Below are 10 principles about accessing revelation culled from this week's parsha.
#1 Accept wisdom from wherever it appears, even “outsiders.”
Our parsha, the parsha of the 10 commandments, doesn’t begin with those commandments, but instead begins with the visit of Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro, for whom the parsha is named. The story centers around Yitro’s advice to Moshe -- seeing Moshe overburdened by judging, Yitro suggests that Moshe set up a system of lower judges. By placing this story in juxtaposition to the 10 commandments, the Torah makes it clear that wisdom and truth can come from many places -- from God on a mountain as well as from human beings on earth, and even from those who are officially outside the fold, as Yitro, the priest of Midian, surely was. Wisdom is strewn about the world, carried in many forms, and it is our job to have an open mind and an open heart, to listen to it all and to take it in, as Moshe does. The giving of the Torah does not close the doors to outside wisdom. On the contrary, in including this story, the Torah manages to become a container for all truth, so that Yitro’s executive intuitions -- and all the wisdom carried by the many humans who walk this earth -- also become a part of its fabric.
#2: You can’t always do it alone.
Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the tasks before us, and we feel beaten down by the daily strain of responsibility. We may even at times have an urge to give up. Instead of giving up, though, we can learn to “give it over,” to hand some of it over to others, to let go of full control and responsibility and make use of the many talented people around us who are often happy to share the burden. The result is always better and richer than when we do it alone. Moshe learns this lesson from Yitro, who looks at Moshe’s one-man show and says -- as God first said to the lonely Adam -- lo tov, not good (Genesis 2:18 and Exodus 18:17). Yitro suggests a model which involves many people sharing the work, and this model also applies beautifully to the Torah the people are about to receive, called tov, as in lekah tov, “a good teaching.” This is a Torah that is received not by an individual, but by a nation, a collective, and this is a Torah that is layered and rich with generations and multitudes of voices, a truly joint -- and therefore tov -- project. We need each other for this Torah project. We humans each can only carry a fraction of the wisdom.
#3: Don’t be too busy to witness the divine.
Maybe they could have gotten the Torah earlier, but Moshe was too busy to receive it. Maybe what made that moment ripe for revelation was precisely the enactment of Yitro’s advice, the setting up of a system that freed Moshe of enough time to do higher level work, to be open to the divine revelation that was wanting to manifest through him. There has to be room to receive the divine -- time in our day and space in our hearts and minds that is not already filled by a thousand details and to-do lists. We lose sight so easily of what matters, even when we are engaged in religious activities. To pause and look up and remember is to witness the divine.
#4: Take the initiative in your relationship with God.
The people encamped at Mount Sinai, and then God called to Moshe to come up and receive the Torah, right? That is how we think the story goes, but if you look carefully, you will find that Moshe actually makes the first move. Moshe starts up the mountain, and only then does God call to him (19:3). It is as if God has been waiting there for days, months, generations even, for someone to come searching for Him in this way. As soon as Moshe begins the climb, God responds. Karov Hashem lekhol korav. God is close to all those who call to Him (Ps 145). But you do have to call. You have to open the door a crack, or at least turn the knob. When you do, you find that God has been right there, waiting for you all along.
#5: Before you have access to revelation, you need to feel protected and safe.
Meditations often begin with the instruction to feel how you are supported by the ground beneath your feet or the chair you are sitting on. Before you can move further in contemplation and access something deeper, you need to relax into some sense of safety, some sense that you are being held and embraced. Perhaps this is why God tells Moshe to remind the people, when they are considering whether to enter into this covenant, that He carried them on eagle’s wings (19:4). As Rashi notes, the image is one of perfect protection; unlike other birds who carry their young beneath them, the eagle places its young above her wings, opening herself to arrows from below as a protective shelter. The feeling is one of safety and trust and letting go of any control, as the mama eagle takes full responsibility for the ride. The Israelites have had this experience with God, learning to trust the ride and to feel some sense of security. They are ready for the next level of connection, for an intense revelation and a more active partnership. But they -- and we all -- have to feel that we are safe and held first; we can only be open to receiving from above if we are in a place of deep relaxation and trust.
#6: Embrace uncertainty; don’t run away from it.
In the midst of thunder, lightning, shofar blasts, and a trembling, smoking mountain, the people fell back and stood at a distance, but “Moshe approached the thick dark cloud where God was,” Moshe nigash el ha’arafel asher sham Ha’Elokim (Ex 20:18). Moshe understood that it was in the arafel, in the fog, in this thick cloud of not seeing, that God resides. The Israeli singer Shuli Rand sings a song called “Arafel” based on this verse. Its refrain is -- ki shama, ki shama Elokim. For there, for there [in the fog] is where God is. We think God is only in the bright sunshine, but He is also, perhaps primarily, in this thick cloud of darkness
A famous medieval Christian mystical work called “The Cloud of Unknowing” suggests that in order to be close to God, one needs to surrender the human need to know things with certainty and to allow oneself to enter the mystical realm of not knowing. Moshe was doing just such a practice; he was not frightened by the fog as the people were, but allowed himself to enter a place where things were not clear in the human realm in order to receive the wisdom and knowing of another realm.
We struggle with uncertainty. We want to know with clarity the way things are and what will happen tomorrow, and we are restless when we don’t. But maybe the ability to sit in the not knowing, to trust and allow life to unfold without our holding on to understanding it too clearly is to enter the divine realm, to allow God, to allow mystery, to enter our lives. By letting go of having to know we allow something we cannot know to be part of us. There is a leaning in quality to this attitude. Instead of running away, we lean in, we embrace what seems hard to tolerate, and in doing so, we approach God; we open ourselves to the unexpected possibility of revelation.
#7: Stand still to receive revelation right now; don’t keep moving somewhere else.
The journey through the desert involved moving and encamping, moving and encamping. Both are ways to connect to the divine. We tend to value the movement more, to worry about progress, about getting somewhere. Crossing the Sea last week was an experience of the divine through motion. But here on Mount Sinai, with the intense revelation of the giving of the Torah, the people stand totally still -- vayetyatzvu, like a matzevah, a statue. Their standing is emphasized by the use of the term ma’amad Har Sinai, “the standing at Har Sinai,” and also by the physical immobility of a mountain (as opposed to a sea). There is something that we can only receive when we stand totally still, firmly planted where we are, like a mountain, not rushing around to get somewhere or to get something done, not striving to improve or fix, but just totally still and receptive to what already is, the revelation that is waiting for us to stand still enough to take it in. The rabbis say that the Mount Sinai revelation happened on Shabbat; this makes sense; every Shabbat we have this opportunity, to stop our striving and movement, to stand still, to act as if we are already perfect -- nowhere to go, nothing to fix -- and when we do so, we realize that indeed we are already perfect, already ready for revelation right at this moment. We don’t have to take any further steps or wait till tomorrow. This moment itself is one of revelation.
#8: Make yourself into a vessel for God to work through you..
God wants human partnership and participation in revelation. Consider the introduction to the ten commandments: “Moshe went down to the people and said to them” (19:25), and then, with no break at all, “God spoke all these words saying: I am the Lord Your God . . . “ (20:1-2). Who spoke these words --, Moshe or God? Tradition answers this question by dividing up the commandments; some were spoken directly by God and some by Moshe. But the point here seems to be that in some way God wanted a human mouthpiece, that Moshe’s role in carrying the word of God was essential to the process. Moshe speaks and out of his mouth come God’s words.
In an earlier description of the scene, the partnership is described this way: Moshe yedaber veHaElokim ya’anenu bekol. “Moshe spoke and God answered him loudly/with thunder” (19:19). Read literally, this seems to imply a call and response between a human and God, a back and forth energy of partnership. Rashi suggests that God’s “answering with kol (loudness or thunder)” means that when Moshe spoke, God gave him the divine power to speak loudly and be heard. It is as if the human frame became a vessel for God’s energy; Moshe’s human words were married with God’s outsized thunder to create a revelation on earth.
Sense the possibility inside yourself of God’s powerful energy force flowing through you to help you do God’s work in this world. God reveals himself through the mechanism of human beings. He is looking to partner with us, to act through us, to flow through us, if we can become vessels for His Presence, if we can consent to the divine that wants to manifest itself through us.
#9: Trembling is good; let yourself feel it in your body.
“There was thunder and lightning and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled” (19:16). The people trembled at Mount Sinai. They didn’t just hear and see the words and the sounds and the intense sights; they didn’t just think about and understand what was happening; they had a somatic reaction to the experience. They felt the revelation in their whole bodies, trembling with awe and relief and a sense of their own transformation at this moment. There are various therapeutic techniques that make use of shaking or trembling as a way of relieving and letting go of stuck patterns of tension in the body, and making room for new energy to enter. The Israelites at this moment of intensity seem to have had a spontaneous whole body shaking reaction, as if to show bodily the transformative nature of this event. We tend to brace instead of shake; we don’t really allow a full bodily expression of what is going on for us. Part of the path to revelation is to be embodied in this way, to fully feel the divine flow that wants to enter not just the mind and the heart, but also the body that God created for us.
#10: Let your small “I” get to know the “I” of God.
The first word of the 10 commandments is Anokhi, “I.” “I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt [Mitzrayim].” Maybe we need nothing more. Maybe it is all contained in this one word. Anokhi. “I”. There is an I that is greater than our own little I, an I that wants us to know it and to feel our connection to it. This I is capable of freeing us and redeeming us from our mitzrayim, our narrow places, from the constraints and suffering of our small selves, our sense of aloneness and separation, of insecurity and neediness. This I extends beyond time and place and has limitless love and compassion; our small, mortal I can rest in its vastness and feel a sense of belonging. When we know of this I, when we remember it and remember that we belong to it, we are free; we are one; we are at home; we want nothing. We certainly do not “covet” our neighbor’s wife or donkey, as the last commandment, on the other end of the envelope, instructs; we belong to something larger and are at peace. There is nothing else to know.
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