D'var Torah

Iyyar-Sivan 5767

Counting the Days – Making the Days Count

Between the night of the second Seder and Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, we count the days and weeks that lead up to the receiving of Torah at Sinai. During this period of the Omer, we reflect on what it means to be free and what it means to be the recipients of the gift of Torah. As we are asked to put ourselves in the place of our ancestors who were released from Egyptian bondage, so, too, are we asked to see ourselves coming to stand at Sinai. On the first day of Shavuot (this year May 23), we will re-enact the sacred moment when Torah became ours. As we read of the account, we find an apparent contradiction. Exodus 19:20 reads “and God descended on Mount Sinai,” while Exodus 20:19 reads, “and Adonai said to Moses – You saw for yourselves that I spoke to you from the heavens.” How could God descend on Sinai, while speaking from heaven?

In true rabbinic style, our Sages remind us that there can be no contradictions, – only apparent ones. Suggests Rabbi Hayyim Dov Rabinovitz, the Da’at Soferim, “at the moment of the giving of the Torah, everything reverted back to the primordial state of creation before God made a separation between the heavens and the earth – at this hour the earth was joined with the heavens and the distance between them removed.”

A caravan merchant came to Rabbah bar Hannah and said to him: “Come I will show you a place where heaven and earth touch so closely that that appears that they are kissing.” (Baba Batra 74a). The moment of giving of Torah has been identified with the passionate embrace of God and Israel as husband and wife, the full integration of two as one, with the Torah as the ketubah, the marriage contract, between God and the Jewish people. The physicality of this relationship indicates the love, devotion and attachment between God and the people Israel.

Both Mount Sinai, traditional site of the revelation of Torah, and Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount and site of the binding of Isaac, are part of the same mountain range: the Syrian-African rift. Once they were part of the same physical space. According to a Jewish mystical tradition, Adam and Eve came together as one on Mount Moriah, site of the Garden of Eden; the binding of Isaac, severed the ties between Sinai and Moriah. With the binding of Isaac, the mountains were split apart as an earthquake created a literal and spiritual rift between God and humanity. At the moment of revelation, both mountains came together yet again, restoring the world to its initial orderliness and connectedness, the oneness of God and the oneness of the universe, uniting the world and reuniting humankind and the world as one. With the gift of Torah the two mountains joined once more, the one to the other, providing the glue with which the world and all of its inhabitants will be united and embraced within the loving arms of God. Tikkun happened, the world was corrected and perfected under the sovereignty of the Almighty.

Torah and Tikkun. Count the days, and count the ways, in which we can be partners with God in correcting and perfecting the world.

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