The Golden Calf: Ancient AI, Divine Fury & The Mask of Moshe with Rabbi Yirmiyahu Levitas
Why did the generation that heard God’s voice at Sinai immediately worship a Golden Calf? 🐂✨
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In this mind-expanding episode of Parasha Deep Dive, Shlomo Godsi sits down with Rabbi Yirmeyahou Levitas to explore the mystical underbelly of Parashat Mishpatim. They move beyond the legal code to explore the theological "distance" God places between Himself and humanity for our own protection, and how we bridge that gap through the holy act of eating.
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In this episode, Shlomo Godsi and Rabbi Yirmiyahu Levitas go beyond the surface to explore the "bizarre" and "bothersome" questions of Parashat Ki Tisa. They reveal that the Chet HaEgel wasn’t a mistake, it was a sophisticated attempt to bridge the gap between a distant God and a vulnerable people.
Topics covered in this deep dive:
0:00 - The Mystery of the Golden Calf
5:12 - Mathematics & The Power of "Remainders" in Truth
10:45 - Reincarnation: Aharon, Chur, and the souls of Hevel
18:30 - The "Beyond AI" of the 16th Century BCE
24:15 - Why Moshe’s face radiated light (and why they were afraid)
29:00 - The Erev Rav: Demonization vs. Spiritual Reality
Initiated into English poetry through Nissim Ezekiel, Yirmi Levitas dabbles in philology, epistemology, hermeneutics, translation and mysticism. Educated in mathematics at EPFL and ETH, he started as a seer in the ’90s and continued as an empirical mathematician, more philosophical today than ever. For 13 years, he learned Jewish wisdom with an old sage in Jaffa: Sabba Avraham Iraqi haKohen al Ousta, who walked from Egypt to Mandatory Palestine in 1933 and studied at Yeshivat haMekoubalim Beit El before its destruction in 1948.
The poetic works of Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, Henri Meschonnic, Yvan Goll, René Char, Andreas Thalmayr, Jacques Roubaud imbue Levitas’ writing with ontological reflections on recursion and the Book, the emergence of light and Hebraic letters, and the reciprocation of image and divine absence. Moreover, various thinkers - Baruch de Spinoza, Henri Poincaré, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Derrida, Monsieur Chouchani and Grégory Lafitte, to name a few - extend his perspective on the traces and roles of infinity and combinatorics in the interplay of chance and structure.
Alongside poetry, Yirmi Levitas pursues an art project, here in Ṣaffed, under his original artist name, Oshaya Oumana.
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