May 20/06 - Shabbat Behar / Bechukotai

Commentary by Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker

The closing and opening words of the book of Leviticus present an interesting problem. At the end, we read:

“These are the commandments that the LORD gave Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai.” (Leviticus 27:34)

The opening words, however, explain that God called to Moses to pronounce the laws “… from the Tent of Meeting …” (Leviticus 1:1) So exactly where did the revelation take place?

There are many commentaries on this seeming contradiction. The 1988 statement of principles of the Conservative movement (titled Emet Ve-Emunah) offers an inspiring way to harmonize the two. Here is the text as expanded in a note in our new Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, p. 757:

Sinai is not a geographic location. It is a symbol of Israel’s awareness of having stood in the presence of God and having come to understand what God requires of them. Whenever a person hears the commanding voice of God and commits himself or herself to live by that voice, the person can be considered to be standing at Sinai. “The greatest single event in the history of God’s revelation took place at Sinai, but was not limited to it. God’s communication continued in the teachings of the Prophets and the biblical Sages, and in the activity of the Rabbis of the Talmud. It remains alive in the Codes and Responsa to the present day.”

At first glance this seems such an uplifting and satisfying response—but you are advised to beware. This “solution” raises some important theological problems: If revelation happens “whenever a person hears the commanding voice of God and commits himself or herself to live by that voice,” then revelation continues in our own time, but it is also highly individual. If we choose to view the revelation at Sinai as merely a symbol, however powerful it may be, it’s just a symbol—and that means that we have to toss out our understanding of the special, Divine authority ascribed to the Sinai revelation.

This is no small matter, because now God is saying Wednesday is the proper Sabbath day according to the revelation granted to our neighbour, Mr. Ploni. And what if Mr. Ploni’s personal message from God also tells him that shrimp, lobster and Canadian back bacon are kosher? What if God says that murder and stealing are okay for Mr. Ploni as well?

This notion of “personal revelation” runs counter to the most basic principle of Judaism as a system of ethics and a religion. Within Judaism it is presumed that there is a community charged with sustaining the Divine authority of both the Torah and the Oral Law, which together are the foundation on which all of traditional Judaism is built. In his award-winning book Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, Rabbi Neil Gillman explains the origin of the traditional view of the authority of the Torah and its companion the Oral Law as follows:

“… God dictated the words of the Pentateuch to Moses, and Moses recorded those words in one coherent and consistent text that is the Humash (literally, the “five” books) or Pentateuch, the same text we have before us today. Parallel to this written text, God revealed a supplementary Torah that is the authentic interpretation of the written Torah. Transmitted orally from generation to generation, this text was set down in writing by the rabbis of the Talmud. By the close of the Talmudic era, then (ca. 500CE), the Jewish people had a complete and authoritative written record of God’s will for the community.”

Many non-Orthodox Jews simply reject that this is the literal, historical truth of the Torah and Oral Law and thereby saddle themselves with a terrible problem. Everything hinges on what we believe happened in that moment of revelation at Mt. Sinai. In what sense is God’s will for the Jewish people revealed in the Torah if that event never happened? What authority does that tradition have for us if Torah was not literally dictated by God to Moses? What can it possibly mean to call oneself a “religious” Jew within the world of “liberal” Judaism—if the only definition of being religious is fulfilling commandments laid down by God and one doesn’t believe that God ever dictated anything?

Without accepting the traditional view of matan Torah (revelation), how can we possibly make sense of that charming claim that God reveals Torah in our own time and to each person? By discarding the notion that God is and has been “revealed” to our people at specific moments, we also reject the related notion that God’s covenant is community-based—a contract revealed to them to establish common standards of mutual respect, personal dignity, and responsibility for oneself.

The questions I am raising—which are raised every day by how we conduct our congregational life and by how our congregants choose to honour our congregation standards and practices—are incredibly important to our identity as Jews, and to the issue of whether there is anything substantive to non-Orthodox Judaism. If there is no basis for the standards and practices of Jewish living, then serving Tiffany’s favourite food—shrimp hors d’oeuvres—for Tiffany’s bat mitzvah and replacing prayers in Hebrew with three hours of her favourite songs by Mos Def and Britney Spears should be no problem. Synagogue life—if it continued to exist at all—would all be a matter of taste. The insipid poetry of Kahlil Gibran replaces the visions of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

As Rabbi Gillman explains:

“… revelation … creates Judaism as a religion. Revelation is what brings God into relationship with a community of human beings. Without God’s revelation, however we understand it, God would be irrelevant to the human enterprise, and Judaism would be purely a matter of peoplehood [ethnic identity] and culture alone.” [Neil Gillman, Sacred Fragments, p. 1]

The truth is that Jewish peoplehood and culture will also vanish—as is evident in the sad history of the Secular Jewish movement in North America, whose commitment to “Jewish culture without religion” has all but ended in descendants with virtually no identity as Jews.

The only long-term future for Jews lies rooted in a Judaism that is neither a museum piece nor an occasional hobby. Our future as a people depends on our ability to find intellectually honest, soul-nurturing answers to the fundamental question of how we believe God is revealed to us within Judaism. In the end, the task facing us is to go to the core of our historical claims and look upon it as evidence that our ancestors experienced God’s presence in an extraordinary fashion and reject the argument that Torah must be either the work of God or the work of human beings. Whatever strategy we will need to use in reconciling these two, we will ultimately find that Torah is both the work of God and of the human beings who read it and from it draw a means to sustain being a Jew as a beautiful and rewarding way of living in the presence of God.

In a few short weeks we will observe the festival of Shavuot, traditionally understood as the celebration of the revelation at Mt. Sinai. Perhaps, these weeks are a perfect time to ask what we mean when we say that our ancestors received Torah from God at Mt. Sinai. Maybe this is also the right time for parents with children preparing for bar or bat mitzvah to ask why. And how would you answer your child if he or she asked, “What’s the point of all this—what’s the meaning and purpose of Jewish existence?” No matter where we may live, maybe this is a good time also to ask whether we can stand once again at Mt. Sinai.

Shabbat Shalom.