蜜芽传媒

I鈥檝e never been to Mount Sinai, but I one day hope to visit, because here God gave the Jewish People the Ten Commandments in the revelation we commemorate today on Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks. God鈥檚 message can be summarised simply: 鈥業鈥檓 your God. Don鈥檛 abuse me or one another.鈥�
I hear these words with sorrow and shame, but also hope. I鈥檓 horrified by how we hurt each other, the wars, the cruelty and hunger. Yet the world remains intricately and inspiringly beautiful.

That鈥檚 why I cling to the deeply imaginative interpretation, rooted in Jewish mystical thought, by the Rabbi of Ger, a popular Hasidic teacher who died in 1905:
鈥榃hen God said, 鈥淚 am your God,鈥� every creature experienced those words as spoken directly to them.鈥� For an instant, every living being, humans, donkeys, birds, understood that their deepest nature, their innermost spirit, comes from, and belongs to, God. They heard those words 鈥業 am your God鈥� not just from the mountaintop, but from inside their hearts.

Afterwards everything returned to normal, each human and animal to its separate consciousness, its own reality, in this material world which conceals from us the deepest truth of who we are. But, in that moment, we understood that one life, one consciousness, fills us all and that something sacred, something deeper than all divisions, unites us. For that brief interval, said the rabbi, we were incapable of harming one another.

This was long ago. But, he maintained, if we listen deeply, we can still catch the after-echo of God鈥檚 voice in all creation. If we could be attentive to that voice in our fellow humans, and in all life, we would instinctively hold back, and, in Isaiah鈥檚 words, not cruelly hurt or destroy any living being, but instead do our utmost to bring healing to our world.

Maybe it鈥檚 that after-echo we hear, when, in a heartfelt conversation, we reach a pause and sit silently together, knowing that something words can鈥檛 reach has touched us.

Perhaps it鈥檚 what my congregant Alan meant when he wrote to his beloved sister: 鈥楲isten to the trees for they have much to teach us.鈥�
It鈥檚 the sound I feel David Attenborough may have been talking about, when he wrote that the ban on whale-hunting came about after millions heard for the first time the recordings of the humpback鈥檚 deep-sea songs.

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