The revelatory moment at Mount Sinai is bookended by two challenging passages. Six sentences before the giving of the “10 sayings” (aseret hadibrot), also known as the Ten Commandments, we read, “And the sound of the ram’s horn/thunder grew stronger and stronger. Moses would speak, and God would answer him with a voice” (Exodus 19:19).
Immediately following the Revelation at Sinai we are told, “And all the people were seeing the thunder and the flashes and the sound of the ram’s horn and the mountain in smoke, and the people saw and they drew back and stood at a distance” (Exodus 20:18).
This theophany to an entire people takes place, as Moshe David “Umberto” Cassuto points out, in “the howling of the wind blowing among the mountains.” That setting makes sense. The mountains impart a different aspect to the wind, as the general airflow, or wind, is forced to move around the terrain. In this case, a larger volume of air is sometimes forced through a narrower passage much like putting your thumb over the end of a water hose), causing the wind to accelerate, which would indeed creating the "howling" mentioned.
It is not surprising that the Revelation at Sinai – the meeting of God and humankind, of the infinite and the finite – is described as taking place in a loud tempest, caused by that imbalance.
However, within that description, we read something that does not conform to our everyday human experience: The people “saw the thunder.”
We hear thunder and we see lightning, but we do not see thunder. Here the text reinforces the symbolism of the wind representing the disproportion in the human encounter with God: In that instance, our senses were so overwhelmed that we “saw” the thunder.
Did the Jews "see" thunder?
A RADICALLY different way of understanding the text has been taught by Rabbi Daniel Kamesar:
“Even the description of Sinai is an inadequate metaphor,” he writes. “My guess is that there was no thunder and no lightning.”
He continues: “The awareness broke on the people so powerfully, that was the only way they could express it. What happened was far more than thunder and lightning (The text tries to say this when it says they “saw the thunder”): It was an explosion of the heart, mind, and soul. It was silent.”
With that insight, let’s turn our attention to the silence Rabbi Kamesar refers to.
As I write these words, and as you read them, music is everywhere, but we can’t hear the jazz, classical, folk, rock music, and more that is playing. We hear only silence. There may be music playing in our heads, but that is not what we are referring to.
Hundreds of radio stations are broadcasting music that reaches us all, although we can’t hear it. In order to do so, we need a radio to capture the electromagnetic waves and transform them into a sound frequency that we can hear.
According to Kamesar’s explanation of “silence,” God’s words were initially inaudible to us. Moses, like a radio receiver, was able to translate that perceived silence into a frequency that we could hear.
This brings us to the other sentence mentioned above: “Moses spoke, and God responded in a voice” (Exodus 19: 19). On the face of it, that does not appear extraordinary, but the rabbis are always bothered by superfluous words. In the Talmud, we find this comment:
“Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi said, ‘There is no need for the verse to state ‘in a voice’; it is redundant. To what purpose did the verse state ‘in a voice’? ‘In Moses’ voice” (Brachot 45a). One way to understand this is that God spoke to Moses in a frequency that he could perceive and understand.
Rabbi Ana Bonnheim reminds us that “a midrash explained that during the Revelation at Sinai, ‘Each Israelite heard what was in his power to hear’ (Shmot Rabbah 28:6). As in all human experiences, no one experienced Sinai in exactly the same way [as anyone else].”
AND THIS brings us to two Hollywood productions – Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 production of The Ten Commandments and Steven Spielberg’s 1998 animated The Prince of Egypt. In both cases, the directors needed to cast someone as the voice of God.
One evening after filming The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston (who played Moses), DeMille, and the abbot of Saint Catherine’s Monastery were having dinner together. The monastery’s full name is The Sacred Autonomous Royal Monastery of Saint Catherine of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai. It lies at the base of Jabal Musa, thought to be Mount Sinai and the site of the Burning Bush. DeMille and the abbot were discussing who might do the voice of God in the movie.
Heston recalled, “With a temerity that was a rather daring thing for a young actor... I saw an opportunity, and I said, ‘You know, Mr. DeMille, it seems to me that any man hears the voice of God from inside himself. And I would like to be the voice of God.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, Chuck, you’ve got a pretty good part as it is.’”
Heston continued; “The abbot said, ‘That’s an interesting idea, though.’ And I think that tipped the scales for me.”
When they returned to Hollywood, Heston did the voice of God in the Burning Bush scene. Still, as DeMille wrote in his autobiography about the voice of God in a later scene in the giving of the Ten Commandments, “It was agreed among us that, out of reverence for the part of the voice of God, the name of the man who played it should not be revealed. I will not reveal it here.”
Spielberg faced the same question with The Prince of Egypt. The famed director assigned the answer to that question to sound editor Lon Bender and the crew working with the film’s music composer, Hans Zimmer. Bender explained:
“The challenge with that voice was to try to evolve it into something that had not been heard before. We did a lot of research into the voices that had been used for past Hollywood movies, as well as for radio shows, and we were trying to create something that had never been previously heard, not only from a casting standpoint but from a voice-manipulation standpoint as well.
“The solution was to use the voice of Val Kilmer (who was also the voice of Moses) to suggest the kind of voice we hear inside our heads in our everyday lives.”
What is interesting is that Bender, DeMille, the abbot of Saint Catherine’s, and Heston all came to the same conclusion as the Talmud: The voice of God is the same as the inner voice of the listener. In Hebrew, the word for “to hear,” lishmoa, can also mean “to understand.”
Similarly, in English, the connotation when we say “I hear you” can be the same as in “I understand you.”
Comprehension begins within us, including our understanding and encounter with God – the universal web that connects us to everything and everybody. ■
The writer is a Reconstructionist rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation in Manchester Center, Vermont. He teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura and at Bennington College.