For Shavu'ot: On Kabbalat HaTorah and Learning to Receive

Kabbalat HaTorah --  to receive the Torah.   That is our goal on this holiday.    What does it mean to receive?  How does one go about receiving?

We tend to worry primarily about giving, about what we are contributing to this world, what we are doing to earn our precious lives.  These pursuits often have a restless, endless quality to them; we will never fully earn the gift of life; we will never give enough to be at peace.

But how would it feel to focus for a moment on receiving, on cultivating an open receptive attitude to the divine and human gifts that are always flowing our way?   To be receptive involves humility, an admission of our dependence and incompleteness, our holes, our need to receive from outside ourselves.  To only give is a kind of arrogance, a stance of superiority; to learn to receive is to admit deficiency, to open to the greatness of others.   

The Israelites at Mount Sinai stood betahtit hahar, “at the bottom of the mountain,” at the lowest rung beneath a towering force above them; they understood their humble place in the universe and could therefore open themselves completely to the intensity of this experience of God.   It is no accident, either, that Moshe, the humblest man to walk the earth, is the one to have brought the Torah down from heaven for us; his humility was a form of supreme receptivity, with no barriers of arrogance or “already knowing” to get in the way.

To be receptive is to open ourselves up to the flow, to admit something is missing and thereby “admit in” what is standing at the door waiting to come in.   This opening, this knowing we are not full, this letting in and receiving -- this process is one of making room inside us, opening space, emptying at least a little the vessel that is us so that we can hold what is offered.      

Indeed, the Israelites’ preparations for the Mount Sinai experience seem to be directed at just such a process of gaining greater receptivity.   They are told, first, to purify and cleanse themselves, a way of preparing one’s vessel, ensuring that there is nothing extraneous and harmful standing in the way of proper reception.  Second, they are told repeatedly to create boundaries around the mountain to prevent anyone from encroaching.  This process of hagbalah, border making, for which the three days prior to Shavuot are named, is another way of speaking about the need to make room -- to demarcate open space -- for the reception of the divine flow.  The people must stand back from the mountain -- hold themselves back, behind a barrier -- in order to open up a conduit for the divine to enter.    We are often told “to take up more space,”  but here, the object is to pull back, to bound our selves, to become smaller, all in order to make room for something so much bigger than us to fill us up.   

We have this experience in conversations and classes.   If you’re talking, you aren’t listening; you’re taking up the space.   Sometimes it takes a holding back of self to make room for the other to emerge, to be able to really receive what that person has to offer.   While on Pesach the instruction was for us to speak -- to tell the story to our children, vehigadeta levinkha -- now, on Shavu’ot, we hold back our own speech and open ourselves to receiving the divine voice -- the awesome thundering lightning and shofar of Mount Sinai and the voice of God delivering the ten commandments.  

In thinking about this holding back, this form of self-contraction we do on Shavu’ot, we can look back to God’s own self-contraction -- called tzimtzum, making Himself smaller -- in the process of creating the world.  We only exist because of God’s pulling back of His full Presence to make room for us; self contraction is a form of love, a way of dancing backward into the shadows so that the other can come onto the stage.   God did that -- and continues at every moment to do that -- for us, and we, for our part, also have a self contraction to do to make room to receive God’s full presence and Torah.   No wonder the Torah repeatedly emphasizes how essential this act of hagbalah -- boundary making -- was for the Israelites as they received the Torah; they needed to step back to create a container in this human world for the divine.  

There is something deeply relaxing about this holding back.  We normally feel an overwhelming pressure to perform and act and produce and do things in the world that will somehow earn our existence.   We are exhausted.   Here we are asked for something much simpler -- not to do; not to run around -- but to stand still right here and open ourselves to receiving.    The stillness is important.    Vayityatzvu is how the Israelites are described at the foot of the mountain -- standing as still as a matzevah, a statue.  Nowhere to go; nothing to prove or to say or to make happen; there is surrender here and a receptive openness to what wants to flow into them.   

Psalm 23 speaks of the good and the hesed, the loving kindness, as chasing after us -- yirdifuni.  As Julie Kaminsky, a member of my Psalms group, pointed out, this language of chasing or pursuing implies that if we stood very still, the goodness and the love would catch up to us.  While we are running around the world chasing them, they are right behind us, trying to catch up to us.  If we slow down and open up to receive them, they will come flowing in.