Imagine Mount Sinai. Imagine , if you can, the intensity. The mountain with the clouds, the voice of the shofar, … the voice of that which we so inadequately call G-d. If we can imagine that which is so expansive, so beyond limits… well, we're getting there. But imagine trying to describe details of the vision. Remember we received the whole Torah there. All the details and specific little halachot , as Rashi says at the beginning of this strangely named parasha.
Details, specifics belong to the realm of the intellectual. So we think normally. The experiential is less about details and more about feelings and senses. The visionary's challenge is often how quantify, how to "bring it down" from the clouds (and the mountain, in this case) into "this world." The distance between the real and the beautiful, holistic vision is often irreconcilable. In other words, there's being at the mountain and then there's coming down.
But the midrash tells us differently. " What does the sabbatical year have to do with Mount Sinai? To teach you that just as the sabbatical with all its details and specifics were given over at Mount Sinai, so too all the Torah was given over with its details and specifics." This Midrash means a thousand things. But there are two sides of it I would like to share.
First of all, the Midrash teaches of the realness of the vision. Mount Sinai was not just an awesome mind-blowing spiritual experience - it was a true envisioning of a world that could be, that could become. With details and specifics. With laws and commentaries and opinions. Down to earth.
Secondly, a little bit deeper, the Midrash tells us that details and specifics can be the deepest, the most profound experiences. The minute detail can be as much part of the picture as the most expansive. Love, transcendence, holiness, oneness, is not only in the high and mighty, but in everything all at once. In other words you don't have to come down from the mountain, you just have to make sure your mountain is also down to earth.
How do we do this? How do we bring these two parts - the visionary, experiential, unlimited side with the detailed, small side- together? The Midrash is telling us - look at the sabbatical year. The Shmita. The year we stop working the land and return to recognizing G-d. Being in the land, eating from the land on the year which is "For G-d", is the shalom, the bringing together of G-d and the literally "down to earth." In the land, where we can be still detailed and finite, and still giving it over to G-d, to the Infinite, opens the doorway for us to experience the details as visionary, the small as expansive and to unify all parts of our being.
One way of translating "behar" is "at the mountain." But I prefer "in the mountain" - immersed in the most concrete, physical, finite world. And yet, "behar" has the same numerical value in Hebrew as "Ohr" (light). Let us find the light in the details, let us in all of our lives, at every small place that seems so finite, turn to G-d, pray for expansive consciousness, and love.
Rav Raz Hartman
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Rav Raz Hartman, born to Israeli parents, grew up in Southern California. He was attending U.S.C., majoring in Music Peformance, when he met Rav Natan Greenberg. That meeting eventually result in Raz's coming to the Bat Ayin Yeshiva, where he studied for six years and was given Semichah in 2003. He is married to Leah, and they live, with their three children, in Nachla'ot, Jerusalem. Raz serves as Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo, and founder of the v'Ani Tefillah minyan. He has produced several albums of Jewish music. |