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Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. In this episode, I’m going to speak to you about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, and what we can learn from that about ancient Hebrew manuscripts.

Now, you might wonder, what on earth does the Green New Deal of the Democratic Party in the United States have to do with the Bible? But we’re going to find out. So, let’s start out with who AOC is; that’s how she’s referred to, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC. Who is this AOC? And what’s her Green New Deal?

She is a junior member of the House of Representatives in the United States from New York, and she is now considered the fresh new face of the Democratic Party. She’s being trotted out on all the talk shows and lauded as, really, the representative of the new Democrats. And she openly calls herself a “Socialist.” Openly, it’s not an accusation. She calls herself a “Democratic Socialist.” And what she presented here is really scary, in this Green New Deal. It’s this program that, in the next 10 years, will involve eradicating all internal combustion engines. My car will still be running in the United States in 10 years from now, and according to her, I won’t be allowed to drive that car. So, how is she going to stop me from driving the car? She’s going to use the force of government to do that. So, this is some scary stuff that’s going on. But I really want to focus on what this Green New Deal is, and the Hebrew significance of it.

February 7th, her office issued the Green New Deal, including a FAQ, a Frequently Asked Questions. And one of the items in that FAQ is just unbelievable. Now, they’ve pulled this from the Internet, but you can’t erase stuff from the Internet. It’s not so easy. This is still on archive.org. Here it is. You can see, archive.orgocasiocortez.house.gov was the origin of this page, February 7th. Oh, and it was actually published on February 5th. She says, “What is the Green New Deal? The Green New Deal is a 10-year plan to create a greenhouse gas neutral society that creates unprecedented levels of prosperity and wealth.” Oh yes, you’re going to get rid of all the cars. Everyone’s going to have prosperity and wealth. And look, she could be right.

There was a time when they said, “Internal combustion, cars, we’ve got all these horses. You’re just going to get rid of all the horses in 10 years?” Yeah, we got rid of all the horses. There are still a few horses, but mostly we drive cars. “Prosperity and wealth for all, while ensuring economic environmental justice and security.” That word “justice” makes me very nervous. I don’t think she means what the Prophets of Israel meant when they spoke about justice.

“The Green New Deal achieves this through a World War Two-scale mobilization that focuses the robust and creative economic engine of the United States on reversing climate change.” Look, if America went to zero climate emissions, it wouldn’t make a difference for what the Chinese and Indians are doing, so I don’t know what she’s talking about. Anyway, let’s skip ahead. This is the key part. “Any large-scale transformation of society can create the risk of some people slipping through the cracks.” I want to stop for a minute. Why am I even talking about this? Why should you care? And why is this important?

This is important, because every representative of the Democratic party who has announced they’re running for President of the United States has signed onto this Green New Deal, and this is some scary stuff. These announcements that 10 years from now we’re going to stop using all carbon emissions and we’re going to retrofit every house in the United States, and we’re going to replace planes with trains, this sounds a lot like Mao Zedong, the dictator of China’s Great Leap Forward. He said, “Okay, now everybody, start making iron.” “Well, how do we do that? We’re rice farmers.” “It doesn’t matter, just do it. Why are you asking how to do it? Just do it, you’ll figure it out.” And it was an economic disaster that led to the starvation and death of tens of millions of people.

So, she talks about how the United States is the greatest economy on Earth. Not if she has her hand on it. She goes on, “That’s where the Green New Deal also calls for an upgrade to the basic economic securities enjoyed by all people in the US, to ensure everybody benefits from the newly created wealth. It guarantees to everyone a job with family-sustaining wages. High quality education…” this sounds great. Well, who’s going to pay for it? And her response is, “Well, how do we pay for everything else?” We don’t. We’re in over a trillion dollars of debt. We’re not paying for it. Someday, this is going to come home to roost. She goes on, and the last bullet point here is the key one. She says, “Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.” Wow! “Unwilling to work.”

So, AOC’s representative was on Tucker Carlson, who’s on Fox News, and I think he’s great. He has the Tucker look, which is like unbelievable. So, he has on Robert Hockett, who is a Professor of Law at Cornell University and a representative of AOC, and he asks him, “Unwilling to work? We’re going to support people by this Green New Deal who are unwilling to work?” And Hockett says, “That’s erroneous. It’s the wrong document, Tucker. That’s not us. We certainly don’t believe in anything like that.” Guys, you can go watch the video. It’s incredible that he makes this claim.

And you just heard that they do make the claim, right? That’s on the page that they removed after this became a news story, that they were telling people, “Hey, we’re going to take care of people unwilling to work.” Unable, okay, that’s something we can talk about, but unwilling? So, they have taken it down from the website, and here’s what happened. On February 8th, Robert Hockett was on Tucker. February 9th, another representative of AOC, Saikat Chakrabarti, he posts the following to his Twitter account. He says, “Mistakes happen when doing time launches like this, coordinating multiple groups and collaborators.” Meaning, the phrase “unwilling” is a mistake. Now, how can that be a mistake? And that’s where we can actually learn something. And we’re going to go back to the issue of the Green New Deal, but I want to look at this whole issue of it possibly being a mistake. I’m not sure it’s a mistake. I think they meant unwilling, because he also made a different statement which seems to indicate that. But let’s see, how could it be a mistake? How does a mistake like that happen?

So, this is actually a very common type of mistake, maybe one of the most common types of mistakes that we have in Hebrew manuscripts, and in any kind of source. And apparently, even in modern times. This is why I decided to do this episode. I know this type of mistake as a type of scribal error that was common in the ancient world, common in the medieval world, and we find it in manuscripts. And it happens in 2019 with the House of Representatives of the United States, and that’s the amazing thing to me.

In Hebrew, we call this thing “ashgara.” And actually, that word “ashgara” comes from the Jerusalem Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud is a collection of rabbinical writings completed around the year 350 AD, or CE, in Tiberius. A large part of the Jerusalem Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah. The Mishnah was completed also in Israel, around the year 210 AD. So, the Mishnah has a statement in the Tractate of Megillah 2:4, and it says, “Hakol ksherim likro et hamegillah,” “All are kosher, are valid to read the megillah.” They’re talking about the megillah, the Scroll of Esther. And what they mean is, in rabbinical law, it’s a commandment that one must fulfill a duty of hearing the Scroll of Esther. And they’re saying everybody is allowed to read this scroll for the purpose of others hearing it and fulfilling the duty.

And then it says, “Khutz mikheresh, shoteh, vekatan,” “With the exception of a kheresh,” which is a deaf mute, shoteh, which… I’m not sure how to translate that using a word I’m allowed to use. It means someone who does not have a mental capacity to understand what he’s doing because of his low intelligence. There used to be a word for that. There’s a bunch of words for that. So, Neusner’s translation translates it as an “idiot,” but it doesn’t mean someone like we would say an idiot. It means like, in the technical, rabbinical sense, an idiot is someone who doesn’t understand the commandments. And that might not be the exact technical sense, but it’s basically someone who is mentally deficient because of lack of intelligence, and a minor. So, three types of people, if they read the Scroll of Esther, your duty of hearing the Scroll of Esther is not fulfilled. And then, Rabbi Judah declares, “Valid in the case of a minor.” He says it’s kosher if a minor reads it, but not a deaf mute, or an idiot.

Okay, so what’s the obvious question here? How does a deaf mute read from the Scroll of Esther? He’s mute. So, the Jerusalem Talmud comes along and says, “Rav Khisda says, ‘Deaf mutes should not be there in the Mishnah,’” “ashgarat lashon hee,” “it is a familiar idiom.” And “familiar idiom” isn’t even a perfect translation. Jastrow translates this phrase “ashgara,” which is also “hashgara,” with a hey, as “current phraseology” or “fluency of tongue.” And what do they mean by that? What they mean is, the Rabbis have a category, and the category consists of three types of people, kheresh, shoteh, and katan. And this is a phrase, “kheresh, shoteh, vekatan,” “deaf mute, idiot, minor.” And there’s a whole slew of rabbinical laws of commandments that the Rabbis teach that are not incumbent upon, or cannot be fulfilled by a kheresh, shoteh, vekatan, a deaf mute, idiot, or a minor.

And so, they’re talking about reading the Scroll of Esther, and they include the mute. Ashgarat lashon hee, it’s a familiar idiom; it’s a scribal error. And in this case, “scribe” isn’t the correct term, because at this time in history, the Mishnah was actually not written down. We talk about the Mishnah being the core document of the Oral Law. It was still oral in 350 AD. It had been codified, and people would recite it verbatim. There were these Tannas, and Tanna is from the Hebrew word “leshanen,” to repeat by rote. So, there were repeat readers who would repeat these words. And when they got to the phrase “kheresh, shoteh, vekatan,” or really, they got to the phrase “shoteh, vekatan,” they inserted into their recitation the word “kheresh.” And the ancient Rabbis are acknowledging this is a scribal error. This is an error, a slip of the tongue, and it comes from the word “shigra.” “Leshager” is to be familiar with, it’s a familiarity of the tongue. The tongue is so used to saying “kheresh, shoteh, veaktan,” “deaf mute, idiot, and minor” that it sticks in deaf mute in the context of reading the Megillah. And remember, we’re not talking about reading the Megillah with your eyes. We’re talking about reading the Megillah out loud in a public ceremonial reading. Well, how do you do that if you’re a mute? So, we have this in the Mishnah and the Talmud discusses it, and I actually find this type of error in medieval Hebrew Bible manuscripts.

About two years ago, they started publishing these manuscripts online, and I started reading them and I would see these errors. And many of them are familiar idiom errors, “ashgarat lashon,” or in Hebrew University, we called it “hashgarat sofrim” or “ashgarat sofrim,” the “familiarity of scribes.” But the original phrase is “ashgarat lashon,” or in modern Hebrew, just “ashgara.” So, let’s look at an example. Here is an example in a Torah scroll in the Vatican library, and it is Numbers 27:15. And Numbers 27:15 has kind of an unusual phrase. The normal phrase in the Torah, which appears… I don’t even know, countless times, it’s, “Vayedaber Yehovah el Moshe le’mor,” “And the LORD,” or Yehovah, “spoke to Moses, saying.” It appears numerous times. All of a sudden, in Numbers 27:15, Moses speaks to God. And it says, “Vayedaber Moshe el Yehovah le’mor.”

Well, the scribe, he’s writing, and he’s probably trying to concentrate as much as he can, but he’s looking back and forth, looking back and forth at his source and he’s copying what he sees. And as he’s looking back and forth, ashgarat lashon takes place, the familiar idiom takes place. Instead of writing, “And Moses spoke to Yehovah,” he writes, “And Yehovah spoke,” and then he stops. And he realizes this is a mistake. And the Rabbis have an ancient law… I have a whole teaching about it called “The Mistake That Got It Right.” They have a law in the Sifrei, and in ancient rabbinical literature, that says you’re not allowed to erase God’s name even for a mistake. Not a single letter is allowed to be erased for a mistake. So, what does the scribe do? Now in codices, that is book form, they have all kinds of notations, and they can make little notations on the side if you make a mistake. You can’t do that in a Torah scroll; you’re not supposed to. So, in the Torah scroll, you have to deal with this differently. There are no special notations. So, instead of making a notation, like a circle or something, he takes a razor, and he cuts out God’s name. And what’s left is, “And he spoke…blank,” and literally blank. There’s a space there, “Moses to Yehovah.” And originally, it said, “And he spoke Yehovah,” that is, “And Yehovah spoke.” So, here’s an example of ashgarat lashon.

Now, what does this have to do with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? In our language, in English, the phrase is “unable and unwilling.” So, this is a logical, natural mistake, right? They’re talking about people, providing them with economic security, who are unable to work. And somebody along the way, and as he says, “The iterations in the process as they’re brainstorming writes, ‘Unable and unwilling,’” which is the familiar idiom. So, it makes sense that it’s a mistake. Now, is it really a mistake? We’ll get back to that. It turns out it’s probably not. But it’s a perfectly plausible explanation, just as this scribe who was doing a sacred thing, right? I suppose you could say that people working for the House of Representatives of the United States, that’s kind of sacred, too, right?

So, they take their business very seriously. But this person who’s writing the Torah scroll, I think he kind of took his business more seriously than AOC does. Maybe not. But certainly, when it came to God’s name, he was being very, very careful, yet he still made a mistake, because it’s a familiarity of the language. But then he corrected the mistake, which is what happens in these Hebrew Bible manuscripts. Sometimes they don’t correct it, right? That’s where things get interesting. In a case like this, they would eventually, I think, correct it, although I was looking at a Torah scroll last week at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, and it had an outright scribal error. It spelled “Joseph,” instead of yud, vav, samekh, peh, it spelled it vav, yud, samekh, peh, and nobody ever caught the mistake. It’s a 700-year-old Torah scroll, and it has a mistake in it; it happens. And this is why we look at more than one manuscript. We don’t just look at a single manuscript of the Bible, we compare them. Okay, so that is an example in a Torah scroll of a mistake that was caught and then corrected.

Here’s a case from a Codex, and this is from the Book of Joshua Chapter 10:10. And it has the phrase, or it should have the phrase, “And Moses commanded Joshua,” “Asher tziva Moshe.” But again, we have a familiar idiom, “Asher tziva Yehovah,” which actually appears two lines before as well, and is supposed to appear two lines before. So, when the scribe got to verse 10, he copied the familiar idiom. He was supposed to write, “Asher tziva Moshe,” “Which Moses commanded.” Instead, he wrote, “Asher tziva Yehovah,” “Which Yehovah commanded,” and he immediately corrected it by putting a rectangle around “Yehovah,” which you can do in a Codex. In a Torah scroll it’s done, but it’s very rare. Then he writes immediately afterwards, “Moshe.” So, this is, again, a familiar idiom. It’s the type that AOC caught only after a Twitter storm, if it was a mistake in her case. I don’t know.

Now, there’s a more significant type of familiarity of language of ashgarat lashon, of familiar idiom, and this is something we find when it comes to God’s name. And you can even see it in this example, where they write God’s name on the first line and the third line, and there’s no kholam, there’s no “o.” The name is normally written in medieval Hebrew Bible manuscripts without the “o.” That’s the standard practice of what you’re supposed to do. Here is just a breakdown. I actually took this from my teaching, “Ten Rabbis Who Speak Out on the Name.” There are 10 Rabbis who explicitly tell us the name is Yehovah, with the vowels shvah, kholam, kamatz. They tell us straight out. You don’t have to guess. It’s not speculation.

But in most Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the kholam, the second vowel, is missing. And here’s an example, by the way, from the Aleppo Codex, where it’s missing. This is from Isaiah 61:9. The shvah here is a bit unclear, but there’s a shvah and a kamatz. There’s no kholam; the kholam is not unclear, right? It’s very definitive that this does not have the “o,” the “kholam.” And why is it left out? Because that is the standard practice of the medieval scribes. I have suggested the reason for that is that they didn’t want people to pronounce the name. I have a whole study about that. I wrote a book about it, “Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence.” I have more evidence I’ll be bringing in the future.

There are a number of times in the Aleppo Codex where, due to the error of ashgarat lashon, of familiar idiom, they put in the kholam, making the name “Yehovah.” And let’s go back to the previous example. Here there’s a missing vowel. You can’t pronounce this name the way it’s written. Even if you want to, it can’t be pronounced the way it’s written. You have to have some prior knowledge of how it’s pronounced from outside this written text. And here, they put in that vowel. Where does the vowel come from? From the prior knowledge. It’s a familiarity of tongue, a familiar idiom. That could only mean the scribes knew that it was “Yehovah.”

And, by the way, on the very next line, you can see in the unhighlighted part, and the line above, as well, it’s “Ye-va” with the vowel missing. Technically, in Hebrew, that’s unpronounceable. The only way you can pronounce that is by bringing information from outside the written text. And what is that information of how they pronounced it from outside the written text? It’s “Yehovah.” That’s the piece of missing information.

So, look at this. We start off with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making this dumb mistake, and we can actually learn something about the Bible. And I knew about this before, right? I didn’t learn about it from her. But I tried to explain to people this idea of familiar idiom, and they’re like, “This seems so vague and out there.” Like scribes making mistakes, a house of representatives’ person in the 21st century, who knew she would be in the national news, and the mistake still happened, of familiar idiom.

Now, I want to ask the question, go back to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before I end, just really quickly. I’ll wrap this up. Is this really a mistake, in her case? And in a sense, is it really a mistake in the Aleppo Codex? In other words, I call this “the mistake that got it right.” In other words, it’s a scribal error, but it’s not like the scribal errors we saw in the Vatican and the other manuscripts. This scribal error reflects a knowledge of the pronunciation of God’s name, meaning the scribe, in the back of his mind… it’s kind of like what we would call a “Freudian slip.” The scribe knows it’s Yehovah and puts that in there. And in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I’m not sure this is entirely a mistake. Because if we go back to the tweets of Saikat Chakrabarti, here is what he says. He says, “We were essentially thinking about pensions and retirement security, eg. economic security.”

Now, remember, this is the guy who said it was a mistake. So, at 10:03 am he says, “Mistakes happen.” Later in the day, he backtracks and he says, “Actually, this wasn’t a mistake at all.” 8:33 pm, Chakrabarti says, “We were essentially thinking about pensions and retirement security, for example, economic security for a coal miner who has given 40 years of their life to building the energy infrastructure of this country, but who may not be willing to switch this late in his career.”

I’ve got to tell you why that’s so interesting. There were a bunch of journalists who were just fired from these leftist newspapers, these radical leftists, who had essentially mocked coal miners years ago, saying, “Hey, you coal miners. You’re going to be put out of work by our leftist environmentalist agenda. Just learn to code.” That’s what they told the coal miners. So here, being a little bit more sensitive, Chakrabarti and apparently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, what they were thinking is, “Hey, we’re going to have people whose jobs we eliminate. We’ve got to take care of those people if they’re not willing to learn to code, not willing to learn another profession.” And another profession might be to pick up garbage, and the coal miner says, “You know what? I’m not willing to pick up garbage. You pay me for the rest of my life, because I’ve put in 40 years.” I don’t know how they decide it’s 40 years. What if the guy has been at the job for one year? I don’t know how that’s going to work out.

So, we start off saying, “We’re going to support the people unwilling to work in the new Green Deal.” And then we say, “Well, that was a mistake. We didn’t say that.” And then, the third thing they say is, “We said it, but it was a mistake.” And now, he’s saying, “No, we said it, and here’s what we meant.” Now, how do I know Chakrabarti is right? We have four different versions. “We’re going to support the person. We didn’t say it. We did say it, but it was a mistake. And no, we meant that.” So, we’re back, essentially, to the first version.

So, let’s go back to the page which has the Green New Deal on it, the archive, and see what it says. And here, it’s again, something we can learn from the Bible. One of my key principles is, read the Bible in its historical context, literary context, cultural context, understanding the Bible in its context. I do not take the Bible literally. I take the Bible in its context. That’s usually meant to be literal, right? Usually, the literal meaning is the contextual pshat, what we call in Hebrew the “pshat,” the plain meaning, based on the language and the context, using common sense. But if it says, “Circumcise the foreskin of your heart,” the literal meaning is not the pshat, is not the contextual meaning. The contextual meaning is, “Don’t be stubborn.” How do I know that? Because the second half of the verse says, “And no longer harden your necks,” which in ancient Hebrew refers to an animal that doesn’t want to turn its neck to the left or right. It wants to do its own thing, rather than God’s thing.

Okay, let’s see what Chakrabarti says. This is from AOC’s Green New Deal, pulled off of her website on archive.org. “Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work. The frontline communities…” somebody say, “coal miners” “…that are already facing the ravages of climate change and pollution, and working-class communities reliant on fossil fuel industries…” somebody say, “West Virginia coal miners” “…must be prioritized in any transformation of our society to a renewable energy economy.” So, you really do mean unwilling to work, right? These coal miners, whose jobs are going to be eliminated, that’s who you’re talking about here, the frontline communities who rely on fossil fuel industries. They’re poor to begin with, let’s be honest. A lot of people who are working as coal miners are dirt poor people. These are not New York intellectuals going and sitting in cafes. These are people who are underground, working, and allowing millions of people around the world to have electricity, so that people in China and India aren’t sitting in the dark because of these people who are working in the coal mines. Those people’s jobs will be eliminated?

And it shouldn’t seem to care too much about the Chinese, who are going to be sitting in the dark because of the lack of coal miners. Now, look, I’m all in favor of cleaning up pollution. If you want to find a way to burn coal which doesn’t choke people to death in China, that sounds like a great idea. But this fantasy of eliminating fossil fuels, okay, we all know that’s not going to happen. Even most leftists realize it’s not going to happen.

Okay, so look, at one point in the process, and some people are still reporting this, it’s not clear to me that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t still making the claim that this was an error. But it’s clear from Chakrabarti and from reading it in context, that he really meant people who are unwilling to work. And we can learn something about that from this modern-day example. We can apply that to understanding manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. I love that. That’s so cool that we can take this modern-day example, which should really scare us. I mean, we should be really scared of this example, not because of the scribal error, but it reveals what their real intention is. And now, they’re backtracking it and trying to remove it. But read it in the context. Listen to what Chakrabarti said in the tweet. I think they meant it, and this is quite frightening, because this really is like something out of Mao, where he says, “Okay, everybody, stop growing rice. Now you’re going to be making steel in your backyard.” “Well, we don’t know how to do that.” Nobody knows how to do that without some technology input, and we don’t have that. “Well, just do it. Don’t ask how to do it.” “Oh, okay.” Tens of millions of people starved to death because of that.

Look, I’m happy. This blessed me. It blessed me that this mistake was made because it allowed me to explain to people, and even for myself, to see a living example. I really thought, “Okay, this is something from history.” No, this is a living example, 21st century house.gov has an example of ashgarat lashon, this type of scribal error. I’m just so blessed that we can go through these Hebrew Bible manuscripts and compare them today in a way that, there are people who in the past didn’t always have the opportunity to do. If you were in some small village and you were reading your Torah and you see this error, you don’t know. You think maybe it’s wrong, but you have no Bible to compare it to. Maybe there’s one Bible in your whole village.

And here, we have the opportunity to go online and see thousands of Bible manuscripts. I mean, it’s unprecedented in history, the opportunity we have to see manuscripts from all around the world. And we can verify now and easily identify and weed out these scribal errors and purify God’s word; get back to that original, beautiful, perfect word of God without the errors, by comparing and contrasting. And it is really a beautiful thing. It really, to me, is an amazing blessing.

And then, it also provides us with this opportunity to see hey, here was this scribal error where the scribes knew God’s name, but because they were so familiar with its true pronunciation, they put in the vowel, “Yehovah.”

Yehovah, thank You for giving me the opportunity to share this with the people, to see these manuscripts, to see manuscripts from the Vatican, from the Russian National Library, from the Museum of the Bible, from all around the world, and even the Aleppo Codex. Thank you, Father, in Your holy name, Yehovah. Yehovah, please, I ask that You guide the leaders of the United States, that You give them wisdom. I don’t want them to fail. I want them to repent and let Your word and Your name and Your will be the center of their focus to bring true justice, the justice the Prophets spoke of, in our times. May it be, Amen.

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