Greetings skeptics, non believers, and believers alike. This segment explores a book
that delves into the lasting influence of Jewish scripture. Despite being rooted in ancient
tales of loss and defeat, the Bible remains a powerful and revered text.
This book suggests that the Bible's resilient can be attributed to its portrayal of adversity
and defeat as virtues. Jewish writers faced with persecution, expulsion, and exile
reimagine defeat as a spiritual triumph. The Bible's message shifted from worldly success to
the spiritual realm, emphasizing that failure today might promise victory tomorrow. While the
Bible's influence indoors, rights insights invite us to reevaluate the timeless text through a
modern lens. And what America doesn't love Excuse me, what American does not
love a good underdog story. However, the cracks and crevices in the Bible
make it a continually evolving, misinterpreted text, much like any other human creation.
Stay curious, skeptics. This article is from The New Yorker dated August
twenty first, entitled The Enduring Bible Legacy of Loss, by Adam Gopnik,
which reviews authored Jacob l writes book Why the Bible Began, so kicking it
off with our resident former Jewish person, and like Phoebe Roses commentary on this
first, what a boring article, What a boring article. I had trouble
getting through the intro. I had to say, I'm sorry you had to
sit down. Article that was. I mean, I read it because you
know, I want this panel. But what a load of I mean,
you had a few good lines in it. Okay to me crumbling pagan religions
when abrah Hammick monotheism came along. It's just badly written. I mean it's
just badly written. Bad really, it's long winding, doesn't say anything.
There's no you calling your teeth into anything on this. It's so dry.
I mean, crikey, this is I feel like I needed to, you
know, drink from a fire hose once I finished with this. It was
so duh. I mean, it's well meaning, it's based in assuming is
a fairly sensible, well research book. I don't doubt Guy's thoroughly enjoyed everything
that he said, but as part of me, that goes that the editor
or somebody out the New York has gone to this guy. You've written stuff
on religious text. Four, we'd like you to write about this because we're
promoting this and payment and all this stuff. And he's just kind of I
don't want to do this, and he's just lost, He's just lost it.
He just carry on. He's just gone into like a dictaphone and he's
just rambling on and on and on and on and on, and he's forgotten
one thing here, one major thing. He doesn't mention Judaism properly. He
doesn't mention the tarach properly. He doesn't mention the tarrellment properly. He mentions
exact lamentation or as we call them today, platitudes or worst astrology. But
that's as bad as far as he goes. It's rubbish. I mean,
I'm uncomfortable with this weird notion of luzardom Wing in the end, because yeah,
okay, my ethnicity is basically that I'm a loser. That's risen to
the top. I mean, I'm someone who was raised in Judaism, had
the mitzvah and the lot, and I still wear a mother and David.
But I'm not a practicing religious jew. I wear it because it's an ethnicity
thing. I wear it for the history of it and so on, and
to see my ethnicity, my cultural heritage boiled down to this article of nonsense.
I mean, for goodness sakes, I mean, I've got nothing against
the guy. It's just made stop. Oh bother, please reinterpret this and
just reinterpreted into something called b one n you do us all a favor,
Cynthia. Help. I'm losing the will to live the more I talk,
you know, I just want to say. It took me two days to
read this article, and I listened to articles. I listened to articles.
I'm doing other work. Yeah, I was having a fourtmth of zone in
on epis so dull. Yeah, I did something in between. Phoebe like
you listen to it. I've read it. But like I said, it
took me two days, and I got bored and decided to do laundry because
that was way more fun. But before I really get into my commentary,
I'm curious, really actually to hear what Aaron has to say about it.
This is the worst book report I've ever read. Somebody says something nice intellectually
the book, myself something I kind of want to New Yorker. I kind
of want to be the book, but I want to read the book.
Just by reading this titled up. By reading this guy's article, it sounds
kind of he says, like, Okay, interesting, the interesting take on
on the Bible. You know, I've always heard that history is written by
the winners, not necessarily the losers. So you know, call me intrigued.
But this guy, he presented none of the arguments of the book.
He did, but he present them so poorly. I don't under I don't
understand what the argument of the book is. I don't understand. I have
to. I'm gonna have to read the book to understand what this what this
review is. Understand his argument was dead. Jacob l Right, isn't apologist
A part of our bo A book about losers is explains why it's popular.
Gosh, that's you know. I was raised LDS Mormon, and we never
saw we were never taught that Jews were losers. We taught that they were
disobedient and so God kept punishing them. You know, there's they're saying kind
of similar stories in the Book of Mormon where people were disobedient and God would
punish them or withdraw blessings, not that they were losers. And if if
Right's book has to reinterpret the Bible with the modern lens, you've already lost.
If you have to reinterpret supposedly the word of God, the creator of
the universe, the moral center, the moral fiber of all that is good,
right, and holy, if you have to reinterpret his word with a
modern lens, that means his word is crap. And he didn't he didn't
quite get his point across, right, You mean God didn't show up to
clear things up. I'm stunned, not that I've heard. I mean,
you know, when I was in eighth grade Sunday School, our teacher told
us that all Jews go to Hell, and that's where my religion began to
crumble. I just want to point that out. I was like, what
did he just say? But I want to go to Hell? Oh you're
not. You're not Jewish anymore. If the four of us put our heads
together and we wanted to come up with a system to teach people about God
and that God is good, we could come up with about five minutes.
We could come up with a better system than what's in the Bible. And
then what history has teacher has taught us, and that's just four talking heads
on the internet, because that's how all this works. That's what makes us
the experts. We are four talking heads, but we could come up with
the better system. Just trying to drag this back to the Ash article itself,
it was something that was really quite disturbing that was mentioned in this at
the beginning. I'm very uncomfortable with beatification of anybody or any action for somebody
does. But what it did raise was that there's this movement in some parts
of some Jewish communities in areas of New York that they're going and turning men
messianically, and they're looking at these men messianically. And that's a very disturbing
take because if we're starting to Messiah people, we're going beyond just beatification.
I mean, I'm going to get some backlash here, but Gretta Tumberg has
been be actified by far too many people, and I don't particularly like the
fact that that's happened. And that's a level of doing something. But what
we're doing here is where going to some men who they genuinely are the second
coming of Jesus Christ and people are buying into this, so they go there
creating messiic creatures in front of the human beings. And that's really dangerous.
That's really dangerous because when that happens, what you're doing is you're abandoning reason,
you're abandoning skepticism, And when you start to view somebody in this way,
it's worse than a cult. It's worse than religious cults, because what
you're doing is you're going beyond someone being a leader to someone being the embodiment
itself. And when somebody is the embodiment itself, it's unchallengeable. And because
it's unchallengeable, that is really a problem because it means that that person has
can't blosh to do en block what they can well feel like. And that
was the most disturbing take from me. Yeah, absolutely, So Yeah,
what I tell people when I come across this line of thinking is that if
they're willing to kind of give this, uh, this empowerment to somebody,
well, then that's exactly what they're doing. They're giving up any power that
they have to kind of be their own person. And that's like incredibly dangerous
and so it's it's always a risky move to kind of just make make God
figures out of out of ordinary people. But you know, we've been dealing
with it for a long time, which kind of brings me to what I
wanted to talk about a little bit, which is like the history of the
Jewish people or the ancient Hebrews. I should say, first of all,
I think this article is incredibly difficult because it's it's a review of a review,
which is like, I don't I don't know how Yeah, it's just
boring by default. But anyway, the thewing a review of the review.
I'm reviewing a review, yeah, and I don't even know. And then
people who called in on this are going to be reviewing the review of the
review of the review. Yeah yeah, and they're gonna be just, you
know, worse. I'm not leading them into anywhere good, so uh,
you know, don't listen alive. But look, judging judging from this article,
something that I think I do want to talk about is the history of
the Bible. Ascribing the Jewish people to being a persecuted and victimized people and
making that the cause of the of the Biblical popularity is such an oxymoron in
a way, because the only reason the Bible is popular is because people were
slaughtered and destroyed, Jews being among them. Yes, but uh, you
know, the the author of this article owes Christianity a great deal of gratitude
for making the Bible popular in the first place. You say the Bible is
popular, but I haven't yet met many Christians who read it. Well,
it's popular among those of us who used to be Christians. So that's why
you don't meet Christians that read it, because they're all atheists now. But
uh, you know, I think that there's so much controversy about who the
hebrew people were, like five thousand, six thousand years ago. There's there's
competing theories. We don't know if the Israelites fought the Canaanites, or if
they were the same people, if they kind of merged, or if one
disappeared and the other took over and the like. It's there's so much nuanced
theoretical discussion about how this even all came about that there's there can't be a
whole lot of agreement on how the Bible became popular. I mean, we
just don't know what the timeline looked like for the Bible to become what it
was today except for when the Christians came in and started started wielding their sword.
And so I think we can we can owe we owe a lot of
the popularity to this Bible, not because the Jews were persecuted, although we
know of many times in history they were. We also know the Bible even
says it, if these people would actually read the Bible, they'd know that
the Jewish people committed great atrocities. And so I can't I can't just call
them losers, but that those are out of my thoughts on that. I
definitely want to read this book for myself, like Aaron said, because who
knows. I mean maybe maybe this uh, this whole review is just lost
in translation. So those are my points. I'll kick it back over to
Cynthia. Yeah, you have kicked and I've received. You know, guys,
but that was a punt, not a kick. I don't know.
Did we make a feel, goes, did we I don't know, No,
no, no, no, we haven't to go a touchdown yet.
So third down Aaron is looking at what are they talking about? But yeah,
real quick, before Cynthia goes, I just want to say I don't
I don't think I haven't read the book. But I don't think you can
ascribe the popular of the Bible to just one thing. There's gonna be it's
it's a complicated issue. Sure that the Messianic message probably is part of it.
Uh, the power of the priests and early Christianity, the power of
the Catholic Church. Uh, don't forget it all cause a team. It
all comes into play on why the Bible, excuse me, is so popular
and what what caused christian to spread It's couldn't because the Jews were losers,
as this guy says. Maybe, but if it's it's not just the one
thing, it's not. It's not gonna be one thing. There's it's way
too complicated, you know, five thousand years of history. It's way too
complicated to ascribe to one one thing. Blame Gideons. Everywhere they keep they
keep printing them and buying them. Okay, I ran to over Cynthia your
turn. Well, guys, like I said, I this, it took
me two days to re actually read this article, and and I'm not gonna
lie. I was straw rug going. So instead of actually coming up with
commentary that's thoughtful and well informed and intellectually basis a base. Rather, I
actually asked chat gpt to come up with a funny commentary for this article.
So here go. We're taking a hilarious roller coaster ride through the twist and
turns of Jacob L. Rights take on why the Bible? Just one quick?
So buckle up because I'm going it's gonna be a wild one people.
So picture this. You're strolling down Madison Avenue and suddenly you're hit with posters.
They're declaring that Luba the Luba Vic Carrabba Shanierson, Yes, thank you,
thank you. Resident former Jew on this panel is the internal messiah in
twenty twenty three. That's like finding a poster for a nineties bands boys band
for a reunion tour. I mean, come on, the guy passed away
in nineteen ninety four? Can you say eternal life goal? But I'm home
now. North Korea does a total president, but I think they were doing
it in New York. I think you're doing in New York. Why not?
Now, let's talk about messiahs. The home psia concept originates from ancient
Judea's dream of a warrior leader defeating Persians, Greeks, and Romans. It's
like once in your local high school high school quarterback to become an NFL MVP.
So when someone suggests new Jewish Messiah in twenty twenty three, you can't
help but chuck on an ass. Is this guy going to take on the
entire New York City traffic next? And then if he does, can he
come to Chicago? But wait, there's more so maybe or even the outside.
But I got more because Wright tells us that the Bible's secret sauce.
It's it's obsession with loser's ruling. Forget about success stories. We want the
underdog narrative. It's like Hollywood making a movie where the villain wins. So
who remembers the pennant winning the sixty the nineteen sixty two Yankees when you could
talk about the record losing nineteen sixty two? Mets am I right? M
I right now now? I feel attacked. Man, I'm attack you some
more now. Right argues that the Bible endurance is all thanks to Jewish people
turning to feed into a virtue. It's like saying that falling failing a math
test actually made you a better person. Honey, I didn't fail. I
just practiced being a virtuous scholar. If only my teachers had brought that into
play, but they didn't. And let's not forget the Bible's division and entanglement
of narratives. It's like watching a soap opera with so many plots and twist
turns that you need a flow chart just to keep up. Is that King
David's illegentleman Cousin's half sister or just that just a neighbor who just wandered into
the story? Am I right? But the best part is when Wright suggests
that Jewish stories have a special virtue because they were forged and suffering. Oh
the poe Attics suffering. It's like saying, are at the tail are better
because we had worst luck than everybody else. Sorry, but I prefer my
stories with the side of optimism, Thank you very much. But in conclusion,
people will rights analysis is fascinating. We can't help but add a pinch
of humor to the next. The Bible's endurance is like a sitcom that's been
running for over a millennia, full of unsuspected and unexpected twists and unforgettable characters.
And isn't what that? Isn't that what actually makes this a timeless classic?
Especially when the classic has been copied from a copy from a copy where
words and paragraphs and pages have disappeared, and then new words and paragraphs and
pages have been added to fit a certain narrative. So washed our golden plates,
LSD Church. So thanks, folks, I won't be here all night.
Make sure you do tip your waiters and become us. I decided to
get my commentary from chat GPT. This is why I will never be asked
to do a XP. However, from Cynthia, I passed this article by.
If we would all have passed this article by. But I think it's
a wider indication than people are passing religion by that part. But you guys
who are watching and listening, if you don't want to pass us by and
you want to hear more from the nonprofit Care