CHOCHMAS NASHIM: YITRO: BUT FOR THIS…
By: Suri Davis
In pop culture, the ten commandments are IT. There is nothing as memorable biblically as Charleston Heston, throwing down the ten commandments in anger at the idol. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. And in a few verses, this act which was the raison detre for the creation of the world at all, for the personal acts of G-d redeeming us from Egypt, but for this exquisite moment.
The Jews received the torah, the pinnacle. Go ahead, ask the general Jewish population about Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur, you’ll get a whole megillah: apples, honey, fish heads, shofar. Ask the Jews about Pesach: brisket, wine, matzoh, afikomen, dayenu, horseradish. Ask a Jew about Shavuoth, or in the reverse, ask him if he knows if there is a holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. If you’re lucky, they’ll reach into the deep recesses of their brains and remember something about blintzes and cheese danishes…the rare ones. Eight days for exodus. Another eight days celebrating Exodus again, but this time in a tent. But the giving of the torah, the quintessential purpose of creating the entire world, gets two days, and not very many memorable customs…As a matter of fact, it shares its reason for being with the season of harvest.
And in all this, this failure to celebrate the giving of the torah, have we lost the understanding of what the torah means to us. Are you scrambling eggs with your $800 artisan Kitchen Aid, frozen dinners in your Wolf commercial oven?
It appears so. You know we the suffering Jews of world history, we break glasses to commemorate disaster at the height of joy at our weddings, some putting ash on the grooms forehead…So it is apropos for the Shabbos which we read the marriage of Jews to G-d, the giving of the Torah, one of the contracts between G-d and man, that in our haftorah, we read: Isaiah 6:9: “You hear indeed, but you do not try to understand what you hear; you see, indeed, the miracles I have performed for you, but you do not try to know Me.” Was the purpose of the giving of the Torah, where the Jews heard the commandments at first from G-d and then from Moses, for blintzes. Was the sight of the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea, cheese cake? You did not take these foundational events as opportunities to know Me to understand Me. G-d is foretelling trouble in His marriage with the Jews. He tells us in coming Torah portions, that He will drive us from His holy temple, our common home. How awful for G-d to have done so much for the Jews, and how many times did he complain to us that we were unfaithful to Him, and we ignored the warning signs of separation, over and over. G-d gave us chance after chance, until He could no longer, and He drove us into exile, until this very day.
The Torah is our Cartier solitaire bound with G-d’s personal diary/journal, which gives us insight, if we have the love of G-d to sit down and read His journal and attempt to understand where G-d is and what He wants with us, so we can remain bound to Him and grow in our love of understanding of Him daily. Grab hold of the Torah journal and challenge yourself to grow. It’s a good thing. But for getting close to each other, was the Torah gifted to us and the entire world.
Shabbat shalom.
-Suri