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February 16, 2001/Shevet 23, 5761, Vol. 53, No.20
Interpreting Sinai defines Judaism
Torah Study
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN
Yitro/Exodus 18:1-20:23
My re-encounter this year with Exodus 19, the central chapter in this week's Torah reading and arguably the foundation for the Jewish religion as a whole, happens to coincide with my teaching the topic of revelation in a class in Jewish theology.
This chapter provides the setting for God's revelation of Torah to Israel. I read that narrative again and again, each time with a growing sense of its inherently mysterious quality. My impulse as an academician is to try to "comprehend" it conceptually, to "explain" it to my students.
But the narrative resists my every attempt. What really happened at Sinai?
I then recall what Professor Heschel wrote about this chapter. He counsels us against trying to "understand" the biblical account of the revelation at Sinai. It was never intended to be a literally accurate description of an event, he claims, but rather a song.
And then his unforgettable sentence: "As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash."
Imagine then, if that chapter were written as a poem, just as Moses' Song at the Sea in Exodus 15 is written in the Torah scroll. In that latter passage, it is obvious that we are dealing with poetry, not prose. When it tells us that the waters of the sea "stood straight like a wall," we realize that we are dealing with the language of metaphor.
But Exodus 19 is not supposed to be a song. At least it would seem that the Bible itself understands it as a historical narrative, not poetry.
What happens when we read it as poetry? Does God literally "come down" on the mountain? Does God literally "speak"? Were there literal shofar blasts? Thunder and lightning? Or are all of these poetic touches, designed, as Heschel suggests, to enhance the mystery?
Does it make a difference how we understand Exodus 19? Very much so. How we relate to Judaism does not rest on how we understand the Song at the Sea, but it does depend on how we understand Sinai.
Those of us who read this chapter as a literal description of a historical event base our understanding of Judaism on the fact that God did literally speak at Sinai, that the Torah is literally God's word; therefore it is binding on all Jews forever and is unchanging from generation to generation.
In contrast, those of us who read the chapter as a midrash acknowledge that what we have is a human response to an event that surpasses human understanding and language.
That's precisely what we mean by midrash: a midrash is a human interpretation of a text or an event.
What God transmitted had to be formulated in human terms. "The act of revelation," Heschel writes, "is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man." That's why Exodus 19 is a song or a midrash.
That way of understanding Exodus 19 transforms the broader issue of the authority of Torah in a way that many of our contemporaries can only welcome. If, from the outset, Torah was embodied in human terms, then all subsequent generations of Jews have the right and the responsibility to acknowledge that same human factor in how they read the mandate of Torah in the light of their own historical and cultural contexts.
To this day no one knows for sure precisely where Mount Sinai is located. For this reason, we can echo Heschel in suggesting that Sinai is not a place but a moment - a moment when God and Israel entered into a relationship.
However we understand Exodus 19, that relationship remains as binding today as it ever was.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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