According to tradition, the gathering at Sinai this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Nitzavim, includes not only the tribal leaders, elders, Israelite households, strangers in their midst, from woodchoppers and water drawers, but us as well. The Torah states in Deuteronomy 29:13-14: “I make this covenant not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before our God and with those who are not with us here this day.” For the rabbis, those “who are not with us” are us. How wonderful to think that we, too, received Torah directly from Sinai.
But, as wonderful as it is, we know it is just myth not fact. As Susan Sontag wrote in her book Regarding the Pain of Others*, “There is no such thing as collective memory.” By this she meant that no matter how much we document our past, it never can fully be reborn in our present. No, we did not really stand at Sinai. Likely, no such mountain even existed.
Yet, saying that we stood there was as important to them as it is to us. As my mentor Rabbi Sid Schwarz writes, we need a “Sinai Consciousness” to infuse life into our religious identity. According to Sid, Sinai shows us how to live, centering our faith on the “Torah’s teachings about acting with compassion (chesed), protecting the stranger in one’s midst (ahavat ger), and pursuing peace (shalom) and truth (emet).”
For me, “Sinai Consciousness” gives us a communal identity separate from the Land of Israel, a sense of identity that we can all feel a sense of belonging to no matter when or where we live. We feel it any time one Jew meets another. Any time we celebrate a holiday knowing Jews the world over are celebrating the same tradition with us. Any time our heart is filled with joy and wonder at belonging to this long, beautiful tradition we all share. We feel it at every one of our Shabbat services, and we will feel it this coming week on Rosh Hashanah. Whether it is Sinai or not, may we have occasions to gather in celebration of life’s wonders in the New Jewish Year, 5783.
Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah,
Rabbi Alex
*(Taken from this week’s New Yorker review of the Ken Burns documentary “The US and the Holocaust”:https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ken-burns-turns-his-lens-on-the-american-response-to-the-holocaust)