The extreme polarities of their response to Revelation are seen by Haamek Davar as expressing a moment of immense growth. The people are stretched to the limits of their strength. The effect is to release a new sense of their own capacities, a new awareness of their ability to contain previously unknown extremes. On this reading, when Moses reassures the people in this vein: “Do not be afraid, for in order to test (le-nasoth) you, God has come to you …” (20:17) and when the word le-nasoth is translated by Rashi, “to exalt you,” Ha-amek Davar develops the idea: it is human spiritual greatness that is God’s purpose in revealing Himself—the ability to endure suffering, in the immense amplification of inner resources that is the heritage of the ordeal of Sinai. The implications of this reading are quite radical: the purpose of Revelation is to develop human qualities. What is enacted at Sinai is the revelation of the human being in larger range and strength. A new consciousness is born in this revelation; the Israelites endure an initiation that ensures them against the extremities of history. God comes at Sinai, so that the human may come fully into its own.
In Deuteronomy 18:15–17, the connection with the future is made explicitly: God your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your own people, like myself; to him you shall listen. This is just what you asked of God your God at Chorev, on the day of the assembly, saying, “Let me not hear the voice of God my God any longer or see this great fire any more, lest I die.” And God said to me, “They have done well in speaking like this.” Here, as in the earlier Deuteronomy passage, God approves of their delegating prophecy. They are reclaiming an appropriate, modest human posture. Ramban, we remember, reads their short-lived prophetic experience as of merely instrumental value: it generates in them a new belief in the excellence of Moses’ prophecy. Their fear is a right fear; God Himself validates it. And yet, there is more ambiguity in the Torah text itself, and certainly in the midrashic narratives, than this account allows for. If it is the voice of the living God that terrifies them, even as they know themselves alive, then the healthy-mindedness, to use William James’s expression, of Ramban’s position, may seem not entirely satisfactory. The recoil of the people, for instance, is described in many midrashic sources as a kind of death:
The people have no strength to stand the experience of God’s glory, as expressed in “hearing His voice from out of the fire.” They swoon; effectively, they die. And are restored to life, strangely by the Torah, God’s daughter, who is to be given in marriage to the Israelites. The Torah gives life; while the Revelation of God, His voice, perilously ravishes the soul. Two orders of experience are delineated in this and many other midrashic sources. The Torah, the Commandments, the ethical and ritual structures given at Sinai, are distinguished from the overwhelming, potentially fatal voice of God, which is beyond human strength to bear. The nations of the world, not directly involved in this encounter, rejoice: the world’s survival depends on the success of this marriage, on the Israelite capacity to accept the Torah. In a similar vein, one of the midrashic commentators17 suggests, we can read the expression of the people’s fear as the reaction of those who have died and been resurrected: “Who that is all-flesh has ever heard the voice of the living God speak out of the fire, as we did, and lived—i.e., and returned to life?” (Deut 5:23). This reading connects this verse with the end of the previous one: “… we shall die” is read “we have died … and returned to life.” In some versions, a dew falls from heaven to revive them.18 In this context, having known death and resurrection, their desire to delegate to Moses becomes more comprehensible. In these midrashic narratives, the people experience the extremes of death and life at each of the Ten Commandments. To hear the voice of God is to suffer the unbearable; to receive the Torah is to return to life, to one’s recognizable self.19 To stand at Sinai is to achieve some equilibrium, some possible standing-ground, where God’s voice may bearably inform the Torah.
SINAI: THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNBEARABLE
We return to our questions: what is the terror of God’s voice? What is the nature of the trauma that it inflicts? And what is its relation to death and life? A cluster of midrashic sources describes the experience of God’s voice as being registered at the very margin of the bearable:
20 The plural dimension of God’s voice indicates an exquisite compatibility with the “strength of each individual,” with the specific world in time and space that is a human being. If God had spoken with a single voice, it would have shattered the world: “the world would not have been able to bear it.” In other midrashim, indeed, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions threaten to return the world to chaos. But here, the wonder of Revelation consists of six hundred thousand different qualities of voice that are registered by each listener. God allows his unequivocal voice, the magisterial soul of anochi, the “I am God …” which opens the Ten Commandments, to be refracted into myriads of subjective voices. One paradoxical implication is that Revelation is both objective and yet fully subjective, attuned to the consciousness of each individual. But another implication—significantly different—is that the voice of God places a strain on the strength of each individual: what is registered lies at the very limit of the bearable. These two facets of Revelation become clearer in the following midrash: “All the people saw the voices …” (20:15): not “… the voice,” but “… the voices.” R. Yohanan said: when the voice came forth it did so only according to the strength of each individual Israelite, according to what he could bear. So, it says, “The voice of God is in strength” (Ps 29:4)—according to the strength of each individual. Said R. Yossi bar Hanina: If this surprises you, learn from the manna which fell for the Israelites in the wilderness: its taste was adapted to each individual taste, so that they should be able to bear it; if this was so with the manna, how much more so with the voice of God—that it should not cause injury.21 Here, the phrase, “as much as he could bear,” is added to “according to the strength of each individual.” And the analogy with the manna, which varies its taste according to the individual palate—a congenially hedonistic notion—is similarly qualified by the unexpected phrase, “so that they should be able to bear it.” If even the manna, dropped from heaven, has an unbearable dimension that requires tempering, individuation—then, certainly, the voice of God requires modulation if it is not to injure the listener. What is endangered by the heavenly manna is an earthly integrity, the familiar world of taste, sensitivity, sensibility. The word ta’am—“taste”—also connotes “meaning”: what is varied according to each individual, then, is the subjective experience, the construction of significance attaching to the manna—and to the voice of God. This is the dimension of kavod that Jethro abandoned in his journey into the wilderness. The encounter with the kavod of God is experienced as an invasion, an annihilation. For that reason, it is tempered to the limit of the bearable, so that a world of meaning can survive the transformations of encountering God. The traumatic effect of God’s voice on creation is the subject of Psalm 29, where God’s voice kindles flames of fire, convulses the wilderness, strips forests bare (v. 7). In view of this prodigious cosmic effect, Jethro’s expectation that his kavod will be reconstituted, that he will be compensated in the same coin for his losses, emerges as rather naïve. Similarly naïve, perhaps, is his confidence that administrative restructurings of society will make it possible for Moses to stand, to withstand the burden that threatens to crush him. What Jethro experiences with paradigmatic clarity, however, is the real human anxiety about the erosion of kavod, of a stable, recognizable identity. The experience of the unbearable, of that which tests and stretches the limits of consciousness, is the essential ordeal of Sinai. A famous midrash makes the point about the ponderous weight of Sinai: “They took their places at the foot of the mountain” (19:17): … This teaches that God suspended the mountain over them, like a barrel, and told them, “If you accept the Torah, all is well; if not, here will be your
Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb (2011-02-01). The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos (Kindle Locations 6081-6150). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The extreme polarities of their response to Revelation are seen by Haamek Davar as expressing a moment of immense growth. The people are stretched to the limits of their strength. The effect is to release a new sense of their own capacities, a new awareness of their ability to contain previously unknown extremes. On this reading, when Moses reassures the people in this vein: “Do not be afraid, for in order to test (le-nasoth) you, God has come to you …” (20:17) and when the word le-nasoth is translated by Rashi, “to exalt you,” Ha-amek Davar develops the idea: it is human spiritual greatness that is God’s purpose in revealing Himself—the ability to endure suffering, in the immense amplification of inner resources that is the heritage of the ordeal of Sinai. The implications of this reading are quite radical: the purpose of Revelation is to develop human qualities. What is enacted at Sinai is the revelation of the human being in larger range and strength. A new consciousness is born in this revelation; the Israelites endure an initiation that ensures them against the extremities of history. God comes at Sinai, so that the human may come fully into its own.
Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb (2011-02-01). The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos (Kindle Locations 6019-6028). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
