Reconciling Exodus and Sinai (pps. 251-252)

By Rabbi Sid Schwarz

Excerpt from Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World © 2006 Sidney Schwarz (Woodstock, VT; Jewish Lights Publishing). $24.99+$3.95 s/h. Order by mail or call 800-962-4544 or online at www.jewishlights.com. Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091.

All of this brings us back to the millennial tension in Judaism between Exodus and Sinai impulses. Every faith community is committed to the survival and perpetuation of its own. Judaism is not immune to these tendencies. Judaism has often fallen prey to the tendency, affecting all groups, to see itself in parochial terms, to believe that the interests of the group supersede all else. This is especially true in times of crisis. In modern times, this defensiveness extends to times when Israel is at risk, either from war, terrorism, or worldwide campaigns to discredit Zionism and the right of Jews to collective existence in its ancestral homeland.

Still, the Jewish tradition’s universal teachings about responsibility toward all human beings and to the entire world continue to bring us back to the needed equilibrium between self-interest—the Exodus impulse—and the interests of humanity—the Sinai impulse. Even when, or perhaps especially when, the Jewish world tends toward the parochial, there are voices in our midst that call us back to our prophetic legacy to be agents for the repair of the entire world.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, a prominent Orthodox opinion leader, spoke to the tension between Exodus and Sinai in the consciousness of the Jewish people in another way:

“In order to explain the difference between the people of fate and the nation of destiny, it is worth taking note of the antithesis between camp (machaneh) and congregation (edah). The camp is created as a result of the desire for self-defense and is nurtured by a sense of fear; the congregation is created as a result of the longing for the realization of an exalted ethical idea and is nurtured by the sentiment of love.” [Joseph Soloveitchik, Fate and Destiny: From the Holocaust to the State of Israel (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1992), 57–60.]

The Jewish community cannot realize its fullest potential to become a people of the covenant, committed to the ethical principles of righteousness and justice, if it remains in its tribal camp, paralyzed by fear and consumed by its perceived need to defend itself from every threat, real and imagined. It is true that without the proper communal mechanisms and political advocacy to properly defend the Jewish people at risk, no Jew would have the luxury to pursue the more lofty, Sinai agenda. At the same time, unless the Jewish community begins to give higher priority to an agenda of righteousness and justice—the agenda that started with the first Jew, Abraham—it will have confused the means and the ends.

That prophetic legacy is why the Jewish people were put on this earth.