Classically Abby - February 09, 2023


Why We SHOULD Speak Out About The TRUTH： Faith Talk

Topics
strengthening faith
Hosted by
Abby Shapiro
Mentioned
Torah Sarah
Chanale On Judaism Vs. Christianity, Conservatism, And Making Music In A Religious World ⧸⧸ Ep. 5 My Thoughts On PURITY Culture + 5 Ways You're FIGHTING Your Femininity ＊and how to stop it＊ ⧸⧸ Ep. 6

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

153.28

Word count

1,334

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When the death of the firstborn occurs, Pharaoh can t resist any longer, and tells the Israelites to get out of his land. They leave so quickly that there is no time for their dough to rise, and all they can bring is matzot.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So if you haven't listened to the podcast before, quick explanation of what this section is of my
00:00:05.700 podcast. Every week we do a Torah portion and I talk about what is going on in this week's
00:00:13.140 Parsha. Parsha means Torah portion in Hebrew and it's it's I love doing this section of the
00:00:19.620 podcast because I love talking about the Torah. I think it's so fascinating. I did realize that
00:00:24.600 because I record a week in advance, you all are hearing last week's Torah portion each week. So
00:00:32.560 I'll say this week's Torah portion, but truly you're hearing last week's Torah portion. But
00:00:37.160 in any case, in today's Torah portion, we're talking about bow, which means come as in come
00:00:45.400 to Pharaoh. So in this week's Parsha, God brings the last three plagues upon the Egyptians. 0.88
00:00:55.200 Locusts, which eat all the crops, a darkness so thick and palpable the Egyptians can't even move 1.00
00:01:01.840 within it and the death of all the firstborn in Egypt at midnight. Before God brings the last
00:01:08.880 plague, he tells Moses that after this after this plague, Pharaoh will drive them out of the land
00:01:14.380 of Egypt. He'll shoo them out. He'll say, get out of here. He won't just let them go. He will 1.00
00:01:19.700 legitimately tell them to, you must leave. Before they leave, the Jews are told that they should 1.00
00:01:26.060 ask the Egyptians for their gold, silver, and anything of value. The Israelites are also told
00:01:31.660 that they should bring a Passover offering to God, a kid goat to be slaughtered. And it's a lamb or a
00:01:39.720 kid goat to be slaughtered. And the blood should be sprinkled on the doorposts of Israelite homes so that 1.00
00:01:44.800 God should pass over them when he comes to bring the plague of killing the Egyptian firstborns. 1.00
00:01:52.540 And the roasted meat of that offering is to be eaten together with matzah that night and bitter 0.98
00:01:59.400 herbs. Are you getting where we are? We're getting Passover. This is the story of
00:02:05.040 Passover. And these are the laws. And it's very interesting because in the Torah, we're getting
00:02:08.300 actual laws that we use during the Seder on Passover. When the death of the firstborn occurs,
00:02:17.020 Pharaoh can't resist any longer. And he tells the Israelites to get out of his land. They leave so 0.82
00:02:21.580 quickly that there is no time for their dough to rise and all they can bring is matzah. There's also 0.98
00:02:27.000 a few different commandments, mitzvot, that are shared in this Torah portion. But I have a question.
00:02:35.840 So my question this week is, why did the Jews need to put blood on their doorposts? Wouldn't God know 1.00
00:02:46.360 who the Israelites were? Why did they need to delineate themselves as Israelites, separate from
00:02:55.320 the Egyptians? God knows who we are. He knows I live here and Sarah lives next door. He knows
00:03:02.440 where we all who we all are, where we all are. So why are we doing something to like clarify it to
00:03:07.820 God? God knows. I always found that funny, right? Is we're going to put blood on the doorposts. So
00:03:12.980 I'll know to Passover. Come on. God knows. Like, why do we have to do that? Why did we have to do that
00:03:19.140 extra step? So there's a good reason. God was asking the Israelites to show who believed and trusted in 0.90
00:03:29.800 him. And not only that, he was doing it so that they could show each other who believed and trusted
00:03:36.740 in him. So why is this true? So number one, the animals that the Jews were supposed, the Israelites 0.99
00:03:44.660 were supposed to kill and put the blood on their door, those were actually gods to the Egyptians. 0.99
00:03:50.060 So that was frightening. We're going to kill your gods and we're going to put, take their blood 1.00
00:03:56.820 and put them on our doorposts so that God, our God, the God, the God who's been bringing all these 1.00
00:04:02.900 plagues upon you, will know to pass over us and not put, and not bring this plague of the death of
00:04:09.480 the firstborns on our children. Like, that's a little terrifying is we're going to take your God
00:04:16.480 and sacrifice it to the God. So that's number one. I mean, that's dangerous. The Egyptians are much more 1.00
00:04:24.480 powerful than the Israelites, right? That's why they could enslave them. So that's a scary thing to do. 0.96
00:04:30.600 But number two, this seems weird, right? You're not only killing an animal and you're taking its blood
00:04:39.060 and then putting it on your doorframe. It's a weird thing that God is asking them to do. And
00:04:44.600 you have to trust in God and do it, even though it seemed odd. Like, would you,
00:04:49.140 would you trust in God enough to do that? So God wanted to see that the Israelites, 0.61
00:04:57.400 the Israelites who did this were the ones who got to leave Egypt. They were the ones who trusted in
00:05:05.260 God and believed in God. They were the ones who, even though this was an odd thing to do and scary
00:05:11.220 thing to do, they did it. And it showed their faith. Now, why did God need to know that they're,
00:05:17.060 that they're, that they had faith in him? The truth is he didn't. They needed to know.
00:05:25.160 They needed to know themselves. They needed to prove to themselves that they had that faith in God.
00:05:33.000 And I always think that's an interesting thing because we always say things like God needed us
00:05:36.300 to prove or show our faith in him. But really, God doesn't need to know anything. He wants us to do it
00:05:43.720 for our own sake. I want you to do this thing because it is scary. And if you do it, you'll know
00:05:49.920 that you can, you can trust in me. You know that you do trust in me. You are proving it to yourself.
00:05:55.540 And then there's the second part of this, which is showing each other.
00:06:02.220 If you were the only person in Egypt who was putting blood on your doorframe, 1.00
00:06:07.960 that'd be a lot scarier than looking across the street and seeing your neighbor doing it too.
00:06:15.500 And seeing the guy down the block and seeing two people, two houses down.
00:06:20.660 Now, that communal strength that they drew from each other allowed them to do something so hard
00:06:31.260 and so scary and so kind of weird without as much fear.
00:06:38.740 So what can we take from this?
00:06:42.200 We have to be brave and show what we believe in for the world to learn from.
00:06:47.620 Right? We need to be brave in what we know is good and right.
00:06:53.400 Even when it's hard, even when everyone else is fighting against it or telling us that we're bad or wrong.
00:07:01.740 And by taking the steps to do that, by doing it ourselves, we are proving to ourselves that we can do this,
00:07:09.340 that we are brave enough to do it, but it's not enough to do it on your own.
00:07:12.900 We need one another to lean on when we do the scary thing of standing up against what's wrong in the world.
00:07:22.420 When you know that somebody else is on your side and is doing the same thing with you,
00:07:28.700 you are so much stronger in the stance that you take.
00:07:32.260 So that means that A, build up and shore up your own support systems,
00:07:38.680 but B, if you can, speak out because somebody may feel more brave about speaking out themselves because you did.
00:07:49.340 And that multiplies, that grows the movement, both for God and for conservative values, traditional values.
00:08:04.360 Being brave publicly about our faith strengthens our faith, our own faith and then others' faith.
00:08:10.660 And that is so important.
00:08:14.660 So I think that's a really great lesson that we can learn this week is sometimes being brave,
00:08:23.200 showing what we believe, even when it's a little scary, is really important for ourselves,
00:08:34.060 strengthening our own faith and for others.
00:08:36.560 Strengthening our communities, strengthening our movements.