Hey there and welcome back to take one, the podcast that brings you just one

Conclusive Page of Talmud each day.

Ladies, gentlemen, friends, it is so hard to believe it, but here we are at the end of this amazing, demanding, beautiful, sometimes frustrating, but so gratifying tractate.

A hundred and twenty long pages later, we conclude tractate Zvachim.

And as ever, to help us make sense and recall and sum up everything that we have learned,

it is my great privilege and pleasure and

honor and joy to welcome back, our friend, our teacher, the one, the only, Rabbi David

Bachevkin.

Liel, what an absolute privilege and pleasure to conclude not only tractate Zavachim,

but the first tractate of the order of Kudsham together with you,

our entrance, our glimpse into the world of sacrificial offerings and the temple.

And as always, I want to share with you from the essay that I wrote to conclude this tractate.

And I begin with his historical incident that took place in November of 1885.

There was a gathering in 1885 of American reform rabbis from throughout the United States of America who are trying to

articulate a vision for what modern Judaism should be on American shores.

This was organized by the famed rabbi, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, which we could talk about

at length, a fascinating personality.

And one of the things that they adopted is they said that if we're really going to be

modern, if we're really going to see ourselves as a part of the American landscape, we need

to re-articulate what we are.

And they did something that led to a great deal of controversy, where they essentially

said, we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore

...