 So, what is it that determines someone's Jewish status? Is it the mother that determines whether someone is a Jew? Is it the father that determines whether someone is a Jew? Or is it both? Do you have to have both? So this question can actually be a little bit confusing because in some respects Judaism is patrilineal. For example, if a woman from the tribe of Asher marries a man from the tribe of Ruvane, which tribe the children belong to? So according to Judaism, the children will be associated with the tribe of Ruvane, not with the mother's tribe of Asher. So when it comes to tribal affiliation, that is patrilineal. When it comes to, for example, whether or not someone is a Kohane, someone is a priest, that goes through the father. There's a very cute joke that someone once came to their rabbi and said, Rabbi, I would like you to make me a priest. And the rabbi said, well, you just can't make someone into a priest. And the guy says to the rabbi, I'll pay you a million dollars. And the rabbi says, I'm sorry, you just can't pay someone money and become a priest. He said, I'll give you two million dollars. The rabbi says, fine, you're a priest. So the rabbi then says, let me ask you a question. Why was it so important for you to be a priest? He says, what are you talking about? My father was a priest. My grandfather was a priest. So that's exactly how you become a priest. If your father was a priest, you become a priest. So those kind of designations are patrilineal. They go through the father. But in terms of whether or not someone has the status of being a Jew, this has always gone through the mother. And I'd like to share with you a number of places in the Torah where this becomes clear. One reference is actually not from the Torah itself. It's from the later part of the Bible. It's from the Kutuvim, the book of Ezra. And the book of Ezra describes the time when the Jewish people were coming back to the land of Israel after their exile in Babylon and after the first temple had been destroyed. So they came back to rebuild the second temple in Jerusalem. And in the latter part of the book of Ezra, it describes that when this great sage, great prophet Ezra came back to Israel, he was shocked to see, to find that many of the Jewish people that had been living in Israel had taken non-Jewish wives from the surrounding non-Jewish tribes that were living in Israel. It was a bit of a crisis because this was the first time in Jewish history that this had ever happened where there was massive intermarriage. And so they at that point resolved and they made a decree that these non-Jewish wives and their children would have to be expelled. That was the decision. That the men who had taken non-Jewish wives, their wives that were not Jewish and the children that were born to these wives, of course, this is referring by the way to any wives that had not been properly converted, but any wives that were determined to have been non-Jewish were expelled with their children. Now, let me read to you the passage where this appears in the book of Ezra. It says, now then, this is chapter 10, verse 3, now then let us make a covenant with our God to expel all these women and those who have been born to them in accordance with the bidding of the Lord and of all who are concerned over the commandment of our God and let the Torah be obeyed. Now, this is speaking about Jewish men who married non-Jewish women and they're going to expel not only their non-Jewish wives but the children and the question is if the child of a Jewish father is Jewish, then why would they expel the children born to these women? Meaning in this situation, it wouldn't make any sense to take Jewish children and to send them back away from the Jewish community with these non-Jewish women. It's clear from this story that if the father is Jewish but the mother is not Jewish, we see from this passage in Ezra that the children are not Jewish and that's why these children will be sent back with the mothers. Very clear that in this situation where the mother is not Jewish, the children are not considered to be Jewish either. And what you should notice about this passage is that it concludes by saying and they will be obeying the Torah. Meaning that Ezra indicates here that this definition of Jewishness is not just some late innovation at that time. This policy of sending away the non-Jewish women with those children is actually the policy of the Torah itself. Now there is an earlier source for matrilineal descent that interestingly also occurs in the Bible in a passage dealing with the issue of intermarriage. And this is from Deuteronomy chapter 7 and you have to remember that the book of Deuteronomy is being addressed to the people of Israel after their 40 years of wandering in the desert, after their exodus from Egypt, and it takes place weeks before they were entering the land of Canaan. The entire book of Deuteronomy is recited by Moses in a course of about five weeks. The passage there in Deuteronomy chapter 7 says the following. And listen very carefully to the words because you're going to hopefully notice something peculiar. Moses says, you shall not intermarry with them. Again, the context is you're leaving the desert now. You've been in this cocoon in this bubble. It's all Jews 24-7 in the desert. That's all we have here. But you're about to go into the land of Canaan where there are all these non-Jewish nations. So Moses warns you shall not intermarry with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son and you shall not take his daughter for your son for he will turn away your son from following me and they will worship the gods of others and the anger of God will be kindled against you. That's the passage we need to look at. And if you listen carefully, you should have noticed something really strange. What the passage should have said was for he will turn your daughter away from me or it should have said, for she will turn your son away from me. Meaning God will be saying, in the case of an intermarriage, God will be saying that if you do intermarry with them, God says in the second verse, for he, the non-Jewish spouse, will turn your daughter away from me or it could have said she, the non-Jewish spouse, will turn your son away from me. That would have made sense. But after saying you shall not intermarry with them, you shall not give your daughter to their son and you shall not take his daughter for your son. What does it say? It says, for he will turn away your son from following me. For he will turn away your son from following me. What is this speaking about? Who is the he? And who is the son that it's speaking about? So one possibility is that this is referring back to the first prohibited case. If you remember, the first prohibited case was, don't give your daughter to their son. That's the first case that's described. Do not give your daughter to their son. And it's referring back to that case and it explains now why. Why shouldn't you give your daughter to their son? I mean, this non-Jewish son. Because he, because he, the non-Jewish father, will turn your daughter's son away from me. And again, the verse here is describing, is really speaking to the grandparents. So it's saying, don't give your daughter to their son because he, your non-Jewish son-in-law, will turn your daughter's son away from me. And the verse describes your grandson as your son. Now this shouldn't sound too strange because throughout the Bible, grandchildren are often referred to as children. So again, we're trying to understand the flow of these verses. And the passage begins, you shall not intimary with them, you shall not give your daughter to their son. And it's possible to say then that in the next verse, which says, for he will turn away your son, it's referring to he, your non-Jewish son-in-law, will turn away your son, meaning your grandson, away from following me. And the Bible refers to your son, really it means your grandson. And that's not so unusual. What we see though, is that in this verse, it says that this child is considered as your son. Meaning, even though the father is not Jewish, the father is not Jewish in this case, because the mother here is Jewish, meaning your daughter, right? The mother is Jewish. The child has a status of being a Jew. And the Bible describes this as your son. So we see here that the status goes through the woman. That's one possibility. Again, we're trying to understand, what does it mean when it says, for he will turn your son away from following me? So one possibility is it's referring back to the first prohibited case of the Jewish girl, the Jewish woman who's marrying a non-Jewish man. And it says, for he, the non-Jewish spouse, will turn your son, meaning your grandson, away from following me. But you see from this way of reading the passage, that this child of the Jewish woman and the non-Jewish man is considered to be Jewish. The other possibility in understanding this verse, is it's referring to the second situation, where your son is going to take a non-Jewish woman. Now how do we understand the phrase, he will turn your son away from following me? So there, the word he that will turn away your son, will be the father of his non-Jewish wife. Your son is going to marry this non-Jewish woman. He, meaning that your son's father-in-law is going to turn away your son from following me. What is this segment teaching? So this segment's teaching that by marrying out of the Jewish people, your son will be turning away from God, why? Because his children will not be Jewish. And since in this case where your son who's Jewish is marrying a non-Jewish woman and his children, your son's children will not be considered Jewish, this is going to ultimately end up pushing your own son away from the Jewish people. It's going to be your father-in-law essentially that turns your son away from following me, God says. In either way of reading this passage, we see that the child of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father is Jewish. But if the mother is not Jewish and the father is Jewish, the child is not Jewish. And this basically, this analysis I just took you through is the way that the Talmud demonstrates how matrilineal descent is from the Torah. Why might this be the case? Why might it be that the status of a Jewish child goes after the mother rather than after the father? What might the reasoning be? So one reason that's been offered is that you can know with certainty who the mother of a child is with much greater clarity than you're able to determine who the father is, especially in ancient times when we didn't have DNA testing, you can always know who the mother is, but who the father is is not so clear. A second rationale was offered by the previous Lubavitch Rebbe, Rabmanachem Mandel-Schnersen who says, and it's quite logical, that a child is more biologically connected to the mother than to the father. Aside from the fact that the embryo was nurtured in the mother's womb for nine months, but we know that the child is then often nursed by the mother and in most cases, the child will spend most of the time during its formative years in the company of its mother, more so than with the father. So Jewish status, which is really a question of a person's essential identity, who are you? Who are you? This is determined by the mother.