B’haalot’cha
Numbers 8:1 – 12:16
Arguably the most important event in the entire Jewish Bible is the moment of Matan Torah, when we were gifted with the Torah during the Revelation at Sinai. There, atop the trembling mountain wreathed in smoke, God spoke the Ten Commandments from within a cloud. There, according to rabbinic myth, Moses received the entire Torah, both oral (later codified as the Talmud) and written (the Torah itself). This transmission occurred through a direct communication from God to Moses, as this week’s parashah reminds us:
And God said, “Hear these My words: When prophets of the Eternal arise among you, I make Myself known to them in a vision, I speak with them in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses…. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles, and he beholds the likeness of the Eternal.” (Num. 12:6-8)
Divine transmission, as we learn here, happens at different levels for different recipients. For Moses it happened so directly that it was almost as if it were by a kiss from God. The Hebrew in that verse is literally, “mouth to mouth I speak within him.” What Moses awakens to in the transmission is the very essence of Torah, its innermost light, the pure light of God’s Being. It is a Torah of light that Moses receives directly; a dissolving into the “I AM/Anochi” of the first Commandment. Lesser prophets may realize this I-AM-ness indirectly, through dreams and visions, says the Torah, but the mere mortals at the base of Mount Sinai were confoundedly awestruck to even hear it. As recounted in Exodus (20:15), they “saw the voices”—i.e., their senses were confused—but “fell back” and, overwhelmed by the experience, begged Moses to act as intermediary. Whatever God commanded, Moses should speak the words and they would obey: “Naaseh v’nishmah—We will do them, and then we will hear” (Exod. 24:7).
From this we can infer that there are at least three levels of Torah: Moses’ Torah of pure light, beyond words and images; the Torah of the prophets, which awakens at the subtle level of dreams and visions; and Torah for the rest of us, the scroll of words telling stories and imparting practices through its commandments.
This latter Torah is the one that we, at the base of Mount Sinai, are to study and mine for its teachings and practices relevant and applicable to our life so that we may hear it at a deeper level. “The commandment is a lamp and Torah is light,” says the book of Proverbs (6:23). Within each commandment, within each practice the totality of the light of Torah is contained, the infinite light of God is present. We study Torah because it is a vehicle that inspires our growth on the spiritual path up Mount Sinai. As our mastery expands and begins to move beyond the literal level of understanding, more is revealed to us. Between the words and through them, we awaken to subtler teachings, to the visions of the enlightened masters who wrote them, to the sparks of divine light embedded within. Our study can also lead us beyond the words altogether, where the sparks become pure light and we are finally able to hear the Anochi of the first Commandment, the I AM that we are, the I AM that we have always been. This is the promise that Torah Study holds. This is our particular path to universal Truth.