¹⁰ Then he called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand this! ¹¹ What makes a person unclean is not what goes into his mouth; rather, what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean!”

¹² The talmidim came to him and said, “Do you know that the P’rushim were offended by what you said?” ¹³ He replied, “Every plant that my Father in heaven has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. ¹⁴ Let them be. They are blind guides. When a blind man guides another blind man, both will fall in a pit.”

¹⁵ Kefa said to him, “Explain the parable to us.” ¹⁶ So he said, “Don’t you understand even now? ¹⁷ Don’t you see that anything that enters the mouth goes into the stomach and passes out into the latrine? ¹⁸ But what comes out of your mouth is actually coming from your heart, and that is what makes a person unclean. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come forth wicked thoughts, murder, adultery and other kinds of sexual immorality, theft, lies, slanders. . . . ²⁰ These are what really make a person unclean, but eating without doing n’tilat-yadayim does not make a person unclean.”

²⁸ One of the Torah-teachers came up and heard them engaged in this discussion. Seeing that Yeshua answered them well, he asked him, “Which is the most important mitzvah of them all?” ²⁹ Yeshua answered, “The most important is,

³¹ The second is this:

There is no other mitzvah greater than these.” ³² The Torah-teacher said to him, “Well said, Rabbi; you speak the truth when you say that he is one, and that there is no other besides him; ³³ and that loving him with all one’s heart, understanding and strength, and loving one’s neighbor as oneself, mean more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.” ³⁴ When Yeshua saw that he responded sensibly, he said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” And after that, no one dared put to him another sh’eilah.

³⁵ As Yeshua was teaching in the Temple, he asked, “How is it that the Torah-teachers say the Messiah is the Son of David?