Revelation and Experience

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 2 June 2025

Zoe read this morning from the first chapter of the Book of Numbers. In Hebrew, B’midbar. In the wilderness.

Tomorrow evening we begin the celebration of the festival of Shavuot – the festival on which we celebrate matan Torah, the giving of the Torah to the people of Israel. We celebrate primarily by studying – by engaging with the words of Torah. Not just the words that are literally on the page, but also the commentaries and experiences that have come since.

There is a tradition of staying up all night in a tikkun leyl Shavuot – at Alyth we are going until just after midnight. Many will recognise the word tikkun as meaning ‘repair’ – what are we repairing? Well, there is a tradition that the Israelites were supposed to arise early to receive the law from God, but that they overslept! And so now every year we stay up and study through the night as a way of making up for the fact that we didn’t get up the first time.

If you look behind you at our wonderful stained glass windows designed by Arden Halter, you can see the place where this revelation happened – Mount Sinai, the holy mountain. And you can see that the mountain peaks with the full moon – and just to the left of that the month of Sivan, the month we are in – telling that story of the process of revelation, both as a particular moment in history, but also something that happens for us every year. In which Moses comes down the Mountain with those two tablets of stone.

From the first verse of this portion, the rabbis of the Midrash taught that Torah was given with three elements: with fire, with water, and in the wilderness. Why these three? Because they were all freely available. They are all free, and therefore Torah is also free – we do not need to pay for it. But more than that, as we are reminded later on, Torah is not something that is far away from us – we do not need others to go up to heaven or across the sea to go and get it for us – it is in our hearts and in our mouths to do it.

Another explanation that is given by the midrash is that the reason the revelation of the Torah was given in the wilderness is that: ‘anyone who does not render himself like a wilderness, accessible to all, is unable to acquire wisdom and the Torah.’ In other words, anyone who is not open to hearing what the Torah is saying to us, anyone who has already made up their mind and closed their ears is unable to receive revelation.

We need to be willing to learn. We need to be open to hear. We need to be ready to receive. If we have already decided who we are and what we need to do, Torah is somewhat useless.

This is a demand of Torah, but it is also a demand about how we approach the world. In the words of Rabbi Leo Baeck: ‘Everything given to human beings in their existence becomes a commandment.’ Experience equals a kind of revelation. And Leo Baeck saw the experience of the Jewish people through history as an expression of continuing revelation.

Being a Progressive Jew means being willing and open to hearing the experiences of others, and seeing that that too might be a form of revelation. To hearing narratives other than our own. Being willing to learn from others. As Ben Zoma tells us in Pirkei Avot, the Sayings of the Sages: ‘Who is wise? One who learns from everyone.’ Particularly at this time when society in general, and we in the Jewish community are so polarised, and so siloed – often willing to only listen to those who share our version of the narrative, who have our particular political perspective. It is as important as it has ever been that we are able to learn from everyone and hear their version of the narrative.

This might mean placing ourselves again in the metaphorical wilderness – making ourselves (in the language of the midrash) ‘ownerless’ – in order that we can shed our pre-conceptions, all the accumulations of history, to hear things anew.

This Shabbat, this Shavuot, let us make ourselves accessible again. Let us hear the revelation – the divine calling that comes to us through Torah, but also the calling that comes to us through our fellow human beings. Let us open ourselves to new knowledge and new revelation, from our fellow human beings, and from God.

And let us say: Amen.