“Ayeka?!”
This is the first question in the Torah when God rather rhetorically asks
Adam: “Ayeka – where are you?”
This same question is one that God is
calling out to us today – everyday – perhaps no more so than this week, as we
prepare to celebrate the anniversary of Matan Torah, The Giving of the
Torah. We are at our essence a kli,
a vessel of Hashem and for His Torah. We
are constantly receiving and re-receiving this Torah. We do not just do so on the annual cycle on
which we read it, but in our constant study and re-study of Jewish texts, in our
day-to-day actions by fulfilling the mitzvoth bein adam l’chaveiro (mitzvoth
between man and his fellow), in our prayers through connection with our
Creator.
We have different chagim (holidays)
throughout the year that require special reflection on different aspects of
Judaism, our lives, our relationships, our God.
On Rosh Hashana we may reflect on the
question: “Where are you in your relationship with family, friends, prioritization
of work-family…and where are you going?”
On Yom Kippur we may ask ourselves: “Where
are you in your connection to God…and where is your relationship with God
going?”
On Pesach we may be asked: “Where
are you in your personal redemption, how are you relating to your people and
your history?”
On Shavuot I believe the question to
be: “Where are you today, as I, Hashem your God, am setting before you the
Torah?”
The question is quite clearly ‘where are
you.’ Not where were you, but
where are you now…and what are you doing to be able to better answer the
same question tomorrow, next week, or next year?
On Shavuot morning the literal answer
for most may be half-asleep, mumbling words over an open siddur (prayer book),
eyes fluttering open and shut after a full night of learning and no sleep (the tradition
is to stay up all night learning Torah in anticipation of receiving It in the
morning, and to pray the morning prayers at the crack of dawn). But with a little broader view, we can
hopefully answer this question with a bit more seriousness.
The starting point in being able to
answer this question and build upon our honest answer of today, is our approach
to the holiday’s most noteworthy tradition – studying Torah all night. Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo writes:
Learning Torah is neither the study of what happened a long
time ago nor what God once commanded man to do.
Rather it is the confrontation with the Divine word at this present moment. Torah learning is made from completely different
components from any study known to man.
It is not confrontation with a text, but with a voice. And it is not just listening to this voice
which is required, but it is a type of higher hearing which comes about through
actively responding to that voice.
It is not necessary to put ourselves
in the shoes of those who stood at the base of Mt. Sinai some 3,000+ years ago
in the midst of the “thunder and lightning and thick clouds.” Nor is it appropriate, as is our typical
approach to ancient texts, to stand at arm’s-length trying to fathom how the
text spoke to our ancestors. Quite the
opposite, we must receive the texts today, letting it speak to us with
whatever capacity we have to understand it intellectually or connect to it
spiritually. Whether we believe or don’t
believe in revelation, whether we know the entire Torah or barely any, whether
we approach the text as a binding document of truth or an uncertain account of
the Jewish people, the way the text was written to be read is as “a
confrontation with the Divine word at this present moment.” Everything else – all our background knowledge,
struggles, beliefs – can come later.
First, we must understand the Torah as it was meant to be understood.
We cannot appropriately “respond to
that voice” until we have properly heard it.
Our response will, invariably, be different upon first studying a text,
first being inspired by a text, then it will be when we begin to see the text’s
context and apply outside knowledge to it…but just responding is a start. All of Judaism is a response to the
Divine. We don’t just receive the
Divine Word without a purpose for it.
Judaism is a religion built upon actions. We are a religion of deeds that are in
response to the fact that we received the Torah at Mt Sinai and that It is
still being revealed to us today and we are, therefore, still responding to it. In modern, secular society (which I too am a
product of) we are trained (perhaps without intent) to numb ourselves
spiritually, to buy in to technology and be constantly going going going, never
reflecting, never contemplating the things that men used to contemplate: the
awesomeness of nature, the beauty of the soul, the spirit of life. And, as we grow older it becomes more and
more difficult (in fact, even awkward for many) to try to express oneself in a
religious way.
Elsewhere, in speaking on the
proliferation of “proving” or “disproving” mathematically and scientifically
the “truth” or “falseness” of the Torah (and other religion’s bibles), Rabbi
Cardozo quotes Rabbi Tzvi Mecklenberg (early 19th c. Germany) to answer
the question of why we are approached with so much skepticism in today’s world:
“is it due to the fact that we are more intellectual sophisticated than [our
ancestors]?” Not at all. Rather, “[he] would suggest that the reason
we are confronted in our day with so much skepticism concerning the Torah’s
divinity is not because of intellectual sophistication but because of lack of
spiritual receptivity, which is developed through labor of the soul.”
[This seems to echo Rabbi Abraham
Joshua Heschel’s opening remarks to God in Search of Man: “It is
customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the
eclipse of religion in modern society.
It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it became
irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.
When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love
by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored by the splendor of the past; when
faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks
only in the name of authority rather than the voice of compassion – its message
becomes meaningless.”]
And perhaps this is why, while Pesach
is still celebrated throughout the Jewish world and Sukkot is well-known if a
bit less-widely observed, Shavuot has somewhat of a degraded status in modern
Jewry among the shalosh regalim, the three holy Jewish holidays. On Sukkot we have the harvest season, the
Sukkah “huts” and lulav and etrog. On
Pesach we have the Sedarim, the matzah, the maggid. We have physical representations and mandated
physical actions. Shavuot is devoid of
such mitzvoth; it is rather a holiday of spiritual toil in Torah,
spiritual preparation to become a vessel for Torah, to prepare ourselves to feel
as if “yes, I am standing at the foot of Mt Sinai interacting
with my God…thunder, lighting and clouds abound…but for me it is as if ‘no
bird [is twittering], no fowl [is flying], no ox [is lowing], none of the
Ophanim [are stirring] a wing, the Seraphim [are not saying] “Kadosh, Kadosh –
Holy, Holy,” the sea [is not roaring], the creatures [are not speaking], the
whole world is hushed in breathless silence and the voice [is coming forth]: I
am the Lord thy God.’”
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Moments of such clarity are rare –
two to three times a life for most of us…never for some. But we can only achieve it if we try. We can only experience it if we learn Torah
as Torah. Even Maimonides, the great logical
philosopher, says “sometimes truth flashes up before us with daylight
brightness, but soon it is obscured by the limitations of our material nature
and social habits, and we fall back into a darkness almost as black as that in
which we were before. We are thus like a
person whose surroundings are from time to time lit up by lightning, while in
the intervals he is plunged into pitch-dark night (Guide to the Perplexed).”
A close constant connection is not
going to always be there for most of us. But a moment of such
revelation can bear a lifetime of faith.
For that we must strive on Shavuot, as we contemplate our answer to God’s
question: “Ayeka – where are you? I call heaven and earth today to
bear witness against you: I have placed life and death before you, blessing and
curse; and you shall choose life so that you will live, you and your offspring
(Deuteronomy 30:19). Ayeka – where are
you?”
