#yitro

[A short one this week, and probably again for the next few weeks. If you know, you know.]

In Shəmot 20:15, we read: וַיַּֽרְא הָעָם וַיָּנֻֽעוּ וַיַּעַמְדוּ מֵרָחֹק | vayár ha’am vayanú’u vaya’amdu meiraḥoq | “the people feared and wavered and stood at a distance” during the theophany at Sinai.

One might ask: How much of the theophany did they actually experience before pulling back from the mountain?

Rabbi Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropshitz (1760–1827) says that his teacher, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov (1745–1815), suggested שֶׁאֶפְשַׁר שֶׁלֹּא שָׁמַֽעְנוּ מִפִּי הַקָּדֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא רַק אוֹת א דְּאָנֹכִי | she’efshar shelo shamánu mipi haqadosh barukh hu raq ot alef də’anokhi | “that we [a] heard nothing from the mouth of the Holy Blessed One other than the letter alef of ‘anokhi’ [the first word of the first commandment]” [b].

[a] I have not spent a lot of time with this text, but I assume that R' Horowitz writes “we” instead of “they” here in reference to the tradition that every Jew who ever was or will be was at Sinai — that Torah was revealed to all of us in all times, not just the generation of the Exodus. [b] I am not 100% sure how to cite this text properly. On Sefaria, it’s included as section 13 of the Shavu’ot chapter of the Festival part of Zera Kodesh, but I’ve seen other people cite it more simply as “Zera Kodesh 2.40”. Hopefully that’s enough for you to track down the original if you want to.

Alef is a glottal stop; it makes no noise. It is the absence of noise, the cessation of breath. How can one hear this?

We read earlier in Shəmot 20:15: וְכׇל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת | vəkhol ha’am ro’im et haqolot | “And all the people see the thunder” — from this we know revelation is a moment where the senses commingle, where hearing and seeing and otherwise experiencing are not necessarily distinguished.

We know from Bəreishit 1:2 that before there can be creation, G-d’s breath must be free to move, to blow across the primordial waters, to carve out the small cosmological bubble in which all earthly life exists. We know from the blessing for morning light that creation is never complete, that it is renewed daily by constant action from G-d. When G-d’s breath is interrupted, creation unbecomes.

Alef, in gematria, has a value of one. At Sinai, we heard this alef; we experienced one. And not just any one, but the absolute, all-encompassing One of G-d. We were, for the flick of a glottis, united wholly with G-d, experiencing and being simultaneously all things, all places, all times.

I sometimes try to imagine myself at scale, fitting myself in to the largest space I can comprehend. I’ll start with holding the entire room I’m in in my head, then the entire building, then the street, the neighborhood, the city, stretching my awareness out and out to the nearest coastline, the nearest ocean, the great grand curvature of the Earth. I usually cannot get very far before my head starts swimming, before the smallness of me and the hugeness of this so so tiny planet overwhelm me and splay me out like so much insubstantial nothing.

Imagine doing this with the whole entire universe.

To lose all distinctions between self and not-self is a form of oblivion, a kind of death. A human cannot interface with G-d directly and survive. No wonder we begged for Mosheh to bear the terrible burden of being plunged into this incomprehensible unity in our stead.

Revelation is at hand, but who can stand to receive it?