S6 Ep1 - King Saul and Suicidal Empathy

Well, a little background for people, like I've said before, the great black hole of most Jews, even well-educated Jews' education, is anything in the Bible after the book of Deuteronomy, Devarim, unless it's Ahav Torah, one of the sections of the books of the prophets we read after the weekly Torah reading on the Sabbath.

Unfortunately, people don't know the story so well, but beginning with the book of Joshua.

I mean, the background to the story of Saul is this is when the Jewish people have entered the land of Israel.

That's the book of Joshua.

We have a period of almost 400 years of loose central authority, which is the period of time of judges.

where various people appear and to save the Jewish people from threats, people like Deborah and Ehud and Othniel and Dvorah and Samson.

And then we have the great prophet who is Shmuel, Samuel.

He is the transitional leader who brings us into what is the monarchy and Saul being the first king of Israel from the tribe of Benjamin.

will be the first king anointed by a prophet.

That's how kingship happens.

And he will rule, according to Jewish tradition, for a very short time, only a few years because of his personality.

It's just an interesting backstory to who he is.

When he is crowned king, he's not looking for the job at all.

He happens to go to Samuel the prophet looking for his father's lost donkeys.

Yeah.

And then Samuel says, oh, by the way, you're king of Israel.

And he goes and hides.

You know, he has he has he has even though he's described as being head and shoulders, not the shampoo, but actually just a really great person above everyone else.

He has the fatal flaw of misplaced modesty.

And one thing you can't have leading the Jewish people, which is something we've discussed before, is you got to have the right combination of diplomacy and strength.

Jews are tough people.

Yeah, I think that's also confusing for a lot of people because usually as a leader, you're seen as somebody who must be ultimately confident.

And when we talk about Moshe, who's the uber leader of the Jewish people, we hear that his main characteristic was humility.

And I think today a lot of the lines out there are like anyone who wants to be in power should be in power.

But how do you square that with somebody who, you know, that humility is a lauded thing in Jewish leadership.