Okay, I think the record button is working. Yeah, so we looked very briefly at the book of Exodus. There are so many things that we could have, you know, talked about, but there was no time. So we just looked at some very basic concepts. So we'll have to now move into the book of Leviticus. The book of Leviticus is not very popular. People don't like it a lot because there are no stories in it. But if the book of Leviticus was not there, the nation of Israel would have stopped existing because it's the book of Leviticus which explains to them what sacrifices they can do, how they can please the Lord, how they can, you know, make themselves acceptable to the Lord. The book of Leviticus is very important because that laid the foundation for these Israelites to continue living in the presence of a holy God and, you know, be able to finally enter into the promised land. So Genesis is generally known as the book of beginnings because it talks about the beginning of many, many things, you know, we touched on that last class. Then when we come to Exodus, Exodus is called the book of redemption because the people redeemed the people from God redeemed his people from slavery. Leviticus is called the book of atonement that word atonement means someone paying the price for somebody else's sins so that they can be forgiven. So the sins of the people were atoned for by the sacrificial lamb. The sacrifices which were done, those sacrifice atoned for the people's sins. Because of those sacrifices, the people's sins were forgiven. So Leviticus talks a lot about the sacrifices which were performed and the various steps which the priests, which the Levite priests should take in performing the different ceremonies. So it's more like a instruction guidebook about sacrifices and what the people should do when they come to the temple. It is also a guidebook to the Levite priests to explain to them all the procedures which they should be following when they are serving in the temple. So all these details are mainly found in your book of Leviticus. So because the focus in this book is upon the sacrifices and the temple procedures, I mean, of course, the temple had not been constructed yet, but you know, all these things would be done in the tabernacle. So all the details regarding this are given in the book of Leviticus. And here in this book, because of the topic, the nature of the topic which is being covered over here, the word which is used most often, the word which is, you know, used repeated more often than any other word in the book of Leviticus, it's the word holy. Holy is that one word which is mentioned more than a hundred times in the book of Leviticus, because this book is all about a holy God telling his people how they can be sanctified and purified and how they can make themselves acceptable to him. So the word holy is mentioned more than a hundred times in this book. You can guess what the next most repeated word would be. It's the word sacrifice. The word sacrifices mentioned 42 times in this book of Leviticus. And of course, you have the word blood also being mentioned many times. The word priest is mentioned many, many times because there are so many instructions given to the priests in this book of Leviticus. So these are the main topics that are dealt with in this particular book. So God told the Levit priests what they should do during the festivals. You know, the Israelites were asked to celebrate certain festivals and they were supposed to perform sacrifices in the morning and in the evening. So the procedures for that was given and all these things were done so that one day when Jesus comes, he can take the place of all these sacrifices and fulfill once for all the atonement, the final act of atonement for us. So if you look at all the festivals which the other nations would have had, they all had their own religious festivals, all the surrounding nations, including even the Egyptians. Their festivals were just festivals. But when you look at the feasts which are mentioned in the book of Leviticus, each of these feasts has a purpose. It's actually pointing towards Jesus Christ. If you look at the festivals and feasts of the other nations, they are just something that the people are doing in the hope of pleasing the gods, you know, in the hope of getting their blessings from those gods. But when you look at the feasts which are mentioned in the book of Leviticus, each of these feasts has a significance. As the people were celebrating these feasts, without even realizing it, what they're actually celebrating is what Jesus is going to accomplish one day. So there's a lot of spiritual significance attached to the feasts which are mentioned in Leviticus. So the people were not supposed to celebrate these feasts in a very light-hearted, casual manner. This was something that should be done with a lot of reverence in a very sacred and holy manner because these feasts are actually pointing towards what Jesus is going to accomplish one day for the people, not only of Israel but for the entire world. So this book of Leviticus basically is dealing with things which happened during one month, that one month when they were at the Mount Sinai. So the events which are mentioned in this book of Leviticus, all those events take place during a span of just about one month. During the time when they were actually receiving instructions from God at Mount Sinai. And people who say that the book of Leviticus was not written by Moses, we have evidence to prove that he wrote it. If someone can read out from Romans chapter 10 verse 5, where it clearly gives the name of the author of Leviticus, Romans chapter 10 verse 5. For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, the man who does those things shall live by them. This verse which is quoted over here, the person who does these things will live by them. That's actually your Leviticus chapter 18 verse 5. So Paul is quoting this particular verse over here and according to him who wrote this verse, he very plainly says that Moses wrote it. So Moses says, so Paul says Moses wrote this in Leviticus 18 5. He wrote that the person who does these things will live by them. So this is actually proof that Moses wrote the book of Leviticus. Just to look at the overall structure of the book of Leviticus, we can again divide this book also into five sections. The first section can be chapters 1 to 7 where you have the five main sacrifices being described. So chapters 1 to 7, the five main sacrifices which all the people must perform on a regular basis that is explained in great detail in chapters 1 to 7. Chapters 8 to 10 is where you have instructions given to the Levite priests. The instructions are given to Aaron and to his sons on what they should do, what they should wear, what sacrifices they should perform before entering into the tabernacle. All those details are given in chapters 8 to 10. It's mainly the instructions given to the Levite priests. The third section would be chapters 11 to 15. Here you have a detailed list of what is clean and what is unclean. This long list given of animals which are considered as clean and unclean. If you touch what objects will become unclean and what are the things which are sacred and should not be touched by people, all those details are given. So this section chapters 11 to 15, it focuses more on the clean and the unclean, the pure and the ordinary everyday use objects. Certain things you're not supposed to touch because they are sacred. Other everyday objects you can touch. Those kind of details are given. Chapter 16 maybe can be called a separate section by itself because in chapter 16 is where it talks about the day of atonement. This is that one single day in the entire year when the high priest is allowed to enter into the Holy of Holies. For the rest of the time, the Levite priests will only do their work in the holy place but nobody will ever enter into the Holy of Holies because you have the Ark of the Covenant placed over there and God's presence dwells over there in that most holy place. So nobody could enter there but on the day of atonement, Aaron would sacrifice an entire bull just for himself. I mean imagine, he can't just walk inside the most holy place, it's too risky, it's too dangerous. So he in fact very reverentially performs the sacrifices which he's supposed to do before even entering. So in fact he would sacrifice a bull, he would follow all the procedures which are given, he would prepare himself and then he would enter into the most holy place with the blood of the goat which has been killed and then he would sprinkle that blood on the Ark of the Covenant on the inside, inside the most holy place. So the details of this are not mentioned in the book of Levitechus but generally according to tradition, we are told that when Aaron or whoever the high priest is who is serving, when the high priest would go inside the most holy place, they would tie a rope to his leg because in case God's anger comes upon him and he falls down dead, who's going to go inside and bring out the dead body, nobody would have the guts to do that. So they would tie a rope to the leg so that in case there is judgment, at least they can pull out that person from using the rope and then there was this special rope which the high priest was supposed to wear and at the bottom of the rope near the hem, the bottom hem of the rope, you would have a decoration of little pomegranates and bells. So you would have one pomegranate, one bell and one pomegranate and one bell, that would be your hem, the lower hem of the rope and this was supposed to represent fruitfulness, the pomegranates represented fruitfulness, on the other hand the bell represented holiness. So when this high priest would go into the most holy place at one single time in the entire year when he's allowed to go inside, when he goes inside, as he's moving around doing what he's supposed to do over there, his bells would tinkle, you can hear the tinkling of the bells and it's basically like as if the priest is reminding, the high priest is reminding God and saying, Lord, I'm coming inside over here covered by your holiness. I'm not coming over here on my own, it's because of the bull sacrifice which I have performed according to the instructions which you gave me, I have prepared myself and now in your holiness I'm stepping inside to do this task of high priestly duty which I'm supposed to do and so the people standing outside, the people, the Levite helpers who are there in the holy place, they would be able to hear the tinkling of the bells. Now for a long amount of time if there's no noise from inside and there's no tinkling of bells then you have to understand, maybe the high priest was killed because you had not met the requirements which God has made.  So this was not a light hearted ceremony, the day of atonement was something very sacred because on that day once a year God would remind himself once again that one day Jesus Christ will be coming to make final atonement for everyone. So based on that God would accept whatever the high priest is offering over there in the most holy place. So chapter 16 basically deals with this. Chapter 17 to 27 I suppose can be called one single section. Chapter 17 to 27 is where you have different laws which are given to live a holy life. So what are all the things that you should do to live a holy life? So you have many laws which talk about not indulging in idolatry. You have property laws being mentioned. You have laws regarding giving of justice. You have laws regarding moral life of course. And in chapter 23 is where it talks about the seven feasts, the seven festivals which the people were supposed to celebrate. So that's also mentioned in chapter 23. So these are the five sections which you find in the book of Leviticus. Let's look very briefly at the seven feasts which are mentioned in chapter 23. Like I said all the feasts which the Israelites performed had significance. They all were pointing towards Jesus Christ. The Passover Feast of course is very obvious. We know that Jesus became the Passover lamb. We know that's explained to us in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 6 to 8. We are told that Jesus Christ became our Passover lamb. So we know the significance of the Passover Feast. The second feast which was celebrated by these people, the Israelites was the Feast of Unleavened Bread. In fact that also is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5 verses 6 to 8. So it says over there, because Jesus Christ has now become our Passover lamb, we should be living without any leaven in us. That word leaven over there is talking about yeast. You know so there's nothing wrong with yeast. It's just a symbol that is being used to represent something else. So you know God uses the symbol of the yeast to talk about sin. So the people when they are celebrating the Passover Feast and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, they are not supposed to mix any yeast in the bread which they prepare you know inside the tabernacle to represent the fact that we should be living lives which don't have any yeast. So we can all ask ourselves this question. Is there any yeast inside my heart right now? And I'm of course not talking about the yeast which we prepare in our kitchen. I'm talking about the spiritual yeast. Is there any yeast because in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 6 to 8 you know Paul says, remember Jesus Christ has become the Passover lamb and so now you have an obligation. You are now supposed to live a life which does not have any yeast in it, which does not have any sin in it. You need to be holy because the Passover lamb has made a sacrifice on your behalf. Those things I know explained in 1 Corinthians chapter 5. Now coming to the next Feast which these people celebrated, it was called the Feast of First Fruits. So when the Israelite people celebrated the Feast of First Fruits, that's basically when they would bring the first fruits which they have you know grown from their crops, their trees and their crops and they would place that before the Lord as an offering saying, Lord you promised us this land, now we have come inside this land and we have been able to grow these crops. You have blessed us with rain, you have provided us with all that is required and now we were able to produce these first fruits and now we are coming and presenting it before you to say thank you to you. We are grateful to you for the first fruits which you have given us and remember the term is called First Fruits which means many many more fruits are going to come, you know even as the harvest season continues. So it's like an act of faith. The people are saying we are coming and giving you this first fruit so Lord as an offering and making a statement saying we trust you that you're going to continue giving us much more fruit even as the season goes by and also the first fruits is like a act of submission. The people are saying Lord we are giving you this first fruits, we are dedicating it to you as a symbol that in the same way we have dedicated this first fruits the rest of the crop which is going to come later that also is dedicated to you. Yes it is true we will use it for our homes, we will use it to sell and earn money, we will use the fruits which come later for other purposes but the fact remains that in the same way the first fruits were dedicated to you the rest of the fruits are also dedicated to you which is basically what we do today with our Sunday offerings. When you're putting that offering amount or that type into the offering bag you're not just dedicating that particular amount to God, you're basically saying in the same way I'm dedicating this amount the rest of what you're going to give me that also I consider it as dedicated to you so I will use it in the right manner I will use the money in a honourable manner so it is like the first fruits you're giving him the first portion which has come into your hand and you're trusting him and saying in the same way you provided this I know you're going to provide the rest and because I believe in you and I trust you I'm right now declaring and saying even all the rest which you're going to give to me that also I consider it as dedicated unto you and I will use it in the right manner so they called it the feast of first groups today we don't have a feast of tithing but it is something that we are supposed to do in an honourable manner you know when we go to the church and make our offerings the other feast which they had was the feast of weeks so this feast was observed 50 days after the feast of first fruits so they would celebrate the feast of first fruits 50 days after that they would celebrate something called the feast of weeks so which means there are basically 50 days in between these two festivals and later when you came up with Greek and Latin the word for 50 is Penta so it began to be called the feast of Pentecost so the feast of weeks the Greek word for that would be the feast of Pentecost but originally it was called the feast of weeks in what way does the feast of weeks remind us of what Jesus did you see after the feast of first fruits okay let us look at how first fruits you know points towards Jesus first Corinthians chapter 15 verses 20 to 23 there Paul takes an old testament word he takes this word first fruits from the book of Leviticus and he applies it to Jesus he says when Jesus Christ was resurrected it's like as if Jesus Christ was the first fruits in the same way he got resurrected all the people who follow him who will be coming after they also will be resurrected in the same manner so he takes an old testament concept and he applies it to Jesus Christ and calls Jesus the first fruits so in that sense you can think of Jesus Christ as being the first fruits and then 50 days after Jesus resurrection you have the feast of weeks taking place at which time you actually have you know in the New Testament the Holy Spirit coming down upon the people so I'm not saying that it no the exact number of days it matches and all of that but basically there is a kind of significance in the Old Testament time they had the feast of first fruits 50 days they would wait and then finally they would have the feast of weeks in the New Testament times Jesus Christ rose up from the dead he rose up victorious and then for for you know for for a certain number of days he mixes with them and oh and he shows the people that he's alive and that he has risen up and then finally he ascends and he goes away and the people are waiting in the same way in the Old Testament the people would wait for those 50 days for the next feast to begin here in the New Testament time you also see the people waiting for the next event to take place and that even takes place on the day of Pentecost so there is a kind of connection so everything that God did in the Old Testament he was doing it with the New Testament in mind almost everything that happens in the Old Testament is a shadow the shadow is pointing towards what's going to take place in New Testament times so the Old Testament is not something outdated it is a shadow of all the things that we are experiencing today there's a very direct connection which is why in Second Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 you know Paul says all the things which have been mentioned in the Old Testament in the scriptures it is for your learning it is for you to learn from it is for you to be corrected from you know so there is value in these things which we are doing in the Old Testament survey class because all these things which were which happened so many centuries ago they are directly connected to the things which are happening today in our own Christian lives so that's the connection between the first fruits and the feast of weeks the feast of trumpets they generally say it could be a pointing towards the you know second coming of Jesus Christ when when it says everyone would hear the trumpet being you know sounded and then Jesus would descend once again so they say the feast of trumpets is probably connected to the second coming of Jesus Christ so we see that all the feasts of the Israelite people they had spiritual significance and they were pointing towards Jesus Christ now maybe we can look at those five sacrifices which are mentioned in your Leviticus chapters 1 to 7 because those were every single person who lived in the land of Israel was supposed to perform these five sacrifices now if you look at that list I know the first seven chapters two of those sacrifices are compulsory okay so they are compulsory sacrifices the sin offering and the guilt offering those two were compulsory everyone has to perform them you know according to whatever instructions are given so let's look at what these two offerings are actually supposed to mean you know if someone could be kind enough to give me a sip of water it would be a big help let's look at what the sin offering talks about now that would actually be in your Leviticus chapter 4 yeah where it talks about the sin offering so a person may sometimes commit a sin without actually meaning to do it you know accidentally he happens to commit a sin so in such cases the sin offering would have to be given also in the same way they may break a purification ritual for instance they may touch you know the fungus on the wall you know if that happens then you know your impure and you have to offer a sin offering to be cleansed or you may accidentally touch some object you know that God has declared as sacred so if that happens again it is a it's a it's a sin so then you would have to make a sin offering to be forgiven of that particular sin so sin offering was something that was performed every time a person would commit a sin but they're not doing this deliberately it's just that accidentally it happened you know unintentionally they happen to do that particular sin guilt offering on the other hand is basically for the offering which you are giving for the sins which you deliberately did you decided in your heart I know God wants me to obey him in this way but I choose to break his commandment and do this sinful thing so the guilt offering is something that you would offer for things that you have done deliberately so sin offering is for unintentional sins which happened accidentally you know you may you may accidentally harm somebody you know you're having a fight with a person and then maybe you push that person that person falls and they are very badly hurt so you know sin offering is for unintentional sins which just happened on the spur of the moment on the other hand guilt offering is for those sins which you have deliberately chosen to do by breaking the commandments of God you know it's it's a decision that you make in your heart to disobey the Lord for such things the guilt offering would be given so these two were compulsory offerings which the people must perform on a regular basis the other three sacrifices which I mentioned they all were voluntary so the other three sacrifices the first of them was the burnt offering now you see when was when was when did God give the instructions for all these sacrifices he gave these instructions at the Mount Sinai but long before Mount Sinai from the time of Abel and Cain we see people offering burnt offerings why because the burnt offering is basically saying Lord you know like this animal which I am sacrificing I'm offering myself completely to you in submission to obey you to follow you completely in every single way so the burnt offering the main central meaning of the burnt offering was you're saying that I just like this animal which is being given over completely to you completely it's going to be burnt in front of you in the same way I am choosing and saying that I also am completely offering myself to you in submission so right from the time of you know Abraham Isaac and all that you have burnt offerings being given so this was a voluntary offering God doesn't force anyone to go and make you know offer themselves as a burnt offering it's a personal choice the person whenever he wishes to make that commitment he goes with the sacrifice to the tabernacle and he performs that sacrifice over there to say Lord see just like this animal which has been completely given over to you completely burnt in front of you I also I'm willing to give myself totally so in Romans chapter 12 verse 1 where it says you know I urge you brethren by the mercies of God to offer yourselves as a living sacrifice it's basically talking about the burnt offering in the case of the Old Testament on the altar you would be placing an animal the animal would be placed over there but over here in our New Testament in Romans chapter 12 verse 1 I know Paul is saying in the same way the animal was placed on that altar and it was completely burnt up for God I'm asking you believers to place yourself on the altar not to be burnt up but to be living sacrifices so on a daily basis you choose to stay on the altar and you know the main point which preachers make regarding this is if you put an animal on the altar the animal will try to run away so which means you have to take ropes and tied to the altar on the other hand the believers are not tied to the altar it's a choice that you make to stay over there you know when it starts burning and the sacrifice starts hurting you want to get down and escape but at that time you're not like an animal you know you have you have been created in the image of God so you think about what you are doing and you choose and say yes even though this is burning even though this is hurting I choose to continue to stay on this altar because I'm offering myself in submission to the Lord so this burnt offering was a sweet smelling offering to the Lord of course all the offerings were sweet smelling sacrifices to the Lord but this would have meant a lot to the Lord because the person is coming voluntarily this is not one of the compulsory sacrifices and yet the person comes chooses to come and do this on a monthly basis where they are giving this burnt offering to say to the Lord I'm submitting myself completely to you you know if they had known the New Testament terminology they would have actually said the same just like this animal I am going to be a living sacrifice unto you oh Lord you know that's the kind of commitment that they would be making when they are doing this particular sacrifice the second kind of voluntary sacrifice was the grain offering this is basically when they you know when they were whenever crops are grown they would bring the crop a portion of the crop to the altar to say thank you to the Lord and say Lord you know you have given me all of these crops and now out of gratitude I'm bringing this grain offering to you so that would be the grain offerings and then you have another final offering which is called the peace offering or the peace offering was given sometimes to to say to say to say thank you to the Lord sometimes the peace offering was given because a person has taken a vow and you know they have said I will you know I will dedicate myself to the Lord for so many days and I'll spend time you know in his presence during that time instead of doing my everyday jobs you know I'll just spend time at the tabernacle in God's presence you know in spend time in prayer and things like that so the end of the vow they would make they would give a peace offering so that is the last type so you so these are five main types of offerings which were given in the Old Testament and you know if you reflect upon it all these five offerings they apply even to us we are also supposed to be living sacrifices just like the burnt offerings grain offering the same way God gives to us we give back to him in the form of types and offerings how does the peace offering apply to us sometimes we make an offering just to say just to thank the Lord for something sometimes we may make an offering as a kind of a vow where we are saying Lord I'm dedicating this amount to you because I have no decided that you know my business is going to be completely devoted to you the way I run this business will be only according to your principles so I am making this offering to you as a kind of a vow where I'm saying well whatever I'm whatever I know I'm going to take up whatever venture I'm taking up it's going to be completely only for you and for your purposes or something like that so we in a sense these Old Testament sacrifices also apply to us but of course we would not do it with animals because no one can substitute for Jesus Christ so we will not be using animals or anything like that but the spiritual principle which is there in these sacrifices those spiritual principles they apply even to the New Testament believers we maybe we can also look at you know Leviticus chapter 16 which talks about the day of atonement and so in Leviticus chapter 16 verses 6 to 10 it talks about how Aaron would first you know offer a bull for his own sins you know so he first of all performs that sacrifice for himself so that he can enter into the most holy place and then it goes on to explain in those in those verses you know Leviticus 16 verses 6 to 10 that he takes two goats okay so one goat is offered as a sacrifice for the sins of all the people of Israel and so the blood of that goat is what the you know high priest will take inside the most holy place and sprinkled sprinkle it on the Ark of the Covenant what about the other goat why were two goats used for this particular ceremony the second goat is you know it explains what Aaron is supposed to do with the second goat maybe we can actually read these verses Leviticus chapter 16 if someone can read out verses 7 to 10 Leviticus 16 7 to 10 okay so the second goat is supposed to have some different spiritual significance it says that this goat is it is to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness it explains over here if you look later on you know in verses 20 21 22 you get a little more detail maybe we can read out verses 21 and 22 someone could read out same chapter verses 21 and 22 about the second goat and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the inequities of children of Israel and their transitions in all their sins putting them upon the head of a goat and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness yeah so the first goat which was sacrificed the sins of the people are placed on that goat and the goat takes the punishment which would come upon them so that becomes the sin offering in the second case of the second goat again Aaron places his hand is it says he lay he lays his hands on the head of the second goat and again all the sins of the people the wickedness and rebellion of the people is passed on to the goat but this one is not killed as a sin offering rather it is taken into the wilderness and left to go free so the goat just goes wandering away nobody knows where it has gone and it has gone carrying all the sins of the people upon it what is the signifying it signifies the first goat signified the fact the sins of the people have been washed it's a sin offering and so by the blood of that goat the sins of the people were washed and cleansed is the spiritual significance the second goat which is bearing all the sins of the people and which has gone away somewhere and no one can find it anymore it has gone away it's like God to say I have forgotten what you people did not only did I pay for the sin and wash you off it I have also chosen a second goat which signifies that it's gone away from you you know nobody can find that goat it's gone somewhere in the wilderness completely lost only if you catch hold of it will you again remember all the sins which were put upon it so in a symbolic sense God is saying that far your sins have been removed from you it's like it's been taken away from my presence and I will no longer remember what you did you are completely forgiven so these so you know the technical terms that I used the first goat is for the propitiation of sin where the sin is paid for the second one is for the remission of sin where God is saying you know I cut the sins away from you completely and I will not even connect you to those sins anymore the next time I look at you and no longer think of you as the person who did that sin no the connection between you and that sin is cut off I will no longer think about you in terms of that sin anymore you are forgiven to that extent so that's the you know significance of these two goats which were used for this particular ritual to briefly touch upon this whole thing about clean and unclean animals a lot of people say that you know God categorized some animals as clean and some as unclean for health reasons so they say all the unclean animals are the ones which are bad for our health and that is why God said you should not eat them but this is this a defect in that argument because what happened in the New Testament in the New Testament God says you're allowed to eat all animals so does that mean with women when the New Testament started God stopped caring about the health of his people so it's not for health reasons that he categorized them into two categories God still cares about our health he still wants us to eat only the you know the correct kind of meat so it's not for health reasons that he makes a division between the clean and the unclean animals we get an idea of what God is trying to say you know on the rooftop where Peter has that experience where God connects this whole idea of unclean and clean animals to the idea of gentiles and Jews very clear connection nobody you know humanly made that connection God himself said that to Peter God talks about clean and unclean animals and he connects that idea to the concept of Jews and Gentiles so in the Old Testament time when God introduced this idea of clean and unclean animals he was trying to make a point which are the animals which are declared as unclean it's those animals which are not following the standard pattern you see the animals which are supposed to chew grass you know which chew the cut you know is what it says in the in the verse they're all supposed to have you know that the hoof of the thing is supposed to be divided so if the hoof is divided that is the proper vegetarian animal you know on the other hand you have some animals which are vegetarian for the hoof is not divided so they are not following the standard pattern so such animals God says they are unclean he has separated away all the all the no Philippians see when he writes his book he calls them the odd balls the standard ones which follow the pattern they are called clean all the odd balls which are not following the regular pattern they are you know steps kept in a separate set as unclean why does God have anything against that those animals no not at all no God loves the prawns you know God loves the pigs so it's not that God has got anything against any any any animal because when he got created creation he created all of them and declared and said this is good so all animals are good in his eyes but he was trying to bring out a spiritual meaning he was saying you Israelite people have been chosen by me to follow certain standards I am setting the pattern for you I have written five books of the Torah to show you what pattern you're supposed to follow so you are following my pattern the rest of the people the other nations are following different patterns so they are unclean but a day will come when they will also come to me and when they come to me I will teach them my ways and then they too will follow the ways of the Lord and at that time there will be no unclean unclean because you see now they're all following the same standards which God has set so at that point of time there is no need for any separation anymore so this is the spiritual significance which is there behind this whole idea of clean and unclean animals every time the Jewish people the Israelite people would eat the clean animals and they would avoid all the unclean animals in their mind they are basically saying to themselves yes we are like these clean animals which are following the set pattern which has been set by God we are not like the Gentiles who are choosing to live in other ways in different ways we be on the other hand are following the set pattern of the Lord and so finally when the time of Peter comes and Peter is on the rooftop God says now I'm going to start bringing in all the Gentiles to myself and they too will be baptized by the Holy Spirit just like the Jewish people and they too will become new you know in their inner man they will be reborn into somebody into a new person and so now those people can no longer be regarded as unclean so from now on you don't have to follow this idea of eating certain foods and avoiding certain foods because that was supposed to signify the separation of the Jews and Gentiles and now that the separation is now over you no longer have to follow that food law so God did not introduce the food loss just for the sake of health reasons he had a spiritual reason for introducing this concept all right so there is no time had this we could have talked about a few more things but that's okay anyone has any questions or doubts no one has posted anything over here either so if you don't have any doubts or questions you know we can close with the word of prayer let's pray Lord we just thank you so much for the spiritual lessons that we could learn from the book of Exodus and Leviticus Lord I pray that you would help us to live sanctified lives we thank you that you reached out to us first and now you're waiting for us to reach out to you to reciprocate from our side and express our devotion to you so we pray oh Lord that you would help us to be like those burnt offerings to completely offer ourselves in submission to you so that you may be honored in our lives thank you Lord in Jesus name amen thank you ma'am


Good evening, and welcome to the Ford Presidential Library. My name is Elaine Didier, and it's my privilege to serve as the director of the library here in Ann Arbor and the museum in Grand Rapids. Tonight is a very special program to honor Hank Book, Hank Meyer, and the publication of his authoritative biography on Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Tonight's program is very special because it's made possible by a three-way collaboration. The Ford Presidential Foundation, the Bentley Historical Library, and the Ford School of Public Policy. As many of you are aware, Hank has been an active contributor of his time and talent to each of our organizations, as well as to the university at large. Tonight's program is being live-streamed and also videotaped for later broadcast. So I have a request for your cooperation on two matters of housekeeping. First, please turn off your cell phones. And second, as you think of questions during the program, please pass them to the side aisles, and they'll be brought forward later for the Q&A so that we can have everyone hear your questions. And we promise to handle as many questions as possible. We'll begin tonight's program with introductory remarks by a couple of special guests. In a moment, we'll have Dean Michael Barr, Dean of the Ford School of Public Policy, and then President Schlissel, the 14th President of the University of Michigan. But first, let me acknowledge a couple of other guests as well. I understand that Regent Ron Weiser is supposed to be here, but I haven't seen him. Ron, are you here? OK, he may join us later. And with us is the Ford Presidential Foundation's Executive Director, Joe Calveruso. It's been a lot of fun to collaborate on this program with our neighbor, the Bentley Library, and with the Ford School. The Ford Library is especially honored to host this celebration tonight because he's been a pillar of support to all of the work that we do and currently serves as Vice Chair of the Ford Presidential Foundation. Hank, on behalf of all of us at the Library and Museum, thank you for your many, many years of support. And now it's my pleasure to introduce Michael Barr, who is the Joan and Sanford Wilde Dean of the Ford School of Public Policy. Dean Barr began his appointment in August of 2017, but had been on the faculty of the Ford School for a number of years with a primary appointment in the U of M law school. At the law school, he is the Roy and Jean Profit Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Finance, Law, and Policy. Over the course of his prestigious academic career, Dean Barr has also served in the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of our government, including Stintz at the State Department, the White House, and the Department of Treasury. Most recently, in 2009 and 10, he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions, where he led a policy team working with Congress to enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. We also were just joined by the former dean of the Ford School, Susan Collins. So it's delightful to have you with us as well, Susan. But now let me welcome and invite to the podium the new dean of the Ford School, Michael Barr. Thanks, Elaine, for that kind introduction, and many thanks to you and your team for the wonderful collaboration on this exciting event, which started under my predecessor, Susan Collins' leadership. And I've said it on other occasions, but I'll keep saying it. I'm deeply grateful to Susan for leaving me leading such a strong and vibrant and exciting institution. It is a real pleasure for the Ford School to be co-hosting tonight's book launch with the Ford Presidential Library and the University's Bentley Historical Library. President Schlissel will, in just a moment, introduce our featured speaker, Hank Meyer. But I want to say, first, a few words about the friendship that Hank has really demonstrated to the Ford School for so many years. Hank Meyer is among a group of leaders in Grand Rapids who find tremendous inspiration in the life and legacy of President Gerald Ford, as we do at the Ford School, who was, of course, a favorite son of both that great city and of the University of Michigan. From the day in 1999 when the university named its fine policy studies program for President Ford, Hank and other Grand Rapids leaders have rallied around the school. Their generosity and supporting student fellowships, strategic initiatives, and our building helped us leap forward and take a place among the country's top ranked schools of public policy. And let me just say, on a personal level, as I have been getting to know the Ford School community better, it has been just an honor and a privilege to get to know Hank, to get to know other leaders in Grand Rapids who have welcomed me into this family in ways that I could not have asked for. Hank and the Meyer Foundation, among their many gifts to the school, have championed a new Gerald R. Ford Presidential Fellowship. Our exceptional students under this program exemplify President Ford's commitment to bipartisan cooperation and civility. They're deeply and positively engaged in community and public service. And inspired by his work researching and writing the Vandenberg biography, Hank and his family made a generous gift to the Ford School to establish the annual Vandenberg lecture. The lecture series will focus on global issues and will serve as a vital intellectual tribute to Senator Vandenberg, who forged bipartisan support for our country's most significant and enduring foreign policies of the 20th century, including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the creation of the United Nations. I've had the chance to read Hank's book about Arthur Vandenberg. And let me just say, it is a beautiful book. It is a delight to read.  Presidential scholar Doug Brinkley has called it, quote, an important contribution to 20th century US political history and a landmark achievement. And I couldn't agree more. I was a history major in college. I'm a scholar of banking. And I learned things about Senator Vandenberg and banking history that I had never heard before. I didn't know about his key role, for example, in establishing federal deposit insurance in 1933 in the wake of the horrific bank failures here in Michigan and also around the country. And I also found a tremendous inspiration in Hank's story that he recounts, I think, again, so beautifully, of this powerful principled man who, despite, let's just say, his very healthy sense of self, he still knew how to listen. He still knew how to learn. He turned, really, from an isolationist view of America to a full-throated advocacy for the crucial post-World War II international institutions. Vandenberg remained open and deeply curious about the world. And in response to a changing world, his thinking evolved. He took a risk, a big risk, of reaching out his hand across the aisle and forged bipartisan consensus for American foreign policy when we needed it the most. What a great role model for all of us and for our University of Michigan students. So we are very grateful, Hank, for your belief in Arthur Vandenberg and his story and for your belief in the young people studying now at the Ford School and in the promise that they hold. And I know that you believe they hold for our future. It is now my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Mark Schlissel, who is the 14th president of the University of Michigan. I could probably end there. You know the rest of the story, at least in broad outlines. But let me just say, in my view, under the president's leadership, the university has taken bold action in a wide variety of ways to make college affordable for all Michiganders, to deepen our commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, to seek long-term solutions to poverty, to broaden the university's public engagement in the service of this fine state and the country. He's putting us on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary work in biosciences. He's just launched a new school focused on sustainability and I could go on for quite a while. I am deeply honored and privileged to have the opportunity to work with him and please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you. So good evening, everybody, and thanks, Michael, for that very kind introduction. Thanks to all of you for coming this evening. Many of us know the name of Meyer as the leading supermarket chain. And that's all I knew before I had the privilege of meeting Hank in a number of settings. But as we know, Hank Meyer is the CEO of that company and a respected business leader in West Michigan and actually in our nation. But Hank is much, much more when you consider his outstanding contributions to society and to the University of Michigan in particular. He's a U of M graduate and while here he won the prestigious Hopwood Award for his essays. The Hopwood Awards are university-wide literary prizes. He then worked as a journalist in West Michigan before joining the family business and he continues to write, of course. In addition to this book on Senator Vandenberg, Hank has written a book chronicling the family history and the life of his grandfather, the founder of the Meyer business. His wife, Liesl, also graduated from the U of M and she too is a writer. Hank has been a trusted and dedicated advisor to several University of Michigan presidents as members of the president's advisory group. His volunteer work for the university also extends to the College of Literature, Science and the Arts where he served on the dean's advisory committee for the English department. Added to Hank's roles as a businessman, historian, journalist and university volunteer is his dedication to helping others through philanthropy. He and the Meyer Foundation have supported scholarships for first generation students. He visited the Bentley frequently to conduct research for his Vandenberg book and supported the Meyer Foundation gift to create a scholarship at the Bentley so future researchers would have this great resource. It is fitting that during the University of Michigan's bicentennial we're here to celebrate an alumnus who's helped us better understand our own history while creating brighter opportunities for new generations of students. And at a time when thoughtful perspectives seem to be sorely lacking. We are fortunate to have people like Hank Meyer who seek ways to foster and encourage intellectual growth, who support others who need assistance and who chronicle the stories of those who've lived a life of public service. Like Senator Vandenberg, Hank embodies the essential role of the engaged citizen who looks out for the greater good of society. Thank you, Hank, for all you do for the University of Michigan for being a true Renaissance man and for your commitment to intellectual discovery. It's now my pleasure to introduce Terry McDonald, the director of the Bentley Historical Library. Terry, an Arthur Thirnau professor of American history became director after serving for a decade as dean of our College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Terry and the Bentley have played a large role in our bicentennial. And in addition, as chair of the President's Advisory Committee on University History, he's been advising me on how to consider requests to rename buildings on the University of Michigan campus. I'm lucky I've got Terry. Please welcome Terry McDonald. Thank you, Mark. I'm very grateful for the introduction and I don't want any more mail about the issues that I'm working with Mark, of course. I want to say how grateful I am to be here with my friend, Hank. We've known each other now for some years. And it's a real pleasure for me to be able to interview him about his book tonight and we'll hopefully have plenty of time for your questions as the evening goes on as well. As the President mentioned, I wanted to start with a point about Hank, which is, of course, that this is not Hank's first book. The first book is actually this book, this one called Thrifty Years, which is the life of Hendrick Meyer. But in fact, it's much more than that and that's the beginning of this skill that Hank has developed over time to use a biography to open up a really significant scope of American history. I recommend this to you if you have any interest in the history of Michigan and the history of West Michigan, what the Dutch colony was like and in Holland and Grand Rapids, any interest in the really interesting subject of the history of supermarkets, all of these things are opened up through this incredibly interesting period in American history in his first book. And so his second book, which we'll talk about in a moment, is really the evidence of him actually as a writer. I sort of wanted to begin with that. So Hank, you do many, many things, but one thing you do is be a writer. So tell me about, how did you first start to think about writing? How do you do it in your busy life? A little bit, you're about yourself as Hank the writer. Well, I regard myself and thank you all for coming tonight. This is very humbling and it's delightful to be able to sort of come home to the Bentley and by extension of the board where this story really started. I always loved to write. I mean, I was an English major as an undergrad and I remember a professor, a classics professor, Donald Cameron, who went and did an essay on the Odyssey and he didn't just grade it, but he critiqued it in a way that made it feel like I was the writer and he was the editor instead of the student and the professor. That was one of those sort of validating moments and that was an awkward entry that did pretty well. And then I was a reporter after college and I would say a failed poet and fiction writer, but discovered through a lot of history that it was great to be able to take a character who already existed and explore and understand and try to bring that character to life. Great, by the way, unless you think I'm just making this up, we just got a copy of an advanced review that's gonna appear in the national review in the published version, it's on the web right now, which says this, at the risk of offending Hank Meyer as the author is called, I will make a confession. I thought this book might be a fond book by a multi-billionaire with a taste for history of a half-forgotten figure from his hometown. No, it is a first-class political biography enthralling a page-turner. It ought to win prizes. Meyer ought to quit business and do this full-time. Yeah. Yeah, I know. So just so you know, my comments that have been, I feel the same as Dean Barr does that this is a fabulously interesting book. It should be on your Christmas list for people that care about Michigan history or the history of the United States because this is beautifully written door that opens up through the life of Vandenberg, this incredible period of American history. So one of my models as a history teacher is that you should never assume that anybody knows anything you're about to talk about. And so Hank, can you just kind of orient us with the life of Vandenberg? So when was he doing this and when was he doing that and kind of situate him a little bit? He was of the same generation in the late 19th century as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. And graduated from high school in Grand Rapids in 1900 and had won an oratorical prize for the Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899. So he was a high school kid, he was 16 years old. He's already thinking about international relations. Claimed he started reading Congressional Record at 14. We don't have any evidence to back that up. But when he graduated from high school, he first, his first job was working, he didn't have enough money for college and so he went to work for a biscuit factory in Grand Rapids. And this was in 1900 when Teddy Roosevelt was campaigning for vice president with William McKinley. And Teddy Roosevelt often had the same kind of exercise, the same kind of charismatic influence on a generation in 1900 that JFK might have in 1960. And Vandenberg walked away from his desk at the biscuit factory and went to that parade when Teddy Roosevelt was in town with a contingent of rough riders and when he got back to the biscuit factory, he was fired. And I would say he was fired and inspired at the same time because he then got a job as a cub reporter at the Grand Rapids Herald and quickly became their most prolific young reporter. His first byline a few months later was a big story on the Electoral College. So here again, he's 17, 18 years old doing this. For this audience, he came to Michigan, spent a year here in about 1901. Three, and ran out of money after his first year in the law department and came back to Grand Rapids and went back to the Herald. But he was, this was somebody who became editor of the Grand Rapids Herald just before he turned 22. So he was kind of a wunderkind in that sense. But what I love about his story is you begin to realize that in those days, if you were the editor or publisher of a newspaper, if you had your own constituency, you were the source of information in that community or at least in partisan papers for the Republican or the Democratic segment of that community. And he was already writing editorials and sharing opinions that were influencing the national debate from his office in Grand Rapids. So he meets Will Hayes, who's the chairman of the Republican National Committee and writes, starts writing speeches for the most important foreign policy speeches for Warren Harding in that 1920 campaign. At the same time or just before, the great debate is over American participation in the League of Nations. And Vandenberg was already at that point trying to find a compromise. For him, compromise was an art form. And he's, you've got Wilson coming back from the peace talks in Versailles, seeking approval of the Covenant for the League of Nations and not tolerating the thought of any reservations or amendments or changes to that Covenant. And then you've got the Republicans who feel slighted because none of them, Henry Cabot Lodge, a chair of foreign relations, and none of them were invited along to a peace conference and they resent and distrust Wilson and then there's isolationist who are the irreconcilables ready to stop it all together. And Vandenberg is looking for a path in the middle and he's supplying arguments that Henry Cabot Lodge is using and he's trying to persuade senators to persuade Wilson to accept some changes. He doesn't succeed, but he's already a part of the debate and he's rising in state political visibility and giving keynotes at conventions and things. But after World War I, he shares that widespread disillusion of that generation with what the war had brought. All that carnage and the seeds are sown for future conflict. And so he falls back on his hero worship of Alexander Hamilton who was the original author of No Entangling Alliances for Washington's Farewell Address and says, we really need to stay out of these European wars. And that's the spirit that's guiding him in the 1920s and the 1930s as war clouds are beginning to loom again in Europe, he becomes the leader of the isolationists in the United States Senate. And he's, and besides that, he has a growing, he's elected to the Senate appointed and then elected in 1928, becomes, the gets on foreign relations committee leads the arguments in favor of isolation and supports some early new deal measures, but then the second new deal begins to really fall out with Franklin Roosevelt and become one of his chief antagonists. He doesn't trust Roosevelt and Roosevelt's gonna get us into the war and he is staking out his position in isolation. Looked like he was gonna be the leading candidate for, he was in 1938, 39, he was regarded by many people as the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 1940. In fact, the FBI opened an office in Grand Rapids in 1938 and sent an agent out there and an elderly former editor of the Grand Rapids, Harold became a good friend of his and shared with me, he asked this guy, no, what are you working on here? Because Grand Rapids in 1938 wasn't like a really hot spot. And the agent literally said, I've been sent here to keep an eye on Arthur Vandenberg. And that's politics. But then war breaks out and the isolationist position is really discredited. And Wendell Wilkie zooms past Vandenberg and Robert Taft who's an up and coming senator at that point to win the nomination in 1940. I'm running through this sort of Cliff Notes version of his career. And then, and Vandenberg fights every step of the way the repeal of the arms embargo of the neutrality act that Roosevelt is seeking so he can aid the British. And then fights lendleafs when we wanna give 50 destroyers to the British. Fights at every step of the way, but then of course Pearl Harbor comes along and that changes everything. And Vandenberg would claim that overnight he becomes, he loses his isolationism. It's not a real legitimate claim. He always wanted to run a biography of St. Paul and he liked that conversion story. His political conversion was never quite so instantaneous. But then in the 19th, as the Republicans have been split down the middle when Wilkie comes along and his foreign policy is much closer to Roosevelt's actually. And so they've got this schism that's opened up that is open today again between their isolationists and the interventionist or internationalists in the party. And so they're looking ahead to the 1944 election when presumably Roosevelt may not want to run again and they have a chance to take back the White House. And the party bosses say, yeah, but if we can't agree on a platform we're gonna be in trouble. And so they hold a conference up on Mackinac Island and Vandenberg is in charge of the Foreign Policy Committee there and he gets these 49 Republican elected officials to, and this is Robert Taft and Earl Warren who's the governor of California and a number of people to come together around a statement in favor of a post-war organization. The Allies, the tide's turning in the war and the Allies are beginning to contemplate the future. And he crafts it so that our sovereignty won't be infringed but we are willing to be part of a new international organization. And this is at a time when Franklin Roosevelt is preventing the Democrats from making any kind of statement like this. He's focused on winning the war. He doesn't want to alienate our allies by coming up with a plan that may offend the British because their colonies might be in jeopardy. It may offend the Russians because they've got other plans for Eastern Europe. And so Vandenberg by default finds himself taking the lead in speaking out in favor of an international organization leading the Republican Party in that direction. And he says, when I got 49 primadimas to agree and he certainly took one to no one. I found the secret formula or the magic formula. And so that gains him a lot of applause but he's still viewed generally as an isolationist until as the war is nearing its end and Roosevelt's getting ready to go to Yalta for a summit conference with Stalin and Churchill where they're going to turn their attention to post-war planning. And Vandenberg stands up in the Senate on January 10th, 1945 and in a statement that contradicts a lifetime of political activity says we need to have a post-war security treaty. Let's us allies, the Russians, the British and the French, the Americans agree that we will sign a treaty to make sure that Germany and Japan are never again threats to the security of the world. And it's a very public renunciation and this is viewed as the sinner who has recanted his views. Press loves it. FDR is sort of condescending and suspicious about it but just as he's leaving for Yalta he takes 50 copies of the speech along with him. So it's a major impression. But that Mark Vandenberg sort of coming out as someone who is in favor of a global leadership role for the United States after World War II. And that means that if you're Franklin Roosevelt and you're planning to create the UN in a conference in the summer of 1945 in San Francisco, much as you despise the guy, you've got to name him to the American delegation founding the UN.  And of course Harry Truman famously had had lunch once with FDR in those between the inauguration and FDR's death and so was a decisive leader. Said, yep, we're gonna go ahead with this conference even though it's a few weeks after Roosevelt dies but is unschooled in foreign policy. Roosevelt had always been his own State Department. When it came time for a diplomatic mission he would send Harry Hopkins. He didn't call Cordell Hall the Secretary of State and ask him what to do. He kind of bypassed the State Department. So Vandenberg gets to San Francisco and the Secretary of State, Edward Statenius is a competent manager but has not been engaged in international relations much. Vandenberg's Democratic counterpart, Senator Tom Connolly, isn't that strong a figure. Vandenberg is the most important American delegate at the founding of the UN and he's sitting down across from Molotov, the Russian Foreign Secretary in the penthouse of the Fairmont Hotel and that's where a lot of the decisions get made about what the charter of the UN is gonna look like. And so that really starts Vandenberg on this new path. He comes back from there, goes to the first UN General Assembly where one of the other delegates is in London is Eleanor Roosevelt with whom he's had a really fractious relationship because the Republicans figure, she's always been sort of the socialist behind FDR and Vandenberg's mantra was we need to be, as a moderate Republican, we need to be social minded but not socialist and he drew that big distinction. But they sail over to Southampton together and he writes that they become good friends. And he said, I take back everything I've said about her and it's become plenty. And then he goes on to attend and no senators I don't think have ever played this role in our diplomatic history, he and his counterpart Connolly go to the peace conferences in Paris where the treaties are being negotiated among the foreign ministers of all the Italy and all the other defeated allies of Germany. And so he's, and in fact in 1946 he's a candidate for reelection and he only returns to Michigan into Grand Rapids in time to vote. He's been in Paris or Washington the rest of the year but it's that sort of indispensable and then comes the need for European reconstruction and George Marshall unveils the Marshall Plan, Vandenberg, good conservative Republican that he is bristles at the cost but sits down with Marshall and they figure out how to sell it to the Senate and he puts that through the Senate and then redevelopment is great but we need to, but the Red Army is posed across Europe and the Western democracies are feeling very insecure and so they want to create some kind of defensive union and they come to the United States and Vandenberg in drafting the charter of the UN has made sure that the Latin Americans and the U.S. can have a mutual defense-packed sort of under the tradition of the Monroe Doctrine and so that's a template in the UN charter that will allow him to create the Vandenberg Resolution that enables U.S. participation in NATO. And see, so UN Marshall Plan, NATO and then he dies rather abruptly, comes easy, he fights for the appropriations for NATO and then he's a leading, he's viewed as a potential candidate for president in 1948, doesn't campaign, his wife has cancer at that point and soon after that a spot is discovered on his left lung and in September of 1949, he comes here to Ann Arbor to have half of that lung removed. He wanted to postpone that because he wanted to be indispensable in Washington and it really made his ego feel good to think that maybe Truman and the government couldn't get along without him and the week he's scheduled to come back here for surgery is the week the Russians explode their atomic bomb and he writes to his wife to say, to consult with his doctor who's his best friend back in Grand Rapids, to say, talk to AB, the doctor at Eskimo, is it really necessary for me to come back now because I think I need it in Washington. Doctor, no, you gotta come back and he's next two years, he's in and out of a hospital, goes back to Washington once but ultimately dies in the spring of 1951 as the Korean War is breaking out, as the civil war in China comes to an end and Mao wins and other Republicans are saying, who lost China? And then there's a young senator named Joe McCarthy who is beginning to run wild. All these things are contributing to the deterioration of this bipartisan sort of miracle that had happened from 1945 to 1949 and Vandenberg is off the scene and not able to be a part of that debate and one of the things that's fun to conjecture about is what might have happened with McCarthyism had Vandenberg lived. Edward R. Murrow the week that Vandenberg died talked about that and said that had he lived, he would have gloried in the debate and he would have steadied it and expected sound reminds to prevail. Anyway, that's the outline of the life. Anyway, as you can hear from that, fantastic times in American history and this book basically chronicles all that through the lens of Vandenberg's life in an incredibly interesting and easily accessible way. So big personalities in these years, you've got Vandenberg on the Republican side, you've got Roosevelt on the Democratic side and one of the strongest statements you make in the book is Vandenberg hated Roosevelt. So what was the relationship between Vandenberg and Franklin Roosevelt? Why was it so bitter? Well, they had once been somewhat closer. I mean, Roosevelt sort of jokingly said that if Vandenberg had, well, Vandenberg was smart enough in 1936, Alph Landon really wanted him on the ticket as vice president and smart move to stay off since Landon famously carrying Maine in Vermont. But Roosevelt, they were amicable at that point because Vandenberg, being both a wily politician but also understanding the emergency of the depression had supported some of the early New Deal measures. And, you know, even gave, Michael was talking about the FDIC and that was Vandenberg's brainchild. He had to fight Roosevelt to get it but finally gave credit to Roosevelt for implementing it. But he was very mistrustful of Roosevelt, the isolationist. And Roosevelt was concerned about him as a candidate. In 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of war in Europe, the British king and queen came to the U.S. on a goodwill visit that was a beautiful piece of PR building support for the British and they had a big garden party at the British embassy and then they had a reception that night at the White House and Vandenberg was in line, the receiving line and Roosevelt introduced him to the king as this is a man who thinks he's going to succeed me but he isn't without introducing, without mentioning Vandenberg's name and it went on. And the king addressed a joint session of Congress the next day and saw Vandenberg again and said, well, it's nice to put a name with a face. But there was just real bitterness on both sides. Well, and then Hazel, one of her planned communities was to be a town in West Virginia whose cottage industry would be furniture making. And you can imagine how the senator from Grand Rapids looked at a federal project to build furniture. Just didn't sit right. But anyway, they had a very rivalrous relationship. One of the things that's interesting about this period is how a senator could have so much authority and be so much involved with all these very high level policies and of course one of the reasons they had the retention between Roosevelt and Vandenberg was because this was the leader of the opposition party that had extraordinary visibility and authority. So how did Vandenberg basically accumulate all this prestige and authority within the Republican party and ultimately beyond? What do you think was the secret to his assent? Well, I would back up a little bit and I think there has been a significant erosion in the stature of the senators in the last 50 or 60 years. I think that novel advise and consent that it was one of the first political novels that I read when I was a kid was in the 50s and that was when it was still a big deal to be a senator. A lot of them are household names in a way that they tend not to be today unless there's something sort of notorious happening. No, and the legislative branch, that Roosevelt was in the early stages of the imperial presidency and as more power has accrued to the executive, that has come at the expense of the legislative sometimes I think through abdication on the part of the legislators, but the committee chairs in Congress had such power. And I mean, even when Vandenberg was chaired foreign relations and he and Robert Taft, he basically deferred to Taft on domestic policy in the 40s and Taft deferred to Vandenberg on foreign policy generally. It didn't matter who the minority or majority leader was. People didn't even remember that Wallace White was I think the majority leader because Taft and Vandenberg were calling all the shots. And I think the committee roles were so much stronger than as well. Something else you might remember that Hank was here the night that we had a celebration here for Congressman Dingell. And one of the things he pointed out was in those days everyone that went to Washington stayed there. I don't know if you noticed that that there was this kind of interaction among all the office holders. Whereas of course today, they are expected to return almost every week. So I don't think you think that made a difference. Very much. The Wardman Park Hotel, which is the sheriff on Connecticut Avenue today had a residential tower. And it was one of two or three really nice big apartment buildings in the district. And there were cabinet members and other congressmen and senators. They were all living in the same apartment building. I mean, Vandenberg tells a story and I don't think it's in the book about Henry Wallace is a neighbor. Now, Henry Wallace is Secretary of Agriculture. Vandenberg is slamming the Agricultural Adjustment Act where the plan to create scarcity to raise farm prices. But Henry Wallace is a neighbor and is out back in the hotel throwing a boomerang trying to show and showing Vandenberg is boomerang and nearly taking his head off. But you had that kind of just casual interaction. So let's go back to the actual transition. I mean between, and I think it's important and one of the really interesting things about the book is how dramatic it was for the absolute leader of the isolationist in those years to turn internationalists. So what do you think were the various things that went into that change in Vandenberg? Obviously Pearl Harbor changed our sense of security but there were other factors. Vandenberg's nephew, and in many ways I most want to say sir against son was Army Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg. And so Vandenberg Air Force based his name for the general, not the senator. And he was a young up and comer in the Air Force, a real student of modern warfare. He'd been in Britain during the Battle of Britain as an observer and would later become the second director of the CIA. It was pretty plugged into things. But I think he's coming over to the Wardman Park on a Sunday afternoon and he and Arthur excuse themselves to the kitchen and talk strategy. So I think that was a factor. I have to mention that I don't think it was a factor but Arthur had a pretty high profile affair with the wife of a Canadian attaché attached to the British embassy. I was interviewing one elderly reporter who said, well the, and her name was Mitzi Sims. And in fact, Walter Winchell had one of his radio pieces described the senator from Mitzi again. Which didn't, this was in 1939, did not help Vandenberg's prospects in 1940 either. But the, but an elderly reporter said to me, well of course the British planted Mitzi on Vandenberg just like they planted Kay Summersby on Ike. And there was that sense and I think it's eminently, and her husband was a good friend of William Stevenson who was the British intelligence director in the US. And he was reputed to run the code room at the embassy. But there's every reason to believe that they may well have planted her because Vandenberg is leading the isolationists who are plotting in the Senate to stop the repeal of the arms embargo, to fight Lend-Lease, and the British needed to know what was going on. I mean these were the people who were, might be standing between them and destruction by the Germans. So I don't, I think, but other, you know, critics of his blamed her. I don't, it's fun to mention it sort of salatiously but I can't give it a lot of credibility. But I think it was Pearl Harbor, it was Hoyt-Vandenberg, it was unquestionably a recognition that World War I had ended badly and that the US was going to be in a position of global leadership and had to take that seriously. And it was increasingly apparent that there would be a vacuum when the war ended. And in fact, you very quickly, when Vandenberg's in San Francisco, he's negotiating with Molotov, this is in 1945, the war's still going on. And the vast preponderance of information that most Americans are getting is that the Russians are still our friends and allies. But in San Francisco, at the UN, they're already having arguments about their separate visions of the world. And in fact, Vandenberg writes a speech in the fall of 1945 and he calls it the Iron Curtain speech. And it is, as far as I can tell, the first use of the phrase Iron Curtain in a public address or forum of any kind in the US. Now Churchill has used it in communications and in the UK, but in the US, Vandenberg delivers his Iron Curtain speech and his friend and advisor, John Foster Dulles, writes to him and says, great speech, basically too bad nobody heard it, but I think the coinage will catch on. The speech was like the same week that I'm not sure Eisenhower returned from Europe or something and there were big parades. MacArthur, wasn't that MacArthur who came back? That was when he died, that's when Vandenberg died. But the news of the day drowned out his speech, even though he had to send it out on congressional stationery that says Iron Curtain speech. But he was early on more conscious than most that the new power rivalry would be with the Soviets and that the US was gonna have to step into that. So tell us something then about the man.  You point out that he sort of aspired to greatness but sort of wanted to be asked. He wasn't really, for example, the fact that he constantly couldn't decide to run for president when there was a possibility of all these years. He enjoyed being in the center of things all the time. He was, on the other hand, he was kind of fragile and insecure. What's your take on him as a man at the end of the biography? Well, I think, I mean, it's an easy shorthand to make but you could say there was sort of this lifelong search for security. His father had a harness business that was pretty prosperous in Great Rapids that went bust in the panic of 1893 when Vandenberg was nine years old and they lived in a pretty big Victorian house and his father was an exaggeration to say a broken man but he never really, he was always, I think, felt crushed by the failure of his business and his mother took in borders and Arthur started doing all sorts of odd jobs and really was working, working, working to achieve a level of security again that he had lost when he was a kid. Now, can you transfer that to a sense of an American need for security? It's, I like that narrative idea. It's a bit of a stress but it's also a true, I think there is a kernel of truth there that he was looking for security. He wasn't a visionary leader in many ways. He wanted to make sure things worked. When his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, split off from the Republicans with a bull moose party, he stayed with the regular Republicans. He wasn't ready to follow the grand adventure of Teddy Roosevelt and he stayed and then he worked to bring the factions of the party together again. He was, he had a huge ego invested in what he did but what he did was usually trying to patch things up. So this was not in any way written to be a track for the times and I can say that because I've been in touch with you during the writing process but it turns out it probably has something to say to us. Most of the time historians of course don't want to be asked about what are the lessons of your book for the present but this kind of is coming out at a time when some of these same questions are back on the table. So what would you take, what would you think so much would take from this story about the contemporary conversation about international engagement and all these kind of things? Well there is a world order that for better or worse has sustained, has prevented global war for what seven decades now and that has to do I think with the architecture of the security frameworks that were created in those years after World War II and it seems like we ought not to risk we risk those at our peril and so he would have been very protective of his babies and that includes the United Nations. I mean he had very idealistic visions for the United Nations even as we all struggle with its effectiveness sometimes. I think of course the challenge for someone who wants to be working a bipartisan way is you need partners and we've seen not just in the current climate but in past administrations of both parties you've seen a reluctance on one side or the other or sometimes on both to engage with each other and he was all about engaging and then of course we think about so many things being done by executive order and that was one of his great resentments of Roosevelt because Roosevelt was employing executive orders more aggressively than his predecessors but Vandenberg when he did the Marshall Plan the hearings for the Marshall Plan I haven't researched this fully so things may have changed recently but I sure don't think so. I think had the most exhaustive senate if not congressional testimony ever. Basically because he's saying I'm gonna wear down the opposition I'm gonna give everybody a chance to talk and I may not agree with them but they're gonna have their day in talking about it and then in fact he would get in trouble occasionally in the foreign relations committee because he would invite in senators who weren't on the committee to participate in closed door sessions and things because he knew he might need their votes and if he could get them inside he'd have a better chance of getting their votes so he was and he would be digressed but I think Dean Etchison's book present at the creation for someone interested in that period is the great history of the post-war years and it's beautifully written and very comprehensive and it puts Dean Etchison at the center of the creation and he sort of he kind of is a little bit kind when Marshall is presenting the case for the Truman Doctrine to come to the aid of Greece and Turkey, Etchison talks in his book about how Marshall's done and the congressman are kind of shaking the leaders of the senator like Vandenberg and are kind of listening and shaking their heads trying to figure out what to do and then Etchison says well then I chimed up and I explained how to do it and then he said with Vandenberg his ego required him to put his, we'd craft a proposed piece of legislation and he'd have to put his stamp on it now Etchison saw that as an expression of Vandenberg's ego and it was absolutely there but Vandenberg also was tweaking it in ways that he knew he could take to the Senate and sell it and one of his colleagues once asked him after I'm one of his bills you know what's the meaning of these words and Vandenberg said well don't worry about it they mean different things to 10 different people but I can tell them all what you know I've covered I've got what you want in this bill and that's how you made it work and so you know we're not used to that kind of exhaustive tinkering anymore we're putting things through that people aren't reading. Great we have time for some questions do we have some? Free so far so please pass them forward. This is the, you made good use of Vandenberg diaries and letters you also interviewed a lot of people was there a time during an interview or reviewing documents where you thought wow I can't believe I'm learning this? There was a Chicago Tribune Washington correspondent named Walter Trohan who was in the Chicago Tribune Vandenberg had a very complicated relationship with Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune who was one of the most ardent isolationists which meant that Vandenberg for a long time was one of his favorites and then when Vandenberg changed became a traitor and so Trohan would get invited into a lot of the isolationist issues and debates and so he was telling me about a meeting in Vandenberg's apartment with half a dozen of the leading isolationists who were not all Republicans it was Burt Wheeler from Montana who famously accused Roosevelt when he wanted to push for aid to England and said you're going to plow up every third American boy or something like that but there were like half a dozen of the isolationist leaders they're plotting how to fight the repeal of the arms embargo and Mitzi Sims stops by because the Sims has lived upstairs from the Vandenbergs at the Wurban Towers and Mitzi comes in and is sort of fawning over the senator with these other senators there and Trohan says just where do I go to throw up? Those wonderful little vignettes that sort of confirm I mean the scrapbooks the Vandenberg family gave their papers to the Bentley and a wonderful a small but wonderful resource here and in those scrap and in those papers are Hazel Vandenberg scrapbooks and she was a good writer in her own right and kept fairly meticulous records and I became good friends with Vandenberg's youngest daughter who died in the late 1990s she lived out in Connecticut and was pushing her on his relationship with Mitzi Sims because she wanted to kind of say it was platonic but then she pulls out this one scrapbook page that they had not donated with all the rest to the Bentley that had a picture of Mitzi Sims from the society columns of one of the Washington papers talking about what a luscious peach she was and showed Hazel from the year before when she was out in Arizona for her sinuses which is why these issues these liaisons could take place because she was gone a lot of the year for allergies and she says so much happier than now and anyway it was those were close to kind of wonderful moments in your research and have you noticed whenever he mentions that this whole Mitzi situation the lights down? This is actually in the book have heard that Vandenberg's pivotal speech embracing internationalism was drafted by James Reston of the New York Times any truth to that? Partial truth Vandenberg he was an old newsman himself and the senior journalists a lot of them were his good friends and he routinely would share his speech drafts with three or four journalists and Jim Tobin here is an immense help with the book you did your dissertation on Blair Moody and Blair Moody who was then at the Detroit News was one of those Washington correspondents that Vandenberg would share his speeches with James Reston was another and Arthur Croc James Reston's boss and predecessor at the Times was a very good friend of Vandenberg's and Reston read the speech and said you got to beef it up a little bit let's flesh out this proposal for a post-war treaty and as best we can so I think Reston does get credit for making a big contribution to that speech just how much as Vandenberg is going through multiple drafts of things like that he was definitely an influence and definitely influenced his influence he influenced Vandenberg to be more outspoken in favor of a post-war treaty which did a lot to elevate Vandenberg's stature and speed his conversion this is a little presentist but is there anyone in the present-day Senate who you think would be approaching Vandenberg as a moderate unifier and as an opposing force to isolationism there's just nobody with that stature who commands... there was a look magazine profile of Vandenberg in 1946 and they quoted one of his colleagues who said Van thinks what the American people think just a little bit earlier in other words he wasn't a visionary leader but as the popular opinion was beginning to evolve after the war he was just able to capture what people wanted to hear said and that gave him... and because he had been an isolationist before he had all kinds of credibility he wasn't somebody who was... he was... most Americans wanted to stay out of the European war before the war and then they were ready to be... to find a new direction after the war and he was capturing that general thought in both cases so you don't have that kind of... those kind of pivotal points today that someone could identify with but you also just don't have the stature so Richard Lugar in Indiana and I'm trying to remember was he primaried out? or... there would have been somebody who would have embodied that spirit without the stature but obviously wasn't able to represent enough of his party to carry... to survive in the Senate I think... Bob Corker may have some of those instincts but again, not... not of the stature We're going to end with this one because this is... takes us onto the spiritual plane what if any was the influence of Dutch Calvinism on Vandenberg? rigorous after-church debates on fine points of theology led to the success of Grand Rapids as four religious publishers for example one of those religious publishers published the book of my grandfather who was not remotely religious so they were pretty tolerant too but Vandenberg was never reformed or Christian reformed he was congregationalist lifelong but... and so the... that Christian reform influence as such was not profound one of the great little pieces of his... chapters of his life was his relationship with some of you may have heard of Peter Marshall a big bestseller called a man called Peter he was this charismatic Scots Presbyterian preacher who was chaplain of the Senate just a couple of years when Vandenberg was president pro tem of the Senate and chaired foreign relations committee and as president pro tem there was no vice president under Truman he had the vice president's office and presided over the Senate and so he would meet with Peter Marshall almost every day the Senate was in session Marshall would stop by Vandenberg's office and find out what was on the agenda that day and then craft an opening prayer tailored to that and you know Vandenberg one occasion Vandenberg's worried about his wife Hazel's cancer and there's something about healing and that sort of thing in fact I didn't think I was going to share anything with this book but there was one moment that might relate slightly to presentism but the Vandenberg in his last big fight before he goes home and has the cancer surgery as I mentioned is fighting for the military aid to the European democracies to give some teeth to NATO and as a New York congressman who chairs the house I think appropriations committee named John Taber and he is fighting Vandenberg gets works with the administration on a certain amount of aid in the aid package and Taber guts it and Vandenberg is furious and he's being undercut by the Republicans in the house and so Peter Marshall I just have this in here Peter Marshall opened the next day's session with a nod to Vandenberg's frustration our father he intoned sometimes we are discouraged and disappointed in the government of this nation and the common people of other lands cannot understand the difference between what we say and what we do so he used his spiritual relations to political purposes well thank you everyone and thank you Hank I know a lot of people want to see you and possibly have some copies of the books autograph which are available out in the lobby wonderful book wonderful man to have a relationship with the university in the state of Michigan so thank you so much for being with us it's a treat thank you so much


So I'm going to introduce two methods of trying to describe flats in a general vector space. And the names aren't super clever. We're going to have the top down approach versus the bottom up approach. In this video we're going to discuss what we mean by the top down approach. Now the top down approach for describing flats is to use linear equations and we're going to start adding more linear equations. So let's say we have a single linear equation and use the example of R3 to help motivate what happens here.  The angle will depend on the coefficients ABCD and things like that, but we'll have some plane that lives inside of 3 space. Because the solution to a single linear equation and R3 is a plane, what we do is in general, we say that the solution to a single linear equation in Rn, or in fact in any vector space fn, we call this a hyperplane. The prefix hyper here is kind of describing that it might be transcending our usual notion of three-dimensional geometry. But really what a hyperplane means is that a hyperplane is something, so like our hyperplane we'll call it H. This is something that's congruent to fn-1 when we look inside of the vector space fn. It's one, so to speak, dimension smaller than the universe that's living inside of it. So for example in R3, a hyperplane is just a genuine plane because a plane is essentially congruent to f2. This two-dimensional space. And when you look at the linear equation by itself, everything except for the first variable could be treated as a free variable after all. A single linear equation in R3 has two free variables and that two-ness is kind of with predicting that we actually had a plane right here. On the other hand, when you have a linear equation in fn, you're gonna have n-1 free variables and that's essentially why the hyperplane's gonna look like f to the n-1. And so this is an affine set that looks like fn-1 inside of fn. That's what a hyperplane is. Well what happens if we take a second plane inside of R3? If we take a second linear equation, it produces a second plane and we then could draw maybe something like the following. Looks like this maybe. And these planes of course we can see through them. And so when you look at the two planes, they're gonna intersect each other to form some type of line, right? And so maybe if we draw this a little bit better, like this right here is on the other side of the plane. So these things, whoops, no that's not what I wanted to do, I want to do something like this, yes. So when we look at these, whoops and I did that wrong as well, that part, there you go. So when you look at these planes, they intersect at each other at a line and I apologize for the crudeness of this drawing here. Clearly I never got a PhD in art, I already think like that. But when we intersect two planes, their common intersection would probably be a line, which a line is another type of flat, isn't it? So when we put the two equations together, so let's imagine we have now this system of equations where we had the first equation a11x1 plus a12x2 all the way up to a1nxn equals something we'll call b1. We didn't throw in the second equation a21x1 plus a22x2 all the way down to a2nxn equals b2. So when we look at this system of equations, two equations in unknowns, we've now intersected two hyperplanes. So we have the intersection, the intersection of two hyperplanes. And when we take the two hyperplanes together, their intersection is not a hyperplane. In some respect, the intersection is one dimension smaller. If we take two planes, which we think of as two dimensional, when we intersect them, we get this one dimensional object, which in R3 we'd call that a line. But in general, this is going to give you something that's congruent to f in minus two. We sort of lost two dimensions when we intersect these two hyperplanes. So one has to be careful that if these two equations, if they're not linearly independent, then adding the second equation actually doesn't change the first one because they just overlay each other. So if we have two independent equations, their intersection will give you a flat that is two dimensions lower than the ambient space. And what if we keep on doing this? What if we keep on adding more and more equations to the system of equations? What if we add another equation A31x1 plus A32x2 all the way up to A3nxn equals B3? And what if we add another one, A41x1 plus A42x2 all the way up to A4nxn is equal to B4, right? We could keep on doing this. We could keep on adding it. And every time we add a new linear equation, assuming that it was linearly independent to the equations we pretty easily have, right? The first one gave us a hyperplane f in minus one. But then the second one, when we put them together, gives us a flat that looks like f in minus two. These are just congruence, right? Then we do the first three, you get something that looks like f in minus three. When you do the next one, you're going to get f in minus four. And so as you keep on adding more and more and more, eventually this kind of like terminates. There's a limit on how many times you can add a linearly independent equation, right? You end up with nnx1 plus An2... Sorry, not. That should be An1x1 plus An2x2 all the way down to Annxn equals Bn. And so if you look at this all together, you're going to end up with, again, assuming all the equations were linearly independent the entire time. We didn't add an equation that was already covered by combinations of the previous ones. When we combine this together, this should give us something congruent. The solution set should give us something congruent to f0, which f0 is just the vector space containing only the zero vector space. It's just a single point, a zero dimensional vector space. And so when we add this final equation, you get something that's just a point, which would be a unique solution. This is kind of why we love this square linear system when you're in by n. If your equations were chosen to be linearly independent, having the same number of equations as you have variables is the minimal number of equations you have to have to have a unique solution. If you have too few equations, if it's an underdetermined system, then you will not have unique solutions that will have to be multiple solutions. Because if you have too few equations, you have too many variables, which would represent this linear, you necessarily have to have this linear independence on the variables. That is, there have to be a free variable in the system. So we can describe flats as intersections of hyperplanes. You have one hyperplane, you're going to get fn-1. Two hyperplanes, if they're independent, will give you fn-2. If you have three hyperplanes, if the equations are independent, you'll get fn-3. You can keep on adding more and more equations until at the end you have a single point. Well, once you start adding another equation after the nth spot, you can't guarantee independence anymore. You're going to add in another equation. Well, you're going to get an overdetermined system in that situation. So you potentially, you're going to get inconsistency, right? So the only way you proceed is you add equations which are dependent to the previous equations. But you could also add them in such a way that you get inconsistent, right? So along this whole journey, we're assuming we were consistent and the equations were independent along the way. And so there is sort of like a limit in describing these affine sets. And this summarizes what we mean by the top-down approach describing a flat.