
[00:52:51]  They should call it the year of the Jew.
[00:52:55]  If three out of four senatorial candidates are Jews, then it's much more accurate to call it the year of the Jew.
[00:53:01]  But you laughed.
[00:53:03]  It's laughable.
[00:53:04]  Who cares?
[00:53:05]  But because women are newly enfranchised, they're still in that category, not all, those women who buy into this, of trust your own.
[00:53:14]  It's still familism.
[00:53:15]  I want a woman because she's a woman.
[00:53:17]  I want a black because he's a black.
[00:53:18]  I want a Hispanic because he's a Hispanic.
[00:53:20]  It's what happened to Solars, why he lost a distinguished congressman in Brooklyn.
[00:53:25]  There were Hispanics who said, how do you have the chutzpah?
[00:53:28]  I don't know what the Spanish word for chutzpah is.
[00:53:31]  How do you have the chutzpah to run a Jew running in a Hispanic district?
[00:53:35]  This will last a generation for Hispanics.
[00:53:38]  Then the next group to come in will have their provincialism.
[00:53:43]  And that's the way it works.
[00:53:44]  The Torah wants you to deprovincialize, to learn to love the other.
[00:53:51]  It's the most important thing we could learn on the face of this earth.
[00:53:55]  It's important to keep your family, and this is one of the final points here.
[00:53:59]  There is a fine tension here that I wish to address.
[00:54:03]  There are Jews, for example, who not only bought the line that you should rise above your birth and your family, they actually bought a hook line and sinker and said, family and group mean nothing.
[00:54:19]  That's wrong too.
[00:54:21]  The Torah's ideal is not that you don't belong to a family or that you don't belong to a group.
[00:54:28]  You should belong to a family and you should have an ethnic, national, religious identity.
[00:54:35]  Judaism is not against particularism.
[00:54:38]  It is against the particular that destroys the universal.
[00:54:42]  But a universal that destroys the particular is also not healthy.
[00:54:46]  You are not only a human being.
[00:54:49]  You are a man or a woman.
[00:54:51]  You are a member of your family or a different family.
[00:54:55]  You are a Jew or a Christian or an American or a Dutchman or whatever.
[00:54:59]  That's important.
[00:55:00]  You should have many identities.
[00:55:02]  That is healthy.
[00:55:04]  It is not good to say, as some do, I am only a human being.
[00:55:08]  And some go even beyond that.
[00:55:10]  I am a living species.
[00:55:12]  I'll never forget, I did this with college kids when I ran a college-age program years ago for many summers.
[00:55:19]  And the first night, it was at a Jewish institute.
[00:55:23]  So one of the first nights of the month for the first years, I did, I never liked playing these games, but this one I found interesting.
[00:55:32]  I said, listen, please go into a corner of the room if you feel that your first identity is.
[00:55:38]  Go into that corner if it's male or female, and to that if it's American, that it's Jewish, that if it's human.
[00:55:45]  Okay?
[00:55:46]  And so they divvied up into four corners, more or less.
[00:55:49]  But the very first year, the kids from Santa Cruz, needless to say, immediately said, wait a minute, where is the corner for all living beings?
[00:56:02]  And of course, I was a newcomer from the East, and I felt that I had entered the Twilight Zone.
[00:56:10]  All living beings?
[00:56:11]  What do you mean?
[00:56:11]  You feel closer to zebras?
[00:56:13]  I don't understand.
[00:56:14]  What are you talking about?
[00:56:15]  So that's right.
[00:56:16]  My first identity is as a living being with other living beings.
[00:56:19]  So how to make a pentagon rather than a square?
[00:56:22]  Okay?
[00:56:23]  Fifth corner, all living beings.
[00:56:25]  And I see this whole group rush into this corner that I had no idea would exist.
[00:56:30]  All living beings.
[00:56:33]  That's not healthy.
[00:56:34]  Your first identity is with bacteria is not a good sign.
[00:56:38]  Okay?
[00:56:40]  Now, so you have to understand, there is a tension here, a critical tension between the particular and the universal.
[00:56:49]  You shouldn't only have a human identity, but you shouldn't only have your provincial identity.
[00:56:55]  You need both.
[00:56:57]  You are first a human being.
[00:56:59]  Of course that's true.
[00:57:01]  But that's not all you are.
[00:57:03]  You have to have other things too.
[00:57:05]  It's like saying, first I'm a musician.
[00:57:07]  Well, that doesn't mean a thing.
[00:57:09]  That's true.
[00:57:09]  But what instrument do you play?
[00:57:12]  And the orchestral analogy or metaphor is perfect.
[00:57:16]  You must blend in the orchestra of humanity or humanity can't make music.
[00:57:21]  But you can't play every instrument.
[00:57:23]  You have to specialize on yours.
[00:57:26]  Is it Jewish?
[00:57:27]  Is it Christian?
[00:57:28]  Is it Muslim?
[00:57:29]  Is it Buddhist?
[00:57:30]  Is it French?
[00:57:31]  Is it American?
[00:57:32]  Is it Uruguayan?
[00:57:33]  Those are instruments you play in the orchestra of humanity.
[00:57:37]  I don't wax poetic, so I don't think of this as poetry.
[00:57:40]  I think of it as a literal metaphor for how we should approach life.
[00:57:47]  But here, what is being undermined is the notion of sticking with your own only.
[00:57:54]  What?
[00:57:55]  Again, remember the story with Avraham, with Abraham, when he went into Egypt and he had tells Sarah, tell them you're my sister.
[00:58:03]  Tell them I'm your brother?
[00:58:06]  Because they'll see me, they'll kill me, and they'll take you.
[00:58:08]  Right?
[00:58:09]  Remember that?
[00:58:10]  And we're going to come to it again, by the way, in another place called Girar right now.
[00:58:16]  What is the story all about?
[00:58:19]  Treatment of the foreigner.
[00:58:22]  Abraham is a foreigner.
[00:58:24]  They'll kill me.
[00:58:26]  I'm of no worth.
[00:58:28]  Every story, in effect, all the moral stories are about the foreigner, the stranger, and treating the person.
[00:58:37]  I have one more point to make in this regard, which is, in our time, understandably controversial.
[00:58:43]  I certainly don't mean it to be so.
[00:58:46]  I deeply believe that the ban in the Torah, which is very early, against incest and homosexuality, is part and parcel of the desire to learn to love the other.
[00:58:59]  In incest, you are loving your family again.
[00:59:03]  Not good.
[00:59:05]  You must love from outside your family.
[00:59:08]  You have to learn to love a stranger.
[00:59:11]  In effect, it's easy to love your sister or your brother.
[00:59:15]  It's too easy.
[00:59:17]  And it would argue it's too easy to love the same sex.
[00:59:20]  You must love to learn the opposite sex.
[00:59:24]  That will cause you to grow, just as marrying outside your family will cause you to grow, as will being able to relate to the stranger will cause you to grow.
[00:59:35]  The argument that some are born homosexual may or may not be true and is irrelevant to the point.
[00:59:41]  That some people may not be capable of an ideal doesn't make the ideal unworthy of being pursued.
[00:59:47]  I've always found that argument to be a non-sequitur.
[00:59:50]  Well, homosexuals are born that way.
[00:59:53]  That may or may not be so, but it's not the point.
[00:59:56]  There are people born in all sorts of ways.
[00:59:58]  You don't drop an ideal because some people are inherently incapable of living it.
[01:00:03]  You don't condemn them for it, but you don't hold that the ideal is no longer worth pursuing.
[01:00:10]  And by the way, it's interesting.
[01:00:12]  I was just, I was talking to a young woman who was a part-time actress, which is most people in Southern California.
[01:00:22]  And she was telling me about how it's almost among many of her friends, it's like it's expected that you will have homosexual relationships.
[01:00:36]  It's in many quarters to be gay.
[01:00:40]  And that it becomes, she says, for a lot, very, very comfortable.
[01:00:45]  It's very tough to get along with the opposite sex.
[01:00:50]  The battle between the sexes is age-old, and it will be age-old.
[01:00:54]  It is not easy.
[01:00:55]  It's easier to get along with your own.
[01:00:58]  There's a common myth that men really don't know how to make friends with men.
[01:01:02]  Women are really great at making friends with women.
[01:01:04]  It is one of the biggest myths that I am aware of in life.
[01:01:09]  I actually have found more, at least in my generation, more men friends with men than I have found women friends have had women friends.
[01:01:18]  And I know a lot of women who like men friends in some ways.
[01:01:22]  It's an interesting, it's very easy to get along with your own sex.
[01:01:28]  Not all of them in one room for a long time.
[01:01:32]  That's often difficult.
[01:01:34]  But it is easy.
[01:01:35]  The guy's night out is very, the guy can enact all he wants.
[01:01:38]  We can be as primitive as we want.
[01:01:40]  And we are primitive.
[01:01:41]  Raise a boy, and you'll see.
[01:01:43]  Every woman should have the opportunity to raise a boy.
[01:01:46]  It would immediately raise her husband in her eyes immeasurably.
[01:01:51]  You started like this?
[01:01:53]  You're a giant.
[01:01:55]  You are the greatest.
[01:01:56]  It's incredible.
[01:01:58]  I mean, my wife is absolutely befuddled by our son's behavior.
[01:02:07]  To a woman, it is revelatory.
[01:02:09]  They're pigs.
[01:02:10]  They are natural pigs.
[01:02:14]  And we have to be civilized.
[01:02:17]  And when we are with other men, we don't have to be.
[01:02:21]  Not that women are all that pure, don't get me wrong either, because I have a daughter in the house and the room looked very similar to Sidome on a good day.
[01:02:29]  I know that too.
[01:02:31]  But she did.
[01:02:32]  She grew out of it quite naturally.
[01:02:35]  It was not, you know, there's just like a magic age with most girls where all of a sudden she didn't want the room to look like a stable.
[01:02:44]  It just didn't correspond to her inner nature.
[01:02:48]  At any rate, this need to learn to love the other, and that that's what makes you grow, is everything.
[01:02:57]  By the way, I'll just give you one religious, I keep saying final point, but it's so important.
[01:03:02]  Every session is one point I like to make in greater depth.
[01:03:06]  I want to give you a religious example of this that I have found in life.

=== Learning To Love Others (15:06) ===

[01:03:11]  I have found that overwhelmingly, with virtually no exceptions, the best religious people I have ever met have been religious people who have been forced to confront other religious people and irreligious people.
[01:03:30]  The most intolerant, the most closed-minded of religious people have been those who were able to live solely with others identical to themselves.
[01:03:44]  I have found this true with Jews.
[01:03:45]  I have found it true with Christians.
[01:03:47]  I have found this true with Muslims.
[01:03:51]  You speak to Muslims in Iran, where they're all Muslim, and you speak to Muslims in Los Angeles, you have met very different people.
[01:04:01]  You speak to Jews in Borough Park, Orthodox Jews in Borough Park, and Orthodox Jews in Memphis.
[01:04:12]  And it's very different, very different, because the Orthodox Jew in Borough Park can live his whole life solely with other Orthodox Jews.
[01:04:21]  Borough Park, Brooklyn.
[01:04:23]  The Orthodox Jew in the South or in any smaller city around America or Australia or wherever it is must interact with others.
[01:04:32]  Non-Jews, non-religious Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, and it has an incredible difference in the way they conduct themselves.
[01:04:45]  The best people are those who, in my opinion, are those who retain their identity while immersing themselves with others.
[01:04:55]  It's no trick to lose your identity.
[01:04:58]  For a Jew to assimilate, for example, is no trick.
[01:05:02]  That's easy.
[01:05:03]  But then he's no longer a Jew.
[01:05:07]  The task in life is to be who you are and yet immerse yourself with others as well.
[01:05:15]  That's why I often say to Jewish groups when I lecture, Jews don't know how to deal with nice non-Jews.
[01:05:21]  It is a dilemma that Jewish life does not know how to deal with.
[01:05:25]  They know how to deal with anti-Semites because they've been used to it for thousands of years.
[01:05:29]  But when non-Jews are nice, Jews are highly confused.
[01:05:32]  And as I say, there are basically two Jewish reactions to nice non-Jews.
[01:05:37]  The Orthodox and the non-Orthodox.
[01:05:39]  The Orthodox reaction is avoid them.
[01:05:43]  The non-Orthodox reaction is, marry them.
[01:05:52]  Jews don't know how to deal with nice non-Jews.
[01:05:54]  They don't know how to stay Jewish and deal with the non-Jewish world.
[01:05:59]  So they either leave it or assimilate into it.
[01:06:03]  The trick is to be who you are and yet deal with the stranger.
[01:06:07]  Then you truly grow.
[01:06:09]  That's the ultimate growth.
[01:06:11]  Abraham stayed a Jew.
[01:06:13]  Abraham stayed with his covenant with God.
[01:06:16]  But he cared about miserable Sodomites.
[01:06:22]  That's his greatness.
[01:06:24]  And that's the whole theme.
[01:06:28]  By the way, who takes the Jews out of Egypt?
[01:06:31]  Well, who's the Jew?
[01:06:33]  Where was Moses raised?
[01:06:36]  It took a Jew who could deal with Egyptians to take the Jews out of Egypt.
[01:06:41]  By the way, it's not uncommon.
[01:06:42]  This is true in a lot of places.
[01:06:44]  Napoleon wasn't born in France.
[01:06:47]  Muhammad Ali, the great Egyptian leader, was not born in Egypt, born in Albania.
[01:06:53]  It's very common for some truly magnificent leaders to have been from outside and yet retained the identity of the inside.
[01:07:06]  And that's what our task in life is.
[01:07:08]  It's true for everyone.
[01:07:09]  It's true for Christians.
[01:07:10]  It's true for Muslims, for Jews.
[01:07:13]  It's easy to stay with the gang.
[01:07:16]  It's easy to stay with the sex.
[01:07:18]  It's easy to stay with the family.
[01:07:21]  That's why what is the first thing God says to Abraham?
[01:07:24]  What's the first thing he says?
[01:07:27]  Get up and leave.
[01:07:31]  Leave your home, your family, your land.
[01:07:36]  But don't leave me.
[01:07:39]  You must retain your values.
[01:07:41]  You must retain your identity, but you have to leave and become worldly.
[01:07:47]  That's our task, is to become worldly and stay who we are.
[01:07:51]  That's what all of this is about.
[01:07:54]  And it's just overwhelmingly powerful when it's read that way.
[01:07:59]  Okay, any questions on this before we go to chapter 21?
[01:08:04]  Yes?
[01:08:05]  Thought that maybe that would work?
[01:08:07]  It was a delaying tactic.
[01:08:09]  I mean, it makes sense.
[01:08:11]  I mean, if somebody, it's almost like a robber comes to your house, wants gold, and you know that there's gold hidden, you might say, look, take all the silver.
[01:08:21]  I mean, it's just that it's a natural reaction.
[01:08:22]  Well, take something.
[01:08:24]  In other words, I won't deprive you of the men, but here, take the women.
[01:08:28]  I mean, it obviously didn't work, but I think it's a natural human reaction to offer a compensation to a mugger.
[01:08:35]  I mean, those were muggers at the door, and he just didn't shudder at them.
[01:08:38]  He said, hey, wait a minute.
[01:08:39]  Don't think I'm going to deprive you guys.
[01:08:42]  Yes?
[01:08:43]  For the things that the lawyers were all in great ways once ago, and the Marathonite, and somehow wanted to justify the office.
[01:08:56]  I have a feeling that if they were impregnated prior to the father, the last thing they would want to do is say, you know, it really came from dad.
[01:09:06]  Because even to them, I am sure, incest was less noble than extramarital sex.
[01:09:13]  I mean, remember, those are the two possibilities.
[01:09:15]  Premarital sex from Sodom versus incest with their father.
[01:09:20]  But somehow, just like the television, Abraham, the other child was Abraham.
[01:09:34]  I'm wondering if somehow it was that act to change the nature of the child already within them.
[01:09:42]  Yeah, that's reading too much into it.
[01:09:44]  I'm a big believer in just sticking to the text.
[01:09:46]  Let me take just one more.
[01:09:47]  I'm sorry.
[01:09:48]  And then, yeah.
[01:09:48]  Do we have any sense of the time from the time that a town was destroyed over the time that they decided to do the same thing?
[01:10:00]  No, we don't.
[01:10:02]  We don't.
[01:10:02]  The time is not listed.
[01:10:04]  It's just clear that they had already lived in this little city of Soar, left it, and gone to this cave.
[01:10:10]  But the amount of time we don't know.
[01:10:13]  What I'm trying to get at is something that we have is saying it could be other models aside from the role and like what?
[01:10:23]  Well, you know, just trying to have sex versus mind that has to be aware of.
[01:10:28]  Okay.
[01:10:29]  I am not a woman, but I claim some degree of knowledge being married to one.
[01:10:36]  So it most women would not enjoy an act of sex with a man who didn't know he was having sex and moreover was their father.
[01:10:47]  Okay?
[01:10:48]  This is a really raunchy woman you're describing and we have no basis for holding that that's what they were.
[01:10:56]  I believe that what it says is what is intended.
[01:11:02]  They thought the world would end and they wanted to populate it.
[01:11:07]  Let's go to chapter 20.
[01:11:10]  Abraham journeyed from there to the region of the Negev, settled between Kadesh and Shur, and he settled in Gerar.
[01:11:18]  And here we go again.
[01:11:21]  And Abraham said to Sarah his wife, or of Sarah his wife, as they're translating it here, this is my sister.
[01:11:34]  And Avimelech sent, Avimech the Melech, Avimelech, the king of Gerar, sent and took Sarah.
[01:11:44]  In other words, he sent men to kidnap her, in effect.
[01:11:47]  Now remember that.
[01:11:48]  That's very important, because you're likely to focus on the fact that he wanted to have sex with her when in fact the issue here is really going to be one of his taking a woman, of his just, of his, in effect, kidnapping.
[01:12:05]  God came to Avimelech in a dream of the night.
[01:12:12]  Why didn't it just say in a dream?
[01:12:14]  This is more removed.
[01:12:17]  God appears to people in very many different guises.
[01:12:22]  Moses is the only one where it was direct.
[01:12:25]  Don't ask me what that means because I haven't had the experience.
[01:12:28]  But it's the only one that was direct.
[01:12:30]  In all others, it's vision.
[01:12:32]  But yet even more removed than vision is in a dream at night.
[01:12:35]  That's why it says a dream at night.
[01:12:37]  And he says to him, you're going to die because of this woman who you took.
[01:12:42]  She's married to a man.
[01:12:45]  Okay, this statement by God implies that Avimelech would have slept with her.
[01:13:02]  Correct?
[01:13:04]  You've taken a woman, and I want you to know that she is married to a man.
[01:13:09]  She is, what does it say?
[01:13:10]  Yeah, she's a married woman.
[01:13:11]  Okay, right?
[01:13:13]  Well, question number one, do you know how old Sarah is at this point?
[01:13:18]  90.
[01:13:21]  Now, that's quite a woman, you've got to admit.
[01:13:28]  The Jewish sources grappled with this.
[01:13:31]  It's not every day that men are kidnapping 90-year-old women to sleep with them, especially kings who can have anybody.
[01:13:40]  So some of the rabbis in the tradition held this, this teaches you how beautiful she was.
[01:13:49]  Okay.
[01:13:53]  It's possible, well, she gave birth recently, or is about to give birth, which is it, did she give birth?
[01:14:00]  Oh, she didn't give birth yet.
[01:14:02]  She is about to give birth.
[01:14:03]  It's announced.
[01:14:06]  And so she really got A revivified look, apparently.
[01:14:16]  I have to believe that unless we go into legend that she was of extraordinary beauty and a man who could have any woman in the kingdom, which is what kings could have in those days, to take a 90-year-old woman, the odds are it was not so much the sex, although it was going to be sex, but that it was the way you would have union with another rich clan, which Abraham represented.
[01:14:44]  It was probably to consummate some sort of union with Abraham and his clan that this was done.
[01:14:54]  That's the way I read it.
[01:14:55]  Otherwise, it's simply too difficult to imagine that she was 90 years old and just absolutely stunning.
[01:15:02]  It's conceivable, it's just extremely unlikely.
[01:15:05]  But whatever it is, there's another question here: Avimelech kidnaps her.
[01:15:13]  Would he have kidnapped her if Abraham had said she was his wife?
[01:15:20]  And you will see why the question is legit in a moment.
[01:15:23]  God comes to him in the dream, right?
[01:15:25]  We're in three.
[01:15:28]  Now, four.
[01:15:29]  Avimelech did not come near to her.
[01:15:33]  So he did not have sex with her.
[01:15:36]  And he says, My Lord is talking to God now.
[01:15:41]  And this is very interesting what he says.
[01:15:43]  Hagoy, gam sadik taharog.
[01:15:47]  How is it?
[01:15:48]  I have it translated as.
[01:15:49]  It took a while for me to figure this one out.
[01:15:51]  The Hebrew, every word is clear, but the syntax isn't.
[01:15:55]  Now, I have here: you slay people even though they're innocent, even though innocent.
[01:15:59]  What else do you have?
[01:16:02]  Will you, yeah, I'll say, will you slay someone even though they're innocent?
[01:16:04]  Is that what you all have?
[01:16:09]  Ah, what translation is that?
[01:16:11]  I don't know.
[01:16:13]  Okay.
[01:16:13]  Righteous nation.
[01:16:14]  Go on.
[01:16:15]  What is it?
[01:16:15]  What are all the words?
[01:16:16]  Lord, will thou slay even a righteous nation?
[01:16:20]  Okay.
[01:16:21]  What does nation mean in Biblical Hebrew, non-Jew?
[01:16:27]  Goy.
[01:16:28]  That's the word, goi.
[01:16:29]  Goy is not pejorative.
[01:16:31]  It's unfortunate a lot of non-Jews and a lot of Jews think it's pejorative.
[01:16:34]  Oh, they're goiim.
[01:16:35]  Goyim means nations.
[01:16:37]  In fact, Israel is told to be by God, to be a goi kadosh, to be a holy goi, a holy nation.
[01:16:43]  It's all goi means.
[01:16:44]  When Isaiah says, nation shall not lift sword against nation, lo yi sagoi el goi chere.
[01:16:52]  Okay?
[01:16:53]  Nation against nation shall not lift sword.
[01:16:55]  Okay?
[01:16:56]  So now, but what he's really saying, I think, is, are you going to slay a good non-Jew?
[01:17:06]  Whose argument is he echoing?
[01:17:10]  Abraham's.
[01:17:11]  It is virtually the same language that Abraham used against God earlier with Sodom.
[01:17:18]  Isn't that interesting?
[01:17:19]  Now we've got non-Jews arguing with God.
[01:17:23]  It's fascinating, but it shows the immediacy of God to the biblical mind in the Torah.
[01:17:29]  You just, you answer God.
[01:17:32]  The logical thing would have been, I'm quaking, I'm quaking.
[01:17:36]  The Lord is speaking to me.
[01:17:38]  And I said, hey, wait a minute.
[01:17:40]  You're going to kill an innocent non-Jew?
[01:17:42]  Or an innocent nation?
[01:17:43]  Because I'm the head of a nation.
[01:17:45]  So that's what he's really asking.
[01:17:53]  Because he's not Jewish.
[01:17:53]  Avi Melech is not Jewish.
[01:17:59]  Yes, it could be an innocent nation.
[01:18:01]  You're right.
[01:18:02]  It could be an innocent nation.
[01:18:03]  But it adds to the fact that it is not Abrahamic.
[01:18:07]  It's just any innocent nation.
[01:18:09]  Well, you're right, it could be that.
[01:18:11]  But the fact is that it's not a Jewish one.
[01:18:14]  I think there is an underscoring of God's universal morality here.

=== Quaking Before An Innocent Nation (11:43) ===

[01:18:18]  That is very critical.
[01:18:21]  So he goes on.
[01:18:25]  He's continuing his argument to God, his defense for himself.
[01:18:28]  Hey, after all, didn't he say to me, she's my sister?
[01:18:34]  And she even said to me, he's my brother.
[01:18:39]  In the simplest, in the purest form of my heart, and with my clean hands, I did this.
[01:18:50]  It's very beautiful in Hebrew.
[01:18:51]  It's with the purity of my heart.
[01:18:53]  I mean, this is an honest plea.
[01:18:55]  Why are you going to kill me?
[01:18:57]  It's not right.
[01:18:59]  She said he's my brother.
[01:19:00]  She said he's my sister.
[01:19:02]  However, ladies and gentlemen, as innocent as his argument may be, what did he not defend himself against?
[01:19:12]  Kidnapping.
[01:19:16]  So before you get totally taken with Abimelech, please remember, he took a woman.
[01:19:22]  He sent people to grab a woman.
[01:19:25]  It's so funny, you know, that could be lost on anybody reading this.
[01:19:29]  You know, really, poor guy.
[01:19:32]  He only slept with her because he kidnapped her, not because he knew she was married.
[01:19:37]  Oh, that's okay.
[01:19:38]  You realize what a world that they were living in in that day.
[01:19:41]  That's not an issue.
[01:19:42]  You could take any woman off the street to bed with you.
[01:19:46]  But if she's married, that's why it's almost as if he doesn't even realize there was anything wrong in taking the woman off the street.
[01:19:53]  Everybody who can do that is powerful does that.
[01:19:56]  But a man's wife, oh, that's already a separate story.
[01:20:02]  So, and by the way, it is a separate story.
[01:20:04]  We have every reason to believe that this guy was a decent guy, as decency went in those days.
[01:20:12]  Okay?
[01:20:12]  And I mean that sincerely.
[01:20:14]  I will add, by the way, that the Ramban, medieval Jewish commentator, holds Abraham guilty over here.
[01:20:27]  He says, is it entirely an issue of Abraham's suspicions?
[01:20:31]  This is a very decent place, Gerar.
[01:20:34]  And he attributed to them actions that were not, that they had no reason to do so.
[01:20:41]  Of course, Abraham had just been to Sodom, had gone through this thing in Egypt, so he had some reason to be suspicious.
[01:20:52]  But the fact is that not everybody's the same.
[01:20:55]  Gerar is not Egypt.
[01:20:58]  In Egypt, we didn't have the innocence quite.
[01:21:01]  Remember, we had that story earlier in here, which is almost an echo of that story.
[01:21:05]  It's different.
[01:21:06]  At any rate, he says, by the way, notice what he says.
[01:21:10]  He says, my heart blameless and my hands clean.
[01:21:15]  Now, in other words, I didn't touch her.
[01:21:21]  Neither in my heart did I want to take a man's husband, nor with my hands did I actually do anything.
[01:21:27]  So both parts of me, my actions and my heart, are clean, is his argument to God.
[01:21:34]  So God says to him in six in the dream, I also know that in blameless heart you did this, and so I prevented you or kept you, saved you from sinning against me, and that's why I didn't allow you to touch her.
[01:22:00]  Now, how is that possible that he didn't allow her to touch?
[01:22:03]  He didn't allow him to touch her.
[01:22:05]  Is it because of the dream that prevented him from touching her?
[01:22:09]  So it's a little odd, though, you have to realize, because first of all, the assumption is that they would have had sex and then he had his dream.
[01:22:19]  Not that he slept and then had it.
[01:22:21]  I mean, that's the normal way that those things work.
[01:22:24]  What prevented him from doing this?
[01:22:27]  And the assumption is that God did a physical thing to him to prevent him from possibly having relations with her.
[01:22:35]  And you will see that in a moment.
[01:22:37]  Seven.
[01:22:38]  So now, return the wife of the man.
[01:22:47]  And because he is a prophet, he will pray on your behalf and you will live.
[01:22:53]  But if you don't return, know that you will die and everything that you have will die.
[01:22:59]  Okay?
[01:22:59]  By the way, this is an extremely interesting statement.
[01:23:02]  First of all, it's the first prayer in the Bible of one person on behalf of another.
[01:23:09]  It's an interesting, just an interesting concept.
[01:23:12]  It's also the first mention of a prophet, Navi.
[01:23:15]  It's very unfortunate, incidentally, that the word is Navi or prophet.
[01:23:19]  Excuse me, it's very unfortunate that the English is prophet.
[01:23:22]  Navi does not mean prophet.
[01:23:24]  Navi means spokesman.
[01:23:27]  It would be a lot better if the English were consonant with the Hebrew.
[01:23:33]  Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, these are spokesmen.
[01:23:38]  That's what Navi is.
[01:23:40]  They are not prophets.
[01:23:41]  When you hear the word prophet, you think of a soothsayer, right?
[01:23:46]  A fortune teller.
[01:23:47]  And that's not what prophets are.
[01:23:49]  They're merely mouthpieces for God.
[01:23:52]  Anyway, he is a Navi, and he will pray for you.
[01:23:56]  Eight.
[01:23:59]  Once again, Avimelech got up early in the morning, and he called to all his slaves or servants, servants is better, and he said all these words in their ears.
[01:24:13]  See, how many of you have, that's interesting, how many of you have in their ears?
[01:24:19]  How many don't have in their ears?
[01:24:22]  See, now that's an interesting thing.
[01:24:24]  How could a translation avoid a word?
[01:24:27]  You know, even though it's a little awkward, I think it should be there.
[01:24:31]  That's what happens with a lot of those.
[01:24:33]  And the people were very afraid, right?
[01:24:37]  You got that?
[01:24:38]  End of eight.
[01:24:39]  Who are they afraid of?
[01:24:40]  Avi Melech or God?
[01:24:43]  I don't know.
[01:24:44]  I must tell you, I don't know, probably God, but we don't know.
[01:24:48]  It's just an interesting question that occurred to me.
[01:24:53]  Probably both, frankly.
[01:24:56]  Okay.
[01:24:57]  Nine.
[01:24:59]  So Avi Melech called to Abraham and said to him, What did you do to us?
[01:25:03]  And why did I sin against you that you brought on me and on my kingdom this great iniquity?
[01:25:13]  Now, what do you have this brought upon me this great what?
[01:25:17]  Guilt, sin.
[01:25:18]  This is a real problem.
[01:25:20]  The Hebrew was sin.
[01:25:22]  Yet it is there, and sin and guilt are not the same things.
[01:25:28]  So you brought upon me this great sin seems that's the Hebrew.
[01:25:35]  And it makes sense to me, you brought upon me to make a big sin.
[01:25:39]  Are you with me?
[01:25:40]  That that's what really apparently it is.
[01:25:42]  And guilt.
[01:25:43]  Both are true.
[01:25:47]  Things that just aren't done, you have done with me.
[01:25:52]  10.
[01:25:53]  So Avi Melech said to Avraham, and Avi Melech said to Abraham, What did you see that you did such a thing?
[01:26:02]  That's a fair question.
[01:26:04]  That's Ramban's question.
[01:26:06]  Why did Abraham feel he had to lie?
[01:26:08]  What was it about the city of Gerar, or the kingdom of Gerar, that made him think he had to lie?
[01:26:15]  That's what the king of Gerar is asking.
[01:26:18]  And here is the answer, and I explained this when this same thing happened with the Pharaoh in Egypt, 11.
[01:26:24]  And Avraham said, because I said, there's just no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.
[01:26:32]  In other words, they'll kill me to take you.
[01:26:34]  They don't take men's wives, but if they're widows, there's no problem.
[01:26:39]  That's in effect what he's saying.
[01:26:41]  But that's, of course, the point.
[01:26:43]  He had a sense there's no fear of God here.
[01:26:47]  Now, this is a fascinating thing, and with this I'll have to conclude.
[01:26:53]  As I've told you, not in this series, but in the previous ones, the Torah holds that the basis of morality is fear of God.
[01:27:04]  That if there isn't a God who says thou shalt not murder, and you have no sense of a God who stands behind it to whom you're accountable, that society will not be a good society.
[01:27:14]  I fully subscribe to that.
[01:27:15]  That's what ethical monotheism is about.
[01:27:17]  God is the source of ethics.
[01:27:19]  Now, here is the question.
[01:27:22]  What exactly did Abraham see in Gerar that made him think that there's no fear of God here?
[01:27:27]  It wasn't Saddome.
[01:27:30]  And I have to say that the probable answer is this.
[01:27:36]  He probably didn't yet fully realize that others could fear the God who had revealed himself to him.
[01:27:44]  He feels himself the first monotheist.
[01:27:48]  So he doesn't think that others could have either non-Jews or non-Abrahamics or non-monotheists could have fear of God.
[01:27:59]  Do you get what I'm saying?
[01:28:00]  That and his God may not have yet been in his own mind fully universal.
[01:28:06]  You mean others know about you?
[01:28:10]  You get what I'm saying?
[01:28:11]  That's what I think the issue is.
[01:28:13]  Because we haven't the slightest basis upon which to hold that Gerar was a bad place.
[01:28:19]  And we'll see next time that he treats him very decently, the king of Gerar, and truly was innocent of what he was accused of doing.
[01:28:26]  He was not quite the slimy guy that the Pharaoh in Egypt was.
[01:28:31]  But Abraham is learning that God is universal.
[01:28:35]  And that knowledge of God and fear of God may be outside of my religion.
[01:28:39]  And let me tell you something.
[01:28:41]  This is a lesson that a lot of monotheists today don't have.
[01:28:45]  There are people in particular, there are some Christians and there are some Muslims.
[01:28:51]  This, I must say, does not afflict Jews.
[01:28:54]  Plenty things do, this doesn't.
[01:28:56]  Who really don't, in their heart and in their theology, acknowledge that there are people in other religions who are God-fearing.
[01:29:05]  If you don't believe in Jesus, you can be all the nice things in the world, but if you don't affirm Jesus, how can you call yourself a believer?
[01:29:15]  There are some Muslims, even though it goes against their own theology, because Muslim theology holds that there are Christians and Jews and they are monotheists.
[01:29:23]  They are believers.
[01:29:24]  It's listed in the Quran.
[01:29:26]  But if you ask Khomeini, Jews are intrinsically incapable of being God-fearing.
[01:29:32]  The Jews are cursed by their very birth.
[01:29:34]  This would be a Khomeini attitude.
[01:29:39]  The notion that there could be truly good and religious people outside of my group is another part of growing up.
[01:29:47]  Another part of what I said earlier of learning about the stranger.
[01:29:51]  My motto after 10 years, I did the show on religion for 10 years, Religion on the Line, where I moderated a priest, rabbi, minister, and fourth religion frequently.

=== Gains Before The Crowd (02:02) ===

[01:30:01]  And I did this every week.
[01:30:03]  And after years, I said, this is the biggest thing I learned.
[01:30:07]  The day you meet someone of another religion whom you feel is at least as good, at least as intelligent, and at least as religious as you think you are, you will never be the same the rest of your life.
[01:30:24]  Abraham had not yet met people that would jolt him into realizing there are yere e elohim, there are God-fearers outside of my group.
[01:30:36]  He just assumes, goes into grar.
[01:30:39]  Gee, none of them are like this.
[01:30:42]  And it turns out he was wrong.
[01:30:44]  See you in two weeks.
[01:30:45]  Thanks a lot.
[01:30:48]  This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
[01:30:51]  Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs and to purchase Dennis Prager's rational Bibles.
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