Chag Sameach!
Today we celebrate the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments symbolize the Torah, so it is as if we are given the whole Torah today. What a gift!
But is it really a good gift? Or is it the kind of gift we have to set out when Aunt Ruthie comes over and then put it away again until the next time she comes? We hope no one sees it around the house because we are embarrassed by it.
The Torah after all is full of lying, theft, trickery, murder, pornography, war, plague, and slavery. If any book should be banned under today’s ultra conservative microscopes, it should be the Bible.
The characters are flawed, the hero, G*d, has regular temper tantrums, and the people never seem to learn from their mistakes. Is this really a book we want to teach to our children?
The answer at Shavuot, is yes, for the same reason we need to read banned books. Because the characters are flawed, the heroes lose their tempers, and people make mistakes.
In the Torah and in banned books, the people in them reflect reality. They have real fears, errors, losses and gains, successes, and failures, hopes that are fulfilled and ones that are dashed. They mirror us and our messy chaotic ways of being in the world. As readers of the Torah, we can see our struggles reflected there, as well as our attempts to learn and improve.
The Torah is alive because of its ‘realness.’ It reaches out to us from the past and says, ‘Read me, because I am you, and you are me.’ When we read about Isaac mourning the death of his mother, or Moses praying for healing for his sister, Pharoah’s greed, and Moses’ bitter disappointment at not being able to enter the Promised Land, we remember the deaths of our loved ones, those who we pray for healing, our own egos, and our disappointments. It also celebrates life, birth, children, and grandchildren. We learn more about how to manage our lives by studying their lives, year after year.
So, bring on the banned books, and open our Torah scrolls again this Shavuot. When we do, it’s like we unroll a mirror; we see ourselves reflected back as we read from it. I hope we find something new in it, again this year.
Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Marcia Plumb
