 So let's talk about the concept of how to find real answers in Scripture. In other words, they're telling us, you look in the Scripture, you look in the Tanach, you'll find the answers to your question, according to them, you'll find Jesus. What is our response to that? Now we spoke about the template, how they feel we should look at Scripture. So actually what I'm doing now is I'm going to be talking about the subject of idolatry. Hopefully I'll get to the subject of atonement as well. How to find the answers to these questions. What does Scripture teach about idolatry? What does Scripture teach about atonement in the context of Tanach? I'm not going to be addressing what I spoke about earlier, the stereotypes of Judaism. And perhaps at the end I will try to address some of that. But at this point I'm going to be speaking about answers from Tanach, the template of the conversation. So if you want to know how to find real answers, the first step we have to realize is that when you're asking a question, you're already framing an answer. You're already, you know, if you come over to somebody, he says, is it true that you paid back that loan two weeks ago? So if he's going to say, yes I did, then everyone's going to think, well he borrowed money two weeks ago. He says no, he still owes money, but he never borrowed money. In other words, the question could frame a wrong answer, or you're asking for an answer. So you have to find real questions. But then, okay, so what are the real questions? So before we start asking questions, just like with any text, really you have to ask yourself before you read any text, what is it that the author wants me to walk away, that I should walk away with from his text? What was he trying to get across? What was the underlying message of his text? And that a Tanach is a very large book, and there are many messages in Tanach, okay? So that means that there's a lot of work involved over here. But what we have to do over here is we have to look at what are the literary tools that the author had at his disposal to tell us that something's important to him, to tell us that something is, to bring something into focus, to tell us that this is something that we should be focused on. And there are quite a few literary tools that the author has at his disposal. He uses repetition. He repeats a concept many times. He emphasizes a concept. For example, you build a story up to a climax that tells you that this is the important point over here. By making certain things clear, by articulating things clearly, that tells you that these are important to the author. It was important for him that you not walk away from his book without knowing, without knowing whatever it was with clarity. Now let me give examples. I'm not sure if there's a subject that's more spoken of in Tanach than when we're talking about the subject of obedience to God, more than idolatry. It's emphasized in so many ways. It's the first two of the Ten Commandments. When it speaks about keeping the covenant, the Jewish people keeping the covenant, it's talking about not worshiping idols. Whenever it's describing Israel's strain from God, it's following other gods. Idolatry is very, very important to the author of scripture. So it's obviously a very important question to the author of scripture is, what is idolatry that we should avoid? What is something, what is considered idolatry? What is not idolatry? The rabbis articulated this idea, again, this is rabbinic, this is coming from the rabbis. You can see where they're coming from when you read scripture. They said, khal hamayda b'avayda zara, anyone who accepts, acknowledges idolatry is as if he's denying the entirety of the Torah. He could keep all the other 612 commandments, but if he's worshiping idols, it's not there. And khal akhaifur b'avayda zara, anyone who denies idolatry, it's as if he acknowledges the entirety of the Torah. Obviously it's not literally the same, but there's a certain aspect. Because idolatry, worshiping God on the one hand versus not worshiping God, that's the hub of the Torah. To illustrate this from a different angle, I had the occasion to, I was, I paid a shiva call to someone, an elderly person who passed away, and his wife was there, and his wife's sister was there. I never met his wife's sister, she was a secular Jew. She posed the following question. She said, I was in a messianic synagogue. I was in a messianic synagogue, and the worship over there was very vibrant, alive, and it looked, they're following all the rules, whatever it is. Some of these messianic synagogues, they actually followed pretty much the format of a conservative service. They follow the format of a service, you know, there's Shacharist, there's Lening, there's Musseph, they use the Archchurch Sidder. So what's wrong? Can you tell me what's wrong with that? She didn't know too much about Judaism, she wasn't brought up Jewish. How can you explain to me what's wrong with that? And I see many people don't go to the synagogue at all, so the messianic Jews seem to be more Jewish than the Jews who are not going to the synagogue, only Khamenei and Kippur. So I gave her the following answer, I told her it follows. You know, there's an institution in the world that's called marriage. Marriage, now there's an ideal marriage, and there's many steps less than ideal. So you have a situation where, let's say a less than ideal marriage, maybe the couple doesn't get along with each other, perhaps they're separated from each other, it's terrible, it's very not nice, it's not what we're looking for. The ideal marriage is beautiful, but imagine you have a marriage which on the outside looks very ideal, it looks, they look at getting along with each other, speaking so nicely to each other, but each member of the couple has a relationship with someone else, with someone outside of the relationship. That's not a marriage, it's not a less than ideal marriage, it's a destroyed marriage, it's a violated marriage. So if someone isn't observing the Torah, but he at least maintains this connection to God, that he's not worshiping idols, the marriage is less than ideal, but we could still say the marriage is there. If they committed themselves to worshiping another entity, the marriage is not there, the marriage is destroyed, no matter how many other aspects of the marriage they're keeping. Judaism is not about keeping the commandments. Judaism is about keeping the commandments as an expression of a relationship with God. It's keeping Shabbos as an expression of loyalty to God, obedience to God, love for God, fear of God, but if you keep God out of the picture and you're keeping Shabbos, that's not what God was talking about in the Torah when he said to keep Shabbos, when he said to whichever commandment it is that we're talking about, it's all about a relationship, it's all about connecting to God, it's all about obeying God and seeing God in the commandment. So yes, idolatry is a very important question. Now, if we look at it at first glance, of course, Christianity is idolatry. How could you say differently? They point to a man that walked this earth, that breathed the air that we breathe, and they call him a God. How could this not be idolatry? At first glance, there's no question. What is there to talk about? Now, Christians are very uncomfortable with that first glance. They don't like that first glance, and the truth is the way they are educated, the way they are taught to think about it is that it's not idolatry, and they try to obfuscate, and I'm not saying that they're consciously doing that, but that's how they were taught. That's how their teachers taught them, that no, it's a deep mystery, and somehow these two are one and the same. In other words, God and Labdol Jesus, they're somehow fused together, and in the mind of the Christian, they're fused together. Now, how do they defend this charge? Again, when we're talking about the Bible, idolatry is the most important question you could ask. So if they're coming with this book, the Tanach, and they're trying to encourage worship of Jesus, what are you talking about? This book is all about a relationship with God. How could you tell me that this is about a relationship with someone or something else? So the general response is as follows. They try to prove, either from Tanach, from scripture, or from the rabbinical writings, or from philosophy, or from apocryphal writings, in other words, Jewish writings that were perhaps not accepted by the Jewish community, but their ancient writings, that somehow God could become a man. It's not a contradiction to say that God is somehow a man. Now, the typical response is to show them how their read on those texts are inaccurate, and they are inaccurate. But there's something much deeper and much more important going on over here. Because idolatry is not a question about what God could or cannot do. Idolatry is not about a belief. Idolatry is not about if you believe this, then you're an idol worshiper, and if you believe that, you're not an idol worshiper. Idolatry, like Judaism, is about a relationship. No Christian will tell you it's enough to believe in Jesus. It's not enough to believe it in your head. They believe you have to have a relationship with Jesus. You have to submit yourself to Jesus. You have to consider him your savior, your personal savior. You have to find in your heart a pull and a drawn and attraction to him, and until that happens, they won't allow you to call yourself a true Christian. Idolatry is about, it's an act of the heart. It's an act of worship. Worship is opening your heart, worship of God is opening your heart in a way to God, in a way that no other entity on earth deserves. It's not appropriate for a creation. Any of God's creations to open their heart, to submit themselves so completely the way we submit ourselves to God. If someone submits themselves, opens their heart that way towards any other entity, that's called idolatry. So it's not a matter of what God could or can't do, it's a matter of what is drawing your heart. The Torah, when the Tanakh speaks about idolatry, it doesn't speak about believing things. It speaks about pen yifte levavchem, lest your heart be persuaded. It's a persuasion of the heart. In other words, let's take the ancient pagans. They saw a beautiful mountain, the majesty of the mountain, and there's beauty to it, and there's awe to it. And they allowed themselves to submit themselves to that awe. There's something that draws the heart. Now, there's nothing wrong with admiring the beauty of a mountain, feeling the majesty of a mountain. But what idolatrous would be is to completely submit yourself to that beauty. The sun was probably the most popular God in the ancient world. In fact, that's the holiday today, it's really the birthday of the sun, S-U-N. That's what it is. It's, you know, when the sun start, the days start getting bigger, that's what they celebrated. Because the sun, if you think about the life-giving warmth of the sun, people were attracted to that. They respected that. They looked up to that. They were in awe of that. And at some point, they would bend their hearts. They would bend themselves and sort of tell the sun, we are totally negate ourselves before you. That's what idolatry is. It's an attraction of the heart. So it's not a question of what God could do or what God can't do. The question is, what is pulling my heart? And the heart of the Jew is expressed in the book of Psalms. The heart of the Jew is expressed throughout the Bible, but the book of Psalms brings it out the most clearly. It's all about the awe and the reverence that we feel towards the Creator of all. That's what's supposed to be pulling our heart. Any other attraction is a different attraction. So it doesn't make a difference. Whatever philosophical explanation you can come up with, if it's a different attraction, it's idolatry. Christians have a hard time with this. The reason they have a hard time, for us, for outsiders, someone who's not a Christian is very simple. There's attraction to God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and then there's attraction towards the sun. OK, that's idolatry. The moon, that's idolatry. The tree, that's idolatry. And a person, any person, that would be idolatry. What does it make a difference? What his name is? But in the Christian's mind, these two attractions are fused together. In other words, they have an attraction to Jesus. They read the Christian Bible, and they find a very special person, a mysterious person, a righteous person, whatever it is. And they allow that magnetism to draw their hearts. And they're drawn towards that, and they bend towards that. And we call that idolatry. Why don't they call that idolatry? What else would that be? And the answer is because in their minds, they fuse two attractions together. In their minds, they take the concept of God and the concept of Jesus, and they fuse them together. But the fact is that these are two separate attractions. You could fuse them together in your mind, but they don't have to be the same. I'll give a strange parable from the world of sports. You can have an attraction. People are, I wouldn't call that worship, but they like a certain player. And then they like a certain team. If that player is playing for that team, then the two are fused together. The player goes to another team, gets traded. So they're still following the team. They're still following the player. There are two separate attractions that happen to be fused together. It could be a together. Just because today they're together doesn't mean it's one attraction. So in the Christian's mind, Jesus and God are one and they see them as inseparable. One way to help a Christian see through that obstacle, that fusion that they have, is to explain it as follows. You have Christians that don't see Jesus as a God. They don't see him as a God. They're Christians, they call themselves Unitarians that teach that Jesus was a great teacher, he was a prophet, but he wasn't a God and it's not appropriate to worship him. But they have an attraction in their heart towards him as a teacher, as a man, which is okay, if all you believe about him is a man, I disagree with him, I don't think he was a great teacher and I don't think he was a good man altogether, but that's a different discussion. That's okay, if they want to believe that's fine. Fine, but that's not idolatry. So imagine if such a person, a Unitarian, one day decides to become a Trinitarian. A Trinitarian is a Christian that do believe that Jesus was God, which is what mainstream Christians believe. Does he have to build up an entirely new attraction in his heart towards the person of Jesus? Not at all, it's the same attraction, he just take it one step further. And if let's say, take the other example, if you have a Trinitarian Christian who decides, you know, I don't believe anymore that Jesus is God. And he becomes a Unitarian Christian. The attraction that he now feels toward Jesus as a Unitarian, will it be different than the attraction that he had towards Jesus as a Trinitarian? It'll be the same attraction, the same magnetism that he feels towards the person will be there. It's just that he won't elevate it to that level, but it's the same magnetism. From a biblical standpoint, if you look at the standpoint of Tanakh, idolatry is not a philosophy. Tanakh is not a philosophical book. It speaks about relationship. We spoke about the Ten Commandments. I am the Lord, your God. What does it mean, your God? In Shema we say that. Hashem el-Akhenu, he is our God. In what way is he our God? He's our God, it means it's describing a relationship. Just like someone says, that's my husband, that's my wife, that's describing a relationship, that's our God, we are his people. You should not have any gods before me. That's a second of the Ten Commandments. What does it mean to have a God? God has a nation, I will beat you for a God and you will beat me for a nation using the same Hebrew words. It's describing a relationship. It's describing a relationship between a nation and a people. And when we say God is my God, we're talking about a relationship, we're talking about, we're not talking about a philosophy. Of course there's philosophies to explain that relationship, but there's servants of the relationship. The philosophy is here to help us understand the relationship, to help us understand how God works in this world, but that's not worship, that's not what we're talking about when we say idolatry. Idolatry means the violation of that relationship. When you look at the Christian proof texts, meaning to say is the text that told the Christian that God could somehow be a man. I'll give one wild example. In Genesis 18, you have three angels appearing to Abraham and the opening phrase in that passages and the Lord appeared to Abraham and he opened his eyes and behold, there were three men standing there. So however they interpret that, they somehow understand that there's God and there's three men and somehow they're one and the same. At least one of the three men represents God and there's physical men because they ate and they drank under the tree. So, oh, we have a proof over here that God could become a man. Besides the fact that this is not a passage that's teaching us how to worship, this is just telling us how God visited Abraham and brought him good news, but it doesn't leave us with an attraction. It's not telling us, it's not describing these people in any way that we should be attracted to them. That's not the lesson that's being brought out over here. If you're asking yourself what attraction, what pull of the heart is the Bible encouraging, it's only encouraging one pull of the heart. It's encouraging a pull of the heart of created towards creator and that attraction tells us something about ourselves, tells us something about God, it tells us we belong to God like we spoke about before. The whole idea of prayer is coming to contact with the idea that God is the creator, he's the master, he's the king. He created every order of our existence but it also tells us something about every other existence that we see. It's telling us that every existence that we see also belongs to God. So yes, we can look at a mountain and appreciate the majesty of the mountain, the beauty of the mountain. We see the beauty of a sunset. We could see the power of the sun and think about it. Think about how all that heat and warmth sustains life on this planet but because the sun is in existence in our finite world, it's in existence that we can understand, we see it as a gift from God. Part of the relationship that we share with God gives us a perspective of God, it gives us a perspective of ourselves, it gives us a perspective of all existence. It tells us how to look at creation, it tells us how to look at the stones, how to look at people. When we see a righteous person, when we see a good person, when we see a person that's blessed with whatever blessings God gave him, we see that as a person that's more beholden to God. We don't see that as a reason I should submit myself to that person but we recognize that the gifts and the blessings that that person possesses are gifts that make him more beholden to God. He should be worshiping God on a deeper level because he's blessed with so many more gifts than other people are. So I see the majesty, the righteousness, the mystery, the greatness of any given person that doesn't make me bend myself towards him. The teaching of the Bible is that that person is a deeper subject of God than someone who might not be so blessed. So going to the question of idolatry. A, first of all, establishing that it's an important and foundational question. If you believe in the book, if you believe in the Tanach, if you believe in the Jewish scriptures, you cannot walk away from this book without recognizing that this is an important question to the author of the book. That's step one. Step two is when you're dealing with the question of idolatry and you read the book, it comes across very clearly that we're not dealing with a philosophy, we're not dealing with an abstract, we're dealing with something that has to do with your heart. It has to do with who and why you bend your heart, to who you bend your heart only to the creator of your heart. There's a verse in the book of Daniel in chapter five when Daniel was rebuking a Gentile king for worshiping idols. And he's telling him the God that holds your breath in his hand, you didn't worship him. In other words, he's your creator. He's the one that's sustaining your life here and now. That's the reason, that's the attraction of the heart. That's the cause for worship. There is no other cause for worship. So whatever philosophy the Christians could come up with, when you're coming from biblical angle or from any other angle, it's still idolatry because we're not, once you identify that idolatry is not a philosophy. It's not about beliefs. It's about practice. It's an action of the heart. The conversation takes a different turn. They're arguments fade away and they're left without answers. What do they do at that point? Well, that's a good question. But that is the dynamic of the conversation. That's where you're supposed to bring the conversation to and slowly but surely, hopefully it will sink in with time. And I've seen, some people do come around on this basis. Some people, the main argument in response is, well, it's a big mystery, we can't understand it. But again, there's no question in my mind that after they hear this and after they realize what the book of Psalms is about, what it means to be a Jew, what the underlying message of the Bible is, they cannot feel the same about their worship of Jesus, their attraction to Jesus. Because once you put it down in that light, it has to feel different. Yes, they could block you out. But if they heard you, it has to feel different. Let's move on to the subject of atonement. Atonement, this is a big missionary sales pitch. What is atonement? Everyone of us has done things wrong in their life. None of us are perfect. So how do you get atonement for your sins? What do you do about your sins? What do you do about your guilt? So the Christian missionary tells us that the only way you can achieve atonement for your sins is through devotion and belief in Jesus. His sacrifice somehow atonement for everybody's sins. And if you connect to that sacrifice through worshiping him, you're good to go. But if you don't have that, you have nothing. So we have to, again, look at the Bible. The question over here is what is the real question? What are the real answers? So he asks himself, does the Bible have an emphasis on atonement? And the answer is yes and no. Yes, there are passages which speak about atonement. There are passages which speak about forgiveness for sin, but that is not the primary emphasis. The primary emphasis is obedience. For someone who's asking a question, how do I achieve atonement for my sins without asking the question is, what is a sin and what is not a sin? How do I obey God tomorrow? He's certainly missing the spirit and the heart of the Bible. Let's say we wouldn't have atonement for our sins. Theoretically, let's assume there's no atonement for sins. You sin, you can get punished, and there's nothing to do about it. Are you still obligated to serve God? Of course you're obligated to serve God. Your obligation to serve God is not predicated, does not lean on the fact that God will forgive your sins. Your obligation to serve God is because that recognition, God is your king. God is the one who's giving you the strength to live right here and now and he's telling you what to do with that strength. That's the root of your obligation to serve God. That has nothing to do with atonement for sin. But the Bible does speak about atonement for sin. In some places, the Bible tells us that we have to bring an offering in the temple and the Christians latch on to that. Oh, you have to bring an offering in the temple. That means that if you don't have that offering, there is no atonement for your sins. No, the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible does not say if you don't have an offering, there is no atonement for your sins. It does say in certain situations that that is the way to achieve atonement. But that's not the only message the Bible has on atonement. In Deuteronomy chapter 30, the Bible speaks about how Jewish people as a nation can repair their relationship with God. Now, this is very important because the Bible, even though we spoke about a relationship with God, we in Western civilization are used to thinking about my personal relationship with God. If you ask yourself, is the Bible focused on my personal relationship with God? Not so much. The Bible is much more focused on the national relationship with God. The relationship of Israel as a whole. The Bible sees us, all the Jewish people together, not only all the Jewish people that are alive at any one given point in time, but all the Jewish people throughout history as one entity. And it's that entity that stands in a relationship with God. How do I know that? For example, when the Bible uses the word you, singular you, who is it talking to? Who is that you? In Deuteronomy 30, we have a passage where God uses that word, you. Actually, it's Moses speaking. It's Moses speaking. And he says like this, it will be when all of these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse that I've placed before you. In other words, Moses had just articulated the blessing and the curse, the blessing if we follow the law and the curse if we do not follow the law. And you'll turn it to your hearts amongst all the nations that the Lord, your God has scattered you there. One second. The you in the beginning of the verse was, would give us to understand that he's talking to the people standing in front of him. But now he's talking to the people who are living after the curse, after the exile and they're in the exile, scattered amongst all the nations. And you'll turn back to the Lord, your God, and you'll hearken to his voice. You'll listen to him. According to all that I command you today, the same you, the same you that he's talking to in the end of time, after the exile, when all people are scattered all over the world, he's talking with the same today, the same you to the people who are standing in front of him. The Bible sees us as an entity that stands in a national relationship with God. And that's primarily focused on the national relationship. And this very passage in Deuteronomy 30, this is the same passage that I began reading, goes on to say how we repair that relationship. Now this passage assumes that we don't have a temple because it's telling us the curse has come upon us. The curse includes the destruction of the temple. So there is no temple. And the Bible doesn't tell us well if there's no temple you gotta go to Jesus. Doesn't say that. It actually says you gotta turn back to the teachings of Moses. You gotta turn back to the teachings of Moses according to everything that Moses commanded us back then. And then the Lord, our God will bring us back into the land and bless us, circumcise our hearts in order to love the Lord, you God, with all your heart and all your might. And that's very important. It's a messianic prediction. It tells us that when we come back into the land of Israel and we merit that messianic age, God will circumcise our heart. What does that mean? The other prophets also spoke about this. Isaiah speaks about this. Ezekiel speaks about this. In Ezekiel's language is God will take the heart of stone out of us and give us a heart of flesh. In other words, in the stage that we're in now, there's a certain deadness, there's a certain spiritual deadness that we can't fully experience. We can't fully appreciate the love of God and the fear of God. But God will circumcise our hearts and will remove that spiritual deadness and will be alive and will be able to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our might. Why is it so important? It's a beautiful messianic prediction. You know what it tells us? That in the beginning of the passage, when it told us that you will turn back to the Lord your God and obey my commandments with all your heart, it didn't literally mean with all your heart. It didn't mean to perfection because perfection won't be achieved till later, till the messianic age, when our hearts will be circumcised. This is talking about while we're still in exile, we're not in the land of Israel, we're outside the land of Israel, before the circumcision of the heart and Moses describes it as turning back to the Lord your God with all your heart. God doesn't demand perfection from imperfect human beings. God knows that we're human beings and that's cold with all your heart. That's enough. That is what God demands. He doesn't demand more than that and that's very clear in the passage and the answer is repentance. So here's where we have a passage that speaks about repairing the national relationship with God. In the book of Ezekiel, Yicheskel, we have two passages in chapter 18 and in chapter 33 and this is quoted in the Yom Kippur Liturgy in the Maghzer. These passages are quoted which speak about a personal relationship with God. The people ask, our sins are upon us. How then can we live? They felt guilty. They realized how terrible sin is, disobedience to God is and they couldn't imagine how we can crawl out of that, how we can live with ourselves, how we can live with God, how we can repair our relationship with God after sin and God reassures them that repentance is all that you need. Yes, when there's a temple, there's a requirement to bring offerings and the prophets promised that the temple will come back and we will have the offerings back. How can we understand that? That when there's no temple, it, repentance is okay but when the temple is here, we need repentance. The answer is very simple. What is a temple? A temple is, we call it the house of God in the Bible, that's what it's called. You should make for me a sanctuary, God says and I shall dwell amongst you. It's a place where God allows his presence to be open and manifest, meaning to say is that first of all, he allows his name to be called on that house. Even when you just see a building, this is God's house and his presence is here. Let's absorb that for a minute. That means this is God's house and this is the center of the Jewish nation. The Jewish nation, their attention is focused on this house, their worship is focused on this house. Three times a year, the people would come here to worship God and God allows his name to be called on this house. So that means he's openly associating himself with the Jewish people. Gentiles are also encouraged to come and worship in this house. When Solomon dedicated the temple, he prayed that when the Gentiles come, the Gentile comes and prays, his prayers should be answered. This is a place where God allowed his presence and his name to be called in an open and manifest way. That means God is associating himself with the Jewish people. The Jewish people are not perfect. The Jewish people, sometimes make mistakes, sometimes they sin, sometimes they do wrong things, but God is okay with that. So there's a dichotomy over here, there's a problem over here. God is perfect, God is holy. The relationship between God and the Jewish people is compared to a marriage and God is allowing the people of the world to call themselves the God of those people, the God of those imperfect people. So it's not enough that we were in that situation when God openly puts his name on our nation, it's not enough that we repent in our hearts. In that situation, we need to bring our repentance out into the open with an open demonstration of that repentance. That's what the sacrifices are all about. The sacrifices symbolize the repentant heart, but the sacrifices were not a replacement for repentance, they were not an exchange for that. In fact, in the book of Proverbs, it says clearly the offerings of the wicked aren't abomination before God. So if someone does something wrong and it gets a title wicked, if someone has a title wicked and he wants to bring a sacrifice, he has to change his title, he has to change his name tag from wicked to righteous before he brings that sacrifice. The sacrifice is only meaningful after you change that name tag. How are you gonna change the name tag? How are you gonna change the name tag from wicked to righteous? And the answer that the Bible gives is clearly is clear and unequivocal, it's repentance. Repentance means turning back to God. But it goes deeper than that. It's tied in with the concept that we spoke about before about idolatry, about the idea of God being the king. What does repentance mean? The word literally in Hebrew is chuva, returning to God. None of us are perfect. Let's take a teacher of students, a teacher of high school students, and he's thinking to himself, that boy doesn't feel so good about himself. He made mistakes and he feels silly about those mistakes. He doesn't have so much self-esteem. He doesn't have that confidence. He doesn't have that life in his step. How should I talk to him? He just made a terrible mistake. He's something really wrong. He deserves to be rebuked. What should I tell him? So he has two options. The teacher has two options. He could tell the boy, listen, yes, you made a mistake. But look at all the good side of everything that you're doing. Over here, you were kind to your friend. Over there, you had a study session where you really did well. Over there, you did the right thing. Give the boy a picture, give the student a picture of generally he's okay, generally he's good. Yes, there's a mistake. There's something wrong that you have to improve. That doesn't diminish the overall picture. And a wise educator chooses that path. Sometimes an educator will tell the kid, you're terrible. Look at this mistake you made. Below all expectations, how can you go forward? What's gonna be with you? If you're gonna do that to a child, if you do that to a student, he's not gonna go forward. He's gonna be dejected and he's gonna walk out. He'll give up. He's gonna stunt his growth. He's not gonna go anywhere. So okay, we have two paths. We have the path of sort of rebuke mitigated by encouragement and then you have straight out rebuke. Now you open the sitter. The liturgy that our teachers put down before us for confessing before God. So there's actually, in the Kippur Maghza, we have a confession of specific sins. I did this wrong, I did that wrong, I did that wrong. There is another confession. Hashem, but God, that confession speaks about we are guilty. We have become abominable. We're treacherous all the way to the bottom. No encouragement. Now we're not talking about one mistake. We use the sins to describe ourselves as rotten to the core, which is, that's not Judaism. Judaism is all about the greatness of man. But what is repentance? And what is the greatness of man? Repentance, why is it that we can't live with that? Okay, so I'm rotten to the core, so what? Big deal. Let me move forward. In order to move forward, in order to be confident, in order to do things, in order to accomplish, I need to feel good about myself. And in order to feel good about myself, I need to have a certain self-image. I need to see myself as, at least the word good should be there, at least in little letters, I have to see myself in a certain positive light. And if I don't see myself in that positive light, I find it difficult to stride forward. You know what that means? That means you're not leaning on God. Because if you're leaning completely on God, and the only confidence that you have to step forward is God's grace and His mercy, then you don't need that self-image. You don't need to see yourself as good. You don't need to see yourself as righteous in any way, shape, or form. You could be rotten to the core, and it doesn't make a difference. Because I'm leaning completely on God's mercy, on God's grace. When God spoke to Moses about repentance, he said, I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. What does that mean? Of course, I will have mercy upon whom I will, what does that mean? It means if you're looking to somewhere else for mercy, God said, okay, go to that someone else. If you're only looking to me, and to me alone, then I give you my mercy, then I give you my forgiveness. Returning to God means recognizing that we stand on nothing but God's mercy. Any righteousness that we have, any goodness that we have is a gift from God. It's not something that should make us feel good because I did good yesterday. If it makes you feel good, it's because God gave me that gift yesterday. If it's all going back to God, it's all about leaning on God, the sin of idolatry going, tying the two together, tying atonement and idolatry together, the sin of idolatry is actually bending itself in complete submission to another entity. But there are lesser forms of idolatry. Having God as our God, the word for God, Elohim, means power, a power that we trust in. When we say he is our God, it means he is the power that we trust in. That's the strength that we have in our stride. That's what gives us confidence to move forward. That's what gives us confidence to accomplish. That's the fact that God is behind us. The fact that God is giving us breath here and now. The fact that our exist in God's world is what's giving me confidence to talk, to move, to act. That's leaning on God. If I need something else, and we all need something else, it's a process. None of us are perfect in anything. Not even in leaning on God. But that's what we're striving for. That's the journey that we're on. That's the underlying message of Judaism. The underlying message of Judaism is, don't lean on anything else but God. This is the message of Judaism as relates to atonement. This is the message of Judaism as relates to idolatry. If you read the Bible with your heart open to the heart of the author, you will not escape these truths. You will not escape that worship is about bending your heart to God and to God alone. It's about an attraction of the heart. It's not about believing in one philosophy as opposed to another philosophy. And repentance is about leaning on God and on God alone, relying on God's mercy, finding confidence in God's mercy, in God's love, and in nothing else.