My Festival in Florida

We recently enjoyed a delightful few days in South Florida where I was guest speaker for a large and well-established synagogue in the Fort Lauderdale area. The occasion was the Biblical holyday commemorating God giving Israel the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. It was the Bible festival of Shavuot that we celebrated at the start of June, the Festival of Weeks as it is often known. This name is because when the festival is introduced to us in Leviticus 23:15, we read that the festival is set by counting seven weeks from Passover. A similar thought is captured by the Greek name for the festival, Pentecost, meaning Fiftieth, again alluding to Shavuot falling on the fiftieth day after Passover, or as Leviticus puts it, after you have counted seven complete weeks.

In yet another manifestation of the startling symmetry that is such a distinctive feature of the Hebrew calendar, the official Torah reading on the Sabbath two days before Shavuot was the start of the Book of Numbers and this is nearly always the case. Why is this interesting? Because the Hebrew name of the fourth book of the Bible is not Numbers but BaMidbar, which means “In the desert”. Were you to stop almost any Jewish child on the streets of Jerusalem and ask him or her, “Tell me, what important event happened to the Israelites in the desert?” They would inevitably respond, “God gave Israel the Ten Commandments in the desert.” This is because the chapter introducing the drama of receiving the Torah opens with these words:

In the third month after the Children of Israel left Egypt, on this day, they came to the Desert of Sinai. (Exodus 19:1)

As if to emphasize the connection between the desert and the receiving of the Torah, the next verse, not once, but twice repeats that all this is occurring in the ‘desert’. Why are we instructed to associate the giving of the Torah, not with the mountain but with the desert in which the mountain stood?

The answer is because in Hebrew the word Midbar means both desert and speech. As many of my readers already know, in the Lord’s language, when a Hebrew word appears to have two meaning, the real meaning of the word emerges from our forming a sort of mental amalgam of the two apparent meanings. In this case, the two words are desert and speech, suggesting that speech is significant even if there is nobody there to hear it, because when you hear yourself speak, something far more profound is happening than when others may hear you speak.

Why do sports coaches often psych up their players by having them yell out passionately “We will win!” Why not have the coach merely say to the team, “In my opinion, if I had to guess, you will win”? Because when team members hear their own mouths, lips and tongues articulate the proclamation, “We will win!” their bodies and psyches derive a spurt of energy and conviction.

When I was ten years old, I competed in a chess tournament. My father, hovering anxiously nearby, later told me that although my opponent had three excellent strategies to beat me, he heard him muttering to himself the fateful words, “I think he’s got me.” I did win. Even though I shouldn’t have. When my opponent’s soul heard his own mouth declare defeat, it quickly became reality.

This is why when we study Bible, there is great value to reading it aloud, so our own ears hear the words our mouths are uttering. This is also part of the magic of prayer.

With Moses bringing God’s word to Israel in a desert, we learn that there were no distractions. They were in a desert with nobody else around. A very good way to learn and study effectively. From time to time I have been a visitor in homes in which children were doing homework with music playing on earphones in their ears. I have even seen children doing homework with a screen beaming fast moving images. Studying with a video playing? Surely the very opposite of receiving wisdom in a desert.

South Florida is far from being a desert but the atmosphere in the synagogue during my teaching was desert-like. There were no distractions and the attentive audience shared my solemn reverence for the Word we studied in commemoration of the silence in which we received God’s Word, 3,337 years ago.

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