Earlier this week we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates one of the most fundamental moments in Jewish history: the Jewish people receiving the Torah. 

The revelation at Mt. Sinai demonstrated a covenant between God and the Jewish people, transforming a downtrodden group of slaves into a free people who were suddenly invited into direct covenant with the Divine. No intermediary was needed; this relationship was open to all Jews directly. In Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ words: 

Courtesy

Illustrative. Courtesy

“[N]owhere else do we find anything like the politics of Mount Sinai, with its radical vision of a society held together not by power but by the free consent of its citizens to be bound, individually and collectively, by a moral code and by a covenant with God.” 

Rabbi Sacks explains that this was the antithesis of what the Jews had experienced in Egypt. While Egypt represented power held by the few and enslavement for the many, the experience of Sinai offered power equally distributed to all in attendance — a covenant entered consensually by an entire people. 

But Sinai was not only important because it represented a radical political model. It was significant because it represented a radical educational model as well. 

God invited each Jew to be part of the conversation of Torah in their own unique way. A midrash in Shemot Rabbah teaches that each person heard the voice of God in the manner in which they were capable of hearing it. Torah and one’s relationship with the Divine was tailor-made for every person. 

This personalized revelation was just the beginning. Pirkei Avot, the seminal work of Jewish values, opens with the concept that the experience of Mt. Sinai was not a static one-time event in the Jewish past. Rather, Moses received the Torah and passed it on to Joshua, who passed it to the Elders, who passed it to the Prophets, and so on. Every generation of Jews is invited to be part of this dynamic chain of transmission that continues the divine conversation begun at Sinai. 

Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, the 17th-century Czech rabbi known as the Tosafot Yom Tov, interprets this mishnah to mean that after we no longer had prophets, each Jew received a small prophecy and held onto a tiny piece of the original revelation. In his words: 

“But afterwards — as the generations declined — the entire thing was not passed on as one unit. Rather, everyone received [a piece of] it according to their ability. Nonetheless, the portion of the Torah that was in one’s hand was a transmission to them, that had been passed on from one person to another going back to Moses from Sinai.” 

Rabbi Heller is saying something astounding: Every single Jew holds a small piece of the Torah — and thus, no one of us today holds the entire thing. Not just this, but if one ever has a hope of learning and understanding the whole Torah, one must seek out their fellow Jews to listen closely and hear the Torah that they can offer.  

Thus, receiving Torah is not a passive act. It is an invitation to add our unique voices, perspectives and opinions and hear others’ voices as well. This is the Torah She-be’al Peh — the Oral Torah — where we help Torah expand, grow and stay relevant to the Jewish people and to the world. 

This ancient educational model holds profound implications for contemporary Jewish education. Today, there can be a powerful desire among educators to act as intermediaries for our students, wanting to protect them from the difficulties of Jewish text study, feeling that Jewish texts can sometimes be problematic, challenging to understand, or even boring or irrelevant. Yet this protective instinct runs counter to the very essence of the Sinai experience. 

Instead, we can and should show our students the value of intellectual grit — the value of wrestling directly with text. Their own questions, ideas and insights are precisely what make Torah study and Jewish education so powerful. When we introduce our students to the primary texts of Torah and allow them to spend time truly studying them, asking hard and new questions and wondering about what the words and phrases mean, they often develop brilliant and insightful interpretations that we might never have considered. Not only this, but we are also teaching them that their ideas matter, giving them a sense of pride and ownership over the Torah. This Jewish confidence will serve them for the rest of their lives.  

Just as we believe that each student sees the world uniquely and we allow them to be the center of their own learning in secular contexts, so too should we embrace this approach in Jewish educational spaces. At The Jewish Education Project, together with incredible partners and experts in the field, we have been creating a suite of educational tools to help Jewish educators do precisely this. The Deep Rich Jewish Content Toolkit is a resource for educators who want to bring more primary Jewish text into their educational settings but need help in doing so.  

The message of Sinai is clear: Each Jew was given an opportunity to have direct access to the Divine and to Torah without intermediaries. In our educational settings, we must empower our students to engage directly with Jewish texts, allowing them to hear the Divine voice in their own way and share their unique Torah with the world.  

Rabba Yaffa Epstein is the senior scholar and educator-in-residence at The Jewish Education Project.