Ronna Burger on Moses as Lawgiver and Founder

Welcome back to the new thing. My name is David Barr and with me as always is my good friend Alex Priya. How are you Alex? Doing well.

I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing? I'm well and my good friend Greg McBrayer. Greg, how are you?

I've been upgraded to good friend now. I appreciate that. Yeah, I know that your ear for Santa fauntex subtleties is just my friend for years. I'm just like here's Greg.

Our guest today is Rana Berger, my dissertation advisor. She's here to talk about Moses. I guess I should give him a more formal introduction. Rana is the Catherine and Henry J.

Geysman chair in philosophy at the University but also in Jewish studies as well. And religious studies. Religious studies, right, right. She's written a lot of stuff.

A book on the Fido, Plato's Fido, a little bit. That's being re-released, right? Yeah. Did you just rewrite a new preface for it?

And it's going to come out with the use of for LSA. Oh, very nice. Yes, and the use of for LSA was published through Heinrich Meyers operation out in Munich, the Call of Future from Siemens shift. Aristotle's dialogue with Socrates on the Nick and the Nick and the King of ethics.

That's from 2008. And Plato's Phaedrus, which was your dissertation adapted into a book, edited a number of volumes and co-edited them written on all sorts of stuff from Aristotle and Plato to Maimonides and her biblical writings, which a few of them have been published, but this one is not, I believe, published yet. Or I think really interesting. And in many ways, I think Rana really comes into her own there.

I think because you see her drawing on her philosophical background and certainly the case of this essay in the wilderness Moses is law giver and founder where we get a very close reading of the text, but also sort of bringing in Machiavelli, who's so Plato and of course Maimonides in her interpretation. So I think this is going to be very far wide ranging conversation on the book talks. It's great to have you here. Yeah, very honored.

And Ron, did you give the talk on Moses at St. John's years ago? There was some talk I heard. I don't know, there was a podcast, somebody captured the audio where you bring to light the Moses scheming with the Levites and I was like, oh, this is all making sense.

Let's talk about that. Where was that given? You know, the first time I should give credit, the first time I did this or any of these things, I think, maybe one of the first times was Stuart Werners and Fettos Arminkoff, their Roosevelt Montesquis for them, they call it. And I think I was the first speaker in it with this Moses talk and got some flak from all sides, which is always fun.

And this one, I think morphed into a couple of different things. I gave it in Jerusalem once at the Shalem Center run by Yarrow Hosoni, some of you may have seen his work on the Bible. And I gave it in some kind of exchange with Leon Cass on Exodus, you know, various versions of it. One of the nice things about not publishing is that you can do the same thing or it's never the same, of course.

What are we talking about today? We're talking about Moses as law giver and founder. So I thought that a good place to begin, because you want to talk about this, Ron, is your sort of approach to reading the Bible, your interpretive scene. But I thought I'd begin with actually an anecdote, which might be a good entry point.

Used to say in your classes all the time on Plato, what you could begin them, that your only interpretive principle is that he's God. So he's in control of every single detail. But then I once heard you give a talk and you said your only interpretive principle and reading the Bible was that it was written by Plato. So you're seeing him for the like-able syllogism there, Alex.

I know. So I'm sort of, you never said those two things at the same time. So I want you to explain yourself. I'm not just saying at the same time, it might just be a matter of confusion.

But it was sort of cool because Plato, in an undergraduate class, they have no idea what they have no idea. And you have to kind of get across the idea that they have to look at everything. Everything counts. Nothing is superfluous.

So, okay, that's an easy way to put Plato is God. I'm my only assumption all the semester is Plato is God. And of course, then you know how they apply it to every journal article we read. No, it's a little word.

Shut up and call for them. Yes. And the Plato side in ways, you all know it right now. I think we all know it.

The idea of logographic necessity that everything is there for a reason. And it's not just some external like people have come to accept now in Plato studies. Oh, the drama does count. Then there's also the idea of the whole cosmos of that Strauss called Plato zoo, you know, these 35 works.

So, and also the fact of Plato being behind the whole scene and not in it. So for all those reasons, it kind of captures a lot to say the dialogue as if Plato is God. Now the Bible written by Plato, it's a little word questionable perhaps. You know, the main thing I think I look at it as a kind of a permanent principle.

It's much richer experience to read it as an integrated whole as if things are there for a reason and to especially pay attention to things like contradictions or poor arguments or cracks in the text that can make us think more carefully. Or a speaker saying God said X when the Bible doesn't actually record God saying X. Exactly, right. It's kind of speeches indeed, Byron almost.

So those are all things that I think are in common. Can you just say a little more about how you actually, I mean, Plato, I know that you're being somewhat hyperbolic or maybe just sort of interesting and challenging students when you say this, but you are pointing to as you just were like an actual way of reading the Bible. So can you lay out some of your interpretive principles? What do you?

Yeah, please. So one that I've come up with and I hope we'll maybe talk about this episode a little bit more as we go forward with the details about or the content about the Moses chapters. In any case, at the crucial moment when Moses read this terrible actions, he's going to have to take, you know, this is Exodus 32 and Moses starts by saying, the say of the Lord, right, but every man you're sorry that you're sorry and so forth. And it's going to be a terrible action he has to undertake.

So it looks like he's appealing to divine authority. That's true. But he was just talking to God and there was no sign whatsoever. Not just out of evidence that God indicated any kind of policy like this.

So my thought is, I think this is common sense. When the biblical authors could have easily given you something, they could have easily had a sentence of God told Moses go down and civil war. So if you do not see that corroborated that way, you are that's permission to read it as part of this human agents rhetoric and not the objective account of this situation. Yeah, I think in this, when you talk about the layers of composition in the Bible, I think you seem to be getting this a little bit from Strauss according to one of your footnotes, but sort of following out what he might be indicating, which is that the idea that the, so there's this thing called the documentary, right, which is that the Bible is this compilation of sources and you could do philological analyses and observations like this, led Spinoza to doubt that this is really a sort of something like a sort of cochlear attacks.

But you make the point that you can even accept this sort of hypothesis and view it the layers of composition as an internal dialogue between multiple authors over many generations where some are following out implications from earlier versions of the text and others or maybe throwing things to show another side to it. And so that this almost sounds kind of platonic that there's this internal dialogue or silent dialogue. So can you say something more about that? Yeah, I really was happy when I finally formulated that approach that way because, yeah, it seems like you're torn.

Is there, you know, is there one author of the whole Bible or was it just a jumble of these fragments the way the scholarship seems to take it too often? And often you do or not often sometimes I have to go a lot better than it helps me. It just won't fail otherwise. We can give some examples later.

But yeah, so I was looking for a way out of that dichotomy. And I think so many inputs, so many sources of inspiration for that way of looking at it, like obviously part of it, gel, when I came up with the idea to do the heiress. I've been working on aerosol ethics for Greg, not 10, but 20 years. And I didn't have an angle or a way to sort of put it together, kept getting bigger and bigger.

And then I came up with this idea of it's really a dialogue, probably should have been aerosol dialogue, the play-doll but we can talk about that. But anyway, an internal dialogue in the text that he's playing out, he's internalized a voice and he's engaged in dialogue with it throughout the text. And so that was one of the inputs. Another, there's so many, there's two scholars I might mention that people don't know I don't think or don't know well enough.

One is my generation a little older, I have been out of touch with him for a couple of years, but his name is Kaitlyn Carmichael, I don't know if anyone's ever, his books are so fascinating and also very readable. So his whole thing that he does is law and narrative. And the tradition looks at the Hebrew Bible as a combination of narrative and law. And what he does is so intriguing, he shows you how all the legal texts in the Hebrew Bible, not all, but a great many, are actually reflections on earlier stories and not really law about reality.

So take one of his examples, the law about incest, parachild incest, father-daughter incest, who would ever put the responsibility on the daughter? What? No incest law would blame the daughter, right? For illegal sexual relations with the father.

And he shows how it goes back to this, I don't think I better get off on the story, but a story in Genesis about Lot and his daughters, maybe you know it. Of course. Yeah. So yes, you can then see the Leviticus, which looks like a pure legal text, is an in dialogue with the story from way back from Genesis, a lot to his daughters.

And so that's another thing where there was a kind of dialogue like that. And to go one more step, like Carmichael's teacher, who was really an amazing scholar that doesn't have the recognition he deserves, and better than he called my attention, and I started becoming fascinated with this work, David Dauba, who was a contemporary of Strauss and actually apparently a cousin of Strauss. Nobody seems to know that or corroborate it. He's books are highly legal, aren't they?

Yes. He was like the head-highest chair in all the Kingbridge, the Regis chair in history of law in England, which was like the highest position in the world. And he had been trained in Roman law in Germany, the old-fashioned Roman law, but he knew Roman law, Biblical law, Tom Yudik law, Greek law, Greek law, Greek law, and all the languages, of course. And he was very ry.

Really great. I met him a couple of times, really great ry, dry sense of humor. He was in Cambridge, and he fell in love with a woman who was a psychiatrist from Berkeley and followed her to Berkeley. So he became a law professor at Berkeley, and Carmichael has collected their amazing volumes.

I think they're five or five huge books like this, collecting works of Dauba, like Biblical law, Roman law, ethics. But in a way, his most original stuff is New Testament and rabbinic Judaism. Really interesting how these two movements were developing at the same time, the Gospels and the rabbis. And how many different elements from the Hebrew Bible get transformed into the New Testament?

So especially most of this is fantastic writing is on the Passover Seder and the Last Supper in the Gospels. Almost every element of the ritual is kind of a theme and variations. So this dialogue, right, it definitely extends also to the New Testament, I think, all the way to the New Testament, variations on a theme, and you can really think through why certain movements, you know, why certain problems elicited certain responses. Yeah, so there's all that, there's probably more.

I think the line, Alex, that you were referring to is in, I couldn't remember, Switzerland Athens, where Strauss is trying to deal with this problem. You're going to accept this scholarship. You can't, what are you going to do? You have to accept this scholarship and Strauss was, but maybe to quote Matthew Velli, it's memories of ancient histories.

And then he pushes it even, memories of memories. And then Strauss ends that point by saying, that doesn't necessarily mean fading. Or non-historic or something. It can be a deepening of an initial insight, right, through the memory of memories, can be deepening it.

So I really like that formula for this way of reading the different inputs, different layers of composition. Yeah, for those interested in the text of Strauss, it's in studies in Platonic political philosophy in the Jerusalem and Athens essay on page 150 to 151, where he's talking about, you know, the challenge of biblical criticism in Spinoza and where that leaves us in trying to interpret the Bible and it's a very interesting discussion because he's taking very seriously what Spinoza in part uncoverably pushed to its extreme. But then showing that there's a possibility of some sort of interesting, you're operating to a degree in that tradition. I don't want to derail this.

But when you talk about the books in the Bible, in dialogue with one another, like if I were to give you those coke and Pepsi challenges, where they put the blindfold on people and they're like, what is it? You know, if I was to put a blindfold on you and read you a passage of Xenophon and Plato, you could immediately identify the author. I mean, you know the dialogue so well. Here, can you identify the different authors if that's the right word?

Cool. Yeah. Does that make sense or is that it? Yeah.

No, there's a personality or something like that. Yeah, styles. There are a couple of things to say. One of them, I just talked to some of the book of sample, which is because I just thought it now my favorite.

So it's so, the whole book is so super naturalistic and realistic and political and God, but I don't know God, I don't know where God is. God is not manifest. And all of a sudden you'll get like two times, there's like suddenly an intrusion of the arc, you know, the arc of the covenant and somebody's carrying it and they accidentally is about to fall off the cart and then man touches it and God kills him immediately with some kind of lightning struck or something. And what then?

Yeah. So I was like that. There are a couple like these intrusions or segments where you realize that's not the voice of my author in the book of Samuel, I'm beginning. And by the way, David, of course, the important answer to you is it takes such a long time to develop a feel, right?

As we know, like a good friend, right? To develop a feel for one of the authors you're reading. And I will give Xenophon as an example of this. I don't have a deep enough.

I haven't worked on it enough to know sometimes is it ironic? You have to really live with these authors and know where they are. One small point on this, Xenophon was that I was reading, I was translating something and I was using, I don't read Latin. And so I was translating, I was like, this just doesn't sound right.

I couldn't just couldn't make heads of tails, I couldn't make heads of tails. And finally, I checked the apparatus and it says something like a screamy doe or something like this. And I'm like, I have to look it up and it's like, oh, I inserted this, this lady. And I was like, I spent like weeks trying to make sense of this thing.

And then I was like, that doesn't sound like something. And I was like, oh, she just added that. I said, check it out, it made both sense. Once you're in their underway, you can feel it.

There are also these weird passages that they say are traces of more primitive mythology. Like, for example, in Genesis, the sons of God made into a lot of the man and producing the heroes. What, what's that doing in the revival? So you have these, you know, it's, you know, I was saying in a way that's kind of what makes it fun.

But also another good, hermeneutic fiction, I guess people tell me it's a fiction, is that there's some ultimate redactor or editor, right? No scholars think that's right way to think of it. in case that fiction, somebody allowed these diverse accounts like let's take the most obvious Genesis 1 and 2, right? Some editor allowed those to both be there as contradictory as they are.

So I like, I think you are going to get more out of reading, anything reading a book like this, if you think that there must be something we're supposed to see by having those two very clashing perspectives put together. I remember when I was reading Spinoza, I was like, well why can't Ezra just be like a great political philosopher? Yeah. I think why can't this compilation Yeah.

Yeah. So let's get to the- Oh, can I add one other thing to this? Yeah. And there's a kind of traditional Bible scholar named Christine Hayes who wrote a book introduction to the Hebrew Bible, or maybe introduction to the Bible, everything.

And she kind of explains the scholarship pretty clearly. That helped me. Anyway, one of her first things is the Hebrew Bible is not a book, we've heard that, but she says it's a library. And that's kind of useful because it's one thing, as I would like to argue, that Genesis 1 till the end of Kings is a kind of integral narrative.

But now then there's also Psalms and Proverbs and Prophecy and right? All kinds of genres. So you can't really read the whole thing as a book. I have one more into question before we jump off into the actually doing it.

Is there any risk? I mean, Strauss seems to go to great lengths. I mean, you sort of trace this out actually in his thoughts on Machiavelli, but he seems at times to go to great lengths to distinguish the Bible from other kinds of books. And that it has to be read in a very different way and treat it differently on its own terms.

Is there any risk in what he does and maybe in what you're doing of an overly rational reading of these things? So I've taught first and second Samuel or just Samuel before. And I'm inclined to sort of see a very Machiavelli in reading about it is extremely plausible, but then I sort of try to remind myself, no, I think it's legitimately presenting David as a sincere pious human being. And in some ways, the successes seem to be supernaturally supported in some way.

I don't know. Is there any risk of over rationalizing the Bible? Well, by the way, I'm so torn between the two pictures you just said, torn. And I've been resorting to, I guess this is fludging it, but over determination.

I kind of better than ambiguity. Like every time, every episode, the motives are over determined. And we'll get back, I think, into the similar with some of the questions I think Alice has in mind about different ways of reading. But when you say rational, those are both.

And I think what Strauss exaggerates, I feel, but I wish I could prove it, is that it's not a book at all. And so we can't read it as if it were. I think he's exaggerating. I mean, you know, I have never solved this in all these decades.

What you actually see Strauss doing in the few things he himself discusses about the Bible doesn't seem to illustrate some of his dicta about the dichotomy of Bible with philosophy. So I don't know what exactly to do with that. Maybe we'll get some more cases examples as we come. Let's get to Moses.

So we're talking about a dialogue, it has interlocutors, and the main sort of interpretive tool you use is to see this as a dialogue between a believer on the one hand and political philosopher. This emerges through certain contradictions, conflicting representations of certain events. But the believer will interpret events in the story in terms of divine punishment, sort of God's agency. Whereas the political philosopher will see behind all of these rather political necessity that what Moses does had to be sort of was absolutely dictated by necessity to get this.

So I thought it might be helpful one to just give an example of the ambiguity of this interpretation, how this shows up in the text itself. But also I thought it would be helpful to think about what's at stake in this question. What are the consequences or what kind of interpretation emerges if so many, if not all of these instances of apparently divine punishment turn out to be sort of also examples of political necessity. It's such a great question.

I guess, you know, over the years this has been becoming more and more dominant in my thought as it's maybe the unifying thread through my whole reading of the Bible. And yeah, different readers. I think one thing that interests me is could this be too bold perhaps for me as an hypothesis? Could the biblical author or authors be practicing the art of writing in the sense that by control they are presenting the many episodes if not all or the whole story on these two levels so that it's meant to accomplish a certain purpose with one set of readers.

I'm not sure exactly what that purpose is. I would like to come back to that again, but presenting it as God's intervention in human affairs and control of human affairs, usually punishment. Let's come back to that. And but at the same time showing you something else on another level that there's some reader out there that would see things in this more less moral, more theoretical political philosophic perspective.

So by the way, I think maybe the primary model for this problem might be Genesis 3 might be the story of the Garden of Eden and the so-called fall. Because when you think about it, I like to use the terms maybe this is generalizable. The platonic or risk-attealing idea of genetic versus madeatic account. An identity account is an analysis of the way things are, the kinds of things and the way things are, whereas a genetic account is simply how did these things come to be the way they are.

And it's used all over the place. Like why did early modern philosophers, political philosophers so much, try to get at the idea of political society through a genetic account of how we move from a state of nature to civil society. Why do they want to do it through that genetic account? So it's a really widespread, it's a very good set of tools to have in mind.

It's so widespread. And the Bible, to a great extent, but maybe Genesis above all, is doing that. It's trying to show how did human condition come to be what it is. So if you start from the reality of human life, right?

We have these emotions, shame and fear, desire. We have to work really hard to live, to labor over the earth for food. Women have wide women of painful, you know, dangerous childbirth and ultimately death, I would say. It's really about mortality, I think.

So that's the people the authors couldn't possibly not realize that they're talking about the nature of the human condition. And then in this story, Genesis 3, they present all of that as a product of divine punishment. So I don't know if this makes sense to you asking that question, but it looks like the two layers there are so manifest, so obvious. And you know, the only thing I can make of it in that case is that the punishment account, by the way, this is an aside question.

Like for an A in the course, is every genetic account always about punishment? We won't try to answer that now. It's too hard. Can't just reformulate what you said.

That every time we get a situation that's in terms of divine punishment, it seems like this is what God needs to do to bring into being this thing, right? But it's this nation with laws and everything like that, right? So there's this sort of transition that's necessary. That's the genetic side.

And it didn't respond to some transgression. So we have to go on the one hand. On the other hand, if you analyze politics in its nature, or the way in which it sort of has to operate, you've got to basically count the way it always has to be so that what looks like an imposition, thanks to our fallen state or sort of defects or our past sins, becomes actually known just a matter of political necessity. And even if it didn't have to happen, you'd have to manufacture it.

Yeah. Which would be a million. Yes. But there's so many strands to this, right?

It gets so complicated. Like by treating it, the account of the coming into being as a matter of punishment, what you're ending up doing is saying, I think Strauss does something like this too, that the harsh conditions of human life are due to more responsible for the harsh conditions of human life, right? It's the punishment for our sins. So that's one thing that you might be bringing out.

The other thing is, I have to do with the whole relation of the whole status of the morning, right? That when you see a situation, we should talk about this in a few minutes, especially all about Moses and the chapters we were looking at. When you see a situation and say, oh, it's a matter of political necessity, it's usually because there's some violation of what would otherwise look like moral action. You're trying to justify or explain it.

So then you wonder, well, does divine punishment kind? Okay. And not like thread to this, which I think we'll get to, we'll get to, we'll get to the content of this story again better. But sometimes divine punishment is just invoked by the human agent acting.

That was what we were saying earlier, right? And there really isn't any other objective narrative evidence for us. So why? Okay, my last point.

This is my favorite way, because I just started thinking about today. If God, if God is a has a big plan, if God is a prudent statesman with a long term plan, then what looks like divine punishment over against political necessity might not work, because God is using what we experience as divine punishment as a tool for his plans motivated by prudence or the understanding of necessity. Does that make any sense? Okay, this may be getting out of order a bit, but I think you're kind of getting out is, is Exodus 33 and my monadies interpretation of it, where it was strange, as I was reading the chapter, my monadies sounded so much like Machiavelli, right?

When he says things like this, sometimes with regard to some people, he, this is like a law giver should be keeping anger and jealous of edging in accordance with their desserts, not out of near anger. So he may order an individually burned without being angry and obsessed with him without hating him, because he perceives the desserts of that individual and considers the great benefit that many people will derive from the accomplishment of the action question, right? So it almost sounds like remira to Orko or something like that. Absolutely, yeah.

Or he says he should be merciful and gracious, not out of mere compassion and pity, but in accordance with what is fitting, right? And so I think what you're touching on is how these, the way my monadies puts it, these actions or dispositions that would normally be a function of human beings of morality, out of God operating out of something like prudence or necessity. And this is something, is that what Moses learns from seeing God's back? Yes, yes, that's good.

I didn't quite make that connection. The two points, the way you just did it, that's exactly what I think that's exactly right. So that passage, if I can kind of jump into, I guess, you know, I had heard that medieval philosophy has an issue, a question called divine attributes, right? I mean, never grab me.

I don't know what they were worried about, what are divine attributes. But that passage of my monadies, when I understood it, was a big clue also for me to Aristotle's ethics. So, okay, I think this is what my monadies are saying. We might have to fill in a few more gaps as we go forward, but by the time we get to the point you cite it, he is saying that what God was willing to show Moses was not his true being, the true essence or the ultimate reality.

No, that would be too direct. He couldn't show Moses that, but he was showing him his attributes. And the image in the biblical text is you can't no man can see my face, remember, and live, but God would show Moses his back as he withdraws. So, my monadies interpretation, I think, is so brilliant.

The scene the back of God is the attributes of his actions. I didn't understand it first, why that was so important. Not qualities or adjectives, but like attributes of his actions in place of seeing the face of God. So, the attributes of the actions, it takes you to the passage you're citing.

What might look, if the human being act, it would look like it flows from a character of mercy or generosity, or on the other hand, maybe anger, or punitiveness, but not in God. No, the action has that quality, which if a human being would have that origin or source, but we can't describe that to God. We can't project that onto God, onto the unknown first being. So, if I can throw this in, what was so important for me when two things came together, when I understood this, I think a little bit, it was maybe my biggest clue to what Aristotle might mean by distinguishing the moral man from the philosopher, right?

That the moral man, the philosopher's actions could and probably would look absolutely indistinguishable from actions flowing from a moral character, from a character of moral virtue. But he would be projecting onto the philosopher the moral character. The actions are the guide, and they might be identical, but it's not the same source or root. And I think that what my monadies is saying about God and human beings, Aristotle is saying about philosopher and moral person.

Can I press that a little bit? So, I'm persuaded by that, especially in the case of philosopher, and I get it with God. But it doesn't my monadies kind of let it slip, that might be true about God, but Moses himself was actually quite angry. And okay, it would be tough for me to swallow that it was an act.

I mean, he really does, the Bible does seem, I mean, maybe you can correct me on this piece, does seem to be angry. And doesn't my body say something about that being a limitation of Moses at some point in the guide? Yeah. Also in eight chapters, I think he was right.

Well, that's a little tradition, but it makes me suspicious because of his whole tradition. But yes, do I have that my paper? I forget. I tried it out.

I don't think I can prove it, but I tried out the idea that it's an act. Okay, very good. You kind of you start off, maybe I'm misreading you at the end, I thought it seems like early on Moses is quite angry. I think you can put these two thoughts together when he when he kills the Egyptian, for example, right?

But then you point out that when God tells Moses much later, obviously in the wilderness, when God tells Moses about the golden calf, Moses doesn't react. But when he gets down there, then he he reacts. And that example seems more like feigned anger. That's what I have in mind.

It might be the sight of it is what sets them up exactly. It's one of those things, you have to be a little bit sometimes I'm surprisingly bold instead of moderate, I'm a moderate person, but I made that bold suggestion. I still am very attracted to it. But now you should admit when you don't have the text or evidence or it.

But there's a lot of reasons that makes sense of a specialist, you have Plato's the most right that's the most also, better I say analysis of for cynicists is so good on this, the play acting of anger that is got a thematic origin, but the anger is still famed or play acting for a certain purpose. So Moses, yeah, I mean, I think it's worth considering, but I don't think it's something to say is a not down proof. You know what I really like contrasting with, if I may, on the Odyssey book 17, this is also kind of snap like I remember the things where you finally got a little bit of help with something. So remember that scene, Odysseus back in the palace, he's dressed as a beggar, and he's at the banquet, the feast and all and he's, to one of us knows who he is, but you may as does not.

And Athena comes to Odysseus, it whispers in his ear and says, I want you to go around the whole, you know, the whole palace and figure out which suitors are just and which are unjust. And then Homer pops up and she was going to have them kill them all. Right, so there, the goddess, the divine being is perfectly rational. If this, whatever the political issue is that has to be settled in, it's like, you cannot leave these suitors alive, they have to all be killed.

And that's the goddess's insight into political necessity. But she is teaching, I take it, she's teaching Odysseus, is she trying to teach him a lesson that sometimes you, because it turns out that only one suit or is bad, right, and didn't know it was as bad. The rest of them, what bad are they? Okay, they're eating his food, right?

They don't deserve the death penalty. So he has to, it's like she's telling me you have to find out that the innocent will have to be killed with the guilty, violating justice for the sake of the political mission you're here in, it's good to accomplish. And Odysseus, oh, so now I get this from Ben and Denny's honestly book, which is all about anger and reason, the whole entire book, I think. So Ben and Denny, I think leaves it somewhat open, how you want to interpret Odysseus.

Is he as rational as Athena, or is he when he finally kills the suitors move more by anger and tune into this? And I remember I had a conversation with Ben and Denny where I was elevating the rational perspective. And I think that he said, it's okay for a God, but isn't it awfully cold-hearted for a human being? Kind of interesting.

To operate that rationally in that way. Yeah, we've been more forgiving and understanding if he acted out of anger than if he calculated this, terribly. Oh, yeah, you do expect at least from human beings some awareness of this sort of common fragility or something. But it really strikingly, and this is a footnote to an I know, Dysseus needs to discover the moral differences among the suitors, not as he might have wanted to punish the unjust and reward the just, but rather to learn a lesson from Athena about the politically necessary action required to establish a new regime.

And I think the way you put it there is in terms of what he might have wanted, I think really strikes a really like sort of somber or even part note that he needs to know that some of these men are innocent and that despite all that, despite what he might like to forgive, he just can't give into that. And that, you know, so he has to have an education in course, in human sort of distance that doesn't come to human beings naturally unless they're. Yeah, yeah. But it's kind of interesting because I thought in the end, when I compared these two passages that the biblical God was more like a human being, Moses more like a God compared to the octane version where the goddess is more divine in her distance.

Wow. But one thing that is clear, it's all about the tension between justice and prudence, I suppose, would be one way to put it. Do you think that Moses is doing something similar? Like when he comes out from Mount Sinai or even later after the Civil War, is he, I mean, it's clear that they're guilty, although the commandment hasn't necessarily been promulgated yet, although you do mention it's a, you know, don't make false idols or whatever.

I mean, are there folks who vary, I mean, he's just killing people who don't deserve it necessarily in either case, and you say yes, okay. Well, I'll put it on your butt. Yeah, go ahead. The other way around that.

Okay. There was no indication in the account prior to this of a division between the innocent and the guilty. Right. So more or less, there are no just slaughter people.

Yeah. Especially as you find out at the end, that last line that we might want to talk about where suddenly God shows up. Yeah. And slaughtered everyone who made the calf that Aaron made.

Yeah. Aaron is single. I've always wondered why he's not blamed. He's not all.

And that's because like when Moses says, let all who are on the side of God come to me and the Levites or the members of his own tribe come to him only. Yeah. So it's a division between the Levites and the rest, not between the nothing to do with justice and the innocent and the guilty. And Aaron is of course a necessary ally for Moses.

He can't be killed. He is about political allegiance, right? Not about justice. It's a kind of harsh teaching.

I find myself worrying about that I'm corrupting the young. I can understand why some philosophers would have a deeper, dangerous teaching that's meant for generations unborn. But it seems like the Hebrews have a good thing going, right? You're found and like you have a founding.

You have a people. Why would you even risk sharing any of these secrets? Is it because there's always the danger of the cities that Hebrews being scattered to the wind and so they'd have to return to a founding story to relearn it? Because otherwise it seems so useful in dangerous in the hands of one's enemies to just copy the blueprint, which in a way is hard because they're not the chosen people.

But if you read it politically, there's a blueprint to be copied certainly about rulership. Yeah. It is. You know, every I've been teaching this series, of course, is on Bible and philosophy.

And every time I get more and more perplexed, what is the, you know, is to generalize what is the overall intention of the biblical authors? And I think this is too negative in my putting it, but there's a lot to it. You know, you start with the family. The family is a mess, right?

The family drama is fraught with conflict and it doesn't work and it shows you you need something beyond the nuclear family. And then we find the gap 400 years later, Moses shows up and we get divine code of law. So that should be it. We've got now the rule by divine law, right?

Everything should be solved. And it doesn't solve really anything or not, not everything for sure. And then you know, you have the total chaos and anarchy of the judges period with no centralized rule after Moses is gone. So that obviously has to be corrected and we need to correct that a king.

Okay, we finally get the answer. Kingship. And that's a complete disaster or soon quickly becomes a disaster. We have a peak with David and Solomon, but then it's a disaster.

So kingship doesn't work. You know, I'm not sure what is the teaching that is. What are they trying to, the authors of the Hebrew Bible in this segment, trying to communicate? I'm not sure.

I mean, the best I've been able to come up with, which is not very, maybe not very satisfying, I guess a platonic idea is, it's sort of about maybe don't look to the political sphere for the solution to the human problem. Something like that. It's a real revelation of these deep fissures in the human condition in the family and the city. And it's a warning that you can't have an ideal solution on the political plane.

Maybe. I mean, that thought seems to definitely play out talking a little bit about the Odyssey we saw this, but maybe we're turning back to the Bible. It seems like actually in both texts, what you get is something like a God's education of a human law giver in the act of law giving, but also more fundamentally in the nature and limits of politics and the necessities governing its sort of operation or founding or what have you. Is there something like a sort of education that this is a very socratic through and through, but is it excellent?

I guess one way to put this, actually, is really a story of education of Moses's education at the deepest level. What's going on? Yeah, that's such a neat way to put it. I mean, at first on the surface, even, is so much more in the other direction.

You know, Moses is constantly reminding God of what he should be thinking. What? You're going to punish this people? Are you kidding?

What are you going to do to your reputation? What will people say about your power? And what about your prom, the story, ancestors, and so on? Right?

All the Moses negotiating with God is Moses trying to help God learn something about how to handle these situations. The best I could do with a socratic God being the socratic educator of Moses is you refer to it earlier, the Maimonides interpretation gives me a key to that, because what it really amounts to, I think, is the biblical understanding of second sailing. So in Plato's, I'm thinking about in Plato's Fido, the day of sachidovian, he gives this autobiography, and the description he gives his so-called socratic turn, what made him take a turn away from the procedure of his predecessors, he gives this image that it is like, if you try to look at the sun directly in the cliffs, it blinds your eyes. So you can't do it that way.

You have to turn around and look at an image of the sun and water, and then use your thinking to infer what the sun's nature is. And that's sachidovian's image for it seems for the good. We can't have it, it would be blinding our soul to try to get a direct vision of the ultimate truth of the good. We have to look at it in arguments and speeches as an image and then try to reason from that.

And he calls it, the idea of second sailing is when the wind is good and your sailboat just moves, but if not, you have to do the labor of rowing. So that would be the same. But the main idea is this realization that we do not just open our minds and have the revelation of truth given to us. And I think that surprisingly, I take the Exodus so-called, you know, the revelation of chapter 33 to be the same, at least under my Maundi's interpretation, which I find very plausible, the same argument that when God says, no man can see my face to live, that sounds so much like you can't look directly at this without being blinded.

So we have to find, we're not, here's the Bible telling you there's the Hebrew Bible. There's not going to be a direct revelation of God's nature to man. The Socratic education, maybe with this work for what you're looking for, that the Socratic education God is giving Moses is the teaching of a second sailing, that you can only, I'm going to put you, remember that beautiful image, I'm going to put you in the cleft rock and I'll put my hand over you and as I withdraw, you will see my back as I withdraw. And we talked a few minutes ago about the divine attributes.

You'll see what I am in action. And that is what you need Moses to shape a people who'll be a king of a priest and a holy nation. That's the knowledge you need. You didn't know, you knew you needed knowledge now.

After the golden calf episode, Moses really knows how much knowledge he lacks and what he needs. But it turns out God has to educate him. It can't be what you think it's going to be. It can't be a revelation of the ultimate truth of reality directly.

So is this the meaning of also his revealing his name earlier on, right? Just so we have the 13 attributes, right? And when somebody's merciful, we say that's a merciful man. These angry say that's an angry guy, right?

But in God, all of those attributes flow from a mysterious source. And essentially what he's learning on some level is that whenever you adopt these waves, their source should not be the familiar one, but a more mysterious one. And as my mom is interpreted, it's something like knowing what's fitting or necessary in search. That's what's meant by I shall be what I shall be.

Yeah. Is that somehow connected? Yeah, I think that is very encapsulated, right? This idea of the unknowable naming is always a kind of power over what you name.

You can't have that power over God. Though it's very interesting, how many episodes in Exodus starting with the Persian bush? God gives this mysterious formula. My name is I shall be what I shall be.

And Moses says, I'm not going to go to this people as political leader and say, who are you following? I will be what I shall be. That's not going to work. And then God goes, tell them I'm the father, the God of your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So he also often answers those three ancestors as a kind of other way to name himself for the political purposes that Moses needs. But you know what's really hard? This is an aside, I suppose, but really hard in my monadies in case anyone wants another word. When he's illustrating what he means by these divine attributes like mercy, he gives an account of the human embryo, not of an animal embryo.

Because it's really incredible. It is so incredible. House is seen developing exactly the right order. First you need lungs, then you need this, then you get a brain and whatever.

In the exact right order, nature is developing this organism. In this dark wool, right? It's really a miracle and it has everything it needs. So my monadies says, that's what I mean by God being gracious.

The illustration of God's graciousness or charity or mercifulness is the natural development of an embryo. There's something, I mean, I'm not sure what he's, you know, it's very striking. It's interesting that we have this a senior as you sort of are developing into a thing that can to a greater degree, not only live in development. But so it's interesting that he chooses, I mean, this opens up way to be the question and not so much on our topic tonight, but it is interesting that almost spinosistically, right?

He chooses an example of a natural process on the taking for granted that God is the creator of nature to illustrate why you shouldn't attribute a quality of graciousness to it as a character trait of God. But I don't know, I mean, the most sense I can make of it is God has a double role, right? He's the creator of nature and he's the source of the law or legislation. And what Moses needs is the actions of God, which he will be able to emulate in order to be to govern this people.

That's how he puts it. That's how Moses says he needs. So yeah, I think to go back to your original question, could we say that's a kind of democratic education? God showing Moses, you thought you, you thought you knew what you knew.

I mean, the, the hasn't I have is that the closest thing he gets us and Greg can talk about this, is maybe Socrates and Xenophon, the anatomist, there it seems like far from making a law giver. So that's my reluctance. Though there is a kind of, I mean, there's, yeah, there is a similarity between what the states have been known as a knowledge of soul. Yeah, that's be quasi-cigarette.

Yeah. Maybe this is a good time for me to turn around and, you know, I really enjoyed your, your piece here on Moses and I like the way that you use, especially Plato, but also my Mottadis and Machiavelli, whom we haven't really talked about a lot tonight, which we can if you like, but I was wondering, turning it around, how have, how has reading the Bible shaped in any way that you're reading of these other texts? Have you learned things from the Bible that now you read the Plato differently or Machiavelli or Mottadis or whomever, Aristotle? I guess you did already say how it's sort of informed your Aristotle, perhaps.

It's not really a very simple two way street, I don't think, in other words, I don't really think I learned how to read Plato and Aristotle or Homer from the Bible. I don't think that would be quite right to say, but it's certainly finished. Some amazing examples are one thing that I think in which my sometimes more abstract understanding of what's going on, I don't know, I'm going to sort of obvious one, perhaps is which maybe you know, I've used the famous Youth Afro problem, right? It's only because the God's love it or because it's only using the two stories of Abraham and Genesis, Abraham negotiating about Saddam on his own standards of justice versus Abraham just apparently the empty divine command in the demand for the sacrifice of Isaac.

One small point on that sacrifice, you made an off, it seemed like a sort of impassing remark that I really thought was really insightful that, you know, I've always taken this to be evidence of Christian probably like evidence of Abraham's great faith that he does whatever God says, but I like your notion that maybe that actually God's disappointed in his following the command like, oh, you didn't pass that test, I guess we'll have to wait a few hundred years for a long ever, you can't do it. You don't understand politics. Yeah, point out, he doesn't, after that point, God doesn't speak to Abraham again, nor does he speak to anybody else until Moses, right? Is that normally Abraham?

I mean, as one is such a withdrawal, he's been talking to Abraham all the time, right? Go out of your country and now he has one speech with Isaac, which is don't go down to Egypt. Definitely. You're not tough enough to handle that.

And with Jacob, I'm real interested in the speeches with Jacob because they're all in a dream and they're very obscure. Does he speak with? I mean, doesn't really speak with Jacob. He doesn't really speak with him.

There's moons and then it's always imagery and also a precious moment. So it's like he's waiting for Moses who, contrary to Abraham, does push back against God, who does sort of question him, make demands of him, disobey him at times, and then you have this whole interpretation of the second set of tablets, right, which seem less obviously to come from God, to put it mildly. Yeah. And I did, you know, I have a list somewhere like maybe there are 10 different statements who wrote the dead in tablets, but most of the statements that Moses wrote the tablets are in this after the golden calf.

I wish it were more consistent, but it's certainly a sign, right? So let's go back a minute. The story versus Abraham of the Akkadah of the sacrifice. It looks to me, it looked pretty clear.

Those are completely two different, I get this late individual. I have a lot of little ideas why it works that way. But Alex to tweak what you just said, the person God is waiting for with Moses is really the Abraham of the Saddam story. Right.

Someone who will hold up what he understands by his reason and his human standards of morality to be just and try to get God to agree or show him why he's wrong, you know, a real negotiation. And by the way, before the Saddam story, there's an amazing moment where God, we're told that thought to himself, should I talk to Abraham after all, he's going to be my guy. That's amazing. And maybe the only example in the Bible you know of God speaking to himself.

I think he's a little queen with God. Very cool. I really enjoyed that. But I've gotten pushed back and there's one argument that I kind of worry about and that is, to me, they look like opposite figures of those two Abrahams.

And to go back to our original point, Moses picks up on one of them and that's what God said. So Abraham might have passed the test of a night of faith of a Kierkegaardian night of faith, of course, nothing like it in human stories or history. But maybe he failed the test for the potential legislator or law giver or founder. That has to be a more independent of divine authority.

So that's what I thought. But then we spoke about this. We were going to be great. But after rereading, I thought there's something very strange about Abraham's question, which is, will you save the whole city for this 10 innocent people?

Whereas what Moses seems to learn like Odysseus is, save them. You need to kill 14,000, 700,000 from me. It is numbers, right? You might actually have to kill a large number of innocent men in order to save the innocent men.

It seems like he's one, maybe one problem with Abraham, maybe I'm not from the wrong term, but one problem with Abraham is he wants not perfect justice, but he doesn't seem like, you know, ready to accept that large death might be necessary under a certain extreme situation. That's a really good point. And in a way, what happens in Saddam proves your point, right? Yeah.

So that's a good point. I think another thing that is troubling to me is, while it looks like opposites, the two Abraham stories, several people have said to me, yeah, but really the second one, I think this might, I don't know where this comes from originally, the second one is a straws, I think. The second story is a deepening of the faith that Abraham had in God being rational and moral in the first story. And the deepening is, I know who God is, I know what this God is, he would never go, you know, expect me to kill my son, the promise for the future and so forth.

So he has a deeper faith, and he can set out to do this because it's not gonna happen. I must be a trick and guardian reading who wouldn't like that because then it wouldn't be a night of faith if he didn't think it was gonna happen. But I can see that argument, because I see the argument people make that. Yeah, it's an even deeper faith in knowing who and what God's reasons are.

So really what's behind this is, as we said before, I shall be what I shall be, right? The mysterious or the unknowable God, which is, I think, and obviously that's what Kierkegaard has in mind, I take it. And Moses doesn't accept that, puts himself on a par with God almost to negotiate. So who is the God of the Hebrew Bible?

What is the God of the Hebrew Bible? Probably not all of the peace. Yeah, I mean, this, I know we're sort of wrapping up, but just one point that I wanted to sort of ask you about this line is that as you have this sort of relationship between political necessity and divine punishments, this comes out really well in the story of the Golden Calf, right, where you point out that the narrative says, after Moses meets out pressure, the narrative says, the Lord smoked the people because they made the calf was sharing me. Yeah, we never hear God's question.

And that seems to be a great example about how a bit of text comes in. It doesn't make any sense. You don't hear anything more about it. And it seems almost to be a sign that the insertion of divine punishment is a kind of exposed factor justification of those harsh realities.

So I, maybe this is maybe I'm just sort of sharing your observation here more than asking a question, but it seems like that's a great example about how the textual dialogue is actually sort of a sort of later sort of imposition or the divine, I don't know what I put this, but this will be about what it's going on. And I think also you could say the simplest version of this is everything, oh Lord, why did we sit here? What's the good God back in the picture? What did in his shoulders?

The sort of things you can see that would disturb a reader of the original or the earlier story. Yeah, and we frame it. That's what Moses had already done himself in the action of healing to divine authority or even the first, I mean, we're going to talk about the fall, but even the first series of punishments, it seems to me it's inversely proportional to who's actually at fault, right? Like the snake really is the dude who did it and then Eve and then Adam, but the snake gets off with only one punishment, the woman to and then Adam three, it's really it's sort of neat in a way that it's sort of they just go completely against what I would assume would be punished.

The rational calculation. Yeah. Another really great example that kind of takes us somewhat to the end of our story is Moses not being allowed into the promised land, right? So he's 120 years all this.

All this is a lot of vision he's been on and he's been with these crazy people for 40 years in the wilderness and do you blame them? They don't know what this is all about. What do they know about this God that he met on the Sinai and they don't remember Abraham Isaac and Jacob that was 400 years earlier and they've been slaves in Egypt and living without water and food. It's just, you know, drastic conditions.

So you have to empathize with them and then and we understand the story that they're not allowed that God comes up with the idea. Oh, no, too good example. They are not remember the line is nobody over nobody of this generation led to the promise land. Everyone over 20 will be killed before they and only the children will enter the promise land.

So that I always like to link that to the Plato's Republic when you finally found out in book seven, how are you going to get this best city? Well, you got to get rid of everybody over 10 years old. It's even more extreme. So we understand that that there are too much imbued with the spirit of slavery to be the start the conquerors and founders of the new regime and to start a new way of life.

But what about Moses, right? And that is bother commentators forever that, okay, God said, talk to the rock and it will gush water and Moses struck the rock choice and the water came out. Hearing now you rebels, you want water or the rock? So that people have always thought the rabbis thought this is too harsh a punishment to deprive him of the room of his whole life's labor for that one moment of exhaustion and frustration with people.

It looks like the punishment way out ways of the crime. And so I thought of it as this presented, yes, as divine punishment, but almost because it's so unjustifiable, it looks like you're tempted to figure out what is the political necessity. And the political necessity is, as you know well, Plato's statesman is probably the best argument for it, right? That the founder and the law giver has to withdraw if the law is going to be sovereign, just like God has to withdraw.

So it's really a reworking and we thought of the argument of the statesman, the end of this is more the end of numbers, rather than the next is, but this absence of Moses from the promised land, but withdrawal of God and of the legislator looks almost like a, some lines are almost a paraphrase of the statesman argument, I thought. So what is this nice example of this two layers, right? Of the divine punishment story, but the authors must have understood the political necessity being there, I think. So wrap up and transition to just the final part of our show.

Thank you again, Rana. You know, you have this wonderful book encounters and reflections with your great teacher, Seth Benardetti, which is a dialogue with your teacher. There are a few other interlocutors, but you're the primary I think. Yeah, I was a teen.

I was a teen. My husband Robert Berman was in the other room, and Michael Davis, we really hadn't been done. Yeah, you were able to pin it, it takes three of you to pin it, and then it's a little hard. So the question is, what were you thinking about?

So usually we'd ask about, you know, famous teachers along the way in contemporaries, but people that know your story, I think, know your connections are better, they do well. I'm curious instead, what put you on the path to the philosophic life? Were you always inclined to, I mean, was there a turning point? You know, sometimes people were like, well, I was in a used bookstore, and I, you know, and I saw this dusty old Aristotle and boom, or some people just look, I ran into the right teacher at the right time.

What was it with you? Were there any pre-conditions of a young Rana burger that made you receptive to when you did encounter a great teacher? That's it. Well, I was just a little sideline, but in, I think, 11th grade, we had a horrible course in arts in my day, where you had to do public speaking.

I remember my mother made me go take lessons because my voice was so undignified. But anyway, you had to do public speaking, and you could take any speech. And for some, somehow I got to play those, the polochi was socking. Oh my gosh.

Now what you're all in the right mind? 11th grade? What the tug of a thing? I go, oh, man, it happens.

That's fantastic. I don't know. I don't know. I don't even know where, and it just grabbed my attention, and that's what I did for my public speaking.

That's not much of an answer. I don't know. But I think, you know, it's interesting that I, the way I got, I really feel like I had a somewhat of a circular root in a way that I came to this Bible stuff very late. You know, I thought, like everyone were taught to think, you know, that's not my specialty.

I can't officially talk about it. And it was kind of through a couple informal things I did in community stuff. And I realized, I have so many ideas guided by Plato and Aristotle, you know, to read the Bible. Why can't I say something?

So I've been doing that. But in a way, that was going back because probably the way I got to philosophy was from the Bible. So growing up, like in junior high and high school, I went to, I did not go to a day school. I went to an after school Hebrew school, and we learned biblical Hebrew.

It was very old fashioned. I had the books still. They don't do it like this anymore at all. It was just that was it.

You had the biblical book there with big letters, you know, letters, nonsense, some games and all that. You just read the thing in biblical Hebrew. So, and I really did love it. I stuck with it till through 12th grade.

So I think that was a big part of it. Like, I had a sense of interpretation. And then I went to, I didn't know what I was doing. And the world was so different.

Everything was so much less competitive in my generation, which had a lot of advantages. But no one said to me, you have to go to this college or that college. Anyway, I kind of arbitrarily went to University of Rochester because I was visiting my aunt who lived there and I thought it was nice. I'll go there.

And I ended up with two professors there who were pretty influential. I'd say, one was, at the time he was a renowned conscal and Lewis Whitebeck. I think, yeah. You did translations?

I was going to say, I thought I used his translations of that. Yeah, he was kind of the con man. And he liked me. And I was, I came to college.

I said, I want to be a philosophy major, by the way. I don't know what I thought it was, but I said it. But anyway, I got along with him, but he was really pushing me. You've got to go to the best graduate school in Stoney Con.

By the way, we also had in those days an honor is whatever honors course could come for eight credits. So in my senior year, I had one course on the three con critiques with Lewis Whitebeck for the year and the other course on Sophos v. Stachman for the year. That was it.

It was more like graduate school. But in any case, I paid a price. I didn't learn enough economics or whatever. But anyway, I had another teacher named Alfred Geyer.

Now he wrote a book on the symposium, late in life. Mary Nichols, Lexon. No, he was a student of Strauss and he was a classics PhD. So he taught in the classics department.

And we started reading these platonic dialogues. But anyway, I'm a skier. Like, I want to go keep doing this. I don't want to go to study.

I want to do what we're doing. Where should I go? And he said, well, there's only one person in that step that are dead. So that's how I got on that.

And then the first time before the classes started at the new school, the week before better daddy was giving a talk on, let's see, what was it? I think it was on, I used to know, I'm forgetting now maybe it was on the last books of day on about or something crazy. Like in the time, I think that was, yeah. Anyway, I went to this talk, it was at City University.

And everybody was like completely flustered and perplexed and out of it. And I just thought, that's what thinking is. That's what I wanted. The charm was immediate.

The charm was immediate, then. Absolutely. Like I felt like this is the natural way to think. That's cool.

And then the first course I did was on the time, which obviously I learned very, very little actual knowledge from. But it was pretty amazing just watching him at work, working through this thing and going back each week and rethinking. That is so much what you really learn in grad school, your courses, which is courses, many courses that often you get little insights here as things really stick with you. Oh, that's a really compelling question.

But it's learning how to take care with the details and how to unravel something at the detail. And then also trying it and failing and learning the caution that's required. I don't know the other two guys, but now you've done so much with that over the years. After you brought it to fruition.

I talked some more about what it was like to study with Ben and Dettie. It was the feed-on that I did with him as a tutorial. So that was absolutely crucial, of course. And I hope I indicate how indebted my book is now.

He works so hard. He works so hard. I have all the work to have them all in that archive, hopefully, eventually. Transcriptions of the lectures and maybe of the notes too.

Because I do have, you know, cabinet school, final cabinet school with notes from each course. He's just handwriting his now when he was in his band of straws. And he would maybe do 200, 300 pages of notes preparing a course for each semester. It was basically six days a week working to prepare the course.

Unbelievable. If you had a, of God bestow you was just a normal intelligence. And you took a Ben or Dettie class and you're like, well, set this is pretty complicated. And you were in earnest as an undergraduate.

How did he deal with that? He's a good habit. He's an idiot. Or was he, if you saw that somebody was striving to learn as an undergraduate, was he more patient with undergraduate students?

Okay. That's not your model, as I recall. In the classes, there was almost no question. That was, didn't come up that often.

He really had, and they were short. I realized no, they were too short. My son was like two and a half hours as you recall. Those news people were like, I think an hour and a half, although he stayed after me to keep talking.