The Rabbis of the Mishna refer to Shavuot as עצרת, a term that likely results from their seeing the holiday as finishing up the religious business of Pesach (Passover). In perhaps a similar vein, my previous post noted that Jews are required to remember the events of Pesach daily; today, we will find out that the same is true of the event we commonly connect to Shavuot, the Giving of the Torah.

The First “Never Forget”.

In this case, though, Devarim 4:9 does not tell us to remember the event—which might have meant, to some, maintaining it in latent memory but not as an active part of one’s consciousness at all times— but to “guard yourself and guard your soul well lest you forget the events that your eyes saw and lest they leave your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children and grandchildren.” The next verse specifies the gathering at the foot of Mount Sinai to hear God’s words.

We should note that the Torah did not express a hope that we will share this information with our children and grandchildren, as in the Exodus, it required it, the only example I have found of the Torah obligating grandparents regarding their grandchildren. This means that, building only from Scripture, a Jewish approach to the world already includes the lived belief, never forgotten, that at least once in history, an entire people experienced direct revelation from God. Forgetting Sinai, Scripture tells us, endangers our souls.

Let me add two caveats to that paragraph. First, as earlier readers reminded me, the nature of that revelation is a matter of dispute, with some authoritative thinkers limiting it to the Jews’ hearing that Moses was being spoken to but not the actual words conveyed to him. Whatever it was, all agree that the entire people had an experience of revelation that confirmed to them, and was meant to stand as such confirmation for all history, both the fact of prophecy and of Mosaic prophecy in particular. Second, I make no claim to know unequivocally the nature of the danger in which we place our souls should we forget Sinai, only that the Torah says clearly that we are so doing.

The Loss of a Linchpin of Orthodox Faith

Clear and unequivocal as the Torah’s stress is, this knowledge has become untrue for many who otherwise identify themselves as Orthodox. Whether out of ordinary religious doubt or as a function of an intellectual commitment to the conclusions reached by science and/or academe, I repeatedly meet Jews who will wonder whether God really exists, whether the Torah is really divine, and how we can know all this.

Understandable as I find doubt, in general and in specific, questions such as these would take a different shape if these verses had been more fully incorporated into such people’s worldviews. As part of a Jew’s daily reality, Scripture is telling us, the Jew must keep in mind that he or she is a direct descendant of people who, after being taken out of Egypt by God, themselves heard and saw the Revelation at Sinai. That is an important nuance, since many nations or religions have foundation myths. But the point of Sinai is not that we have a tradition that it occurred, it is that our parents are telling us what they heard from their parents, all the way back, in a direct line, to eyewitnesses.

(Parenthetically, let me say that it is in this way that I, personally, understand the point of the tradition that all future Jewish souls were at Sinai. Since God gathered the entire people to create a lasting national memory, we are supposed to experience the truth and factuality of this event as if we personally were there.)

This is powerful to me as a personal matter because my father, ob”m, told me exactly that when I asked him that question as a teenager. It is also, however, a marker of a widespread loss of core values that sit at the center of the Orthodox mission of the world. In an experience I have had more than once, I recently ate with American students in Israeli yeshivot, and one casually mentioned that it would be nice if he could have some proof that God exists, that the Torah is divine, etc. I mentioned this idea, that we all have a direct ancestral tradition attesting to the reality of the event at Sinai, and he and his friends all agreed that while the claim was interesting, it did not prove the point nearly as well as some solid archaeological evidence might.

Sympathetic as I am to their struggles, I note that it already shows a failure in the community’s transmission of its experience of the world. What the Torah says unequivocally is that the knowledge of basic aspects of the world—those not amenable to scientific proof—was vouchsafed to us as a people in a series of events at the founding of our nation. We are supposed to continually remember these events, which would certainly shape our lives, and live our lives with those events an assumed part of our past.

That we have not succeeded even in maintaining our own awareness of the essential quality of these memories—and our certainty of their basic truth—is only a first example of where Jews have lost sight of their mission. Since a person who believes in the historicity of these events will act and think differently than one who does not, this is a first giant step in the direction of recognizing our mission.

The Ten Commandments as an Extension of Sinai

The Torah does not specifically say that this should apply to the content of the revelation, only the experience, but we will soon see that Rabbinic tradition assumed that the requirement extends significantly further. As a first step, I suspect that memory of the Ten Commandments would fit with what the Torah intended us to remember as part of our continuing experience of Sinai. Let us therefore pause to review the most unequivocal claims and lessons of this text. Those who reject this extension can safely skip the next few paragraphs without jeopardizing the project’s central claims.

Perhaps as some support, although not unequivocal, I would note Rabbi Soloveitchik’s famous suggestion that the public reading of the Ten Commandments differs from ordinary Torah readings—so that whereas it is a problem to stand for only certain Torah readings, he accepted sitting for most readings, and standing for this one—in that it reenacts Sinaitic revelation. If so, the lessons of the Decalogue become a necessary part of not forgetting the event.

The first three of the Ten reiterate the need to believe in the God Who took the Jews out of Egypt, to the exclusion of other powers or idols. The commandment to observe the Sabbath is explicitly connected to remembering both the Exodus and the belief in Creation of the world in six days (literal or not). At the very least, then, the first four commandments of the Decalogue ratify and strengthen the nascent theology we have been deriving: Jews are commanded to believe in a God Who is involved in history, Who took us out of Egypt, and obligates us to follow His commands, ritual or ethical.

A First Stab at Jewish Ethics, But Not an Unequivocal One

The rest of the obligations, to honor parents, to avoid murder, incest, kidnapping, false testimony, and coveting all carry conceptual messages, but my view of those may stray into personal interpretation. In addition, I am not attempting to extract all of the significant messages of our texts, only those least amenable to debate.

Many of the ideas I find in the other six commandments will become clearer in later posts, the ones that utilize directly halachic texts to inform our Orthodox mission. For example, the prohibition against incest is a first indication of Judaism’s central abhorrence of improper sexuality, but we will see that more convincingly in a later context.

The obligations to honor and fear one’s parents are often cast as a function of the gratitude each person ought to feel towards those who produced him or her (2), since it notes the Scriptural parallelism between the commanded attitudes towards parents and towards God, mentions the tripartite partnership in forming a human being, and, later, approves of R. Yosef’s reaction to hearing his mother’s footsteps, “Let me rise before the Divine Presence that comes.” That may also explain why this commandment is among the first five of the Decalogue, the ones that articulate obligations between a human being and God.

Accepting that construction of the mitzva—and I grant that it is not as unequivocal as other points I have been making—would deepen our sense of mission, in that even a seemingly intuitive activity such as honoring parents becomes woven into our constant awareness of, and devotion to, God.

The theme of the intuitive being translated into the God-oriented seems to me to characterize the Torah’s presentation of murder, kidnapping, and adultery as well. In our times, this is clearer than in the past, since halacha defines the first and third of those three in ways at odds with current “intuitive” morality. Many people today—including Jews—would differentiate killing a person who has a chronic or terminal illness, especially if it is painful or the patient gives consent, from murder perpetrated against an ordinarily healthy person. Many more, I suspect, would not see adultery as a capital crime, or even one necessitating the cessation of the betrayed marriage.

We will say more about these when we get to halachic sources, but already here we can and should note that the content of the revelational event Jews are warned to never let leave their consciousnesses articulates a morality many Jews fail to internalize. The same and more apply to false testimony and covetousness, which may be widely accepted as wrong, but not at a level that would elevate them to Decalogue-seriousness.

Remembering Sinai: Does It Include the Entirety of Torah?

The Talmudic tradition goes further than I have here, taking for granted that the Torah’s requirement not to forget Sinai extends to all of Torah. Avot 3:8 warns against deliberately forgetting any piece of Torah learning, applying our verse to show that such forgetting entails soul-liability. Importantly for our discussion, the Mishna refers to forgetting any of “משנתו, his Mishna,” which includes the Oral Law in the injunction.

Kiddushin 30a cites the story of Zevulun b. Dan, whose grandfather taught him the entirety of Torah—Written, Oral, and more—and notes that the grandfather’s role is a fulfillment of our verse, again assuming that the study of Torah in general is encompassed by the verse’s requirement to remember Sinai. In both of these sources, the attestation of verses is offered without debate or suggestion that it is a novel view.

So, too, the late R. Moshe Feinstein assumed that the obligation to remember Sinai meant that the obligation of Torah study extended to the entirety of both the Written and Oral Laws. He made this claim despite the Talmud, in the story of Zevulun b. Dan we just mentioned, asserting that studying all of Scripture qualifies as a minimal fulfillment of the obligation (1) Reading the first part of Sefer haChinuch’s reasoning for this mitzva, for example, would give the impression that it was a matter of such gratitude.

(3) R. Feinstein, Iggerot Moshe, Yoreh Deah, 4:36, cites Menachot 99b, which quotes Resh Lakish making a similar comment to the Mishna in Avot, citing our verse for support. I have written more extensively about the commandment to study Torah in “Choices and Values in the Mitsvah of Talmud Torah” Journal of Halakhah and Contemporary Society XLVII, Spring, 2004.