Dr. Laitman teaches that the Torah has both an internal and an external part. The internal part is the main concern in the kabbalistic perspective. He refers to the state of the desert: “one who has not corrected him or herself is…immersed in the …evil inclination”, also known as the desert. The desert is the place of klipot, or uncorrected desires. In the desert, we have nothing to revive us, or to give us spiritual life.
Read Rabbi Barenblat’s beautiful poem on the giving of Torah
Rabbi Sacks observes that Israel’s formative experience was in the desert; namely, that an ideal society is one in which everyone has equal dignity under the sovereignty of God. He cites the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep who applied the term “liminal”, or threshold, the describe the state of transition between the old and new, in other words, the space between Egypt and the Promised Land. In the desert, Israel is reborn from a group of slaves to a kingdom of priests and a holy nation
On Shavuot we recite the Decalogue, commemorating the giving of Torah. Rabbi Sacks writes that the Decalogue itself, as moral principles, was not unique. It is their simplicity that makes it special. The states establish parameters of Jewish existence for all time.
Bamidbar is read on the Shabbat before Shavuot, and the rabbis have connected the two. One interpretation is that since the Torah was given in the open, in a place that is not owned by anyone, then anyone may come and accept it. Another interpretation is that the wilderness is free, so is the Torah free. However, the most spiritual reason is that the desert is a place of silence, with no distractions. In Kings, Elijah heard the still small voice because he was listening. However, Judaism is highly verbal, and silence is frequently seen in a negative light. But not all silence is bad.
Who will be left to pray
gratitude for the body
of our planet
if currents fail?
Who will be left to pray
gratitude for the body
of our planet
if currents fail?
Rabbi Sacks describes the last parashah of Leviticus as a “rejection of rejection”. In this, he reminds us to the original basis for much of the anti-Semitic history of our civilization—that God rejected the Jews—Abraham’s physical descendants—for Christians—Abraham’s spiritual descendants. He quotes Lev. 26:44-45, which states that God will not cast away His people, nor break His covenant with them.
Rabbi Sacks observes that while the Torah commands us once to love our neighbor, it commands us 36 times to love the stranger. The obligation to the ger includes the right to live in the Holy Land and the right to share in its welfare provisions. This is an ancient law, way before the Talmudic principles of charity and care to non-Jews as well as Jews.
Rabbi Cowans addresses the conflict over the different standards for people with “normative” bodies and people with “other” bodies, and how the text seems discriminatory and ableist. She raises the concept that sacrificial work in the Temple was physically challenging. However, she asks, ‘why shouldn’t the Torah be more inclusive?’ She continues to say that “the messianic future is not one without disability. It is one where inclusion is innate.”