Community Torah Corner, Feb. 10, 2023

What do I believe happened at Sinai? And if I don’t believe that God literally gave us the Torah, word by word, in that encounter, how does the Torah maintain an enduring call on my life and actions?

For me, understanding God and the Torah through the lens of metaphor and myth does not diminish its significance, but rather allows me to embrace it more fully. I am grateful to my teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Neil Gillman z”l, for teaching me the power of metaphor as a moral compass and source of inspiration that can guide our everyday life. He writes:

 “Our tradition provides us with a rich kaleidoscopic system of metaphors for God. We appropriate some of these, reject others, and add some of our own that reflect our personal experience of God. I accept most of those traditional metaphors – for example, that God is unique, personal, ultimate yet remarkably vulnerable to human claims, that God creates, reveals, and redeems, and that God is the ultimate source and principle of this ordered world – precisely as metaphors. Knitted together, these metaphors form the complex Torah myth.”   - Doing Jewish Theology

The truth that I derive from the story of the revelation at Sinai, stems not from historicity but rather from the symbolic significance of how our sacred text describes what happened. The wondrous and radical notion that we can enter into covenant with a transcendent God is captured in the verses immediately following the Ten Commandments, “And all the people saw the thunder, and the lightning and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking” (Exodus 20:18).  This frightful image emphasizes how amazing it is that our tradition understands God’s power and inaccessibility while at the same time insisting that God cares about how we treat each other and how we carve out time for rest and holiness. May we see in our actions all that we metaphorically heard at Sinai.

Shabbat Shalom.