Mishpatim
Exodus 21:1-24:18
I Samuel 20:18-42
Amid the lexicon of laws given in this week’s parashah, one remarkable commandment stands out. “God said to Moses, ‘Come up to Me on the mountain and be there, and I will give you the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments which I have inscribed to instruct them.'” (Exodus 24:12)
Remember that Jews have traditionally assumed that the Torah was given by God. As such, every word, every letter, every peculiar turn of phrase in the text must have divinely intended meaning. From this point of view, nothing in the text can be superfluous.
Why, then, must God, having commanded Moses to come up to the mountain, add the command to “be there”? Listen to the extraordinarily contemporary words of the Kotzker Rebbe:
“This is difficult. If Moshe ascends the mountain, he is there. Why the added emphasis ‘Be there’? What follows from this is that even one who tries, who climbs to the summit, can sometimes arrive, and not be there. Surely, he stands on the mountain, but his head is elsewhere. What is essential is not the ascent, but to really be there, and only there, not to be above and below at the same time” (Itturei Torah vol. 3, p. 199).
We have come to think of this as a uniquely contemporary problem. Our generation, God help us, even has a new word for this phenomenon: “multi-tasking.” Driving our kids to school while talking on the cell phone and catching a bit of news on the radio at the same time. Eating breakfast while reading the paper, planning the morning’s presentation at work and shouting instructions to the kids.
We are so hurried, so worried about not getting everything done, so busy trying to complete all of our tasks, that we are often everywhere and nowhere, frequently exhausted. We have forgotten how to be just where we are, to do just one thing at a time. Or it is a luxury we fear we cannot afford.
Even when I am trying to be where I am, my mind wanders. I am driving on 280 and suddenly realize that I have lost track of a chunk of time. A bit of beautiful scenery is gone, the time is gone, lost, and I was elsewhere.
My daughter is telling me a story and I must ask her to repeat herself. She is annoyed, and rightly so. “Ima, you weren’t listening.” She is right, though not for lack of effort on my part. I would love to coax my brain into slower gear, but the rush of thoughts, plans and concerns has flooded me, and we have both suffered.
I find myself in the middle of the Shacharit service and I realize I have been reciting the words absent-mindedly. How many prayers have I just recited, the book open to the right page, but my mind and soul elsewhere? My mind has been leaping around from thought to thought, planning, wondering, imagining. I have missed the chance for some moment of inspiration that the siddur might have brought me today.
But then there is that delicious moment of awakening, when I realize I have been elsewhere. I suddenly notice that the sky has turned a brilliant shade of blue, that my daughter is a wondrous creature, that the siddur is filled with exquisite wisdom. For a moment, I wake up and come back to where I am.
The day is full of these mental wanderings — my attention hops away again and again and I bring it back again to where I am. I once learned that one might say the blessing “Baruch…mechayei hameitim” “Blessed are You, God…who brings the dead to life” over such moments, when we recover our senses, when we notice where we are, when we awaken, many times each day.
The Kotzker Rebbe, anticipating our fast-paced, status-conscious society, says that the point of it all is not the climb, not getting to the top, not reaching any destination at all — even if the destination is the top of Mount Sinai! The point is to be where we are all along the way, noticing the opportunities for learning, for growth, for wonder, just savoring the moment of being alive in God’s world.
May God’s deceptively simple instruction to Moses penetrate our lives. May we awaken to be where we are for this day.