Shavuot, the Festival celebrating God’s revelation of Torah, has become one of Judaism’s hidden jewels. Far more Jews observe Yom Kippur or the Seder than stay up late to learn at a Tikkun Leil Shavuot. What makes this relative obscurity all the more unfortunate is that the notion of God giving the Torah to the Jewish people is at the center of Judaism in every age, and remains so in every contemporary expression of Jewish religion.
While the fact of revelation is at everyone’s core, the exact nature of that revelation has always engendered a rich discussion. One of the debates raging through the various contemporary trends within Judaism is the issue of revelation: in what way did God make divine will known at Mt. Sinai, and in what way do we come to know God's will for today?
At one extreme are those who claim that each and every word in the Torah are literally God's words. Not only the words of the Torah, but subsequent prophecies by Israel's prophets, and subsequent rulings by rabbinic sages are all understood as being given by God at Mt. Sinai to Moses and the assembled throng.
At the other extreme is to see revelation as so all pervasive as to become almost meaningless. This view sees the will of God in everything that happens, in all literature, in art, in music. If everything emerges from the will of God, than no single path to God can serve as a reliable vehicle for piety and obedience.
Traditional Judaism has always been somewhere in the middle of these two views, asserting that the Torah and subsequent traditions do embody the will of God, without necessarily insisting that each and every word is literally God's own.
To the contrary, Judaism affirms the essential role that human beings play in bringing God's revelation to light.
Just before the beginning of the Ten Commandments, found in this Festival's Torah portion, the Torah records that "God spoke all these words, saying." The rabbis of Midrash Sh'mot Rabbah notice an apparently unnecessary word: "all". Wouldn't the sentence have worked just as well without it? And if so, then what was intended by its insertion? What additional lesson is the Torah trying to teach?
The midrash responds that this phrase indicates that every generation has a voice in how God's word from Sinai is translated into life in each new age: these are the souls that will one day be created,...although they did not yet exist, still each one received his share of the Torah... Not only did all the prophets receive their prophecy from Sinai, but also each of the Sages that arose in every generation received his wisdom from Sinai."
Now we know from the Tanakh itself that the prophecies to Isaiah or any of the other prophets were not articulated at Sinai, but were given during the lifetime of the prophets. So what this midrash is saying is that each new application of the original revelation, each new understanding of what God wants of us, or of how to develop and apply the Jewish tradition--that new understanding itself acquires the force of Sinai.
Even though rabbinic tradition developed thousands of years after Sinai, even though we know names and lifetimes of the sages whose words and rulings built Talmudic Judaism, still we assert that the authority for their wisdom is Sinai itself and the revelation that happened there.
You see, when a human being speaks, the words issue forth, are heard, and then die away. But not so the word of God. In interpreting the biblical verse, "The voice of the LORD is with power" the midrash understood that to mean "it was with the power of all voices."
The power of God's voice resonates whenever Jews study and live our sacred traditions, whenever rabbinic sages argue about new phenomenon or seek to apply Judaism in new ways. In all of those instances, we touch base again with the mysterious power of encountering God afresh, a new Sinai that recurs over and over again whenever Jews harvest their heritage anew.
The voice of God is with the power of all voices. In new readings of our ancient writings, we hears that voice as if for the very first time.
Hag Shavuot Sameach!