By Rabbi Guido Cohen
Asociación Israelita Montefiore Bogotá, Colombia.
In these past few weeks, the Torah readings challenge us to test our faith and our creativity, and to bring us closer to a text that narrates some events that to the modern mind are difficult to believe.
Questions about whether or not the sea really opened as we read in Parashat BeShalach, or if the theophany in Sinai happened just as it is described in Parashat Yitro that we read this week, are very common when we study the text in a group.
The contemporary mind –growing further away from poetry and creative reading- has gotten used to reading things in a linear way, stuck in the literal with messages that cannot escape the explicit. The Torah, as the Jewish people for millennia have read it, must allow us to rise from those linear ways of reading and encourage us to understand it in a different manner by expanding the limits of our creativity.