The Shul's Blog

The most important sentence in the theophany and giving of the Ten Commandments, which we read this week, is not found in the Ten Commandments, but in a line, which describes what the Children of Israel had just witnessed. They saw a mountain covered by clouds and expressed by lightning and thunder. Revelation occurred. Moses came down from Sinai with the Decalogue in his hands. The Torah reports that the “people saw the sounds.”

In modern translations of Exodus the verb “saw” is mistranslated as perceived. Modern authors chafe at paradox, and so could not use “see” and ‘sounds’ together. They concluded that one cannot see sounds. One hears sounds, or in order not to damage their translation’s integrity opted to write that the people perceived the sounds.

In truth the Torah was correct in the way that it presents the words “seeing sounds” for the Torah is presenting a paradox. The Torah is relating an experience that the Children of Israel experienced, but an experience that cannot be repeated. That generation felt God’s Presence in a way that we cannot. They lived through a revelation, a onetime experience, which we and every other generation will never have the opportunity to discover.

Our Torah at times recognizes that the boundary between God and man cannot be bounded. For that reason so many times we read about a people who stood before the name of God and not just before God. Onkelos, the official translator of the Torah into Aramaic, always recognizes man’s inability to stand before God in an intimate manner. Rambam uses Onkelos interpretation as the basis for his theology, which is found in his magnum opus, Guide to the Perplexed.

Our generation has been too interested in empirical proof. We do not accept the idea that there are concepts and relationships, which we will never understand. Our translations only affirm that bias.

When will we relearn the necessity of accepting paradox in our lives?