Welcome everyone to our annual program. I want to thank you for coming and I want to introduce at this time our special guest who came in from the United States to be with us Rabbi Yisrael Chaim Blumenthal who actually grew up here in Toronto as a youngster now living in Lakewood, New Jersey. Rabbi Blumenthal studied at some of the leading Ishibas in the world and he writes a weekly column if you get the Atena Eman, a wonderful weekly column on the weekly Torah portion and he's the author of a very important blog called One Thousand Verses. It's an organization that's called Judaism Resources. It's an incredibly wonderful resource to people interested in the interface of Judaism and Christianity. So that's a blog called One Thousand Verses. It's highly recommended. We met Rabbi Blumenthal back in 1994 and I want to thank him for his continued support, encouragement, help, friendship. He's been a mentor to us and an inspiration and it's with great pleasure and honor that I introduce Rabbi Yisrael Chaim Blumenthal. Thank you Rabbi Skoback. Thank you Julius. Thank you the staff of Jews for Judaism for bringing me here today for giving me the opportunity to share and thank you all for coming here this afternoon. We have gathered here to discuss the phenomena of Christian missionaries quoting rabbinic literature to advance their campaign for the soul of the Jew. I want to give you an outline of what I plan to do this afternoon. First, I want to explain and illustrate how the missionary quotation of rabbinical literature has affected the dynamic, how it has affected the encounter between the missionary and the Jew, how it changes that dynamic, how it changes that encounter and what it does to it. In the second segment I hope to give an overview of the history, the authority and the structure of rabbinical literature. And in the third segment we'll get to the fun. The Jewish responds to the missionary quotation of rabbinical literature. Now before I begin we have to give at least a small identification. What do we mean when we say rabbinical literature? What does that mean? On simple terms again in the second segment we'll focus on this in more detail but at this point I will just say as follows. When I use the term rabbinical literature what I mean is any literature that the Jewish community respects as valid and authentic religious literature that post-states the Bible, that comes after the sealing of the canon of Jewish Scripture. That's what I call rabbinical literature and that's what I'm talking about over here when I say missionary Christians quoting rabbinical literature to advance the cause of their campaign. This leads us to an immediate question, a very obvious question. When the missionary quotes the prophets or he quotes the Jewish Bible we understand what he is doing. We don't agree with what he's doing but we understand what he is trying to do. What his argument is? You see all the prophets predated they came before the advent of Christianity. They were here before Jesus. Christians look at the prophets as men of God. They're authentic prophets. God truly spoke to Isaiah. He spoke to Jeremiah. The book of Esther is divinely inspired. Christians accept that. So they accept the authority of the prophets. They respect the prophets and their argument is that had the prophets been there when Jesus came on the scene they would have accepted him and if you read the words of Isaiah, if you read this passage in the book of Daniel you'll realize that Daniel really would have believed in Jesus and the only way we could argue with them is let's read the passage and discuss the words of Daniel because by the time Jesus came around Daniel was no longer alive to tell us what he would say about Jesus. But when we're talking about missionaries quoting rabbinic literature and almost all of it post dates Jesus comes after Jesus has been ungone so they knew about Jesus and they rejected him and they didn't accept his claims. They didn't accept the claims of the church. So what are they doing quoting rabbinic literature in order to advance their campaign in order to advance their arguments to get us to give our devotion to Jesus. The rabbis rejected Jesus. How could you quote the words of these men in support of a campaign that these men opposed heart and soul? Now the truth is when the missionaries quote rabbinic literature we can basically categorize it into three categories. I'm going to be mainly focusing on the third category but I'll speak a little bit about the first two categories as well. The first example, the first type of missionary quotation of rabbinic literature is antagonistic. It's a situation where a missionary would quote rabbinic literature not in support of Christianity but rather to act as a foil to be a contrast to Christianity. They would quote a rabbi who says such and such and I'll give you an example in a minute and the point is look how foolish, look how wrong, how obviously wrong it is what this rabbi is saying and now let's contrast that with the teaching of Christianity which is so obviously true in light and contrast to the teaching of this rabbi. I'll give you an example for this category, this type of missionary quotation. Perhaps it's the most popular, at least currently one of the most popular ones. Christians believe in the Trinity. The Trinity in short is a concept where God is not absolutely one but rather a composite unity composed of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and those three are somehow one. Now we all know that the Rambam codified, he put down 13 principles of faith and one of them is as it's printed in the Siddhar. The Rambam speaks about God being Yahid, alone, unique and Christians say wait, the Rambam is using a very interesting Hebrew word. He's using the word Yahid to express the Jewish concept of absolute unity. God is absolutely one. But when Moses talks about it, he doesn't use the word Yahid, he uses the word echad.  The Bible says echad, the Rambam says Yahid. Maimonides says a different Hebrew word. So the Jewish people who are following Maimonides are not in line with the biblical truth, rather they would argue that the word echad represents a composite unity and they would quote where the Bible speaks about Adam and Eve getting together or man and woman getting together and there will be one and that's obviously a composite unity, a household is made up of man and a woman. It's two that are somehow one. So the word echad means a composite unity and that's the biblical truth. In contrast, the Jews are following the Rambam who is not in line with the biblical truth. So this is an example of Christians quoting rabbinic literature to provide a contrast, not to support their doctrine directly but rather to provide a contrast to what they are trying to teach. Once I put this Christian argument on the table, I will take the time to respond to it. First of all, it's based on ignorance to begin with because anyone who knows a little bit about the history of the thirteen principles of faith and the way the Rambam wrote them down, the brief statements of faith that are found in the Siddharth and the back of the Siddharth were not written by the Rambam. The Rambam wrote an essay in Arabic which is printed in the back of the Mishnah in Sanhedrin. He wrote in the Yadah Chazaka in Hebrew about it and when he writes in Hebrew about it, he uses both the word echad and yachid and to accuse the Rambam of not fully understanding Hebrew is a bit ridiculous. He was probably one of the greatest scholars of the Hebrew language that we ever had. So it's based on a mistake because it's not the word yachid, that little statement of faith that we have in the Siddharth is some anonymous writer who just paraphrased the Rambam's principle in a short sentence. Secondly, if you know Hebrew you'll realize what the word one means in English. It could refer to a composite unity. It could refer to an absolute unity. Just like the word one in English could refer to an absolute unity, a composite unity. The word yachid, alone and unique, could refer to an absolute unity and could refer to a composite unity. When we speak of a person being yachid, every human being is a composite unity. He's made up of right and left, front and back, body and soul. A human being is a composite unity. Yet it's completely appropriate within the Hebrew language to use the word yachid to describe a person.  So this contrast between yachid and echad is an artificial contrast. And finally, just let's step back and look at the big picture. What's going on over here? The Christian would have us direct devotion to a man that didn't live in the times of Moses. When Moses spoke the words to the Jewish people, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Yachad, Hero Israel the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. The Jewish people took this as their declaration of faith. Were they thinking about Jesus when he said that? They didn't know about Jesus when he said that. What were they thinking about? They were thinking about the God that they knew. Here the Christians are coming and asking us on the basis of their interpretation of this verse to direct attention, devotion, heart to a person that Moses and the people he spoke to never heard about. So who's being loyal to the Bible? Is it the Christian or is it my monities who was encouraging the Jewish people to give their hearts and to put their hearts in the same place that Moses was encouraging his people to put their hearts in the same place that Moses' audience understood Moses' words when he was telling them where to put their hearts. That was the example for the antagonistic, for the contrast, for the situation where the missionary is quoting rabbinic literature to provide a contrast. The second category of missionary quotation of rabbinic literature, and I would say that this is perhaps the most honest of the types of quotations when missionaries quote rabbinic literature, and that would be in support of a scriptural interpretation. In other words, the missionary is not quoting the rabbis because he attributes any authority to the rabbis. He's not quoting them because he attributes any respect to the rabbis. All he's doing is as follows. We often have a debate, and in our counter-missionary work we sometimes tend to simplify. It makes things easier when you simplify the argument and you say, this Hebrew word means this, and I'll give an example in a minute, it means this, and when the Christians say it means that, this is wrong, and then the missionary would counter and he will say, look, one of the Jewish commentators who you respect gives an interpretation of the verse which accords with our interpretation. In other words, and I'll give you the example, Psalm 2, the words in Psalm 2 which the Christians focus on are nashkuvar, which could be translated as embrace purity, worship with purity, arm yourselves with purity. Most Jewish commentators go in that direction. Christians insist that the words mean kiss the sun and they understand that to mean worship the sun, give devotion to the sun, and by them, by Christians the word the sun means Jesus. So the typical argument and the simplified argument, and I would say perhaps not entirely accurate argument is that the word bar has to mean purity and it cannot mean sun in this context. One of the preeminent commentators on the Bible and one of the greatest Hebrew scholars that we ever had, someone with a ramba, Maimonides respected greatly, tells us that the word bar in this case does mean sun. So when the Christian is quoting the Ibn Ezra, he doesn't have to respect the Ibn Ezra, but he's telling us that our argument is inaccurate and we have to accept that and we have to realize that we have to explain the verse according to the Ibn Ezra and of course the Ibn Ezra did not believe in a divine Messiah, he did not believe in worshiping the sun, but what he did believe in is that there's a concept of paying homage to the David king, giving loyalty to the king from the line of David, and we'll explain that later on in this presentation, but when the missionaries quote the rabbis in support of a scriptural interpretation, we have to pay attention. I will give another example of a missionary quote of rabbinic literature in support of a scriptural interpretation and this actually is totally mistaken. Perhaps one of the most famous and popular debates between Jews and Christians over Scripture is over the verse in Isaiah 714, behold the virgin shall be with child. Wait, it doesn't say anything about a virgin. The Hebrew word that is used is Alma, which does not mean virgin, it means a young woman. Now, one of the Christian arguments in response to this argument is, well, which word would you want the prophet to use to speak about a virgin? And the immediate response is, of course, the word besula, which means a virgin. And the Christian argument in response is to quote rabbinic literature, which tells us, perhaps or perhaps not, that the word besula does not literally mean a virgin. So let's just put the argument into context. Again, this might be a little bit complicated, but let's try to put it into context. Again, in context, what the Christians are arguing, they're not arguing over here in this case, that the word Alma, the word that the prophet used, means virgin. They acknowledge it does not mean virgin. There is some argument that it might mean that, but it doesn't, and we're not going to get into that argument today. What they are arguing is that there is no alternative word in Hebrew to express the concept of virginity. And they're quoting the Talmud and the tractate Nida, which tells us that the word besula seems to tell us that the word besula does not mean virgin. The tractate Nida discusses the concept of a woman who is young, who is a child, who never experienced a menstrual flow of blood. And it uses the word betulah to describe that situation. And it actually uses the words, e'zaihi besula, what is considered a betulah? kalsha layrasa dammiyamea, she never saw a flow of blood in her life. So the Christians read this as, well, here the Talmud is telling us that the word betulah does not mean a virgin, rather it refers to a young woman who is just too young to, she's not mature enough to experience a period. And that's all the word betulah means, so the word betulah does not mean virgin. That is a terrible mistake, because the word betulah does mean virgin, and it could be proven from the Bible. In fact, when the Bible wants to speak about the concept of virginity, it speaks about, in the book of Deuteronomy, and it speaks about a woman who is supposed to be a virgin and she gets married. And her husband comes to court and says, my wife was not a virgin, and basically the Talmud understands this to mean he brings evidence that she committed adultery during her period of engagement. And the word that the Torah uses to discuss the virginity of the girl is betulim. Not only, it takes the word betulah as a noun and turns into an adjective to describe the girl. To describe the concept of virginity in and of itself is betulim. So the word betulah certainly does mean virgin. And when the Talmud says, what is it betulah? It means a woman who didn't experience the flow of blood. That's just like we use the word virgin in English to refer to earth that wasn't planted. And the Talmud uses the word virgin for that as well. So when the Talmud says, azoe betulah, what is it betulah? Does it mean how do we define the word betulah in the Bible? What is the intrinsic meaning of this word? Well, the Talmud is telling us in this context, in the context of this local discussion about a woman who does or doesn't have a flow of blood, the word betulah means someone who didn't experience the flow of blood. In other words, the word betulah as a borrowed term, intrinsically what it means is a virgin, a woman who never had relations with a man. That's what intrinsically the word means as the book of Deuteronomy tells us. But it's being borrowed and the Talmud is telling us that in this local context, the word betulah is being used for a woman who never experienced a flow of blood. In the tractate, Baba Basra, the Talmud uses the word betulah to refer to earth that hasn't been plowed or trees. They had a system for certain wood producing trees, they would allow them to grow, chop them in a certain way that would make the trees, that would encourage the trees to grow thicker branches and better wood, so a tree before it was chopped would be called a betulah. Again, borrowed term. It means a virgin tree. Of course a tree cannot be a virgin, but we're borrowing the term which applies to a woman and we're associating it with a tree that had never been interacted with. So this is an example of the Christians quoting rabbinic literature in a desperate attempt to support a scriptural interpretation, but it's a misquotation. Now we're going to come to the third category which is the main topic, the main focus of our discussion this afternoon. And that is when Christians quote rabbinic literature in support of one Christian doctrine, one Christian teaching or another. I'll go through a list of various Christian teachings that the missionaries use rabbinic literature to support these teachings, and hopefully in the third section we'll get to examples of the missionary quotation and the Jewish response to these examples. Perhaps the most pervasive is the concept of a divine Messiah.  And Christians believe that the Messiah will be divine or half divine. He has God for a father. He has no biological human father. And Christians point to various passages, various statements in rabbinic literature which either exalt Messiah to such high level of exaltation which Christians argue would only make sense if we assume he's divine, or they point to passages which speak about God redeeming the Jewish people in the future, various passages which give an understanding of a divine Messiah. Associated with this type of quotation would be where Christians try to quote rabbinic literature which seems to counter the Maimonides model, the Maimonides expression of faith where God is incorporeal, has no body. There seems to be quotations specifically amongst the Kabbalists which associates faces with God, plurality with God, corporeality with God, in other words, body-like attributes. And they use these quotations to present support for the Christian teaching that God isn't absolutely one. He isn't absolutely incorporeal without body, without bodily attributes. Missionaries, another category, another area where missionaries quote rabbinic literature is to support the concept of a suffering Messiah. In a simplistic level, Jews understand that the Messiah will be a glorious king who'll come to reign to rule over a utopian society but there are statements in rabbinic literature which speak about a suffering Messiah and missionaries point to that to show how Jews believe in a suffering Messiah not only in a glorious Messiah. On this one, I would tell you that our view of a glorious Messiah perhaps is too simplistic. In this case, the missionary quotation of rabbinic literature is not so inaccurate and perhaps we'll get to that as well. Missionaries quote rabbinic literature to support the concept of a rejected Messiah. They try to point to passages in rabbinic literature which would have us believe that the Jews will reject the Messiah and the Gentiles will accept him. That's another Christian teaching that the missionaries point to rabbinic literature to find support for. A fifth concept, atonement through blood. One of the major differences between Protestant Christianity and the Jewish people is how does one achieve atonement? How does one get forgiveness for their sins? According to the Jewish Bible, according to the testimony of the Jewish people, we achieve atonement, forgiveness for our sins with sincere repentance, turning back to God, accepting that we did wrong, trying to improve in the future, turning around and bringing our lives back in line with God, apologizing to God, repenting. Christians counter and argue that, no, one can only achieve atonement for his sins with a blood offering. There's a Christian teaching. It has no support in rabbinic literature, no real support in rabbinic literature, but Christians point to various passages, various sentences in rabbinic literature which, at first glance, would seem to agree with the Christian teaching that there is no atonement without a blood offering. We mentioned Christians quote rabbinic literature to support the teaching of a virgin birth, a concept that is completely foreign to Judaism. Christians quote rabbinic literature to present an argument in favor of the timing. When does the Messiah have to come? Christians argue the Messiah had to come 2,000 years ago. Jews argue the Messiah will come when he will come, but the Christians point to various passages in rabbinic literature which would lead one in direction that Messiah did have to come 2,000 years ago, and perhaps we may address some of those. And finally, again, this is not an exhaustive list, but it's on my little list. The last one on the list is Christians quote rabbinic literature in support of their claim that they know the name of the Messiah. There's a prayer in the Rosh Hashanah Maazer which says the word Yeshua in it, and Christians point to that. That proves that the rabbis knew the name of the Messiah, and this is somehow a hint or testimony that Yeshua, which is the Hebrew version of Jesus, according to some, is the real name of the Messiah. So these are basic Christian doctrines, Christian teachings that Christians find support for within the body, the vast body of rabbinic literature. Now here's when we come to our questions. What are they doing? The rabbis were not Christians. The rabbis did not believe in Jesus, so why are they quoting the rabbis in support of their teachings? The rabbis did not believe in a virgin birth. They did not believe in a divine Messiah. So why are they quoting rabbinic literature to support their teachings? There are various approaches that the Christians have used to justify their quotation of rabbinic literature, to answer this question, to explain why it is that they're quoting rabbinic literature in support of a teaching that the rabbis did not believe in. This goes back, the first answer goes back to a debate that took place in Spain 500, 600 years ago in Tortosa where the rabbis presented the Christian debaters with this question. Why are you quoting rabbinic literature in support of your doctrine? Why are you quoting rabbinic literature quotations from rabbis, from men who did not believe as you do in support of what you believe? And the response was is that listen, the Jewish people possessed the truth way back when, in the times of the prophets and some fragments of that truth remained with the Jewish people and the rabbis unknowingly are transmitting those truths without realizing what they're transmitting. And here is an example and it doesn't sound as foolish as it would appear at first glance. One of the quotations that they used was from a medrush called Tana de Veio. And literally it means we learned in the Yeshiva or in the base medrush in the academy of Elijah the prophet. The Talmud relates that there was a rabbi his name was Rav Anan who met regularly with Elijah the prophet and Elijah revealed to him various truths and these truths are recorded in this medrush Tana de Veio and when they quoted this medrush and this is actually the medrush that the medrush says in the name of Elijah the prophet that the history of the world is divided into three periods of 2,000 years the first period of 2,000 years is emptiness the next period of 2,000 years which starts with Abraham is the period of Torah and the last period is the period of the times of the Messiah. So here we see according to say the missionaries that the prophet Elijah is telling us that Messiah is supposed to come and when the rabbis argue well if you don't trust the Talmud the Talmud obviously didn't understand it the way you understand it or else they wouldn't have recorded it and the missionaries response was I don't care how the rabbis understood it but they're recording the words of Elijah the prophet Elijah was a prophet this is a fragment of truth that the rabbis are unknowingly transmitting now the question I would ask the missionary is one second do you believe that Elijah the prophet met with Rav Anan if he didn't meet with Rav Anan you trashed this whole book and if he did meet with him you can assume Rav Anan was a saintly person and you can assume that he was talking Elijah was talking to someone who he assumed understood what he meant and to say that you the missionary who didn't meet Elijah the prophet understands what Elijah was saying to Rav Anan better than Rav Anan himself better than the rabbis of the Talmud themselves is a little bit audacious a little bit chutzplatz we would say the way we do understand this concept of 2000 years of Messiah is the way the Talmud explains it these were 2000 years in which Messiah could potentially appear we understand that the suffering that we are undergoing now in exile is part of God's program to bring the Messiah so the program of bringing the Messiah started 2000 years ago in fact Christians would have to acknowledge that the Messiah didn't come in other words the Messiah that the prophets of Israel spoke of didn't come 2000 years ago when the Christians say the Messiah came 2000 years ago what they mean is the person who eventually is going to accomplish what the Messiah is supposed to accomplish appeared 2000 years ago and he did part of his job and he began the program and the rest of his job will be completed upon the second coming so in other words what they are saying is the program was set in motion we believe the program was set in motion when the Jews went into exile the program of the messianic era was set in motion and these 2000 years are dedicated to the bringing about of the fulfillment and the culmination of that program so this was an example of how Christians use the rabbinic literature to support a Christian doctrine without acknowledging without saying that the rabbis believe in the doctrine just that the rabbis are transmitting a fragment of truth without realizing what they are transmitting a second explanation that the Christians have presented to justify their quotation of rabbinic literature is the argument that Judaism changed at some point in history Judaism was open religion it believed in many of the teachings of Christianity at least it allowed for it was broad enough to allow it was diverse and it allowed for different opposing beliefs including the doctrines including the teachings of Christianity and at some point in history Judaism took a radical turn and went away from those beliefs, those teachings which at some point in time were considered authentically Jewish and our quotation of rabbinic literature is to prove that at some time Judaism did believe in those teachings the question is at what point in time did this change take place at what point in time did Judaism take this violent turn this turn away from Christian beliefs now one theory which won't really help the Christian argument, the Christian quotation of rabbinic literature is a theory which many academics believe and that is that at the time of the destruction of the temple, Judaism underwent a radical change while the temple was standing second temple was standing according to these to this theory Judaism was centered on the service of the temple it was centered on blood offerings and that was the focus of Judaism and that was all of Judaism and when the temple was destroyed the rabbis, the leaders of the Jewish people had to come up with something different, they had to come up with an alternative they had to come up with another focus and that's why they changed Judaism and they moved it from the temple to the synagogue, from the temple to the study hall from the priests to the rabbis and that's the point in time where Judaism underwent this radical change I will first say that this is entirely false simply because if anyone knows anything about the history of the Jewish people during the second temple they will realize that at the same time there was a temple and a community in the land of Israel, a temple in Jerusalem there was an even larger community in Babylon there was a gigantic community of Jews in Babylon, there were many Jews in the diaspora all over and they didn't have a temple of course some of them would come to the temple occasionally they would try to come to the temple but from Babylon to Jerusalem is a long way if you're walking and that's the general mode of transportation most people didn't have cars in those days and so what was their Judaism? what did it consist of? it was synagogue based it was study hall based it was based on what Judaism was always based on Judaism was based on a relationship with God and the temple was one means of national expression indeed the central means of the expression of the nation's relationship with God but it was not the only expression and every individual Jew personally always had the study hall the book of Psalms his own heart as a place where he could relate to God the concept of a synagogue the concept of a study hall actually appears in the book of Ezekiel in chapter 11 when the Jews went into exile in the time of the prophet Ezekiel in the time of the prophet Jeremiah where God says to the Jewish people I will be their miniature sanctuary in all the lands of their exile in other words wherever we go God is with us and we're never without a temple even though we don't have the temple in Jerusalem and we pray three times a day for the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem but we have God with us and no one can take that away from us that's the first thing I would say about this theory the second thing I would say about this theory as it relates to our discussion this afternoon is that it doesn't help the missionary argument simply because most of rabbinic literature is post temple so to quote rabbinic literature in support of the theory that before while the temple was standing Jews believed as Christians rabbinic literature is not going to give you that information because most of rabbinic literature the mission of the Talmud, the Medrashim were all written post temple there are bits and pieces, there are fragments of rabbinic literature as we shall see that existed during the time of the second temple but most of the missionary quotations don't come from those bodies of literature a second theory proposed by the missionaries to explain at what point in history did it happen that the Jewish people took this violent turn away from these Christian beliefs which used to be authentically Jewish used to be part of the mainstream of Jewish thought is the theory that Judaism developed as a negative reaction against Christianity it used to be that Jews believed some Jews believed in a divine messiah some Jews didn't believe in a divine messiah some Jews believed that God had a body others believed he didn't some believed in a suffering messiah others didn't but once the Christians took upon themselves the belief of divine messiah God could have a body a suffering messiah, a rejected messiah that's when the Jewish people rejected those beliefs I'll use the words of a prominent missionary to give expression to this theory the phrase that Dr. Michael Brown coined is these are his words that the Jewish rejection of the Trinity is a it's a result of a gut level negative reaction to anything Christian in other words it's not intellectual it's just we recoil if it's Christian we have to reject it and that's how Judaism went away from its Christian moorings interestingly if you look at the history of Christianity when was it that the church officially adopted the theory, the doctrine, the teaching of the Trinity was at the Council of Nicaea I want to tell you something people the Council of Nicaea was plagued with a gut level negative reaction to anything Jewish this is not something that I am making up the official historian Eusebius tells us that the Council of Nicaea didn't just discuss and vote upon if God is three or one but rather they also voted on many other teachings one of the teachings that they had a discussion about and voted upon was the following when the Christians followers of Jesus observed the holiday of Easter the holiday which commemorates the crucifixion, the resurrection of Jesus now many Christians were following the Jewish calendar when they celebrated and when they commemorated the resurrection of Jesus simply because Jesus was a Jew he lived in Israel he was a practicing Jew and he celebrated Passover together with all the other Jewish people so if he was going to be resurrected on Passover it was going to be according to the Jewish calendar it was going to be the Jewish Passover problem in those days the Jewish calendar was not fixed like it is today the Jewish calendar originally was a calendar that the leaders of the Jewish people the central the unified leadership of the Jewish people would decide upon every month if the previous month had 29 or 30 days every year they would come together and decide if the previous year is going to be a leap year if it's going to have 13 months or 12 months Jewish people are last minute people you're not going to be able to plan your Easter party three years in advance you're not even going to be able to do it three weeks in advance you're going to have to wait until the rabbis decide if the previous month has 29 or 30 days if the year is going to have 13 months or 12 months and many Christians around the Roman Empire would wait for the decision of the rabbis and when the rabbis would decide when the new moon is when the new year is that's when they would know the celebration is going to take place so this is I can't read Greek so I can't read Eusebius in the original but this was the reasoning behind they rejected that they said we're not going to follow the Jewish calendar we're not going to follow the decision of the rabbis to determine when we're going to celebrate Easter and this was the reasoning behind it it wasn't some esoterical spiritual reason it wasn't based on hard study of the Bible that's not what it was based on the argument was as follows why should we follow in the footsteps of these people who are scorned by God in other words why should we follow in the footsteps of the Jewish people who are rejected by God to celebrate our holy festival together with them is there any greater impertinence than this to them this was the greatest chutzpah that they could have towards Jesus that these hated Jews should be able to say that we cannot celebrate and observe our festivals unless we follow their calculations this is an English translation of what went on in the Council of Nicaea so this Council of Nicaea which came to the decision of when they should celebrate their holiday basically based on a gut level negative reaction to anything Jewish also voted on the Trinity now I wasn't there so I can't argue for certainty that the vote in favor of the Trinity was associated with a gut level negative reaction to anything Jewish rejection of the Trinity is based on a gut level negative reaction to anything Christian is chutzpah it's audacious it's arrogant and it's wrong a third theory a third timing for when it is that the Jewish people took this radical turn this violent turn away from Christian teachings and the one that actually historically at least would be the most helpful to the Christian usage of rabbinic literature would be to blame mymonities the Rambam mymonities is the bad guy he was the one that studied Greek philosophy and he took the concepts of Greek philosophy and he integrated into Judaism and he came up with the 13 principles of faith and that steered Judaism away from its biblical moorings and most of the quotations of rabbinic literature predate the Rambam and we're following a what the Christians are saying we're following a pre-Rambam view of Judaism and what modern Jews today are following is a post-Rambam a hijacked Judaism a Judaism that was hijacked by mymonities and by those people who respected and followed him that's another theory this is a theory it's not as easy to deal with the previous theories it's not as obviously wrong but one way superficially again in the third segment we'll get to responses to the same quotation of rabbinic literature but in short we would say is that missionaries find the same quotations in pre-Rambam or rabbinic literature they find it in post-Rambam or rabbinic literature in the words of the Rambam himself they find support for their doctrines so this has nothing to do with pre-Rambam post-Rambam this has to do with misreading the text if you want to tell me that was the Rambam who moved Judaism aside why does he have these quotations why does post-Rambam Judaism have these quotations I'm not reading these quotations correctly but these were three segments or three alternative modes for the theory that Judaism changed the final theory is as follows in other words we're answering the question what do Christians mean when they're quoting rabbinic literature didn't the rabbis reject Jesus and here is the insidious one the one which many Christians believe sincerely is that Judaism even today is a diverse religion there are many streams within Judaism there are Hasidim and there are opponents to Hasidim there are people who believe in the Kabbalah and adhere to it and people who oppose the Kabbalah or don't emphasize the Kabbalah and they present their views as a part of Judaism we are more Hasidic Kabbalah inclined and you count missionary activists are rambamists rational Jews misnagdom, anti-Hasidim and we represent a stream in Judaism which is valid and authentic and alive today a slight variant of this is the fantastic theory that the followers of Jesus we know were Jews but we also know that at some point the Gentile church eradicated the Jewish followers of Jesus swallowed them up persecuted them as heretics but this theory goes is that throughout history there have always been Jewish followers of Jesus and these people are following pre-temple Judaism they're following Judaism as it was in the times of Jesus and these people are being bullied into submission and silenced by the establishment the rabbis the leadership of the Jewish people who wants conformity, wants political power and this plays right into the general feeling that we have to go for the underdog versus the establishment to go for the weaker one versus the bully and there's another theory proposed by missionaries to justify their quotation of rabbinic literature a fourth way of presenting this concept about this stream of Judaism that is still alive today is presenting the counter-missionary argument as if it's just simplistic we're just dumbing it down this is counter-missionary Judaism as if there's two Judaism there's counter-missionary Judaism and there's real Judaism there's simplistic Judaism versus sophisticated Judaism if you're a sophisticated Jew and you're a well read Jew if you read Mark Shapiro's book on the limits of Orthodox theology which is a book which speaks about the 13 principles of faith and attempts to show how they were not universally accepted and if you read such books and you read rabbinic literature with an open eye and open mind you'll realize that Judaism is much more diverse and much more open than the rabbis today would have you believe than the establishment rabbis would have you believe than the counter-missionary activists would have you believe and we're just a little bit more sophisticated than those simplistic and dumb counter-missionaries now this set of arguments and particularly the last one is very insidious and represents a real change in the dynamic in what was going on in the encounter between the missionary between the church's campaign for the soul of the Jew for the heart of the Jew over the ages it started out, the campaign started out we'll start with the Gentile church they usurped our prophets they took our prophets, they usurped our promises but they said you guys keep your religion, keep your observances keep anything Jewish, we just want your prophets we want your promises and that's what we're going to take at some point last 50, 60 years they said no, I think we want some of those observances as well we want some of your culture as well and now what they're doing is we want your community as well the possibility of belonging to our community and not all of it is insincere some of the people really believe that they truly belong in the community they really believe the story that they're selling they really believe that this isn't on the basis of their reading of rabbinic literature they believe that yes this is the sophisticated and the real understanding of Judaism and it's just simplistic and narrow-minded to exclude them from the community it affects the dynamic in a very serious way because one of the most powerful arguments that we as counter-missionary activists would use not to persuade the potential convert to leave Christianity but to open his mind to the argument is as follows messianic Jew walks in and he says I'm a Jew I call myself a messianic Jew and I believe in Jesus and I'm very proud of the name Jew so 20 years ago what I would have told him is I would have asked him the following question who gave you the name Jew? you didn't buy it in the store you inherited that name do you realize how much blood how much suffering went into that it wasn't easy for your grandfather to give you that name it wasn't easy for your great grandfather to give you that name you owe it to your great grandfather to find out what that word Jew meant to him and this would be something that appealed to people and it would be something that they understood and they said yes I don't know too much about what my grandfather what my great grandfather what my ancestors believed about being the Jew it behooves me it's right for me to find out more but now that the missionaries have adopted the quotation from rabbinic literature not only the quotation from rabbinic literature but our observances, our culture, our garb and they come and say I look the same like your grandfather you don't know what your grandfather believed he might have been a Hasidic Jew he might have been a Kabbalistic Jew he might have believed in the teachings that I'm trying to sell you so this cuts off the door closes the door it closes the avenue of research the reason why a potential convert would look more deeply into the question there's a double edged sword over here we all know that Christianity has been the source of immense suffering for the Jewish people why? to put it simply Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah predicted by the Greek oracles he never claimed to be the Messiah hoped for by the people of Rome of Italy he was the Messiah predicted by the Jewish prophets he was supposed to be the man that the Jewish people are waiting for the biggest argument against the Christian claim for the Messiahship of Jesus not the Jew saying anything the Jew being the Jew and just ignoring Jesus one second this is the man that prays three times a day for the restoration of the Davidic Kingdom he's the man that prays three times a day for the messianic era to be ushered in he's looking forward to that why does he reject your Jesus why does he ignore your Jesus that is a question that Christians had to deal with and if you read the New Testament you will see that this is what they did what they did was they dehumanized the Jew the question is based on a premise in other words why is the Jew rejecting Jesus is based on the premise well if Jesus is truly the Jewish Messiah then the Jew should accept him that only makes sense if the Jew is a type of person that submits to the truth that bends to the truth when he sees that the truth is here he walks towards it and the truth is that no the Jew is not such a type of person you might be such a type of person but the Jew is not such a type of person the Jew when he sees truth he turns around and walks the other way he hates truth he's the child of the devil you can't ask me the question why is it that the Jew rejects Jesus he knows the truth but he rejects it anyways because he's anti-God now he's canonized in the book of John rather they say the Jews don't really know if they would truly know Jesus they would truly be presented with the real background of Jesus they would accept him but now with the onset of Christian quotation of missionary literature we're going back to the old model we're finding quotations in missionary literature and I'm talking about missionaries that don't call themselves Christians missionaries that call themselves rabbis they're going back to the model the Jews know the truth and they reject it anyways they see Jesus in this verse they see Jesus in this passage and they reject it anyways that's a double-edged sword it's another effect that the missionary quotation of rabbinic literature has on the dynamic of the encounter between the missionary and the Jew


Contrary to the view of many people, the highest earners are not necessarily the wealthiest. Wealth is not dependent on how much a person gets. It is a product of how they can manage the money earned. In this video, I will share with you 9 ways to better manage your money. 1. Create an emergency fund. Did your car break down in your way out? Did you or someone you love get in an accident? One fact about life is that there is nothing certain in life. Unespected things happen, and it is best always to be prepared. This is why setting money aside for our uncertainties is extremely important. Best of all, it will help you stay out of financial trouble and you will sleep better at night. Yes, you are occupied with lots of other expenses, but it is wise to set aside some amount of money monthly to save an emergency fund. It would be best if you didn't take out this money unless it's for something important. Having money to deal with problems as they come will help you stay out of financial trouble and help you feel more secure. 2. Create and use financial goals. If you want to improve your money management skill, you must set short-term goals and long-term money goals. Your short-term money goals can involve an amount of your emergency needs, expenses, and privileges. On the other hand, your long-term goal can be about your retirement plan and funding this plan. As long as you are focused on your goals, you can always be motivated to budget your money in the right way. However, making a financial goal is not enough. You must also apply the needed steps needed to produce the best results with your financial matters. Sticking to your financial goals requires discipline and commitment. You must be disciplined enough to stick to your budgets, focus on your earnings, and invest wisely if you want to reach your goals. 3. Track your expenditures. One mistake many people make is overlooking small expenses. People tend to take note of the enormous amount spent, but do not pay attention to those little over-the-counter transactions, bank charges, and even money spent on airtime recharge. The truth is that these small expenses you ignore are the reason for the lapses you experience in your overall financial goal. You may ask, how does $1 affect me when I earned hundreds of thousands of dollars? Well, the truth is that, when added together, these little expenses are no longer small. They become huge expenses that can drastically affect your financial life in general. To better handle your money, you must take note of every cost you make, no matter how hard it seems. If it's too challenging and you cannot afford a financial expert, get a financial book or download financial applications on your device. 4. Make money work for you. So maybe there was a time when a man was supposed to work for money, but in the era that we are in today, money is meant to work for the man. If you still have that working hard to get and save money mentality, you will keep working, yet remain low or average. One of the best ways to manage money is to make it work for you. If you have the right information and the right decisions, money on its own can multiply itself to produce more money for you without you doing anything. Money invested wisely today will amount to massive sum in times to come. Invest and grow your money. 5. Consolidate debts. No one likes debt. However, most people can't help getting out of debt. One of the biggest mistakes people, especially young adults make, is taking unnecessary debt, such as multiple credit card loans, purchasing items on credit, etc. The obligations keep piling up until the point where you have to make monthly payments for a long time to pay it off. For you to manage your money wisely, you need to get your debts under control and work in finally getting rid of them. Although credit card loans, student loans and loans to settle other pressing bills may be helpful at times, however, before acquiring this loan, make sure that they would be beneficial in the future and also try to get the lowest interest rates possible. Find ways to cut down on your expenses. If you have multiple debts, sometimes you worry about which one you should pay up first. Paying off high interest debt saves you lots of money in the long run. Money is precious and the sooner you pay off those high interest debts, the less interest you'll end up paying. 6. Get multiple streams of income. Do you work 5 days a week for long hours but still struggle with money at the end of the month? Nowadays, having multiple income streams is not just necessary. It is compulsory. Millennials have been breaking the trend of having only 9-5 jobs because times are hard and just one income pathway cannot suffice. Side hustles, freelance jobs, monetizing talents, social media jobs, creating courses in e-books and entrepreneurship have become the norm of the day and people are diversifying their income streams. It's essential to find out the ways to earn extra cash which can help you meet some expenses, sponsor your desires or even pay off debts. Skills like article writing, website development, photography, social media management can earn you extra bucks. You can also try out things like baby sitting, pet sitting, selling goods on social media or eBay, tutoring students and others and then guess what? With technology, it is even more and more comfortable to carry out these activities.  7. Avoid using your credit card. Just as a credit card makes it easy for us to purchase the things we want, so does it make it easy for our accounts to be empty. Research shows that people buy more things when they shop with their credit cards. For instance, let's say you create a budget and go to the grocery store with the exact or little more in case of emergencies cash and you see some exciting chocolates across the counter, would you be able to purchase? No, because the money at hand cannot cover it. But what happens when you are with a credit card? You buy more. Make sure to apply discipline to yourself and avoid unbudgeted spending and also shopping with cash. If you have extra savings, you can use it for entertainment and fun to reward yourself. However, don't overspend on trivial things like shopping, expensive clothes and other items. Focus on more important things to ensure that you will not suffer from financial problems later. 8. Write a will. The simplest way to ensure that your funds, property and personal effects will be distributed according to your wishes, even after your death is to prepare a will. A will is a legal statement that guarantees that your assets will be given to family members or other beneficiaries you designate. Having a will is especially essential when you have young children because it allows you to select a caretaker for them in the event of your death. Although wills are simple to create, research has shown that about half of all Americans die into state or without a will. With no will to indicate your wishes, the court steps in and distributes your property according to the laws of your state. If you have no apparent has and die without a will, it is even possible that the government may claim your estate. It is sad when such a thing happens because then the money you struggled or your life to acquire might be mismanaged by people you do not even know. Take an inventory of your assets, outline your objectives and determine to which of your friends and family you wish to pass your belongings. Once your will is drafted, you won't have to think about it again unless your wishes or your financial situation changes substantially. And when you finally pass on, you will be sure that your wealth is being handled by those you trust. 9. Change your mindset Some people have a specific view of money, some of which are thinking that people who have a high amount of money are smarter than you or that you must also purchase the new car your neighbor got. Well, the truth is that many of the beliefs you have about money is wrong and that wrong mindset is the reason why you have not been able to reach your financial target. It does not matter the plans you put in place or the rules you follow, if your mindset is incorrect, you will not achieve results. Hence, you must change the way you think about handling your money. It would help if you had a healthy way of thinking about your money.  It does not matter how much money comes into your account. If you cannot manage your finances properly, you will become broke and miserable.


Well, hearing the concerns of the public is just as important as educating them. And that's exactly what happened at Cass County's Community Outreach Day. Yesterday, community members gathered at the Pillager Fire Station to learn about numerous projects going on in the area. Food was also served as community members were able to address any concerns they had with the Sheriff's Department. People could also apply for a gun permit and bring any old medications they had to be properly disposed of. We have a table set up with our trail information, which is really our most important thing. East Skull Lake to the south of us has a trail. Lakeshore to the north of us has a trail under construction. And we're kind of the people in the middle with no trail. And so we're trying to construct a 7.8 mile trail that will connect East Skull Lake with Lakeshore. To learn more information on that new trail in Fairview, you can visit this story on our website at lptv.org slash news. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


And so Verena really what happened was I was doing an at lead chat a leadership chat in education for on my Twitter feed And out of the corner of my eye on my home I saw that you had tweeted and the last time I had seen you was during the Twitter versus zombies I hadn't really seen anything from you since then and I just saw that you were talking about these ideas And so I kind of popped over to the Verena and started talking to her While my students were talking in the Twitter chat But isn't it amazing that from that little I mean really split second out of the corner of my eye Verena split second response to me when she included me in the response and said Adley at a Kaley G to this because she's got some ideas We are live Welcome to gamified ooke for March 26 2014 my name is Verena Roberts, and I'm the game maker host for today along with Colin Osterhout This is the first webinar of the day dedicated to exploring games-based learning Hey, my name is Akshay, and I'm going to be talking about what really is gamified Gamefire is a huge project that has been taking on the way in the past month Gamefire is a group of students and educators who are testing and evaluating serious games We are finding different types of games to help with any kind of subject or class a student might need help with or a teacher might need A better way to teach a class Students have been finding and testing games and then running our view along with this overall performance Then an educator comes in and also test the game and reviews it to show how the educator and student evaluation ranked the game The purpose of gamefire is to create our own encyclopedia of serious games that can change the world


Hey all, my name is Pushfak Pujari and I'm here to give a talk about how to use machine learning to protect customer privacy as a product manager. Now before we get started, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the awesome team at Product School. Thank you for inviting me to give this talk and for working with me patiently throughout this journey. You guys are awesome. A bit about me. I currently lead the product team at work order on the security cameras product line and before that I spent a couple of years at Amazon where I spent one and a half years at Amazon's Alexa AI Group working on privacy-related products and services. And before that for two and a half years and the Amazon Web Services IoT Group. I hold an MBA from Wharton and I hold an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from IoT Deli. In my spare time, I love playing tennis, going hiking, beer brewing and talking about all things technology. At the end of this webinar, I want you to go away with key four takeaways. I want to start by explaining how privacy is important. Why has it become so important in today's world? For the part two of the presentation, I will talk about some of the privacy preservation techniques that I use today in industry and academia. For the third part, I will do an end-to-end walkthrough of an example of how you can use machine learning to protect privacy. And I would leave you guys with a few tips and strategies on how to be an effective product manager in privacy. So let's get started. First and foremost, why does privacy matter? Well, it matters because we live in a data-first economy. Data is the new oil and which means that companies collect and retain tons of customer data. Anytime you're ordering something online or you're ordering groceries or you're requesting a loan provider to approve that loan for the new car that you want to buy, your data is being collected and processed by the companies. Sometimes they also need to retain the data for legal or regulatory requirements. And many times they want to use that data to ultimately give you the end customer a better customer experience through personalized recommendations or marketing. And in some cases, the customer, the company might just be repackaging your data and selling off to third-party data aggregators. You don't know what's going on till you read the fine print. And the data that these companies are collecting today can contain sensitive information. And if this data is in the hands of the adversarial or attackers, then it can have devastating consequences, not only for the individual who will have the identity theft or identity stolen and the financial records erased or misused, but can also be devastating for the company where the data breach happened. And we don't talk about it a lot or maybe we don't hear about it, but data breaches happen way more frequently than you think. On the right side is a graph from a statisticer that tracks the number of data breaches that were reported in the years. And if you see the data here in 2017, there were 1,632 data breaches that were reported and in 2018, 1244, it's almost like four breaches per day, but we don't hear about these breaches because they almost always don't make it to the common press. And the problem is also aggregated by the fact that the data that the companies are collecting are all spread out across organizations and sub-organizations across different storage media. And once the data leaves the walled garden, it's almost impossible to reclaim control over that data, which is why privacy or legal authorities across the world have started thinking about the end customers privacy and what does that take here? And have instituted a bunch of different laws from GDPR by the European Union to HIPAA, CCPA, COPPA in the USA and many, many more that are getting in the works of getting deployed or activated in the next couple of months or years. Additionally, there's this growing distrust with social media providers, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal on how different companies are using or misusing their data. And ultimately at the end of the day, a customer wants transparency on how the data is being collected and used. And that's not an unreasonable ask if you're a customer. So we have been talking about private data. What exactly does private or personal data mean? Well, in a high level, it could mean two things, either anything that can be used to directly identify a unique individual. Typical examples of this include full names, addresses, social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers, et cetera. Then there's this other class of indirect identifiers or quasi identifiers that by themselves can't be used to identify a unique individual. But when combined with other data out there publicly or otherwise could be used to identify individual uniquely. Examples include gender, demographic information, salary, and location history. Within an organization, data can be classified in multiple buckets. The most typical classification use for security is shared below. Identified data can contain direct or indirect identifiers and has no processing done on it. So anonymous data has known direct identifiers, transformed or eliminated. So it gives certain amount of privacy beyond identified data. The identified data takes it up notch above where direct and known indirect identifiers have been removed. And the anonymous data is at the not star where the data has mathematically guarantees that the data cannot be used to explicitly identify an end customer. And this is represented from the graph on the right where personal data, say John Doe, can be transformed into a gibberish of pseudonymized text using some kind of a tokenization function or a key function. This can be one way or two way. We'll talk about synonymization later on in the presentation. And at the bottom is anonymization where you can add a random amount of noise and kind of create a string or substring that has no way of being linked to the original text. If there's one thing that I want to leave you with this presentation, that is this. As product managers, you will be grappling with this privacy versus utility tradeoff, which means that you can't eat the cake and have it too. With, if you wanted to have more privacy, then the data will have to reduce its utility. And at the extreme end, from this, as we can see from this picture in front of us at the extreme end, there is 100% utility, but no privacy. We can all tell that this is President Barack Obama's photo. On the extreme right side, you can see that we have added a lot of noise. So there is 100% privacy is anonymous. This can be anybody in the picture here, but again, this leaves no utility in the data and it's pretty much moot to use this data for any operation, machine learning or not. And so throughout your careers and throughout your products, you'll be always grappling with where is the right optimal point or inflection point and that gives you the most privacy but still retains enough utility in the data. Now privacy enactment is a truly cross-disciplinary effort. If there are multiple shareholders or stakeholders that need to work together to ensure that privacy implementation happens consistently across an organization. There's a compliance team that ensures that the organization is compliant with the top security regime out there or compliance regime. Then there's a information security group or InfoSec that ensures that the data has been secured with the utmost integrity and with the tightest controls. Legal team that gives you guidance on how to deal with the privacy laws. And then of course there's a privacy engineering and the product team that is responsible for building out the tools and these are experiences that allow the privacy preserving computation to happen while delivering an amazing customer experience. Well, why do we need to think about privacy? Well, there are obvious downsides of not thinking about privacy. First is if the company has data breaches then it could be subject to huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission or FTC. And even GDPR stipulates that a big breach can lead up to 4% of annual revenue being fined as the penalty. So the penalty is huge. At the same time, if this happens consistently the company might actually use its business license as well. And not to mention the fact that data breach definitely erodes customer trust and loyalty. So there might be far reaching consequences of not taking privacy seriously. On the other side, taking a privacy first approach gives companies increased loyalty and retention can help with customer lifetime value and higher conversion rates because your customers will trust the platform better. And for some companies like Amazon they have also made it a very strong comparative mode where the iPhone has been dooted as the privacy first phone which is something that you see in the ad campaigns across the world. And so from a business standpoint privacy first positioning is a stable stakes. There's no way around it. I need you to start thinking about this if you already haven't done so. So what are the different sources of risk of privacy risk within an organization? Well, there are three big sources that exist. One is of course the raw customer data and any of its derivatives that are being stored by the company. Second are the metadata and the logs that could be used to join with some other data sets and reveal or identify the end user. And of course there are machine learning models that are though unintuitive a derivative of the raw customer data. And so might retain some of the characteristics which can be used by clever attackers to reconstruct the actual or original data set. Of these three, the raw customer data is the most important thing that needs to be protected but machine learning models should also not be ignored. Now protecting machine learning models in itself is a full seminar or series of seminars in itself but this is a 30,000 foot view of why privacy even machine learning models present privacy risks. So on a high level, you can think of a model as a derivative of the data that kind of takes in the end data and summarizes it. So that and which is used to do machine learning inference and make predictions. A machine learning model depending on the architecture if falling in the wrong hands can be inspected and the contents examined to try to and an attacker can run a series of attacks on the model starting with model inversion attack where the attacker would try to get back the feature vectors which in turn can be used to run a series of reconstruction attacks on and get back the actual raw data. And on the bottom is membership inference attack which in where an attacker would have a test data set and try to guess if that any of the data within the test data set has been used to train the machine learning model. And if it found so, that is going to preach the privacy of that individual. And the logic behind doing that is that a machine learning model behaves slightly differently when it sees a data point that it has seen before. For example, as part of it's the training data set for example, and how it behaves if it has not seen the data point before. And here's a graphical representation of that if there are non-members or data points that it has not seen it might have a distribution like this. But if it sees something new or my bad if it had already seen something in the previous training data set then the distribution is slightly different and that this delta is enough to tell smart attackers that a particular data point was present in the training data set thereby preaching customer's privacy. But so far I've been talking a lot about why privacy is important and it's very important for us to preserve customer data. My objective here is to not get you alarmed and locking away the customer data in a secure vault and throwing away the keys is not really the answer. What we as the product teams want to do is be able to use the customer data to deliver an amazing customer experience but without sacrificing their privacy. And so for the rest of the presentation I'll be focused on how you can do that using machine learning. For part two I will cover some of the privacy preservation techniques that exist in the academia and industry today. Broadly you can break these techniques down into two buckets. There are data sanitization techniques and there are privacy preservation privacy preserving computation techniques. The former relies on perturbing the data or changing some of the contents of the data so that the data it cannot be used to uniquely identify an individual. On the other side privacy preserving computation relies on not changing the data per se but changing some of the ways in which data is being computed so that you can still get the insight from the data but without sacrificing privacy. Privacy preserving computation itself requires multiple webinars to talk about them. So in this webinar I'll just focus on data sanitization techniques and perhaps come to privacy preserving computation at a later point of time in a different webinar. So we talked about this briefly in the past but here are some of the direct identifiers that HIPAA requirements requires you to address. And as you can see these are all any of these in itself can be used to uniquely tie back to an individual. So our first technique of protecting privacy was to, well, why don't we just, why don't we just detect the different kinds of direct identifiers that exist in the data and remove records in case we find any of them. Now doing this is pretty easy. It's easiest to implement but unfortunately doing this is gives you no measurable privacy guarantees. You are only addressing identifiers that you have access to or that you know that exists. So you're addressing the known knowns. You don't even know what the known unknowns are at that point. This method requires humans in the loop to be able to detect and correct or actually generate the high quality training dataset that is used for machine learning training. And once you have set these, define these identifiers and beta solution extending it as a business close for different locales, different countries. It's pretty hard and takes enormous amount of time. Another technique that gets us to more anonymization is by transforming the data using some kind of a mapping function into unique tokens that by themselves cannot be used to re-identify the original or go back and find out what the original data was. This mapping can be one way or two way. Here we have tried to take a credit card dataset and transform the middle digit so that into some gibberish that by itself cannot be used to recreate the original dataset. This definitely is gives us stronger anonymization and also not that hard to implement and also keeps some of the utility of the data because it allows you to join the dataset. But this is not safe because an attacker with who knows the logic of the anonymization along with the token can potentially extract the original data. And this needs to be consistently enforced across the different end points within an organization that could be challenging. Another way of getting more stronger anonymization guarantees is by using key anonymization where the objective is to make each record indistinguishable from at least K minus one other records. And this is done through smoothing or generalizing the datasets. For example, for zip codes that start with 944 we could just round it off to the first three digits and use that as a training data. Same with age, we could round it or converge it to a central data point for a range of ages. As you can imagine, if K-anonymization gives stronger anonymization guarantees than PI detection and randomization, however, because you are adding no issues to the data and perturbing it, it does impact the utility of the underlying data. And more importantly, choosing the right K values and logic is hard. And the generalization logic itself on what algorithm you use to smooth out the dataset or take an average median, that also it's very custom and requires custom implementation to do, which can be expensive. And lastly, we'll talk about differential privacy, which is the state of the art when it comes to providing anonymization guarantees. This is a technology that gives you measurable, mathematically proven privacy guarantees. The fundamental behind differential privacy is simple. Is this that a single record should not impact the outcome of the query? So basically differential privacy ensures that records are kind of hiding within the entire dataset and no one record stands out. There are a couple of downsides of working with differential privacy. It is pretty hard to choose the right parameters and requires a lot of valid experimentation. It's also not practical yet for a lot of use cases because it takes a lot of time to get right and has to be continuously evolved as the dataset evolves itself. And thirdly, maintaining differential private datasets at scale can be expensive and difficult to do. For part three, I will, let's go through an end to end walkthrough of how we can use machine learning to detect how we can identify some direct identifiers. And from our typical product management standpoint, let's start with the use cases first. So I've made up an example here. Let's assume that your website has a search bar and as we one of this project, you want to scan those search phrases for direct identifiers. And if you find any, you want to delete the record immediately. And as an extension of this use case in the future, we want to be able to do it at end mass so that an employee who's trying to access customer data, say for analytics, can get back a dataset that has no direct identifiers in it. We'll define a few functional requirements, starting with five different identifiers that we want to detect in B1. Full name, addresses, telephone numbers, email IDs and social security numbers. We will focus our attention on the ENUS locale only. And we've arbitrarily set a goal success criteria as precision of 70%, recall of 95%. We'll talk about this in the latest slide. From non-functional requirements, we want this to be done in near real time. So we have taken a generous 250 milliseconds as margin to able to scan one query. And in the future, we also want to do an API for doing it at batch or in parallel. So what are the requirements to create a spicy machine learning model? Well, there are five things that you need. You need the training data, you need to define the success metrics, you need a model architecture, you need to have an infrastructure that allows you to train, test, iterate, and host the model. And then you need a plan for a workflow for continuous improvement. Let's talk about each one in one slide. For training data is the most important part of the machine learning pipeline.  And so the trick here is to use training data that is as close to your runtime data as possible when it comes to the syntax and semantics. Of course, there'll be a bunch, you need to work through human labeling challenges because identifying direct identifiers is a very cognitively challenging task. It's because of context. Let's take an example. Let's say you hear the word Fargo, right? And you don't know what to do with it because is it an address, the city of Fargo, which then ultimately is a direct identifier for an address, or it could be a reference to a movie, it could be somebody's name. Even if you hear the name, for example, Britney Spears, is that somebody's name or are they actually, is that the celebrity that they're talking about? Because with the celebrity, it's not really a person later because their name isn't the public domain. But if it is somebody's name who was named after a famous pop star and you're using the name, well, it could be a breach of the privacy. So it's really ambiguous to determine what really is that identifier and there's a cognitive load and requirement to know the context behind it. Then using the, sending or collecting data that you want to use for labeling might contain examples of such privacy preaching data points, which when exposed to a human labeler, could in itself expose privacy risks. So there's an inherent risk of getting data labeled as well, which is something that you need to think of as you go through the machine learning pipeline. Because the labeling itself is not intuitive here, we want to start tracking labeling metrics or what is the quality of which labeling is going on, which in itself would be challenging. And as a product manager, we need to ensure that we are using the right size and diversity in the data so that we minimize the overfit and underfit effects. As a product manager, this is the most important part of the workflow that you should be worried about. What are the metrics of success and how do I evaluate success? Typically, the most commonly used metrics in machine learning are precision and recall, but which of the two is more important for this use case. Any guesses? Well, for us, it's going to be recall. It's because the cost of false negatives is more than the cost of false positives. In other words, the cost of misclassifying private data as not private is more than the cost of classifying something that was not private to be private. So in the latter, you would lose a few data points, which is fine, but in the former, that is actually misclassifying private data as not private data, you will be using that across your ML workflow and sharing it with other people that is going to be a massive breach of privacy from your customers, from your company side. So as a product manager, and for privacy-related use cases, you should emphasize or focus on reducing or improving recall. Then as a product manager, you also need to think through sampling challenges because if you think about how a customer interacts with your search bar, there nobody is willingly giving their private information. Nobody is typing their address or SSN, for example, in the search bar. And so the occurrence of like, in your entire dataset, only over two or 5% perhaps data might have something that is privacy breaching, with 95% of the data not even being clean or clean. And so your data will have an inherent distribution of being massively skewed, where a very few data points are going to have privacy-containing artifacts. Still, you should scan them, but just makes your job slightly harder because I need to think through that distribution, think through what is the sample size that you will use to get it measured for ground truth, for measuring success rate of your models, and doing that at scale can be challenging as well. The other thing that I need to optimize on is how frequently you want to run your workflow. The more frequently you run, the more accurate data points you get, but of course it's going to be more expensive. On the other hand, the distribution might mean that sometimes your sample has no private data in it. And so you think that your machine has done the job and you have 100% recall, but in other times, you might not. So there'll be consistency or inconsistencies rather between different workflow measurement runs which you need to think about as a product manager. Now, we've talked about training data, we've talked about sampling and success criteria. Let's talk about what kind of model architecture you should use to do this task. On the highest level, perhaps the easiest thing to do is to put together a binary classifier, feed it a bunch of training data and ask it if it contains private data or not. It is pretty easy to implement this, but the challenge with that is it's very hard to attribute what is driving the success or lack thereof in your model. On the other hand, you could use a pattern matching based mechanism such as a regular expression to start tracking the data identifiers. Drexels are really good for anything that has a consistent schema. And in our use case, telephone numbers have a very strong schema where they need to be 10 digits. If it's not a 10-digit number, it's not really a phone number. Social security numbers are typically nine-digit and email addresses are something, something at the rate something.com or.edu or something like that, which you can easily manipulate or set pattern or rules for detection. But regexels from several downs, downside that is they're extremely dumb, they're really hard to generalize. And for example, if you have a missed, if you have a number that is nine-digit, is it really a social security number or is that a telephone number that had a digit missing? Regexels can't tell you that. And regexels are also hard to expand and scale, especially as your business becomes, expands across different locales, different regions, different languages. You need to create a custom rule every time we expand. Then there are named entity recognition models or NER models as they're called that are very good with contextual data. There are a few examples of that, Stanford NER stands up there and recently state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures like BERT and others. But these are ideal for our use cases, especially for names and addresses that rely a lot on the underlying context. But implementing this and hosting this is very computationally expensive and can require enormous amounts of data to get good accuracy. But I think the overarching point of the slide is that there is no one glove fits all solution here. It all depends on what your use cases are, what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are rather, right? And trial and error-based experimentation is the key to choosing the right architecture. For our exam, for our use case, we will pick NER-based models for names and addresses and for others, we will go with the regex because it's easier to do. And again, you're starting off with a V1, so this is what we will choose to implement. I won't spend a lot of time talking about infrastructure. This really depends a lot on what your company is already using, what expertise does your team have. But all public cloud providers, AWS, GCP Azure, you name it, they have infrastructure for model training, testing, hyperparameter optimization, hosting and ensuring that models work across time or MLops. And the framework to choose from whether it's Pytorch or Keras really depends on what your scientists are comfortable with. So this is something that you should make a joint decision with the team implementing this solution. And yet another part where it's very important to think through especially as a product manager is how do you plan for improving the model continuously in the field? You need to retrain your model periodically so that you're picking up changes in the search queries or search patterns over time. For example, with COVID happening, the search patterns might have changed for if there's a high inflation happening, maybe the search patterns change again. So it's important to know and keep your model up to date with the latest in the industry and academia. You have to ensure that you're tracking the model performance metrics and regularly as you know, when things are not looking good, you can quickly attribute it and fix it. And at the same time, the other side of the puzzle is you need to optimize the training frequency too because every time you train your model, you will incur a huge cost. And so what is the sweet spot that gives you up to the data without costing too much is something that you need to make a decision of as a product manager. Models left unaddressed can drift in their performance over time. So you should watch out for that as well. And something that we've talked about in the past should also start tracking the labeling quality, like how much success you're having with getting a good crown truth and optimizing the labeling workflow as you expand into new languages or locations. Few, we are done through 75% of the webinar. Are you guys still excited about it as much as I am? For the final part, I will leave you with a few tips and strategies on how to become an effective product manager for privacy. And from the outside, privacy can seem very technically challenging and very ambiguous. And it is. But in my opinion, don't let that deter you because becoming a product manager for privacy is perhaps the most rewarding opportunity you can get because it is truly differentiated and a distinguished opportunity to stand and to stand out and lead the team through this ambiguity. People, there is not a lot of industrial knowledge about privacy. And so it is a good time to bootstrap yourself and your company and your organization around what the best practices are and how your company can do a good job becoming privacy first. Privacy PM requires pure product management from dealing with ambiguity, coming up with the use cases, prioritization matrix. It has it all. It is the dream job, if I may, for a product manager. There is tremendous learning opportunity where you're working with a purely cross-disciplinary team. There are aspects of machine learning, machine learning infrastructure, security, legal, compliance, and all of that have come together to create this branch of privacy. And being part of that, you can learn some really specific skill sets that will empower you for your career ahead. Especially if you think about the massive adoption of data and AI, it means that privacy will go hand in hand with it and as adoption, as AI becomes more ubiquitous, so will privacy concerns. And this is a great time to jump in and be involved in this field. And lastly, from personally, which I find the most important is that becoming a PM for privacy gives you a chance to actually create positive impact, ensure that your customer's data is being safe and secure, and really make the world a better place. I mean, what else could you want from an opportunity? Here are some of the strategies that I wanted to share that will give you more leverage within the organization that you're operating in. The first and foremost is that you need to set up a very exciting and appealing non-starvation that gets people excited. That is something that a goal that they look forward to. And a great way to do that is to start with the goals. What are you working backwards from? A good goal strategy could be working backwards from customer promises, which is what kind of customer promises or guarantees would you want to make as an organization three years down the line, five years down the line and working backwards from there and building out an incremental roadmap that gets you there is going to be very important. The third thing that you need to do is really quantify the impact on brand from doing privacy first initiatives and ultimately tie it to an organization's business metrics so that your top leaders are able to connect the dots here. The more appealing, then you should tie yourself or find partners within the organization that care about privacy as much as you do. It's typically the CSOS office, so the chief information security office, and typically the more senior leadership who really care about the long-term vision and perception of the brand will care about privacy. So reach out to them, it's a great way for you to get credibility and visibility at the highest level but also getting them to be your partner will help drive your programs and make adoption plan much easier. Once you're starting out, you should ensure that you have put together a dynamic team of cross-functional people and more importantly, curious people along on this journey because this is going to be tremendous ambiguity and curiosity is the best feature asset that you can have as a team. We've talked about this earlier but building out an incremental road maps that doesn't take a huge leap but goes from, they make small and quick wins and deliver them to your leadership is going to be key here.  And lastly, think about incentivization mechanisms because adding noise to data or creating sanitized data sets might not be exciting for the machine learning engineers or scientists in your team but it's good for the company. So how do you balance these two things? What are the right incentivization mechanisms as something that you need to think through deeply as a product manager? Where do you begin in the organization? Well, I would recommend that you start with following the data, right? Start by charting out the customer data lifecycle where all the end points that data is being ingested. Where is the data being stored? Who has access to that data? How long do they use the data for? Where do they copy the data, if at all, right? And where is the data deleted? How long does it take for the data to be deleted? And charting all of this out will quickly give you a sense of who the actors involved are, where are the humans, what are the use cases and start bubbling up these surface areas that have high privacy threats. So you should start thinking about creating a threat map next. Once you have a threat map, then you can key identify the top use case that you want to go and cover in the V1, V2, V3 of your solution. And that's when you should start thinking about the privacy versus utility trade off that is inherent in the dataset. And start by identifying the drivers and define success metrics that you can measure and control. They are some of the best practices that I found very useful as a product manager to stay up to date in this field. First is need to be plugged in into the academia and industry what's going on so that you are up to date with the latest technology that you can implement on your own. Second is to actually build out a community within your own organization of like-minded and curious people so you can work together on ensuring privacy first practices. Do attend bunch of conferences, meet like-minded people, share and exchange things that work for you. And lastly, there is no one-gloved solution. Experimentation is the key here. Here are a few resources that I think will be extremely helpful as a product manager to get your hands dirty and really understand what's going on. They'll be part of the presentation so feel free to take it offline or look at this at a later point of time. But thank you so much. It's been a pleasure sharing my knowledge with you. I have shared my LinkedIn contact. It can be found from my name Pushpak Pujari and you can follow me on Twitter at Pushpak Pujari. And I look forward to hearing from you on getting some feedback and hope to stay in touch. Thanks now.


After video of a brutal attack in downtown Bemidji circulated on social media, prosecutors in the case are seeking to charge a 16-year-old juvenile as an adult. According to a release earlier today from Bemidji police chief Mike Mastin, 216-year-old juvenile males have been taken into custody in connection with the assault, which happened Sunday afternoon. The security camera footage of the assault has been shared thousands of times on social media. When officers arrived on the scene, they spoke to witnesses and the victim who had suffered injuries to his head and face. The officers were able to take the information and locate two juveniles near 7th Street Northwest in Urban Avenue near downtown Bemidji. The police reports in this case were forwarded to the Beltrami County Attorney's Office for charges. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.