Last week’s Torah portion was Parashat Yitro, the portion in which the Israelites receive the revelation of Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. Here at Society Hill Synagogue we spoke last Saturday morning about what the nature of that revelation was—what did the people hear as they stood there at the foot of the mountain? A moment which tradition teaches, we were all present for: in our spirit, in our DNA, in our bones; we, too, have the experience of having been been present for that revelatory moment, with reverberations of it echoing throughout the generations.
So what did we hear, what happened in that moment, of the mountain trembling and smoke rising from it, with blast of a horn and thunder and lighting, from which, according to tradition, came the utterance of the Ten Commandments?
Rabbi Harold Kushner summarizes different traditional understandings of the experience as follows:
“What did the Israelites actually hear at Sinai? Some say they heard God proclaim all 10 of the utterances. Others say that God spoke only the first two, declared in the divine “I”, [I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt; You shall have no other gods besides Me—] and that Moses added the remaining eight in which God is referred to in the third person — [“you shall not swear falsely by the name of Adonai your God,” and so forth.]
One scholar suggests that the [only] word actually spoken by God was the first word—anokhi (“I am”). From God’s affirmation of existence and presence, all else flowed.
Finally, one Rabbi taught that the Israelites heard only the first letter of the first word (the alef in anokhi, which is actually a silent letter) and simply intuitively understood the rest.”
Others, as I shared last week, have a less supernatural understanding of what happened in that moment. Rabbi Jacob Staub writes, “if I had brought a tape recorder to Mount Sinai, I believe there would have been no audible divine voice to record; only the human side of the conversation was recordable.”
In other words, The Ten Commandments, the Torah, revelation, is humanity’s understanding of what happened at Sinai.
But, he says, that’s not a rejection of God. He goes one to say, “I believe that God was at Sinai, encountered by Moses, so that even though the words of the Torah are Moses’ human interpretation of God’s will, they are inspired by that encounter and contain divine insight.”
What does that mean exactly? What does it mean for torah/revelation to be humanity’s words, but containing insight from the Divine?
For Rabbi Staub it means that even though there may not be moments where a voice is literally calling out to us, there is still the capacity for us to, as he puts it, “interpret God’s will.”
God is present, even if human discernment is required.
Of course this can be dangerous. We find ourselves wary of people who say they have a definitive understanding of God’s will—that they know what God wants.
I saw a recent Facebook post poking a little bit of fun at this approach to God and to revelation.
It said, “I’m just gonna read this ancient text that’s been interpreted into my language, and assume all of my cultural understandings apply and there’s nothing deeper going on and no symbolism anywhere to be found, and I’m also going to refuse to cross reference this paragraph I’m reading with any of the other parts of this library that I also believe are true to see if there could be some nuance here AND you hate God and God’s word if you aren’t reading it the same way as me.”
That approach, this Facebook post is suggesting—the approach of the hubris of pulling an ancient book off a shelf, reading a line in 21st century English and then assuming you definitively understand God’s will—is probably not a serious way of engaging with what we imagine God wants from us and for us.
As Rabbi Jacob Staub goes on to say, “What we hear and understand of God is necessarily conditioned by who we are, by where and when we live, by our culture’s values, by our individual propensities.”
Our own life experiences, the culture we live in, the language we speak, influence how we perceive and encounter God.
But that is not to discard our capacity for encountering God altogether.
Rabbi Aryeh Ben David teaches that there is still the capacity for us to incline our hearts to the Divine.
“Why do I cry out [in prayer]?” he asks. “Will my heart-wrenching yearnings be fulfilled? Will I receive answers for my longings?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“But this is not really the goal,” he says. “I call out because I need to call out. Because life, with all of its wonder and beauty, can also be devastating. Because there are failures and insecurities, doubts and disappointments. I need to encounter and express my vulnerabilities, my failures, my shortcomings, my worries…”
“With whom can I do this?” he asks. “With whom can I call out, without hesitation or concern of being judged or disregarded? With whom can I express the fragility of my life? With my friends? When they ask, ‘How are you doing?’ can I reply, ‘I think I have failed one of my children, my body is showing worrisome signs, my wife and I seem to be missing each other, and I have an overall feeling of dread’? Will my friends ever ask me again?”
“With my wife?” he continues “I have been married for almost thirty years. My wife is one of the world’s great listeners, nonjudgmental and loving. Yet when and how can I bare my soul without qualification or second-thought? How often? Is she ready to hear me at precisely the moment I need to unburden myself?”
I have a relationship with God,” he says. “A personal relationship. God knows where I am.”
Both of these instincts are Jewish. Both the instinct to have the humility that our understanding of God is necessarily conditioned by our cultural context, by our life experiences, and therefore not to assume all of our intuitions about God are relevant for someone else—while at the same having the chutzpah, the belief in God and in ourselves that our personal and cultural experiences are what we have. Who we are and what we’ve been through—the context we’ve been through it in—is the material with which we can approach God. That’s it, that’s what we have, and therefore it’s as valid as any other approach.
The medieval, influential rabbi Maimonides believed you really shouldn’t apply human descriptors to God. Even if you said, God is wise or God is compassionate, he believed, you were limiting your understanding of God because you were boxing God into human descriptors. God is so much more than wise, so much more than compassionate, he thought, that to use those words kept our conception of God too grounded; too weighed down to our limited understandings. Better to try to clear the mind of human descriptors, and imagine God beyond that. His approach was deeply influential to much of Jewish theology.
But not all Jews agreed—the Kabbalists; the Jewish mystics; moved in exactly the other direction—they believed that using language to describe God’s essence with detailed imaginings could bring us closer to effecting a true healing and redemption of the divine; their descendants, the hasidim, believed in pouring out one’s thoughts to God whatever language was available to them. Yiddish, English, and beyond. Acknowledging, sure, God is so much more than we can comprehend, and also, here we are, ready to bring ourselves forward with whatever we have. Herein we find the Jewish essence: yisrael, wrestling, with God and with ourselves to discern the right path for us. Whatever happened at Sinai, it’s still sounding, and we’re still listening.
