Imu Shalev: Hi, I’m Imu Shalev and this is A Book Like No Other.

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

We ended last episode teasing you about a mystery third text, an epilogue to the Mekallel that would help us see the moral of this story — and we’re going to get there. But first, one of the key ideas behind this podcast is that Torah can take you to unexpected places, and that's what happened when Rabbi Fohrman and I sat down to learn again. See, before we could get to the mystery new text, I shared a thought with Rabbi Fohrman, and that thought sparked a conversation. That conversation is a bit more speculative, a bit more freewheeling than usual. Honestly, we didn't expect to leave it in the podcast. What happened is that it also opened up for us so many new layers of meaning that we realized we couldn't leave it out. And at the heart of this conversation, what it's really about is blasphemy. 

You know, I think for many of us blasphemy is so instinctively offensive, we don't stop to question what it really is or why it's wrong. But the more we studied the Mekallel, the more these questions seemed really critical. Is the great evil of blasphemy just getting angry, really angry, at God? There had to be more to it than that, but what that “more” was felt elusive, and that felt like a problem. How were we supposed to understand the Mekallel's punishment, why he was executed, if we didn't really understand his sin?

We raised some of these questions in earlier episodes, but for the first time, I thought I'd found a clue, a way of addressing them. And that's what I wanted to run by Rabbi Fohrman. 

So let me set this conversation up for you just a little bit more because this clue that I thought I found into the nature of blasphemy had to do with a connection we saw last time; how both Moshe in Exodus and the Mekallel in Leviticus use the name of God. In the case of the Mekallel, he uses God’s name when he curses God. Remember, that’s what cursing is. It’s so mind bending to think of, but that’s what it is. Blasphemy means turning God’s name against God. 

Meanwhile, we saw that, according to the Sages, Moshe uses the name of God to kill the Egyptian, which is mind bending but a little bit differently. How does God's name kill someone?

Rabbi Fohrman suggested at the time that using God’s name in this case meant something like standing up for God’s moral vision; you know, embodying and channeling God’s justice. So what was on my mind, the thought I shared with Rabbi Fohrman and that ended up sparking this whole, larger conversation I'm about to play for you, was this: What if the Mekallel is using God’s name in the exact same way as Moshe, and that's the problem with blasphemy? Let’s jump in and you’ll see what I mean.  

So what I'm picturing is, Moshe goes out of the palace and the first thing he sees is injustice. And he pronounces God's name as if to say, “This shouldn't be right,” and that, you know, incinerates an Egyptian. 

If that's true, that that's what it means to invoke the name of God, to declare some justice in some way, I do think that that is really interesting when it comes to the Mekallel. Because, almost like a mirror, it feels like the Mekallel is turning God's name of justice on God. Like he's saying, “Hey you, God, you're a bad God. You're not just.” Something about that is, I don't know, not kosher, or extreme.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Well, here's the interesting thing: Can you imagine a kosher example of just that in the Torah? I can.

Imu: Yeah, it’s Avraham.

Rabbi Fohrman: It's Abraham. Can you imagine a better example of that than saying to God, you know: חָלִלָה לְּךָ מֵעֲשֹׂת  כַּדָּבָר הַזֶּה לְהָמִית צַדִּיק עִם־רָשָׁע — It would be profane of you to do such a thing, to kill the righteous along of the wicked. חָלִלָה לָּךְ — It would be profane of you. הֲשֹׁפֵט כׇּל־הָאָרֶץ לֹא יַעֲשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט — The Judge of the whole world can't do justice (Genesis 18:25)?

Abraham was celebrated for that, seemingly, right? God invited that as a possibility. 

Imu: By bringing Abraham into the picture, Rabbi Fohrman was throwing a wrench into my theory. Blasphemy couldn't simply mean judging God against God's own standards, because that's exactly what Abraham seems to do back in Genesis, when he questions God's plan to destroy the city of Sodom.  And certainly Abraham is not stoned for doing that. But Rabbi Fohrman wasn't rejecting my theory entirely. Instead, he was making an important distinction about how we might judge God. A distinction that would get to the heart of what he saw as the evil of cursing. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So I think that there's a very fine line between a version of this that can be wonderful and a version of it that can be terrible. And to me, it has to do with slamming the door. When Abraham said that, he didn't slam the door.

Imu: Mm-hmm. Yeah, he's interacting with the Divine and I think that's what you mean by slamming the door, right? Like, he’s beseeching God. He's even angry, seems like, but he's still asking God for an explanation. He's like, “You're the Just One. Aren't you going to be just?”

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, I think that's the whole point. I think that that, in a way, what you do when you use the name of God against God and curse God is, you're not actually having a dialogue with God. You're not actually relating to him. You're basically just saying, “Here's how I'm leaving you behind.” Even when you curse anybody, what sort of emotion is raging through me as I curse them? 

Imu: Typically anger. 

Rabbi Fohrman: And even more: “Get the heck out of my life!” In other words, cursing is basically your way of saying, “I'm done with you now.” You curse someone and you slam the door. 

Imu: “Would that I could erase you.” 

Rabbi Fohrman: Would that I could erase you.

Imu: So perhaps the difference between Abraham and the Mekallel was that Abraham made an initial assessment: “Hey God, this doesn't seem just. Can we talk about it?” While the Mekallel made a final judgment: “God, case closed. You failed. I'm done with You.” Slamming the door on God, as Rabbi Fohrman put it, as if that could erase God. Almost like the Mekallel's blasphemy was his attempt to sentence God to death — or the closest thing to death when you're dealing with a Divine Being.

That might sound dramatic, but it wasn't coming out of nowhere. Remember, after the Mekallel curses God and is brought to Moshe, Moshe turns to God for guidance. God tells him that the punishment for blasphemy is stoning. But then God goes on to give the punishment for a few other crimes, and back when we first read this story, we noticed how odd that is. Why does God bring in these laws that have nothing to do with the case at hand? But Rabbi Fohrman thought that perhaps couching blasphemy among these seemingly unrelated laws actually told us a lot about the nature of blasphemy itself.

Rabbi Fohrman: You have all these laws: A) Cursing God, B) Striking a person and killing him, C) Striking an animal and killing the animal, D) Striking a person and maiming him. Let's just play our little game: Which one of these things is not like the other?

Imu: The one that is most not like the other seems like the cursing.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, the one that's most not like the other is the one that is actually the subject of whole discussion, right? So what's that doing as the outlier?

Seemingly, you know, generally speaking, when the Torah plays this little game with you — “Which one of these things is not like the other?” — the answer is that the outlier isn't an outlier; it is like the others. So what that would lead us to believe is that violence can be achieved through the mouth as well, through the tongue as well.

 There's something violent about cursing God, and that really is its sin, right? With a human being, I can be violent against your body. With God, all He’s got is a name in this world. I have to be violent against that. So it's the “slam the door” kind of violence, but it's the way that a human being is violent with God.

Imu: Seeing cursing as violence was a paradigm shift for me. You know, throughout our learning we'd been struggling to understand why God isn't more sympathetic to the Mekallel. Doesn't the Mekallel have the right to get angry given what he went through? But I think most of us would agree, in most circumstances, it's one thing to get angry, but it’s a wholly other thing to lash out in violence. Violence is never okay. Violence demands a strong response.

Which isn't to say that God's punishment no longer seemed harsh or in tension with the sympathy I felt for the Mekallel, but by placing the prohibition against blasphemy in the context of the prohibitions against violence, the Torah did seem to be saying, “Don't underestimate the severity of this crime.” 

But here was my problem with this idea: You can't really do violence against God. You just can't. So symbolically, yeah, there was something rich in this analogy between cursing and violence, but practically, what real threat did the Mekallel pose?

And then I noticed something: The violence in this story wasn't just symbolic. And it wasn't just against God. 

Imu: This just popped out to me. Maybe it's obvious to you and everyone else, but this person who is cursing, he was struggling with somebody else. He was fighting with somebody else. It's mixed together, right? He's hitting someone else and he's cursing God. Not sure what to make of that…

Rabbi Fohrman: I think that somebody who feels completely displaced in the world, like they have no place, if they choose to work that out with violence, that violence can easily express itself indiscriminately. There's something about anger which is almost, by nature, indiscriminate. Think about the various different Hebrew words for anger, right? Charah af, charon af; the language has to do with fire, or the language has to do with transgressiveness; like vayit’aber, “and God became angry with me.”

Imu: Evron, za’am…

Rabbi Fohrman: And it's interesting that there's something inherently transgressive about anger. Anger is not the kind of thing that is…it's like fire. It's not very easily controlled. It starts somewhere, and it goes to all sorts of other places. And so if you have somebody who's consumed with anger by a deep sense of having no place in the world, I think this is the Torah’s warning; that that is somebody who can really upset the apple cart and kind of destroy society. The anger's going to come out against animals. It's going to come out against man. It's going to come out against God. It's going to come out somewhere or everywhere, surprisingly. It's almost as if society has to defend itself by taking this person out of society and by killing them. It's almost a self-preservation thing for society.

Imu: We'd gone from blasphemy as slamming the door on God to blasphemy as violence against God. Now, Rabbi Fohrman was adding another layer. Seen within the larger context of the Mekallel's story, his displacement, his fight with another human, it seemed like the Torah was presenting blasphemy as part and parcel of a wider, indiscriminate rage that could end in real violence towards anyone.

With each of these evolutions, my conception of blasphemy had become deeper, and my sense of the moral problems the Torah was wrestling with in the Mekallel story far more sophisticated. It wasn't just a matter of the Mekallel as a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” The story seemed to be touching on the difficult balance between caring for victims of social injustice and protecting society from any source of harm. A really sensitive topic still even today, which just speaks to its relevance and significance.

But our deep dive into blasphemy wasn't done yet. I still had Moshe on my mind and the way he used God's name to evoke God's judgment, which seemed to imply that the heart of cursing, at the core of all this violence and rage, was using God's name, evoking God's judgment against God. And to me, that seemed to have its own set of implications for why the Mekallel was punished. Maybe his death wasn't just a protective social necessity. Maybe it was the inevitable outcome of what he himself wanted. 

It seems like the Mekallel is declaring that Justice Himself — that is the name of God, Justice Himself — is unjust. That is an undoing, right? That is the ultimate slamming the door because how could you do that? I'm not even saying, like, “How could you do that, that's an awful thing to do?” It's a paradox. How can you invoke the name of justice in saying something is unjust? It breaks everything. It shatters the name of God. It just creates a rupture in time and space, and so you lose your place. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So in other words, if I understand you correctly, cursing God, you’re suggesting, is that I'm trying to wield the power of God as if I am an agent of God, but I'm using it paradoxically to cut God out of the world. Almost as if to say, “We need a new God now, and it should be me. It should be me because You can't be trusted, and I'm going to destroy You with this great power of Divinity, which just happens to be Your own name.” 

Imu: Yeah, but if we followed through with your wish, which is fine, let's delete God, what would happen to you? Like, if you just got into the source code and said, “Delete God,” what would happen to you? 

Rabbi Fohrman: You'd be that way too. 

Imu: Yeah, and that's what it feels like. What's happening in these verses is someone who tries to delete the life of someone else, they get deleted. Someone who tries to take out the tooth of someone, your tooth gets taken. It's this grand mirror.

I was getting back to that earlier question: Why does the story of the Mekallel include these laws of murder and maiming that seem irrelevant? But now I was seeing another possible answer; a pattern not in the violent nature of the crimes themselves, but in their punishments. All these laws seemed to have reciprocal, mirror-esque punishments. And throughout God's speech, we have this reciprocal mirror language: נֶפֶשׁ תַּחַת נָפֶשׁ…עַיִן תַּחַת עַיִן — A soul for a soul, an eye for an eye (Exodus 21:23-24). Maybe the Torah was trying to tell us something.

You know what's interesting? The Sages say, “No, the Torah doesn't mean ‘An eye for an eye.’ It means the value of an eye for an eye. If you poke out someone's eye, we're not going to poke out your eye.” Well then, why did the Torah write it that way?

I can maybe now see a reason why: Because if you are going to take the position of God and declare, “You don't deserve your eye anymore,” or, “I'm going to punch out your tooth,” the Torah then holds up the mirror and says, “You're taking the position of God and deciding who gets to keep their eyes and who doesn't? You know what, whatever you do to others, we're going to do unto you because you're not God. You cannot take that position.”

It feels like it's the same idea of, like, how could you curse God? God is not “other.” God is everything. God is the Creator.

In retrospect, I was really making two related points. One was that if cursing was judging God as unfit for His position, well, if you believe that God, that Justice Itself is unjust, then you're essentially undermining all of existence, including your own. It's like pulling the rug out from under reality.

And so, as painful as the blasphemer's death is from this angle, it also seemed like maybe the Torah's way of playing out for us the natural consequences of the Mekallel's own worldview. To really believe God's world is fundamentally unjust is tantamount to leaving it.

But the other related point I was seeing was that taking justice into our own hands in general, whether against God or against another human, is a way of flirting with playing God. Especially committing violence, which is the judgment against someone; “Your life is not valuable. Your body is not sacred.” Isn't that kind of like playing God?

And God's response, in these verses, is to hold a mirror up, almost as if to say, “Ok, if you were God and that's what you'd decree, let Me show you what it's like to live in that world.”

All of this had unfolded from looking at how Moshe used God's name, and now Rabbi Fohrman took a step back to compare Moshe and the Mekallel once more. After all, Moshe did also commit an act of violence; he killed the Egyptian. Though, in Moshe's case, it's an act of violence that was in defense of someone helpless, an act of violence that sits precariously on the fence between playing God and serving Him. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So I guess what you're saying is that what Moshe was doing was using the power of Divinity, but using it to affirm the sanctity of human life when he kills the Ish Mitzri (Egyptian man). So even though there's something dangerous about saying, “Hey, I see myself as a representative of God in this vision,” or, “I feel that God's own morality is inspiring me,” if it's used to uphold the sanctity of human life, that is at least a constructive aim. The most destructive of all possible aims would be to channel the power of Divinity against God Himself; not seeking to dialogue with God, but seeking to utterly destroy something that's incompatible with that.

In other words, the idea of using the Shem HaMeforash (God’s Ineffable Name), against someone is to use God's name in the face of something that's utterly incompatible with it, to cause it to dissolve. That's the definition, that's the function. Moshe is doing that, and then Mekallel is doing that, but doing it against God, which becomes paradoxical and self-destructive and destroys the system. Hence, he himself is destroyed, almost as if he short-circuited himself. Interesting. 

Imu: We’d come to the end of our detour into blasphemy. The Mekallel’s severe punishment, the inclusion of laws of violence in Leviticus, and the parallel with Moshe were all pushing us to check our sympathy for the Mekallel and give serious consideration to the social, moral, and even metaphysical risks that his actions, blasphemy, and violence embodied. By doing that, it seemed we’d come to at least part of that elusive moral to this story we’d been after — but it couldn't be all of it.

Remember, we still had Moshe's role in this story to make sense of. He didn't take the Mekallel in before the Mekallel curses, when the Mekallel was just an innocent outsider. So we still had to ask: What are we supposed to learn from that? How do all these pieces — Moshe's coldness, the Mekallel's violence and playing God — fit together?  

And that question brings us back to our epilogue. The mystery third text that Rabbi Fohrman promised was the final chapter in the epic drama of Moshe and the Mekallel. 

Rabbi Fohrman: The story of the Mekallel is not a happy story, there's nothing happy about it, and this epilogue isn't a happy story either. It's a story of the Idol of Micah. I want to thank Rabbi Avraham Kowalski, who, years ago — maybe 20 years ago or so — alerted me to some of the resonances in the story of Pesel Micha, the story of the Idol of Micah in the Book of Judges and how it resonates with this story.

Imu: Man, Rabbi Fohrman sure knows how to sell a story, right? Nothing happy here, folks. But ok, at least the wait is over. Pesel Micha, the Idol of Micha, that's our epilogue. So, let me just give you the context for this story and then we'll jump in to reading the text together and seeing what it has to do with the Mekallel and Moshe.

The story of the Idol of Micha is found in Judges, chapter 17. This is a couple decades after Joshua and the people have conquered the land of Israel, but still before the establishment of a king. There's no real central leadership. It's a chaotic time, a violent time, a time when the ideals that Moshe lived for were nearly forgotten. So it's against this backdrop that we're suddenly told about this man Micha and his unnamed mother.

 Rabbi Fohrman: So there's this man Micha and the story begins with this really interesting interaction he has with his mom.

וַיֹּאמֶר לְאִמּוֹ — He says to his mother, אֶלֶף וּמֵאָה הַכֶּסֶף אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח־לָךְ — you remember that 1,100 talents of silver that was taken from you, seemingly stolen from you, וְאַתְּ אָלִית — and you cursed someone? וְגַם אָמַרְתְּ בְּאׇזְנַי — And I heard you curse.

So here's a story that actually begins with cursing. There's a mom who cursed the thief. Whoever it is that stole these 1,100 talents of silver, she cursed.

Imu: What is interesting to me again there is the function of curses. Curses are what you do when you feel the world has not been just, so you cry out this curse so that everybody gets their just desserts, right? 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. Here I am, without this 1,100 talents of silver, right? The world did me wrong, and so she curses. Who did she curse? Unbeknownst to her, she cursed her own son as we'll see as the verses continue 

הִנֵּה־הַכֶּסֶף אִתִּי — That money, I have it. I am the thief. אֲנִי לְקַחְתִּיו — I'm the one who took it from you. What's Mother's response? בָּרוּךְ בְּנִי לַיקוָה — Blessed be you, my child, to God.

So Imu, how do you take the mother's response? What does she mean when she says that? 

Imu: She's undoing her curse. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Seemingly, she's undoing her curse. So put yourself into Mom's shoes for a moment. What are you thinking, Mom, at this moment that you hear your child saying this?

Imu: If I'm playing it in slow motion, I guess my face goes white, my heart skips a beat. Like, what have I done? I was picturing, you know, a guy in a black and white shirt with a black ski cap or whatever, a robber bad guy, but it was my own son all along. I only want great things from my son. I need to undo this curse immediately. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. But the question that's left with the reader is, does that work? Do you get to undo a curse that way?

You know, back when I was a kid, there was always this possibility that you could take back a chess move even after your hand was no longer on the piece. We always think that we can take back things. The question is, can you take back a curse? So this is one of the questions that sort of haunts this story. 

Imu: But this question, can you take back a curse, haunts the Mekallel story too. I mean, if you think about the conversation we'd just had about blasphemy, what we were implicitly asking the whole time was, why couldn't the Mekallel have taken back his curse? The sense in that story is that he couldn’t. No matter what actions led up to it, his blasphemy was a point of no return. But I would never have framed the Mekallel's struggle that way before reading this verse in Judges. So, already, this epilogue, as Rabbi Fohrman liked to call the story of Pesel Micha, resonated with the story of the Mekallel in an interesting way.

But a basic plot point like cursing, which is all over Tanach, does not a deep intertextual link make. So why were we really here? What was it Rabbi Fohrman saw in Pesel Micha that really made it such a key part of the broader Mekallel narrative?

We'll get there. But in the meantime, our thematic connection was about to get even more interesting.

Rabbi Fohrman: וַיָּשֶׁב אֶת־אֶלֶף־וּמֵאָה הַכֶּסֶף לְאִמּוֹ — So the good son goes and he returns the 1,100 talents of silver to his mom. At which point, Mom says: הַקְדֵּשׁ הִקְדַּשְׁתִּי אֶת־הַכֶּסֶף לַיקוָה מִיָּדִי לִבְנִי — Well, I already did something with this money. I actually consecrated it.

So you think, oh, that's very virtuous of you. You consecrated it. Did you give it to the Temple? What'd you give it to?

So I consecrated this לַיקוָה — to God, מִיָּדִי — from my hands, לִבְנִי — with respect to my son, לַעֲשׂוֹת פֶּסֶל וּמַסֵּכָה — to make a molten idol.

Now, it seems like there's something weird about what she's doing. What in the world is she doing? She's consecrating this money specifically לַיקוָה. It's one thing if she's idolatrous and she consecrates this to an idol, but she consecrates it to God. In order to do what? To make a פֶּסֶל וּמַסֵּכָה — a molten image. 

I don't know, but there's something so paradoxical about what she's doing, about consecrating this money to God to make an idol which stands for the very opposite of God, that it almost evoked what you were just saying a few minutes ago, Imu; this notion of cursing being something paradoxical. It's almost like, here's this mother who curses, and the next thing she does is this crazy paradoxical thing— she consecrates something which is a direct un-consecration, but using the word “consecration” of that money at the same time.

Imu: It gets worse in the very next verse. 

Rabbi Fohrman: How does it get even worse, this story which seemingly could not get any worse? The son returns the money to his mother: וַתִּקַּח אִמּוֹ מָאתַיִם כֶּסֶף — So Mother takes out 200 of it, וַתִּתְּנֵהוּ לַצּוֹרֵף — and gives it to a silversmith, וַיַּעֲשֵׂהוּ פֶּסֶל וּמַסֵּכָה — and makes a molten image out of it.

So in the last sentence, she consecrated all the money, but now she takes her 200 talents, and that's going to be the idol, leaving us with the distinct impression that she's stealing the other 900 from the consecrated estate.

Imu: Yeah, so Weirdness #1, I thought it was 1,100 that was supposed to be donated. It ends up being 200. Weirdness #2 is, you know, if you're consecrating it it should probably go to the Temple, but it's not going to the Temple. It's going to an idol, which is a religious object that I have ownership over. If you're consecrating, it's almost like you're giving it up, but even the 200 she is supposedly giving up is going to be in her domain or her son's domain, ultimately.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, it's like a shell game with the money.

Imu: Yeah. If this were straightforward, you'd donate it to God and you'd be done, but what you're illustrating is that they're playing a game here.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, and that there's something paradoxical about the game, almost like this whole notion of cursing we were talking about before is marshaling the power of God to undo God. Another way of marshaling the power of God to undo God is to go and consecrate something to God so that it can become an idol. 

Imu: “Make your own god.”

Rabbi Fohrman: “Make your own god.” By the way, that's what happens. Not only does she make her own god, but where does the god end up staying? וַיְהִי בְּבֵית מִיכָיְהוּ — she then gives it to her son. It's like, “Here, bubbeleh, here's a little gift for you from me. Let this always stay in your domain.” That is itself a paradox because a holy thing, you'd think, is not yours. It's “God,” it's transcendent. But no, this is a holy thing that, as you say, is an idol that you control and that's yours.

Imu: So in the name of “giving to God,” this mother-son duo find a way to keep all the control and wealth for themselves. Again, a very interesting resonance with the Mekallel and the idea that blasphemy is also a grab at God's power in God's name. But still, not an undeniable link. That was coming next. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So what happens? Micha goes and plays this for spades. He becomes the little priest. וְהָאִישׁ מִיכָה לוֹ בֵּית אֱלֹהִים — He makes himself a little idol synagogue and he makes himself some nice outfits to worship the idol with. He anoints one of his children to be a priest with the family business.

Imu: He learns from Mom.

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, he learns from Mom. So now Mom's in on it, Micha's in on it, and the grandson is the great “Kohen.”

Imu: Just remember, they're from the tribe of Efraim. So, not a priestly family, and yet they consecrate their own priest. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. So: בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם — And meanwhile, in those days, אֵין מֶלֶךְ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל — there was no king in Yisrael. אִישׁ הַיָּשָׁר בְּעֵינָיו יַעֲשֶׂה — Everybody did his own thing. All of this is an example of people really doing their own thing, as much as that thing is folly.

So now we get introduced to a new character in this mess: וַיְהִי־נַעַר מִבֵּית לֶחֶם יְהוּדָה — There was a lad, and the lad came from Bethlehem in the tribe of Yehudah. But it's not so simple — he's from Mishpachat Yehudah, he's from a family of Judites, but: וְהוּא לֵוִי — His actual tribal affiliation is that he is a Levi.

So Imu, what does that remind you of in our Vayikra story?

Imu: A conflicted identity. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Conflicted identity. וְהוּא גָר־שָׁם — He was… 

Imu: He's a ger (stranger). 

Rabbi Fohrman: A ger. He was a sojourner in Beit-Lechem (Bethlehem). Why is he a sojourner in Beit-Lechem? Why can't he just live in Beit-Lechem? The answer is, even though he is from the family Yehudah, it must be that the Yehudah people said, “You know, you realize that you don't really have a place here.” Presumably, maybe in a mixed marriage, tribal affiliation goes after Dad. His Dad's probably a Levite, which is why he's a Levi who comes from a mishpacha, a family of Yehudah but was just sojourning in Yehudah.

Imu: And there it is. Our first undeniable — or at least eyebrow-raising — link. Like Moshe and the Mekallel, this story also features a displaced person with a mixed identity.

Rabbi Fohrman: וַיֵּלֶךְ הָאִישׁ — The guy, the Levi, left the city, מִבֵּית לֶחֶם יְהוּדָה לָגוּר בַּאֲשֶׁר יִמְצָא — to find another place. He's kind of homeless, looking for a place that he can pitch his tent for a while. Wouldn't you know it: וַיָּבֹא הַר־אֶפְרַיִם עַד־בֵּית מִיכָה — He came to the mountain of Efraim and he comes upon Micha's house, לַעֲשׂוֹת דַּרְכּוֹ.

וַיֹּאמֶר־לוֹ מִיכָה — So Micha says to him,  מֵאַיִן תָּבוֹא — Where are you coming from? וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו — And he says, לֵוִי אָנֹכִי — I'm a Levi, מִבֵּית לֶחֶם יְהוּדָה — I come from Beit-Lechem in the tribe of Judah. וְאָנֹכִי הֹלֵךְ לָגוּר בַּאֲשֶׁר אֶמְצָא — I'm going to try to find some place to live.

So Micha says: שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי — Why don't you stay with me for a while? You can hang out with me. וֶהְיֵה־לִי לְאָב וּלְכֹהֵן, and this is really odd — You can be with me, and you can be…what? You can be my father. You can be my Kohen. וְאָנֹכִי אֶתֶּן־לְךָ עֲשֶׂרֶת כֶּסֶף לַיָּמִים — I'll pay you 10 talents of silver for your days.

Imu: He had a lot of leftover silver, so… 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. And I'll give you some clothes and I'll give you food. וַיֵּלֶךְ הַלֵּוִי —And so the Levi thought that would be a really good idea.

Imu: Ok, so we have this new character, this Levite, but he’s not a pure Levite. He’s of mixed lineage and that’s left him displaced. This displaced mixed-lineage Levite encounters a stranger named Micha, who welcomes him in.

You see it, right? This Levite fellow, he's our Moshe/Mekallel character, our outsider. By the way, Moshe was also from the tribe of Levi. And Micha, he's our Yitro.

I could just imagine where this was going. No doubt, Rabbi Fohrman was about to show me some parallel language in the text that would cement the link.

Rabbi Fohrman: Micha says: שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי — Stay with me for a while. Does that remind you of anything elsewhere in the Chumash? Who says, “שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי — Stay with me a while?” 

Imu: Isn't that what Yitro says? 

Rabbi Fohrman: It's not actually Yitro. 

Imu: Oh, wait, what? I guess I didn't see where this was going. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Believe it or not, that's Lavan welcoming in Yaakov; שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי. Lavan is a little bit of a malevolent father-in-law, right? He basically ends up enslaving him.

Imu: So, that was weird. Why was Lavan-language showing up here? Like Rabbi Fohrman said, Lavan was Jacob's father-in-law. He's infamous for the tricks he played on Jacob, including making Jacob work seven years to marry his daughter Rachel, then marrying him off to the other daughter Leah and making Jacob work another seven years to actually marry Rachel.

Yeah, Lavan's that one. If there’s any father-in-law who’s the antithesis to the welcoming, “really-there-for-you” Yitro, it was Lavan.

So hold that thought…but guess what? I wasn't totally wrong. There were also resonances to Yitro here, and not just that Micha was offering asylum to this mixed-lineage Levite guest.

To show them to me, Rabbi Fohrman brought my attention back to what Micha said to the Levite when he took him in. Here’s the verse: שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי וֶהְיֵה־לִי לְאָב וּלְכֹהֵן — Stay with me and be a father and a priest to me.

 Rabbi Fohrman: Notice the difference in roles here: You should be like a father to me, but you should also be like a כֹהֵן to me. What other person had a relationship with someone that they were like an אָב and like a כֹהֵן at the same time?

Imu: Well, that feels like Moshe and Yitro. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That feels like Moshe-Yitro. In Moshe’s relationship to Yitro, he's an אָב and he's a כֹהֵן, right?

Imu: Yitro was the high priest of Midian and Moshe's father-in-law, so, Yitro is a priest and a father-esque figure in Exodus. Now, Micha is asking the Levi to be a priest and a father to him here in Judges. But the connections get even better. 

Rabbi Fohrman: The hammer comes down in the next verse: וַיּוֹאֶל הַלֵּוִי לָשֶׁבֶת אֶת־הָאִישׁ — And the Levi was just all too happy to go and hang out with this guy.

Now, there's only one other time in Tanach that you have the language of, “...וַיּוֹאֶל…לָשֶׁבֶת אֶת —  And X was all too happy to stay with Y.” And it is…?

Imu: There's your corner piece. 

Rabbi Fohrman: There's your corner piece. That is Moshe in Yitro’s household. It's almost as if there's a latter-day Yitro here, right, and the latter-day Yitro is Micha.

Imu: If you have any doubt that Micha is being cast as a later day Yitro, there was more.

Rabbi Fohrman: The Levi goes, hangs out with Micha, and what does Micha say?

וַיֹּאמֶר מִיכָה — And Micha says, עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי — Now I know, כִּי־יֵיטִיב יְקוָה לִי — that God will be good to me, כִּי הָיָה־לִי הַלֵּוִי לְכֹהֵן — because I managed to find a Levi, a real-life Levi, to be my Kohen. I have a veneer of legitimacy.

That language is really chilling, “עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי.” Where do you have in the Torah עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּ, someone who rejoices and says, “Now I know, כִּי־יֵיטִיב יְקוָה לִי — that God has been good?”

Remember, right after the crossing of the sea, Yitro comes to visit Moshe. Let's actually open our Shemot (Book of Exodus) to that moment where Moshe greets Yitro.

Imu: We're heading to Exodus, chapter 18, verse 7

Rabbi Fohrman: So Yitro comes, וּבָנָיו וְאִשְׁתּוֹ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה, to the desert, and Moshe comes out to greet him. He tells Yitro about how God had saved them. וַיִּחַדְּ יִתְרוֹ — Yitro rejoices and he says: בָּרוּךְ יְקוָה — Blessed is God, who saved you from the hands of Egypt.

He then says the following words, in verse 11: עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי — Now I know, כִּי־גָדוֹל יְקוָה מִכׇּל־הָאֱלֹהִים כִּי בַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר זָדוּ עֲלֵיהֶם — Now I know that God is greater than any other gods because the Egyptians have met the same fate that they sought to impose upon the Israelites.

So that language עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי, together with great rejoicing, is the same language which we're finding here. Also, what was he so happy about? וַיִּחַדְּ יִתְרוֹ עַל כׇּל־הַטּוֹבָה — Yitro was so happy about all the good things that God had done. And over here: עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי — Now I know, כִּי־יֵיטִיב יְקוָה לִי. 

Imu: Which means, “God will be good to me.” Rabbi Fohrman's pointing out that not only do Micha and Yitro both say, “עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי — Now I know,” but what they know is related to the tov, the good that comes from God.

Put that together with the fact that when Moshe stays with Yitro, we're told: וַיּוֹאֶל מֹשֶׁה לָשֶׁבֶת אֶת־הָאִישׁ — Moshe was happy to stay with the man (Exodus 2:21). The only other time in Tanach that we have a similar phrase is here, when the half-Levi stays with Micha and we're told: וַיּוֹאֶל הַלֵּוִי לָשֶׁבֶת אֶת־הָאִישׁ — The Levite was happy to say with the man.

Rabbi Fohrman: The Yisro resonances in this story are profound indeed. 

Imu: Profound, yes, but also strange, no? Doesn't something feel off to you? Yitro was such a kind-hearted man. Micha…? Don't forget, he's the man who stole from his own mother; and set up an idolatrous temple in God's name; and whose invitation to the Levite also parrots the nefarious Lavan.

There was also this: the rest of the verse we were looking at earlier, “וַיּוֹאֶל הַלֵּוִי לָשֶׁבֶת אֶת־הָאִישׁ — The Levite agreed to stay with the man,” that's the phrase that parallels Yitro, but then the verse goes onוַיְהִי הַנַּעַר לוֹ כְּאַחַד מִבָּנָיו ׃ — And the youth became like one of his own sons. “The youth” seems to refer to the Levi.

So, the Levi became like one of Micha's…sons? Remember, Micha had just asked the Levi to be like his father.

There is something dark about this. He said, “Oh, you'll be like a dad and a priest for me,” but this guy ends up being like one of his kids, which is sweet but also not the right relationship you're supposed to have with your religious figure. He's looking for a dad and he gets a kid. That is weird. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Right. וַיְהִי הַנַּעַר לוֹ כְּאַחַד מִבָּנָיו is actually an inversion of what he said before. First, “You're going to be like my father and a Kohen.” Now, “You're going to be like one of my children.” It's a real mixed up kind of thing, right? There's something problematic about it.

Imu: Yep. Let's get a therapist in here. 

So was Micha being a “Yitro” for this Levi a good thing…or not? Rabbi Fohrman wasn't ready for that question yet. Before we could step back and figure out what it all meant, there was still more to the story to read and more evidence to gather.

Rabbi Fohrman: Verse one of the next chapter in the Book of Judges: בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם אֵין מֶלֶךְ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל — In those days, there was no king in Israel, וּבַיָּמִים הָהֵם שֵׁבֶט הַדָּנִי מְבַקֶּשׁ־לוֹ נַחֲלָה. Who do we meet but the Danites? Haven't heard about them for a while.

Turns out that they have no place to be. כִּי לֹא־נָפְלָה לּוֹ עַד־הַיּוֹם הַהוּא בְּתוֹךְ־שִׁבְטֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּנַחֲלָה — They were the last tribe to get their tribal appropriation in the actual land.

Imu: Talk about poetic justice. Remember, the Mekallel's mother was from Dan. They were the tribe that wouldn't accept the Mekallel and left him without a place — and now, they don't have a place. So, add that to our evidence list and on with the story. The Danites are wandering around.

 Rabbi Fohrman: They're wandering around, wandering around. וַיִּשְׁלְחוּ בְנֵי־דָן  מִמִּשְׁפַּחְתָּם חֲמִשָּׁה אֲנָשִׁים — So the B’nei Dan decide it would be a great idea to send five people, לְרַגֵּל אֶת־הָאָרֶץ — to try to spy out land that might work for them, that they could have some sort of temporary place to be. Who do they come to? הַר־אֶפְרַיִם עַד־בֵּית מִיכָה — They ended up showing at Mica's house, too.

So now you've got a real party, because: הֵמָּה עִם־בֵּית מִיכָה וְהֵמָּה הִכִּירוּ אֶת־קוֹל הַנַּעַר הַלֵּוִי — They, from Dan, recognized the voice of this Levi. Strangely enough, they say, “We know you, Mr. Levi. מִי־הֱבִיאֲךָ הֲלֹם — Who brought you here?”

Now that word, הֲלֹם, very unusual word in Tanach. Where in Chumash do we have the word הֲלֹם?

Imu: אַל־תִּקְרַב הֲלֹם?

The translation is, “Don’t come closer.” This is one of the first things God says to Moshe at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:5).

Rabbi Fohrman: Which is the story right after Moshe meets Yitro. You see what's happening? It's as if we have a Moshe-meets-Yitro story here in the Book of Shoftim, where there is a latter-day Moshe, a Levi, who encounters a latter-day Yitro, this Micha character. Right after that, you have the next story. What story is that? It's a “הֲלֹם” story, almost as if we're at the Burning Bush now.

Imu: By the way, there's more than that. There's a kol, a voice, and “וַיָּסוּרוּ שָׁם — They turned there.” 

Rabbi Fohrman: Oh good, I hadn't even thought of that. Very good point. So there's a whole bunch of connections:

1. Moshe hears a voice; here, הִכִּירוּ אֶת־קוֹל הַנַּעַר — they hear a voice.
2. וַיָּסוּרוּ שָׁם — They turned him; Moshe turned at the Burning Bush.
3. מִי־הֱבִיאֲךָ הֲלֹם; Moshe heard the word הֲלֹם.

Really does sound like another Burning Bush story.

Imu: Normally, this is the part where I'd go over all these connections more slowly so that they're really clear in your mind. But I'm going to make an unusual editorial decision this time and skip that step. I invite you to open your Tanach to Judges 18 and Exodus 3 and compare the verses there for yourself. I'd love to hear what else you find. But for our purposes, what's going to be important is not the details of these connections but the bigger picture, and that's what I want to draw your attention to.

It's like Judges is tracking Exodus. Yitro takes Moshe in, Micha takes the Levi in. Then, Moshe encounters God at the Burning Bush, and now the Levi, the “Moshe” character in our story here, encounters these Danites in a way that evokes the Burning Bush.

And this pattern continues. Let's keep reading. So the Danites recognize the Levi's voice and they begin to ask him some questions.

 Rabbi Fohrman: Who brought you here? וּמָה־אַתָּה עֹשֶׂה בָּזֶה — What are you even doing here? He says: כָּזֹה וְכָזֶה עָשָׂה לִי מִיכָה — Oh, Micha, he was really good to me. I've got this job here; I'm a Kohen. So the people from Dan say: שְׁאַל־נָא בֵאלֹהִים — Do me a favor, if you're such a Kohen guy, if you have such an “in” into the transcendent world… They say to the Levi: שְׁאַל־נָא בֵאלֹהִים — Why don't you ask God, וְנֵדְעָה הֲתַצְלִחַ דַּרְכֵּנוּ אֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ הֹלְכִים עָלֶיהָ — are we ever going to find ourselves a place to be? וַיֹּאמֶר לָהֶם הַכֹּהֵן — So the Kohen, i.e., the Levi says: לְכוּ לְשָׁלוֹם נֹכַח יְקוָה דַּרְכְּכֶם אֲשֶׁר תֵּלְכוּ־בָהּ — Yeah, God's going to make you very, very successful. You're totally going to find a place to be.

Imu: לְכוּ לְשָׁלוֹם is Yitro-language. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's true, that is Yitro-language. לֵךְ לְשָׁלוֹם; he sends him off and says, “Go in peace (Exodus 4:18).”

Imu: Before, Moshe needs to go on his journey, after the Bush. It's right after the Bush. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So you see what's happening? Literally, you have the Yitro story, the Bush story, the after-the-Bush story. It's fascinating. 

Imu: Fascinating but confusing. That was becoming the mantra in my head. As I saw it, our reading so far had opened up three provocative paths that needed to be explored further:

One was the thematic connection with cursing from the beginning of the story. Could you undo a curse? And what to make of the way Micha and his mother's idolatry was paradoxically like blasphemy?

The second was what to make of Micha taking in the Levi. Was this a benevolent act like Yitro taking in Moshe? Or a more malevolent act like Lavan taking in Jacob?

And finally, three, the Levi seemed to be taking his role as Moshe and running with it. His story continued to trace the evolution of Moshe's story, from Yitro's home to Burning Bush to returning to Egypt. Only, there was something weird here, too. Moshe's journey was from small-time vigilante to full fledged steward of God, and the Levi's journey seemed to be in the opposite direction, away from God into the service of idolatry. I was curious about each one of these paths, and of course, how they would all come together. But to get there we had to read the end of the story — and it's an ending that does not disappoint.

Here's what happens next. The Danites make a surprise attack on a city called Laish, and they conquer it. They then go back to Micha's temple and steal the idols. The Levi confronts them and they invite him to join them. Well, they don't phrase it quite as politely.

 Rabbi Fohrman: Basically, they say, “You're coming with us now, and you're going to be our Kohen.” They bring him to Laish; they end up destroying Laish, they end up destroying the city, and the Danites end up conquering this area. They name the place Dan, and: וַיָּקִימוּ לָהֶם בְּנֵי־דָן, verse 30, אֶת־הַפָּסֶל — They ended up setting up this pesel, this idol.

Now, what happens is one of the anonymous characters in the story gets revealed — the Levi. We never knew who the Levi was. He was just a Levi who apparently was a child of a mixed marriage, but now we hear who he is at the very end of the story.

וַיָּקִימוּ לָהֶם בְּנֵי־דָן אֶת־הַפָּסֶל וִיהוֹנָתָן בֶּן־גֵּרְשֹׁם בֶּן־מְנַשֶּׁה הוּא וּבָנָיו הָיוּ כֹהֲנִים לְשֵׁבֶט הַדָּנִי עַד־יוֹם גְּלוֹת הָאָרֶץ — He and his progeny ended up staying in this house of idolatry, being this Kohen and this house of idolatry, for hundreds of years until exile came to the land. But who is this person, Yehonatan ben Gershom, the child of Gershom, ben Menashe? מְנַשֶּׁה, מְ-נַ-שֶּׁ-ה. 

Imu: On my screen, it says מְ-נַ-שֶּׁ-ה, but the נ is elevated almost as if the נ is trying to escape.

Rabbi Fohrman: Correct. 

Imu: And the name would be “ben Gershom ben Moshe.” 

Rabbi Fohrman: “Ben Gershom ben Moshe.” Chazal come along, the Sages say in fact that the Levi was Yehonatan, the grandson of Moshe, the child of Gershom, the child of Moshe, right? And this is who all this happened to. He ends up being this idolatrous priest for Dan. It's as if all the characters from the Mekalell have come back. There's this story of cursing; the mother tries to undo the curse, but the curse is not undone.

Imu: The chickens are all coming back to roost. 

Rabbi Fohrman: The chickens are all coming back to roost. There’s this Yitro role. Yitro is the one who took in Moshe, who basically supported Moshe and allowed him to express whatever anger or vexation he had towards God in some sort of non-destructive way. The Mekelall, in Moshe's own day and age, didn't have the benefit of the Yitro. There was no Yitro. And ultimately, Moshe's grandchild, according to Chazal, ends up being the protagonist in a story in which the grandchild becomes the wanderer, like the wanderer that approached Moshe. As if the, the challenge of Moshe's own grandchild is, without a positive Yitro, can you make it in life? What if there's a malevolent Yitro in your life? What if the Yitro that you meet is a Micha-like guy who brings you into idolatry? What then?

It's this really forceful sense, I think, that when someone comes to you and they're desperate, they're dislocated, it's a moment you have to connect with them and to be a Yitro for them. If you don't and that person acts with abandon, sure, he can be responsible for his actions. You're not directly responsible for those actions because ultimately everyone is responsible for their own actions. But that doesn't mean that there's no din, that there's no expectation for those whom you encounter that could have changed your path. History will have its way when it comes to that.

Imu: This is such a haunting story.

One of the things I found so haunting was that the din, the judgment here wasn't that Moshe's descendent should experience the same fate as the Mekallel. I think that's where I would have gone, right? You didn't take the Mekallel in, now your grandson won't be taken in. But the grandson, this Levi, Yehonatan is taken in by Micha and then by the tribe of Dan, the very tribe that had in fact rejected the Mekallel. And it's through these relationships that Yehonatan goes from being a homeless outsider to being a respected priest and leader in his community. It just made it very clear: Yehonatan's story was a Moshe story, tracing the same path Moshe did, from outsider to leader. Just, tragically, a version of that path polluted by the legacy of Moshe's mistake.

But there was something else I found haunting too; it was just a little harder to articulate. It was the nature of this polluted legacy. I mean, where in the story do you see Yehonatan, Moshe's grandson, acting anything like Moshe did towards the Mekallel? It seemed to me that maybe there was a moment of this.  

I want to come back to a few verses here that are also really meaningful about how the the people of Dan are so delighted with this priest that they come and they kidnap him.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. 

Imu: They don't really kidnap him. They say, you know, “Come with us,” and he's like, “No, I'm here. I'm with Micha,” and they're like, “Yeah, but we're going to give you a much better job.” What would you rather be? Would you rather be the priest for one man, or would you rather be the priest for a whole tribe? And he's like, “Okay, this is a good idea.”

Rabbi Fohrman: “Yeah, sure. I'll take that. I'll go with you.” It's almost as if all this latter-day Yitro is offering for this Levi is just, you know, a little bit more money. 

Imu: They offer him a bargain, and he's like, “Yeah, that's a great idea. Good calculus.”

I don't think any of us could imagine Moshe making the same decision; you know, being a priest-for-hire to the highest bidder. Of course not. But the cold calculation that Yehonatan the Levite priest uses to make this decision…I don't know, it felt like maybe that had its roots in Moshe's cold calculation towards the Mekallel. 

But where Moshe's coldness was at least in the name of justice, his grandson's was in the name of cash. That got me thinking back to the beginning of Micha's story, how he and his mother also did everything to hold on to their silver; how that control of money was also entangled with the mother's desire, it seemed, to have control over justice, to be able to curse the thief who stole from her. It seemed like two threads in our stories that you might think were opposites of each other. Cold calculations and impassioned cursing; they share a common denominator, and that common denominator was desire for control. As I shared some of these thoughts with Rabbi Fohrman, he connected the dots even more back to idolatry.

Rabbi Fohrman: The whole notion of idolatry, the whole sin of idolatry might just be transcendence as in your control. The whole notion of transcendence, the whole notion of worship of God is that you're worshiping Someone that isn't in your control. The whole pull of idolatry is, “But what if it could be? What if it could be in my control?” Money is the stand-in for the transcendent thing. If you would interview the Levi, the Levi would say, “Sure, I'm in control. Look at me. I've built up my business. Boy, you know, I started with a little shteibel in Micha’s house. Look at me now. I got myself a whole network, you know. I'm really making it big in this transcendent business.”

But ultimately, it's God who controls him. God is controlling history, and he's just a link in a much larger historical drama where he's in anything but control. 

Imu: Yeah, it really does feel like justice and avodah zara (idol worship) and control… it seems like those themes are bedfellows.

And, of course, the other bedfellow that fit right in with this group was blasphemy. It felt like we'd come full circle: Back to blasphemy as the attempt to judge God in the name of God. Now, I could see another reason why Pesel Micha was very much the epilogue to the Mekallel. 

In both stories, it feels like there is a human wielding a judgment of what shouldn't be. The Mekallel, in the first place, is the one deciding that this world is unjust. Then, in the Pesel Micha story, people are wielding God again. They're not wielding the name of God; they're actually wielding gods for their own gratification. Everybody's wielding God, it feels like — a name or an idol.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, you might see idolatry as a further step along a road that begins with blasphemy. You know, there's a blasphemy as using God's name against God, right? What is idolatry but using the idea of God to make God irrelevant?

Imu: With that, I felt we'd come to the moral we'd been searching for: Beware the dark side of justice. Desire for justice often masks desire for control, but human beings who desire too much control are wading into God's territory, and we are not God. It's definitely not our place to judge Him or try to replace Him. What we can do is care for each other the way Yitro cared for Moshe, the way Moshe might have cared for the Mekallel. It was a haunting lesson, to use one of my favorite words, but a powerful one, and I finally felt satisfied with where our journey had ended.

But here's the funny thing: When we sat back to reflect on the last three episodes, Rabbi Fohrman was now the one with misgivings.

Rabbi Fohrman: I can't help it, but the way I see the story is that it's just the playing out of a very harsh din in the world, which is why I'm troubled by it. That, to me, is where I land, which is troubling to me. I'm just being honest. That's where I land. 

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman's reaction made me realize that I was so enamored with the lesson that human beings are not God that I’d lost sight of what these stories were saying about God. Whatever reasons we may offer for the Mekallel’s punishment or the stain on Moshe’s legacy, both of these men met really harsh fates. And that's where our story just ends.

That seems to paint God as the exact type of cold, controlling judge that we're being warned not to emulate. So was that the moral of the story? That God is sort of saying, “Do as I say, but not as I do?”

Let me put this another way: The Mekallel saga seemed to be about human trespass and Divine punishment. The Mekallel, Moshe, everyone who acted badly faced retribution. The story is so dark, the moral is so dark. Where is the path to redemption. We talked about this downward spiral from desire to justice to blasphemy to idolatry, but where’s the way out of that?

These were the questions that I think were bothering Rabbi Fohrman. He couldn't pretend, of course, that he saw something different in the story than he did. This was where the text had led us. But his instinct was telling him that there had to be more to the story, something even more meaningful in all of this than just a grim lesson about control and judgment.

The more we thought about it, our theory did feel incomplete. For one, we'd shown how Moshe seemed to get his just desserts, but we never explained why Moshe makes this terrible mistake in the first place. What was going on for him at that moment when he judged the Mekallal?

And there were some other questions from way back when we first read this Mekallel story that we still hadn’t answered. Like, why are we told that the people put the Mekallel in jail? Why include that detail? And our very first question: Why does this story show up in Leviticus, a book that has very, very few narratives? It feels totally out of place, and nothing we'd seen so far explains that. Clearly, we were missing something. We just didn't know yet what that was.

Next time on A Book Like No Other: We head back to Leviticus to take a fresh look at the Mekallel, notice a couple of new intertextual connections, and once again follow the Torah somewhere unexpected.

Credits:

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

Our producer is Tikva Hecht.

Audio editing for this episode was done by Hillary Guttman.

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.