From the Rabbi

 Today’s thoughts of our Torah reading, Yitro, were inspired by our very special guest last week, Rabbi Naftali Citron, who talked beautifully about finding God in – and out – of nature.

Seeing is believing,” we say, knowing there is nothing so convincing as the power of sight. “Don’t you see?” we say to those who disagree with us, until they concede, “Alright, I see what you mean!” We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to be told that divine thunder and lightning accompanied God’s appearance on Mt. Sinai, and that “The people saw the sounds and the lightning.”

But how could they see sounds? Sound is what you hear, not what you see. And sounds of what? Thunder, presumably, but the Torah just says “sounds.” What sounds were they, and how can sound be visible? Some Kabbalistic commentators explain things literally. Kabbalist Moses God altered the state of nature to imbue the Israelites’ ears with sight. Maybe…but I prefer an answer rooted in close textual reading.

The Ten Commandments are given in Chapter 20: 1-14, and the information that “the people saw the sounds and the lightning” comes immediately afterward (20:15). But the thunder and lightning occur beforehand — part of God’s appearance on the mountain (19:16). Why did the people “see the sounds” a whole chapter later, only after Torah was revealed?

That the people “saw the sounds” only after revelation is the key, because we really do see sounds when they are written down as text. When we read, for example, we do so with at least some implied cadence to our inner voice. We raise and lower our voice as you read a sentence; we emphasize words in italics. You actually see sounds in the written words. The “sounds” that the Israelites saw were not God’s thunder, but God’s words of Torah that Moses heard and then wrote down. Maybe Moses enjoyed revelation directly from God’s mouth, but everyone else gets it only as writing.

Judaism insists that God’s word is still best accessed through the sounds that we see: our sacred texts. People searching for God often look to the miracles of nature: the Grand Canyon, a starry night, the intricacies of the human body. Our tradition tell us that the way to God is study of our texts. We study, debate, and form conclusions from what we read.

On a clear day, you can see forever, goes the saying. It is possible, though, to see forever in the fogginess of text: an opaque piece of Talmud with its Rashi, Tosafot, Rabbenu Asher, and all the other greats of Jewish tradition. We can see their presence in the text loud and clear as if we are in the same room with them.

Shabbat shalom…and see you in shul! 

Rabbi Yaakov Chaitovsky