God to the Angels: “I told you so.”
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008I think I felt the night before last why God us gave the Torah.
That sounds kinda presumptuous. Maybe I mean more like “I think it’s pretty cool that He gave us the Torah.”
Yesterday and yesterday evening, we celebrated Shavuot and our receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. To mark the day, we spent the entire night learning, in order to properly receive the Torah in the morning.
The evening began, for us, at a dinner with friends, among them a very brilliant young man who told us about the metaphysics of Facebook and social networking on the Internet, how Facebook signifies our leaving time-space limitations to experience a world based on pure data (Ok I’ll be honest- I think that’s what he said. Just believe me when I tell you it was impressive).
When dinner was over, we stopped in at friends who were hosting a “Habura,” a learning group made up of religious people, not religious people, men, women, all sitting around, learning ancient and modern texts and having discussions on the tension between the freedom to choose being bound by a system of morality and having one imposed on us.
Also enjoying the party was downtown Jerusalem, which held an all-night learning-fest with groups and classes going on right in the street.
In general, the “Tikkun Leil Shavuot,” or “Fixing of Shavuot Night” has become somewhat of a mainstream activity in Israel, singled-out as a time for people to check-in with the Torah and learn a little something more. It’s un-become a religious thing, and more a national one. It’s an important phenomenon, I think, because traditional wisdom and culture shouldn’t only be the property of people that keep the traditions.
Amidst all of this and holding my own Tikkun Leil Shavuot at my bedroom desk, my thoughts took me to wonder if we received the Torah in order to take ownership over it. God gave it us because growing and exploring and asking questions excites us. It must have been boring to be up there with angels who did everything right, without humans to take Torah and stumble and bumble along with it. (Traditionally, the angels objected to God giving us the Torah. Imagine the look of “I told you so” that God sends the angels during Tikkun Leil Shavuot).
Only humans would look at massive pop-Internet trends and explain them in light of Godly wisdom. We would see differences in background as a contribution to a learning circle. We’d realize the center of Jerusalem to be the obvious place to make Shavuot and Torah accessible for everyone.
I really hope that we take Torah to be the gift that it is and that we treasure it. It’s a major challenge to sustain the excitement of Shavuot night over the course of the year. I really pray that I’ll accept the Torah and mean it.
But I guess I take a lot of strength from the fact that God knew what He was getting into when he gave the Torah to us. So if we have the Torah, it means we have the potential to really accept it and maybe even to fix the world with it. Good luck to us!
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