Congregation Beth El

The Jewish festival of Shavuot, which we celebrated this past week, commemorates when Moses and the Jewish people received the Torah on Mount Sinai. One of the customs of Shavuot, is to stay up all night studying Torah, as a way of not only honoring the revelation way back when, but also to remind ourselves that revelation is ongoing. There is still thunder on the mountain, and a great spiritual task for all of us, is to remember that, as our brothers and sisters in the UCC say, “God is still speaking.”

In thinking this year of the idea of ongoing revelation, I have found myself returning to the poetry of Stanley Kunitz, the late Poet Laureate, who recently died at the age of 100. When Rabbi Ira Stone was in Bennington recently, he spoke about Torah as that which paradoxically expresses in words what words cannot express. This is how Kunitz saw poetry. For him, words and language were revelation. He describes being a child growing up loving the sounds of words, and that he was particularly fortunate to live in a home with an unabridged dictionary. “I explored it every day for new words, and then I would go out into the woods behind our house and shout my latest discovery and listen to the words reverberate. I considered it my duty to give my new words to the elements, to scatter them. Even though language is so limited, it is still our bridge between the touchable and the untouchable. If any moment where we feel close to God is impossible to adequately describe, or is ineffable, we still, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, have no choice but to “eff” about it. If Moses came down from Mount Sinai with holy words, it makes sense that prayer could take the form of us offering the words back. Kunitz shouting words into the woods is, in this way, a wonderfully Jewish image. After all, Judaism holds that the world was created through speech, and that revelation came in the form of words of fire.

Every Shavuot, Jewish communities come together and attempt to find their way back to Sinai. This involves leaving the familiar confines of what we imagine we know, and this is one reason why revelation is hard to bear. Again, Kunitz: “If the poem moved only through the familiar, it would be so relaxed that it would have no tension, no mystery, nothing that could even approximate revelation, which is the ultimate goal of the poem.” Revelation is also hard to bear because it asks us to be partners in a covenant of life, it asks us to be responsible. Kunitz writes that there are obligations when a poet writes a poem. It must speak the truth. It must reach towards another. And it must have a social sense. And so it is with revelation. Revelation is true if it leads to truth: if it brings us closer to one another, if it has a sense of obligation, if it helps people suffer a little less.

When Kunitz was dying, he spoke often about wanting to become language, to become the words themselves. “The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue.” In my bones, I feel that this is what the Torah is also trying to do. Maybe one way of looking at what happened on Mount Sinai is that Moses entered into the realm of the unspeakable, and came back with a great poem that we call the Torah. Even though it might not adequately capture what happened, it is our best human effort. On Shavuot, we explore these words, but we also do our best to speak our own words back.