This week we celebrate Shavuot--the Giving of the Torah at Sinai. In last week's newsletter, I talked about how all the Israelites were counted in the census. I should have noted that only the men were counted. Michael (michaelstrassfeld.com)
A word of Torah: After 40 days together on Mt. Sinai, God gives Moses the tablets. When Moses comes down from the mountain and sees the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf, he smashes those tablets. Eventually, God invites Moses to return to the mountain and tells him to write a second set of tablets. I used to understand this text as another example of the failure of human beings to accept God’s gifts for them. Despite all the miracles that God performed for us in Egypt and on the way to Sinai, we can’t go forty days without doing the wrong thing, worshipping the Golden Calf. We only deserve the second rate set of tablets---not one written by the hand of God but by mortal Moses.
I now think that the point is the opposite. The world needs to be built by human hands, guided by laws and wisdom developed and written by human beings. We are seekers of truth not guardians of the truth. We create the truth and question it over and over again. The midrash tells us that when the Ark of the Covenant was completed, the second set of tablets were put inside (Bava Batra 14b) but the broken pieces of the first set were also placed in the Ark of the Covenant. We strive for a vision of the whole tablets. We may attain pieces of that vision, but for now, the Torah we live with is the human interpretation of the encounter with the divine at Sinai.
We have the written Torah and the Oral Torah. Our task is to continue to study the written Torah. As we bring our insights and our questions and challenges to the text, we create the Oral Torah, which changes in each generation. We live in the tension of the written Torah and our contemporary understanding--each which challenge the other. That is the task of all those who are students of Torah. It is why we need two Torahs—the written and the oral. One without the other would be incomplete.
Who is engaged in this extraordinary process? The wisest scholars of our time? In fact, all of us are participants, each adding the piece of our lives to the Torah until it is complete. According to a mystical tradition, each Jew has one letter of the Torah, our own special letter that we learn and develop and raise up to the Holy One. (See Me’or Einayim on Va-Yelekh) This notion is based on the tradition that there are 600,000 letters in the Torah and there were 600,000 Jews who left Egypt. (Neither count is really accurate). Each person’s Torah is different and unique. This vision, that each of us has our own special letter of the Torah, is empowering, but also frightening for it means that with so many Jews distant from Judaism, whole parts of the Torah are being left unread.
According to Jewish law, if even one letter is missing from a Torah scroll, it is pasul/not kosher and can’t be used in the synagogue. Lacking even one Jew, one letter, the Torah scroll is incomplete. Our task is to invite everyone to find their place in the Torah scroll. Adding their “Torah,” their understandings, to ours and to those that came before, will help complete the Torah.
Kavvanah/intention
If not just a letter, what are the teachings, stories and principles of the Torah that help shape your life? Are there new teachings from the past year that you want to make sure to carry with you as you continue your journey?
Song lulei toratekha sha'a'shu'oy az avaditi ve-onyi
l'olam lo eshkah pikudeikha ki vam hiyitani
If not for your Torah, I would be list in life's challenges;
I will not forget your teachings for they help me to live
Ps. 119:92
