So What If It Didn't Happen That Way?

February 12, 2010
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

     In this week's portion, we read sections that seem strung together like mismatched beads on a string. The portion begins with laws regarding slaves. If you own a slave that refuses to be released in the seventh year, you must back him up to a doorpost and drive a hole in his ear with a hammer and awl. Female slaves became part of the family, not eligible for release in the seventh year. But if a female slave was mistreated, she was set free without any recompense. Or, if her new family was unhappy with her, her freedom could be purchased by her real family. These laws are interesting, but remember that the Israelites are supposedly at Sinai. All have just been released from slavery. No one at Sinai is a slave, so these laws are premature.

     Next come laws regarding people who harm or murder others. Here is the famous law, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand and a foot for a foot..." Actually, no Israelites ever followed this law. It was replaced in Deuteronomy with laws calling for cities of refuge where people could flee from revenge if they accidentally killed someone. And the rabbis later said that the law of "an eye for an eye" was never meant to be taken literally. God really meant that fair payment should be substituted for actual damage, but if you read the Torah itself, that is not at all what God said at Sinai. It's just what the rabbis wished that God had said.

     Another bunch of laws give the penalties for damages. What if someone's ox gores a man or woman? How much is that worth? What if someone's ox hurts someone else's ox? What if someone opens a pit and another person accidentally falls into it? How much should be paid for that? And then come laws regarding how to deal with thieves and laws about being a good neighbor. What do you pay if your cattle grazes in someone else's field or if you set fire to your neighbor's grain? And, of course, if you borrow from a neighbor, whatever you borrow must be returned unhurt.

     All of these laws were really what we might call "rulings" or "judgments." They all seem to derive from court cases. If such and such happens, then such and such should be the judgment. So the laws given in this portion are really the distillation of years of court cases that arose after the Israelites were settled in Canaan -- no doubt when there was a king and a government, since the rulings presuppose courts of justice. Then why place them in the Torah? Why say that they were given at Mount Sinai when it would be enough to list them in the Book of Kings where they most probably belong?

     The answer is not too difficult. In the story told in this portion, Moses goes up the mountain and returns with God's laws for the people. Even before the laws are written, the people respond by saying, "All the things that Adonai has commanded, we will do!" Then, Moses sacrifices a bull and sprinkles half the blood on the altar. The other half of the blood of the sacrifice Moses sprinkles on the people. They have entered a blood covenant with God. And, notice, this is the only blood covenant in the entire Torah.

     Just after this covenant of blood is concluded, Moses and seventy elders are called half way up the mountain.

And they saw the God of Israel: under [God's] feet there was the likeness of a pavement the color of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet [God] did not raise a hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank.

     Is it really possible that seventy elders "saw" God, while "eating and drinking"? Or was it just that Moses and the elders went half way up the mountain and experienced the presence of God in an unusually intense and vivid way? The ancient rabbis commented that just experiencing the presence of God was like a feast for the senses. We should not take "eating and drinking" too literally. There was no need for food for the elders, just as Moses had no need for food during his forty days on the mountaintop.

     Maimonides later offered that "seeing God" should also not be taken literally. The elders didn't really "see" God but, emotionally and intellectually, they had an experience to which they responded the way we might respond by saying "I see," meaning "I truly understand."

     Modern commentators often say that the encounter with God engages one's whole being, so the encounter itself seems like both eating and drinking; it is a feast for the senses. Or, it is also a modern position that we come to know God through our real experiences in this world, even experiences like eating and drinking when we feel closest to God. We "see" that it is God who provides for us. For Jews, the modern scholars say, eating and drinking is just as immediate an encounter  with God as is praying.

     All these things, like beads on a string, were tied into the Sinai story, a story which encompasses the largest segment of the Torah stretching from the Book of Exodus all the way to the Book of Numbers. It may very well be that the Sinai story started simply, with Moses going up the mountain and returning with God's commandments. But there were so many codes of law that should have been given at Sinai that the editors used the setting the way we use the Constitution of the United States. When we see that something essential is not mentioned in the Constitution we amend it, adding the amendment as if it were always there, as if it were an integral part of the original document. It's hard to imagine our Constitution without the Bill of Rights, just as it is hard to image the Sinai story without the list of the Ten Commandments. So what if the list of commandments we now call the "Ten Commandments" was composed later and inserted into the Sinai story by some later editor? So what if the laws regarding slavery did not arise until much later when the people were living under the kings? So what if the story of the elders eating a meal with God was someone's elegant tale told many hundreds of years later? It would be difficult for us to imagine the experience at Sinai without these things. So we find them here, some more perfect and some less perfect, some more believable and some less believable. Sinai is our original covenant, just as the Constitution is the original contract we citizens made with ourselves. Because they both live and breathe, we may be adding to Sinai even now, amending it to make it clearer and more usable, just as the rabbis did in their time, just as Maimonides did in his time, and just as Jews have done ever since Sinai. And let us say: Amen.