Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Shavuot: Matan Torah - The Giving of Torah


“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?”

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