Who Really Wrote the Torah? A Conversation on G-d, Truth, and the Power of Ideas

In this heart-open, mind-stretching class, Rabbi Yisroel Bernath dives headfirst into one of the most profound questions ever asked: Who wrote the Torah and what do we mean by G-d? Sparked by a challenge from Ilana, a thoughtful soul who just "won the raffle" and then handed Rabbi Bernath some of the hardest theological questions he's faced, this class isn't a debate, it’s a bridge. Drawing from Torah, Talmud, Rambam, Tanya, Harari, Einstein, Spinoza, and Chassidic mystics, we explore traditional belief, academic scholarship, and the honest soul-searching that sits between them.

Is the Torah a divine blueprint or a human masterpiece? Or… could it be both?

Together, we walk a path between Sinai and the seminar room, from ancient revelation to modern doubt and discover that sometimes, the questions themselves are the invitation to a deeper relationship with truth.

Key Takeaways:

1. Traditional Belief Holds Depth: Torah mi-Sinai means Moses recorded divine revelation over 40 years. It's not simplistic, it’s layered and deeply rooted in Jewish collective memory.
2. Modern Scholarship Brings Honest Challenges: Thinkers like Harari argue that the Torah was assembled over centuries, reflecting political and social needs. These critiques must be addressed, not ignored.
3. Kabbalah and Chassidus Provide a Bridge: Divine revelation doesn’t exclude human expression. The Torah flowed through Moses’ voice and personality, G-d worked with human vessels.
4. Assumptions Shape Interpretation: Believers and skeptics alike interpret the same data through different axioms. Acknowledging this fosters respectful dialogue rather than defensiveness.
5. The Torah’s Endurance Is Itself a Testament: Its moral vision, power to unite, and enduring relevance across time and culture hint at something more than human genius, it points toward the Divine.
6. This Is Not About “Winning” an Argument: It’s about honesty, humility, and the courage to explore big questions together.
7. The Torah Is a Living Document: Beyond history or philosophy, Torah continues to speak—not just inform, but transform. That may be its greatest proof of all.

#Torah #God #Judaism #sinai #Moses #Divinerevelation #Documentaryhypothesis #YuvalNoahHarari #Kabbalah #Jewishtradition #BiblicalCrticism #Tanya #Spinoza #chassidus #Faith #theology 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Before we get started today, I just want to remind you that we're in the middle of our annual raffle, and tickets are just $50, and it really helps support all the wonderful work that we're doing. If you buy a ticket today, I'll send you a personal thank you letter and a little gift. It's really easy. Just go to www.ndgeraffle.com. That's ndgeraffle.com. I'll be ever so grateful to you. Now let's get started. Good morning. It's a beautiful morning. We are reeling from an incredible, successful sellout raffle. Thank you all. There's going to be a lot of a lot of opportunities for thank yous and for different uh uh special celebrations as a result of this amazing fundraiser. But today, just after, a few hours after the raffle is finished, I'm happy to make good on my first of many promises. So this group here, we had a little raffle, and Alana won the raffle. And the raffle was to be able to decide the topic of our Thursday morning class. And what I'll say is that Alana sent me some of the most profound and challenging questions that I've been asked. I also know that the questions that Alana asked are questions that a lot of people grapple with. And many of you who spend time with me know that my style is to approach something head-on and to try to give the best answer and discussion that I can give. My caveat before I start is number one is I don't know if I'll be able to finish today. I will try. So we may have to do a two-part series. Number two is I am going to approach this from a traditional Jewish perspective. I'll also talk about some other perspectives, but the main gist of our conversation today is going to be approaching Alana's question from a traditional perspective, which may conflict, be in conflict with some of the other ideas and perspectives. There are a number of best-selling books, books that have been on the New York Times bestselling uh bestsellers list for quite a while, that are going to be in conflict with some of the ideas. I'll talk about some of them. Let me just get into it. Here's the basis of the question. Alana asked four questions. Who really wrote the Torah? What exactly do we mean when we say God? Are we talking about a person, a force, or a moral idea? And fourth, is God a metaphor or a reality? So we're going to talk first about the Torah, and then we're going to get into a conversation about God. To me, it's absolutely amazing because in the past 20 years, I remember 20 years ago, I used to have many conversations about God. But somewhere along the line, it just became taboo. People just stopped talking about God. It wasn't a conversation anymore. People stopped asking questions. And over the past year and a half, I have seen a shift where God is a conversation again, which is why I'm really happy to have this conversation now. For those of you who have the opportunities to sit on my porch on Shabbat afternoons, I have porch class on most Shabbat afternoons, especially in the summer when it's beautiful here in Montreal. This is the kind of conversations that we have. That said, trying to figure out the answer and a way to approach this sent me down a rabbit hole. And I tried to uh put together as much information as I could on the topic. I do have a source sheet. I wanted to send it out to you, but I'll send it out to you afterwards. So I do have a source sheet so you can get all of the sources that I'm gonna use today in an onesheet. I promise to answer honestly. We're gonna talk Torah, we're gonna talk Talmud, we're gonna talk Rambam, Maimonides, Tanya, we're gonna talk Harari, Einstein. I'm hoping that we can bring it all together and we can walk on this path together. So let's start with who wrote the Torah and what is the traditional belief versus the modern scholarship. So the traditional account is that the Torah is from Sinai. This is the Jewish belief. Now I will give you a little asterisk here that that belief, the nature of belief is that we believe it first and then we understand later. We said to God at Sinai, the Torah says, Nase Venishma. We'll do and will ask questions later. So in order to really get an appreciation for my answer to this question, we have to also remember that the answer begins with faith. According to our tradition, the the five books of Moses, the Torah, are a result of a divine revelation. In simple terms, God dictated the Torah to Moses, and Moses wrote it down. Now, this process didn't happen all at once in a single sitting, but it unfolded over 40 years. The 40 years actually that we're talking about in these Torah portions, that's going to culminate in next week's Torah portion, or in two weeks from now, the Torah portion. So it unfolded over this 40 years when the Jewish people, when the Israelites were wandering in the desert. After the exodus from Egypt, after we left Egypt, they ended up going to the desert. It wasn't supposed to be 40 years, but because of the spies, they ended up wandering for 40 years before they got into the promised land. The Talmud and the Midrash describe Moses writing sections of the Torah at intervals. So, for example, some parts he wrote shortly after hearing God's words at Mount Sinai, and other parts he wrote later as the events unfolded. And finally, near the end of the 40 years, like the book of Deuteronomy, Moses compiled the complete Torah scroll and then gave copies of it to all the tribes of Israel. According to one traditional opinion, it was only in the last weeks of Moses' life that he finished writing out the full Torah and he delivered it to the Qur'anim, to the priests. That's what it says in Deuteronomy. And even when he delivered it, he instructed that every person should make their own Torah. He made a mitzvah. There's a mitzvah. The 613th commandment at the end of the Torah is that you should write your own Torah. And many people, especially people of means, have written their own Torah scrolls. Now, for those of us who can't afford to write a whole Torah scroll, because you're talking about at this point probably around $100,000 to commission a scribe to write a Torah scroll, because there's 305,806 letters in the Torah. And because a Torah is not complete without every letter, you can buy a letter in a Torah, which many of us in this room have. And because the Torah is not complete without that letter, it's as if you wrote an entire scroll. Though I bless you all with the means to be able to write an entire scroll. Until then, I encourage you, if you've never bought a letter, let me know. I will arrange to buy a letter for you so that you can have a letter in the Torah. So he said, Moses said that everyone should have a Torah of their own. And this culminated in Moses presenting a Torah scroll to each of the 12 tribes. And essentially, I would call this the first publication of the Torah. I think it's worth noting that even within the Torah's text, there are hints of this process. For example, the Torah says, Moses wrote down this Torah. And it refers to the earlier books that Moses kept, like the Book of the Covenant, right, which was in Exodus. It was initially called the Book of the Covenant. Rashi, who's the super commentary, he explains that before the revelation at Sinai, Moses had already written down the story of Genesis until the beginning of the Exodus. So, in other words, there were ancient records and traditions from the patriarchs, from Abraham, from Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, from Yaakov and Leah and Rachel. There were these ancient traditions which Moses had and he incorporated. Then came this dramatic national revelation at Mount Sinai, where the entire people, all of the Jewish people, heard the Ten Commandments. And after that, Moses continued to receive and record the rest of the commandments throughout the desert sojourn. And by the end of his life, the Torah was complete. And so, from a traditional standpoint, Moses is indeed the writer, but God is the author. And Moses acted as a faithful scribe, or maybe I would call him the editor of God's words. Writing some sections earlier, writing some sections later, all under divine instruction. As somebody once said to me, God can work with editors just as well as he can with authors. I used to own a publishing house, I always loved that term. The involvement of Moses' hand, maybe quill and maybe prior documents, doesn't make the Torah any less divine in our eyes. Again, I'm talking about from a traditional standpoint. That even though it's Moses that was the scribe, it doesn't make the actual Torah any less divine. It's what we call Torah Messinai, the Torah from Sinai, meaning the Torah from God. The Rebbe once said that this idea of Torah Misinai, that the Torah from Sinai is central because it represents a mass revelation, that the entire people witness God's communication and it wasn't a hidden private vision. And in Jewish tradition, this is critical, it's crucial. Because if one or two people come and claim a revelation, then other people can doubt them. But here we have an entire people that experienced it together. And they told their kids, who told their kids, who told their kids. So for many generations, obviously, we're talking about 3,000 years ago. At this point, we don't appreciate it, which is why we have the written word. But for many generations, people would tell their children the story that their parents told them, but that their parents told them. The Passover Seder, for example, started the first year following leaving Egypt. And the idea was the parents sat down once a year. Obviously, they probably talked about it. Or maybe they didn't, right? Many Holocaust survivors, I'm not, I don't want to use a comparison, but that's in our generation, many Holocaust survivors did not tell their kids the story. So I think the idea of the Seder was that the parents sit down with the kids and say, tell them the story that happened when they left Egypt when they experienced Sinai. That was the point of it. Shavuo was you sit down with the kids and you say to them, this is what happened at Sinai. And then they're going to say to their kids, my parents told me what they saw at Sinai. And then they're going to say to their kids, my grandparents told me what they saw at Sinai. And then they're going to say to their kids, my great-grandparents told me what they saw at Sinai. And so this was how this revelation that was experienced by all the people was passed down. Judaism stakes its authenticity on that national memory. This is, I would say, the critical thing I can tell you today. That Judaism stakes its authenticity on that national memory. Our sages actually say that all future prophets and sages, that everything in our tradition is validated by that one collective event at Sinai. It's as if God signed the contract with all of us all at once. Now I know this is what you're waiting for. Enter modern scholarship. Historians, Bible academics, especially, I would say, over the last two centuries, have developed theories. One of those theories is uh an example is a documentary hypothesis. And these theories challenge the single author Sinai account. I would say the most famous is the New York Times best-selling author, Yuval Noah Harari, is the one that many people in this room would know. He takes this academic view. And so I'm going to, as best as I can, honestly outline what Harari and similar scholars say about the Torah's origin. And I'm going to talk about it as well from a traditional uh standpoint as well. In Harari's analysis, the Torah and I guess the Bible in general was not written down in one fell swoop by Moses. What he says is that it was multiple authors over centuries. He describes it by that the text shows signs of different writing styles, of different vocabulary and perspectives. So he would say that that suggests that different authors or groups wrote various parts at different times in Israelite history. He says, maybe between uh um 800 to 500 BCE, long after Moses, and that they were later compiled into a book. He also says that uh political and social agendas, that the Torah's laws, the stories he claims, often match the needs of whoever held power when those sections were written. For example, certain laws in Deuteronomy insist that um all must worship, uh all worship must be centralized. It says that uh in a place that God will choose, hinting at Jerusalem. So Harari and and and others as well see this as reflecting a political agenda to centralize worship in Jerusalem. Like during the time of King Josiah, there were there were there were he made religious reforms. So rather than a mandate actually given in Moses' time, he he was able to use this to kind of create his religious reforms. And there were narratives like God promising kingship to the house of David. So he says this could be seen as written or edited later to legitimize the Davidic dynasty in Jerusalem. So according to this opinion, the Torah, in this view, isn't this neutral history or pure theology, but rather it's a product of its time, full of updates that supported whoever was in charge during the time that it was updated. The next conversation that the scholars have is whether the Torah's literal history or foundational myth. So Harari says that while the Torah contains some historical elements, it reads more like a theological or moral epic than a factual chronicle. There are grand stories of creation, of floods, of miracles, and these carry moral and spiritual messages. Harari, who wrote in his book, Sapiens, calls religion a kind of shared fiction or a mythology. He would say that the Torah was meant to unite people under common ideals and not to document history like a modern textbook. And the last thing that I wanted to talk about that these scholars speak of is religion as a human construct. So, zooming out, Harari sees all religions, Judaism included, as human inventions. Albeit he does say incredibly influential ones. In his words, religion is an early form of information technology or social technology, a genius system that encoded shared laws and narratives so that large groups of humans could cooperate effectively. In Sapiens, he marvels that millions of strangers can coexist and trust each other because they share belief in the same stories and in the same laws. And it's true to a certain extent. The biblical Torah from this angle was a brilliant, as he says, ancient project to create a national identity and a moral order. But the key point is to Harari, the Torah's origin is human, not supernatural. That its genius lies in human creativity and social needs rather than what traditional Judaism refers to as divine revelation. No. I don't necessarily agree with him. I'm not here to beat Harari in a debate. The point of it is to score points, is not to score points. I'm not interested in in just having, you know, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna prove Harari wrong. That that people have tried that. And I that's not my style, and that's not my interest. We'll be back after a quick break. I just want to say thank you to everyone who picked up the forgiveness experiment. Your messages, your stories, they mean so much to me. And together we've taken this book to a number one bestseller on Amazon. I'm really grateful. If you haven't read it yet, if you haven't picked it up yet, it's available on hardcover, paperback, on your e-reader. You can listen to it, uh, the audiobook on Audible, and you'll find all the links in the show notes. I think that there's much value in what he observes. And I think There's much value in what he says. The Torah has indeed served as a unifying constitution for the Jewish people, and many other peoples have adopted that. It's been amazingly effective at preserving our identity across vast distances and ages. And maybe the most successful information system, as he puts it, of values in history. A secular historian can legitimately be in awe of that achievement. Alana, in your question to me, you mentioned Harari Kongatora a genius piece of information technology. And that is true. That standardized truths to hold society together, which I think maybe in a world today that needs a little bit more morals and ethics could be something that people should look at, and people do look at. It recognizes the Torah's power, where we, I say we meaning traditional believers, will differ from Harari as how we explain that power and purpose. It's purely an outcome of human evolution and clever nation building. Or is there a transcendent author behind it using human history as that author's pen? And so I want to kind of bridge the perspectives. I want to offer a perspective that is honest about our belief while also understanding the academic view. From a Kabbalistic standpoint, we certainly maintain that the Torah is divine at its core. But we don't have to depict the process as God literally whispering into Moses' ear, every word in a vacuum, with Moses as the robot scribe. It's much more nuanced. The classical sources say that God's presence and voice flowed through Moses, flowed through his own mind, his own voice. So Moses wasn't an automation, he was a prophet with a towering intellect and a faithful heart. The Midrash says that the divine presence spoke from Moses' throat. And Rabbi Chaim Vital, the sixteenth century mystic, explained that a prophet hears God's voice in his own voice, meaning divine revelation is somewhat filtered through the prophet's personality, through the prophet's language. And this is how Moses could have a writing style at all, yet it was all inspired and approved by God. Kabbalah even allows that Moses might have been acting as an editor under divine guidance. For example, Moses likely drew on those earlier patriarchal and matriarchal chronicles from Genesis and God guiding him. So if we notice the Torah as having differing tones or different terminologies in different sections, our sages would not be shocked. They knew, for instance, that the book of Deuteronomy has a distinct style because it's basically Moses' own final speeches to the people, albeit given with divine inspiration. And if you look at that similarly, the legal sections versus the narrative sections. The legal sections of a Torah are going to read differently than the narrative sections because Moses received them in different contexts. Sinai revelations versus uh wilderness events, and maybe compiled some reports, like the census lists. Right? There's two census in the book of Midbar Nasso, and then again in Pinchlas in next week's Torah portion. The bottom line is that from our perspective, multiple styles or stages in writing do not equal multiple authors opposed to each other. One composer, God, can write a symphony with different movements and instruments. We see unity where secular scholars see fragmentation. I'm gonna explain to the I'm gonna explain this with an analogy. Imagine an architect who designs a grand building, and a crew of builders constructed over time. A historian examining the building might point out that the different construction styles or the different materials that were used in different wings and conclude that this wing was built later by a different planner and the design maybe evolved. But insiders might say no, it was one architect's plan from the start. The apparent differences are because he deliberately used different techniques and different sections, and the project took time. So I think in a similar way, a believer sees one architect behind the Torah, even if parts of it feel different. And those differences have reasons, some of which our commentaries discuss at length, but they don't shake the underlying unity. I know what you're thinking. So, why do so many intelligent scholars disagree? Is it bias? I think it often comes down to starting assumptions. A lot of scholarship is that way. You have to begin with something. What's your beginning assumption? So modern academia generally operates from a secular axiom. That axiom doesn't allow supernatural revelation as an explanation. It's just they're not even going to go there. They start with the premise that the Torah must have come about by natural socio-political process. And then they interpret all evidence in that light because that's their initial assumption. Here's what I would say. No amount of evidence for a Sinai event would sway those scholars because their axiom is real history, can't include, it can't include God talking to people. We're talking about axioms. So if you presuppose that God doesn't or couldn't speak to humans, or that God doesn't exist, then we're really just we can't have the same conversation. If you, you know, and I've had these moments, the younger version of myself used to like this. You know, get me up on stage with a with an atheist. I'm gonna prove him wrong. Well, you can't prove an atheist wrong if you're a believer because you're talking about apples and oranges here. You're talking about two different conversations. So if you presuppose that God doesn't or or couldn't speak to humans, then of course you'll conclude that humans wrote the Torah on their own. The basis of this goes back to the 7th century, the 17th century philosopher Spinoza. Spinoza, who was one of the first to critically argue that Moses didn't write the whole Torah, he believed in a non-personal God. I would call it nature. He called it non-personal God, it was convenient for him to say that. And his non-personal God, he said, doesn't communicate or care about human affairs. Starting from that belief, Spinoza naturally concluded that all those Torah verses saying, and God spoke to Moses must, must have been written later by human editors. Now, on the contrary, if you allow that axiom that a caring God exists and can and can communicate, then a revealed Torah is not illogical at all. Now, I don't want you to think that I'm I'm dismissing critical scholarship. I'm not asking us here to turn off our brain. I think quite the opposite. Judaism is about qu is about questions. I've spoken about this so many times. Judaism is about intellectual engagement, it's about critical thinking. What I would say people who have challenges about yeshiva, about rabbinical scholarship, the greatest thing that I learned in yeshiva was critical thought. My education allows me to be able to take a look at Harari, which I don't fully agree with. I agree with some, definitely Spinoza, who I don't agree with, but to look at it and have this conversation and be able to not just bring you, I could very easily just bring you Torah sources and forget about the scholarship. So I'm not saying that you should turn off your brain. What I'm saying is that everyone, skeptics and believers, are going to bring a certain assumption to the table. And what how you start is how it's going to continue. If you start any of these conversations, especially the Torah conversation, the God conversation, with that assumption, then that assumption is not going to allow for other ways of thinking. So the only way to do it, perhaps, is a bit Talmudic, where you have to look at it from all perspectives. But I want to acknowledge the bias and the assumption, more the assumption than the bias, that exists between, let's say, a Harari, a Spinoza, and a Maimonides. So the believer says, I have millennia of Jewish testimony, millennia of spiritual experience backing the idea that God is real and that God spoke at Sinai. And the skeptic is going to say, we've seen people invent religions, we've seen people invent legends. So probably that's what happened here, too. And each side is going to weigh the evidence through its own lens. And my role here, at least this is my personal opinion, my role here is not to attack the other lens, but to explain the traditional lens in a credible, empathetic way. I want to address Harari's specific points. Because in Alana's question, she raised points about the Torah reflecting political agendas. And Harari talks about this. That I spoke about this before, that like centralizing worship or or or boasting David's lineage. So how can traditional Judaism, how can a traditional perspective answer that? So it's interesting. The Torah itself actually says that God will choose a specific place in the future for his sanctuary. It's in Deuteronomy chapter 12. It doesn't mention Jerusalem by name. It couldn't, because Jerusalem wasn't in Israelite hands, it wasn't in Jewish hands. But Deuteronomy definitely sets the stage for a central temple once they settle the land. So from our view, this was a prophecy of the future, not a product of it. And I think in a similar way, promises about a king from the line of Judah or David can be seen as genuine predictions or divine plans that were later fulfilled. What a secular historian would call back projection by a later writer, a believer would call foreknowledge by a divine author. It's two ways of looking at the same data. And consider this. If parts of a Torah were written to legitimize the Jerusalem Temple or the lineage of David, the Torah certainly doesn't read like a royal propaganda piece. Actually, it puts heavy limits on royal power. For example, in that same chapter in Deuteronomy, it says that a king must not have too many horses or wives or gold, and that he's subject to the Torah like everyone else. He's not above the law, the Torah law. It even portrays the people later in chapter 17 demanding a king as a compromise. That's hardly a sales pitch from King David's PR team, in my opinion. A Bible professor, Joshua Berman. He points out that the Torah was revolutionary in decentralizing power. If anything, he says, it turned the Israelite kingship into a limited, almost constitutional monarchy and elevated the idea that law is above the king, which, if you think about it, was a radical notion in the ancient world. The Torah placed the service of God not only in the temple, but also in every home, which is completely unique. That most of the mitzvas are done outside of the synagogue, outside of the temple. And that concept of decentralizing mitzvahs, of decentralizing Judaism, made prophets and priests a challenge to kings. So if it were just the king's propaganda, why would you want it outside of the castle? That would be very odd. I'll give you another example. Throughout the ancient Near East, kings claim to be gods. Or many of them claim to be appointed by gods to rule unconditionally. But the Torah has the prophet Samuel chastising King Saul and later anoint the shepherd boy King David. For those of you who spent time with me when I did my House of David class, showing the Torah, I believe in that episode, shows that even kings are chosen and critiqued by higher law. The agenda of the Torah, seen in its laws, seen in its narratives, consistently favors justice, consistently favors equality and morality over any one political group's political gain. It even says that the Hebrews, the Israelites, angered God many times. It's not a good idea. It should talk about walking on water. Why is it talking about God being angry at us? Not exactly a self-congratulatory national history. And if the priests or the kings were editing the Torah to serve themselves, I would say maybe take out the golden calf incident, which makes the priestly class Aaron look pretty bad. Or maybe going into the Book of Kings when King David himself makes all those mistakes. Maybe take that out. It's not good for the monarchy who wants to hear about King Charles and all the mistakes he made. Using a modern example, just saying. Now, none of this, I know what you're thinking, none of this proves the Torah's divine origin in a laboratory sense. But I think it does suggest that the Torah isn't easily explained as just a power play manual, as some of the scholars want to say. That the Torahs value, the values often transcend the norms of the era in ways that benefited the weak more than the strong, that benefit the people more than the kings, more than the monarchy. For instance, it mandated rest on the seventh day for everyone, for servants and for masters. It talks about a fundamental equality of all humans. Words like humans are created in the image of God. That's not good if you're a deity. You don't want everyone to be in the image of God. Only the deity should be in the image of God. It instituted protections for widows, for orphans, for strangers. These weren't ideas that would serve the elite. Actually, the opposite. They challenged the elite. And I think, and here's a key element I think historically, those divine values helped propel movements for human rights and ethics worldwide. Even up until our generation. It's fascinating. And maybe not coincidential that modern democracy and civil rights ultimately grew in civilizations influenced by biblical ideals, by one God creating all people equal. Jonathan Sachs of Blessed Memory once said that the Torah introduced the ethical vision that would centuries later undermine slavery and tyranny. Now Harari may look at Sachs and say, that's brilliant human innovation. That was good work. But we call it the fulfillment of God's plan to make the world a better place. That the Torah's wisdom was ahead of its time. There's another argument. One of my teachers once shared this with me. He said, look at the results. Somehow this Torah, if you follow it, produces an eternal people and a roadmap for a moral society. My teacher once said that all the evidence in the world might not convince a skeptic of Sinai, but the very success of Moses' teachings should make us pause. Moses taught that every human being is dignified and that God cares about the slave as much as the priest. Today, we take human rights for granted. But Professor Berman, I was reading an article that he wrote, he said that in the ancient context, it was a bombshell, that those ideas worked, they gradually changed the world. Empires rose and fell, philosophies came and went, but the Torah's core ideals have endured and spread. Because from a believer's perspective, from the axiom of believers, it's because truth lasts. As the it's we say this in the prayers, for length of days and years of life and peace will Torah add to you. It works. Society today is simply not sustainable without the values that Moses taught, without a belief in a God who cares. We're left with no solid basis for rights or morality. It's just dog eat dog. I know it's strong words, but think about the twentieth century, the tumultuous twentieth century, regimes that explicitly rejected any higher moral law. Nazi, Stalin. These regimes created horrors almost unfathomable. Meanwhile, movements that appealed to a higher law, civil rights movement, singing church songs, for example, they achieved justice. I always think about through the eyes of Martin Luther King, if he would imagine that 50 years after he marched, there'd be a black president. It's a beautiful story. And it's our story, it's a modern story. It's a story that we've lived through. It's not his story or her story, it's our story of our time. It seems that the Torah idea of a caring higher power has been a force for good well beyond the boundaries of any one religion. So, from our angle, from the traditional angle, the Torah's impact and coherence are not just an accident of history. They are signs of a guiding author behind the scenes. We happily acknowledge that human beings were involved in transmitting and compiling the Torah. Moses, first and foremost, and later the scribes who preserved it with painstakingly accuracy, letter by letter. It's unbelievable when we found the Dead Sea Scrolls and we saw that in 3,000 years not one letter has been changed. It was mind-blowing. But those humans were, we believe, carrying out the design of a higher intelligence. In a sense, I would say that God partnered with people in authoring the Torah. That our sages have a beautiful saying that the Torah is not in heaven, meaning that once God gave it, it's for us, for the humans, to handle and to discuss doing what we're doing, what we do here every single week. But they also say that the Torah is black fire on white fire in its spiritual form, meaning that it's of divine essence. And we see the Torah as a meeting point between heaven and earth, where heaven and earth kiss. Now, if that sounds mystical, it is. Kabbalah emphasizes that the Torah has infinite layers of meaning because it originates in the infinite mind of God. Yet it's written in human language to guide real people. It's both divine and deeply human. I was talking to Sarah, and she was saying that one of her meditations lately is she just takes one word in Hebrew and starts kind of letting it bounce around her head and seeing, like kind of piecing it apart and the layers and the elements and any word in Hebrew. That's how rich the language is. It's literally an infinite language that is that is also finite. That's why I think, and I can encourage anyone who hasn't uh studied the Hebrew language, I think it's a great uh thing just just to be able to appreciate the the layers and layers and layers of understanding behind each and every word. So, Alana, I want to uh close this section of my response. This is my honest view. And I have to say that I truly believe the Torah is the Word of God, as our tradition holds, but I also understand why someone who's educated in modern critical methods would see it otherwise. I don't scorn that perspective. What I do is I invite you and anyone else to consider that the traditional view has its own robust logic and depth. It's not a naive magic book that fell from the sky. And if you if you thought about that, it could also be that a lot of people only learn Torah, they only learn Judaism when they're kids. So a lot of us have this infantile view and perspective of Torah. So if your Hebrew school taught it to you simplistically, it's because of your age and you're not alone, because most people got this children's version and have to relearn it as adults. And that's somewhat for many of us of what we're doing here. What we believe is a profound claim about encounter, that our people encountered God and ethics in an unprecedented way. And that story has been so strong, it's held us together ever since, and it's held together a people for 2,000 years, waiting every single day to go back home. There's not a people that have been in diaspora for as long as us that have held it together. And our secret has been the Torah. The historian Paul Johnson, a secular historian, if I can add, once wrote that in his opinion, no people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that ideas matter and that the truth of ideas matter. No people, he says, has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that ideas matter and that the truth of ideas matter. So for the Jews to cling tenaciously to the idea that God spoke at Sinai through every generation, even when it was difficult, even when it was dangerous to do so, what it tells me is there's something real and there's something precious there. Our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, they found it compelling enough to live and die by it. And for that alone is why I believe it, and why I teach it with conviction and humility. So I want to just sum this up for you. Who wrote the Torah? Who wrote the Torah? From a Torah, from a from a traditional Torah standpoint, God is the ultimate author. And Moses is the faithful scribe, writing over forty years, integrating earlier documents, all under divine revelation, from a secular standpoint. Various Israelites wrote it over centuries as a national saga or legal code. Those are very, two very different narratives. And my approach is to respectfully disagree with Harari's purely secular narrative. The Torah is more than an ancient Wikipedia of laws. It's a living document with a soul that has guided us, that has given meaning to countless lives, and perhaps the best proof of its divine spark is that it continues to speak to us and challenge us in every era. That still, 3,000 years later, look at us here. We're thousands of miles from the origin of a Torah, and we're still debating it, and we're still challenging it. I love that more than anything else. The Torah means instruction. The word Torah is instruction or guide. And even Harari sees that it brilliantly guided a society and continues to. And that I love this room so much because of our ability to bring different approaches, different ideas, to think critically. And instead of trying to score points and debating each other, we try to find the unity and the joy within it all. That's my blessing today. And I wish you all a beautiful Shabbat. And thank you very much.