Post by Rabbi Neil on Feb 6, 2018 17:39:23 GMT
Revelation is a complicated business. The idea of God revealing Godself to humanity is very complicated. Firstly, there is the notion according to the Torah that God spoke to the Israelites. But when we use the word “spoke,” we automatically limit ourselves and guide our imaginations to something clearly incorrect. God didn’t speak with vocal chords. God didn’t speak with anything that is similar to speech that we know. So to read about God “speaking” is confusing.
Then we have the difficulty of God descending on Mount Sinai. God, as we know, is not a man on a cloud, God is not to be found anywhere physically. So reading that God has descended is also confusing.
We also have the fact that this is God’s utter revelation to the people, and revelation is an exposure, an opening up, yet the revelation happens from the midst of a cloud. God is revealed through a medium which conceals God. The whole thing is incredibly confusing.
There are so many commentaries on the revelation that it is amazing that so few of us know them. To me, there is one that is more important than any other, and it comes not only from Heschel but Rosenzweig and many other modern Jewish thinkers. The most important thing for us to note about revelation, the fact that will forever change our approach to Judaism is in this short sentence….. “As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash.” It is not a historical fact in the way that we view history nowadays.
To quote Franz Rosenzweig, the words “God descended” (19:20) already conclude the revelation, and everything that follows is interpretive. For a number of prominent Jewish thinkers like Rosenzweig, the content of revelation is simply the fact of revelation. The fact that we know that we can enter into a unique encounter with God is enough. The rest is commentary. “Do this, don’t do that”….that’s all our interpretation of what it means to have a relationship with God. This is a very challenging idea, and also a very liberating one.
God did not physically descend onto Sinai, and God did not physically speak to Moses. But these things did nonetheless happen. They happened because we experienced them. The Torah is our description of that encounter, our response. These things happened, but because they were literally so awesome, the only way we describe them is completely inappropriate. In fact, if we imagine clouds, God descending, a voice, then we’re guilty of serious idolatry. God was revealed from the midst of a cloud, and yet God was obviously not in a cloud. It is a paradox. A wonderful paradox that shows the limits of our language when talking about encountering God. Have you ever had a moment when you really felt the Presence of God? Could you describe it fully? No, of course not. You could put words to it, but your words would always fail to describe it. It’s the same with Torah. Words fail, and yet words have to be used. God spoke, but God didn’t speak. God descended, but God didn’t descend. God was in a cloud, but God wasn’t in a cloud. Words are an attempt to describe the encounter, but they fail completely.
But the words allude to something important. Heschel (p.192-4) explains how, throughout the Torah, God is consistently revealed from a cloud, or from deep darkness. He explains that there is a very good reason why the Torah describes God’s revelation as being obscured, because God is obscured, and yet revelation from obscurity shows us “there is meaning beyond the mystery” (p.194). God in our lives is hidden. It is so hard to find God that God is obscured. The Torah is telling us that even when God is not apparent, God can still be with us, God can show us that our lives have meaning. There is meaning to our lives even when God is hidden. It is an unbelievable message from God. So the Torah describes the revelation as happening from the deepest, darkest point of a cloud to teach us that our lives have meaning, and that meaning comes from God who is hidden in our lives.
But then what about “God descending”? God descends not in a physical sense, not like a heavy rain-cloud, but in a very real sense of Presence. When we get depressed we say we’re “down,” when we have hope we say we feel “lifted”…these aren’t literal terms. But they signify that we feel different. Something inside us has changed, and we are different. The same with the Torah. When God descends, God changes us. God’s revelation to us is an act on us. We are never the same again once God has been revealed to us.
And in terms of God “speaking,” consider the idea of a piece of music “speaking” to us. It’s not the sound that speaks to us, it is that our souls have been moved. So if we can go beyond a literal reading of these words, we find something unbelievable – revelation was the moment when our hearts were moved, when God made God’s Presence known to us, changing our lives forever, and showing us that there is meaning to our lives.
We cannot imagine what happened at Sinai, but as Heschel says, “we can only answer it. Or refuse to answer.” We shouldn’t be focussing on what happened, but how we respond. God changed our lives forever by imprinting on our very being the knowledge that our lives have meaning. So when we read the revelation at Sinai, our response should be, “Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? What does God want of me?” If we read the Sinai account and don’t ask ourselves “Why am I here?” then we haven’t really read it. If we simply try to picture it, we miss the point.
There is something that I want to add. We read, “As Moses spoke, God answered him” (19:19). Revelation is not just an act of God, but an act of human beings. And the order is so important. God does not act unless we approach God first. We only find meaning in our lives if we first ask God for help finding meaning.
I appreciate that all this might be sounding a bit frum… all this talk of God when I’m aware that there are a number of members of our community for whom God isn’t important. What’s important for those members is to be a good person, or to keep mitzvot, or just spending time in community. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan called Judaism an “evolving religious civilization,” by which I understand him meaning that the core of Judaism is and must always be religious, it’s just that what we understand by Jewish religion needs to constantly evolve. Talk of God is alienating if the metaphor of God is alienating. And yes, just as God talking is a metaphor, just as God descending is a metaphor, so, in fact, is God a metaphor. God is the incomprehensible, the indescribable. A thousand years ago, Moses Maimonides clearly stated that we cannot say anything accurate about God, only what God is not. A thousand years later, still vast swathes of the Jewish community – from believers to non-believers – take the metaphors of God literally, either as the God they believe in or the God they don’t believe in! The search for God is the search for meaning, the search for our best selves. Early Judaism personalized that search, anthropomorphized it and gave it a masculine form but that was an expression of that patriarchal society. How we understand God may change – in fact, must change - but I do believe that the need for the idea of God remains.
So this is all very complicated. We cannot imagine God, and if we do imagine God, we can be certain that God is not like that. We cannot imagine what happened at Sinai, and if we do imagine it, we can be certain that it didn’t happen like that. All we can do is make a choice – to respond, or not to respond, although in some sense not responding is in fact a choice of response. Revelation was not a list of do’s and don’t’s, it was the awareness of a simple fact – the fact that we live in relationship with God. From there, we have to define what that means to us, and it’s okay, probably very healthy, actually, if that means different things to each of us. The response of ancient Israel to living in a relationship with God was to create Torah. The big question for us today – the biggest question of all – is and will always be “How are we going to respond?” or, perhaps more personally, “Why am I here?”
May we continue to explore that question personally and within a supportive community, and let us say, Amen.
Then we have the difficulty of God descending on Mount Sinai. God, as we know, is not a man on a cloud, God is not to be found anywhere physically. So reading that God has descended is also confusing.
We also have the fact that this is God’s utter revelation to the people, and revelation is an exposure, an opening up, yet the revelation happens from the midst of a cloud. God is revealed through a medium which conceals God. The whole thing is incredibly confusing.
There are so many commentaries on the revelation that it is amazing that so few of us know them. To me, there is one that is more important than any other, and it comes not only from Heschel but Rosenzweig and many other modern Jewish thinkers. The most important thing for us to note about revelation, the fact that will forever change our approach to Judaism is in this short sentence….. “As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash.” It is not a historical fact in the way that we view history nowadays.
To quote Franz Rosenzweig, the words “God descended” (19:20) already conclude the revelation, and everything that follows is interpretive. For a number of prominent Jewish thinkers like Rosenzweig, the content of revelation is simply the fact of revelation. The fact that we know that we can enter into a unique encounter with God is enough. The rest is commentary. “Do this, don’t do that”….that’s all our interpretation of what it means to have a relationship with God. This is a very challenging idea, and also a very liberating one.
God did not physically descend onto Sinai, and God did not physically speak to Moses. But these things did nonetheless happen. They happened because we experienced them. The Torah is our description of that encounter, our response. These things happened, but because they were literally so awesome, the only way we describe them is completely inappropriate. In fact, if we imagine clouds, God descending, a voice, then we’re guilty of serious idolatry. God was revealed from the midst of a cloud, and yet God was obviously not in a cloud. It is a paradox. A wonderful paradox that shows the limits of our language when talking about encountering God. Have you ever had a moment when you really felt the Presence of God? Could you describe it fully? No, of course not. You could put words to it, but your words would always fail to describe it. It’s the same with Torah. Words fail, and yet words have to be used. God spoke, but God didn’t speak. God descended, but God didn’t descend. God was in a cloud, but God wasn’t in a cloud. Words are an attempt to describe the encounter, but they fail completely.
But the words allude to something important. Heschel (p.192-4) explains how, throughout the Torah, God is consistently revealed from a cloud, or from deep darkness. He explains that there is a very good reason why the Torah describes God’s revelation as being obscured, because God is obscured, and yet revelation from obscurity shows us “there is meaning beyond the mystery” (p.194). God in our lives is hidden. It is so hard to find God that God is obscured. The Torah is telling us that even when God is not apparent, God can still be with us, God can show us that our lives have meaning. There is meaning to our lives even when God is hidden. It is an unbelievable message from God. So the Torah describes the revelation as happening from the deepest, darkest point of a cloud to teach us that our lives have meaning, and that meaning comes from God who is hidden in our lives.
But then what about “God descending”? God descends not in a physical sense, not like a heavy rain-cloud, but in a very real sense of Presence. When we get depressed we say we’re “down,” when we have hope we say we feel “lifted”…these aren’t literal terms. But they signify that we feel different. Something inside us has changed, and we are different. The same with the Torah. When God descends, God changes us. God’s revelation to us is an act on us. We are never the same again once God has been revealed to us.
And in terms of God “speaking,” consider the idea of a piece of music “speaking” to us. It’s not the sound that speaks to us, it is that our souls have been moved. So if we can go beyond a literal reading of these words, we find something unbelievable – revelation was the moment when our hearts were moved, when God made God’s Presence known to us, changing our lives forever, and showing us that there is meaning to our lives.
We cannot imagine what happened at Sinai, but as Heschel says, “we can only answer it. Or refuse to answer.” We shouldn’t be focussing on what happened, but how we respond. God changed our lives forever by imprinting on our very being the knowledge that our lives have meaning. So when we read the revelation at Sinai, our response should be, “Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? What does God want of me?” If we read the Sinai account and don’t ask ourselves “Why am I here?” then we haven’t really read it. If we simply try to picture it, we miss the point.
There is something that I want to add. We read, “As Moses spoke, God answered him” (19:19). Revelation is not just an act of God, but an act of human beings. And the order is so important. God does not act unless we approach God first. We only find meaning in our lives if we first ask God for help finding meaning.
I appreciate that all this might be sounding a bit frum… all this talk of God when I’m aware that there are a number of members of our community for whom God isn’t important. What’s important for those members is to be a good person, or to keep mitzvot, or just spending time in community. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan called Judaism an “evolving religious civilization,” by which I understand him meaning that the core of Judaism is and must always be religious, it’s just that what we understand by Jewish religion needs to constantly evolve. Talk of God is alienating if the metaphor of God is alienating. And yes, just as God talking is a metaphor, just as God descending is a metaphor, so, in fact, is God a metaphor. God is the incomprehensible, the indescribable. A thousand years ago, Moses Maimonides clearly stated that we cannot say anything accurate about God, only what God is not. A thousand years later, still vast swathes of the Jewish community – from believers to non-believers – take the metaphors of God literally, either as the God they believe in or the God they don’t believe in! The search for God is the search for meaning, the search for our best selves. Early Judaism personalized that search, anthropomorphized it and gave it a masculine form but that was an expression of that patriarchal society. How we understand God may change – in fact, must change - but I do believe that the need for the idea of God remains.
So this is all very complicated. We cannot imagine God, and if we do imagine God, we can be certain that God is not like that. We cannot imagine what happened at Sinai, and if we do imagine it, we can be certain that it didn’t happen like that. All we can do is make a choice – to respond, or not to respond, although in some sense not responding is in fact a choice of response. Revelation was not a list of do’s and don’t’s, it was the awareness of a simple fact – the fact that we live in relationship with God. From there, we have to define what that means to us, and it’s okay, probably very healthy, actually, if that means different things to each of us. The response of ancient Israel to living in a relationship with God was to create Torah. The big question for us today – the biggest question of all – is and will always be “How are we going to respond?” or, perhaps more personally, “Why am I here?”
May we continue to explore that question personally and within a supportive community, and let us say, Amen.