The Violence of Sinai
The Violence of Sinai
The first rule of Judaism is that we never asked for any of this.
Hello, kind readers. Today’s post is something of a provocation.
The moment when God delivers the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai is usually depicted as a joyous or awesome occasion.
The rabbis imagine it differently. Floating in the sea of Talmud is a idea that should stop you in your tracks.
“And (the Israelites) stood at the bottom of the mountain” (Exodus 19:17).
Rabbi Avdimi son of Ḥama son of Ḥasa said, “This teaches that God held the mountain over them like a barrel and said, ‘If you accept the Torah, good. If not, here shall be your graves.’” (bShabbat88a)
God leads the Jews out of Egypt and forces the Torah upon them. Nobody asked them if they wanted to be chosen. God decides that they are bound, and so they are bound.
The Bible doesn’t say this. This is an interpretation the rabbis choose to be true.
The violence of the situation is noted by the Talmud itself in the very next sentence.
Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: This should be a declaration (moda’a) against the Torah!
The term declaration (moda’a) has a very specific legal meaning: it’s a document declaring that an agreement was made under duress. Rav Aḥa is saying, in so many words, that Jews shouldn’t have to follow the Torah. We didn’t receive it consensually.
But, of course, that can’t be the Talmud’s bottom line, right? And indeed, the next sentence saves the day.
Rava said: Even so, they willingly accepted it in the time of Achashverosh, as it is written: “[The Jews] established and took upon themselves” (Esther 9:27), meaning they established what they had already taken upon themselves.
Note the verse that Rava cites as a prooftext: it’s from Esther, one of the chronologically latest books of the Bible. It’s a story that takes place after the entire “main arc” of Jewish history has crashed and burned: the Jews have conquered the land, had their kings, built their Temple, broke in two, and were conquered and demolished. The “Plan A” of Jewish history is over—and it’s only now that they decide to buy into the plan in the first place.
Revelation as sexual assault
If this wasn’t disturbing enough, the Maharal—an early modern commentator—takes things a step further in a doubly outrageous passage. (Credit to Miriam Gedwiser for the citation.)
According to the Bible, the punishment for rape is that the rapist can never divorce his victim. Leaving aside whether you think this is a just punishment, the Maharal notes that this law bears a striking similarity to revelation: both are violent coercions that lead to unbreakable bonds. For the Maharal, this is a good news—in fact, he suggests that God coerced the Israelites into accepting the Torah because God wanted to forge an unbreakable bond. If revelation had been consensual, God might have eventually backed out. (Good to know!)
What are we supposed to make of any of this? More importantly, what are we supposed to make of the fact that the rabbis want to imagine their tradition this way?
I want to suggest a couple of interpretations. Both are a little disturbing.
The heritage of your oppressor is your heritage
What does it mean to be the inheritor of a tradition whose very existence in your life is evidence of violence committed? In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin asks this question about his own sense of culture as a Black writer in America.
I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe.
Baldwin recognizes that he doesn’t own Shakespeare, that Rembrandt has been thrust upon him—but he also knows he can’t escape them, because he has been robbed of all the alternatives. He is forced to inherit the very tradition that enslaved his ancestors.
Is this not exactly the experience of the Jewish people in the desert? The Israelites whisper about missing their Egyptian home, and they are punished for doing so. Revelation takes place in the vast wasteland of Sinai, far away from any civilization, and in this wasteland they are given a “choice”: Torah, or nothing. The Jews took the Torah. What else were they going to do?
If we take the coercion of revelation seriously, we must turn Torah on its head. The Torah might feel close, but only because it has overwritten anything that might feel closer. It can be resisted, yes—but only in its own language. Its win is all-consuming, irreversible.
Jew, not by choice
The other interpretation is that the mountain-over-your-head model of revelation fits perfectly with a religion that is also an ethnicity.
Most Jews didn’t choose to be Jewish; rather, Judaism is thrust upon them, unrequested. There are times when being a Jew can feel positively awful or stifling or terrifying; there are times when it feels like someone should have given us a choice. Perhaps the rabbis accepted it of their own accord; but did we accept the rabbis? Did you?
In this sense, the coercion of revelation repeats in every generation. Nobody held a mountain over our heads—but we didn’t exactly get a choice, either.
A mandate to be free
Regardless of which interpretation you prefer, there is only one way out: take control. Make it your own. Eat the tradition alive.
Baldwin understood this perfectly.
I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.
The only response to historical coercion is to take back as much power as you can. If you’re a rabbi, that might mean telling stories about besting God in an argument by blatantly misreading the Bible’s own verses. It might mean telling God that your belief is really just a choice, or writing so many books that the one forced upon you becomes nothing but a distant memory.
On an individual level, this means that the way Jews define their Judaism actually means something, that it has theological meaning. If you decide to give a religion to someone at birth, before knowing what they’ll do with it—well, don’t be surprised if they use that absolute right to make of it what they will.
Of course, this is a mandate of its own. If revelation is a choice between the Torah or erasure, the response to revelation is control or nothing. Choices are still limited; life is limited. Still, all things considered, I take comfort in the idea that revelation demands that we set ourselves free.
I see a bit of Yitz Greenberg's post Holocaust theology in קימו וקבלו. The people in Esther made their choice in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem, the burning of the Temple, and saving themselves, on their own terms, from a genocidal threat that God pointedly did not intercede to protect them from.
Re: Jew, not by choice: I'm wrestling, too, with identity, how it's (inevitably) thrust on us, and the choices we make to own it. And while I don't want to reduce all conversations to a neo-Marxist analysis of power, I wonder about relative responsibility based on where the identity/ies we are born into fall on that spectrum. How is James Baldwin's conundrum of being Black in America the same/different from mine (e.g.) as a white-skinned Latino Jew in the same country? What choices are there for me to make to make myself *and others* more free? I appreciate you bringing Baldwin's voice into the mix. And for the Torah.