 Good day mate, 40 here. What a wonderful time to learn some Torah with Mark Shapiro talking about the rise of reform and the rabbinic response. It's the history of Chicago's Jewish gangsters. Now the classic book is from a real historian, General Weissman Jocelyn. I mean the person I'm with is also a historian, but I mean in terms of the Jewish, the classic work from an American Jewish historian is our gang Jewish crime in the New York Jewish community. But there's another one. It's a very funny book. By someone I've known almost my entire life and that's Meyer Sugerman. The Chronicles of the Last Jewish Gangster from Meyer to Myron. If you want to be entertained, you can read it. You can watch the videos online. You can even watch it, believe it or not. In the grab lies of Boca Raton just two weeks ago interviewed him. And they had to say a few times in the video that we don't condone being a gangster, but it shows you that there's this fascination that we choose have with the people who didn't go the street. We all know about the coming and everything like that, but the gangster. Okay, so I'm a functionalist and a structuralist. I'm all about power of structure and function. Like why do we have organized crime? Because it meets needs that are not being met by wider society. It can provide protection. It provides strong in group identity. It provides a way to navigate around legal structures. It's particularly powerful for immigrants who find the New World confusing. Where as a lack of enforcement, then organized crime can step in and make the rules. So why did organized crime flourish after the fall of the Soviet Union? Because it met fundamental needs. Civil society had fallen apart. Like why do we have rumors? We have rumors because the official information is not adequate to our emotional needs. We need more than the official story. And so we turn to rumors to try to speculate if the official news doesn't make sense. Then we need some way of trying to make sense of the world around us. And that's also a function of organized crime. It's a way to try to help make sense of the world around us. So what's more important? Your principles or your interests? There's not a definitive answer. Sometimes principles are more important. Sometimes interests are more important. But if you have gangsters who are members of your in-group and they're doing powerful important things for your in-group, then you have all sorts of incentives to overlook their gangster behavior. Sometimes there are problems in life, but gangsters best equipped to handle them. So your principles may not care for their methods, but your practical needs may be best met by gangsters. So if you've got a favorite football team, you probably want law-abiding people on the team so they don't get suspended. But what you most want to do is to win. And in the game of life, living is usually the best way to go. So this is Mark Shapiro on the rise of reform and the rebuke response. So the Tefillin are talked about in the Torah. They're the boxers with verses from the Torah in them. You wrap them on your Jewish man, you wrap them on your left arm if you're right-handed, and put one around your head with a little box on your forehead. So traditionally Judaism holds different roles for men and for women. A lot more commandments demanded of men than for women because it's expected that women will be busy taking care of the kids. And if you don't hold special roles for men, they will tend to drop out of religion. Men don't like competing with women. The Marubra State Park, that's where we're at right now, there's a firing range near here. I don't think there's shooting right now. And he says that if a woman comes and she asks us and she wants to raise herself in midst most, we tell her not, but if she continues to want to do it, come and sit down. She wants to do it privately. He says there is hope that she can rely on this. So I have a friend who grew up an Orthodox Jew, who was dating, went on a date, took his Tefillin bag, so it was called a Tefillin date, and spent the night with the woman, got up in the morning and was putting on his Tefillin. When he looked over his shoulder, there was his girlfriend, who was apparently a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the conservative movement in Judaism, their seminaries. She was apparently a rabbinic student and he looked over his shoulder and there she was putting on Tefillin. But generally speaking, highly unusual for women to put on Tefillin. It's traditionally a masculine role. Can someone ask me if we stick with catacombs in Rome? Jewish catacombs in the non-Jewish? And someone said, well, can someone kind of go and go down into... So a Kohane, alright, that's the Jewish priest class. Usually people with the last name Kohane are members of the Jewish priestly caste, but not always. They are forbidden to attend to a cemetery, because they're expected to maintain their focus on the living rather than the dead. And so there are places where a Kohane can't go, such as a cemetery. For a second, and then I said, no, I'll tell you why I hesitated. I think I realized that I was listening to the class. And by the way, we have, there's two things in particular, two times it just comes to play on our trips. One is when we go to Morocco, one of the places we go to is the tomb of the king, the kings. It's a site to behold, and then there's something else. So I've spent thousands and thousands of hours listening to Mark Shapiro lectures. He's a scholar, he got a PhD from Harvard. He also got his rabbinic certificate. He's a modern Orthodox rabbi. He specializes in modern Jewish thought. He's published excellent books, such on Jewish theology, changing the immutable on how Judaism rewrites its history. He wrote a biography of Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg. And I just love his mixture of Jewish learning with secular learning. And I love how, I don't know, I just love his work, man. When I get tired with traditional methods of Torah study, I study some Mark Shapiro and it gets me excited about Torah again. So I'm walking all around Sydney and listening to our upon our Mark Shapiro lectures. Many of them for a second and a third time. It just gets my brain going. It's fascinating, it's good for my Neshama, for my soul, for my brain, for my heart. You know, that's Ohio, Tonejo, and there's two synagogues there. Both of them used to, obviously they were confiscated when the Jews were expelled even before that, during after the pogroms of 1391. Now really they should give it back to us because they took it from us and this is part of our heritage and as well there's a lot of Torah scholars there. Although I don't think a lot of people are obligated to believe in that because there's been Yehiel so the Jews gave up hope and it's transferred a few different times. So yeah, when you give up hope of recovering a lost object, it no longer belongs to you, according to Jewish law. I just never get tired of the ocean and the rocks. Australia mate, the beaches are our cathedrals. They have been removed from all the Torah sites. So what's your personality type? Would you get onto that ledge right below me? You're a risk taker. Would you not get onto these rocks at all? I think I'm moderate, kind of in the middle. I think I'm a huge risk taker but I'm not a huge scaredy cat either. I'm moderate fear of heights. Yeah, I know some people love to get right on the edge. I remember when I was a kid, my friends meaning at about age 17, we climbed below this bridge and we were able to swing out and it was about a quarter mile drop below us. So we would just swing there with a quarter mile drop below and another crazy thing my friends did which I did not appreciate was they'd drive crazy in the rain and do wheelies and burnouts and scared me to death and I'd scream at them. Like, stop, I haven't even had sex yet. So non-Jews and completely secular Jews often think of Jewish law as incredibly inflexible and rigid and a straight jacket. But there's so much flexibility built into Jewish law and the way it is observed and the way rabbis instruct people to observe it, it is supposed to be something that enhances your life rather than something that diminishes your life. You're supposed to observe Jewish law so that you may live by the laws and that they shall be your wisdom in the eyes of the Goyim to quote I believe Deuteronomy. And so, yeah, they're often ideals. But if you can't live up to the ideal, then often it's okay. To not live up to the ideal, that's Makhmer means strict. Menhag means custom. Makhlerkist means controversy, dispute. So see how the rocks peel away? I sure wouldn't like to be up here when the rocks start peeling away below me. But it probably makes for, you know, amazing video. Rabbi Monsour, he has a good following question. So, Kauhain isn't supposed to attend a funeral. Rabbis often want to try to make Jewish law as lenient as possible so that Jews don't feel like they are sinning because if people get too much of a sense that they're just breaking Jewish law at every turn, it will turn them off from attempting any observance whatsoever. So there's a significant movement within Judaism to make observance of Judaism as easy as possible. So Tame means impure, unclean. So I remember when a rabbi at an Orthodox synagogue brought me in and said, hey, you know, here you're writing about the porn industry. And he said, you know, I'm sure it's all very academic and that but we just can't have that in our community. And he's reaching for a word and then he just says Tame. It's just impure. We can't have that kind of filth in our community.