Congregation Beth El

We have a built-in sensitivity to place. The secular and religious alike among us seek out sacred places: places with historic significance, places of natural beauty and awe, places where we feel a ‘charge’ of some sort. Mircea Eliade famously said that such sites serve as an axis between sky and earth. When we are in these places, we experience what we might call revelation - in that something is revealed. We are affected. Jacob woke up from his dream of the ladder and said, “God was in this place, and I, I did not know.”

In a few weeks, we will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates the seminal moment of revelation in Judaism – the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. It is not surprising that the site for this revelation is a mountain, which literally occupies that rare air between heaven and earth, and requires effort to climb and endure. The revelation stories in many cultures take place on mountains. In our specific example in Exodus, thunder and lightning fill the sky; there is smoke, fire, and trembling. The people take their places at the foot of the mountain and prepare to receive best they can. A major distinction in Judaism is that the moment of revelation, which in most traditions is given to a particular prophet who then relays it to the people, is something that the entire people share at Sinai. Granted, the people cannot endure this axis moment for long, and need to retreat – but the attempt is there.

For some of us, the mountaineers among us perhaps, the mountain is the most intuitive setting for this kind of holy encounter. I’m not someone who climbs a lot of mountains (or even does well with heights), but years ago, when I climbed the mountain in the Sinai peninsula known by the Bedouin as Jabal Musa (the mountain of Moses), I knew that even if this spot may not have been the actual mountain, it was clearly a place to go to get down to brass tacks with G-d. We watched the purple sunrise over Saudi Arabia after hiking all night to the summit, and the revelation was wordless and profound.

Yet I wonder about the mountain when I compare it to other axis sites, particularly labyrinths. A labyrinth is a sort of maze – but one in which there is only one path that winds and branches and leads to a center. It appears in the stories of many cultures, particularly in Greek mythology. Judaism does not have much evidence of physical labyrinths, though it was said that when a pilgrim in the middle ages couldn’t afford to go to Jerusalem, he or she would walk a labyrinth to simulate the experience of being in the holy city. Prayer has often been described as entering into a labyrinth of the spirit.

I am drawn to this model because it is not a model of G-d ‘up there,’ but instead a model where we find G-d by tunneling within. Early on, as children in this culture, we learn to locate G-d above. Art Green has written that it may be time for a new metaphor. “Let us think of the journey to G-d as a journey inward, where the goal is an ultimately deep level within the self rather than the top of a mountain,” he writes, “Spiritual growth, in this metaphor, is a matter of uncovering new depths rather than attaining new heights. Perhaps we could even try to think of Torah itself as having been given at the deepest level of inner encounter, rather than from the top of the highest mountain, the mountain serving as a vertical metaphor for an inward event.”

Maybe we also don’t have to work as hard to climb, at least in the ‘up by the bootstraps’ sense, to reach this axis. Scott Carrino, who teaches Tai Ji in Cambridge, New York, often instructs his students who are in the midst of movement to ask themselves “how could this be easier?” I always love this instruction, as I usually am striving or forcing something. Sometimes revelation comes when we stop trying so hard.

The labyrinth teaches us that the path to revelation is itself revelation. Each place is potentially an axis mundi. Jacob’s story of the ladder teaches us that we never know when we will stumble upon such a place. The Mount Sinai moment – that we get ready to commemorate on Shavuot – teaches us that whether we climb up or in, we have to keep searching for a language of shared revelation. It is said that every person at the foot of Mount Sinai heard something different, and that every testimony was necessary.