News from Rabbinate

The Chaos That Blooms

The holy Ari saw in Pesach—Pe-Sach, “a mouth that speaks”—the moment when speech returned to a people who had lost it through years of slavery. The culmination of that process, he believed, is the giving of the Torah—Shavuot—in which we received mishpatim and dibrot, laws and utterances, born of speech. Like a child learning to speak, the people of Israel learned to think, to grasp, to take responsibility.

But within me, another voice stirs— a voice that longs to rebel against this linear reading, this image of us walking from voice to book, from passion to law, buttoned-up and composed, growing proper and polished on our way to Sinai.

I return to Franz Rosenzweig’s description of the divine revelation at Mount Sinai. He claimed that revelation is a force so immense it cannot be folded into language, and that the revelation itself ceased even before the first letter of the law was written—before the aleph of Anochi. And if we dare to look at divinity not as text, but as visual essence— we discover that there are no laws there, no rules. There is a fire that erupts and cannot be extinguished, a God who is terrifying and overwhelming, compassionate and gracious, a God who darkens the day and illuminates the night, a God who might even ask a father to sacrifice his son The revelation at Sinai, then, is not only the peak of order. It is also a chaotic outburst—untamed, uncontainable, dizzying.

Law is a structure of knowledge, but, whenever we try to ask what law truly is— in every culture—we eventually touch mystery: When something is revealed, something else is concealed, resisting exposure. This is how things appear in the world.

I want to think of the Counting of the Omer as a process of movement— not from chaos into order, as is often assumed, but from order into chaos. Not as its opposite, but as its evolution. Because order is the fertile ground from which chaos may bloom. Chaos allows emotion to break through, for creativity to arise, for transformation to occur. Chaos, like spring, begins to blossom— and the Hebrew letters which make up ליבלוב (blossom) are the same letters found in בילבול (confusion).

As I reflect with you on the coming month, I offer this: Let us not walk through it only as if toward a final, rational, orderly destination— but let us also make space for chaos—for openness, for freedom, for wonder.