Come, Follow Me Conversations | Isaiah 40-45 with Rabbi Joshua Garroway

[MUSIC] >> Hello and welcome to tonight's event. My name is Laura Redford. I'm a board member of the John A. Witsow Foundation and the host of tonight's Come Follow Me Interfaith Conversation. One of the goals of the Witsow Foundation is to inspire members at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to engage in meaningful interfaith dialogue and community outreach in order to strengthen our local communities around the world. For our conversation this evening, we're going to talk about Isaiah's message of comfort and victory in Isaiah 40 through 45 from a Jewish perspective. We invite you to join the conversation by asking us your questions at any time using the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. Inside the Q&A window, you'll be able to vote for the questions you'd like to see answered and I will see them come to the top of the list. We'll start answering your questions at around the 40-minute mark of our conversation and you can also make comments and engage with other audience members using the chat feature also at the bottom of your screen. Finally, you can find video replays of all our events along with links to the podcast recordings of this interfaith conversation series at www.wdsofoundation.org. I'm so pleased tonight to introduce you to our guest, Rabbi Joshua Garaway. Rabbi Garaway serves as the Saul and Erlene Bronstein Professor of Judeo-Christian Studies and Professor of Early Christianity and second commonwealth at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Rabbi Garaway was ordained by the Hebrew Union College in 2003 and earned his doctorate from the religious studies department at Yale University in 2008. While his academic books and articles explore the origins of Christianity and in particular the Apostle Paul, he also lectures widely on broader topics of the history of Judaism and Christianity. A native of Rochester, New York, just a stone throw from Calmyra, he lit currently lives in Pasadena, California with his wife and three boys. Rabbi Garaway, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for having me. That introduction included a lot of me and I just want to clarify to our audience that Rabbi Garaway is going to be answering all the questions. I do not consider myself an expert in Isaiah and I am thrilled for our audience to hear from you, Josh, our conversation, so far have been incredibly enlightening. Agreed. One of the things that I wanted to start with is a little bit of a personal confession that Isaiah scares me a little bit. He seems a little overwhelming. We are instructed in our own scriptures. The Book of Mormon prophets quote Isaiah extensively. I was reading in our Bible dictionary that gives us background on different parts of scripture that Isaiah is the most quoted prophet between all of the books of scripture that Latter-day Saints use. And nevertheless, I'm probably not alone in feeling like it's a little maybe difficult to understand or a little bit of trepidation when Isaiah comes up. And I wanted to understand a little bit more about a Jewish approach to the scriptures. Isaiah specifically, and it's very different from this experience that I have had. Well, it is somewhat different, but it's also a little bit the same. So Isaiah is also the most frequently quoted of all the prophets in rabbinic literature and in the prophetic readings that are done on Saturday morning in the synagogue, the highest percentage of them comes from the prophet Isaiah. So Isaiah is incredibly central to Jewish study and worship as well. And there's 66 chapters of Isaiah and there's a lot of really colorful imagery and a lot of really difficult messages. So there is a certain measure of difficulty that I think Jews do have with Isaiah. At the same time, and this is what I talked about with Laura last week, is Isaiah is also a source of tremendous comfort for Jews. And I can never imagine opening up chapters from Isaiah and doing so with trepidation and not with excitement about being inspired prophetically or about the prospect of being comforted by the prophet's words. And so it just so happens that we are in a period of time in Jewish life called the Seven Sabbaths of Consolation. So the last two months of the Jewish year, which we are in now, we just started the last month, the last two months are called Av and El-Lul. And on the ninth of the month of Av, which was about three weeks ago, Jews don't celebrate, I guess you'd say commemorate a holiday called the ninth of Av, which is a commemoration of the destruction of the first temple and the second temple in antiquity and Jerusalem, both of which are supposed to have happened on the ninth of Av. And so every year, the three weeks before the ninth of Av, there are prophetic portions that are read on Saturday morning in the synagogue called the portions of Paranuta or the portions where the prophets are saying, "Hey, Jews, be ready. You're about to get punished." And then after the ninth of Av, after the destruction of the temple is commemorated, there are seven Sabbaths before the new year on Rosh Hashanah. And at those seven Sabbaths, there is always a passage from Isaiah 40 through 66 that is read. And those are called the Seven Sabbaths of Consolation. The idea being that these are supposed to comfort Jews in those seven weeks as they come away from the destruction of the temple and towards the new year and the hope of what a new year has to offer. So three weeks ago, every year, in August, I go to synagogue for the first of those Sabbaths of Consolation. And I hear Isaiah 40 and the prophet saying, "Nah-hamu, nah-hamu, comfort, comfort, you all says your God." And to me, that's a great source of comfort every year. That I think is just so beautiful. Would you be willing to recite or sing perhaps a little bit more of that, what you hear when you come to the synagogue every year on one of those Sundays? Sure, I'll just do a couple of verses. So if you've ever been to a bar of Bottomitzfa, and by the way, I know the rabbi in Park City is a good friend of mine and the rabbi in Salt Lake City, is a friend of mine. So if you ever get invited to a bar of Bottomitzfa at one of those synagogues, you will hear the 13-year-old after the Torah is read, sing from the prophetic portion, and it will have the same tune. But on the first Sabbath after the ninth of Av, it's called Shabbat-Nach, it's called the Comfort Shabbat, the Comfort Sabbath, and it says Nakhamu, Nakhamu, Ami, Yomar, Eloheikh, M. Davruh, Al-Aleb, Yusya, Laim, Vekir, Uleha, Kima, La, Tsaba, A'ah, K'inir, Zah, Abona, K'ilaka, A'ah, M'ya, Da, Da, Da, Na'ah, K'ifla, Iim, Vecho, Khatote, Ha. That's just two verses. Oh, thank you. I feel like if we sing it, maybe it is even more accessible, but it actually reminded me in our conversation when I look back, as much as I have shied away from Isaiah from a scholarly pursuit perhaps, I personally had a really meaningful experience as a young missionary feeling very, very far away and feeling very, very alone, reading Isaiah. And it's Isaiah chapter 41 verse 10, which is also the text of part of the Protestant hymn, Haferma Foundation. And having that be part of a song, I think, was really instrumental, and it brought me a great deal of comfort at the time when I felt very much kind of alone and forgotten. Yeah, music is incredibly powerful and probably why it features so prominently in religious communities. Yeah. Can you talk to me about the idea of multiple Isaiah's? This was totally new information to me, and I have been odd by it since we chatted. Sure. So Isaiah, the book, as it appears, in what LDS folks would call the Old Testament, is 66 chapters. And in antiquity, the general belief was that all 66 chapters were the product of the prophet called Isaiah, who lived at the end of the 700s BCE around the time of the conquest of the northern kingdom and other events you might be familiar with. But really, as early as the Middle Ages, there were Jewish interpreters who said, "Captors 40 through 66 look totally different from chapters 1 through 39. They seem to have a different voice, they seem to have a different perspective, they seem to be coming from a mind that is in a different place than was chapters 1 through 39. And one of the medieval commentators called Abraham, Ebenezra actually said, yeah, this is a, this is just a different prophet. This is a different prophet whose oracles were attached to the prophet Isaiah. Now many other commentators for centuries said, yeah, it's different, but only because the prophet was seeing the future and speaking as though he was from the future. But what's happened in the last couple hundred years is that in almost all Jewish communities that I'm ever interacting with, there is now the assumption, which is the standard assumption in any academic study of the Hebrew Bible, which is that the book of Isaiah is in fact the product of at least two voices. So that chapters 1 through 39 with a few exceptions are oracles that trace back to the original prophet Isaiah, whereas chapters 40 through 66 are a voice that comes from the end of the Babylonian exile, which is a different time period. The temple was destroyed in the year 586. Yeah, Jews were exiled to Babylon where they spent 50 years. And at the end of that period, the Babylonian empire was conquered by the Persians and their king Cyrus. And so it's at that time that chapters 40 through 66 were written. And that's why the prophet says, oh, all hail king Cyrus. God's true Messiah. We all love Cyrus. He's going to bring us back. And scholars say, yeah, that's because this is a second voice. When I teach what I call second Isaiah, chapters 40 through 66, I actually refer to the prophet as a woman because it's an anonymous prophet. There were prophets in the ancient world that were winning. And so I often refer to her as second Isaiah. Now, you should know there are some scholars who would say that in fact, chapters 56 through 66 are still a third voice from a later period. And that's called third Isaiah or treto Isaiah. I'm not as convinced of that. But yeah, in the synagogue and academic worlds in which I run, it's simply taken as a fact that the book of Isaiah consists of two prophetic voices, one, the prophetic voice of the historical Isaiah and the second, an anonymous prophet, some 150 years later. Thank you for explaining that. And I know as we get into the chapters, you very easily use the language of second Isaiah. So I think that will help our audience understand what you're referring to when you talk about that. I also have wanted to know a little bit about the way that the Jewish community, not that there is a single voice, we know this. My approach, Isaiah, in a different way than Latter-day Saints do, we read a lot of the text as prophesies of the Messiah, or the little notes at the beginning of our chapter heading say, Isaiah is speaking messianically at this point in time. Certainly, we know that Jews believe in a Messiah. And so tell me more about about Isaiah's voice as in this sort of messianic speaking and how that relates to the Jewish experience. Sure. So I don't think it's fair to say that Christians, including LDS folks, read Isaiah messianically and Jews don't. But I think one could say that Jews read it messianically, but only in part, and less so than they read it in other ways. So when I say they read it messianically, yeah, in Isaiah 11, when it's talking about how in the future there's going to be this wise leader and wolves and lambs are going to lie down together and all that stuff, Jews say, oh, in the in the distant future when the end comes, that's the amazing thing it's going to be like. Or at the end of Isaiah when the prophet second Isaiah, or maybe third Isaiah, is talking about the, you know, refreshing creation, everything will be recreated and new. Yes, the understanding is, oh, that's what's going to happen in the end. But it's not read typically messianically in the sense of trying to look at things that are happening in the present world as though Isaiah is describing them for us 2500 years ago. And because Jews don't think that there has already been a messiah, there's no figure to read the prophecies of Isaiah against. And so most of it is just sort of general thinking about the end of times. And therefore, I think for most Jews, the significance of Isaiah is not in Isaiah's predictions of what's going to happen sometime in the future, but in Isaiah's very explicit demands about the kind of world Jews are required to fight for today. So the message of justice and repair that Isaiah emphasizes is, I think for most Jews, what is inspiring to them. I can appreciate that difference and the beauty in that approach as well. We had talked about, let's kind of dive into the chapters. You had wanted to talk about monotheism and seeing evidence of a shift in Jewish thinking in these chapters. What did you mean by that? Right. So I've given a few lectures. Actually, I started doing it a couple of years ago as we started to come maybe only a year ago as we started to come out of COVID. And people wanted to hear lectures about how dramatic events in our lives can actually be opportunities for improvement or opportunities for changing for the better. And so when I tried to show, we're different ways in which the Babylonian exile, which was a catastrophic 50 year event in this century BCE for the Jews of Jerusalem, in some ways ended up producing ideas that have become the staples of Judaism and eventually Christianity and Islam. And one of those ideas is monotheism. It's a one of the things that's probably even more challenging for some Jews and Christians to hear. Even more challenging than there's more than one Isaiah is the idea that in ancient Israel before the Babylonian exile, Israelites were probably not monotheistic in any sense that we would think of monotheism. There is only one God. It's not that they didn't have a loyalty to one God or even the belief that that one God was the most powerful of all the gods. But it's probably that there was an understanding that there were different nations with different gods and so on and so forth, but simply that our God was the best and the most powerful. There's a line for example in Exodus 15 that says when the Israelites crossed the sea and they praised God by saying, "Micha mocha ba'ilim adonai." "Oh adonai, how great are you among all the gods?" And these kinds of lines appear over and over and over again suggesting that the Israelites thought of their God as the best God but not the only God. Yeah, that made me think of what it was like Elijah calling down the fire on the altar on the prophet's bow. Yeah, so it's like, although I've always read that as a showdown between there's only one God and your gods don't do anything and you're saying it could have been like they were thinking there are multiple gods and he was just showing them that that that that that that that that that that that we run into this is where we run into trouble with whether one accepts historical criticism of the prophetic works or not because most people would say that that episode of Elijah comes from around the same time as the book of Deuteronomy, which comes around the same time as the second Isaiah of the prophet. And that it's in that period when monotheism is being forged and probably being forged precisely as a result of the Babylonian exile. In other words, when Jerusalem was destroyed, Israelites had a hard time coping with the notion that their God had been defeated. That was the standard assumption in the ancient world. If you lose a battle, if you lose your temple, you lose your city, it's because your God was weaker than the other guys God. But the solution that the Israelites seem to have come up with is that no, no, no, no, we were defeated not because our God was defeated by another God, but because our God is actually the only God, our God caused us to lose because our God was dissatisfied with our behavior. And many would argue that this is the origin of something called ethical monotheism. The belief that Jews had over time that their God was actually the only God, the God of creation, the God of all history, the God of all peoples, and that the way that that God interacts with the world is dependent upon the ethical behavior of the Jewish people. And the second Isaiah, especially chapter 43, 44, and really throughout the last 25 chapters of Isaiah, is replete with statements like, "I am God, there is no other, there wasn't one before me, there won't be one after me." And these kinds of things that you won't see if you're looking at texts from the Israelites that are from the ninth or the eighth of the seventh century. But in the late seventh, sixth and fifth century, you start to see them more and more and more. And so scholars of ancient Israel will argue that what you're seeing there is the emergence of monotheism, strict monotheism as a Jewish concept. - Yeah, and these, this is so fascinating. And these chapters that we're talking about specifically today, keep referencing over and over and over who God is, right? God keeps announcing, I am, I am this, I am that, I am this, I'm really defining what kind of roles God would have. - Yeah, and presumably because, again, especially after chapter 40, the prophet is probably responding to a lot of concerns that Jews have about God. Like, why did we lose? Why did our gods home get destroyed? How can we pray to our God if we're in Babylon and God's home is in Jerusalem and is in rubble? And the answer seems to be articulated over and over again by Second Isaiah. God doesn't live there. God is the one God, the God of all creation, the God of all peoples, the God of all history. Yes, you were naughty and that's why God punished you. But because God wasn't defeated and God is the God of the world, after your period of punishment and exile, God is going to restore you, rejuvenate you, return you to your land, resume the covenant that God has with you. And that's the message of comfort that Jews are actually reading weekly at this time of year. - I appreciate that there's that message of comfort, for sure. How is it not a vengeful God if you, well, you didn't do what I say. So then I've sent the Babylonians to destroy your city and take you away. How do you, yes, there is comfort eventually, but do you focus on the comfort to avoid the vengeance or how does that kind of plan? - That's a hard question. I mean, it depends on what you mean by vengeful, I guess. So if I have kids and I set up rules, and sometimes they don't live by the rules. - Sometimes my kids, - Yes, so I punish them. - Yeah, and I don't think of myself as being vengeful. I think of myself as being just and teaching them important lessons and helping them develop the right skills and attitude for a successful future. And so one might say, and the way Jews historically have read it for centuries, is that God allowed Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian to destroy the temple and allowed the Jews to be punished for those 50 years in exile because Jews deserved it. And the reason they deserved it is because they had not worshipped God properly, they had resorted to idolatry in Isaiah's terms because they had neglected the widow, the orphan and the vulnerable in their midst and so on and so forth, but that God always comes back. And so the reason this is such an important theological trope in Judaism is because unlike any of the other people that were around in the sixth century, Jews are still here. And in the last 2500 years, it's not like the first temple was the only source of catastrophe in Jewish life. The second temple was destroyed. Jews were exiled in Christian Europe in rather horrible circumstances for a thousand years. You know, you have the Holocaust most recently. And that just dozens and dozens and dozens of these kinds of events because Jewish history goes up and down and the theological understanding for Jews is when we're doing what we're supposed to do, good things happen and then God punishes and then good things happen and then God punishes and so on and so forth. But in, I would say the last 100 to 200 years, that kind of theology has been called a dequestion because people have said things like, what could Jews have done that was so bad that would have merited the Holocaust? This sort of thing, the question of the Odyssey that all religious people have to ask. And so that question of, is God vengeful? Is God really rewarding in punishing the Jewish people and so on are questions that are alive and well today as much as they ever were and I don't expect them to ever go away. But there's always still a, not, I don't wanna say a trope because I don't think it's trivial. There's always still a message of hope and redemption that this is the God of Israel, the God who will restore, the God who will, the God who is just, the God who will make things right, the God who is all powerful. - I wouldn't say always. I say this because two years ago actually, I just started a sabbatical, but it's a sabbatical to make up for a sabbatical that I started two years ago. - Okay. - And then in a very unfortunate series of events, one of my colleagues passed away suddenly and someone had to teach her classes at USC and she was a specialist in the Holocaust. And so here I am, the scholar of antiquity, but in order to fill in, I'm given lectures on the Holocaust all of a sudden. So I learned so much more about Holocaust literature and Holocaust survivors than I ever thought I would. And I would say that understandably, especially in a post-Holikost world and especially among Holocaust survivors that were plenty of Jews who just said, God, comfort, God, restoration, come on, forget about it. But I would say usually that is the assumption of Jews is that God ultimately is that source of restoration and hope and comfort. And I would say that maybe if there is an always, it is a Jewish idea that the course of the world and the course of God's treatment of the world is in some way dependent on Jewish ethical behavior. - And what do you mean by Jewish ethical behavior? - That Jews don't just take care of the poor because taking care of the poor is the right thing to do. There's this notion because it comes out of Isaiah that the cosmos is actually shaped by Jewish treatment of the poor of the infirm, Jewish worship of God correctly, that this has cosmic implications. Now, it's not as easy to understand as it might have been in antiquity, like where we're good. God gives us a temple, we're bad, God destroys the temple. That sort of quid pro quo relationship, I think for most Jews has gone the way of the dodo. But nonetheless, there's still this assumption that Jewish, that the command upon Jews to act in a certain way is of cosmic significance. - There's still a. - And that is the prophetic idea of Par excellence. - Yeah, there's still a covenant, there's still a godly contract in place. - Yes. - You could see that. Tell me about the servant in Isaiah and your reading of the servant as we talk about these chapters in Isaiah 40 through 45. - Sure, so this is in Jewish Christian relations, at least, a very challenging topic because if you've read Isaiah starting in 42, but then throughout the 40s and into the early 50s, there is this figure that is referred to as the servant. And in the later songs about the servant, Isaiah describes the servant as a suffering servant. And of course, many Christians then read that against Jesus and say, "Ah, this is Isaiah predicting the passion of Christ and Jesus as Messiah and so on and so forth." And that is obviously not the way. - I'm going to be the Jewish reading, yes. - Yeah, the way that Jews have read this description of the servant. Now, it is true that there are a few voices in the medieval tradition that have said, "Oh, yeah, this servant that Isaiah is referring to, "is the Messiah. "It's not Jesus, but it's the Messiah "that eventually is going to come." But I would say that that is very much so a minority reading among Jewish interpreters. Some Jews read it as a historical description of the Persian king Cyrus. Some Jews read the description as a description of the prophetic office. So Isaiah is describing what it's like to be a prophet. You're trying to lead God's people, but the people are constantly being mean to you and so on. - And we have lots of examples of that happening, yes. - Yeah. - The most typical reading, however, is to see the servant as the Jewish people themselves. That God has this special chosen people that is the servant of God in the world. And that's a difficult and challenging task and often leads to tremendous suffering and humiliation and so on and so forth. But that ultimately, the servant is the Jewish people. And that's the reading of the most famous medieval commentator whose name is Rashi, the 11th century French rabbi. I have even heard of Rashi. So he's made his way to the lay reader. I wanna go back through in my own study now and read those chapters and put in in place of servant like my people or Israel or something and see how that is my understanding. You're just the experience of reading those chapters. - What in Isaiah does that, Allah? I mean, Isaiah says, calls Israel God servant and describes Israel as, and this is a moniker that Jews still use all the time. In chapter 42 somewhere, God refers to Israel as, or La Goiim, which in Hebrew is a light onto the nations, which I think a fairly familiar phrase in Isaiah, but Jews take it personally, so to speak and understand themselves as a light onto the nations, especially modern Jews in the last 200 years. It's hard to see yourself as a light to the nations when you're living in ghettos with high walls and not allowed to actually go out. But since the French Revolution, as Jews have been allowed into modernity and many Jews have said, well, now what do we do? This whole new world that's open to us and this notion of being a light onto the nations and spreading into the nations and bringing with them ethical monotheism, has become an incredibly resonant image for modern Jews. - Do you feel like Isaiah particularly contributes to the idea of what it means to be ethical and kind of how people are supposed to act in this covenant relationship more than other prophets or is it just in totality together? That's how we understand it. - I don't know if it's more than, say Amos, or Hosea or, but Isaiah says it the most and with the most beautiful language and with the most force. I mean, chapter one of Isaiah is a tirade in which Isaiah says, it would be maybe two Christian to say, Isaiah says, ceremonies are not important. All that matters is how you behave. But Isaiah says, look, if you overemphasize, oh, I'm fasting, oh, I'm praying, oh, I'm sacrificing and that causes you to neglect your obligation to the poor and the widow and the orphan and so on and so forth, that actually make God hate your fasts. And I think that's an overstatement as a Jew who fasts on Yom Kippur. I don't think God is saying don't fast, God is saying if your fasts are not accompanied by kindness toward strangers, then your fast is worthless. And Isaiah makes that case again, at greater length and with more beautiful imagery than anyone else. And I think that's why Isaiah has this reputation and why Isaiah gets quoted and used more than any of the other prophets. - So it's not that religious ordinances or ceremonies aren't useful or needful. It's that if our focus is on the nitty gritty of that performative thing and our heart hasn't been changed or moved or acted out in a manner that would be, you would maybe say ethical, I would say kind or generous or I would honestly say Christian, that would be the first word that would come to mind. Then that is the problem. That is where the sin lies, that is where God's anger is. - Yeah. - And I think the reason why Isaiah has been embraced not only by Jews, but also by Catholics, Protestants, LDS and so many others is because that conflict between the need and religion for a sense of formality and procedure and also the need for, the fear of ceremony becoming empty and performative. That tension is ever alive, right? And different religious communities are constantly moving back and forth, you know, saying, well, Catholics are too far on that side, but then the Catholics will say, well, you Protestants, you're too far on that side. And we have it in the Jewish world too. And it's precisely because I think a religious experience that was devoid of either would be incomplete, but finding that appropriate mix and not airing in one side or the other is very challenging. - I think that's universal. I really do. From the religious traditions, I know of our friends that practice and multiple different faiths that that seems to be a difficult balance to strike, both as an institutional religion and as a person practicing. - Absolutely. - Well, Isaiah can give us some good advice on that, but let's go ahead and switch to some of our guest, our participant questions. So those who are listening in, thank you again for being here. And thank you, Josh, for talking with me so far. If you'd like to add more questions, please feel free to do so in the Q and A portion at the bottom of your screen. We have the calls who tell us that Isaiah is exciting if you like time travel, the past, the present and the future, what could be more enticing? And that goes back to I think our initial conversation. And I just would throw this out to you, Josh, how often as a Jewish scholar do you find yourself reading? Isaiah, for past, present and future, or do you find one? - I would say always. - It emphasizes more than the other. - Always. I mean, so today's Sunday, which means yesterday, I was in synagogue, there was a lovely botnist for one of my kids friends. And so she was singing because we are in the Sabbath of consolation, she was singing from Second Isaiah about the beautiful new creation at the end of time and about the future. But while she was singing a bat, I'm thinking, oh, this was written by Second Isaiah. At the end of the exile, what do you think? Isaiah was experiencing, or the Second Isaiah, what was she experiencing when she wrote this and so on and so forth. And then after that reading, we read the prayer for our country. And as part of the prayer for our country, they recite a verse from Isaiah chapter two, "The chit-tuhr, Khart, Botanli, itim, vachani, toti, ham, lemaz, me, ro, lo yisagoe, el goi, harav, lo yul, madu, od, mil, hamah." People will beat their spears into farming emblemators. Yeah, and they're farming it in all that. Nation will not-- [INAUDIBLE] Nation will not lift up the sword against another nation. They won't learn more anymore. So Isaiah is there taken as what we as Americans and we as people should be thinking about right now, which is how can we achieve peace so that we can Jews and Gentiles hold hands and walk up the mountain of the Lord together or whatever the other part of that image is. So yeah, I would say that that's one of the wonderful things about being a part of a religious community that has existed for so long and constantly envisioned for the future is that you're constantly mixing in the ancient with the future and the present. And to me, it's exhilarating. I guess to others, it's annoying and frustrating. I'm going to go with exhilarating. I'm going to change my stripes here, for sure. Just the scripture that you quoted and then translated for us reminded me that the passage of that is written inscribed upon a wall across the street from the United Nations building. And I found that to be very powerful one day when I stumbled across it. Yes. On the one hand-- A question, another of the indicative of the Christo normativity of the United Nations, but at the same time-- Indeed. --if we were going to pick something from the Bible, that's a darn good one. Yes. Yeah. Do you have any comments on any Jewish appreciation of Handel's Messiah and the extensive use of Isaiah in that now celebrated-- I would say within the Christian world very celebrated musical experience? I don't know if I have any opinions. I don't agree with that reading of Isaiah. But at the same time, I don't know. I around Christmas time find myself periodically breaking into song. And I'm not the first Jew who doesn't-- mind going to a handle sing along and I feel a little guilty about it but you know beautiful music is beautiful music but theologically it's such a far cry from the way Jews think about either Isaiah or the Messiah. I should say that one of the things that's challenging about being a Jew is that aesthetically Jewish beauty is not as mainstream as Christian beauty is. You know you don't hear beautiful Sephardic Spanish Jewish melodies from the 17th century as part of mainstream American discourse but handles Messiah is going to be on the radio around Christmas time and so if you want to hear Jewish beautiful Jewish stuff you always have to go to some like weird concert in a place you've never heard of and and that's one of the things that stinks about being a minority culture. Yeah I for one would love to hear more of the beautiful Spanish Sephardic melody that you just mentioned or anything about. I mean I think and I'm just hearing you seeing in recite some of Isaiah in Hebrew I just think is beautiful. I wish that there was more of that. I wish I was exposed to more of that more frequently. I can tell you it is even more beautiful when it's read by a canter that trains for five years to be able to recite. It's not as beautiful when it's a 13 year old kid who is tone deaf. I'm somewhere in the middle between what can be really unpleasant and what is absolutely beautiful. Yeah. We have somebody with a question for you what is the best English translation of Isaiah? Do you have an English translation you recommend? I mean I'm not I should say I'm not an expert in Isaiah. I'm an expert in text from a much later period. But generally speaking when I assign passages from the Hebrew Bible to students I recommend what's called the new revised standard version just because I think it is the most ecumenical objective academic historical translation of the Bible. Would that be abbreviated as the NRSV? The NRSV which is pretty much the same as the RSV except it has fewer old fashioned terms of phrase. You know many Jews will suggest the what's called the JPS the Jewish publication society translation. But that's from a Jewish perspective like the King James is from a Christian Christian. And so it's hard for me to recommend if it's a person who's LDS asking that it's hard for me to say because on the one hand I don't want to discourage you from pursuing an LDS oriented translation which you are entitled to. But if you're asking me what the best sort of objective one would be for a person who wants to try to take away bias as much as possible I guess I would say NRSV. But at the end of the day what I would say is learn Hebrew. I just learned Hebrew and read it. I love it. I've just thought of a question I want to throw in here. The Hebrew Bible is organized differently than the Bible that Latter-day Saints are used to the King James version of the Bible. Where does Isaiah fall in the organization of the Hebrew Bible? So this is actually a lecture I give which I call there's no such thing as the Bible which at first makes people upset until I try to point out that if you ask a Catholic person what the Bible is you'll get a book with the different contents in different order than what a Jewish person will tell you the Bible is which is different than what a Protestant will tell you what the Bible is which is different from Russian Orthodox which is different from Greek Orthodox sometimes the differences are slight but there are so many different Bibles. So if you're talking about an LDS Bible which my and my understanding is that that's the King James version. Yeah so the main difference would be so Protestant Bibles and Jewish Bibles have the same books not counting the New Testament. Yeah but the Old Testament of a Protestant and the Hebrew Bible of a Jew are the same books they're just in a different order. So for Jews the prophets come first you have the five books of the Torah a Genesis Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and then you have the prophets with Joshua, Judges and then first Samus, Second Samus, and so on and those are called the historical prophets and then you have the literary prophets starting with the big three Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and then the minor 12 and then you have after that what are called the writings that Psalms, Proverbs and so on and so forth. Whereas my understanding is that in Protestant Bibles the prophets have been moved from the second section to the final section. So the prophets come last in the Old Testament for a Protestant and my understanding is that the reason for that is that they are seen as foreshadowing Jesus who emerges in Matthew 1-1 sort of. If you're reading the Bible, so the Christian Bible is a continuous Old Testament straight into the name. So our books of the Bible would be the same Jews would just have them in a slightly different order and the prophets would be earlier in the listing. I only really learned that. The last conversation we had I got to talk about the book of Ruth and where it was placed. The placement of it was significant to the telling of the story. Anyway. We have a listener who would like to have you speak more about the messages of comfort in chapters 43-45 and how it is applied today in Jewish life. If you have more to say on that. Yeah, I don't know if it's I don't know if it's applied in Jewish life as much as it is just a part of the Jewish liturgical cycle. So that Jews go through the year reading parts of the you know the entire Torah in the course of a year and reading the the prophets and tying that into experiences in Jewish history from creation, the Exodus, the giving of the law at Sinai and and one of the events in that history is the destruction of the temple which are seen as I'm not a scholar of literature. Is Sinecta key the right word? I don't know. But the the destruction of the temple are seen as events of devastation in Jewish history. And so when one reads Nachamunachamu and then the seven Haftar of the seven passages of consolation in the seven weeks that we're in, I think many Jews see it not as necessarily about comfort related to the destruction of the temple but just about God as a source of comfort in Jewish life and in Jewish history. And of course it's a prelude to the beginning of the Jewish year and for those who don't know the Jewish year begins with a fun holiday but then just 10 days in that that's the most somber holiday of the year in which Jews grovel before God and say we know that we're we're sinful and that we're not perfect and we're just begging you God to show kindness to us and keep us around for another year. That's in short the theology of Yom Kippur of the day of Atonement and so it makes sense that in the seven weeks before that a Jewish thinking about the kindness and the comfort of God that no matter no matter how bad the punishment has seemed no matter how bad the sin might have been there is ultimately a source of comfort that's there. And so if I how that's applied I don't really know when I think of Jews having tough days or Jews dying or other such things and then looking to the scriptures for comfort I think more of the Psalms than I do second Isaiah. Yeah. But I think it's interesting that it's I don't know if you're reading would be this way. Comfort you comfort me my people say, "Athiagod it's almost a commandment to receive comfort." It seems like a directive or at the at the nicest way maybe an invitation but it seems more you should allow this comfort to God. Yeah sure. Well it's sometimes it's hard sometimes I mean I'm not a psychologist but my my understanding is that when people are really in the dumps it's impossible for them to turn around until they're willing to accept the help and they're willing to accept the possibility of turning around that and I think there's a great logic to that and something tells me Isaiah was aware of it that that the ancient Jews had to accept that they were worthy of comfort before they could be comforted. I'm looking through our questions here. This is one I don't even understand the question for. So I'm going to pose it to you because it's probably something I should learn about. What is the biggest difference in Tanakhra? T-A-N-A-K-H. I don't know what that is. So Tanakh is an expression that refers to the Hebrew Bible. So what Christians call the Old Testament. Jews don't call the Old Testament. Obviously, because that would mean there would be a new testament as well. Actually, I know the name for this. It's called a Retronim. Okay. Like World War I is a Retronim because it was the Great War. Then there was World War II. So you had to go back and rename the first one. Yes. Apparently acoustic guitars, one of those two. There was guitar. Then there was electric guitar. So they had to go back and call it acoustic. Okay. So if there was a testament and then there was a new testament, well, it became the Old Testament, but only to people who thought there was a new testament. So if you're Jews, those books are referred to as an acronym, Torah, T, Niveem, which means prophets, that's the N, and then Ktovim, which means writings. So it's T-N-K-K, but if K-K comes at the end of a word, it has to be aspirated. So it becomes Tanakh. Okay. And that would be the Hebrew word for the Hebrew Bible. Tanakh. Yeah. But I don't know what it means to say. What is the biggest difference in it? Unless he's asking after what I already described that the Tanakh has the prophets before the writings, whereas in the King James, the writings come before the prophets. We've got, let's see. We have a listener who participated in an LDS Jewish dialogue once in Oregon, our host shared the story of two rabbis debating how the heavens were open. And the other said that the heavens were closed, given the scripture, referencing the Talmud. And the other said that the heavens is the Jewish interpretation of revelation in the writings of Isaiah. And I would just preface that question again with there is not one Jewish interpretation of just about anything in scripture from what I understand. So perhaps a prominent Jewish interpretation of the revelations in the writing. What is today considered Jewish generally means that it's derivative of the rise of the rabbis and the understanding of Judaism that the rabbis of the second, third, fourth and fifth centuries created. And generally speaking in that rabbinic Judaism, which today gives us modern Judaism. And the other question is that revelations is for by that's a germ, the revelation is there is no longer revelation. And the other one has the revelation that was received from God, which is the Torah. And for the rabbis also the oral Torah that was taught to the ages and came down in the form of eventually the mission and the Talmud. That Jews have the Torah and the Talmud. That is the revelation that's the revelation that was given and now it's Jews responsibility to learn it to teach it to twist it to interpret it to understand it in its full complexity. But there's no new thing coming down. And there's no opportunity to go up and somehow get something new. And oftentimes quoted is the very end of the book of Deuteronomy, where God says like look I've given you the word. It's for you. You don't have to cross the sea to go get it. You're not going to go up to heaven to go get it. You have it. And so if someone was to study it, master it, live it, that is the Jewish attitude. And so if someone were to come into a synagogue and say I have been inspired by God to speak. And here is my revelation. That would be awkward to say a least. And if it was I have been reading the revelations of God and here's my interpretation. That would be different. Exactly what Judaism has been for the last 2000 years. And here's how my interpretation is different from this long list of interpreters before me or how it relates to what they've said I love that tradition of obviously I was trained as a historian so I love looking back at what people have written and said. And then where you are going to situate yourself. Okay, this next question I'm going to preface with Josh, I know you are a historian and a scholar of ancient Judaism. This is a present moment question. So there you go. And the question is all nations are as nothing referencing Isaiah 47. And wants to know has this been used as a tool against over nationalism and a mover toward globalism in the ethical Jewish community. And what is its connection with Zionism. And this is what I'm talking about right now is the question. I have no idea how Isaiah 47 has been mobilized at all. I mean questions of nationalism, globalism, and Zionism are of tremendous importance in the last 150 years. I have tried to figure out in the 19th century, for example, whether Jews were of the Jewish nation or whether they were Germans or whether they were Americans. And then eventually realizing no, we deserve a nation of our own and then trying to create it and then having to undertake all of the difficult challenges of having your own nation and your own military and. These are all very complicated questions that are interrelated, but I simply can't say anything intelligent about how that verse from Isaiah has been a part of that conversation. Nor is it your specialty as it is. No, I was in years after things that you have really studied. Yeah. I mean, there's never an excuse for ignorance, but I yeah, I just don't know. I just like to leave you the last word. Maybe going full circle. If I don't think. How do I say this? Because you participate and have for some time now in in Jewish LDS dialogues and you're talking with people who are incredibly invested and incredibly intelligent and spend a lot of time studying. And have a long background in scriptural processing and reading and things like that. I felt like you were a little not shocked, but surprised to learn that people like me sometimes are a little bit scared of Isaiah. So to go to bring our conversation full circle, do you have any closing thoughts to leave our audience with about. An approach to Isaiah or the importance of Isaiah or. And I think that's a new way to look at it that might not be so either off putting or or just seem to be a high wall to climb. Yeah. I should tell you, first of all, that when I teach Christianity to Jews and I show them the book of relation. Or I show them the book of Daniel, which most non orthodox Jews have never seen. They I think have the same kind of reaction that you're describing as you having to Isaiah. So it's not like there aren't text that that kind of weird Jews out to. I'll end with something that I think is fairly universal. But I'm an interrupt you to also say as much as we've already talked. I have changed my perspective on Isaiah. Thank you for that. Are people. I don't know if people are familiar with the phrase and I have no idea who said it. I believe it was a Christian cleric at some time, but someone said that the ultimate purpose of the profits is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. And we've talked a little bit. I say the most of our time about second Isaiah as a profit of comfort. And a comfort to the afflicted who were in exile and comfort to the afflicted and all ages who want to think about their relationship. Either individually or collectively with God being restored. But I suspect that one of the reasons why not just Isaiah, but a lot of the profits, especially Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. One of the reasons they're hard to read is because they are trying to give a message that is meant to make you squirm in your seat and to make you feel uncomfortable and to afflict you and to prevent complacency. You don't just sit in your seat and read and say, "Oh, this is kind of boring." But instead, you say, I am. I don't like being talked to that way. That's a nasty image. Woo, that makes me feel uncomfortable. Then you listen up. And if you're lucky, you hear the message and it inspires you to change your life and to change your community and to find a new relationship with the world and with God that hadn't been available to you before you got that shock therapy. So maybe I, to use an expression I hate, but it's out there. You're supposed to lean in to that feeling of discomfort with Isaiah and say, yeah, it does make me uncomfortable. But why? Maybe it's meant to shock me into a new way of being that's going to make me a better person. I love that. That's a great way to close. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. It has just been delightful to talk with you. And I would like to thank everybody else for joining us and obviously, Robby Garroway for joining. Thank you. As I mentioned earlier, you can rewatch this event or listen in the podcast version of our conversation by visiting www.Widthowfoundation.org. The Widthow Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit organization and is entirely funded by our generous audience members. So if you find what we're doing valuable here, please consider making a tax deductible donation at the website with so foundation.org/donate. Please. Our next conversation is on September 25th. We'll be discussing Jeremiah's consolation for Israel and Jeremiah 30 through 31 with rabbi Corey Utkin. So please come back for that. Thank you again for joining us this evening. Goodbye, everybody. Bye, Josh. Bye. [Music]