Radical Torah

At Sinai, when the Holy One gave the Torah to Israel, God manifested marvels upon marvels with God’s voice. How so? When the Holy One spoke, the voice reverberated throughout the world. At first, Israel heard the voice coming to them from the south, so they ran to the south to meet the voice there. It shifted to the north, so they ran to the north. Then it shifted to the east, so they ran to the east; but then it shifted to the west, so they ran west. Next it shifted to heaven. But when they raised their eyes towards heaven, it seemed to rise out of the earth. Hence Israel asked one another, “But wisdom, where shall it be found? And what is the place of understanding?” (Job 28:12)

“And the people perceived the thunderings” (Ex 20:15). Since there was only one voice, why “thunderings” in the plural? Because God’s voice mutated into seven voices, and the seven voices into seventy languages, so that all the nations might hear it. (Exodous Rabba 5:9)

It’s a funny, kind of pathetic image, picturing the Israelites scuttling around like they’re the butt of some Divine prank. Except for the fact that their desperation is evident, and it’s pretty clear that this anxiety is serious business.

The running around, the frantic freneticism of the Israelites in this story reminds me a lot of how we live in America lately.

In constant motion, hurtling down the street with lattes in paper cups, moving from office to gym to post-work activities and then going to bed and doing the same thing all over again. And it’s a comfortable place to be—moving from place to place, we can constantly be in “quest” mode, constantly trying to find the thing that we seek, whatever it is. When you seek, there’s a goal, a raision d’etre, something to get you out of bed every day. We are a nation of—as the language is often used—“spiritual seekers.”

Looking. But finding?

You can almost picture a glossy magazine with the tagline: “Wisdom, where shall it be found? What is the place of understanding?” Bookstores are clogged with books with titles like The Ancient Wisdom Of The Blue-Haired Pygmies of Lower Gooptasia. These time-old ancient secrets are going to unlock the keys to—whatever. The answer is right around the corner, the next corner, whatever it is.

But the joke is so on the Israelites, here. They’re running from place to place, when it’s clear that God is perfectly capable of translating God’s voice into any language. If God is such a polyglot, certainly getting the news to its intended primary hearers shouldn’t be the problem? “Wisdom, where shall it be found?” How about right here? “What is the place of understanding?” Okay, how about this place? Maybe the Israelites are just missing a basic lesson, one that it took Dorothy Gale a while to get, too: everything you need is right where you are. Oh, Toto. What you seek is right in front of you. Stop running and the present moment will come to meet you. And I think to some extent that is the lesson that the Israelites are struggling to internalize, here.

But I don’t think it’s that they’re stupid. On some level, they know exactly what’s going on. The way the midrash is written it appears as though God’s voice is shifting every time they move. And that may be true. But I wonder if there isn’t an element of avoiding hearing God’s revelation as well.

After all, revelation is terrifying.

One only has to look to our parsha to know that. Before Mattan Torah, God says to Moses,

You shall set bounds for the people round about, saying, “beware of going up on the mountain or touching the border of it. Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death.” [Then] there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn, and all the people who were in the camp trembled…. Mount Sinai was altogether on smoke, because God descended upon it in fire, and the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The horn grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by a voice….And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the sound of the shofar, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they were shaken, and stood far away. (Exodus 19:12-19, 20:15)

Hearing God’s voice is not only scary, it’s not only difficult, but it’s dangerous. The text underscores again and again that this business, Revelation, is a life-or-death scenario.

What God wants of you, what God asks of you, is not always easy—in fact, it’s usually not easy. Which is why the Revelation story is so frightening. And why, in many places in the Torah, before God speaks to someone for the first time, God says, “Al tirah.” Don’t be afraid. Not because hearing the voice of Ultimate Reality is scary (though that’s probably true, too), but because the kind of information that’s about to be imparted is going to throw you for a loop and a half. God calls, and your problems have just begun.

I think here it’s worth distinguishing for a moment between what we want for ourselves and what God might demand of us. Because there’s a difference between wanting and needing. Wanting is endless, and can be manufactured to aim at just about anything… there’s a billion-dollar ad industry, for example, out there that exists solely to make people want more, to want what they don’t really want, let alone need. To keep them running in circles.

What God needs of you—what you, in the deep recesses of your being, need of yourself, is almost never what you want. Because needs are messy. And inconvenient. And demands that you do things like acknowledge that it’s time to end a relationship even if it makes you feel safe; like quit your job and embark on a career path that’s fraught with uncertainties; like risk alienating people in your life who like you as you already are; let go of things you want to hold onto; and so forth.

It’s fairly comfortable to seek, but once the Israelites stop and actually hear what it is that God has to say, they’ll be on the hook. For quite a bit. Their lives will change drastically with just the giving of the ten commandments—let alone all of Torah. The ability to pretend that they’re not responsible for half of a covenant is gone, and there are a lot of painful, horrible discomforts in its place. Not only “do this, don’t do that” but, even worse, what comes later, as part of the central laws of Leviticus: “You shall be holy.” Oh, shoot. That doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? How many comforts and distractions and petty ways in which we indulge our less admirable qualities do we have to give up to do that? Could we get there if we tried, even? It’s certainly easier to be a seeker, because when one seeks, one lacks the information that actually requires action, demands response, engages meaningful responsibility.

I think the Israelites were running around because they didn’t want to hear. Like those of us who placate ourselves with multitasking, with busyness, with freneticism and obsessing over things that don’t matter, with media stimuli and all the other things that we do to not actually be here, to be present, the Israelites are running around numbing themselves out and then pretending that they don’t know what would help. And maybe they really don’t know. They don’t know where the wisdom’s kept. But God’s voice has been calling, and calling, calling for them to come home.