Imu Shalev: Welcome back to A Book Like No Other.

When we last left, our heroes, that would be me and Rabbi Fohrman…well, I don't know if I would call myself a hero. Maybe a sidekick. Regardless, we were knee-deep in our exploration of Tehillim, chapter 126, Shir Hama’alos.

Last time, we had examined the first half of the psalm. In it, we explored the possibility that for the captives of Zion to embrace the joy of redemption, they needed to get out of a dreamlike daze by working through their residual trauma. Now, as Rabbi Fohrman and I sat down to learn together today, we were ready to jump into the second half of Shir Hama’alos and examine its meaning.

We were almost ready to jump into the second half. Because before we took a close look at those final three verses, there was something we needed to do first. Rabbi Fohrman had noticed connections between this entire chapter of Tehillim and another section of Tanach all the way back in Genesis. And he suspected that the link between these two sections of the Bible would actually give us a whole new way of understanding that second half of the psalm. So we're going to check out those connections first.

From Aleph Beta, I’m Imu Shalev, and this is another episode of A Book Like No Other, generously sponsored by Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Okay, so what I want to do then is play our intertextuality game, “Where have we heard these words before?” and we're going to do that with the bookends of Shir Hama’alos. We're going to take the first image from Shir Hama’alos and the last image of Shir Hama’alos and see what they are. The first image, שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת בְּשׁוּב יְקוָה אֶת־שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן הָיִינוּ כְּחֹלְמִים — When God returned our captives, הָיִינוּ כְּחֹלְמִים — We were like dreamers.

So the very first image, dreams. The last image in the psalm is that you've got this guy walking around crying, holding this bag of seeds. בֹּא־יָבֹא בְרִנָּה — He's going to come in joy, נֹשֵׂא אֲלֻמֹּתָיו — he's going to be holding his sheaves. So the last image is sheaves of wheat.

And now I want to put those two images together. Dreamers, sheaves of wheat; dreamers, sheaves of wheat. What does this remind you of?

Imu: That reminds me of Yosef who had a dream about alumot, about these bundles of wheat; the eleven that bow to the one, to his bundle of wheat.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, that's the dream. Yosef tells his brothers, “Hey, I had this crazy dream. We were all in the field and we were harvesting this wheat, and suddenly my sheaf of wheat stood up straight and your sheaves of wheat all bowed before my sheaf of wheat.” And it gets him in a whole bunch of hot water. (Well, really it gets him in a pit.)

The brothers are very upset about this. They think, here's this narcissistic little kid, 17 years old, with dreams of grandeur. He's going to take over the family. And that's what they say. “What, you think you're going to rule over all of us? You're going to be the king over us?” And they hated him, both for his dreams and for his telling them about the dreams. So this is sort of the beginning of the end for Joseph, these dreams.

But they seem to make this cameo appearance. Is it just our imagination? Are we dreaming if we think that Shir Hama’alos includes references to Yosef's dreams? So you might think, well, maybe that's a coincidence. There's lots of dreams about sheaves of wheat…but are there? Like, there aren’t really that many dreams about sheaves of wheat in the Torah specifically. By the way, think about that word alumot.

Imu: I went to go check you on this and I went to Pharaoh's dream, which also includes crops, but I wasn't able to find the word alumot. I found shibbolim… 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes. Interestingly, Pharaoh does talk about wheat, so one wonders whether there is some interrelationship between Pharaoh's dream and Joseph's dream. We can leave that for later.

But that aside, the notion of alumot just happens to be a really direct reference to Joseph. That is the very unusual word which is used to describe the stalks of wheat in the Joseph dream. And lest you think that is coincidental, I will ask you, Imu, exactly how many times do you think alumot appears in the entire Hebrew Bible, Tanach?

Imu: I think you usually don't ask a question like that unless it's just these two times.

Rabbi Fohrman: As far as I know, it's just these two times. It's Psalm 126 and Genesis 37, and that's it. There is no other alumot in the entire Hebrew Bible, to such an extent that when alumot shows up, this very unusual word shows up for the first and only time in the Five Books of Moses in Genesis 37, Rashi whose job it is to tell us what strange words mean struggles to figure out what the word means, and says, “Oh, look at Psalm 126. That will tell us what the word means.” And through context in Psalm 126, it's like, oh yeah, these are stalks of wheat. That's what alumot are.

So it really feels like Shir Hama’alos is channeling Joseph's dream, if you put the two images from the beginning of the dream and the end of the dream together. That's what it seems like.

But you might say, I don't know, maybe it's still a coincidence. Here's the thing, though. Go to the middle of the psalm, verse 4, the beginning of the second part of the psalm. שׁוּבָה יְקוָה אֶת שְׁבִיתֵנוּ כַּאֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב. That's a very particular metaphor. God, return our captives, כַּאֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב — like flash floods in the desert. אֲפִיקִים is a highly unusual word, so unusual that it actually appears nowhere in the Five Books of Moses. But that's only partially true. The word אֲפִיקִים does not appear in the Five Books…

Imu: I know where you're going.

Rabbi Fohrman: But it does appear somewhere in the Five Books of Moses if you tweak it a bit. אֲפִיקִים is a noun. What if you “verbified” אֲפִיקִים? What if you took אֲפִיקִים and made it into a verb?

Imu: לְהִתְאַפֵּק.

Rabbi Fohrman: There it is. And where does that appear, oh Imu?

Imu: וְלֹא־יָכֹל יוֹסֵף לְהִתְאַפֵּק — Yosef is struggling to hold back his tears.

Rabbi Fohrman: וְלֹא־יָכֹל יוֹסֵף לְהִתְאַפֵּק — Yosef could not hold his tears back, and he starts sobbing when he reveals himself to his brothers  (Genesis 45:1).

So אֲפִיקִים does appear once in the Torah…well, really twice; וַיִּתְאַפַּק, the first time Joseph holds himself back (Genesis 43:31), and the second time he can't hold himself back and his tears come like floodwaters. These are the only times you have anything like the word אֲפִיקִים in the Five Books of Moses.

So is it a coincidence that the beginning, the end, and the middle of Shir Hama’alos seem to take you back to the Joseph story? And you think to yourself, but that's crazy. Why would Shir Hama’alos be talking about the Joseph story of all things?

So is there anything about the Joseph story that reminds you about the general theme of Shir Hama’alos?

Imu: I mean, thematically he's the first exile, right? He's the first captive.

Rabbi Fohrman: First captive. First guy ever taken out of Canaan, and he's the first guy to ever return. Now, he doesn't quite return in the sense of returning to the land, but even he comes back in the sense that there is a reunification between Joseph and his family.

So in a way, there's a certain kind of שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן. When is that moment of שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן, if you would have to pinpoint it? That moment of reunification with family. Isn't it interesting that that moment takes place at the אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב moment? At וְלֹא־יָכֹל יוֹסֵף לְהִתְאַפֵּק. That actually is the climactic moment, when Joseph breaks down in tears. And what's the next word he says to all the brothers who are sitting there astounded? אֲנִי יוֹסֵף — I am Joseph (Genesis 45:3). He reveals himself, and suddenly the brothers are back together.

Imu: Interesting. The revelation moment happens at a לֹא־יָכֹל לְהִתְאַפֵּק peak. The dam breaks and that which was dry becomes flooded with water.

Rabbi Fohrman: What's the water in this case?

Imu: Tears.

Rabbit Forhman: It says tears. And it's literally  אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב, because you're going hiking in the Negev, right? You're thinking, there's no water.

Imu: Dry, dry, dry.

Rabbi Fohrman: Dry, dry, dry. And there's this stone-hearted Egyptian who just keeps on throwing obstacles in your way. He accuses you of being spies, he sent you back and is making your life hard, and you're thinking, like, “Man, he doesn't have a heart.” Can you imagine your surprise, your shock, when all of a sudden Mr. Hard-Hearted Egyptian just breaks down in tears and sobs and can't stop crying? It's אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב, it's flash floods in the desert, those tears, right?

So could it be that Shir Hama’alos is describing the very first שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן, the first time any individual kidnapped person ever comes back to his people? That moment of reunification is the first reunification of a prisoner of Zion coming back to his family.

And if so, what is Shir Hama’alos trying to tell us about the Joseph story — or what is the Joseph story, in a way, coming to tell us about Shir Hama’alos? And that's what I want to explore with you here.

Imu: Intriguing.

So we had established what seemed like a pretty strong connection between the Shir Hama’alos and the Yosef story, both in terms of the wording of the text and even a thematic link with the returning captives. But remember, the reason Rabbi Fohrman had shared the connections between these two narratives was because he thought that they would help us understand the second half of Shir Hama’alos. In fact, we'd already examined the first verse of that second half, שׁוּבָה יְקוָה אֶת שְׁבִיתֵנוּ כַּאֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב, and those words even hinted to a theme that Rabbi Fohrman suspected was integral to those very verses, a theme that he was now ready to explore with me.

Rabbi Fohrman: What I want to suggest is, if laughter and song are the modes of the first part of the psalm, as we talked about last episode, tears are the theme of the second half. And it's not just אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב.

אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב might be a reference to Joseph's tears, but now listen to the next words of Psalm 126: הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה — Those who plant with tears, בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ — will ultimately reap in joy. הָלוֹךְ יֵלֵךְ  וּבָכֹה — There's a man walking around crying, נֹשֵׂא מֶשֶׁךְ־הַזָּרַע — he's holding a bag of seeds. בֹּא־יָבֹא בְרִנָּה — That man, one day he's going to come in song. נֹשֵׂא אֲלֻמֹּתָיו — He's going to come holding triumphantly his sheaves. 

Now the question I have for you is, if Shir Hama’alos is channeling, on some level, the Joseph story, if Joseph is the one who cries אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב, who's the one who's crying here? It's a very different kind of tears than אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב.

אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב is all of a sudden, bam, there's just sobbing and sobbing, overwhelming tears. But there's a different kind of tears. Just somebody who's walking around every day, just cries a little bit more. What would this be a reference to if we're talking about the Joseph story? Who's the guy who cries הָלוֹךְ יֵלֵךְ  וּבָכֹה, every day he's walking around crying?

Imu: It's interesting because I would have thought that this is continuing to describe Yosef. But when you gave that preamble, I realized Yosef doesn't look like he's crying every day. In fact, he's the picture of strength. His pains are buried deep. And you even hear that he's trying to hold back tears the first time, and he's successful, and the second time he's not successful. So he's not the walking man who's crying. And if it's not Yosef, is there somebody who cries a lot and actually doesn't stop crying? That reminds me of his father, of Yaakov.

Rabbi Fohrman: It does. So let's actually go to those verses, right? Jacob, the second he hears about the loss of Yosef, intuits that he's always going to be walking around crying. וַיְמָאֵן לְהִתְנַחֵם — He refused to be consoled. People tried to console him. The whole point of consolation is to stop crying. וַיְמָאֵן לְהִתְנַחֵ — He would not be consoled. כִּי־אֵרֵד אֶל־בְּנִי אָבֵל שְׁאֹלָה —I will go down to my grave mourning Joseph (Genesis 37:35).

And when Jacob says that “I am going to go down to my grave mourning Joseph,” the Sages, including Rashi, wonder about that. How is it that you cannot be consoled? Everybody gets consoled. Death is always awful, but we always move on. Jacob thinks that Joseph is dead, so why can't he move on?

And he really does go down to his grave mourning Joseph. He never gets over it. When he shows up at Pharaoh, he tells Pharaoh what a terrible life he's had. He really has been mourning every single day of his life. Why? And Rashi says, because Joseph wasn't really dead.

The whole point of mourning is that when death happens, it's final. And if it's final, no matter how awful it is, you can somehow heal. But if it's not over, you can never heal. And Jacob somehow intuits that, even though he thinks consciously that he’s dead. And here goes the unconscious again, almost like a dream. The unconscious part of Jacob is like, “I don't know about this. And somehow, it's like I can't get over this.”

So, in the second half of the psalm, you have two images of people crying that are almost opposites of each other. On the one hand, you have Joseph crying. He's Mr. אֲפִיקִים בַּנֶּגֶב. He is Mr. Super Dry Desert-like Person, never feels like he's going to break, and all of a sudden, there he is. לֹא־יָכֹל יוֹסֵף לְהִתְאַפֵּק — Joseph can't hold himself back, and he sobs. On the other hand, earlier in the story, and throughout the story of Jacob, he's the guy who's הָלוֹךְ יֵלֵךְ  וּבָכֹה, walking around crying.

So the question I would ask is, these two sets of tears — Joseph's tears, the sobs, and Jacob's tears, these everyday tears — are they connected to one another? Are they just two images of like, “Oh yeah, there were two people crying, isn't that interesting?” But Shir Hama’alos is putting them back to back, giving you these two images right after each other. Even though in the text of Genesis, they're not right after each other. Jacob's tears are Genesis 37, Joseph's tears are all the way at the end of the story. But Shir Hama’alos comes and just sandwiches these back to back. And I want to suggest that Shir Hama’alos actually is laying out a connection between the tears.

In Shir Hama’alos’s view, I want to suggest Jacob's tears are deeply connected to Joseph's when Joseph reveals himself. Jacob's set of tears, in a deep kind of way, is responsible for Joseph's, which is the deep meaning of הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ. 

When Jacob was walking around crying, and we would interview him, “Jacob, is there any meaning to your tears? Are your tears doing anything?” Jacob will look at you like you are stark raving mad. That's not why you cry. You don't cry to achieve something. You cry because you just cry. You're broken and you can't imagine there's anything good with these tears. They're just the expression of bitterness.

But what I want to do is sketch out to you how it is that Jacob's tears set up Joseph's tears. I'll give you the first of those theories in this session, and then next time I'll give you the second one.

Imu: So Yaakov is constantly crying over his son for years, and while Yosef doesn't cry for all that time, he then bursts forth with this flash flood of tears. And Rabbi Fohrman was suggesting that even though these two sets of tears seem to have nothing to do with each other in the text of Genesis, you Shir Hama’alos is indicating that they're somehow linked, that in some way, Yaakov’s continuous crying actually causes Yosef to weep all those years later.

It was an interesting idea, but how could that be true and what would it even mean to dig into this? Rabbi Fohrman took us back to the moment when Yosef finally bursts forth with those tears, the same exact moment that he reveals himself to his brothers.

Rabbi Fohrman: Ask yourself why it is that Joseph reveals himself when he does. He could have revealed himself at lots of different places. He could have lost it in all sorts of different places. The Torah even says that Joseph, earlier, held himself back. But there's a moment where he just literally cannot hold himself back. It sounds like he wanted to hold himself back. It sounded like if it was up to Joseph, like, “No, I'll keep on holding myself back,” right? What is it that happened that caused Joseph to finally lose it?

Part of the answer to that question might be, well, why was it that he was trying to hold himself back? A lot of people read the Joseph story and they assume that Joseph was always going to reveal himself. It was just a matter of when. He was very calculated, and he figured out exactly when he was going to reveal himself. 

But if you look carefully at the story, that's not what the text tells you. The text tells you: לֹא־יָכֹל יוֹסֵף לְהִתְאַפֵּק — He could not hold himself back anymore. His emotions overcame him, which suggests that were it not for the fact that his emotions overcame him, he would not have revealed himself to his brothers. He might never have revealed himself to his brothers.

So I want to introduce you, really reintroduce you, to a theory I sketched out in my book The Exodus You Almost Passed Over, which really isn't my theory, it's the theory of Rav Yoel Bin-Nun. Rav Yoel Bin-Nun wrote this up in the first issue of the Tanakh journal Megadim, and he has this really provocative theory that Joseph  might well have been the victim of a terrible misunderstanding. 

You have to understand that when you're reading the Joseph story, you're getting information that no character has. The Narrator is giving you information, but not every character in the story has the same information that you have. In particular, Joseph doesn't have the information that you have.

Joseph is on his way down to Egypt. He's in an Ishmaelite caravan, heading down to Egypt to be sold as a slave. And as that's happening, the text tells you back in Canaan what the brothers are doing. The brothers are taking Joseph's coat, and dipping it in blood, and bringing it back to his father, but Joseph has no way of knowing that that's what happened. 

Now, if Joseph has no way of knowing that the brothers dipped the coat in blood and brought it back to their father, what terrible misconception might Joseph be under that we, the reader, know isn't true?

Imu: That Dad was in on it?

Rabbi Fohrman: Maybe Dad was in on it. Either maybe Dad was in on it from the beginning, or maybe others came back and convinced Dad. Let's just look at it from Joseph's perspective:

“There I was, I was 17 years old, and things were going okay, and suddenly, you know, I started having these dreams, and Dad was favoring me, there was all these tensions in the family, but Dad knew about those tensions. And then one day, Dad dispatched me to go check on my brothers in Shchem, go all alone to my brothers in Shchem. Shchem of all places, where massacres happened. Brought to you by Shimon and Levi, of all people.”

“And you know, I was nervous about that. This doesn't seem so wonderful to me. But look, Dad, if you want me to go check on my brothers, sure, I'll go check on my brothers. Hineni, I said. I'm ready to do whatever it is that you want, and I trusted you. I trusted you that things would go okay, but things did not go okay. I was jumped, I was put in a pit. And next thing I know, I'm bumping along down to Egypt in this caravan being sold as a slave, and my whole life has been turned upside down.”

“And now my question is, how come there was never any search party? How come I go down to Egypt and like, ‘Oh well, that's it for Joseph. Never hear from him again.’”

And isn't it interesting that Joseph in Egypt, when he finally gets elevated to a position of power and he can do whatever he wants, he's there in Egypt for years, and he never writes a postcard to his father who he clearly loved so much. Why doesn't he send some word to his father who he loves that he's okay?

And Rav Yoel Bin-Nun's answer is that the terrible misconception Joseph might have been under is that maybe I was kicked out of the family. And it's not like it never happened before. Two generations before this, Ishmael was kicked out of the family. A generation before, Eisav was kicked out of the family. Is this the third time? Is it that Leah finally had too much of this child of Rachel that was favored? 

And one way or the other, either it was all a plot and Jacob was in on it, or it wasn't. And the brothers came back to Dad and said, “Hey, it was either him or us.” And somehow the family is moving on without me, and I am left for dead. And therefore maybe, Yoel Bin-Nun suggests, Joseph never plans on revealing himself to his brothers. He feels that he was kicked out of the family.

And maybe when he sees Benjamin, the whole plan with the cup and the silver and all of that is really just a ruse. It's just a way to get Benjamin with him in Egypt. He cannot abide the notion of, “If this is what the brothers did to me, who knows what they're doing to Benjamin? I'm going to take this other child of Rachel, I'm going to save him from their clutches.”

And he's all too happy to send everybody back. “Goodbye, guys. I'm going to take Benjamin, we'll be here, and we'll set up the Confederate States of Rachel on the other side of the Nile. We'll do our own thing. Good riddance to everybody else.” And that is Joseph's plan.

But if that is Joseph's way of seeing things, at some point something shatters the illusion. Judah shatters the illusion. What is it that Judah tells Joseph in his impassioned speech that completely destroys Joseph's illusion, Joseph's narrative, of what might have happened?

Imu: He reveals his father's reaction to the loss of Yosef.

Rabbi Fohrman: And essentially what he says is, “Father has been crying for you all along. He's been mourning you. He was so broken up.” He said: כִּי־אֵרֵד אֶל־בְּנִי אָבֵל שְׁאֹלָה — I'm going to go down to my grave mourning his child. And therefore he couldn't let Benjamin go, because he couldn't abide the loss of two children. שְׁנַיִם יָלְדָה־לִּי אִשְׁתִּי — My beloved wife gave birth to two children, and it broke me up so much when one was taken, I'll die if the second is taken (Genesis 44:27). And suddenly it hits Joseph like cold water. “Oh my gosh, he was crying for me all along.”

Therefore, in a very real way, one might argue that הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ doesn't just mean that those who plant seeds while they're crying will eventually get their wheat. It means in a way that sometimes when you're crying, the tears themselves are the seeds. הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה — Those who sow with tears. You could read it that the tears are the seeds. 

What if you came to Jacob and said, “Jacob, those tears that you're crying, that you say you'll always be crying for him, do you know what they're going to do? Those tears are seeds. They're going to bring back Joseph.” He would look at you like you're mad, like you're crazy. There's no way. How can my tears bring back Joseph? But Jacob doesn't know that Joseph really isn't dead. And the one thing that's holding him back is the suspicion that I was thrown out of the family.

You know, if you ask Jacob when he was sending the brothers off to Egypt to go search for food, and you would say, “What are they searching for in Egypt?” he would have said, “Food. We're searching for wheat.” But in reality, what do they end up finding? In a way, they find something even more precious than food. They find the lost child. And Joseph in the dream, what was he? He was an aluma, he was a sheaf of wheat.

Along comes Shir Hama’alos and says, well, in the end, guess what Jacob's going to have? He's going to have his sheaves of wheat, but there's two meanings to the sheaves of wheat. He's going to get his food, but he's not just going to get his food. He's going to get the child that in the dream was the sheaf of wheat, and he's going to get it because he planted with tears, because his tears were themselves seeds.  The fact that every single day, Jacob was crying just a little bit more. When he realizes that, it leads to that flood of tears, those sobs. Jacob's tears catalyze Joseph's tears, and bring Joseph back to the family.

So what we have here, then, is one way of interpreting the second half of Shir Hama’alos. הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ means that sometimes tears can themselves be a kind of seed. Tears have a meaning that's often hidden from us, that in some ways that we can't understand. They catalyze a kind of connection with those that we love, that our tears somehow are part of the story of how we can reconnect with those people. The tears are meaningful in ways that we can't even imagine.

Now, if you see it that way, then one could argue that Shir Hama’alos is using this as a paradigm for some sort of future redemption, which is that we too, when we cry about captives of Zion, it could also be that our tears are seeds; that the same way that Jacob's tears indicated a connection to those who were lost, and that tearful indication of connection was enough to unmask a high Egyptian official, so too in Shir Hama’alos's case. Who would be the one who would be, quote, “the high Egyptian official?” The one who's in charge of keeping the captives of Zion away from the rest of their family? In this case, that would be God, right?

And yet, in response to tears indicating this incredible connection, God, like Joseph, can almost Himself become, so to speak, overcome and unmask Himself and allow for a reunification of captives with their family. And that might be something of the message of what Shir Hama’alos is trying to get across. Don't discount the power of your tears.

Imu: On the surface, tears seem like the least productive things of all. Like, they're no more than a reaction to loss or an instinctive expression of sadness and bitterness. But this read of the Yosef story was suggesting that tears may mean so much more than that. Tears can have power.

In the case of Yaakov, his tears were so powerful that they even brought his captive son back to him. They changed the outcome of the story, and maybe at times our tears can do the same. Maybe when we cry, our tears aren't just falling to the ground. Maybe they too are seeds that can germinate and sprout, and sometimes even yield redemption and reunion. 

And perhaps when the ultimate redemption comes, we may even look back and find that our tears were part of what helped bring us there. I found this idea really moving and comforting. 

But while all that may be true, there was something that didn't sit quite right with me. Sure, Yaakov's tears may have brought Yosef back to him in that story in Genesis, and maybe sometimes our tears can do the same, but aren't there so many times where we cry and it doesn't bring back the ones we've lost? Not every story is the Yaakov story. Not every tear changes the outcome. What about those tears? Do all those tears that I've personally cried, that we've all cried, have no meaning?

Well, remember that Rabbi Fohrman said that he had a second read of the tears in Shir Hama’alos, and that new read will address this very question, suggesting that tears may have a mysterious, meaningful impact regardless of the outcome. 

What is this potential deeper meaning to tears and how might it alter our understanding of Shir Hama’alos? You're going to have to tune in next time to find out.

This season of A Book Like No Other was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman and me, Imu Shalev.

It was produced by Robbie Chernoff.

Our audio engineer is Hillary Guttman.

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

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

Thank you, Shari and Nathan, and thank you all for listening.