This week our People encounter God at Mount Sinai. They hear
God’s voice directly for the first time as a people, and they enter into the
covenant as a whole community, becoming God’s “am segullah,” or “treasured
people.” Because the experience is so intense, the people are afraid, and they
are only able to handle hearing the first ten utterances. Moses will take down
the rest of God’s laws and relay them to the people.
In the JPS commentary, scholar Nahum Sarna writes about what
makes the covenantal moment at Sinai unique among other Near Eastern covenantal
documents. In the ancient world, there are many instances of covenants,
testaments, and treaties between parties. But ours is the only example of a
covenant made between God and an entire people.
Another feature that sets our text apart is that the
covenant is made in the context of a larger narrative. We don’t just have a
document listing the laws and rules we are to follow so that we might be God’s
treasured people. We have these laws and rules and agreements within the
context of a larger story – our dramatic story of liberation from slavery and
revelation of God’s presence at Mount Sinai.
The Decalogue (which we often call the Ten Commandments) is
revealed in a mystical immediate intense moment in time that is etched into the
memory of our People from that moment forward. Our tradition asks us to imagine
that we were all there – those of us yet to be born along with our ancestors of
old. This story is read by later generations as an event that is out of time,
transcendent, eternal.
Later rabbis, especially in the Chasidic tradition, put more
importance on the moment of our people experiencing God’s presence than on the
content of the ten utterances themselves.
As we study this parasha together, I want us to consider how
the context of this narrative shapes how we understand its content. What is
more important – the direct experience of God by the people or the list of
“thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots”? Do we agree with our Chasidic masters that
really all we heard was God’s name? Or even just the “aleph” in the first word if
the first phrase, “Anochi Adonai Elohecha,” “I am the Eternal your God”?
No comments:
Post a Comment