Season 1: Episode 29 - Epilogue

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I'm glad you're here with me, here at the end of all things Sam. You know, there's a perspective you can gain at the end of a process, which isn't available while you're in the flow. And I'm not just talking about 20-20 hindsight, I'm talking about the fact that in the Hebrew language the word for truth is emet, alef, mem, taf, and that is the first, middle, and the last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which means in a sense that the truth always emerges at the end. And here we are, at least at the end of an era. And I want to take a little bit of a retrospective, because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Epilogue on Season 1. So, we've witnessed the third great destruction. That's really what the expulsion from Spain was, and it's hard to know if the people who lived through it saw it as such, but as they sat on the decks of ships watching the Iberian Peninsula retreat across the Mediterranean, or on wagons as they tried to cross the Pyrenees, or on foot as they walked into Portugal on the very day, the 9th of Av, that history marks as the destruction of the First Temple, as the destruction of the second temple, it's hard to imagine that they didn't see what was happening to them as something of equivalent scale.

And this also marks for us in our story a turning of a critical period. I want to take a little bit of time to go back and to pick apart in a very brief fashion the nature of the identity which has been founded and really has grown organically for the last, I don't know, 1,500 if not 2,000 years. Because I see up to now three great stages in the consciousness of Am Yisrael. Don't forget, this is a class in Jewish consciousness in its historical context. It begins in the mythic. The mythic consciousness that the Torah speaks about, or doesn't even speak about because it's mythic, it just speaks. The mythic consciousness which really lasts right up until the destruction of the First Temple, that era in which the kingdom of God was meant to be lived as a kingdom of flesh and blood.

And that's really where we picked up our story with Daniel. But that mythic consciousness is undifferentiated. It's not even aware that there is a story, so to speak. We moved on with the return to Zion, after the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians, into what I call the Midrashic consciousness. This is the consciousness of wisdom. And it's the beginnings of differentiation. part of wisdom is stepping away from what you know in order to understand it and that process of detentiation we'll see gave rise to a very different type of identity and what lies ahead in the era which really begins after the expulsion from Spain will be the return or perhaps the emergence of a mythic consciousness which is a re-entry into intimacy of relationship but in a conscious fashion And we're going to trace the path of the mythic to the midrashic to the mystic in the coming series.

But for now, just know that the corner has been turned. And I also want to consider in this epilogue, what are the strategies that the Jews can use to bridge the gap, the great discontinuity that really lies here in the expulsion from Spain, and somehow stitch together a coherent narrative of their lives. Remember, when we speak about healing from trauma on a personal level, we're really speaking about how I integrate what's happened to me into my sense of self, such as that I'm the same person in my own eyes, both before and after the event, though I may have groaned, though of course we all become wiser with time, and experience is the great teacher. Nevertheless, if I'm left feeling that the me on one side of the gap is not the same me on the other, that begs the danger of disintegration.

And this will be one of the great challenges and we'll even talk about in the coming series the fact that many modern or post-modern Jewish historians will actually deny that continuity is the hallmark of Jewish history at all. But I claim that this is one story. So we're going to have to think about what I consider to be the process of creative memory. Of how do I tell a story of the past and integrate it into my present identity in such a way that I can function in the world which I want to live. And of course, I'm also empowered to actualize my vision of where I want to go. That will be our primary focus of the coming series. But like I said, for now, I want to look back before we move forward and to trace a few of the parameters that have defined Am Yisrael as a people and again, to touch those high points of Jewish consciousness.

So let's remember Ezra and Nehemia, the spiritual and political cultural leaders of the return to Zion. Now we're talking about after the destruction of the first temple, and after the 70 years of Babylonian exile. And if you recall, we spoke about the difficulties of dating, but for now we'll just put it in the 6th century, before the common era. And they were, as I said, wall builders. They built physical walls of Jerusalem. They built the cultural walls of Am Yisrael by forcing their followers to divorce their non-Jewish wives. They built the religious walls. Many of the structures that we're familiar with today as Judaism have their origins in this time. And in my model, they stand at the turning point between that mythic, prophetic consciousness and the midrashic consciousness which is founded in wisdom.

They also stand at another important turning point. Because we look at what the boundaries of Am Yisrael, of the Jewish people, were. We can find, basically, three parameters that were used to define them. First, in the Bible, at least up until the Persian era, until the return to Zion, we see very clearly that the boundaries of Jewish peoplehood were geography. You were a Jew because you were not a Jew, sorry, there was no Jew in the Bible. You were an Israelite because you were in the land of Israel. And on some level, that was sufficient. You know, a great demonstration of this idea is actually found in the book of Ruth. Even though we have the habit of looking to the book of Ruth as the story of the first convert, as indeed it was, it's often missed what exactly the process of her conversion was.

Because when Ruth held fast to Naomi, her mother-in-law, and refused to go away, and made her famous declaration that transformed her into a member of Am Yisrael, what did she say? Wherever you go, I will go. And wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God. meaning there's a geographic element which is dominant right up until she says, oh, by the way, your God will be my God. And that held true really through the entire First Temple period. However, we see in the books of Ezra and Nehemia, in the entire Persian period, a shift toward genealogy. There's a tremendous emphasis on lineage which is placed in the books of Ezra and Nehemia, and it's not for naught, because the geographic boundaries had been shattered, not only in the sense of conquest and the dissolution of the kingdom, but also because the majority of people did not return when the time was come for Shivatsiyon, for the return to Zion.

And so now, the family lineage, the almost racial, even though the concept didn't exist at the time, but familial, tribal element, will be dominant. And further on, with the destruction of the second temple, and the explosion of the concept of religion, which we'll touch on a little bit, and we've spoken about quite a bit in the past, then and only then does ideology, conversion as we think of it the adoption of a consciousness actually become the defining boundary of where Am Yisrael begins and ends and I want you to note for now because we have one eye toward the coming series that these elements are going to start to reappear as we move deeper into this coming mystic age and I want you to note for now that these elements will start to reappear as we move deeper into the coming mystic age in particular, we see in the modern embodiment of the Jewish people in the state of Israel a deep challenge between ideology as the defining boundary, genealogy as the defining boundary, and geography.

All you have to do is ask the very simple question, an oh-so-painful one, a Russian soldier who has been born in this country to a mother who wasn't Jewish, but who has served in the Israeli military, and is speaking Hebrew, and, God forbid, Shalom Eidah dies in combat. Are you really going to tell me that this person is not a critical part of the Jewish story? There's a challenge in that question, and we'll come back to it. For now, I just want to point out that the identity created by Ezra and Nehemia was one which used the tools of entirety and exclusivity. Entirety was based on the idea that Ezra and Nehemia said, we are the entirety of the Jewish people. Because we control the boundaries, everyone we say is in is in, and everyone we say is out is out.

That's their building of walls. And because they were able to claim entirety they were then able to claim exclusivity over who tells the story of the Jewish people That why the camera so to speak in the biblical narrative stays focused on the people who came back from the exile Even though the vast majority were elsewhere, and it stays that way right up until, if you recall, Hillel the Elder appears. You can go back and do some for you. And it's not for naught that the canon of the Hebrew Bible is coming to a close at this point. Because remember, for all practical purposes, the end of prophecy was a legislative decision. It's not that people stopped claiming to be prophets. Certainly not. And it's not that perhaps even people weren't still receiving information or visions or experience of God.

That we don't know. What we do know is that their works were no longer given the authority to make it into the Hebrew Bible. And that is another very important boundary of the story. Because this period of time, which was really begun by Ezra and Nehemiah, this period in which wisdom begins to replace prophecy as the model of leadership and really as the organizing principle of community and identity, this period of time is a time in which a strong boundary is critical to know who we are. We are us and you are you. The primary intellectual tool they're using is what's called compare and contrast. In order to compare and contrast two things, you have to know what they are separately. All healthy relationships are founded on a clear boundary.

Or, to borrow a phrase, good fences make good neighbors. Now, the first challenge to this, if you recall, was the Greek encounter. When Alexander the Great and his tutor Aristotle brought Hellenistic culture to the East. And we're not going to go through it all now. Surely you're at least vaguely familiar with how it was love at first sight, and then love went out with the Maccabean Revolt. But do recall, please, that just as Greece was moving from the mythological to the philosophical age, Am Yisrael is moving from the prophetic to the age of wisdom. And what is the difference between wisdom and prophecy? Now, on one level, there's a very simple answer. And that is, for Am Yisrael, the root of wisdom is the fear of God.

Right? Reishi Chochma Yirat Hashem. And that isn't just simply a religious moral standpoint. Nor is it just the idea that the beginning of knowing is when you accept that you don't know. And in fact, there are things you cannot know, even though those two things are quite true. Ultimately, it's the notion that even if we are the authors of our lives, God is the editor and publisher, so to speak. And it is this sense that the Jewish story is actually God's story in the world that lays the foundation for the identity in the era that begins with Ezra and flows in a fairly steady stream right up until the expulsion. The boundaries of the story are one and one with the boundaries of the Jewish people. Now, as long as the national vessel stood and the temple was there at its center, geography was still a relevant part of the discussion and that caused quite a bit of confusion.

Furthermore, the tribal element of all peoples in this era places a high value on lineage. But nevertheless, ultimately we're going to see that the rabbinic project, the great leaders of the model of wisdom, both in identity and in leadership, the rabbis founded their vision of identity on Jewish is as Jewish does. It will be praxis more than anything else that serves as the ultimate boundary condition for membership within the people and therefore control over the story. The most familiar element of this is the halachic project. This idea, this insane and noble notion that I can actually know what it is God wants from me in any given situation, even though I'm not a prophet. And the twin tools that we spoke about, which the rabbis both crafted and which shaped them, that allowed them to make such an astounding assertion, are Mishnahh and Midrash.

law and narrative these two tools will define the identity which is all about boundaries about me here you there and furthermore will be largely about pursuing the power to draw the kingdom of God within because as in the first temple period the attempt to build a kingdom of flesh and blood which articulated the kingdom of God in the world failed so too in the Second Temple Period, it doesn't even really seem that the project got started. You can make an argument in the Maccabean era, but I'll leave that discussion for another time. Now, the struggles of the Second Temple Period had really two dimensions, internal and external. Externally, the Judeans became the indigestible element of the Roman Empire.

As you'll recall, in that era that historians called the Pax Romana, When most of the world had been sort of beaten into submission and decided that it was better to have the Romans build your roads and your aqueducts and, you know, have an organized tax system than it was to get squashed under the heels of the legions, the Jews fought not one, not two, but three wars against Rome. And it left Rome with the sense that Judeans are an indigestible element and therefore must be removed. And ultimately that is indeed what the Romans do. They wipe out the national vessel. They transformed Judea into Palestina, with perhaps the most far-reaching decision they made in their battle against us. And they also struggled to destroy the spiritual basis of the Judeans, fortunately with far less success.

But what's astounding is that the Roman focus on killing the sages, on preventing specific ritual practice, and on eliminating the learning of the Torah, which, by the way, were all borrowed from the Greeks back in the Maccabean era, served to push forward the seemingly divine project of transforming covenantal relationship into religion. Now, let's just recall the difference here, because that's also one of the elements that's going to begin to shift once again in the coming era. I would say the covenantal relationship goes hand-in-hand with the mythic era, and that religion is really a product of the era of wisdom. The mythic era, again, ending with the destruction of the First Temple, And the Midrashic era extending, again, these things never disappear entirely, but the primarily occupying from the destruction of the First Temple all the way through to the expulsion from Spain.

And what's the difference between the two? Well, religion is a set of beliefs, behaviors, and practices that define my relationship with God. Whereas a covenantal relationship is the context for my entire being. An example, perhaps, will help. Right? I love my wife. We have a wonderful relationship. There are beliefs that inform that relationship. There are behaviors that facilitate it. There are practices that make it rich and sometimes difficult. But you can't sum up my relationship with my wife to the beliefs and behaviors and practices that articulate it because my relationship with my wife is the context for the rest of my life. Covenantal relationships are a vessel which become a context for the relationship.

They really hold all of life. And so, what happens in this era of wisdom is that religion is born, and by implication at first, and ultimately through realization, which we're going to see again in the coming series, there is a secular section of life. There is a place in life where God is not. And we're going to see in the coming series that the Jews were bound up with the birth of secular culture within European society, particularly because we did not share religions. We had competing sets of beliefs, behaviors, and practices, and yet we shared an overarching sociopolitical context. There was some sort of covenantal social relationship, what was ultimately known as the social contract in the Enlightenment, which held the context for our lives.

And the sense that religion was an inadequate vessel for holding us all together is in many ways what will give birth to the secular world. But we'll wait until we talk about Spinoza, until we get there. So, back to history. Just as the last round of struggle between Am Yisrael and Rome subsided, and the Jews began to turn our focus on the great project of the portable homeland, that taking of the oral process of Mishnahh and Midrash, and writing it down into a framework that could allow a conversation to be conducted which transcended the boundaries of geography and chronology. It's just an astounding thing. I sit almost every day and learn Mishnahh myself, and I often get to teach it to others. And it's amazing to see people in the 21st century or the 6th millennium, whatever calendar you like, engaging in a conversation with people they've never met, that they don't share a language with, that they don't even share a geography and certainly not a history with.

It's astounding. It's an astounding thing. And this Mishnahh really also took the concept and produced tools that would allow us to bring the Kingdom of God to life in the whole world through every personal action Instead of having it hinge on the national story and its geographic center in the land of Israel and the temple. This will be a critical part of the ability not only to survive but thrive in exile as we've been speaking about. And what we're going to see in the coming series is that the halachic project will not stop. The pursuit of God everywhere, in fact, will go into hyperdrive as the expanding world opens up in the early modern era. And yet, there will be deep challenges by some of the elements of worldview which were subtly implanted into the portable homeland.

When the flat world turns into a globe, when other cultures who've never heard of us are encountered, etc., etc. There's a new chapter in this story. But again, back to history. At this point, when the battle with Rome is subsiding, and the portable homeland is being shaped in the form of the Mishnahh, a new identity struggle arises. And that's the birth of Christianity. Now, it's too big to lay out. Now, go back and listen to the series if you're just tuning in right now. In fact, I would encourage you to stop the epilogue, go back to episode one, and take some time. Maybe binge listen or something. But for us, early Christianity was essentially the most powerful challenge to this idea of identity based on exclusivity and entirety that we have seen yet.

Because early Christianity, of course, through the doctrine of supersession said, we are you. We are the new Israel. And therefore, we are holding the right version of the story. Now, this isn't just the first recorded act of national identity theft. which it is, it's also the real beginning of what I like to call the hermeneutic battle, or what my friend Yishai loves to label in our day as narrative warfare. And in the hermeneutic battle, particularly with Christianity, the question is, who's telling the story within the sacred text in a way that can create a people that will merit to see redemption? Notice the dynamic once again. Who's got the power of the story of the past that can create an identity in the present which will get us to a future which we want to live?

This will become the fundamental context for the formation of identity for both Judaism and Christianity in the struggle over the next 2,000 years. And by the way, it's ongoing. All I need to do is think about the Vatican II, which happened in 1964, when the Catholic Church shifted fundamental theological principles in response to the return of the Jewish people to its land and the thriving nation they were building. or closer to our day, the emergence of Christian Zionism. Christians who are seeking their Jewish roots in their own faith and are coming to see the return of the Jewish people to their land as the fulfillment of God's promise to all humanity. These are astounding and important things which we will again reflect on in the coming series.

Now, in terms of differentiation in this identity battle with early Christianity, there is a period of, seems about 200 years or so, of deeply ambiguous identity. It's not so clear who we are and who they are. But, once the Church co-opts the Roman Empire and arises as a truly temporal power, a much harder binary of us versus them sets in. And the Jews are no longer the indigestible element of the Roman Empire, now they become the obstinate rejecters of Christian salvation. And that binary, that us versus them, the struggle in the text of the hermeneutic battle, will hold more or less firm until the emergence of the converso identity that we've been speaking about in the last few episodes. Because, of course, as we mentioned, the converso identity is deeply threatening to both sides of the equation.

To someone who has been baptized, and may even outwardly practice as a Catholic, but lives within the Jewish quarter, who on Sunday might be in church taking communion, but the next day could be found in a Jewish cemetery attending the Jewish funeral of one of his family members. This idea of us here and them there being the backbone of identity is starting to crumble. And as we'll see in the early modern era, this is going to have vast implications for both Judaism and Christianity. Now, moving forward in time, we get to the rise of Islam. And I can't, of course, review it all, but it certainly deserves a mention. Because the depth and complexity of the cultural fusion that happens in the Islamic world really can be best summed up in the fact that it's not until Greek philosophy is translated into Arabic that it becomes kosher for the Jews.

I mean, it's astounding, right? But also, we have to look at one of the great struggles that came out of that cultural fusion, which defined the last, I don't know, 500 years of our discussion, and will be carried forward. And that is between the philosophers and the mystics. Of course, the struggle between philosophy and mysticism wasn't created by the Islamic world. But for Am Yisrael, it was deeply facilitated because we gained access to a sophisticated approach to Greek philosophy. And rabbinic culture, meanwhile, reached in what is many ways the peak of its development in the Gaonic period. Remember, the Goonim were this last living central authority based in Baghdad, in Babylon. And let's just note for a second, why is it important that they were the last living central authority?

Well, because there's a power, and unbeknownst to many people, a flexibility in living authority that is not available when authority resides in text. What do I mean? Just imagine all the Jewish people were on a football field. And I had a megaphone, and I get to call the shots, and I say, okay everyone, take one step to your left. Have we moved? Now, from the outside, you say, of course, all the Jews took one step left. But from the inside, from within the Jewish story, we're all still in the same place. And in this identity, which claims an exclusivity over the ability to tell the Jewish story, and therefore over the story of God in the world, as long as we stay together, then nothing shifts. but that will begin to end now, the Ganim also transformed the Gemara as we spoke about, from a live conversation into a canonical text into something which you can actually point to and say this is the oral Torah and now one could at last honestly begin to make the argument that there was a one-to-one mapping between Judaism and the Jews right up until the Karate Schism, of course because remember, ism and schism come into the world together.

It's only once you have orthodoxy that heterodoxy becomes heresy. And this process may be different than the one that happened in the 18th century, but it's an important dynamic which will return to us in the era of the Enlightenment. So stay tuned. So meanwhile, in our review, the period of the Rishonim, the early medieval authorities, their very name gives them authority, right? they are the first ones, brought us to a whole new phase of exile. The Gemara now becomes the central authority, which really means that we're facing the power and opportunity of local leadership. There will be North African Jewry, Ashkenazi Jewry, Sephardi Jewry, there's still Baghdadi and Far Eastern Jewry. And I'll just remind you of my daughter's first Davar Torah, when she asked me, coming home from Gan, that she could have a cup of water, some oil, and a fork.

And when I gave it to her, she began to stir, and in the Ganada's voice said, just like water doesn't mix with oil, so too Am Yisrael doesn't mix with the nations. And we spoke about my horror at the end of liberal education. But we also spoke about the fact that I had a realization in that moment that it's true, water doesn't mix with oil. But what really happens is that the oil emulsifies. It becomes little globules which have an internal cohesion, they stick to themselves, and an external phobia. They push off the waters. And this is really what begins at this phase of exile. Because the Jews of North Africa, and the Jews of Ashkenaz, and the Jews of Spain, and the Jews of the Far East, will look at each other a little bit askance if they're even aware that Jews of another way exist.

And one of the hallmarks and challenges and great sources of creativity in the coming early modern era will be what happens when the increased mobility of that age allows Jews to meet Jews who don't look like them. Funny, you don't look Jewish. Now, if a fork stirring in oil and water was the age of the Rishonim, the medieval ages, there were a lot of hammer blows to Jewish whole identity. There were expulsions, there were persecutions, and yet, on some level, the world was still relatively small. In the early modern era when technology will vastly increase the capacity both to travel and to oppress that fork will become a blender and the emulsion will become much more intense I want you to think about the fact that there are only two ways that I aware of that one can actually get rid of an emulsion and return that oil back to a layer of wholeness to bring the Jewish story back together, as it were.

One is settling. If you let the cup sit there for long enough, the oil will reconstitute, right? Settling, of course, is the Zionist dream. Just give us a piece of ground on which we can catch our breath for a thousand years or so and we'll get things back on track. And we're going to have to spend significant time discussing how the Zionist dream came about, and in particular considering why it happened when it did. The other method of getting rid of an emulsion is by using a surfactant. A little bit of science, right? Surfactants are compounds that lower the surface tension between the oil and the water, in our example, right? The solution to pollution is dilution. The other way to get rid of emulsion is to stop those little globules of sticking to themselves and let them just embrace the water.

Let the Jews just disperse into the mass of humanity. Stop telling your own particular story. And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the practical philosophical approaches to how to get the Jews to be just like everybody else in the coming series. But for now, to bring us back to the end of the previous season, Ashkenazi Jewry has found a temporary place to settle in Poland. We haven't really discussed it yet, and we'll come back to it in the coming series, don't worry. But we will see that that powerful combination of geographic concentration and relative autonomy will allow for a blossoming of Am Yisrael in Torah, culture and identity, in a way in which makes it clear that what the sages said was true, that God always prepares a solution before the blow is given.

As Spain crumbles, Poland rises. But of course, anyone knows, even the smallest bit of Jewish history, knows that the Jewish story in Poland doesn't exactly have a happy ending. Now, the Jews of Spain didn't fare as well in this period of our story, because from the middle of the 14th century, the solution to the Jewish problem, of course, has been increasingly brutal. The church, led by the mendicant monks, feels that the time is ripe to win the hermeneutic battle once and for all, and to eliminate the other and consolidate their own identity. And you might say, actually, that this moment was inevitable. Because an identity based on the non-existence of the other is a zero-sum concept. Somebody has to go.

And not to blame the victim. But we do need to consider whether a new and more sustainable model of Jewish identity must emerge from the coming era. because the idea that in order for me to be me, you cannot exist, really was started way back in the time of Ezra and Nehemia. But even the forced conversion, the Inquisition and the expulsion failed to eliminate the Jewish story from Spain. They don't succeed in getting rid of other, But they do succeed in breaking down this binary identity of us and them, which has driven our story for so long. So we're going to have to see if some new model of identity will emerge in the coming mystic era. A last word on what lies ahead. One of the hallmarks of the coming phase of history, of what's called the early modern phase, is expanding horizons.

you know whether Columbus himself was a Jew is irrelevant to our story in my mind but it is noteworthy that the conversos were amongst the first Europeans who set foot on the shores of the New World with the Inquisition in hot pursuit by the way and as a map with edges becomes a globe the Jews will go there wherever there is and since they go there as Jews meaning as part of a people connected to a people all over the globe all of whom are telling on some level the same story, even though they've never met, even though they don't share language, even though if they passed each other in the streets, they might not know that they were Jews. They're telling the same story. And because of this, you can argue that the Jews will be the first to birth a global consciousness.

Because the international Jew isn't just some anti-Semitic trope. It's a lived experience of the coming age. and furthermore as the boundaries of ignorance are gradually pushed outwards by the project of human knowledge culminating in what we know as the enlightenment the Jews will go there too and they will often go there as Jews and this itself will push the envelope of traditional identity sometimes to the breaking point and a new facet of a very old definition of Am Yisrael will come to light under the pressures that this expansive experience produces and that definition is Am Segula that Am Yisrael is defined by God way back in the five books of Moses as a treasured people now this is usually understood as a strongly particularist perspective treasured above all others kept separate and sacred etc.

more important but to me one of the fascinating things about treasures is that in a sense it has no value in and of itself if you could only have one thing in the world and you were on a desert island I'm willing to bet a box of gold wouldn't be it you can't eat it it's too hard to sleep on it won't keep you warm at night its precious nature its value is found insofar as it is adaptable for acquiring other things and interesting by the way that to be misugal the word treasured people is am sigula in Hebrew and to be misugal in modern Hebrew is to be capable the histagel is to adapt to a situation the value of treasure is in its adaptability so you can see how that treasured nature of the Jewish people in this expansive world will become more and more about their ability to adapt to the new and yet, if the amn segulah of this treasured people ceases to be precious in its particular nature it also loses the richness of that adaptability you can't take all the stuff you've acquired, and just turn it back into treasure.

And this will be the primary tension that we're going to need to keep our eye on in the coming era, the tension between the particular and the universal. And it will be the lever for the breaking and remaking of Jewish identity, which is good because the Holy Zohar says that the tension, the redemptive tension, which the soul comes into the world to negotiate, is the tension between the prat and klal, between the particular and the universal. and as the world expands as knowledge grows as identities shift and change the question will arise and this is really our question for the coming series whose story is this? like I said I firmly believe that we are the author of our lives and that God is the editor and for the first phase of the story that we've been discussing the Jewish story has been God's story and this overlap has been the cornerstone of our identity since the time of Ezra the wall builder but of course there's only one story just like there's only one God and if that's the case then on some level the whole world is telling it and one of the true revolutions of the coming age will be the rise of the individual as the real unit of measure in existence it's a truism amongst historians that the individual as we know him is a product of modernity And if that's the case, then we're all responsible on some level for telling the story through our own lives.

And yet, and yet, the Jewish people are a people. And particularly in our time, the story of the nation of Israel has taken some pretty spectacular turns. And so, we as a people will have to keep telling our story. And you as an individual, we as individuals, will have to keep telling our story. God's story. Because I'm Rav Mike Boyer and this is The Jewish Story. Ad Khan, the first season. I just want to thank you people. I want to thank the people who give their hard-earned money. Please, now is the opportunity to join them in supporting this project. You can find me on Facebook, Rav Mike Boyer, and you'll see the information there. You can go to Patreon. That's www.patreon.com and find my M. Foyer page.

You can send me an email at ravmikefoyer at gmail or ravmike at thelandofisrael.com and I'll send you the information. I want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for giving me a platform to reach so many people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute pardes.org.il for allowing me to touch the hearts and minds of so many precious Jews out there. I want to thank Sulem Yaakov for being a home. And I want to thank you for listening. Once again, I'm Rav Mike Foyer and this is the Jewish story.