Episode 92: Mark Part 32—What Defiles a Man?

This is the second part of last week’s teaching, where Yeshua/Jesus lays down the difference between impurity that can and cannot be washed away. This parable is brutal and takes no prisoners.

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¹⁴ And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵ There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” ¹⁷ And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. ¹⁸ And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, ¹⁹ since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) ²⁰ And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him ²¹ For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, ²² coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. ²³ All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

As I hope I mentioned last week, this is the third of the three purity controversies in Mark’s Gospel. The first was the healing of the leper, whom Yeshua/Jesus touched (rendering him ritually unclean), and the second was the woman with the issue of blood (again rendering him unclean). You might ask why I don’t include the raising of Jairus’s daughter but that wasn’t a controversy. Although Yeshua became unclean the moment he entered the room with her dead body, no one was around to challenge Him on it. Therefore no controversy arose. But this, of course, is part two of the infamous “unwashed hands” incident where the Pharisees notice that Yeshua’s disciples are not ritually washing their hands before eating bread as was dictated in the “tradition of the elders” and we talked about what that was and was not about. Unfortunately, there is this tendency within Messianic Judaism and the Hebrew Roots movement, and mainstream Christianity to focus on the food aspect when that was not Yeshua’s focus at all. His focus was twofold (1) His accusers were majoring in the minors by nitpicking over their own traditions when some of their traditions were oppressing others and (2) there is uncleanness that can and cannot be washed away and they were focused on the wrong kind.

The Pharisees were overly concerned with cultural boundary markers—those things that separated them from everyone else and even other Jews. I call these sorts of things “artificial set-apartness” and we still see them loud and proud among believers today. You know, the things that aren’t salvational and yet are still used by one believer or one group of believers to divide from others. And the boundaries are usually very convenient—I do this and set myself apart while ignoring this other thing. For example, if you don’t pronounce the Divine Name this way, I will consider myself to be not really one with you the way that Yeshua commanded His disciples to be one. And we are commanded to not be divisive—in fact, we are told to throw the divisive brother out of the congregation in Titus 3:9-11. Who is the divisive brother? The brother who, like these Pharisees who came after Yeshua, engage in “foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.” And this is what we saw the Pharisees doing last week. They had a tradition that they were holding others accountable to—a tradition, mind you, that would later make it impossible for the Gospel to be preached to all the world. The man-made commands to adhere to a suprahuman level of imposed ritual cleanliness would have made table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles impossible. So deeply ingrained was this belief and these human-imposed boundaries that it wasn’t until Acts 10, a full decade after Yeshua’s resurrection, that He finally got through to His followers, who were all Jews at the time. In order to make them clean, you must go to the unclean, without scruples. In order to lift someone out of the dirt, you are going to have to get your hands dirty. The same goes with us today. You can’t feed the homeless from a mile away or minister to drunks on skid row without being right there with them. I mean, any more than you can be a doctor without getting blood on you. Being a believer is about being in the trenches and it is a filthy place, being in the trenches. We get to leave the trenches in the world to come but this life is about being there and being filthy at times. The Pharisees and their scribes believed they could stay separate from all that. They felt it was their job to tell everyone what to do and to get just close enough to do that—but they wouldn’t share table fellowship with the am ha’aretz, the people of the land whom they suspected of not being observant enough, much less with Gentiles. But the handwashing controversy was very much what I call a created controversy. It didn’t have to exist because these were traditions that were not commanded and thus they had no business judging people over.

Example:  About eight years ago I was part of a congregation in my community where the leader objected to me for a few reasons—none of which having anything to do with my character and were entirely over silly differences. He didn’t approve of how I said the divine name—it even popped up in a sermon once under the auspices of being tolerant, “it doesn’t matter how you say it but…I know that my way is right.” But things came to a head when I had the audacity to wish everyone on my social media wall Chag Sukkot Sameach on the “wrong” day. He was dark moon and at the time I was first sliver (now I just keep the Rabbinic calculated calendar in order to stay sane and keep out of the ridiculous infighting). So, he started to argue with me and everyone on my wall over it. And when it went to private messages, it got even worse—told me I was nothing but a cowboy Messianic who ought to listen to what a Jew has to say about it (he being Jewish himself). I pointed out the Jews who, in fact, do support the first sliver (including the Mishnah) but I guess only the Jews who followed the dark moon reckoning counted. In the end, he ended up blocking me. Not because I was promoting my way as the only way in the congregation or even on my wall. I merely said the Name differently than he did and kept a different calendar—this put me outside of his artificial boundaries. Of course, this is a good example of a created controversy over a side issue. As he cannot categorically prove either of his positions, they were unworthy divisions between brothers and sisters in Messiah. Years ago, like sixteen years ago, Yahweh told me specifically not to divide from anyone on the basis of anything other than Christ and Him crucified—which is why I take such a hard line on former brothers and sisters who have gone on to deny Him. But anything less than that and we have to be very careful with whom we divide based only on reasons of doctrine and tradition. We generally find ourselves on shifting sands when we do so and how many of us have divided over nonsense that we later found to be entirely untrue? Ugh. Don’t even get me started. Let’s just say that I have gotten to be very good at apologizing.

So, last week we covered the Pharisee’s manufactured controversy. Yeshua’s disciples were not ritually washing their hands before eating bread and Luke tells us that Yeshua wasn’t doing it either. As it is not a commandment, everyone should have shrugged it off but it became the source of an accusation—one that had to be addressed because of what is about to happen in the accounts that follow, which we will discuss over the next three weeks. Yeshua has to set the precedent that will be remembered later. Namely—there is uncleanness that can and cannot be washed away. Unless one is headed to the Temple, the latter is far more important than the former.

As we go through the Torah, we see that most sources of uncleanness come from inside a person. Menstrual blood, seminal emissions during sex, venereal discharges, the blood that comes from childbirth, leprosy, etc. The overwhelming majority of these are not from sin—with venereal discharges being a huge example of that. You had to get it from somewhere and unless you were a faithful spouse who got it from a cheating partner, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do. Corpses make one unclean—even being under the same roof with one. Carcasses of dead unclean animals also make a person unclean. But the uncleanness of all these is temporary—with the exception of corpse impurity today, which cannot be cleansed because there are no red heifer ashes. We are all, therefore, incurably unclean with the worst form of uncleanness of all. The Grandfather of Impurities is what the Mishnah calls it. But again, the overwhelming majority of uncleanness has nothing to do with sin. In the case of sex, for example, it is the only way to be fruitful and multiply.

The Pharisees wouldn’t eat with unwashed hands for fear that they had come in contact with some mystery uncleanness out and about and especially in the marketplace. But that sort of unwritten need for hyper-vigilance was a decision of their sect of Judaism and not a command. When they confronted Yeshua, it was for the purpose of making Him and His disciples look like they were outside the boundary of acceptable Judaism. But Yeshua is going to turn the tables on them, as He always did. Let’s get to the text, chapter seven of the Gospel of Mark starting in verse 14:

¹⁴ And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 

Yeshua, with the Pharisees still right there, calls the crowd to Him again. The word for people here is ochlos, which is usually translated as crowd elsewhere, so these are the people who typically flock to Him whenever He is in a place. He says, “Hear me and understand,” and again this is a statement of authority—specifically speaking as wisdom speaks in the Proverbs as we will read at the end (oops, ran out of time! Homework for you!). We will read from Proverbs 1 at the end as a finale (oops, no we didn’t), but when He speaks like this, you know that revelation is about to come to the people. Let’s look at Micah and the Wisdom of Solomon really quick here, one is Scripture, of course, and the other is Second Temple wisdom literature.

Micah 1:2 Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple.

Wisdom 6:1 So then, you kings, you rulers the world over, listen to what I say, and learn from it. 

This is strikingly similar to, “Hear me, all of you, and understand” because these are formulaic opening statements for revelation of something important that must be understood, accepted, and acted upon. He’s about to tell them that the Pharisees are majoring in the minors, over personal decisions about how to live that are not authoritative. Notice that He never rebukes them for their handwashing, only over their focus and (as we saw last week) the ways that their legalistic wrangling has sometimes led to oppression.

¹⁵ There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” 

Yeshua is simply stating a truth of the Torah here that it is death and bodily discharges and things that lead to social death that make people unclean. This is what the Torah teaches. Of course, the Pharisees were saying that otherwise clean foods could be defiled by eating them with unwashed hands. The problem is that the food in question wasn’t holy food, and holy food is the only kind of food that can truly be defiled. Food is already clean and if it is not clean then it isn’t food. Food is defined by Leviticus 11 and all food is clean unless is has been torn by beasts or found dead or, if it is sacrificial meat and holy, has somehow been kept for too long or removed too far from the Temple or any of the other disqualifiers. But there is nothing in Torah saying that what is clean can be made unclean because of unwashed hands. The only exception to this is that the priests’ hands had to be washed before they could serve at the altar and if they didn’t, the sacrifices would be defiled. But Yeshua wasn’t teaching anything here that isn’t simply in the Torah.

The crowd, however, would only understand the meaning that was against the Pharisees. Namely, that they were wrong to hold Him or anyone to this artificial standard because it wasn’t keeping them or their food from becoming defiled. As we have seen, there is always a move from public to private for those who followed Him and asked questions. To those who kept close, He will tell the rest of the story.

¹⁷ And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 

So, this is a parable. And they realized that there was more to the story than met the eye—probably because there was always more to His teachings than met the eye. But we see that He entered “the house” and we don’t know where this house is. We know it isn’t in Jerusalem, where the Temple is called “the house” and we see that specifically on Shavuot/Pentecost where 120 of them were praying there when the Spirit came on them in power. He might well be back in Capernaum and this is either His own house or the home of Peter’s mother in law. The text doesn’t say. But now He is alone with His disciples and like good students, they never ask Him questions in public. Now, why is that?

In honor/shame cultures, the only questions asked publicly are generally challenges or genuine requests for information from outsiders. But mostly they are challenges. If you can trip someone up, your honor status rises and theirs falls. It’s simple zero-sum economics, which we have discussed before and I talk about in my curriculum book, Honor and Shame in the Bible which is for kids but I think most of the people who use it are adults. There is only so much honor to go around so if I want more I have to take it from you somehow. A loving disciple, relative or friend never questioned in public for fear that they wouldn’t be able to give a good answer and would be shamed in the public eye. Private questions never shamed anyone because you needed an audience in order to be honored or shamed. When you were with your kin or your close friends, that was a safe zone.

But, like I said, this is a parable that surprises people who think that a parable has to be some kind of story. A parable was a teaching with deeper meanings than one would immediately see on the surface. But, as usual, they were confused. There was a deeper meaning but they weren’t understanding it.

¹⁸ And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding?

I always wonder if Yeshua was as frustrated and distressed as I head Him in my mind. “Are you also without understanding?” Like, “Look, the leadership that opposes me is blinded, but you too?” So often He said, “How long will I be with you?” almost as though He is making the remark that there will never be enough time to get His message through their thick skulls and indeed, as we see, there wasn’t ever going to be enough time because even after His death they were clueless until He returned and spent time teaching them—but even afterward, as we see in Acts 10 and Galatians, serious course corrections were needed to bring them on track with His agenda and will. And He says this to them, or the text makes reference to their lack of understanding, like five times in the Gospel of Mark. He said it when they asked Him about the Parable of the Sower, when they failed to discern His identity when He calmed the storm, when He walked on water after the feeding of the 5K, here and after the feeding of the 4K.

The Scriptural source for this statement is, again, in Isaiah 6:9-10

⁹ Then the Lord said, “Go and tell this to the people: ‘You will listen and listen, but you will not understand. You will look and look, but you will not learn.’ ¹⁰ Make these people stubborn. Make them not able to understand what they hear and see. Otherwise, they might really understand what they see with their eyes and hear with their ears. They might really understand in their minds. If they did this, they would come back to me and be forgiven.”

Understand this. They have the passion, okay? They left everything to follow Him. They have gone out on their own doing ministry in His Name. They have cast out demons, healed the sick, preached the Gospel. These guys aren’t wimps—they simply lack understanding. Yeshua doesn’t give up on them, He just keeps explaining things. Their blindness is for a season and for a reason—they need to be partially blinded until the great plan of the Gospel is completed because, as Paul said in I Cor 2:8, “None of the rulers of this world understood it. If they had, they would not have killed the Lord of glory on a cross.”

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 

Continuing on with verse 18, Yeshua begins to explain the meaning of this parable. He is explaining the truth behind the commandment. Okay, so hear me. God’s people are holy, and not common. Not defiled. By the very virtue of being allied to God through Covenant, they are made holy. Then, of course, they are to act holy by keeping the commandments—the commandments being the bare minimum requirements for keeping us from oppressing and abusing one another. If kept honestly and with one’s whole heart, anyway. Even if someone eats what is torn or unclean, something that does not meet the Biblical requirements for being food, that person is still holy and not defiled. They will be ritually unclean and they will have to take steps to correct that before coming into the physical presence of God’s Temple, but they do not lose their status as being the holy and set apart people of God. So how does a person become defiled, then? To a legalist keeping it all together only on the ouside, the answer is horrifying.

¹⁹ since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

Food goes in and food goes out and unwashed hands don’t change the cleanliness of foods. Of course, if one was defiled with corpse impurity or other discharges, they were not allowed to eat holy food (aka sacrifices) but they would not ruin good food through touching it. What is food is always clean. So, whatever is one of the animals defined as “food” or vegetables or grains or fruits, and if the animal is not torn by wild animals or found dead—then it is clean because God made it to be eaten. Unwashed hands from the marketplace cannot change what God has made clean.

This, by the way, is more clear when the words “thus He declared” are removed—because they aren’t in the Greek. The verse actually reads, “since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled, all foods clean.” When combined with the Biblical and Mishnaic evidence that excrement itself is not unclean, this all makes a lot more sense. Clean going in—clean coming out. As long as you are eating food, it’s clean on both ends.

Mishnah tractate Makhshirin 6.7 says the following: These neither render pure or render susceptible: sweat, foul secretion (aka pus or spit), excrement, the blood that issues with these, and liquid of an eighth-born (amniotic fluid from the eighth month). Additions mine.

²⁰ And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him

Again, this is pictured by Torah laws—menstrual blood, semen, venereal discharges, death, etc. They come out from a person and they make one ritually unclean and therefore unable to approach close to God’s Temple, His throne room on earth. Depending on your level of uncleanness determined how close you could get but these defilements were of a minor sort—the most basic required a complete washing and waiting until sundown. No big deal. The worst required the ashes of a Red Heifer and a seven day waiting period. But, as I said before, there are conditions that can be washed away and conditions that can’t. Torah only deals with conditions that can be remedied by washings. Which, as it turns out, is the impetus behind Jeremiah 31:33 where Yahweh is determined to address this inherent problem with the Sinai Covenant by making a new Covenant that will transform people from the inside out: “I will make this agreement with the people of Israel,” says the Lord. “I will put my teachings in their minds. And I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” If any of you have a child who will follow your rules to the letter but will take advantage of every loophole and drive you insane you know what this is about. You can follow someone’s rules and resent them every inch of the way, and grudgingly do the minimum while your heart is not in it. But Yahweh, repeatedly throughout the Scriptures, implores us to cling to Him. When we do not cling to Him, genuinely, giving Him our allegiance and being willing to be transformed, He will cleanse us of our inner defilements. Let’s look at what those are:

²¹ For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, ²² coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. ²³ All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

William Lane in the NICNT Gospel of Mark Commentary, great series, btw, has this to say, “Here, however, Jesus’s expression is general and enigmatic. It did not abrogate the Mosaic laws on purification or erase the distinction between clean and unclean and declare them invalid. It rather attacked the delusion that sinful men can attain to true purity before God through the scrupulous observance of cultic purity which is powerless to cleanse the defilement of the heart.”

Let’s look at this list because a few apply to me even after all these years of following Him. I can admit it and I long for the day He has completely cleansed me of them and until that day I must fight them tooth and nail because they are not okay. They reflect the wickedness that is still within my heart. Let’s look at Jer 17:5-10 and Is 29:13-16 real quick:

⁵ Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. ⁶ He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. ⁷ “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. ⁸ He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” ⁹ The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ¹⁰ “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”

 ¹³ And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men,
¹⁴ therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder;
and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” ¹⁵ Ah, you who hide deep from the Lord your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?” ¹⁶ You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?

We need to cling to Yahweh through sacrificial allegiance to His Son Yeshua, giving ourselves as living sacrifices and saying no to the flesh so that we will not be defiled. Otherwise, we are clinging to the flesh and making excuses for it and justifying it, and never do we see that more on display than during election years—on every side. No side is exempt from behaving shamefully and brazenly.

Evil thoughts, wow, that’s a broad category. But maybe I ought to back up before I go there. In Matthew 25, we have the Son of Man coming as judge but we only see two categories when there are clearly three. We have the sheep who relieve and help those who are oppressed. We have the goats who did nothing to relieve and help the oppressed. Where are the oppressors? It is troubling to me that they aren’t there but maybe by the end of the age they are already dealt with. If so, then we really want to make sure that we aren’t oppressors because there are worse things that being told to “Depart from me, you cursed!” But who even are the oppressors? We have some pretty extreme standards where very few people qualify but I think there are more oppressors out there than we imagine. And I look around and I see oppressive behavior in spades during election cycles. And I am not just talking about rioters and looters, although that is bad enough.

²¹ For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, ²² coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. ²³ All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Evil thoughts—here is the core problem behind all of the things within that defile us. Evil thoughts come in many manifestations and we need to say no to all of them. Sexual immorality—the word is porneia. Sexual immorality is oppressive by its very nature. Whenever we degrade anyone sexually, even in our thoughts, we are degrading someone made in the image of God. Even if that person is a cartoon character or made up in our minds, we are degrading the image of God within ourselves. Pornography is steeped in the oppression of others, just like buying sex. Just because we think that someone is willing to be violated doesn’t make violating them okay—we become the oppressors when we are complicit. And let me tell you that there can be freedom but you have to want it, work for it, and not let your guard down. I run into a lot of people who think they can dabble but you can’t dabble in oppression and degradation without being guilty of a terrible sin against the image of God in yourself and others.

Theft and murder—let’s go beyond the obvious and talk about people’s reputations. When we hate or oppose someone to the point of being willing to lie about them (even when we don’t name them but describe them to the point where who they are is obvious) then we are stealing their dignity (even if we think they are entitled to none) and reputation (even if it is already bad) and we have become oppressors. That’s on us. I don’t see any verses in the Bible giving us permission to lie about evil people. If the truth isn’t enough then maybe in our hearts we aren’t really convinced that they are nearly as evil as we wish our opponents were. That reveals a great deal of evil in us.

Adultery. It goes beyond cheating on your spouse. Porn also counts. I know women who have rightly left husbands who wouldn’t give it up. But hey, romance novels aren’t innocent either—setting up a standard that our husbands could never live up to. Did you know that the best-selling books on Amazon Kindle are all “romance” novels about women being swept off their feet by gorgeous bad boy billionaires? So, not only can’t your husband compete with mister perfect romance, but he is financially insufficient as well. That’s how women feel about competing with women in movies and magazines. We shouldn’t do it back to them and call it okay.

Coveting. Goodness, we have to be satisfied with what we possess because, if we aren’t, we will do evil things to get it. Wickedness comes from the Greek word meaning deliberate malice. It means you are going after someone intentionally with the desire to destroy them in some way. It means no mercy. Now, in our modern age of internet cowardice, it is still possible to do this by proxy—without naming them but giving yourself plausible deniability while making sure that everyone knows exactly who you are talking about. Deceit. Deceit involves both cunning (which means you are clever—this isn’t an outburst of anger but planned) and treachery (meaning betrayal—either of the other person or a betrayal of your professed standards). Treachery is a biggie because when we say we are believers, people expect (or should be able to expect) certain things from us like absolute integrity and mercy. When we act deceitfully, we betray those core values that make up the bare minimum of what people should expect from us.

Sensuality—a lot of people are guilty of this. Living in self-indulgence in any number of ways. Are we gluttons? Do we live in utter luxury? Do we deny ourselves nothing and focus on ourselves not only with respect to partaking in pleasures but also emotionally? Does anyone else matter at all? Envy—this is the translation of opthalmos, or evil eye. Are we generous or do we take from everyone while giving back nothing? Do we assume that God will take care of people if we don’t? There is a reason this one follows sensuality because they are practically married to one another. Slander—during election years it’s like this is all you see but the truth is that believers are into full-time slander nowadays with sharing urban legends and photoshopped nonsense about people they hate or fear. If you confront them with a blatant lie, they just tell you that it may not be factual, but it is true in Spirit. I doubt they would accept such an excuse from someone who lied about a person they loved. But this is a defiling thing. Doing this and not caring about it are both defiling things and not just proof of a pre-existing defilement.

Pride. You know, pride comes in many forms but perhaps the most puzzling is when it comes from people who do the aforementioned things and feel as though they are entitled to do them because of their so-called discernment, the worthiness of their cause, or some other false valuation of their excellent qualities. No, these things defile everyone and are proof of defilement that cannot be easily washed away. Foolishness is an interesting one because, Scripturally, it means someone who does not know their place, their limitations, and does not have a reasonable valuation of themselves. This is why the Proverbs say that a wise servant will end up ruling over a foolish son. And why no one should argue with fools because they are too foolish to realize that they even are fools!