הוכחות לאמיתות התורה

00:01 This is Igris. I have a bit of a sore throat today or just a froggy throat, I don't know. So, uh, if I don't sound normal, I apologize. This is still Igris, and it's still me. And today, we are going to do a s-- a, uh, single share. I think it'll only be a one-parter, proving that the Torah was received at Sinai, at Mount Sinai. Anyway, we're looking at this letter. It's Gimel Shin Pe Vav, is what the letter is labeled. That's the one we're gonna look at first. From Taf Shin Tes Vav, Dalet Nissan of Taf Shin Tes Vav, and the Rebbe writes, "Shalom u-bracha." You wrote to me about various questions. You wrote to me about questions you have about the fundamental parts of our faith. And how to prove them using human intellect. I am asked on many occasions, by the way, when I travel, to prove the Torah, and I usually, I usually give a more clever answer than hitting it head-on. But in some of these letters, the Rebbe specifically tries to, tries to, he succeeds in proving that the, that the Torah is true. That's what we're doing today is proof of the Torah. The Rebbe says, "It has been published many books, many , many statements have been put out regarding proving that the Torah is true." That you're asking me for some logical proof for the fidelity of the Torah, for the authenticity of the Torah, and you haven't mentioned even one of these books. It's difficult,

01:18 says the Rebbe, obviously, for me to, uh, do this in letter form. It's gonna be long, and also, I don't wanna have to repeat things that have been written over the course of many years and condense them into a single document. The Rebbe says, "I don't wanna leave your letter entirely unanswered, though, so I'm going to bring you a couple major points." And after that, I guess the Rebbe wants him to go look in the regular works. Uh, number one. The first question is whether God exists and how to prove it, and we're not gonna do that today. Maybe we'll do it in a different share. We're gonna jump down to number two. What is the proof and what is the obligation for us to believe that the Torah is , that the Torah was received at Mount Sinai in a mass revelation that everybody saw? Uh, where do I have proof for that? We got it through tradition, sure. Uh, the person asks the Rebbe, "If your only proof is that it's been passed down from generation to generation, there are a lot of religions that claim that they have a tradition that's been passed down from generation to generation, some quite old." Not as old as ours, incidentally, but that's not what the Rebbe's gonna talk about here. Um, Judaism claims that we, we res-- we, we claim that we received the Torah at Mount Sinai as a tradition. Other religions claim that too. So the Rebbe responds. I don't know what that

02:32 is. Uh, but talks, talks and tales. I know what talks and tales is. Anybody know what the is? Ah, . Thank you very much. It seems you have not read the put out by , uh, that is called Talks and Tales. I have a copy of that, a couple copies of that. That there is a major difference between other religions, and our religion when it comes to explaining the beginnings. It's possible that one individual can fool their entire generation. It could be a couple people get together and make a conspiracy, and they fool their entire generation. Maybe they got together, they made a conspiracy, and people had a good reason to get together and create a religion. That can happen. And as a matter of fact, even in modern times, we've seen that happen, right? Small religions are popping up all the time. That applies to all religions. This applies to the Christians, to the Muslims. This applies, I assume when he says he means the Hindus, but he might also mean the Buddhists. Uh, that's anybody over in India. The way that all these religions work is that one individual, a founding prophet, says to a couple of his students that he met God, God was revealed to him, and handed over some things that you have to do, lessons, mitzvahs, laws, decrees. This applies to every religion in the whole world. There are no exceptions to this rule. Um, I-- not that I don't trust the Rebbe, obviously, I do, but I wanted

04:02 to back this up a little bit, so I just threw into, uh, I threw into ChatGPT before the class started today, "Can you tell me any religion that does not start from a single founder, uh, sort of single founder having a revelation that he passes on to his immediate students, besides Judaism?" And ChatGPT didn't know of one either. So this is a, this is a, uh, that, that's as good as it gets, right? There simply are not-- The Rebbe says, There are no religions that are exceptions to this rule. Every religion starts because a very small group of people, usually just one person, experiences a revelation, and then they explain it to their students, and then their students believe them. We are the one exception to this rule, our religion and our Torah. We know about our-- we know about what happened from previous generations. The Jews that are living in this generation, everybody living in this generation knows about Torah and Torah because they were told by the generation that came before them. This goes from generation to generation. And our original source for it is not one person or a small group of students. Our original source passed from generation to generation is where everybody was there. There were six hundred thousand people between, men between the ages of twenty and sixty. The Rebbe says there were much, much more than six hundred thousand. There were also women, so that's at least double. Now you're talking one point two million. There were people

05:22 who were older than sixty, people who were younger than twenty. And there were the who were not counted. So at the end of the day, we're talking millions of people. Millions of people all witnessed this together. They all together heard the exact same thing. They all heard God himself say the words, "I am the Lord your God at Mount Sinai." Moses didn't pass that along to them. They heard those first words, from God's mouth himself, whatever that means. These six hundred thousand people, furthermore, these six hundred thousand people, they were not a, uh, they were not a homogenous group. They were, they were very diverse. They were very smart people. They were not so smart people. They were rich people. They were poor people. They were all at Mount Sinai. They all heard it. They all report having heard the exact same words in the exact same way. And they passed it down in the exact same . They didn't even change the details. It's not like we all agree we were at Har Sinai, but somebody heard and somebody else heard . Every single detail of Har Sinai has been passed down precisely by every single one of the people who saw it. So we have something like several million witnesses who are all giving not even a slightly varied, the exact same report, exact same This is passed down from the children to the children's children all the way down to our generation. reformers via conservatim, that would be reform and conservative, I

06:37 believe. that any, any new ideas about the source of terror, unfortunately in reform and even in some groups of conservative, there's an idea that terror was not given to Sinai, that it was written by people, which is entirely incorrect. The Rebbe says here, this, th-this, this, this, uh, this idea, this idea that terror was not Sinai started like a couple, a couple decades ago. Uh, up until now, we haven't had this problem. Up until now, there have been individuals who were who rejected the idea of terror. But millions upon millions reported the exact same nosach. So the Rebbe here is allowing for the fact that we can't say we've never had people who have said, "Hey, I don't think I believe in Sinai." It's not like we don't have any sects right now of Judaism that don't believe in Maamad Har Sinai. But the Rebbe's point is that number one, for thousands of years, we had individuals who would defect, but broadly speaking, we all agreed on the exact same nosach, the exact same terminology, the exact same event. And as for the recent groups that have popped up and started making a claim that terror is not Sinai, the terror did not come directly from Har Sinai, uh, from Hashem, that those claims are quite new. We have thousands and thousands of years of reliable testimony. Millions upon millions said the same things with the same exact words. This final point the Rebbe is making is a super important one, and it is that

07:54 also we have no interruptions in our faith. Almost every other very old religion, l'havdil, has periods of time where I-- where, where they basically were not practiced, where it was reduced to just a couple people, or it was wiped out entirely and then restarted again. We have thirty-five hundred years of uninterrupted transmission of this story with no major gaps where there weren't thousands and thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people passing an identical message on to their kids. So we also have an uninterrupted chain, which is very significant. all transmitting it at once. There is nothing in the entire world that we have as good testimony of as Matan Torah. Uh, this sentence kind of roll-- A lot of what the Rebbe just said rolls off our shoulders. I know it does, because these are classic answers to a classic question. But a lot of this stuff is really revolutionary. It's just the Rebbe is not the first one to say it. This last line down here, where the Rebbe says that there is nothing that we've ever had better testimony about than Maamad Har Sinai is something to contemplate, that there is nothing that we are sure of in the entire world that has better evidence than millions of people witnessing and then passing down something with complete fidelity for thirty-five hundred years. Uh, there, there's, there's, there's no science, there's no religion, there's no ideology, there's no history that has anything close to that level of testimony. We rely

09:05 on much less testimony for other things, as we'll see in other letters. Uh, we're not gonna look at the rest of this letter today. The Rebbe goes on to answer questions about Takanat Chazal and about Terush Malpe. We might do them at another time, but for today, that's the only part that I wanna see, this section here. Let's take a little break from the Hebrew and do some English letters. I'm just hopping around today. This letter is written to quite a famous Jew. You see the title at the top? This is a letter written to Shlomo Carlebach. To Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, it says at the top of the letter. It was written to him. Uh, it was not his question. He had a study group where he learned with some students, and one of his students, a student named Howard B. Goldstein, asked a question to Shlomo Carlebach. He didn't know the answer or wanted the Rebbe to answer and forwarded it to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe's gonna write to him at the bottom of this letter. You can keep a copy of it for yourself if you like, but I can send two copies in case you wanna keep one and send one to the student. So this is a response to both Shlomo Carlebach and the student, but he writes Shlomo Carlebach. Said, "Recently, you brought to my attention a letter addressed to you by Howard B. Goldstein." I should mention, I guess, some things about this. This letter was written the

09:56 twenty-fifth of ER, fifty-seven twelve. That would be nineteen fifty-two, give or take, and it was written to Shlomo Carlebach. I go, "Where, where is it printed?" I'm not even sure. I mean, I found it in the Yagrah set and in the, uh, in the Rebbe response set. But in any event, we're looking at the original. "Recently, you brought to my attention a letter addressed to you by Howard B. Goldstein, a student at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. In this letter, the writer professes to be a true scientific thinker and an unbeliever in the supernatural. He also asserts that all facts seem to be in contradiction to the existence of God, professes to be a liberal Jew," et cetera, et cetera. So this person makes claims. I mean, people still use these exact same words, uh, on college campuses and around the world. They say that all, all facts point to there being no existence of God, God forbid. They say they don't believe in the supernatural. They're scientific thinkers. They're logical people. So this person writes this to the Rebbe. "Not knowing the background of this student, nor the field of science in which he specializes, I cannot deal with the subject in detail, especially in the course of a letter." So the Rebbe says, "I don't know what he does for a living, uh, so I can't really go into the details of his problems." But the Rebbe continues, "There are, however, several general observations that I can make which the said student has

10:55 apparently overlooked and which he would do well to consider carefully." So the Rebbe says, "I have some things I do want to point out. Number one, science does not come with foregone conclusions and beliefs with the idea of reconciling and adjusting facts to these beliefs. Rather, the opposite. In details-- it details with facts-- It deals with facts," excuse me, "then formulates opinions and conclusions. To approach a subject with one's mind made up beforehand is not true scientific thinking, but a contradiction to it." So the Rebbe is saying, "Let's start off by re-re-recognizing you're being unscientific. If you're telling me you're coming to the topic of religion with the foregone conclusion that it is a reach and that it's supernatural and that it's unlikely, then you're not coming at it as a scientist. You're coming at it as someone with bias, so let's stop pretending we're scientists. Number two, science requires that no conclusion can be valid before a thorough study and research was made of the subject. The question therefore presents itself, how much time and effort had the aforementioned writer, above-mentioned writer, devoted to the study of religion to justify his conclusions on the subject?" This one drives me crazy. This is so common. Somebody will have these real well-formed, deep opinions about God, and you ask them, "How much time have you spent studying religion and God?" And the answer is, "None. I just kinda, you know, in my own head, thought up what I think religion and God should be." That's kinda

11:57 ridiculous. When generally speaking, if you want an opinion on something, you're supposed to-- I don't know if this is true anymore, but it used to be that if you wanted to have an opinion on something, you had to know something about it first. Uh, may-maybe we've, uh, may-- I'm not sure that's still the case. Um, but and I made it in Yemen. But, uh, but certainly this was once the case, that before you opined, you were supposed to have some background. And the Rebbe is saying, "I don't know what your background is, so it's not like you studied." Number three, a fact is considered any event or phenomenon testified to by witnesses, especially where the evidence is identical and comes from witnesses of varied interests, education, social background, age, et cetera. Where there is such evidence, it is accepted as fact, which is undeniable, even if it does not agree with a scientific theory. This is the accepted practice in science, even where there are several reliable witnesses, and certainly scores of them, hundreds and thousands. Here the Rebbe is saying science is a great way of collecting evidence when you don't know the answer to something. But the fact is that science takes a back seat when everybody agrees to something, especially when there are multiple witnesses, especially if those witnesses come from varied interests, education, social background, age, et cetera. So if we have people from diverse backgrounds all telling us that they are seeing the exact same thing over and over and

12:58 over again, there really isn't much room for any kind of scientific theory. The accepted practice is that we accept what the entire world sees as true as fact automatically. Now, the Rebbe continues, "The divine revelation at Mount Sinai was a fact witnessed by millions of people, all of whom reported it to its minutest detail accurately, for the whole people of Israel stood at Mount Sinai and witnessed it." We know this is a fact. The word know is underlined because millions of Jews in our day accept it as such, and they received it as such from their own parents, and these millions in turn received the evidence from the previous generation, and so on, in an uninterrupted chain of transmitted evidence from millions to millions of witnesses, generation after generation. A lot of the things that we saw in the Hebrew letter now expressed in English back to the original millions of witnesses who saw the event with their own eyes. Among these original witnesses, there were many who were initiated in the sciences of those days, like Egypt, many achievements of those-- uh, many achievements of which are still baffling nowadays. Here, the Rebbe just points out that, uh, that Egypt, uh, did, did all sorts of things archaeologically that, uh, not archaeologically, it's not the word I'm looking for, um, architecturally, excuse me. Architecturally, they did all sorts of things with buildings, specifically with pyramids. We have no idea how they did that even nowadays. They clearly had some advanced science going on there,

14:00 and there were clearly some Jews and also some of the Erv who were Egyptians who defected to our cause, who were part of this incredible science of the day. So we had some smart Egyptians, smart ancient Egyptians out there, and, uh, they were there at Mount Sinai, too. Some of them were philosophers, some of them were thinkers, as well as ignorant and uneducated persons, women and children of all ages, yet all of them reported the event and phenomena connected to it without contradiction to each other. So the greatest Egyptian scientists, the greatest philosophers, the greatest thinkers, the most uneducated, the children, e-everybody together reported the exact same thing, and that proves that it was in fact seen then. Such a fact is certainly indisputable. I do not believe that there is another fact which can match it for evidence and accuracy. That's similar to the line we saw in the Hebrew letter, but here the Rebbe uses the word fact, that there are no other facts. The Rebbe says, "I do not believe there is another fact in existence, any fact which can match the idea of Torah for evidence and accuracy." The things that we are sure about, ask anybody if there's anything they're sure about. Odds are it has less evidence than the Torah, which is just wild. So to deny such a fact is anything but scientific, it's the very opposite of science. This is a, this is a, this is a strong answer. The answer here is people are saying, people

15:02 say this all the time, that the evidence doesn't seem to point to the existence of God. I can't find any evidence for Mount Sinai. I don't know for... Well, it-it's got better evidence than anything you are sure about, so what exactly is the bar for evidence? How many more millions of people would you like to have witnessed something before you accept it? Might be a Yetzirah, I don't know. The Rebbe continues, "Parenthetically, it's unfortunate that this basic difference between the Jewish religion and those of others is so little known, for the Jewish religion is the only one that is not based on a single founder or a few, but is based on divine revelation witnessed by all the people numbering several millions." The Rebbe just says it's a shame people don't know that what really separates us from every other religion is, uh, more than anything else-- I mean, obviously, there's a lot that separates us from other religions, but one of the big differences that people don't talk about much is that we claim a mass revelation. This also answers Mr. Goldstein's statement that the acceptance of the Torah as being the only truth is dangerous since, quote, "Its authors were only men, and as men, they could not have been incorrigible," and it seems he used the wrong word because the Rebbe inserts infallible. Jews accept the Torah precisely because it was given by God, not by men, and it was given in the presence of millions of people who have seen it

15:57 and heard it with their own eyes and ears. That is why the Torah is the absolute truth, for God is absolute. I'm enclosing an extra copy should you wish to forward it to your correspondent. With all good wishes, the Rebbe's signature, presumably. This actually doesn't have the signature. It just says cordially, but I presume it was sent. Okay, another English letter that we're gonna look at. This is from twenty-seven Shevat, fifty-seven twenty-three, and it is not addressed to any person in particular. It starts, "Greeting and blessing." And the Rebbe writes, uh, "Needless to say, it's difficult to discuss adequately, adequately in a letter such questions as you raised. Since you write you had the time-- you had the occasion to spend time with the Babitch students, I trust you discussed some of these questions with them. Perhaps you'll have another opportunity to discuss them further. However, inasmuch as you've raised these questions, I will attempt to answer them briefly." I'm noticing that there is a common, uh, opening paragraph to a lot of these letters where the Rebbe says, "I hope you're talking about this with somebody else, but I can't not respond to you because you're asking me about the fundamentals of the thing." We're going to read, I believe, just the first one up here. The Rebbe writes, "Your question is, how can one be certain of the authority of Tanakh and all of its particulars?" And the Rebbe answers, "The answer to this is based on common sense, and if one approaches

17:00 the question open-mindedly and without prejudice, one must come to this conclusion. To put it very briefly, and going back from our pre-- present generation to preceding generations, we have before us the text of the Tanakh as it was transmitted from one generation to the other by hundreds and thousands of parents of different backgrounds to their children." We're seeing a lot of common themes here. "Even during the times of the greatest persecutions, even un-- after the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, there always survived hundreds and thousands of Jews who preserved-- hundreds of thousands of Jews who preserved the text of the Tanakh and the traditions so that the chain has never been broken." It's an uninterrupted chain. Now, this part's new. We haven't seen this part before. Now, assume that someone would come today and wish to add a new chapter, a new section to the Tanakh. Let's say that we have Parrots in the chair today. So let's say Parrots comes by and says, "I have a new chapter of Tanakh to add," declaring that this new edition will be of the same antiquity and validity as the other parts of Tanakh. It is clear that nobody would accept Parrots' new Torah. No one will accept him on the ground of the simple question, if this is truly a part of the Tanakh, how is it that we have not had it before? This is the Rebbe writing. That anybody would ask, how is it possible that we didn't have this until now, and they

17:55 would reject it immediately. You can't just add new books to the Tanakh today. No one's gonna buy it. The Rebbe continues, "The same would apply to any question as to the dating of any particular section of the Tanakh, which itself is-- contains a record of the prophecies beginning from Moshe Rabbeinu to the latest prophets, Zecharya, Chagai, and Malachi." So the Rebbe's saying here that another proof to the fidelity of the Torah, that we're sure that the Tanakh we have is complete and accurate in the way it originally was, is that just like right now, you couldn't add a piece without everybody freaking out. At what point in history do you think you could have added a piece without everybody freaking out? There is no point in history where you can just pop in a new Sefer of the Torah, and everybody goes, "Oh yeah, that was always here." The Rebbe continues, "You mentioned in passing certain theories by certain Bible critics." So obviously, they're Bible critics. Uh, I unfortunately had to take Bible criticism classes as a mandatory course at Yeshiva University. I don't know if that's still true, but it was when I was there. So you mentioned in passing certain theories by certain Bible critics, but as you know, it is not a case where these people have a different tradition from ours going back to all those ancient generations, but it is rather a case where this one or that one has come up with theories or hypotheses which are not only

18:51 speculative but have been shown to be unscientific as well as illogical. So here the Rebbe is saying in response to Bible critics, let's make one thing clear, uh- First of all, they're entirely unscientific. There's no-- Th-th-it's not like-- They're, they're not scientists. They're people who look at text and go, "Oh, I think because this text says..." They're not even archeologist Bible critics. They're looking at textual variances to try to draw conclusions about authorship, and that is an inherently unscientific and illogical field by itself. It's not really, not really a-- It's not a very refined science as it is. But in addition to that, keep in mind, a Bible critic is not saying that there are multiple opinions about what happened thirty-five hundred years ago. That there's, uh, that there's one group, the Jewish people say that there's Mount Sinai, and we found an ancient group that says there wasn't Mount Sinai. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that the entire ancient world agrees or says nothing about the topic of Mount Sinai, about the topic of Tanakh, and about its fidelity. And meanwhile, people like a hundred years ago popped onto the scene and said, "We disagree." So this isn't a thing where two ancient peoples don't agree about what happened. This is a thing where every ancient people agrees about what happened, and a couple of people a hundred years ago decided they don't agree. That's not really a valid contribution to the discussion. So the Rebbe continues. With all the

19:55 arguments about, about superstitions or mass hypno-hypnosis, et cetera, such radical changes by hundreds of thousands of people of different backgrounds in different parts of the world, et cetera, are simply very far-fetched and alt-- and most illogical. So the Rebbe says, "You're gonna tell me that millions of people saw something that they didn't really see, that they were all, uh, that they were all hypnotized, or that they were, uh, that they were all superstitious altogether at exactly the same time." I mean, now we're getting something so far-fetched and illogical, to use the Rebbe's words, that it is now more logical to say there was a Mount Sinai than anything else. How do you explain this many people all having the same conclusion? Furthermore, there's a basic difference between Jud-- be-between Jewish tr-- our Jewish tradition and those of other faiths such as Christianity or Islam, for whereas in the latter cases, the traditions go back to one individual or limited number of individuals, our traditions go back to a revelation which was experienced by a whole people at once. We have heard this argument before. I'm going to not read the rest of this letter, although again, the Rebbe goes into many interesting details in this letter. I wanna show you one more letter in Hebrew, although we're running a little bit late. We're gonna conclude with this letter in Hebrew. This letter is in Igris. It is Lamed Vav Tav Tav Kuf Zam Tes, and it is from Menachem Av of Tav Shen Yod Tes.

20:56 Yod Dalet Menachem Av of Tav Shen Yod Tes. And it is a, uh-- There, there's so, so many things in this letter. Uh, we're gonna do just some of the most interesting parts. I'm responding to your letter, uh, which was malei shalos-- shalos and kushios. It was full of questions and full of difficulties. Now, now I need to read the Rebbe's introduction because it's my favorite part of the whole letter. The Rebbe says, "V'tigbosi sh'al maaseh l'maarah sh'bach lal lezeh odeach l'vehel eizeh heseg sheyeih al yeish kol hakushios." The Rebbe says, "I just need to start off by telling you, you are not approaching this topic properly. You don't enter into a discussion where you're trying to figure out the truth by just raising thousands of questions." Kama kama b'agchas. You throw a bunch of questions at me all at once. It, it's like an interrogation here. Um, the Rebbe doesn't say that, but, uh, if somebody comes to you, and they have forty-five questions, and they give them to you all at once, that's not how you begin a discussion. Im reitzon lavin eizeh shiita. If you wanna understand a position, al agas kama kama hashkafos elok, certainly if you wanna understand a worldview, hashkafa makifas kol hachaiyim, especially a worldview like ours, which encompasses the entire life. Tzrichim libat-- tzrichim libatal kol ha-nacham mikdemas. You have to, first of all, set aside all of your prior assumptions. V'kosh kiitzadach l'vat ha-achlat u'mocharach l'nitzer girin v'chasarin. You certainly have to set aside the desire

21:57 to find fault, to find some seed and some le-- so-some, excuse me, not seed, some lacking and some ch-- and some, and some chisar, and so anything missing. Matem kama chisin ez kama kushios. Meaning a lot of people, they ask you a question, and first of all, they pile questions on. Second of all, they come in with a ton of assumptions. And third of all, really worst of all, they, uh, they are listening because they're trying to find some way to, to disagree with you. They're listening for the point they might disagree with. This is not a way to learn. This is not a way to listen. So the Rebbe starts off by just telling him, "You're not approaching learning properly. Somebody needs to school you in how to learn." And the Rebbe, I guess, is gonna be the one to do that. Ba'ach sheamru chazal lei baish l'lamed, even though it is brought in Pirkei Avos, that an embarrassed but bashful person cannot learn. Mochran leimer, I am obligated to share with you. Ze zignah mechtav hu lo shel ba'alma, ela kama she'azal leo kushios efshar aviasem yzeh. The-- I, I am obligated to tell you, although it's true that you're not supposed to be bashful if you wanna learn, and so you need to have a certain amount of ego to get involved in learning anything. The style of your letter is not just questions. It's like I said earlier, difficulties and maybe more than that. So the Rebbe's really, uh, really sort

22:54 of, uh, pushing back against the tone of this letter. Now, the Rebbe says, "Lamad na she'azal li," despite everything I just told you, "kem she'dani niyei zeh l'chafs chos," I'm going to judge you with merit. "Shezayif kol seyif kam nasal b'tzurya," and I'm going to take it for granted that at the end of the day, you had good intent in writing this letter to me. "El shevishu lei shpia lamir alef limud shiita v'hashkafos elok, v'hu leya ashem b'gish hashmechtaveh." That I just-- I'm gonna blame your teachers, that people did not teach you how to learn properly, and therefore, I'm going to not-- I'm gonna say it's not your fault. The tone of your letter, the way that you wrote to me, isn't your fault. So the Rebbe says, "I'm gonna make an assumption that you're legit and that you were just had bad teachers." Hineh ma'anal sheilos ach panim b'kitzer. Now I will answer some of your questions briefly. Ki b'temah shalos elu, and the Rebbe gives a little introduction here that we don't have to read inside. The Rebbe says here that when it comes to these sorts of questions, uh, I'll try to explain them to you in, uh, in writing, but the truth is they're better done face to face because then you can figure out where the problems are and try to drill down into anything that's not understood well. But anyway, I will give you some, uh, some answers. The Rebbe says, "Afshar lechi echshkedu be-Sinai beyaad Hashem Yitbarach." We're

23:52 going to read the first answer to these questions, which is the proof that the Torah was given MiSinai by way of God. "Vayeich achach bezeh mube'aras kama-- befar bekama mechtavi." The Rebbe says, "I've explained this already in a lot of my prior letters." "V'lo ed ela gam be-sefer gedolei Yisroel sh'ruitzu kama kamas maan." Not only in my letters, other gedolei Yisroel have explained-- have printed books on this, uh, for a very long time. "Vastug mecha'evu peh." Let's bring an example. And here, what's gonna be cool about this letter is the Rebbe in this letter is not going to use pretty much any of the things we saw him use previously. He's gonna take an entirely different tactic. Um, so he says here, "When it comes-- Vastug mecha'evu peh. Let's give an example from our daily lives." "Vered machneh yesh hakolen yanum kama nasi ki she'ezeh pu'alah v'lo kazeh shederesh menug bizbus meretz u'ksinas amah ene deresh na'atem lefred mikedem me-achus." The Rebbe says, "When we set off to, uh, to, to do something, even if it's going to cost us a lot of effort and a lot of time, we don't require ourselves to check it out one hundred percent." What does he mean? "Shevadi tichmen et ha'tez rudus zeh." We don't, uh, we don't confirm in any reliable way that the time and energy that we are putting into a certain pu'alah is going to actually be worth it. "El shemetach bezeh al acherem," we rely on other people. "Vedugmah," the Rebbe says, "Let

24:56 me give you an example." "Dugmah pshatah," simple example. "Ki she'kenah kartis linse lev makom shuh." Let's say that I buy a ticket to travel to a certain place. "Einin nigesh metchil lemachein al hakavas liddegess." I don't go to the bus, I don't go to the train and check out its machinery to make sure that the ticket that I bought is for a vehicle that's going to be able to take me there. "Limed choch mashiv zeh." I don't learn like machinery. I, I don't learn, I don't learn how to-- I don't learn engineering. I don't figure out how to-- how buses work. I don't need to confirm that the ticket will be able to get me to my destination. This doesn't just apply to things that have, uh, short-term, uh, short-term impacts. This applies even to things that have long-term impacts. I generally speaking, will not deeply investigate things, uh, that, uh, that I put in despite the fact that it could cause an incredible waste of time and money. When a person investigates themselves, that is, Myself, I will find. Generally speaking, I don't rely on my own information. I rely on what trustworthy people have told me. As long as these people are not suspect of lying or people who normally mislead people or waste my time or my money. The more people I have like this, the more true I tend to feel something is. That's like, excuse me, The more people who can tell me that a certain thing is true, the

26:20 more I tend to rely on it. And furthermore, When it comes to things involving life and death, this is how it works. The Rebbe gives an even stronger example. For example, Let's say somebody needs, A very serious surgery. They rely on the surgeon. They let somebody cut them up. This guy has a document in his hand saying he knows what he's doing. He says that he studied by a good surgeon. Like ten or twenty years ago. And there's a document on his wall saying that he's a good doctor. The truth is, it's even better if a couple of people come and tell me. That he did surgery on them, and things worked out. But based on this alone, based on no personal experience with this surgeon, a document on his wall and the testimony of some other people who've experienced the surgery, we let people cut us open. Even though he's a person, he's a, He himself admits that he actually could mess up. He admits he's not perfect. He says, "Look, I've succeeded in the past, but I'm a human too. I might mess up." And nonetheless, we are willing to take on faith that this is probably gonna work out 'cause it's not really on faith. We rely on expert opinion. We rely on people who know what they're doing. We rely on documents, we rely on testimony. And the Rebbe goes on. I'm running out of time, so I'm not gonna read this whole paragraph. The Rebbe goes on like this. Now,

27:37 the Rebbe says, When I give you this introduction, now we can understand a bit about Matan Torah. The idea that the Torah was given from Har Sinai by way of God Himself. This is not a new idea that we made up in the past couple of years. We heard it from our forefathers and our fathers, from their fathers all the way back. This tradition and story has been passed down from generation to generation. Every generation, the Rebbe says in the, in the brackets here, passed it down in a way that is With the exact same nosach, the exact same wording, people from all different backgrounds, as the part we're seeing in a lot of letters continuing. Going all the way back to the generation that entered the land of Israel with Yehoshua, whose parents, them-- whose parents themselves were the ones who left Mitzrayim, and they themselves, many of them, saw the actual revelation and heard it. The Rebbe says, "It is therefore understood and simple." If some generation meanwhile came up with a new theory, It's not possible that a bunch of people could conspire in the middle of Jewish history to suddenly come up with a story that would be universally accepted. If somebody suddenly comes up with the idea of Matan Torah and tries to spread it around, one guy in a-- one, one person living in Israel will say to the other, I don't know, a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, one will say to the other, "What, what,

28:57 What, what's this new thing?" "We never heard of this before." So the Rebbe is saying here that if somebody two thousand years ago tried to create a religion like Judaism, everybody else would have told him, "We don't know what you're talking about. We, we-- our, our, our forefathers didn't tell us that they were, that they heard-- that they were at Har Sinai." The more you think about this, the more you're able to expand upon the idea, and then you will understand that we can rely on this, uh, absolutely. Uh, I'm not going to read any more inside. We are, um-- We're about to be canceled by the Zoom session itself. We're going so long. So let me just summarize some of the things that the Rebbe brings us, proofs all in one place. I put them on a little screen over here. Here we go. Uh, some points the Rebbe makes in all these letters. Number one, we are the only religion with a foundational claim of mass revelation. That is, one of our foundational claims that makes our religion is that many, many people, millions of people, all saw the same thing. It would be very illogical to, to deny a mass revelation. Uh, to say that it's hypnosis or something like that is more illogical than just accepting that God talked to people. Number two, uh, it's not only a mass revelation, it's a revelation to a very diverse group of people from different social and intellectual parts of society. The Rebbe stresses

29:56 this in a lot of places. Number three, parents transmit this information to their children in an unbroken chain. We are the only people this old who have had no breaks or reconsolidations or rearrangements of the religion of the people. Millions of people have continued to confirm this tradition in the exact same nosach, with the exact same words of the exact same story for thousands of years, except for the occasional, uh, heretic. Number four, no one would accept a new chapter being added today as authentic, so why would they have accepted that a thousand years ago? The Rebbe says something like in this most recent letter, "How would you even get the entire Jewish people to collude to spread the notion of Matan Torah? It's not even possible to get that together. That's the, the greatest conspiracy ever. You couldn't pull it off." Uh, maybe number five, I lost count. No other ancient traditions exist that contradict ours. Only contemporary, unscientific Bible scholars disagree with us, but there are no ancient traditions to say we're wrong. And finally, we rely on assumptions all the time for life and death matters like surgery because we trust figures of authority and the prior experience of others. There's no reason not to extend that trust to something that has far more fidelity, which is Matan Torah. These are the Rebbe's traditional answers or the expansion of traditional answers as explained by the Rebbe to the classic question of how we can prove Torah miSinai. Thank you all very much.