Dear Friends,
Sunday evening, we begin the festival of Shavuot. Shavuot recalls the powerful moment at Sinai when, according to tradition, our people received God’s word. Strikingly, according to our sacred text, the moment when God’s presence “broke” into the world was not a quiet event. Instead, Torah describes an overwhelming scene filled with fire and smoke, thunder and lightning, and the blast of the shofar echoing through the wilderness.
“Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for God had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder and louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder.” (Exodus 19)
Revelation was not subtle. It was overwhelming.
And yet, amid all that chaos, something else happened—something easy to miss if we’re too focused on the spectacle. The Torah tells us in Exodus chapters 19 and 20 that while Moses received God’s word, the people—the entire people—stood together and experienced the presence of God.
That point is driven home by an odd phrase in Exodus 20:15 which states, “All the people saw the voices…”
We don’t usually see sound. But perhaps the text was trying to drive home the point that the revelation at Sinai wasn’t just heard—it was witnessed. It wasn’t given to individuals in private; it was made in a public, collective, communal forum.
But here’s where it shifts. While the people saw the Divine presence, only Moses ascended the mountain and received God’s word. Thus, while the experience was communal, the instruction was intimate. The message was delivered to one individual, but the Divine presence embraced everyone.
That, I believe, is the spiritual legacy of the Sinai moment. It was not just the commandments and laws received that day. It is also the affirmation that every one of us is capable of encountering the Divine. It is a reminder that we don’t have to be Moses to feel something sacred.
We don’t live in an age of smoke and fire, trembling mountains and shofar blasts powerful enough to split the sky. Life would be easier if we all heard a thunderous voice telling us what to do, what’s right, and how to move forward. But, at least in my experience, that’s not how it works.
Instead, we are taught, God speaks to us as kol d’mama dakah – A still, small voice. (I Kings 19:12)
Instead of Sinai’s thunder and lightning, God now speaks through stillness and subtlety. The voice isn’t gone—it’s just quieter now. And the challenge is that we have to learn to hear it.
We can hear the voice when we’re sitting in silence beside someone in pain, or in the moment when a child asks a question that pierces straight through our assumptions.
We can hear the Divine presence in music, in wonder, in birth, and in loss. We can hear God’s voice… in Torah.
We can hear the voice when we choose to act with kindness, even when it’s inconvenient. And we can hear it when we listen—not just to others, but to the quieter corners of our own souls.
That’s the challenge Shavuot sets before us. Not to wait for the mountain to tremble, but to recognize that the voice still speaks. That Sinai wasn’t a one-time event. It was a beginning. And it never really ended.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, “God is not silent. It is the human who is deaf.”
In our complex, loud, cacophonous world we are called on to try to listen. Not for thunder—but for truth. Not for drama—but for depth.
For as the Torah itself makes clear, while Moses may have been the one to have gone up the mountain, we were all there.
We didn’t all receive the same words. But we all received the same presence.
And that presence has never left us.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Daniel Cohen