Close Enough to Hear Torah

Rabbi Lea Mühlstein explores the significance of Sinai and Shavuot, highlighting a crucial Midrashic teaching that revelation begins not with God's voice, but with people standing together in unity. She discusses the priestly benediction and its emphasis on peace, suggesting that Jewish community is about maintaining covenant even in disagreement. The sermon encourages listeners to consider whether they can stand close enough to one another to hear Torah again.

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What is Kolot: Voices from The Ark Synagogue?

Welcome to Kolot, the podcast of The Ark Synagogue, a bold, experiential and caring Progressive Jewish community in Northwood, London.

Through sermons, reflections and conversations from across our community, Kolot explores Jewish life, learning and values in the world we live in today. Rooted in tradition and open to new perspectives, these episodes bring together voices that inspire thought, connection and belonging.

Whether you are Jewish, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for meaningful reflection, you are warmly welcome.

To learn more about The Ark Synagogue, visit arksynagogue.org.

This Shabbat, we stand right on the cusp of Shavuot. In fact, just up the road, in the United Synagogue, the community will still be celebrating the festival this morning.

There is something rather beautiful about that. Across different communities, with different customs and calendars and theological languages, Jews are still gathering around the same mountain.

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Shavuot asks us to return once again to Sinai: to that moment of revelation, thunder and trembling and covenant. We often imagine Sinai as dramatic and loud: lightning flashing across the sky, the sound of the shofar growing stronger and stronger, the mountain itself wrapped in smoke. Revelation, in our imagination, can easily become something overwhelming and supernatural.

And yet one of the most important rabbinic teachings about revelation is almost entirely quiet.

Rabbi Neil Janes reminded us at our Tikkun Leil study during the night of Shavuot of a Midrash, a rabbinic teaching, on the verses immediately before the giving of the Torah. The Torah tells us: “Vayichan sham Yisrael neged hahar” — “Israel encamped there before the mountain.” Up until this point, the Israelites are consistently described in the plural: they journeyed, they travelled, they arrived. But suddenly, just before revelation, the grammar shifts. Not they encamped but he encamped.

Rashi, drawing on an earlier Midrash, explains: k’ish echad b’lev echad — they stood there “like one person with one heart.”

Now the rabbis are not naïve. They know perfectly well who these people are. This is the same community that has spent much of the wilderness journey complaining, panicking, quarrelling and rebelling. The Torah itself is astonishingly honest about how difficult human community can be. And yet the rabbis seem to suggest something almost impossible: that revelation does not begin at the moment God speaks, but at the moment human beings learn how to stand near one another without walking away.

Not because every disagreement has suddenly disappeared. Not because everyone thinks alike. But because, for one sacred moment, they remain together at the foot of the mountain.

I have been thinking about that teaching alongside the priestly benediction in our parashah:

May God bless you and keep you.
May God’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May God lift up God’s face toward you and grant you peace.

These words are among the oldest prayers in continuous use in the Jewish world. Archaeologists discovered them inscribed on tiny silver amulets in Jerusalem dating back more than 2,500 years. Jews have carried these words through exile and destruction, through expulsions and migrations, through moments of profound joy and unimaginable grief.

And what is striking is where the blessing leads. Everything culminates in one final word: shalom. Peace. Not triumph. Not certainty. Not even faith. Peace.

The rabbis understood something profound about this. In Vayikra Rabbah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai teaches: “Great is peace, for all blessings are contained within it.” Peace is not simply one blessing among many; it is the vessel that allows every other blessing to endure.

Without peace, blessing spills away.

Perhaps that is why the priestly blessing and the story of Sinai belong so naturally together. Sinai, in the rabbinic imagination, is not held together by unanimity but by proximity. The people remain close enough to one another to hear something greater than themselves.

That feels increasingly difficult in the world we inhabit.

We live in an age that often rewards outrage more than attentiveness, certainty more than curiosity. Public discourse has become harsher, quicker, less patient. We have become very good at declaring where we stand and less practised at remaining in relationship with those who stand elsewhere.

And Jewish communities are hardly immune from this. Sometimes our disagreements stop being machloket l’shem shamayim — disagreements for the sake of heaven — and instead become rupture. We retreat into smaller and smaller camps of ideological comfort. We begin to imagine that covenant only exists amongst those who think exactly as we do.

But that has never really been the Jewish story.

After all, the Israelites at Sinai did not become one person because they all suddenly agreed. If anything, the rest of the Torah makes abundantly clear that they did not. Rather, revelation became possible because they were willing, however briefly, to remain together long enough to receive it.

Peace in Judaism is not the absence of disagreement but the refusal to let disagreement become estrangement.

My teacher Rabbi Sheila Shulman, of blessed memory, once described the role of community as standing as witnesses for one another: “for the reality of each other’s need, for the seriousness of each other’s intention, for the intensity of each other’s longing for wholeness.”

Reading the Midrash again this week, I found myself wondering whether Sinai itself depended on precisely that kind of witnessing. Perhaps revelation became possible not because the Israelites ceased to differ from one another, but because, for one sacred moment, they became willing to witness one another’s humanity without turning away.

That may be one of the hardest religious tasks of all. To remain in relationship even when we disagree. To resist the temptation to reduce another person to a single opinion, a single argument, a single slogan. To remember that covenant asks something more demanding of us than mere agreement.

And perhaps that is also why the priestly blessing is phrased in the singular. Yevarechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha. May God bless you. Not you in the plural, but you individually. Jewish tradition never dissolves the individual into the collective. Each person stands before God with their own dignity, their own voice, their own soul. And yet these singular words are spoken over the entire community gathered together.

Judaism insists on holding both truths at once: individuality and covenant, difference and belonging.

Every Friday night, in homes across the Jewish world, parents place their hands on the heads of their children and repeat these ancient priestly words. Often hurriedly. Sometimes self-consciously. Sometimes with toddlers trying to wriggle away before the challah appears. And yet generation after generation we continue this ritual act of blessing as though Judaism insists that before we eat, before we sing, before we begin Shabbat, we must remind one another that our task is not only to seek blessing but to become capable of transmitting it.

Rabbi John Rayner, of blessed memory, taught that Judaism only fulfils its purpose when it helps us become the sort of people capable of responsibility for one another and ultimately for humanity itself. Jewish community, in his understanding, was never simply about self-preservation. It was a training ground for moral and spiritual responsibility.

And maybe that is what the Midrash about Sinai is ultimately trying to teach. Revelation is not sustained by perfection. It is sustained by the willingness to remain in covenant even when community becomes difficult.

The Hebrew word shalom shares its root with shalem — wholeness. Peace in Jewish tradition is not passive. It is not pretending differences do not exist. It is the difficult spiritual labour of creating communities in which human beings can remain fully themselves while still remaining connected to one another.

That is what the Israelites achieved, if only fleetingly, at Sinai. And perhaps that is what Shavuot asks of us now: Not that we abandon conviction. Not that we erase difference. But that we refuse to let disagreement destroy covenant. That we become people capable of holding blessing together.

And so, standing here on the threshold of Shavuot, as Jews across the world once again gather around Sinai in all our diversity and disagreement, perhaps the question is not whether we are capable of perfect agreement, but whether we are capable of shared revelation.

Can we stand close enough to one another to hear Torah again?

Yisa Adonai panav eilecha v’yasem lecha shalom.

May God reach out to you in tenderness and give you peace.

And may we become worthy of receiving it.

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