REVELATION PART 1
We are moving towards the holiday of Shavuot. The holiday was originally an agricultural festival that marked the completion of the grain harvest and the first bread baked with the newly harvested wheat. This is given to us in Exodus 23:16 where it is called Hag Hakatzir, the harvest festival. We’ve obviously lost touch with the harvest aspect of the holiday. Most of us are not connected to agriculture and many of us we live in places where the principal grains are not harvested by late spring/early summer (though the winter wheat harvest often starts around Shavuot).
The core historical/theological meaning of Shavuot is a commemoration of the revelation at Mt Sinai. A common way to celebrate is now to stay up late at night studying. In Judaism, the revelation of the divine presence at Sinai was both a unique event, never to be repeated, but one that gave us a path to continual revelation through engagement with what was given to us. The Rabbinic claim to sacred authority lies precisely in the idea that Oral Torah, the revelation that comes through engagement with the text, has equal standing with the written document that was ostensibly revealed at Sinai.
The idea that some kind of written text was revealed at Sinai has, of course, been challenged in Jewish theology and is a rich topic of discussion. There’s a school of thought, associated with Buber and Rosenzweig (who didn’t exactly agree with each other), that what was revealed was “only” the divine presence, or the single letter “aleph” or just the existence of the divine, without all the elaboration of the written Torah, what we today call the five books of Moses.
The great merit of this move is that it presents a different path for continual revelation beyond just study of a written text. We can then ask ourselves how can I experience the divine—because to experience the divine is to receive revelation. I read Buber as saying that an I-thou relationship with a fellow human or with any aspect of the more than human world is, in a sense, a recapitulation of the original I-thou moment that happened at Sinai. It is revelation.
Next week I will offer some possibilities for how we might open ourselves to the possibility of revelation.
Do you believe in the possibility of revelation in your life?
