I am taking the unusual step of posting the outline of my sermon tonight in advance.
Here goes:

Torah Writing Project Launch Shabbat

October 4, 2013

Rabbi Mark H. Levin, DHL

 I don’t know exactly what Sinai was. 

·      Orthodox Jews contend it was a one-time event in history:  God revealed the Torah to Moses.

·      I believe Sinai is a metaphor for a process:

o   When the people of Israel, the Jewish people, focus on God for divine purposes, we tend to discern God’s will for us in history.

o   The result of that we call commandments, mitzvot.

o   In other words:  commandments are the action results of the interaction between God and the Jewish people.

One of the books we received as a result of Sinai, the encounter between the Jewish people and God, is the Book of Deuteronomy.

·      Since the second century rabbis have agreed that there are 613 of the these action statements, these mitzvot, in the Torah

·      The very last one in order, from the 31^st chapter of the fifth book of the Torah, is this:  once every 7 years, you have to read this book out loud where all of the people are assembled to hear.

In other words:  these encounters with God, and their results, are special to us: they are holy or sacred.  It’s not that they constitute our obligation. They are our responsibility. But that’s like you have a responsibility to your  birthday, or the day someone special died; or to pursue a challenge you relish in your life.

·      Mitzvot are embedded in, originate from, the Jewish people’s encounter with the sacred.

·      Let’s take Shabbat:  the Jewish people were the first to realize that if we are to bring the sacred into our lives, we must have certain techniques and devote time to it.

o   So on Shabbat we pray, study, rest and enjoy sacred pleasures:  all of them gifts from God to raise our material bodies to a higher, more spiritual level.

o   Embedded in each mitzvah, each commandment, lies a spiritual spark that we can harvest with the right motivation and intention. 

·      Our ancestors knew this, and that’s the answer to the question of why or how we are here today:  we’re here because they used this commandments, these embodiments of the experience of the holy, to bring holy actions into the world and into their lives.

o   So, as we are discovering today, it’s important what you eat, because that’s what you become physical.

o   Similarly, what you take in spiritually is important, because that’s what you become spiritually.

§  If you live among truth sayers all of the time, you live in a world of trust

§  If you live among liars all of the time: you live with constant doubt and trepidation.

§  Your spiritual values determine much of your life.

§  They result from our encounters with the holy.

So what did we Jews do?

o   We took those encounters with God, and we strung them together in a story, and we put that story of the spiritual encounters with God in a book that we call the Torah.

o   It’s not only our spiritual history:  when we unpack those embodiments of spiritual encounter in our lives: when we ask how God wants us to live in this world: how to encounter others, how to determine what we eat, whether to be cruel in order to gain politically or in prestige, then we again bring that holiness of the encounter with God embedded in the mitzvah into existence again in our own lives.

o   When we tell the story of the exodus at the Passover seder, we can really experience our emergence from slavery, but then we can also live as the Torah commands: with the lessons of slavery as part of our experience, even though we, ourselves, we never actually physically slaves.

So this book of Torah, containing our narrative history with its embodied mitzvot, the sparks of our encounters with God, can bring holiness into our lives because each experience records that encounter with holiness.

o   And so we call the book sacred.

o   And when we write those words, when we observe the final, the last commandment in the Torah: we are doing what our ancestors did thousands of years ago:  encountering the divine in our lives.

o   We must pause when we write in Torah, and make a particular story, or a mitzvah, something embodying holiness for us, a part of our personal lives.

o   As a result, we find a small portion of God enters our lives.

o   It’s not possible to take all of God into our lives.

o   We must encounter God where we find God.

o   But then we pause, consider, and make the experience part of the body and soul that is us.  We become Torah.

We cannot be at Sinai, but we can BE Sinai.

o   When we inscribe Torah

o   When we find the divine spark at the center of a mitzvah, we bring the Jewish people’s past encounter with God into the present and make it part of our own lives.

o   We stand at the foot of Sinai; we write Torah with Moses; we discover the eternality of God, and ongoing revelation of God’s mitzvot to the Jewish people.