Imu Shalev: Welcome to A Book Like No Other.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta, and made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. Thank you, Shari and Nathan. 

Hi, I'm Imu Shalev, and each season of this podcast I'm joined by my teacher and friend Rabbi David Fohrman to explore a text of his choice. This season, we’re gonna be examining something that we’re all pretty familiar with — God's Revelation at Mount Sinai. 

The Revelation story plays a central role in both the Torah and the history of the nation of Israel. In Revelation, with an awesome display of thunder and lightning, God revealed himself to Israel. And He lovingly tells them that they are treasured to Him and that He has chosen them to be His nation over all others.

Now, it was specifically this idea of chosenness that was on Rabbi Fohrman's mind when we sat down together. He opened our conversation by talking about the challenging and uncomfortable implications of God choosing one nation over another.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Hey Imu, I'm excited to get a chance to learn with you again. It's been too long.

Imu: I'm really excited for another season of A Book Like No Other, and I'm ready to learn more Torah with you.

Rabbi Fohrman: I wanted to share with you something that has been percolating in my mind. It’s actually about the Revelation narrative.

You know, one of the things that the Revelation story talks about is this promise that God makes to Israel. There's God coming out of the clouds and says, “Hey, you're very special. You're going to be treasured to Me in a way that nobody else is.” And I mean, like, how do we even understand that? What in the world is this thing of God favoring us? Why should we be favored?

And it's a promise that has gotten Israel into trouble over time. At some level, the people of Israel are a sibling to other nations in the world. And yet there's this question — does Father love them more? And it's like, boy, do the alarm bells go off there. The Sages even talk about Seenai, this word for Sinai, as being a play on words for sina, a bastion of hatred, or hatred coming out of this. And there's this question, you know, did God just make the great mistake which is favoritism?

Imu: Now, this is certainly a challenge. How could God choose only one nation, knowing that showing favoritism would inevitably lead to jealousy and even hatred? I mean, this a classic problem with Revelation, one that Jewish thinkers have been struggling with for centuries. What is the purpose of chosenness?

But I was curious why Rabbi Fohrman was engaging with this issue now. And, to no one's surprise, it was of course the text of the Torah itself. You see, Rabbi Fohrman had noticed something, something that caused this topic of chosenness to bubble up to the surface for him in a new way. He had been studying the story of Revelation and Exodus and was surprised to find that its wording echoed with an unexpected story in Genesis.

Now, this kind of intertextuality or seeming repetition always gets Rabbi Fohrman thinking. Connections like these are the Torah’s way of hinting that two stories should be read together, that they inform one another, often bringing out new layers of meaning. And in this case, the connections got them thinking anew about this issue of chosenness.

But would these connections help us come to a new elevated, even enlightened understanding of chosenness, or just complicate matters even further? Only time, and the text, would tell. So join me, and let's see what Rabbi Fohrman found and where this journey would take us.

Our journey begins in the story of Revelation, with Exodus chapter 19, verse five. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So as you begin to read Exodus 19, there's a little prologue to Revelation. God says: וְעַתָּה אִם־שָׁמוֹעַ תִּשְׁמְעוּ בְּקֹלִי וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־בְּרִיתִי — And now, if you listen to My voice and you observe My covenants, וִהְיִיתֶם לִי סְגֻלָּה מִכׇּל־הָעַמִּים — then you'll be special amongst all the nations.

I want to focus on those opening words of verse 5, וְעַתָּה אִם־שָׁמוֹעַ תִּשְׁמְעוּ בְּקֹלִי. It turns out that there's one other time in the Torah, and one other time only, that you have the particular confluence of the word וְעַתָּה, “and now;” the word sh’ma, “to listen;” and the word בְּקֹלִי, “to my voice.” Where's the only other time that you have attah sh’ma b’koli? And I'll give you a hint…

Imu: Wait, don't give me a hint. It's in Genesis. Is this what Rebecca tells Jacob, “Now listen to my voice,” and then tells him to take the — 

Rabbi Fohrman: That is exactly it.

Imu: Yay, I got it!

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, you got it. Give that man a free Coke. Genesis 27, verse 8.

The background: Isaac told Eisav to go out in the fields and hunt him some game so that he can bless him, and Eisav goes out to do it. But at that point, Rivka, who has overheard this, calls Jacob and says, “Hey, you know, I was listening to Dad. Dad told Eisav to go out in the fields, hunt some game, bring him these delicacies so he can bless him before he dies.”

“Here's the deal, kiddo: וְעַתָּה בְנִי שְׁמַע בְּקֹלִי — And now, my son, listen to my voice, לַאֲשֶׁר אֲנִי מְצַוָּה אֹתָךְ — to that which I am going to command you. I want you to go to the flocks, I want you to find these rams, and I'll make them into these delicacies, and you're going to bring them to Dad so that he can bless you. You're going to get this blessing, not Eisav.”

Imu: Yeah, and also she says, “And now my son, listen to my voice and to all that I am מְצַוָּה אֹתָךְ — and all that I'm commanding you,” right? She's giving him a mitzvah. 

Rabbi Fohrman: She's giving him a mitzvah. Now, what's God about to do?

Imu: He's about to give mitzvot in Exodus 19, verse 7, two verses later, when Moshe refers to it as “the things that God had commanded him.” God's saying, “If you listen to My voice and you keep My covenant…” Moses refers to that as a type of mitzvah.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. And by the way, Rebecca, who is she to Jacob? 

Imu: Mom.

Rabbi Fohrman: And God? Who is He to us?

Imu: He’s our Parent.

Rabbi Fohrman: Parent in Heaven. An earthly parent tells us to listen to their voice, and now a Heavenly Parent is about to tell us to listen to Their voice, to that which He commands us.

Imu: It is also interesting that what God is telling us in Exodus is, “You're going to be special to Me from all the nations.”

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right.

Imu: You're like, “I've seen this, Imu.” Rebecca is telling Jacob, “Hey, you've got to be special to us from the other kids,” right? “We're about to choose our favorite kid over here.”

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. Two stories of choosing your favorite kid.

Imu: Okay, now I understood why chosenness was on Rabbi Fohrman's mind. While these stories in Exodus and Genesis are certainly very different, they are two stories of chosenness. Rebecca chooses Jacob; God chooses Israel.

But even more than that, the Torah seems to be nudging us to see this similarity by having God echo Rebecca's exact words. It's as if, in the Revelation story, the Torah wants us to see God as playing the role of Rebecca from Genesis, and Israel then takes on the role of Jacob. 

But thinking about this connection a little bit more, it really does create added complications when it comes to the topic of chosenness. You see, the story of Jacob stealing the blessings is a challenging one. It's a story that Rabbi Fohrman presents in a pretty negative light, even referring to it as “The Deception.”

While we certainly have reverence for the patriarchs and matriarchs, the text tells us a difficult story, one of Rebecca encouraging and assisting Jacob to deceive his father and then steal the blessing, causing irreparable damage to the fabric of their family. (For a full examination of Rabbi Fohrman's treatment of this story, see the links in the show notes.) But going forward with the assumption that this is a challenging story, well, that made a connection between Revelation and the deception of Isaac pretty uncomfortable.

Rabbi Fohrman: Now I grant you, Imu, at face value, this seems to have nothing to do with the story of Revelation. There's nothing sanctified or wonderful or holy or Godly about this. It's just terrible. It's a moment of shame. It's a moment of deception. Mom is about to commit, seemingly, this dastardly act to literally put her son up to deception, and God appropriates these words within Revelation itself. It seems like God is about to make the same awful mistake of Genesis 27 all over again.

But it's God, and God is quoting Genesis 27, and God knows how badly that turned out. Jacob lived his life on the lam, fearing retribution from Eisav for decades because of this. And it's like, now we're doing this again? Like, what in the world is going on?

Now, it is possible that it's a coincidence. Every once in a while, a phrase can get used twice. There's nothing that handcuffs God and says you can't use a phrase a second time. It's not necessarily significant. But it might be significant.

Imu: A corner piece does not a puzzle make.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. A corner piece does not a puzzle make. But in Aleph Beta methodology, this is what I would call a corner piece. It's something which is so significant, that hits you over the head so greatly if you know biblical language, that you find yourself thinking, “Oh my gosh, I've heard that before.”

So what if you said, despite the strangeness and the connection here, “I wonder if there's something there?” And you looked for more. What if you found another corner piece, and another corner piece? At a certain point in time, you start feeling like it's not coincidental.

Imu: It was pretty clear that Rabbi Fohrman had already come to that point himself; that he didn't think that this was just some coincidental textual link between Revelation and Deception, despite how odd and uncomfortable the connection between these two stories was. But why was he so certain?

Well, it seemed that he had found more, as he put it, meaning more textual links between Revelation and Deception. So Rabbi Fohrman took us back into the Revelation story, moving a little bit backwards in the text to Exodus 19, verses 3 and 4.

Rabbi Fohrman: God calls out to Moses and says: כֹּה תֹאמַר לְבֵית יַעֲקֹב וְתַגֵּיד לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל — This is what I want you to say to the house of Jacob. אַתֶּם רְאִיתֶם אֲשֶׁר עָשִׂיתִי לְמִצְרָיִם — you've seen what I've done to Egypt, וָאֶשָּׂא אֶתְכֶם עַל־כַּנְפֵי נְשָׁרִים — How I've lifted you up on wings of eagles, וָאָבִא אֶתְכֶם אֵלָי — and I have brought you to Me.

Imu: There it is, Exodus 19, verse 3. בֵית יַעֲקֹב, “Yaakov.” very rare in Torah. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Very rare, very rare. 

Okay, so Imu, I'm going to actually take this phrase, וָאֶשָּׂא אֶתְכֶם עַל־כַּנְפֵי נְשָׁרִים וָאָבִא אֶתְכֶם אֵלָי, and break it into three parts:

Part Number One: וָאֶשָּׂא אֶתְכֶם — to lift up. Part Number Two, עַל־כַּנְפֵי נְשָׁרִים — wings of eagles. And Part Number Three, וָאָבִא אֶתְכֶם אֵלָי — to bring you to Me.

Where else in the Torah do we have a confluence of these three things in that order? A) Lifting up, B) wings of birds, and 3) bringing something to me. So I'll give you a hint: Not only are there parallels between the story of Revelation and the story of Jacob's deception of Isaac and Eisav, but the parallels proceed in exactly the same order.

If you open up to Genesis 27 and you go to that last parallel we saw, and you go back just a little bit, you'll see the earlier parallel to “lifting up,” “wings of birds,” and “bring to me.” 

Imu: Okay, I see “lift up” and “bring to me.” So Isaac says to Eisav: וְעַתָּה שָׂא־נָא כֵלֶיךָ — Lift up your bow and arrow, תֶּלְיְךָ וְקַשְׁתֶּךָ — go get your hunting tools. וְצֵא הַשָּׂדֶה — Go out into the field and hunt for me. And bring them to me, וְהָבִיאָה לִּי, in verse 4. (Genesis 27:3-4).

Rabbi Fohrman: Same language: הָבִיאָה לִּי — Bring to me. So “lift up” and “bring to me,” but in the middle, can you find the hidden “wings of birds?” 

Imu: I don’t see birds…

Rabbi Fohrman: So I'll give you a hint.

Imu: Go ahead, I'll take a hint.

Rabbi Fohrman: The hint is, what kind of bird is an eagle?

Imu: It is a predator.

Rabbi Fohrman: A predator. These are big, scary birds, the apex predators in the avian world. What is Isaac telling Esau to do?

Imu: To hunt, in the same way that an eagle might hunt? 

Rabbi Fohrman: What does he hunt with? A bow and arrow. And what does a God- made hunter hunt with? An eagle hunts with his claws, with his beak. But here's the thing: When man-made hunters hunt, it turns out they mimic God-made hunters.

How does a bow and arrow work? Something flies through the air and kills.

Imu: Uh-huh. Oh, interesting. Okay, this is trippy, I'll give you that. It's like a mechanical bird. 

Rabbi Fohrman: It's like a mechanical bird. It pierces with its triangular thing, just like the eagle. It uses speed, just like the eagle. It flies through the air, just like the eagle. And what do I do to the arrow to make sure that it actually goes where I aim it to go? 

Imu: You put a feather on it?

Rabbi Fohrman: I put feathers on it. I create a tail out of feathers, bird feathers. I mimic the God-made hunter with my man-made hunting tools. 

Imu: So putting this together, I think the bird one was the most of a stretch, but you definitely have the שָׂא־נָא and the וְהָבִיאָה לִּי. So that's like a sandwich, and the middle of the sandwich is the “wings of the eagle,” which turns out to be the bow and arrow.

Imu: Yeah, I'm not sure I was totally sold on that bird-arrow connection, but the rest of the parallel, that was certainly there. In the Deception story, Isaac explicitly told Eisav to lift up his hunting tools and bring him food. And then, in the Revelation story, God said He lifted us up on wings of eagles and brought us to Him.

So the parallel is definitely there, but something was bothering me and it wasn't really the “wings of birds” issue. As I reflected for a moment on this new parallel between Revelation and Deception, it actually made the connection, while stronger, also even more confusing.

In the previous parallel that Rabbi Fohrman had shown me, God had been playing the role of Rebecca, and by extension Israel was therefore taking on the role of Jacob. But now, in this new parallel, God seemed to be playing the role of Isaac. God switched parents, and following that logic, the implication was that Israel was now playing the role of Eisav, which seemed even more odd. And all of this is just piling up on the baseline issue that I was having, of it not making any sense for God to be replaying the story of deception at Revelation at all.

Now, I wasn't alone in that feeling. Rabbi Fohrman was right there with me.

Rabbi Fohrman: So there's this tension here. On the one hand, there's this part of me that's rebelling against seeing this really difficult and painful story, at some level, as being connected to Revelation, but the text is starting to sound like it might be. I mean, these are two phrases that the only other time they appear other than Revelation is in the story of Deception.

But you could still dismiss this and say, like, “I don't know, this makes no sense. I don't see why these stories should be connected. Every fiber of my being is saying Genesis 27 has nothing to do with Exodus 19. I don't want it to have anything to do with Exodus 19. The implications would be too terrible for it to have anything to do with Exodus 19.”

So maybe all of this is a figment of our crazy imagination. You'd need to see more.

Imu: Yeah, I definitely needed to see more. If we were going to really attempt to try and make any sense out of the connection between Revelation and Deception and assume that this connection had something meaningful to teach us about chosenness, then I really wanted another solid parallel — which is exactly what Rabbi Fohrman had in store for me.

We dove back into the text of the Revelation story, jumping ahead to when God actually descends upon the mountain. When He does, there's thunder, there's lightning, and as it turns out, quite a bit of trembling.

This is Exodus 19, verse 16.

And it says: וַיֶּחֱרַד כׇּל־הָעָם אֲשֶׁר בַּמַּחֲנֶה — So the people are trembling.

Rabbi Fohrman: Now, this notion of trembling, it's not just the people that tremble, right? Somebody else trembles in the story, too. Who is that?

Imu: So I did a little Command-F and I searched for “trembling,” and the trembling that my trusty, dusty computer took me to was not the people trembling but that the mountain was trembling.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. וַיֶּחֱרַד כׇּל־הָהָר מְאֹד — and the mountain trembled very greatly (Exodus 19:18). Why was the mountain trembling? What might have made the mountain tremble?

Imu: There's, like, thunder and lightning?

Rabbi Fohrman: It was a thunderstorm. That's what mountains do in thunderstorms. That's all the text is saying. That's what I would have thought, but maybe there's a connection between the trembling of the people and the trembling of the mountain, right?

In other words, why did the people tremble? The people trembled because the Master of the universe was coming into the world. So when the text says, just a few short verses later, that the mountain was doing the same thing the people did, maybe the mountain had the same recognition as the people, right?

Imu: Like, literarily, it would be inelegant if that weren't true, right? I wouldn't use the same word to describe two different phenomena. If the people are trembling because this is an awesome event, it feels like the mountain is getting in on the act. The mountain is feeling like, “Wow, this is an awesome event,” and it, too, is taking on the same verb that the people took on.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. Now, Imu: וַיֶּחֱרַד כׇּל־הָהָר מְאֹד — And the mountain, it trembled greatly. That phrase, וַיֶּחֱרַד מְאֹד, that something or someone trembled greatly, that actually appears only one other time elsewhere in the Bible. When else does someone or something tremble greatly? וַיֶּחֱרַד מְאֹד.  

Imu: I think this is Isaac when he discovers that he blessed the wrong kid. He trembles. Does it say he trembles מְאֹד?

Rabbi Fohrman: It certainly does. Give that man a second free Coke. That is exactly right. Genesis 27, verse 33: וַיֶּחֱרַד יִצְחָק חֲרָדָה גְּדֹלָה עַד־מְאֹד. It's the moment when Isaac realizes what really happened, that the child standing before him was not the child he thought it was.

And when he figures it out: וַיֶּחֱרַד יִצְחָק חֲרָדָה גְּדֹלָה עַד־מְאֹד. It's the only time, other than this, that someone or something trembles greatly.

Now, let's assume that when God wrote Exodus 19, He wanted you to be thinking about Genesis 27, as strange and as different as Genesis 27 is. What does the trembling of Isaac signify? What does it show? 

Imu: I would say that Isaac himself has experienced Revelation. That's what the parallels would suggest, that something was revealed to him.

Rabbi Fohrman: Well, so sure, you can do that. You can take the Revelation story and impose it upon the Isaac story. But what if we went the other way? What if Genesis 27 is acting as a commentary on Exodus 19? Saying, “You want to know why the mountain trembled? The mountain trembled for the same reason Isaac trembled. It realized something. It realized the identity of the One standing in front of it.”

That's why Isaac trembled. He didn't expect the one to be there who was actually there, and would realize that, “Oh my gosh, it's you!” Isaac was seized with trembling. That must have been why the mountain was trembling. The mountain didn't expect the Master of the universe to be in the world. You think that a mountain is too stupid to have that revelation just because the mountain's not alive? No, when the God of life, when the Source of all life comes into the world, things are enlivened. Even a mountain wakes up and says, “Oh my gosh, it's my Creator.”

The mountain and the people are trembling for the same reason, at some level, that Isaac's trembling. “I never thought it could be you, but it was you the whole time,” and you tremble. The mountain’s gonna tremble. Everyone's trembling in front of the Master.

Imu: Okay, this parallel seemed really strong. Isaac in Genesis and the people and the mountains in Exodus were all trembling greatly. And this new parallel had fascinating implications as well. These two stories weren't just stories of chosenness, they were also both stories of Revelation.

However, one was an honest and open revelation, a revelation of the truth that God was standing before Israel. He had been with them the whole time. The other was a revelation of a deception, of Isaac realizing that it had really been Jacob standing before him the entire time. So they were two very different experiences of revelation. What were we supposed to make of that?

But putting that question aside, we had finally done what we were out to do, which is establish that there is a really strong and troubling connection between the Revelation story and the Deception story. But now, I was fired up to understand the meaning of this connection. How does it shed light on our problems with favoritism and chosenness?

So this is really, really cool. I'm definitely compelled that these two stories are connected, but I'm not yet there on the meaning of the connection. I don't really get why God would play dress-up with a very strange and painful and difficult story. Like, why, in a moment of Revelation, would we be replaying Yitzchak's blessing of his sons? And then, aside from it being uncomfortable, why would God take the problematic favoritism story and say, “I'm going to do Revelation by reprising a favoritism story?”

It's very, very strange, so I'm convinced that something's there. I'd love to see, when we mine it for its meaning, what we learn.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, and when the Torah plays intertextual games with us, it really is challenging us, right? But really, the challenge is always there.

Imu: Yeah, without the intertextual parallels, you still have a question on Exodus 19, which is God comes out of the clouds and says something really uncomfortable, which is that “I've chosen you from amongst all the other nations,” right? So you have this chosenness problem in question.

And then, if you know enough literary methodology and you read it all, God isn't covering over that problem. He's revealing it in spades. He's saying, “And by the way, speaking of choosing someone from all the other nations, I'm going to remind you all of the story where one father chooses one son over the other.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. So what I hope to show you the next time we meet, Imu, is what exactly it means to be a special nation. Is God really making the same mistake as Genesis 27, or is He redeeming that mistake? And I want to argue it's the latter. When we come back together, I want to show you why that's true.

Imu: I'm looking forward. I'm “trembling” with excitement. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Okie-doke, sounds good.

Imu: Yeah, that's where Rabbi Fohrman had left me. Here I was, all excited to unearth a whole new layer to the meaning of chosenness, and all he had left me with was textual connections between Revelation and Deception that raised way more questions than answers. Why was God taking on the role of both Isaac and Rebecca at Revelation? Why was God invoking a story of deception at Revelation at all? And again, what did these connections teach us about the concept of chosenness itself?

I, along with you all, would have to ponder that between now and our next session. But there was a glimmer of hope. Right before we ended, Rabbi Fohrman snuck in an idea, an idea that Revelation was some sort of redemption of the Deception story. What did he mean by that?

We'll both have to wait until the next episode. See you then!

This season of A Book Like No Other was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and me, Imu Shalev.  It was produced by Robby Charnoff. Our audio engineer is Hillary Guttman. 

A Book Like No Other’s managing producer is Adina Blaustein, and our senior producer is Tikva Hecht.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta, and made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. Thank you, Shari and Nathan. And thank you all for listening