Getting to Sinai

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

by Dr. Aryeh Cohen
Presented at the ICUJP Jubilee for Justice and Peace
April 16, 2007

The Jewish community is in the midst of the most extended liturgical period on the calendar. We just finished celebrating the eight days of Passover. We celebrated the moment when God Godself came down—not by way of an angel or an agent, but in Gods own glory—God, as the rabbis tell us, came down and saved the Israelites from the hold of slavery and oppression in Ancient Egypt.

One week later we celebrated the moment when God split the Red Sea and allowed the Israelites to cross through on dry ground while Pharoah watched as his armies were drowned in the waters of righteous rage.

These two moments were moments of God’s acting and the people’s salvation. Our tradition tells us that even lowliest person saw more of God’s revelation at the sea than the Prophet Ezekiel ever merited seeing.

These moments were, however, moments when God acted and revealed Godself to the nation of Israel. Israel did not have to act.

We are now in the midst of the seven weeks that lead up to Shavuot, Pentecost or the feast of weeks—the festival that celebrates the revelation at Sinai and the receiving of God’s Torah. It is our custom to count every day of those forty nine days. Today is the twelfth day from the midnight of Gods salvation. We count each day so that we can reach Sinai prepared and worthy to receive the Torah.

The revelation at Sinai, we are taught, came only after the nation readied itself. The grace of Gods salvation in Egypt, the accessibility of Gods revelation at the Sea was over. The revelation at Sinai needed to be earned.

How do we earn the revelation? The great Hasidic master Rabbi Yaakov Lainer of Izbica, reads the story of the revelation at Sinai in Exodus 19 and is struck by the fact that the story begins: “In the third month after the Children of Israel left Egypt, on that day they arrived in the desert of Sinai.” Why, the great master of Izbica asks, why would we want to connect Egypt—the moment of our desperation and shame—to the glorious revelation at Sinai? There is a great lesson here: Although it had been three months since God had taken Israel out of Egypt, it was only when Israel took Egypt out of themselves that they could hear the word of God. This then is the task that we are committed to on the way to Sinai—removing Egypt and Pharoah from ourselves.

What then is the Egypt that must be removed?

When Moses first confronted Pharoah with the demand that Pharoah let the Israelites go and Worship God, Pharoah replied: “Who is God that I should listen to him?”

Pharoah set himself and the power of his kingdom and his army up as equal to any power on earth or in heaven.
When God ultimately comes down to redeem the Israelites, it is the Egyptian people, ignoring Pharoah who beg the Israelites to leave. Pharoah, irrelevant, powerless, stands and watches as his kingdom disintegrates.

It is this hubris, this belief that power is forever, that power is justice that is Pharoah. It is this that we must rid ourselves of, if we are to hear the word of God.

We have a choice that we must make, a dire choice, a choice upon which our fate and the fate and legacy of this great country depends. Do we choose to act like Pharoah? Do we choose to believe that our power on the world stage justifies the fact that we turn a deaf ear to those who cry out in hurt, in hunger and from beneath the yoke of oppression?
Or do we choose to act like God? To hear the cry of the slaves, the cry of the oppressed, the marginal, the hungry. If we let the trumpets of war deafen us to the cries of the poor, we are truly lost. For it is only in fulfilling our obligations—of poverty relief, housing, living wages and dignity for workers, universal health care, education—that we can glory as citizens of a righteous community.

It is only this way the we will all arrive at Sinai and receive the Torah “all of whose pathways are peace.”