Each One of Us is a Torah

On Shavuot, we celebrate the receiving of Torah at Mount Sinai. We reenact Moses bringing the Torah of God to the Children of Israel at the bottom of the mountain. According to Jewish tradition, it is not just the generation of Moses who stood at Sinai. All of us were there, men, women, and children, from the woodchoppers to the water-drawers. It is as if every generation, every soul is present in that moment at that time, past, present and future of the transmission of Torah.

Yet, in the Biblical record of preparing for the moment of communal Revelation of Torah, the instructions to the people (Exodus 19:15) include “do not go near a woman” for three days. This verse was the subject of an article by Rabbi Rachel Adler in Moment magazine in which she questions “if women were not addressed, were not present, were we even a part of the covenant with God?”

In her 1999 memoir, “A Spiritual Life” Merle Feld describes the origin of her two poems about Sinai. Both “We All Stood Together” and “Sinai” were written on the same night in the early 1980s. On that evening Merle Feld went to a friend’s home for the monthly feminist theology group that they were a part of. After reading Rachel Adler’s article, her passionate response was this poem. In her introduction to the poem she writes “I refuse to entertain the notion that we weren’t there….for me the premise that we were present is unshakeable, nonnegotiable.” (A Spiritual Life, SUNY Press, 1999, p. 203-204.)

We All Stood Together by Merle Feld

for Rachel Adler

My brother and I were at Sinai
He kept a journal
of what he saw
of what he heard
of what it all meant to him

I wish I had such a record
of what happened to me there

It seems like every time I want to write
I can’t
I’m always holding a baby
one of my own
or one for a friend
always holding a baby
so my hands are never free
to write things down
And then
As time passes
The particulars
The hard data
The who what when where why
Slip away from me
And all I’m left with is
The feeling

But feelings are just sounds
The vowel barking of a mute

My brother is so sure of what he heard
After all he’s got a record of it
Consonant after consonant after consonant

If we remembered it together
We could recreate holy time
Sparks flying

I first read this poem over thirty years ago; it is one of my favorite poems. At the time I understood it as a feminist response to Revelation at Sinai. Now, I read the poem with a more expansive lens. The feminist movement opened the doors so that today we can recognize not only women’s voices, and the voices and experiences of Jews of color, elderly, differently abled, queer and transgendered, and Jewish-adjacent. So, with this expanded lens it is time to hear the voices of all. As theologian Judith Plaskow wrote in her groundbreaking work, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective (1990) “It is far easier to read ourselves into male stories than to ask how the foundational stories within which we live have been distorted by our absence.”

If as the Midrashic tradition teaches, each one of us is a Torah – we each create a teaching with our lives, then revelation is incomplete without the inclusion of the Torah of each unique individual in our communities. If Torah teaches us that each person is B’tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God, then without hearing the voices of each member of our community, without lifting up and integrating all of the Torah that we all have to teach, it is impossible to fully understand, learn from and be transformed by the revelation of Sinai.

This year we will be celebrating Shavuot at Solel in the evening of Sunday June 1st and the morning of Monday June 2nd. I hope that you will join us for Shavuot Dinner and Tikkun Leil Shavuot on Sunday evening as we welcome and celebrate the new Jews by Choice in our Solel family; and on Monday morning for our Shavuot morning service and Yizkor.

L’shalom,

Rabbi Audrey S. Pollack

Filed under: Rabbi's Message

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