Imu Shalev: Welcome to A Book Like No Other, a podcast about reading the Torah on its own terms. A Book Like No Other is a product developed by Aleph Beta and is made possible through the generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. 

Hi, I'm Imu Shalev. In each season of this podcast, I’m going to be joining my teacher and friend, Rabbi David Fohrman, and we’re going to be exploring a text of his choice. 

So what's on the docket for this season? Well, when it comes to studying Torah, there are the usual suspects, like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the Exodus — foundational stories we turn to again and again. But Rabbi Fohrman had something very different in mind for this season, and it is: the Tale of the Mekallel, the Blasphemer, a lesser-known episode buried deep, deep, deep in, of all places, the middle of Leviticus.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Leviticus is not much of a storybook. We've got all sorts of laws, not much in the way of stories. And all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, we get hit with this story, and it's a really painful story. It's a story of a Blasphemer, somebody who curses God. The death penalty is ultimately accorded to him.

Imu: That's funny. I imagine most people listening will not even know what you're talking about. Most people don't remember the story of the Mekallel, just the random verses about some random guy who curses God.

Random verses about some random guy — or a really painful story? Rabbi Fohrman and I were offering two really different framings for the same text. But when it comes to the Mekallel, there's actually some truth to both of them. 

Let me actually just give you the basics of the story: there’s a nameless man who enters the Israelite camp. Without saying a word, he just gets into a fight and then suddenly he curses God. What the people do when they hear that is, they bring him to Moses, and Moses brings his case before God for sentencing. The verdict of that case? Stone him, and the people do that. The end. 

You can see why Rabbi Fohrman calls this painful. A fight, a stoning, cursing God. Add to that this strange placement in Leviticus and how, without context or warning, the Torah inserts these heavy topics between the laws about the Tabernacle and the Jubilee year. It's just so strange. It’s very jarring, but it’s also random.

Maybe a better way to put it is that it’s self-enclosed, cut and dry. Someone does a terrible crime and he's punished for it. The Torah moves on from that story so quickly. There’s no prologue, there’s no epilogue. So if the Torah moves on so quickly, maybe we’re supposed to as well, and that’s kind of the way many of us treat this story. We know it’s there, we gloss over it, we move on.

But here’s the thing about the Torah, and the thing this podcast is kind of all about. It's also the thing you’ll see Rabbi Fohrman will prove to me once again over the season. A story like the Mekallel can seem cut and dry, like the text doesn't want us to pay too much attention or ask too many questions. But if you look a little closer, trust that every word in this Book is sacred and put there on purpose, then you're likely to find those words are full of oddities and small invitations into deeper and deeper layers of meaning. So what questions is the Torah begging us to ask about the Mekallel? We already had one – what was it doing in Leviticus? To find the rest of the questions, we turned, of course, to the text itself. So join me, let’s jump in and read together.

This is Leviticus chapter 24, verse 10.

Rabbi Fohrman: ​וַיֵּצֵא בֶּן־אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית וְהוּא בֶּן־אִישׁ מִצְרִי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל — and there went out the child of an Israelite woman, the child of an Egyptian man, בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל — into the midst of the children of Israel. וַיִּנָּצוּ בַּמַּחֲנֶה — And they fought in the camp, בֶּן הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִית וְאִישׁ הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִי — this child of the Israelite woman with an Israelite man. 

So Imu, let's just stop here ceremoniously. Tell me what strikes you as either odd or noteworthy.

Imu: I've got a gazillion questions already.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, so go ahead. I'm listening.

Imu: Sure. I guess I'll start in order. The verse says, “And he went out,” this son of the Israelite woman and Egyptian man. What did he go out from? 

Rabbi Fohrman: In other words, if it had in fact said, “and this person left the camp, and then did this,” I would at least understand what that meant. But instead, we actually get the reverse of that: וַיֵּצֵא — He goes out, בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל — into the midst of Israel. It seems like it's backwards. I have no context for where he's going out from. 

Okay, good. What else?

Imu: I mean, there's וַיִּנָּצוּ בַּמַּחֲנֶה. All of sudden, he just starts fighting? That, to me, would beg probably the biggest question in this verse, which is, why are they fighting? What are they fighting about?

Rabbi Fohrman: Why are they fighting? It's strange that we have a fight, and the fight seems to be important, and we know nothing about why they're fighting. 

Imu: It’s funny, I was just reading an interesting Twitter thread about storytelling. They said you can't say, “First this happened and then that happened.” It has to be, “First this happened, therefore that happened.” So here, this feels like bad storytelling. “This guy went out, and then there was a fight,” as opposed to, “this guy went out, and therefore there was a fight.”

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. 

Imu: So the text doesn't give us that explicit “therefore;” in essence, a reason why this man's going-out led to a fight. But we did notice that it gives us some seemingly extra details about the fighters and their identities that might imply their motivation. 

Rabbi Fohrman: The idea here seems to be that there's a child of mixed lineage; on the one hand, his mother is an Israelite, his father is a Mitzri, an Egyptian, and it sounds like he's fighting somebody who's not of mixed lineage. 

Imu: Yeah, totally

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. So he's just fighting a regular Israelite person. So we have a mixed lineage person fighting a regular Israelite person. 

Imu: Could the text be hinting that the Mekallel’s mixed lineage was causing tension with his full Israelite brethren, and therefore he got into a fight? That still leaves a lot unsaid. Even if there was tension, what caused it to escalate into violence at this moment between these people? We were just one verse in, but the story was already full of gaps, and let me tell you the truth — the next verse wasn't any better. 

Rabbi Fohrman: If you go into the next verse, we have another implied “therefore” that also seems questionable. Look at the next thing that happens: וַיִּקֹּב בֶּן־הָאִשָּׁה הַיִּשְׂרְאֵלִית אֶת־הַשֵּׁם — The child of the Israelite woman, he cursed the name of God.

Imu: As one does.

Rabbi Fohrman: As one does. Well, let me ask you this: Who would you imagine would curse at the end of a fight? The winner or the loser?

Imu: The loser

Rabbi Fohrman: So it sounds like we're hearing from the fact that he's cursing that he lost the fight. It sounds like he is the loser in some sense in this fight.

Imu: Right.

Rabbi Fohrman: You would imagine every good fight ends with the loser cursing the winner, right? But here, somehow, God gets pulled into the mix. What's God doing here? 

Imu: God won? 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's the big question mark. What does God have to do with this?

Imu: The man suddenly cursing God is definitely one of the paramount, inexplicable moments of the story. But when it comes to things coming out of nowhere, the end of the verse, though far less dramatic, certainly deserves honorable mention as well.

Rabbi Fohrman: וַיָּבִיאוּ אֹתוֹ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה — And they brought him to Moses, וְשֵׁם אִמּוֹ שְׁלֹמִית בַּת־דִּבְרִי לְמַטֵּה־דָן — and the name of his mother was Shlomit, the daughter of Divri, לְמַטֵּה־דָן — from the tribe of Dan.

We hear about not the identity of the person — the identity of the person who’s doing the cursing remains anonymous the whole time — but we hear, of all things, his mother's name and tribe, as if the tribe of Dan is important here. 

Imu: These details about the man's mother, like the Mekallel’s mixed lineage, felt a little like a tease, like these facts were supposed to help us make sense of this story, but it wasn't clear to me how. This man still felt like a mystery. We didn't know where he came from, why he got into a fight, or why he cursed G-d. But all right, let's keep going. 

So the last thing that happened was they brought the man to Moses and here's the next verse: וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ בַּמִּשְׁמָר לִפְרֹשׁ לָהֶם עַל־פִּי יְקוָה —And he was placed in custody until the decision of God should be made clear to them.

Compared to the earlier verses, this one felt a lot more straightforward, but it did strike me as odd that it was here at all. The story leaves out so many seemingly important details, and then all of a sudden, we're getting a play-by-play of every step of the legal process. It's a good question, right? Why do we need to know about this? 

Imu: Imagine we were writing a different version of the story: There's a guy who curses God, and then they go and they stone him. Would you have stopped and said, “Hey, what's going on here? They should have asked God what to do!”

Rabbi Fohrman: I mean, I would have, because unless you have a law in the Torah that defines this punishment, that would just be vigilante justice.

Imu: Okay maybe it wasn't a good question. But I wasn't ready to give up on it just yet. 

I hear you. So you think that them not knowing what to do and asking God was to give God an excuse to introduce a new law.

Rabbi Fohrman: Well, that's an interesting point. In other words, the question is, why does this law come specifically as a response to a situation, rather than as, “Here's what you do,” like any other law?

Imu: Our Torah would be a lot longer if all the laws in Mishpatim were introduced that way.

Imu: So, revised question: If the Torah wanted to teach us the law for cursing God, it could have just done that and never mentioned the Mekallel. Why couch this law in a story? And that got Rabbi Fohrman thinking… 

Rabbi Fohrman: We do have laws elsewhere in the Torah about cursing, it's just not cursing God. If you curse your mother and your father using the name of God, that's also a capital crime. So it would seem that cursing God was something really bad, but it just hadn't been talked about. To me, the fact that it hadn't been talked about might suggest that had it not been for the fact that there was a case of this, you almost would have considered this unmentionable. It would have been such a black swan that you wouldn't even bother talking about it because who's going to do this?

Think about it, there actually is something weird about it. Here's what's weird: What does it mean to curse God? What does it mean to curse your parents? It doesn't mean to say “Damn you” to your parents. That's not punishable by death. In the Torah's lexicon, cursing means using the name of God, the particular name of God, the sacred name of God, and using that to curse your parents.

Think about what it means to curse God, then. It means using the name of God to curse God. How weird is that? Here you are, you're imputing great value to the name of God because you're using that as the vehicle of a curse, and yet the object of the curse is the same God whose name you're invoking. It just doesn't make any sense.

Imu: You’re suggesting that to use the name of God to curse your parents, that's terrible. But to use the name of God to curse God is strangely an act of faith and also an act of terribleness at the same time.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, right? In other words, if I'm cursing someone, to curse is to revile, right? It's to render completely non-holy. And yet, to curse in the name of someone is to take the most sanctified Being I can and say, “Let that Being render curse upon you.” By implication, I'm holding that Being to be the greatest paragon of sanctity, and that's why I'm cursing in the name of that Being. So to curse God in the name of God is sort of the ultimate oxymoron, which might be why everyone's so flummoxed about what to do about it. 

Imu: We were supposed to just be asking questions on the text, not starting to answer them, but Rabbi Fohrman’s suggestion was intriguing. Maybe blasphemy was so inherently twisted that this law couldn't just be legislated or derived from precedent. It had to be experienced to be believed. Maybe that's why the Israelites only learned about it from an actual case, and I'll add, why we continue to learn about it from a narrative. Maybe.

The theory as a whole is speculative, but I think its real value wasn't in how it answered my question, but in the new questions it raised. How are we supposed to understand the perplexing nature of blasphemy? What compels a person who holds God's name to be sacred to weaponize that name against God himself?

Our read through the story was nearing its end — kind of. The dramatic events were wrapping up. After the Mekallel was put in jail, Moshe consults with God and God tells him what to do: הוֹצֵא אֶת־הַמְקַלֵּל אֶל־מִחוּץ לַמַּחֲנֶה — Take the Blasphemer outside the camp, וְסָמְכוּ כׇל־הַשֹּׁמְעִים אֶת־יְדֵיהֶם עַל־רֹאשׁוֹ — and let all who were within hearing distance lay their hands upon his head, וְרָגְמוּ אֹתוֹ כׇּל־הָעֵדָה — and let the community stone him.

But then, God says more than that — much more than that. 

Rabbi Fohrman: God's speech, you would think, would end right there. I mean, that would be a pretty clear way to end.

Imu: That's pretty final. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Pretty final. They didn't know what to do and God says, “Here's what you do.” But God takes the opportunity to tell some other things, too. 

The verse continues and says: וְאֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל תְּדַבֵּר לֵאמֹר — And to the people Israel, you say the following. אִישׁ אִישׁ כִּי־יְקַלֵּל אֱלֹהָיו וְנָשָׂא חֶטְאוֹ — Anyone who curses God bears his sin.

Imu: I'm just going to jump in here and summarize the rest of God's speech, since it’s actually a bit long. After God tells Moshe that the punishment for the Mekallel is stoning, God clarifies that for anyone who curses God the punishment is stoning.

We then get punishments for a couple other crimes:

1. Murder of a human being, and we’re told the punishment for that is death.
2. Killing of an animal, which God says demands restitution. The language that’s used here is the famous phrase, נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נָפֶשׁ — Soul for a soul. The sages understand that to mean monetary compensation. 
3. And finally, the third crime mentioned is maiming of a human being, which also demands compensation. And here we also have some famous language; עַיִן תַּחַת עַיִן שֵׁן תַּחַת שֵׁן — An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, which, again, the Sages interpret this as monetary.

Finally, the speech ends with a little summary which we can fade back into Rabbi Fohrman’s reading to catch.

Rabbi Fohrman: By way of summary, God says the bottom line is, if you strike an animal, you have to pay. If you strike a mortal blow to a human being and kill them, then the punishment is death. מִשְׁפַּט אֶחָד יִהְיֶה לָכֶם — The overriding thing that governs all these laws is that there's one law for everybody. כַּגֵּר כָּאֶזְרָח יִהְיֶה — A sojourner, a stranger is dealt with the same way as natural born citizen. כִּי אֲנִי יְקוָה אֱלֹקיכֶם — I'm the Lord your God. 

And then they go out, they carry out this punishment. The Blasphemer is killed, and that is the end of the story.

Imu: It was the end of the story, but Rabbi Fohrman had one last question to add to our list. There was something strange about God's speech.

Rabbi Fohrman: What's strange about the speech, I think, is that so much of it doesn't seem to be relevant. If I were Moshe listening to God's speech and I'm thinking, “God, I just needed to know the first part of this. Tell me what to do with the Mekallel. Why are you telling me this whole long rigamarole about all these other things that are not relevant to the story? I didn't ask You about the person who hit somebody. I didn't ask You about the person who killed somebody. I certainly didn't ask You about what happens if you hurt an animal.”

Imu: Not only that, but while you were reading, I was like, okay, maybe the text moved on from the Mekallel story to more laws. It is Leviticus after all. But then the very last verse of this story takes us back to the Mekallel story to tell you, no, we haven't moved on, free association, to do some other laws here. This is all part of the cursing story. It tells you, “And after God gave Moses all these laws, they went and carried out the law as it pertained to the guy who was cursing.” So the text is very carefully sandwiching this random list of laws in the Mekallel story. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah.

Imu: Remember when I called this story cut and dry? Clearly, it was anything but. Okay, once more for good measure, here's what we noticed:

We had the story’s strange placement in Leviticus.

We had a question about the man just showing up in the camp, suddenly fighting, suddenly cursing God. No context, no motivation.

We had a question about the weird inclusion of his mixed lineage and the details about his mother.

We also had my questions about why we need to be told he's put in jail and why the law against blasphemy is taught to us through story. Plus, we were also struggling to wrap our heads around the oxymoronic nature of cursing God with God’s name.

And finally, as a cherry on top, we have God's strange choice to suddenly teach the laws of murder and maiming in the middle of all this.

Now that we had all these questions in front of us, the real question became where to start getting some answers. 

Rabbi Fohrman: It turns out, we weren't the first to notice these questions. The Midrash…

Imu: Oh shoot, I thought we'd pioneered something.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right…no, anything really good is usually really old, and here that's certainly true in spades. 

So Rashi, the great-grandfather of medieval commentators, quotes a Midrash that seems to implicitly deal with almost every one of the questions that we talked about. 

Imu: For those of you not familiar, Midrash is an early form of rabbinic commentary on Torah. It's known for being colorful and sometimes confusing, often adding details or whole episodes to a Bible story that seem completely ungrounded. But when you take a closer look, more often than not, the Midrash is actually playing off of the same kind of textual anomalies that Rabbi Fohrman is so fond of, and that was certainly true for the Midrash Rabbi Fohrman wanted to show me that was quoted in Rashi. Not only would it knit together many of the strange details we'd noticed in the Mekallel story, but by doing so, it was about to give us that larger context for this story that we so deeply desired. Only, of course, this new context, this new lens on the story, would open up its own questions. But we'll get there. Let’s just start by reading Rashi.

Rabbi Fohrman: Rashi is commenting on those first words of the story: וַיֵּצֵא בֶּן־אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית — And there went out this child of an Israelite woman. Rashi asked the obvious question, the same question that you and I asked: מֵהֵיכָן יָצָא — Where did he go out from, this guy? You can't just say he went out without saying where he went out from. 

So here's what the Midrash says: מִבֵּית דִּינוֹ שֶׁל מֹשֶׁה יָצָא מְחֻיָּב — You know where he left? He left the courthouse of Moses, and he left the courthouse of Moses having lost his case. 

It turns out, the Midrash says, that the backstory to the Mekallel, to the Blasphemer, is that he came to Moses to help settle a dispute. What was the dispute? Well, remember how we heard about how his mother came from the tribe of Dan, and we wondered why that was important?

So, the Midrash says, you know why we had to hear about that? בָּא לִטַּע אָהֳלוֹ בְתוֹךְ מַחֲנֵה דָן — Turns out this guy wanted put his tent down in the middle of Machaneh Dan, the tribe of Dan. אָמְרוּ לוֹ — the people from Dan came to him and said, מַה טִּיבְךָ לְכָאן — what are you doing here? אָמַר לָהֶם — So he said, well, what do you mean? מִבְּנֵי דָּן אֲנִי — My mom's from Dan.

אָמְרוּ לוֹ — Everybody from Dan came to him and said, no, no, no, you don't understand. It doesn't work that way. You have to show me your license where it says that your dad came from Dan, because even though whether you're a Jew at all comes from matrilineal descent, your tribal affiliation actually follows your father. So what tribe is your father from? 

And now we begin to understand another of the questions, why we needed to know that the Mekallel was fighting a person who's a full Israelite and he's of mixed marriage. And it turns out that that's actually the reason for the fight. It was the fact that he was of mixed marriage. There was a guy whose father and mother came from Dan who challenged him together with all the other Danites and said, “What are you doing here? Your father's an Egyptian. Go back to Egypt. You don't have a place with us.”

So the guy went to Moshe: נִכְנַס לְבֵית דִּינוֹ שֶׁל מֹשֶׁה — He went to Moses to adjudicate the law, וְיָצָא מְחֻיָּב — and it turns out he lost, because it's true. Tribal affiliation goes after the father. עָמַד וְגִדֵּף — As he left the courthouse, he went and he cursed God.

Imu: There was something really elegant about this Midrash. While it doesn't address all of our questions, it does address a lot of them and just like that, it turned the verses into a genuine story. We knew where this man was coming from — he was coming from Moshe's court, and now we know why he got into a fight. It makes sense, he was ostracized. But you might still be wondering, why did that fight end in cursing God? That's actually the next piece Rabbi Fohrman and I talked out. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Why would he curse God at the end of all of this? What does God have to do with this? If you could interview the Blasphemer, what might he say?

Imu: “God forgot about people who have mixed heritage; they don't have a place in the camp.” Basically, he's upset that God's rule doesn't take him into account.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. God's rule doesn't take him into account. And who is God? God is the Rule Maker, but God's not just the Rule Maker. God's also the Creator. So if you created me, what were you doing? Creating me without really giving me a place in your world. What am I doing here? I just fall between the cracks 

Imu: The law that excluded the Mekallel was legislated by God. And so, just for that reason alone, it makes sense that the Mekallel's anger would be turned towards God. But Rabbi Fohrman was pointing out an even deeper reason for the cursing. God wasn't just the Legislator of this law, he was also the Creator of the person who this law leaves out. It's as if God condemned the Mekallel to be ostracized from the moment of his birth. Realizing that, we began to see the Mekallel in a whole new light.

Imu: This guy, when you read it on his face, he's a jerk. He's fighting with everybody, he's cursing God, but, you know, poor guy.

Rabbi Fohrman: You know, it reminds me of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein. You know, Frankenstein the novel is very different from Frankenstein the movie, but in Frankenstein the novel, the monster is a sympathetic character, actually, once you understand his backstory. Here's this artificial human being that gets constructed by this Dr. Frankenstein, and Dr. Frankenstein is a little bit cavalier about it and didn't pay attention to the responsibilities that attend to creation, one of which is social acceptance and love. 

Consider what the Torah tells us about God who created one human being. What's the doubt and the concern that plagued God after creating that one human? 

Imu: לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ (Genesis 2:18).

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, not good for man to be alone. That is the cornerstone realization of a Creator. And so God was forced, for the benefit of man, to create a mate for him.

Imu: But Dr. Frankenstein didn't get the memo, or, more to Rabbi Fohrman's point, he didn't care. He only created one of his artificial human beings. And the novel takes a tragic turn from there. 

Rabbi Fohrman: And so this artificial human being goes out in search of connection. There's this scene in the book that I still remember where he's, you know, a sight that strikes fear and terror in anybody who sees him. So he hides, and there's this people who are living this poverty stricken existence in the forest. He watches them every day and he's sympathetic towards them. 

So the monster goes and chops wood and puts it at the door, and every morning there's this chopped wood. They can go and sell the wood, and it makes their lives better, and they wonder who their benefactor is. One day, the child goes out and catches sight of the monster and screams in horror, realizing this is their benefactor and this is the one who loves them. It's at that moment that the monster realizes that he just doesn't have a chance. That there's just no way that he's going to be accepted in the community of men, and his heart is filled with rage. At who? At his maker. “What were you doing making me without a place in the world?”

Imu: The rest of the story is now horrific. God doubles down and says, “That's right, this guy cursed God. We have no compassion for him. He's got to get death by stoning.” 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, it's almost like, for as many questions as the Midrash answers, if you take the Midrash's understanding, it opens up so many more questions. It makes the story so much harsher. How do you understand God in the story? Maybe the guy is right.

Imu: For all the questions we asked earlier, one we didn't ask was whether the Mekallel was right or whether his punishment was overly harsh. It's not liek the question didn’t come up because either Rabbi Fohrman or I are big fans of public stonings. It’s just that, when you read a text, there’s a difference between an internal question — questions the Torah seems to be prompting you to ask, there are these oddities that stick out — and there’s another type of question which is called external questions — things that may bother us personally but that the text seems to take for granted. If you’re just looking at the text in Leviticus, it seemed pretty clear to me, in the world of the text, that the Mekallel does a horrible act and is punished accordingly. But the Midrash seemed to be intentionally turning that on its head. It’s suggesting that, on some level we'd been missing, the Torah actually wants us to see the Mekallel as a sympathetic character, as an outsider, as a Frankenstein’s monster. So now we have to ask, how could God respond by having the Mekallel stoned to death?

Now, you might say, Imu, that’s still an external question. It’s not a question the text wants you to ask. But let me put it this way: The text seems to paint a black and white picture — evil on the one side, good on the other. Once the Midrash comes in and upends that, it’s no longer painting the Mekallel as a simple bad guy. He has complexity, there’s nuance here, there’s a backstory. Which means that, however we grapple with God's justice in the story, it can no longer be black and white. It, too, is no longer simple.

And while we’re on the topic of bad guys in our story, the Midrash wasn't just shifting the blame on God. There was another character who didn't fare so well in this Midrash, and that character is Moshe. 

Rabbi Fohrman: One thing that doesn't seem grounded in the Midrash is the notion that they came to the court of Moses. Now, you would imagine that they went to court. Sure, maybe they had to go to court. Where else were they going to settle this? But the text goes out of its way to say, no, it wasn't just any court. It was the court of Moses. So the question is…

Imu: Why are they blaming Moses for this non-acceptance of the guy? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Right? in a backhanded way, they do seem to be blaming Moses. 

In other words, let me ask you, Imu, if you were the judge and this case came before you, what would you do? What is the job of a judge?

Imu: I guess it depends on when you catch me in my political evolution. But you could argue that a judge's job is to apply the law.

Rabbi Fohrman: That is a judge's job. A judge’s job is to apply the law. When judges get too soft, then Congress goes and says, no, there's sentencing guidelines and you're constrained, right? So here's Moshe, there to apply the law. And the truth is, this is the law: Tribal affiliation follows patrilineal descent. Are there going to be some people who fall between the cracks? Sure, there's going to be people that fall between the cracks of any law, but society has to run by laws, right? Your job as a judge is to apply the laws. So on one level, it ain't Moshe's fault. But yet, I can see by your face that you're not so sure if you buy that. So what happier ending could you imagine to this story? Imu, you're Moses, you're bound by the law. You say, “The people of Dan have a point, this is the law.” What do you do as you come out of court?

Imu: I mean, if this were a Rebbe book or about a famous rabbi or a Hasidic master, the epilogue would be, Moshe would say, you know, “What can do? My hands are tied. You don't have a place — but your place will be in my tent. From now on, you'll live with me.” And there's a small victory against the snobby Danites.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. “I got a place my backyard.” And to me, that's really where, by implication, the Midrash is condemning Moses. Because it's the anti-Hasidic Rebbi's tale, over here. We don't get that, which we would expect to get. It feels like this lost opportunity; that, sure, the law came down, but look what happened. He went and he and he cursed God, and that's where your heart really aches.

Imu: So the Midrash wants us to believe that Moshe was the bad guy? This was the point where I started feeling skeptical. Sure, the Midrash is weaving together all these details from the story — the mixed lineage, the tribe of Dan — but there are lots of stories you can tell from any constellation of details. So where was the Midrash coming from? I mean, this specific story of alienation and rejection with Moshe cast in the role of antagonist.

It turns out, Rabbi Fohrman had this exact same question himself, and not just now. It’s actually something he’d been grappling with for years. In fact, the whole reason we’re doing this season of A Book Like No Other is because he recently came across a clue; a clue that helped him address this question, courtesy of none other than his son Avichai.

Rabbi Fohrman: When I was chatting about this story with my son Avichai, he showed me something that knocked my socks off in light of this Rashi. I was aware of this Rashi, but I never knew where Rashi got this from, this notion that this was Moshe's court, until Avichai very innocently showed me something about this first verse.

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman’s referring to the first verse of the Mekallel story, which again is Leviticus chapter 24, verse 10.

Rabbi Fohrman: Let's look at the verse one more time: וַיֵּצֵא בֶּן־אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית וְהוּא בֶּן־אִישׁ מִצְרִי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל — And there went out the child of an Israelite woman, who's also the child of an אִישׁ מִצְרִי into the Children of Israel, וַיִּנָּצוּ — and they fought, בַּמַּחֲנֶה — in the camp.

So Imu, let me ask you, does this remind you of any other episode in the Torah? An episode in the Torah that might just involve, of all people, Moshe? Listen to this one more time: And he went out, this child of an Israelite woman, בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל — into the people of Israel, וַיִּנָּצוּ בַּמַּחֲנֶה — and they fought in the camp.

Imu: Well, don't you have exactly that language of going out into the midst of the Israelites with Moshe when he grows up, when he's leaving the house of Pharaoh?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, you do, so let's look at Shemot (Exodus). וַיְהִי  בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם— And it happened in those days, וַיִּגְדַּל מֹשֶׁה — then Moshe grew up.

I'm reading now from verse 11 in chapter 2 of the Book of Exodus.

וַיֵּצֵא — And he went out, אֶל־אֶחָיו — into his people. Imu, just looking at that grammatically, what question do you have? וַיֵּצֵא אֶל־אֶחָיו — and he went out into his people. It's the same question as the Mekallel, right? 

Imu: Where did he go out from? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Right? I know where he's going out to, but where are you going out from? And by the way, think about who Moses is. Is Moses like this very clean and easy, one-nationality kind of person?

Imu: He has a mixed heritage. Even though his parents are both Israelites, his adopted parents, they're Egyptian. They're not just mixed.

Rabbi Fohrman: Egypt par excellence, the palace, right? The daughter of Pharaoh adopts him. He becomes literally the son of Pharaoh, prince in the house of Pharaoh. And yet he's of, quote, “mixed lineage” because there's this Israelite person in the house of Egypt.

Imu: So both Moses and the Mekallel are children of mixed Egyptian and Israelite lineage, and both of them begin a pivotal story in their life with וַיֵּצֵא, “going out.” And not just going out anywhere, but “into the people of Israel.” Intriguing, right? But the parallels don’t stop there.

Rabbi Fohrman: And he goes out to his brothers. וַיַּרְא בְּסִבְלֹתָם — And he sees their suffering. And lo and behold, וַיַּרְא אִישׁ מִצְרִי….

Imu: Hmm. There's a fight here, too.

Rabbi Fohrman: Look at that — a fight. מַכֶּה אִישׁ מֵאֶחָיו. And who does the fight involve but an אִישׁ מִצְרִי.

Imu: After Moses goes out amongst his brothers, he witnesses an Egyptian, an אִישׁ מִצְרִי, beating a Hebrew slave. Not a fair fight, but a violent altercation nonetheless, and one between an Egyptian and an Israelite. All of which echoes the Mekallel story. But the strongest connection is probably those two words Rabbi Fohrman got so excited about — אִישׁ מִצְרִי, an Egyptian man. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Those words, אִישׁ מִצְרִי, they're very, very rare in the Torah. You know, you have an אִישׁ מִצְרִי three times in the Torah. The first of those times is here, an אִישׁ מִצְרִי מַכֶּה אִישׁ־עִבְרִי מֵאֶחָיו, the Egyptian man that's striking a Hebrew slave.

And the third and last time you have אִישׁ מִצְרִי? It's in our story of the Mekallel. וַיֵּצֵא בֶּן־אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית — this child of an Israelite woman goes out, וְהוּא בֶּן־אִישׁ מִצְרִי — who's the child of an Egyptian man. And by the way, Imu, if you look at Rashi, it'll make your blood run cold. Because Rashi tells us something about the אִישׁ מִצְרִי who is the father of Mekallel.

Imu: Do they say it's the man that Moshe killed? I could see that.

Rabbi Fohrman: Well, let's read it. 24:10, Rashi: בֶּן־אִישׁ מִצְרִי, הוּא הַמִּצְרִי שֶׁהָרַג מֹשֶׁה.

Imu: Oh, I called it. That's great.

Rabbi Fohrman: You called it.

Imu: This is it, folks. This is a methodology. That's all I have to say. The Sages aren't making things up. They're reading a text with methodology.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right.

Imu: We were getting excited and kind of rushed that last point, so I'll break it down for you in case Exodus isn't fresh in your mind. After Moses sees the Egyptian man beating the Hebrew slave, he intervenes and kills the Egyptian, the אִישׁ מִצְרִי. And now, Rashi was saying that this אִישׁ מִצְרִי in Exodus is one and the same with the אִישׁ מִצְרִי in Leviticus, the man who fathered the Mekallel.

Rabbi Fohrman: Rashi’s just putting two and two together and it's like, oh my gosh, you're telling me these stories are actually linked? The person killed was the father of this Blasphemer. Makes your mind just melt listening to this.

Imu: That's actually really, really creepy. According to Rashi, Moshe kills father and son, essentially, or sets up killing the son. He kills this Egyptian man to spare him from what he does to the Israelite. In the case in Leviticus though, Moshe's verdict, according to the Midrash, is the thing that… 

Rabbi Fohrman: That ultimately leads tragically to the Mekallel. Talk about creating a story that seems unsympathetic for Moshe. It's like, oh my gosh, what have you done? Your verdict is setting up the destruction of the child of the person that you killed in this other story!

I guess what I'm pointing out is that this notion that the Mekallel left the court of Moses is not just coming out of the imagination of the author of the Midrash. And if you had doubts, it's not just the word וַיֵּצֵא; it's not just the “child of mixed marriage;” it's not just the words אִישׁ מִצְרִי; it's not just the fact that there's a וַיֵּצֵא where the place that I'm coming out from is not clear.

It's one other word that's the real kicker. If you go back to the Mekallel, you have one other word: ….וַיִּנָּצוּ בַּמַּחֲנֶה— And they fought in the camp, the child of the Israelite woman and the Israelite man. That word, וַיִּנָּצוּ, it's a very rare word. That word for “fight,” the other time you have it is in the story of Moshe. 

Turns out, the next day there's another fight that he sees, a fight between two Hebrews, but look at the language: וַיֵּצֵא בַּיּוֹם הַשֵּׁנִי — And then Moses went out a second time on the second day. And what did he see? שְׁנֵי־אֲנָשִׁים עִבְרִים נִצִּים — Two Hebrew people, נִצִּים — fighting. Very unusual word for “fight,” but again, echoing the fight of the Mekallel. So literally in the first single verse that introduces the story of the Mekallel, the Blasphemer, I have no less than four references to the story of Moshe; another child, so to speak, of mixed heritage who goes out and encounters two fights. And it seems like the Midrash was not coming out of nowhere. The Midrash was coming from the text itself.

Imu: Based on that constellation of evidence, it very much seems like Torah is telling you that in order for you to understand what's going on with the Mekallel, you need to wrestle, pun intended, with the story of Moshe, his coming of age story, and the two fights that he encounters. That's really wild.

Rabbi Fohrman: So the truth is, Imu, we've just begun to scratch the surface of this story. 

Imu: Now, if you know Rabbi Fohrman as well as I do, you know that's his wrapping things up, teasing, “until next time” voice. Yeah, that's right, he showed us all those intriguing parallels between Exodus and Leviticus just to make us wait until next episode to explore their meaning. But I was ok with that. I enjoy mulling over a good parallel between meetings. But what I really didn't like anymore was...well, the whole Mekallel story just got, like, ten times harder to understand. 

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman, before we end, I think we're in a really different place then when we started. When we started, you asked a whole bunch of questions about this story not making sense, this story being out of place, us not understanding exactly what's going on in this story. But now, I've got a question: What is the moral of this story? Which is crazy, and I never would have asked that question, because on face of it, the moral of this story would seem to me, like, “Don't curse God. If you curse God, you know, you're a jerk, and we're going to stone you.” But now, it just seems like the moral is — what? “No matter how bad a hand of cards you get dealt by God, seemingly, you can't question Him, you can't be furious with your lot, and if you dare question Him we're gonna stone you?” Is that the moral? It's difficult. And then God says, “An eye for an eye…” It seems really harsh. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, I mean, as we leave the story at this point, with the Midrash interpretation, we've got three burning questions about the meaning of the story. A burning question about the meaning of the story from the perspective of the Blasphemer, from the perspective of Moshe, and from the perspective of God.

From the perspective of the Blasphemer — isn't this guy kind of sympathetic? From the perspective of God — isn't this a little harsh? From the perspective of Moshe — couldn't you have brought him in? What happened with you? And somehow, all of these questions are hanging in the air. All I can say is that I think that our work is not done here yet.

We began by pointing out that this is a story without context, and we're beginning to see how that's not true, how there is a context to the story and the context is richer and in some ways darker and more poignant than we might have suspected. There is a past to this story, but there's also a future to this story. There's a future that goes on in a multigenerational way well beyond the Five Books of Moses. We haven't seen the end of these intertextual connections that link this story from nowhere to a story that is deeply a part of everywhere, and Moshe is a piece of this from beginning to end. Even after Moshe's lifetime, Moshe is a piece of this.

So what I want to show you in our future sessions together is how the past and the future of the story collide in mind bending ways. And I think when we're done looking at that, we need to come back and ask those questions again. What is the moral of the story? What does it mean to be God in the story? What does it mean to be the Blasphemer? What does it mean to be Moshe? 

Somehow, the moral of the story is how all three of those perspectives end up meshing with each other. But it is a bone chilling story.

Imu: It almost feels like The Mekallel: Days of Future Past. Yeah, I'm excited to take the journey with you.

Rabbi Fohrman: Okay, I look forward to our next time together. We'll see where this goes.

Imu: Next time on A Book Like No Other, we head to Exodus to discover more parallels between Moshe and the Mekallel, and a few striking differences that set these men on very different paths.

A Book Like No Other is recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and me, Imu Shalev. 

Our producer is Tikvah Hecht.

Audio editing for this episode was done by Hilary Gutman.

Our managing producer is Adina Blaustein.

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.