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Friday February 9, 2007

We need to have quiet times with the Torah to hear God’s voice

by rabbi lavey derby

Yitro
Exodus 18:1-20:23
Isaiah 6:1-7:6; 9:5-6

“The call of the Shofar grew louder and louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him with a voice” (Ex. 19:19). Mystics dream of that voice. Poets attempt to cap ture its timbre. Rationalists often dismiss it. The rabbis of the Talmud were intrigued by that voice. They interpreted the voice of Sinai to mean that God spoke “with the voice of Moses!” Similarly, the rabbis comment on the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush that “God spoke with the voice of Moses’ father.”

In our era, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose 100th birthday would have been celebrated Jan. 11, wrote of that voice: “If revelation was a moment in which God succeeded in reaching man, then to try to describe it exclusively in terms of optics or acoustics, or to inquire was it a vision or was it a sound, was it forte or was it piano, would be even more ludicrous than to ask about the velocity of ‘the wind that sighs before the dawn.’”

What we believe about the voice that calls from Sinai is at the very core of our Jewish self-understanding. Those who believe in the literal meaning of the voice, that is, that God spoke in words at Sinai, will also believe that the words of Torah are immutable. For those for whom the voice is metaphor, the language of Torah may be the first sacred human attempt to give voice to the experience of the presence of God. Heschel himself writes, “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is midrash.”

While this theological conflict creates a huge rift in the unity of the Jewish people, I choose to see it as a blessing. The freedom of belief which is part of the modern Jewish experience provides us with the opportunity to seek out the Jewish path which speaks most powerfully to our souls. Everyone should be able to find a spiritually nurturing Jewish home.

For the Chassidic masters, the voice that speaks to Moses suggests that revelation is not a singular historical event but an ongoing spiritual process. The Ohr Ha-Meir offers the insight that since the voice of God was disembodied it required an elevated soul like Moses’ to translate the voice into words. So too, “the light of Torah is revealed by means of the souls of the spiritually elevated who teach new understandings of Torah in every generation … The Holy One gives a person with consciousness an understanding heart to return the words of Torah back into ‘voice,’ according to necessity and for the sake of worship in that time and generation.”

We can hear this teaching echoing with the spiritually radical nature of early Chassidism. Revelation occurs when we are able to translate the experience of the presence of the Holy One into new teaching. Sinai is but the communal paradigm of an intensely personal and individual moment of communion. It is a moment when intuition transcends reason, we sense the ineffable and can speak new meaning. This is why, the Ohr Ha-Meir teaches, when we read Torah we recite “Blessed is the one who gives the Torah,” in the present tense, “for the sound of Torah never ceases and is continuously given according to the preparation and spiritual purity of those who receive it.”

What if we stand at Sinai every day? What if the voice calls out to us every moment, but we are too busy, our minds and hearts too noisy to hear it? Our spiritual task is not to increase the volume of the voice that calls to us — it is infinite — but to increase our ability to hear! We need quiet time, contemplative time, time for preparation, time for prayer and time for study. To be graced with joy and delight in the renewal of Torah for ourselves, we will need to immerse ourselves in its words.

Rabbi Lavey Derby is the senior rabbi of Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon.

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