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By Root 421 0

who sees Sinai as a moment beyond time, a revelatory/apocalyptic event. The eternal and transtemporal God for a moment crashes into linear, temporal history, transforming it totally. All the rules are suspended in that great mystical moment: past, present, and future are fused into eternal presence, making it an event that can thus be relived forever. The multiple moments of ordered time reveal themselves as a single one in the presence of the transtemporal reality of Y-H-W-H. It was in this sense that Akiva saw all of Torah given at once, all present at Sinai. Akiva's view is not a misguided pseudo-historical claim but rather a mystical apocalyptic vision. Akiva is speaking on a different level of reality, if you will, from an inner “place” where the ordinary linear sequence of time does not exist. In this spirit his disciples went on to say that “everything a faithful disciple is ever to teach has already been given in the path revealed to Moses at Sinai.”14 Later generations lost sight of the mystical character of that claim, and what had once been vision was transformed into dogma.

What, then, is the essence of Torah? What is truly revealed by God, however we might define that process? Is it only those passages that open: “The Lord said to Moses,” containing law as distinct from narrative, halakhah but not aggadah? Jewish tradition was wise enough to avoid such a claim, knowing that the tale and the message were so deeply interwoven as to be inseparable, that legal precedent was often derived from the unpacking of narrative texts, and vice versa.15

Some early sources apply the term torah specifically to the ten commandments, that which the text itself quite clearly reads as the content of divine revelation at Sinai.16 All the rest of Torah, it is then taught, is rooted in these. Both the spiritual truths and the moral imperatives needed to found community are rooted in these few words. There was once a tendency in Judaism to downplay the importance of the ten commandments. When the church fathers said that of the “Old Testament” Law only these commandments were still binding, defenders of rabbinic Judaism needed to insist that we follow all 613 commandments of the Torah, not merely ten. But then a poetic and exegetical tradition emerged to claim that there was no real difference between these views, that all the commandments could be derived from those original ten.17 We will come back to the ten, which I believe should still stand as the basis of a contemporary religious and moral vision, one that both encompasses the best of Jewish teaching and reaches out beyond its borders, precisely because they are so well known and accepted throughout the Christian-influenced world.

The ten commandments. They were spoken by God and heard by all Israel. Surely this the text tells us plainly enough: “The Lord spoke all these words, saying” (Ex. 20:1). But a well-known Talmudic source tells it differently. All that God got to speak were the first two commandments, “I am the Lord your God” and “You shall have no other gods besides Me and make no graven image.” Then Israel, stricken with terror, cried out to Moses and said: “You speak with us and we will listen, but let God not speak with us, lest we die.”18 The rest of the commandments were spoken by Moses, and thus are presumably fraught with the possibility of human fallibility.19 Nevertheless, these first two, it is claimed, contain the entire Torah. “I am” bears within it all 248 positive commandments, and “No other gods … no graven image” is the basis of all the 365 prohibitions. All we need to accept, one might say, is God's “I am” and the notion that this alone is to shape and limit our behavior. All the rest will follow.

Franz Rosenzweig, at least in one of his formulations, went farther still, though possibly with similar intent.20 In admitting “ ‘He came down [i.e., “Y-H-W-H descended upon Mount Sinai” (Ex. 19:2)]’ already concludes the revelation; ‘He spoke’ is the beginning of interpretation, and certainly ‘I am,’” Rosenzweig is saying that the fact of divine self-disclosure,