Beloved friends, first of all, may I express my thanks to KLC and for this wonderful program,

for the privilege of being able to launch the Mahza here and share some words with you.

There is a little beautiful story here because that you will see in the Mahasa,

that the Mahsa contains an absolutely glorious new translation of Shih Hashirim

done by my niece, Jessica.

Shih Hashir Hashirim is the greatest love poem in literature, and somehow I hope it was a little bit of

Zakhut in the merit of bringing out the power and the passion of that poetry,

that Jessica, subsequent to doing that, got engaged in first thing tomorrow morning, I'm flying out to Yer Shalayan to officiated the wedding.

So may all our efforts be rewarded so beautifully.

In America, we've just come back from North and South America and in America, they use words that sound like English, but it's subtly different.

And my favorite is momentarily, because in English, English, momentarily means briefly, but in American English it means soon.

And so everyone gets up and says the chief rabbi will speak momentarily.

And I have to tell them that friends, chief rabbis never speak momentarily.

But this evening, I'll give it a go.

Okay, so here we go.

If you've got the McCorot, I want us to take it through a little overview on what exactly

the story of Sefe Shumot of the Exodus actually is.

I want to suggest to you something radical, which we're only

going to see in one book, but I will argue that it's true of other books in the Bible as well,

that the Torah is the subtlest book I know. Because, even at the most basic level, when we read the Torah as children, or when we read it even, you know, with the lessons in mind that we heard as children, we read it one way. There is a surface narrative. But if we we read the clues and there are clues always

those clues will take us one level deeper to the sub narrative or what I call

the counter narrative and read at the second, the Torah gives us a quite different message,

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