Last
week’s meeting between the Israelites and God was full of ambiguity. The text
was chaotic, likely a weaving together of more than one account, and by the end
of our discussion, we still weren’t sure of what exactly the people had witnessed.
The most concrete aspect of the revelation was the ten utterances, or the Ten
Commandments, themselves. These basic laws establish God’s expectations of the
people if they are to uphold the covenant.
In
this week’s parasha, we get even more concrete. Ostensibly, Moses is still up
on Mount Sinai, and God proceeds to tell Moses, “Now these are the mishpatim, the regulations, that you are
to set before them.” And what we have are a series of very specific laws regulating
everything from how we are to treat our Hebrew indentured servants to injury,
accidental and intentional killing of another person, to how we are to treat
the poor, to public safety and property, to the rituals of the pilgrimage
festivals.
The
parasha comes to its end, first with some very Deuteronomic sounding language
about what will happen if we do follow the laws and what will happen if we don’t.
Then there is a covenant cutting or sealing ceremony in which Moses writes down
and then reads the terms of the covenant to the people and then sprinkles blood
on them. And the parasha ends with Moses, Aaron, Nadav and Avihu and seventy
elders going up the mountain where they see God and have a meal.
This
parasha is not as scary or chaotic as last week’s. It makes more sense to our
rational minds. However, it is not devoid of feeling or even of spirituality. Here
we have the spirituality of the every day – the ways in which we will keep the relationship
with God front and center in our mundane activities. The regulations are not
just dry lists of what to do and what not to do. The rhetoric taps into our
historical experience as slaves and strangers and landless, poor marginal
people to provide a deep motivation for following these rules. We are not to
mistreat the stranger, because we know the heart of the stranger, having been
strangers in the Land of Egypt.
As
we study together, I want us to think about these two different types of
spirituality – the transcendent, other-worldly Sinai moments and these
grounded, this-worldly, mundane moments. Which way of connecting to God works
for you?
No comments:
Post a Comment