Parashat Yitro 5784

Here we are. Standing at the foot of the shaking, smoking, mountain. A shofar is blaring. There is lightning, thunder. A voice. We stand aback in shock, begging Moshe not to make us speak to Hashem face to face lest we perish. This is our “receiving” of the Torah. I put receiving in quotes because, the Rabbis of the Talmud, as well as myself and maybe you all, pick up on the fact that, even though the Israelites later say שהֶׂ֥ עֲַנ עֽמָשְׁ ִונְ , nothing about this scene creates the conditions for the full bodied yes we would hope to feel when making a life and tribe-altering decision. Nothing about this scene feels, for lack of a better word, consensual. To risk being sacreligious, in some ways it feels like a big scary male God telling us what to do, with as many theatrics as He could muster. The rabbis of the Talmud draw an even more theatrical picture, via Midrash: 

“and they stood at the lowermost part of the mount” (Exodus 19:17). Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: this verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be G!d, overturned the mountain above them like a tub, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial. 

I picked up (what I thought was) a completely non-Jewishly related book at the library recently called Reclaiming Body Trust: a Path to Healing and Liberation, and was shocked to read the following in the first chapter, “The Hebrew language has two words for fear: pachad and yirah. Pachad is the fear we experience when there is a threat of danger (fight, flight, freeze). Yirah is the fear we have when we are about to take up more space than we are comfortable with.” It’s curious to me, with this interpretation of these two words, that the word repeated over and over again in our Parsha is not pachad but yirah. The Rabbis of the Talmud are definitely painting a picture of Pachad. They are saying that no–this was not a consensual experience. It was forced on us, and we only accepted the Torah because we feared for our lives. As we see in the Midrash, this creates a halachic problem,

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there is a substantial caveat to the obligation to fulfill the Torah. The Jewish people can claim that they were coerced into accepting the Torah, and it is therefore not binding. 

Part of why I love the Talmud is that it is so chutzpadik, as illustrated by our Midrash which is laying out a claim we have against Hashem. We don’t have to keep the Torah, it’s saying, because it was forced on us, and if something is forced on us–it’s not binding. This is a religion where consent is central. It continues: 

Rava said: Even so, they again/later accepted it willingly in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written: “The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” (Esther 9:27), and he taught: The Jews ordained what they had already taken upon themselves through coercion at Sinai. 

I find it fascinating that with this Midrash, the Rabbis create a completely different narrative than the one we have known our whole lives. The Torah wasn’t accepted on Mt. Sinai–that was coercive. It was accepted at the time of Achashverosh, a time when we were pretty much completely assimilated, and in a story which doesn’t mention God by name even once. It’s completely our story, which is what made the full-bodied yes accessible to us. 

Through this Midrash, the rabbis rebalance the relationship between us and the Divine, healing the relationship and making it one of mutuality rather than force. 

All of this makes me think of my dear friend Ditty, zichrona l’vracha, who grew up Haredi in London, was coerced to marry a man even though she knew her whole life that she was a lesbian. A secret relationship with her love Emily, also Haredi, married, and closeted, got her through years of an abusive marriage. I met her here in Brooklyn in 2009 when she was still married. I saw her through her divorce, custody battle (which she won), cancer diagnoses, and eventual death. The last time I saw her, we were right here at Ginger’s in Park Slope, she shared how wonderful it felt to be free–to be out as gay, to be out of the religious world. And, she also shared her bitterness, saying how badly she wanted to “eat a bacon cheeseburger on Yom Kippur at the Kotel.” 

As funny as Ditty was, the pain underneath her words was palpable. So much of her life was a result of coercion, her own agency was like a long lost cousin that she was introduced to much later in life. 

Let us keep in mind that the Israelites stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai only seven weeks after the Exodus from Egypt. Only seven weeks into their lives as free people, having never had true agency until this moment. While we can criticize God for forcing the Torah on them, we can also acknowledge the state the Israelites were in– unable to make their own decisions, so unfamiliar with freedom. 

With Adar on its way, and the commemoration of, as our Midrash says, the true receiving of the Torah on Purim, how can we reclaim our agency? In a world that feels more and more overwhelming, disheartening and disempowering, may we be blessed to give a full-bodied yes to the things we can, and continue to fight for the agency and freedom of others. 

Shabbat Shalom