Exodus 19:1-20:23
Numbers 28:26-31
Ezekiel 1:1-28; 3:12
Each year on Pesach, Jewish families create a piece of ritual theater at the dinner table. For the Passover seder is far more than a festive meal, far more than just a family celebration. With its rich repast of sights, smells, taste, and memories of our people’s journey out of Egypt, this ritual amounts to a dramatic re-enactment of the Exodus story, and we are the players.
The sign of a successful seder: when one of the children — or adults for that matter — slips and says “we” when describing the experience of the Children of Israel being liberated from Egypt. We were there, slaves in Egypt, freed by God’s hand.
So, too, on Shavuot, we bring historical events to life. For 50 days since Pesach, we have counted the omer, imaginatively placing ourselves in the midst of the historical story. Each day we have marked time, impatiently waiting for the event that would give ultimate meeting to our freedom. Until we receive the Torah we are but a band of freed slaves. With the Torah, we are a people with a religious mission and an unseverable bond to God.
Each year, the first night of Shavuot, which began last night, brings us a dramatic re-enactment very different from the night of the seder — focused not primarily on food, but on Torah. Traditional Jews stay up all night, recalling how our ancestors fearfully followed God’s commands to prepare for the receiving of the Torah. Now, knowing that we have received the gift of the Torah, we study through the night, too entranced by the gift to go to sleep until we have savored its rich teachings.
Yet just as Pesach demands that we carry the lessons of the holiday throughout the years, including heightened moral sensibility and compassion for the oppressed, our Shavuot celebration is thin if we forget our relationship with Torah once the holiday is through. How well do we live the teachings of Sinai in our lives?
Today’s Torah reading (the first day of Shavuot for traditional Jews, the one day of the festival for Reform and Israeli Jews) speaks repeatedly of the voices that the people heard while standing at the foot of Mount Sinai. Strikingly, this brief reading speaks six times of voices that the people heard as part of the dramatic events of revelation. Clearly, this was an awesome and otherworldly occurrence. Yet what happened to the voice of Sinai?
The rabbis say that each day, for all time, a voice goes out from Mount Sinai calling on us to do tshuvah, to atone for our misdeeds and get our lives in order. The Zohar, the chief work of the Jewish mystical tradition, takes this teaching a step farther, suggesting that the original voice of Sinai continues to this day, unceasing. It is said that the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism, responded to these teachings with remarkable candor, asking, “What good is it for the voice to resound if the people are not listening?”
But the Ba’al Shem Tov teaches that sometimes, apparently out of nowhere, thoughts of tshuvah arise in our hearts. People who do not otherwise carefully examine their deeds and the course of their lives suddenly have a change of heart and turn to deepen their lives. The never-ending voice of Sinai continues to speak, and it makes its way into our hearts unexpectedly even without our choosing to listen.
Similarly, Rabbi Arele Roth teaches that there are times when a feeling of faith, a yearning of the heart, a longing for God arises in the soul. A person without spiritual connection suddenly finds himself moved by the beauty of nature, the wonder of life. Someone long disconnected from Jewish life finds herself aching to return. Where did these feelings come from? In the Chassidic view, they are sent to a person from the voice of the Giving of the Torah, a voice that has never ceased.
What a powerful metaphor for our connection with the original events at Mount Sinai. Whatever we believe about how the Torah was created, are we willing to open ourselves to the voice of Torah, to the possibility of receiving divine wisdom in our own lives? As we celebrate Shavuot, may we commit to listening carefully for the voice of Torah as it may speak to us every day.