Riviera Presbyterian Church

Psalm 19; Exodus 20:1-21

Read Exodus 20:1-21. Do you hear these commandments as life? As guidance? As judgment? Who hears the Ten Commandments and doesn’t think, if only to oneself: gotcha!

Reacting to this text, the writer Annie Dillard wrote:

God used to rage at the Israelites for frequenting sacred groves. I wish I could find one. Martin Buber says: ‘the crisis of all primitive mankind comes with the discovery of that which is fundamentally not-holy…a province which steadily enlarges itself.” Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail. You may ask God for his presence, or for wisdom, and receive each at his hands. Or you may ask God, in the words of the shopkeeper’s little gag sign, that he not go away mad, but just go away. Once, in Israel, an extended family of nomads did just that. They heard God’s speech and found it too loud. The wilderness generation was at Sinai; it witnessed there the thick darkness where God was: “and all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” It scared them witless. They asked Moses to beg God, please, never speak to them directly again. ‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die.’ Moses took the message. God, pitying their self consciousness, agreed. He agreed not to speak to the people anymore. And he added to Moses, “Go say to them, ‘get into your tents again.”[1]

In the wilderness, the people of Israel recovered, bit by bit, from the long generations of suffering, slavery and sorrow. There, they came to believe, a little, in the possibility of good fortune; they cried and tested and stretched themselves, their leaders and their new, invisible God, and slowly, they began to hope. They were hungry, and food was provided. They were thirsty, and water flowed from dry rock. They wondered and wandered, and in time, began to see the next guy over as a neighbor, not a threat; their future as freedom, not bondage; and the Holy as a present reality with which to be reckoned, the very ground on which they walked. And so it was that God claimed this new community one day, saying, If you will keep My covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. And they said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do. Then Moses gave them three days to prepare themselves, and gathered the beloved community at the foot of Mt. Sinai to hear God speak.

After the thunder, and the lightnings, the dense Cloud fell over the mountain and the people, and there was an indrawn breath, a Silence.

Elie Wiesel, the Jewish theologian and Holocaust survivor, describes what happened then:

And in this Silence a Voice was heard. God spoke. What did he speak of? His secret work, his eternally imperceptible intentions? No he spoke of man’s relationship to man, of one individual’s duties toward others. At this unique moment God wished to deal with human relations, rather than theology. No wonder his audience was recalcitrant; after all, why not steal in a society where everyone else does? Why not kill in a world steeped in violence? The Talmud states it explicitly: Israel refused the Torah until God threatened them. He lifted a mountain and held it over the crowd. It was either the Torah or death.[2]

So, to our everlasting disappointment, being God’s people is not about the Secrets of the Universe, not about seeing God face to face. It’s not about Certainty, it’s about practice, and about mundane human relationships. Wanting to see and know the face of God, they had to settle for what they could actually bear: that is, to begin to practice seeing the face of God in the neighbor. To work for right relationship here, so that in time when we approached the holy darkness we would not be afraid.

Thus the bible story describes the precarious position of believers, who want more than anything to know and to see God; and who at the same time cannot find their way from “oy” to joy. A meditation in the new Reform Jewish prayerbook describes our dilemma:

If we can hear the words from Sinai,

then love will flow from us;

and we shall serve all that is holy with

all our intellect and all our passion and all our life.

If we can serve all that is holy,

we shall be doing all that humans can

to help the rains to flow,

the grasses to be green,

the grains to be golden like the sun,

and the rivers to be filled with life once again.

All the children of God shall eat

and there will be enough.

But if we turn from Sinai’s words

and serve only what is common and profane,

making gods of our own comfort or power,

then the holiness of life will contract for us;

our world will grow inhospitable.

Let us therefore lace these words

into our passion and our intellect,

and bind them as a sign upon our hands and eyes.

Let us write them in signs upon our doors,

and teach them to our children.

Let us honor the generations that came before us,

keeping the promise for those yet to be.[3]

As I was working out a way to describe how this dilemma feels to me, this desire to immerse myself in a Way of God that orders me without feeling Ordered Around, the image of the Grand Canyon came to me. I first went to the Grand Canyon when I was around ten or eleven. It was awesome, inspiring. Approaching its Rim, I leaned into the Void and loved it; I danced on the edge and knew myself safe and beloved. But time teaches us caution, makes us wary, fearing the darkness. I took my daughter some years ago to the Grand Canyon. I went to share with her the beauty and the awe, and recapture the sense of freedom I remembered feeling there. But when I crept to the edge, all I saw was the gulf, the danger, the yawning chasm. My joy was lost in anxiety, and I could not pass on the love of freedom and the beauty of the Void, because I had learned to be afraid.

So it is with Torah. It was given as a way to dance with the Void in human community; we have made it a Rule Book suffused with judgment and fear.

Torah, which can be translated Law, which has been reduced by Christian theology to the First Five Books of the Bible, would be better understood as a Way, if you will, a Way , a Truth, and a Life. It is teachings, it is instruction, but so much more: the Torah to which we are called invites us into a way of being with each other in the world that in due season leads us to the Divine. The ancient root of the word Torah, are the Hebrew letters Yod, Resh, Hey, “to shoot an arrow.” Torah is about the process of being that arrow, it is a way for us to be hitting the mark.

What does that mean for the way we live, not as rule-makers, enforcers or failures, but as a free people chosen by and choosing God? Let me close with another story, this one by a friend, Rabbi Mitch Chefitz.

There was a great archer, the royal archer, the best in the land. But he was dissatisfied. He would set his target a hundred yards away, raise his bow, and release the arrow. But as the arrow rose through the sky, it would encounter the wind. When it fell to the target, it fell less than perfect: a few inches to the right. A few to the left. A remarkable accomplishment, but less than perfect. Time after time he came close, but the wind made his craft uncertain. He left the city to search for a place where there was no wind, no uncertainty, so he might practice his craft to perfection.

As he traveled, he came upon a barn. On the side were twelve targets, and in them, precisely in the center, were twelve arrows. ‘This is a greater archer than I am!’ thought the archer. ‘I have to find him.’ So he inquired. Each person told him he was not looking for an archer, but a fool. ‘Perhaps a fool,’ said the archer, but a great archer nevertheless.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ they told him. ‘He shoots the arrows first, then he paints the targets.’ The archer was enraged, and set off to the home of the painter to give him a scolding. When the door opened to his pounding, there stood a middle aged man with a beer belly, looking up through his glasses at the royal archer. The painter said, “it’s you! the royal archer! I have admired you for years! I can’t begin to tell you…” On and on the painter went, until the anger of the royal archer diminished. The painter invited him in, and together, they drank a cup of tea. Finally, the archer asked, ‘would you please tell me why you do what you do? Why do you shoot a dozen arrows at the barn and then paint the targets around them?’ ‘A dozen arrows? I don’t shoot a dozen arrows, I shoot a hundred arrows. I’m so thrilled when even one strikes the side of the barn! When I finally managed a dozen, that was reason to celebrate. I may not be much of an archer, but I am a painter, so I celebrated each hit by painting the most beautiful target I could paint.’

The archer was looking for certainty, and all he found was a painter. There is no certainty in the wind, and there is no place without wind. The royal archer spent the night with the painter. Early in the morning they left the house, each with a bow in hand, and a box of paints. They walked until they found a barn and stood a hundred yards away. The painter strung his bow, fitted an arrow, and prepared to shoot, but the royal archer stopped him. He showed him where to put his forward foot, how to hold the arrow, how to focus on the target. The painter released the arrow.

It rose into the air, descended in a graceful arc, and struck the barn… way off to one side.

But the painter was overjoyed. Then the royal archer strung his bow. There was a tiny dot at the center of the barn that became his target. He pulled back the arrow, meditated on the target, released the arrow. IT rose into the sky, fell toward the target, and missed a few inches to the left.

The royal archer was distraught. He had traveled so far, accomplished so little. The wind had followed him. He said, ‘were it not for the wind, it would have been a perfect hit.’

But it was a perfect hit. The painter knew it. He and the royal archer approached the barn, and the painter taught the royal archer how to paint a perfect target.[4]