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Parshat Yitro
2007
Reinterpreting Sinai
Parshat Yitro tells a most astonishing tale – the first account of the revelation of God’s Presence to the entire community of Israel at Mount Sinai. We point with great pride to this, our most significant collective memory – not a revelation to a single individual but a transcendently grand mass experience whose multiple significances continue to reverberate across the millennia in the life of the People of Israel, the Jews. Interestingly, a close examination of the text narrates a less than sublime experience for the people, one filled with terror and fear, one that describes a rejection of the direct experience of God’s glorious and immediate Presence in their lives, a failing with profound consequences for all the subsequent history that then began to unfold. The experience at Sinai was to be our collective initiation into assuming the role of a nation set apart and to be a light unto the nations and a kingdom of priests, a status we have yet to realize in this world no matter what we choose to believe.
The crucial sentences are in Ch. 20, verses 15-18, immediately after those that contain the Ten Commandments: 15. The entire people saw the thunder and the flames, the sound of the shofar and the smoking mountain; the people saw and trembled and stood from afar. 16. They said to Moses: “You speak to us and we shall hear; let God not speak to us lest we die.” 17. Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for in order to elevate you God has come; so that awe of Him shall be upon your faces, so that you shall not sin.” 18. The people stood from afar and Moses approached the thick cloud where God was.
These verses relate that our ancestors succumbed to fear, they were completely daunted by the prospect of immediate and direct contact with the Divine, even a momentary one, to say nothing of establishing a continuous, ongoing relationship characterized by deep communion with the Holy Inmost One. The contemporary translator Nahum Sarna comments that an encounter with the Holy can easily arouse feelings of awe, often terror, frequently fear of death. “The unique, transcendent, supernal holiness of the Divine Presence is felt to be beyond human endurance.” I like to imagine though that had the Israelites stood their ground, a completely egalitarian, classless society based on Divine communion as an ordinary, everyday experience would have emerged. Instead, the people begged Moses to act as their intermediary, their expert, who would hear the Voice of God and then tell them what to do. And isn’t that what happened? Isn’t the next command in the Torah to build an altar to sacrifice to God and wasn’t that new communication device placed in the hands of a separate class of people, the priests, who were put in charge of all future communication with God? Because they were afraid, direct experience was misplaced, and the people were forced to rely on the good will of the ‘experts’ who were put in charge of the means for reaching God indirectly on their behalf. We lost an opportunity at Sinai, even though we were given this secondary, and by my reckoning, thoroughly inadequate and indirect method of realizing our birthright to walk with God every step of the way through life.
None of this should be taken as discouraging news. The story is humbling and begs for completion. We as a nation are still in school, we have yet to learn the lesson that God is always reaching out to us, always talking to us, always inviting us to merge with the Glorious Presence as the most efficacious means to repair our broken and imperfect universe. The story of Sinai may be about a missed opportunity but it also tells us that nothing is lost, that all we need to do is pay attention, and to pay attention we must put an end to every hindrance that manifests in life as our fears. When that day finally dawns, only then will the true work of the Nation of Israel in this world begin to be realized.
Written by Michael Faber, Director of Hillel at Ithaca College.
Learn More
For more information on Parshat Yitro visit myjewishlearning.com.
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