In rabbinic tradition, Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. In this week leading up to the festival (it begins on Thursday night; join us to celebrate with worship and cheesecake on Friday night and/or Saturday morning), let’s explore some classical and modern imaginations of the moment itself.
In addition to being Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month, May is also Mental Health Awareness Month, and so I want to begin this week with one of my favorite books on mental health and emotional intelligence. Written not by a psychiatrist or a therapist, not a memoir or a novel—though I have read plenty of those—this one is a rhyming board book by Dr. Seuss, published posthumously after the quest for the right illustrators was found. Entitled “My Many Colored Days,” it is not the whimsical rhyme and made-up words you might expect from Theodore Geisel, but rather an attempt to give children (and maybe adults too!) a language to express their feelings by likening them to colors—and also with animals. For example, bright red and blue days are associated with high energy, like a kicking horse and a flapping bird. In a review by Paige Pagan, she writes that:
“My Many Colored Days” intends to teach early elementary children that it is normal to experience different emotions on different days and even on the same day, which sometimes makes it hard to understand and express yourself.
The rabbis are definitely interested in this sensory overload, and write a lot about the horns and about the smoke, and even about the thunder and lightning. Ultimately, I think they are wondering: Why all the noise? They derive their answer from the verse that states: “God’s voice [came] in strength.” The rabbis, in a beautiful moment of both intellectual and emotional awareness, understand this to mean that every person hearing the words heard them l’fi kocho—according to their own ability. So, whether you were there on a blue day or a yellow day, a gray day or a brown day—you were there, and you heard what you could hear. Like Dr. Seuss’s multi-colored emotional world, our Torah allows for a multivocal relationship; we can approach with our whole selves, which means we might approach it differently on “different colored” days. And each time, like the moment of revelation, I believe we will hear something new.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer