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| Acknowledgments | ix | ||||
| Introduction | xi | ||||
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| Perspectives on the Ten Words | xvii | ||||
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| Ten More Words | 133 | (4) | |||
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| Sources and Notes | 137 | (8) | |||
| About the Contributors | 145 |
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Chapter One
The First Commandment
First Words
How can God command belief?
It is not clear whether "I, Adonai your God" is a commandment at all. A mitzvah (commandment) must be governed by free will and choice; faith is not. How can God insist that we accept the Divine reality and rule? What if we cannot believe? Some commentators suggest that it could simply be a preface (albeit an essential one) to the actual commands. Their authority depends on our faith in a Commander.
A parable: A new king came to rule, but refused to pass any laws. His advisors urged him to assert his rule more visibly. But he insisted, "They must first come to accept me as their king. Then they will know that the laws I give them are for blessing."
Yet Moses Maimonides calls it the first among mitzvot, the pillar upon which all religion and science rest. We are called upon to believe in God and to know that there is a first (Divine) cause. Perhaps it is commanded the way any necessary thing is commanded.
Ma'aseh shehayah ... It once happened
that a young man went to study with the Maggid of Mezritch. He stayed away a long time, until he found what he was looking for. Returning home, his angry father-in-law demanded to know what he could possibly have learned that would justify neglecting his family.
"I learned that there is a God."
His father-in-law was not sure whether to laugh or yell at this foolish man. He summoned the maid and asked, "Is there a God?"
"Of course, sir," she laughed nervously. "Everyone believes in God."
"You see!" he bellowed at his son-in-law. "You deserted your family for Mezritch to learn something that even an illiterate maid could have told you!"
The young man remained calm. "She says there is a God, but in Mezritch I learned to know there is a God."
What did the people hear at Sinai?
Most commentators conclude that the people heard only the first two utterances.
Nachmanides points out that the first two are phrased in the first person, with God speaking directly. The others speak about God, as if Moses is reporting what God said. In the Talmud, the Rabbis play with gematria, a system of interpretation in which each Hebrew letter also stands for a number. Jewish tradition enumerates 613 commandments in the Torah; the word Torah (??) itself has the numerical value of 611. Moses taught 611 mitzvot; the other two the people heard for themselves.
Still, there is not complete agreement. Rashi insists that the people heard the first two of these utterances word for word. Maimonides argues that they heard only the sound, unintelligible without Moses' help.
Franz Rosenzweig, a modern philosopher, suggests that what the people received at Sinai was a revelation of God's overwhelming presence and love. From that experience, they translated what they understood of God's will into commandments, teachings to guide their lives. Perhaps this idea is not so different than a much older interpretation:
All they heard was the first letter, the N of ?? ( Anochi, I). But it is a silent letter! Yes, what the people heard at Sinai was the sound of the Holy One of Blessing opening a gateway, as if opening a mouth to begin to speak. The beginning of a conversation -- and it was enough.
Wouldn't we know that it is God who speaks?
It is necessary to identify God as the One who appeared in various guises -- a man of war at the Sea, an elderly scholar full of mercy at Sinai: "I alone was in Egypt, I alone was at the Sea, I alone was at Sinai. It was I in the past and it will be I in the future." It is assumed from the very beginning that our experience of God is fragmented, incomplete, even contradictory. We experience God in different ways at different times in our lives. Each person apprehends God according to his or her own capacity and experience.
The very first teaching then must be: It is I. I am the One God of your life. When we can see our experiences as parts of the Whole, and share with each other what we have learned of the Divine, we begin to understand the unity of God.
Why mention Egypt?
Ibn Ezra wonders why God chooses to be revealed as redeemer from Egyptian slavery, rather than creator of the entire universe. He reasons that only philosophers will understand God within creation or the science of thought. For them, "I am the Lord" would be sufficient. Most of us, however, need compelling firsthand experience in order to believe, which for the Israelites was their rescue from Egypt.
Benno Jacob asks why the text bothers to say "from the house of bondage," when Egypt is already mentioned and the nature of that experience is all too well ingrained on the minds and hearts of the people. Perhaps, he notes, it comes to remind us how important one's perspective can be. Egypt was the center of ancient culture, famed for its pyramids and art. For Israel, however, it was nothing more than a house of serfs. The insight of this nineteenth to twentieth century German scholar speaks to every time and place. While the United States is known for many great things, for instance, it was a house of bondage for Africans and a house of conquerors for Native Americans. Even today, its status as a great nation depends on your point of view.
Seeking God
I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for Me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek Me; I said "Here I am, here I am" to a nation that did not call My name. (Isaiah 65:1)
God is both immanent and transcendent -- high and exalted beyond this world, yet present within history. How could God take us out of Egypt? As Arthur Green wrote in Seek My Face, Speak My Name :
The divine presence is incarnate in all the world. God is ruach kol basar , the spirit that resides in all flesh. That presence may be brought to consciousness in the mind of every human who is open to it, as it may be blocked out and negated entirely by the closing of the human heart, by cruelty, or by the denial of God's image. The Shechinah , the divine presence in our world, does not dwell where she is not wanted.
-- Rachel S. Mikva
I [Am the One]
Eugene B. Borowitz
"I"
Someone is talking to me. I am not standing at Sinai and I hear no voice. All I have is a text, but that turns out to be not as inert as we might think letters on a page or screen are. As long as I can remember, the text has been read, chanted, for my (and others') benefit. Even when I am alone with the text, the voice of the reader/chanter dimly sounds in me, bringing the words to me as a living address. Mostly, I see/hear it in context, embraced in the story of the Jewish people's memory of what happened -- and understood by them and me to be most sacred. Even read in utter silence, as happened just a moment ago when I prepared to begin writing these words, it came to me as address. (And were Jewishness not central to my being and were I only another reasonably sensitive participant in western civilization, the words would still come to me as someone speaking to me.)
Who is talking? As yet, I don't know. Normally I would look to see where the sound is coming from or concentrate on its timber so that the first few syllables of this Hebrew "I" might identify the speaker. But while the very word "I" makes the act of address plain, there is no one to look at and no sound pattern to identify. And in all the times that I have read/heard this text, there has been no vision or sound connected with this "I" that I might now bring to this hearing.
Yet the word, which in its unadorned articulation seems so devoid of content, is, after all, the mysterious distance/nearness I/we share with You.
You -- not Moses, not one of the other prophets -- You Yourself speak. You present Yourself to me and to us, momentarily making the Far-Off-One the Here-Near-One, approaching as close as our retinas or eardrums. To have been so visited, even if only in paltry recapitulation, dignifies us unalienably.
You tell us Your name, and by it we come close enough to glimpse who You are and are thereby debarred from ever presuming to call you by it. We mean to cherish Your name by avoiding it, by calling You other things instead, none of them unproblematic. Our oldest euphemism, "Lord," now distorts our sense of nearness to You and is too gender-heavy to reflect the breadth of experience with You. Those today whose self-confidence disdains these old bounds and who assert their intimacy with ultimacy by readily calling You by name are nonetheless guessing how to pronounce it as, tradition says, the High Priest did each year in ancient Jerusalem. Yet just when the climactic moment of utterance came on Yom Kippur day, the Levite choirs increased their volume so no distinct sound could be heard. Nonetheless, the very notion that the High Priest was calling You by name shook us enough that everyone in the Temple threw themselves to the ground before You.
Though we are confined to English, Your name still puzzles and dazzles us. No hint of the sacred four Hebrew consonants is found in the Indo-European root gheu (to call, invoke) from which our Germanic-English "God" derives and it surely is more an abstraction than a proper name. Nonetheless, some today reflect their Hebraic awe in their English usage. Reverence for God suggests not fully spelling out the word, so "G-d" or "Gd" become distinctive signs of North American Jewish piety. With disrespect for God rife, believers can well cherish these signs of honest concern. Yet as with so many symbols, a shadow cannot be avoided. Deforming Your title/name seems a curious act of demonstrating regard for You. Does the yetser hara (the evil inclination, which is always in tension with our inclination for good) of otherwise inadmissible doubt here subtly infiltrate piety and, in every repetition do to "God" what the Rabbis said to do to idols so that, once they are defaced, statues might no longer be offensive to the Jewish soul?
* * *
"I, Adonai your God ..."
"My" God? Surely Adonai is God of everyone and everything. Why then this surprising singular: "thy God?" Why this personal address to me -- or not to me or any other individual, but to the people? Your reach here is clearly corporate, communal, national, but in all these Words, You address me/us individually. In pre-enlightenment days and certainly back in Bible times, people did not suffer from today's fearsome gap between the self-legislating I and its society. Rather the self and its group so imperceptibly merged into one another that modern scholars must speculate whether the biblical poet's "I" refers to a person, the nation, or, more likely, both at once in shifting emphasis. So by meaning me, you mean all the children of the covenant, each one preciously an individual to You.
Nonetheless, the singular "thy" comes as a two-fold imperative. The nation, in responding to Adonai, must not forget the supreme value of the single self. Only as individuals one by one, doing what Adonai requires of Israel, can the nation fulfill its covenantal responsibility. I must not forget that though the Jewish people has an existence independent of me, until I (and other individual Jews) carry out the commandments incumbent upon me (us) as one of all-Israel, it cannot be the Jewish people God is calling it to be. And that begins with knowing that Adonai is "my" God in a most personal and intimate way. Temperament, training, soul, experience, endowment -- all mix to make me just who I am and the way I go about being/becoming me. You ask me, Adonai, by addressing me personally, to fulfill the common duty of all-Israel as just the me I am -- that is, in terms of my unique self. To be sure, I speak here with some hesitation, knowing how much I have been affected by the special prominence modernity has given to the self. Yet our people has long cherished the many individualists and idiosyncratics who served You over its centuries, and it has lovingly transmitted their stories to us. I/we respond to Your evocative address to the nation as a collection of single selves by carrying on our uncommon Jewish blend of individualism and corporate concern.
"I, Adonai your God, [am the one] who ..."
The English translation has now betrayed me badly enough that I must intrude upon its flow with bracketed words. Already in my problems rendering the sense of the previous Hebrew word, Elohecha (your God), the non-Hebraic soul of the English language made itself felt. Its "your" might well suggest a Hebraic ambiguity of singular or plural address. So I had recourse to the archaic "thy" to make the singularity of the Hebrew fully evident. Were it not for the Hebrew asher, which here means "who," the translation might have proceeded as the Hebrew does, without introducing a verb speaking of existence, "am."
What shall we make of the fact that, compared to western languages, Hebrew seems to take existence for granted -- or at least does not often see the need to introduce words to refer to being?
Shall we say that existence does not seem so remarkable to the Hebrews that they find it worth mentioning? Or is it the opposite: Non-being is so contrary to their way of facing reality that the wonder of existence becomes almost as ineffable as God? Whatever the case, without asher I could have rendered the text without an interpolation this way: I, Adonai your God, brought you out of the land of Egypt, from a slavehouse. But by saying asher, the text stresses the connection between "I, Adonai your God" and "brought you out ..." requiring something like my "[am the one]" to render its sense in English.
Shall I now simply pass over the fact that I have added some words to the Ten that the Torah declares God said directly to the people of Israel at Sinai? At least I have called my act to your attention, inviting you to join me in wondering about how much else I, in my English-shaped thinking about Judaism, have reconfigured its message while transmitting it. Or should we be consoled that there has never been a moment when the Hebrew language stood still long enough to equip its words with some kind of prime, pure, essential meaning? Does not the biblical record show and our linguistic experience affirm that words and their combinations never fix into one perfect meaning that all else adulterates? Meaning abides in these shifting connotations in as obvious and mysterious a way as I remain me while going through the passages of my life. In translation as in life, we can only strive for ever greater integrity.
"I, Adonai your God, [am the one] who brought you out ..."
Of course You did. But I mean no disrespect by quietly remembering that if I hadn't walked on my own two feet I might still be in the land of Goshen. And, while the text doesn't make much of the minutiae of the journeying -- relying, I assume, on our great Jewish talent for complaining -- it isn't difficult to imagine what daily activity was like when Your cloud lifted, signaling that we were to fold up our tents, repack the goods, get the family together, find our place in the march, and start another trudge. The daily mood, I would guess, was less the high that accompanied Your constant presence than the tedium of one foot after another and the hope against hope that today the ever-lurking problems wouldn't surface and further complicate our lives.
That recital in no way mitigates the wonder You did. Whenever we could lift our spirits so weighed down by each day's demands, we knew we could never have gotten out of Egypt solely on our own. It was as mighty an empire as the world had ever known. Why should they lose all our slave power so necessary for their awe-inspiring, slave-killing projects? Moses' charisma and group cohesion wouldn't have kept us going for very long. No wonder historians, pointing to the absence of confirming external evidence, have argued that although the exodus story is a marvelous national saga, it never happened: "History" doesn't work that way, at least not if you abide by the secular conventions of the academy that rule God out of their kind of "history." Our people, impressed by the continual improbabilities of what has happened to us over the centuries -- not the least being that, against all odds, we are still around -- knows that again and again God has showed up and, one way or another, brought us out. Not without our putting one foot in front of another, to be sure. Partnership, not unilateral action, has been our sense of God as taker-out but with no confusion over who was the Senior Partner in the process.
Not all the great faiths that call You "one" proclaim You, as do we, Bringer-out. They apparently believe that to involve You in history this way is to compromise Your purity or the fullness of Your being. We, who identify You not only as creator but as the one who called creation "good" -- though flawed since the primal parents were chased out of Eden -- know You only as the participating One. To us, one sign of Your greatness is that You are involved with us (and others) and by such interaction do not compromise Your superlative status. As the daily prayer epitomizes You: Melech-ozer-umoshia-umagen (King-helper-and saver-and shielder). The very one who is Most High is also the one who bends down low, not one without the other. And because You continue to be Bringer-out, we are a hoping people.
Not unproblematically so. If Your greatness rendered You neutral toward us, we would not have the problem of evil. Why should a universe indifferent to us not occasionally (or more often) erupt into evil? Why expect anything else? Our spirituality begins with wonder at how beneficent we find creation -- that is, when we stop taking it for granted (as if there were no Grantor). That is particularly true when, after some depressing personal situation or historical calamity, Your help has brought us out once again. More than a hundred Jewish generations have wondered why You do not intervene more often or more quickly, how You can let the people of Israel suffer long years of Egyptian slavery before bringing them out. And the last couple of generations have brought us a new level of anguish over Your inscrutable time schedule. Yet we have also seen incomparable evidences of Your saving hand, though they cannot be said -- vile thought -- to compensate for the suffering that preceded them. A generation back some said You were dead, a curiously dated notion now that says more about human conceit than about Your reality. We, a generation seeking Your nearness, are more apt to pray that You heal our sick than that You explain clearly to us just who You are and why You act as You do.
"I, Adonai your God, [am the one] who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from a slavehouse."
If You had only brought us out of the land of Egypt, Dayenu ("It would be sufficient for us" a recurring refrain in the Passover Haggadah's litany of God's blessings). Despite its plentiful leeks and cucumbers, its advanced culture and international status, Egypt was also where rulers were gods and idols were as much animal as human. At least the statues did not have the fallibility that made the Pharaohs' claims to divinity unbelievable, at least to the children of the children of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah. In such a country, to be created in the image of gods or to seek to imitate them could not lead to the society the Torah would envision and the Hebrews seek to establish. Dayenu.
Worse, Egypt was a slavehouse, literally the place where we were not free. Figuratively, it was a land where the Jewish spirit could not find itself. Literal slavery is not to be underestimated just because we no longer have enough of it in our world so that we have personal experience of slaves and slavery. The Torah, written for a world that took slavery as a human necessity, insisted that Jewish slavery must be limited to six years and extended only if the slave wished to stay with the master. Nonetheless, the Rabbis must have found even that institution sufficiently uncongenial since, while not abolishing Jewish slavery, they added severe restrictions on what the slave holder might do. It took a long time for economic reality to reflect religious idealism in this realm, but the outrage we feel when evidence comes to light of people anywhere who have, in effect, enslaved others is a testimony to what God began by bringing us out from Egypt. Dayenu.
But release from a slavehouse has its greatest effect on us today as a compelling metaphor for anything that releases us from any of the many bondages that impede our acting in proper freedom. The inescapable contemporary model of that exodus is what happened to our families as they went from the ghetto to emancipation. So when we now move from despotism to democracy, from ignorance to knowledge, from unemployment to a job, from discrimination to equality, from illness to health, from neurosis to maturity, from depression to hope, we know our lives have been touched by that same elemental force that so powerfully made its impact on our ex-slave forebears. And it is because God has not yet concluded all the taking out that humankind needs that we can believe that the long-ago promised days of sitting under vine and fig tree with none to make us afraid will one day come. And only when the great shofar sounds will we all be able to say the full, final, Dayenu .
"I, Adonai your God, [am the one] who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from a slavehouse. You must not ..."
Ah. So that is why.
Copyright © 1999 Rachel S. Mikva. All rights reserved.
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