[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, very much Gail.
Thank you all.
I'm glad to know that some were here yesterday.
I will try to avoid telling the same jokes
as I told them yesterday.
It does feel very homey to me to be back here,
not least because just in the last one minute,
I met somebody I graduated high school with
and somebody I was at college with.
Arizona, it's one of those places that people wind up,
I think because your weather or something.
I have no agenda.
I don't have any particular lecture
to give you I truly and honestly promise you
that I would like to be useful.
If there is anything you want to ask me,
I'll be happy to respond to it.
And I promise you that anything you ask me,
I will try my best to answer respectfully
and I'll try to project to.
If you have trouble hearing, there
is a seat here where you could move up closer if you want to.
So we will now have questions from the audience or a prolonged
embarrassing silence.
[INAUDIBLE]
What drew me to David?
A silly answer would be I had a contract to write the book.
It is the only book I have ever written
that was someone else's idea.
A wonderful editor at Random House-Schocken
Jonathan Rosen, a terrific writer himself,
said they were starting a series of Jewish lives,
and he offered me the greatest life.
I think probably, the greatest life
that has ever been attributed to anyone, real or fictional.
And to express what drew me to David,
I'll give you a little personal information.
I grew up in a small town where my family--
a resort town where my family had been for a few generations.
My grandfather had a very well-known bar
in the town, the Broadway Tavern.
And before that, in the 20s, he had been a bootlegger.
When I say he was a gangster, my aunt Thelma
says, Robert, he was in the liquor business,
and it happened to be prohibition.
And in that town, my family was nominally orthodox Jews,
as we belong to the Orthodox synagogue.
And we had two sets of dishes and we drank the blood
of the Gentile b-- out-- but we were surprising--
Only joking.
We were surprisingly assimilated but we also
had these other things.
And the strains, the contradictions in that,
gave me a very typical, not very unusual,
skeptical impatient attitude toward religion.
And there are these two figures in the Hebrew Bible.
One is Moses.
Moses carries around-- You think of these two people
as like medieval Saints carrying their gridiron or their rods,
or whatever they carry.
Moses carries two big pieces of stone.
And on those two big pieces of stone, the law.
Laws.
And 10 laws only begin it.
Deuteronomy is all laws.
And that's the Torah.
That's law.
The other guy has in his hands a harp.
He sings, and that's the Psalms.
So on the one hand, there's law, on the other hand,
there's worship.
One hand, there's do this, don't do that.
And if you do this, you'll get acne.
And on the other hand, there's, I feel worship or I feel sad,
or my enemies are against me.
And you sing what you're feeling.
And there is no question which I respond to.
So that's a more serious way of saying why-- when Jonathan
suggested this to me, why my memories of the books of Samuel
were so powerful for me.
And I discovered through a great work of scholarship,
Louis Ginsburg's Legends of the Jews,
I discovered that the stories that
were made up by these hundreds and hundreds of years
of brilliant and demented pedants, these people who
had been thinking about this material,
were also great stories.
So I was partly just drawn--
Like any writer, I was just drawn
to really terrific material.