Faith vs History: How Sacred Stories Were Meant to Be Understood

There's a famous debate that happened between a scholar named Paula Frederickson and a rabbi over the Talmud and Mishna. And the rabbi is going on. He's just fully passionate, extremely emotional about how you are misinterpreting the Mishna and Talmud. You want to know the who, what, when, where, why, and how. You want all this historical facts and data that that's not what it's for. It's meant for your application in how to live and improve a spiritual life toward God. When she got up, she cooked the out of it. She let him know, "Rabbi, listen. I respect your decision to read this material that way and you have your religious experience through that. My religious experience is to know why in the seventh century a rabbi there would be a story of a rabbi where a young man thinks his wife has been unfaithful and he really thinks that she has slept with someone before him and she's not a virgin on the night they're going to get married. She he brings her to the rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I need to know if she's been faithful." And so they had a custom. She'd sit on a barrel of wine and the rabbi would test it and he'd go to smell her breath and if the smell of wine came from her breath then her hyman has been removed therefore she's lost her virginity. Then all of a sudden she sits the rabbi goes I smell no wine my my young man she's been faithful and they go home he marries her happily ever after. Now many scholars who've studied the who what when and why right find out the rabbi is actually looking out for the young girl. Sure, >> he's doing a good deed because even if she wasn't a virgin, he would have still done it so that the man would have been thinking that she was a virgin, but also that their lives would have been good. He was a good in that case, he was a good person to help in their custom. >> He had their life in his hands. Like a noble lie. >> Like a noble lie. Totally. And but she said to this rabbi she's debating, "My friend, that's my religious experience. Don't take it from me. Don't take what my experience is." So me and Neil have our own we go through the muse. There are moments where I'm listening to a story of Dianisis that I feel like I'm listening to Jesus how how as a Christian I felt. >> You don't like being denied that. >> I want I want everyone to be able to experience that. >> Right. >> That's the unfortunate sad part because we have walls. Our faith causes walls between us and the other. And I'm like dude >> if you just knew how much they are indebted to the earlier Greeks that you so are ready to be allergic to. They are indebted to these Greeks. They are indebted to these other ideas. And they pretend that this dropped out of the sky and God just spoke and therefore like the Muslims do with Muhammad, with Gabriel in the cave. Little do you know that actually these stories come from earlier stories and they're indebted.