 At any rate, one of these scientists that I was listening to several years ago also happened to be a Jewish rabbi. And in his talk, he said, you know you Christians never really understood the meaning of the third commandment, to not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. He said, for some reason, you thought that that meant you were not supposed to say, God damn you. Well, it isn't very nice to say, God damn you. But do you know that's not even close to the meaning of the commandment? Vonus is emptiness. To speak something in vain is to speak it with emptiness, with futility, it's a waste of time. He said the meaning of the commandment, as it was understood for centuries in Judaism, was don't even speak the name. Whatever in your lifetime, pronounce the sacred name Yahweh, never. And he said, this gave us at the very beginnings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a cosmic humility about God, that once you think you've got God in your pocket, that you understand the great mystery, religion always becomes, he said, arrogant and idolatrous, where we love our explanations of God more than actually falling in love with God, where God refuses to ever be an object of the intellect, but is only known by those who enter into love and surrender. Secondly, he said, and probably a lot of you know this, that when you write Hebrew, you actually just write the consonants. And what it means to be an educated Jew is to have memorized the appropriate vowels and to know how to fill in the appropriate vowels in the appropriate places. I knew that from my short Hebrew class. But the third part is what I most want to leave with you tonight. He said, did you know that the consonants used in the spelling of the sacred name Yahweh are in fact the only consonants that if correctly pronounced, do not allow you to use your tongue or close your lips. In fact, we know that the pronouncing of the sacred name was an attempt to imitate and replicate breath, that it was inhalation and exhalation. And then he began to do it into the microphone. Tears started being audible in the room, in a room of PhDs. I now give this to every crowd I can because it can change your life.