Standing Together with Sinai at the Center
By Rabbi Phyllis Berman and Rabbi Arthur Waskow
In the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, the Ten Words that came from the smoking, shaking mountain in the Sinai Wilderness are read from the Torah on Shavuot, 50 days after Passover, as the Sinai experience and its anniversary are identified with the Bible’s spring-wheat harvest festival.
(The gathering of Jesus’ disciples for Shavuot is what led to the experience that became the Christian festival of “Pentecost” [which is Greek for “fiftieth day”]. According to Christian tradition, on that day the Holy Spirit, the Ruach HaKodesh, Hagia Pneuma, made it possible for the disciples to understand and speak in all the languages of earth. Since in Hebrew “ruach,” in Greek “pneuma,” and in Latin “spiritus” all mean “breath” as well as “spirit,” the Holy Spirit can be understood as the Breath, the universal language that opens every tongue and every ear to every language.)
This year, Shavuot begins on the evening of May 18. All night that night, in many communities, study of the Torah goes on from evening till dawn. In the morning, the Ten Words are read from the Torah passage in Exodus 20. Each year, the entire community stands to hear the “Ten Words” that spoke in the thunder of Sinai, just as the people Israel stood together then, to hear as a community.
Yet each of the Ten Sayings is addressed in the singular, to each person separately, not in the plural, to all at once. Since each Israelite is addressed, the real connections are not from person to person, around the circumference of the circle, but from each person to the Center, to the One Who Brought You Out of Slavery.
Even if my neighbor betrays me, my obligation is still to behave like part of that Unity which in fact connects us. If I turn against that Unity, if I act like an alienated fragment of the Whole, I become a slave again.
We might add that perhaps each command is in the singular because to each of us the ten statements come with a different taste: To one of us “Do not steal!” means “Do not lift yourself far above your neighbors by amassing wealth from insider trading,” while to another it means “Do not defraud your comrades on the kibbutz by apathy and laziness.”
But suppose today we ask ourselves the question, “What would it mean for us to hear these Ten Sayings directed also to our community, our society, as a whole?” Does “Do not steal!” come out different if it is addressed to all of us together than if it is aimed at each of us as an individual?
Let us look at each of the Sayings in this light. (These thoughts might be useful for discussion either during the night or after reading the Torah portion in the morning service.)
- ”I YHWH your God Who brought you out of slavery…” Because you saw yourselves as a community, because each of you reached toward the Wholeness by seeing your neighbors as a part of you, bone of your bone, together you became for at least a moment part of the great “I.” That I is the Breath of Life, Whose Name can only be pronounced (”YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh”) by breathing.
And when you make yourselves part of that great “I,” you become free. No Pharaoh, no boss, no army of occupation, no president or prime minister, no central committee, can rule over you.
Whatever you think a “god” is, only the great “I,” the One of which your whole community is a part, but only a part, is to be treated that way. - You shall not carve out for yourselves a piece of the world, a part of the Whole, and worship it as if it were the Whole. Not yourselves, not your community! Do not put a fence around your people and say “We’re it!” or “We are one!” Nothing is One except the Whole.
Children are crucial to the Breath of Life, but if you treat your own children as if they were divine, and treat other children as if they did not count, then your children will suffer. But a community that loves its own and all other children as part of the great Breath of Life, that sees all children as deserving of love and nurture, that community will feel My love for a thousand generations. - My Name is the Breath of Life. Every time you breathe, remember Who I am. Remember that you are breathing in what the trees breathe out, that you are breathing out what the trees breathe in. If you breathe out poison, you will poison the trees, and when they breathe out, they will poison you. All of us breathe each other into existence. If you breathe without remembering this, you are emptying yourselves of life and meaning.
- Remember Shabbat. “Doing” is necessary, but so is “being.” Your community has done great work, is building great cities, is binding the planet together. But if you do this without ever pausing to reflect, you will talk about “modernization” when you mean better engines for destroying all life. Take a day off, take a year off, stop your centers of research and development for a while, to think about what it is all about. To sing and celebrate. Then, when you start work again, it will be work that creates instead of destroying.
- Honor your parents. Make sure that they all live well and joyfully, not some in despair and others in power. You still spend 100 times as much every year on research toward mass murder as you spend on curing Alzheimer’s disease.
- Don’t murder. Those of you who as individuals would be horrified to beat a dog to death are, as a community, spending one-tenth of your incomes on preparing to burn, poison, vaporize, bludgeon millions of children that you have no grudge against. Don’t tell Me that you have no choice, “they” are doing it too, that’s the way the world is. What are you doing to change it, to change “them” as well as “us”? How much are you spending even on the research about how to change it? Don’t tell Me war isn’t murder. If you haven’t worked on figuring out how to prevent it, war is murder.
- Don’t commit adultery. Now, you say, this one a community can’t do; only individuals. Not so, say I. As a community, you have given up on developing a decent, practical, loving sexual ethic, and that drives individuals into sexual craziness. Just as once upon a time you outlawed marriage for Black slaves and then condemned them for promiscuity, so most of you still do with lesbians and gays (though I am pleased to see that some of you are beginning to take My teachings about love more seriously). On the day that all of you make it possible for gay and lesbian people to be married, you will have taken a big communal step toward ending “adultery.”
- Don’t steal. As a community, you are stealing the labor and intelligence of people who want to start their own small businesses, and can’t find the investment capital. Why not? Because they are women, or poor, or just middle-class, or young, and because the investment capital is being sucked up into billion-dollar leveraged buy-outs and “derivatives” that add not a dime’s worth of productivity to the world. Now that’s stealing! Instead, set up revolving loan funds to help start mom-and-pop neighborhood recycling businesses, co-op groceries, worker-owned bicycle factories.
- Don’t swear falsely against your neighbor. When the FBI builds files on nonviolent opponents of an officially approved war on the grounds that they are spies, or security risks, or terrorists, what do you think they are doing? When a corporation blacklists a union organizer because she has fought against pollution in the workplace, what do you think that is?
- Don’t covet what belongs to your neighbor. Have you watched the television ads lately? Or the TV programs themselves? They use the most clever techniques of modern psychology to teach and instill envy. Turn your science toward teaching how to share, and turn your tax system to rewarding those who share.
Then all the people, the whole people, saw deep into the wisdom of these Words.
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