Bekhukotai 5782

Rabbi Harold Kushner

Not all the laws, however, were literally given to Moses at Sinai! The opening verse of Leviticus describes the laws that follow as having been given at the Tent of Meeting. 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, that 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 teaching 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 the present day" (Emet Ve-Emunah).

David Ariel

Not only did the rabbis of the Mishnah expand the concept of divine authorship from the Ten Commandments to the entire Torah; they also believed that there were other divine communications to Moses that had not been written down in the Torah. The rabbis called this the Oral Torah (Torah she-be-al peh). They maintained that this oral tradition dates back to Sinai and has as much authority and antiquity as the written text. According to the rabbinic tradition, the revelation of God at Sinai was not the final word. Revelation of God's teaching continues in the process of deliberation throughout history by competent and learned Jews who meditate upon God's word and law. This interpretive tradition invests the continuous unfolding of the divine revelation not in God but in the wisdom of the rabbis and the rabbinic tradition. The basis for this is the belief that everything that was, is, and can be known from God was revealed at Sinai but that much of the content of the revelation was implicit, rather than explicit, within Torah. Jews can derive new insights, laws, and interpretations after Sinai, all of which are implicit within the Torah text or are part of an oral tradition that supposedly dates back to Sinai. This conveys the idea that Torah is a living document rather than a static code. The rabbis who believed that the Torah is a comprehensive guide to every aspect of life said, "Turn it and delve into it for it contains everything."

Question for Discussion

On the precipice of Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the revelation at Sinai, how can we understand both teachings—the one from the Talmud that the prophets may not add new elements to Torah, and the teaching from Harold Kushner about the perpetual nature of Sinai—to be true? How can each strengthen our understanding of Torah and of our relationship to the Divine?

Rabbi Arthur Green

Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition

The Hasidic masters insist that the Torah must have new interpretations in each generation, in accord with the generation's spiritual character. Only in this way, they clearly state, does Torah, eternally belonging to God, historically belonging to Moses, become our Torah.

In choosing to live with an ancient text in this way, keeping it alive through a constant process of creative reinterpretation, we stand in open conflict with Spinoza's insistence that the Bible must be treated just like any other document, its words meaning what critical scrutiny seems to indicate, and nothing more. As a community still committed to a sacred canon, we privilege those texts to bear, and to transport us to, infinite other realms of meaning, the “inner palaces” of Torah. We thus make the same claim for Torah that we make for the natural world itself: remove the veil of surface impressions, go deeper, and you will find there something profound and holy... In doing this, we should realize that we are using the text as a pathway to insight that leads beyond text, and ultimately beyond language itself.

Only by digging deeply into the outer Torah, its sometimes harsh “shell,” spurred on by the pain it causes us, will we find our way into the secret places where the experience of generations tells us that insight into God's presence will be found.