Rabbi Adam Cutler Adath Israel Congregation – Toronto, ON Both Silent and Complete: The Beginnings of Torah It is with some degree of embarrassment I share with you that this week I participated in the internet’s most recent sensation. In case you somehow missed it, I’m referring to the Laurel vs Yanny debate, which has utterly consumed social media. It is a short audio clip, which, when played, some people hear the word Laurel, while others hear Yanny. Lying in bed a few nights ago, I utilized the specially designed New York Times audio program on my iPhone, which allows the user to change the clip’s frequency, thereby perhaps switching what is heard from Laurel to Yanny. It didn’t work. No matter the setting, for me it was laurel, laurel, laurel. I waved my phone around. Nothing. I moved it from side to side. Laurel, laurel, laurel. I moved it far away. Still the same. I drove Debra crazy. Laurel, laurel, laurel. I held the phone out with my right hand and slowly moved it in. Laurel, laurel… Yanny. About two and half inches away from my right ear and suddenly a change. There it was – my own little revelation, a personal miracle – without pushing any buttons, without changing what was coming out of my phone, Laurel became Yanny. Since I can engage with pop-culture for only so long, being a rabbi, it זמן wasn’t much time before I started thinking about , known as the time of the giving of the Torah, with a focus on the Ten –מתן תורתנו Commandments. I was thinking specifically about the fourth commandment – . The Ten Commandments are presented twice in the Torah – once in Exodus and the other time in Deuteronomy. In Exodus, commandment .שמור yet in Deuteronomy the first word is ,זכור begins with the word #4 Since traditional commentators understood the revelation to be an actual verbal event – God spoke and Moses wrote – how could it be that we זכור את יום have two different accounts of the actual words of Sinai? Is it

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Rabbi Adam Cutler Adath Israel Congregation – Toronto, ON Do we remember or do we ?שמור את יום השבת לקדשו or השבת לקדשו observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy? The Talmud (B. Rosh HaShanah 27a), anticipating the Laurel/Yanny debate by 1500 years, resolves the problem by proclaiming the two versions were spoken by God simultaneously in a single utterance, noting that this type of speech is “something that the human mouth cannot speak and the human ear cannot hear”. Hence we sing during the unique God ,זכור and שמור - שמור וזכור בדיבור אחד [Lekhah Dodi [sing caused us to hear in one utterance. disparity and elsewhere that it is the זכור and שמור We see from the Torah itself that is the first source challenging the idea that our tradition speaks with unanimity as to what happened – what was said and what was heard – on that fateful day on Mt. Sinai. The historical record aside, within our own mythology, we understand Sinai in many different ways. For some, at Mt. Sinai, God spoke to the entire people of Israel every single word of what became the five books of the Torah. For others it was only the Ten Commandments that were heard by all the people or maybe only just the first two (B. Makkot 24a). Yet others still make the audible portion even shorter. For them, all that the people heard was the before they could no ,אנוכי – first word of the Ten Commandments longer bear to hear the voice of God. In this conception of revelation, the only thing that the people heard was God saying “I am”. Even more limited still is Maimonides, who posits that the people at large only heard noise, but no actual words at all (Guide for the Perplexed II:33). But it doesn’t end there. There is a remarkable teaching of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanov made famous by the celebrated scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem. He writes “In Rabbi Mendel’s view... all that Israel heard directly was the aleph with which in the Hebrew text the first commandment begins, the aleph of the word anokhi, ‘I’”.i

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Rabbi Adam Cutler Adath Israel Congregation – Toronto, ON According to this view, the only thing that the people of Israel heard was the aleph. This is what an aleph sounds like [pause]. An aleph by itself makes no sound! That is to say, the great moment of revelation came and left and the people heard silence. As Scholem explains “in Hebrew the consonant aleph represents nothing more than the position taken by the larynx when a word begins with a vowel. Thus the aleph may be said to denote the source of all articulate sound, and indeed the Kabbalists always regarded it as the spiritual root of all other letters, encompassing in its essence the whole alphabet and hence all other elements of human discourse. To hear the aleph is to hear next to nothing; it is the preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate, specific meaning.”ii With this radical move, “Rabbi Mendel transform[s] the revelation on Mount Sinai into a mystical revelation, pregnant with infinite meaning, but without specific meaning… It is mystical experience which conceives and gives birth to authority.”iii I must tell you, I am no kabbalist. Yet, I find profound meaning in this teaching of R’ Menachem Mendel of Rymanov. This purpose that emerges from silence, this force of faith born from absence. Like the big bang, it is a religion whose foundation contains all that will ever be, yet whose future remains unknown. It is a God whose directive to us is, in to grow the Torah and – יגדיל תורה ויאדיר the words of Isaiah (42:21), to thereby glorify it. Genesis sees the world as created through speech. God declares, “Let there be light” and so there was. From the silent aleph of the Ten Commandments in Exodus is created the Torah itself. Complementing yet pre-dating the teaching of the silent aleph is the statement of the otherwise unknown Ben Bag Bag in Pirkei Avot (5:21). turn it, turn it for – הֲפְֹך בָּּהוַהֲפְֹך בָּּה דְּ כֹלָּאבָּּה ,Of the Torah, he teaches everything is contained in it. As the scholar Susan Handelman writes, “The ancient rabbis do indeed turn Scripture – not only as one might turn a jewel to view the way light

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Rabbi Adam Cutler Adath Israel Congregation – Toronto, ON is reflected from its different sides, but they turn it over on itself, upset it's linear narrative order in seemingly outrageous ways”.iv The bible itself was a closed library millennia ago and yet our ancestors wanted to keep adding to its wisdom. They dug deep into the “gaps and ambiguities of the Divine language”.v They turned it and turned it. The Talmud almost preposterously teaches that “[e]ven that which a brilliant student will someday expound in front of his teacher – even that was already given at Sinai (P. Peah 6:2 [and elsewhere]). That is, the rabbis’ own interpretations, additions, turns and twists of language are part of, enclothed within, the divine revelation itself. This.. is not simply [the rabbis’] attempt to legitimate and authorize their own interpretations; it also reflects [a] profound insight into the nature of turn it, turn it for – הֲפְֹך בָּּה וַהֲפְֹך בָּּהדְּ כֹלָּא בָּּה language and interpretation.”vi everything is contained in it. of everything , כֹלָּאבָּּה These two ideas – the silent aleph and the Torah of in it – come together beautifully in an imagine created by Handelman. “The Turning of language over onto itself by the Jew and God creates a pocket, an enclosure where the two may be together. But this is a strange enclosure, both empty and full at once. This turning creates echoes and reverberations where words within words are elicited, where the Divine voice is heard in its echoes and is called to by its seekers… It is the openness of the divine language which leads simultaneously into its secret creative depths and out toward human meaning.”vii I share this not only because I think it is interesting. I share this because I think it matters. Our relationship to Torah and how we choose to let it guide our lives changes if we believe that our ancestors heard each and every word or if it was only the first word that was heard. Our understanding of where Torah can go and how it might grow changes if we believe that every word ever to be taught was handed by God to Moses on Sinai or if we imagine Torah expanding upwards and outwards, organically seeded at Sinai. We have to listen differently if

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Rabbi Adam Cutler Adath Israel Congregation – Toronto, ON God uttered the Torah word by word or if the only thing that our spiritual ancestors heard was the aleph’s silence. The Torah which we received on Shavuot and celebrate today is your Torah. It is a gift whose layers must always continue to be unwrapped even if the gift itself continues to change over time. It is both silent and full. Amidst all of the noise of the world, the sirens and the screams, the babbling pundits and blathering partisans, amidst it all – on this Shavuot may we listen for the reverberating, pregnant aleph of revelation.

In a moment, we will begin Yizkor. The voices of our loved ones now gone are quieted. Their speech once so present in our lives has been silenced. They exist as the silent aleph. Present, in our lives, yet soundless. Their aleph is a world of meaning, of guidance and of love, ready to emerge, if we only are to listen closely, deeply. Let us then taken a moment of silence before we begin Yizkor. Close your eyes and listen as the silence of your loved ones speak to you.

i On the and Its Symbolism (trans. Ralph Manheim). Schocken Books (New York: 1996), pg 30 ii ibid. iii ibid. 30-31 iv “’Everything Is In It”: Rabbinic Interpretation and Modern Literary Theory”, in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought Vol. 35, No. 4, Fall 1986, pg 429 v ibid. 432 vi ibid. vii ibid. 434, 438

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