Finding God in the world this Shavuot
Photograph by Laura Ohlman via Unsplash
Jonah Mac Gelfand
What does it mean for God to reveal Godself in the world? And if we look toward the Bible, what models are we given?
For many of us, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the Exodus from Egypt. Between the plagues, the Israelites crossing the split sea on dry land, and the waves crashing down over their pursuers, God makes Godself known!
This image is an all-powerful God — one who enters history and subverts nature. This is the God that guides the Israelites through the desert for forty years as a pillar of fire during the night and a pillar of smoke during the day.
To experience these miracles is to know the reality of the Divine.
But, perhaps needless to say, that is not my experience day to day. I do not know a God who enters into my life, subverting nature on my behalf. The God we have access to today is much less overt; much less earth-shattering.
But is this any less miraculous? Judaism says no. To the contrary: it is even more miraculous!
Forty days after the Israelites crossed the sea, they arrived at the Mountain. Moses ascended into fire and smoke on its peak and returned with the Torah: the laws and teachings through which we would access the Divine from then on.
To this day, we commemorate the giving of the Torah fifty days after Passover on the holiday of Shavuot. Celebrated with all-night learning sessions and indulging in dairy-based sweets, this holiday is central in the imagination of the Jewish mystics.
In fact, one 18th-century Ukrainian mystic named Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev taught that the giving of the Torah represents a more accessible revelation of God than the splitting of the seas.
All we need to do is crack open the holy teachings of our ancestors and we will find the Divine pulsing in every sentence, word, and letter.
Drawing on an ancient rabbinic teaching that God appeared as a warrior at the sea, and an elder at the mountain, he explains that these represent not divergent anthropomorphic incarnations (he is, after all, a firm believer in the non-anthropomorphization of God), but rather two versions of revealing Divine energy in the world.
The first is the “young warrior,” clean-shaven and ready for war, representing the “ungarbed” version of the Divine. It was about this manifestation that the ancient rabbis were speaking when they said that at the sea, the lowest member of society saw more than the prophets. This is a God who subverts nature on behalf of people; a God of manifest miracles.
While magnificent and otherworldly, this revelation of God is unsustainable and impossible to understand — it simply blows our mind! After all, “no one can see [God] and live.” (Exodus 33:20) This is the version of God that we taste in peak experiences and mystical rapture, but it can’t be the God of doing the dishes on a Tuesday afternoon.
That’s where the Torah comes in, according to Levi Yitzhak. “At the giving of the Torah,” he teaches, “the Blessed Divine garbed itself according to the measure that humans could comprehend.” The “elder at the mountain” version of God is a Divine that garbs Itself in order to be accessible to people. This is represented by the proverbial beard that adorns the elder’s face: the Torah is the “garb” over Divinity that makes it understandable.
While at the sea, God was “clean-shaven,” so to speak. Forty days later, God had grown a beard; something we can grasp onto.
And this, Levi Yitzhak teaches, is the miracle! The fact that God — that Incompressible Energy That Undergirds and Encompasses All That Exists — makes the effort to manifest Itself in ways comprehensible to our limited human brains is itself miraculous!
So while I don’t experience the Divine swooping into my day-to-day life to solve all my problems, parting the traffic during my commute to make sure I get to my meetings on time, Shavuot teaches us that God is still very present in our lives.
All we need to do is crack open the holy teachings of our ancestors and we will find the Divine pulsing in every sentence, word, and letter.
Jonah Mac Gelfand (he/him) is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Gashmius Magazine, which publishes progressive neo-Hasidic art, poetry, and writing. Before starting rabbinical school, he got his MA in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union, where his research focused on neo-Hasidic leadership, and his writing has been published in both popular and academic journals.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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