Torah - Before & After Sinai

 On the second day of the Holiday of Shavuoth, I read an interesting parable in the discourses of the second Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Dov Ber, on the passages of the Torah recounting the experience at Mount Sinai. The parable is meant to help us understand what was the difference between the Torah, as humans grasped it, before the experience at Mount Sinai and after it.

The parable relates that there was a teacher who had two phases of interactions with students. One phase was when students asked him questions to find enlightenment in his learned answers. The next phase was when the teacher prepared classes and actually formally taught.  

In the first phase when the students are simply asking questions, this may call forth concepts and ideas which were previously embedded into the fabric of the teacher’s sub/unconscious mind. With his/her fresh conscious awareness of these notions, the students have in a sense enlightened the teacher (or have at least become the stimulant which caused the enlightenment).

However, this exchange on its own no matter how beneficial it is to both the students and the teacher, represents what the teacher ultimately wants to give over. The teacher’s fuller self is not invested in such an exchanges. They’re mere pastimes compared to the teacher’s real desire, to formally teach classes. For only in classes, will the students really transform into the human products the teacher is passionately enflamed to produce.

In the parable, the teacher is God and the students are the Jewish People. The pre-Sinai Torah experience was like the phase when the interested students assail the teacher with their urgent questions. Similarly, in the pre-Sinai phase the Jews could enter into prophetic states and garner information, as relevant to their situations. Depending on their level of holiness some possibly had more access than others. Based on how the most recent Lubavitcher Rebbe explained the situation (Shavuoth 5731), it seems possible that even when they received an answer, it was offered in spiritual terms - not on earthly terms. The answer first needed to be translated into earthly terms to be useful. In the parable this might be compared to the teacher answering the questions in academic language; not clearly understood by the common folk.

In contrast, the giving of the Torah at Sinai was like students in a classroom intently paying attention to their teacher. In the classroom moment, the teacher is really delivering from the depth of his/her heart! So too, God, so to speak, invested Himself much more deeply than He had previously.  He taught what He wanted each Jew present to know, regardless of personal learning capacity. Unlike previously, He brought the main teachings downs into earthly terms - plain do's and don’ts.

I see something interesting in the parable. Kabbalistically speaking, “God’s Mind” is the worlds of “Atziluth” and “Briyah”. Perhaps when our pre-Sinai ancestors “asked their questions”, they drew down spiritual lights into these worlds from yet higher worlds - which would be the Kabbalistic cosmic parallel of the human sub/unconscious. The reason for this understanding is because the second Lubavitcher Rebbe himself explains that such questions from inquiring students brings forth into the teacher’s conscious mind concepts and ideas which were previously embedded into fabric of his/her sub/unconscious.

Now if a teacher had so many inquiring students, wouldn’t this stimulate his/her desire to organize the concepts being asked about into a proper series of classes? So, it’s possible that the pre-Sinai involvement with Torah actually stimulated what was revealed at Sinai.

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