I do, and many of us do, but not everyone would, so give a little background.

Rabbi Sacks, British, studied at Cambridge, was very into moral philosophy, an extremely gifted orator, an extremely creative thinker, and incredibly well-read.

and a brilliant speaker, as I said.

Yeah, he used to have a little session preaching on the BBC and writing in all the major papers.

When he passed away five years ago, Prince Charles said he was the type of bishop that most British would have wanted for themselves, speaking of non-Jewish people.

Yeah, I...

I had an opportunity to visit England for the first time while I was studying for ordination in Israel.

And what kind of projects are you working on?

Yeah, so maybe the

best example of this is one of the best known phrases from the Haggadah and anyone who has participated in a Seder year in and year out will know it by heart.

And that is that the Almighty took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

It's a line that's several times in the Haggadah, and it really stems from the book of Deuteronomy.

What is interesting about this phrase, that the Almighty took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, is that one might have expected that throughout the Tanakh, any time that the God of Israel performs a miracle on Israel's behalf, that you would find that phrase, there goes the Almighty again with his mighty hand and his outstretched arm.

But in fact, this phrase is found really exclusively with regard to the events of the exodus elsewhere there might be a depiction of the hand of god but that that's it just the hand of god but not not the full phrase mighty hand and outstretched arm remarkably when we look at the pharaonic inscriptions of the egyptian new kingdom roughly 1500 to 1200 bce which to my mind is roughly the period in which the israelites are in sojourn in in egypt itself What we find is that everything the pharaohs do, and this is hundreds of inscriptions like this, everything the pharaohs do, they do with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

The pharaoh defeated his enemy, the Libyans to the west, with a mighty hand.

The general point I think we can understand, what is the specific scholarly claim that you're making? What would it mean for our understanding of Torah, if you're right?

So are you saying that the story didn't exactly happen in the same way, but the Torah wrote it in a different way that's somewhat similar in order to connect it to that victory

over the Hittites? So there's two ways to say it.

Let me just back up a little bit because not everybody has read the Haggadah that I put out the way that you have, Scott.

But okay, let's back up a little bit.

So a lot of scholars believe that the Exodus took place around the time of Ramses II, otherwise known as Ramses the Great.

And he was great.

He reigned forever.

It could be some of them we've already mentioned, but maybe you can give some more examples of looking at Egyptology and the history of ancient Egypt to illuminate ideas in the Haggadah.

Mm-hmm.

It w- is probably what we would go through is a kind of process of what the, uh, the theorists call moral transformation, meaning it would begin with me realizing I had really blown it, and that this was just not the way that I normally would want to treat my good friend Drew Johnson.

And, uh, so I would have remorse and regret, and then I would want to go and immediately share that with you, acknowledge it, own up to it, and, uh, immediately say, you know, "My schedule's entirely free.

Whenever you want to, you know, reschedule, I'm there for you," make amends.

And that you, you know, you might have been a little, you know, peeved off, like, "Why, how could Josh just, like, not show up?"

Right.

I guess, I guess, yeah, yeah, my intuition was correct that maybe there is something that's- More recent about this, and there was something before.

And what he noticed is that in the classical world, in Greek and Roman literature, you don't find any of these things either.