Parshat Yitro, February 10th

This week, we read Aseret Hadibberot, the Ten Commandments (or better, the Ten Utterances), possibly the best-known passage in the Torah. I am always fascinated by the pyrotechnics that accompanied Aseret Hadibberot:  thunder and lightning and clouds and smoke, and to top it off, the blast of a Shofar. What purpose do they serve? To get the people’s attention? To remind the people of God’s glory? Is it just that an event as Cosmos-shaking as God speaking directly to the people perforce, results in atmospheric disturbances of this magnitude?

Even before all of the fanfare on the mountain, I’m curious about the instructions that precede the event of revelation. God tells Moses to have the people set up a boundary around the mountain, not to approach it, and to refrain from sexual relations for three days.

Ostensibly, these two forms of preparation have nothing to do with one another. The boundary is to prevent people from blurring the line between the human and the divine by setting foot on the mountain where God will be revealing His presence, whereas the prohibition on sexual relations has to do with making sure that both men and women were ritually pure at the moment of revelation.

I think both forms of preparation have something in common, however. Both forms of preparation are fundamentally about restraining ourselves. Before we could experience the direct revelation of God’s Torah, we had to demonstration our capacity for self-restraint, for holding ourselves back.

Truly hearing requires being open to the possibility of being changed by what we are about to hear. If we are completely full of our own impulses, opinions, desires, and sense of ourselves, we cannot hear, we cannot learn, and we cannot experience revelation.  As preparation for receiving Torah, the people had to engage in an act of tzimtzum, self-contraction, making themselves a little bit smaller in order to make room for the Torah in the world.

This is in parallel to the original moment of tzimtzum – the beginning of creation – when God diminished Himself in order to make room for the universe. At Sinai, the people, as it were, return the favor, diminishing themselves in order for God’s presence to enter this world more fully in the form of Torah.

Interestingly, the Aseret Hadibberot themselves are all about self-restraint. Their shared theme of self-restraint reaches its fullest expression in the 10th and most challenging commandment, to not covet. Coveting is the absence of self-restraint, coveting is unbounded desire. The last of the Ten Commandments does not demand that we eliminate our desires, only that we remember that our freedom to pursue our own desires stops at the neighbor’s property line.

Perhaps these ten messages of self-restraint are themselves a further prelude and preparation for the revelation of the rest of the Torah. We begin with this message of self-restraint because, without the ability to master our unbounded desires, the rest of the Torah is meaningless.

May we notice the areas in our life where we could stand to engage in a little tzimtzum, a little self-restraint. Perhaps we’re offering unsolicited and unwanted advice; perhaps we’re asking people personal questions that make them uncomfortable or “over-sharing” in ways that others do not appreciate. Perhaps too often we are prioritizing our own wants and desires over the needs and desires of others. Perhaps we are too busy telling other people what we think, to learn from the insights they have to share. Tzimtzum is not about punishing ourselves or denying who we are. It’s about making room for others to shine, and making room in ourselves for new learning, new Torah, a new relationship with God to enter.

May we all be blessed to create the space within ourselves for God’s Torah to leave its mark on our soul.

Rabbi Garth Silberstein