In a recent post on “My Jewish Learning,” by Rabbi Sara Laufer about the Book of Numbers (Thanks Bob Kanner!) she describes a comic strip by Mari Andrew featuring “two identical drawings of a woman, holding a suitcase, staring at the road in front of her. On one side, she stares at an empty road ahead, and the caption reads: ‘I’m leaving.’ The other road leads to a city, with trees and buildings, and clearly a sense of excitement. That caption reads: ‘I’m expanding.’”
This describes the holiday of Shavuot in a nutshell. Celebrating the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, we are surrounded by uncertainty. God’s presence looms large around us in the form of lightning and thunder. Having given up everything to escape our servitude, we still have little to show for it. Instead of freedom, we are granted eternal wilderness. And, yet, in that moment instead of fear and disappointment, we experience possibility.
While we cannot change our physical circumstances, we can change our mental outlook. Judaism is not grounded in space, it is – as Abraham Joshua Heschel once told us – grounded in time or more specifically in God’s time. By focusing on learning and teaching, on Torah, we can never fully be contained. We are, as the cartoonist reminds us, expanding. After a night of intensive study and in the presence of our new confirmands, may we continue to look beyond the fear of the future, into the possibility of the here and now. Learn, grow, expand!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex