Ali Ataie – Radical Judaism and the Attack on Gaza
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Hello, everyone, and welcome to blogging theology. Today,
I'm delighted to talk again to professor Ali
Atay of Zetuna College. Welcome back, sir. Assalamu
alaykum. Well,
thank you for having me. Good to see
you again. Fantastic to see you again. For
those few people who don't know who you
are, I'll just mention that, Doctor. Ali Atay
is a scholar of biblical hermeneutics
specializing in sacred languages,
comparative theology, and comparative literature.
And at, say, Tuna College, he has taught
Arabic, creed of theology, comparative theology,
sciences of the Quran, introduction to the Quran,
and,
seminal ancient texts.
He received his MA in biblical studies from
Pacific School of Religion and his PhD in
Cultural and Historical Studies, some in religion,
from the Graduate Theological Union.
And, he's a native Persian speaker and can
read and write Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek. And
I should say English as well.
Now, today, Professor Ali Atai will do it's
a very serious moment, of course. Perhaps in
history, actually.
And he's going to do a presentation on
the theological
underpinnings of Israel's
current strategic military engagement with Palestine
and also a much needed overview of Judaism.
So
over to you, sir.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, brother Paul. Again, it's an honor
to be back on
logging theology, albeit during these, obviously, very, very
difficult
and strange,
times. I I wanna begin by reading,
a passage from the Torah, actually.
So it says, and it came to pass
when Moses had finished the writing of the
words of this law in a book
that commanded,
that Moses commanded the Levites, which bore the
ark of the covenant of the lord
saying, take this book of the law and
put it inside of the ark of the
covenant of the lord, your god,
that it may be there for a witness
against thee. For I know thy rebellion and
thy stiff neck.
Behold, while I am yet alive with you
this day, you have you have been rebellious
against the lord.
And how much more after my death? Gather
unto me all the elders of your tribes
and your officers that I may speak these
words in their ears
and call heaven and earth to record against
them. For I know that after my death,
you will utterly corrupt yourselves
and turn aside from the way which I
have commanded you, and evil will befall you
in the latter days because you will do
evil in the sight of the lord to
provoke him to anger through the works of
your hands. That's Deuteronomy
3125
to 30.
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm calling this presentation
the, as you said, the theological underpinnings of
Israel's current
strategic military engagement with Palestine.
But in more, simple and explicit terms,
how does the Zionist government of Israel
religiously,
justify the genocide of Palestinian civilians?
Now before I get into what I think
is happening in Palestine right now from a
Jewish
theological, perspective, I wanna do a couple of
things. So number 1, I wanna give the
audience an important reminder.
And then number 2, give the audience a
quick introduction to the religion of Judaism.
So we'll look briefly at what's called the
Shiloh Shah Asar e Kareemuna,
the 13 principles of Jewish faith as articulated
by the great theologians,
philosopher and polymath,
Maimonides and his famous Mishnah Torah.
But first, an important reminder,
in the Quran,
God Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala,
he describes the Ahlul Kitab. Right? The people,
the book. We might even translate that as
the people of the bible.
He describes them in a very nuanced way.
Right? It's it's not black and white.
Right? They're not all the same. So we
don't lump everyone in the same
category because
that's not what God, what Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala does in the Quran.
He's he says in Surat Al Naida,
You'll find the most severe among mankind
in enmity towards the believers, meaning the Muslims,
to be the Jews and the idolaters.
Okay? But Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, he also
says,
And and from the people of Moses is
a is a community
that guides by truth
and thereby acts with justice,
you see. So this this is why the,
with this issue of Ahlul Kitab, the Quran
really requires,
to double, like a deep reflective,
and penetrating engagement.
We have to look at the Quran holistically
and be very careful about blanket statements. We
have to be very careful about,
demonizing other faith communities who are just trying
to live their lives, worshiping God,
and loving their families.
There are many orthodox and conservative Jews, religious
Jews, who vehemently
oppose Zionism on both theological
and moral grounds.
They accuse Zionists of hijacking Judaism, in fact,
rather than the, you know, modern state of
Israel being a Jewish nation. They call it
an abomination.
And these are these are Jews. These are
these are good, decent, upright people.
These are people of Adala. These are people
of, right, in in Hebrew.
Many of them,
won't even look at a Zionist in his
eyes
out of principle. I mean, I've seen this
myself.
They have a they have a motto. They
say,
which
means a a Jew is not a Zionist.
Right? So they actually anathematize
Zionist Jews.
So these are anti Zionist Jews who organize,
you know, events and lectures and protests,
to educate and inform the masses about, Israeli
atrocities
committed upon the Palestinian people. And oftentimes,
they even attend, attend,
Islamic,
conventions and major events. You'll see them at
conventions.
So these are good people and we stand
shoulder to shoulder with them. Judaism,
you know, is is a beautiful, spiritually rich,
and ancient monotheistic
religious tradition
that has a lot in common with Islam.
So I wanted to make that, you know,
clear right off the bat. You know? Now
there are extremists in every religion. There are
Muslim extremists. Of course, we've been hearing about
them constantly
for over 20 years from the western media
since 911.
But there are also Christian extremists and Jewish
extremists. There is something called radical Judaism,
and it's about time for us to learn
the dangers of radical Judaism. The Zionists in
power
in so called Israel right now are Jewish
radicals.
They are motivated by religious
zealotry.
Make no mistake about that. And I'll come
back to this, term.
But okay. So let's do a quick overview
of the religion of Judaism.
So so Judaism is a religion bound to
its history. Right? It's religion whose, theology was
dramatically affected by its history. You will not
Jewish life in Christian lands, Jewish life in
Muslim lands, the holocaust, Jewish life and Christian
lands, Jewish life and Muslim lands, the holocaust,
all of these major events in Jewish history
led to significant,
theological thought and revision.
Our main textbook, here at the college when
we do our section of Judaism is called
Judaism history belief and practice. And I know,
Paul, you have a a copy. Hi, Chris.
I have the cookers. When I visited your
great college, I purchased this and heard you
lecture, using it actually. So I do recommend
this, folks. Get a hold of a copy
of it if you can, published by Rutledge
Press. Right. Yeah. Daniel Khan Sherbuck. Yeah. I
mean, 2 thirds
of his book covers Jewish history, 300 and
50 pages as opposed to a 100 pages
for beliefs
and about a 100 pages for practice. So
so Jewish history is extremely important. Now sometimes
Jewish history conflicts with secular history because traditional
Jews believe that the Bible stories are true
and accurate. Right? For example, the Exodus. And
we've mentioned this in the past, but just
to quick it quickly say it again.
Most historians only affirm what's known as a
minimalist historical kernel
of the biblical Exodus.
This is because secular historians are very skeptical
about the details given in the Bible, the
numbers given in the Bible, in particular,
like 600,000 men of fighting age making exodus.
It just seems so highly,
untenable.
The other reason is because miracles are the
least plausible explanation for things by definition. So
modern historians
simply don't consider them in their method of
historiography. I mean, secular history is
all a game of naturalistic probability.
And for more information on that, people should
watch the podcast that we did Yeah. On
history of the crucifixion.
However, most historians do affirm that his name
was probably Moses,
because no Israelite would invent this name for
their hero. I mean, it's an Egyptian name.
Right? Why would the Israelites give their hero
a name in the language of their enemies,
in the language of their enslavers?
Well, they probably didn't. That was probably his
name.
So in the book of Exodus, interestingly enough,
there's a false etiology that's given for the
name Moses
because the author of Exodus or authors of
Exodus, they found it embarrassing
that their hero was given an Egyptian name.
So so Moshe does not mean drawn forth
in Hebrew as some Christian lexicons that suggest
as the book of Exodus suggests.
Drawn forth would have been Mashu,
grammatically
as as a passive participle. The name Moses
or Mo's means born of in ancient Egyptian.
Right? So, like, Thoth Moses.
Right? So means born of Thoth, the the
god Thoth, the god of magic.
Amoses
means born of Ah, the moon god.
Ramoses. Right? Or Ramses
born of Ra, the sun god.
So Moses means born of
an unknown god. Right? The family of pharaoh
who raised Moses did not know the name
of the god of the Israelites.
Now now Jewish history from a Jewish perspective
has been in a word tragic. Okay? To
use another word, catastrophic,
calamitous.
Why?
What's the theological reason according to Judaism?
Well, it's because Jews have largely failed to
live up to the responsibility.
Now what was their responsibility?
So the Amisrael, the people of Israel were
chosen by god to bring the light of
Yehida,
monotheism,
Tohid,
and set back injustice
to the going to the nations.
And they see this as a duty, not
a privilege.
And the Quran says in this
vein,
Oh, children of Israel,
remember the favor,
that I favored you with, that I chose
you above the above all nations.
Right?
The the poet said in a very short
couplet, how odd of God
to choose the Jews. Right?
But God did. Why did he do that?
The Quran
says, God, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, he chooses
for his special mercy, any whom he wills.
Isaiah 55, my ways are not your ways.
My thoughts are not your thoughts. Right?
In the Hebrew bible, also known as the
old testament, also known as the Tanakh, these
are interchangeable.
Oftentimes, the entire nation of Israel is called
servant, the singular, eved or abd or just
Yaakov, just Jacob,
as if the nation is one man or
one body.
So there's this idea of, in Judaism of
collective responsibility,
but also collective punishment from God.
And as they say, the higher the station,
the higher the expectation, the more profound the
punishment.
Right? In the Islamic tradition,
Hasunatul Abhor Rabin.
So the good works of the pious
are the sins of those who are nearest.
Right? In other words, if you've been favored
by God,
but disobeyed God in spite of the favor,
then your punishment punishment will be more severe
than someone who never had that favor to
begin with. So this is how the tragic
history of Israel is explained theologically.
Now the great Tanakh confession of monotheism is
in Deuteronomy 645.
Right?
Here, Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord
is 1. And then it continues. And
And you must love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, with all thy soul,
and with all thy strength. So this is
called the Shema. Right? This is like their
shahada.
To hear something, right,
in the language of scripture means to obey,
to submit.
So god is ihad. God is 1. The
rabbis point out that the word ihad is
3 letters, aleph, cheit, and daled,
which is the first, the 8th, and the
4th letters. First, 8th, and 4th of the
Hebrew alphabet. So aleph, beitim, and daled, hey,
So so so Aleph is the first letter
of the alphabet
and also the first letter of the word
or god.
So one god, the first without a beginning.
Right? And in the visible essence, no multiplicity
in the godhead. Is the 8th letter. So
one creator of the 7 heavens or 1+7
is 8. And then Dalet is the 4th
letter. This denotes the four corners of the
earth, the goyim, the nations.
So Israel must take the light of El
Echad, right, the one god of mon of
of monotheism,
the one creator of the 7 heavens to
the 4 corners of the earth.
Okay. This is also known as Tikkunah olam.
Right?
Restoring
or repairing,
rectifying the world. So the the duty of
the Jew is then twofold, to bring and
to
bring monotheism
and righteousness
or justice to the nations.
Okay? There's a Kabbalistic,
principle that says as above, so is below.
Right? So terrestrial righteousness must mirror celestial,
righteousness.
Now most Jewish authorities
will say that the human being, right, every
human being, every Adam in Hebrew is made
in the image of God and therefore equal
ontologically, essentially.
So, so we're all equal in kind,
but not of degree. So monotheistic believers
in the God of Abraham are better in
degree than unbelievers.
Right? It's like the poet, he said Muhammad.
He
said the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Salam
is a human being but not like other
human beings. He's a ruby while other men
are mere stones.
Right? So the ruby is a stone. It's
equal in kind but not of degree.
Okay? However, there there is also a consistent
teaching in Orthodox Jewish circles
that there is a there is an essential
difference between Jews and gentiles.
So Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook,
who was the first, chief rabbi of Palestine
from 1920 to 1935,
one of the fathers of religious Zionism, and
I'll talk about that later, he infamously advanced
the opinion that the difference between a Jewish
soul and a goi soul, a non or
gentile soul, is greater than the difference between
a human soul and a cow soul. Wow.
Rabbi Judah Halevy, who's the famous medieval rabbi,
the author of the Sefer Khuzari,
a defense of Judaism. He was a Jewish
apologist. He said that the difference between a
Yehuda,
and a goi, a Jew and a gentile,
is one of kind,
not of degree, just as humans are different
than animals.
You even find this idea in in Jewish
writings,
that that Jews have 2 souls, a nepeshah
behamit
and then nepeshah Elohut.
In other words, Jews have a beastly or
animal soul and a divine soul, a.
Right?
While the Gentiles only have 1, the beastly.
So this is something that many Jewish authorities
do teach. They also say things like Jews
have different teeth or different face due to
the divine spark than.
So there are anatomical differences between Yehudim and
Goyim.
You know, but this this whole discourse,
was very likely influenced by inter religious polemical
propaganda.
In other words, the rabbis probably said these
things as a response to certain Christians,
who said that Jews have, you know, horns
and tails
or that Jews drink the blood of Christian
children.
So a lot of Jewish beliefs developed as
a reaction,
a reaction to Greece, a reaction to Rome,
a reaction to Christianity,
a reaction to Islam, etcetera. Jewish systematic theology
actually crystallized after Islam.
So like Sadia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Maimonides, all
writing after Islam.
Now the word for Jew in Hebrew, Yehuda,
the word sorry. The word for Jew in
Hebrew is Yehuda,
who was one of the sons of Jacob.
Right? Judah. So Judah, the son of Jacob,
Yehudah Ben Yaakov.
The Israelites were actually not called Yehudim, the
Jews, collectively until about the 8th century before
the common era
after the Assyrians attacked the northern kingdom.
The root meaning of the name Judah
is to give thanks of praise.
It's from the root yada. So Judah's tribe
became the largest,
so all of Israel eventually adopted that title
for their nation.
But, but the word Yehuda also contains
the four letters of God's own name, the
Yod Hey Vav Hey, this tetragrammaton.
And this is supposed to be like, the
initials, if you will, of of God's personal
name. It's known as Hashem.
So the word Jew in Hebrew, Yehuda, contains
all four of these letters.
So Jews, the,
they see themselves as the people of god,
those who praise the lord. What's interesting, though,
is that Abraham would not have would not
have called himself a Jew
nor even Moses. So at the time of
Abraham, the word Jew neither existed as a
tribal designation
nor as the name of a nation or
religion.
At Moses' time, it did exist as a
tribal designation, but Moses would have called himself
a Levite,
not a Jew. He was from the tribe
of Levi.
So the question is what was the name
of Moses' religion. Right? So our claim as
Muslims is that it it was called
submission unto God or something like that. In
Arabic, this is called Al Islam.
Okay. So there are 3 major divisions of
world Jewry. Okay. So Mizrahi,
Sephardi, and Ashkenazi.
And I'll explain these very briefly.
Okay. So the Mizrahi Jews, the Mizrahi Jews,
these are the Middle Eastern Jews,
the Jews of the Muslim world. They speak
Hebrew and, Arabic and Farsi.
Then we have the Sephardim,
the Sephardic Jews,
and these are Jews of
Spanish or North African heritage. So they speak
Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish. They write in Hebrew,
in Arabic, in Ladino, which is, you know,
Hebrew with
Spanish with Hebrew letters,
or Judeo Arabic,
right, which is, Arabic with Hebrew letters.
And, finally, the Ashkenazim
or Ashkenazic
Jews.
So these are the Jews of Europe and
then North America.
And they speak Yiddish really before World War
2
and French and German and English. So Mizrahi,
Sephardi,
Ashkenazi. It's Middle Eastern, Spanish, and European
Jews.
Now among the last group, okay, the Ashkenazim,
that is to say modern western Jewry,
North American and European Jewry,
there exist a tripartite
denominational division.
Okay? Reform, conservative, and orthodox.
Okay. This division only appears among the Ashkenazim.
Why is that really? Two reasons,
most likely, the the protestant reformation in the
16th century,
and the enlightenment of the 18th century. So
the Ashkenazim, they they sort of followed the
trends of the European Christians
who were the dominant group.
The the Mizrahi and the Sephardic Jews, they
don't have this tripartite division
because they're similar to the Muslims in those
regions. So the Muslims were the dominant group.
So there's a spectrum of devotion among these
Jews to the Jewish faith and Jewish practices.
Just as, you know, a Muslim in Egypt,
for example, may pray 5 times a day
in the mosque
while another,
Muslim in Egypt might rarely go to the
mosque, But the latter will still identify as
a Sunni, a Shafi'i, for example, not a,
you know, some type of reform Muslim or
something like that. So there's a spectrum of
of devotion.
So here are some demographics of American Jews.
This is according to Pew Research Center. 10%
of American Jews identify as orthodox. 10%.
Only 10%. That's remarkable because all orthodox Judaism
used to be just Judaism, the historic Judaism.
But now it's a tiny minority of
Yeah. Very much a minority. They identify as
orthodox, sometimes called modern orthodoxy.
18%,
conservative
and 35%
reform, and then 37%,
no affiliation. So over a third of ethnic
American Jews do not identify as being religiously
Jewish. Mhmm. These three groups, I'll just mention
this. They have several basic points of difference
between them. I'll just mention 3 basic points
of difference, okay, between,
I'll just mention 3 basic points of difference,
okay,
between,
the orthodoxy
reform,
and the conservative.
So
number 1, the authority of the Torah and
the mitzvot.
Okay? So there are 613
mitzvot commandments
in the
Chumash. Chumash is Hebrew for Pentateuch.
So we're just talking from Genesis to Deuteronomy
613.
Right? Those 5 books of Moses that are
attributed to Moses. The first mitzvah is stated
at Genesis 128,
marry and produce children.
Right? So being celibate or a lifelong bachelor
is actually
haram, Asur in in Judaism.
If it's for pietistic reasons, right, it's considered
a reprehensible innovation. Of course, we know that
Jesus, peace be upon him, had a brother
James, Yaqub Had Sadiq, and I make it
a point to mention his name,
for almost every, podcast. So so the Catholic
doctrine of Marian perpetual virginity.
Right? This actually is sin in Judaism.
It breaks the 1st mitzvah
to say that Mary or Mariam, aries salam,
remained a virgin for the rest of her
life for pietistic reasons.
The
Quran
says. So the Quran says, you know, this
monkery or monasticism,
celibacy, they innovated it. It's a bidah.
We did not prescribe that upon them. And,
of course, we know the first few popes
were actually,
married.
So for the so for the orthodox, the
modern orthodox,
the Torah is the literal ipsissima verba
of God, the very words of God revealed
to Moses.
It's very similar to the Quran, isn't it,
in terms of its ontology and metaphysical status?
Exactly. Exactly. Every single letter was revealed to
Moses
35 100 years ago
over 40 days and nights on Mount Sinai.
Okay? They believe the mitzvot are transhistorical
and thus absolutely binding upon every Jew for
all time. And the historical critical method they
consider is a kufor, is a heresy.
For the conservative, the Torah is the word
of God,
but in a sort of looser sense, I
guess, because there is allowance for the historical
critical method as a providentially
guided
process.
Right? So,
Julius Wellhausen came up with this documentary hypothesis,
very, very popular. And he said that the
5th century, there was someone called the redactor,
probably Ezra, who
sort
of stitched together these different independent narratives about
the early, Israelites, and and Wellhausen calls
him the redactor or r. Well,
and and Wellhausen calls him the redactor or
are. Well, conservative Jews who believe in the
historical critical method, they say, well, Rambenu,
our Lord, is the true redactor. This is
how God wanted to preserve the Torah, and
that's fine with us.
For the reformed Jews, the Torah is not
the literal word of God. It's a,
historical record
of some of the ancient Israelites.
The mitzvot are not binding,
but optional, and, essentially, they're optional. The mitzvot
are mutable according to time and culture. In
other words, the mitzvot
for the reformed are subject to the zeitgeist,
the prevailing spiritual culture of the current time.
For example, there are reformed rabbis who are,
you know, homosexual,
transgender,
or atheist. And very strange, we had an
atheist rabbi
coming to come into the mosque over here
in California.
I remember I went to
interfaith gathering at a reform synagogue. This was
years years ago.
And,
it was a it was a breakfast and
they were serving pork
inside of our formed synagogue. And I and
I I didn't I said, what is this?
And they said, pork. And I said, you're
not supposed to eat that. Right?
And then they explained it to me. And
then And
she was right.
And she was right.
Yeah. Yeah. We we follow these, you know,
these.
Kind of identifying as as Jew Jewish in
the religious sense. You're not actually gonna follow
the commandments given by God to Moses. It
doesn't strike me as suddenly redundant, doesn't it?
I mean, it's the whole point of the
religion, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. This is why
for the orthodox, this is total heresy. Yeah.
So that's the first major point of difference,
the authority of the Torah and and the
Mitzvot.
The second basic point of difference among these
three groups is the authority of the Talmud,
okay, or the oral law. So what is
the Talmud?
So the Talmud is basically two things.
The writings of what are known as the
Tana'im
and the writings of the Amoraim.
Okay. So the Tana'im, who are the Tana'im?
These were Palestinian
Jewish scholars of the 1st 2nd centuries
who wrote down what they knew of the
oral law.
Okay? So the oral Torah given to Moses
on Sinai. A lot of people don't know
this, but Orthodox Jews believe that Moses received
2 Torahs on Mount Sinai. One that he
wrote down, which is the Chumash. Right? So
Genesis and Deuteronomy,
but also an oral Torah.
So this oral law became known as the
Mishnah. It was eventually written down by the
Tanaim
starting in the 1st century after the destruction
of the 2nd temple.
Okay.
Now the oral law or the Mishnah was
compiled and codified
by a Tanah named Judah HaNasi in the
late 2nd century.
Okay? The Amoraim,
were the commentators of the Mishnah
in both the Palestinian
and Babylonian academies,
between 205100
of the common era.
These commentaries are known as the Palestinian and
Babylonian
Gemara.
Okay. That so the the Mishnah
compilation of the writings of the Tanayim
plus the Gemara compilation of the commentaries of
the Amoraim
equal the Talmud.
Okay. So there are basically two versions of
the Talmud.
Simply put, the Talmud is the oral law
and its commentaries.
Okay. The oral law and the and its
commentaries.
So among the modern orthodoxy, the oral law
is true and binding, in fact, inspired
by. They say a spirit of inspiration.
The Talmud is not as exalted as the
written Torah because God himself chose the wording
of the written Torah, the Talmud is sort
of a lower tier,
revelation. So the analog to the Mishnah
in Islam is like the Hadith,
right, which is non Quranic Wahi.
And the analog to the Gemara is
or Ilham,
non prophetic
inspiration, something like that. So it's not a
one to 1, but these are sort of
commensurate,
ideas.
Among the conservative, the Talmud is true and
binding,
but one can be more flexible and selective
with regards to it and it should not
be accepted without criticism.
And then for the reform, you can ignore
it if you want. It's no more authoritative
than any of the writings of any other
Jewish theologian.
You can eat pork as a Jew. Yeah,
exactly.
Exactly. Or not even believe in God if
you're a reform.
The 3rd major port of difference is the
concept of the Messiah.
Okay. So differing ideas of messianism.
So in modern orthodoxy, the messiah
is personal. He's a man from Judah. He's
a descendant of David. He will rebuild the
temple. He'll fight the wars of the Lord.
He will gather the Jews from the diaspora.
He will be the king of the world.
Many of the major authorities in Judaism
give him a deadline. Right? A deadline that
is sort of fast approaching, by the way,
and you'll be surprised when that is. I'll
say more about the messiah
later. This is very important. And I I
think the key to understanding the current situation
theologically,
in my opinion,
For the conservative, the Messiah, yeah, it could
be personal or it could be like an
age, a messianic age, a messianic,
epoch, something like that.
For the reform,
they cancel the Messiah completely
or maintain that the Messiah is an age
or a polity
and this polity does not have to be
Jewish.
So the American government, could be the Messiah.
Wow. Now one of the most celebrated and
authoritative Jewish scholars who ever lived was Maimonides.
Generally speaking, the orthodox today embrace him as
as a great sage and scholar.
So, in order to enrich our understanding of
the Jewish faith, I want to quickly take
us through his famous 13 principles.
But I'll give some biographical information
beforehand just,
to be a little more helpful here. So
Maimonides was a Sephardic,
Jew. He died in 1204 of the common
era in Fostat in Egypt.
So he lived in Spain, Morocco, and Egypt.
His bones were later carried into Galilee.
The name Maimonides is obviously Latinized. His actual
name was Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon.
His Arabic name was Musa ibnu Maimon al
Khortubi.
He's also known as the Rambam.
Right? That's,
the acronym,
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, the Rambam.
His magnum opus was called the Guide for
the Perplexed, which he wrote in Judeo Arabic.
He called it.
In Hebrew, it's called the in
3 volumes.
He was a great scholastic
synthesizer of Judaism with Aristotle.
So Aristotle's theory of virtue,
he was a natural theologian. He was a
champion of negative theology, right, the via negativa.
It's called lahutz salbi, this idea that it
is preferable and safer to describe God using
only apophatic or negative
statements.
According to Maimonides,
God can be evidenced based upon reason and
observation of natural processes similar to, like, Aquinas'
5 arguments. The aim of the guide,
is to reconcile revelation with a reason, or
Torah with.
Sekel. Or to put it another way, to
to demonstrate the compatibility of scripture,
which was at times anthropomorphic
with reason because people were in a state
of hey, Rah. They were in a state
of they were perplexed. Right? So Maimonides would
often make he would he would often make
tat wheel, what we call tat wheel. He
would, interpret,
these
ayat. I don't know what this would
what the Hebrew terminology would be. But, basically,
he would interpret
he would engage in figurative or symbolic exegesis
of the anthropomorphic
verses
in the Torah
while rejecting the apparent or literal meaning.
So for example,
the out stretched arm of the Lord, right,
is clearly a reference to the strength of
God. The Torah speaks in the language of
men to facilitate our understanding, but God is
absolutely and utterly dissimilar.
Facilitate our understanding, but God is absolutely and
utterly dissimilar,
to his creation.
Maimonides also off, authored
the famous Mishnah Torah, the code of the
law, which was a brilliant abridgment of the
entire halakha, of the entire sharia of of
the Jews.
And he wrote this in Hebrew.
So all of his major works, were written
in Judeo Arabic,
which is, again, Arabic with Hebrew letters.
His Mishnah Torah or he wrote in Hebrew,
and the in this Mishnah Torah, it actually
angered a lot of rabbis because,
many many students
would actually study Mishnah Torah instead of the
Talmud directly.
So that made that ruffled some, feathers.
So his position was that all of the
mitzvot, all of the commandments
have a rational basis,
although the rationality may not be immediately self
evident. Right? All of these laws conform to
wisdom
even if it's not, obvious initially. So there's
no contradiction between the Torah
and the sekel. That is to say the
nakal and akel, the revelation and reason.
So he's that's his whole project reconciling the
2. The first part of the code is
about ethics as virtue theory.
He stressed the doctrine of the mean. He,
advocated Aristotle's theory of habitus.
But while Maimonides like Ghazali
said that virtue is both Wahbi and cuspi
that is bestowed at birth and acquired through
habitation.
Aristotle affirmed only acquisition,
through habitation.
Maimonides was also Aristotelian
in his teleological
metaphysic. Right? So there are 4 causes to
every process,
efficient, material, formal, and final.
Right? The final cause in Arabic is called
is its final good. Right? It's telos, it's
end, it's purpose.
So the telos of an acorn, as we
know, is is to be a flourishing oak
tree. Maimonides would say with respect to the
Torah,
god's law, the efficient cause
is god,
right, revealed by god to Moses. The material
cause is the Jewish community, but the material
acted upon.
The formal cause
is what it is essentially.
What is the Torah essentially ordinances of reason?
Okay? And then its final cause, its telos,
its raya, is to end idolatry, thus, recognizing
and loving god.
For Aristotle, the final cause of the human
being is to live a contemplative life of
virtue, to be a thinking creature because our
differentia, our distinction, our fossil as a species,
is reason. We are the rational animal. That's
our definition according to Aristotle.
In other words, what makes our species unique
among the genus of animal is reason. For
Maimonides, the final aim of the human being
is to be a praying creature,
That is to say a saint. It's a
deep.
Okay? When revelation is considered in light of
reason, this will ultimately lead us to a
recognition and love,
for our creator.
So Maimonides says that Aristotle was like, he's
he's almost there. Right? Not bad for a
non profit, he says. Like what Augustine, you
know, said about Plato.
Right? He almost got it. Right? The forms
or essences or things,
in the celestial material realm. Well, they're actually
are
great examples of
are great examples of how far the akel
can go without knuckle, without the revelation.
Now in his Mishnah Torah, in his code
of the law, Maimonides articulates a basic creed,
okay, and creed comes from the Latin credo.
It means I believe, right? So the the
Nicene Creed begins credo and unum deum, for
example. I believe in one god in in
the Latin.
So these are statements of belief
based upon the Tanakh, the 39 books of
the old testament,
and Talmud, the Mishnah and Gomorrah.
So this is a testament to the genius
of Maimonides. This creed is a unique distillation
like the bare bones
of Jewish theology. There's no doubt influenced by
Islamic theology and Muslim creedal articulations.
So this creed is called the
the 13 principles of the faith of the
Jews.
And my model is very clear about this.
If you don't believe in even one of
these, then you are a kofir.
You are, a kafar. You're an unbeliever or
at least a min, at least
a like a heretic.
Now, Joseph Albo who was a 15th century
rabbi,
a bit after Maimonides,
he actually said that Maimonides at times confused
essential principles with derivative principles.
Right? He you know, the usul with the
furor.
And he and he certainly wasn't the only
one who had issues with Maimonides.
There was a lot of difference of opinion
concerning the principles over the centuries.
But despite this, Maimonides' 13 principles has become
maybe the most popular and celebrated creed in
the orthodox,
Jewish world. Yeah. Maimonides
was also a medical doctor,
so it's incredible polymath. And I even heard
that he was the personal physician of Salahaddin
Al Ayubi.
I don't know. I I didn't I couldn't
verify that, but this is what somebody told
me. Maybe somebody can verify that. So I'll
I'll I'll breeze through these,
but I wanna play special attention on principle
number 12
on the Messiah.
Right? Because principle number 12 will nicely segue
us into
talking about,
what is happening right now in Palestine, at
least from my perspective.
So he begins all of his statements with
the phrase,
So I believe with complete faith,
he says. The first one, he says, I
believe with complete faith that the creator, blessed
be his name, is the only one who
creates.
He continues
and guides all of,
creation
and did, is doing, and will do all
actions by himself.
Okay. In his commentary, Maimonides, he quotes from
Isaiah 45:7.
I form the light and create darkness. Right?
Or say shalom,
I make peace,
and I create evil.
I, the lord, do all of these things.
So Maimonides
sees evil as really a privation of good,
a lack of good. Evil has no real,
like, ontological
basis or reality. It's simply an absence of
good. Right? Just as cold is is just
the absence of heat or darkness
is the absence of light. I mean, we
call them cold and darkness,
so we can summarize this iqar, this principle
as god is the creator and doer of
all things.
Okay. Number 2, he
says,
So he's I believe with complete faith that
the creator, blessed be his name, is uniquely
one.
And there is not a uniqueness
similar to his in any matter,
right, and that he was, is and always
will be by himself
our god. So god is unique. He's radically
1. He's immutable.
Right? God is, you know, the perfect has
shalom as salam.
God is yahid
wahid, he's 1. He's ihad, right, ahad, in
other words, he's radically 1
and unique. The trinity, it's
called shilush
in Hebrew is is idolatry according to,
Maimonides. He calls it Abu del Zara, false
worship.
God did not and will never incarnate
into man.
God is not a man that he should
lie, Right?
If you look at the first few commandments,
that I am the lord,
your god, the one who brought you out
from the land of Egypt, from the house
of bondage, lo yihi laka elohim aharim al
panaa, you shall have no other gods before
me. Lo taaselekafisin,
Right?
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image
of any likeness of anything
that is in the heavens above
or that is on the earth beneath or
that is in the water
under the earth.
Number 3,
he says,
So he says, I believe in complete faith
that the creator, blessed be his name, is
not a material
body.
And then he continues, and there is not
for him any likeness
whatsoever.
So as I said, Maimonides interprets the anthropomorphic
verses,
the anthropomorphic,
that's what the verses are called in the
in the, Tanakh,
in light of God's utter transcendence. So the
very famous example, like, the Exodus
3323,
Moses saw god's back and not his face.
He saw the ahor Adonai, not the Panim
or the Panay Adonai. So what what does
that mean? Well, Maimonides says Moses possessed the
meaning of this is that Moses possessed the
greatest
Da'at Elohim Marifatullah, the greatest knowledge
of God possible
for a human being. Seeing the face of
God,
means to know God as God knows himself,
which is impossible for creation.
No one really knows God,
except God.
So god is incorporeal
and incomparable.
Number 4,
I believe with complete faith that the creator,
blessed be his name, is the first without
a beginning
and the last without an end. So god
did not begin to exist nor will he
ever cease to exist.
Maimonides quotes here,
Exodus 314,
I am who I am.
He says the meaning of this duplication of
I am is that god is the very
ground of being. He is being itself.
Right? In other words, I am he who
is
or in the Greek Septuagint,
I am he who is and the necessary
existent
upon whom all creation is utterly dependent.
God is the only non contingent being
who can truly say I am in truth.
Right? So Hashem, right, God is pre eternal.
He is.
He is the creator.
Right? X upon
whom
infinite regress does not apply. Infinite regression dies
at the door of Hashem,
God. He is the creator of space, time
and matter. He transcends space, time and matter.
So God is the first and the last.
Number 5, he says, I believe with complete
faith that the creator, blessed be his name,
is the only one who is worthy of
worship.
Okay. So pray to God alone, not the
prophets, not the saints or angels calling on
anyone other than God for Maimonides'
idolatry.
He was especially,
condemnatory of of praying to angels.
Number 6,
I believe with complete faith that all the
words of the prophets are true.
So in traditional Judaism, there are 3 degrees
of revelation. Right? And these are found in
the Tanakh,
also known as the written Torah, Torah Shebi
Kitav.
Right? Christians call this the old testament.
So the top tier revelation is
the Torah, the instruction, the chumash, the 5
books of Moses.
These were spoken Panim al Panim according to
the text. In other words, were sorry.
Face to face. God spoke these words face
to face
with Moses. They are the very words of
Hashem.
And then,
then you have the prophets, the Nabiem. This
is more indirect prophecy.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etcetera, inspired by God, the
very voice of God, Ipsosim evokes of God.
And then, of course, you have the writings,
the Kitubim.
These are inspired to a spirit of holiness.
You have Psalms and proverbs and 1st and
second kings, etcetera, etcetera.
These are writings authored by nonprofits, like kings,
poets, and, historians.
So they have this kind of 3 tier
conception of revelation.
Now according to Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yixaki was
a very great,
famous, French rabbi in the 12th century.
The Talmud mentions that there have been over
1,200,000
total profits. So they they would just double
the number of men who made exodus. I
don't know why they did that but that's
his opinion. The the opinion of the Talmudic
rabbis,
only 55 of them are mentioned explicitly in
the Tanakh according to Rashi. So 48 men
and 7 women.
Number 7,
he says, animaamin
be'umunah shalaima,
shinnavi atmoshe rabeinu alayfhasalam
hayta
amitit,
they show who,
haya of the Navayim. So I believe with
complete faith
that the prophethood
of Lord Moses upon whom be peace was
true and that he is the master of
the prophets.
So the rabbis mentioned these kind of special
qualities that Moses had, that no other prophet
had. These kind of of
Moses.
They say that he had direct, again, direct
contact, Panim, Panim, face to face contact with
God. What they mean by that is there's
no angelic mediation
between God and Moses when he would speak
with God.
And then Moses, they say, when God spoke
to him, it was as if two friends
were speaking. So very easy on him physically
whereas other prophets would have
a little pain and things like that. They
would start sweating and shaking and things like
that when God was speaking to them. But
Moses is very easy. Like, he's talking to
his friend.
Number 3, they mentioned that Moses could actually
initiate conversations with God. So whenever Moses want
to, he could speak he can begin speaking
with God and God would always respond to
him, and that wasn't true with any other
prophet.
And then they mentioned that Moses possessed, you
know, again, this kind of special knowledge of
God, the highest,
or gnosis of God called that Elohim.
Number 8, I believe with complete faith that
the entire Torah, which we have today, is
the very Torah that was given to our
lord Moses upon whom be peace. In other
words, the Torah is divinely
preserved.
I don't know if there's a single historical
scholar who agrees with Maimonides here.
Most historians either endorse the documentary hypothesis or
the supplementary hypothesis.
If viewers are not familiar with these, then
they should look them up. According to confessional
Jews,
Moses actually wrote 13 Torah scrolls,
one for each tribe, and then he placed
one of them inside the Aron Habirit, the
Ark of the Covenant.
Okay? This latter Torah will, actually reemerge during
the messianic,
era.
We'll talk about that, later. Number 9, I
believe with complete faith that this Torah will
never be abrogated
and that will that there will never be
another law given from the creator, blessed be
his name. In other words, the immutability
of the Torah. So so in Judaism, there's
no such thing as, you know, like a
new testament, in
in the Christian sense.
The Orthodox believe that the covenant that God
made with the Israelites on Sinai is forever
and unconditional.
Okay. So all of the 613
mitzvot are transhistorical.
They're all valid and binding
upon the Jews as long as the olam
Hazay, as long as this world remains.
And even if, many of the mitzvot are
impossible to fulfill
in our day due to the lack of
the, you know, temple and priesthood and sacrificial
system, eventually, these mitzvot will be reestablished in
the messianic era.
Number 10,
he says, I believe with complete faith that
the creator, blessed be his name, knows every
action.
He knows every action of the children of
Adam as well as their thoughts. So God
is
omniscient.
So this iqar, this principle,
affirms personalism.
God cares about human affairs. God knows all
things
that can be known by rational and logical
beings as well as all things that cannot
be known by rational and logical beings. He's
absolutely omniscient. In other words, he knows the
general and necessary truths
as well as the details of individuals.
For example, he knows,
what foods are healthy for human beings to
consume
to maintain optimal health. Now this could also
be known by human beings through reason in
a general sense, but God also knows exactly
down to the crumb what I will eat
for lunch
a 1000 days from now if I'm still
breathing.
Right?
Inshallah. So this this latter knowledge cannot be
known by human beings. So God knows the
past. He knows the future and all the
infinite possibilities.
Number 11,
I believe that the creator, blessed be his
name, rewards the keepers of his commandments with
good and punishes the ones who break his
commandments. So god rewards the righteous and punishes
the wicked. Now there's a lot of difference
of opinion about the,
right, the world to come, the akhira
in Judaism because it's not really mentioned in
the Tanakh.
But according to Maimonides,
the souls of the deceased who were wicked,
they experienced karef. Karef means they're annihilated. God
annihilates their souls.
So they're never resurrected.
While the souls of the righteous
await the Yom Hadin, the day of judgment,
in either Gehenom or Ganaden, in either Jehannam
or Jannah to Adnan. So * or the
Garden of Eden.
Right? The souls of the righteous. Then on
the day of judgment, the souls of the
righteous are returned to their bodies
and they're resurrected in soma. Their bodies are
resurrected.
Then they're judged as to their stations in
the world to come, the olam haba. And
then the bodies die again
and only disembodied souls continue. Okay? So he's
both sort of Jewish and Greek in his
eschatological
orientation. So Jewish in the sense that physical
bodies are recon reconstituted
and Greek in the sense that eventually only
the souls enter
the Olam HaBa.
And as far as reincarnation goes,
reincarnation is called Gilgul HaNishama.
It's based upon the Zohar,
which is a foundational book of the Kabbalah,
which we're not gonna talk about much today.
The orthodox believe that the Kabbalah was originally
part of the oral the oral law given
to Moses as well.
Sadia Gaion, Joseph Albo, they explicitly reject
reincarnation. Gilgul,
Maimonides and Judah HaLevi are silent.
So let me quickly do number 13 and
then we'll come back to number 12.
So the 13th principle,
he says, I can I believe with complete
faith
that the dead will be raised to life,
The
the the dead will be raised? So,
there are subtle indications. These are called the
remezim,
subtle indications
of the resurrection and the Tanakh. Ezekiel 37,
for example, the the valley of dry bones.
Right? The the rabbis teach that that the
the coccyx at the end of the spinal
column,
it's called the Luz in Hebrew. That's sort
of the seed of the human being that
god will water as it were and regrow,
the human being,
on the day of judgment.
Okay. Let's go back to number 12 then.
So this is the one I wanted to
really focus on. Yeah. So this one he
says,
So I believe with complete faith in the
coming of the Messiah.
K. So according to Maimonides,
God used Christianity and Islam
to prepare
the world and raise awareness of the messiah.
That is to say, the concept of the
messiah because ultimately, Jews and Christian I'm sorry.
Muslims and Christians believe in the wrong person
according to them.
For Maimonides, the messiah is not
the savior. He's not.
Like, god is a. God is the savior.
He's the only savior,
nor is the messiah a divine being.
The messiah is a Goel. Goel means like
a redeemer like Moses, a human being in
all respects.
So just some quick history here. So in
721
BCE, the northern kingdom of Israel fell to
the Assyrian Empire, like King Sena Khared. So
10 of the 12 tribes were lost,
either deported or massacred
or a little bit of both,
although a remnant of these tribes, okay, remained.
They were not totally lost.
Now during this time, various prophets and sages
gave rise to something called,
restoration theology,
right, also known as messianism.
So it's this idea
that one day, a great king
from David's line will come and unite all
of Israel just just as it was during
the golden age. This king will be known
as Melech HaMashiach and David, the Davidic King
Messiah.
Right?
In ancient Israelite coronation ceremonies, a king or
a Melech
was crowned by a prophet who poured oil
on his on his head. So that's why
messiah means the anointed one. So Samuel, for
example, he did this with Saul and then
David.
So all Melichim
are Meshichim. So all kings are messiahs.
But a special messiah will come
and unite the Jewish people. So this is
the idea that's developing.
In 586
BCE,
what Jeremiah
warned about actually came to pass. The Babylonian
invasion of the southern kingdom of Judah
by Nebuchadnezzar. So the temple is destroyed
in 586 BCE. The last Davidic king of
Judah, Zedekiah,
was taken captive and his sons were killed.
Now 400 years earlier, around 1000 BCE,
okay,
God made a promise to David. This is
in 2nd Samuel 7 16
that David's house, kingdom, and throne
will be established forever.
Okay? The apparent meaning
is that there will always be a Davidic
king sitting on the throne.
In other words, there's always going to be
a Davidic messiah.
So what happened to this promise? Zedekiah,
the last Davidic king, was deposed and enslaved.
He died in Babylon.
So the Jews, they reinterpreted this promise as
actually pointing to the future.
In the future, the Davidic throne
will be restored and remain forever.
So this was as a result this was
the result of cognitive
dissonance. So this is what happens when your
beliefs are suddenly falsified.
Yeah. It's giving you 2 options.
You either reinterpret
the text or you abandon the text. I
mean, this is very common tension.
By abandoning,
this would mean that either god broke his
promise or that the scriptures were false so
the Jews didn't wanna say that.
Perhaps the promise was conditional upon Israel's obedience
and God nullified it as a result of
their disobedience.
At any rate, an improvised sort of ad
hoc reinterpretation
of the text developed.
So now a belief in an eschatological
king messiah
began to dominate the hearts and minds of
the Jews during the Babylonian period.
This distant future Davidic messiah will conquer the
entire world, not just Israel.
Okay? He will make the Torah the law
of every nation and he will reign over
the world,
until the end of time.
So not just an an improvise but also
a highly exaggerated reinterpretation.
So what are the signs of the messiah?
So who is he and what will he
do? So according to the orthodox, he will
be from the seat of king David,
right, Zerah David HaMelech.
The throne or the rule of David, what's
known as the Malkuf David, will be restored.
He will inaugurate the ingathering of the Jews
from diaspora. This is called kibbutz galut.
He will be a righteous judge, a Shofet
Siddiq.
He will rebuild the temple, the Bayt Hamikdash.
He will usher in an era of global
peace.
The dead will be raised in the messianic
era
to.
He'll bring forth, as I said, the aron
habari, the ark of the covenant, and the
Torah therein.
He will sacrifice a perfect
3 year old red heifer,
the ashes of which must be used to
purify the temple priest, the kohanim.
And currently, by the way, there are 5
perfect red heifers,
right now in Israel flown in from a
ranch,
in Texas. They're almost 2 years old.
So this red heifer would be the 10th,
in their history,
and it it it I guess it's going
to be sacrificed on the Mount of Olives
in a solemn ceremony. I mean, I think
they're preparing for this even right now.
And then he'll also fight the what's known
as the Mirkamath
Adonai, the wars of the Lord. So he's
a warrior messiah, military
messiah.
Now Jewish tradition teaches that this messiah must
appear
and accomplish everything before the year 6,000.
Okay? Before the 7th day, the Sabbath of
the Lord. Of course, a day is as
a 1000 years for the Lord. Right? So
the year right now is 5784
after creation.
So we are in the final hours of
the 6th day. This is how the rabbis
put it. This is mentioned everywhere
in Jewish tradition.
Therefore, the deadline of the Messiah is is
September 22/40
when converted to the Gregorian calendar. So that's
217
years from now, but that's his deadline. So
he has to appear well before this in
order to accomplish everything. So, really, from a
Jewish perspective, his arrival is imminent.
Okay. So to review,
the the end of the Davidic monarchy in
586 BCE produced a belief in a future
Davidic
redemption or redeemer.
Okay. For Jews,
right, God's word is always true. His words
cannot be false.
And in 2nd Samuel 7 16, god promised
David that his house, kingdom and throne
will remain forever. But in light of the
events of 586 BCE with the deposing of
Zedekiah,
what this promise must mean is that David's
throne will be established in the future
until the end of time. So now we
move towards an eschatological
redemption and eschatological messianism.
You know, David was cut off by the
Babylonians,
but he will come back
bigger and better than ever. In fact, he'll
rule the whole world. He'll conquer
the world through militarism
and implement the Torah
as the law of the whole world.
And all of this must happen before the
7th millennium, before the year 6000,
before the 7th day of the Sabbath of
the Lord.
So here's my critique of this. The so
the earlier verses and I mentioned this before,
but I mentioned again because I really want
people to understand this. The the earliest verses
in the Tanakh that mentioned the coming of
a great Davidic King Messiah,
these were fulfilled by Hezekiah. I think they're
describing Hezekiah
who opposed the Assyrians.
Those verses were clearly talking about him. When
the Babylonians removed the last Davidic king from
the throne in 586 BCE,
Jewish scribes and exegetes again started saying that
another Davidic king would come to save them,
someone like Hezekiah.
But this time, he would save them from
the Babylonians and he would rebuild the temple
and gather the Jews, etcetera.
These writings, in my opinion, were wishful thinking
fabrications.
Why do I say that? Well, because no
Jewish king came, a Persian king came named
Cyrus.
And God, Isaiah 45, calls him messiah. And
he rebuilt the temple and he gathered the
Jews back
to to to Israel. So god chose a
gentile as his messiah and that god chooses
whoever he wills.
But this was deemed unacceptable by the Jews
because the later fabricated prophecies
said that a Jewish Davidic king would defeat
the Babylonians and rebuild the temple
as well as regather the Jews.
Thus, a major sort of exegetical revision was
needed in order to justify
those later prophecies.
So so the Jews began ignoring
the historical context of these later prophecies of
the Babylonian period
and began claiming that this Jewish king would
come in the indefinite future.
Right?
In truth, I don't believe there ever was
to be a future Davidic king messiah
who would rule the whole world. I mean,
today, David's line is lost. So even if
a Jewish man would come upon the scene
and say, I'm the Davidic messiah, there's no
way to prove he's from David.
I do think at some point, some Jewish
elements in Israel will try to self fulfill
this.
Okay? But this person will be an imposter.
Interestingly, in in Sanhedrin 99 b, this is
in the Talmud. Rabbi Hillel, this is a
later Hillel, he said, quote, there shall be
no messiah for Israel
because they have already enjoyed him in the
days of Hezekiah.
Hezekiah was a Davidic king messiah.
From our perspective, the messiah that the Jews
were supposed to accept was a prophet messiah,
Isa ibn Mariam alaihis salam. He's a spiritual
master
who taught them the spiritual path, a messiah
who would be saved from his enemies, according
to Psalm 20 verse 6, a messiah who
announced the coming of the powerful Baranash
of Daniel chapter 7. It is this messiah,
Yisay bin Maryam, who will defeat the imposter
messiah
according to Islamic eschatology.
So Jesus, peace be upon him, is the
messiah and he will return to defeat the
imposter messiah.
A very common,
deception used by Christian apologists,
is to say that the Muslim messiah is
the Mehdi.
They they say this all the time. Right?
That's what they call him, the Muslim messiah.
The Mahdi is the Muslim messiah is what
they say. Right? This is totally wrong.
The the Mehdi
is the guided one from the Ahlul Bayt
to the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Salam. So
he will be a leader of the Muslims
but he's not the messiah.
The Quran tells us explicitly who the messiah
for the Muslims is, Isa ibn Marib, Alaihi
sallam.
Right? So Christian apologist,
they don't like to mention this, that Jesus,
the son of Mary, is the Messiah
according to the explicit text in the Quran.
And Jesus, the son of Mary, is the
same Jesus
who lived in Galilee 2000 years ago. Jesus
of Nazareth is the messiah,
according to Islam.
Now a common question that we get all
the time as Muslims is what does Jerusalem
have to do with Islam?
Why do Muslims consider Jerusalem to be a
sacred place?
And it's a shame that people you know,
we still get this question because even a
basic study of Islam will quickly reveal the
answer. Number 1, Jerusalem was the ancient home
of many of the great prophets of of
God. So so Jews, Christians and Muslims, they
have a lot of prophets in common.
And unfortunately, a lot of people don't know
that.
Islam is a religion that reveres Abraham. He's
the great patriarch.
The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was
a direct descendant of Abraham just as Moses
and Jesus, peace be upon him, were direct
descendants of Abraham. But even so, the Quran
makes the argument
Ibrahim. Indeed, those who have the best claim
to Abraham
are his followers as are this prophet
and the believers, meaning the Muslims. And Allah
is a guardian,
of those who believe.
So the true Abrahamites,
I guess we can say, are those who
follow Abraham irrespective
of blood or lineage.
And Islam really sees itself as a restoration
of the, the creed or tradition of Abraham.
The second reason is because Jerusalem was the
the prayer
of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
and the Sahaba for 16 or 17 months.
And then God revealed in the Quran
so now turn your faces to the inviolable
mosque, right, in Mecca. Wherever you are, turn
your faces towards the mosque. This is chapter
2 verse 44,
of the Quran.
But why was the original qibla or prayer
direction Jerusalem?
Because it's considered a holy and blessed place.
Right?
In the Quran,
Palestine, which obviously includes Jerusalem, is called the
holy land. Right? According to the Quran, Moses
said, Right? Oh, my people enter the holy
land. And the third reason is when when
God caused his beloved, the prophet Muhammad, peace
be upon him, to ascend, right, his ascension,
his uruj was from Jerusalem. So, you know,
God could have raised him from Mecca,
but he didn't do that. He brought him
first to the Temple Mount, Beit El Maqdis,
in Jerusalem. And then from Jerusalem, the prophet
ascended
the various, you know, Samahuat,
and while the prophet was at the at
the site of the second temple,
he led a company of the messengers in
prayer because he is Imam al Musa'in. He
is one of the great,
he is the,
the the leader of the messengers of God.
Now speaking of a temple,
in light of current events, I wanna say
something about the idea of a Christian Zionist.
Mhmm. Okay.
This whole concept of Christian Zionism is
a bit sort of mind boggling to me.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around
it. And I'll tell you why. First of
all, what is Zionism? Because broadly speaking,
Zionism is a modern and nationalistic movement
aimed at reestablishing a Jewish homeland.
It was born in Europe.
Okay? Born out of European antisemitism.
The the so called father Zionism, Theodore Herzl,
was an ethnically Jewish atheist.
You know, that's the irony. Right? I mean,
Theodore means the gift of God.
And so Herzl was was seriously considering Argentina
as being the Jewish homeland. I mean, he
didn't have this romantic attachment to Palestine.
But here's the other thing about Zionism.
Zionism is also a modern orthodox reform movement.
Right? And that's to put it mildly.
To put it more bluntly,
Zionism is a hijacking
of orthodox or traditional Judaism. And the vast
majority of Jewish writers
before World War 2 were vehemently
anti Zionist.
And there are thousands upon thousands of orthodox
and traditional Jews today who are anti Zionist.
Now part and parcel to the Zionist project,
from a from a Jewish religious standpoint is
the construction
of the 3rd temple on, on the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem.
It is clearly against the teachings of the
New Testament
for a Christian to support the construction
of the 3rd temple in Jerusalem. For a
Christian to do this is to commit unambiguous
blasphemy
according to the New Testament. And yet there
are 1,000,000
upon 1,000,000 of Christian Zionists all around the
world. They donate 1,000,000 of dollars
to the Temple Institute in Jerusalem.
In fact, the vast majority of Zionists are
not Jewish. They're actually Christian.
Just in fact, there's only 15,000,000 Jews worldwide.
So why is it blasphemy?
Well, in the new testament,
Jesus himself is the new temple.
And the prologue of John's gospel says, and
the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Right? The Greek says,
and Right?
Tabernacles
amongst us. Yeah. Exactly.
Tabernacle. Oh, runner of the temple itself.
Exactly. Yeah. The verb here used in John's
prologue, eskenosin,
comes from the the noun, which
means a tent or a canopy.
Right? So you see in the old testament,
the kavod or the shekhina, the presence of
God dwelled in the tent of meaning
of meeting the the Mishkan, right, the tabernacle,
as you said, in the wilderness at the
time of Moses and Joshua. The indwelling of
god was figurative. This tent was sort of
the prototype of the first temple built by
Solomon.
So the temple honorifically is called the house
of God, Beth El or Beth O'loh. Again,
in this figurative sense, the temple housed God's
spirit as it were. But what did John
say in the prologue? The word became flesh
and tented himself among us. So Jesus is
a new mishkan that houses a kavod of
God. In the very next chapter in John
chapter 2, we read that the Jews said
to Jesus, what sign can you give us?
And Jesus, the Johann and Jesus, this is
a new testament Jesus. He said, destroy this
temple and I'll raise in 3 days. And
the Jews said, it took 46 years to
build this temple. You're gonna raise it in
3 days?
And then John says, the author says, but
he spoke of the temple of his body.
The Hebrew
new testament Jesus is saying that he is
the new temple. For Christians to support the
construction of a third temple in Jerusalem is
to deny.
For Christians to support the construction of a
third temple in Jerusalem is to deny. It's
to deny the New Testament Jesus.
Jesus replaces the temple according to the New
Testament.
The the modern Israelis, they placed a sign
near the temple mount that says the divine
presence, the Shekhinah,
never moves from the western wall. No Christian
on earth, if he wants to follow the
teachings
of the new testament, can ever support such
a statement.
It's blasphemy.
Let me quote the catechism of the Catholic
church, catechism
section 1197.
Christ is the true temple of God, the
place where his glory dwells.
So Christian Zionism is a betrayal of the
new testament Jesus. And here's another thing. John
in his gospel,
as we know,
he moved the day of the crucifixion up
one day. In the synoptics, Jesus is crucified
on the day of Passover. In John, it's
the previous day, the day of the preparation
of the Passover. So there's a contradiction in
the gospels.
Now certainly, he wasn't crucified twice. From our
perspective, he wasn't even crucified once, but that's
another podcast.
But why why did why did John move
move up the day of the crucifixion?
Because this was when the lambs in the
temple were being slaughtered.
Now only in John do we find that
a Roman centurion impales
the side of the crucified Jesus from which
came forth blood and water, says John. What's
the significance of that? Well, on that very
day, at that very moment,
the lambs were being slaughtered
for the Passover in the temple.
The the kohanim, the priests, they would open
a side gate and they'd wash the blood
out with water. Blood and water would gush
forth from the side of the temple. Jesus
is the new temple. Christian Zionism
is utter blasphemy according to the New Testament.
In first John 2 22,
the author says, quote, who is the liar
but he who denies that Jesus is the
Christ? He continues,
This is the antichrist.
The one who denies that Jesus is the
messiah
is the antichrist. This is the New Testament.
This is not my opinion. It's not the
Quran. It's not the Hadith.
This is the new testament. The Jews are
no longer the chosen people according to the
clear teachings
of the New Testament. The the New Testament
advances
replacement theology,
covenantal supersessionism.
Now, Christian Zionists, they love to quote Genesis
12,
verse 3 where God says to Abraham, and
I will bless them that bless you and
curse him that curses you.
Right? So so they take this to mean
that that they must bless Abraham and his
chosen seed, the Israelites,
or else, God will curse them.
So in their minds, it follows them that
if they don't bless and support the modern
state of Israel,
then God won't bless them. And this is
what they say. I mean, never mind the
fact that in order for a Christian to
immigrate to Israel,
he must renounce Christianity.
I
mean, Israel will gladly accept Christian money.
But in order for a Christian to move
to Israel, he has to admit
that Jesus was a false prophet and a
pseudo messiah.
But this is what the Christian Zionists say.
They say we have a religious duty
to love and support Israel. The problem with
this assertion is that it's totally contradictory
to the New Testament. I mean, just read
Paul of Tarsus. Right? 13 of the 27
books
of the new testament are explicitly attributed to
Paul. And Paul is a supersessionist,
right, to his to his very being.
Supersessionism
is this idea that the Christian church has
superseded the nation of Israel
as god's covenant people. It's very clear. I
mean, listen to what Paul says,
in Galatians 316 about God's covenant with Abraham
in Genesis. This is Paul talking here. The
promises were spoken to Abraham and to his
seed. And And here, of course, the Christian
Zionist will say amen. But Paul continues,
scripture does not say and to seeds,
meaning many people,
but and to your seed singular, meaning one
person
who is Christ. So according to Paul,
God in Genesis was only referring to Jesus
Christ as being Abraham's seed. Only Jesus is
blessed, not the Israelites and certainly not the
modern state
of Israel. I mean, Paul goes on to
say,
there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is
neither bond nor free. There is neither male
nor female for you are all one in
Christ Jesus.
If you belong to Christ,
then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according
to the promise. Galatians chapter 32829,
Christians are the new chosen people according to
the New Testament.
You are only chosen and blessed if you
believe in Jesus.
Of course, that's what he's saying. He's a
Christian. I mean, are the Jews who wrote
the Talmud
still chosen and beloved by God according to
the Christians? Are are are the Jews still
the apple of God's eye who cursed and
slander Jesus and his mother in the Talmud?
Also also when Galatians, Paul makes this interesting
claim
that Gentiles
who believe in Jesus, like Greeks and Romans
who believe in Jesus are now the children
of Sarah,
the free woman, while Jews who are actually
descendants of Isaac,
but did not accept Jesus are now children
of the bonds woman Hagar.
Okay? So I don't agree with Paul but
this this is the teaching of the New
Testament. This is what he's saying. Read the
early church fathers,
John Christ system,
Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, Martin Luther. I
mean, my goodness, Martin Luther on the Jews
and their lives.
I don't agree with with the with with
what he's saying but this is the pioneer,
the Protestant Reformation.
Zionism is kuford
according to the New Testament and according to
traditional Christianity.
In the gospel of John,
Jesus tells It says, the Jews,
no longer scribes and Pharisees,
the Jews that if they were Abraham's seed,
they would do the works of Abraham,
Right? Then he says, no, you are children
of your father, the devil.
That's the New Testament Jesus. That's not the
Quran or Hadith. This is the teaching of
the New Testament. In Romans 6 and Hebrews
10, Paul says
that Jesus' sacrifice for sin was to be
all end all sacrifice.
So Jesus is the ultimate temple,
the ultimate high priest, and the ultimate sacrifice.
This is new testament Christianity.
Yet Christian Zionists
fully support the 3rd temple
where sin sacrifices will return one day according
to Jewish messianism.
How can they support this and call themselves
bible believing Christians?
Our new speaker of the house in America,
his name is Mike Johnson, who identifies as
an evangelical Christian Zionist
recently said that America has a religious duty
to support Israel.
Total blasphemy. I mean, blasphemy according to Christianity.
So Christian Zionist is like open secret, original
copy. You know, living dead. It's an oxymoron.
Okay. So, you know, I I feel a
bit, you know, compelled, like, morally compelled as
a human being and as a Muslim and
a professor
to offer my thoughts about the the present
conflict, really the present genocide. I think it's
very important for us as Muslims
to have a
more comprehensive theological understanding
of the present situation.
And I think it's time to, you know,
step up our level of sophistication with this
issue.
Right?
I think we owe it to our brothers
and sisters in Palestine who are suffering right
now.
Now before I get into what I think
is actually happening over there theologically,
I wanna make a few comparisons because comparisons
are very, very helpful, right? They put things
in the proper perspective.
They really help me understand.
So the total number of people killed in
all of the military campaigns
of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
this Muslim and non Muslim was about 1,000
between 1,011
100. These are men on the battlefield.
By comparison, the United States dropped 2 bombs
on Japan,
killing 300,000
civilians on impact.
You know, I mean, think about that. It
was never the practice of the prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him, to target civilians at
wartime and certainly never women and children.
This is known. This is Ma'alom and any
Muslim who does so is in clear violation
of the teachings of the prophet. I mean,
the prophet is a role model and exemplar.
The Quran tells us that he's our role
model and exemplar in the day of Uhud
with blood streaming down his face. The prophet
said, Oh oh,
oh my lord, oh, Allah,
guide my people for they don't know. And
this is mentioned in our sources. I mean,
in Luke 23, right, the
Luke in Jesus says something, sin father forgive
them for they know not what they do.
But that verse is actually missing
from the oldest and best manuscripts of Luke's
gospel. I mean, we just read Bruce Metzger,
Bart Ehrman, they think it's a fabrication.
But our prophet, sallallahu alaihi wasallam,
he prayed for his enemies in the thick
of battle.
And when the prophet conquered Mecca, he said,
that today is a day of mercy,
the exaltation of the Quraysh. And he said,
There's no blemish on you today, and he
declared a general amnesty. So this is the
prophet in a position of power.
Years earlier when he was stoned out of
Ta'if
by the slaves and children of the Bani
Taqif, He refused to curse them. He prayed
for their descendants.
By comparison. Okay? By comparison. And I mentioned
this story before, but now it's also important
to mention. Just for comparison, there's a story
in the bible, the old testament, the Tanakh
is mentioned in 2nd Kings chapter 2. This
is a story that Jews and Christians believe
in. The Hebrew prophet Elisha was leaving Jericho.
And I'll just read the NIV translation. And
he, Elisha, was walking along the road. Some
boys came out,
of the town and jeered at him and
they said, get out of here, Baldy.
You know, so they made fun of him.
You know, they made fun of his bald
spot. Now, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon
him, was when he was leaving Taif, he
was being insulted and they were punching him
and kicking him and throwing stones at him.
He was covered in blood. But what did
Elisha do? This is mentioned in the Bible.
I'm not I'm not making this up and
I'm not mentioning this to ridicule anyone's religion.
I'm mentioning this, in order to draw an
effective comparison.
It says he turned around,
looked at them and called down a curse
on them in the name of the lord.
Then 42 bears came out of Sorry. Then
2 bears came out of the woods and
mauled 42 boys.
So 42 young boys, children,
mauled to death by 2 bears. I mean,
can you just imagine the carnage, the screams,
the terror?
Right? Now, after 911,
for those of us who remember,
a group of anti Muslim war mongering propagates.
They emerged in the public discourse and they
would quote the so called Ayatul Saif, the
verse of the sword
from the Quran, chapter 9 verse 5. And
they tried to convince the American people and
the entire west by extension that Muslims believe
in unmitigated perpetual warfare against unbelievers
and that the Quran orders Muslims to kill
every non Muslim on the planet, man, woman,
and child. Because the Quran says kill the
mushrikeen.
Kill the wherever you find them. And if
Muslims deny this, then they're lying to you.
It's called tapiya,
you know, prudential concealment.
So this was how these, you know, so
called wars of terror against Muslims were justified
for the Western public.
4,700,000
Muslims have been killed in these wars of
terror in the last 20 years, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria, etcetera. 4,700,000
based on a lie. I mean, the the
ultimate blood libel. And and the Jewish people,
they understand the power of a blood libel.
Right? In medieval England, the Christians made up
the infamous
lie that Jews kidnap and kill Christian children
and use their blood for their magical rituals
and in the making of the unleavened Passover
bread.
This lie contributed to massive persecution
of Jews
and Edward the first eventually expelling the entire
Jewish population
from England in 12/90.
You know, it's like saying, you know, Muslims
decapitate innocent babies, A a total blood libel.
But back to Ayatul Saif, okay, the the
so called verse of the sword chapter 9
verse 5. When we look at the context
of that verse in the Quran, it's plain
and obvious meaning.
It becomes very clear that the Quran is
referring to pagan Arabs
in the Hejaz in the Arabian Peninsula who
broke their treaty with the Muslims.
And they were given 4 months to leave
or face retaliation
from the Muslims. And if at any point,
a mushrik, okay, asked for asylum from the
Muslims, he must be granted asylum. This is
according to the passage.
Look at the full context in Surat At
Tawba. And it says take him to a
place of safety and recite the Quran to
him.
And if he refuses Islam, then take him
to the border and release him.
So 9 5 of the Quran has a
locative condition. It applies to the Hejaz, the
heartland of Islam. The cities of Mecca and
Medina. There can be no outward idolatry
in these places. And these verse has a
very clear context. No killing of the innocent.
No killing of women and children is mentioned.
No destroying buildings and livestock.
And if a handful of ignorant Muslim extremists
invoke this verse
as a justification for the killing of civilians,
then they stand condemned.
These are mutata'ifun.
These are these are extremists who have to
twist and turn
the Quran and the Sunnah to coincide with
their deviance.
Now there is a war policy mentioned
and explicitly described in the Tanakh, okay, several
times.
It's called kharem.
Okay. Where is this mentioned? Exodus, Deuteronomy,
Joshua,
1st Samuel, Isaac. I mean, it's all over
the place. What does kharem mean? So let's
go to academic sources. This is the Strong's
Concordance.
Kharem, I'm just quoting here, to ban,
devote,
destroy utterly, completely destroy, dedicate for destruction,
exterminate.
This is the Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew English
lexicon. This is used in seminaries all over
the west. I used this years ago in
Hebrew class, the Brown driver Briggs.
To exterminate
the massacre of all inhabitants.
Gisenius' Hebrew Caldi Lexicon to the Old Testament.
Jerem,
to extirpate.
I had to actually look that up. It
means to eradicate,
eliminate, to destroy utterly.
So what's an example of khedam? Well, Deuteronomy
chapter 20
verses 16 and 17.
So here, god is telling Moses
that the cities that god gave to the
Israelites as an inheritance for the promised land,
all living things of these cities must be
exterminated.
In the very words of the text, it
says,
you shall not you shall not save alive
anything that breeds,
but thou shalt destroy them, namely the Hittites,
the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites,
the the Hivites, and the Jebusites as the
lord thy god has commanded thee. So total
extermination
explicitly ordered by the text,
genocide
explicitly
ordered by the text, and it's plain and
obvious meaning. You don't have to twist and
turn it. This is what it says on
the surface.
Now I mentioned the,
conquest of Mecca earlier.
Now, I wonder how many people have heard
of the conquest of Jericho.
Because here, Joshua chapter 6 verse 21, this
is what it says.
This begins,
this is a he feel imperfect with vav
consecutive.
It's from the verb haram, the verb is
the noun is karem. You
shall exterminate
everything that is in the city.
Mi'ishvaadisha,
both man and woman.
Minna'arvaadzakein,
young and old,
the ad shore, basse, lehamur,
the ox, the sheep, the donkey,
lafi kharev with the edge of the sword.
This is called herem.
Here's the point. The wholesale
slaughter of innocent civilians
as a policy of war is sanctioned
by Jewish and Christian texts.
Deuteronomy 20, Joshua 6,
First Samuel 15,
these are Jewish and Christian texts. You know,
Philip, professor Philip Jenkins, as he pointed out,
Paul, says chedom is a mass human sacrifice.
Oh, just on that point. Sorry. That's the
book we're talking about here, Laying Down the
Sword, Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent
Verses.
Philip Jenkins,
is his actual title is distinguished professor of
history at Baylor University's
Institute For Studies of Religion in America. I
think it's Texas.
I I do recommend this book very strongly
because he's an expert historian,
talking about those verses which got all the
time to be fair and many more, which,
apparently, command the extermination
of whole tribes, peoples, nations, races,
for the chosen people. And this is relevant
today because these verses
have been used and are being used,
throughout the last 2000. This is not history.
This is current application of these verses even
today, unfortunately.
Yes. Thank you.
Now,
somebody might ask, didn't I, you know, didn't
I quote Deuteronomy earlier to make to make
a point? So is the bible accurate or
not? So let me just say something very
quickly here.
You know, Islam has the answer for the
state of the bible. I mean, the Quran
is the Muhammed means the overseer or super
supervisor of the bible. The Quran is the
furqan, the standard of judgment when it comes
to the bible. So the Quran refers to
tahrif, the biblical text, alteration, fabrication, decontextualization.
The text of the Bible has been corrupted
to a certain significant degree.
Okay? And this is totally mainstream
historical scholarship of the Bible. It take historical
scholars about 1200 years to catch up with
the Quran.
In fact, scriptural alteration of the Torah is
admitted in the Tanakh itself. In Jeremiah 8:8,
Jeremiah says, How can you say we are
wise and we have the Torah Adonai? We
have the law of the Lord. He nei
l'sheker
asa 8.
Sheker sufrim, he says, for falsehood, the lying
pen of the scribes have made it. Or
to say it another way, the false pens
of the scribes have turned it, the Torah,
into a lie.
Okay. Now, how do modern rabbinical authorities deal
with these cheben passages?
This is really important. Okay. It's really three
ways.
So number 1, the normative Jewish opinion,
the mitzvah to commit kedem in the holy
land is one of the 613
mitzvot in the Torah. It's number 528
according to the numbering of my modities. It
says leave none alive of the 7 nations.
This is Deuteronomy 2016.
6 of the 7 nations are mentioned in
the next verse, 2017. The Hittites, the Amorites,
the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the
Jebusites. However,
a group called the the Girgashites,
as Rashi and others mentioned, are not mentioned
explicitly in Deuteronomy 2017
but are nonetheless included under the ban, that
is to say order to be exterminated as
well. Now Abraham ben Ezra and rabbi Hezekiah
ben Manoah
and many others maintained that this mitzvah was
limited only to the generation of Moses.
Okay? So Rabbi Hezekiah, this is a quote
from him. The validity of this commandment is
limited to the generation
Moses is addressing, I e the period during
the period during which the Israelites will be
engaged in fighting the Canaanites in order to
settle in the land promised by God to
their patriarchs, Abraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov.
If members of these tribes had immigrated voluntarily
and at some point future date return individually,
and even wish to convert to Judaism, this
is acceptable.
So herem
of these 7 nations was only for that
time
at that place and never again.
And the reason is because these groups are
gone. They no longer exist.
So while the 613
Mitzvot are believed to be perennial and perpetual,
right, transhistorical,
there there's simply no application of this mitzvah
because these groups are gone.
And Maimonides says, even if descendants of these
groups remain unto today mixed among other nations,
as long as their evil culture has gone,
their idolatry, their child sacrifice, their immorality,
then the mitzvah stands fulfilled and there is
no application.
So this is traditional Judaism.
Okay?
Now, it is important to mention that almost,
that almost no critical historians of the bible
believe that such a massive extermination of these
nations,
re really ever took place. Right? These stories
are exaggerations,
and really intended to scare tactics. They function
to scare the enemies of Israel
as well as to give hope to the
Israelites. So what actually happened to these groups?
These groups, you know, they migrated, they assimilated,
they converted. Yes, there were wars and battles
from time to time, but wholesale genocide, probably
not. But what matters is belief.
Right? And the orthodox take these stories literally.
Okay? They believe them to be historically true
as did the most eminent of Christian scholars
from Augustine to Aquinas to John Calvin. There's
a book that I recommend
on this by, the author's name is Christian
Hoffreiter.
It's called Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide,
and then the sub, subtitle is Christian interpretations
of kedem passages.
It was published by Oxford in 2018.
The trend nowadays from apologist
is just to deny these things. They say,
oh, that was meant to be hyperbolic.
So Christian apologist nowadays will say it's just
hyperbole.
Well,
I I I mean, that may be your
experience. In my experience talking to Christian missionaries
over the years is when you confront them
with passages like in 1 Samuel 15 verses
1 to 3, where, you know, God through
Samuel commands, King,
King Saul
to slaughter the Amalekites. And they specifically
detailed that you must kill the men, the
women, the children, and the babies, plus a
bunch of donkeys and whatnot.
They always defend it. They are, oh, well,
you know, these are evil people. I'm thinking
Yeah. The babies are evil? Come on. Babies
are not evil. Oh, well,
you know, if the babies hadn't been killed,
they would have grown up and killed the,
the Israelites. I'm thinking, hang on. That's what
the Nazis argued when they were killing Jewish
babies, because the Jewish babies could grow up,
take revenge on the Nazis. They'd best kill
them.
Yeah. No. That's that's definitely true. But you're
hearing this stuff, but I I I usually
hear them justify
genocide
and child killing. These are people who would
tell Muslims, oh, we believe in a God
of love. Right. But you but you justified
child killing and genocide. This is absurd.
Nowhere in the process is to justify this
kind of behavior. Yeah. Exactly. I think a
lot of them now are just I think
they're embarrassed,
you know. So they'll make up things like,
oh, you know, I don't, it's it's hype
it's hyperbole.
You know? Because these stories, I think they
I mean, obviously, they're very disturbing, and there's
no historical evidence of these things.
So so anyway, that's the that's the
the the sort of traditional normative opinion. Now
another opinion says,
that kedem in the holy land will happen
one more time at that place, but only
when the Messiah comes. So we must wait
for the Messiah, right, their Messiah. Right? The
king messiah, son of David.
So only the messiah can begin the process
of this kibbutz Gadu, the regathering of the
Jews from diaspora
and then reestablish
the Jewish state and then he will fight
the Mirchamoth Adonai, the wars of the Lord,
etcetera.
The third opinion is a position of religious
Zionism.
Okay. In Hebrew, religious Zionism
is called, let's see you note that it,
see you note that it, see you note
that it.
The so called religious Zionist,
they see no contradiction between Zionism and Orthodox
Judaism or traditional Judaism.
Now there has been a constant and sustained
sentiment among the religious Zionists,
the the the religious Zionist Jews of Israel
that the Palestinians are the modern day Canaanites.
And this is a very common sentiment among
religious Zionists. Therefore, it is the religious duty
of the government of Israel
to wage a war of extermination against the
Palestinian people. And this is what you're seeing
right now in all of its horror.
So I encourage people to look up, you
know, Goosh,
Emunim, the Coalition of the Faithful. Look up
Rabbi Abraham Kook. Look up his son, Yehuda
Kook. Look up rabbi Shlomo Aviner. In the
in the minds of these religious Zionists,
the Israeli government has a religious duty to
implement
mitzvah number 528
and utterly destroy the Palestinians.
I mean, they believe that the coming of
their messiah
can be hastened
through continued aggression, conquest, and settlement
of of Palestinian territories.
All of this aggression will culminate into the
coming of their messiah.
And guess what? The political party
known as Halukkud
are extremely dedicated religious Zionists. And, of course,
Halukkud's chairman is Benjamin Netanyahu,
who's been the prime minister of Israel since
2009.
There are many people of this understanding in
his party,
and they're highly influencing him. So, I mean,
so they believe that they can use the
finely sanctioned violence to essentially prepare the land
for the messiah.
They can get the ball moving before his
arrival. They can start the process and the
messiah will finish it.
And, again, we see that the clear and
obvious policy of the Israeli government as a
whole
is apply, that that that they're applying to
the Palestinians in Gaza and now in the
West Bank,
because they want the Temple
Mount is this policy cannot be described as
anything other than herem. It's herem in 2023.
They're preparing the land
for their messiah. So Palestinian civilians, they're they're
essentially paying for the sins of Europe.
Professor,
Roz Siegel, he's a professor at Stockton University.
He's an Israeli journalist
as well. I mean, he's Israeli.
He specializes in holocaust and genocide studies. His
name is Roz Siegel, s e g a
l.
He says that what Israel is doing right
now to the Palestinians is, quote,
a textbook case of genocide.
Textbook genocide. And he cites the UN's definition
of genocide.
Well, the the UN is a leading human
rights guy in the UN himself. He said
that this is the definition of genocide. Absolutely.
Exactly.
Here's a quote from the defense minister of
Israel. His name is Yoav Gallant. This and
he said this on October 9th.
This is a quote from him, defense minister
of Israel. I have ordered a complete siege
on the Gaza Strip. No electricity, no food,
no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting
human animals,
and we are acting accordingly. We will eliminate
everything. So so that's called shirem, you know,
get to know this word, educate people about
this. You know, we heard about jihad jihad
jihad ad nauseam after 9:11.
Right? Why have we not heard of of
kharem?
You know, how is it that in 2004,
my non Muslim neighbor was asking me to
explain taqiyah,
but in 2023,
most of us have no idea about kherem
or Amalek. I'll get to that shortly. Yeah.
How was it how was it that, you
know, for several years after 911, whenever I
would participate in interfaith dialogues, I was constantly
questioned, accosted, bombarded in several churches by non
Muslims about jihad
and yet we are still ignorant of khedim
and Amalek.
Why do we know these concepts? I remember
once in a q and a session,
a man started debating me about jihad. He
was a Christian.
He wanted me He actually wanted to correct
me about jihad. So I said to him,
I'll explain jihad when you can explain kedim.
And he looked at me really puzzled and
he said, what's that?
And I just, wow, that's strange. Hajib. I
mean, he wanted he wanted to correct me
concerning an Islamic concept, something found
tradition. So I think it's time to push
back a little bit. It's time for us
to demand answers.
Right? It's time to expose
the double standard in a more robust, sophisticated,
and academic way. You know, the present policy
cannot be the new normal because what is
happening to the Palestinians right now is sheer
terrorism.
You know how they talk about radical Islam.
Zionism as deployed by Israel is radical Judaism.
Palestinian civilians
are victims of religious extremists really on both
sides,
but especially from the radical Jews, from radical
Judaism for almost 80 years.
I mean, this history goes back to 1917,
way before October 7th. But it it does
actually having ramifications way beyond, the Middle East
in in in France at the moment for
the French senate. It's been proposed as a
law by the French senators
to outlaw any criticism of Israel, the old
law from the 19th century explicitly. So let's
revive this law where to insult,
the nation of Israel is punishable about to
of certain years in prison. This is a
country that, after the the terrible Charlie Hebdo,
attack, said we we have a we have
absolute free speech. You have the right to
the prophet. It's right to blaspheme God. And,
you know, the the same, you know, president
was saying, you know, blaspheme
is a right to a Frenchman. But you
can't criticize Israel. You might go so this
is extraordinary
inconsistency here,
in privileging certain behaviors,
allowing the defamation of the prophet and Islam
Yeah.
But but prohibiting any criticism
of of is extraordinary
twisted Yeah. Going on here.
And and I think there's a theological reason
for that too, and I'll and I'll get
to that. I'm I'm gonna come to that,
in a minute. But the the I'm gonna
quote this verse in the Quran.
So Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says in the
Quran, he says that we ordained upon the
children of Israel
that whoever kills another person
without without that person having killed another person,
or or, for spreading corruption in the land.
In other words, whoever murders another person unjustly,
it is as if he's killed the the
whole of humanity.
And whoever saves and whoever saves a life,
it is as if he's saved all of
humanity.
Indeed, we sent,
indeed, our messengers came with clear signs,
but
many of them after this were extremist. So
right here in the Quran, here's the difference
between traditional Judaism. This is 532, al Mahidah
verse 32 of the Quran. This is the
difference right here between traditional Judaism and radical
Judaism in this eye. Everything is in the
Quran. So this special intent on genocide is
in full display. When you listen to Israeli
politicians and and military officers, right, these Zionist
hijackers of Judaism, these these Jewish radicals. The
official IDF spokesman, his name is Daniel Hagari,
he said, quote, the emphasis is on damage,
not on accuracy.
So, you know, this is defensive. This is
minimizing collateral damage. No. The intention is to
maximize
collateral damage. He admits it. The former prime
minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, when when he
was asked about Palestinian babies and hospital incubators
who need electricity to survive,
this is what he said. This is a
direct quote. Are you seriously talking about Palestinian
civilians?
We are fighting Nazis.
I'm not feeding electricity or water to my
enemies. That's how he put it. I'm not
feeding electricity or water to my I'm just
quoting. And then you mentioned also
a top UN official,
Craig Maccyber. He just resigned. He was the
director of the New York office
of the United Nations High Commissioner For Human
Rights. Here's a quote from him.
He said, quote, the whole the current wholesale
slaughter
of the Palestinian people rooted in an ethnonationalist
rooted in an ethnonationalist
colonial colonial settler ideology
and continuation of of decades
of their systematic persecution and purging
based entirely upon their status as Arabs and
coupled with explicit statements of intent
by leaders in the Israeli government and military
leaves no room for doubt. He means that
it's a genocide. He continues, what's more, the
governments of the United States, United Kingdom,
and much of Europe are wholly complicit
in the horrific assault, end quote.
Now what's interesting is that modern anti Zionist
activists have been recently citing studies
that demonstrate that, Levantine Arabs, including Palestinian Arabs,
have genetic continuity with the ancient Canaanites. In
other words, they are descendants of Canaanites.
Why are anti Zionists highlighting these studies? Well,
this relates to this debate about the land
who was there first. Right? As like as
one Zionist put it, he said the word
Jew comes from Judea.
The the word Arab comes from Arabia. So
who's occupying whose land? In other words, the
Jews were there first. But now these recent
studies are being cited to show that the
Palestinians are actually descendants of the ancient Canaanites
who were there before the Israelites. Even Philip
Jenkins says this, it's without doubt that the
Palestinians
are descendants to Canaanites. He just said But
the thing is, like, I don't know. I
mean, you can imagine how this argument can
actually embolden these religious Zionists of Israel.
You know? You see, they admit they're Canaanites
and it's our duty to wipe them out
according to mitzvah number 528.
Now there are 2 more mitzvot that deserve
our immediate attention. And I'm almost done here.
Just a few more minutes.
Mitzvah number 604.
So this is based on Deuteronomy 2519.
Cut off the seed of Amalek.
Okay?
That is destroy them utterly.
Against Amalek.
And number 605,
based on the same verse, blot out the
memory of Amalek and don't forget Amalek.
So extremist messianic Israeli settlers often invoke Amalek
as a justification for the massacre and displacement
of the Palestinian people. And by the way,
just the other day, the Israeli authorities in
the West Bank were literally passing out assault
rifles
to Israeli settlers. I don't know if you
saw that. I mean, settlers who are illegally
occupying the West Bank now have assault weapons,
military grade weapons.
But anyway, who is Amalek? So Amalek
was the 1st nation to fight against the
Israelites according to the Torah. Right?
So they're also called the Amalekites.
So as you mentioned, first Samuel 15,
King Saul was ordered by God to commit
shedem against the Amalekites, to exterminate their men,
women and children and animals, total extermination.
King Saul, however, spared
the Amalekite King Agag. His name was Agag.
Now, in the book of Esther chapter 3,
we're told that Haman,
the Persian minister of Xerxes was an Agagite.
In other words, he was a descendant of
Agag. In other words, he was an Amalekite.
And Haman wanted to exterminate the Jews according
to Esther.
So this is the MO of the Amalekites.
They want to destroy Israel.
Okay. Now the Torah also says
it says,
The lord will be at war with Amalek
from generation
to generation.
Midor door means from generation
to generation. You know, forever
perpetual warfare
against Amalek. The lord declares
perpetual warfare
against Amalek. Now traditional modern traditional Jews,
they tend to interpret these commandments
against Amalek on strictly genealogical
grounds. In other words, any and all descendants
of Amalek must be killed irrespective of their
culture.
This is why when it comes to the
7 nations,
conversion, they can actually convert and become a
a Ben Noach, you know, that follow the
Noahitic laws, or they can actually convert to
Judaism and become a Ben Barit.
But there's difference of opinion about accepting the
conversion of a of an Amalekite.
However, many would argue
since it is impossible to identify who is
a true Amalekite,
this companion this, commandment simply cannot be fulfilled.
Other traditional authorities like Maimonides,
limit the application of the mitzvah to destroy
Amalek to a Jewish king. In other words,
only an anointed Jewish king could carry out
this mitzvah.
Yet other traditional authorities maintain
that the commandment only applies to the reign
of the Messiah
and that this is after he's taken full
possession of Eretz Yisrael, the covenant land or
the promised land.
However, common among Jewish Zionists
is this horrible teaching
that the term Amalek refers to any enemy
of the Jews in any generation.
You know, it's the mindset of Amalek. It's
the mentality of Amalek. The culture of Amalek
continues perpetually.
So the Romans were the Amalek of their
day,
the Nazis were the Amalek of you understand?
They have to find an Amalek in every
generation.
There was a Jewish professor at UCLA
and a Zionist,
Deborah Lipstadt,
who famously famously referred to British historian of
German history, David Irving,
as, quote, a a contemporary
Amalek.
Right? In other words, he deserves to be
killed for his views on history. I mean,
that's basically what she's saying. This is a
dog whistle.
Now
Oh, if you want to I recommend this
book, by the way, by,
an Israeli historian,
now teaching history at, you know, ex university
as professor. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
This is highly regarded book, very meticulous research
from authentic primary sources in the IDF's own
archives, no less, showing that ethnic cleansing,
that this is is, idea of extermination
was there right from the inception, the beginning
of Zionism. It's not some kind of late
kind of thing. This is right in the
the DNA of the ideology itself. Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly. And now, you know, guess upon whom
the modern Zionist apply
state of Israel is an Amalek.
Anyone who argues against
the legality
of the modern nationalistic
apartheid state of Israel. Apartheid even according to
Nelson Mandela,
you know, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter. But more
specifically, Iran has been called Amalek. I mean,
several days ago, the Israeli minister of economy,
his name is Nir Barkat,
he threatened to, quote, wipe Iran off the
face of the earth. Those are his words.
And then we have these neocon
war hawks in our government, the American government,
who have unconditional
obedience to Israel,
right, who do who do nothing but escalate
the situation. And now they're recycling all of
this 911 rhetoric, axis of evil, all this
type of thing. It's all coming back. Here's
another quote. This goes back to modern Amalek.
The former director of Israel Land Authority, his
name is Ben, Benzie Lieberman. He actually said
this in 2004. He's a director, so these
are people in positions of power.
This is a direct quote. The Palestinians are
Amalek.
We will destroy them, end quote.
So now you understand what what he means.
I mean, he's invoking herem, genocide of the
Palestinian people. This goes back to something that
you mentioned, Ilan Poppe, right, the the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine. This is called Plan Dalet,
Plan Dalet in 1947.
Right. That's in the Hebrew. D. Yeah. Plan
d. The Hebrew d. Got plan d, state
enacted Israeli terrorism.
So these are religious extremists
drunk on messianic fervor. They're trying to inaugurate
they're trying to inaugurate their messianic age with
a massive human sacrifice.
This is really evil stuff here.
You know what? And I I truly believe
this. I truly believe that Jewish people who
are good and just and compassionate,
I truly believe from the bottom of my
heart that when the real Messiah comes, they
will believe in him and follow him.
Now now, Paul, I I I mentioned some
of these
I mentioned some of these things about Amalek,
over a week ago.
And then the the very next day,
Bibi himself,
right
The prime minister of Israel. Prime Minister of
Israel, you must remember what Amalek has done
to you. Another dog whistle. I mean, the
initiated know knows what he means, right? But
now we know what he means.
Yeah. We know it. You know what it
means. I know what it means. I'm just
shocked to how how few people in the
western media have bothered to report this at
all. Like, the BBC Amazing. It's just not
bother me. It's just not interesting. Why mention
it? But, of course, it says the dog
whistle doesn't know the Bible for Jews who
are well versed in the the Torah. They
will recognize what's being said then. It is
a it is a call to genocide. Yeah.
And his appeal to their, you know, 3000
year legacy going back to Joshua then Nun.
Yes. We know what the Tanakh says about
what Joshua did. He implemented kedem upon the
ancient Canaanites.
Right? So this guy, you know, Netanyahu, he
he even blamed the Holocaust and the Palestinians.
This was years ago. Yes. I don't know.
I mean, normal,
Norman Finkelstein, he said that this claim is,
quote, beyond the lunacy.
I mean, he blamed the holocaust and the
Palestinian and he's he's out of his mind.
But what else does the Torah say about
Amalek?
This is what it says. It
says. So that's Deuteronomy 2519.
In Arabic, it says,
you must blot out the very mention of
Amalek
from under the sun. So right now, as
you said, in western public discourse,
there is a disturbing trend. Any defense,
any defense
of the Palestinian people is being branded as
supporting terrorism
and anti Semitic. It's a 2 for 1
now.
Why this trend?
Well, it seems like it seems to me
the remembrance of Amalek, the very mention of
Amalek must be blotted out. And for these,
you know, Zionist extremists and zealots,
Palestine is Amalek
and Western media is totally controlled by Zionist
propaganda. So now just having a Palestinian flag
is seen as supporting terrorism and hating Jews.
I mean, people are losing their jobs across
multiple industries
for uttering
even a word of support for Palestinian lives,
for for speaking out against the carpet bombing
of civilians.
Meanwhile, right now in Palestine,
Palestinian families are debating about whether they should
all stay in one place or to split
up because if they split up and and
Israel drops bombs, at least their entire family
won't be killed. This is what Palestinians are
doing right now. This is their discussion
over the dinner table. This is what a
guy's he's sitting there with his wife wife
and children. This is what they're discussing.
And of course, the Zionists, you know, they
release fake images, fake recordings.
Look up the Hannibal directive. God knows what
they can do with AI. It's all tricksterism.
They have to manufacture consent.
I mean, look, just you read the book
of Genesis. I invite people.
Read Genesis. Okay. The person of Jacob
in the book of Genesis. This isn't the
Torah. This is not the Quran.
In Genesis, Jacob is a master trickster
who no matter what he does,
God continues to bless him. He has unconditional
divine support for his deception.
And Jacob was People I mean, I I
I actually read the book of Genesis, again,
in this version, the Jewish Study Bible.
It's Tanakh, published by Oxford University,
Press.
And, this is interesting because it it is
this is, you know, 200 or so top
Jewish scholars,
experts in the Hebrew Bible,
translated, and the commentary as well. So you
get fascinating insights, the Jewish understanding of the
Bible. Rather than reading the Old Testament through
Christian eyes, which I've always done before. Now
reading the Jewish Bible through you guys, hey,
that's an idea.
But what you're saying about Jacob being a
trickster,
they're they're very blunt about this. And but
let's see. This is somehow,
accepted and part of the the glorious what
you're saying is is pretty accurate, but there's
a shocking story. The the lack of morality
shown by Yeah. Seminal foundational
patriarchs of of what became Israel. Exactly. It's
quite shocking, the amorality of it. Yeah. Yeah.
And, of course, Jacob is Israel. And at
the end of at the end of the
book of, yeah, exactly. That's his name. At
the end of the book of Genesis, even
Jacob's son, Joseph, ends up tricking the Egyptians.
He tricks them and ends up enslaving them.
You know, I don't I don't remember reading
that in the Quran about Yusuf, alaihis salaam.
The Quran corrects these narratives.
But Genesis, as you said, this is the
primary text of Judaism. And as they say,
if such are the clergy, then God bless
the congregation. Right? If if one of their
greatest patriarchs described in their most sacred book
who is also the namesake of their nation
was a master trickster. What do we expect
from Zionist Israel?
And then we have we have these
Sorry. Just one quick thing, which I
wrote. This is this is this is a
study based on the historical critical method. So
he had trained historians
Yeah. Scriptural scholars. They're not fundamentalists.
And yet, when they started to mention Abraham
or Abraham, who became Abraham, name change,
he is referred to repeatedly
as a Jew,
as an Israelite.
Now
if
you read Genesis, you'll realize that Israel or
Jacob,
was a historical figure that came much, much
later. Abraham was not a Jew. He was
not an Israelite, but any this is anachronism,
and anachronism Yeah. Is a sin, if you
like, an intellectual sin in historical methodology. You
don't even put later ideas back into
the text. That's precisely
what they have done. In this Oxford University
critical edition of the Jewish study bible Strange.
Make it up,
that they they they're basically owning Abraham for
themselves. And what does the Quran say? Well,
you can tell tell us sort of, Abdi,
what does the Quran say about Abraham?
Yeah.
Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian.
You're right. It's anachronism.
He was he was he he was
a Muslim in a sense that he submitted
his will to God and a monotheist and
he certainly did not associate partners
with God.
You know, it's just it's just so amazing.
And then you have, you know, all these
kind of gullible and cowardly people who say,
you know, this is not the same as
Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
In Hiroshima, the express purpose was to target
civilians. But in Palestine,
the Israeli military
says that they don't intend to kill civilians.
It just happens on accident. So it's okay.
I mean, just absolute nonsense. And, I mean,
how disturbing is this? I mean, according to
that logic, I I mean, Israel could kill
10,000 children, 20,000 children. In theory, a 1000000
children and just say, oh, that was not
our intention.
You know? So for these these cowardly apologists
for Israel, my question is, you know, when
will it be enough for you to grow
a backbone and condemn Israel? How many more
children
have to be cut to pieces? How many
whole families
have to be taken off the planet before
you grow a backbone and condemn what is
obviously a genocide?
And and I'll end with this.
The prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasalam, he said,
Right? He said that prayer supplication is the
weapon of the believer. And there may be
some weakness in this chain but it's true
in its meaning.
So let's pray for the people of Gaza.
Let's pray for their souls. Pray for ourselves.
The Quran
says, and save yourselves
and your families from the fire. I mean,
deception is everywhere and really, it's just The
Western media is gaslighting the world and maybe
the oppressed are depicted as the oppressors and
vice versa. It's almost like the world is
under a spell.
Again, very I mean, the prophet used to
pray. There's a beautiful dua.
He's
So he said,
oh, god. Show us the truth as truth
and give us the ability to follow it.
And show us falsehood as falsehood and give
us the ability to shun it. And this
Dua is so crucial for us today.
Right? So just to the viewers, ask ask
god to give you the ability
to see through the smoke and mirrors. There's
a hadith,
in the sunun of Abu Dawud, the prophet
sallallahu alaihi wasallam said, Mansami abid Dajjal
Falyan
aanhu for Allahhi
inna rajula yatihi wa huya sibu anahu minun
for yet to be.
The prophet said, let him who hears of
the impostor messiah keep a distance from him.
I swear by Allah that a man will
come to him thinking he's a firm believer
and then end up following
the the imposter messiah because of confused ideas
roused in him by the Dajjal.
I mean, the the imposter messiah, the tribulation
of the imposter messiah is is
the worst of tribulations.
You know and so this is very serious
business and we have to take care of
ourselves.
Abu Herrera he said
The messenger of god used to seek refuge
in Allah for the punishment of *, the
punishments of the grave, and for the imposter
messiah.
So protect yourselves against the antichrist. Hold fast
to the kitab and sunnah.
A lot of Muslims are confused right now.
They're in a state of hira. It's confusion
and chaos. But we also have a Dalalatul
Hayrin. We also have a guide for the
perplexed
and it's a better guide. With all due
respect to the rambam,
It's Al Kitabu Sunnah.
Right? We have the Quran, we have the
Sunnah.
Hold fast to the
the rope that, you know, the lifeline that
God extends and that's the Quran according to
the hadith.
Alaykum bisunati, the Prophet said, right? He said,
hold fast to my sunnah. Establish the prayer.
This is very important. Right?
If
we're not praying 5 times a day, there's
there's major issues. We need to establish the
prayer.
We need
to pray, make dua for our brethren.
So I'll just I'll just end with this
this du'a, this prayer, it's very short.
And this is our weapon, this is our
weapon.
So and means the prophet said, oh god,
I seek refuge,
in you from the punishment of *
and from the punishment of the grave and
from the tribulations of life and death and
from the evil of the tribulations of the
imposter messiah.
So may God,
may God forgive all of us. May God
raise up our states.
May, may God,
alleviate
the pain,
and the,
and the misery of the Muslims around the
world.
And may God educate us and give us
istiqaama. May he give us this uprightness in
the religion and courage,
to speak the truth without fear, Inshallah. I
mean,
thank you so much, Paul.
Thank you very much, doctor Ali Atay. Very
interesting, harrowing, but necessary,
you know, commentary and discussion of these
extraordinary texts, which are not very well known,
particularly these texts of terror, if you like,
in in the Jewish scriptures. Nothing like that
in the Quran, of course,
and not well known. But they are being
utilized, recycled,
alluded to,
dog whistle, as you put it.
Mhmm. This is ongoing.
And many people in the press don't seem
to know about this because the media don't
amplify,
explore, investigate. They're always boasting how they're investigating
things. We don't mention these things, but they're
there. If you just look at them, they're
not hidden, really.
So, yeah, this is the the shocking,
story, and, obviously, we'll we'll keep a a
a prayerful eye on all these things.
And, yeah, so thank you once again, doctor
Elliot Taif for your time. And it's always
a pleasure and an education. You have a
huge following on blogging theology,
and I'm sure everyone will benefit from what
you say. So thank you very much. Thank
you so much, Paul.