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Lessons For Our Moment, From When the Ten Commandments Were Individually Delivered

This is a version of the D'var Torah on Parashat Yitro that I gave in 2021/5781. I've lightly updated it to reflect the changes in the pandemic and the presidential administration since then. It centers a midrash I've linked, and my own take on that midrash.

The midrash called Shir Ha-Shirim Rabba takes the opening of the Song of Songs and applies it to the revelation of the Ten Commandments. The verse says, and I don’t know if my blushing will come through on camera -- Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. יִשָּׁקֵנִי מִנְּשִׁיקוֹת פִּיהוּ כִּי־טוֹבִים דֹּדֶיךָ מִיָּיִן. Like The Weavers: “kisses sweeter than wine.”

The midrash is one of my all-time favorites and as I tell it now hopefully by now some of you will be remembering from when I’ve told it before.

Rabbi Yochanan said that for each of the Ten Commandments, the Divine sent a personal messenger, a מַלְאָךְ mal’ach, to bring that particular mitzvah to each Israelite, to tell it to them, and then to have a discussion about it, for as long as necessary until the particular Israelite would say: I agree.

So imagine the mal’ach coming to you and saying: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or spouse or servant or donkey or anyting else that belongs to them. And you say: I’ve already agreed not to steal anything  -- does God really care if I’m feeling jealous from time to time?

And the mal’ach says well it depends, maybe your envy will cause you unconsciously to pressure your neighbor to give you something you don’t really need and that’s not really going to make you better off. After all, this is your neighbor who would do anything for you and wants you not to be distressed, or maybe just wants to get you out of their hair. So how about instead of thinking about what they have that you don’t, you try to figure out what’s eating you?

And the Israelite says: Ah, that’s why you (meaning: God) included their spouse and their house and the people who labor for them and their animals. You mean sometimes we get focused on the easy life we think someone else is having right now, we think why can’t mine be like that, and then maybe we think they don’t deserve it, I do -- and that drives us apart?

And the messenger says: You’ve got it. Of course we use others to judge our situation, but that’s a first step, not a shortcut.

Envy is a clue to think about what’s out of whack. Maybe it’s something in your power, or maybe it’s out there in society, in the distribution of houses and donkeys and fields. Use that itch to think about those things, and maybe your neighbor even agrees with you about that and you can bond. Okay, says the Israelite, this coveting thing -- you’re not trying to control my mind, it’s trying to make sure we don’t  get so caught up in our minds that we drive ourselves apart from our neighbors.

And the mal’ach says: So it’s a law, agreed, no coveting? And the Israelite says: Yes! And then the midrash says the mal’ach gives them a kiss -- “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” -- and the Israelite feels great, and really connected. And the mal’ach goes back to the mothership for the next mitzvah.

Rabbi Yochanan imagines each Israelite during the revelation of the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments)  in their own spiritual bubble, with a personal angelic tutor who is very patient and a personal time warp. Rabbi Yochanan is solving a problem of grammar in the Ten Commandments, which is actually a bigger problem. The commands are delivered in the Hebrew singular even though all the Israelites are together. And even though every thing in the Ten Commandments only makes sense in the context of the collective. Honoring parents, and not murdering; letting your household rest on Shabbat, and not coveting -- those are all social. Even the issue of idols is about taking some power  or image recognized by everyone and projecting that as a godly power.

It’s all social, but Rabbi Yochanan says there’s a paradox -- first each person has to go into a kind of isolation, and then “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” The individual is wooed into the collective in a very deliberate way. Crossing the sea in a big crowd and singing together wasn’t enough. Each person has to feel loved with some love that is as big as everything, that is love from the Divine and the whole people, and also gets connected through a specific other. Only an individual who has been spoken to and kissed this way by a divine representative will say: What we have together is better than wine, better than the high that I experience from my own pleasure or the buzz I get from having my own ideas all on my own.

Up until now, the people had only negative experiences of the collective. Being miserable together, as slaves, who sometimes turned on each other. Watching Egyptian togetherness -- conformity, complicity in evil, mass psychology, the mob. Even when they got out, the Israelites knew themselves frequently as a group of complainers.

How could they trust themselves to be a group that could heal from slavery and get to the promised land? They needed shared ideas, and not shared idols. They needed a picture of fulfillment more motivating than coveting what some small group of them had.

Rabbi Yochanan in the midrash says that if each Israelite will feel loved enough to say “yes” for a moment, ten times, then we get to the  verse right after the Ten Commandments: “and all the people together perceived the voices and saw the bright lights” וְכָל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת־הַלַּפִּידִם v’chol ha’am ro’im et hakolot v’et halapidim.

A path to solidarity is what we need right now. We need it to stay alive, we need it to be more than just alive. It’s tempting to think of groups, especially political groups, only in terms of mobs and groupthink. It’s easy to perceive comformity, or to see insider groups that do sloppy work together. Those are real dangers of groups.

So Rabbi Yochanan says solidarity has to be built a person at a time, out of two elements: it’s built out of discussion, and out of loving affirmation. It has to originate on top of the mountain; there has to be somewhere for everyone to look up. But the real work is up close, person by person.

We can’t just assert solidarity or unity. It doesn’t come via the media or speeches. We have to make it by wooing people with our ideas and with our love. On the political level, when I first wrote this D’var Torah, I wanted President Biden and Vice President Harris when they were in office to go out and identify individual communities, let’s say the counties in this country where they got the lowest percentage of the vote, and have a midrash kind of conversation -- here are some principles and ideas, let’s talk about them, talk back and I’ll answer. And even if we don’t find a yes ,we’ll go back to the mothership in DC and come back shortly for the next conversation.

Same for Republican leaders in Congress --  do that. Find whatever community organizng group or congregation will do that with you in those counties. Set up a health clinic for the community there, and have the conversations.

On an individual level, in our own synagogue and our local community, we have to be the personal ambassadors for solidary rooted in reasoned conversation and love, for anyone who opens their ears or their arms.

We are going to need more of this kind of solidarity, to comfront the challenges of Am Yisrael and the United States, and to build our own community as a place that is welcoming and helps each of us reflect and be challenged, grow and flourish. It can’t be done if all we do is criticize when groups fail, which they often do. We need to build the collectives where we trust, and ask what it would take to give ourselves over in solidarity, to say yes to what the divine messengers are offering us.

It’s so hard to imagine getting to that kind of solidarity these days, to believing it’s possible. And it’s hard to imagine that we require it -- but I think there is no alternative. Some critical mass of solidarity is a matter of life and death. It doesn’t have to be everyone but it has to be more than it’s been in a long time. At Mt Sinai time could stand still to get that kind of solidarity, and even then it only held for a short time even for B’nai Yisrael.  We can’t stop time like that. But we each need to be receptive to messengers who come and offer us rational conversation and love, and we need to find opportunities to be those messengers.

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” That kind of intimacy, that kind of solidarity -- it can be scary; we know it was in the Torah. Resisting solidarity will always have its rewards for people -- the wine, the yayin, is a symbol for a real intense feeling that you don’t share but have just on your own. It’s not lasting, but it’s powerful. I myself (Jon) do covet -- and what I covet are pockets of solidarity in this world that are somewhere else. But then I know the question is how not be jealous, but to learn how to do solidarity better right here. So let’s think about how we can open ourselves when the mal’achim come and try to connect us more deeply, and how to be those divine messengers ourselves, patiently trying to build the solidarity we need for life and healing, to overcome isolation, for justice and for peace.     

Shabbat Shalom.

 

The Torah Is Not a TED Talk

This is a D'var Torah I shared February 11, 2023 for Parashat Yitro, but I'm publishing it now right before Shavuot, when we read the same section of the Torah, Exodus 19-20.

This book -- the Torah -- has been read and encountered by millions of people through so many generations, and changed their lives and changed the world.

Here are some books that have also been read and encountered, by millions of people -- Aristotle’s Ethics, the Harry Potter series. Some by nearly as many generations as the Torah, some by only a few -- and nonethless they too have changed lives and changed the world.

Are they all kind of the same?

A couple days before Rosh Hashanah of 5781, I read an article in Slate magazine online, by Amanda Prahl, and it was about kindness. It was about kindness in the TV show Ted Lasso, and the article was wise and engaging. It had me at “kindness” -- but the whole thing was phenomenal. I thought Ms. Prahl’s observations would make a great D’var Torah. I guess what I really thought was: It’s two days before Rosh Hashanah and this is better than my upcoming D’var Torah, in let me count how many ways!

Had I had more than two days, I might have worked on incorporating Ms. Prahl’s essay into a D’var Torah of my own. I did speak about kindness on the two days of that Rosh Hashanah, but not directly, and without nearly the perfect touch of Ms. Prahl. I might have woven her article into and around some stories from the Torah or midrash, had I had the same. If you’re a Ted Lasso fan just read her article!

What is Torah? Is it one of the many great books? Like Aristotle’s Ethics, which is a longer book about ethics than, say, Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy combined? What is a D’var Torah -- is it in the same category as thoughtful articles and great TED Talks? If I had woven a secular writer’s beautiful essay on kindness into a Rosh Hashanah sermon, would that make it Torah?

Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the medieval scholar who is the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, says essentially: Yes. If it’s wisdom, and if it’s truth, then by definition its source is in the Divine. It’s Torah, and we have to expand our conception of Torah to include it.

And yet. There is more to Torah than really good content.

In the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon said: Woe to the person who says that this Torah has come to present stories in regular words. For if this were so, even in our time we would be able to make a Torah using ordinary words, better than any of the stories in the Torah... even the nobles of the world have among them superior words. We could just go and make a Torah out of those words.

Rabbi Shimon’s point is that the Torah is not unique because it’s one of the great books. And a D’var Torah might sound like a TED Talk, but it’s not just a really good TED Talk, and often it’s not even as good by TED standards.  (Although to be clear, I am always trying to be as good as a good TED Talk!)

It’s not that the Torah isn’t good content well-delivered. That’s just not all it is. The midrash says that the Torah is black fire inscribed on white fire. It is that something different that we need to define. We can’t completely define that something -- we can gesture at it, just as we point at the Torah and reach toward it when we see it in the air and sing V’zot HaTorah, this is the Torah.

So mah zot, what is it?

The introduction to revelation we read today in Exodus 19 begins: Bachodesh hashlishi l’tzaytz b’nai yisrael me-eretz mitzrayim, bayom hazeh -- ba’u midbar Sinai.

On the third new moon after B’nai Yisrael’s Exodus from Egypt,
On this day,
They come to Mt. Sinai.

As our rabbis understand it, the Torah says of itself both that it comes from a particular place and time in the past, and it comes from today, whenever today is. Torah is most Torah when the day you are encountering Torah is new and fresh, and the Torah itself is new and radical to you. This day when you encounter Torah in its fullest dimensions is in the immediate afterglow of the Exodus, even if it’s 2400+ years later. Torah isn’t just the message but what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the event -- a portal not backwards in history but outward, toward the top of the mountain and toward the fellow Israelites next to you.

We say this same thing twice a day in the Shma. V’hayu had’varim ha’eleh asher Anochi m’tzavcha hayom al l’vavecha. These words, which I charge you with today, shall be on your heart.

And the words of Torah themselves -- Heschel calls them prophetic understatement. Prophetic, understatement. I think Heschel’s doing his thing of taking something that seems unbelievable and saying: You think that’s unbelievable? That’s actually the easy one and here’s the hard one.

Heschel thinks that the problem people think they have is believing that God could reduce all of God’s thoughts for all time to this book, much of which is about animal sacrifice, and that God could somehow reveal God’s entire essential self and message to this small people at one particular point in time.

What Heschel thinks is more unbelievable is that the words in the Torah, however they got there, could possibly carry Divine wisdom and a Divine charge. As Rabbi Shimon said in the Zohar, they are just words, and we’ve seen mere humans make stories and philosophy out of words that are just as amazing if not more. Believe that these Torah words uniquely contain truth? That’s hard to believe, says Heschel.

So Heschel says the Torah is not such a wild leap but a prophetic understatement. The words themselves are not complete. They hint at only a fraction of what they are about. They are the first step on a ladder -- but without them you can’t begin to climb. They are each stone at the foot of Mt. Sinai -- but without standing on them you can’t go anywhere else. Words of Torah are prophetic understatements -- the words themselves are only the beginning.

So of course the Torah has animal sacrifices. And stories and laws, and maps and recipes, and architectural drawings and shopping lists, and poems and songs and sarcasm and comic relief, and if you go out further in the Bible into the prophets you’ve even got a sports section every so often! If you’re going to make something out of human words, you’ve got to use them in every way possible.

What is unique about the Torah is not what is written -- it’s where it can take you, where it can take us together, and where it can take the world as a consequence. The words and verses, one by one and one after another, written in scrolls and books don’t do the job alone, and reading and speaking them and even chanting them are just the start.

We have to recreate the event of Mt. Sinai together -- which is why we re-enact today’s reading every time we read the Torah, calling people up the mountain and sending the words to every single person standing every single place around it.

We have find the Torah together with all our generations. That’s what’s great about the chumash, the book with the Torah text and commentaries. The best chumashim and now the best websites surround you with teachers and translators from every era. As I never tire of saying to our kids when they come of age and hold the Torah, the noise these ornaments make should make you think of everyone who has ever chimed in on any word, trying to find the rung after the rung on the ladder which is that particular word.

We get help to find the Torah from beyond ourselves, somehow. My favorite midrash about the Ten Commandments imagines us standing at the foot of the mountain ready to talk to with our own individual mal’ach, a Divine messenger who wants to engage each of us separately with each one of the Ten Commandments, to explore their ins and outs and our objections and what-if’s and really?-s.

All of that is not a book, and it’s not a TED Talk.

We need not just to read the Ten Commandments as a list of principles, which they are, but to experience them as both so obvious -- I mean really we could come up with every single one of them in a brief meeting -- and also so radical, because look how missing they are in the world. We need to let the words say to us not just implement me, but also: Figure out why I’m necessary, and what is it about you humans that could make this possible, and what it is about you humans that you have to get to the bottom of that is in the way of don’t murder and don’t covet and why aren’t you resting and renewing. That’s the black fire on white fire.

And when we bring the Ten Commandments or any teachings of Torah out into our lives or the wider world, we’re supposed to try to bring those fires.

Imagine if whenever you mentioned or taught words of Torah, or argued about them, you knew they were alive with divinity and humanity more than the other words people use that are just on paper or in air -- and all that divinity and all that humanity were standing with you when you brought up those words.

That’s hard to do, especially when the other words in our conversations are less hot -- words presented in regular essays and stories and books and position papers. Each time we bring down the Torah and cool the fire off enough to use it, we bring something unique to the table, but we risk the Golden Calf -- we risk freezing the fire, making an idol of a single teaching, even a central one like Tzelem Elohim (the image of God), and stopping our own inquiry into the word and into who we people are in relation to what those words are asking.

So that’s why we come back with regularity every Shabbat to recreate the event at Mt. Sinai, to experience the words as fire, together with each other and with our many generations.

I am often guilty of not doing that. I have often treated the Torah even at its best as a position paper, as a really good article. When that works, for you or for people I work with on pressing issues of the day, dayenu, that might be enough for the time being.

But that’s not going to work all the time, because there are other books and other articles, and often Torah is meant to be the event of experiencing Torah wisdom, not just the content of that wisdom. It’s meant to be the commitment to what the Torah is teaching and to figuring out why and how that could be and why it’s not already. 

We usually know right and wrong already, and know what we want to say about it. Torah is more.

This dimension of Torah does not require Hebrew and it’s not just Jewish. If we relate to Torah the way I’m gesturing at, then we’ll know if a book or a great article from any source is just really good content, or if it too is Torah.

To know Torah as Torah, we have to be willing to be shaken up often when we encounter it, to know that our commitment is on the line anytime we learn Torah or try to impart it. That doesn’t come from just listening to a D’var Torah or reading one -- it requires you as well as I to be active participants. But Torah is so unique and so good that Torah itself will help us allow ourselves to tremble that way, and to open ourselves.

Because this is what the words of Torah are, according to Heschel, and none of these other books are like it:

No other book so loves and respects the life of man... It has the words that startle the guilty and the promise that upholds the forlorn... It continues to scatter seeds of justice and compassion, to echo God’s cry to the world and to pierce humanity’s armor of callousness....

There are no words more knowing, more disclosing and more indispensible, words both stern and graceful, heart-rending and healing. A truth so universal: God is One. A thought so consoling: God is with us in our distress.... A map of time: from creation to redemption. Guideposts along the way: the Seventh Day: An offering: contrition of the heart. A utopia: Would that all people were prophets... a standard so bold: ye shall be holy. A commandment so daring: Love your neighbor as yourself. A fact so sublime: human and divine pathos can be in accord. And a gift so undeserved: the ability to repent.

If that’s Torah, what soul would not want to be receiving it, every day.

Whenever you hear words this way, or whenever words you read bring you that picture -- then you know what you are engaged in is not just good content, but Torah.

Your Unorthodox Theology Won't Break Judaism

My D’var Torah from July 30, 2022 * 2 Av 5782

One of my favorite anecdotes about morning davvening (praying) comes from the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Chanina went to shul one day. This was some 1700 years ago, give or take, and at the time there were no siddurim (written prayerbooks). People who led knew the outline of the service, and the theme for each short section and the specific language of the blessing to end each section – Creator of lights, Yotzer hame’orot; Redeemer of Israel, Ga’al Yisrael, etc. A few prayers had been written and were well-known but the leader, the shliach tzibbur, could compose or make up his own prayer on the section’s theme to get to the very few fixed words.

So Rabbi Chanina is in shul and this guy stands up to recite the Amidah, and he starts chanting: Ha’el ha’gadol ha’gibbor v’hanora, v’ha’adir v’ha’izuz v’ha’yarui he-chazak v’ha’amitz v’ha’vadai v’hanichbad. Now you don’t need to know what all the words mean to know that what this prayer leader is doing is adding on top of the familiar prayer more praise adjectives for God. Strong, and courageous, and certain, and honored, and and and….

Anyway, the leader finishes the Amidah and Rabbi Chanina says to him: “Nu, did you get them all? I mean did you use enough words to describe the Divine, you know, better than Moshe Rabbeinu did? Because we’re using Moshe’s own words when we say Ha’el ha’gadol etc. , and some words that other prophetic figures did, and if it weren’t for these ancestors we couldn’t use any words at all to talk about the Divine. But you, you kept on going, but what did you really do? It’s like if there were a king who was known for having so much gold, and a person praised him for how much silver he had.”

So first of all I love that in shul in the Babylonian Talmud, everyone’s a critic and everyone has an evaluation of services while they’re still happening.

But I think about this teaching anytime we get into discussions like last week’s Kiddush program about theology and the Divine. It was really wonderful and thoughtful, and I appreciated everyone’s honesty in the questions you have and the views you expressed. And it did not go unnoticed by your rabbi that the ways our siddur talks about God really do not land for the vast majority of you who were there – the big metaphors of “King” and “Lord”, the importance of praising the Divine as though this was needed on high somewhere.

I just want to say a few things to open this crack more, because a lot of the ideas that you reject about the Divine and that I do not hold either — we feel like we’re breaking something when we say it out loud. And I am really working ahead about the High Holy Days, to make sure that the metaphors we are using to aid us are indeed helpful and true in the moments we need them, and I am concerned that the liturgy as it is will not help us at all unless we do some pre-thinking about it before the holy days. I’m going to say a few things today, and I have started reaching out to the people in our congregation who have been our spiritual teachers because I think we should hear many voices the coming weeks — different voices about what the Divine means to us, what it means to stand in the presence of the Divine with kavvanah, with purpose. There are people here who teach this better and more clear than I do, and you should have a chance to learn from them on Shabbat and other times. If we just walk into Rosh Hashanah without thinking about them, the words of the machzor (prayerbook) will not have depth and will not open a door for us.

So for me, one of the biggest things is maybe a paradox. I do not think of the Divine as a being in some one place, a personality of some kind whom I can address who is completely separate from myself or from us. And at the same time, I find the experience of imagining myself in the presence of a power I had no say in choosing to be very important. Visualizing that, which I do not literally believe, does something important that I won’t give up.

So to the first part of that: I wonder a bit how all of this got started and created, but not knowing doesn’t really affect my day. I take now as a given; we are here and so is the universe. It is permeated with Divinity, and just as every atom and every charge in the universe is affected somehow by every other, so too every spiritual atom and spiritual electron is linked. The totality of it is the Divine; each part of it is; and also each thing made up of it – me and you, the tent and the concrete, the trees and the engines in our cars. We are all spiritual receivers and transmitters. We have that capacity whether we use it or not, and the invisible Divinity is everywhere just as much as the gravitational force we don’t see or the radio waves that are hitting us and going through us whether we choose to tune to them or not, to produce or amplify or play for someone else. That’s my operating picture. That’s where God is for me. And in a way I can’t tell you very well I think that these Divine sparks – atoms and charges – they carry goodness and wisdom and Torah. Like a circuit that can be completed or broken by us, we can tap this goodness, which is a renewable energy and is never consumed, like the burning bush. I and we didn’t create it, but it doesn’t travel unless we extend or complete the circuit.

So I don’t think God sends floods or plagues, or heals from cancer or doesn’t, or decides on 400 years of slavery in Egypt and then its end. I don’t think God is judging or decreeing. There isn’t someone else out there doing those things. Some of the evil and suffering that happens is the fault of humans, and some just a product of nature. That’s the world as created.

Part 2 is that for me it’s good to focus on a particular cluster or manifestation of that everywhere-Divinity, on a regular basis. The metaphor of malchut, of melech or “king”, is made up for me of power and lawgiving and a selection I had no part it. And I need a reminder that there are things outside of me and that won’t disappear when I can’t hold them up, with my incomplete goodness or my incomplete spiritual focus.

Sometimes I look up at the top of the Aron Kodesh (ark) or I look up toward the Ner Tamid (eternal light) or the open sky, because I want to feel smaller than I usually do, humbler, but still present, and aware that this small person is still at the center of my horizons.

Sometimes I talk intimately to the Divine I imagine gathered up that way, atoms and charges concentrated palpably in front of me, and I like to say exactly the words in the book, and to find myself in them. To connect to the thoughts of the many, many people who put them together and sounded them out initially, and the ones who have said them before for important reasons and occasions. I like to say their words, to run them through me, because just as the Divine was not made by me — I had no say in that but I am made up of Divine stuff — so too these words change and recreate me. They make me able to say certain things and they make me into the person who can make those words more real.

I never experience my words as praise of a God “out there”, watching from afar to see what I am saying. I experience my words helping to connect the circuit, making the universe worthy of these praises, reminding me that my intentions help make the words in the siddur true when they don’t seem true in the daily news. Sometimes I’m consciously reconnecting myself to the grid, completing the circuit running through me. Sometimes I’m just noticing that there is more spiritual energy flowing than I remembered since yesterday. Sometimes it’s just cathartic to ask for things, in a chant out loud, speaking directly to the “king” who graces me with an interview. Sometimes it’s good to hear myself say the hopes and yearnings and thank-you’s out loud that I don’t otherwise say to people (but ought to more). Sometimes it’s helpful to let myself ask for things — for help for me, for a better world for you.

It helps me to approach my praying this way, with this kind of cinematography. It doesn’t bother me that I don’t believe my picture is actually there. At least, I do not anymore experience it as any contradiction. In the Kabbalah, the idea of “king” is split in two. If you look at the diagram of the ten sefirot, the ten phase-states of divine energy flowing toward our spiritual consciousness, the farthest away is called Keter, the crown; and the closest is called Malchut or royalty, sovereignty, and is identified with us, with the people of Israel. I like that the Kabbalists are messing with the king metaphor, to make it both so far away and so close by simultaneously.

That’s where I will leave it today. We are in the period leading toward Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the two ancient Temples, and then toward Yom Kippur which recalls when we all were united with each other and the Divine name at the Temple in its glory. This is a time of year to experience the breaking of the circuit, the incompleteness of the Divine name, the breaking of ideas that have led us to inner destructions – the Jewish calendar wants us to do that, to see what’s not whole in our theology and to break what needs to be broken. As Rabbi Chanina reminded us in the Talmud, we don’t have to use words about God that don’t do the job, just to look good to others.

If the teachings you think you have heard from Judaism about the Divine cannot hold, let them break. Break them yourself. You will not hurt God; you will not hurt the shul or me, and you will not destroy Judaism or the world. Some of our old names and ideas for God, they are like building materials that are obsolete, or wires frayed from a lot of good use. But we have better stuff with which to understand and imagine and connect to the Divine. Some of it is brand new and some of it has been in spiritual storage for whatever reason. I’m grateful for the many teachers in our community who will help us find it all and take it out and learn how to use it, so we can build sturdy and electric for the new year.

Why Exodus Is the Most Important Book of All Time

My D'var Torah at Beth Abraham on Shabbat morning, Saturday, January 6, 2018.

Today we begin reading the most important book in human history -- Sefer Shmot, the book of Exodus. 

This is the book that transformed what was possible in the world and what was imaginable in the world. You can divide human history and culture into before the book of Exodus and after the book of Exodus. You can divide world literature into before Exodus and after Exodus, and you can divide religion into before Exodus and after Exodus. No one had ever told a story like this, about the gods or the powers of the world, its peoples or its leaders.

The book of Exodus made it possible to change the world, and to tell other stories about change and hope and transformation. And we, the Jews, are the Exodus people -- people who not only experienced the Exodus from Egypt, but whose whole civilization is built out of this book we are reading here over the next ten weeks.

Genesis, which we just finished last week -- it’s not bad. A God who creates the universe with no more effort than speaking, who tracks people across the world from Mesopotamia to Egypt and talks to them, who identifies special individuals and sends them on missions and adventures -- Genesis is bringing some game. 

But Genesis isn’t radically new. There are new things in it, but it’s full of the kinds of stories you could imagine in other cultures. And Genesis is still a book about the familiar world. It ends not with transformation, but with exile.Exodus announces itself as something different right away. You see it in the opening scenes, when women get out in front of men and even in front of God, taking charge of the transformation of the world where Genesis left off. The world of suffering and oppression. Midwives who talk back to power, an inventive mother, a courageous sister, Pharaoh’s own rebellious daughter -- they are the last line holding against total evil and the first to rise up.

And what a transformation takes place, from the first to the last chapter of Exodus.

Who could imagine this powerless people, whose babies were being tossed into the Nile, standing at a mountain hearing God speak to each and every one of them?  In chapter 1, the Israelites are slaves who have to find their own straw to build cities of darkness to reinforce Pharaoh’s power. By the last chapter, they have given whatever they have in overflowing generosity, and they have built a Sanctuary so perfect that God’s presence immediately fills it and lights it up.

The book of Exodus changed forever how human beings conceive of God. Until Exodus, gods were parents and protectors and allies of kings and overlords, and specific lands. In Genesis, the God Who created heaven and earth seems to be mostly on high, at the top of a ladder of angels perhaps. 

But in Exodus, God leaves our land and God comes down. Down to the Nile, to the lowest spot in the low valley of Egypt.  Down from the sky into those waters of chaos and death that are carved, down, deep into the lowly Earth.  God comes down to the lowest people, who are beaten and dehumanized, whose hands are muddy and blistered and broken, who are detached from their souls to the point where they can hardly do anything but groan, who can’t think beyond the terrible things happening to them now.

God has to fight for them, against a tyrant who everybody thinks is really the god.  God has to fight for the Israelites’ awareness. God has to get next to them, down in the mud and in their slave camps, and next to the taskmasters too, just to get any of these people even to notice.  

God has to frustrate the expectations of all those who think that gods only go with grandeur like Pharaoh has, the beauty and richness of his palace and his temple and his architecture, and the hosts who do his bidding.

The book of Exodus says: This is much harder work than creating the universe. As you read Exodus, it’s clear that redemption, rescuing these people, takes much longer than six days. And it is a much, more, difficult labor than the Genesis project of making the world.

And by coming down, God shows us that more is involved in being God than pure power -- more than just the abililty to make things and do things.  The task of redemption requires commitment, and loyalty, and dedication.  Rabbi Heschel called it divine pathos: God’s essence is that God hurts when people hurt. And God is enraged when people stand by and go along or do nothing.  

So when people are enslaved, oppressed, suffering, the hurt is so large that God’s response to that is the largest thing that God ever does.What God does in Exodus by redeeming our people is the only thing big enough to justify the idea that God is great. God’s true nature, the gadol-ness, the greatness that we associate with the notion of God -- it isn’t manifest until God comes down, as far from Heaven as possible, into Egypt.

The book of Exodus changed forever what it means to be a leader on behalf of God. In previous stories, in other Middle Eastern societies, leaders were blessed by the gods from the beginning and show off divine powers at a human level. Or they were heroes with magical powers or immortality.

Moses is different. Moses isn’t the son of God. He actually the one who ran away for decades even when he felt responsible for what he saw.

Moses at the burning bush doesn’t remotely see himself as a hero, as a leader. He doesn’t have any of the basic credibilities of a leader or a hero -- he can hardly speak, he does not inspire. As soon as Moses experiences his revelation at the burning bush, he argues that he can’t do what God wants. This resistance against leading is easily the longest conversation between anyone in whole Torah.

At almost every key moment in Exodus, Moses is shown not to be a god, but simply to be a human vessel, an instrument for divine energy and purpose. Moses teaches that anyone can become this, regardless of origins or personality or specific qualities and talents.

The book of Exodus redefined forever what it means to have laws and religious practices. In other societies, religion helped cement the social order and taught people how to be servants for the needs of the gods.

The law code of Hamurrabi in Babylonia, for instance, starts off with the investigation and punishments around murder. The law code in Exodus, right after the Ten Commandments, puts the laws of murder and assault second. The first law is about how to set free the slaves in our own society.

This teaches us that every law and every practice is not simply to serve God but to imitate God. We are God-like, the book of Exodus says, whenever we follow the law, live the law. When we bring about more freedom in our world, or pay our workers a fair wage on time, or watch out for the stranger because we know what it’s like to be the stranger -- Exodus reminds us that we are being like the God who liberated us from the house of slavery. 

And the way we pray and the rituals that structure our day and week are Exodus rituals. We sing the Song of the Exodus morning and night, every day. When we rest on Shabbat, we affirm that we are not slave laborers anymore.  When we give tzedakah, we are told that this is the opposite of hardening our hearts to people who live in our community and our world.

And our sacred spaces are celebrations of the Exodus. The whole last section of the book of Exodus is about how slave builders became builders of a Sanctuary to the God who frees slaves. It’s about making physically permanent the transformation from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from hopelessness to possibility. As permanent as any pyramid or mummy.

And of course, Pesach. God says:  The moment of liberation is going to be there, always. We bring it back at least once a year in an elaborate way. So that every time you are oppressed by another Pharaoh, by armies of enemies, by illusion or illness or depression, you will know that I come down, I come there, as low as you are or as low as things go.  No matter how much mud or blood or tears as there may be.  I can’t stop those things from happening, God says, but I can and will be there and fight for you to notice Me, to see me fighting there with you.If a religion is made up of ideas about God and rituals and sacred places -- then the book of Exodus changed religion forever. Not just Judaism, but every religion that ever learned about the book of Exodus.

And the book of Exodus changed history, and the possibilities of history. After Exodus, human beings could know that oppressive power might be strong, but it’s never an equilibrium. Each time the Jews have found ourselves against an unshakeable enemy or an unmovable evil -- we have read Exodus and told the stories and prayed Exodus and observed Exodus -- and eventually overcame.

And other peoples have read the book of Exodus and the stories and histories inspired by it, and the same things have happened. The book of Exodus created and continues to create hope, to prove that hope is not absurd in our world.

We are Exodus people. Charged to keep reading and teaching this book, and to define our lives as responding to this book. We take it in, and we broadcast it out. That is what it means to be a Jew -- to live in the light of the most important book ever written.

Shabbat Shalom.

 

Starting Over: What Is the Torah?

What is the Torah? This week we start reading it from the beginning on Shabbat. We usually think about the Torah one story at a time, or one teaching at a time. What is the Torah when we zoom back? If you've got seven and a half minutes to listen, here are some thoughts on the Torah as a whole:

Rabbi Jon's 7-1/2 minute overview of the Torah

Erev Shavuot 5773

Dear Friends:

According to the Torah, when God brought the Israelites to Mount Sinai, they heard God's voice directly, as a group, for the one and only time in history.  And God said….

"Do not steal."  But surely people already knew that!  "Do not murder."  Did the people really need God's voice to get them to believe that?

We think of these things as the minimum, not the maximum.  A world where people don't harm each other, don't betray each other or their promises, don't go after what belongs to someone else -- this should be the starting point, the line between savages and human beings, no?  If God was intent on cultivating Israel as a nation with a special charge, why spend half the Ten Commandments on the lowest common denominator?

The midrash, our interpretive tradition, wonders the same thing.  Here is one of the answers we find there:  God indeed had big plans for us, and a short time to get us on board with the mission.  So God did what only God can do:  woo us over to the most complicated and demanding project while getting us to feel that the whole thing is actually quite simple.

When the people first heard the Ten Commandments, they might have thought:  We can do that.  There are a couple of commands that are stretches, but on the whole this won't be too hard.

But it turns out that "do not steal" means a lot more than not holding up a bank.  The midrash says that while the people were nodding their heads, each one got a visit from an angel who patiently gave an individual tutorial on the complexities of the command he or she was hearing and feeling comfortable with.  Stealing, the angel would say, includes not misleading someone so that they do something for you that you don't deserve.  Stealing, the angel would add, includes withholding the part of your earnings and your property that actually don't belong to you, but to people in need or to the community for its needs.

The genius of the Torah is that "do not steal" is only part of the "do not steal" of the Ten Commandments.  The simple message leads you to the complicated one.  The complicated one is what we have to do to redeem the world.

Tonight begins Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, the anniversary of the revelation of the Ten Commandments and the giving of the Torah.  On this holy day, try to hear the Ten Commandments as if they were new.  On their simplest level, and on deeper levels.  As the word of the God Who became known to us by redeeming us from slavery and false gods.  As the teaching of the God Whose very name and whose Shabbat are portals, invitations to become God's partners in this world.

We gather tonight at 7:00 PM for services, and to honor the teaching and learning of Torah in our community.  After services and Oneg, we have the traditional late night Shavuot Torah study session as long as people will stay.  Tomorrow morning, our Torah reading is the Ten Commandments.

Chag Sameach -- May you have a holy day of deepest joy,

Rabbi Jon

Click here for Rabbi Jon's podcast:  What Is the Torah in 7-1/2 Minutes

Click here for the schedule of Shavuot services

Heschel This Week on the Sinai Revelation

This week's selection from Heschel's God in Search of Man is keyed to Parashat Yitro and the Revelation at Mt. Sinai.  I'll post more passages in future weeks on Heschel's view of the Torah, or you can read a several page explanation I prepared for one of my classes here.  To subscribe to the weekly e-Heschel directly, send me a note.

Revelation does not happen when God is alone.  The two classical terms for the moment at Sinai are mattan torah and kabbalat torah, “the giving of the Torah” and “the acceptance of the Torah.”  It was both an event in the life of God and an event in the life of man. . . .  At Sinai God revealed His word, and Israel revealed the power to respond.  Without that power to respond, without the fact that there was a people willing to accept, to hear, the divine command, Sinai would have been impossible.  For Sinai consisted of both a divine proclamation and a human perception.  It was a moment in which God was not alone.

As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash... Thus the Bible is more than the word of God:  it is the word of God and man; a record of both revelation and response; the drama of convenant between God and man.