Quotes of Rabbi Tovia Singer Part 3

It isn’t forbidden to have a tattoo (once you have it already); it is forbidden to put a tattoo in your body. Torah says that you’re not allowed to cut into your flesh, and therefore it is forbidden to have a tattoo. But as it turns out you and millions of other people who around the world who turn to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and are considering converting to Judaism, and want to keep the Torah so therefore is forbidden to have a tattoo done. But if one has a tattoo, God does not hold you accountable for what you didn’t know. So therefore there’s no sin in having the tattoo, the sin is to have one done…Some people who feel that, ‘I’d rather not have the tattoo because it kind of reminds me of my old life,’ or whatever. You need to be careful about removing it because there are a number of methods of removing a tattoo and most of the methods for removing a tattoo are actually forbidden for the very same reason that one is not allowed to have a tattoo. The only method that is halachically permissible to remove a tattoo is using laser treatment. Again, you don’t need to remove the tattoo, however, if you feel so compelled, then you should use laser treatment.  

 

Matthew 23 is a very painful chapter. Painful chapter for the Jewish people. I’m sure David Duke likes that chapter, just the Jews don’t. I am certain that I would have many cousins and many more friends, many more Jews in the world alive today if Matthew 23 had never been written. Because as the first Gospel is moving towards the Passion Narrative, the anti-Jewish stomping, the anti-Jewish pronouncements become more and more intense. And Matthew 23 is where the Jewish people are held culpable for every murder ever committed in the Bible. In fact, Matthew 23 toward the very end in verse 34 and 35; (now I don’t believe for a moment, it would be very difficult, I can’t say it’s impossible, it is just inconceivable that a Jew from the Galilee would make such a preposterous statement). But Matthew 23 at the very end, and I am going to the end to give you a flavour of it, literally charges the Jews with every murder of a righteous person in the entire Bible. Where we are told that the Jews are responsible for the death of Abel, that’s the first person ever murdered in the Bible until Zechariah, the son of Berechiah. Now, interestingly, the book of Matthew made a mistake. The author of Matthew frequently makes these kinds of silly errors. I don’t get into these silly errors because I don’t think they are really helpful to Christians. But in fact there are well over 20 people in the Jewish Bible with the name Zechariah, and Zechariah the son of Berechiah, it may be said is the most prominent of all because he is fact the author of the Book of Zechariah. There are many other Zechariahs in the Bible and if we look at Scripture we know that the very last person to be murdered who is actually murdered in the Temple by the Alter was a man named Zechariah, but his name was Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada. So Matthew actually gets it wrong. Zechariah, the author of 14 chapters of the Jewish Scriptures was not murdered. But that’s a mistake Matthew (and we don’t know who wrote Matthew, when I say Matthew did it, his name could have been Bob, it’s unlikely, we just don’t know who it is. When we use the term Matthew we’re just using it for convenience sake). So there is an explosion as Matthew builds and builds accusing the Jews of every murder that’s ever been committed. That’s the kind of stuff you would expect to hear out of the National Socialist Movement. 

 

Of course there is a place called Hell. If there were no Hell, there would be no justice in the world. But Tanakh spends almost no ink talking about it…The Christian bible engages in talk about hell a lot, why? Because it is very scary. There are many people who are listening to this show, there are certainly many of you who hear my voice right now; who have family members who are very intelligent in every other aspect of their lives. They make very wise decisions; very thoughtful people. [But] when it comes to considering: Should I believe in Jesus or not? The cognitive faculties seem to recede sometimes or even shutdown completely because they are terrified of going to hell. Tanakh never threatens us with Heaven and Hell. Never! Now God does warn us and threaten us and identify Himself, and who He is and why it’s important to be faithful and loyal to Him, but He doesn’t say, ‘Because you’re going to go to Hell.’ You know why? Because you can’t test it…You might go to Hell for being a Christian. If Jesus is not God, the second person of the triune god-head and you’re listening to this show, if you plan to stay a Christian, shut this show off now! Shut it off, do not listen to another word. Because if you listen to this and you see, if you look up, and realise, ‘You know what, Rabbi Singer is teaching, I am seeing in the Bible everything he is saying is true.’ And you continue in your sin of worshipping a man as god, that’s very serious. Those Christians who don’t know any better, Hashem doesn’t judge them for what they don’t know…Heaven and Hell as a threat is what is used, is the recourse of a false religion, because you can’t check it out, you can’t test it. So therefore Torah only appeals to history, zachor, remember, Deuteronomy 5, 7, 9, 12, remember. Why would a nation be told to remember something and shoulder that responsibility if it never happened? The Bible appeals to history…There are some people who lived a good life but have sinned and did not repent of those sins. So those people…iniquity can be cleansed after they die. This is alluded to in the Book of Isaiah [22:14], it’s spoken of extensively by our Sages. Where a persons sins can be cleansed for up to 11 months, sometimes 12 months, God forbid if a person has sinned considerably. But Jews consider it completely arrogant to discuss, ‘Oh, he’s going to Heaven, he’s going to Hell.’ Unless you are talking about Adolf Hitler or Bin Laden, you know…But there are those whose lives are utterly wicked; that means they had to know what they’re doing, they did it not for temptation but because they went to war against the God of Israel. They have no place in the World to Come. They exist in a completely separate detachment from God which causes agony. 

 

I’m not sure which case you’re referring to, there are a few of these. There’s one famous with Yoshiyahu where he becomes king at age eight but in fact the eight-year-olds can’t rule a nation. So a sitting king is put in place, this happens whenever children become king but they’re not, they can’t really rule. So therefore he can only rule when he’s 18 and there’s a name for whatever the person is put in charge while the person is growing up [regent]. So you have that difference where you have one text where he’s eight years old and the other is 18. Well [at] eight years old he becomes king but at 18 he really begins to reign. You have the case of, I’m not sure if you meant Azariah who is Uziyahu. So you have another case where a king’s reign is stretched out not from the beginning of his reign but from the time of his father’s birth, in Chronicles. What, the difference between Chronicles and Kings and that’s where you have these differences are always theological. In that Chronicles, which was written by Ezra and the timing is extremely important. It was written after the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel at the rebuilding of the Second Temple Period. Whereas Kings, the Book of Kings (is two volumes but it’s really one book), was written by Jeremiah at the end of the First Temple Period. This is very important. In every instance where Ezra, he is addressing a generation that has returned from a Babylonian exile. He is interested in raising them up and letting them know that the Davidic Dynasty is solid, is strong and will continue and you can trust in it. That’s why in the chronology there’s so much emphasis on King David. And Jeremiah had a completely different agenda. Jeremiah (a Prophet a blessed memory) who lived at the end of the First Temple Period, he had a very long prophetic career. He served as a Prophet for 41 years from the age of 15 to the age of 56, same length as Moses, so he lived in a very long career as a prophet. So during that long span he was very interested in conveying something different, that is, every mistake that the kings made and every mess up of the Davidic Dynasty to show you why the Temple is going to be destroyed, unless you change your ways. So this is very important. Ezra is not interested in amping up the mistakes of the Davidic Dynasty because the people he was speaking to, it wasn’t relevant to them and they were insecure as it is. No-one’s lying but they’ll present information differently and the Book of Chronicles for example will leave out the sin of Bathsheva. It isn’t in Chronicles. Abigail, that whole unfortunate incident is not related… How many horses did King Solomon have? Well, there were, the horses are kept in the stable that’s kept in a larger structure in a superstructure. In Kings, you want to tell the people that there’s a lot more horses or how many stables there were than in Chronicles. They’re both telling the truth technically because it’s a question of how, a horse is in a small confined area where it’s kept. And then there’s an area where you can have, let’s say 10 horses in an area and then there’s a larger superstructure so you can count it differently. But it, I don’t even have to tell you that Kings, Jeremiah, and First Temple wants to emphasize a misjudgement of King Solomon of blessed memory by having too many horses, which was forbidden to a king. Not so much in Ezra, is completely unimportant so that is, that’s the lesson. So it’s the question of when you start counting and I’m not sure which king you’re referring to but it’s in one case there’s a king, in more than one case where the counter begins at the time of a father’s birth rather than when he begins to reign, anyways thank you for that question.