So, Do you guys ever see Moneyball with Brad Pitt? It's a baseball movie, but it's really a movie about life.

Brad Pitt plays a guy named Billy Bean, he's the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. A general manager

isn't the one on the field who tells people what to do.

He's the one who works all the deals to fill out the roster and make the money work.

And the Oakland days are portrayed in this book as being a total rut at this point in their history.

They've been doing things to the typical way and they're portrayed is just accepting mediocrity.

This is just what we're going to be.

And then along comes Billy Bean and he shakes everything up he's passionate about deals and

metrics and different ways to do things and of course that threatens the

establishment but ultimately he's portrayed as having a new outlook on things

that is really a reformers outlook, and he's intimidating to a lot of people.

He's also kind of charming and endearing to a lot of people, but the results speak for themselves and he brings about a revitalization, a renewal of the organization that carries over and ends up affecting all of baseball.

Ezra is kind of like Billy Bean.

He's a reformer.

He's coming into a system that has stagnated.

He is of the priestly lineage descended from Aaron and the priests had gotten fat and

sloppy over the years. They didn't do a great job. They didn't love the law. They didn't

teach people about the law. so Ezra is portrayed in the book of Ezra and the book of the

Nehemiah as being a reformer whose power to reform comes from leaning in to the really old ways, leaning into the

law and loving the law and cherishing it and being that somewhat intimidating reform-minded guy.

Ezra wasn't the guy to go back and do part one of the objective here which was rebuild the physical

temple he's the guy who was positioned properly and built right to come and

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