Podcast #59: Parashat Vayikra

Shalom Shlomo and Elisha discuss the book of Vayikra, which they find challenging compared to the stories of Genesis and Exodus. Elisha wrote a Dresha about Vayikra and how it taught him about himself. They discuss the importance of the Torah being relevant to their lives. They also talk about the dilemma of wanting to leave a stamp on the world and wanting to belong to a group. They share personal stories related to this dilemma. They discuss the concept of calling and how it gives life direction and meaning. They mention Rabbi Sacks' idea that a sense of mission is more important than being good at something. They analyze the word "Vayikra" and its significance. Shlomo questions whether his choice to study economics was a fluke or a calling. They discuss the role of chance and calling in life choices. Shalom Shlomo. Shalom Elisha. So it's a new book. Yes. A book of Vayikra. A challenging book. Indeed challenging and one I didn't look forward to at all Elisha after the amazing stories of Genesis and Exodus and suddenly we come to sacrifices, the whole book, the job description of the Kohanim and then Elisha I read your Dresha. Your Dresha was written I think in 2021, three years ago when we were in lockdown under COVID. The beautiful part of the Torah, I believe, is that sometimes when you read it, especially with the help of bright rabbis, brilliant rabbis, you learn about yourself, not only about your religion, you learn about yourself and it's hard to believe but thanks to your Dresha I learned a lot about myself from Vayikra, the book that talks about the sacrifices. Amazing, absolutely amazing. Thank you, thank you. Yes, but I think it's a really important point that I think people who follow us know it really well. We're not studying the Parashat in order to learn about the Torah. The Torah is a guide to learning about life, life itself and we are where life is happening. We are our own life is where the drama of life takes place. So if the Parashat is not related to our lives then the Torah is not a teacher. Exactly, but it takes very special rabbis who have insights to show how Vayikra is directly related to our lives. Let me explain. So you point out a crucial dilemma which emerges in the first book of Leviticus, which is Parashat Vayikra, in the book of Vayikra. We humans are torn between two deep desires, both basic and diametrically opposing each other. We want to leave a stamp on the world. We want to be individuals who want to do something. The second desire is much less familiar. We want to relinquish our uniqueness and melt into one, into the impelling universe. We want to belong, we want to belong to a group. So this has special meaning for me. I do have a sister. She was 12 and a half years older than me, but I was raised basically as an only child. She went off to college when I was very young. And I grew up Jewish in a very small Jewish community in Saskatchewan and then went to school down east at a university with a few Jews and then went to Princeton, a waspish, Ivy League university with lots of anti-Semites. So on the one hand, I was impelled to excel, to get scholarships and do well and get into good universities. And on the other hand, this tremendous desire to be part of a group that I never was. I was always the outsider. I couldn't date non-Jewish girls. That's pretty hard when the hormones are raging and you're 20 years old. And I had this dream, what about a country where you can really be an individual, a chutzpah Israeli, and be part of a country as one of millions of Jewish people? That was my dream. And that was for me, that was Zionism. But your Dresha expresses that beautifully and you pull that somehow out of the Parsha, out of Vayikra, which is about sacrifices. How did you do that? How did you come to that? How did I come to that? I think each one of us has a calling. You know, Vayikra is also being called out. So we each have a calling. I mean, you just told me about your class yesterday with the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. And I could never teach such a class. I would love to be a student in this class, but I could certainly not teach such a class. And there must be a calling. There's a calling about creativity. There's something in you, within you. Maybe it's coming from high up, who knows, high up or deep inside. Creativity is a calling for you. So I guess we're all called out. We all experience Vayikra. And I need the Torah to be relevant to me, for my life. I need the Torah to guide me. I would define it as an addiction. I'm really addicted to it. There are weeks where I really have no time to write a drashah. Some very intense weeks. And I just can't. I can't not write a drashah. Rarely, rarely. It happens like once a year, twice a year. But it's a calling to nourish the soul with Torah. And to nourish the soul with Torah, the Torah needs to be about the soul. So that's where it comes from. But I want to point out something also interesting about what you said. It's a really interesting definition of Zionism, what you just said now. And I think it would be my father's definition of Zionism too. Now that you said it for the first time, I'm thinking about it this way. His famous, famous story is that he belonged to the Jewish Lads Brigade in London as a kid. Which was a Jewish youth movement, but not a Zionist youth movement. And he was standing at a bus stop opposite his synagogue. We went to visit there a few months ago. And we took a picture by that bus stop. I think I even told the story here. And I must have also told this particular story, but never mind, we'll tell it again because it really resonates with your story. There were some other kids in that same bus stop who belonged to another youth movement. And that youth movement was Habonim. Habonim was a Zionist youth movement. And my dad, who was pretty happy in the Jewish Lads Brigade, they kind of argued. Like, why do you go to Habonim? And they said, you know, well, there are girls there. And there were no girls in the Jewish Lads Brigade. My dad immediately took a different bus than he intended. Went with his Jewish Lads Brigade uniform, went to Habonim, came back with a whole different uniform, and ended up in Israel and made Aliyah, obviously. So, eventually we realized that Zionism is not this ideology of returning back to the land. It's all about finding a date. Yeah, the funny thing is, I had this dream of a country with a million beautiful Jewish girls. And then I met Sharon at Princeton, and we got married. And nevertheless, you made Aliyah. Absolutely, we made Aliyah together. Speaking about calling Elisha. So, the parasha begins, which is puzzling. And a lot of commentaries are written about it. Why does God have to call Moshe? It's really strange. And Rabbi Sacks makes a whole parasha about that one first word. Because that's the parasha for this week. Let's hear what he has to say. So, he says, he talks about the calling, the call. Moshe is called, and we all have a calling. He makes a beautiful point, which I wish I had known that I was 60 years younger. Very often, we counsel kids. They have to choose what they want to study when they're 18, which is ridiculous. And I made a wrong choice. I picked economics. But the question is, what are you good at? What are you really good at? I just had a conversation with one of my granddaughters who's making a similar choice. And, Alisha, that's not the question. Right. That's not the question. That's right. Rabbi Sacks says, we can be good at many things, but what gives a life direction and meaning is a sense of mission, something we are called on to do. And it may be something that you're not good at or even not good at at all. But we need this calling that drives the passion and the energy, which is kind of what I counseled my wonderful granddaughter. So, yeah, that's a powerful lesson. Right? And the first word of this Vayikra, which is ostensibly about sacrifices, it's about us and our calling. Right, right, right. This really touches on the Doshah that I'm in the middle, well, towards the end of writing it for this week. And maybe I'll even quote what you just brought right now. I want to add to it something to go along with what Rabbi Sacks is saying. The word Vayikra is written with a small alif, which is really rare. Like in the Torah, there's vav, yud, ku, fresh, and a tiny little alif. And they're often big letters, right? And they're often big letters. This is a small letter. Right, and this is a small letter. It's a really rare situation. Rare appearance. And obviously the rabbis are going crazy, like why is it small? It almost seems like when they wrote, when whoever the scribe was and wrote it down, they, oops, they missed a letter and they kind of like squeezed it in. That could be a possible reason. And then later on, when later scribes saw the original transcript, they thought, okay, that must have been in purpose and left the alif. So that's a possibility. But the word without the alif in the Hebrew, you need to know a little bit of Hebrew, comes from the word mikre. If you drop the alif, it turns into mikre. Mikre means it's a fluke, a chance. And add the alif, and it's no longer a fluke, no longer by chance. It's a calling. So you kind of went into economics, maybe by chance. I would argue that, by the way, in a second. Maybe by chance. And had you had a grandfather like you or a grandfather to your grandchildren, he would have sat with you and said, Shlomo, how do they call you in America? Shlomo? Richard Allen. Really? My Christian name given at birth by my mother, Richard Allen Malt. Oh, my God. This is a huge discovery. Ladies and gentlemen, a huge discovery. Because I couldn't imagine your family calling you in America Shlomo. It's just too Israeli. So maybe he would have said to you, Richard Allen Malt. You are just following all kinds of, like the fluke is what you're following right now. Let's go deeper. Let's look for a calling. And so there's a big difference between just chance knocking at our door and a calling. However, I want to put a big question mark. Was your choice indeed such a fluke? I mean, today, here you are teaching the Technion. And you could have finished teaching a long time ago. You love teaching. You do a great job at it. And you're teaching all these students about the economics of entrepreneurship. And I'm not so sure if you would have reached that point had it not been for that calling or fluke or chance when you went to study economics. You thought you were studying economics because, yeah, that's the easiest. This is to get a PhD. That's what you do in Israel. But maybe God had a bigger plan for you. And maybe it was a calling after all. Well, there's a principle, Alicia. If you can't do what you really truly love, then you have to learn to love what you do. So you make the best of what you have. But my true regret is not doing medicine. And for only one reason, I could have done it. I could have done it. But my parents really wanted me to do it. And at an age of stupidity and rebellion, I chose not to. Wow. Precisely because of that. Really, we're discovering a lot of things here today. So I'm really interested in medicine in terms of entrepreneurship. And Israel has the most incredible medical technology that saves lives all over the world. And the world doesn't care or isn't aware of it. So now I understand why in many of your examples, many of your stories, you tell stories of medical equipment and medical entrepreneurship. I do. And I really would like the world to know about it because we get a really bad rap as Israelis for all kinds of reasons. And we are members of a religion that chose life. And in choosing life, our technology also represents choosing life, life-saving technologies that are amazing. And it's not a coincidence that so many Jews traditionally turn to medicine. It's not a coincidence. In some classical Christian paths, we can't be doctors because God is the doctor. God is the ultimate doctor. We have to trust God to heal us. It's something very romantic, and I love that idea. But Judaism comes and says, you know, God helps those who help themselves, first of all. Secondly, God operates in the world through us, through human beings. And if we can heal another person, indeed, it isn't us healing. It's God healing through another person. So you want to be a doctor. And just for those, another thing to know about Shlomo, his oldest daughter. She's your oldest, right? Yes. So she's a doctor, a very, very successful doctor, a very sought-out doctor, and is doing wonders in the field of family medicine. And she's lately into artificial intelligence, Alisha. And AI is a big problem in medicine because, as you know, some AI, generative artificial intelligence, it likes to make up things. If you ask it a question, it's such a human characteristic, if you ask it a question and it doesn't know, and it has to supply an answer because that's part of the algorithm, so it will just make it up. It's a big problem in medicine. And my daughter is working with a special AI program for doctors, but it has a protocol. Everything in medicine needs a protocol, a list of instructions. So the first thing you do as an experienced doctor is you go through all the hypotheses and then you instruct the AI what to look for. You take charge instead of having it lead you by the nose. And it turns out to be really powerful. The AI will search the literature and summarize for you on a table in two minutes. That would take you days and days and weeks to do yourself by hand search. Yeah, so we're very proud of her. That is really interesting what you just said. Now this could have been a great drasha for this week, maybe for another week. It's interesting because that's also what our mind does. Our mind doesn't know how to say, oh, you know what, I don't know. Our mind will find an answer even if this answer is really baloney. It will look for an answer just like AI, just like even Google does that. And it's beautiful that the doctors know how to restrain the AI and give it instructions on go to what you know. And if you don't know, say so. Just say, you know what, I don't have a clue. So Alicia, I discovered something. I read Scientific American, which is a wonderful publication about science that ordinary people can understand. And there's a wonderful article this week about generalized artificial intelligence for religious studies. So Alicia, there is a Bible AI, and you can go to it and ask it a question about the Bible. There is a chat bot, AI, by a young man in India, in Calcutta, Muslim. And you can ask it questions about Quran. It's called Quran AI. I tried it. There are several. But they're not foolproof, Alicia. First of all, this young man, they came down on him like a ton of bricks. Who, they? Muslims. Muslims, okay. And I'm curious about the Quran and its relation to Jews. And I asked Quran AI about that. How does the Quran relate to Jewish people? And Alicia, it would not answer. Really? No, it would not answer. And I tried asking that in many different ways. Interesting. It was designed in such a way that it wouldn't answer this question? I think so. Because I'm not AI and I could answer that question. So that's really, that's very interesting. Yeah. But the good part of this, Alicia. Actually, that's also good. Maybe it's good because it's not a nice picture. No, it isn't. It isn't at all. One thing you can do with these Bible AIs, you can ask it an imaginary question. AI, what if Moshe and Yeshayahu Leibovich were to sit down over coffee? And what would they discuss about evil, halakha, korbanot, sacrifices? And it will come up with a whole spiel. Wow. Yeah. Which is hard for us to do. It's amazing because AI does have an imagination. And if you ask AI for sites, where does it take its information from? Will it do that? Will it? It will. It will. Okay. It's really good at searching because you feed it information. Right. And it reads a huge ton of stuff. And these powerful supercomputers. By the way, the AI is powered by a chip. And the leading chip, this is something people also don't know. It's called a GPU, a graphic processor unit, like a CPU, but a graphic processor unit. The leading one in the world is developed by a company called NVIDIA. It's an American company. NVIDIA bought Mellanox, an Israeli company. The Israeli developers are the ones who really led development of this chip. And NVIDIA now is worth $1.8 trillion because they sell huge amounts of these chips that are designed in Israel. Incredible. Incredible. Maybe on a less positive note, Elisha, this Shabbat is Parshat Tzachor, Shabbat Tzachor. That's right. Tzachor is remember Amalek. I have a big problem with this. I have a big problem with Purim when we celebrate a terrible massacre the Jews did of its enemies. And I know for sure this year we're going to hear a lot about Amalek from the very religious parts of our society, drawing a comparison. And I think it's a bad comparison and a wrong one and not appropriate. And I'm going to struggle this Purim about Amalek and even the wording. Elisha, last year I think I read the Haftora of Shabbat Tzachor. And I looked at the sign-up sheet this year and I decided not to. I can't do it. Because for one thing, it's contradictory. Remember Amalek, right? Tzachor at Amalek, Parshat Tzachor, Shabbat Tzachor. Remember Amalek and wipe out his memory totally. What the heck? What does that mean? We have enemies. Boy, do we know that in Israel. We have enemies. But exterminate our enemies? I doubt it. I don't think it's possible. Not realistic. Some of our leaders make that their goal. It's not realistic. And it's not us. It's not Jewish. It's not us. How do you relate to Shabbat Tzachor, Elisha? Okay. First of all, you're absolutely right that this year it got a whole new meaning. So I'll give the opposite viewpoint. I'm certainly not a bloodthirsty person in any way, shape or form. But I feel very, very strongly that Hamas, those who perpetrated the crimes of October 7th, I think for the first time in my life, I feel here's a definition for Amalek. I think they are Amalek. I think going after children, babies, vulnerable women, elderly, that's exactly what Amalek did. And I'll be very honest. I don't see any reason whatsoever to keep them alive. Now, go in and execute them. Of course not. If you can catch them and put them in prison, obviously that's much, much better. But when I'm, you know, I have to be honest. And I hope I'm not going to regret it. But when I hear of those terrorists who are killed in Gaza, and there are many, many of them who were killed in Gaza, I really don't see a moral problem with that. I think, you know, it says, someone who rises to kill you, you have the right to kill him first, especially if they do the kind of atrocities that they've done. And I received an email, someone who hopefully will be listening to this podcast. I'll tell him to listen to it. He reads the Rashot weekly and he's one of our friends, a good friend of Ahavda. He's been here a few times and he's a wonderful, wonderful person. He's also a doctor and brings a lot of goodness to the world. And he asked me a genuine question. He said, it's not a political question, but I take it that you guys in Israel don't watch the same footage that we watch in America. You don't see the devastation in Gaza, the hunger, the suffering. How do you explain it, he basically asked. And he said, it's not a political question. And it took me a few days to answer and I answered quite, it was quite rushed, my answer. I read my answer later and saw how many spelling mistakes I had there. And then I knew that, A, it was also somewhat emotional. And I told him, yeah, you're right. We are less concerned right now about the suffering in Gaza. Hamas can put an end to it any minute that they want to. We're just waiting for them to say, we're done. We're surrendering and we are freeing our people from this nightmare. They brought it upon themselves. Now, we still have 134 hostages held in inhumane conditions. Red Cross has no access to them, is not even bothering to have access to them. The world doesn't care. The women may be raped on a regular basis. The elderly people may be, if they're not already dead, they're surely suffering because they don't have their medications. And not to mention all the youngsters, those who are army age, who may be tortured and, you know, etc., etc. Just even being underground. And we've heard from those who were freed what the circumstances were. So, they are choosing not to release the hostages yet. They're choosing to continue bombing Israel while all this is happening and then crying out to the world, poor us, poor us. So, I have no pity on them whatsoever. I feel terrible about the innocent and the innocent victims. I feel terrible. However, it is those innocent people who chose Hamas time after time. Let me make a counter argument, Vishal. What bothers me about the Amalek-Hamas analogy, which seems on the face of it to be absolutely accurate. There's a military question here, Alicia. We've had 168 days of war. These guys have been fighting for 168 days against a powerful army with F-35s and the highest technology and a superbly trained army that operates with discipline and skill and bravery and motivation defending their homeland. And they're still fighting these guys. They're still fighting and they've lost their leaders. They've lost tens of thousands of casualties probably. And the army doesn't know, Alicia. How come? How come they don't just give up? Because in past wars we've defeated armies and the entire Egyptian army surrendered. So there's a real question and there's an answer. Alicia, this has become a religious war. The enemy is driven by religious fanatic fervor. Right. And Alicia, religious wars do not end well. In fact, they basically don't end. Because when you're in a religious war, you fight and you kill the enemy or you die and then you go to heaven as a great shaheed, as a great martyr. So it bothers me that this has become a religious war. And if a religious war, Alicia, that means we're at war with 2 billion Muslims in the world rather than a few thousand Hamas fanatics. So at least on our side, I would be happy if we did not make it into a religious war with Amalek from the Bible. If you're fighting a cruel enemy, let's deal with it. Okay, now I understand what you're saying. So you're saying using the term Amalek gives it a religious tone and a religious context to it. Exactly. I can see that. But nevertheless, on our side, it is certainly not a religious war. And the fact that we have our own religious fanatics who are turning it into a religious war is unfortunate. But for me personally, there's no such thing as the word religious. Amalek is not a religious term. Amalek is an existential term. Amalek describes a people, an enemy who seeks death. And I can't think of a better description for Hamas than an enemy who seeks death, even of their own people, by hiding in their hospitals, by hiding under schools and firing from kindergartens. They are choosing the death of their own people. And that is a description of Amalek. So that's why I have no problem with that description. That is true, Elisha. There's a famous quote by a Hamas leader who said that we are delighted when our people can become shahidim, martyrs. Not just them. By the way, they are not so eager to become shahidim, martyrs. But their people, to be martyrs? Absolutely. Why not? Right. Their leaders are hiding underground while exposing their people. Right. So, Shlomo, I think that the war could have been over a long time ago if Israel was not Israel. If Israel was either America or Russia or Britain or any other country, they would have simply wiped Gaza off the face of the earth. Because we can. We can. And we didn't. It's taking so long because we're so incredibly careful. And the fact that there are many casualties is, we should have really said, considering the Hamas strategy, Israel made sure the casualties are kept to a minimum. And it could have been a lot worse. And we could have had this war over if we did what any other nation would have done at this point. Absolutely. So, maybe we're getting toward the end. I'd like to quote two things. Okay. One from Buddhism and one from Isaiah Berlin. And this is relevant to this idea of avoiding a religious war. Isaiah Berlin was a famous Jewish philosopher at Cambridge. He wrote wonderful essays and books. And he was 87 years old and the Chinese, of all people, approached him and said, Can you write an article for us and summarize your view of moral philosophy? He was a moral philosopher. And he wrote a powerful essay and said that, There is a thesis that to all questions, to all true questions, there must be one true answer and one only. All the other answers being false. And in philosophy that's called monism, which is fanaticism. And there are Jews who believe that. We are the one true religion and there is no other. And they're all heathens, etc., etc. And Berlin felt that a lot of the trouble and wars and conflicts in the world come from monism. One idea. And our enemies are monists. They believe that only the Koran is true and only Muslims are the true faith, etc., etc. And this is disastrous. And there is another way. So I went to the Buddhist AI, the Buddhist chatbot, which exists. It's called Gita, from the Bhagavad Gita, the Gita GPT. You can go to it. And I asked it about how does Buddhism relate to Jews, to Judaism? And the answer is that while practices and beliefs may differ, the ultimate goal of self-realization and union with the divine, and you mentioned this in your Drosha, we want to be one with God, union with the divine remains the same. Embrace the teachings of all paths with an open heart and mind for they all lead toward the same ultimate truth. That's Buddhism. We Jews, we could be Buddhists as well as Jews, I think, without a problem. If only our enemies, if only we were neighbors with India, rather than neighbors with the people that we are neighbors with. Right, right. Yes, yes. Shalom. So Shabbat Zechor, it's complicated, it's difficult being a Jew at this time. And yet it's Vayikra, we're being called. We're being called, called to be a blessing as we always say. We're being called to be proud of who we are and our contribution to the world. And finally, we're being called to struggle. We're Israel, Yisrael, Yisrael. Your first name is Yisrael, my second name is Yisrael. And our people are called children of Israel. It means to struggle. So the struggle continues. And we're being called, Elisha. We can't be soldiers, most of us, those of us who are seniors, but we can be proud of Judaism and defend it and find ways to explain ourselves to the world, which we do very poorly. A close friend of mine, and I gave you his article, called this Pro-Semitism. How do you counter anti-Semitism? You counter it with Pro-Semitism, which is knowing your religion and telling the truth about it to a world that seems to distort it terribly. Yes, Pro-Semitism, I love that, great article. So Shabbat Shalom everyone. Shabbat Shalom. And Happy Purim. Happy Purim. Be taught.