Maimonides, Prophecy and Science

David Gruenstein: The issue I will discuss today is whether prophecy can be squared with science. I don’t mean to pretend that question has a single answer. We are, after all, Jews – we have multiple opinions. Now today I want to offer one specific opinion, a Maimonidean perspective I developed from my study of his writings.

First I will provide background regarding Maimonides and his teachings relevant to scripture and prophecy. Second, I will discuss the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; that story is a foundation stone to our Judaism, and indeed, in one form or another, all Abrahamic religions. We will read it shortly on Rosh Hashanah, of course. We look forward to the rabbi offering his own thoughts on any matter he wishes to, and following our presentation, we look forward to taking questions from the audience.

The Time of Maimonides

So first, some background about Maimonides. I devoted a large portion of my talk last year to summarizing my Maimonides’ extraordinary life, and I didn’t do him full justice today. I will give you the short version. He lived in the 12th century first in Cordoba, Spain under the rule of the Muslim Almoravid Dynasty, which promoted cultural scientific and intellectual exchange. He had to flee when Islamic fundamentalists took over – the Almohad Dynasty. And Maimonides found refuge near modern Cairo, where the Ayyubid Dynasty ruled. Maimonides didn’t make his living as a rabbi. He made his living from science, specifically as a doctor to the Grand Vizier and the great Saladin.

He wasn’t just a great doctor; he was a medical scientist in medieval times. He showed keen observational skill and understanding of the human body, adding to the body of medical knowledge which was still largely shaped by Hippocrates and Galen. A large portion of his recommendations are for the promotion and maintenance of good health. He taught the importance of proper diet exercise and hygiene. He recognized the link between mind and body in health and disease, emphasizing the role of mental well-being. He advocated for a moderate approach to treatment, starting with lifestyle changes before resorting to drugs or surgery. Of course, this was the 12th century – some of his recommendations have not stood the test of time, but in his time he was remarkable and exceedingly popular. Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor, waited in crowds every day for his return from the Royal Palace, hoping to be treated. But his contributions to Judaism were also immense; he wrote the Mishneh Torah, which codified all of Jewish law. It remains the preeminent guide.

To this day, nearly a millennium later, the question in Talmudic study halls today remains – what does Maimonides say? (Referring to the Mishneh Torah.) The brilliance required to write the Mishneh Torah without modern tools, even the printing press, is beyond reckoning. And the Mishneh Torah is a model of clarity, but I am focused today mostly on his lesser-known work, his Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides deliberately wrote this book in esoteric style, meaning he wrote it as a puzzle not to be clear to the masses but only to the intellectual elite, which was his intended audience. More specifically, he was writing for the Jewish intellectual elite torn between two worlds: the world of Torah and the world of secular philosophy and science. He wanted to remove their perplexity by showing that there is no true conflict.

The Guide has two stated purposes. They represent the two principal methods he used to free the reading of scripture from literal interpretation. The first is how to interpret terms more broadly than the legalistic study of the law in a narrow sense might imply. This includes terms that are ambiguous. but not only because a lawyer would find them to be ambiguous. The second method is to explain very obscure parables, including – and here is a key point – parables that are not identified in scripture as such. So, he posited that a story in the scriptural text could be a parable even though the text did not say so, and that the parable might be true in the sense of its internal message, not its external or facial reading.

The net effect of these two methods is that Maimonides found plenty of license to depart from the simple meaning of the biblical text or the historicity of a story. Altogether, the Bible says – I’ll give an example – the Bible says that man was created in the image of God. A literal reading of this conflicts with Maimonides’ philosophical and scientific beliefs, as expressed in his third principle of faith, which said: “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be his name, is not a body and that he is free from all the properties of matter, and that there can be no likeness in any way to him.”

These philosophical and scientific beliefs were in accord with al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, both medieval Islamic philosophers who based their beliefs on Aristotle’s teaching that the gods, plural, were immaterial beings. Maimonides thus read image non-literally as referring to what he deems man’s essential characteristic his intellectual apprehension this idea too comes from Aristotle, who said, “Study is the human activity that is most akin to the gods.”

Maimonides thus not only reconciled his philosophy with scripture; his philosophy shaped his reading of scripture. And Maimonides’s Jewish beliefs, specifically his love of God, drove his science: “As mortals, we cannot understand God’s Essence, but we can try to understand His works: nature.” The world and the universe, in its full complexity and interconnectedness drove Maimonides as much as it drove Newton.

What is Prophecy?

With that background, we can now examine prophecy. Let’s look at an example of prophecy from the first book of Samuel, chapter 3, which is in the handout on the first page. I’ll summarize the story for you or you can read along.

“Hannah had been barren, and promised that if God gave her a male son, he would serve the Lord all the days of his life. So after Hannah gave birth to Samuel and he was weaned, the boy moved into the house of the Lord the Tabernacle in Shiloh. Eli was the high priest.”

Here’s how Samuel had his first prophetic experience: while still a boy, young Samuel goes to sleep and God calls for him. Samuel says “I’m coming,” but not to God, to Eli, thinking it was Eli who had called for him. So Samuel runs to Eli, who says “I didn’t call you, go back to bed.” The same thing happened again; Samuel gets called by God and says “I’m coming” to Eli. And Eli says “Go back to bed.” When it happens the third time, Eli realizes someone else is calling Samuel – God – and tells Samuel to go lie down, and when he is called to say, “Speak, Lord your servant is listening.”

Then it happened – God came and stood before Samuel. That’s what it says in the text. And Samuel asks God to speak. God then tells Samuel his first prophetic message, which is that Eli and his house are doomed. The text has some words that appear open to interpretation – for example, that “God came to Samuel and stood before him.” Maimonides deals with that separately.

But one thing appears clear from the text: God is speaking to Samuel, or at least directly communicating with him somehow. What’s interesting to me is that numerous elements in the story reinforce that there is such direct communication. It’s not some bubbe meise made up by either Samuel or Eli.

Let’s start with Samuel. He doesn’t even realize God is trying to talk to him, which God does three times. Samuel is not claiming God is speaking to him; Eli has to tell him after numerous attempts. So it’s real from Samuel’s perspective, and the other person in the biblical story, Eli, has no reason to make up this story. It’s real from his perspective, too. So this leaves an obvious issue for a skeptical scientist: does God directly communicate with man? In this case, Samuel more specifically: does Scripture require Jews who are scientists through and through to believe in communication with the Divine?

Now, there’s an obvious way out in this particular story for the skeptical scientist. Samuel was asleep when God called to him, so this all could have happened in a dream. Sure, Samuel woke up and ran to Eli and fell asleep again and woke up and fell asleep again, but this all could have been happening within a single dream. But Maimonides wanted a more wholesale solution, as prophetic narratives do not always start conveniently with the prophet asleep. And Maimonides found that wholesale solution in a text in the Torah itself, which  which supports putting all prophecy in a vision or a dream, with the exception of a single prophet, Moses.

This is the story from Numbers, which starts out with Miriam and Aaron complaining that Moses took a Kushite wife – an Ethiopian wife. They then questioned Moses’s authority as a prophet relative to their own God, then put Aaron and Miriam in their place. And this is what he says:

“Hear my words. If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision. I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses – he is faithful in all my house with him. I speak with him mouth to mouth clearly and not in riddles.” And he beholds the form of the Lord. “Why, then, were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?”

I’m going to put aside today the special case of Moses’s Prophecy. I am saving that, God willing, for another time. The key point, for today’s purposes, is that for all other prophets – everyone, in all their instances of prophecy – Maimonides interprets as happening in a vision or in a dream, even if a prophetic story does not identify the prophecy as occurring in a vision or in a dream. This rule of scripture of scriptural interpretation simply operates in the background. We understand that a dream happens in the mind.

For Maimonides, a vision similarly occurs in the mind. A vision happens during the day, but for Maimonides, after slumber has overtaken the prophet, there is no input from the senses. During a vision in both, a dream and vision, the senses are not experiencing anything that is actually happening in the physical world. For my Maimonides, this is all part of the natural order to become a prophet. Maimonides says an individual must first develop the intellectual capabilities of a philosopher and the imaginative capabilities of a political leader, which are necessary to lead the people. They must also have a strong moral character and be able to control their desires and not seek to dominate others for their own glorification. They must also have a healthy body. These are the personal qualities a prophet must develop in order to be able to achieve prophecy.

This is contrary to what Maimonides calls the pagan view of prophecy – that God can pick anyone, and that person will be his mouthpiece as to the precise mechanism whereby the prophet can achieve prophecy. There is some medieval science and philosophy, which is a bit confusing to a modern audience, building on origins in Greek philosophy. Certain Islamic philosophers, and Maimonides, believed the natural order included what was called the “active intellect,” which was a kind of emanative force actualizing human intelligence and enabling human understanding. For the Islamic philosophers and Maimonides, the active intellect was the final emanation from God in a hierarchical universe. It existed distinct from the brain, an intermediate force between man and God. Pure intellect without matter – in the case of Prophecy, an individual who has developed himself to the highest level – achieves perfection. That’s what Maimonides believes the active intellect first enables: perfection in the rational faculty, then the active intellect spills over from the rational faculty to the imaginative faculty.

The prophet has an extraordinary vivid and compelling experience of a sensory type – seeing or hearing things, forming images and symbols when the body is not receiving sensory information from the senses – i.e., in a vision or in a dream. The prophet experiences sensory information in the imaginative faculty as though it were happening in reality. And so the prophet believes it completely.

A leading figure in Jewish thought and ethics today, Moshe Halbertal, explained it well: “God does not reveal [God]self to the prophet in a dream; rather, the prophet dreams that God revealed [God]self to him. The difference between these two concepts is vast, as vast as the difference between going out for a pleasant walk and dreaming about that walk.”

Halbertal further explained: “Maimonides’ perspective prophecy does not partake of a miracle entailing a revelation of God’s will within a human life. It is, rather, the causal outcome of a certain way of life, as a result as a result of which the Holy Spirit alights on the prophet. Prophecy is the prophet’s ascent to the divine world, not the divinity’s address to a human prophecy that, so conceived, may be seen as the prophet successfully tuning in to a frequency that broadcasts constantly.”

There is one other essential part of prophecy for Maimonides. The prophet must be able to communicate the prophetic experience effectively, teaching others what the prophet received through prophetic vision. Since Maimonides acknowledges God’s sovereignty, he accepts that God could veto this natural process of prophecy – a divine intervention to check a natural process. This is the main difference I see between Maimonides’ view of Prophecy and the philosophers. While Maimonides had a textual basis in the Torah itself, for his interpretation that all prophecies occurred in a vision or a dream, the interpretation was nonetheless controversial. Following Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, known as Nachmanides – also the Ramban, not the Rambam – strongly disagreed, adhering to a more traditional view. He was faithful to the literal text of the prophets: sometimes they receive their prophecies in visions or dreams, sure, but sometimes the story did not say it, and seemingly did not even make it possible.

Maimonides emphasized the role of the imaginative faculty of the mind; the Ramban, Nachmanides, was concerned that Maimonides’ view could undermine the authority of prophecy, but he was also more mystical in his orientation than Maimonides the rationalist. Indeed, Maimonides’ views were so radical that they led to him being censored and the burning of his guide.

Maimonides on Abraham

Let’s now turn to Abraham and apply what we have learned. It’s interesting to consider that the summary of Abraham’s life that Maimonides wrote in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides makes Abraham seem like a natural philosopher. This is what Maimonides wrote:

“From the time he was weaned, Abraham’s mind was busily reflecting, working, thinking and wondering. He grew up with false beliefs and idols, and he worshiped Idols like everyone else, but he asked a philosophic or scientific question: how is it possible that this celestial sphere should continually be guiding the world and have no one to guide it and cause it to turn round, for it cannot be that it turns round of itself?”

And by constantly applying his mind with no teacher, just by thinking, at the age of 40, Abraham attained – he figured out the central truth of monotheism, that there was one God. Maimonides states in the Guide: “This is knowable by human speculation alone. It does not depend on revelation.” And Abraham, when he figured this out, taught the lesson to many others. This got him in trouble with the authorities. In the words of Halbertal, he became a subversive Socratic figure. So he had to leave, and later went to Canaan, and the Bible recounts and he called there “In the name of the Lord God of the world.”

This introductory quote prefaced all three books of the Guide, underscoring the importance to Maimonides of Abraham proclaiming in the name of the Lord.

Maimonides also appears to embellish when he says that Abraham preached the truth not only to his family, but to tens of thousands – what he called the men of the House of Abraham. And Maimonides says Abraham composed books on the subject, but in a way he wasn’t embellishing Abraham’s teachings on monotheism are now followed by billions.

What’s important is also what Maimonides left out: it contains nothing of God communicating with Abraham – most importantly, no divine injunction, no Lech Lecha may-artz’kha, no “Go forth from your land.” Abraham naturally had to leave when he became too successful in spreading monotheism. He was a dissident, a threat to the existing power structure. There is also no mention in the binding of Isaac. This is all consistent with these events occurring in a vision or a dream. In all events, Abraham was portrayed as natural philosopher, an iconoclast who correctly thought through the falsity of widely-held beliefs in polytheism, and then had the courage and the capacity to to spread the truth. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Maimonides named his son Abraham.

Let’s now turn to reading 2 the story in Genesis of the binding of Isaac, known as the Akedah, which we will read on Rosh Hashanah. You all know the story: God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a test of his faith, and Abraham proceeds to do God’s will. At the last minute, with Isaac already bound and Abraham standing over him with a knife, an angel intervenes and stops the test. A ram is caught in the thicket and is substituted as the sacrifice. Because Abraham passed that test, we now have a Jewish people and Eretz Israel. We will blow the ram’s horn soon on the High Holidays, in part to remind us, and God, of Abraham’s supreme act of faith.

Well, that’s a great story and we like how it came out, but it’s troubling. I will mention a few of the ways in which it’s troubling. How could God demand of Abraham human sacrifice, let alone sacrifice of the son that Abraham treasured? Did Abraham deserve this? He led an exemplary life, the most exemplary life. And how was Isaac deserving of this? According to Maimonides, he was just a young boy and could not have sinned. And our tradition is that because of this incident, when Sarah heard of it, she died –  the first Jewish mother. She didn’t deserve this.

I find it even more difficult to reconcile the binding of Isaac with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abraham famously argued with God. Specifically he argued for those cities by virtue of a hypothetical small minority of people who were not evil. He bargains with God, “If you find 50 righteous men, will you still destroy this city, and not forgive them for the sake of the 50?” And getting an inch, Abraham tries to take a yard from God, bargaining him persistently down to 10, a bare minyan, for a mortal to argue. So with God, where the people were evil ,this was extraordinary in contrast to the Akedah – in the binding of Isaac story – where there is no bargaining. There’s no complaint to God, just silent subservience to kill a pure innocent. Indeed, we are taught vashayshkem Avraham, that when Abraham got up early in the morning he hastened to do this terrible act.

So how does Maimonides interpret the binding? First, Maimonides explains that the purpose of biblical trials – the Akedah included – was not to test anyone. The purpose was pedagogical – to teach, to create a model to be imitated. Maimonides states, “the binding of Isaac contains two great lessons that are fundamental principles of the law: first, this story teaches the limit of love for God and fear of Him.”

Maimonides observes, correctly, that Abraham was ordered to do something beyond human nature. It’s an absurd demand. And here I’m quoting Maimonides: “Abraham was a sterile man having an exceeding desire for a son, having the wish that his progeny should become a religious community.” I love what Maimonides says next: “When a son comes to him after his having lost hope, how great will be his attachment to him and love for him?”

And yet, the story teaches that Abraham loved God so much that it overpowered even his enormous love and need for his son. And Maimonides noted that in the biblical story there is a period of days after God issues his command, and before Abraham actually binds his son – teaching that Abraham was not committing a rash act, but thought it through, and was this devoted to God.

Love, Zeal and Human Sacrifice

In short, Abraham’s willingness, and in fact his zeal, to do an absurd thing that God demanded of him, shows that there are effectively no limits on our love and fear of God. This is what we are commanded to do. That is why Abraham doesn’t argue in this story, but he does in Sodom and Gomorrah, where the express purpose of that biblical story is to teach us God’s way of doing just and right.

The second lesson, the second notion, consists in making known that the prophets consider as true that which comes from God in a prophetic Revelation. Maimonides stated, “it should not be thought that what they [the prophets] hear, or what appears to them in a parable, is not certain, or is commingled with illusion, just because it comes about in a dream and in a vision, as we have made clear.” And through the intermediary of the imaginative faculty, it is – and here, I’m quoting Maimonides again – “in the opinion of the prophet, a certain truth that the prophet has no doubts in any way concerning anything in it, and that in his opinion its status is the same as that of all existing things that are apprehended through the senses or through the intellect.”

Maimonides said a proof for this is the fact that Abraham hastened to slaughter as he had been commanded his son, his only son, whom he loved, even though this command came to him in a dream or in a vision.

Now, if we only read that one proof text, Maimonides would seem to be saying that God’s command to Abraham occurred in a vision or dream. But Abraham’s hastening to do God’s will, and potentially the binding itself, occurred in reality. But I read the Guide elsewhere (and remember, Maimonides is always laying out a puzzle for us to piece together) as providing support for a contrary construction. Maimonides, said – here I’m quoting him – “Know again, in the case of everyone about whom exists a scriptural text, that an angel talked to him or that speech came to him, from God this did not occur in any other way than in a dream or in a vision of Prophecy.”

So when we go back and we look at the binding of Isaac’s story, it says an angel stayed Abraham’s hand by calling out to him. According to Maimonides, this had to happen in a dream or a vision of prophecy – in short, the story was a parable, and the second lesson of the parable was that the prophets believed their prophetic visions and dreams utterly.

These issues are not just of historic or theological interest. I believe how to read scripture, and in particular how to read prophecy, matters very much in the real world. Today I’m going to offer some personal opinions now. And they may be controversial or upsetting to you. I don’t know what the policy of this shul is on trigger warnings, but you’ve been warned. And I’m laying this out because it illustrates, at least for me, our continuing need to learn from Maimonides and to apply his teachings to our issues today.

The example we’ve been talking about today, Abraham’s prophecy, illustrates Maimonides’ continuing relevance to current events. It matters today, right now, whether we believe God directly communicated with Abraham promising him the land of Israel. While I am not a fundamentalist, I can understand why a fundamentalist would be governed by biblical text when he reads it to contain an explicit divine promise for the entirety of the land of Israel. That kind of promise is not to be trifled with by mere mortals, a fundamentalist would say. But we can ask ourselves as they do in the study hall with the Mishneh Torah, “What would Maimonides say?” I don’t claim to know the answer, but I believe it’s an important question. My personal opinion is that Maimonides would not be a fundamentalist. Rather, he would be a rationalist in service of Torah objectives, specifically in service of Abraham’s vision of a Nation for the Jewish people in the land of Israel to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and righteous, tzedaka u-mishpat.

And finally, I want to address the other side of the coin, Islamic fundamentalism. Not that I equate Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, especially after October 7. Hamas supports its charter, which it actually calls a covenant, with a Hadith that attributes to Muhammad a prophecy of killing the Jews in the future. Hamas interprets this Hadith literally. While I am not at all an expert in Islam, I hope and pray that one day Islamic scholars will unite to reject this fundamentalist reading of this Hadith. I also hope and pray that they will give greater weight to another lesson in the Quran itself. Here, I’m referring to the Quran’s own binding story, where Abraham’s firstborn Ishmael was spared by God from human sacrifice. Islam condemns human sacrifice, just like our own religion.

Dan Geffen: The world in which Maimonides comes into his knowledge, his experience, his scientific background, his medical background – all these things are happening in a place in a time that’s really quite remarkable in comparison to the rest of the world at that time.

It’s the epicenter of enlightened learning, of the convivencia, this idea of multiple religions, their greatest thinkers all being in the same place, all challenging each other constantly to not accept the simple idea – and by that, I mean, let’s call it the more traditional mindset. It’s not that it is simpler, but it is an easier thing for human beings generally to accept: what did our parents think? What did our grandparents think? What did our great-grandparents think? To be an iconoclast in any age is to be, quite frankly, at constant risk, not just of barbs, you know, verbal barbs, but really of excommunication from your community, of your life’s work being burned in front of you. And so we have to understand, as I think David really imparts at the very outset, to understand what a radical thinker Maimonides is, even in his time of radical thinkers. I also want to really, again, highlight what you pointed out, which is that Maimonides, his contemporaries from the Islamic world, are really also building off of a lot of things that come from Greek understanding, Greek philosophy, Greek theology.

A lot of times in religion we have a tendency, especially the rabbis over various centuries, to distance ourselves as far as possible from anything even resembling an outside influence, because it gets at the very nature of what we assume to be ours. But of course, the Talmud is already full of these discussions as well. There are plenty of examples of the Greek influence already present at that point in time. And Maimonides is again having the courage to say, on the one hand, “I’m not trying to say my ideas are the only ideas,” is still courageous enough to say “I have important ideas that I need to share with the world, precisely because they matter.” That while it is to some degree in intellectual exercise, as David says, the applications of Maimonides’ thinking, even almost a thousand years later, are still relevant today because they deal with the fundamental questions of what it means to be a religious, believing person, and how those beliefs, if one is not careful, can shape behaviors, and those behaviors can become devastation.

And we just last week read in the Torah from Parshat Shoftim, one of the sections of Shoftim, which is really repeating some earlier ideas from the Torah, is a very serious conversation about being very careful around anybody who claims to be a soothsayer, a seer – an interpreter of things, whatever it might be. And we have to dance a little delicately, because there are many traditions in the world in which these positions are positions of veneration, that especially in Eastern traditions, in which you know many variations of this idea of prophecy are deeply respected – but they are distinct. They are very different from the prophets of the Nevi’im that we read in the haftorah that we are most familiar with. For those that may have been in my class, I’m not sure in which we studied Heschel’s book on the prophets, a considerable portion of Heschel’s book is just trying to distinguish what made the Hebrew Bible prophets distinct and different from others. And I think the challenge of this question, of “What does it mean for something that is inherently beyond our comprehension to communicate with human beings?” Again, not just for the heck of it, but for, generally speaking, a very important purpose – how does one draw a line, or a delineation, or create a circumstance, in which a person can comprehend it, even thousands of years later in modern society?

And Maimonides’ way of approaching it is, as David said, to give, really for the first time in history, to some degree, to open the window to a marriage of a deep respect and veneration for the Law (and I’ll use that sort of capital-L law), and at the same time to open up for, quite frankly, what we would call scientific thinking. Thinking that doesn’t accept, for example, a simple idea or a simple maxim at its face value – is not content with, frankly spiritual platitudes or mythology of a beyond-comprehensible nature. That in the end, the question is “why,” right? The fundamental question of the Guide for the Perplexed is: “Why all of these things?” – the perplexed nature of our existence. Why are we here? What is it that we are meant to do? What does God specifically want or expect of us? And if God’s expectation of us is that we are willing to march up on top of a mountain and slaughter our firstborn child, who we have been praying for, if that is the end of that sentence or that conversation, then Maimonides, I think, is laying a gauntlet down to say not only is that not really an acceptable read of this text in that way, but it’s dangerous if that is the only way in which you read the text.

I think you know most Maimonidean scholars [would agree], there is a certain – how should I put this – ego to the man. In other words, he believes in himself, believes in his point of view. But at the same time, I don’t believe that his intention was to create some monolithic sense that Maimonides is the only one who understands, and Maimonides is the only one who can explain it. I think what he was really trying to do is to crack open a window in a world that was dangerously shutting windows all over Europe and various parts, even, of certain parts of the Islamic caliphates.

And I think, you know, David, as you point out, sometimes you can take the most brilliant person in the world, but if they’re not in the right place at the right time, that brilliance never makes it into the stratosphere, never makes it into something that lasts through centuries. So even in his own life, there is a certain way to read right that his existence, his ability to touch onto the concept, let alone the actual active intellect, and to be able to bring forth an idea that transformed, quite frankly – even if in his day, at least in Spain right was being attacked for it – and all these generations later, as David said, he wasn’t exaggerating.

The first step of most students of Torah are really Rashi and Maimonides. And it’s not accidental. I think what Maimonides did in his day, and did for us today, is he gave us a way in which to find a space between the extremes of the rational thought and the supernatural thought.

And as a last word – I think about this every year when we get back to this text of the Akedah. And after 10 years of trying to come up with something to say on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I really am going to ask whether you would consider giving the sermon for it – because I think you know, for that room full of people, they they need to hear, also, this possibility that this text – that gets so much into the kishkes of our sense of righteousness or rightness of our relationship with God – [can be] read that text as parable, and as a parable with important messages that really, really need to be understood today.