Image from Brainless Tales
[We neglected to repost this on the anniversary of this website in February; the original title was “A Year in the World Wide Web . . . Already? It recounts the beginning of Sinai 6000 which we’ve repeated in many articles like a broken record, ad nauseum. The truth is, we can barely convince one more soul in our individual circles of friends/acquaintances/Christian colleagues, so we figured perhaps there are like-minded seekers elsewhere on God’s earth who might benefit from our research and sharing. So we got on the “www” that transcends all kinds of boundaries and there, we found our niche!—Admin1]
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If you are a frequent visitor to this website, you have most likely read the Sinai 6000 raison d’être and ongoing apologetics in subsequent posts. The month of February marks our first anniversary in joining the World Wide Web so we keep looking back to where we were then, the starting point of our journey on the pathway leading to Spiritual Sinai, the Mountain of Divine Revelation.
Sinai 6000 as a start-up community was casually organized in Tishrei 5772 (September 2011), significantly timed during the biblical festival called “Rosh Hashanah” the Jewish new year. At the time, a website was not in our horizon but as we progressed from starting over on a new pathway, our research, study and discussions of untold lessons learned as well as unlearned compelled us to share fresh insights, specifically our “new” understanding of “old” truths that had been staring us in the face for all those decades we were neglecting the “Old Testament” prequel in our Christian Bible. These ‘old’ truths were new to us but only because we had not taken any serious interest to read the 39 books, 2/3 of the Christian Bible except to check out “prooftexts” cited by Christian apologists which we never questioned; after all, who were we compared to the best minds of the Christian faith?
When we did veer off the detour that Christianity took from the original path long trodden by the people of Israel, it has been a slow progress because we simultaneously dealt with new discoveries as well as unnecessary irrelevant unshed excess baggage from our Christian roots. In a year we managed to cover only Bereshiyth, Shemoth and got halfway through Waiqrah, struggling to remember, pronounce and spell Hebrew titles and names while learning the peculiarities of the Hebrew language that we had difficulty grasping in the English translation and with our Hellenized/western mindset. What!? Hebrew has no neuter, no upper case, no vowels in the original? And the concept of such a word as elohiym (used to prove that God is ‘plural’) is no big deal in Hebrew, includes many shades of meaning, with applications depending on context. Do we even have enough years left in our lifetime to scratch the surface of just the Sinai revelation?
We were realistic enough to expect that our “radical” change— from “saved” to “unsaved”, switching loyalties from Jesus to YHWH, swapping our Christian Bible for the Hebrew Scriptures—would not at all be welcome in the Christian/Messianic circles we had for so long been part of; so we imagined that perhaps there were others like ourselves who were in a similar quandary, discontented with unresolved questions regarding their faith, seeking answers but having no access to resources such as what we had already collected in our Sinai 6000 library. Perhaps we could help them in their search by sharing our quest step by step . . . .
What could we possibly contribute to the glut of information already available in the internet about any and every conceivable topic? What could we say specifically about Christianity and its Bible, or Judaism and its Hebrew Scriptures? Who would bother (if they even stumble upon our website) to check out what this bunch of unknowns (consistently mistaken for ‘Jew-wannabes’) are all about?
Image from This too shall pass – blogger
At the time it did not matter . . . recall that philosophical question: if a tree fell in the forest and nobody was around, would there be a sound? Of course there would be, just that nobody would hear at the time it happened but should somebody discover the felled tree later, he could possibly hear the sound in the ears of his imagination and even whisper “timberrrrr”. . . . So if nobody knew about our website and nobody ever read anything we posted, what use is it to anyone except to us? If it never mattered to anyone else but to us, that was all that mattered at the time, for we were not all in one location and in fact some had migrated to other lands. The website would keep each of us feeling connected, belonging to one community who think alike, for where else would we fit in the scheme of things?
Six months after organizing as Sinaites, during the month of February, www.sinai6000.net was launched, categorized as a “resource center,” a virtual repository or medium for expressing our collective and individual voices during our transition when we switched loyalties in answer to one all-important question:
Who is your God?
In what we have described as a spiritual pilgrimage to meet the One True God and relearn His original revelation, we virtually travelled from the cradle of Christianity—Rome— but not toward Jerusalem as wrongly guessed by most people; our destination became Sinai, the place after which we chose to name our small community. As we have repeatedly explained, Sinai is the mountain on which YHWH declared His Name, cut a covenant with a people who would be His representatives in delivering His revelation to the nations. It was comfortable to be on neutral ground, our ‘spiritual home,’ territory that could not be identified with any major world religion, save the Revelator of the TORAH. While YHWH is the God identified with the nation of Israel, He is the God associated with Sinai, the God of the nations, the Creator and Master of the universe, the Revelator we rediscovered in the Hebrew Scriptures Whom we readily embraced.
We embraced as well His revelation in the TORAH, the first five books attributed to Moses, recognizing and acknowledging these books and them alone, as the “Word” of YHWH for all mankind. Thus began the process of unlearning our previous wrong approach of reading the Christian “Old” Testament with a New Testament mindset; instead, we read the TORAH with fresh eyes and with the uncluttered mind of a child. Not surprisingly, it made a big difference in our understanding.
The most helpful resources came from Jewish websites; we didn’t hesitate to seek answers from Ask the Rabbi. We searched for Hebrew translations that did not shy away from printing the Tetragrammaton Name “YHWH” but failed to find any; so we settled for the Stone Edition of ArtScroll Tanach [AST] which, in keeping with Jewish reluctance to utter or print the Name, substitutes “Ha Shem” [the Name]. [Update 2017: Since then we have discovered Everett Fox’s excellent translation in poetic format, naming God directly as YHWH instead of circumlocutions like LORD, and we are now adding the translation of Robert Alter and his commentary this year.]
And since our background had been as teachers, preachers, bible study organizers, church planters, fellowship-starters in Christ-centered denominations, our grasp of Christian teachings enabled us to conduct discourses with Christian and Messianic mentors and colleagues.
To date [2017] we have lost count of recorded visits to this website from all over the world; many no doubt are unintended or accidental landings, though a precious 10% are frequent returning visitors who linger for hours, in fact lately a handful seem to be downloading every post in every category! This encourages us to continue our sharing; evidently, there are not a few kindred spirits out there just as gung-ho as we are in searching for more satisfactory answers.
It is our prayer that SINAI 6000 continue to be given more opportunity and time to serve the God we have come to know, love, and worship because of the ‘light’ and ‘legacy’ of Israel to all mankind — an enduring record of YHWH’s TORAH as foundational and preliminary to their chronicles, their prophets and their sacred writings.
May the Jewish websites representing “the people of the book ” be blessed for their continuing efforts to help Jews and Gentiles alike in understanding that the Hebrew Scriptures are still and all the more relevant in our day and age.
May YHWH,
the Revelator on Sinai,
the God of Truth,
be praised, blessed be His Name!
May the day hasten
when He will be known
and worshipped by all peoples,
all religions, all nations,
for only then will His Shalom
bless the Land and people of Israel,
and His servant people in the Diaspora.
In behalf of Sinai 6000
Core Community,
First posted:
3 Adar 5773
February 13, 2013