The Shul's Blog

According to tradition the Torah was given to Moses by the Almighty as a completed document. Such a concept of revelation was an accepted method, which explained how God could speak to human kind. There was no inkling that revelation might be a progressive process because the concept of progress was unknown and not to be discovered for thousands of years.

There were hardly any machines in ancient times. People used animals to carry heavy loads or just as a means of transportation. Irrigation was done by hand and so was harvesting. The most advanced machine that our ancients had was a sickle. If they had swords, that was the ancient machine that they used for war. Because they had few machines, they used life to complete their tasks. They had horses and mules and even people to help them with the most minor of tasks.

The people they used to help them complete tasks were called slaves, and it is precisely the law of slaves that we learn about in the beginning of this sedra. Had the slave owners had an inkling that machines could be developed to do the tasks of slaves, they would have used those machines in place of forced human labor. Alas they could not imagine a world without slavery, or in an easier terminology they could not imagine a world with progress.

So an equitable manner of treating slaves is included in the Torah. Thousands of years later when machines took the place of slave labor a progressive revelation held that slave labor was sinful and forbidden.

Progress not only eliminated the institution of slavery, it also changed our concepts of revelation.

The most important sentence in the theophany and giving of the Ten Commandments, which we read this week, is not found in the Ten Commandments, but in a line, which describes what the Children of Israel had just witnessed. They saw a mountain covered by clouds and expressed by lightning and thunder. Revelation occurred. Moses came down from Sinai with the Decalogue in his hands. The Torah reports that the “people saw the sounds.”

In modern translations of Exodus the verb “saw” is mistranslated as perceived. Modern authors chafe at paradox, and so could not use “see” and ‘sounds’ together. They concluded that one cannot see sounds. One hears sounds, or in order not to damage their translation’s integrity opted to write that the people perceived the sounds.

In truth the Torah was correct in the way that it presents the words “seeing sounds” for the Torah is presenting a paradox. The Torah is relating an experience that the Children of Israel experienced, but an experience that cannot be repeated. That generation felt God’s Presence in a way that we cannot. They lived through a revelation, a onetime experience, which we and every other generation will never have the opportunity to discover.

Our Torah at times recognizes that the boundary between God and man cannot be bounded. For that reason so many times we read about a people who stood before the name of God and not just before God. Onkelos, the official translator of the Torah into Aramaic, always recognizes man’s inability to stand before God in an intimate manner. Rambam uses Onkelos interpretation as the basis for his theology, which is found in his magnum opus, Guide to the Perplexed.

Our generation has been too interested in empirical proof. We do not accept the idea that there are concepts and relationships, which we will never understand. Our translations only affirm that bias.

When will we relearn the necessity of accepting paradox in our lives?

Our faith is a faith of optimism. The cup is always half filled, at least. We look to tomorrow for the little joys of life, and we look for tomorrow for redemption, which is a purpose of creation itself.

The ten spies were condemned in the Torah for seeing with a pessimistic eye, the attempted conquest of the Children of Israel of the Promised Land. That was their major sin. They looked at the world; they looked at the Land of Israel without hope. They saw curses when they were supposed to focus on the blessings of the land.

In the sedra we read this week, Moses sings with the men of Israel about their successful event of liberation from the flesh pots of Egypt where they were slaves for more than two hundred years. Moses begins his song with the word, “Then.” He was speaking of a constant "then" for the Jewish people. He sung about how we must look at history, how we must look at our future. He told us that with “then,” one word, we could hold on no matter how difficult the times.

It was that “then” that took us through the Crusades, the Pogroms and even the Holocaust. We survived because we always believed in a tomorrow.

God told Moses that he would strike dead the first born of Egypt “in the middle of the night.” Moses told Pharaoh that God would strike at “about the middle of the night,” so that Pharaoh would not object after the plague had passed that it was not brought by God since God’s timeline was wrong.

The clear fact, at least to us, is that nobody knew when the ‘middle of the night’ was back then. The clock was not to be invented for another three thousand years. Consequently no one had any true way to determine time when night fell. In Tractate Berachot there is an argument that the night has four watches. If that was so, that would mean that the second of the four watches had to end exactly at midnight. The rabbis asked how one could tell when midnight arrived. They could only answer by miracle. Precisely at midnight, when King David would arise, a wind would blow over the harp that was hung over his bed, and would play a certain tune. A miracle was necessary to answer a problem that could not be answered by logic or invention.

For most of history people had trouble telling and describing time. They did not know what a second or even a minute was. They only had a subjective view of an hour. People could not live by the clock. They did not have calendars filled with appointments.

Life was slower then; it went at a leisurely pace. When we began to make inventions during the industrial age, life quickened. With every advance life became faster and faster. Today we know what a nano-second is, and we live by the second. The night is no longer an amorphous time of blackness, but is delineated by the watch or the more perfect iphone that has taken its place.

The telephone, telegraph, train and later jet plane are only emblematic of the speed at which life is quickening.

Blood is central to sacrifices in our tradition. When a sacrifice was offered, no matter if the sacrifice was devoted completely to God, or parts of the sacrifice were eaten by the priests or even the general population, the blood was always offered to God in its entirety. After the animal was slaughtered, its blood was poured on the altar.

The Hebrew ancients believed that the soul of man and animal was found in the blood of that being. To drink of that blood was to put oneself in danger of the most severe penalties that our faith allowed. Blood was beautiful when offered to God, but an abomination when used for any other purpose. The blood always came first and then the consummation of the sacrifice occurred.

Is it any wonder that the first plague was about blood, when the Nile River turned to blood? That event inaugurated a period of sacrifice both for the Children of Israel and for the Egyptians. The period only ended when every house in which the Hebrews lived had part of its lintel covered with blood. Those homes without blood were homes of death. And the Egyptians who followed the Children of Israel into the Sea of Reeds also ultimately met their death.

We are so far removed from the imagery and symbolism of the plagues that we have lost our sensitivity to compare the plagues to the sacrifices, which Israel offered to God from the time sacrifices were offered in the desert until the destruction of the Second Temple.

Yet, if we think carefully we can see in history a reenactment of the act of sacrifice, which was the basis of our ancient faith. Our redemption is the act of sacrifice brought from the altar to the world in which our forefathers and mothers used to live.