Hello again, everybody. Today we're releasing the third lecture from my last tour.

Each of them stands alone, but together they provide a detailed analysis of the deepest,

most meaningful, and most influential stories ever told.

Our attention turns today from Canaan Abel and the discovery and significance of sacrifice,

to the conceptualization of life as romantic adventure.

This is captured in the great account of Abraham,

who was called, as we all are, away from the security and familiarity of our childhood surroundings,

into the uncertainty and possibility of our adult lives.

What could we possibly become? What could we possibly offer if we swore above all to aim up

regardless of the catastrophe and tragedy of our lives. Watch and see. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. So I'm going to jump right into the story and then

elaborate on it as we proceed. I want to talk to you tonight about the story of Abraham.

Not all of it, just because it's a long story.

We'll see how much we can get through.

I guess I'll start by telling you what a story is,

because that'll lay open, thank you, thank you.

That'll lay open why I'm presenting the material that I'm presenting. I didn't really expect when I first embarked on my career that I would become interested in biblical stories. It happened because I was fixated on the deepest problem that I could

find, which was the problem of evil.

I became aware of what had happened in Nazi Germany when I was about 13, and it was

shocking to me, and I started to study what had happened there at that point.

I didn't really know how to go about doing that, but I had some, I had a librarian there who was quite literate and she pointed me in some useful directions.

I read first book by Alexander Solzhenits,

and I read when I was about 13. It was one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.

...