Creation is Great, But Have You Tried Revelation?
On Recognition and the First Commandment
I the LORD [YHWH] am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. (Exodus 20:2)
“I the Lord am your God”—is a positive commandment…that you should know and believe that there is YHWH.”—Nachmanides
“My discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.”
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism
The inner sense of dignity seeks recognition. It is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence.
Francis Fukuyama, Identity
Theologians and philosophers have long puzzled over the question, “Why did God create the world?” “Why is there something and not Nothing?”
The Torah does not give us an explicit answer to this age old question. We are not permitted to read God’s mind, assuming it were even legible—though this hasn’t stopped us from speculating. Seemingly, this is the great metaphysical question, the alpha of all searches, the vanishing point at which all disciplines converge.
But this week’s Torah reading—Yitro (Ex. 18:1-20:23)—raises a question that I find equally (if not more) compelling. Why does God reveal Godself to us? Why doesn’t God simply place a chip in our brains in which the Torah is pre-installed? Alternatively, why doesn’t God rule by an Invisible Hand, allowing us to derive all that the Torah contains through a combination of reason and experience? Why—according to the Torah—does God appear, and appear at Sinai? Numerous solutions have been proposed over the years. One common answer offered by rationalist theologians is so that we should know that God—and not the human mind—is the source of all knowledge. That seems somewhat weak, though. After all, couldn’t God simply program us to know that?
For me, the reason for divine Revelation has nothing to do with knowledge. Whether we could deduce the Torah from our own minds or not—a question that occupied medieval theologians—is tangential. Revelation is about relationship. The God who speaks to us reveals Godself as a God who wants—even needs—us to listen, to witness God. Though personification is limited, we can venture to say that God doesn’t want to stay hidden. The need to come out, to come down, to be known, is just as important—and possibly more important—than the need to create.
A colorful Talmud passage, attributed to Reish Lakish, illustrates the point that revelation is ontologically superior to creation, even if it is chronologically later: “God told Israel: if you accept the Torah, all well and good. But if you do not, I will revert the world to chaos [Tohu Vavohu]” (Shabbat 88a). I think of this passage as analogous to an artist who says that if their artwork is not appreciated, they will destroy it. Imagine Anselm’s Perfect God saying, “If humanity doesn’t recognize that I’m perfect, I’m calling it quits.” It would be absurd.
Creation is a mystifying concept, but is an easier pill to swallow than Revelation. At least with Creation, we grasp the essential need for a Beginning. Secularists may disagree about the mechanics of the Beginning, but most can’t help but imagine a Beginning of all time. But Revelation seems like it’s extraneous to, and also more farfetched than, Creation. All cultures have a story of cosmogenesis. But not all cultures have a story in which the same God that created the world speaks to a people and enjoins it to enter into relationship with it. What could compel God to seek relationship? Aristotle’s God (“Thought thinking itself”) is perfectly self-content, self-enclosed. For Plato, the highest being is the Idea of the Good, a static entity that neither moves nor wants nor feels. To speak of a God who takes people out of slavery is philosophically absurd. But more philosophically absurd, I would argue, is a God who not only liberates, but seeks to be recognized, as a liberator—which is what we find in the First Commandment, revealed in this week’s parasha.
Nachmanides writes that the first commandment is that we affirm God’s existence. But, as I understand it, the commandment is not an abstract theological requirement, but an existential insight into the nature of Torah. The Torah is to be understood, fundamentally, as God’s self-expression, God’s entrusting of Godself to us as readers and listeners.
The first commandment—I am the Lord your God—is an identity statement. Behind every revelation, divine or human, is a request for recognition. If we think of the Torah as God’s self-disclosure, the way we read and respond to it takes on a unique intimacy. We aren’t just studying for our own edification, or out of some obligatory devotion; we are studying so that we can encounter the divine. How strange. Just as we love people for their idiosyncrasies and not for their paraphrasable teachings, we must love the Torah not only for its content, but for its idiosyncrasy, its singular personality. We must see it as the face/mask/persona of God.
We moderns are obsessed with identity in a way that our ancient forbears were not. Martin Luther gave us the insight that we have an inner sense of self that society can’t know, understand, or substitute for. Rousseau gave us the idea that we are fundamentally good, and that any friction between ourselves and society is, fundamentally, society’s fault. Together, Luther and Rousseau, gave us the idea of an inner self to which we must be authentic and which the world must also come to recognize (and which Christopher Lasch criticized as “a culture of narcissism”).
But if identity is largely a modern concept and value, the desire for recognition that undergirds it, is not. And it seems that the Torah is indicating something important by showing us that God seeks recognition. There is one sense in which a need to be recognized seems less than ideal. After all, if we had perfect self esteem, we wouldn’t need recognition. If we loved our art and believed in it, we wouldn’t wager to destroy it upon learning of its rejection by others. But there is also a positive dimension to the need for recognition, and that is the fact that we arrive at self-knowledge through relationship.
If we were only instinctual beings, we’d be ruled by desire. If we were only calculative beings, we’d be ruled by reason (following the voice that says “delay one marshmallow now to get two tomorrow”). But we’re reflexive beings, that is, beings who are ruled by self-understanding, by the part of ourselves that wonders “who am I?” Of course, I’m projecting here, but the Torah seems to imagine that God is likewise reflexive. God may desire to create the world, or even reason God’s way to creating it, but it is only through Revelation—and our response to it—that God can understand Godself.
It is not coincidental that the Revelation of God at Sinai occurs right after the liberation of the slaves from Egypt. The first commandment explicitly ties the two events together. Slaves are denied recognition and dignity by their owners. Who better than newly liberated slaves to grasp the power of being recognized? In revealing Godself to us, God reveals to us the need to reveal ourselves to—and be recognized—by others. In receiving divine epiphany, we practice receiving the epiphanies of others. If we can listen when “God speaks God’s truth,” we can surely listen when our fellow earthlings speak theirs.
A hardened heart can neither reveal itself nor receive the revelations of others. Pharaoh’s society was one where recognition was afforded only to Pharaoh. That Pharaoh is unnamed underlines the point, intensely. Pharaoh is recognized for his social role, not for his personhood.
Revelation liberates, and liberation reveals. But revelation only works if there is recognition to meet it. The opposite of a hardened heart is a recognized and recognizing one. God lets Godself be recognized by ex-slaves, by those who have lived unrecognized. In so doing, God also shows the Israelites that they matter, they have dignity, they are seen. If we follow Reish Lakish’s reasoning, it’s not just that God would destroy the world if God were unrecognized, it’s that God needs ex-slaves to be the ones who recognize God.
There is a tension in what I’m saying. As long as God exists, and as long as we recognize God’s existence—the first commandment indicates—we ourselves are recognized. No Pharaoh, no oppression, no discrimination, or marginalization, can diminish us. At the same time, we are social creatures, and it is not enough to live in a world where only God recognizes us. We need to create a world in which we can receive and give recognition to each other.
How do we create a world that appreciates the universal need for recognition, but does not conflate it with (zero-sum) status? How do we create a world that values achievement and accomplishment, but doesn’t do so by diminishing the dignity of those whose contributions in a given domain are average or below average? Recognition for all risks emptying recognition of meaning, while recognition for the few risks perpetuating Pharaoh’s dehumanizing society. For recognition to be meaningful it cannot come too easily. But if recognition is scarce, it seems inevitable that we end up with winners and losers, nobles and deplorables.
We have yet to solve the problem of recognition as a society, but the fact that the Torah places it at the opening of the Ten Commandments indicates its importance. That Reish Lakish thinks Creation is conditional on Revelation tells us just how transformative it can be for us to show others who we are and to receive the disclosures of others.
Artistic activity can (and often must) be conducted in solitude. Self-understanding requires discourse. In Genesis 1, God says “Let there be light” and there was light. In Exodus 20, God says, “I am,” and there was God.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
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