Pierre Teilhard_de_Chardin

This week’s Torah portion, bamidbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20), is the first Torah reading in a book of the same name (referred to in English as Numbers). The word bamidbar (במדבר) means “In the wilderness”.

Wilderness is the backdrop of most of the Torah. It is where all the drama of the people of Israel as a people, as opposed to a family, takes place. And it unfolds in the space of 40 years, after which, supposedly, our forefathers crossed the Jordan river and entered the Promised Land.

But have we really left the wilderness? Have we really entered the Promised Land?

Think about it. For thousands of years, every Simchat Torah we start reading the Torah from the beginning, from the Torah portion of Bereshit. And after fifty weeks or so, towards the end of the cycle, we read the last chapter of the Torah, Deuteronomy 34, in which we find a powerful image: Moses goes up to mount Nevo, from which he has a view of the land of Canaan, and, Y-H-V-H tells him:

זֹאת הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּעְתִּי לְאַבְרָהָם לְיִצְחָק וּלְיַעֲקֹב לֵאמֹר לְזַרְעֲךָ אֶתְּנֶנָּה הֶרְאִיתִיךָ בְעֵינֶיךָ וְשָׁמָּה לֹא תַעֲבֹר:

“This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘I will assign it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.” (Deuteronomy 34:4).

Moses passes away, the Torah ends, and we start from the beginning. The entry into the land of Canaan, which is described in the book of Joshua, is not part of Jewish life cycle.

Notice also that God is not referred to in the Torah as “the God who took you into the land of Canaan.” He is only referred to as the one who took the people of Israel out of Egypt. As, for example, in the first of the Ten Commandments:

אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים.

I, Y-H-V-H, am your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. (Exodus 20:2)

The Promised Land is spoken of as something to prepare for, something that will happen in the future. In the book of Deuteronomy Moses repeatedly uses the expression-

…עַל הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם עֹבְרִים אֶת הַיַּרְדֵּן שָׁמָּה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ.

…the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan. (Deuteronomy 32:47).

We are out of Egypt; getting into Canaan is something that is going to happen in the future; so where are we now? In the wilderness.

What is this condition, that we call it “the wilderness?” We are no longer in mitzrayim (מצרים), a word which means Egypt but literally means duality of boundaries. And you are not yet in Canaan, the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of heaven on earth, although you long for it, you yearn for it, you are oriented towards it, you are informed by it, you move towards it.

You can never really get there. We are told that the people of Israel had to stay in the desert for 40 years until the last person who was a grown up when they had left Egypt—the last person who still had slavery to programmed in them—dies out. Only those who were one-pointedly and wholly to freedom and to the One, who had no trace of duality in them, were fit to cross into the Holy Land. May I suggest, that we are still waiting for those people to arise.

The human condition is not perfect. Perfect saints exist in Renaissance paintings. We all have the devil in us as well. That is what makes it interesting: because even though are bodies are firmly rooted on earth, our consciousness is grounded in Heaven and we can abide in that heaven right now. But we cannot deny duality, we cannot deny our body, we cannot deny those aspects of our lives that constantly pull us towards mitzrayim, towards the duality of boundaries.

So we are here in this in-between land, the land of bamidbar. This is where our unique drama unfolds. We were given an awesome task: the partake in the task of the creator, of moving creation towards more and more consciousness, towards higher and higher order. And how do we do that? As God tells Cain:

לַפֶּתַח חַטָּאת רֹבֵץ וְאֵלֶיךָ תְּשׁוּקָתוֹ וְאַתָּה תִּמְשָׁל בּוֹ:

Sin couches at the door; his urge is toward you, yet you can be the master. (Genesis 4:7)

You still have Egypt in you, it still exerts its pull, but you can make a choice. And that choice has cosmic implication, it is the most direct way towards tikkun ‘olam, towards the repair of the world. This is our task here on earth.

* * *

But does it make sense to aspire towards an elusive Holy Land which one can never reach? I’d like to bring one modern answer to this conundrum, that of the great French scientist, philosopher, theologian and educator, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). He conceived of the idea of the Omega Point. Omega, of course, is that last letter in the Greek alphabet, which is why Jesus says in the Book of Revelation: “I am the alpha and the omega, the First and the Last.” (Revelation 22:13)

In Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of evolution, the universe perpetually evolves towards higher levels of material complexity and consciousness, starting from simple inanimate matter and culminating, thus far, in us, humans (emphasis on “thus far”). The Omega Point was for him the ultimate point of complexity and consciousness which acts as an attractor, as a point that the universe constantly evolves towards. It is both transcendent and real, and acts as an imperative—everything must evolve towards it, it cannot be undone, and its very existence exerts an irresistible pull on the whole physical matter.

I propose that the same is true of the idea of the Holy Land, the Promised Land. That land does not exist in time and space. The world we live in, the physical world, is the world of the wilderness. The Promised Land, a very real but transcendent concept, is something we can see, we can aspire for, but cannot cross towards. Yet its existence has had a transformative cohesive influence on the Jewish people for thousands of years.

So yes, we are still bamidbar, in the wilderness, in the desert. And that is the good news. Because in choosing to align ourselves with the move towards the Promised Land and away from mitzrayim, away from bondage, we are co-creators of a better world. This is Tikkun Olam at its best. And from a certain perspective, that is what we came here to do.

וְכִי יָמוּךְ אָחִיךָ עִמָּךְ וְנִמְכַּר לָךְ לֹא תַעֲבֹד בּוֹ עֲבֹדַת עָבֶד: כְּתוֹשָׁב יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ עַד שְׁנַת הַיֹּבֵל יַעֲבֹד עִמָּךְ: וְיָצָא מֵעִמָּךְ הוּא וּבָנָיו עִמּוֹ וְשָׁב אֶל מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ וְאֶל אֲחֻזַּת אֲבֹתָיו יָשׁוּב: כִּי עֲבָדַי הֵם אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִי אֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם לֹא יִמָּכְרוּ מִמְכֶּרֶת עָבֶד:… כִּי לִי בְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲבָדִים עֲבָדַי הֵם אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִי אוֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם:

If your kinsman under you continues in straits and must give himself over to you, to not subject him to the treatment of a slave. He shall remain with you as a hired or bound laborer; he shall serve with you only until the Jubilee year. Then he and his children with him shall be free of your authority; he shall go back to his family and return to his ancestral holding. For they are my slaves, whom I freed from the land of Egypt, and may not give themselves over into slavery…. For it is to me that the Israelites are slaves: they are my slaves, whom I freed from the land of Egypt, I Y-H-V-H your God. (Leviticus 25:39-42, 55)

As discussed earlier, in the context of the Torah portion of Vayera, the Hebrew word for slave is eved. Being an eved is considered to be a despicable way of life; referring to someone in this manner is a great insult. Why? Because as a slave, one has nothing of one’s own. One’s body, one’s cloths, one’s spouse and one’s children belong to one’s master-owner.

But when it comes to God, this relationship is hailed as the ideal relationship. Abraham is hailed by good as “my slave, Abraham”; Moses is referred to as God’s slave; and the prophets’ highest ideal of life was to be a slave of Y-H-V-H:

הֵן עַבְדִּי אֶתְמָךְ בּוֹ בְּחִירִי רָצְתָה נַפְשִׁי נָתַתִּי רוּחִי עָלָיו מִשְׁפָּט לַגּוֹיִם יוֹצִיא.

This is My slave, whom I uphold,
My chosen one, in whom I delight.
I have put My spirit upon him,
He shall teach the true way to the nations. (Isaiah 42:1)

English translations of the Bible, by both Jewish and Christian sources, translate the words eved adonay, which literally mean God’s slave, as God’s servant, because it’s a “less humiliating” way of describing someone who is so surrendered to God. But in doing so, they are performing both a linguistic and a philosophical error. Linguistically, because eved actually means slave; a servant would be mesharet. Philosophically, because the use of this word is deliberate—it describes a situation in which one recognizes that nothing that one has is one’s own, it all belongs to God.

Far from being an insult, calling someone “God’s slave” is the highest compliment. It is, in fact, the name of one of the prophets, Ovadiah (עֹבַדְיָה). And it’s the same in Arabic: calling someone ‘abd (عبد), Arabic for slave (which comes from the same root as the Hebrew eved), is an insult; but when used in conjunction with Allah, it is the greatest honor. Hence the name ‘Abdallah (عبد الله), which means “Allah’s slave.” In fact, many traditional Arabic names start with the word ‘abd followed by one of the epithets of Allah from the Qur’an: ‘Abdulrahman (the Slave of the Merciful), ‘Abdulquadir (the Slave of the Powerful), etc.

Interestingly, the Hebrew word eved also shares its root with the Hebrew word avodah, which means both “work” and “worship.” Worshipping God in Judaism is not a question of choice; it is work, a duty. One is to performs it as a slave, in the sense that one who is cognizant that one’s body and mind exist for the sole purpose of performing God’s work. It is the same concept in Islam, in which these three words—work, worship and slavery—all come from the same Arabic root, which is identical with the Hebrew one.

And yet it is important to realize that this slavery is understood, and experienced, in both religions as the key to real freedom. In the words of the great 11^th Century Rabbi and poet Yehudah Halevi:

עַבְדֵי זְמָן עַבְדֵי עֲבָדִים הֵם –
עֶבֶד אֲדֹנָי הוּא לְבַד חָפְשִׁי:
עַל כֵּן בְבַקֵּשׁ כָּל-אֱנוֹשׁ חֶלְקוֹ
“חֶלְקִי אֲדֹנָי!” אָמְרָה נַפְשִׁי.

Slaves of time are slaves of slaves—
Only God’s slave is free:
Therefore, when each human asked for their share,
My soul said, “God is the share for me!”

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)

וַיִּקְרָא אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה אֵלָיו מֵאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לֵאמֹר:

He called to Moses; Y-H-V-H spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting. (Lev. 1:1)

Those familiar with the Torah and/or readers of this blog will remember that this portion follows many chapters in Exodus in which the text dealt mainly with the construction of the mishkan (the tabernacle, here referred to as “the Tent of Meeting”). As mentioned repeatedly in this blog, the Hassidic viewpoint is that the tabernacle is principally an internal structure, an inner sacred space within each person, and it’s up to each of us to “erect” this structure so that God can be realized as dwelling within.

According to this interpretation, therefore, when the Torah says that “Y-H-V-H spoke to him [Moses] from the Tent of Meeting”, it is a voice that Moses, who serves as a metaphor for each one of us, hears from within himself.

This is hinted at by an “anomaly” in the actual text of the Torah scroll. The first word of this Torah portion (and therefore, of the book of Leviticus), vayikra (ויקרא), ends with the letter aleph (א). This letter has the numerical value of 1, and stands for “The one without a second”–the one and only, i.e. God. But in this case, the letter is written smaller than other letters, almost like a superscript:

In the commentary on the first portion of the Torah, bereshit, I mentioned that there are a few places in the Torah scroll in which the letters are written differently, e.g., larger, smaller, or turned at an abnormal angle. These “abnormalities” are neither typos nor decorative devices. Rather, they are used to highlight or amplify important metaphysical points.

The fact that the word vayikra, which means “He [God] called”, ends with a small aleph, highlights the fact that the voice of God that one hears is not a dramatic voice from outside through “cosmic loudspeakers” but rather a “still, small voice” that one hears from within.

And indeed, one of the early Hassids, Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, explains this in his book Meor Eynayim. He says that the small aleph indicates that He, the Master of the world, reduces Himself in order to be present in the soul of every human, to guide us towards Himself, towards aleph, towards the One.

* * *

The word vayikra, which is translated here as “He called”, is from the root kara, which means “to read”, “to call out”, and “to proclaim”. It is identical to the same root in Arabic, qara (or kara; the use of K in Hebrew transliterations vs. Q in Arabic ones is due to differences in pronunciation).

Interestingly, the first word that was revealed to Muhammad and that started his mission was the word iqra (اقْرَأْ), which means to call out (or proclaim) as well as to read. In today’s traditional Qur’anic arrangement, this is the opening words of surah 96, but it is nevertheless understood as the first word of Allah that was revealed to the Prophet.

* * *

In traditional Jewish religious education, the first text that young students of the Torah are exposed to soon after learning the alphabet is the book of vayikra. This is because this book is almost entirely devoted to the worship of God in the tabernacle (hence its Latin name, Leviticus, i.e., pertaining to the Levites, the priestly class, and their duties). This was thought of as the purest of subjects and therefore appropriate for beginning Torah study.

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)

As mentioned earlier, ancient lore considered the tabernacle to be a mirror of the structure of the human psyche as well as the structure of the universe. The art of creating the tabernacle, then, is a mirror of, or a commentary on, the primordial act of creation spoken of in Genesis, on one hand, and the nature of human creativity on the other.

We are told that the artisan who was charged with overseeing the construction of the temple was called Bezalel (בצלאל). The name itself reveals to us the ideas of the Torah about the creative process. The name Bezalel means “in God’s shadow”, an image that in Biblical idiom means “shielded by God”. For example, we are told in the Psalms:

מַה יָּקָר חַסְדְּךָ אֱלֹהִים וּבְנֵי אָדָם בְּצֵל כְּנָפֶיךָ יֶחֱסָיוּן:

How precious is your faithful care, O God! Mankind shelters in the shadow of your wings. (Psalm 36:8)

In addition to his revealing name, the Torah informs us, on a number of occasions, that Bezalel’s skills were a result of a gift of profound wisdom granted to him by God:

וַיְמַלֵּא אֹתוֹ רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים בְּחָכְמָה בִּתְבוּנָה וּבְדַעַת וּבְכָל מְלָאכָה:

[God] has endowed him with a divine spirit of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge of every kind of craft. (Exodus 35:31)

What is that special wisdom the Bezalel received? The Jewish tradition tells as the God created this world by means of speech: God commands vayahi or (ויהי אור), “let there be light,” light indeed manifests, because the letters of the Torah, the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, are said to contain within them the fundamental vibrations of the universe, and the divine creative wisdom is combining these letters in such a way that the words represent the vibrational quality of the object which they represent. Said differently: the word used by the Torah for an object (e.g., or for light) are not arbitrary symbols, but contain the essence of the object portrayed.

Ancient lore has it, that the special wisdom afforded to Bezalel was the very skill with which God has created the universe: the skill to create through the combinations and permutations of the letters of the alphabet. Later traditions attributed this knowledge to saintly rabbis, such as the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew, the legendary creator of the Golem (Incidentally, the Maharal’s father was called Bezalel).

Judaism is not alone in considering letters, the fundamental components of speech, as the primordial energies that lie at the basis of physical creation. The Hindu mythology relates to the texts of the Veda as the speech of Brahma, the creator. Like the Torah in Judaism, the Hindus consider the fundamental vibrations of the Veda to be the blueprint through which creation has come about. They also believe that the words of the Veda are not arbitrary symbols, but that each word contains the vibratory essence of the object to which they refer.

And just like in the Jewish tradition, the Vedic notion is that the knowledge of those fundamental energies can be created not just for the creation of the universe but also for specific acts of artistic creativity. For example, in the Mahabharata, and enormous Indian epic about the war between the clans of the lunar dynasty, the magical palace of the Pandavas is said to have been constructed through mantras, Vedic sounds, by Vishwakarman, the architect of the Gods.

How are we to understand this in our day and age? I believe that the text offers us profound commentary about human creativity. The letters of the alphabet are quantified values of the fundamental Energy-and-Intelligence that created the universe, which is beyond any quantification. This idea is particularly clear in the Hebrew tradition, since the Hebrew letters are also—or some would say primarily—numbers. As expressions of divine intelligence, they are quantified expressions of that which cannot be quantified, cannot be expressed.

While some may understand the story of Bezalel to be about an ancient figure in the desert, I prefer to see in it a universal commentary about how we create. Bezalel is each and every one of us, when we harness our creative potential. That creativity, which we personalize, is not really ours. Its source is mysterious. Read some of the descriptions of creative people about their moments of creative inspirations and they sound remarkably similar to the descriptions of mystics of all traditions about their insights into the deepest nature of reality.

One of the takeaways of the Torah portion of vayakhel is that human creativity is divine and should be harnessed for what the Torah sees as the purpose of life—to make every corner of the Earth sing the glory of heaven. This Torah portion reminds us that this is our task.

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)

A few verses into the portion, the Torah specifies the effect of building the mishkan:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם:

And they shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them. (Exodus 25:8)

The verse seems to suggest, that the tabernacle, the mishkan, will enable God to dwell (lishkon) among the people of Israel. But that is absurd: God confined to a tent? And does that mean that before the construction, God is not able to dwell among them?

As King Solomon said in his prayer after completing the construction of the first temple:

הִנֵּה הַשָּׁמַיִם וּשְׁמֵי הַשָּׁמַיִם לֹא יְכַלְכְּלוּךָ אַף כִּי הַבַּיִת הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר בָּנִיתִי:

Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! (1 Kings 8:27)

And as the prophet Isaiah declared:

כֹּה אָמַר יְהוָה הַשָּׁמַיִם כִּסְאִי וְהָאָרֶץ הֲדֹם רַגְלָי אֵי זֶה בַיִת אֲשֶׁר תִּבְנוּ לִי וְאֵי זֶה מָקוֹם מְנוּחָתִי:

Thus says YHVH: Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is my resting place? (Isaiah 66:1)

But the verse may be saying something else. Firstly, the Hebrew word for “among them” is betocham,( בְּתוֹכָם), which means “within them.*” And it does not say betocho (בתוכו), which would mean “within it”, referring to the mishkan; it says within them, referring to the people of Israel.

The mishkan spoken of here is primarily a structure within the psyche. Each one of the people of Israel was enjoined on building a space within themselves, open themselves up in such a way so as to allow the divinity within them to shine through, to occupy the psyche. And then, God will dwell within them, within each and every one of them.

Some midrash commentaries support this understanding. We are told by the midrash hagadol that the structure of the mishkan parallels the structure of the cosmos as well as the structure of the human. It is not talking about the physical structure of the human, but the interior one: the one that is made of 248 limbs and 365 tissues, which parallel the 248 positive mitsvoth (commandments), the “do’s”, and the 365 negative mitzvoth, the “don’ts”.

Thus, the mishkan is truly an interior structure that comes into being when one lives according to YHVH’s will. And then YHVH is found to be dwelling in that structure. Even if an exterior, physical mishkan exists, it was only a sensory representation of the internal structure.

This is very reminiscent of the ideas of sacred architecture of both the Hindu and the Buddhist traditions: both model their temple according to their understanding of the human psyche, with the idea that the structure of the temple mirrors both the structure of the psyche and the structure of the universe.

According to these traditions, the actual physical experience of walking into the temple, from its outer boundaries into its sanctum, is said to be a mirror of the process of meditation, through which one realizes the divine Self within. Said differently, the structure of the temple points one to the fact that through meditation one creates this structure within one’s consciousness.

This Torah portion further describes the function of the mishkan:

וְנוֹעַדְתִּי לְךָ שָׁם וְדִבַּרְתִּי אִתְּךָ מֵעַל הַכַּפֹּרֶת מִבֵּין שְׁנֵי הַכְּרֻבִים אֲשֶׁר עַל אֲרֹן הָעֵדֻת אֵת כָּל אֲשֶׁר אֲצַוֶּה אוֹתְךָ אֶל בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל:

There I will meet with you, and I will impart to you—from above the cover, from between the two Cherubim that are on top of the Ark of the Pact—all that I will command you concerning the people of Israel. (Exodus 25:22)

These words are addressed to Moses, but Moses is a metaphor for each and every one of us. For each of us to “hear the voice of God” within us, we need to construct this structure within ourselves, to created that sacred space within us through meditation so that we can be in tune with our deepest interiority—which is not different from the interiority of the universe.

* * *

This Torah portion is the first of five that deal entirely with the details of the construction of the mishkan. In fact, from now until the end of the book of Exodus, the Torah deals with nothing else.

Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, in his book “Seven Years of Talks on the Weekly Torah Portions,” points out that the number of verses that the Torah devotes to the construction of the mishkan is 450; in contrast, the number of verses that the Torah devotes to the “construction” of the world in the book of Genesis is 31.

And that reveals the status and purpose of the Torah. It is not a book about cosmology, neither is it a book about history. It is a book that aims primarily at providing a map through which human awareness can align itself with the divinity within. And it is in this light that everything in this text should be interpreted and understood.

—————————–

*See a similar comment in the commentary on vayigash

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)

Famously, Moses goes up the mountain and returns with the Torah inscribed in stone. Ancient lore has it that he received not only the written Torah (torah shebikhtav), but also the oral Torah (torah she’be’alpe), a tradition of interpretation of the written text which was initially passed on orally.

Few Biblical scholars take seriously the claim that the entire Torah was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Even some orthodox and ultra-orthodox scholars acknowledge the fact that the books of the Torah—let alone the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and the Kabbalistic texts—are a collection of writings contributed by different authors at different periods (see this article).

Does that mean that the concept of divine revelation is a sham? Only if you relate to Torah as the text that appears in the books. But in the Jewish tradition, this is only one of a few ways of understanding the concept of Torah, and if you consider the others, the story gets interesting.  (This may appear a bit abstract to some).

Torah as Alive Primordial Intelligence

Rabbinic literature relates to the Torah as much more than a concrete text and a tradition of its interpretation. The Torah is also described as:

· The speech of God or the name of God;
· Embodied as chokhmah, Wisdom, the architect of creation;
· A sequence of expressions that serves as the blueprint for Creation (the DNA of the universe, if you will).

These three concepts of Torah emphasize its nature as an alive level of primordial intelligence, rather than as merely text.

Interestingly enough, this mirrors the attitude towards the Veda in the Hindu tradition*. While the Veda is commonly understood as a text, a collection of mantras that are recited during the sacred performances, the Veda is also described in the Vedic literature as:

· The Word, the essence of the ultimate reality, Brahman (this is parallel to the Jewish concept of the Torah as the speech of God or the name of God);
· The totality of knowledge, embodied as the Creator (parallels the Jewish concept of Wisdom or Chokhmah);
· A sequence of sounds which forms a blueprint for Creation (again, the “DNA of the Universe”).

What is the connection between the concrete words of the text of both Torah and Veda with these more esoteric understandings of them? Abiding by the concrete texts and by the performances derived from them is meant to align one with the alive, transcendental level of wisdom as a living reality within oneself.

Be Awake and See the Sounds

The close similarity between the notion of Torah and Veda in both traditions may be informative. By understanding what the Vedic tradition says about the process of cognition of the Vedic hymns we may glean something about prophecy and revelation in the Jewish tradition.

About the Vedic hymns, the Rik Veda proclaims:

यो जागार तमृचः कामयन्ते
yo jagara tamrichah kamayante
He who is awake, the richas [Vedic hymns] seek him out. (Rik Veda, 5.44.14)

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one of the foremost teachers of Vedic teaching in our time, often commented on this verse. He explained that the Veda—much like the Torah—eternally murmurs to itself in the transcendental field of creation. The hymns zoom forth in the awareness (“the richas seek him out”) of whoever can bring his or her awareness to that level of reality [“he who is awake]”.

An interesting feature of this process of cognition is that it involves not only sound but also sight, not as two separate elements but as a unified cognition of sound and sight. For this reason, the person who is able to thus cognize the Veda is referred to as a rishi, a seer.

This may shed light on a peculiar expression in this week’s Torah portion. After listing the ten commandments, the Torah describes the experience of the People of Israel as they heard them, starting with a peculiar phrase:

וְכָל הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת הַקּוֹלֹת

And the people see the sounds (Exodus 20:15)

Sounds, of course, are heard, not seen. Could it be that the reason the text here says that the sounds were seen is that it describes a process of cognition similar to that describes in the Vedic texts?

Torah Revelation Now

The Torah phrase describing the process of revelation has another peculiarity: although it is referring to an event that occurred in the past, it uses the present tense. Instead of saying “the people saw the sounds” it says “the people see the sounds.” Just as the Veda spells out a principle—“He who is awake, the richas [Vedic hymns] seek him out”—so does the Torah suggest to us that we can realize the Torah as a living reality within our awareness right now.

In other words, instead of speculating whether or not the entire Torah was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, let us be like Moses and allow the Torah to be a live presence in our awareness. That would be the fulfillment of what Moses declared that he wanted:

וּמִי יִתֵּן כָּל עַם יְהוָה נְבִיאִים כִּי יִתֵּן יְהוָה אֶת רוּחוֹ עֲלֵיהֶם:

Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them! (Numbers 11:29)

And this will also be the fulfillment of the words of Prophet Jeremiah:

הִנֵּה יָמִים בָּאִים נְאֻם יְהוָה וְכָרַתִּי אֶת בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאֶת בֵּית יְהוּדָה בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה:… כִּי זֹאת הַבְּרִית אֲשֶׁר אֶכְרֹת אֶת בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל אַחֲרֵי הַיָּמִים הָהֵם נְאֻם יְהוָה נָתַתִּי אֶת תּוֹרָתִי בְּקִרְבָּם וְעַל לִבָּם אֶכְתֲּבֶנָּה וְהָיִיתִי לָהֶם לֵאלֹהִים וְהֵמָּה יִהְיוּ לִי לְעָם: וְלֹא יְלַמְּדוּ עוֹד אִישׁ אֶת רֵעֵהוּ וְאִישׁ אֶת אָחִיו לֵאמֹר דְּעוּ אֶת יְהוָה כִּי כוּלָּם יֵדְעוּ אוֹתִי לְמִקְטַנָּם וְעַד גְּדוֹלָם נְאֻם יְהוָה כִּי אֶסְלַח לַעֲוֹנָם וּלְחַטָּאתָם לֹא אֶזְכָּר עוֹד:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,* says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

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* The analysis of the various non-scriptural understandings of Torah, as well as their parallel to the non-scriptural understanding of Veda in the Hindu-Vedic tradition, is based on Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture, by Barbara Holdrege, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. The book is based on her PhD thesis at Harvard.

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)