Sinai Revisited

Dr Raphael Zarum, Dean of LSJS, explores the scene at Mt. Sinai and discovers how the Divine Revelation still beckons us today.

 

“I know you!” he said. “No, I don’t think so,” I replied anxiously. It was midnight at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the man before me looked rather menacing.

“I’ve got it,” he said, “you were standing in front of me at Mt. Sinai!”. I smiled. Just as the Haggadah teaches us to see ourselves as having personally left Egypt, so Tradition tells us that ‘we all stood at Sinai’. But I had never before met a Jew who recalled it – and my presence there – so vividly. Was this midnight stranger being too literal?

 

Our biblical commentators – and the Torah itself – are surprisingly vague about the facts surrounding Sinai. How many Israelites left Egypt? Roughly two to four million. What route did they take? There are at least three, very distinct, possibilities. Where is Mt. Sinai? We are not sure. On what date did Revelation occur? The sixth or maybe the seventh of Sivan. With such inaccuracies, would our story hold up in court?

 

The fact that a Jew’s understanding of the Revelation at Sinai is often used as a litmus test for their denominational affiliation only compounds the problem. This encourages monolithic and simplistic pronouncements about an event for which nuanced appreciation is so much more worthy. Maimonides remarked, “It is very difficult to have a true idea of what happened, for there never was, or will be, anything like it.” (Guide for the Perplexed II:33). And Abraham Joshua Heschel challenged us, “It is easy to say prophecy, revelation. But do we sense what we say? Do we understand what these words mean?”

 

An exploration into just one phrase from the very moment of Revelation may begin to show its immense complexity. To describe what the Israelites actually heard at Mt. Sinai the Torah says, “And all the people saw the voices [ro’im et hakolot]…” (Exodus 20:15). Now how can you see a voice? “And all the people perceived the thunderings…” translates Hertz thus avoiding the issue. Rabbi Akiva in the Mechilta explains this as a unique miracle, “they saw that which is normally heard, and heard that which is normally seen”. Hasidic writers elaborate saying that the Israelites had a higher spirituality experience through direct sensory perception. But what does that mean? Hirsch explains seeing voices as a proof of the authorship of the communication: the Israelites saw that the sounds emanated directly, and unquestionably, from God.

 

What is left unanswered though is why God communicated in the plural: ‘voices’. I think this maybe an allusion to the layered nature of the contact. In the balcony scene of the movie ‘Annie Hall’, when Woody Allen is trying to impress Diane Keaton, the dialogue is subtitled to show us what they are really thinking. A radio signal can contain many layers of information nested within the transmission, each requiring a different technique to decipher its contents. So if human communication works on a numerous levels, then a Divine message must be infinitely more layered.

 

 

It could be said that the whole history of the Jewish people has been to perpetuate, make sense of, and live out, the many layers of that Divine communication. That is why Rabbi Chiya bar Abba said that, “listening to your grandson recite a Torah portion is like hearing it from Mt. Sinai.” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Shabbat 1:2). For if the transmission of the tradition has not suffered from attenuation, then the message can still contain the many layers of meaning, waiting for us to find and fathom. And as advances in psychology uncover more subtle layers of our consciousness, so we may become more sophisticated in our ability to appreciate God’s message to us.

 

Perhaps the Revelation can never be fully and neatly explained. Ever closer reading is surely more rewarding than the pursuit of polemics and ideological posturing. Obsessing about how much Torah was given at Sinai and the historicity of the event misses the point. The religious approach is much more concerned with the human experience of receiving.

 

Studying Revelation is essentially about trying to understand a relationship. It is nuanced, delicate and multilayered and, like most good relationships, requires a lot of careful and patient listening. You could stay up half the night thinking about such things…

 

And that is precisely what we do. At our LSJS programme I’ll be joining thousands across the Jewish world staying up late on the eve of Shavuot. Though numerous topics are studied at “Tikkun Leil Shavuot” (literally, ‘fixing up the night of Shavuot’) they are all part of the ongoing Jewish endeavour to make sense of our relationship with God that had its national beginnings at Sinai.

 

So did all Jews literally stand at Sinai? Maybe not. But the voices seen on that day are perceptible to every Jew willing to make the determined effort to listen.