On Simchat Torah, the skies fell in Israel. Eight months have passed and we have yet to rise from the shiva, the initial week-long mourning of October 7.
Since the tragedy of October 7 and the war that ensued, countless moments of grace and wonder of civic courage, sacrifice, selflessness, kindness, friendship, camaraderie, and more have been revealed time and again.
The heroism and fall of Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, of the Counterterrorism Unit – who commanded the daring operation on Shabbat, at the beginning of the Hebrew month of Sivan, in which four hostages were rescued alive – is just one of those moments that gave a little air and breath to the tormented soul of all of us this year.
From the dawn of its existence at Mount Sinai, the people of Israel have relied on faith in the spirit. Over our 3,000 years of existence, we have overcome ruins and crises that no other people or culture could have. Time and again, we have risen like the phoenix and continued to create and demand a meaningful life.
This remarkable ability to grow from hardship to cultural and spiritual flourishing is the secret doctrine of our existence that was given to Moses on Mount Sinai on the sixth of Sivan, the holiday of Shavuot.
We are about to celebrate Shavuot – the holiday of the giving of the Torah. Shavuot encompasses many values and diverse themes, such as the attitude toward the stranger and the first fruits of the land. However, although there is no connection in the Torah itself between Shavuot and the giving of the Torah, the story of the giving of the Torah has become the founding story of the holiday over the generations.
The question of what happened on the mountaintop between God and Moses has fired the imaginations of many over the centuries, and many works of art and stories have been associated with the defining moment of the giving of the Torah.
The Torah and the Midrash
THE TORAH describes the moment of Moses’ ascent to the mountain: “Moses went up to God, and the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying: ‘Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the children of Israel’” (Exodus 19:3).
The Midrash in this verse describes what happened on the mountain as a real wrestling match between Moses and God: “Rabbi Berechiah said: The tablets were six handbreadths long. As if they were in the hand of the One who said, ‘Let there be light,’ and the world was two handbreadths, and in Moses’ hand two handbreadths, and two handbreadths separated hand from hand” (Exodus Rabbah 28:1).
The Midrash describes that God held onto the upper two handbreadths and pulled them strongly toward the heavens, and Moses held onto the lower two handbreadths and pulled them strongly toward the earth.
The middle two handbreadths were a kind of no man’s land between Moses and God, between heaven and earth.
The divine heavenly Torah seeks, like any great idea, to be realized and materialized in reality. But God, who is not ready to part with the perfect Torah he created, holds on to it tightly and does not allow Moses to bring it down to earth.
This description is a fantastic image of an existential struggle that takes place in the tension between vision and reality, between ideology and psychology, between zealous and destructive heavenly truth, and conciliatory and moderate human truth.
The struggle is over the character and nature of the Torah, and the question arises: Is the Torah directed to the divine truth in heaven or to earthly human foundations – a humble, human truth that strives for peace between people?
NINETY YEARS ago, Rabbi Dr. Meir Elk arrived in Haifa from Germany and chose the verse “Truth shall spring from the earth” (Psalms 85:11) as the guiding idea and motto of the Leo Baeck Education Center, to teach us that the truth we should seek and strive for is not heavenly, divine, zealous, and pure, but rather simple, human, humble, and complex, seeking to realize itself in education and community.
This struggle has accompanied Jewish and human culture from the moment of creation to the debates of our day about the Jewish and democratic identity of Israeli society today.
In Jewish tradition, joy is a commandment, and does not depend on emotion or mood. Joy is the source of optimism and hope.
We need joy to continue to be filled with hope, but joy will only be complete when our hostages return and the war ends.
On Simchat Torah, the skies fell. May we begin to rise from our mourning on Shavuot, and merit seeing the return of the hostages, the recovery of the wounded, and the end of the war.
Happy Shavuot.
The writer, a rabbi, is the managing director and headmaster of the Leo Baeck Education Center.