By Rabbi Shani Abramowitz
Rabbi Shani Abramowitz
For nearly all 49 days of the Omer, I am simultaneously blessed with and plagued by one persistent question: How do we unlock and open the doors to our tradition, whittle down barriers, and make our shuls more open, expansive, and truly welcoming? In short, how can we help people discover and fall in love with Torah and Jewish life? To be sure, this is the central animating question of both my personal and professional lives. I think about it constantly. But, in the lead-up to Shavuot, as we prepared to relive and experience Revelation at Sinai, its call was a little louder, its pull just a little stronger.
Shavuot is one of my favorite Jewish holidays. I love the late-night learning– schmoozing and questioning together over coffee cake and tea. I love the intensity, and the beauty of Shavuot, that sacred invitation to step back in time, to gather around the mountain, and imagine that moment when we truly became a covenantal people – bound to G-d, but also to one another. I love reading the story of Ruth– celebrating a learned, resilient woman who defies the odds to join her fate to ours. The cheesecake is pretty good, too.
But more than the experience of the holiday, I find the preparation to be sacred, too. Not only in counting the Omer, but in encountering the many different Midrashim of the Rabbis, as they contend with what really happened at Sinai– many of which radically underscore the fundamentally expansive, inclusive, and accessible nature of Torah.
One such Midrash from the Tanchuma teaches that all Jews– past, present, and future, were present to receive the Torah at Sinai. Every single person who was or would ever count themselves among the Jewish people experienced this identity-making moment together. Each of us, no matter our context, no matter how learned we are, or where we find ourselves on our journey, share equal ownership over this tradition and its most sacred text.
Another Midrash, from Exodus Rabbah, suggests that everyone who was present for the revelation heard it in a language they could understand. In this deeply collective moment, G-d simultaneously spoke to all of us, and each of us, transforming revelation, and by extension our entire tradition into something that is meant to be personal, relatable, understandable, and accessible. You needn’t, this Midrash teaches us, be fluent in Hebrew or classical Aramaic. Perhaps you needn’t even be particularly religious or “perfect” in your faith or observance to be counted among the Jewish people– and counted, more importantly as a member of this holy covenant. I love this Midrash because it acknowledges the basic fact that each of us learns and communicates differently. What better way to honor and validate our G-d given humanity, than for G-d to be our very first teacher?
But there is yet another Midrash on the first two verses of Parshat Bamidbar that I am holding close and thinking about differently this year. In Numbers 1:1-2 we read:
On the first day of the second month, in the second year, following the exodus from the land of Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of meeting, saying: Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.
Bamidbar Rabbah, the Midrashic work that focuses on the whole of the book of Numbers, asks why it was important for the verse to specify that this encounter between Moses and G-d took place in the wilderness?
From here the sages taught: the Torah was given through three things: through fire, through water, and through the wilderness…And why was it given through these three things? Rather, just as these are free to all who come into the world, so too the words of Torah are free to all.
Torah, just like fire, water, and earth, is elemental. It gives us life, sustains us, guides us, and gives us steady ground on which to stand. Torah is sharpening and clarifying. It can be warming or scalding to the touch. Torah is healing and heavy, G-d’s creation, and our responsibility.
But the Midrash here is also pushing us to think about the cost of Torah, and more specifically, the sometimes inaccessible costs of trying to find a true place of belonging in Jewish community and tradition. When I read this Midrash, I read it both as an invitation and a caution. I hear the echo of the Rabbis from all those years ago, challenging us to make Jewish life as life-affirming and accessible as possible. What might change, what new revelation might we all encounter if we welcomed with open arms all those people in our communities who have not yet found their place. What if we removed the barriers and boundaries, and lived out this value that our tradition has been channeling for thousands of years: The Torah was written and given over to every single one of us. It is free. And it’s just waiting to be expounded.
Shani Abramowitz is Rabbi of Ohavay Zion Synagogue in Lexington, Ky.