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Parashat Naso - Shabbat Preceding Shavuot - June 10, 2005

This, too, could be called Shabbat Hagadol, the Great Sabbath. It is, after all, the Sabbath preceding our celebration of Shavuot, 'man matan Torateinu, the season of the giving of our Torah. Perhaps it is not so named because the Sages were able to foresee the shrunken yet stubborn crowds that gather yearly in schul to observe and remember the festival of Shavuot. I do understand the reasons Shavuot takes a back seat to the fabulous story of redemption from bondage that is central to Pesach and the much needed release and celebration after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that characterizes Sukkot.

Among other things, including its timing, the concept of revelation central to Shavuot is a tough nut to crack. That there was a specific time and designated place that God revealed God's will to our people, is a difficult notion for the rational minds among us. And even if we are believers that God is in some way present in our lives, it still might perplex us to imagine that there was a moment and a site where God spoke in the human tongue and was understood as is told to us in Torah. Our Torah tells us that the encounter, the place where divine and created kiss in our sacred tradition, takes place at a mountaintop, Mount Sinai.

However, even as far back as Rashi, French Torah scholar from the eleventh century, there may have been difficulties integrating the Mount Sinai experience and story into our religious consciousness. Rashi drew a map of Israel's wanderings based on the book of Numbers. Interestingly, he chose to include the Sinai desert, marked the site of Mount Hor where Aaron was buried, but neglected to pinpoint the location of Mount Sinai. In Spain, the twelfth century philosopher-poet Judah Halevi penned the words, "My heart is in the East, but I am in the uttermost West." The east of which Halevi spoke was not Mount Sinai, but Mount Moriah, the place to which the Jew, no matter where she lives, inclines her prayers.

If you think about it, Har Hamoriyah, "the mountain of being seen," the site of both the Akeda and the First and Second Temples, has always been a more significant place to the Jewish people. It is a focal point of our past and continues to be central to Jewish life to this day. So why should Mount Moriah have taken Sinai's place? Daniel Taylor, an English Professor at Bethel College wrote a book on Celtic Holy Islands. One of those was Skellig Michael, a 700 plus foot high pinnacle of water-and wind-worn rock that, in his words, "rises like Excalibur out of the Atlantic waves of the southwest coast of Ireland." Around the year 600, Irish Christian monks settled on the inhospitable rock peaks of Skellig Michael, "looking for a place to battle the flesh and the devil...to destroy false selves, to shed counterfeit versions of their own life, so that they might help bring into reality the kingdom of the High King of Heaven."

Their dearly loved isolation from the horizontal demands of the physical world came to an end 200 years later when the Vikings raided the island. Indeed, they learned the hard lesson that we are never able to escape the world as long as we are in it. All that remains of the monks is the skeleton of their presence, their extraordinary and inspiring attempts to climb "to the mountaintop" and reach God. Twenty three hundred steps are carved into the stone cliffs that lead to 6 huts, two oratories, two cisterns, and a graveyard. However, pilgrims who visit Skellig Michael don't stay over for the same reason as the short lived time of the monks.

Attempting to settle on the mountaintop is not only physically rigorous, but perhaps is religiously untenable. In this spirit, Harvard religion professor Diana Eck, in her book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras observed that "Mount Meru, the mythic cosmic mountain said to anchor the universe at its very center, was duplicated throughout India...I was astonished... to find that this cosmic mountain joining heaven and earth, described so carefully in the mythological texts, was said to have a greater circumference at the top than at the bottom. Who had ever imagined such a mountain? Its proportions were an inversion of our usual image of a mountain peak. Rather than culminating in a single point, it spread out at the top, making room for the cities of a whole host of gods.... For those of us schooled in the religious imagination of the West, a mountain peak is not a spacious place. If there is a God on the mountaintop, there is room enough for one only...What I discovered and confronted in the course of my work [in India] was my own distinctively Western habit of thought, grounded in primarily in the Western tradition of monotheism: the expectation of singularity and uniqueness....In monotheism, the singular is the proper number for questions of Truth: There is One God, one Only-Begotten Son, one Seal of the Prophets, one Holy Book, One Holy Church...The idea that the human apprehension of truth is multi-sided, a view developed so extensively in the traditions originating in India, is quite alien to the monotheistic consciousness of the West."

It strikes me that the exclusivity implied in the image of a mountain only able to hold one person or one truth, was equally disturbing to those who expounded our Jewish tradition. And while our fore bearers did not guide our mythology toward a polytheistic concept, they did reject the exclusivity of God's revelation to the moment of Sinai. And perhaps this is the key to why it is Mount Moriah that is our spiritual center and not Mount Sinai.

Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, a great Hasidic rebbe taught us that the reason we call Shavuot 'man matan torateinu, the time of the giving of Torah, is because Shavuot only marks the moment God gave the Torah. At any time or place, when one acts in accordance with God's will, one can receive Torah. In other words, when we study Torah, the mountain comes to us. Moreover, according to our Midrash, God intentionally gave the law to the Jewish people in the wilderness at Mount Sinai and not in Israel proper so that we might not say to other peoples that the Torah belongs only to us.

In this vein, I would add that we were given Torah in the wilderness of Sinai so that the people would not remember just the medium, but the message. The experience at Sinai was not about the place. More important than revelation at Sinai has always been our people's ability to take God's message with us wherever we were: in Israel of old, in the expulsion of galut, in our return to the land and in Jewish homes in the Diaspora. For the Israelites in our sacred story, establishing themselves on Mount Moriah is the real story, Mount Sinai was just a stop on the road. And that is what is so important to recall on Shavuot every year. Its not about whether or not we believe that God gave the Torah on Mount Sinai, or that we must not be good enough Jews if we don't.

To be a Jew, Sinai isn't the issue. Everything else after Sinai is: the oral tradition, the codes, the responsa, the ongoing conversation and struggle of generations of our people to understand God's will. We owe our survival of our tradition to the ways we have uncovered a many-layered notion of truth, and how we have accepted complexity, ambiguity and critical inquiry. To be a child of Yisrael has truly meant being God wrestlers, not story believers. And our struggle isn't about climbing to the peak of a mountain to claim the one version of Truth or to get away from the world which distracts from it. The struggle happens living around the mountains and valleys, but believing with the Kotzker Rebbe that we, too, can receive Torah.

To be a Jew today means living in conversation with what might have been transmitted at that mountain, about being part of a Sinai tradition that continued on for ages, and by adding our own voices to it. When our congregation is in Israel in 2 weeks, the mountain we will ascend to take our first taste of Jerusalem, our holy city, is Har Hatzofim, Mount Scopus, named for its beautiful view. Interestingly, the names of these places are deceiving because Jerusalem is not a city built on mountaintops either. The city stretches itself across the Judean Hills. And from the height of Mount Scopus, one can gaze at Mount Moriah, and see it for the place it is today: a mountain one doesn't really need to climb. But a place claimed by many pilgrims of different faiths, many paths towards God. And a place claimed by the parallel truths of Jews all of all kinds Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, Renewal, Reconstructionist, Post-Demoninational and the like. Indeed, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount remain a hotbed for disputes, both interreligious and intra-religious because of the many competing claims on its sacredness. Here I return to Taylor's image of the monk's huts on Skellig Michael: "their flat stones held together only by that accommodation to gravity known as corbeling. They still stand fourteen centuries later, without mortar or prop because they were built in keeping with the vectors of force inherent in the pull of the earth on everything that aspires to rise above it. They work with, not in defiance of what is."

May our lives of faith be so constructed. Not simply to believe for the sake of tradition. And not simply to reject for the sake of consistency or ease. To embrace with humility the spirit of AJ Heschel's thought: "The voice of God reaches the [human] spirit in a variety of ways, in a multiplicity of languages. One truth comes to expression in many ways of understanding." May this Shavuot help us remember not just the time and place of Sinai, but the times and places where divine and human can continue to embrace.

Amen

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri