Epikoros

Like, I, I, it's not that I want to-

You love being an Apikoros.

Yes.

[laughs] Right.

That's a good...

I mean, an Apikoros, for those who aren't familiar, it's, it's, you know, a, a heretic, I guess.

It, it's somebody who is actively dissenting from Jewish law.

Often it is an insult.

We explained, though they were religious and pious, now he's talking to his crowd, toiling in Torah study, they were not upright in their so- societal behavior.

And so due to the baseless hatred, the Sinat Chinam, for one another residing within their hearts, they suspected anyone, here's the word, Chasash, who was not religious in accordance with their worldview, to be a Sadducee or a heretic, an Apikoros.

He is literally dividing an insular, ultra-Orthodox community where everything, everybody who's not like them is a suspect.

This deficiency in Torah scholar characters led to rampant murder, along with the transgression of all the other evils in the world, causing the temple's destruction.

Hashem now says, "I'm gonna make a covenant, that if there are any more Noahs, that if there are any more beams of light that make it worthy and worthwhile to have creation, I will not destroy the world." Unlike Noah, that it's worthwhile creating and destroying the world, that's the Rashi in last week's Parsha.

When they asked-- when the Apikoros asked, "How could God change His mind and feel bad about creation? Didn't He know what's gonna happen? Don't we believe that God knows the future?" And, and the Talmud responded by saying, "You also know what's gonna happen in the future.

When you have a child, you know that child's gonna die sometime.

Nevertheless, what did you do when you had a child? You celebrated.

Okay, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna figure it out without the English that you have, but hopefully it'll be, uh, fairly accurate.

'Epikoros goy,' so there's two different versions of Rashi, but it seems that from the two versions it's understood, and the commentaries seem to understand that it means that it was a non-Jewish...

You know, it's interesting because people think that the term goy is a slur.

It's not a slur, it just means peoples, yeah? Yeah? As opposed to us, yeah? So there was a non-Jewish heretic.

Just like the term Epicurean has also been adopted into the English language, sort of to mean gourmet, which was only a small fragment of what this school stood for.

And more significantly, the term Epicurean has been adopted into the Aramaic language as Apikoros, which means heretic, kind of like a catch-all for all of the various heretical philosophies that were challenging to Judaism at that particular time.

But to get back to our individual Av Nemos, or Nemos, the brother of Rabbi Yeshua, the fly in the ointment here...

Oh, and by the way, it's perfectly normal for vowels to shift slightly between the multiple languages that are being used in Israel at this time, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, um, Latin, and a version of Greek called Koine.