A Picto-D’rash of Parsha Yitro
Andrea Luna
1. Core significance of this Parsha
2. The Scene of Sinai
3. The People
4. The Boundary
5. Moses: Who said what to whom?, “Darsheini”
6. The Torah is Given
7. Torah Kedumah / Primordial Torah
8. Oral Torah/ Written Torah
9. God / Clouds of Glory / Shekhinah
10. Hands of God
11. Unification/ Our Portion
* * * * * * * * * * *
1.SIGNIFICANCE of this PARSHA
Depending on where you are on the spectrum of Jewish belief you may see the event as a religious truth, a historical event, or a myth, (or even all of these). However you hold the story, it is a core strand in our spiritual DNA, our tradition’s version of Revelation : God manifesting to humans.
“The encounter at Sinai forms the literary and ideological heart of the Torah. Israel’s experience at “God’s mountain” is presented as the determining factor in its spiritual and national identity. It is here that God proposes and Israel accepts the covenant (b’rit) that creates a legal and binding relationship between a people and its deity…”
(The Torah : A Women’s Commentary, Eskenazi and Weiss, WRJ, 2008)
I’ve been trying for years to visualize and understand what happened at Sinai and I’ve often used images inspired by the story in my art. The deeper I go into the different texts of the Peshat, the story in Torah, layered by Midrash, Talmud, centuries of rabbinic and philosophical commentary and the Kabbalists’ mystical writings about the event, the more elusive it becomes… layers appear quickly, for what happened at Sinai is a Mystery… and a topic of study and discussion for Jews for centuries. This morning we will continue that conversation: the conversation about the Mystery that veils the nature of Torah and most mysterious of all, the nature of God, and the mystery of the relationship of both to us, as a community, “Am Y’israel”, the Jewish people and to us as individual Jews.
2. THE SCENE at SINAI
Let’s take a bit of time get in touch with our Jewish soul and pull up this scene from our cellular memory: the pause before the Torah actually was given to Moses, that cataclysmic event, the thunderous, fiery, earth-shaking rending of physical reality, when, according to this Exodus account, God appeared, for the first time to the whole of the people IsraeL. And the people acted, for the first time (and maybe the last!) in consensus, with one voice. The scene at Sinai was wild and crazy; ear-splittingly noisy (all the thunder and shofar blasting continuously!), scary, exhilarating. And fire, lots of fire. PIcture it: imagine a volcano shooting fire above you in the night! (I’ve seen an erupting volcano a few years ago on Hawai’i and it is awesome and terrifying.) And lots of thick clouds: God was there, in the Clouds of Glory and Moses was going up and down the mountain between God and the people. Versions of this story in Torah differ, but the core event, and a core belief of the Jewish people was that God manifested into our world, into physical reality, and gave a Torah to the Jewish people, and they, as One, accepted.
As I began to develop a design for a cover for the table that holds our Torah for Saturday services, I studied the texts in Exodus, Deuteronomy that tell this story, including Rashi’s commentary, the Zohar with Daniel Matt’s translation and commentary, and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’ commentary on The Tanya of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyadi.
I also looked again at art pieces inspired by this event that I’ve made over the past few years.
3. THE PEOPLE
Point to Handprints of MCJC members on the border of the Torah Table Cover representing the “Am Y’Israel” assembled at the bottom of the mountain.
In Fran’ Schwartz’s teaching on this Parsha at her Hochma Simcha at this time last year, she spoke of the “entire people” responding as one :”Everything that God has spoken we shall do!” (EX 19:8). (There has been considerable discussion if “the 600,000…the people” included women, children, servants, non Jewish spouses and others who left Egypt. Who they were exactly and what that meant then and now, is a larger topic which we will skip today.)
In The Tanya, Reb Schneur Zalman of Lyadi, the Alter Rebbe speaks of the 600,000 who left Egypt and were at Sinai as the source of all the souls of Jews born since then, the “general souls of Israel with their individual offshoots, down to the ‘spark’ in the most worthless and least estimable members of our people, the children of Israel, are thus bound up with the Torah, and the Torah binds them to the Holy One, Blessed be He…”. As God’s angel said to Sarai in Genesis 16:10: “I will greatly increase your offspring, and they will not be counted for abundance.” According to the Alter Rebbe’s teaching, the souls we are born with are all individual fragments of the original 600,000 souls. Says Rabbi Steinsaltz in his commentary on this passage, “even those who take no interest in Torah, who perhaps do not want Torah---are connected via the Torah. For all of them, the Torah is the means of connecting to the almighty, and thus do all of them at least have a connection to the Torah.”
I understand this to mean that there was a deep, soul-level actualization that occurred at the giving of Torah, that opened up a pathway to the spiritual information coded into the Torah, a divine quickening of the spiritual DNA of everyone there that not only unified them as the Jewish people, but connected them to all the Jews that would be born in the future, including those of us who would choose to be Jews. We all carry fragments of the souls of the 600,000.
4. THE BOUNDARY
Deut. 4:4-5 describes the scene:
“so you approached and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain was burning with fire up to the heart of heaven, darkness, cloud, and thick cloud. God spoke to you from the midst of the fire; you were hearing the sound of words, but you were not seeing a likeness, only a sound.” Deut. 4:11-12
“Face to face did Hashem speak with you on the mountain, from amid the fire. I was standing between Hashem and you at that time to relate the word of Hashem to you for you were afraid of the fire and you did not ascend the mountain…”
(Point to Boundary on the Torah Table Cover)
Tamar Kamionkowski’s teaching (from RRC course Our Ancestors Search for God: The Many Faces of God in the Bible, 2006, online), “One of the primary issues of that text was the boundary and whether the people of Israel at the base of the mountain would rush up to see God and have some kind of first hand experience of God. There is a constant tension in that text. Do the people want to break through, or are they afraid? The assumption is that God is actually up there on the mountain, and the people could SEE God, if only they could get up there, and the anxiety of living with that knowledge of the potential of seeing God.
Exodus is very much focused on the sense of sight; it is central, that the people have the potential to SEE GOD, that Moses SEES the burning bush. The Hebrew term “ra’a” “to See” is central in the theology imbedded in the Book of Exodus.”
The display of God’s might is so overwhelming and terrifying that the people withdraw behind the boundary and demand that Moses assume the role of mediator.
Deuteronomy presents Moses’ retelling of the story looking back, after many years, and the experience of God’s Presence is not so immediate. I prefer the Exodus version where the immediate experience of God’s Presence is more visceral and alive.
5. GOD, MOSES, the PEOPLE, and WHO SAID WHAT TO WHOM?
What they heard:
EX 20:15-16: “all the people witnessed (i.e. “SAW the voices”, “reim et hakolot”) the thunder and lightning. The blare of the horn and the mountain smoking and when the people saw it they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us lest we die’.”
Concerning these voices Rashi: comments in his discussion on Ex. 20:2, ”Because they then heard many voices, as it is said :’The people heard the voices (“ha kolot”)” –voices coming from the four cardinal points and from heaven and from earth--- therefore God said to them, ‘Do not say there are many Deities’.
Reading the accounts of what happened at Sinai in the Torah we now have is often confusing, because there is no chronological order. As Rashi says, “There is no “earlier” or ‘later’ in the events related in Torah.
When the commandments are given (EX 19:20 and DEUT 5: 1-18) GOD recites them directly to the people. Some commentators say that the people only heard the first two mitzvoth directly from God, they heard his voice, and that Moses told them the others for supposedly only he heard God’s.
Ex 31:18 says “God gave Moses, when He finished speaking to him, two tablets of testimony, stone tablets, written with the finger of God.”
Rashi commenting on this verse, says that he “first heard the laws from the mouth of the Almighty…but he must have been unable to learn in its entirety every law to be derived from it….and they then repeated each Halacha together.” DEUT 4:12-13 “
(These accounts are of the first Tablets that were given which then broke when Moses threw them on the ground upon seeing the Golden Calf (the pieces of which were placed in the Holy of Holies, the Ark, along with the second set of Tablets and kept there until when they were supposedly buried by King Josiah with the Ark in the wood pile for the temple, but later lost…”The Lost Ark”…again, a story for another time.) .
What God said vs. what Moses said:
Rabbi Margaret has taught us to notice what jumps out at you, or bothers you when trying to read a text, to go with it, for it may be the door and “opening” in the text for you. The Kabbalists tell us to look for a Remez, a clue to go deeper into the layers of meaning of PaRDeS, the Holy Orchard.
A significant discrepancy between what God said and what Moses said God said in a few verses before today’s Parsha raises this issue (Ex 19:10- 140) that Diane M. Sharon, in “Another View” (in The Torah; A Women’s Commentary, p. 421 ) says cries out “Darsheini”/ “Interpret me!”
God said to Moses: “ Go to the people and sanctify them today and tomorrow, and they shall wash their clothing. And let them be prepared for the third day, for on the third day God will descend in the sight of the entire people on Mt. Sinai. You shall set boundaries for the people roundabout, saying, “Beware of ascending the mountain or touching its edge; whoever touches the mountain shall surely die. A hand shall not touch it, for he shall surely be stoned or thrown down, whether animal or person he shall not live; upon an extended blast of the shofar, they shall ascend the mountain. Moses descended from the mountain to the people, “Be prepared after a three day period; do not draw near a woman.”
Says Sharon: “Moses’ deviation from God’s command is troubling well beyond the feminist focus. Moses’ alteration of God’s command raises the central question of who is the final authority on what God really says. Which version of the command is authoritative? Is Moses faithfully transmitting God’s words? Is the text accurately presenting God’s instructions? And, ultimately, what gives Moses or the text the right to report God’s words differently from the way in which they were delivered?”
“The entire history of interpretation of our sacred texts, from the Mishnah to modern feminist midrash, is empowered by Moses audacious transformation of God’s words. Exodus 19:9-15 subverts omniscient external authority and hands authority to the reader. This troubling passage empowers all of us to read, interpret, and find meaning in this parshash and its contradictions.”
Judith Plaskow also comments (ibid., p. 423): “It is striking that God’s instructions to Moses are addressed to the whole community. It is Moses who changes them…who assumes that the instructions are meant for only half the people. Thus at this early stage in Jewish history, Moses filters and interprets God’s commands through a patriarchal lens. His words are a paradigm of the treatment of women, but a complex one. They show how Jewish tradition has repeatedly excluded women, but also in the way in which that exclusion must be understood as a distortion of revelation.
“Interestingly, the Rabbis seem to have been disturbed by the implication of women’s absence from Sinai, because they read women into the text in a number of ways. …According to one midrash (B’reishit Rabbah 28:2), the order of the verse suggests that God sent Moses to the women with the Torah first. “
“Several lessons can be drawn from this. One is the inseparability of revelation and interpretation. There is no revelation without interpretation: the foundational experience of revelation also involves an act of interpretation. Second we learn that the process of interpretation is ongoing. What Moses does, the Rabbis seek to undo. …Third, if the task of interpretation is ongoing, it now lies with us. If women’s absence from Sinai is unthinkable to the Rabbis---despite the fact that they repeatedly reenacted that absence in their own work---how much more must it be unthinkable to women and men today who function in full communities in which women are full Jews? We have the privilege and the burden of recovering the divine words reverberating behind the silences in the text, recreating women’s understandings of revelation throughout Jewish history.”
6. THE TORAH IS GIVEN
What is revelation, what was revealed??
What . is . Torah ?
If it was given complete at Sinai, how to account for all the changes, commentary, and editing that has taken place in the over 2,000 years that have passed between God’s communication to Moses and the people at Sinai and the writing and content of the Sefer Torah we have here on the table. The tradition tells us that the possibility of the Oral Torah, all the changes and commentary was given with the second Torah.
But....where was the Torah before God gave it to Israel at Sinai?
7. TORAH KEDUMAH / PRIMORDIAL TORAH
This teaching that the Torah which “had been written before him from olden times” has long fascinated me and I have often pondered. This is the primordial Torah that “was given in a frame of white fire and the letters were engraved in black fire” (TJ, Shek. 6:1, 48d, ref. EJ).This is quoted and agreed with in many sources and disagreed with by none, Rashi comments: “This is also associated with the “black fire” with which the primeval Torah was written”. ( Tanchuma, Bereshit 1, Yerushalami, Shekalim 6:1 (25b), Shir HaShirim Rabbah, loc. Cit., Zohar 2:84a, 2:114a, 2:226b, 3:132a, 3:154b, Tikuney Zohar 56 (90b).)
I wonder if this might be a description of what Moses saw, and he transmitted it so strongly and clearly that it has been passed down intact from his mouth. Moses was an initiate of a very high spiritual order; clearly he must have understood the Mystery: that the Torah Kedumah was the source of what he heard and perceived.
7. b. More on the FIRE
The verse I mentioned above from Deuteronomy, states that God spoke “out of the fire”. Elsewhere, however it says, “You heard His voice out of the midst of the darkness” (Deut. 5:20). But as the Zohar states, the “fire” mentioned here is the fire of darkness. (Zohar 1:11b. Also see Moreh Nevuchim 2:30, Rashi on Genesis 1:2. Cf. Va Yikra Rabbah 18:3). It is the burning longing that comes from the total nullification of thought.. In the Zohar, Shemoth, Sec. 2, p. 87a: “The Torah was manifested in a black fire which was superimposed upon a white fire, signifying that by means of the Torah, the ‘Right Hand” clasped the ‘Left Hand’ that the two may be fused as it is written: “from his right hand a fiery hand to them.” (Deut. 32:2)
The primordial Torah Kedumah is the Soul of Torah, it is the place of Pure Spirit and Cosmic Wisdom and Divine Intelligence that manifested in material form to the Jewish people Moses; it is the essence of Torah, its Ruach. In rabbinic literature, it was taught that the Torah was one of the six or seven things created prior to the creation of the world (Gen. R. 1:4; Pes. 54a, et al.). Of these preexistent things, it was said that only the Torah and the throne of glory were actually created, while the others were only conceived, and that the Torah preceded the throne of glory (Gen. R. 1:4).
(Rashi comments on Genesis 1:2 :”The throne of divine Glory was standing in space, hovering over the waters by the breath of the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, and by his command, even as a dove hovers over his nest.”
According to Eliezer ben Yose the Galilean, for 974 generations before the creation of the world, the Torah lay in God's bosom and joined the ministering angels in song (ARN1 31, p. 91, cf. Gen. R. 28:4,
with the second Tablets of the written Torah.
The kabbalists taught that the Torah is a living organism. Some said the entire Torah consists of the names of God set in succession (cf. Nahmanides, Perushei ha-Torah , Preface) or interwoven into a fabric (cf. Joseph Gikatilla, Sha'arei Orah). Others said that the Torah is itself the name of God. The Torah was identified with various Sefirot in the divine body (see above). Ultimately, it was said that the Torah is God (Menahem Recanati, Ta'amei ha-Mitzvot, 3a; Zohar 2, 60a [Ex. 15:22]). This identification of the Torah and God was understood to refer to the Torah in its true primordial essence, and not to its manifestation in the world of creation.
I am fascinated by the idea of the Torah Kedumah which pre-existed the world. I wanted to express that moment, that mystical synapse, that cosmic nanosecond, a luminal opening between the plane of existence and our existence in dimensional time.
As I studied and thought about how to express this on a piece of cloth,
the image that began to emerge for me was a picto-midrash of the primordial Torah in the moment preceding the actual giving of it by God to Moses and the people.
8. ORAL TORAH / WRITTEN TORAH
As mentioned above, Rabbi Steinsaltz teaches that Torah is the medium through which every Jewish soul is bound to God. ….but, each Jew, as an individual, is connected to only part of it. So we pray, at the end of the Shemoneh Esreh prayer, the Amidah: “…give me my portion in your Torah..”, our own individual part. Nevertheless, not every person is privileged to recognize his individual place in the Torah says Reb Zalman; as Steinsaltz comments: “this prayer is also, to be granted the knowledge what portion is ours.” (Opening the Tanya, 2003, Jossey-Bass)
“My interpretation of this midrash is that each of us has an obligation to share their Torah with their community.” (Tamar Kamionkowski, wrap up to course “Voices of Our Ancestors”, RRC online Fall 2006). We are part of the triad: God, Torah, Jewish People.
The written Torah is the manifest Torah; the hidden, primordial continues to be the source of the Torah yet to be manifested, our portions of Torah, the Oral –Torah.
We are the current co-creators of the Oral Torah, which was given to Moses at Sinai.
This Torah Table cover is a picto-Midrash of my imagining of the Primeval Torah moments before it manifests at Sinai.
9. GOD / CLOUDS of GLORY / SHEKHINAH
The thick clouds are a key motif, a “Remez” /clue that indicates a deeper meaning in all accounts of the Sinai experience; in the peshat/story in the Bible, in midrash, in Kabbalistic mystical writings, in all commentaries . They are universally seen to indicate the presence of God, God’s Glory/ “Kavod Adonai”.
(EX 19:9) And God said to Moses I will come to you in a thick cloud..”
(EX 20:18) So the people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick cloud where God was.”
(EX 24:15-17) “He called unto Moses out of the cloud,” and at the same time, “the appearance of the glory of God was like devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel.”
(EX 25:8) God commands Moses to build GOD A SANCTUARY ‘that I may dwell (v’shakhanti ) among the children of Israel.”
(EX 40: 34-38) :The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the glory of God filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter unto the Tent of Meeting because the Cloud abode there and the Glory/Kavod of God filled the Tabernacle. And whenever the Cloud rose up from over the Tabernacle, the children of Israel set out in their journeyings. But when the cloud did not rise up, then they journeyed not till the day that it did not rise up. For the Cloud of God was upon the Tabernacle by day and there was fire there by night in the sight of all of the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”
In this traveling desert Tabernacle the area within the courtyard of the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness was called The Camp of the Divine Presence, “Machneh Shechinah”. And even later in the Temple, the Glory of God/ “kavod adonai” descended in a cloud “that filled the House was the palpable sign of God’s presence in Solomon’s Temple as well: after the priests deposited the Ark in the Sanctuary, under the wings of the Cherubim, “when the priests were come out of the holy place, the cloud filled the house of God, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the Glory/ Kavod of God filled the house of God.’ “( ll King 8:10-11)
And at the end of the Amidah, after we pray to be given our portion in Torah, we pray:” May I merit, with all Israel, and with all your people, that your Presence dwell upon us.” This manifest Presence of God signaled by the Clouds is the Shechinah.
10. THE HANDS OF GOD:
A troubling issue for me that I discussed with Margaret was if representing the Hand of God on a ritual object for the shul was breaking the Jewish prohibition of expressing an image of God in pictorial form…or if it was not a prohibition, and was it still a taboo.
The concept of the Hand of God reaching from the clouds of Glory, with the primordial Torah with the as yet unattached aleph-beit floating on the background was a development of themes and images that I have been studying and working on for a few years: Here refer to art on the wall: The first letter being written on the primordial Torah (originally for MCJC Bulletin Board art); the hand of God (Shiviti for Ella Russell) ; the fiery hand of God I attached to Jacob’s Ladder last Shavuot; human hands (made in the image of God, receiving and offering (Tu B’Shevat Picto-Haggadah, Rosh Hashanah Bulletin Board art and other are some visuals in my religious art.
The practical constraints were that it had to be washable and tough enough to withstand the heavy use, leaned on, books piled on, etc. and wear and tear of a table cover that is put on and taken off weekly.
My process of creating a ritual piece of Sacred art, another piece of my piece of Torah, an attempt to conceptualize a physical thing made of cloth and thread and pigments, inspired by my studies and beliefs of Torah and Matan Torah to be used in our communal Torah service was complicated and problematic:
The tension between my personal consciousness and work as an individual artist and the collective and communal consciousness of both MCJC and the larger Jewish community was a constant presence in the process of making this piece. This tension, I realized is another aspect of being Jewish, a given, with we who “struggle” with knowing God. It comes with the territory, in many ways for all of us: of finding our identity as individuals in the larger “Am”, in relationship to Torah, to Halakah, to tradition, to other branches of Judaism, and to our smaller, local community and practices. It comes with the inclusion of “it is this, but it is also that”, acknowledging the opposing opinions, in Talmudic discourse. It comes with being a Feminist in a traditional that was for thousands of years weighted to a Patriarchical framing of God, and it comes with being homosexual in a tradition with a homophobic bias. It comes with struggling to keep the tradition alive but relevant in our lives here and now. It comes with struggling to find our piece of Torah.
11. UNIFICATION and OUR PORTION
Said Rabbi Isaac: “The Torah was manifested in a black fire which was superimposed upon a white fire, signifying that by means of the Torah, the ‘Right Hand’ clasped the ‘Left Hand’ that the two may be fused as it is written” from his right hand a fiery law to them.” (Deut 32:2); Zohar, Shemoth sec 2 p. 81a.