Episode 87 · March 2, 2025
The Truth Hurts · Episode 87 · audio in Hebrew
Everyone around you, including the most experienced professionals, is telling you one thing, and something inside you knows otherwise. Malka Bazov lived through that in the hardest way there is: the doctors said her son wouldn't make it through the night, and she knew clearly that he would live. That experience sent her on a path that led her to distinguish between God (Elohim in Hebrew, a plural form) and the Creator, and to see the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) not as an arbitrary collection of commandments but as a user's manual for the body and for life. The way she sees it, fear and hope are both tools, and anyone who understands that stops letting other people control their choices.
If you're handed a framework for a healthy life and you don't follow all of it, you can't complain when the problem comes back.
There is a fundamental difference between God (a plural form in Hebrew, with an image and a likeness) and the Holy One, blessed be He, the Creator, who is one, singular and without a body.
There is a fundamental difference between God (a plural form in Hebrew, with an image and a likeness, as the Tanakh puts it) and the Creator, the Holy One, blessed be He, who is one and singular and has no body at all.
Gili describes herself as not religious, but with absolute faith in the Creator, and she draws a distinction between the two.
As she explains it, the Tanakh is a user's manual for the body and for life, not a collection of arbitrary rules.
The example of meat and milk: the prohibition doesn't come from the commandment in itself, but from the fact that the digestive system can't break the two of them down together, and that creates toxins in the body.
In the episode, God, Elohim in Hebrew, is plural, as the Tanakh puts it: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." They have an image and a likeness. The Holy One, blessed be He, the Creator, is one and singular. He has no body, no image and no likeness, and He is the one who created God, the Elohim, themselves.
In the episode she describes seeing the Tanakh as a guidebook for living, not as arbitrary commandments handed down by the Creator. As she puts it, the ban on meat and milk together isn't a religious decree in its own right, but a rule meant to keep the digestive system working properly, so that the body functions in a healthy, optimal way.
This part of the conversation explains that the framework given in the Tanakh was meant to help a person, not to frighten them. The warning "if you do not keep them, you shall surely die," for example, refers to the consequence of living the wrong way, not to a threat. As she says in the episode, religious figures later used that information to frighten people and to concentrate power and control in their own hands.
As she says in the episode, knowing the date of the redemption would give people hope and the strength to hold on, like prisoners who know when they'll be released. Hiding that information was meant to deny people hope, because a person without hope is a person who is easy to control.
A special, festive episode in honor of a special guest, Malka Bazov. Who am I to say, but to my mind this is one of the most interesting conversations there is.
What's the difference between the Creator and God? Is there only one God? How does keeping the commandments relate to religion, and are we being told the whole truth? The answer is no. All about what we aren't being told, and why. The truth hurts, but it will also set you free.
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