I am still riding the “high” of the Shabbaton we shared this past week with Rabbi Avi Weiss. What made Shabbat special for me was not just getting to hear Rabbi Weiss’s moving and inspirational Torah, but getting to sing, dance, daven, and learn together with so many of you. Nor was it just the size of the crowd (I think we had over 70 people Friday night); rather, the energy that each of you brought helped create an atmosphere of simcha (joy) and kedusha (holiness) throughout Shabbat. Shabbat culminated with a beautiful Se`udah Shelishit, complete with food and drink, singing, and a lively discussion about the parsha, followed by Ma’ariv and a soulful, musical havdalah. Thank you to everyone who helped make this past Shabbat so special.

At the end of Parshat Ki Tavo this week, when Moshe is reminding the people of all the miracles that God had performed for them, he tells them “God did not give you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear until today.” (Devarim 29:3) Although they have seen God’s miracles with their own eyes, it took them forty years of testing, denying, and complaining, to reach the point of perceiving and appreciating God’s role in their lives.

Moshe goes on: “for forty years in the desert,
לחם לא אכלתם ויין לא שכר לא שתיתם, you neither ate bread nor drank wine or other intoxicant, למען תדעו כי אניה׳ א-לקיכם that you might know that I am Hashem your God.” There seems to be some connection between the people having not eaten or imbibed for forty years in the desert, and their coming to know God.

This is not the first time we see such a link. In describing his ascents to Mount Sinai, where he encountered God directly, and receive the revelation of the Torah, Moshe twice says,

אַרְבָּעִים יוֹם וְאַרְבָּעִים לַיְלָה לֶחֶם לֹא אָכַלְתִּי וּמַיִם לֹא שָׁתִיתִי׃

Forty days and forty nights, I neither ate bread nor drank water. (Devarim 9:9, 18)

Not once, but twice, when Moshe ascended Mount Sinai, he “neither ate bread nor drank water” for a period of forty days, in order to see, to hear, and to know God in a way that he hadn’t been able to before. At the time, the people, for all the miracles they had already witnessed, were not yet capable of understanding their relationship to God. They were still completely reliant on Moshe to be their spiritual proxy, to bring God’s revelation to them and pray to God on their behalf.

By the end of the period of wandering in the desert, however, the people had experienced a life without bread and without wine (though not without water). After forty years of living on Mannah, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, the people too had at last gained the ability to understand, to see, and to hear God’s communication with them. A good thing, too; Moshe would not be going with the people into the Promised Land, and they would need to forge a new relationship with God without Moshe to serve as their proxy.

When I think back to the ruach, the singing and the dancing, that Rabbi Weiss brought to our shul this past Shabbat, I feel like we here at KITC experienced a spiritual high, perhaps even a new kind of God-consciousness, through Rabbi Weiss’s agency. While we can’t have Rabbi Weiss here every week, to bring that kind of spirituality to us, I know that we can learn to reach that kind of elevated spiritual experience on our own.

For me what I’m taking away from the shabbaton with Rabbi Weiss isn’t a memory of how uplifting and inspiring he was, how he was able to connect us to a spiritual consciousness. What I’m taking away from the shabbaton, is an awareness that we as a community are capable of deeply spiritual and spirited davening, learning, singing and celebration. I trust that it won’t take us forty years to figure out how to achieve that kind of spirituality for ourselves.

If we start practicing this shabbat, we’ll get there sooner than we think.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Garth Silberstein