Season 1: Episode 1 - The Time Between the 1st and 2nd Temples - Daniel, The Mythic Link

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It's never easy to start. Kol hatchalot kashot, all beginnings are hard and they're not simple either. Nevertheless, every story has its point of departure and I've got a story to tell. It's not my story. No, I'm a little bit too small for that. It's the Jewish story but I'll be telling it how I see it. And if I want to do that, then you have to know a bit about where I'm coming from. First of all, let's get it straight. There is no word for history in the Hebrew language. Lashon HaKodesh is not talking about history. That's a Greek concept. So if what we're talking about is not history, at least in the sense that the Western Academy developed it up until the interwar period of the past as it really was, then what on earth are we doing?

I can say that very simple. We're remembering. Zachor. You know, the Torah is filled with the command to remember there are events which you never experience that are calling upon you to recall. And what is the power of memory? And how does it relate to the Jewish story? Well, just as your memory, though it's about the past, is actually located in the present, that's the core of our story. What do I mean? Now, if you remember something in your past, it's inaccessible as it really was. All you're doing is summing it up into your present identity. That's why so many of us have had the experience of speaking to a friend, a sibling, a loved one, a parent saying, oh, do you remember when this and such happened?

And yeah, it was like it was like that and then the person looks to you and says, ah, that's not how I remember it. That's because memory is only partially about the past. What it's really about is integrating the past into our present identity. And here's the trick. You hear that? There it goes. That was the present. Because unless you've done quite a bit of work in mindfulness and meditation, then being present to the present is a lot harder than you think. And therefore, we're actually future-oriented. Be it in the sense of anxiety or aspiration, depending on where you fall down, on the emotional spectrum in the moment, but nevertheless, that's the full picture. Memory is located in the present, and it's about constructing a past that can build up a present identity which will take me to the future in which I want to live.

And that is exactly what I'm doing in the Jewish story. We're going to tell a story of the past. And there will be facts, and dates, and particulars, and a narrative thread. Nevertheless, we're telling it in the present. And what's even more important is that as far as I can tell, we as a people are interested in the past and we're quite engaged in the present, but what we really dream about is the future. So there's one more piece, really, and that is a heartfelt sense that I have that the past should unite us, right? It is, in fact, by definition, what we share, but because of this tricky dynamic that I mentioned just a minute ago about the fact that our story of the past is really about our present identity.

Well, since our identity in today's day and age is so fragmented, we find that the way we tell the story of the past and the vision of the future embedded in it more often divides than unites. So here I am, I want to tell the Jewish story in a way which is a bit of narrative therapy. I want us to unearth the narratives, the constructs, the stories, which are the topography on which our identity is built in order to try to bring them together to unite the Jewish people and to take us to that future in which we want to live. One more note about me and my approach to methodology here. You know, the holy grail of historical studies right up until the interwar period and the birth of the postmodern problems was objectivity.

You know, if you want to look for the origins of objectivity in the study of history, the best place to locate it is in the introduction to Thucydides' classic work, the Peloponnesian Wars. Right, way back in the fifth century before the common era, Thucydides laid the groundwork not only for the Greek approach to history, but in truth to their approach to thought and the underlying foundations of what became the scientific endeavor, endeavor, and that is, he said, give me the facts and I will draw right conclusions. In other words, the truth is subordinate to the facts. Insofar as I have the facts, then I can tell you the truth. Now, Thucydides, as far as I can tell, was blissfully unaware of all of the postmodern problems down to the point that criminology has begun to undermine the integrity of first-person testimony.

Nevertheless, he felt that if you could get facts, you would actually know what really happened. The Torah presents us with an entirely different perspective. The Torah says, listen, I have the truth. Now, you can check the theology and really care, frankly, whether you agree or not with that statement. You need to understand from an internal narrative perspective that the Torah is asserting truth and it offers facts insofar as they are useful for understanding it. In other words, in the Torah, the facts are subordinate to the truth. Now, this opens up a rich and problematic angle on truth, which is literary truth. What do I mean? Have you ever read a good book? Maybe you haven't. You need to get out more.

But I'm sure that you have. When you think about that good book, ask yourself, was it true. If the question is, does it belong on the fiction shelf as opposed to the nonfiction so, if it's a novel, we know where it goes. But, if it's a classic, if it's a piece of literature that truly moved you, then the answer is, well, it may not have been literally true. But, the literary truth in it, the truth of human experience, was exactly the truth to the book. And what's astounding is that, sometimes, The truth is so large that it refuses to be shoehorned into a pedantic attachment to literalism. In other words, sometimes the story is bigger and more true than the truth. These are myths and facts, right? We live in a world where I say myths and facts, what I really mean is lies and truth, but the reality is that's how Thucydides looked at it.

In telling you that the truth was a subordinate to the literalism of facts, Thucydides forces you to say that anything which is not factual is not true. The Torah's perspective is entirely different. The truth is transcendent, and we'll speak a little bit more about that as we come along here. But it is larger than the particular events of life. Oh, you need details to relate. No one is going to be moved by now that says some guy came one day and did something and it really had a effect on him at the end. No, it's in the particularism that allows us to build a relationship and a attachment to the story. But it's in its grandeur and its sense of the breadth and commonality of human experience that the literary face of truth can draw out the greatness which is available.

This is Mythos. So I want you to keep in mind, as I'm telling the Jewish story, how I see it, that there is no word for history in the Hebrew language, that what we're doing is remembering. We're telling a story about the past in order to build a present identity which is motivated to take us to the future in which we want to live. That my goal is to find what unites us and to do a bit of narrative therapy to help the Jewish people tell a story not only that we can all tell, but the whole world can share. And finally, beware the myths and facts. Now, the story's got to start somewhere, and for us, it's going to start in the book of Daniel. Who was Daniel? He was a young boy, taken away from his home, but on a deeper level, Daniel is the final fruits of the first kingdom, who witnesses both the end and the beginning.

What was the first kingdom? It was the first temple time, right? The world in which a kingdom of flesh and blood was meant to embody the kingdom of God in the world. Prophets spoke in the voice of God. The king stood before the people as his embodiment. The temple was there to connect between heaven and earth, but it didn't work. The sages tell us that the temple was destroyed for idolatry, sexual immorality, and the spilling of innocent blood. And as Rav Kook explains, it was the grandeur of the clout of the collective identity of Am Yisrael, the wholeness as it were, that was unable to trickle down to the behavior of the prod of the particular. Another way to say this is that temple, king, and prophet were meant to represent the kingdom of God in the world.

But just to imagine, an idolater somewhere toward the late first temple times, here is about the God of Israel, travels across seas and lands and mountains and deserts to come to this glorious revelation. It comes into the land, what we've even seen. Well, we just said idolatry, sexual immorality, and the spilling of innocent blood. And then he would have said either that there is no God in Israel, or that this God is just like every other God. I know what this stuff looks like. I came from a place just like this. And now that means that the temple, prophet, and king actually undermined the unique nature of God's kingship in the world, rather than reinforcing it, and therefore it's time to go. So Daniel has actually taken away in the first exile.

If you look closely in the verses as they're described in the book of kings and elsewhere, there are actually two exiles of the first temple period. The first one, he went along with Mordechai, the prophet Ezekiel, the king, the nobles, and the craftsman of Jerusalem before the temple was destroyed. He did not have to witness the brutality of the actual destruction. And it's important also to remember that exile is only exile because I believe that there's somewhere else I belong. What do I mean? If the Jews have been taken away at the destruction of the first temple or in Daniel's case, 11 years of preceding the destruction, and they had believed that there was no promise of their return that would not have been exiled, it would have just been the progress of time.

But because they carried with them the promise in the voice of Jeremiah that this interim from the destruction to the rebuilding would only last 70 years, therefore their very existence in Babylon was one of a temporary nature. Exile is rooted in the belief that I have somewhere else I belong. So Daniel was carried away, and he took with him Jeremiah's prophecy, that the coming destruction would only last 70 years. You know, the irony here is that in Jeremiah's own time, the majority of people weren't listening to him. I mean, he didn't even actually witness the destruction of the temple because he was at the bottom of a pit he'd been thrown into, not only to save his life from the angry masses, but Daniel must have believed him, because we see that even though he's taken away from Jerusalem, nevertheless, he's turning back toward it three times a day to pray.

Now, my first question about Daniel is, was he a prophet? If we open up his book, in terms of content at first glance, the answer is yes, there is no other book of the Bible so committed to prediction of the future. You know, the king comes from here, and he has four horns, and the he-goat from the west and all these strange and wonderful visions. So at first glance, yes, it's prophetic, perhaps, as we'll see. Second, the timing. Well, I mean, the book of Daniel places him, as we said, right after the destruction before the building. This is the time in between, and chronologically puts him before the prophets of the beginning of the second temple, who are the classic end of the Age of Prophecy, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.

Okay, he's in. Third and final question. Where is his book located in the Tanakh in the Hebrew Bible? Uh-oh. In theory, a prophet's works should be located in the book of prophets, and Daniel is there square in the middle of the writings. We'll come back to that. But just on one slight side note, when did the prophetic age end? If we start digging around in our sources, first place that we could look is actually in the first Mishnahh of Pirkei Avot on the ethics of our fathers, something that as we make our progress through time, we're going to spend more time with. But here, we see what's known as a chain of attribution of authority. Most received the Torah from Sinai. He handed it to Joshua, Joshua said, to the elders, the elders, to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the great assembly.

So, in theory, the end of the prophetic age would be the beginning of the men of the great assembly, which, as we'll discuss in its right time, is the beginning of the second temple. Fine. The Gemara itself will tell us that the end of the age prophecy was with the destruction of the temple, which presumably means the first temple, although we'll see as we work along, that's not necessarily clear. The last piece I'll throw into the mix is a quote from Seder Olam Rabbah, the great rabbinic chronology that we'll discuss at more length shortly. And the rough, he goat, is the king of Greece. He is the first king. Can you hear it? It's from the book of Daniel. And a mighty king shall stand up, and when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken.

Still, Daniel. Here's the sages. This is Alexander of Macedonia. That's Alexander the great to the rest of us, who reign for 12 years until then, the prophet's prophecy with the divine spirit, from this time onward, incline your ear, and hear the words of the wise. So, either the destruction of the second temple, as we seem to see in the Mishnahh and in the voice of the Gemara, or at the advent of Greece. Now, when we reach the Greek encounter, we'll spend more time considering it, but for our purposes, he's Daniel a prophet, but he exists in this time of transition. Israel is emerging from the age of prophecy into what we're going to call the age of wisdom. And as Seder Olam Rabbah hinted at us, there's a parallel here to Greek culture, which is emerging from the mythological age into the philosophical, and we'll spend quite a bit of time with that question, what's the difference between philosophy and wisdom?

But the story of Daniel is the story of the place in between, between the temples, between two lands, between prophecy and wisdom, because Daniel is the mythic link. And whether or not he's a prophet, he brought down a very important vision for us, and it's planted there at the beginning of his book. Now, it's actually not his own, but he married it to explain it. If you open up the second chapter of the book of Daniel, you'll find there one of the most dramatic and important stories, in my opinion, in the entire Tanakh. So Daniel was taken away, and Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, commands his servant, get me some juice, feed him up, teach him our language, clean him up, give him a nice clothes, and let them stand before me as advisors.

So he did, presumably, with all the conquered peoples of his kingdom. And so one of those was Daniel. Now, one day, the king has a dream, and he wakes quite disturbed. He calls in all his sorcerers, necromancers, soothsayers, stargazers, et cetera. And he says to them, I've had a dream. I need you to interpret it. And they say, oh, my dear king, tell us your dream, and we shall tell you its meaning. He says, no, no, no. I don't remember the dream. You have to tell me what I dreamt, and then tell me what it means. And they said to him, oh, my dear king, that's not how it works. We're dreaming interpreters. Tell us what you saw, and we'll tell you what it means. He says, what? That's all you're good for? Ha, kill them all!

And because, of course, it's Bavel, and they begin to do so. And as the slaughters work their way out from the court, and fan out through the kingdom, literally killing every necromancer, stargazers, soothsaying, fortune teller that they can find. Eventually, they reach Daniel. And there, what do they find? Open up. We've come to kill you. Daniel, being the Jew, doesn't say no. He says, wait, just give me one night. And in that night, he doesn't action, will define his relationship to reality for the rest of his book. In fact, will lay a significant brick in the Jewish story for all time. And that is, he turns to God and prays. He says that it's not for his merit, but that in order that God's name should be made great in the world, he prays that God revealed in the secret of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and indeed he does.

So Daniel gets up in the morning, and the slaughters are eating breakfast, and he says, listen, no need to kill me. I can help the king. We say, okay, kill you here. Kill you there. What do we care? Come, let's go. And so they bring Daniel before the king. Picture, the mighty king of Babylon on his throne. The young Jew stands before him, and he says to him, oh, mighty king, you were disturbed by visions in the night. And what you saw was this. There was an image of surpassing brightness. Its head was a fine gold. Its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of brass, its legs of iron, its feet of iron and clay. And as you looked, a stone was cut without hands. Just struck the image at its feet, and broke them into pieces.

And there, all the pieces together were like chaff on the summer-threshing floor, and the wind carried them away, and the stone grew to become a great mountain which filled the whole earth. And now, Nebuchadnezzar is sitting there, his eyes are his biggest saucers. He can't believe that this is the dream. And Daniel goes on, and you, O King, King of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, you are the head of gold. In perhaps the most astute political move ever made by a storyteller, because now, everything that follows is just icing on the cake. You are the head of gold, and there shall come another kingdom lesser than you of silver. And then a kingdom of brass, which will have rule over all the earth, and the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, which breaks, and subdues all thing.

And then, it's all going to fall apart. And after Daniel, brings down this vision, which was given to the King, and its interpretation, which was given to he, Daniel. The King falls on his face, offers incense, and wants to sacrifice, to Daniel himself. Now, what is this vision that lies right here at the beginning of our book? First thing is important to note, is that it's an idol. Right? The stages of the development of this idol are the progress of Malchut, of kingship after its past the nations. That's why Daniel says that Nebuchadnezzar is the head of gold. He is the physical agent who has taken Malchut kingship away from Israel, and given it over to the nations. Remember, the first kingdom was about the living out of the kingdom of God through the kingdom of flesh and blood, but that phase is over.

Right? Because now, kingship will be in the hands of the nations, and instead of being an articulation of the divine will in the world, it will become an idol, a mask over reality. Because Malchut kingship is the ability to dictate the context in which everything unfolds. And the classic Malchut of flesh and blood, socio-economic political power, is no longer meant to be in the hands of Israel. In a sense, galut will be a pushing of the realm within which Am Yisrael is called to dictate the context to realize Malchut shaman the kingdom of heaven, pushing it inwards into the inner consciousness, as opposed to the vision of the first temple period, which was to push it ever outward toward the nations in a growing ability to actually dictate context for the world.

Now, this was Daniel's first glance, but you should know that our sages take this vision, which was given to the non-Jewish king, Nebuchadnezzar, and interpreted by the boy Daniel, they take it quite seriously, because they say that these are the four stages, which we will follow through the Jewish story. The head of gold was Babylon. The chest and arms of civil will be Persia, who take the kingdom away from Babylon, and return the Jewish people with their hands to the land of Israel. The body and thighs of brass will be greased, the trunk of western culture to this very day, and those legs of iron will be the legions of Rome, which will break and subdue all that stand before it, and that's red, that culture, that kingship, that context, to the world.

Aside from this particular vision, which is going to serve us quite well, over the coming sessions, there's another important element, which Daniel adds to our story. And that is that there's a strange threat of martyrdom in Miracle, which runs through the book of Daniel, and it has echoes to a much broader genre of literature, which is called apocalyptic literature. Now, as a category, apocalyptic literature, in general, details the author's visions of the end of times, and is often bound up with a sense of personal salvation, or martyrdom, depending on which way the wind breaks. Now, what is the difference between prophetic and apocalyptic literature? First of all, we have to place it in time. Apocalyptic literature begins to emerge in that space in between, which we're discussing, and as we make a little bit of progress in the Jewish story, we'll see that it plays quite an important role in the development of the second temple period.

But in general, as the voice of prophecy fades, but wisdom has not yet fully come into its own as the model of leadership. The question of how one determines the divine will in any given situation becomes quite pressing. I mean, you have a culture of which is used to asking God directly, or at least indirectly, via the prophets. And in this period, there's a flourishing what's known as pseudonomic literature. What do I mean? This is what we call in Hebrew, tolu be'ilan gadol. If I have true insight, some deep sense that God is revealing to me, critical truth for his people. And yet, I have accepted the decision that the authority of prophecy ended really with the destruction of the first temple, though it eeks over, as we mentioned.

Well, then, how am I going to get anyone to take my thoughts seriously? I'll tell you what. I'll write my thoughts down in a book, and I'll give it the name of someone much older and wider than I. The book of Enoch. Right? The Travels of Lamech. And perhaps, just perhaps, the Book of Daniel. Because only the ancients really had the authority to speak in the voice of God. The present is focused on divining his will through exegesis, through the reading of text. Now, there's one more critical difference between prophecy and apocalypse. And that, prophecy is really a fourth telling of the will of God, and not a four-telling of the future. Sometimes, the prophets, indeed, are focused on particular events in time.

Though, we see, even in the prophetic literature, that this is primarily in order to establish the truth of their prophetic mission, and sometimes, for a pressing need of salvation, as we see, with Isaiah in the time of the Assyrian siege for people who are familiar with the story. But prophecy is actually not primarily about the details of history. What is prophecy about? As I said, the fourth telling of the will of God. Therefore, we either develop in the light of the guidance, which prophecy offers us into higher beings or higher peoples, because the prophets are so often speaking to nations. Or, in rejecting the words of prophecies, we automatically destroy ourselves through continual, wrong behavior.

We're just not fit to the guidance that God has offered. So prophecy is really about the development of the moral consciousness of humanity, and not so much about its historical consciousness, its historical development, except in so far as, history is the context within which morality and consciousness development, but actually, apocalyptic literature is obsessed with the question of how the infinite will play out in the particulars of time, the end of days. And this is why the book of Daniel has such an emphasis on that very idea. How long will it be? How is it going to play out? It may also be why. The sages teach us that the words of the prophets which we have in the Hebrew Bible were written down for all time.

Meaning, they must transcend the particulars of the historical context within which they were given. Otherwise, how could I read them in 21st century Israel? Perhaps then, the apocalyptic literature picks up the thread of the more, so to speak, local prophets, whose words were not written down, who were dealing with the specific needs of the present, and is attempting to link that present to an understanding of how the past is carrying us to its culmination in the future. So, this element of miracle in martyrdom and the sense of a fixation even on how the particulars of history are going to articulate divine will has a narrative in the book of Daniel. You know, and it's most powerful to express through the story of Daniel's three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused to submit to the mighty king.

Nebuchadnezzar sets up a golden idol, and he decrees at the sound of the bagpipes and the trumpets in the lyre all must fall down and worship it. And of course, the Jews refuse. And when they are accused by the other adviser of the king, that of not submitting to the king's will, the king asks them, if it's true that they won't bow to his god, and they indeed affirm that they will not, and they are condemned to be cast into the fiery furnace. And right there at Death's Door, they declare that their god is able to save them, but that the king should know, that even if God does not save them, they will not forsake him. And in the end, of course, they are saved by a fiery angel. And if you look there in the third chapter, in verse 29, that the king himself makes a decree that every people nation and tongue, which speaks anything against the God of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, is going to be cut into pieces that their house has made a dung hill, because there is no other God, who can deliver like this.

Meaning, that the willingness of these friends to accept martyrdom, even though they believe the God is able to save them, that God might not choose to do so. That willingness actually brings out a recognition of Malchutshamayam of the kingdom of heaven, in the king, himself. Now, this is a critical element in Nebuchadnezzar's education, which, by the way, includes being struck dumb like a beast of the field and running around with long hair and fingernails like claws and wet by the rains of heaven until he's ready to accept the kingdom of heaven. Right? It's a critical element in the education of kingship at all, which is, remember, Daniel's vision taught us that it's true that kingship was taken away from Israel and given to the nations, but that it's a mask, it's an idol, and that real kingship lies beyond.

And, by the way, it also points at another important element that we're going to develop as we tell our story, which is a new path of individuality in relationship with the divine. Right? And a turning point on this journey that we already mentioned of the kingdom of heaven away from the ability to control the outer socio-political context, toward an interstate of consciousness. And that inner sense of the kingdom of heaven is what will ultimately allow Israel to crown God king, somewhere as dark and far away, as Auschwitz. Of course, Daniel himself also faces martyrdom in that famous incident of the lion's den. When the powers of the kingdom are jealous of his role as royal advisers, and they seek a pretext against him, and they realize that they'll never find anything to accuse him of unless it's in connection with the law of God.

Just remember, that's a pattern that gets its full articulation in Megillat Esther, which of course occurs at this phase of the kingdom as well. But aside from this vision, and this sense of the importance of martyrdom and the question of the nature of apocalyptic literature and how it may have made its way into our story, into our Tanakh, via Daniel. What's the practical guidance we can take from all this? How do these elements of consciousness become embodied in the life of Am Yisrael and the Jew on the street, so to speak? And that's become really part of the Jewish story. So here I think that the critical element is prayer. Just remember, that Daniel's response when the slaughters come to kill him, along with the rest of the necromancers who are saying fortune tellers of the kingdom, is not to refuse argue.

It's to ask for time to pray. Prayer also serves as a trigger for his own martyrdom episode. He's thrown into the lion's den because there was a decree that no one could worship for 30 days. And yet, Daniel was turning back three times a day toward Jerusalem. That inner conviction that he came from somewhere, toward which he must return, is, as we said, really the beginning of the fulfillment of Jeremiah's promise that they will be saved. In that sense, that consciousness precedes action and, in the divine sense, consciousness precedes creation. So, Daniel harnesses the power of prayer in order to see what lies behind the mask. To not accept the events of time as a direct articulation of the divine will, but rather, to use his inner conviction, his inner commitment to the kingdom of heaven as a touchstone with which to pray and determine what really lies beyond.

So, we've got one more story to close. At this point, Babylon is no more. As the king foresaw at the beginning of our book in Daniel interpreted, Paras and Madai, you know, Persia and Media, swept the Babylonian empire away only 50 years after the destruction of Jerusalem. Now, Paras Persia is not yet the silver arms who will return Israel to their land. That's a discussion for the chapter that lies ahead. But it is actually worth it to mention a significant challenge that we have in our story, which is the gap between what's known as contemporary chronology and traditional Jewish chronology. Now, contemporary chronology, which you'll find in all the academic world, is based initially on the Greek historians, beginning with the so-called history himself, Herodotus, right, in the fifth century before the common era, as well as subsequent archaeological research primarily into inscriptions.

Jewish chronology is based on what's known as Seder Olam Rabbah. When we mention this, it's the rabbinic attempt to reconcile the chronology of the Tanakh right up through the Bar Kochba revolt of the second century of the common era. It's a book written by the Tanna Rabbi Yose ben Halafta, and that is not a simple endeavor, by the way. But what we find when we compare Jewish chronology to conventional chronology, is a gap of almost 200 years of missing history, and it lies in our period in the Persian period. According to the contemporary academics, there were 10 and perhaps 11 kings of the Persian period, and according to the sages, in Seder Olam Rabbah, there were only four. That's a big difference.

Now, I want to note that it's always possible to force the world into the duality of fundamentalists and heretics. You could say, listen, we're the Jews, we're faithful to our sages, what are these Greeks and academics know? They must be wrong. That's the fundamental aside, if you didn't sense it. Or you could say, these rabbis didn't really understand anything. They were simpletons or they were beholden to their own narrative or what have you. The academics, of course, are right. That's the heretic. But I believe that, as usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. This is not the time or place where a full analysis. I commend you to the longer version of this class you can find online. But nevertheless, it's going to open up a fundamental tension between the Torah and the academic approach of the West on the question of where the truth lies.

Truth in Western thought is reductionist, meaning I need to take something apart down to its original fundamental units. And that is how I can know the truth. Remember, if you said these, give me the facts. And I'll tell you the truth. Well, Judaism doesn't outright reject such a notion. But we say that the truth is known as emet, right? That's alef, mem, tav, the first middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Meaning that the truth is a process. Furthermore, the seal of God is emet. The seal of God is truth. Now it's true. That could be in the sense that it's the stamp, the mark of God. Anything which is true must be Godly. But don't forget, you put the seal on when it's finished. Because truth, ultimately, in the mind of the Torah is an emerging principle.

We don't know what elements of Daniel are literary true. And which ones are literary true. Furthermore, I should say that the biblical critics placed Daniel not in this in-between period, as I've described them. But they're in the second century before the common era, at a time of much different ferment, which we'll speak about when we reach it in our progress. But either way, this question of where the truth lies, and how to relate it to this gap of missing years, this mysterious Persian era, which, of course, finds the story of the Megillat Esther, the book of Esther, which is simply read as the book of the hidden. This may hold the seeds to understanding why the Sages put Daniel into the writings and not into the prophets.

Because perhaps they felt that the visions in Daniel held a critical element in the unfolding of Jewish consciousness that's going to help us bring the divine intention to its fruition. Regardless of its technical origins, but nevertheless, the Sages knew that the authority granted to prophecy, especially to the words of the prophets which were written down tall generations, might lead to an over-the- eager pushing for the end, based on a mechanical approach, I mean, if I had the book and it says what's going to happen, well, don't we all just have to play it out, and anytime one attempts to apply the will of the infinite particular of history in a mechanical deterministic perspective, disaster lies ahead.

And therefore, they took the book of Daniel and they placed it in the writings, making each visions and lessons always available, but what I'll call exegetically safe. They neutralized some of the problems, and left it there for our contemplation. So, on that note, our last story. In the setting for this story, bears an uncanny semblance to the opening of the Purim tale. Here is Belshazzar, the son of the mighty King Nebuchadnezzar, right, that golden head who had taken away the kingdom from Israel. And he is called for all the vessels, which his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem. Vessels of golden silver, in order that he, his wives, his lords, his concubine could drink from them, and they drank wine, says the fifth chapter of Daniel, and prays iron and wood, end of stone, and then something quite strange occurred.

A hand appeared over behind the lamp. And it wrote, something on the plaster of the wall. And when the King saw that hand writing, despite being filled with the majesty of his own power, he was terrified. His joints of his loins were loosened, meaning he was so scared, he wet himself. Because no one knew what that hand wrote. And before absolute pandemonium could break out, all of the necromancers, sorcerers who sang stargazing magicians were forced to admit that they could not read the writing. And they call for Daniel. And Daniel comes, and he, of course, is able to interpret it. He tells the King, that there is a very important message for him here. And that he should remember that his own father, Nebuchadnezzar, was so filled with his own majesty, his conviction that he was now the king of the world.

That he was forced to crawl like a beast in the grass for an entire year until he accepted the will of the King of kings. God, the kingdom of God, says Daniel, lies behind your kingdom, and above it as well. So Daniel comes, and he reads the message, and this is what it says, Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. And this is the interpretation of it. Mene, God has numbered your kingdom, and brought it to an end. Tekel, you are weighed in the balance and found wanting. Peres, your kingdom is divided and given over to Madai and Paras, Media and Persia. This message that he has been counted, weighed, found wanting, and that the kingdom is being taken away, and given to another, is a reiteration of that original vision.

Kingdoms come and kingdoms go, but everything is according to the will of God. But the role the Jew has now changed. Remember, Daniel is the bridge. He is the mythic link from that world in which a kingdom of flesh and blood was meant to articulate the kingdom of God. But now, through the power of prayer, through the power of divining the will, which lies behind the mask of kingship, he's able to interpret what is happening through the events of the time, because Daniel is the one who gives us a task of reading the writing on the wall. That's it for our story today. Before we go, I just want to thank all those wonderful people out there who made this really happen. First of all, Sulam Yaakov, sulamyaakov.com.

It's my home. Come down and visit. The Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il, for their generous support. And all the other amazing people there at the Land of Israel Network and the individuals through their generous support, who helped me tell the greatest story ever told.