 would define Judaism as the spiritual path of the Jewish people. Judaism as the spiritual path of the Jewish people and I think that before we actually begin exploring this path it would be first important to come to some understanding about the Jewish people. Who are the Jewish people? So the Bible begins with the account of creation and mankind is placed in what is referred to as Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden. In Hebrew, Eden means pleasure or delight and God's intention was that humanity, human beings, live in paradise. That was the plan. In the Garden of Eden, our needs were provided for and we were able to dedicate ourselves to spiritual pursuits and to growing in our closeness to the Creator. But we know what happened. Mankind Adam and Eve rebuilt. They didn't follow God's instructions and they were exiled from paradise. We know that for the next 10 generations humanity failed to improve and they grew increasingly immoral and wicked. God finally destroyed the world with a flood, choosing to save the righteous Noah and his family with the plan of starting over again with them. Unfortunately after Noah, mankind united this time. They weren't killing each other. They weren't acting horribly to each other. They united but they united in order to rebel against God. And what they did was to build a huge tower to assert their own autonomy. And what God does is to confuse their languages and scatters them all over the world. At this point in the Bible's story, we focus in on someone named Abraham. Abraham was born in 1812 BCE, 1812 BCE, which was 1948 years after Adam. And God chooses Abraham to father a nation that would change the world and lead the world back to him and towards living righteously. When we first encounter Abraham in the Bible, this choosing of Abraham, God says to him in chapter 12 of Genesis, he tells Abraham was living then in the Ur of the Chaldean area, which is today's Babylon, Iraq. And he tells him to pick up and leave his family, leave the land of his birthplace and travel to some unknown unnamed land, which will turn out to be the land of Canaan, of Canaan. And he tells Abraham that I'm going to make you into a great nation. And through your people, God tells him, all the nations and people of the world are going to be blessed. So the choosing of Abraham to begin this nation is not simply for the purpose of having a nation all by themselves. The purpose of this nation that Abraham is to start is to be a nation that will change the world for the better. And then God tells us that the entire universe, all the world is to be blessed through Abraham and his family. Abraham travels to the land of Canaan, to Canaan. And God promises to give him this land as an eternal possession. In the Bible, Abraham is originally referred to as an Ivri. The word Ivri is usually translated as a Hebrew. What does this word mean? Abraham the Ivri, Abraham the Hebrew. So it's usually understood to be a form of the word ovar, avar, may avar, which means across from the other side. Some say that it means that Abraham's family came from the other side of the river. But more pointedly, what the Bible is telling us was that Abraham stood on one side of the world and everyone else stood on the opposite side of the world. We had a world at that time that had descended into wickedness and more seriously into idolatry. Abraham was someone who was unique in his excellence in the trade of loving kindness and generosity. And he was unique in his attachment to the Creator, his faith in God. The world had sunk into worldwide idolatry to the point where we're told in our literature that Abraham's father, Terah, was someone who sold idols for a living. We're told that Abraham contemplated the universe. He was not raised as a monotheist. And he came to understand through his contemplation that there must have been a Creator who created everything in the world and who controls and supervises everything in the world. It's a famous story that's told, both in Jewish literature and actually in the Quran, that Abraham was the first iconoclast. They tell that Abraham's father, when he was a child, left Abraham to mine the store. His father had a store that sold idols. His father had to go away on business, maybe to a big idol makers convention. And here is young Abraham taking care of the store. And what does he do? He gets a big sledgehammer. And with it, he smashes all of the idols in the store, except for the largest one. And he puts the big sledgehammer into the hand of the large idol. And when his father comes home to the store, his father sees all of the idols are destroyed. And he says to Abraham, what happened? I put you in charge of watching the store. And Abraham says, I couldn't help it. They got into a big fight because someone had brought some sacrifices for the idols. And the idols wanted, everyone wanted the food for themselves. So the biggest idol picked up this sledgehammer and destroyed all the other idols. And his father said to him, what are you talking about? These are just clay statues. They can't fight. They can't argue. They can't do anything. And Abraham says, exactly. So why do you worship them? And one of the questions that we have to explore is why is it that God chose Abraham for this mission to be the founder of this nation and not Noah? Because the Bible had told us previously about Noah, that he was someone that was perfectly righteous. Here we had someone that was perfect and righteous. And God could have chosen Noah to be the progenitor of this special nation. Why does God pass over Noah and choose Abraham for this job? I believe that one of the clues we can find in the fact that both Noah and Abraham each faced the same test during their lifetime. Because both Noah and Abraham were told by God that I am going to destroy the world. Noah was told that there's going to be a flood that's going to wipe out everything. And Abraham was told by God that he's going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Amorah and Adma and Sevolim, which were the major population centers in the world back then, basically a worldwide devastation. But Noah and Abraham react very differently. Noah says to God, okay, you're God. I'm sure you know what you're doing. You want me to build a boat and save myself and my family? Fine. I will obey you, God. God, you say jump and I'll say how high. That's what Noah says. God says to Abraham, I'm going to destroy these cities. And Abraham starts screaming at God. How dare you? God forbid. And he starts to argue with God. And he says to God, what are you doing? Will you the judge of the whole world not do justice? He says to God, will you destroy the righteous with the wicked? What he seems to be saying to God is, look, God, if you want to destroy wicked people, I can't argue with you. But if there are righteous people in those cities, it would be evil for you, God, to destroy the righteous together with the wicked. You can't do that. So he says to God, something interesting. What you would expect Abraham to say is, look, God, if there are 50 righteous people in those cities, so take out the righteous people and then kill all the wicked people. Abraham doesn't say that. Abraham says, God, if there are 50 righteous people in those cities, you've got to save the entire city. And then he says, okay, what if there aren't 50? What if there are 45? Okay, not 45. What about 40, 30, 20 gets down to 10. And God says, fine, if you find 10 righteous people, I won't destroy the cities. What is Abraham's thinking? If you look at the Hebrew text, it doesn't just say 50 righteous people in the city, it says, HaMishim tzadikim betoch ha'ir, 50 righteous people within the city, meaning that Abraham is not looking for 50 righteous people or 10 righteous people who are in some cloistered monastery all by themselves having nothing to do with the rest of the city. Abraham is saying that if there are righteous people, even 10 of them, who are living amongst the rest of the city, betoch ha'ir, then God, you have to save the entire city, not just those righteous people. Because Abraham's thesis is very different than Noah. Noah was someone who basically gave up on the fact that every human being is created in the image of God, and therefore every human being has the possibility of changing. Because Abraham, Noah was someone who looked at a world that was so wicked and so abominable, he couldn't imagine anyone changing. Imagine if you're walking downtown Toronto, and you cut through some alley, and you see they're in the alley lying in his vomit, someone has been drunk for two days. So how many people would walk by and say, you know, it's a shame. If I got this guy cleaned up and maybe sent him to school, he could become someone very successful. Many people wouldn't feel that way. Many people would be disgusted and maybe walk around and just keep on going. And that was Noah's personality. Noah could not imagine that people who sunk so low could ever change. But Abraham's difference was that he never lost touch of the fact that every human being is created in the image of God. And so Abraham's thesis is that if there are 10 righteous people living within the city, God, you have to save the entire city because these 10 righteous people have the potential, the ability to change everyone else through their example. And that's why Abraham is chosen to be the progenitor, the father of this people, the Jewish people. Because the plan is that God is going to have this people who will model what it means to live righteously. And this people will have the responsibility of being a blessing to the rest of the world. How the blessing will be that by modeling what it means to live righteously, we will be able to impact the world and change the world. But that assumes that people can change and people have the ability to change. And the agent for change, the agency of change will not be people lecturing them or people haranguing them or people trying to convert them. It's simple that they will see an example. They will learn by example. And so because Abraham believed in the power of a living example, and Abraham believed that this living example could change people, Abraham argues for the people living in Sodom and Amor and Adam and Svallim and says, God, it would be wicked and immoral for you to wipe out everyone if there were these righteous people living within the city. So the purpose of Abraham's family is to be such a model of righteousness, righteousness and fidelity to God. And having their own homeland is a critical part of this plan because it's a place we were able to build a model society. The Bible speaks about Abraham's family in many places. For example, right before the Jewish people received the Ten Commandments in the book of Exodus chapter 19 verse 6, God says to these people who were about to receive the Torah, you will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Among the Jewish people, the priesthood are those who are teachers of the rest of the Jewish people. And the Jewish people are told that you were to be priests towards the rest of the world. The prophet Isaiah says twice in chapter 42 verse 6 and chapter 49 verse 6 that you are to be an or lagoyim, a light unto the nations. And that is the vision of God choosing Abraham and Abraham becoming the father of this nation. And the vision is that one day the world will be ready to come to the light that is generated by Abraham's family. The prophet Isaiah says in chapter 60 verse 3 that nations will come to walk by your light and kings by the brilliance of your shine. That is the promise that one day our mission will succeed. The prophet Zechariah, Zechariah chapter 8 verse 23 says that in those days it will happen that 10 people from all the different languages of the nations will take hold, they'll take hold of the corner of the garment of a Jew. And they will say let us go with you for we've heard that God is with you. And this will unfold as the messianic utopia that's promised in the Bible. Where all of humanity, the entire world will come to a knowledge of God which will ultimately lead to a world where every human being will live together in peace and the world will once again become a utopian garden of Eden. Abraham's legacy was carried on by his son Isaac. That legacy was then passed on to Isaac's son Jacob. And we know that Jacob received a second name. Jacob's second name was Israel. Originally the people of Abraham as I mentioned were known as Hebrews, but ultimately we became known as Israelites. And our homeland, the land of Israel, the family of Jacob, his 12 sons became a nation during their 210 years of slavery in Egypt. When we came out of Egypt after seven weeks we came to Mount Sinai where God spoke to the entire nation of three million people and began revealing the Torah to this nation. The plan was for them to go directly to the land of Israel, to the promised land, to the ancestors land. But they ended up having to wander for 40 years in the desert. They finally come to the land after 40 years. They conquer it. They settle it. And several hundred years later King David's son, King Solomon, finally builds a permanent temple, a permanent sanctuary to replace the portable sanctuary they had built in the desert during the first year in the desert. They had been carrying around with them all those years. They finally have a permanent temple in Jerusalem, our first holy temple. However, after the death of Solomon, things began to sour. The kingdom began to unravel and it split into two kingdoms. There was an alliance of 10 tribes in the northern part of the land. This was known as the Kingdom of Israel. The northern 10 tribes was called the Kingdom of Israel. In the south, there were basically two tribes. There was a small tribe of Benjamin and a much larger tribe called Yehuda or Judah. This was called the Kingdom of Judah. Around the year 700 BCE, the 10 northern tribes are conquered by the Assyrian armies and they're exiled. And they end up totally assimilating into the lands where they go. And they disappear for all intents and purposes. We call them the 10 lost tribes of Israel. And all that remained of our people after this was the southern kingdom of Judah. And therefore all the remaining descendants of Abraham are called Yehudim, those people from Judah. Or in English, we'd call them Jews. We see, for example, in the book of Esther, in the Bible, Mordechai, who is actually from the tribe of Benjamin, is called Mordechai Ha Yehudi, Mordechai the Jew, because he was from, even though his tribe was Benjamin, he was from the southern kingdom of Judah he's referred to as a Jew Yehudi. And later on in this scroll of Esther, we're told that when non-Jews want to convert to the faith of Abraham's descendants, it speaks about them becoming Jewish. So now that we have a little bit of a handle on who we are, who are the Jewish people, let's begin exploring what Judaism is. As I mentioned at the outset tonight, Judaism is the spiritual path of the Jewish people. And this path was given to us by God in the teachings of the Torah. What is Torah? What does the word Torah mean? So Torah is related to several words in Hebrew. One of them is the word Hora'ah, which means teachings or instructions. So when we speak about the Torah, Torah basically means instructions. We call the Torah our instructions for living. Traditionally, we are taught that the Torah contains 613 mitzvot, 613 commandments. 248 of them are positive commandments, things that we are supposed to do. And 365 of them are negative commandments, don'ts, things that we're not supposed to do. There was a rabbi here in Toronto years back Rabbi Mordechai Bekker who lived in Israel for a while. He was living here. And his wife was going back to Israel for a trip. And she was late at Pearson Airport. And she was worried that she wasn't going to clear security. He definitely was going to miss the plane. And she's getting grilled by LL security. And she says, look, I'm a rabbi's wife. I got to get on the plane. So the security official says to her, how many commandments are in the Torah? She says 613. He says, how many positive commandments? 248. How many negative? 365. Okay, go. The word mitzvah, however, doesn't only mean commandment. Mitzvah also means connection. And so every mitzvah is not just the commandment. Every mitzvah is there to connect us to the Creator, to connect us to the giver of the commandments and to connect us to our own inner potential. The purpose of all of the teachings of the Torah are ultimately to refine us, to perfect us, to help us grow. There's another word that Torah is related to, which is the Hebrew word for shoot, like to shoot a bow and arrow or to shoot a gun. Why is that related to the word Torah? Because Torah doesn't only include instructions. What Torah contains is tremendous wisdom and inspiration that is able to shoot us in the direction of these teachings, to propel us in the direction of these teachings. It's not just an instruction. Like when it says in Canada, don't go more than 60 kilometers an hour on this road. There's nothing in that instruction which gets you to do that unless you're afraid of getting the fine, the ticket. But the Torah contains positive wisdom and inspiration that helps us move in the direction of its instructions. The word Torah is used generically. When we say the word Torah, it's used generically really for any Jewish spiritual teaching. If I'm going to speak, if I'm the rabbi of a synagogue, I'm going to get a sermon, we say that the rabbi is sharing words of Torah, even though he may not quote one word from the Bible. The word Torah becomes a generic term for any Jewish spiritual teaching. But strictly speaking, the word Torah refers to the five books of Moses, the Chami Sheikhum Shei Torah, which are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The rest of the Hebrew Bible, we refer to the Hebrew Bible as the Tanach. Tanach is an acronym for Torah. Torah would be those first five books of Moses. The N sound, is Neveim, which means prophets. Because after the five books of Moses, we have the writings of many prophets from Samuel to Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and a number of other minor prophets. But we have many books of the prophets. The prophets did not come to give us any new laws, any new teachings. The only thing the prophets came to do was to encourage us to follow the teachings that God gave Moses and to berate us or scold us when we weren't doing that. And then the third part of the Bible is the khapart, the ketuvim, which are the writings. And the writings would include books like the book of Psalms, which is poetry by King David, spiritual poetry or the book of Ecclesiastes by David's son Solomon about the wisdom that we have about the world or Solomon's book of Proverbs. There are many other books in the Bible that are not books of the prophets, but different writings. But let's get back to the Torah itself. It's critical to understand that the revelation of God at Mount Sinai was not limited to the words that were recorded in the five books of Moses. In addition to these five books that Moses wrote, there was an accompanying explanation and elucidation that was supposed to remain oral. God really gives us a two-part revelation, a part that was to be written down and a part that was to remain oral. And you can compare these two parts of the Torah to our two eyes. The truth is that if you close one eye, you can see a lot. You can see quite a bit out of one eye, but you're not going to get the clarity of vision. You're not going to see fully. You're not going to see everything. It's only when you look through both eyes that you get a full picture and you get a picture with clarity. Let's look at an example. The written Torah if you pick up a text of the Bible, it discusses the laws of someone who injures another person. Someone injures another person. And the Bible says an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot. That's in Exodus chapter 21, verse 23. Everyone has heard this. It's called the law of Lex talionis, an eye for an eye. Tit for tat. Does it make any sense that if I poke out someone's eye, I'm going to be dragged to the court and the court's going to have someone take a pliers and remove my eye? Can you imagine that's the case? There are actually at least three problems with this. Three problems with this idea of an eye for an eye. Number one, it is barbaric. It's barbaric. Number two, it won't do any help. It won't help in any way the victim. How is the victim that was blinded or that lost a hand going to be helped by removing the hand of the attacker? It's not going to help the victim. And number three, it's unfair. It's not fair. It's not equitable. Imagine for example, the attacker was someone that only had one eye. He was a one-eyed attacker and he takes out someone's eye. Now the person he attacked has one eye left. He can still see plenty. But if you're going to take out the remaining eye of the attacker, he's totally blind. That's not fair. Or imagine another kind of case. Imagine that the victim in this case was an opera singer. You can still sing opera with one eye. But what if the attacker was a surgeon or a pianist? If you do that to him, he will not be able to fly planes anymore or play the piano or do surgery. So the idea of an eye for an eye is barbaric. It doesn't help the victim and it's not equitable. So the oral Torah, the oral Torah teaches us you don't take out someone's eye. The attacker has to pay five kinds of monetary retribution compensation to the victim. Five kinds. Number one, he has to pay for the value of the limb. The court makes an assessment. How much is an eye worth? I don't know how you do it, but they'll determine an eye is worth $100,000, whatever their determination is. The attacker has to pay for the value of the limb. The attacker has to pay for the medical costs and the treatments of healing the person. The attacker has to pay for lost wages. The attacker has to pay for any pain that was caused. So they actually assess how much pain the victim experienced and how much she needs to be compensated for the pain. And then finally they have to pay, the attacker has to pay for the embarrassment. Maybe he'll be embarrassed now to walk around the victim with an eye patch for the rest of his life or missing an arm. So they assess five different things that the attacker has to pay. That certainly is not barbaric. It certainly helps the victim and it certainly is fair. But now we have a big question. If that was the intention of God all along, if God's intention was that if you hurt someone, if you remove their eye, you've got to pay five kinds of damage. So why in the world did the Torah, when it wrote down the law, say an eye for an eye? Why didn't the Torah just say money for an eye? The truth is that had the Torah written that, it would have been incredibly crass, incredibly crass. Take out someone's eye or chop off their hand and all you have to do is write a check. Is that justice? Is that a punishment that really fits the crime? So the Torah writes an eye for an eye to let the attacker know how wicked and how vile their action is. If you hurt someone like that, you have to know that what you did is so wicked and horrible that on some level you deserve to have your eye taken out. That's what you deserve. However, that would be barbaric and that would not help the victim and that would not be fair. So what happens is the written text, the written text teaches what the attacker deserves to convey how abhorrent their act was. But the oral Torah mediates, it mediates what is written in the written Torah and teaches us that in practice the attacker pays five forms of monetary compensation. This is the stereoscopic vision of the two forms of Torah. The fact that we have a written text and an oral elucidation allows us to read God's will in stereo. It's much broader than just looking through one eye. What the oral Torah does is to fill in the details that are missing from the written text. If you want to understand the relationship between the written Torah and the oral Torah, here's a helpful analogy. If you have the five books of Moses, what you will get from reading it is a picture of a big house. That house has 613 rooms. That's what you will learn from reading the Torah. And what you'll know is not just that there are 613 rooms, you'll know the name of each room. So you'll know that there's a room called the Sabbath and there's a room called dietary laws and there's a room called marriage and there's a room called Jewish holidays and there's a room called business law and there's a room called speech ethics and you'll have 613 rooms in this house. That's all you will know from reading the text of the Bible. But what you won't know is how big is that room? Is there carpeting? Is there wallpaper? What color? Are there windows? Does the windows have blinds or drapes? Are there electrical sockets in the wall? Is there internet connection? Is there furniture? Meaning that all you'll know from reading the five books of Moses is the fact that you've got a big house called the house of Judaism. It has 613 rooms and you'll know the names of the rooms. You won't have any of the details about what these rooms are really about. Let's give a few examples. Deuteronomy chapter 12 verse 21 speaks about someone that wants to eat meat. So the Bible says, if you want to eat an animal, you have to slaughter the animal God says, as I have commanded you, You have to slaughter the animal as I've commanded you. So you know that there's a special way of slaughtering an animal. You just can't go up with a gun and blow its brains out. You can't necessarily just poison it. But the problem is where did God explain how to slaughter an animal? Again, the text says, you shall slaughter the animal as I have commanded you. But you could look throughout the entire five books of Moses. There's no instructions on how to slaughter an animal that is provided in the oral Torah or in the written Torah. It says numerous times that on the Sabbath, you cannot do any Milachah. Now it's taken very seriously in the Bible. It's a capital crime to do any Milachah on the Sabbath. The problem is we have no idea what this word means. There's no cognate word. It doesn't appear in other places. It's not the word in Hebrew for work. So the Bible doesn't say on the Sabbath, you can't do any work. It says on the Sabbath, you can't do any Milachah. And if you do, you're in big trouble. So the problem is, what are we not supposed to do? And the Bible never tells us. So the oral Torah explains that Milachah is defined as 39 conceptual activities, 39 conceptual categories of activity. For example, you're not allowed to do weaving on the Sabbath, making clothing, or you can't write, can't write in a journal. And that's exactly what happens between the written Torah and the oral Torah. The written Torah basically is the big picture, the oral Torah, other details. And this oral Torah was supposed to remain oral, and it did remain oral for about 1500 years. We maintained it as an oral tradition. But the problem was that after 1500 years, we were living in the land of Israel. And it became impossible for us to have any peace, to be able to study and commit this to memory, because we were living under a brutal Roman occupation. The Romans were killing Jews left and right. The Romans made terrible edicts against the Jewish people. We had no peace. We couldn't study. It was impossible. So the Sages, at that time, about the year 200 CE, about 200 CE, about 1800 years ago, the Sages said, look, if we don't commit some of this oral law to writing, it'll be forgotten. So what they did around the year 200 CE is they composed a short outline of the oral Torah, just the basic high points, the basic ideas, almost like if you're studying for a test, this will be your condensation of your notes, so that if you have this document, you'll be able to remember everything else. And this original condensation of the oral Torah was called the Mishnah. Around 200 years later, the Mishnah text was expanded by compiling all the commentaries and discussions that were had about this text into what was referred to as the Jerusalem Talmud. So the Talmud is an expanded version of the Mishnah. It was first redacted around the year 400 of the common era in Jerusalem, and then about 150 years later in Babylon, which we now have as the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud has six sections. They're called six orders. And these six orders comprise all of Jewish law. The first of these six orders basically discusses the laws of agriculture in the land of Israel. The Bible has special laws about agriculture in the land of Israel. The second part of the oral Torah discusses the Jewish holidays, the Sabbath and all the holidays. The third part of the oral Torah discusses the laws of marriage and divorce and all the related laws to that. The fourth area of the Talmud discusses civil law, torts, damages, employer-employee relationships lost and found, all the laws that would apply to civil law. The fifth section of the Talmud discusses the sacrificial system in the temple. And the sixth section of the oral law discusses the laws of ritual purity and impurity. Now, in addition to all these legal discussions, the oral law also has numerous stories and spiritual teachings that convey the goals and the meanings, the inner meanings of the commandments and the ideology of Judaism. Judaism is not just a bunch of laws. There's a philosophy. There's an ideology. So the Talmud contains both law, L-A-W, and law, L-O-R-E. Now, a very obvious question, which I'm hoping all of you are asking yourself. Why is it that God gave us a Torah that had a written and oral part to it? Why didn't God just make everything written? Why have part of it oral and part of it written? Just put everything in a book. It's going to be a big book. It's going to be humongous, but stick it all in a big book. What is gained by having it split into an oral and a written Torah? Now, the truth is, there are numerous answers to this question. We're going to be having one of our lectures this spring. It's going to be on the Talmud itself, and we're going to delve into this question very deeply, but I want to share one answer tonight. When God created the world that we live in, God's intention was that we be active participants in the world. Everything is not simply presented to us on a silver platter, where we passively partake of the world. For example, wheat has to be processed into flour before you can bake it. You just can't pull wheat out of the ground and eat the raw wheat. Maybe you could, but you're not going to enjoy it. Or in order to have medicine, we have to be able to harvest the herbs and the plants and other natural resources of the earth in order to manufacture medicines. Human beings have a role to play in living in this world. We have to actually develop technology. We have to create things. We have to work with what God gave us. And so in the same way that God expected human beings to be active participants in the world that was created the physical world, that was his design for the Torah as well. God didn't want human beings to just be passive babies that just always get the answer from mommy and daddy. So for example, God authorized and empowered the leading Jewish sages to make very important decisions. The Bible says in Deuteronomy chapter 17 that anytime there's a serious question in how to understand Jewish law, there are two things that the Bible could have said. The Bible could have said, look, I'm giving you a Torah. Any questions down the line? Just pray unto me and I shall reveal the answer to you. God could have said that. God could have kept us very passive and very dependent and not us having to think at all. And every time we have a question, we go to daddy and we get the answer. But the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says that these are the laws. And if you have a question down the line, you will consult with the leading sages, the leading teachers of each generation, and they will teach you what to do. And we'll find in the oral Torah, because the oral Torah is that part of the Torah, which is not circumscribed by what was written down. It's that part of the Torah, which is dynamic. It's open-ended. We see that the Talmud contains many teachings that go beyond what God revealed to us. And they are rabbinic innovations and rabbinic initiatives. For example, much of the prayers that we recite were composed by the rabbis. The Bible doesn't contain all of the prayers that Jews recite. So the rabbis composed prayers. Or we have a holiday today that was not given by God. It was a holiday that was instituted by the rabbis. That holiday is called Chanukah. Chanukah was invented by the rabbis. Or the custom of lighting candles to honor the Sabbath. That's not in the Bible. The rabbis said that you should light candles at the beginning of the Sabbath. And then there are various fences that the rabbis instituted to protect the laws of God. You know, when you go into a subway, you'll see that although physically you can walk up to the very edge of the platform, if you're out of your mind, you could stand there at the very edge. Every subway that I've been to has a yellow line that's painted before you get to the very edge of the platform. And they're saying basically, look, if you want to be smart, don't stand at the very edge of the platform. Stand on this side of the yellow line. So what the rabbis were able to do was to paint a yellow line around the laws of the Bible. For example, you read through the Bible, you'll find plenty of forbidden sexual relationships. You're not supposed to have sexual intercourse with certain people. Fine. But what about hugging and kissing that person? What about being alone with them in a locked room? Is that okay? Well, the Bible itself, God never said you can't go to third base with them. But the rabbis said, you know what, if God is teaching us not to sleep with that person, we are going to say, you know what, you'd be smart not to hug them and kiss them and be alone with them in a locked room. That's what we call a rabbinic fence that's there to protect the Torah law. Another example, I mentioned before that in the oral Torah that God gave us, one of the things that we're not supposed to do on the Sabbath is to write. You're not supposed to write on the Sabbath. Now, is there any problem according to the Torah with having a pen that you're walking around with? No, the Torah just says you're not allowed to write. But the rabbis said, you know what, since we're so used to writing with a pen, if you want to be smart, don't walk around with a pen on the Sabbath because you may come to inadvertently write with it. So with the rabbis legislated were fences around the Torah, what I would call the yellow line in order to protect people from falling in. Just to conclude, the core of Jewish living, the very core of Jewish living is captured by the two words that were said by the Jewish people when God was about to give them the Torah at Mount Sinai. The nation of Israel at Mount Sinai said to God, everything that God says, na'aseh venishma, everything God that you say, na'aseh we will do. Venishma means we will hear, we will understand. And that's the basic focus of Jewish living. Jewish living is centered on A, living according to the laws and the instructions of the Torah. That's the centrality of Judaism, is to live our lives according to the teachings of the Torah. And secondly, to dedicate ourselves to studying and exploring and trying to understand these laws in a lifetime of study in order to grow in understanding these laws, to grow in appreciating these laws on deeper and deeper levels. The ultimate goal of the path of Judaism is to help us achieve our spiritual potential as people, as individuals, and as a nation. That is the goal of this entire system that I shared with you tonight. The goal of this spiritual path of Judaism is to enable Jews to fulfill, to actualize their spiritual potential as individuals and as a nation, to grow in our love of God, to grow in our love of our fellow human beings, to become holy people, and to become a holy nation that will ultimately serve as a catalyst to bring about a restored utopian world.