This past weekend we celebrated the holiday of Shavu’ot, or Feast of Weeks – also known as Pentecost in the Christian tradition. It is always celebrated exactly 50 days after the first night of Passover – we count seven weeks, as ordained in the Torah, and then mark the 50th day with celebration. 

Before the Exile, this was the time of bringing the first fruits to the Temple, and expressing gratitude for a good harvest. Once the Temple was no more and the connection to the land became attenuated, the Rabbis declared that Shavu’ot was also the anniversary of the Revelation at Mount Sinai, when the people received the Ten Commandments, also known as the Ten Utterances or the Decalogue. It is still traditional to decorate the synagogue sanctuary with greenery in honour of the holiday’s agricultural roots, but the main focus is on Revelation.

For those of us who are not fundamentalists, it is by no means clear what happened at ma’amad har sinai, the Standing at Mount Sinai. Even the Rabbis of the Talmudic era were not sure what exactly was heard by the people – the text in Exodus seems deliberately confusing. It jumps back and forth between singular and plural verbs, includes synesthesia (the people are described as having seen the voices), and has some odd sentence construction that really makes it unclear who said what. In Deuteronomy, the same event seems to be described in a less confusing way, but then the Decalogue itself isn’t exactly the same as in Exodus. What are we to make of this? More concretely, what does this mean for us post-modern people?

Regardless of what actually may or may not have happened in the wilderness of Sinai, it is clear that a tradition was created that values receptivity – making ourselves open to the call, however we may perceive it. Many of us have moved on from the concept of a desert deity who must be placated with the sweet smell of sacrifices, but we are still open to the glory of the world around us – rearrange the letters of the Tetragrammaton, and you have a Hebrew word meaning experience or reality. We are living in times where our planet is heating up and fascism is running rampant. Not a reality we want to bequeath to our children. 

The Rabbis said that the Voice of Sinai calls out to us every day – we just have to be open to hearing it. Right now, it seems to be calling us to save the world. What are we going to do about it?